Humanism and Embodiment: From Cause and Effect to Secularism 9781472529145, 9781472594310, 9781472531971

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Humanism and Embodiment: Three Sources
Humanism as a meta-ethical view
Projectibility
Implications for humanism
Th ree philosophical sources
Issues of embodiment
Conclusion
2 Humanism and Global Development Ethics
Global development
Moral progress and ranking
Certain philosophers of the South
Evolution and practical identity
Authentic humanism
Bottom-up accounts
Shared humanity
Back to Sen
Conclusion
3 Alienation and Authenticity
Mindfulness
Mind/body dualism and contingency
Authenticity
‘Right sort of person’
Consequences of contingency
Antonio Gramsci and Che Guevara
Christianity and Buddhism
The yoke and the star
Conclusion
4 Mystics, Anti-imperialists and Fear of Contingency
Contingency and secularism
Buffered and porous selves
Radical contingency
Porous selves (again)
Fullness
Brokenness, not fullness
‘Chirpy’ connectedness
Porous selves in modern times
What mystics and anti-imperialists have in common
Conclusion
5 Secularism, Ethics, Philosophy: Against Philosophical Liberalism
Secularism
Kinds
Essentialism (again)
Self-sufficiency
The Samaritan and rhinoceritis (again)
Pragmatic naturalism (again)
Non-persons
Non-religious analytic ethics
Embodied reason
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Humanism and Embodiment

Also available from Bloomsbury Feminist Epistemology and American Pragmatism, Alexandra L. Shuford Objectivity in the Feminist Philosophy of Science, Karen Cordrick Haely Posthumanism, Stefan Herbrechter Rationality and Feminist Philosophy, Deborah K. Heikes The Virtue of Feminist Rationality, Deborah K. Heikes

Humanism and Embodiment From Cause and Effect to Secularism Susan E. Babbitt

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 Paperback edition first published 2015 © Susan E. Babbitt 2014 Susan E. Babbitt has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-2914-5 PB: 978-1-4742-6921-6 ePDF: 978-1-4725-3197-1 ePub: 978-1-4725-3192-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Babbitt, Susan E. Humanism and embodiment: from cause and effect to secularism / Susan E. Babbitt. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4725-2914-5 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4725-3192-6 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4725-3197-1 (epdf) 1. Humanism. 2. Secularism. 3. Analysis (Philosophy) 4. Realism. I. Title. B821. B245 2014 144–dc23 2013049730

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

Dedicated to the memory of Sue Campbell 1956–2011 who loved wild flowers

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Humanism and Embodiment: Three Sources 2 Humanism and Global Development Ethics 3 Alienation and Authenticity 4 Mystics, Anti-imperialists and Fear of Contingency 5 Secularism, Ethics, Philosophy: Against Philosophical Liberalism Notes References Index

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1 13 43 71 103 137 171 175 189

Acknowledgements For most of my career, most of my academic community was Sue Campbell, until her death on 12 February 2011. Sue was, as her colleague Rich Campbell said, ‘intellectually fearless’, seriously considerate of non-traditional philosophical themes. Her work on emotions and memory informs this book, as they have informed my classes. I am indebted to Sue for philosophical companionship and friendship, as well as for the inspiration of her memory. Nkiru Nzegwu is another who is intellectually fearless, pursuing truths mostly out of synch, culturally and philosophically, with North Atlantic philosophical culture, and all the more valuable for being so. I thank her for insight, creativity and conviction in art, politics and ideas. I am especially grateful to my colleagues Carlos Prado and Paul Fairfield for support in approaching and finding a publisher for this work. After 44 months of medical leave between 2003 and 2012, I was outside the publication world. Carlos read many drafts of the prospectus and I have benefitted from his feedback, integrity and collegiality over many years. Linda Alcoff, Richmond Campbell, Elaine Cheng, Jackie Davies, Jason Dudek, Christine Koggel, Adèle Mercier, Christine Overall, Nancy Salay, Alex Zieba and an audience at the Queen’s University Philosophy Department commented on different parts of this work. I am grateful to them for their insight and attention. I owe to Haideh Moghissi and Saeed Rahnema my turn towards secularism, initiated by their invitation to present at ‘Retreat of the Secular? Challenges of Religious Fundamentalism’ at York University, Toronto, May 2009, for the 30th anniversary of the Iranian revolution. I felt privileged to be part of that intimate, intense discussion. I thank Haideh and Saeed for longtime intellectual and moral inspiration. I owe a special debt to Drs Martin Blackstein, Charles Catton and Peter Ferguson at Princess Margaret Hospital, Toronto. That I teach, write and walk today is due to their enormous expertise, as well as that of their teams, and medical staff at Princess Margaret, Mt. Sinai and Toronto General Hospitals. I am grateful to the Canadian medical system that the extensive and aggressive treatment I received is not available only to some.

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I would not have completed this book without the help of Virginia and Bill Hamilton and the Ontario Vipassana Centre. They initiated and have sustained my interest in the Buddha, and from them I received invaluable practical assistance in how to live my life when it seemed to be ending. Christine Knott and Marguerite Van Die introduced me to the work of Thomas Merton, and I thank them for inspiration towards his prodigious writing, which I admire. Having abandoned religious faith, I was intrigued to find in Merton, a Trappist monk, sensible, insightful views of self-understanding, human freedom and individual integrity. I owe to Christine and Marguerite, in particular, my growing awareness that Merton’s philosophical genius, and that of many religious thinkers, is vastly undervalued by academic philosophers, at least in North America. I remain grateful to my first supervisor, Andrew Lugg, who introduced me to the philosophy of science and its importance, and who remains an inspiration, and a friend. I also maintain gratitude to Richard Boyd and Nicholas Sturgeon for their supervision, and for their arguments for naturalistic realism, which have followed me through eclectic academic pursuits. I thank Allen Wood, also at Cornell during my graduate years, whose Karl Marx (1981/2004) has enabled me to explain better to students, again and again, Marx’s enormous, and unfairly neglected, philosophical contribution. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada contributed to this book with three research grants received in the 1990s. That research – at the University of Havana – is not the focus of this work, but the book would not have been written without it. Special thanks to students who encountered in my classes for the first time (they told me) the likes of Siddhartha Gotama, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, José Martí, Thomas Merton and Ivan Illich. From interactions with many of them, I have learnt. Finally, for all sorts of support – practical, moral and emotional – through the past, unusual decade, I thank my family and special friends (they know who they are). I have learnt from them in particular, including the kids, the freedom to start again, from here, as it is.

Introduction

Embodiment has been a focus of feminist philosophy. Women, after all, are devalued because of bodies, being supposedly more emotional than men and therefore less rational (Grosz 1994). Feminists argue that embodiment is about radical thought. Judith Butler (1990), Julie Kristeva (1982) and more recently Alexis Shotwell (2011) have discussed embodiment in relation to critical understanding. Although some feminists (e.g. Rich 2001; Nzegwu 2006) have opposed the politics of identity motivated by such discussions, embodiment is politically and philosophically alive within feminisms: The theme of the 2012 Conference of the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy was ‘Theorizing the body, embodiment and body practises’.1 I argue, in part, that embodiment as a philosophical challenge reaches further than feminist philosophy typically ventures. Moreover, contrary to claims that ‘mainstream’ analytic philosophy ignores it, embodiment is best conceptualized from within one of the core areas of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, the philosophy of science. This is true even though analytic ethics and political philosophy mostly fail to recognize embodiment. Well-known philosophers from less familiar philosophical traditions better articulate the broader implications of embodiment. Three principal sources for a philosophical discussion of embodiment – Marxism, Buddhism and Christianity – are ignored by academic philosophers, including feminists. Indeed, one could say that such traditions are viewed with contempt.2 Continental philosophers, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michelle Foucault, have taken embodiment to challenge more than dualism about mind/ body relations. Various feminist philosophers have relied upon Merleau-Ponty to explore how bodily experience – of gender, race, class, disability – constitutes a sense of self and expression (Alcoff 2006; Bartky 1990; Young 2005; Weiss 1999). Foucault has shown how all social institutions, not just the media and families, regulate and control individuals’ bodily experiences, providing resources for feminist analyses of such modern phenomena as self-starvation (Eckermann n.d.).

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Humanism and Embodiment

Although phenomenology deserves consideration, I draw upon recent analytic epistemology and philosophy of science because it provides resources regarding knowledge, language, reference and rationality. In particular, it emphasizes cause and effect as part of the explanation and defence of knowledge after the failure of positivism. Positivism is a foundationalist view according to which all knowledge is justified by appeal to foundational beliefs with a privileged status, for example, beliefs based upon observation. It failed because all beliefs depend upon other beliefs and values as well as upon circumstances and conditions and there are no foundational beliefs in the sense required (e.g. Hanson 1958). A response is that we have knowledge because there is a world with which we engage, causally. We know the world, when we do, because the world acts upon us, affecting us, bodily. Embodiment is the rejection of dualism, the view that the body and mind are two sorts of substances, the former extended in space, affected by causal relations, and the latter characterized by the fact that it thinks. Dualism suggests that minds think and bodies do not. Contrary to dualism in this sense, one might hold that the mind is part of the body, the conscious, intentional part. Thus, the body thinks. John Searle (1998) argues that the mind is part of the material world and that the qualitative, subjective nature of consciousness can be explained biologically. When we consider embodiment in terms of the causal nature of knowledge, examining implications for practical reasoning, we discover a paradox: Those dismissing religion in the name of reason ought to consider religious traditions for a more scientific conception of reason.3 One surprising consequence of a more embodied conception of reason is that, as argued in Chapter 5, the capacity to be quiet – in mind and body – is more rooted in practical reality than commitment to ‘total activity’.4 This conclusion follows from the embodied nature of knowledge although it happens to be an insight found in religious traditions. I argue that when we consider the causal nature of knowledge, religious traditions matter to concerns about absolutism, extremism and dehumanizing discrimination. For this reason, they show how embodiment is radical, or could be. I discuss the following philosophical contributions: First, Karl Marx maintained that bodies think. To change our thinking, we must change our lives. However, twentieth-century Marxists, according to Allen Wood and Armando Hart, mostly ignored Marx’s views about knowledge and the self (Wood 1981/2004: 266; Hart 2006: 134). Second, for a number of Eastern philosophers,

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the most prominent Siddhartha Gotama, everything that happens in the mind occurs in the body. Meditation, on one understanding, has precisely to do with cause and effect, within the body, and as a practice of mental discipline is about bodily action. Lastly, in Christianity, a key insight is that to know, even to identify, your neighbour, requires being moved – emotionally. Charles Taylor argues that Christianity, since the Middle Ages, has abandoned the embodiment it once embraced (Taylor 2007: 738–41). I draw on these three sources, in particular, to indicate direction. I aim in part to warn against a kind of dogmatism within analytic philosophy, which once banned feminism, treats Marxism as dead and cultivates indifference to religious philosophers. There are other sources. I make reference to Cuban philosopher, José Martí, who was neither a Marxist nor a Buddhist, and only nominally a Christian. Martí wrote about embodiment as he pursued revolution (Vitier 1962/2011a: 9). Knowing colonialism as he did, Martí was not tempted by European dualism, recognizing that and how (oppressive) material conditions affect cognitive activity. Throughout the book I use ‘humanism’ to refer to the possibility of (approximate) truths about human well-being, not in an ethical but rather a personal sense, that is, about how best to live, given my idiosyncratic circumstances and conditions, as a human being. In current analytic philosophy, it is controversial whether there is knowledge about how to live a good life, morally. I do not intend to enter the debate about moral realism. For those who find moral realism implausible, humanism in the sense I define it will be even less plausible, addressing non-moral truths related to particular individuals. However, humanism in this sense is presupposed by liberation struggles against systemic oppression. Systemic oppression dehumanizes people and dehumanization presupposes humanization. Resistance to dehumanization presupposes at least some knowledge of humanism, as I argue in Chapter 1. Thus, it is worth asking how such knowledge is explained, given that it is presupposed in practice. At least for those committed to global justice, this question matters, or should, because the answer has practical consequences, identified below. Moreover, if the question is ignored, as it usually is by ethicists and political theorists, argumentative foundations are taken for granted, risking arbitrariness. To borrow a few points from the moral realism debates: First, a defence of truths does not imply that for every judgement, there exists an objectively justifiable answer. Neither is there always one answer. In defending moral realism,

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one can argue that ethical claims rest upon (natural) facts but not in every case. Some ethical issues are not resolvable and others may be matters of convention. However, if at least in some cases, perhaps only a few, there is more to ethical judgements than reliance upon community beliefs and practices, objectivity is in question. Quite often, disagreements about what it means to be human are merely a matter of opinion. But occasionally, facts about humanness are presupposed. One such case is resistance to systemic oppression. The application of the argument, though, is intended more generally, as will become clear. Second, arguments for realism are often big-picture arguments. By this, I mean that they are not arguments that proceed point by point against an opponent. Instead, they argue for a reconception of the nature of knowledge, including ideas of explanation, justification and individuation. Karl Mannheim pursued such a strategy in the 1930s (Mannheim 1936), when he noticed that all knowledge claims are context relative. Mannheim did not embrace relativism about truth (1936: ch. 2). Instead, from the fact that knowledge is possible, even though all beliefs are ‘perspectivist’, Mannheim identified a mistaken (foundationalist) view of the nature of knowledge and justification, and argued for an alternative. Recent naturalistic realists have done the same, reconceptualizing knowledge, and working out the implications to show greater explanatory capacity (e.g. Boyd 1988). A similar strategy is required for embodiment. Dualism about minds and bodies is deep-seated with implications for, for instance, agency, morality and freedom. Successfully arguing against such a view requires showing that an alternative big-picture conception better explains human experience. This book aims to contribute to such a project. Humanism is presupposed by some who deny it. Some object that humanness is expressed by the myriad of cultures. Storytelling, not truths, is required. Martha Nussbaum, philosopher of global development, proposes that we identify the essential properties of humanness by collecting stories from appropriately diverse sources (Nussbaum and Glover 1995: 72–3). In her view, ‘if we proceed in this way, using our imaginations, we will have in the end a theory that is not the mere projection of local preferences but is fully international and a basis for cross-cultural attunement’ (1995: 74). Nussbaum is not alone. Consider, for example, the popular work of anthropologist and film-maker Wade Davis. Davis argues that culture matters because of humanness: ‘Culture alone allows us to reach, as Abraham Lincoln said, for the better angels of our nature’. Polemics don’t work, in his view, but ‘with the hope that story-tellers can change the world’, he aims to ‘provide a

Introduction

5

platform for indigenous voices . . . that might inspire . . . entirely new dreams of the earth’ (Davis 2009: 225). Moreover, the need is urgent. Destruction of natural environments is insignificant compared to the speed and extent of cultural extinction. The evidence is language loss: Of 7,000 languages spoken today, half are not taught to children (Davis 2009: 3). Of the world’s population, 80 per cent communicates with 1 of 83 languages while 3,500 languages are kept alive by a fifth of 1 per cent of the world’s population. And Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) linguist Ken Hale notes that ‘When you lose a language, you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art. It’s like dropping a bomb on the Louvre’ (Hale cited in Davis 2009: 5). Davis is concerned about humanism as I define it, although he does not say so. He claims that the world risks losing ‘a vast archive of knowledge and expertise, a catalogue of the imagination, an oral and written language composed of the memories of countless elders and healers, warriors, farmers, fishermen, midwives, poets, and saints – in short, the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual expression of the full complexity and diversity of the human experience’ (Davis 2009: 34). That is, destroying cultures matters because human cultures contain resources for defining and realizing human potential. And the reason this matters is that the world is in bad shape. Thus, Davis suggests, but does not explicitly defend, the idea that cultural destruction matters because some cultures are getting it wrong, imposing values and ways of living with a certain sort of unhealthy ‘baggage’ attached. Davis writes that at least since the disappearance of the Neanderthals from Europe, human culture has pursued the meaning of humanness. The cave art of about 30,000 years ago discovered in south-western France and northern Spain ‘pays homage to that moment when human beings, through consciousness, separated themselves from the animal realm, emerging as the unique entity we now know ourselves to be’ (Davis 2009: 30). For Karen Armstrong also, the cave art provides the earliest known evidence of the pursuit of humanness. In her view, it indicates an ‘ideological system’ that remained in place for 20,000 years in which human and non-human animals struggle together for survival even though, tragically, life requires destroying other creatures (Armstrong 2009: 3–10). If the ‘cave art marked also the beginning of . . . our restless quest for meaning and understanding that has propelled the human dream ever since’ (Davis 2009: 31), it makes sense to catalogue such wealth in order to know what it

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means to be human. The problem is that Davis, for example, does not catalogue. Neither does Nussbaum. Davis records some stories and omits others. He does not consider all indigenous voices but rather some voices telling about some aspects of their myths, rituals, values and beliefs. Indeed, he admits this: The goal of anthropologists is not to preserve cultures. Cultures must change. But they can nonetheless survive. And a culture survives when it has ‘enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo’ (David Maybury-Lewis, quoted in Davis 2007: 127). So, cultural survival is defined by ‘spirit and essence’. This means it is not the survival of cultures that matters for the future of the world but the survival of some parts of some cultures, namely, those parts that have ‘deep metaphorical resonance, something universal to tell us about the nature of being alive’ (Davis 2009: 225). We can see what parts Davis thinks these are: community, connection to nature, solidarity and strength of relationships. Regarding the Penan of Borneo, for example, a ‘unique vision of life’ (Davis 2007: 141) has faded within a generation. But it is a particular lost vision that is lamented, not the entire set of Penan beliefs, values, practices, etc. Davis admits that the only Waorani (of Ecuador) who ‘wanted to retain the old ways were the ones who had never lived [them]’ (Davis 2007: 125). Yet although ‘no one who understands the life once led by the Waorani would wish it on anyone’ (Davis 2007: 127), the recent transformation of Waorani culture has meant ‘loss of another possibility of life’ (Davis 2007: 128). It was not the missionaries, themselves, who were responsible but rather ‘the baggage’ (Davis 2007: 127) of their world view. Yet Davis does not explain the distinction between ‘possibility of life’ and ‘baggage’ that denies life. He refers to the power of some over others. But he admits that, for the Waorani at least, contact with more powerful missionaries ‘stopped the spearing raids, the killing of innocent women, infanticide, and the live burial of children’ (Davis 2007: 125). Thus, on the one hand, it is ‘within this diversity of knowledge and practise, of intuition and interpretation, of promise and hope, that we will all rediscover the enchantment of being what we are, a conscious species . . . [capable of] . . . ensuring that all creatures in every garden find a way to flourish’ (Davis 2007: 202). However, on the other hand, not ‘all creatures in every garden’ should flourish. So Davis distinguishes between knowledge and non-knowledge about what it means to be human. His claim to ‘identify stories that had . . . something

Introduction

7

universal to tell us about the nature of being alive’ (Davis 2009: 225) presumes knowledge of such a nature. Yet he might explain such judgements given, as he argues, that much that happens in the world, culturally, denies life for many beings, humans included. Davis seems not to recognize the issue. He gives a platform to cultural representatives to tell stories that express ‘the better angels of our nature’ without defending his reasons for choosing some and not others to do so. Others recognize a question about justification. Amartya Sen identifies an ‘inescapable valuational problem involved in deciding what to choose if and when it turns out that some parts of a tradition cannot be maintained along with economic and social changes that may be needed for other reasons’ (Sen 1999: 31). But he gives it short shrift. His answer is that when a traditional way of life may need to be sacrificed for the sake of development, ‘it is the people directly involved who must have the opportunity to participate in deciding what should be chosen’ (Sen 1999: 31). Neither the elders nor development experts should decide: The people should choose. Sen does not explain how those ‘directly involved’ know. He argues that development aims for the realization of human capacities without explaining how to know which capacities are the essentially human ones. Like Davis whose response to the destruction of cultures is to ‘identify stories that . . . tell us about the nature of being alive’ (Davis 2009: 225), Sen assumes humanness is known. He even gives the experience of such humanness a definitive role: As regards how to take responsibility as ‘competent human beings . . . [i]t is not so much a matter of having exact rules about how precisely we ought to behave, as of recognizing the relevance of our shared humanity in making the choices we face’ (Sen 1999: 283). No field is more dependent upon humanism in my sense than global development. ‘Development’ refers to the realization of human potential. The proper development of a child, for instance, involves normal physical, emotional and intellectual growth. However, critics of global development since the end of the World War II argue that the term refers not to fulfilling natural (genetic, social) potentials but instead to increased homogenization (e.g. Esteva 2010: 5). According to critics, global development has allowed global hegemony for North Atlantic views and values and has robbed many people of the opportunity to define their own lives. Defenders claim it is still possible to pursue development as the realization of natural potential. By 1970, there was growing discomfort with strictly economic

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Humanism and Embodiment

definitions of development since economic growth did not indicate social progress. In 1975, the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation proposed ‘human-centred development’ and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) called for ‘integrated development’. Many now refer to development in terms of empowerment and participation, meaning that the South should decide for itself. Majid Rahnema argues, though, that regardless of whether it is the South or the North that decides, one must always judge which sorts of empowerment and participation constitute humanly liberating ones (2010). Taking embodiment seriously, what we can know depends upon who we are. This was clear to Martí who wrote about development before the term became popular. For Martí, development is not about ‘civilization and barbarity’, or North and South, as if we know what these are. Instead, what is most urgent is that Latin America ‘show herself as she is, one in soul and intent, rapidly overcoming the crushing weight of her past’ (Martí 2002e: 295). The urgent issue, for Martí, was identity, human identity, which Latin America did not have, and could not have under colonialism. Thus, for Martí, development must be about ‘false erudition and nature’ (Martí 2002e: 290), that is, about knowledge. Not only had Latin America been ‘deformed by three centuries of a rule that denied man the right to exercise his reason’; it was also true, because of imperialism, that ‘[n]o Yankee or European book could furnish the key to the Hispanoamerican enigma’ (Martí 2002e: 293–4). Martí, unlike Sen, put the question of humanist truths at the centre of his philosophy of development, which required independence. For if the world is governed by colonialist forces deforming the exercise of reason, ‘[t]he problem of independence was not the change in [political] form’ (Martí 2002e: 292); rather, it was existential. Considering development to promote human potential, Latin Americans, dehumanized by Empire, had to become a people. Thus, it was urgent that in the face of the North American threat, Latin America ‘show herself as she is’ (Martí 2002e: 295). This makes self-knowledge crucial to a radical independence struggle. I argue that the suggestion has merit although it matters how it is understood. One implication of embodiment, as a view about the nature of knowledge, is that all ethical and political understanding presupposes self-knowledge. Buddhists and early Christians knew this to be so but they were not dualists and gave no truck to introspection as a vehicle to self-knowledge, at least not in the usual sense. Paradoxically, for them, one knows the self, in effect, by abandoning it, as we

Introduction

9

will see. Philosophers today, of course, don’t take philosophy to depend upon the self-knowledge possessed by philosophers. But embodiment implies that we ought to. This is for two reasons: First, it is well known now that every aspect of intellectual activity depends upon circumstances and conditions, including personal ones. This includes an individual’s way of life and values. Second, to the extent that knowledge depends, among other things, upon personal circumstances and conditions, attachment to a conception of self, one’s sense of self-importance, say, can block understanding. This book explores these two points in different ways. The second point above is central to much religious thought and gets little attention from contemporary academic philosophers. But it follows from the first, which is relatively uncontroversial and motivates emphases on social epistemology (Kitcher 1992). Knowledge claims are always radically contingent upon circumstances and conditions, meaning that if there is knowledge, it is because not in spite of particular circumstances and conditions (e.g. Boyd 1982). So just as social, political, economic, cultural and cognitive conditions sometimes need to change in order to advance the pursuit of knowledge, it is also true that, at least in some cases, people must change. There are reasons for not pursuing this insight. Lenin described the pursuit of knowledge – at least for self and society – as a passage through dark waters. This was because, when we consider the nature of knowledge, it turns out that in order to know the world objectively, in some cases, subjects have to be transformed. This is hard. It makes pursuing knowledge a threatening endeavour because not all personal transformation is positive. Taylor describes ethicists’ response to this insight, which he argues is central to early Christianity, although later abandoned, as the ‘monomaniacal perspective in which contingency is an adversary’ (Taylor 2005: xii). I argue that Marxism, Buddhism and Christianity provide philosophical resources for allaying such fear. This is because such traditions acknowledge cause and effect. The metaphysical claim shared by Marxism, Buddhism and some Christian traditions is that no individual entity can be understood without reference to the whole of which it is a part, causally. Now, I am not referring to the institutions of Marxism, Buddhism and Christianity which for the most part have abandoned the insights of which I write. I am referring to philosophical insights, largely lost in current practice but still central in theory. Thus, I argue that analytic philosophers of science and epistemology, within the naturalist

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Humanism and Embodiment

realist camp, should look to Marx, the Buddha and Christian philosophers like Thomas Merton, Jean Vanier and Ivan Illich to more fully pursue their insights about the causal nature of knowledge. Secularists, upholding reason, should do likewise. The book is organized as follows. In Chapter 1, ‘Humanism and Embodiment: Three Sources’, I argue for humanism as the meta-ethical view that there are discoverable truths about the human condition. In this sense, humanism answers a problem within feminism or any field concerned about global justice: When social systems normalize dehumanization, how do we know how to live as human beings? I consider how humanism might be explained. Three philosophical sources – Marxism, Buddhism and Christianity – show how embodiment explains the discovery of (approximate) truths about the human condition by acknowledging cause and effect. Chapter 2, ‘Humanism and Global Development Ethics’, notes general agreement that the ‘developing’ should decide for themselves. Disagreement exists, though, about what this means. I consider Amartya Sen’s commitment to the objectivity of judgements regarding human development. Although Sen defines ‘development’ in terms of the realization of essentially human capacities, he does not ask how to know such capacities. Other philosophers hold that part of what it means to be human is to discover such capacities, as if they are not automatically known. Considering such issues, development cannot be defined in terms of substantive freedoms, as Sen proposes; instead, real human development, requiring transformation, must occur first to identify such freedoms. In Chapter 3, ‘Alienation and Authenticity’, I discuss authenticity as a conception of freedom involving embodied understanding. Mindfulness and authenticity have become popular, even medically. But existentialists took authenticity or self-making to answer a problem about knowledge: Abstract concepts, scientific and/or moral, are not adequate for understanding human existence. Existentialists, though, did not go all the way with authenticity and Marxist humanists like Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and Antonio Gramsci can contribute. Perhaps surprisingly, the Buddha goes further than most Marxists towards explaining the radical self-reconception often necessary for human liberation. Chapter 4, ‘Mystics, Anti-imperialists and Fear of Contingency’, addresses Charles Taylor’s argument that in secular societies, whether one believes in God or not, human flourishing is defined ‘from within’. Taylor follows Ivan Illich

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in holding that one feature of ‘a secular age’ is distrust for embodiment. But Taylor does not see the broader philosophical picture as Illich does. If he did, the ‘porous’ selves he associates with the Middle Ages provide more promise of humanism than the ‘buffered selves’ he takes for granted. Considering the consequences, mystics and anti-imperialists are those with resources for a more sensible conception of practical deliberation. Chapter 5, ‘Secularism, Ethics, Philosophy: Against Philosophical Liberalism’, argues that the secularism/religion distinction matters because secularism often stands in for reason, modernity and even humanism. I approach the distinction by arguing that a popular understanding of reason holds no promise of breaking down the barriers to human community, as secularists intend. Yet a more adequate (embodied) conception of reason is more central to religious philosophical traditions than to non-religious analytical ethicists. I argue that philosophical liberalism, not religion, should be the target of those for whom secularism is a vehicle towards genuine freedom of enquiry. Brazilian writer and priest, Frei Betto, wrote recently that in 1960, an area of Sao Paulo, Brazil, had 6 bookstores and 1 gymnasium. Now it has 70 gymnasiums and 3 bookstores (Betto 2012). Betto is not against body-building; he just wonders as one might what is lost on such a conception of human growth. His point is not that nourishing the mind is more important than building the body. It is not even that the two are deemed separate and distinct. Instead, it is that without embodied awareness – for Betto it is a kind of spirituality – some knowledge, urgently needed, is not accessible. This book suggests the needed awareness is of cause and effect.

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Humanism and Embodiment: Three Sources1

Humanism is sometimes understood in terms of vaguely defined ‘human values’. However, just as there is a question about how we know the physical world, there is a question about how we know, if we do, what is best for human beings generally or for one human being as a human being. Thus, humanism can be understood as the meta-ethical view that there exist discoverable truths about the human condition, that is, about what it means to be human. I am not referring to moral truths but rather to non-moral claims about how to live well as the idiosyncratic people we are. One could think that as long as one believes that one is living the best life for oneself in particular, one cannot be wrong. Yet, social situations sometimes make dehumanizing conditions acceptable and expected, in which case one could believe that one is living well while falling short of one’s human potential. In this chapter, I consider the nature of understanding, drawing upon recent defences of realism in science. In science, there is a question about how objectivity is possible. This is because beliefs about the world are always conditioned by other beliefs and by the context in which we acquire such beliefs. Indeed, it is now well known that all aspects of scientific practice are profoundly dependent upon social, political, economic and cultural conditions. So how is it possible for scientists to know the world as it is, independent of beliefs and expectations? One answer, offered over the past half century, has challenged a popular foundationalist picture of the nature of knowledge and justification. For Descartes, the self is the mind which, unlike bodies, is not situated in time and space. Descartes’ appealing characterization of the direct accessibility of thought and his doubts about knowing his body influenced discussions about knowledge and rationality in Europe. His foundationalism – that is, the suggestion that we achieve knowledge when we build beliefs from solid foundations, like building

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a house – led eventually to the heyday of positivism in the twentieth century, a view that failed. Although philosophers have argued against Descartes’ dualism and feminists in particular have argued for the significance of the body, I suggest below that three philosophical sources – Karl Marx, Eastern philosophy and Christian scriptures – are particularly helpful in understanding embodiment. Unless it is true, as French philosopher Alain Badiou argues, that Anglo-American philosophy is now merely an ideology (Badiou 2003: 6), we can look outside the tradition, including feminist philosophy. These ignored sources demonstrate the challenge of embodiment as an answer to dualism.

Humanism as a meta-ethical view Humanism can be understood many ways. However, paralleling realism in the philosophy of science, humanism can express the view that we discover truths about what it means to be human, truths reflecting a mind-independent reality. Humanism in this sense implies that communal beliefs and practices may be wrong about humanness and that, in theory at least, this can be known and demonstrated. Some will object. But feminism at least presupposes such humanism. Feminists do not usually maintain that believing one is living well means one is living well. This is because oppression, among other things, diminishes expectations. An oppressed person might not expect to live well or even imagine such a possibility. To oppose the dehumanization of women, which is arguably what it means to be a feminist, one has to hold that a more human way of living makes sense, even if it is hard to see what that means and few believe it possible. Dehumanization only makes sense if humanization does. Certainly, appeals to humanism have a bad history. Frantz Fanon argues that European colonialists were ‘never done talking’ about humanism and yet would ‘murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe’ (Fanon 1963: 311). Fanon knew that ‘human’ did not apply to people like himself, darker people of the South. When the world had 2 billion inhabitants, writes Fanon, 500 million were men and 1,500 million were natives, that is, other than men. The Europeans took some natives and trained them up ‘with the principles of Western culture’. They ‘stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases’, like ‘brotherhood’ and

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‘humanism’ (Sartre 1961/63: 7). Thus, dehumanization of some became both reasonable and expected. Some worry about humanism because the variety of human beings and experiences indicates that there is no human essence. In her influential Inessential Woman, Elizabeth Spelman argues that a subtle form of racism pervades feminist movements in the United States because of essentialism: Feminists refer to women as if ‘women’ is defined by an essence but in practice, ‘women’ refers only to white, heterosexual women (Spelman 1988). The essentialist worry is that generalizations presuppose a fixed set of properties defining who counts, and any such presumption is arbitrary, privileging the more powerful and visible members of the group. Let us consider the essentialist worry first and then return to Fanon. I draw upon analytic realism in this book because, as mentioned, it provides philosophical resources, not just for knowledge but also reference and rationality. Of particular significance is the question of general terms. The nature and employment of general terms is crucial to humanism because ‘human’ is presupposed in humanism. Some take ‘human’ to be a descriptive term unlike ‘person’ which is normative. For instance, one might recognize someone as a human being and then fail to treat her or him as a person, which implies possession of rights and moral status. Sue Campbell refers to the ‘ideology of personhood’ which defines some people as non-persons (2003: 31). I take ‘human’ to be a normative concept because dehumanization occurs to human beings, suggesting that some human beings, while biologically human, are nonetheless not subjects of humanism. The question of natural categories goes back hundreds of years. In 1837, Linnaeus introduced clear and simple rules for biological classifications that led to an ‘unprecedented flowering of taxonomic research in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ (Mayr 1982: 173 cited in Ereshefsky 1999: 285). One feature of such research concerns us here: The project of logical empiricists, identifying natural kinds as exceptionless, ahistorical and eternal, was based upon a naïvely idealized conception of the precision of physics. Positivist empiricists, whose profound influence continues today, maintained that natural kinds must possess definitional essences in terms of necessary and sufficient, intrinsic, unchanging properties. Much of the resistance to real essences in recent times, both within and outside biology, has targeted this conception. Yet even within physics, definitional essences do not have such characteristics (Boyd 1999a: 151–2; Wilson 1999a).

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In modern times, serious scholars do not admit to being positivists. Yet a thoroughgoing rejection of positivism requires radical reconceptualizing of the nature of knowledge. Positivism was inspired by Hume’s foundationalism, motivating attempts to account for explanation, causation and definitions through reduction to statements about observation. What rejections of such verificationist strategies have had in common, over the past half century, is recognition of the contingent and a posteriori nature of philosophical questions previously assumed to be a priori. One of these issues is kinds. On the positivist view, a general term is real, or natural, or objective because it meets conditions defined in advance. Rejecting foundationalism means that such conditions cannot reliably be defined in advance. Not only this, they need not be. Some have rejected foundationalism by rejecting objectivity, rationality and general terms altogether. But as Mannheim argued, such a strategy, in effect, endorses foundationalism (Mannheim 1936: ch. 2): The idea is that objectivity and rationality are impossible because standards cannot be defined a priori, applicable to all contexts at all times. But such an argument presumes that ahistorical, eternal standards, defined a priori are necessary for objectivity and rationality, which is foundationalism. To fully reject foundationalism is to reject the idea, not that foundations are possible but that they are necessary. And if they are not necessary, their absence does not undermine knowledge. This means judgements about knowledge, rationality and general terms can be contingent upon circumstances and conditions, even, as we discuss further below, radically so. One purpose of this book is to examine the implications of such contingency as a general characteristic of knowledge, including the nature of generalizations and general terms. If generalizations about nature do not require fixed, eternal essences, specifiable a priori, neither do generalizations about people. It would be counter-intuitive to expect of the social sciences and humanities greater exactitude than is expected of the natural sciences. Whereas positivism looked for definitions that were unchanging and applicable to all contexts at all times, a rejection of positivist foundationalism acknowledges that definitional essences, for science and for everyday deliberations, are inexact, relational (not just involving intrinsic properties), historically specific and non-eternal (Boyd 1999a: 152–7). This does not make them arbitrary because of the causal connection between the application of general terms and the real world to which they refer. A further point about the essentialism debate in feminism is that in arguing against false generalizations about women, feminists assume just such inexact,

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relational, historically specific essences. For, distinguishing between a category’s real and supposed reference, as criticism of social convention does, implies realism; it implies that the meaning of the category being employed is not dictated by convention but that it acquires content as a result of empirical facts. The suggestion is that although it is believed by many that ‘women’ refers to white, middle-class, heterosexual women, this is mistaken because, as a matter of empirical fact, other women are also human beings. The idea is that what is believed about ‘women’ is not really true of women, which implies realism. Reliance upon general terms is intricately involved in understanding of any sort. We not only refer to things, events and beings in the world, but also make generalizations about knowledge, rationality and goodness. Now, some take human and social kinds, or ways of sorting people and behaviour, to be different from natural kinds, being more rooted in social conventions and values. But others take categories of race, ethnicity and even moral goodness to be kinds similar to natural kinds. What makes them natural is the contribution their employment makes to specific demands for understanding within a field of enquiry. Richard Boyd refers to ‘epistemic access’: A term is natural, real or objective to the extent that a systematic, causally sustained tendency to employ the term within a disciplinary research programme results in approximately true theoretical results (Boyd 1999a: 149). Alain Badiou refers to a term ‘indexing the real’, as we see below. Although Badiou does not refer specifically to a causally constrained process, he accounts for the non-arbitrariness of a generalization, not in terms of standards defined a priori but instead of relationship to contingent circumstances and conditions. So, as regards essentialism, neither ‘human’ nor ‘person’, whether descriptive or normative, presupposes fixed sets of properties defining all members of the group for all times. The positivist idea was that a general term has meaning to the extent that its content can be reduced to statements about observations, and whatever cannot be traced to such statements is meaningless. Ethical and aesthetic judgements, for example, were meaningless. But if we reject that view, general terms like ‘human’ can possess content as a result of empirical, cause and effect, engagement. If this were not so, not even the general terms employed in science could be non-arbitrary. Let us return to Fanon. When Fanon denies that European colonialists are acting for humanity, he (implicitly) assumes essentialism. Fanon maintains that although Europeans strongly believe they act for humanity in general, they are mistaken. Moreover, there is evidence. For example, European values are

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inconsistent: ‘You are making us into monstrosities; your humanism claims that we are at one with the rest of humanity but your racist methods set us apart’ (Fanon cited in Sartre 1961/63: 8). Of course, such evidence can be explained away by colonialists who respond, for instance, that natives are hot-headed or that they ‘have it in for’ the Europeans. But Sartre argues that Fanon explains this very phenomenon, namely, the ‘dialectic which liberal hypocrisy hides from [the Europeans] and is as much responsible for [Europeans’] existence as for [Fanon’s]’ (Sartre 1961/63: 14). Europeans can claim consistently to act for humanity while colonizing ‘the natives’ because ‘the natives’ are not people: they are ‘superior monkeys’. But Fanon also points out that eventually, ‘this imperious being, crazed by his absolute power and the fear of losing it, no longer remembers clearly that he was once a man’ (Sartre 1961/63: 16). In other words, Fanon shows that there is a reality – beyond what is believed – that refutes the logic making Europeans’ beliefs consistent (for them). Of course, the reality need not enter in and can also be explained away – for a long time. But it can enter in and it does, according to Sartre. Europeans forget that although the colonized may be reclassified as ‘superior monkeys’, they are not, just because of this classification, converted to non-human. That is, although the concepts applied to the world are socially constructed, in this case by imperialism, reality is not, after all, causally affected by such concepts: However persuasive we may be in describing the world, the causal structures of the world do not change as a result (e.g. Boyd 2010). Fanon’s argument that the Europeans are mistaken about humanism does not require a fixed, eternal essence defining all human beings for all times. It requires evidence showing that some applications of the term ‘human’ are better supported than others, as Fanon shows. Some applications of the term provide ‘epistemic access’ in that they result in approximately true generalizations, where the approximate truth results both from knowledge already possessed and from engagement with the reality under investigation. Fanon argues, in effect, that since the colonized are actually human beings, treating them as ‘superior monkeys’ will eventually fail in explanatory capacity. Colonized people, because they are human beings, will, according to Fanon and Sartre, eventually respond like human beings, no matter what they are called. They may even take up arms to resist dehumanization. Humanism’s bad history does not show that humanism is false. The opposite is true. That ‘humanism’ often involves cruelty, stupidity and indifference shows

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that humanism in the sense suggested here is defensible. It is presupposed when such examples are criticized. Fanon and Sartre argued that Europeans’ ‘humanism’ was unjustified. Today their views are considered correct. Yet the idea of error requires the idea of correctness. In order to condemn misunderstanding, there must be proper understanding. Humanism is at least intuitively plausible, being assumed by feminist and anti-racist philosophers who criticize systemic oppression. It is presupposed in discussions of global development, as I discuss in Chapter 2. Since the development era began after the World War II, some have wondered whether the drive to help people in the South is another form of imperialism (e.g. Sachs 1992). Now that the division between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ routinely informs descriptions of the world’s inhabitants, those committed to human development must commit to humanism. For human development must be discovered. It cannot be taken for granted. However, to remove the question of humanism from such political grounds for now, let us consider the philosophy of science.

Projectibility ‘Projectibility’ refers to judgements about plausibility in scientific investigation (Goodman 1973). It expresses the widely recognized fact (by philosophers and psychologists) that investigators seek answers from a ‘small handful’ of options commended by the framework or tradition within which they operate.2 They consider options that are projectible or plausible answers to the question at hand. For example, most people will not investigate the possibility that aliens from outer space extinguished the lights. It is not plausible given normal expectations. Anyone who pursues implausible options, given the context, falls short of expectations for rationality. One consequence of projectibility is that it is not enough to have the right answer (e.g. Boyd 2010). The correct answer offered by an unknown, unfunded and unpublished researcher will not advance understanding. A proposed answer must also be plausible, given current conditions. Otherwise, it won’t be considered. This means that science advances not when scientists discover approximately true theories but when the social, economic, political and cultural factors are such that approximately true theories are also plausible and due to such plausibility are then publicized and funded.

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Some worry that science is not objective because of projectibility. If scientific practice depends upon social, economic, political and cultural factors, scientific theories cannot express a mind-independent world. There are two possibilities (e.g. Boyd 1988: 183–4). One is to debunk science. Science does not provide truth justified by facts about the world but rather truths explained only by scientists’ beliefs. But this is intuitively implausible. It leaves much unexplained. Some like to dispute science’s claim to objectivity but such people, in daily decision-making and practices, act as though science does indeed explain the world. It would be hard not to do so. The second possibility is to reconceptualize objectivity. We think objectivity requires that relevant beliefs be untainted by subjective values, dispositions and the like. As Philip Kitcher suggests, we think objectivity requires an ‘out of theory’ experience, that is, it requires standing outside any theoretical framework.3 However, objectivity may result, not from somehow standing outside all beliefs and values but rather from the relationship existing between specific beliefs and values, and the world explaining them. In other words, objectivity, when it exists, is explained by the causal connection that occasionally exists between beliefs, values, intuitions and dispositions and the world that brings them about. The thoroughgoing dependence of scientific practice upon circumstances and conditions does not show that science is not objective but rather that objectivity depends upon the reliable regulation of beliefs and research methods within the causal relationship between investigators and the objects of investigation (e.g. Goldman 1967). Some beliefs are made true by the fact that we believe them. For example, ‘your book is interesting’ is true as long as I believe it because the implication is that it is interesting to me. Thus, its truth depends upon me. But for the statement ‘your book is about penguins’, truth depends upon facts independent of me. The truth of the first statement is subjective. But the truth of the second statement depends upon external facts and is therefore objective in the relevant sense. The second statement also depends upon me in some sense, because I made it. But the crucial point is that its truth does not depend upon me. The upshot of reconceiving objectivity is that science should not be debunked because science, like other domains of investigation, depends upon social, cultural, economic and political structures; rather, science, like other domains, sometimes gets it right about the world precisely because of such dependence. Boyd, for instance, argues that (approximate) scientific truth is possible because of accommodationism, that is, because in good scientific research, concepts,

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standards and theories, at least occasionally, accommodate themselves to the causal structures of the world (1999a, 2010). By this he means that the capacity of language, research methods and theory development to reflect the world is explained by appropriate sorts of causal connections between relevant research activities and the entities or phenomena being researched. Accommodationism recognizes that justification depends, not primarily upon the conceptual framework one starts with – for example, evidence, standards and theories – but rather upon the causal relationship between theories and methods and the object(s) of investigation in the physical world. Accommodationism explains the role of intuitions in science. Intuitions are subjective, being feelings. And yet scientists sometimes explain their success as resulting from intuitions. How can intuitions play a role in reliable scientific research? They can if explained by causal structures of the world, that is, if caused by the very subject matter under investigation as a result of that investigation. These views are not uncontroversial but neither are they silly. They express a plausible and defensible philosophical position explaining the discovery of truths about the physical world even though science depends upon contingent circumstances and conditions, including moral values and personal predispositions. Humanness, as a view about truths, is presupposed in such disciplines as anthropology and development studies, the critical importance of which depends upon distinguishing between ways of life expressing human values and capacities, and those not doing so. It is also presupposed in resistance to oppression which, in opposing dehumanization, makes judgements, often implicit, about humanization. If such pursuits are not arbitrary, judgements about humanness require explanation and defence. Or at least, it should be possible to say how an explanation and defence could go, if it were explicitly offered. Naturalistic realism offers resources.

Implications for humanism Projectibility might invite despair. When Bertoldt Brecht argued against fascism at the First International Writers’ Congress for the Defence of Culture in 1935, he suggested that when someone falls down, other people faint but if violence falls like rain, people turn away when others suffer (Brecht 1935/2003: 156). His point was that human beings naturally react to others’ suffering but if violence is everywhere, we cannot react because suffering is unsurprising. In such

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situations, someone may believe correctly that suffering is wrong but may not be capable of acting on that belief because it is implausible in the circumstances. Brecht’s point is that even if it is known that fascism is wrong, that truth by itself is not enough because fascism is everywhere. The wrongness of fascism becomes unprojectible. Systemic injustice is the projectibility of injustice. Injustice is expected and real justice is unimaginable. The rise of fascism in Europe was so characterized, according to Brecht. Nobel prizewinning author, José Saramago, at the World Social Forum in Brazil in 2002, suggests that real justice is just as unprojectible today. What is defined as justice, even by unions and left-wing political parties, is ‘flowery, empty legalistic rhetoric’ having nothing at all to do with ‘rational, sensitive dignity we once assumed to be the supreme aspiration of mankind’ and yet ‘some sort of verbal and mental automatism’ keeps people from seeing the ‘raw, naked facts’ (Saramago 2002). Eugène Ionesco described the challenge of projectibility in his play Rhinoceros (1959/95). Rhinoceros is about a small town where people turn into rhinoceroses. At first, everyone is horrified by the rhinoceroses but as more people turn into rhinos, being a rhinoceros is seductive. Even the town’s logician becomes a rhinoceros, wanting to ‘move with the times’ (Ionesco 1959/95: 102–3). Finally, only one man, Berenger, remains. Now he is the monster. Ionesco said his play is about totalitarianism – of thought and reason (Ionesco cited in Merton 1967a: 20). The point is not about false consciousness. Berenger’s beliefs are true. However, Berenger cannot argue against rhinoceritis because, once everyone is a rhino, the human being is implausible. Berenger, as a human being, is unprojectible, perhaps not even seen, because existing conditions do not support such an expectation. Now the answer to rhinoceritis is humanism in the sense defined. Rhinoceritis is a situation in which monsters and monstrous behaviour are expected. Moreover, monsters are seductive (Ionesco 1959/95: 120–1). For what reasons could Berenger fight against rhinoceritis, if he did have reasons? Humanism is not the question of whether Berenger ought to oppose rhinoceritis or whether he can do so effectively; rather, it is about whether there is even something that it means to do so. Some will object that the idea that there is something that it means to be human, when everyone believes in being a rhinoceros, leads inevitably to the imposition of one way of being human. But humanism does not require this result any more than the idea that

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there is knowledge about the physical world implies that there is only one way to describe (truly) the world. Absolutism need not follow from truths and commitment to truths need not entail intolerance. Indeed, without (approximate) truths, genuine tolerance is impossible (Kitcher 1982: 165–85). Tolerance, as John Dewey remarked, is never unjudgemental (Dewey cited in Kitcher 1982: 187). For one thing, tolerant people are intolerant of intolerance. Ionesco’s point, or part of it, is that reason itself can lead to arbitrary imposition because reason is constrained by projectibility (although Ionesco did not use the term). Resisting such imposition requires access to (approximate) truths. So how is that possible? Consider the causally driven accommodationist view of practical deliberation. On a causal picture, criteria for justification cannot be, nor need they be, completely justified in advance of investigation (the goal of positivism). Instead, the success of a theory is dependent upon the relationship that exists between standards of justification and the reality being investigated. The key idea is causation. Rational standards themselves are causally affected by the world, meaning that we have rational standards, when we do, because not in spite of dependence upon contingent circumstances and conditions. Thus, it is a mistake to insist upon some position according to which standards distinguishing knowledge from non-knowledge are defined a priori. Positivists pursued such a goal but there is no such point. Applying this view to the problem of humanism, humanism is possible because at least occasionally practical deliberation is such that concepts, standards and theories accommodate themselves to the causal structures of the world, which in this case would be constituent or indicative of human reality. If humanism is true, it is explained by the cause and effect relationship between beliefs, values and expectations about what it means to be human and the lived reality of human beings in the world. As we engage, we sometimes receive back from other people or from an activity in ways relevant to understanding. Or in some cases, experience of existence is itself relevant to understanding what it means to flourish as a human being. In 1691, Mexican philosopher and feminist, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz wrote that if Aristotle had cooked, he would have written much more (2005: 274). In part, de la Cruz refers to ‘secrets of nature’ that can be discovered in the kitchen, for example that ‘an egg unifies or fries in butter or oil but, to the contrary dissolves in syrup’. But she also maintains that people ‘without receptive intellects and good inclinations’ should not be allowed to study. This is because a person

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who is of ‘an arrogant nature, restless and proud’ only becomes more ignorant as he or she learns, speaking just to have said something, like a fool with a sword who ends up hurting himself or herself and others (De la Cruz 2005: 277). For de la Cruz, then, it is not just that we gain specific bits of knowledge through activities like cooking. Rather, we can cultivate a bodily relationship to objects and phenomena and not to do so is like eating and remaining unnourished because of a bad constitution (De la Cruz 2005: 278). The suggestion is that we understand, at least in part, through the body, that is, through the effects of investigation on the body. Moreover, if we are not affected bodily, we fail to learn even that we might learn. Feminist poet and activist, Audre Lorde, writes that particularly as regards oppression, there is a question of ‘how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing’ (1984/2006: 189). Feeling a sense of satisfaction at realized capacities, ‘we can then observe which of our various life endeavors brings us closest to that fullness’ (Lorde 1984/2006: 189). Lorde writes about women because women, precisely because of bodies, ‘have been made to feel contemptible and suspect’. And yet, it is precisely through bodies that it becomes possible ‘to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity’ that makes some people and options implausible. It won’t do to merely settle ‘for a shift of characters in the same weary drama’ (Lorde 1984/2006: 192). There needs to be a new drama, the projectibility of which will be brought about by those same despised bodies. Now in one sense it is well known that minds and bodies are causally interconnected. Descartes, as mentioned, thought the body exists in time and space and that the essence of the mind, in contrast, is thought. We know now that the mind interacts with the body. But as Gabor Maté (M.D.) points out in his study of drug addiction and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Western medicine distinguishes itself from Chinese and Ayurvedic medical traditions in its commitment to residual dualism (Gabor 2008). Doctors, however, are not a good target, not proclaiming to refute mind/body dualism. More interesting is the failure of philosophers. European philosophy has largely treated agency as a matter of intellectual will and knowledge as about truths expressible in sentences, ignoring the role or even existence of truths that are felt (Meynell 2009; Shotwell 2011). But embodiment is fundamental to philosophical traditions rarely considered within Anglo-American analytic philosophy. And when we consider such sources, embodiment is more radical than might be expected, raising questions that analytic philosophers do not typically address, such as how to think of and confront death. In the rest of this book, I argue that humanism, understood

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as a claim about truths, has implications that deserve to be considered by philosophers. Moreover, it has implications for how we should live if we were to consider them. In the rest of this chapter, I identify three philosophical sources for which cause and effect are fundamental. Such traditions offer a more thoroughgoing appreciation of embodiment than has been advanced in analytic philosophy, even by feminists. Or so I will argue.

Three philosophical sources Historical materialism The first source is historical (sometimes referred to as dialectical) materialism. According to the Cuban philosopher, Armando Hart, Marxists of the twentieth century mostly ignored historical materialism (Hart 2006). Hart suggests that if academic Marxists had given more importance to Marx’s vision of the structure of reality, including a conception of rational self-determination, Marx could have provided a genuine alternative to liberal individualism on subjectivity. Hart suggests that Marx’s historical materialism even explains spirituality which often has to do, arguably, with overcoming dualism (Hart 2006: 130–4). Historical materialism is a vision of the structure of reality according to which human beings are part of nature. Human beings, like every other part of nature, are causally interconnected which means that we gain rather than lose freedom through responsibilities towards others, as is explained below. Marx got his dialectical view of reality from Hegel and famously turned it on its head to reject Hegel’s ‘mystical shell’. But Allen Wood, in his important discussion of Marx’s philosophical significance, suggests scholars often reject the ‘mystical shell’ of Marx’s essentialism, organicism and realism in favour of the view’s empirical content. And this involves eliminating what is arguably most valuable about Marx (Wood 1981/2004: 266). Hegel’s dialectical vision suggests that we do not understand the world or ourselves when we think in terms of discrete entities, each defined by its own intrinsic properties. No individual entity can be understood without reference to the whole of which it is a part. Systems or wholes are characterized by their tendencies, some towards self-harmony and preservation and some towards transition to another stage and to development. An organism moves towards perfection by adopting new structures to allow it to resolve conflicts within its nature (Wood 1981/2004: 215–17).

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Historical materialism, on Marx’s inverted dialectic, means that thinking starts with the real world, not with an image planted in our brains (Marx 1844/1978: 114–16). Our ideas and our thinking arise from our practices. This is just an empirical fact about how we are in the world: Because of our nature as causally connected creatures in a causally interrelated universe, it is a fact about our thinking that it is caused by the world. This does not mean, as Wood points out, that we are driven to think as we do. Marx held that historical materialism shows people how their actions are limited by social conditions so that they can be more aware of causal relations and make deliberate self-determining choices. For Marx, as Wood points out, we may not be able to do what we intend but we are able to intend what we do, which is a capacity for freedom characteristic of rational self-determining agents (Wood 1981/2004: 113–14). Recognizing that as natural beings we are causally situated in the world, we are also able to act on the world, that is, on the relations that form us. Thus, we change our thinking by changing how we live, even who we are. But we can’t do this alone. Rational self-determination for Marx must be at least in part a collaborative process in which I am dependent upon others for my identity (Wood 1981/2004: ch. 8). Lenin dedicated much of his monumental collection of writings to implications of historical materialism, including the dialectical relation between individuals, others and society (Lih 2011: 6). Lenin pointed out that ‘Every individual is connected by thousands of transitions with other kinds of individuals (things, phenomena, processes), etc’ (emphasis in the original) (1930/61a: 361). According to Lenin, Hegel’s ‘unity of opposites’ is the idea that every individual is a kind, a sort. We can see this, according to Lenin, in our ordinary, everyday judgements such as ‘the leaves of the tree are green, John is a man, Fido is a dog, etc’ (1930/61a: 361). In each such judgement, the individual is the universal, although individuals and universals are opposed. According to Lenin, ‘the individual exists only in the connection that leads to the universal. The universal exists only in the individual and through the individual. Every individual is (in one way or another) a universal. Every universal is (a fragment, or an aspect, or the essence of) an individual’ (1930/61a: 361). This is the issue of kinds mentioned above. No two objects, events or beings are identical but I might judge them to be of the same sort because they share some properties, like two books are the same kind even though of different colours and sizes. As mentioned above, such judgements are intimately connected to any act of understanding, and Lenin, for one, saw the political implications. When we fail to address kinds, Lenin argues, we become confused. We think individuals

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are just that – individuals. Yet an individual is never just an individual; it is always a sort of being and what sort it is depends upon the whole. An individual is always an individual and a kind, and it cannot be an individual without also being a kind. Lenin argues that people who are ignorant of causal interconnectedness end up confused about their freedom. They think they are acting on their own ends, uninterfered with by the outside world, whereas, in fact, desires, preferences and ends, are precisely dependent upon that outside world. Commenting on Hegel, Lenin notes that ‘[i]n actual fact, men’s ends are engendered by the objective world and presuppose it. . . . But it seems to man as if his ends are taken from outside the world, and are independent of the world (“freedom”)’ (1930/61b: 189). If the world is structured homeostatically, with equilibrium being defined by the whole, individuals also are defined by the whole. Thus, we must struggle with the whole to struggle with ourselves, indeed, to know ourselves. In practice, this means that the whole must sometimes be transformed for individuals to exercise or even recognize options in their best interests. Acting out my dreams and desires just because they are my dreams and desires limits me to possibilities defined by my society and my place in history. However, what is created with others through human interaction and production (in Marx’s broad sense) makes conceivable and realizable human capacities otherwise unprojectible within my current situation. This involves risk. For Lenin, the pursuit of self-understanding is a passage through ‘dark waters’, (1930/61b: 114) meaning that the subject must sometimes be transformed in order to understand herself or himself. Moreover, she or he may not know beforehand that or how such a transformation promotes understanding. This is Marx’s ‘organicism’, the idea that we discover (as opposed to relying upon convention) what is humanly possible for an individual or a group only through active, personal engagement, which may be, and quite often ought to be, transformative. If I cannot, or do not, so engage, I risk merely acting out social conventions even if I think I am free because I am acting spontaneously upon my own dreams and desires. We think of ourselves as discrete entities, our individuality defined by deepseated desires and life plans. We take freedom to be undermined when external forces, such as the state, or religion, interfere with such desires and life plans. But Lenin suggests that when we take such a view, it is as if our desires come from somewhere outside the world so that when we act on them, we are free. Instead, ‘Life gives rise to the brain. Nature is reflected in the human brain.

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By checking and applying the correctness of these reflections in his practise and technique, man arrives at objective truth’ (Lenin 1930/61b: 201). Lenin concluded that ‘The idea of including Life in logic is comprehensible – and brilliant’ (Lenin 1930/61b: 202). He meant that ‘Life’ plays a causal role. The world reacts back upon us and we need, at least occasionally, to be acted upon, causally, in order to understand that world, even if such engagement destabilizes our self-image and importance. Marx’s philosophical view is humanist because the cause and effect relation resulting in truths about humanness involves real human experience as felt in the body. When we discover the humanly possible, if we do, as opposed to, say, going along with convention, such understanding is ultimately rooted in what is felt by someone suffering or resisting as a human being, not as a member of this or that social group (e.g. Marx 1844/1978: 83–5). It is someone who suffers and resists not because of some particular wrong done to her or him but rather because of her or his very nature as a human being and the need to realize it. This is why only the proletariat can actualize philosophy, according to Marx (1843/1988: 34). The proletariat challenges the status quo in order to satisfy real, not manufactured, human needs. Since labour is never disembodied, the labourer, in Marx’s broad sense, acquires knowledge as a result of practical needs. In other circumstances, according to Raya Dunayevskaya, humanist understanding might be explained by youth struggling against decrepit social forms or minorities asserting their human status against systemic discrimination (1965). In any case, whether in fact such groups actualize radical philosophy depends upon whether their actions are based upon real human needs rather than needs resulting from (arbitrary) group membership. For Marx, the body thinks because the world acts on bodies. This means bodies must create, motivated by human needs and aspirations, in order to think more and better. We may believe that we are in touch with human reality and we may have good reasons according to intellectual traditions. We may build our politics accordingly. But such politics will not really advance the interests of human beings as such if there is no actual connection to human needs, both theoretically and practically. This is our cause and effect reality.

Eastern philosophy The second source for embodiment is Eastern philosophy – for example the ancient Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu (fourth century BC) and Siddhartha

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Gotama, the Buddha of 2,500 years ago. Chuang Tzu maintained, as does the Christian Gospel, that to lose one’s life is to save it and to seek to save it for one’s own sake is to lose it. The statement is explained by embodiment. It means that my self, conceived as the origin of meaningfulness, denies life. This is because the self is a product of a particular society and history and, as regards meaningfulness, is limited at best. It cannot be the source for the meaningfulness of human life which comes from the Tao which is (in the context of Taoism) the essence of nature, of which we are part. Chuang Tzu’s statement is a practical suggestion about how to pursue meaningfulness given our natural situation. One must lose one’s self, at least as one conceives of one’s self, in order to gain real life. If one is instead stuck on a certain conception of oneself, one loses opportunities for growth and for understanding. We cannot understand our capacities, relationships, aspirations and so on, primarily through introspection because in doing so we ignore the world that makes those capacities, and so on, what they are. The issue is about understanding. According to Chuang Tzu, the problem of the Golden Rule, for example, is that one seeks to do for others what one wants for oneself without first asking how to know what one wants for oneself (Merton 1992: 18). Chuang Tzu argued that when ethics is about ‘the good’ as an object to be studied and pursued, it becomes an evil. This is because its pursuit distracts from ‘the simple good with which one is endowed’ which is ‘the simple fact of existence’. Any self-conscious virtuousness, even if spiritually contemplative, undermines the pursuit of truths because it ‘cuts one off from the mysterious and indispensable contact with the Tao’. Indeed, ‘all deliberate, systematic and reflexive “self-cultivation”, whether active or contemplative, personalistic or politically committed, cuts one off from the mysterious and indispensable contact with “Tao”, the “Mother” of all life and truth’ (Merton 1992: 29). This is because one is ‘cut off ’ from the cause and effect realities of human existence in the natural world. Thus, for Chuang Tzu, the way of Tao begins with the simple fact of existence with which one is endowed and grows quietly in the humility of a simple, ordinary life (Merton 1992: 23). One might think that Chuang Tzu’s suggestion is just another recommendation for ethical behaviour, namely, that one lives well, simply, humbly, with nature; as such, it is just another way to be ‘imprisoned’ by ethics. But Chuang Tzu is not explaining how to behave here; instead, he is explaining how to know how to behave. Living ‘quietly in the humility of a simple, ordinary life’ is more likely to increase understanding because it promotes awareness of the natural world upon which understanding depends.

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We can understand this point in recent terms: When we interpret our lives, we rely upon background beliefs and the conditions of our current situation. John Searle calls this ‘the Background’ (Searle 1995; Prado 2006: 30–65) and Pierre Bourdieu, ‘the habitus’ (Bourdieu 1977; Shotwell 2011: 12–16). By this, they mean the set of dispositions, capacities and accumulated know-how that explains how we interpret language, behaviour, entities and events in everyday life. Although necessary to our very getting along day to day, this background cannot be the explanation for discovery of what Chuang Tzu calls ‘life and truth’. Although Chuang Tzu did not use such terms, the causal nature of knowledge and existence itself means that one should live ‘quietly in the humility of a simple, ordinary life’ rather than try primarily to be good according to the terms of a Background. The Buddha of 2,500 years ago, Siddhartha Gotama, talked centrally about cause and effect. The Buddha argues for the acceptance of reality ‘as it is’, yathabutha, at every stage. In his view, emotional or experiential understanding is a higher form of understanding than analytical because analytical understanding is always dependent upon intellectual tradition. Universality, the Buddha insisted, originates within the body, in particular, in the experience of the cause and effect relations within the body. Every act no matter how simple has an effect within the body. Even a thought has such an effect. If we were more aware of sensations in the body, we would be more aware of such effects and would better understand our own motivations. The Buddha did not teach Buddhism (e.g. Hart 1987: 18). He taught dhamma which is the Pali word for the laws of nature, that is, for cause and effect. He would not have taught Buddhism because experience of cause and effect is not particular to any one tradition. The Buddha taught that intellectual understanding is explained by traditions but awareness of cause and effect is experiential and not dependent upon any particular tradition. Analytical understanding is constrained, relying again on more modern terms, by projectibility. Thus, discovery of how to live requires feelings because feelings are not dependent upon traditions, at least not in the first instance.4 The Buddha’s insistence on experiential understanding of cause and effect was in effect an appreciation of the role of projectibility in intellectual reasoning. In the Mahã satipatthãna Sutta, for example, the Buddha refers to ardent, continuous awareness: ãtãpi sampajanõ satimã (Goenka 1998). Yet this disciplined awareness is not awareness of what one is doing or seeing, as is sometimes thought, but rather of the specific cause and effect relations within

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the body itself – the ‘rising and passing away’ of every aspect of mental and physical experience. Everything within the framework of the body is constantly changing into something else – anicca. This is the law of nature, the same insight (arguably) that characterizes historical materialism.5 The Buddha departed from other Buddhas (the term ‘Buddha’ just means ‘enlightened one’) through his emphasis on sensations of the body, that is, on the experience of cause and effect: If a mediator abides observing the impermanence of pleasant sensation within the body, its decline, fading away and ceasing, and also observing his own relinquishing of attachment to such sensation, then his underlying conditioning of craving for pleasant sensation within the body is eliminated. If he abides observing the impermanence of unpleasant sensations within the body, then his underlying conditioning of aversion toward unpleasant sensations within the body is eliminated. (Gotama cited in Hart 1987: 156)

Every unfreedom is merely a reaction to such sensations, pleasant or unpleasant, which are themselves the result of habit patterns resulting from one’s Background. An unfreedom therefore begins with sensations on the body: One sees someone one dislikes and reacts with avoidance. One thinks one has made a decision but in fact one reacts to (unpleasant) sensations on the body. With greater awareness of sensations, acquired through observation, one could judge, rationally, whether to act on the conditioning expressed in one’s body. Without such awareness, one is imprisoned by one’s Background. With bodily awareness, we would, as Wood says about Marx, be able to intend what we do even if we cannot always do what we intend. Something is missed when actions are merely reactions to habit patterns rather than responses to the situation, even if the resulting action is the same. For instance, I might act in a caring manner because I have been trained to do so. If I am trained as a caregiver, I become aware of how someone in my care might be hurt. I detect that that person is vulnerable in specific ways and I act to prevent the harm. But when I am reacting to a situation on the basis of my training and because of habit patterns acquired as I carry out responsibilities I am trained for, I have no need to be experientially aware of the person I am assisting or my relationship to her or him. I may even resist any such awareness for fear it might distract me from my official responsibilities. Thus, although I do manage to respond to the need of a fellow human being and I do so adequately, I don’t actually respond to that need. I act to fulfil a need without doing so because

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of that need.6 I am therefore, in some sense, ‘cut off ’ from human reality in the way Chuang Tzu described. Like Marx’s historical materialism, the Buddha’s view implies that selfabsorption is epistemically more than morally limiting. Historical materialism suggests that the endless pursuit of desire satisfaction is not proper self-realization because individual desires are socially explained. This is not necessarily bad but as Lenin argues, it can lead to confusion about freedom. The Buddha maintains that desires that ‘spring up’ in me provide a means for identifying the truth. But this happens to someone ‘when he has accepted those teachings as a result of pondering them’ or when someone lives the teachings after careful and sustained intellectual study (Boddhi 2005: 100). That is, if someone cultivates awareness of cause and effect, she or he becomes able to distinguish between the different sorts of desires springing up in the body. Desires experienced in the body can be truth detecting but one cannot know such truths if one does not first cultivate embodied understanding, which is experiential awareness of cause and effect. Contrary to the Western view that it is quietistic, the Buddha’s philosophy urges active and persistent work towards a better world through small but significant causal impacts on the structures which causally affect us. As a result of such engagement and awareness of cause and effect within one’s own body, one becomes more aware of projectibility and more capable of genuinely creative choices.

Christian scriptures The third source is Christian scripture. Badiou who studies St Paul (2003) and Charles Taylor in A Secular Age (2007) have noted that Christian scriptures, although not Christian institutions, recognize that cause and effect explains understanding, although they do not say so explicitly. Consider, first, Thomas Merton. Merton, a Trappist monk for 27 years, argued after Vatican 2 that there was no hope for humanism in the Catholic Church because it was wedded to a European view of the self, ignoring embodiment. Although the Church, following Vatican 2, demonstrated activist, anti-mystical, social and revolutionary tendencies, it nonetheless conceived of modern man as a ‘subject for whom his own self-awareness as a thinking, observing, measuring, and estimating “self ” is absolutely primary’ (Merton 1968: 22). Like Lenin, Merton argued that such an idea leads to confusion: ‘The more [a person] is

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able to develop his own consciousness . . . the more he tends to isolate himself in his own subjective person, to become a detached observer cut off from everything else in an impenetrable, alienated and transparent bubble’ (Merton 1968: 22). Humanism, however, requires ‘liberation from [our] inordinate selfconsciousness, . . . monumental self-awareness, . . . [and] obsession with selfaffirmation’ (Merton 1968: 31). Ivan Illich, a Catholic estranged from the Church, argues that Christianity did not always fear embodiment, as it now does. Taylor agrees with Illich that Christianity, like modern society itself, has become accustomed to ‘decentering ourselves from our lived embodied experience in order to become disciplined, rational, disengaged subjects’ and risks becoming ‘alien and dehumanizing’, if it is not so yet (Taylor 2005: xii). Even Christians in ‘a secular age’ do not expect God to intervene in their personal lives. This fear of contingency, characteristic of believers and non-believers, is a loss, resulting in dependence upon systems of rules, organizations and institutions eliminating the need for the body (Taylor 2007: 737–43). Modern ethics, according to Taylor, illustrates this ‘fetishism of rules and norms’ to avoid relying upon ‘the gut-given response to a particular person’ (2005: xii). The ‘gut-given response’ is the embodied response. The suggestion is that a genuinely human response is contingent upon circumstances and conditions. In the Good Samaritan story, as Taylor points out, sheer accident has a role in shaping the correct response to the question, ‘who is my neighbour?’, which might be considered worrying for ethics. But the response of the Samaritan to the Jew is not an accident. The encounter is an accident but the fact that the Samaritan is ‘moved by compassion’ is not an accident; it has a relevant explanation.7 The Samaritan responds to the Jew in the way he does because the Samaritan and the Jew meet within ‘a skein of relations which link particular, unique, enfleshed people to each other’ and not, as the ‘detached observer’ view would have it, on the basis of a ‘grouping of people together on the grounds of their sharing some important property’ (Taylor 2005: xii). In other words, the Samaritan’s response is not an accident in the relevant sense because it is caused by actual human sentiment within a ‘network of living concern’. It is a response to the presence of the suffering Jew, a human being like the Samaritan. Whatever the Samaritan has been conditioned to think about differences between Samaritans and Jews, the living, enfleshed reality of the Jew is that of human beings generally. The scary part of contingency, Taylor points out, is that it means that the ethical response cannot always be defined in advance

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and indeed in many cases ought not to be. It cannot be primarily explained by general rules. Badiou argues that the New Testament explains radical thought, namely, that ‘it is not the signs of power that count, nor exemplary lives, but what a conviction is capable of, here, now, and forever’ (2003: 30). He arrives at this conclusion as a result of his study of the life of St Paul, the Christian transformed on the road to Damascus just after his involvement in the stoning of a man. The Italian poet and film-maker, Pier Paulo Pasolini, wanted to make a film about St Paul set in contemporary times because he saw Paul as the example of what communism ought to have been about (Pasolini cited in Badiou 2003: 36–7). This was not because Paul was advancing the cause of the poor and the dispossessed, if he was, but rather because Paul came to his views as the result of a chance encounter, a singular unexpected event and had the conviction to pursue them, at great cost (Badiou 2003: 37). Pasolini saw Paul as an example of deliberation as a historical materialist. If our thinking starts with the world, and not from an image in the brain, then at least sometimes it will and ought to be transformative. What matters, Badiou suggests, is that Paul responds with conviction. Badiou admires Paul, ‘a Lenin for whom Christ would have been the equivocal Marx’ (2003: 2). According to Badiou, one becomes a subject, as opposed to a mere product of one’s situation, when one makes a stubborn commitment to ‘an utterly original happening which is out of joint with the smooth flow of history, and which is unnamable and ungraspable within the context in which it occurs’ (Eagleton 2009: 117). Such a commitment, if acted upon, opens up new realms of understanding precisely because of the resulting subjectivity. This is not to say that any ‘original happening’ explains universalism. However, universalism is possible, when it is, because of the conviction that Paul possesses towards such an event, which then explains more universal sources of meaning, specifically more human ones. The Samaritan’s action, for instance, brings about a relationship incompatible with the current world view requiring, in order to be acted upon, a new understanding of that same world view. His action is not independent of truths acquired so far but neither is it fully explainable in terms of such truths (Eagleton 2009: 117). Badiou argues that if we consider how insight into inhumanity results from such an encounter, universalism, paradoxically, has its origins in subjectivity. This is because, once again, the body is where we receive the causal impact of the world of human relations and the body can cause ideas appropriate for understanding the human condition, that is, for grounding humanism.

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Issues of embodiment Projectibility suggests that at least occasionally, social, economic, cultural and political structures are such that even when people know human interests and values, they cannot act. At least, they cannot act and be understood. Thus, sometimes, social, economic, cultural or political change must occur in order for people to act and be understood by others. There are also situations in which, because of projectibility, people cannot know what is best in a human sense because it is unimaginable. In such cases, also, social, economic, cultural and political change is needed for knowledge. One result of the dependence of knowledge claims upon cultural, economic, social and political conditions is that intellectual understanding is sometimes insufficient for practical deliberation. It is for this reason that Buddhist philosophy ranks experiential understanding as the highest form of wisdom above (1) rationalization and (2) reliance upon convention. One reason is, precisely, the limitations of projectibility judgements. Suppose, for example, that as feminist poet and activist Adrienne Rich suggests, people want to ‘imagine and claim wider horizons . . . rather than rehearse the land-locked details of personal quandaries or the price for which the house next door just sold’ (2001: 8). And suppose, as Rich remarks, ‘profit driven economic relations filter down into thought and feeling’ (2001: 4). If the latter is true, the former is difficult because of projectibility. Audre Lorde’s hope would be that someone or some group acts upon what she calls ‘creative energy empowered’, which is, among other things, feeling together with conviction, just as in the case of Paul. This is hard. When Paul acts upon conviction acquired from his chance encounter on the road to Damascus, he brings about conditions for a more adequate understanding for both Jews and Gentiles. But he also has to strike out on his own, independent even of the other disciples. Paul’s activism eventually makes plausible the belief that Jews and Gentiles are not essentially different in human terms, that whether one is circumcised and lives in Israel is irrelevant to whether one can be liberated by the Gospels. The fact that it is Paul who experiences this ‘upsurge’ is irrelevant to the truth of the idea expressed but the insight had to occur to someone and Paul both experiences it and judges it important. The truth he pursues is relevant to humanism, namely, that there is ‘neither Jew nor Greek’, etc., just humans. But its expression was the work of a lifetime.

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What matters to the truth of Paul’s claim is that it ‘indexes the real’ (2003: 22) by which Badiou means that it is caused by an experience of reality. Badiou’s theory of truth lies beyond this project. What matters here is that Badiou separates agency from subjectivity, as do Marx, Lenin, the Buddha and Merton in different ways.8 To put the point differently, he separates agency from the self, known from within, as a discretely conceived individual. Instead, self-determination, acting on one’s own, is a matter of broader circumstances and conditions. In certain contexts, the separation of agency and subjectivity has been obvious. Eduardo Galeano argues that the literary genre testimonios is misunderstood to involve true stories of individuals (cited in Timossi 2000). Instead, testimonios in the Latin American traditions are about collective struggles, and are stories advancing specific political and moral agendas. This is because in situations of historical injustice, individuals often only have stories as individuals to the extent that the relevant historical memory of the group is rescued. Cuban writer Miguel Barnet cites the example of ex-slave, Estevan Montejo, whose story, told in the first person, is entitled The Biography of a Runaway Slave, not the autobiography (Barnet 1994). Barnet points out that Montejo’s personal story is dependent upon those who struggled for independence and against slavery in Cuba. Before such struggles, social expectations were such that Montejo could not have had a story, at least not a human one. National struggles made it possible for Montejo’s story to be about a person. Montejo’s story is explained by access to truths, not just about him but also about human beings more generally. Such access would have been achieved by individuals in the anti-slavery struggles and would have been claimed and pursued in collaboration with others. Badiou calls this ‘subjective upsurge’ and Lorde ‘creative energy empowered’. I have often used the following example, in classes, to indicate to students how access to relevant truths is sometimes emotional and personal. The following passage is a description of acquiring antiracist insight from Mab Segrest’s memoire of growing up in the southern United States during the Civil Rights Movement9: As racial conflict increased in Alabama in the 1960s, I also knew deep inside me that what I heard people saying about Black people had somehow to do with me. This knowledge crystallizes around one image: I am thirteen, lying beneath some bushes across from the public high school that was to have been integrated that morning. It is ringed with two hundred Alabama Highway Patrol troopers at two-yard intervals, their hips slung with pistols. Inside the terrible circle are twelve Black children, the only students allowed in. There is a stir in the crowd

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as two of the children walk across the breezeway where I usually play. I have a tremendous flash of empathy, of identification, with their vulnerability and their aloneness within that circle of force. Their separation is mine. And I know from now on that everything people have told me is “right” has to be re-examined. I am on my own. (Segrest 1985: 20)

Segrest might be considered irrational: She feels empathy out of synch with expectations dependent upon background beliefs and traditions. But instead of rejecting her feeling of empathy for the Black children, Segrest rejects the beliefs that make it surprising, which include self-conception. Moreover, she rejects those beliefs completely: ‘And I know from now on that everything people have told me is “right” has to be re-examined. I am on my own’. Segrest suggests that if she had not re-examined ‘everything people have told me is “right”’, she would not have understood racism as she eventually did. When I teach this example, I get objections: ‘Segrest’s experience is subjective’. ‘What if she had felt hatred instead of empathy?’ True, Segrest’s response looks like an accident. And if an apparently accidental feeling can possess such significance, ethics is undermined. Or so it seems. But it is not. Understood differently, ethics becomes possible in a way that it was not previously because people become possible. Segrest’s insight is that she is identified with the Black children; the insight is notable because until then she had not been identified with the Black children. She had considered them other, different, of another sort. Why, though, is Segrest’s ‘subjective upsurge’ not arbitrary? The causal theory of knowledge explains the reliability of some intuitions, which are feelings, in the same way that it explains the reliability of perceptual judgements. When we make a judgement based on observation, we do not rely upon premises or inferences (Boyd 1988: 191; see also Goldman 1967; Quine 1969); instead, knowledge gained from perception is explained by the causal mechanisms according to which the perception comes about. Such mechanisms are not identified but lack of explicit justification at the time does not undermine reliability. The same occurs with intuitions and other feelings. Judgements based upon intuition sometimes even reflect deeper understanding than can be articulated, even though the explanation for reliability is often unavailable. Neither Paul nor the Samaritan act arbitrarily. They make no leap into the void. Neither, though, do they rely upon specific standards of justification available at the time. In science, reliable intuitions are ‘trained’ intuitions, coming about as a result of experimental practice and relevant theoretical knowledge. Moreover,

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emotions are involved in science more generally: Kepler and Newton could never have accomplished what they did, Einstein writes, without the ‘strength of the emotion’ that allowed them to ‘spend years of solitary labor in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics’ (Einstein 1954: 39). Yet such a significant role for subjectivity in science does not undermine objectivity. Although no rational principles can be (or ought to be) definitively established a priori, and moral, social and personal values are intrinsic to the working of science, philosophers determine what the non-arbitrariness of scientific judgements consists in for particular cases (e.g. Kitcher 2001: 63–82). We can do the same for arguments against deep-seated dehumanization, often involving the kind of subjective experience described by Segrest. For instance, if we look at Fanon’s arguments, we can see that and how Fanon argues for the humanity of the colonized. Fanon doesn’t bother to address meta-ethical questions about essentialism and realism. As Cuban philosopher Felix García points out, these questions don’t arise for philosophers claiming their humanity in face of imperialism’s long-standing brutal denial (2011). Their very claim to personhood indicates that ‘the real’ can be indexed, to use Badiou’s terms. As Fanon argues, colonialism is neither illogical nor morally inconsistent if ‘the natives’ are not human – if they are, for example, ‘superior monkeys’ (cited in Sartre 1961/63: 15). But colonialism is inconsistent with the experience of the colonized which was subjective but nonetheless real. We return to this issue in Chapter 2. However, Sartre argues that it is hard to consider arguments against rhinoceritis, to use Ionesco’s metaphor. Precisely because of rhinoceritis, Berenger, the only human left, is now the monster, and few examine monsters’ arguments. For this reason, in his preface to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Sartre urges Europeans to ‘enter into’ Fanon’s book: ‘At a respectful distance . . . it is you who feel furtive, nightbound, and perished with cold. Turn and turn about; from these shadows from which a new dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies’ (Sartre 1961/63: 13). To access the arguments, intellectually, Sartre is urging Europeans to be affected, emotionally. A few remarks here about bias: The question of bias arises in the philosophy of science because of the role of social and moral values, and feelings, such as hunches. In the late nineteenth century, for example, ‘scientific’ evidence showed whites to be superior in intelligence to other ethnic groups. Steven Jay Gould argues that the scientists involved were not evil (Gould 1981/1996: 53). They were well-intentioned, committed, respectable scientists who, probably

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unwittingly, were influenced by racist social values. Now, some take the example of nineteenth-century scientific racism to provide reason to debunk science. But the example supports the opposite conclusion because the errors were discovered, indicating that science does indeed access (approximate) truths. Moreover, as Richard Boyd argues, the discovery of errors made by such scientists is itself a result of social values.10 Anti-racist values of the twentieth century made such racist results implausible and provided reason to question them. Scientists don’t re-examine the arguments and evidence for every past theory, willy-nilly. There had to be a reason for a scientist, like Gould, to spend so much time in the Harvard archives painstakingly re-examining the data. Anti-racist social biases provided such reason. Although science goes wrong because of social (and other) values, it also goes right because of such values. Richard Miller argues that objectivity in the social sciences often requires strong bias (1989). In the 1880s, for example, the term ‘culture’ had no plural and applied only to white Europeans (Miller 1989: 747). Non-Europeans were ‘primitive’, not cultured. Therefore, an anthropologist like Franz Boas would not have advanced understanding by returning to the United Kingdom with an ‘inclusive’ set of truths about the people he studied. For, given the context, none of Boas’ truths about non-European societies could have been understood to be about human culture. Boas, however, was narrow-mindedly committed to the idea that such people and societies were ingenious and complex. He was biased towards their humanity, and as a result was motivated to ask relevant questions about why such people were not considered cultured. Philosophers of science have considered how arbitrary biases, undermining objectivity in science, are identified and corrected (e.g. Campbell 1998: 30–2). They have also noted that without biases, without interests, there would be no way to organize evidence (e.g. Antony 1993). But one aspect of the bias question is given little attention by philosophers of science and epistemologists. Objectivity, when it occurs, is explained by the reliable regulation of linguistic and inferential practices in a dialectical process that includes psychological factors, like interests and values. This means that biases of various sorts are endemic to science, and are necessary. It also means, though, that one may be biased, for better or worse, by being attached to a certain conception of oneself, and one’s importance. In the same way that attachment to a particular set of rules, standards or definitions can block understanding, attachment to self-importance, or self-image, can skew research results. Sartre’s plea to Europeans to ‘[t]urn and turn about’ until they see that they themselves are zombies recognizes such bias.

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Some philosophers have noted this issue. Nkiru Nzegwu argues that feminist discussions of cross-cultural understanding, which recognize biases related to national and ethnic identities, does not consider personal attachment to such identities, that is, that people not only identify themselves in terms of a conception of how the world divides up (Nzegwu 2006: 196). We are also personally invested in such identification, drawing upon it for stability and confidence. Merton suggests that this was understood by the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s. Weird, wacky and dysfunctional as were the communes of that time, their members at least understood that in order to think differently they had to live differently. They understood, as Merton writes, that they had to get out of their ‘minds’ which were a product of the society they were criticizing, undermining their proper understanding of it. According to Einstein, such biases towards oneself are relevant even to science. Einstein argued that great scientists, as opposed to good ones, must be the most religious of persons. He meant this in his sense of ‘religious’ which is the capacity for ‘rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law . . . compared with [which] all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection’ (Einstein 1954: 40). This is because great science asks new questions, big questions, and the capacity to ask such questions involves wonder, which requires humility, at least to some extent. Whether Einstein is right about science, it seems evident that such biases matter to humanism. Gramsci’s famous claim that ‘[e]very man is a philosopher’ (Gramsci 1948–51/1971: 9) means that everyone – no matter his or her education level or position – sustains or undermines a particular conception of humanness. Deciding how to be a good friend or parent, how to do a job well, what to prioritize, depends upon concepts about and related to what it means to be human, implicitly. We can take such concepts for granted or we can revise them through deliberation and practice. Such revision is evidently more difficult, and less reliable if one is biased towards an established conception of oneself and one’s importance. The Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that humanism today requires three things: experiential awareness of cause and effect, an ‘agonizing social struggle’ and ideas that are ‘comprehensible to those most deeply involved in that struggle’ (cited in Merton 1967c: 287). Feminist philosophers concerned with embodiment have focused on the second and third items in his list. One object of my project is to suggest that the first be given more philosophical attention. The following chapters aim to make the direction clearer.

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Conclusion Feminist and anti-racist philosophers presume humanism in the meta-ethical sense I have defined. This is because they take as meaningful the question: if social norms and values are dehumanizing, how do we know how to live as human beings? There need not be one answer, and in many cases there will be no clear answer. However, to the extent that it makes sense to resist, or even to identify, systemic oppression, knowledge of humanist truths is presupposed. The nature of such knowledge matters because of the practical consequences. In fields such as global development, the question is urgent, as we see in Chapter 2. It implies that global development requires critical self-awareness by the ‘developed’ more than aid to the ‘developing’. In one sense, this is well known. What is less well known are the implications, which may be better recognized by sources outside Anglo-American philosophical and theoretical traditions.

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Global development Critics of global development argue that the term ‘development’ refers not to the fulfilment of natural human potentials but instead to the movement towards an ever more perfect form of being, which is a more Western/Northern one. Since the end of the World War II, some argue, the metaphor of development has prevented the people of the global South from defining their own lives (Esteva 1992/2010: 9). When Harry Truman talked about a ‘bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas’, he was suggesting that the ‘underdeveloped areas’ needed to be fixed (cited in Esteva 1992/2010: 1). Henry David Thoreau famously wrote, ‘If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me some good, I should run for my life . . . for fear that I should get some of his good done to me’ (cited in Gronemeyer 1992/2010: 55). Thoreau would not run if he were asking for help. But if someone wants to do me good without being asked, she or he is likely offering help for his or her own purposes, not necessarily my purposes. So strong is the consensus that global development should not impose the values of the ‘developed’ upon the ‘developing’ that even the World Bank claims that the ‘developing’ should decide for themselves (Narayan 2004, 2005 cited in Koggel 2007: 9). There is disagreement about what this means. Feminist scholars criticize unnuanced understanding of empowerment by institutions like the World Bank. While ‘empowerment’ is better than imposition, it ignores the global and national forces already implicated in regional development (Koggel 2007: 8–11). Empowerment is not just about deciding. It should address the capacities for

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understanding power structures resulting from global and national circumstances and conditions (Allen 1998 cited in Koggel 2007: 10–11). For Gustavo Esteva and Madha Suri Prakash, the Zapatista movement in Mexico in 1994 was the political manifestation of deep discomfort with the development imposed by the World Bank (1998: 287). ‘Post-development’ in Latin America of the 1980s meant networks of groups took up specific local problems (such as the building of a dam or nuclear plant or abuse of rights) working democratically and legally. A new model aims to ‘consciously avoid any temptation to lead or control the social forces they activate’ and to ‘detach themselves from abstract ideologies’ (Esteva and Prakash 1998: 187), emphasizing collective leadership and attention to the grass roots. By 1989, a neo-liberal process of development was threatened in Latin America by ‘new social movements’ wanting more socially inclusive development (Ocampo 1998, 2006, 2007 cited in Veltmeyer and Rushton 2013: 6). For those disenchanted with both socialism and neoliberalism, emphases on local and grass-roots solutions, including libertarianism, are appealing in Latin America (e.g. Lopez de Sousa 2009: 488). In 1990, the Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean; CEPAL) published Changing Production Patterns with Social Equity, emphasizing integration into the global economy.1 As CEPAL launched its ‘development from within’ (CEPAL 1990, Sunkel 1993 cited in Veltmeyer and Rushton 2013: 7), the UN pursued sustainable development, relying upon local organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), following the work of Amartya Sen and others on the Human Development Index.2

Moral progress and ranking A meta-ethical issue explains movement towards grass-roots organization, participation/empowerment and libertarianism by development ethicists and activists. Development has involved risk that some person, ideology or perspective arbitrarily defines the most worthy lives, imposing values and ways of life. The solution is grass-roots democracy, non-hierarchical organization and engagement within the particular context: Development must be locally defined, as long as this is done with adequate recognition of complexity. Feminist scholars considering empowerment conclude that ‘privileging of the global scale over other, smaller scales of organizing threatens to undercut the ability of the

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[anti-globalization movement] to realize the transformative changes that are its goals’ (James DeFilippis cited in Parpart et al. 2002: 244). The worry is about ‘top-down’ moral reasoning, typical in Western philosophy. Just as philosophers have argued against ‘top-down’ reasoning (e.g. Tobin and Jaggar 2013; Wong 2002), development ethicists and social and political theorists argue for ‘bottom-up’ approaches emphasizing specific contexts. ‘Grass-roots’ or ‘democratic’ solutions oppose organized political struggle against national and/ or global power structures assuming that such solutions are more appropriately reflective of regional interests. At issue is a question about justification; in particular, about whether and to what extent ‘top-down’ approaches can be nonarbitrary. Claims to non-arbitrariness, for values, are themselves suspicious. Some argue that knowledge cannot ground judgements about value, and development has to do with value – for example, quality of life and well-being. We expect that in science, beliefs are justified by observation and experience but that judgements about human well-being are too personal to be objective (e.g. Boyd 1988; Campbell 2011). Science involves beliefs based upon evidence known to be true but for questions of human well-being, there can be no factual evidence. Or so it seems. Thus, any presumption of truth(s) is suspect, likely to involve arbitrary biases, like self-interest. Furthermore, Charles Taylor describes modern times as an ‘age of authenticity’ (2007: 473–9). We pursue our dreams and desires just because we possess them. Around the middle of the twentieth century, a ‘cultural revolution’ introduced pervasive relativism about truth into discussions of well-being. Causes include consumerism, greater geographical mobility, the rise of television, and new family patterns, with the ‘60s provide perhaps the hinge moment’ (Taylor 2007: 473). Consequently, authority is suspicious and no one can tell anyone else how to live or how to behave. Clearly, individual choice, the more the better, trumps any argument about human well-being (Taylor 2007: 479). Yet, global development, according to Sen, involves an ‘inescapable valuational problem’ (1999: 31) that, implicitly or explicitly, requires ranking ways of life. Moreover, such ranking can be objectively justified by facts about the realization of essentially human capacities. In cases in which ‘some parts of a tradition cannot be maintained along with economic and social changes that may be needed for other reasons’ (Sen 1999: 31), it is possible to rely upon ‘external facts’ that go beyond the information base related to preference rankings (Sen 1999: 251). And Sen maintains that it is possible to discover and to make explicit ‘the

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relative weights of different types of freedoms in assessing individual advantages and social progress’ (Sen 1999: 30), his ‘human capabilities approach’. At least in Development as Freedom, Sen compares himself to Aristotle and Marx who held that human well-being is not defined by what we believe but by facts about humanness. Freedom involves becoming the person one values and has reason to value (Sen 1999: 10), suggesting that what one values and has reason to value are not necessarily equivalent. Moreover, ‘expanding the freedoms we have reason to value’ makes us ‘fuller social persons’ (Sen 1999: 14–15) as if, as Marx and Aristotle held, what it means to be a full person is not the same as what one thinks it means. For Sen, as for Aristotle and Marx, we can think we live the best life possible as the people we are and fall short of realizing our human potential because, like plants and non-human animals, human beings have an essence, which can be realized or not. Sen recognizes that development theorists ‘grumble’ about ranking (1999: 30). They don’t agree that evaluations are explicitly made according to objective criteria regarding which ways of life are better than others in terms of substantive freedoms (as opposed to perceived freedoms). But Sen argues against libertarians that any approach to development – for example, utilitarian, libertarian, economic – involves ranking (1999: 30). The criteria are not always made explicit but are nonetheless presupposed. Objectivity is unpopular in the ‘age of authenticity’, especially as regards living a good life. In his popular Pulitzer prizewinning The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker argues against the ‘therapeutic revolution’ in which one is either ‘drinking or drugging himself out of awareness’ or burying himself ‘in psychology in the belief that awareness all by itself will be some kind of magical cure’ (1973: 284). Instead, one should accept one’s ‘creatureliness’ in the ‘full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear and of sorrow’ (Becker 1973: 284–5). For meaningfulness, one can ‘fashion something – an object or ourselves – and drop it into the confusion’ (Becker 1973: 285), making an offer, so to speak, to the ‘life force’. Becker’s proposal is typical: ‘[F]ashion something’ as if whatever one chooses to fashion is meaningful just because one chooses to fashion it. What matters is what one believes to be meaningful. So Sen’s objectivity goes against the grain, at least at first glance. Analytic philosophers have argued about whether normative judgements can be objectively justified and about whether such judgements even possess content (e.g. Campbell 2011). There are also arguments against essences, even for nonhuman animals. Sen does not engage such debates.3

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Certain philosophers of the South Sen is not alone. Ethics involves both normative ethics and meta-ethics. Normative ethics is about what we ought to do and what sorts of people we ought to be. Meta-ethics, by contrast, is about what we mean when we talk about, say, right and wrong. Whether value judgements can be objective is a meta-ethical question. Development ethicists in general do not address such a question; they take it for granted that relevant knowledge is possible, as Sen does. They have to. Frei Betto, the Brazilian liberation theologist, notes that too many people ‘se nace para morir’ (are born to die) (cited in Minà 2001: 30) just because of where they were born. Betto notes that 400 people per square kilometre in Holland are not excess but 16 Indians in Brazil in the same amount of space are considered surplus, expected to die of hunger. When expectations about who counts as human are deep-seated, popular opinion cannot support the idea of a better world in the relevant sense, which would be one in which all human beings count. Global development, therefore, to the extent that it is human development, would seem to presuppose knowledge of truths about humanism. Philosophers of the South were explicit in such a commitment. Martí, leader of Cuba’s last war for independence from Spain, argued that Latin American independence could not be achieved through self-government alone, or even through respect for civil and political rights; rather it depended upon ‘the free, direct and spontaneous employment of the magnificent faculties of man’ (Martí 1882/2002a: 50). For Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, development ‘is not a matter of how many kilograms of meat one can eat’ but rather ‘of making the individual feel more complete, with much more inner wealth and much more responsibility’ (1965/2002: 43). Paulo Freire refers to the struggle for ‘full humanity’ (1970/2000: 85), ‘an incessant pursuit of the humanity denied by injustice’ (1970/2000: 92). Not one of these philosophers bothers to argue for truths about humanism. Like Sen, they take it for granted that essentially human capacities are known. Yet, some ask a meta-ethical question that Sen does not. Martí writes that development is not about ‘civilization and barbarity’, as if these are known; instead, it is about ‘false erudition and nature’, (1891/2002e: 290) that is, knowledge. He does not mean knowledge about development, which Sen pursues; rather, Martí asks what it means to know in the first place. It is not a surprising question from Martí: Latin America had been ‘deformed by three centuries of a rule that denied man the right to exercise his reason’

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(1891/2002e: 290) and Martí, knowing imperialism, suspected that ‘[n]o Yankee or European book could furnish the key to the Hispanoamerican enigma’ (1891/2002e: 293–4). Guevara’s ‘new man’ view (1965/97: 203) answers questions about knowledge. Like Marx, Guevara held that human beings, like all parts of the universe, are causally interconnected. The ‘new man’ on such a picture is not some particular being, as critics claim (Becker 1973: 281), but the person who knows her or his existential stake in human interconnectedness: Her or his very existence and how to understand it depends upon the society created with others. Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed is entirely about understanding. Not only is Freire committed to ‘authentic humanism’ (1970/2000: 93); for him, it is impossible that the direction towards ‘recovery of the people’s stolen humanity’ (1970/2000: 95) not be detectable (1970/2000: 103). Perhaps, possibilities ‘must simply be felt – sometimes not even that’ (Freire 1970/2000: 103) but they do exist and are discoverable. To the extent that human beings increase their awareness through engagement (e.g. Freire 1970/2000: 109) and as reflective creatures strive for that awareness (Freire 1970/2000: 97–101), the very existence of ‘authentic humanism’ means it will eventually be detected, somehow. Like Guevara, Freire argued that human completeness can never be achieved alone but only in solidarity with others moving forward with ‘unity, organization and struggle’ (1970/2000: 139). As regards this last point, Sen’s alliance with such thinkers is interesting, as we discuss below. Martí, Guevara and Freire understood, practically and theoretically, imperialist dehumanization. Even Simón Bolívar, a liberal political theorist more than a philosopher, understood that imperialism shapes the structures and relations determining what can be known and imagined. Bolívar was committed to the age of reason and never ceased citing Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau. But Bolívar knew that no European philosopher, with the possible exception of Jeremy Bentham, saw a contradiction between proclaiming equal rights and freedoms and maintaining Empire (Lynch 2006: ch. 2). They overlooked centuries of racism and colonialism that diminish expectations so that the protection of individual rights and freedoms is consistent with dehumanization. Fanon argued that racism can never be understood, or even identified, through empirical investigation alone (e.g. 1967: 109–40). If a society is racist, racism is expected. In a racist society, Blacks do not just sit at the back of the bus; importantly, it is expected that Blacks sit at the back of the bus.4 Because of the systemic nature of discrimination, informing people’s judgements about

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themselves, Martí knew that imperialism could not be fought just with guns and ammunition: ‘The tiger, frightened away by the flash of gunfire, creeps back in the night to find his prey. . . . But now his step is inaudible for he comes on velvet paws. When the prey awakens the tiger is upon him’ (2002e: 292–3). Bolívar, Martí, Guevara and Fanon knew the colonization of the mind. After liberating South America, politically, Bolívar wrote, despondently, that ‘he who serves a revolution ploughs the sea’. They took humanism for granted because they confronted systemic discrimination which they recognized as such. They knew that within the ‘relentless logic of imperialism’ (my translation) (Rodríguez 2010: 12), those relevantly like them do not count: they are ‘población sobrante’ (leftover people) (Restivo 2012). Gianni Minà writes that it is as if life and aspirations are guaranteed, by some sort of divine right, to 25 or 26 nations of the world who control the markets, representing only a fifth of the world’s population (2001: 28). Minà asks what sort of ‘verdadera incomprehensión cultural’ (genuine cultural misunderstanding) protects that 20 per cent from the horrified gaze of the 80 per cent (2001: 34). Recognizing such ‘verdadera incomprehensión cultural’ for what it is, these philosophers of the South assumed humanism through inference to the best explanation. This is often how we justify knowledge claims. If I see a wet dog running out from the bush and I know there is a lake behind the bush, I infer that the dog has been in the lake. I don’t have to observe the event to know, with reasonable certainty, it has occurred. Given all the available facts, no other story is acceptable. An inference to the best explanation is a judgement that a particular story, if it were true, would best explain what is directly observed. Gregor Mendel did not see genes. He crossed pea plants and observed certain results. He then came up with a story – involving genes – which if it were true would explain observable facts, an inference to the best explanation. Objectivity in science (scientific realism) is defended this way. To understand the world, scientists rely upon beliefs, values, orientations and even feelings and emotions. Nonetheless, scientists discover truths and they determine that previously held views are false. It would be counter-intuitive to think otherwise. The only plausible explanation for the reliability of a scientific method that is so theory and value dependent is that beliefs are made true by a theory-independent world, causally (e.g. Boyd 1988: 190). Returning to Sen: In deciding whether to sacrifice a traditional way of life to escape grinding poverty, ‘it is the people directly involved who must have the

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opportunity to participate in deciding what should be chosen’ (1999: 31). Neither the elders nor the development strategists should have the final say; instead, ‘the people’ should choose. But how do those ‘directly involved’ distinguish human development from the alternatives? Sen recognizes that people often ‘adjust their desires and expectations to what they unambitiously see as feasible’ (1999: 63). And systemic discrimination makes dehumanization feasible. For the ‘población sobrante’ (leftovers), how to know cannot be ignored. Hence, Martí’s commitment to Cuban independence, the major focus of his life, was at the same time a revolution in thought, according to Cuban scholar Pedro Pablo Rodríguez (2010a: 21). This was necessary because the struggle for independence presupposed a struggle, theoretical and political, for the very grounds of belief in dignity, freedom and life itself, a struggle that could only be explained by access to truths about humanness.

Evolution and practical identity Now one might think that Darwinian accounts of the origins and persistence of value judgements among humans better explain resistance to systemic injustice than knowledge of humanism. According to evolutionary theory, right actions promote survival of the species and wrong ones do not. Thus, natural selection explains human instincts favouring resistance to oppressive behaviour that damages the human species. Such explanations do not require controversial entities such as ‘external facts’ of a normative sort (Kitcher 1993; Sober and Wilson 1998 cited in Campbell 2011). Philip Kitcher has recently so argued. According to his pragmatic naturalism, ethics is a ‘social technology’ that first emerged in response to costly altruism failures within groups and it retains this function today. No value truths exist. Pragmatic naturalism explains judgements leading to moral progress as practical decisions based upon increased understanding and reflecting existing social needs and values. Considering the history of ethics, ethical progress is mostly a result of increased empirical information, not external facts. It is not as if ‘one day, one band member enjoys some experience of the rightness of a pattern of behavior the group has not yet tried and that he communicates his experience in some way, enabling them to share his recognition’ (Kitcher 2011: 195). Ethical arguments are pragmatic, appealing to a specific audience with determinate values, having nothing to do with discovering fundamental ethical insights.

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Critics respond that ethical objectivity does not require a special kind of fact distinct from natural facts (Fitzpatrick 2012). It does not require facts about ‘rightness’ the apprehension of which requires special faculties. Objectivity only requires that factual evidence of a natural sort supports such judgements (Boyd 1988; Sturgeon 1988). Realists can hold, as Kitcher does, that questions about value judgements often depend upon factual disputes, such as about which particular religion is true, or which account of human psychology or which theory of political organization (Sturgeon 1988). Although such questions are hard, they are not unresolvable by empirical investigation. Thus, there is no need for a special kind of fact beyond natural facts. Leaving aside arguments about what constitutes moral realism, Christine Korsgaard argues that evolutionary accounts of value judgements do not explain why normative claims are compelling (1996: 14–15). If someone is inclined for moral reasons to sacrifice her or his life, would she or he be motivated by the survival of the species? Even if evolutionary theory explains why people act morally, it does not explain compulsion: Why when we recognize an action as good are we compelled to carry it out, even when it is hard? We feel compelled, Korsgaard argues, because our endorsement of such reasons expresses our sense of practical identity (1996: 30–48). ‘Practical identity’ refers to the description under which one values oneself and finds one’s life to be worth living and actions to be worth undertaking (1996: 20). We care about value claims because the process of reflective endorsement, according to which we become aware of our intentions, desires, beliefs and attitudes and how they are formed, depends upon self-conception. Korsgaard’s proposal is appealing, for one thing, because it explains the failing involved when someone acts entirely on principle without personal sentiment. Such a person might lack understanding, as Peter Railton suggests (Railton 1984), but Korsgaard adds that the failure is misunderstanding the nature of moral judgements themselves. Normative commitment is personal: People often say, ‘if I had not acted, I could not live with myself ’, suggesting that motivation depends partly upon self-conception. In a recent study of moralism, Craig Taylor supports the point: The vice of moralism involves making moral judgements with ‘no serious recognition of the life of another’, judgements that are explained by the shallowness of personal response and an inability to conceive of oneself in relationship to another person (Taylor 2013: 30, 87). Korsgaard suggests that reasons are like causes. A cause makes its effect happen and a reason necessitates a person to act or believe as it directs. Our

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ordinary notions of causation involve ideas of power, of one thing bringing about another, and ideas of universality, of something being affected in a regular or law-like way. Just as the special relation between cause and effect cannot be established in the absence of law and regularity, so the relation between agent and action depends upon universality. For instance, I have a reason to be punctual for my classes because I see myself as someone who fulfils obligations, respects others’ obligations and so on. My endorsement of impulses as reasons involves fitting such impulses into a pattern. Whether I have a reason, as opposed to acting upon a whim, depends in part upon how I see myself over time. Agency as a relationship explains, for example, the ‘imposter syndrome’ according to which people do not believe that they are the cause of their success (Young 2013). Women in top positions in male-dominated fields often expect their success to be a fluke, the result of error. They feel like an imposter and expect to be found out. ‘Imposters’ have difficulty in seeing themselves as the cause of their own success. They seek another explanation, like luck. They fail in agency, not because of false beliefs or failure to act, but because of failure to understand themselves as fitting into a relevant pattern. Specifically, they fail to understand themselves as those to whom such success generally happens and so fail to understand their relationship to success as appropriately causal (Dillon 1997). Korsgaard’s view of motivation is not relativistic because judgements about value are constrained by norms within a particular society. Agency, including moral agency, depends upon self-conception but self-conception depends upon the actions and expectations of others, upon community. When I feel compelled to act, that is, when I have a reason to act, it is because, in part, I conceive of myself in a certain way in relation to the object of my action. However, I cannot conceive of myself in just any way because my self-understanding is constrained by social norms and values, that is, by what Korsgaard calls ‘public reasons’ (Korsgaard 2009: 210, 211). So Korsgaard’s argument against evolutionary accounts is that they do not explain moral compulsion. We are compelled to act because doing so matters to the kind of people we are, because the identification of moral reasons involves practical identity and failing to act undermines practical identity. Moral claims grip us; they make demands upon us; they compel us. Such compulsion is not explained by evolutionary truths which do not explain the particular quality of value claims that oblige us, even when it is hard.

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However, practical identity cannot explain moral motivation if moral motivation is required to bring about that identity. Consider again the example, referred to in Chapter 1, of Mab Segrest’s moral motivation to undertake a lifelong struggle against racism: As racial conflict increased in Alabama in the 1960s, I also knew deep inside me that what I heard people saying about Black people had somehow to do with me. This knowledge crystallizes around one image: I am thirteen, lying beneath some bushes across from the public high school that was to have been integrated that morning. It is ringed with two hundred Alabama Highway Patrol troopers at two-yard intervals, their hips slung with pistols. Inside the terrible circle are twelve Black children, the only students allowed in. There is a stir in the crowd as two of the children walk across the breezeway where I usually play. I have a tremendous flash of empathy, of identification, with their vulnerability and their aloneness within that circle of force. Their separation is mine. And I know from now on that everything people have told me is “right” has to be re-examined. I am on my own. (Segrest 1985: 20)

Segrest, we learn, is from a liberal family dedicated to equality for Blacks. Her family donates to schools for Black children and supports efforts to improve the lives of Blacks. Segrest’s practical identity would include such liberal values. Yet Segrest’s feeling of empathy for the Black children provides reason to question that identity. Segrest endorses an impulse – a feeling of empathy – as a reason. Her endorsement is not explained by the practical identity she has lived with so far. To the contrary, to the extent that ‘their separation’ constitutes a reason for Segrest to act, and to re-examine ‘everything people have told me is “right”’, it contradicts that identity. Segrest could be crazy, acting on a whim, without reason. It is for good reason that we worry about people who depart radically from previous beliefs and commitments; they may have been brainwashed or psychologically coerced, or they may suffer from serious mental illness. Segrest’s judgement is based upon facts – for example, that the children are alone, surrounded by state troopers. Moreover, her moral insight involves identity in that if she had not acted, eventually dedicating her life to anti-racism, she would presumably not have been able to live with herself. The question, though, is why those facts and why that identity. Segrest’s judgement that her feeling of empathy constitutes a reason for radical moral departure from white liberal racism does not fit into an identifiable, generalizable pattern.

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According to Korsgaard, I act as an agent when I am consciously aware of myself as the cause of my actions, where my conception of myself and my conception of the object of my action depend in part upon social norms and values. I understand myself as the cause of my actions when my choice fits into generalizable patterns of behaviour. Causation, however, need not depend upon the kind of universality that Korsgaard describes (Boyd 1982; Shoemaker 1984). Positivists took knowledge of causes to be reducible to statements about observable patterns. They denied knowledge of unobservables and explained causation, which is unobservable, in terms of generalizations, correlations and logical relations of deduction. Such a view makes sense for foundationalists about knowledge. But if one accepts that knowledge neither possesses nor requires foundations, explained instead by the cause and effect relations between knowers and the world, we can know causation without explaining it in terms of generalizations. According to more recent accounts, knowledge of causation, which exists, is best explained by the experience of causation. It is not best explained by the experience of regularities in nature which can be reduced to statements about observation, as Hume believed. On more recent accounts, when we identify causation, we are looking for an explanatory story – causes are explanations – where what constitutes explanation depends upon context-relative goals for understanding. A fire, for instance, cannot occur without oxygen and therefore the presence of oxygen is among the fire’s causes. However, rarely do we say that oxygen explains the occurrence of fire (Miller 1987: 191). Roughly, the idea is that causal stories explain in the relevant sense if they tell us what we need to know in the specific situation (e.g. Kitcher 1982: 50–2). If knowledge of causation, contrary to Hume, need not be justified, or accounted for, in terms of generalizations, my conscious awareness of myself as a cause may not depend upon public reason, or at least not upon existing public reason. Agency depends upon public reason because the way I conceive of myself depends upon public reason, according to Korsgaard. Causation can be known, however, not by reducing a suspected causal relationship to observable patterns but instead by actual cause and effect engagement, that is, through experiential engagement with causal powers, even ones that cannot so far be identified. At least occasionally, I can be consciously aware of myself as a cause of my actions without being able to understand my causal relationship in terms of generalizations about myself or society. Such is Segrest’s case. She experiences a connection to the Black children because the connection is there. Her awareness of herself as a cause is not

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explainable in terms of accessible generalizations. Instead, her awareness of herself as a cause – as having reason (e.g. to re-examine her beliefs) – explains generalizations about herself and society, such as that a more adequate moral framework needs to be discovered. Segrest generalizes that the rightness of her society, indeed of her own value framework, needs to be re-examined because ‘their separation is mine’. She does not explain the moral significance of her feeling of identification in terms of her practical identity. Instead, the moral significance of her feeling of identification explains her rejection of one practical identity and the need for another, more adequate, identity. Segrest knows, intuitively, that ‘what I heard people saying about Black people had somehow to do with me’. She experiences identification with the Black children and finds it contradictory to her practical identity, which needs to be re-examined for that reason. For, if according to her practical identity the Black children are other, of another sort, Segrest must reject the view of herself from which the Black children are relevantly different. On Kitcher’s view, failures of altruism are resolved pragmatically by appeal to empirical resources and ‘vague generalizations commending honesty and disavowing violence’ (2011: 7). However, Segrest has understood, intuitively, that racism in the South during the Civil Rights Movement cannot constitute a ‘costly failure of altruism’. For, according to the ‘vague generalizations’ of her liberal society, the Black children are not candidates for altruism, being different in relevant respects from those to whom altruism applies, namely, people. If we give up on the Humean account of causation, as we should, ‘practical identity’ acquires content, as does any category, as a result of explanatory adequacy regarding goals for understanding within a specific context. Liberal whites in the South, like Segrest and her family, were attempting to address failures of altruism by ‘helping’ Blacks. But precisely because they relied upon public reason, or the practical resources in terms of which Kitcher explains moral progress, ‘costly failures of altruism’ could not apply to Blacks, at least not as human beings. Hence, Segrest’s intuition, as a result of her real identification with the Black children: ‘I am on my own’. There are two possibilities: One is that Segrest is crazy because her intuition is not explainable in terms of generalizable patterns; the other is that she is not crazy even though her intuition is not explainable in generalizable terms. The former is implausible given her quite understandable life as an activist and writer. The latter is possible if the reasonableness of her intuition can be explained otherwise than primarily in terms of public reason or any ‘indefinite sequence of progressive transitions’.

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It can be explained by facts. Segrest’s moral motivation is explained by knowledge of facts – about actual human connection, which she feels. Segrest feels a connection to the Black children and she feels it because it is there. The connection, however, needs to be given relevant importance and in this she is on her own. We might say that Segrest’s moral motivation is explained by a possible practical identity because the significance Segrest gives to her feeling of empathy makes a more adequate self-description plausible, one that needs to be pursued, through activism, which is what her memoire recounts. To the extent that Segrest pursues a more adequate self-description, she also pursues more adequate public reason, through activism, to provide resources for such a self-description. Segrest’s moral agency, therefore, explains public reason, not the other way around. Or at least, we can say that her agency – that is, her awareness of herself as a cause – explains the possibility of public reason in a more real sense, that is, a sense that includes relevant others, such as the Black children. Segrest knows herself as a cause, having reason as a result of experiencing a causal effect – human connection – and her actions on such reasons, over time, explain (more adequate) public reason. Thus, both her moral motivation and her moral contribution are explained by truths, experienced causally.

Authentic humanism Kitcher denies that ethics involves discovery: ‘[T]here are no analogues [in ethics] of episodes of scientific insight’ (2011: 6). Instead, ethical truths ‘are those acquired in progressive transitions and retained through an indefinite sequence of progressive transitions’ (Kitcher 2011: 7) involving ‘vague generalizations commending honesty and disavowing violence’ (Kitcher 2011: 7). But it is sometimes precisely those ‘progressive transitions’ characterized by ‘vague generalizations’ of a moral sort that explain costly failures of altruism, of which racism is one. Toni Morrison makes this point in discussing US national literature and the national identity and values it supports. As a student of US literature, Morrison thought the novels of Poe, Hemingway and Faulkner were not about Black people, that Blacks just weren’t there. However, eventually, more conscious of how meanings are created, she noticed that Blacks are present in such stories. However, they are without physical descriptions and names, and they do not speak (Morrison 1992: 17).

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For example, in Hemingway’s, To Have and Have Not, the central figure, Harry, includes a ‘nigger’ in his crew (Morrison 1992: 70–6). At a crucial moment during the fishing expedition, the boat moves into promising waters. The Black man tends the wheel, Harry being otherwise occupied, so the Black man would be the first to see the fish. Hemingway’s challenge, Morrison writes, is ‘how to acknowledge the first sighting and to continue the muzzling of this “nigger” who, so far, has not said one word’. Surprisingly, Hemingway writes, ‘The nigger was still taking her out and I looked and saw he had seen a patch of flying fish burst out ahead’ (Hemingway 1937: 13 cited in Morrison 1992: 72). ‘Saw that he had seen’ is, as Morrison notes, ‘improbable in syntax, sense and tense but . . . it is risked to avoid a speaking black. The problem [Hemingway] gives himself, then, is to say how one sees that someone else has seen’ (1992: 73). If Hemingway had had the Black character proclaim ‘There are the fish’, there would have been a failure of credibility on the part of readers. They would not expect the Black character to speak and the story would read less well. The national literature, supporting national identity, both constituting and drawing upon what Kitcher describes as ‘an indefinite sequence of progressive transitions’, was precisely what explained the invisibility of Blacks. They were present in the novels of Poe, Hemingway and Faulkner but they were not expected to be present. But Morrison, for one, discovers that this is so. As a writer, creating meaning, aware of how the writer controls expectations about what is normal and possible, she says it was like stepping back and seeing a fish tank. When one looks up close, one sees ‘the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green’ (Morrison 1992: 17). But when one steps back, one sees ‘the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world’. Morrison recognized, as she created her own stories, ‘the self-evident ways that Americans choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence’ (1992: 17). That is, Morrison discovered that the ‘progressive transitions’ of US national identity and the ‘vague generalizations’ to which it gave rise were racist. The structure of beliefs and practices, the Background, grounding US national identity and literature made Black people invisible, expected to be without names, physical descriptions and voice. Through her own writing, in which Black characters do speak, especially Black women, Morrison identifies such

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beliefs and practices. She identifies the fish tank, which is precisely what Segrest, for example, learns she has to re-examine, completely. This is Morrison’s success, creating the stories that create the expectations that make Black characters credible. In this way, she names the fish tank. This is Freire’s point. Freire argues that for the oppressed, ‘naming’ is an existential, ontological activity that brings about human possibilities. It is an act of ‘creation and recreation’ (Freire 2005: 89) that, occasionally, explains social transformation. Naming, not any given practical identity, explains agency for the oppressed because it explains the identification of people and behaviour not expected to exist given social beliefs and practices that give rise to expectations that determine what and who can be seen and recognized. For situations in which neither the oppressors nor the oppressed can properly identify themselves, or ought to, in terms of such beliefs and practices, naming is urgent. Freire’s account of naming takes ‘authentic humanism’ for granted because it is presupposed in the expectation of a better world in the relevant sense, that is, a world in which all human beings are recognized as such. For Freire, as for Martí and Guevara, among others, the explanatory capacity of any story that included them as ‘fuller social persons’ (Sen’s term) depends upon the possibility of a better world, where ‘better’ is not a matter, mostly or at all, of ‘progressive transitions’ or ‘vague generalizations’. If one recognizes the fish tank, as these philosophers did, it can’t be. Korsgaard denies external facts about value beyond the ‘package’ (2009: 11, 51, 82, 172) that explains a particular person’s practical identity and the context in which she generalizes about values and ends. In this sense, Korsgaard agrees with Kitcher who denies ‘the idea of a special moment (long ago on Mount Sinai, perhaps) when people received authoritative information about how they should live’ or ‘philosophical theories about external constraints discovered by special faculties’. Martí, Freire, Guevara and Fanon did not expect ‘special moments’ or ‘special faculties’ to explain moral direction against colonialism/imperialism. They did, nonetheless, depend upon external facts not accessible from within the relentless logic of oppression that, for some at least, constitutes public reason (Rodríguez 2010: 12). They were facts about their own humanity.

Bottom-up accounts Herein lies a problem for the bottom-up response to arbitrary imposition in global development: Fanon’s point is that since racism informs expectations, evidence

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against racism is not understood as evidence precisely because of public reason, with its ‘vague generalizations commending honesty and disavowing violence’ (Kitcher 2011: 7). In a systemically racist society, social norms and values give rise to expectations that some people are non-persons, leftovers. Evidence that supports the reality of dehumanization, in all its forms, does not count as evidence unless the context itself is judged (morally) wrong, or as Freire says, named. Such judgements cannot be justified by the context since the context is what needs to be judged, like the fish tank. Freire’s suggestion is that judgements about development should be ‘mediated by the world’ (2005: 139) through a process of collaboration involving ‘unity, organization and struggle’ (2005: 139). In other words, it matters not where the beliefs come from – from ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ – but how they are arrived at, that is, what caused them. They should come about through engagement with the world (of human beings). Now Sen says something like this. He suggests that in order to be ‘competent human beings . . . [i]t is not so much a matter of having exact rules about how precisely we ought to behave, as of recognizing the relevance of our shared humanity in making the choices we face’ (Sen 1999: 283). The idea that ‘shared humanity’, which is an experience, provides more adequate resources for realizing our responsibilities as ‘competent human beings’ (Sen 1999: 283) than established rules, or we might say public reason, is a step towards issues about the nature of rationality. But Sen goes no further, meta-ethically. If systemic dehumanization is real, it is not easy to identify ‘shared humanity’. To see how this is so, it helps to consider examples. A recent award-winning film about the ‘Water Wars’ in Bolivia shows how intelligent, well-intentioned and well-informed anti-imperialist film-makers fail to identify an instance of imperialism despite knowledge of imperialism (Bollaín 2010). Even the Rain tells the story of the crew of a low-budget film about Christopher Columbus’ brutal treatment of indigenous people on behalf of the Spanish Empire and the courageous condemnation of such by Dominican friars Antonio Montesino and Bartholomé de las Casas. The director of the film admires Montesino who, from a straw church and under threat of excommunication or worse, proclaimed week after week that the Spanish colonizers were living in ‘mortal sin’ due to their tyrannical treatment of the local Tainos. As one man speaking up against the Empire in 1511, Montesino asks, ‘Are these not men? Do they not also have rational souls? Are you not obliged to love them as yourselves?’ The director is impassioned by Montesino’s words. Yet the director and the producer have no qualms about making the movie with Quechua Indians, who look nothing like the Tainos, as if all Indians are the same. Nor are they

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embarrassed about paying extras a mere $2 a day. The focus of Even the Rain is that the film (within the film) coincides with the Cochabamba Water Wars (2000) in which tens of thousands protested the privatization of municipal water supplies resulting, after hundreds of injuries and one death, in the reversal of the privatization (e.g. Olivera with Tom Lewis 2004). A lead indigenous actor, playing the part of Hatuey (a Taino who resisted the Spanish in Cuba), is a leader of the protests. The film crew, however, do not understand his commitment. They urge him to stay out of the protests until they have finished filming. He does not do so, explaining, ‘Without water, there is no life. You don’t understand’. Indeed, they don’t. But this is not surprising which is what makes Even the Rain powerful. The idealistic director admires Montesino because he evokes wrath from the Spanish authorities by claiming, repeatedly, from his outdoor pulpit that the Taino are people. Montesino’s courage is in naming the Taino as people which is radical in an Empire sustained by the logic that such people are other. As Fanon argues, colonialism is neither illogical nor morally inconsistent because it defines ‘the natives’ as non-human, making the treatment of the colonized irrelevant to European ‘humanism’ (Sartre 1963: 15). The film crew is against imperialism, even supporting protesters’ demands of the government. They cannot, however, understand the Indians as people like themselves. In the end, the producer makes a commitment to the protest struggle and risks his life. Some critics argue that the producer’s change of heart is not credible (Holden 2011). But it is. The producer’s change of heart is explained by his emotional connection to the lead indigenous actor, a connection that changes him. Only at that point does he say, ‘If I do not do this, I cannot live with myself ’. If agency depends upon self-conception, the producer’s sudden insight and compulsion to act upon it are understandable. His identification is felt. He either has to abandon previous commitments and take action in a different direction, as he does, or deny his personal attachment to the Bolivian, which would be to deny who he has now become. In the film, we do not know how the producer deliberated after the transformation of his practical identity through his emotional connection. But we do know that he abandons the film. In effect, all that occurred was that he identified a particular person and his struggle as a person and a struggle of a certain sort. His understanding is, in one sense, merely of a particular relation. He understands the Bolivian actor’s struggle as being, as he explains, about life. Unless the producer abandons his personal commitment to the Bolivian (which he promises not to do) he will also have to adjust other beliefs, some of them

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formative. He cannot consistently hold, for example, that the Columbus story itself is about others in the past. The producer’s experience of shared humanity comes at a cost to his current practical identity, the description under which he values himself and finds his life worth living. He has to give it up. Like Segrest, his moral motivation, which is the significance he gives to his felt connection to the Bolivian, explains his identity, not the other way around. Let us also now consider Maritza: The award-winning Cuban author, Marilyn Bobes, tells the story of a lesbian architect living in a systemically sexist society.5 Maritza is realizing her idiosyncratic capacities for human relations and creativity: As an architect she aims to construct alternative buildings because getting up every morning to see buildings that are all the same renders people intolerant (Bobes 1995/98). She is intelligent and brave but she lives in a systemically sexist society, the nature and consequences of which become evident in the story. We do not hear the story of Maritza from Maritza because she has already committed suicide. Instead, we hear about Maritza from her friends. The story starts with Daniel, the only male, looking at a photo of a 15th birthday, ‘the 15th’ being the birthday at which girls ‘come out’ in society. Maritza, he says, stands out from the others physically, her face the only one that ‘is not a birthday face’, that is, not committed to the ‘coming out’ party. The stories begin and end with the impression of Daniel who focuses on Maritza’s appearance. Cary, who is closest to Maritza, says Maritza was never like the rest of them; she refused to prepare herself for the ‘future auction’, meaning the pursuit of men. Maritza wore flowing clothes that disguised her body; she didn’t carry make-up. Cary is influenced by her. They go together to lonely stretches of beach that Maritza likes to frequent on cold, grey days. Maritza tries to convince Cary that she (Cary) is making a mistake letting men determine her life. Maritza tells Cary that Cary has talent as a writer. But when they talk about Maritza’s beliefs about love and self-realization, Cary finds it hard to follow Maritza’s reasoning. For Maritza holds that the more realized a person is, the less she needs another person to be happy. Love is an invention, she believes, to placate the losers (women), and people who think they are in love are really wanting approval. Maritza herself has been in love, she admits to Cary, but Cary cannot ask Maritza about it because by that point in the conversation, Cary is not sure what they are talking about. Alina and Lazara, two other companions of ‘the 15th’, both remark on Maritza’s questionable sexuality. Alina always suspected that something was

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wrong with Maritza. She says she went to the funeral out of respect and good manners but that she did not put her name on the wreath. Alina, married with three children, describes Maritza as clearly deviant and, like a deformed child, better off dead. A woman without children, she says, can never realize herself. Lazara, in contrast to Alina, respects Maritza but like Alina, thinks Maritza’s sexuality immoral: Even if Maritza were gay, she was still a good person, as if being gay and being good are opposed. The story of Maritza is powerful, not for what it represents, but for what it doesn’t – Maritza herself. Maritza is already dead but even if she were not, it is not clear how Maritza could have told her own story. The point is not that individuals can only tell their own stories and that anything else is inauthentic. Rather, the story of Maritza – who she was and who she aimed to become – is hard because Maritza’s sense of herself does not fit with the expectations defining her society. The same values that Maritza opposes – for example, appearance and reproductivity – are, for the most part, taken for granted in her companions’ stories about Maritza and why she died. The strength of such social values is evidenced by their presumption, without argument. Only Cary understands that Maritza thought differently. The story of Maritza tells us about a story, just as Even the Rain tells us about a film. In each case, the story is about a story that cannot easily be told given the norms and values that define the broader society. In Maritza’s case, we learn from the stories and how they are organized (around the photo of ‘the 15th’) that Maritza’s context is one in which women are supposed to love men, auction themselves off to men, concern themselves with appearances, and in which it is expected that women without children will never realize themselves. Within such ‘public reason’, Maritza’s understanding of herself is hard to express, or be understood if it is expressed. Cary, for instance, knew Maritza did not make herself an object for men, and that she was independent and committed to ideas. The others also know this about Maritza but do not give it relevant significance. Cary engaged with Maritza’s ideas to the point that she could not ask Maritza who she (Maritza) had been in love with because Cary no longer knew what they were talking about. But Cary knew that Maritza had something to say about love. Cary understood Maritza well enough to know that there were questions she might have asked of Maritza, questions that were not easy to ask. The difference between Cary and the others is that although Cary did not understand Maritza, Cary understood that she did not understand Maritza.

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Cary’s understanding of Maritza is distinct not because she understood more but rather because she knew there was more to understand. Alina’s explanation for Maritza’s death is that ‘women without children never manage to realize themselves’. Alina’s explanation is not unreasonable in the circumstances, being based upon social expectations. In Alina’s view, women without children never manage to realize themselves, so Maritza did not realize herself. However, Cary has understood that Maritza’s struggle was precisely to realize herself. Maritza’s struggle to realize herself – without children and a man – could make sense, even if it did not make sense to Alina. The two examples have the following in common: It is not possible to recognize the indigenous actor or Maritza as the people they are, namely, human beings engaged in pursuing the realization of essentially human capacities within public reason informed by imperialism and/or sexism. The Bolivians’ struggle for life, understood as a struggle for life, is against the film crew who want the actors to stop protesting: ‘I know this story’, Daniel tells the producer in regard to the $2 a day wage. But what he knows is a story about the producer and his film and it contradicts the story that the film crew believes and identifies with. Similarly, it is not possible to respect Maritza’s struggle to realize herself as a person – that is, her struggle to be the kind of person she values – and at the same time accept Alina’s view, which is the more socially accepted view. Alina’s story expresses public reason. Cary counters Alina not with arguments – indeed, she does not offer any – but rather through her relationship with Maritza. No arguments can contradict Alina because any argument about Maritza, from Alina’s perspective, would be about someone deformed. Public reason is contradicted by Maritza herself, by who she is, but Maritza has to be known as such first before any such contradiction can be understood. Otherwise, she can be dismissed, as she is in the story. A bottom-up approach cannot explain how Maritza matters to development. Maritza aims for substantive freedoms, which Sen takes to define development. She is not just interested in perceived freedoms – for example, to marry and have children. But from Cary we know that it takes work and time to know that Maritza is even worth understanding. More important, there is a cost that is not just about her: It has to do with the very nature of her society and the beliefs that support it. Maritza’s ideas challenged institutions extending beyond the particular context. In order for Maritza’s life and struggle to matter, the institutions that Alina represents and expresses have to be identified and judged. Otherwise, Maritza can be dismissed because of such institutions.

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Alina, however, is part of the local context; indeed, she is the local context, metaphorically. Similarly, in Even the Rain, the Bolivians’ struggle for water is a struggle against imperialism and, as it turns out, the film crew. But the film crew is Spanish speaking, hence also ‘grass roots’. The producer gives up his film project when he understands the Bolivians’ struggle. But he does not know what he will do next. And when the Bolivian indigenous leader is asked what he will do now that privatization has been reversed, he replies, ‘What we do best, I guess, survive’. He has no platform. However, this is not because one is not needed but rather because what has been understood is not consistent with an already existing and dominant world view. A platform on the basis of which to go forwards in the appropriate sense has to be worked for, collaboratively, with organization, unity and vision, as Freire argued. Both examples show how easy it is to fail, not just to promote the realization of essential human capacities but also to identify them. This can be true no matter how much listening, consulting and engaging with complexity take place within a given context. To the extent that an experience is unexpected and until now not conceptualized, it is not easily recognized for what it is.

Shared humanity Sen is right to point to the significance of ‘shared humanity’. In both of the examples above, the hope of a new direction exists in the personal and transformative relationships experienced by the producer of the film and by Cary. Cary is changed by her relationship with Maritza and it is who she becomes as a result that makes Alina’s arguments, for example, inapplicable. But in order for Cary to go forward on the basis of insights acquired, she has to interpret, refer to and apply her experience. She has to recognize her experience for what it is and give it appropriate importance. Hence, the importance Freire gives to naming. It is not possible to recognize Maritza’s struggle within the conceptual framework relied upon by Alina. Within Alina’s conceptual framework, Maritza is dismissible. Acting on understanding derived from the experience of shared humanity, especially when it is most relevant, requires pursuit of a relevantly alternative conceptual framework. This was clear to Freire when he argued that ‘authentic humanity’ could only be discovered and pursued with ‘unity, organization and struggle’ (2005: 139).

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The point has been made by some development theorists. Ken Cole, for example, argues that development must involve political activism, even organizing and leading such activism (Cole 2002: 201–16). Cole argues that ‘What crushes the element of real choice out of the lives of isolated individuals is their total separation from any . . . [organized] movement and their utter dependence, both economically and ideologically, on a system that is entirely hostile to their needs and aspirations’ (Cole 2002: 203). Development theorists, therefore, should become ‘political activists, facilitating people’s understanding of the causes of their disadvantage’ (Cole 2002: 206). But political activism, to be effective, needs to identify such causes. It seems to be true, as Sen suggests, that experiencing ‘shared humanity’ provides better grounds than established rules for realizing responsibilities as ‘competent human beings’ (1999: 283). But in practice such experiences often change us, or should. They introduce disorder, existentially and theoretically and, as Cole suggests, can crush us if insights derived from such experience cannot be pursued in a context of collaborative, directed political and social action. In the last chapter, we discussed Illich’s use of the Good Samaritan parable to illustrate a point about embodiment. The Samaritan could have bypassed the man in the ditch because the Samaritan’s conceptual framework excluded Jews. In terms of the discussion above, the Samaritan could reasonably have ignored the Jew since the Samaritan’s practical identity was not a description of himself that would make meaningful a relationship with the Jew. The Samaritan’s action brings about a relationship but it is not a relationship compatible with the Samaritan’s practical identity nor with public reason. According to Charles Taylor, Illich uses the parable to argue for a ‘new kind of fittingness’ (Taylor 2005: xii) determined in part by a ‘gut-given response’. The Samaritan brings about a new sense of community, as a result of his response, that includes Jews. But the community could not have been predicted. It comes about as a result of an emotional response to a ‘call’. According to Taylor, the relevant community is a ‘skein of relations which link particular unique enfleshed people to each other rather than a grouping of people together on the grounds of their sharing some important property’ (Taylor 2005: xi–xii). The ‘rather than’ is important. The two ways of defining community are not compatible. Existentialists made the point: Whatever their differences, existentialists held that social conventions rob us of real life by substituting fraudulent and illusory relationships for the real community of human beings. We like the warm feeling of togetherness when we come together under a flag or

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a cause. But Soren Kierkegaard used the term ‘leveled’ to describe how people lose their identity and individuality when they are drawn into a false sense of community defined by what he called ‘the hopeless forest fire of abstraction’ (Kierkegaard cited in Merton 1967d: 264). Existentialists identified two sorts of communities, one an arbitrary fiction through which we escape the insecurity of existence, the other a genuine community of those who accept their fragile, solitary lot (Merton 1967d). The two are not compatible because the latter is explained by its experience of essential insecurity (of existence) from which the former provides escape. Real human community arises only from experience of that which all human beings share, whatever their nation, political party, religion and so on, which is the precarious nature of existence. Such experience can be avoided when we pursue the togetherness of ‘sharing some important property’ – like nationality, political leaning or support for a football team. Or so Kierkegaard, for one, argued. Jean Vanier describes the same paradox. Human beings seek out community because loneliness is destructive. But community is sometimes a relief from the insecurity that is the natural condition of reflective beings, aware of their vulnerability. According to science, human beings are not set apart from other beings changing form, through death, in a constantly unfolding universe. Vanier writes, ‘Reality is the first principle of truth’ (1998: 15), thus in effect allying himself with naturalistic realists: If we want truth we must engage reality – experience it – because we know the world through cause and effect. This means that as regards human community, we should engage the reality of human existence, which is insecure. Loneliness, therefore, is ‘essential to human nature, it can only be covered over, it can never actually go away’ (Vanier 1998: 7). The paradox is that we seek community to escape loneliness but loneliness, being that which is universally shared, provides grounds for human community. Loneliness, of course, can be detrimental. Vanier describes his experience of visiting a psychiatric hospital in which hundreds of disabled children lay neglected in their cots. There was, he writes, a ‘deadly silence. Not one of them was crying. When they realize that nobody cares, that no one will answer them, children no longer cry’ (Vanier 1998: 9). This sort of loneliness engenders depression, confusion, chaos and a desire for death. Therefore, experience of reality cannot itself provide a basis for human community or for imagination of such. Such experience needs to be named. And it needs to be pursued with relevant others. Indeed, experience of causal reality needs to be interpreted and pursued in specific ways with specific

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people with specific aims. It needs to be, as Freire writes, ‘mediated by the world’. It cannot be pursued in just any way at all. Sen refers to the experience of ‘shared humanity’ as if nothing more needs to be said. In practice, though, the relevant ‘new kind of fittingness’ is disruptive. Taylor, Illich and Vanier are not against rules. The point at issue is how these are defined. A community defined by the ‘skein of relations which link . . . enfleshed people’ together is not the same as a community of people ‘sharing some important property’ (Taylor 2005: xi–xii). For one thing, in a dehumanizing world, the former conflicts with the latter which, being dehumanizing, rules it out. For another, the former is not easily articulable. When Segrest says, ‘I am on my own’, it is not just in a social or political sense that the statement is true. It is also true as regards conceptual resources, which need to be discovered. The UK author Jeanette Winterson describes how as an adult she learns to live with the deep psychological wounds incurred as a child. Not only was she given up for adoption but she was also adopted by someone incapable of loving anyone else, including her child. Winterson describes being unable to love or to be loved. Partly through writing and partly through relationships, Winterson recounts in her memoire how she avoided the scenario Vanier describes in which loneliness leads to self-destruction, sometimes seemingly with reason. Winterson writes, ‘I could not smash the ice that separated me from myself, I could only let it melt, and that meant losing all firm foothold, all sense of ground. It meant a chaotic merging with what felt like utter craziness’ (Winterson 2011: 229). For Winterson, her experience ‘felt like utter craziness’. So why wasn’t it? If it felt like utter craziness, it might have been utter craziness. Her suggestion in the memoire is that she gained greater understanding of human potential – her own and others’ – in a process characterized by ‘losing all firm foothold’. The difference between a foundationalist view of justification and one that recognizes cause and effect is, for one thing, that pre-established rules cannot answer the question, how to distinguish between knowledge and non-knowledge, at least not completely. Instead, the answer is dependent upon contingent circumstances and conditions. But this means, at least sometimes, there is necessarily no ‘firm foothold’, which does not imply that what feels like ‘utter craziness’ is utter craziness. It is counter-intuitive, in both Segrest and Winterson’s cases, that they are crazy, at least if one reads the rest of each account. In Winterson’s case, she drew conclusions from personal experience and she built upon such experiences through writing. But just like Segrest, she gives importance to some particular

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experiences in some particular ways. For Vanier ‘the discovery of our common humanity . . . is the process of truly becoming human’ (1998: 5). That is, it is a process of a certain kind of growth. Both Segrest and Winterson, in different ways, can be understood to describe such a process. In neither case is it predicable but in both cases it is distinguishable, in practice and theory, from directions that could have been described as craziness. An inference to the best explanation of such non-craziness is facts about human connection. These are not external facts coming from some Mount Sinai moment, as Kitcher accuses his realist opponents of holding, but they are, in important cases, external to established beliefs and values. Indeed, they may provide reason to abandon such beliefs and values, on which agency depends, according to Korsgaard. In one sense, then, what Korsgaard calls ‘practical identity’ is itself sometimes an external fact regarding moral motivation. At least, this is so for ‘leftovers’ for whom agency requires a description of how I might value myself, making meaningful actions and choices realizing essential human capacities that are not meaningful, or even identifiable now.

Back to Sen Sen defends the possibility of objective judgements for the case of global development. This is because, recognizing global injustice and its implications, human development requires distinguishing real freedoms from perceived freedoms. Considering that, as he says, people ‘adjust their desires and expectations to what they unambitiously see as feasible’ (Sen 1999: 63), someone’s perceived reasons may not always be real reasons. Thus, Sen argues, as Martí, Freire, Guevara and others did, for truths about humanism. Global development, he proposes, should promote the realization of essentially human capacities. And he acknowledges, at least sometimes comparing himself to Aristotle and Marx, that these may not always be what we think they are. But Sen offers a bottom-up approach. As regards the ‘inevitable valuational problem’, it is ‘the people’ who should decide (Sen 1999: 31), not the elders or experts from outside but the people ‘directly involved’. The problem is not that ‘the people’ is vague and potentially exclusive. That is, it is not that ‘the people’, like ‘sisterhood’ or indeed ‘humanness’, is a generalization that risks being defined in terms of the most powerful or most visible. Instead, the problem is the opposite. ‘The people’ needs to be claimed in a sense that really is general, and not just in the sense that corresponds to existing social norms and values.

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In other words, ‘the people’ needs to be able to represent human reality, not just what is considered to be human reality, which requires access to truths. If shared humanity is not discovered, the meaning of ‘the people’ is dependent upon dehumanizing circumstances and conditions, where such situations exist, which is almost everywhere. So the first conclusion to draw about Sen’s argument for objectivity is that ‘development from within’ (CEPAL 1990; Sunkel 1993), or the popular bottom-up approaches to development, do not avoid the problem of arbitrary imposition. This is because judgements made from within specific contexts are just as likely to be dehumanizing as those made from an external context or on the basis of an organized political movement. In fact, they may be more likely to do so because bottom-up justification is taken for granted, so that there may be even less critical effort involved. Cary, for example, knew that Maritza’s vision was hard whereas the bottom-up folk could just assume that, by listening to Alina and those relevantly like her, they had all they need. Given the existence of systemic injustice against some, human development, as Freire for one recognized, requires naming. It requires new, more adequate categories, capable of really referring to human beings and human capacities. Such categories, however, need to be supported by a conceptual vision, which needs to be pursued, politically as well as theoretically, in order to eventually displace an established world view. The second implication is that developers need to return to the ancient philosophical imperative: know thyself. Nkiru Nzegwu (2006) argues that the real issues underlying divisions between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ are unlikely to be addressed by analytic philosophers, including North American feminists, let alone by developers (Nzegwu 2006). This is because problems arise not just when theorists rely uncritically upon a dominant perspective. Rather, they also arise because of ‘their heavy investment – conscious and unconscious in their society’s conceptual scheme’ (Nzegwu 2006: 196). For Nzegwu, this means the problem of understanding others is always about imperialism, not what it means but instead how it informs ‘practical identity’. Vanier argues that a distinction must be drawn between actions motivated by ‘self-aggrandizement’ (1998: 109) – which may be the expression of practical identity – and actions that are ‘truly . . . for the inner growth and fulfilment of others’ (emphasis added) (Vanier 1998: 109). Following Nzegwu, development ethicists should think the same. We live in a world divided between ‘developed’ and ‘sobrantes’ (leftovers) and it is a division that, as Majid Rahnema writes, subjects ‘its participants all over the world to often invisible and destructive

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processes of addictive manipulation’ (Rahnema 2010: 127). The ‘invisible and destructive processes’ are precisely those that constitute grounds for practical identity, for community, for relief from insecurity and loneliness. To see such processes for what they are requires naming the metaphorical fish tank. This is not bottom-up. It cannot be done alone and it will definitely involve insecurity. It may even feel like ‘utter craziness’. That it is not always ‘utter craziness’ is explained by facts about human reality, especially facts about human connection. Such facts are not always predictable but to say that they cannot be known to be true is to assume a questionable view of justification. Vanier suggests that to be human is to recognize the ‘anomalies that are the seeds of change [and] . . . to create sufficient order so that we move on [to] . . . discover the new’ (1998: 13). Creating ‘sufficient order’ should be the task of developers and there is no reason to think it will be or must be bottom-up in the sense suggested.

Conclusion When we consider the nature of systemic injustice, the question of how to know human capacities must have primacy in global development. This is because some capacities – like the people who possess or pursue them – are ruled out by the very structures that often define development itself, that is, the entrenched division between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’. Sen recognizes that the ‘inevitable valuational problem’ is crucial in global development but he does not recognize an issue about the nature of knowledge, including self-knowledge. If developers acknowledged such a question, they would understand that the realization of essentially human capabilities cannot define global development, as Sen proposes. This is because essentially human capacities have first to be identified and properly theorized in order to be relevant to development. Moreover, this is not an entirely intellectual issue. The experience of shared humanity, where it is notable, is disruptive and emotionally difficult. It involves transformation, not just of individuals, but of entire contexts. Contrary to Sen, human capabilities cannot constitute grounds for measuring human development. Instead, human development, importantly including organized political resistance to imperialism, and the pursuit of adequate self-knowledge, is required first in order to identify essentially human capabilities.

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Mindfulness In his critically acclaimed The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Search for His Disabled Son, Ian Brown describes a fantasy. He imagines a community in a beautiful spot, in view of the sea or the mountains. Such places should not be just for the rich, he notes, and this village is for intellectually disabled people like his son, Walker. The village is owned and inhabited by the disabled, ‘on their schedule, at their pace, according to their standards of what is successful – not money or results, but friendship, and fellow feeling, and companionship’ (2009: 270–1). In his fantasy, the able-minded must be ‘integrated’. Visitors must adapt to the pace of the village. They will leave to go back to their pressing lives but they will return again to live as the disabled live – slowly, aiming only to discover and to be their real selves. Brown imagines that people without disabilities would pay to spend weeks or months in such a village. They would pay to stay in one of the homes to do their own work, only obliged to eat lunch and dinner with the disabled and help someone take a bath once a week. People would pay because staying in such a village would change how they see the world, benefiting them more than the disabled. Brown discovered that the intellectually disabled know how to accept others and themselves for who they are. People would pay to learn, even partially, to focus on what they have, not what they should have or would like to have. It is not hard to see that one lives better when one minimizes certain expectations. Clichés abound – ‘one day at a time’, ‘seize the day’, ‘live each day’ and so on. The point is not moral: We miss out when we focus mainly on what we could have or who we might be. Brown’s fantasy indicates the appeal of lives lived with humility and simplicity.

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But while we might agree that Brown’s son, Walker, is special, Brown is ambivalent towards Walker’s achievement. Brown has a successful career. It is significant that the fantasy involves a village apart on a mountain that can be left behind and returned to later. The appealing idea that one should accept the cards one is dealt seems to contradict another powerful idea: achievement. Competitive lives are stressful and unhealthy. However, we all want to rise above the crowd and shine a light towards the future. Walker won’t do this, or so we expect. We teach children to follow their dreams. There are mountains and valleys, wilderness and beaten paths. The metaphors are common, and everyone wants to be the light on the hill, the forger of new trails. Perhaps, though, those torn between ‘mindfulness’ and the ‘light on the hill’ are like the peasant who by chance acquired an old motor car and insisted on harnessing his horse to it (Deutscher 1984: 265). On the one hand is an insight about alienation that, according to existentialists, occurs when we identify ourselves in terms of abstractions neither chosen nor controlled. We experience what is really ours – existence – in terms of something outside ourselves. A popular response to such dissociation is mindfulness, or awareness of contingent circumstances and conditions, often described as the ability to live in the present. On the other hand, though, is the meaning of self-awareness. Mind/body relations can be conceived differently and discussions of mindfulness rarely make the distinctions. Descartes held that body and mind are distinct substances, the former extended in space, affected by causal relations, and the latter characterized by the essential property of being able to think. For Descartes, my self is a mind. Who I am is my mind. I have direct access to my thoughts. My body and the world, though, are separate and distinct. Descartes asked how we can know, not only other people, but also our own bodies, since bodies possess an essence distinct from minds. According to John Searle (1998), the mind is part of the material world and the qualitative, subjective nature of consciousness is explained biologically (see also Prado 2006: 39–50). Although some argue that Searle does not adequately explain how mental events can be caused by physical events, unreduced notions of causation in the philosophy of science, referred to in the last chapter, help resolve this problem. Events have many causes and the cause of an event is the cause that explains, with explanation dependent upon needs for understanding within the specific context (e.g. Boyd 1985). Philip Pettit (1996) argues for higher and lower states of causation, suggesting that intentional states cause lower-level

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neurological states to obtain causing the individual to behave as she or he does (Wilson 1994). For present purposes, the non-Cartesian view of mind/body relations, whatever the details, has consequences for what it means to control one’s life. Yet, as mentioned already, dualism is difficult to dislodge, culturally. Western medicine, for example, unlike Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine, tends to separate mind and body despite scientific evidence showing otherwise (e.g. Maté 2008). Feminists argue that emotions and feelings are still treated suspiciously, as if they are distinct from mental events (e.g. Meynell 2009). Brown’s book provides just one example of an attractive idea – mindfulness, acceptance, expressed through his appreciation of Walker – hitched to the old dualist horse, as we will see.

Mind/body dualism and contingency Descartes’ view suggests the ‘epistemological chasm’. If my mind is distinct from my body and I have direct access to my mind, how do I know whether beliefs in my mind hook up to things ‘out there’ in the world? Hume argued that beliefs about the world are justified by observation and experience. Positivists argued that we distinguish (objective) beliefs from the world, and (subjective) beliefs from us, by tracing beliefs back to observation and experience. Only those beliefs directly derived from observation and experience count as knowledge. All others are unjustified. Positivism is a foundationalist view of knowledge, as we’ve noted. Foundationalism takes all knowledge to be justified by appeal to foundational beliefs with privileged status, for example being self-evident. Which beliefs are foundational is an a priori question, not one for empirical investigation. Foundationalism is directly related to dualist views about the mind because on a dualist view the body gets in the way of objectivity (e.g. Railton 1984b). The ‘chasm’ is the gap between subject and object indicating a problem about how beliefs ‘in the mind’ connect to a separate world of bodies. The problem for foundationalism, as it turns out, is that all beliefs based upon observation are mind dependent (e.g. Hanson 1958): I have to possess a concept of a thing in order to see that that thing is there. I cannot see that there is a tree if I have no concept of trees. Distinguishing knowledge from non-knowledge in terms of observation and experience fails if observation and experience always depend upon ‘subjective’ beliefs.

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Instead, as we’ve noted, knowledge is better explained by cause and effect. However, the dialectical character of knowledge means that the causal mechanisms relevant to the growth of knowledge are psychological as well as social and technical (Boyd 1988: 192). This means feelings and emotions play a role. While on a foundationalist view of justification, the role of feelings and emotions is puzzling (because they come from the body), the reliability of a hunch or intuitions is explained in the same way that the reliability of perceptual judgements is explained, as mentioned in Chapter 1. As Kuhn points out, part of the training in experimental science involves acquiring a ‘feel’ for good scientific practice. The exact cause of any such ‘feel’, though, may not be explicitly known. European/North American philosophical traditions focus mostly on propositional knowledge which is knowledge expressed in sentences. However, knowledge is also non-propositional – for example, knowing what it means to see the colour yellow. Gilbert Ryle distinguished between knowing how and knowing that: I may know how to ride a bicycle but I may not be able to express such knowledge in sentences (Ryle 1949). Philosophers call it ‘tacit’ knowledge (e.g. Boyd 1988: 193) because it cannot be made explicit, perhaps even in principle. Non-propositional knowledge includes knowledge of what it feels like to live a certain kind of life or to be in a certain kind of body (e.g. Babbitt 1996; Shotwell 2011). Interestingly, judgements based upon tacit knowledge, or intuition, sometimes reflect a deeper understanding than that which can be made explicit in theory. Now, reliable intuitions in science, resulting from experimental practice and relevant theoretical knowledge, are not so surprising. If a scientist spends her or his life investigating Parkinson’s disease, the reliability of her or his intuitions about such research is explained by such involvement. However, in the case of experience of human relations, the reliability of feelings appears more problematic, perhaps because the object is less precise but mostly because the knower is more involved, or at least involved in a more complicated way. As regards some issues about what it means to be human, there is no knowledge, only conventions, that is, decisions made at some time and turned into social practices. However, for some issues, there seem to be truths, with resistance to oppression being a primary example. My project, just to reiterate, is to ask how such truths, when they exist, are explained, and what is implied. For this purpose, it is useful to consider the case of science, which most people take to involve knowledge. For, it would not do to dismiss humanism on grounds that would also require dismissing science.

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Authenticity Mindfulness, understood as an ‘ability to intentionally bring awareness to the present moment without judgment’ has captured medical attention, particularly in psychiatry (Abbey 2012: 61–2). The Specialty Committee in Psychiatry of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada has recently included ‘mindfulness training’ for practising psychiatrists and other mental health professionals who increasingly encounter patients and clients who have heard about mindfulness and its benefits. Mindfulness is linked to authenticity, the ‘ability and willingness to let others see one’s true self ’ (Carson and Langer 2006: 31). Mindfulness promotes authenticity because the ‘person who lives mindfully is fully “in the moment” and is not worried about how he or she is coming across to others’ (Carson and Langer 2006: 31). But for existentialists, authenticity is rooted in embodiment as a view about knowledge, or at least it can be understood this way, as we see below. Often understood as primarily a cultural movement, involving artists and writers, existentialism nonetheless involves distinctive philosophical doctrines. What distinguishes existentialism, according to Steven Crowell, is ‘not its concern with “existence” in general, but rather its claim that thinking about human existence requires new categories not found in the conceptual repertoire of ancient or modern thought’ (2010). Human existence is not best understood in terms of abstract truths, scientific or moral; instead, categories should come from existence itself. As István Mészáros says of Sartre, the question of meaningfulness ‘must find its supporting evidence in the various manifestations of human passion as ways in which living individuals take cognizance of the world in which they are situated and try to cope with the problems and challenges of their situation’ (1979/2012: 99). In other words, adequate categories arise from bodies getting along with other bodies, namely, from the experience of existence. Authenticity involves acting on my own rather than on others’ expectations, even moral expectations. I may act morally and act authentically if I act on my own understanding and commitment but if I act morally only because of others’ expectations, authenticity is compromised. Thus, authenticity is associated with integrity, having to do with making and being myself rather than being defined by social roles. It involves autonomy for the same reasons. Existence matters to authenticity because categories emerge from personal experience. Kierkegaard cites the example of Abraham’s intended sacrifice of his son Isaac, which is meaningful because it depends upon Abraham himself, not upon morality,

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which it contradicts. For Kierkegaard, ‘subjectivity is the truth’ (Kierkegaard cited in Crowell 2010) because there is no objective justification for Abraham’s act. The only justification available to Abraham is not subsumable under existing universals but consists in his subjective embrace of the contradiction between God’s law (not to kill) and God’s commandment to Abraham (to kill Isaac). Meaningfulness depends, for Kierkegaard, on the singularity of Abraham himself because philosophy in general and morality in particular cannot explain the meaningfulness of an act that is out of synch with both. For existentialists, freedom consists in such singular self-making, or authenticity, which is not relativism about truth. According to Sartre, Kierkegaard failed to make this clear because he ‘neglected praxis, which is rationality. . . . [H]e denatured knowledge, forgetting that the world we know is the world we make’ (emphasis in the original) (Sartre 1974: 169 cited in Mészáros 2012: 329). The singularity of Abraham’s truth is not opposed to the significance of universals but challenges the idea that universals can be adequately justified by abstract philosophy, or that the occurrence of events can be deduced from abstractions. For Sartre, ‘[t]he essential thing is contingency. I mean that, by definition, existence is not necessity. To exist is simply to be there; what exists appears, lets itself be encountered but you can never deduce it’ (emphasis in the original) (Sartre 1949 cited in Mészáros 2012: 214). Authenticity or self-making, as a conception of freedom, is a question about knowledge in a way that a more common understanding of freedom is not. European philosophers distinguish between negative and positive freedom with negative freedom involving the absence of constraints and positive freedom the ability to act. Isaiah Berlin defined negative freedom as the absence of obstacles, barriers or interference and positive freedom as the presence of control, self-mastery, self-determination or self-realization. Positive freedom is often associated with Marxism, and is thought to support repression, while liberalism is associated with negative freedom, considered a better block on the paternalism and authoritarianism perceived by Berlin during the Cold War. Recent liberal theorists, aiming to move beyond the negative/positive distinction, argue that freedom is not simply about non-interference. Even if the slave enjoys non-interference from her or his master, she or he is, as Pettit argues, ‘dominated’ (Pettit 2011 cited in Carter 2012). What makes a slave unfree is not non-interference but status permitting interference, arbitrarily. The ‘republican’ view of freedom is arguably distinct from the negative view in insisting on social institutions: I am free only if I live in a society with the kinds of political

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institutions that guarantee the independence of each citizen from exercises of arbitrary power (Carter 2012). Republican theorists claim that their view is not negative. A free person can be interfered with as long as interference, through republican power structures, tracks one’s interests (e.g. Goodin and Jackson 2007; Carter 1999, 2008 cited in Carter 2012). But critics argue that the republican view is still a negative conception of freedom, just one promoted by certain kinds of political institutions (Larmore 2001). It is common to distinguish positive and negative freedom in terms of factors external and internal to the agent. John Stuart Mill defended negative freedom by comparing an individual’s development to that of a plant: individuals, like plants, need the right environment to develop their own faculties to the full and according to their own ‘inner logic’ (e.g. Appiah 2005: ch. 1). Critics argue that the republican view is a negative view of freedom because it gives priority to such ‘inner logic’ in defining, for example, arbitrary power. It would not be surprising if this were so. Freedom is undermined by arbitrary power where arbitrary power is that which interferes with one’s interests. But ‘one’s interests’ are ultimately defined internally for important reasons. John Rawls, among others, argues that a person’s interests are what she or he would choose on the basis of desires and preferences if she or he possessed adequate instrumental reasoning abilities, full and complete information and the capacity to vividly imagine the consequences of her or his actions (Rawls 1971: 416f., see also Sidgwick 1907; Brandt 1979; Hare 1981). To avoid paternalism in acting for another, we had better be able to argue that the individual herself or himself would have so decided if she or he had chosen under the right conditions, namely, those listed above (Rawls 1971: 248–50). It is inadequate to speculate about what someone would have chosen if she or he were a different sort of person because this could possibly justify psychological coercion or repression. If the republican view of freedom did not limit interference according to similar sorts of criteria for defining individual interests, it would have to define the sort of person someone ought to be if not the one she or he is, which it does not do. Rawls’ point is that if I am acting in someone’s interests, and I cannot argue that that person would herself or himself so act if she or he were capable, and well informed, I may be exercising an undesirable form of paternalism, making judgements about someone’s interests arbitrarily or according to some ideal of how people ought to be, that is, an idea of the ‘right sort of person’. And if I assume such an ideal, I risk imposing upon others, or even coercion and abuse.

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Berlin worried that if an idea of how someone ought to be is defined in terms other than an individual’s own ‘inner logic’, repression is possible, even likely (Berlin 1969: 132–3 cited in Carter 2012). Existentialist authenticity does not assume the inside/outside distinction, at least not as it figures in definitions of positive and negative freedom. Authenticity has to do with real selves as opposed to socially defined selves but the real self is not necessarily defined by ‘inner logic’. In Flannery O’Connor’s existentialist novels, the characters committed to ‘love’, ‘kindness’, ‘right’ and ‘truth’ are inauthentic (e.g. O’Connor 1976). They are ‘levelled’, as Kierkegaard put it, despite acting on their desires in accordance with instrumental reason. Although inauthenticity is opposed to acting upon intuition and one’s own experience, the more admirable authentic ‘bad’ characters in O’Connor’s novels are likely to go to jail, suggesting that acting authentically is not the same as acting instrumentally upon ‘one’s interests’ defined from the inside. For existentialists, authenticity requires that one’s intuitions and dispositions be interpreted according to an appropriate set of categories, which should be those arising from existence, which is relevantly ‘outside’. Sartre resisted definitions of freedom in terms of an ‘inner voice’ or ‘inner logic’: ‘[E]verything is outside, everything, including ourselves: outside, in the world, together with others. It is not in I don’t know what kind of retreat that we discover ourselves but on the highway, in the city, in the middle of a crowd: thing among things, man among men’ (emphasis in the original) (Sartre 1939: 32 cited in Mészáros 2012: 98). Simone de Beauvoir recognized social institutions as a major constraint on freedom defined from within, for women in particular. Whereas a man can experience himself as ‘human’, women’s experience is constrained by institutionalized gender oppression. Men, de Beauvoir argued, can experience subjectivity whereas women are always subject to the ‘Look’ of a society considering them objects, not subjects (Crowell 2010). Sartre, particularly in later years, struggled with the ‘force of circumstance’ that makes self-definition difficult, admitting he was ‘scandalized’ by his earlier existentialist views about limitless individual freedom (Sartre 1969: 44 cited in Mészáros 2012: 325). However, even so, in the end, Sartre believed an individual can ‘always make something out of what is made of him’. Sartre rejected the idea that freedom is defined by non-interference, and saw introspection as a mistaken view of self-knowledge. However, he understood the limit of freedom as consisting in ‘the small movement which makes of a totally conditioned social being someone who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him’ (Sartre 1969: 45 cited in Mészáros 2012: 325).

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Mészáros argues that Sartre did not, as he thought he had, move past the idea that human freedom is defined ultimately by individuals’ own ‘inner logic’. He refers to Sartre’s argument for ‘consciousness of alienation’ as grounds for a radical emancipatory movement as if workers should understand that automobiles, for example, are ‘acquisitive artificial needs’ created by an exploitative ideological system (Sartre 1970: 238–9 cited in Mészáros 2012: 315). What is missing, Mészáros argues, is acknowledgement that ‘millions of individual actions’, which for Sartre explain the march towards human freedom, are in the real world ‘deeply embedded in objectively structured and materially mediated social complexes’ (emphasis in the original) (Mészáros 2012: 323). Although Sartre chastised Kierkegaard for neglecting ‘praxis, which is rationality’, he failed according to Mészáros to give enough attention to the ‘fundamental problem of mediation’, according to which an adequate ‘we-subject’ (Mészáros 2012: 323–4), or what Marx calls ‘species consciousness’ (e.g. Marx 1932/78: 83–6), becomes possible.

‘Right sort of person’ This means that Sartre did not, in the end, give enough attention to the formation of the universals that he criticized Kierkegaard for neglecting. For, it is just these sorts of universals that worried Berlin who maintained that an idea of ‘right sort of person’ might be coercive. ‘Right sort of person’ is a general term and we might think that, to be applied non-arbitrarily, it must be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, specified a priori. If so, there would be good reason to worry, as does Berlin, that employment of such a term could be repressive. However, the meaning of such a general term not only cannot be adequately defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, specified a priori, as if there is one fixed, ahistorical definition. It also need not be. At least, it need not be if positivist foundationalism is rejected. And if the meaning of the term is defined contingently, there are a number of constraints on its employment, just as there are for terms like ‘neural crest cell’ which, as Rob Wilson argues, depends for its meaning not upon necessary and sufficient intrinsic properties, but upon the clustering of properties in relation to specific features of the normal development for that cell (Wilson 1999a: 195). Sue Campbell shows that it is naïve to maintain that an individual’s internal desires, interests, preferences, etc., possess special status in relation to individual

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freedom just because they are internal. For one thing, such internal desires, interests and feelings cannot be identified without reference to and reliance upon the expectations and behaviour of others (Campbell 1994, 1997b). So it is not clear that they are really internal. We consider feelings to be private, referring to them being ‘revealed’ as if such feelings are identifiable independently of and prior to expression. But if this were so, it should make no difference how others react. However, expression of feelings depends upon ‘uptake’ (Campbell 1994: 46). An intention to express anger, for example, fails if what is being expressed is not recognized by others as legitimate. Instead, bitterness is expressed. There is much feminist literature on the social constitution of persons and how someone’s sense of personhood is affected by unequal relationships (e.g. Koggel 1998; Sherwin 1998). Campbell is interested in the cognitive effects of unequal relationships as a result of which social response affects an individual’s ability to reason, to plan, to initiate action and to conceive of herself or himself as worthwhile (Campbell 2001). In Relational Remembering, Campbell shows how memories are also a social achievement. Children, for example, are taught to remember by their parents (Campbell 2003: 38). Any such influence presupposes a judgement of ‘right sort of person’ because it aims to promote a certain self-conception that is adequate for that child but is not the one the child currently has, at least not necessarily. The same is true in discussions of an inadequate sense of personhood explained by oppression. Yet there is no presumption of a single, unchanging definition of ‘right sort of person’, applicable to all people at all times. ‘Right sort of person’ is a concept relied upon in deliberation without an exact, eternal, generally applicable definition. Within the negative/positive debate, some suggest that freedom depends not upon desires and preferences but rather upon the formation of desires and preferences. John Christman, for instance, takes a person’s desires to be free as long as she or he is aware of reasonable alternatives and weighs and assesses her or his desires against other options (Christman 1991). Even if she or he prefers subservience, she or he is not necessarily unfree since what matters is not the content of desires but the mode of formation. Following Campbell, though, it matters how personhood is formed, affecting the ability to weigh and assess desires and even to form them in the first place. If personhood is undermined by social, even global, structures, external changes are sometimes required first before an individual’s ‘inside’ can ground freedom. Deliberation about such external changes, whether for groups or individuals, requires judgements about ‘right sort of person’, usually implicitly, just as does the decision by a parent about how to teach a child to remember.

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The idea that the meaning of a general term either has to be specifiable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions identifiable a priori or risk ‘anything goes’ is a hangover from positivism. In science and everyday deliberation, we do not expect such definitions and we do not worry about arbitrariness without them. We can conceive the content of general terms as non-arbitrary by recognizing that linguistic, classificatory and inferential practices sometimes accommodate themselves to the people and social practices we aim to better understand. This happens because of cause and effect. As part of the dialectic, a general term can possess objective content to the extent that reliance upon such a term contributes to the process of accommodation just mentioned (e.g. Boyd 1999a: 170). A parent, for example, may implicitly rely upon a conception of ‘right sort of person’ in teaching her or his child to remember. The content of such a term will be inexact, relative to the context and fluid. However, it need not be arbitrary. It can be judged (if examined explicitly) to possess objective content to the extent that it plays a relevant role in understanding the reality of a child’s education, growth and general well-being. We do not treat each other, or sometimes ourselves, as full and equal persons, even if we think we do. So, if we engage in a theoretical or practical/ political pursuit of equality and respect for people generally, we will rely, mostly implicitly, upon a concept of ‘right sort of person’. And this is what defenders of negative freedom typically aim to avoid by insisting on ‘inner logic’ as grounds for freedom. We might, though, consider the practical consequences of the idea that the content of general terms, including ‘human’, is contingent upon circumstances and conditions, including processes of personal transformation resulting from bodies engaging with bodies, as Sartre urged. If so, authenticity as self-making is more interesting than the popular idea that I live ‘in the moment’ and do not worry about how I come across to others.

Consequences of contingency One consequence of authenticity so understood is, as Sartre acknowledged, that the ‘inside’ ought not to define individual freedom. Randy Pausch, terminally ill, gave his ‘last lecture’ on ‘really achieving your childhood dreams’ and it went viral (2007). He tapped into a popular view that life is well lived if the person whose life it is fulfils her or his dreams. Pausch was not holding a predawn power breakfast. He was talking to his kids and students before he died, moving millions.

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But why should it be a good thing to live one’s life for dreams one happens to have just because one happens to have them? Such a view says nothing about the explanation for such dreams and nothing at all, of course, about what it might mean to be free of them. The follow-your-dreams view of a good life disregards the ‘outside’ explaining both the dreams and their grip on us. We return to this point below. A second consequence is that the dialectical character of knowledge undermines the description under which I value myself (Chapter 2) as an explanation for agency. Such an idea emerges in ‘narrative identity’ theories, which define ‘real self ’ in terms of self-describing stories. The suggestion is that my real self is constituted by a story or stories weaving the various experiences of my life into psychological unity (e.g. MacIntyre 1981; Schechtman 1996). David Velleman argues that death at a particular time in someone’s life is meaningful if an appropriate story can be told about it (Velleman 1991: 62). The idea is that experiences of a life have meaning – rather than being merely isolated events – as part of a larger story relating them to one another within the specific context of that life (Schechtman 1996: 96–9). Feminists have taken up this idea. Susan Brison argues that narratives allow people to gain control of their lives after traumatic events. Trauma shatters fundamental expectations about the world and one’s ability to act within it (1997: 14). Brison argues that the bodily nature of traumatic memories, resulting in debilitation by sounds and smells, shows that narrative identity is not psychological unity (1997: 17). Autonomy depends upon narratives ascribing unity to a self but people reconstitute themselves after trauma by being heard and understood by others: ‘It is not sufficient for mastering a trauma to construct a narrative of it: One must (physically, publicly) say or write (or paint or film) the narrative, and others must see or hear it, in order for one’s survival as an autonomous self to be complete’ (1997: 29). Agency requires storytelling because impulses become reasons when we generalize about ourselves and others. But it is not clear that the relevant storytelling, as told and heard, should primarily draw upon and reflect a person’s life. In some cases, expectations broken by trauma should not have been held in the first place. One may have been naïve or uninformed. Relevant control in such cases may require reconceptualizing circumstances explaining such expectations. Reconceptualization may require, not controlling memories through stories but acting on specific memories, or events, in order to discover more adequate stories in general, not about oneself but about the world.

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Occasionally, as suggested in Chapter 2, we act to make a story possible rather than relying upon a story to act. And the relevant story may not be about oneself, at least not as conceived so far. In Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee (1999) describes a man volunteering at an animal clinic, with the task of taking dead dogs to be incinerated. Instead of leaving bagged corpses for the incinerator crew, he keeps them overnight in order to load them one by one onto the belt as the workmen stand by and watch. If left for the incinerator crew, the dogs would be dumped with the waste from hospitals and roadside carrion. With the dogs’ legs stiff with rigor mortis, the crewmen beat the dead dogs to break the rigid limbs. No story about the man himself explains why someone ‘as selfish as he should be offering himself to the service of dead dogs’ (Coetzee 1999: 146). He cannot even tell a story about morality: There are too many other ways to be useful. Instead, he acts for ‘his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient form for processing’ (Coetzee 1999: 146). He might have done ‘the animal welfare thing, the social rehabilitation thing’. Instead, he ‘saves the honour of corpses because there is no one else stupid enough to do it’ (Coetzee 1999: 146). He may not be stupid. The rejection of foundationalist conceptions of justification means that the regulation of belief is more significant as regards acquiring knowledge than the production of beliefs (Boyd 1988: 192). That is, as regards increased understanding, what one does with one’s knowledge matters more than knowledge possessed. The key notion is causation and the causal mechanisms, explaining knowledge, are social and technical as well as psychological, as noted above. If what Coetzee describes is ‘stupid, daft, wrongheaded’ (1999: 146), it is not because the man’s action does not fit into a story about his life or about morality. The contingency of justification suggests that the adequacy of reasons depends not primarily upon a particular life but upon where the significance given to such reasons leads or even might lead. A third consequence is the unpredictability of both reasons and generalizations. In self-making, we apply general terms, such as ‘person’, ‘good’, ‘freedom’. We do so implicitly but any deliberation about how to live well, successfully or whatever, involves general concepts. Such concepts acquire content from the same dialectical process described above, that is, reliable (causal) regulation (Boyd 1985; Putnam 1975b; Quine 1969). The content of a term depends upon causal connections existing (or not) between the use of the term and instances of its referent (Boyd 1979; Putnam 1975b). We return to this topic in Chapter 5 but, for now, general terms cannot reliably be defined in advance of their application,

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as logical positivists considered necessary, at least not entirely. If definitions depend upon a dialectical process of application and results, imprecision and vagueness are to be expected (Boyd 1988: 198–9, 1999a: 152–3). General terms, to be reliable, must be revisable in light of ongoing engagement including, as existentialists insisted, with existing bodies. Virginia Wolfe once referred to ‘moments of being’ allowing her to ‘stand outside’ her life and to gain insight, occupying a different perspective. ‘Being’ is an example of a general term upon which individual deliberation might depend, even if we do not, as Wolfe does, articulate such reliance. For Wolfe, ‘moments of being’ may come from experiences as apparently trivial as seeing a flower and understanding its place in a larger whole (Schulkind 1976: 19). Wolfe referred to such moments as independent of any object or particular circumstances. For her, such experiences were so personal and lacking in identifiable causes that they did not ‘bear arguing about’: They were not rational. Yet such moments can be rational depending upon the cause. Considering the nature of knowledge, ‘being’ cannot be defined once and for all at any particular moment in time. Cause and effect relations suggest that general terms can and ought to be revised on empirical grounds. So, one explanation of Wolfe’s ‘moments of being’, and insight acquired, is that her experience of the flower constitutes sensual contact with an aspect of the real world impacting her beliefs. The experience is unpredictable but it acts upon her understanding in relevant ways, causing insight. Wolfe’s momentary experience of a relationship to the flower is, in effect, constitutive of perspective. It does not add to knowledge possessed. As she describes, it constitutes conditions for judging knowledge possessed so far, a ‘standing outside’ conditions occupied previously. To summarize, rejecting dualism undermines expectations about individual freedom in ways that matter to authenticity, which is the goal of those pursuing, or admiring, mindfulness. First, it is not helpful, and indeed mistaken, to assume that deep-seated desires, preferences and life plans provide adequate resources for defining freedom, ignoring ‘outside’ causes of the possession and content of such desires, which can be known through causal engagement. Second, stories involved in self-conception presuppose more general stories, including about humanness, which may be mistaken, requiring discovery of a more adequate general story, presupposing truths. Third, predictability is not required for rationality; instead, the revisability of key concepts is contingent upon circumstances and conditions, including personal ones, making rationality dependent, occasionally, on transformation. Each of these consequences suggests that controlling one’s life, knowing and taking responsibility for oneself,

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authentically, is not primarily explained by subjectivity, or awareness of oneself as a discrete individual, separate from others. Armando Hart, among others, argues that Marxist dialectical materialism provides resources for understanding freedom as authenticity because it provides resources for explaining knowledge, rejecting dualism. Understood properly, as realist, essentialist and organicist (Wood 1981/2004: 266), dialectical materialism provides the ‘strategic “Archimidean” material mediatory leverage’ that Mészáros argues is missing in Sartre, showing how radical change can express individuals’ best interests without consisting of ‘millions of individual actions’ (Sartre cited in Mészáros 2012: 323). Hart argues that twentieth-century Marxists ignored the implications of dialectical materialism for subjectivity, depriving the world of a genuine alternative to negative/positive views of freedom ignoring embodiment (Hart 2006). It is to such dialectically materialist views that we now turn.

Antonio Gramsci and Che Guevara Antonio Gramsci and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, who were Marxists, held views of individual freedom consistent with the cause and effect view we have been discussing. Each provides resources for authenticity at issue in mindfulness discussions, although this can be missed if one ignores the bigger philosophical picture. For Gramsci, considering the dependence of knowledge upon social conditions, it is naïve to expect intellectuals to act independently of class interests, just by being intellectuals. Intellectuals are products of social/historical conditions, affected by interests possessed as group members. Indeed, formal education itself prejudices intellectuals since ‘school is the instrument through which intellectuals of various levels are elaborated’ (Gramsci 1948/83: 10). He means that intellectuals are made into intellectuals of a certain sort by their formal training. But although intellectuals are ‘elaborated’ within their particular social/ historical circumstances, they sometimes acquire critical understanding of such circumstances and conditions. Like Marx, Gramsci holds that a way of seeing the world cannot be better in and of itself but only in relation to a direction of action. A ‘new and integral conception of the world’ (1948/81: 9) will not arise from the work of ‘the traditional and vulgarised type of the intellectual . . . given by the man of letters, the philosopher, the artist’ (Gramsci 1948/81: 9). Such intellectuals depend mostly and perhaps only upon intellectual traditions.

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Instead, a better conception arises from ‘critical elaboration of the intellectual activity’ related to ‘the muscular nervous effort toward a new equilibrium and ensuring that the muscular nervous effort itself, insofar as it is an element of a general practical activity, which is perpetually innovating the physical and social world, becomes the foundation of a new and integral conception of the world’ (Gramsci 1948/81: 9). In other words, it arises from actual collaborative work, of a physical/social sort, towards ‘a new equilibrium’ meeting the real needs of specific people at a particular time. Gramsci is not against philosophers and artists. But unless ideas are formed and pursued in relation to an actual physical and social effort to change social structures, they express the ‘implicit concept of the world’, that is, the status quo. Gramsci did not subscribe to the inside/outside distinction as regards freedom. For him, adequate critical understanding, for individuals and groups, is a dialectical process transforming the individual herself or himself. An individual finds freedom in situations ‘where he can think, look beyond, and has a responsibility, where he both organizes and is organized, where he feels part of a vanguard that pushes forward, carrying the multitude with it’ (Gramsci 1919– 20: 655 cited in Santucci 2010: 80). It cannot be otherwise: Everyone, no matter their social position, depends for their own self-understanding and identity upon an ‘implicit concept of the world’, not chosen or, likely, recognized (Gramsci cited in Santucci 2010: 141). Thus, Gramsci considers it ‘foolish common sense’ (Gramsci 1917–18/1982 cited in Santucci 2010: 60) to expect individual freedom to be possible without transformative social change since only such change can bring about conditions for ‘new modes of thought’ (Gramsci 1948–51/1971: 9), and authenticity. Gramsci’s famous centaur metaphor – half beast, half human – refers to ‘levels of force and consent, authority and hegemony, violence and civilization, of the individual moment and the universal moment’ (1948–51/1971: 170). Gramsci is Hegelian in the way Marx is, namely, in understanding reality in terms of homeostatic relations and processes. Individual feelings play a role in the dialectic. Gramsci’s statement, ‘[o]nly the man who wills something strongly can identify the elements that are necessary to the realization of his will’ (1948–51/1971: 171), reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s ‘subjectivity is the truth’, does not mean that Gramsci is a relativist. His realism needs to be kept in mind. Indeed, Wood suggests that much is missed when Marx’s realism, essentialism and organicism are ignored (1981/2004: 266), and the same holds for Gramsci. For Gramsci, when intellectual traditions are inadequate for conceptualization, when the singularity of an event cannot be subsumed under

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existing universals, passion may be all there is to go on. But this only happens when such passion arises from the ‘muscular nervous effort’ towards a ‘new equilibrium’. Unlike adherents to the inside/outside distinction, Gramsci maintains that individual freedom requires that one ‘think, look beyond, and [have] a responsibility’ for organizing. Berlin’s worry about repression resulting from positive freedom is answered by the constraints of causal interconnectedness. For Gramsci, ‘new modes of thought’ are explained by ‘muscular nervous effort’ because only through the body can we know human needs and relations not conceivable or identifiable according to the ‘implicit concept of the world’ already in place. Of course, there are errors. But when there is relevant truth, this is how it is explained. Gramsci’s acknowledgement of cause and effect is clear in his remarks on optimism. Optimism is ‘nothing but a way to defend one’s own laziness, irresponsibility and unwillingness to do anything’ (Gramsci 1975: 1191–2 cited in Santucci 2010: 121). This is because optimism (‘of the intellect’) depends upon factors beyond a person’s own ‘will and industriousness’ which are ‘burned at some sacred alter of enthusiasm’ (Gramsci 1975: 1191–2 cited in Santucci 2010: 121). The only ‘justifiable enthusiasm’, which he called ‘optimism of the will’, is that which ‘accompanies intelligent intention, intelligent industriousness, a wealth of inventiveness in concrete initiatives that bring change to existing reality’ (Gramsci 1975: 1191–2 cited in Santucci 2010: 121). An intellectual optimist, then, believes in events beyond her or his control, which is irresponsible. What matters instead is optimism generated by one’s own actions and interactions when directed towards concrete change of an appropriate sort. ‘Optimism of the will’ arises primarily from the experience of the body. Optimism ‘of the intellect’ is unreliable because it does not, depending instead upon an ‘implicit concept of the world’. One relies irresponsibly upon intellectual optimism because in doing so, one ignores the ‘intelligent intentions’ one might form by being more attentive to ‘concrete change to existing reality’. How much more sensible a view than the ‘pathological upbeatness’ (Eagleton 2009: 138) with which current culture insists on ‘positive thinking’! Patients are urged towards ‘positive thinking’ and an attitude called ‘hope’, which involves believing in survival despite the evidence (e.g. Hendler 2012: 91–3). Alternatively, though, one might be empowered by awareness of one’s reality, even when the situation is unfavourable. One could discover, as Gramsci suggests, the capacity to form intentions and create initiatives in relation to just such a reality. We return to this point below.

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Turning now to Guevara: Guevara’s ‘new man’ is a philosophical view also recognizing the radical contingency of justification. Like Gramsci, Guevara was an historical materialist committed to Marx’s view that human beings are part of the natural world. Like every other part of the universe, human beings are causally interconnected. Guevara held, like Marx, that political freedom cannot constitute human freedom (Marx 1843/1978: 26–52). Marx was not against rights (Wood 1981/2004: 127–42). However, the primacy of liberal rights undermines human freedom being premised on the idea that we need protection from each other. Guevara’s ‘new man’, as mentioned in Chapter 2, is a way of being and of conceiving of oneself in relation to others. Guevara argued that ‘in this period of the building of socialism, we can see the new man being born’ (1965/97: 203). He did not mean some particular man or woman for the ‘image is not yet completely finished – it never will be, since the process goes forward hand in hand with the development of new economic forms’. Thus, social progress ‘is not a matter of how many kilograms of meat one can eat’ but rather ‘of making the individual feel more complete, with much more inner wealth and much more responsibility’ (1965/2002: 43–4). ‘What is important . . . is that each day individuals are acquiring ever more consciousness of the need for their incorporation into society and, at the same time, of their importance as the motor of that society’ (Guevara 1965/2002: 36–7). An individual cannot be complete alone (Guevara 1965/97: 201). Indeed, she or he cannot be complete at all. One can only ever be more complete as one transforms and is transformed by relations with others. We might think, as mentioned above, that an individual acts freely as long as she or he forms her or his desires by weighing relevant options, with full information, etc. However, Guevara referred to freedom as ‘close dialectical unity’ (Guevara 1965/97: 200) existing between social direction, or the vanguard, and the people. Individual freedom is not properly characterized by metaphors of breadth and openness; instead, it is dependent upon direction because it depends upon knowledge, which requires institutional change. Although it seems paradoxical to suggest that individuality depends upon others, it is the same point, as made by Lenin (Chapter 1), about individuals and universals. An individual is always at the same time a universal, as in, say, ‘Fido is a dog’. We often assume individuality is defined intrinsically, a point we return to in Chapter 4. Yet, individuality is dependent upon others because the sort of individual one is depends upon the whole that gives content to generalizations applied in conceiving oneself. More adequate self-conception requires interaction

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with others because adequate generalizations come from bodies working together in an appropriate direction, that is, in ‘close dialectical unity’. Some take such a view to invite repression, as Berlin worried about positive freedom. Part of Guevara’s response is that negative freedom is already repressive, for reasons supplied by Campbell’s arguments about the social explanations for ‘private’ feelings. Some think they can escape alienation by doing their own thing, as if their innermost desires and preferences are indicative of their real selves, as if they are private. They forget about what Guevara called the ‘invisible cage’ (1965/97: 222), according to which people assume they are ‘on their own’ because they are not interfered with, and yet their lives are informed by values and expectations they may not understand or even recognize. This is what existentialists called ‘alienation’. Consider the cage (e.g. Frye 1983: 4–5). A bird in a cage seems to be doing its own thing. If we look closely at the bird we don’t see the cage. The bird moves around, doing what it wants. Its actions seem to be free, explained by volition. But when we step back and see the cage, we think differently. Certainly, the bird’s desires and preferences cause the bird’s actions. But they do not explain. That is, the desires and preferences of the bird do not provide the relevant understanding of the bird’s actions. The birdcage, and not the bird, explains the bird’s behaviour, even though the bird acts on desires. The bird’s choices do cause the bird’s actions. But the existence of the cage, not the choices, explains why the bird lives as it does. An event has many causes but only some are explanatory, as we noted in Chapter 2. The presence of oxygen does not explain the fire because it does not help us understand why the fire occurred, although it is a cause of the fire (Miller 1987: 93–4). In the bird’s case, we might ask why the bird does not live according to its birdness in which case the cage’s existence becomes explanatorily relevant. But to ask such a question, one has to think birdness matters. That is, one has to think it matters to freedom that the bird acts as a bird, and not just or even primarily on desires, even with information. The question about who leads, or who constitutes the vanguard, is not as important as the question about how knowledge – about humanness – might motivate those in the lead, whoever they are. For it is only as regards humanness that the cage even becomes relevant: If one holds that one’s best interests are just what one thinks they are, then the birds are pursuing their ‘best interests’ and no questions need be asked about why they have those interests. A question arises, then, about how there can be reasons, which depend upon generalizations, for

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judging and resisting structures that undermine freedom to be and live more adequately as human beings in a specific context. Those who worry that positive freedom justifies repression often ignore the very possibility of knowledge of humanness. Positive freedom may justify repression but not necessarily, depending upon whether deliberation is grounded to some extent in knowledge of humanness. Negative freedom, by contrast, necessarily justifies repression because it makes the cage explanatorily irrelevant as regards freedom. And this doesn’t mean the cage doesn’t exist. It is easy to miss the significance of the cage, or the ‘outside’, for freedom. One only has to focus on desires, preferences and dreams as primary grounds for defining freedom. As long as I commit to the follow-your-dreams view, I need not ask about structures explaining such dreams, and how the ‘outside’ matters to the individual I might be and the life I might live. To return to Mab Segrest: Nothing about Segrest in particular, or her beliefs at the time, explains the reliability of her insight that white liberalism is racist in presupposing the inferiority of the Black people it ‘helps’. Instead, the reliability of Segrest’s insight is explained by the fact that she and the Black children are indeed the same in relevant respects, even if the generalizations in terms of which she conceives herself disallow such sameness. Both Gramsci and Guevara understood that truths have to be detected by someone and must be pursued in order even to be identified as such. Freedom is a narrow dialectic because it requires transforming circumstances and conditions, in order to discover such truths, which requires direction initiated by someone or some group. They did not mean freedom in a negative or positive sense as if these can be relevantly distinguished but in the self-making sense that recognizes embodiment as a source, sometimes the only source, of humanist truths.

Christianity and Buddhism Flannery O’Connor’s existentialist novels, according to Thomas Merton, portray a failure of respect and reason characterizing inauthenticity (Merton 1967b: 37– 42). O’Connor wrote ‘in and out of the anatomy of a word that became genteel, then self-conscious, then obsessive, finally dying of contempt, but kept calling itself “respect”’ (Merton 1967b: 38). O’Connor portrays such ‘gestures of respect’, conveying contempt, in her stories: ‘Contempt for the child, for the Negro, for the animal, for the white man, for the farmer, for the country, for the preacher, for the city, for the world, for reality itself ’ (Merton 1967b: 38). Merton writes

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that O’Connor should be honoured ‘for seeing [failure of respect] so clearly and looking straight at it without remorse’ (1967b: 39). It is not clear, though, that existentialism explains or answers the failure of respect clarified by O’Connor’s novels. Campbell argues that we may recognize someone as a person while failing to act out of respect. And in such failure we undermine ‘person-abilities’, including cognitive abilities to form intentions and to deliberate about interests (Campbell 2003: 31). The authenticity question, then, is partly a question about knowledge, as we’ve noted: We recognize ourselves as persons but not really. We think we recognize others as persons but we are mistaken. Community identity is involved. When we rely upon what Searle calls the ‘Background’ (1995) and Bourdieu the ‘habitus’ (1977), one part of the Background is, as Ivan Illich argues, an ethnos, ‘an historically given “we” which precedes any pronunciation of the word “I”’ (Illich 2005: 47). Ethnos, or a sense of social unity, depends upon social conventions and as such, according to existentialists, is largely fraudulent. But it is necessary. Like everything else, we interpret ourselves and our innermost feelings in terms of background beliefs, etc., including myths. Searle remarks that most people would not fall in love if they had not seen it on television (Searle 1995: 113–26). This is because feelings must be interpreted and we implicitly rely upon the Background, even for the supposedly most idiosyncratic of personal feelings. This means community sometimes needs to be changed for the sake of adequate self-knowledge. For Guevara and Gramsci, adequate self-understanding often requires social transformation involving transformation of the self. Apparently paradoxical, Merton remarks that the 1960s’ hippies understood what the Catholic Church did not: Noting the slaughter in the name of democracy, they understood the fraudulence of certain social values (e.g. Rudd 2009: 3–26). But they themselves were products of such fraudulence (e.g. Kitchel 1990). Thus, they concluded, as mentioned in Chapter 1, that consciousness only ‘extend[s] its awareness of itself by seemingly getting out of itself ’ (Merton 1968: 28). Existentialism would seem to have difficulty with this point. Freedom as self-making, or authenticity, lies mostly in the capacity to choose oneself without, as Kierkegaard remarks, being ‘levelled’ by sociological pressure. It requires adequate categories for understanding existence, not just those deriving from abstract science or philosophy. But as Merton argues, we might wonder how such categories are more authentic, being identified, understood and applied by the same self that is a product of fraudulent social conventions (Merton 1967d: 268–9).

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Christianity, at least in theory, claims that ‘one must lose one’s life in order to gain it’. Now one way to understand this claim is that one must lose one’s life in the world in order to gain it in God. But it can also mean that one must lose one’s life as understood so far in order to gain it authentically, that is, as defined by relations with human beings generally, not only by ethnos. According to Illich, and to Charles Taylor, precisely the second understanding was central to the Christian Gospels and was lost. Christianity initially acknowledged that understanding of others is blocked when we rely primarily upon ethnos and self-image. This is evident, Illich argues, in the Good Samaritan parable. Scholars typically take the parable to be about action: How ought I to act? And the lesson is that we should help those in need. However, the question the parable answers is ‘who is my neighbour? ’, a question about the referent of the term ‘neighbour’. The parable indicates the unpredictability of the term’s meaning and that it is inadequately grasped through reliance upon given categories, particularly that of ethnos. We return to categories in Chapter 5. For now, the point is that how one understands oneself precedes questions about ethical behaviour because ethical deliberation involves judgements about who is included in the community to whom ethics applies, judgements presupposed in self-conception. Such was the issue of respect that Merton detects in O’Connor’s novels: We may act ethically according to social norms and values and precisely by doing so act unethically in terms of respect for others. This is because ethical norms and values are based on judgements about human community, or ethnos, implicitly, discounting some people. The Christian response to this problem is to indicate that interpersonal relationships exist between those not otherwise considered neighbours, such as Samaritans and Jews. It is possible to discover and move past epistemic limitations when ‘something comes to me through the other, by the other, in his bodily presence’ (Illich 2005: 51). Christianity, according to Illich and Taylor, lost this insight, which has to do with embodiment. Taylor draws upon Illich’s argument that Christianity corrupted itself pursuing a ‘fetishism of rules and norms’ (Taylor 2005: xii). It abandoned dependence upon unpredictable bodily relations and, in so doing, abandoned discovery – of truths. Reliance upon rules removes insecurity, imposing order, absolving Christians of responsibility for deciding who is a ‘neighbour’. Precisely such institutionalized control of the meaning of Christian behaviour characterizes the move towards secularism, according to Taylor and Illich.

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The discovery issue was answered in Christianity by unpredictability. Without unpredictability, knowledge of those outside one’s ethnos is not possible, undermining ethics. Yet, although Christianity explains understanding through embodiment, as mentioned in Chapter 1, Christianity is too wedded to European liberalism to properly exploit its own resources (Merton 1968: 22). The epistemic limitations of self-image are resolved when ‘something comes to me through the other, by the other, in his bodily presence’ (Illich 2005: 51). But for fear of unpredictability, the Church committed itself to ‘inordinate selfconsciousness, . . . monumental self-awareness, . . . [and] obsession with selfaffirmation’ (Merton 1968: 31). For Taylor, Illich and Merton, the systematization of Christian behaviour through rules ignored the ‘awkward way these rules fit enfleshed human beings’ (Taylor 2005: xii); specifically, it ignores the way our knowledge of others and ourselves depends upon bodily connection and is, sometimes, unpredictable. Unbeknown to many, Buddhist teaching emphasizes cause and effect and embraces epistemic unpredictability, that is, contingency. This does not make it flaky. The Buddha, like some twentieth-century analytic philosophers, took philosophy to be empirical, even scientific. But the Buddha went further in his rejection of speculative philosophy: He was concerned with the fuzzy philosophy informing self-conception when one takes for granted the concepts ‘me’, ‘my’ and ‘mine’. For the Buddha, unlike existentialists, the root of all alienation lies not in conformity to arbitrary abstractions and social conventions in practical deliberation; rather, it lies in ignorance that such abstractions and conventions inform ‘me’, ‘my’ and ‘mine’, making self-making itself a risk to authenticity (Merton 1967b). The point is not often considered. Nkiru Nzegwu worries that philosophers, including feminists, are incapable of addressing the failure of understanding between, say, Europeans and Igbos, because they do not consider commitments implicit in self-conception. They consider conceptual frameworks without addressing the personal investment in such frameworks. Nzegwu argues that feminists overlook the personal investment in and dependence upon a given way of organizing the world when, for example, they propose ‘world travelling’ as a metaphor for understanding difference (Nzegwu 2006: 196). Such a metaphor ignores the presupposition, in any engagement with other ‘worlds’, of self-conception, implying that individual security, confidence, comfort, pride and general psychological well-being play a role in understanding others. If such concerns were deemed properly relevant to critical, respectful engagement, one’s ‘world’ would not be the primary concern.

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Sartre made such a point in discussing how Europeans might access the work of Black African and Caribbean poets (Sartre 1964). Although in such poetry, ‘white heads are no more than Chinese lanterns swinging in the wind’, Sartre predicts that Europeans will not be ashamed when they read that, for such poets, Europe is no more than a ‘memory, a malaise, a white mist at the bottom of sunlit souls’ (1948/64: 15). This is because they will read the poetry as if ‘they are reading letters over someone’s shoulders, letters not meant for them’ (1948/64: 13, 16). In order to direct Europeans in how to ‘access’ such poetry, Sartre writes that he ‘should like to show that this poetry – which seems racial at first – is actually a hymn by everyone for everyone’ (1948/64: 16). In other words, the poetry is not just about ‘them’, the Blacks. This is hard. Encountering difference, we do one of two things: We ask about differences between, say, the Black poets and us, and focus on ‘them’. Or, we take the poetry to be about us, that is, about human beings, and ask how the experience of Blacks clarifies humanness in general. On the second approach, the different perspectives of Black Africans challenge the primacy of France and Europe in defining ‘human’ in the first place. Europeans might read such poetry while maintaining their commitment to Europe’s centrality: They understand Black poets as voices of difference from that centrality. However, Sartre urges Europeans to read such poetry as, among other things, about that centrality; if they do, they will be ‘eaten away to the bone by these quiet and corrosive looks’ (1948/64: 15). Insecurity is a predictable result of knowing one’s reality, truly. The physical universe, we know, is constantly changing. The Buddha suggests that one can know this for oneself, experientially, by observing one’s own body. Sitting with a calm mind and body, one can observe within one’s own body the constantly changing nature of the entire mental and physical structure. ‘Everything that arises in the mind starts flowing with a sensation in the body’, the Buddha insisted (Gotama cited in Goenka 1998: 26). Some interpret Buddhist ‘mindfulness’ as awareness of one’s activities – for instance, ‘I am walking’, ‘I am eating’ etc. In the Mahasatipatthãna Sutta, the message is more interesting: ‘Feeling the whole body, I shall breathe in. Feeling the whole body I shall breathe out’.1 How does one meditate? One observes: ‘This is matter, this is the arising of matter, this is the passing away of matter’.2 One can observe the rising and passing away of all the sensations of the body – related to both mental and physical events – and one can know experientially that one’s reality is essentially insecure. The Buddha answered the question of authenticity scientifically: One observes cause and effect within the body and one knows experientially one’s essential

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nature. Freedom is not about deep-seated desires, preferences and life plans, at least not primarily, perhaps not at all. It is not even about self-making but instead, as for Christianity (initially), it is about self-losing, or at least self-image-losing. Now, some will insist the birds are free as long as they think they’re free, and the cage is irrelevant. Indeed, in the ‘age of authenticity’, as Taylor argues, we take individual choice to trump any argument about well-being (Taylor 2007: 473–9). But if one cares about authenticity, one cannot take for granted that authenticity is properly understood according to the social conventions of the ‘age of authenticity’. Thus, the cage becomes relevant. For Marxists, understanding the relevant cage requires social transformation. But Marxists did not do much with the question of self-conception, although Armando Hart suggests they might have done so if they had more seriously considered dialectical materialism (Hart 2006: 130–4). Both Gramsci and Guevara emphasized self-knowledge to some extent. Gramsci despised haughtiness: ‘Whoever replaces important events with conceit, or carries out conceited politics, is certainly to be suspected of a lack of seriousness’ (Gramsci 1975: 1735 cited in Santucci 2002: 158), which was not a moral weakness. The ‘seriousness’ one risks losing has to do with truth which is, for Gramsci, a prerequisite of political success: ‘In mass politics, to say the truth is precisely a political necessity’ (Gramsci 1975: 1735 cited in Santucci 2002: 158). But one cannot state the truth about the society by which one has been ‘elaborated’ while also being stuck on oneself. Hence, arrogance blocks apprehension of truths required for politics. For Guevara, leaders of the freedom struggle are those who struggle with themselves: ‘[T]he daily stretch of the road . . . is the personal road of each individual; it is what he will do every day, what he will gain from his individual experience, and what he will give of himself ’ (1960/97: 104). The Buddha’s addition to such remarks is that we know our reality, which is impermanent, through (mental) observation of cause and effect within the body. If one is aware of one’s (impermanent) nature, experientially, one cannot be stuck on oneself because there is nothing to be stuck on, experientially. Selfabsorption amounts to a contradiction when understanding is through feelings. For, it is not possible to be absorbed in that which one experiences to be constantly changing, being ethereal. Thus, although non-propositional understanding must often, for the sake of agency, be theorized, embodied understanding, and not the merely or even mostly intellectual, explains radical self-reconception. Embodied understanding of cause and effect reality is incompatible with the attachment to self-image that blocks relevant understanding of others, that is, of humanness.

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The yoke and the star Returning to The Boy in the Moon and the problem of mindfulness, or the capacity for awareness and acceptance: Brown spends three half days at L’Arche, a community for the intellectually disabled founded by Jean Vanier (Brown 2009: 216–17). Vanier has written that living and engaging with the intellectually disabled promotes acceptance of ‘brokenness’ (1998), without which freedom is impossible. Vanier is Christian, and ‘brokenness’ might be understood to refer to a kind of humility; however, Vanier’s point is more interesting, having to do with the meaning of and how to understand, ‘becoming human’ (1998). Vanier’s understanding of freedom began when he accepted that he was not good. In the Cold War, good and bad were clearly defined, and such (supposed) clarity about goodness limited understanding of goodness. In recognizing that he was not good, Vanier recognized a specific expectation with practical consequences. Taking good and bad to be clearly defined makes the goodness inconsistent with such definitions difficult to identify, blocking understanding. Vanier is not referring only to moral goodness: ‘I have come to learn that embodied in [acceptance of others] there is an important principle: . . . the necessity of accepting constant movement as the key to our humanity and as the only road to becoming truly human’ (Vanier 1998: 11). This is what he means by ‘brokenness’: We miss out when we rely uncritically upon expectations that guarantee self-stability. Of course, sometimes we must do so; otherwise, we would not act at all. But quite often, as Brown describes, we experience shame because of expectations of which we are unaware, which is debilitating. Wendell Berry wrote, ‘Though you have done nothing shameful, they will want you to be ashamed. They will want you to kneel and weep and say you should have been like them’ (Berry cited in Brown 2009: 219). But if you say you are ashamed, ‘such light as you have made in your history will leave you’ and ‘They will no longer need to pursue you. You will pursue them’. The only resistance is ‘inward clarity, unashamed, that they cannot reach’. The ‘inward clarity’, though, requires identifying outward causes. Specifically, Brown overcomes shame about buying bread in less-than-adequate French. As it turns out, although he cannot speak French, he can buy bread. His shame is based upon inadequate expectations about the situation, the truth about which is that intentions to buy bread can be communicated otherwise than in adequate French. One way to describe Brown’s lesson is that expectations, explained by false beliefs, block the capacity to identify relevant truths about the situation at hand, such as that people not sharing a language can understand each other.

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Buddhist insistence on reality as it is, often understood to be conservative, can be understood in this sense. To see reality as it is – in the Pali language, yattha butha – involves observing one’s reality rather than interpreting it blindly relying upon expectations. However, this is not easy because some such expectations are part of one’s self-conception. One becomes attached. Brown, for instance, might have liked the idea that he could buy bread without having to rely upon the good intentions of others in the bread store. Occasionally, relevant expectations, in fact arbitrary, not rooted in empirical evidence, are ones we are attached to, implicitly. They play a role in our sense of identity and self-importance. Brown may very well like the expectation that he can buy bread in adequate French, implying that he can do without the help of others, both of which may be false expectations but nonetheless comfortable. The Buddha knew the importance of theoretical traditions, urging his followers to study, memorize, analyse and teach. But without the capacity to respond to contingent conditions, intellectual analysis is limited, dependent upon expectations that may be arbitrary. Because we become attached to arbitrary expectations, ego matters, epistemically. Attachment to ego impedes understanding because it makes it hard to relinquish expectations upon which self-importance depends. However, the Buddha also noted that one cannot get rid of ego by working to get rid of ego. This is because in the process of working to get rid of ego, a popular religious endeavour, one builds it up, with the wellknown result of self-righteousness or false humility, also epistemically limiting. The Buddha’s solution to the epistemic burden of ego is awareness of cause and effect. If one cultivates awareness of cause and effect, that is of one’s essential reality – yattha butha – ego diminishes by itself. This is because awareness of cause and effect – experientially at least – and attachment to ego, which is then known to be insecure, are contradictory. They cannot exist together. Like any other kind of knowledge, self-understanding is radically contingent upon relevant cause and effect mechanisms, and awareness of cause and effect provides understanding of ego, and its limits. In signalling the epistemic barriers constituted by attachment to ego, the Buddha examined a question that Marx did not. But Marx also held the view that knowledge, including self-knowledge, depends upon cause and effect. This is why Armando Hart thinks Marxists might have contributed to questions even about spirituality if they had been more serious about dialectical materialism, that is, about cause and effect (Hart 2006: 130–4). Returning to the negative/positive debate, negative freedom suggests, roughly, that we are free when not interfered with. Disease, loss and disruption

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are among the ways that freedom in this sense is undermined. Physical wellbeing and ‘total activity’ (e.g. Hammond 2012) are celebrated while disease, old age and loss (of wealth, productivity, success) diminish prospects for a good life in the non-moral sense being discussed, including prospects for freedom. It is common to think that if I lose my health, wealth and/or capacities, I lose my well-being, including freedom. Yet, this is an odd view, and quite unscientific. Everyone loses physical capacities, eventually, from the beginning. Not only this: Every moment of happiness is eventually lost. Observation suggests there is no certainty about existence, a point not just from Buddhism but from Engels (1940: 24–5). Yet, we expect well-being to consist in non-interference, not only from governments, but also from the reality of nature of which we are part. When publisher, author and historian, Conrad Black, was asked to identify the worst event that might befall him, his answer was chronic illness (Black 2013). He admitted he’d not known chronic illness but imagined the darkest possible experience to be chronic loss of health. He is not alone. We make toasts to ‘health, happiness, etc.’ with health first because if one loses health, one loses ‘everything’. Black apparently takes the non-occurrence of adversity to be a relevant expectation as regards well-being: For him, the failure of such an expectation would amount to disappointment as regards prospects for well-being. His expectation, though, will necessarily fail, eventually, being inconsistent with reality, every part of which changes and deteriorates. Merton wrote that ‘the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture’ (Merton 1948/70: 105). We can understand Merton’s statement in terms of the Buddha’s insistence on yattha butta: If an expectation is inconsistent with reality, we are better off recognizing such inconsistency and living accordingly. If one insists on living according to false expectations, such as that one might not suffer, one suffers twice. One will suffer and one will suffer because one suffers. Indeed, as Merton suggests, one will suffer because of the very nature of one’s existence, which is fragile and insecure. One could, more realistically, accept one’s reality, yattha butta (as it is),

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and suffer only once, not suffering because one suffers, as is likely for Black, whose expectation is unrealistic. Emphasis on yattha butha is not conservative. Instead, it urges us to recognize that knowledge, including self-knowledge, is radically contingent upon circumstances and conditions, that is, upon cause and effect. The Buddha did not urge people to seek out suffering, just to recognize reality for what it is, scientifically, and not live according to unrealistic expectations that increase suffering. When we cannot respond to contingent circumstances and conditions as they are because of attachment to expectations we could easily know to be false, we miss out. Negative freedom is not just metaphysically shaky because it ignores the causes of ‘inner logic’; it also expresses an expectation about wellbeing and freedom that is unrealistic, providing inappropriate grounds for authentic self-making. We return to this point in Chapter 5. Two points follow for authenticity from the radical contingency of knowledge upon circumstances and conditions, including psychological ones. First, paradoxically, Buddhist meditation, understood in terms of cause and effect, which the Buddha emphasizes throughout, promotes the efficiency of practical deliberation and action towards goals. This is because Buddhist meditation is about causal connectedness. For the Buddha, mindfulness is ‘ardent, continuous, awareness’ of the rising and passing away of all sensations in the body, including those pertaining to mental events (Gotama cited in Goenka 1998). With awareness of cause and effect, one is better able to respond to current conditions rather than blindly reacting to patterns of behaviour based on social conventions that give rise to expectations, which determine actions. Such freedom from social convention was the object of authenticity. However, its achievement is better explained by the Buddha, with his insistence on cause and effect, than by existentialists who, like Sartre, could not quite move past the explanatory appeal of ‘inner logic’. Some teach Buddhist meditation as a focus on mantras. This interpretation, arguably, gives less importance to cause and effect just as many interpretations of Christianity give less importance to contingency. For present purposes, it is not necessary to argue some or other interpretation to be correct. The point is that recognizing the centrality of embodiment provides resources for, among other issues, authenticity. Considering the nature of knowledge, particularly the radical contingency of justification upon circumstances and conditions, the Buddha’s emphasis on cause and effect, which is hard to miss, is about logic: As we become experientially aware of cause and effect within the body, we are less attached to a particular self-image because such attachment results in a

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contradiction, as explained above. And if we are less attached to self-importance, we respond better to evidence contradicting expectations supporting such an image, and blocking understanding. We reason more effectively, as Brown did in buying his bread. Second, if we are aware of cause and effect, we are less likely to depend upon illusions, in particular, the illusion that we can avoid death. Patients, in North America at least, are subject to the medical establishment’s commitment to positive thinking. Doctors tell patients the truth about their diagnoses but except in the relatively new field of palliative care, and with some psychiatrists, patients are urged never to lose ‘hope’, suggesting that although evidence suggests one result, I should believe in another. The Buddha’s insistence on yattha butta suggests, among other things, that death is not hugely difficult, conceptually, because it occurs moment by moment, throughout the universe, of which we are a part. It is odd to suggest that we live better denying reality as if we live better clinging to illusions of negative freedom that we could recognize as illusions by looking around. As Gramsci argues about the dangers of ‘intellectual optimism’, we can be empowered by looking at a situation as it is, as bad as it is, without changing it into something else more attractive, because we can then form our intentions on those grounds. In particular, we are empowered when we know we can look at a situation as it is, rather than changing it into something else, and learn to live with it, that is, to live well and fully with it. Martí, in his poem ‘The Yoke and the Star’ (1913/99), illustrates a practical consequence of rejecting dualist thinking. Martí’s poem is about a parent’s advice to a child: ‘Flower of the womb’, the mother says to her son at birth, ‘Look at these two insignia of life I offer you/In pain; consider them and choose’. The first is a yoke. The one who accepts the yoke is ‘like a gentle ox, and when he lends his services/To gentlemen, sleeps on warm straw’. The other symbol is ‘a mountain peak from a mountain . . . /He who bravely girds himself with the star,/Since he creates, he grows!’. The images are familiar. On the one hand, the submissive beast conforms to expectations and lives comfortably, with warm shelter and nutritious food. In existentialist terms, she or he lives inauthentically, alienated from her or his true existence because she or he follows convention. On the other hand, on the mountain peak, is the person who ‘girds himself with the star’. This is the ‘living one’ who shines light for others. The mother’s painful message to her son is, to follow Kierkegaard, that we can be ‘leveled’, living comfortably and acceptably

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within ‘the public mind’. Or, we can climb the mountain and follow the light. On the first scenario, we risk alienation, submitting ourselves to others’ expectations. On the second, we create and grow but we become threatening to others because of our distinction. Martí rejects the dichotomy between the yoke and the star. He responds, ‘Give me the yoke, oh Mother, so when I firmly/Stand on it, the star that lights and kills/ May better shine forth from my countenance’. His point is that the mountain peak in opposition to the submissive beast is inadequate, metaphorically, when we consider what it takes to grasp humanist truths. The one on the mountain sees more but she or he may not see differently, or better. Martí knew that discovering humanness requires the capacity to be moved by human connection, where it offers itself up as an opportunity, and even to be changed. This requires humility, even submission. Sartre urged the Europeans to ‘[t]urn and turn about; from these shadows from which a new dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies’ (1963: 13). His insight is not captured by the image of the one who ‘girds himself with the star’. Precisely the contrary is true. Sartre warned his European colleagues that they would not understand the Black African poets without feeling ‘furtive, nightbound, and perished with cold’. The submissive beast, at least sometimes, may be more likely to encounter humanist truths being more responsive to cause and effect. Mindfulness, conceived in relation to authenticity, is not just a mental exercise of focusing on the present moment. For one thing, most fail at such an endeavour unless they work at it day by day over time, just as most people fail at lifting weights if they don’t practise regularly. More significantly, though, actions of the mind depend upon actions of the body, or rather, they are actions of the body. Brown recognizes this in his fantasy: he imagines people would stay in the village for periods of time, engaging with the disabled and integrating themselves into the community. Their thinking would change because their lives change. But Brown imagines that people will leave the village, at least occasionally, to keep up their lives, their achievements, their success, their growth. Yet, if the goal is individual authenticity, the fantasy ignores the requirements of knowledge, especially self-knowledge, which is the capacity to respond, to receive back, causally, a capacity that needs to be cultivated. Freedom from alienation, or control by the cage, is impossible without what Vanier calls ‘brokenness’ and Guevara the ‘new man/woman’, always incomplete. For, it can’t be possible without freedom from illusions, which must first be identified, and which often cannot be identified without cost to the self-importance they support.

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Conclusion Brown’s fantasy expresses the appeal of more sensible and realistic values. It is not hard to see how material abundance, acquired competitively, is not always consistent with the goal of living well, non-morally (e.g. Wilkinson and Pickett 2009). But freedom from unrealistic expectations, which Brown admires in his son, requires awareness of relevant causes, which requires focus and direction, and epistemic humility. Such requirements contradict popular emphases on the relentless accumulation of experiences, relationships, knowledge and travel. Increasing relevant understanding – of humanness – necessarily carries a cost to the very self that grounds and drives such accumulation. A thoroughgoing acknowledgement of radical contingency, and embodiment, suggests that for freedom from alienation, and real growth and creativity, Brown’s fantasy village should not be off on a mountain.

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Mystics, Anti-imperialists and Fear of Contingency

Contingency and secularism In logic, a contingent proposition depends for its truth upon facts, not uniquely upon logical relations. The truth of ‘the dog is black’ is contingent whereas ‘the black dog is black’ is analytically true. A contingent property is one that might not have existed, such as being tall. One might not have been tall whereas being mortal is not contingent since human beings are necessarily mortal. In Christianity, ‘contingency’ had a different sense, referring to God’s will. Hans Blumenberg argues that the Christian age of contingency began with Augustine who held that God created the world because God felt like it. For Thomas Aquinas, God’s will was so inscrutable that contingency took on the meaning it has today (in English and French), which is chance: ‘All one can say about what happens is that it happens because it happens’ (Illich 2005: 67). For Charles Taylor, the secularization of North Atlantic societies involved acquiring a world view from which contingency of the Christian sort is largely absent, for believers and non-believers alike. When the world’s existence depended upon God’s will, a ‘transcendent’ realm was causally relevant to personal lives. In an ‘enchanted’ world, ‘charged objects have influence and causal power, “holy” objects emanating from God and his saints are our bulwark against maleficent beings’ (Taylor 2007: 71). However, as a more secular version of Christianity was imposed throughout Europe and the American colonies, God became merely an addition to a causally closed universe, devoid of magic. For today’s believers, spirits do not intervene in personal lives, and voices like those that directed Joan of Arc are explained immanently as, say, a mild form of schizophrenia. Taylor’s immanent/transcendent distinction is not relevant only to religion; it explains a more general change in Western society (2007: 15). In the immanent

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world, spirits, demons and goddesses do not explain meaningfulness. Instead, ‘the only locus of thoughts, feelings, spiritual élan is what we call minds’ (Taylor 2007: 30). Taylor is not endorsing Cartesian dualism; he is describing lived experience. In the modern age, ‘meanings are “in the mind”, in the sense that they only have the meaning they do in that they awaken a certain response in us’ (2007: 31). So we understand ourselves ‘prior to philosophical puzzlement’ (Taylor 2007: 30). Premodern or ‘porous’ selves, in contrast, lack clear boundaries between the individual and impersonal, external forces. For a porous self, well-being can be explained by ‘being smiled on by Aphrodite’ (Taylor 2007: 36), whereas a modern ‘buffered self ’ is ‘invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things for [herself]’ (Taylor 2007: 38). The porous self is susceptible to external influences ranging from the political to the cosmic to the spiritual. The buffered self, by contrast, protects herself or himself from ‘forces external, be they demons or disease, marauding warriors or malevolent monarchs’. There is no collective or cosmos, in which one is embedded, determining identity and aspirations from somewhere ‘beyond’ oneself. The transcendent/immanent change involves human flourishing, or ‘fullness’: In the enchanted age, human flourishing depended unproblematically on causal forces beyond ourselves whereas today’s flourishing is explained immanently by reason, natural benevolence or the authentic ‘inner voice’ (Taylor 2007: 8–11, 15). Modern people are aware of their dependence upon others for well-being; they are not atomistic. However, the causal relevance of others to meaningfulness takes just two forms: (1) We observe the world and are stirred by what we observe; or (2) being in constant causal contact with external bodies, we are affected in strength, moods, motivations, etc. (Taylor 2007: 33). The meaningfulness of the objects or beings with which we interact comes from us, as minds, not from outside. Taylor rejects the ‘subtraction’ theory that secularism results from the removal of God and religion, holding instead that in ‘a secular age’, believers and non-believers alike deny the explanatory relevance of causal forces ‘beyond’ our own minds (Taylor 2011; see also Calhoun et al. 2011). Without a transcendent realm, secularism has meant a change in ethics. Since the Middle Ages, a ‘new, civilized, “polite” order’ (Taylor 2005: xi) succeeded one reliant upon magical or superstitious practices. Mystery, dependence and unpredictability were replaced by systematized rules making ethical behaviour predictable, not subject to the sort of revelation claimed by Meister Eckhart and Theresa of Avila (Taylor 2007: 70–1).

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Buffered and porous selves Taylor admires Ivan Illich for explaining the ‘good and bad’ of the modern age without entering the ‘facile and noisy debate between the boosters and knockers of modernity and the “Enlightenment” project’ (Taylor 2005: xiii). Like Taylor, Illich understands the modern age as a ‘spinoff ’ of Christianity, moving from older, more ritualistic forms of religious practice to a Christianity disposed towards ‘a moral order of rights-bearing individuals destined (by God or nature) to act for mutual benefit’ (Taylor 2005: xi). But for Illich, secularity is also a corrupting of what was best about Christianity, namely, embodiment. Whereas in the Gospels, moral motivation is explained by ‘enfleshment’, the modern Church has erected a system of rules and norms making the ‘gut-given response’ unnecessary. Codes and disciplines ensure that Christians internalize rules for behaviour, and rationally constructed organizations – schools, universities, bureaucracies – ensure rules are followed. Consequently, both within and outside Christianity, we ‘grow accustomed to decentering ourselves from our lived, embodied experience in order to become disciplined, rational, disengaged subjects’ (Taylor 2005: xii). For Taylor, Illich’s work is ‘useful, even inspiring’ in providing a ‘new road map, a way of coming to understand what has been jeopardized in our decentred, objectifying, discarnate way of remaking ourselves’ (2005: xiii). He supports Illich’s argument that the modern secular ‘fetishism of rules and norms’ allows Christians to do what is right while maintaining the ‘old protections’ that conspiratio (2007: 739), or real human communion, disrupts (2007: 741). According to Taylor, Illich argues that we should ‘find the centre of our spiritual lives beyond the code, deeper than the code, in networks of living concern, which are not to be sacrificed to the code, which must even from time to time subvert it’ (2007: 743). But Taylor does not fully support Illich’s ‘new road map’. One point makes this clear: For Illich, the porous self, supposed product of a past enchanted age, is also part of the Christian ideal that has been corrupted. The porous self, not the buffered self, is capable of receiving back from ‘enfleshment’, that is, from the body of another. Illich does not mean being inspired or influenced by another. ‘Enfleshment’ means that ‘something comes to me through the other, by the other, in his bodily presence’ (Illich 2005: 51), a point noted in Chapter 3. And what comes ‘through the other, by the other, in his bodily presence’ is not always made meaningful by meanings ‘in the mind’ of the receiver but is instead constitutive of meaning of a relevantly foreign sort.

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The porous self is more capable of mastering her or his destiny because the porous self has access to meaningfulness other than institutionalized rules and norms, providing more appropriate direction for autonomous action, as we will see. Better able to receive back from people, events and objects external to herself or himself, the porous self is more adequately ‘protected’ from ‘superstitious’ elements intervening to wrest control of her or his existence and its significance. Importantly, the porous self, at least potentially, possesses resources for identifying the ethnos, or the sense of community on the basis of which some are ‘neighbours’ and others are ‘alien’, arbitrarily.

Radical contingency Taylor understands contingency, as developed by Illich, to express the significance of ‘networks of living concern’ for ethics. He takes Illich to argue that we can be motivated by a sense of mutual belonging, by ‘a skein of relations which link particular, unique, enfleshed people to each other rather than a grouping of people together on the grounds of their sharing some important property’ (Taylor 2005: xii). Illich’s work is important today because even the best codes of a ‘peace-loving egalitarian variety’ can become ‘idolatrous traps that tempt us to complicity in violence’ (Taylor 2005: xiii). Contrary to Kant’s insistence that ethics be regulated by reason, ‘the network of agape puts first the gut-given response to a particular person’ (Taylor 2005: xii), and cannot be regulated by general rules. Contingency for Illich, though, is not centrally about ‘networks of living concern’ (Taylor 2005: xiv) or the ‘skein of relations which link particular, unique, enfleshed people to each other’ (Taylor 2005: xii). As Taylor notes, Illich refers ‘again and again’ to the story of the Good Samaritan. Yet, most interesting about the parable is not ‘another way of being’, a ‘new kind of community’ (Taylor 2007: 738), or the ‘new kind of fittingness’; rather, it is how these come about, which is as a result of the Samaritan’s recognition of the Jew. The Samaritan identifies one man – the Jew – as a man. He might not have done so because no ‘skein of relations’ supported such a judgement. Precisely for this reason, the Samaritan could reasonably have ignored the Jew just as the learned scholars who passed by before him had done. He could, quite rationally, not have seen him. Illich points out that in Greek the word logos in the Bible means ‘proportion or proportionality or fit before it means what we call a word’ (2005: 205). Sarx, on the other hand, means flesh but not soma, or body. Contrasting logos in the Bible

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is not body but ‘fleshiness’, which opposes proportionality or fit. The Samaritan story is significant as a story about fleshiness, not fit or proportionality. The Jew by the road, after all, does not fit. He falls outside the Samaritan’s ethnos, or sense of community, that determines fit or proportionality. The Samaritan, nonetheless, encounters the Jew. Indeed, he responds to him. The significance of the story is not, in the first instance, the moral motivation provided by ‘networks of living concern’ but rather the capacity of the Samaritan to encounter and respond to the unfitted flesh of one particular human being. Illich understands contingency in the more radical sense in which it has figured in arguments against positivism. Foundationalist views, as we’ve seen, defined knowledge in terms of standards specifiable a priori – for instance, verificationist standards according to which a theory’s knowledge content is reducible to statements about observation. We have noted that on a naturalistic view, the content of general terms can be explained by the dialectical character of the growth of knowledge, including everyday knowledge. This includes terms like ‘knowledge’ and ‘rationality’ themselves; standards for defining knowledge and rationality are themselves contingent upon circumstances and conditions. Illich has this more radical sense of contingency in mind, not primarily referring to ‘networks of living concern’ but to how such networks are recognized. That an event or entity is known to be part, or potentially part, of some particular ‘network of living concern’ is a result of specific engagement with contingent circumstances and conditions, which are unfitted. In the case of the Samaritan and the Jew, the relevant network resulted from the Samaritan’s response to the Jew; it does not explain that response. That Illich is referring to the contingency of standards is evident in his discussion of the vernacular. ‘Vernacular’ usually refers to ‘untaught or untrained forms of language or architecture’ (Illich cited in Cayley 2005: 21) but Illich uses the term to refer to the ‘homebred, homespun, homegrown or homemade’. ‘Vernacular’ better describes what economists refer to as the ‘shadow economy’ comprising activities such as homecare that are unpaid but necessary for an economy’s maintenance. This is because such activities as the ‘preparation of food and the shaping of language, childbirth and recreation’ need to be defended from ‘measurement and manipulation’ (Cayley 2005: 21). Considering such activities ‘shadow economy’ means expecting them to be measurable relative to pre-established ends. The value of such activities performed for their own sakes is then overlooked. Vernacular activities can define relevant economic ends; they ought not to be valued instrumentally relative to predetermined ends.

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Illich develops this idea in his highly controversial book, Gender (1982). In premodern societies, division according to gender constituted a duality disallowing measurement according to pre-established criteria. Instead, ‘the specific whole that the complementarity of concrete genders brings into being – a “world”, a “society”, a “community” – is both shaped and limited, asymmetrically, by its components’ (Illich 1982: 81–2). Illich takes ‘gender’ to distinguish ‘places, times, tools, tasks, forms of speech, gestures and perceptions that are associated with men from those associated with women’ (Illich 1982: 3). He refers to ‘vernacular gender’ because such associations are as peculiar to specific times and places as is vernacular speech. Of crucial importance to Illich’s discussion is the idea that such dynamic duality between genders disallows application of any single predetermined measure of social value. Rather, standards are contingent upon the growth of the community conceived as an organism with interdependent parts. He compares such social decision-making mechanisms to the growth of a snail which is limited by its internal coping abilities relative to its purposes: The snail adds rings to its shell but stops when additional size would throw everything else out of balance (Illich 1982: 82). Vernacular speech, gender and subsistence define a community ‘on the assumption, implicit and often ritually expressed and often mythologically represented that a community, like a body, cannot outgrow its size’ (Illich 1982: 81). Like a body, a community has many parts and it grows, not in a way that is predesigned but rather constrained by the body’s changing needs and constitution. In contrast, a ‘life style based on the consumption of commodities’ assumes measurement of value according to pre-established economic needs and ends and is not therefore fully autonomous. Because it is associated with loss of control of meaningfulness, ‘the loss of vernacular gender is the decisive condition for the rise of capitalism and a life-style that depends upon industrially produced commodities’ (1982: 3). Gender was so badly received, particularly by feminists, that some claim it ended a distinguished career (Cayley 2005: 23–4). The idea that individual identities embedded in group identities might advance women’s equality was unpopular. It strikes many as counter-intuitive since groups – especially gender groups – have promoted sexual inequality. Yet Illich’s point in this and several other discussions has principally to do with the contingency of standards for the identification and measurement of meaningfulness (see also Illich 1973). Although sometimes criticized for envisioning a ‘near idyllic future state’ (Ayant 1975: 999), Illich’s arguments about standards identify implications of abandoning foundationalism and recognizing radical contingency. He does not

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condemn technology but instead expresses concern about the manipulation by technology rather than technology serving human potential. Moreover, his concern is for what is lost in terms of meaningfulness when the value and purposes of technology are mostly predetermined by economic ends. As a result, the very identification of such human potential (Illich 1973: 14) could be missed, like the Jew by the road. Such is the issue also with the ‘disease of medical progress’ (Illich 1976: 3). Some will read Illich as advocating refusal of chemotherapy and radiation treatments in favour of ‘natural remedies’. But his point is clearly about how such decisions are made. ‘Health’, he suggests, is an ability to cope with both internal states and one’s environment (Illich 1976: 7). Health is damaged not by medical technology itself but by environments that undermine ‘autonomous personal, responsible, coping abilitie[s]’ (Illich 1976: 7). The ‘disease of medical progress’ has to do with how people understand themselves, with our lived experience and how we conceptualize it. ‘Medicine undermines health’ because of ‘the impact of its social organization on the total milieu’ (Illich 1976: 40) where the ‘total milieu’ is one in which embodiment is irrelevant to the identification of meaningfulness. Health, according to Illich is a ‘responsible performance in a social script’ (Illich 1976: 129). It is about how someone relates ‘to the sweetness and the bitterness of reality and how he acts toward others whom he perceives as suffering, or as weakened, as anguished’ (Illich 1976: 129). Health is not an avoidance of the ‘malfunctions from which populations ought to be institutionally relieved’ but instead, among other things, an ‘art of suffering and dying’ (Illich 1976: 132), by which he means an ability to live fully with the inevitable reality of suffering and dying, for example, a ‘responsible performance’. The medical establishment plays into a bigger picture of disembodied reason, according to which ‘the script’ must be available before the performance. Illich’s proposal that ‘health is a responsible performance in a social script’ acknowledges, among other things, that health is the ability to discover and properly interpret that script. We return to this point in Chapter 5. For now the idea is that contingency, for Illich, refers also to the identification of, say, health, which itself is an engagement with fleshiness.

Porous selves (again) Two aspects of Illich’s discussion show that buffered selves cannot be effective agents of the vernacular. First, ‘homebred’ activities constitute meanings, giving rise to criteria for measurement through practices, orientations and concrete

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ways of interacting. The vernacular explains meaningfulness arising from practices not done for some specific purpose but rather for their own sake. Considered ‘shadow economy’, such activities are expected to be measurable in relation to given economic ends. Illich argues that in so measuring the value of such activities, meaningfulness is missed. Key to the value of the vernacular, then, is its failure to be properly measurable relative to existing social values. This does not mean, for Illich, that such value cannot be measured. The suggestion is that the vernacular matters because it constitutes meaning that is properly measurable only if the starting place for meaningfulness is not meanings ‘in the minds’ of social members. Second, meaningfulness arising from the vernacular, or that might arise, can explain a radically new social order, one relevantly alien to the existing order. Illich was convinced that out of ‘the women’s studies movement, would come . . . a radical questioning of the categories of economic, of sociology and of anthropology’ (Illich cited in Cayley 2005: 23), in part because of feminist interest in the vernacular. The ‘shadow economy’, appreciated non-instrumentally, could provide resources exposing the inhumanity of a commodity-driven mode of production, that is, of capitalism and imperialism (e.g. Illich 1976: 3). Thus, Illich was not referring to meanings that arise from minds here but rather to meanings that change minds, even identities. Now, Taylor tends to distinguish porous and buffered selves in terms of magic, demons and so on. As a result, porous selves seem to resemble Joan of Arc, hearing and obeying the voices of saints, without witnesses or proof. But for Taylor, a ‘whole gamut of forces’ (2007: 33) displaces the ‘confidence in our own powers of moral ordering’ (2007: 27) characterizing buffered selves. He even doubts whether Aristotle counts as a buffered self ‘because of the important role of contemplation of a larger order as something divine in us’ (2007: 27). Key to distinguishing porous and buffered selves, then, is not the particular causal forces intervening in agency but rather the absence of boundaries ‘which seem to us essential’ (Taylor 2007: 33). For instance, premoderns become ‘possessed’. In the enchanted age, ‘meaning exists already outside of us, prior to contact; it can take us over, we can fall into its field of force. It comes upon us from the outside’ (Taylor 2007: 34). Meaning in external phenomena or events can ‘even impose quite alien meanings on us, ones that we would not normally have, given our nature’ (Taylor 2007: 33). In the immanent world, external entities do not impose meaning; they influence and inspire. The meaning of encounters with such entities arises in us as a function of

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how minds operate (Taylor 2007: 30). Thus, the distinction between porous and buffered selves depends upon the starting point for meaning. In modern times, it comes from minds whereas in premodern times the porous self is ‘vulnerable’ to meanings from outside. But if contingency is radical, not only are meanings themselves contingent upon circumstances and conditions; the meaning of meanings – for example, their relevance and value, whether they matter and to what or whom – is also contingent upon circumstances and conditions. According to Taylor, the Samaritan’s action ‘cuts across the boundaries of the permitted “we’s” in his world’ (2007: 738). However, the Samaritan’s act not only ‘cuts across the boundaries’ of previous expectations; the Samaritan also takes it to matter that it does. After all, Samaritans and Jews were enemies. So the Samaritan, even after encountering the Jew, might not have acted as he did. The Samaritan not only encounters the fleshiness of the Jew; he encounters such fleshiness and takes it to be meaningful, a reason to act. The meaningfulness of the Jew, as a real human being, first, and as a reason for acting, second, did not come from meanings ‘in the mind’ of the Samaritan. The story matters because the Samaritan encountered unproportioned fleshiness, which could not be properly ‘proportioned’ within a ‘causally closed’ universe because such a ‘universe’ would be ‘closed’ according to that same sense of proportionality. No ‘skein of relations’ explains such meaningfulness. The encounter involved only the Samaritan and the unfitted fleshiness of the Jew. If the meaningfulness of the Jew did not somehow ‘take [the Samaritan] over’, as happens to porous selves (Taylor 2007: 34), the Jew could be ignored. And there would have been no story because it would not have mattered that the Jew was left, unremarked. The Samaritan encounters the Jew as a human being because the Jew is a human being. Unless such an external event itself could ‘impose quite alien meanings on [the Samaritan], ones that [it] would not normally have, given [the Samaritan’s] nature’ (Taylor 2007: 33), there could have been no ‘new sense of fittingness’.

Fullness The more radical sense of contingency has implications for fullness, or human flourishing, in a secular age. Or at least it has implications for how we know such fullness and judge its importance. Fullness is the experience of moral

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or spiritual richness that we find in certain activities and/or conditions. In special (emotional, mental or physical) places, life is ‘fuller, richer, deeper, more admirable, more worthwhile, more what it should be’ (Taylor 2007: 5). In modern society, fullness, or human flourishing comes, in some sense, from within: ‘We have moved from a world in which the place of fullness was understood as unproblematically outside of or “beyond” human life, to a conflicted age in which this construal is challenged by others which place it (in a wide range of different ways) “within” human life’ (Taylor 2007: 15). Fullness may be from ‘God, or the voice of nature, or the force that flows through everything, or the alignment in us of desire and the drive to form’ (Taylor 2007: 6). There are many ways to construe fullness but in the modern world, such experiences possess an immanent explanation, even for believers. Yet any experience of fullness, so described, is of something being full – a life, perhaps, indeed a certain kind of life. Taylor acknowledges that however we experience fullness, it is often revelatory, providing direction or a new perspective, even if just of very ordinary events. Such experiences unsettle us, providing insight, suggesting fullness is about something. Taylor is not talking philosophy here. He articulates a certain way of experiencing fullness, explaining its origins. This matters because the origins of modernday experiences of fullness are immanent, not transcendent, for believers and non-believers. We can, though, articulate the broader framework, philosophically. We know from metaphysics that any condition, being or event is whole, or real, or rich, or deep, in some respects and not others. Any entity has infinitely many properties if we include relational properties, such as distance in time or space from other entities. However, only some such properties matter to identifying, explicitly or implicitly, an entity as the entity it is. As mentioned in Chapter 1, how to classify entities has engaged philosophers and biologists for hundreds of years. There are many conceptions of kinds, including that kinds are individuals, not kinds after all, and pluralism about kinds, meaning that what constitutes a kind is discipline-relative. Richard Boyd argues that some of the differences among such views would disappear if positivist influences were fully superseded (1999a: 158–64). For instance, some argue that kinds (in biology) are individuals because two organisms are the same if (a) they are members of the same initial population and (b) they are able to interbreed. The idea is, in part, that species are individuals not kinds because there is no fixed, unchanging definition (Boyd 1999a: 146). However, one might argue that common descent and reproductive integration are essential defining properties,

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not because they are necessary and sufficient to being a species but because, as a matter of empirical fact, they establish the homeostatic evolutionary unity of a species (Boyd 1999a: 146). In other words, roughly, species definitions are not definable a priori but instead are contingent upon empirical circumstances and conditions. The important point here is that more than half a century past the demise of positivism, fundamental philosophical questions – such as the individuation of entities – hinge on the implications of rejecting positivist foundationalism. It is generally accepted, across disciplines, that positivism is indefensible as a view about how to distinguish knowledge from non-knowledge. However, it is not easy to fully reject positivism because it has implications beyond knowledge, such as for subjectivity, mind/body relations, freedom (or authenticity), as we’ve discussed. Rejecting positivism has implications for fullness, and how it is identified. Sydney Shoemaker was one of the proponents of the now relatively uncontroversial causal theory of properties. The core idea is that ‘the identity of a property is determined by its causal potentialities, the contribution it is capable of making to the causal powers of the things that have it’ (1984: 213, see also Achinstein 1974). Some objected initially that Shoemaker’s account is circular because it involves specifying which sorts of causal connection constitute identity, the danger being definition in terms of identity itself. But circularity worries often rely upon reductionist premises typical of a residual foundationalism. Acknowledgement of cause and effect implies that circularity, if it exists, is not necessarily vicious because some appearance of circularity is just a characteristic of a dialectical process. For present purposes, it is important that identity involves some properties and not others, and which properties identify an entity depends upon more than the entity itself. Such identifying properties are not explained entirely by the being or event in isolation. For instance, the ‘typewriter has the property of being over one hundred miles from the current heavy-weight boxing champion of the world [but] it is not easy to think of a way in which its having this property could help to explain why an event involving it has a certain effect . . .’ (Shoemaker 1984: 207). Thus, properties that identify are ‘the properties in virtue of which things have the powers they have’ (Shoemaker 1984: 211) and ‘the properties on which powers depend’ (Shoemaker 1984: 212). Each property is associated with a set of causal potentialities, which involve what the thing does or would cause by itself or (more likely) in concert with other properties. The causal theory of properties has played a role in a multitude of realist views about kinds. However,

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whatever view one takes, it is relatively uncontroversial that, at least in the realm of the living, intrinsic identifying properties are not determinable in isolation from causal relations within a broader context. Nzegwu makes the causal theory of properties point when she remarks that there are no Blacks in West Africa.1 She means that no one in West Africa identifies as Black. Certainly, being Black is a characteristic possessed by people in West Africa. However, it is not an identifying characteristic. This is because no relevant effects are explained by it. Being Black is an identifying characteristic in racist situations because certain effects need explanation. Being Black explains, for instance, how someone acts (given expectations of racism) or is treated by others (because of racism). The first Black woman elected to a provincial legislature in Canada, Rosemary Brown, wrote in her autobiography Being Brown that she was not brown in her native Jamaica; she became brown when she immigrated to Canada (Brown 1989). Fullness is about human flourishing. But knowing it as such implies picking out some properties and not others as defining the sort of flourishing one takes oneself to have experienced as full in the relevant sense. To the extent that access to real human flourishing is possible, and it may not always be, it is not a matter of ‘hooking up’ a concept in ‘the mind’ to a phenomenon in the world, as if there is some particular phenomenon to be hooked up to. Significant to the demise of positivism, as already mentioned, was recognition that positivist ideals, motivated perhaps by ‘physics envy’ (Boyd 1999a: 151), did not even work for physics. In the case of human flourishing, there is, of course, no entity to which an idea of flourishing might correspond. If an experience is revelatory as regards flourishing, increasing knowledge of such, it is insofar as reference to such an experience within a set of practices promotes relevant understanding. Taylor describes experiences of fullness as if they are experiences providing new insight. But in order to discover human flourishing, it must be identified, at least vaguely, which involves picking out some properties and not others, and presupposing a context in regard to which such properties are explanatorily significant. In ordinary cases of knowledge, involving discovery, the context is one of relevant reliable regulation. But such a dialectical process, regulated by cause and effect, is not best described as one of fullness since it involves ongoing revision of the standards according to which there is something that is full. Buffered selves rely upon meanings ‘in the mind’ to explain the significance of external events and beings. So presumably, the defining properties of fullness of human flourishing are explained, for buffered selves, by meanings ‘in the mind’.

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Such a view would seem to disallow the revelatory dimension of the experiences in question. István Mészáros argued against Sartre that ‘millions of individual actions’ (Sartre cited in Mészáros 2012: 323) cannot ground progressive social change, as Sartre proposed, because such individuals are ‘in the really existing world of history always deeply embedded in objectively structured and materially mediated social complexes’ (emphasis in the original) (Mészáros 2012: 323). However, some individual actions can ground progressive social change if such actions are explained instead by causal access to human needs and reality and are theorized, over time, through organized, directed politics, similarly regulated. Mészáros’ point is that whether a movement is progressive cannot be properly determined by the origins of the movement. Instead, a movement’s progressive nature depends upon whether such practices are effective, over time, in identifying real human needs and aspirations. We might think the same about an experience of fullness. Whether it is really fullness of human flourishing depends upon the ‘strategic “Archimidean” material mediatory leverage’, which is cause and effect, the point of historical materialism, as Mészáros insists. Lived experience as buffered selves is incompatible with the revelatory aspect of an experience of fullness because it is incompatible with ‘mediatory leverage’ which results in revisions, sometimes radical, of the standards for identifying meaningfulness. The significance of such leverage is precisely to relevantly impact universals according to which one’s context is understood, universals such as ‘human’, ‘being’, ‘flourishing’ and so on. Embodiment implies radical contingency, not just of meanings but also of meaningfulness. The meaningfulness of encounters with unfitted fleshiness is not adequately determined by meanings ‘in the mind’ that allow only a certain kind of fittingness for such unfitted fleshiness, disallowing the dialectic. The Samaritan’s encounter with the Jew is an encounter with meaningfulness that cannot be explained by the categories the Samaritan (until then) relied upon. Thus, the encounter creates explanatory necessity: It does not fit and raises questions about its meaningfulness. If the meaningfulness of the Jew were not foreign, and if the Samaritan were not able to be affected by alien meaningfulness, there would have been no explanatory need answered by a ‘new sense of fittingness’. Of particular significance, then, is the encounter between the Samaritan and the Jew as one of recognition, of identification. But this occurs because the Samaritan is, as Illich says, ‘touched in his innards’. He is made uncomfortable in a way that is not an experience of fullness in the relevant sense but rather of need and compulsion towards more adequate meaningfulness.

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Brokenness, not fullness Vanier takes brokenness, not fullness, to explain insight about human flourishing: ‘To be free is to know who we are, with . . . all the brokenness in us: it is to . . . be open to others and, so, to change. Freedom lies in discovering that the truth is . . . a mystery that we enter into, one step at a time’ (Vanier 1998: 117). Vanier asks, ‘What is this abyss that separates people? Why are we unable to look Lazarus straight in the eye and listen to him? . . . If we listen to his story and hear his cry of pain, we will discover that he is a human being. . . . As we enter into dialogue with a beggar, we risk entering into adventure. . . . That is why it is dangerous to enter into a relationship with the Lazaruses of the world. If we do, we risk our lives being changed’ (1998: 70–1). This is because the fleshiness of Lazaruses does not fit meanings ‘in the mind’ relied upon for self-protection. Vanier is a Christian. But Bertrand Russell, who was an atheist, acquires revelatory insight from an experience, while visiting a friend in pain, described as one of becoming ‘possessed’: She seemed cut off from everyone and everything by walls of agony, and the sense of solitude of each human soul suddenly overwhelmed me. Ever since my marriage my emotional life had been calm and superficial. I had forgotten all the deeper issues, and had been content with flippant cleverness. Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself in quite a different region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflection as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless; it follows that war is wrong, that a public school education is abominable, that the use of force is to be deprecated, and that in human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that. . . . At the end of five minutes, I had become a completely different person. For a sort of mystic illumination possessed me. (Russell 1953: 146)

Russell experiences a place in which life is ‘fuller, richer, deeper, more admirable, more worthwhile, more what it should be’, as Taylor describes fullness (2007: 5). The experience unsettles and indicates new direction. But Russell’s discovery comes about as a result of an experience more akin to Vanier’s brokenness than the immanent responses of buffered selves protected from the mysterious ‘beyond’.

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Terry Eagleton, an atheist and a Marxist, argues that those on the Left, having for historical reasons abandoned Marx, ought now to turn to theologians: ‘The Jewish and Christian scriptures have much to say about some vital questions – death, suffering, love, self-dispossession, and the like – on which the left has for the most part maintained an embarrassed silence. It is time for this politically crippling shyness to come to an end’ (Eagleton 2009: xii). In particular, Eagleton suggests that the Christian Gospels oppose the ‘great bourgeois myth of selforigination’ (2009: 16) offering instead the more Marxist idea that ‘freedom thrives only within the context of a fundamental dependency’ (2009: 16). Another way to put this is that the Christian Gospels oppose the ‘great bourgeois myth’ of buffered selves, just as Marx and the Buddha do, as was suggested in Chapter 1. This is not how the Gospels are interpreted within institutionalized religion. But it is easy enough, Eagleton argues, to see the message: ‘forgive your enemies, give away your cloak as well as your coat, turn the other cheek, love those who insult you, walk the extra mile, take no thought for tomorrow’ (2009: 14), and so on. Of course, this can seem like ‘fanciful wishful thinking about the meek and the peacemakers’. But it can also be read as a reconception of the human condition according to which ‘self-fulfillment can ultimately only come about through self-divestment’ (Eagleton 2009: 24). Eagleton does not make the issue philosophically explicit but we can do so with the resources employed so far: Questions about knowledge are intimately connected with questions about individuation. This includes self-conception which is always rooted in ‘the Background’ (Searle 1995) which limits (although also explains, as we’ve seen) understanding. Acquiring more adequate understanding requires more adequate Background, which affects individuation, displacing an established sense of self and importance. Individuating fullness, as an instance of human flourishing, is contingent upon appropriate revisability of beliefs and concepts, as well as standards, including for self-importance, which in practice amounts to self-dispossession. The ‘monomaniacal perspective according to which contingency is an adversary’, according to Taylor, takes unpredictable encounters with fleshiness to result in chaos and arbitrariness, undermining ethics. But such encounters do not, necessarily, have such results. If they did, scientific results would be arbitrary, and they are not always. The importance of considering twentiethcentury analytic epistemology and philosophy of science is that we see that the failure of foundationalism does not result in chaos and arbitrariness. It does not

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undermine objectivity. To reiterate: The point of considering recent philosophy of science has not been to suggest that deliberation about human flourishing is just like deliberations in science; instead, it is that if the failure of foundationalism does not result in chaos for science, contingency, even radical contingency, does not necessarily undermine knowledge elsewhere. Radical contingency, though, suggests that experiences of fullness might not be as significant as regards flourishing as Taylor suggests. It is important to consider motivation: Taylor’s suggestion is that self-mastery is better explained by barriers between the self and the causal unknown. Such a view is appealing, especially in the ‘age of authenticity’. But if it is motivated by fear that ‘possession’ leads inevitably to chaos, risking justification of brainwashing and psychological coercion, residual foundationalism needs to be considered as an explanation. If so, Taylor’s argument is itself an expression of the ‘monomaniacal perspective’ explaining the modern secular ‘fetishism of rules and norms’ that undermines conspiratio (2007: 739), or real human communion. Thus, it is doomed not only to conservatism but to dehumanization because it disallows the revelatory dimension of embodiment explained by cause and effect. The Samaritan’s challenge to ethics is not principally about ethics itself. It is about the implausibility, in the modern age, of porous selves and an aversion, theoretically and practically to brokenness. As Merton suggests, ‘The science of ethics then teaches us . . . to live in such a way that our actions will make us more perfectly human. . . . Training in ethics means, then, not only the study of these norms, but also the formation of a personal and mature conscience that can make practical judgments in applying moral norms to the problematic situations in life. . . . Ethics . . . aims at the complete formation of the human person’ (Merton 1979: 126–7). By ‘problematic situations’, we can substitute the unfitted fleshiness of particular instances of human being and behaviour, ones that fall outside the ‘ideology of personhood’ (Campbell 2003: 33). Another is, to state Merton’s point, that ethics requires the capacity to engage with unfitted fleshiness, creating an explanatory need for more adequate general categories, including ‘human’. For, ethics only becomes possible, for some people and some ways of living, when such unfitted fleshiness becomes relevantly meaningful, which porous but not buffered selves are able to discover. Marx argued that any person, no matter one’s education level or society, who deliberates about one’s life, relies implicitly upon a conception of what it means to be human. He called this ‘species consciousness’ (e.g. Marx 1932/78: 83–6). Gramsci later claimed that for this reason, every person, no matter one’s education or social position, can influence the direction of one’s society.

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For one can either take for granted or challenge the ‘species consciousness’ assumed by one’s current society. The Samaritan story is about challenging such consciousness as a result of the meaningfulness of fleshiness not properly made meaningful within accepted ethical resources. Thus, as Merton remarks, ‘[t]he only real “seriousness” that a mature ethical knowledge can trust today is the unseriousness of a profound humility and openness which is ready to commit itself to the risks of provisional decisions where moral norms no longer seem absolutely certain in themselves’ (Merton 1979: 125). Such real ‘seriousness’ is not possible for buffered selves who are ‘protected’ from imposition and cannot therefore benefit from the potentially foreign meaningfulness of such ‘provisional decisions’, or their results.

‘Chirpy’ connectedness Disregard for ‘networks of living concern’ is not, for Illich, what best characterizes disembodiment in the modern age. In Medical Nemesis, Illich describes ‘chirpy contemporary discourses’ about connectivity in discussions of, say, health, nature, yoga and relationship ‘circles’ as a ‘demonic parody’ of the significance of embodiment (Illich cited in Cayley 2005: 41). The ‘everything is connected’ view is an abstraction, a version of Hegel’s ‘night in which all cows are black’ (Hegel 1807/1967: 79 cited in Cayley 2005: 41). ‘Networks of living concern’ are popular in the way that mindfulness is popular, recognized as therapeutic in modern-day competitive, individualistic societies. But the radical implications of embodiment are misunderstood and/or ignored. According to Cayley, Maurice Merleau-Ponty supports Illich, writing, ‘Scientific thinking . . . must return to the soil of the sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and for our body – not for that possible body [but for] . . . this sentinel standing quietly at the command of my words and my acts’ (Merleau-Ponty 1961/64: 160–1 cited in Cayley 2005: 40–1). For Illich, if we really lived from ‘the soil of the sensible and opened world as it is in our life and for our body’, the result would be ‘apocalyptic’ in the original sense of the word, which is revelatory. For one thing, living for a ‘possible body’, is living within imagination, the mind. But living from the body ‘such as it is’ may engage causal forces hitherto unidentified, unfitted. For, ‘the soil of the sensible and opened world’ extends beyond what is or can be known by the mind at any one time. Embodied experience is apocalyptic, that is, revelatory, because it makes meaningfulness possible that was not possible previously because the fleshiness

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that is encountered is unfitted. According to Taylor, we should ‘find the centre of our spiritual lives beyond the code, deeper than the code, in networks of living concern, which are not to be sacrificed to the code, which must even from time to time subvert it’ (2007: 743). But the ‘our’ of ‘our spiritual lives’ depends also upon the encounter with unfitted fleshiness. The Samaritan has access to human connection because he is a being ‘drowned in carnality’ (Illich 2005: 207), and can respond on that basis. However, in such cases, the ‘he’ who responds will not necessarily correspond to the ‘he’ that becomes defined by unfitted fleshiness. Such is the radical contingency of meaningfulness. For Illich, it is not that we should ‘find the centre of our spiritual lives beyond the code’, or beyond the rules of ethics; rather, ethics itself depends upon causal connections made possible by fleshiness because the meaningfulness of its components so depends. Christian enfleshment, as expressed in early texts, ‘deeply threatens the traditional basis for ethics, which was always an ethnos, an historically given “we” which precedes any pronunciation of the word “I”’ (Illich 2005: 47). Yet enfleshment does not threaten ethics by replacing one ethnos by another, differently defined. There is no threat to ethics by grounding ethics in some other ethnos, also defining barbaroi. Rather, the threat to ethics has to do with how ethnos, adequately understood, is defined, which is only as a result of fleshiness. The threat to ethics consists in the fact that ethnos, or community, can only be known through relevant encounters with fleshiness, which themselves threaten the ‘we’ or ‘I’ that is the subject of ethics. The Samaritan story indicates that ‘it is open to anyone who walks down that road to move away from that road and establish a relationship, a fit, a tie, with the man who is beaten up. To do so corresponds to the nature of two human beings and permits its full flowering’ (Illich 2005: 206). That is, the relationship, in the flesh, permits, or causes, the flowering of human nature, of human capacities, of human flourishing, or fullness. It permits identification of that nature, or capacities, or flourishing, which suggests that such identification had not yet occurred. Probably, however, the one entering into such a relationship would think that it had already occurred. He or she would already have some identity. Illich does not say that it is open to the Samaritan to meet the needs of the Jew, as if some thing passes from the Samaritan to the Jew, or some (moral) aim is accomplished through the exercise of power or responsibility. Instead, the Samaritan’s opportunity is for self-creation by which Illich means that the Samaritan has an opportunity for individuation as a human self in a way that would be different from how he had previously identified himself as a human being.

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The question is not whether ethics is guided by rules or is responsive to human relationships. The deeper problem, Illich argues, has to do with the individuation of human beings, including oneself, upon which ethics depends. The suggestion is that such individuation, in the first instance, itself carries an ethical cost, or could. The Samaritan had to ‘move away from that road’ in order even to consider the Jew who can be ignored from the road, just as he had been by the two Jews who passed by before. In the community at the time, the Samaritan would have been expected to pass by the Jew. However, the ‘road’ is not just a world view determining right and wrong. The departure referred to in the parable is deeply personal. That the Samaritan ‘felt touched in his innards’ is, for Illich, probably ‘the most respectable way to say it in English’ (2005: 222). For, the Samaritan responded to an opportunity for self-constitution – of individuation – that would have been uncomfortable and disruptive, not just morally but personally. The Samaritan, a being ‘drowned in carnality’ (Illich 2005: 207), creates the ‘reason for his existence, as he becomes the reason for the other’s survival’ (Illich 2005: 207). Survival is not physical but a result of relating ‘in the flesh’ and thereby creating conditions for self-definition as a sort of being. In Chapter 1, it was noted that for Lenin it was key that ‘Every individual is connected by thousands of transitions with other kinds of individuals (things, phenomena, processes), etc’ (emphasis in the original) (Lenin 1930/61a: 361). He noted that every individual is in fact a universal. This matters because if we ignore universals we get confused. For, ‘the individual exists only in the connection that leads to the universal’ (Lenin 1930/61a: 361). The Samaritan creates conditions for the existence of the Jew and himself because by responding ‘in the flesh’ to the Jew, he creates conditions for a more adequate universal, ‘human’, according to which the Jew counts. The ‘I’ that results for the Samaritan is caused by a capacity to relate that is ‘entirely sensual, incarnate and this-worldly’. It cannot be of ‘the mind’. Now, some will respond that self-constitution is, on such a view, arbitrary, that relying upon connections ‘in the flesh’ means ‘anything goes’. Again, though, it is important to consider the bigger picture, metaphysically. On a naturalist view, according to which human beings are causally situated, whether or not a ‘fleshy’ relationship provides grounds for self-constitution depends upon whether one actually connects with another human being and her or his needs as a human being. That such connection is not predictable, or even properly identifiable at the time, does not mean that it cannot be real in the relevant sense.

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Considering individuation, Illich takes it to be misguided to make power, and responsibility for power, the centre of concern for global justice, as post-modernists have done (2005: 222–4). If one cares for global justice, one should, in the first place, cultivate sensitivity of the relevant sort so that one can discover and possess appropriate resources for self-creation, or individuation, as a result of which one can rely upon more adequate ‘species consciousness’. Only on such grounds can one pick out other human beings and be capable of even contemplating, let alone acting upon, relevant relationships.

Porous selves in modern times Not all philosophers take lived experience as buffered selves for granted. José Martí, typically for his time, was enamoured of science. Untypically, though, he did not subscribe to positivism (Vitier 1964/2011b: 153–78). In particular, Martí was not a dualist separating mind from body, as if body and mind are two sorts of substances. This was partly because Martí knew imperialism ‘creeps back in the night . . . on velvet paws’ through the very expectations people hold for themselves as a result of (imperialist) institutions (1891/2002e: 290). Thus, individual freedoms could only be pursued through ‘means and institutions’ and a ‘good governor’ must be, above all, a ‘creator’ – of meaning (Martí 1891/2002e: 290). For Martí, Latin America needed to be ‘revealed’ (Retamar 2006: 30) and had to ‘show herself as she is’ (Martí 1891/2002e: 294). She had to identify herself, which was political. Martí did not assume buffered selves as masters of their own destiny. Cuba in the nineteenth century, according to Armando Hart, was richly situated intellectually (Hart 2006: 59–75). Not only did early nineteenth-century philosophers, Félix Varela y Morales and José de la Luz y Caballero articulate Enlightenment philosophy, they did so without opposing Christianity. Both were Catholic priests and teachers committed to Christian ethics, which applied to believers and non-believers. From Christianity, Varela and Luz took the view that philosophy, to be meaningful, must be lived. So compatible was Christianity with both the Age of Reason and the pursuit of independence in Cuban intellectual traditions that Fidel Castro was later to say about the Cuban Revolution that anyone who betrays the poor betrays Jesus Christ (Castro cited in Hart 2006: 61). The influence of Enlightenment philosophy together with Christianity put Martí in a position to confront the separation of materialism and idealism,

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understanding culture, broadly understood, as necessary for an appropriate sort of theoretical vision. From the Enlightenment, Martí acquired admiration for science and from Christianity, commitment to a universal ethics of human solidarity, defined by lived experience. One of the central ideas of Luz, following Varela, was that the moral and the physical are not separable, meaning that knowledge of morality and knowledge of the physical world are interconnected.2 No individual, or entity, is properly understood in isolation from processes and context, and studying people, including morality, involves studying nature, physical and sociological (Hart 2006: 64–5). For Luz, subjective and objective investigations are not two sorts of endeavours (Hart 2006: 63). The ‘inside’, which is the ‘mind’, is caused by and situated within the ‘outside’, or the laws of nature, and cannot be properly understood or supported without serious investigation of that ‘outside’. So Martí was influenced by and built upon traditions denying the separation of mind and body prevalent in European philosophy. Partly as a result, his political programme for radical independence promoted porous selves. Martí did not believe in magic or demons. But precisely because he believed in science, although not in positivism, Martí never assumed the boundaries between personhood and external forces that today, according to Taylor, ‘seem to us essential’ (2007: 33). They would not have seemed essential to Martí, who knew imperialism. Indeed, for Martí, the person who looks to himself for selfknowledge ‘is like an oyster in its shell, seeing only the prison that traps him and believing in the darkness, that it is the world’ (Martí 1887/2002d: 187). Martí saw a predicament at the end of the nineteenth century: Latin Americans were free from European governments. With the exception of Cuba and Puerto Rico, the colonies were liberated. But they were not independent. In a sense, they were free but not free. Thus, Martí dared Latin Americans ‘to be free in a time of pretentious slaves’ when ‘so accustomed are men to servitude that they have ceased to be the slaves of kings [and] are beginning . . . to be the slaves of Liberty’ (Martí 1884/2002a: 50–1). Pedro Pablo Rodríguez argues that the central importance of Latin American identity in Martí is intimately connected with his understanding of the theoretical and political need for social and economic transformation of basic institutions (2010a: 3–48). Without institutional change, there could be no challenge to the diminished view of Latin Americans’ human status, held even by Latin Americans themselves. Fidel Castro, in an interview about religion with Brazilian priest Frei Betto, says that the revolutionaries who defeated the dictator, Fulgencio Batista, in Cuba in 1959, had faith in the same way that some religious martyrs have faith

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(Castro 1987: 147). By this he means that the sacrifices made by revolutionaries, including death, are not explained by meanings in the minds of those who carried out the acts. ‘No mere consideration of consequences’ (Castro 1953/97), he says elsewhere, can explain how young people undertake such actions, which not only fail to realize their specific dreams, desires and preferences, but have little likelihood of being successful at all. Of course, they might have been crazy but at least in some cases such a judgement is intuitively implausible, given other information. Castro, an atheist, responds to Betto that discrimination against religious believers would have been impossible in the revolutionary movement because the characteristics required for revolutionary struggle were the same as those possessed by people of faith (Castro 1987: 164). He has in mind a capacity to be motivated by forces not entirely understandable from a buffered mind, likely even to put at risk the understandings of the mind. Badiou argues that discovering truths always has such a character. When Paul had his revelation on the road to Damascus, he did not check it out with the authorities. Badiou argues that any truth, to the extent that it is new, will not be understandable in terms of resources available at the time. This is because for an as-yet-unrecognized truth, there will be no appropriate universals. Such a truth has to be proclaimed and acted upon in order for such universals to acquire adequate content resulting from engagement. This point has been made by philosophers of science. An unknown phenomenon, like a black hole, is not identifiable at the time it is discovered. ‘Black hole’ is a metaphor, identifying probable respects of similarity with something familiar but not identifying the thing itself. The thing itself becomes identifiable only as a result, over time, of ongoing research (Boyd 1979). It would have been a mistake for Paul to look for confirmation from the authorities in Jerusalem whose theoretical resources would be incapable of accommodating Paul’s discovery precisely because it was so far unknown. Paul had to be like Joan of Arc, a porous self, for whom what matters is ‘not the signs of power . . . nor exemplary lives but what a conviction is capable of, here, now, and forever’ (Badiou 2003: 30). Part of Badiou’s point is that agency, moral or non-moral, is contingent upon the coming about of more adequate unifying concepts. We might think this issue urgent. After all, as George Orwell wrote in the original preface to Animal Farm, the greatest threat to freedom of thought and expression is not authoritarian government but public opinion: ‘Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark’, not because of official bans but instead because of ‘an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all rightthinking people will accept without question’ (Orwell 1943). If one asks how it

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is possible to resist such orthodoxy, one answer is access to approximate truths about humanism. However, such truths may, like the discovery of ‘black holes’, have to be claimed and applied out of singular conviction, as in the case of Paul. Paul apprehended the meaningfulness of an event that was out of synch with the orthodoxy, including with how that orthodoxy informed his own buffered sense of self.

What mystics and anti-imperialists have in common Illich refers to modern-day emphases on connectivity as ‘chirpy’ because they fail to recognize that living from ‘the soil of the sensible and opened world’ is apocalyptic, that is, revelatory. Specifically, the revelatory dimension of enfleshed relations is incompatible with experiences of fullness explained by buffered selves. Embodiment as revelatory explains the epistemic significance of the Samaritan’s experience of being ‘touched in his innards’, an experience not of fullness but precisely of brokenness. It is hard for ‘chirpy discourses’ about connectivity to acknowledge brokenness as relevantly revelatory, as creating explanatory need for more adequate unifying concepts, necessary for real self-mastery. For, such need is disruptive, uncertain, unstable, and buffered selves are, well, buffered, protected from such apocalypses. Two groups of theorists acknowledging and dependent upon the apocalyptic dimension of fleshiness, in theory and often in practice, are anti-imperialists and mystics.

Anti-imperialism Figuring into the boundaries that, according to Taylor, ‘seem to us essential’ are national and global orders. We may not think so but Campbell’s arguments make the point. She argues, as already mentioned, that judgements about personhood are dependent upon collectives, and these include global structures. We take ourselves to respect everyone equally. However, ‘in practise we operate with diminished categories of personhood, a fact that the ideology of personhood obscures’ (Campbell 2003: 33). Campbell cites arguments by Charles Mills that a global white supremacy is maintained by a ‘set of informal and formal agreements’ among more powerful groups to categorize some people as subpersons, as having ‘a different and inferior moral status’ justified by supposed cognitive inferiority (Mills 1997: 11 cited in Campbell 2003: 34). Carole Pateman argues that an implicit ‘contract of indifference’ structures judgements about who matters, that

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is, about who constitutes the generalized ‘we’ in moral and political references to the human condition (Pateman 2007). This is not hard to see. As Minà notes, it is not surprising that the rich minority usually does not see the evils of a global system in which so many, as Betto remarks, ‘se nace para morir’ (are born to die). But it is surprising that the 20 per cent who control the wealth experience no shame. According to plausible definitions of human flourishing, it is not possible to live well with shame (Adam Smith cited in Sen 1999: 270–8). And yet the 20 per cent live well. We are ‘developed’. Minà asks what sort of ‘verdadera incomprehensión cultural’ (real cultural misunderstanding) (Minà 2001: 34) explains surprise that the other four-fifths of the world’s population, who have lost their resources to the richest fifth, are trying to enter our borders for some chance of survival. The explanation is an argument for Pateman’s ‘contract of indifference’. We see this contract in everyday speech. Canada’s national radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, reported throughout the entire day on 23 July 2013 that ‘the world waits’ to see the face of the newborn royal baby. Even within Canada, plenty of people have no such interest. Many are concerned with poverty, disease and unemployment. But why in the world would someone in Turkmenistan or Sierra Leone care about such an event? The suggestion is that ‘the world’ consists of a subset of the world’s people and that others are somehow in another category. Such language is not only used but it is used without embarrassment. This is what Pateman refers to as the ‘contract of indifference’. Martí for one knew that how the world is divided up matters to how people conceive of themselves, and indeed, to whether they conceive of themselves as persons. The division of the world into ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ is one aspect of the collective upon which individual self-conception depends. As mentioned in Chapter 2, even Simón Bolívar, a liberal committed to the Age of Reason, understood how imperialism shapes the structures and relations determining what can be known and imagined. For the former Spanish colonies, having suffered for three centuries under the triple yoke of ‘tyranny, ignorance and vice’, respect for liberal institutions and individual freedoms would not amount to independence (Bolívar 1819/2003a). Bolívar recognized a contradiction between proclaiming equal rights and freedoms and maintaining Empire (Lynch 2006: ch. 2) and argued for strong central government and regional unity for the sake of individual liberties (Bolívar 1826/2003b). Mexican intellectual, Pablo González Casanova, many times Nobel Peace Prize nominee, wrote the following in 2003 when Cuba was being condemned around the world for human rights violations:

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One feels that the world is in grave danger. When there’s a bloodbath in Iraq, with bombs and super-bombs falling at all hours, Cuba is condemned for human rights abuses. When the US makes war to take control of the country with the largest reserves of non-privatized oil, Cuba is condemned for human rights abuses. When the majority of the world’s populations suffer unemployment, hunger, lack of medical services and education, and Cubans have work, food, healthcare and schools, Cuba is condemned for human rights abuses. When the invasion of Iraq is followed by military threats against other countries, including Cuba, Cuba is condemned for human rights abuses. (Casanova 2003)

The ‘grave danger’ is not imperialism but rather the failure to see that imperialism matters to how objects, beings and events are interpreted. It matters to the content of the universals, like ‘human rights’, we rely upon. Norberto Bobbio suggests that definitions of human rights are pure tautology: ‘the rights of man are those that are due to a man inasmuch as he is a man’ (Bobbio 1990/95: 5 cited in Fischlin and Nandorfy 2002: 110) where the circularity just means that ‘human rights obviously become more of a matter of “who” has the power to interpret the emptiness of their definitions’ (Fischlin and Nandorfy 2002: 110). But the point is not that, as Martí warned, we go through life like ‘blinkered horses’ (1882/2002a: 49) because of such conditioning. Martí was not commenting on the inauthenticity of relying upon such conventions, as if by not relying upon conventions and instead relying upon myself, buffered from external forces, I can live authentically. Instead, Martí, like Mannheim decades later, saw in inevitable social conditioning a challenge to the nature of knowledge. According to Pedro Paulo Rodríguez, Martí’s leadership of the independence movement was at the same time a revolution in thinking motivated by the need for appropriate naming, particularly of ‘non-persons’ (2012). Knowing imperialism, Martí knew circumstances and conditions needed to be changed, not just for political but for epistemic reasons, and discovering and claiming Latin American identity was key. Avoiding ‘false erudition’ (1891/2002e: 290), or ignorance, is not a matter of possessing knowledge, as if for those ‘wield[ing] a quick pen or a vivid phrase, the world was made to be [their] pedestal’ (Martí 1891/2002e: 290–1). Rather, it is a matter of possessing an appropriate relationship to the world about which one pursues understanding. Thus, Martí wrote that ‘a tree knows more than a book, a star teaches more than a university, a farm is a gospel, and an unschooled farmer’s boy stands closer to universal truth than an antiquary; no candle can rival the stars, no altar the mountains, no preacher the deep throbbing night’ (Martí 1882/2002c: 121–2). Martí was not against books, universities and antiquaries. His point was that

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if someone wants to learn from books, universities and antiquaries, she or he should, most importantly, cultivate sensitivity, a capacity to respond. She or he has to be porous, able to be affected by meaningfulness from without, so that she or he can be better situated to unify knowledge, to judge its importance. Avoiding ‘false erudition’, made reasonable by imperialist institutions, requires the capacity to feel: ‘[W]hen the mind falls silent . . . intuition bursts forth like a caged bird . . . and makes its escape from the broken mind’ (Martí 1882/2002c: 127). The ‘broken mind’ is not mental illness. Elsewhere, Martí explains finding his own voice, his authenticity, in ‘difficult sonorities . . . fiery and devastating as a tongue of lava’ (1913/2002b: 57). Words that are his own, ‘borrowed . . . from no one’, did not emerge, he writes, ‘from my mind, warmed over, artful and beautified’ but instead ‘like tears springing from the eyes or blood spurting out from a wound’ (Martí 1913/2002b: 57). They were not written ‘in academic ink’ (Martí 1913/2002b: 57), dependent upon the traditions supporting meanings ‘in the mind’. Such traditions denied Latin Americans’ reason and humanity. Instead, it was clear to Martí that relevant truths must, at least occasionally, ‘burst forth like a caged bird’ because they depend for their plausibility on external sources. The mind is ‘broken’ in any case in which unfitted fleshiness is made meaningful, not by meanings ‘in the mind’, but by the causal mechanisms explaining the proper identification of relevant encounters with fleshiness. John Pilger, in his War on Democracy, suggests that significant historical facts about Latin America are ‘hidden’ from historical memory, not accessible to Americans (of North and South) because of the unifying perspective that is taken for granted when interpreting them (Pilger 2007). During Pilger’s lifetime, the following Latin American and Caribbean countries have been assaulted by the United States, directly or indirectly, and their governments replaced by dictators and other pro-Washington leaders: Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Surinam and Venezuela. Still, the United States is understood to respect democracy. Pilger interviews Sister Diana Ortiz, a US citizen who was raped and beaten by US servicemen protecting the dictatorship in El Salvador, who says ‘When I hear people express surprise about Abhu Graib, I ask myself: What planet are they living on? Don’t they know the history of our country?’. The problem is not that they do not know the history. Pilger calls these ‘hidden histories’ because within a particular way of unifying the world, they play no explanatory role. Characteristic of such a way of unifying the world, Pilger suggests, is the absence of the concept ‘empire’. Empires have to do with

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conquest and domination, and in the absence of such a concept a plethora of US invasions, undermining democracy, play no explanatory role. However, they are explanatory for Sister Ortiz, whose personal experience creates the explanatory need. Ortiz’s is an example of a ‘broken mind’, not because of pathology but because of an encounter with unfitted fleshiness, in this case US actions that do not fit the general concepts taken to describe the United States. Ortiz’s singular experience, the meaningfulness of which defies the Background she relies upon but which is meaningful nonetheless, creates demand for a more adequate conceptual framework, involving empire. In Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, Achebe tells the following anecdote: Once upon a time the leopard who had been trying for a long time to catch the tortoise happened upon him on a solitary road. AHA, he said; at long last, prepare to die. And the tortoise said: Can I ask one favour before you kill me? The leopard saw no harm in that and granted it. But instead of standing still as the leopard expected the tortoise went into strange action on the road, scratching with hands and feet and throwing sand furiously in all directions. Why are you doing that? asked the puzzled leopard. The tortoise replied Because even after I am dead I want anyone passing by this spot to say, yes, a fellow and his match struggled here. (Achebe 1998: 128)

Achebe tells the story to suggest that more important than politics is control of the story. He means by this that more important than controlling political events is defining the conceptual framework in terms of which events are interpreted and understood. According to Achebe, there are some who rush to battle and some who tell the story afterwards. Some think it is easy to control the story. But, he says, they are fools. The tortoise doesn’t fight for his existence. The tortoise doesn’t even fight for the story about his existence. He fights for the possibility of the ‘broken mind’ which would make such a story necessary. The tortoise is not, after all, a match for the leopard. But by creating a disturbance, the tortoise creates conditions that make an alternative explanation plausible because they are conditions that won’t fit the expectations of those who pass by. Martí famously wrote that ‘[t]renches of ideas are worth more than trenches of stone’ (1891/2002e: 288). This is because ‘[t]he tiger [of imperialism] . . . creeps back in the night to find his prey. . . . But now his step is inaudible for he comes on velvet paws’ (Martí 1891/2002e: 290). He was referring to the colonization of the mind as a result of the relentless ‘logic’ of imperialism (Rodríguez 2010: 12).

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This is a realm of meaningfulness that is not within the control of any one individual but which can be identified as such as a result of ongoing humanist engagement. In contrast to European philosophers’ affinity for buffered selves, protected by rights, Martí wrote that individual freedom involves a ‘Herculean struggle against . . . one’s own nature’ (1882/2002a: 49). Martí knew that ‘one’s own nature’ provides inadequate grounds for freedom because it disallows discovery of humanness, which is disallowed by imperialism, which defines who counts and who doesn’t. The tiger can ‘creep back in the night’ (Martí 1891/2002d: 290) without being noticed as long as one’s experience is buffered, like the oyster who sees the shell and mistakes it for the world (Martí 1887/2002c: 187).

Mysticism Merton points out that St Augustine was aware of the same danger, namely, unwitting control by the story, noted by Achebe (Merton 1953: 133–8). Augustine argues that Paul’s phrase, ‘the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life’ is intended to convey more than that some scriptures have a figurative sense going beyond the literal. The letter ‘killeth’, Augustine suggests, because it constitutes a conceptual framework on the basis of which alternative sorts of meaningfulness can be dismissed because they are implausible. According to Merton, Augustine’s point is that if we only have knowledge of morality, and do not experience its truth by living accordingly, we not only fail to understand morality; we miss out on understanding more broadly. Augustine’s battlefield imagery is reminiscent of Martí. The basic point is this: All understanding is dependent upon background beliefs, circumstances and conditions, including self-conception. Thus, what Eagleton refers to as ‘self-dispossession’, and Martí the ‘broken mind’, is an essential characteristic of the advance of understanding, at least as regards the human condition. It is disruptive, involving loss. This is because individuation of self is intimately connected with self-knowledge. Attachment to a certain conception of self, and the background that supports it, that is, the ‘letter’, undermines not only new insight but the questions that could motivate its pursuit. The point is recognized, in theory and practice, by Christian mystics. Mysticism involves mystery, deriving from the Greek word mystikos, having to do with entering into that which has been concealed. The ideas of mystics sat uncomfortably with those of the Christian Church because they undermined the authority of the Christian Church (MacCulloch 2010: 209–12). Not all mystics seek unity with God. Some pursued contemplation of objects, phenomena

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and beings other than God(s). The most famous female mystic of the twelfth century was Hildegaard of Bingen whose writings covered such fields as cosmology, medicine and musical composition, as well as theology (MacCulloch 2010: 420–2). Hildegaard and others of the time turned away from the idea that mystery is uncovered through positive knowledge of God and Christian teachings. Instead, they turned, as in Eastern traditions, to silence and mental quiet (MacCulloch 2010: 421). A characteristic feature of Christian mysticism, though, in both East and West, is movement forward (MacCulloch 2010: 438). Mystics may have seemed to others to be steeped in stillness and immobility, but the emphasis was on travelling onwards and directing one’s hard work towards a goal (MacCulloch 2010: 438–9). For Merton, the mystic traditions tell us something significant about selfknowledge. Philoxenos, a Syrian of the sixth century, argued that to be a contemplative is to be an outlaw (Merton 1967a: 14). Contemplation is often conceived of in opposition to active engagement. So, one might think that, for Philoxenos, to be a contemplative is to be set apart from others and to be an outlaw in this sense. However, if human beings are part of the natural world, existing within relations of cause and effect, contemplation is also, whatever else it is, the solitary experience of causal relations. For the mind’s thought is of the body, and can be experienced, and the reality of the body is after all causal. For Philoxenos, to be a contemplative is to be an outlaw because to the extent that one’s mind is really quiet, one is not set apart from other people at all. On the contrary, one is in communion with other people, just not on the terms prescribed by social convention but by fleshiness. Merton points out that one can experience oneself as an individual while being ‘willingly enclosed and limited by the laws and illusions of collective existence’ (1967a: 14). This was, in effect, Lenin’s point about universals and particulars, noted in Chapter 1. Ignoring the metaphysics, we think that an individual is just that: an individual. But as Lenin argues, an individual is never just an individual; he or she is always a sort of individual, depending upon the social, political, economic and cultural context. Shoemaker’s causal theory of properties makes this point in a different way: Every entity has infinitely many properties, when we consider relational ones, but which ones identify an entity as the entity it is depends upon what such properties explain, which depends upon context. Philoxenos’ point, then, is that solitary contemplation involves experiencing contingency, which is vulnerability to transformation and eventual death. In contemplation, one’s identity is not defined in relation to a specific ‘collective existence’ but instead to one’s contingent causally connected reality, common to all human beings.

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The ‘transcendent’ plays a definitional role here: As mentioned, Taylor gives the impression that the transcendent realm involves magic and demons. For mystics, though, it was to acknowledge meaningfulness displacing ‘laws and illusions of collective existence’ as grounds for freedom and identity. For existentialists also, the ‘laws and illusions of collective existence’ undermine access to human freedom, as we saw in Chapter 3. This is because when we identify ourselves in such terms, we are alienated from existence itself. The role of mystikos for mystics can be understood to answer a similar concern: We are humanly limited when we take for granted (often without recognizing) universals that acquire content from a particular Background. Sartre, for one, according to Mészáros, did not explain how more adequate universals are discovered (Mészáros 2012: 323–4). If a causal dialectic provides access to such universals, the process of discovery will to some degree at least involve entering into mystery. We can understand Russell’s ‘mystical’ experience in terms of the acquisition, through engagement, of more adequate universals, with implications for individuation. Nothing is mysterious about pain itself. The mystery for Russell is the suggestion that pain is a defining characteristic of the ‘human soul’, or humanness. Russell identifies a particular event – an individual’s experience of pain – as being a sort of event, namely, one that is shared by all humans. He might have experienced his friend’s pain as a particular feature of his friend’s existence. As noted in Chapter 3, we can experience something new in two ways: As Sartre indicates, Europeans can experience differences between, for instance, the Black poets and themselves, and understand the poetry as about those who are different. Or, they could understand the Black poets to be human beings like themselves, and take their poetry to say something different about human beings, that is, about the universal ‘human’. Sartre urges Europeans to take the second approach (Sartre 1948/64). Russell does so and becomes a ‘completely different person’. Described differently, his identifying properties are now relative to a view of humanness in regard to which their explanatory capacity is altered. His ‘calm and superficial’ life no longer explains humanness, whereas the pursuit of peace and love possesses such an explanatory role, or could. Intrinsic identifying characteristics become differently meaningful as the universal – humanness – is revised. Russell’s metaphorical comment that ‘the ground seemed to give way beneath me’ can be understood to refer to the relativity of identifying properties to the content of universals that are revisable as a result of causal engagement. Understood metaphysically, the point is that Russell’s experience of his

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relationship to his friend in pain – namely, that it is shared – is not properly understandable in terms of the universals – such as humanness – he has relied upon so far. Indeed, his experience of ‘unendurable pain’ as human experience contradicts a conceptual framework according to which a ‘calm and superficial’ marriage and ‘flippant cleverness’ are relevant identifying characteristics – for human identity. Russell might have understood his friend’s pain as specific to her. But if ‘unendurable pain’ defines human experience, essentially, it affects the kind of individual Russell now is, and hence what needs explaining by intrinsic properties that are identifying ones. Surprisingly, perhaps, mysticism expresses two insights that make sense on a cause and effect view of knowledge and individuation: First, mysticism has to do with entering into mystery. It might be a union with God or something else but what matters is the character of the union and its significance. It is not a union of one entity with another but rather the experience of a context that provides conditions for individuation. For Philoxenos, according to Merton, whatever unity is experienced explains identity; it does not constitute or result from identity. Second, mysticism has to do with forward movement (MacCulloch 2010: 438–9). The twelfth-century Byzantine abbot, John of the Ladder, named for his Ladder of Divine Ascent, embodied the metaphorical rungs of continual movement that characterized Christian mysticism. It is the forward movement – into mystikos – that makes identity an issue. (For Philoxenos, entering into mystikos was about being born, that is, about individuation as human.) Since identity becomes an issue relative to universals, it is not unity (of oneself or God) that explains the forward movement but rather the forward movement (or entering into mystery) that provides resources for defining unity. Such two features – the entering into a more adequate conceptual framework and the epistemic primacy of forward movement – also characterize the pursuit of knowledge within a causally connected universe: An established world view, supporting self-conception, has at least sometimes to be displaced and a new world view, including universals, has to be pursued, through action, with commitment in a specific, perhaps even narrow, direction. Of course, some see mysticism as a practice of self-absorption. Richard King suggests that ‘the privatisation of mysticism – that is, the increasing tendency to locate the mystical in the psychological realm of personal experiences – serves to exclude it from political issues as social justice. Mysticism thus becomes seen as a personal matter of cultivating inner states of tranquility and equanimity, which, rather than seeking to transform the world, serve to accommodate the individual to the status quo through the alleviation of

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anxiety and stress’ (King 2002: 21). But it is just this sort of phenomenon that Illich refers to as ‘chirpy’ discourses about connectivity in modern times, where meditation and ‘Buddhism’ are trendy but the implications of embodiment are overlooked. Popular references to connectivity are ‘chirpy’ because the self that is ‘willingly enclosed and limited by . . . collective existence’ cannot be a contemplative self in Philoxenos’ sense. As long as the protective barriers of the buffered self ‘seem to us essential’, the only result of contemplation is precisely, just as King suggests, to ‘accommodate the individual to the status quo’. But such a view fails to acknowledge or express the forward movement that was crucial to mystics. Moreover, mysticism was a threat to the institutionalized Church and would not have been so if it were not revelatory. The ‘awkward inwardness’ of Theresa of Avila would not have been a concern to anyone if Theresa had been merely ‘cultivating inner states of tranquility and equanimity’. For mystics it was not enough to ‘enter into’ mystery any more than for Sartre it would have been enough for Europeans to ‘enter into’ the poetry of Black poets, and stop there. If Russell had entered into the ‘unendurable pain’ of his friend and continued to rely upon a ‘calm and superficial’ marriage and ‘flippant cleverness’ for his life’s significance, he would not have told the story. As it turned out, Russell was one of a few pacifist resisters during the World War I and was dismissed from Trinity College and eventually jailed for his activism. Like Mab Segrest (Chapter 2), he moved forward over a lifetime, presumably building bit by bit the practical and conceptual resources in terms of which he later identifies the experience of his friend’s pain as one of possession. To put the issues here in terms of Chapter 1, anti-imperialists and mystics separate agency from subjectivity, as did Marx, Lenin, the Buddha, Merton and Badiou in particular. They denied that one’s capacity to be a self-determining agent, in control of one’s destiny, depends primarily upon one’s identity as a discrete individual. They deny that it depends upon buffered, protected selves. The idea is not to urge guidance from magic and demons. Rather, if we are not acted upon by unidentifiable forces, occasionally, we cannot know other human beings, at least not those excluded by the contract of indifference. To know human flourishing, as for knowledge generally, we need to observe and respond to relevant mechanisms of cause and effect, inside or outside the body, not most importantly to the ‘inner voice’. Merton wrote that ‘[t]he more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. . . .

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Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance’ (1938/74: 504–5). Another way to put this is that when we insist on understanding ourselves as buffered selves, analysing and interpreting experience from meanings ‘in the mind’, we both misunderstand our own reality and miss out on what is happening elsewhere. But ‘if we could just let go of our obsession with the meaning of it all’, we could be part of the ‘general dance’ (Merton 1938/74: 505), that is, of contingent reality, and we could know what cannot be known from the ‘awful solemnity’ of the self-importance of buffered selves.

Conclusion Taylor follows Illich in holding that one feature of ‘a secular age’ is distrust for embodiment. But Illich argues that embodiment in the Christian Gospels, although not in Christian institutions, is more radical than typically acknowledged by those pursuing connectivity in the modern age. Connectivity is popular. However, embodiment has to do, not primarily with relations and networks, but with individuation of certain sorts of relations, motivated by and involving individuation of self. The Samaritan’s knowledge of the Jew, for instance, is not explained by relations; instead, his experience of causal connection, which is tacit knowledge, explains the relevant relations, which would be meaningless otherwise. Understood as explaining individuation, embodiment makes ethics subsidiary to non-moral questions about knowledge of human existence, depending upon fleshiness. Mystics and anti-imperialists knew the primacy of the question of individuation for ethics; to ignore such a question, in a dehumanizing world, promotes rather than answers dehumanization.

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Secularism, Ethics, Philosophy: Against Philosophical Liberalism1

Secularism Secularism is often defined negatively as what is left when religion is removed (Calhoun et al. 2011; Taylor 2011). And although secularization often concerns the disappearance of religion, secular institutions are not just or even mostly anti-religious. Such institutions often promote humanitarianism, with Cecilia Lynch arguing that religious elements figure prominently in the humanitarian, that is, the secular work of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in her study (2011). Secularism is understood normatively. It informs discussions of global cosmopolitanism, expressing movement towards reason, maturity, universal rights and global connectedness. For Jawaharlal Nehru, it was one of the ‘pillars of modernity’ involving tolerance, just laws and an egalitarian political process. The word ‘secular’ derives from the Latin saeculum, a unit of time opposed not to religion but to eternity. Indeed, ‘secular’ was initially a distinction within religion, distinguishing members of the clergy attached to religious orders from those involved in worldly affairs. Still today, the term sometimes refers to religious institutions and projects of a more temporal, worldly sort (Calhoun et al. 2011: 1). According to David Nash, British secularists of the nineteenth century constituted a sort of back-to-the-land hippy movement (Nash 1992). They pursued humanism by building communities that were self-sufficient in food production, and in which there was an important role for arts and crafts. They took seriously Marx’s worry about alienation resulting from religion and aimed to pursue self-realization, through work and art. They emphasized a return to nature, to production and local food, with an emphasis on design and handicraft

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(Nash 1992: 168). They sought to free themselves from rampant consumerism, the drive to overproduction, the relentless striving for growth and the maldistribution of benefits that characterized their society. Such secularists pursued an ideal of self-sufficiency. Charles Taylor also describes secularism, both within and outside Christianity, as the pursuit of selfsufficiency (Taylor 2007: 15). Taylor identifies three sorts of secularity. The first is political, according to which religious belief plays no role in politics. The second is sociological, referring to the prevalence of religious belief among citizens. The third involves conditions of belief, with belief in God being one option among many and not, as before, the only route to human well-being. All North Atlantic societies are secular in the first sense. Western Europe but not the United States is secular in the second sense and all such societies, including the United States, are secular in the third sense. Taylor explicitly limits his analysis to the North Atlantic but Richard Madsen argues that Taylor’s third sense of secularity, according to which explanations for human flourishing are immanent, not transcendent, as we’ve discussed, explains a residual religiosity in, for example, China, Indonesia and Taiwan after the Cold War. Although ‘modernized’ in structure, such states mediate between citizens and cosmic forces transcending the visible world. The Chinese government, for example, claimed the right to determine the real reincarnation of the Panchen Lama and will likely do the same for the Dalai Lama (Madsen 2011: 250). Thus, Madsen argues that failed barriers between the self and outside forces, such as collective ritual and social identity, explain hidden strains of religiosity in such societies. For instance, the cult of Mao Zedong, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, was an example of state power overstepping the boundaries between the self and outside forces, with possible benevolent but also quite malevolent results. It is easy to understand secularism as the pursuit of self-sufficiency. Marx took religion to be the opiate of the people because religion, like capitalism, is alienating. In a capitalist system, the worker produces a product that is taken away to make money for others. But the worker, in creating that product, has put something of herself or himself into that work. When it is taken away, one loses part of oneself, becoming alienated from oneself, from others and even one’s own humanity, being unable to participate in the use and enjoyment of one’s product by others (Marx 1932/78: 71–81). Religion does the same, it would seem, because religion removes the control of meanings, even existence, or at least it did so before the ‘secular age’.

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I have been suggesting that arguments for naturalistic realism provide a broader philosophical picture than other approaches to embodiment, constituting a fuller articulation of the implications of embodiment as a metaphysical view opposing dualism. One aspect of the larger picture is the issue of kinds, that is, of the individuation of entities. Questions about knowledge are intimately connected to questions about individuation, as we saw in Chapter 4. To gain further insight into secularists’ goals for self-sufficiency, we turn directly now to kinds, or how an individual becomes identifiable as a sort of individual.

Kinds There’s a philosophical problem about kinds (e.g. Boyd 1999b; Hacking 1991, 1999; Wilson 1999b). It concerns how we interpret the world in terms of the kind of thing or person or experience encountered. When we encounter something, we encounter it as a sort. If I don’t know what sort something is, I don’t know what to do with it. No two objects or experiences are identical but they can nevertheless be judged the same sort of object. This is because they share some properties, like two books are a kind even though they may have different colours, shapes and sizes. How we judge things or experiences to be the same kind, or to constitute a unity, is an important problem in metaphysics and epistemology because such judgements determine what we understand and how we act in the world. Kinds are rarely within our understanding and control. And we depend upon them. In everyday experience, we see that this is true: Not knowing what sort of thing or experience we confront, we are confused and unable to act. Thomas Kuhn pointed out that we do not see something that is front of us when we do not know what kind of thing it is (Kuhn 1970, see also Putnam 1975b; Quine 1969). Kuhn cited a psychology experiment in which people were shown playing cards, some of which were anomalous (e.g. the black king of hearts). Not only did people not know what to do with the anomalous cards, some were upset and disoriented because they could not recognize the cards (Kuhn 1970: 66). Now, kinds apply to human beings. For instance, when I encounter someone as different from me – perhaps because of skin colour or religion – it is because I see myself as the same as others in certain respects. When something or someone is different, it is in respects relevant to what makes others the same. For instance, if something is considered different from a cup, it is because it doesn’t

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hold liquids. It may have the same colours, size and position but if it lacks the relevant respects of sameness (e.g. holding liquid) it is a different sort of thing. So if I consider someone a different sort of person because of skin colour, it is because I hold an implicit belief that skin colour makes me the same as other people in relevant respects. When we refer to ‘I’ or ‘we’, we judge what matters to being the sorts of people that we are. Mostly, such judgements are unselfconscious, based upon implicit beliefs about sameness, about how people are unified. Some people are different in respect to what makes us, as persons, the same, and we dismiss them, as people. Fanon described his experience of such judgements in Black Skin, White Masks: ‘I move slowly in the world. . . . I progress by crawling. And already I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed. . . . I am laid bare. I feel, I see in those white faces that it is not a new man who has come in but a new kind of man, a new genus. Why, it’s a Negro!’ (emphasis in the original) (Fanon 1967: 116). Kinds, applied to human beings, have further consequences. Craig Taylor argues that moralism, as a vice, consists in failing to respond to someone as a human being and instead reducing her or him to a single moral characteristic or act. He refers to Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorn’s A Scarlet Letter, punished for adultery by being forced to wear the letter ‘A’ and ostracized from the community: ‘Hester’s identity as a morally accountable being even capable of acknowledging guilt and expressing remorse does not figure in [the community’s] judgment of her. Hence Hester becomes “the fallen woman”, no more a real person than the rake in Hogarth’s series of paintings’ (Taylor 2013: 27). Taylor argues that ‘there is something deeply morally offensive in reducing other human beings to such caricatures’ (2013: 27). Activist against the death penalty, Sister Helen Prejean cites such categorical reduction as central to the death penalty’s dehumanizing character: ‘Everyone is worth more than the worst act of his or her life’ (Prejean 2013: ix). But how do we come to classify things, people and events? Searle argues that the content of kinds is explained by the ‘capacities, dispositions, know-how, etc.’ that make up the Background (1995: 130) and that give rise to expectations, roles, rights and responsibilities (Searle 1995: 127–48). Searle argues that there need be no correlation between expectations about kinds and the actual physicalchemical properties of the thing designated. Consider, for example, a decaying layer of stones or cement on the ground (Searle 1995: 71). What actually exists on the ground does not prevent anyone from crossing over but because this

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phenomenon is ‘a wall’, it gives rise to expectations of deterrence. Even if it is crossed over, it is so recognized. Participating in specific social relations, we unify the world according to expectations arising from such relations, and so we organize our lives and choose relations with others. This is true as regards natural objects like walls as well as for people and behaviour. The philosophical problem of kinds suggests that we may not escape from alienation, the condition in which we are cut off from ourselves and from others, through self-sufficiency. This is because instrumental reason involves kinds, which depend upon outside forces. Moreover, reason by itself cannot always answer the arbitrariness of kinds judgements in, for example, racist or moralist discourse. Taylor argues that ‘primitive responsiveness to other human beings’ (2013: 29), not reason, explains the pity and compassion often missing in moralism. Sister Prejean’s campaign against the death penalty gained most from an award-winning film (Robbins 1995) that drew audiences, emotionally, into the life of a death-row inmate. We return to this point below. Natural kinds, like ‘granite’, ‘beaver’ and ‘cedar tree’, are considered different from social or human kinds, like ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘racism’. When we sort human beings and behaviours, we are more heavily influenced by our own dispositions and values (e.g. Haslanger 2006; Mallon 2006). Judgements about human or social kinds are intrinsic to political and ethical theory, although how to explain such judgements is not a central question for ethicists or political theorists, as will become clearer below. The issue of essentialism, though, noted briefly in Chapter 1, arose as an issue for feminists in the 1980s and 1990s. Essentialism as a political issue responded to the dehumanization within feminist movements, that is, it responded to the arbitrariness of the kind ‘women’. Generalizations about women, based upon the experience of white, mostly middle-class women, excluded non-white and/or poor women (Spelman 1988). Essentialism, as a political problem, referred to the social/historical/ cultural bases for unifying judgements about women. However, most arguments saw essentialism itself as the problem, and not how essences are defined (Babbitt 1996: ch. 4).

Essentialism (again) Essentialism was held to justify arbitrary exclusion, until recently. Whether or not one holds that natural kinds ‘cut the world at its joints’ (e.g. Boyd 1988: 199),

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as realists argue, it was unlikely that human or social kinds do. At least, this was the case within feminism. But as was noted in Chapter 1, the target of antiessentialism debates was a conception of essences that is inadequate, even for physics. Considering more realistic accounts of species categories, it is unlikely that human and social kinds are fundamentally different from natural kinds. In current debates, the existence of real essences, even for social or human kinds, is defensible. Theodore Bach argues that his realist account of ‘women’ addresses problems in ‘a considerable amount of feminist scholarship’ attempting to establish the objectivity of social kinds (Bach 2012: 235). He answers two principal challenges (section II): The ‘representation’ problem involves identifying specific intrinsic properties, as if ‘gender’ possesses a biological essence. Although such an approach has often ‘been placed in the service of misogynist agenda’ (Bach 2012: 233), feminist movements require that ‘gender’ refers to more than what is believed to constitute gender, implying facts about who is and who is not a woman (Haslanger 2000; Stone 2004; Young 1994 cited in Bach 2012). The ‘commonality’ problem has to do with the fact that categories are not singular, intersecting with other categories, and that they involve no single set of properties Bach argues for a parallel between ‘women’ and biological species, which are identified by causal histories of embodiment (rather than some fixed set of properties). One of his targets is the homeostatic property cluster (HPC) theory of kinds which, according to him, ignores historical relations. The HPC view, mentioned in Chapter 1, argues that individuation results from historical processes according to which ‘certain changes over time (or in space) in the property cluster or in underlying homeostatic mechanisms preserve the identity of the defining cluster’ (Boyd 1988: 218). The key idea is that any act of individuation depends upon causal (explanatory) relations within a set of methodological and inferential practices specific to the investigation. Individuation results from the contribution made by the use of a defined term to the accommodation of such practices over time to the specific reality under study. Bach’s counter view, roughly, is that whether an individual is in fact (and not just as a matter of belief) a woman has to do with whether she is historically connected to other members of that kind. Bach maintains that the HPC view cannot account for the role of shared histories in determining, for example, whether one 1990 Nissan Sentra is of the same sort as another. This is despite the fact that according to the HPC view such groupings are ‘always historical kinds’ because the property clustering

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is sustained, in the case of a 1990 Nissan Sentra, by an historical process by which mechanisms are replicated and information (about 1990 Nissan Sentras) is transferred (Boyd 1999b: 68). It is true, as Bach argues, that on the HPC view, properties, not history, explain inductive success. This is because some phenomena, like meteoric storms, are not linked to each other by a history but are nonetheless the same sort of thing. However, the HPC account defines (species) kinds in terms of properties and historical relations; kinds are historical entities but it does not follow from their historical nature that essences are historically defined (Boyd 1999b: 80–2). This discussion is relevant to present purposes for two reasons. First, Bach wants to explain swamp woman: ‘If a lightning storm were to strike a swamp and create a being that perfectly exemplified the properties that define women’s historical gender role, swamp-woman would not be a member of the historical kind woman because swamp-woman does not have the correct history’ (2012: 261). However, on the HPC view whether swamp woman is really a woman depends upon whether the ‘causal structures that underwrite the inductive and explanatory practises of the relevant [research into swamp women]’ have the result that referring to swamp woman as a woman promotes relevant epistemic access (Boyd 1999b: 80–2). Individuation of swamp woman as a woman might depend on a specific history but it might not, depending upon the dialectical process according to which the use of the term ‘woman’ is reliably regulated by the reality to which it refers. In defining ‘woman’ in terms of historical processes, Bach’s view does not adequately acknowledge radical contingency, according to which no one factor accounts for justification or objective content, except, that is, causation. The second reason is more important: Bach’s account fails in an explanatory capacity as regards the motivation for the essentialism problem, which was dehumanization. As we saw in Chapter 1, the nature of systemic discrimination raises questions about humanist truths because systemic discrimination normalizes oppression. That is, it makes dehumanization acceptable. Lévi Strauss once wrote in an anthropological text, ‘The whole village left, leaving us alone with the women and children in the abandoned houses’ (cited in Noel 1994: 27). His statement illustrates the invisibility of women (and children) within what Nkiru Nzegwu calls ‘single-sex’ societies structured practically and conceptually on the primacy of men (Nzegwu 2009). The idea is that ‘patterns of cooperative agreement’ upon which, according to Searle, expectations (for kinds) depend can deny the humanity of women. When reasoning depends uncritically upon

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such background, we not only overlook some sorts of people, as people, in both theory and practice; we do not know that we do. On Bach’s view, the swamp woman is not a woman because she is not relevantly historically connected to other women. The swamp woman has a history. It is just not the right one so she is not a woman. However, this is also why the ‘natives’ were not human beings according to the colonialists. So important was the role of history in individuating ‘human’ that the retelling of histories has been a crucial political project in resisting colonialism (e.g. Galeano 1973). Fidel Castro points out, in conversation with Frei Betto, that it would be radical if liberation theologists could show that the Catholic Church has not respected the rights of aboriginal people (Castro 1985: 291–3). Religious authorities spent centuries arguing about whether black, brown and yellow people have souls. They finally decided that Indians have souls but they don’t recognize their bodies for if they have souls and bodies, they would have rights: ‘Rights to liberty, integrity and life . . . were recognized for white Europeans. History shows that rights have not been offered to the peoples of the Third world’ (my translation) (Castro 1985: 292). It would be radical, Castro suggests, if liberation theologists succeeded in telling this history. But it is not easy. Castro doesn’t say that it would be radical for the Church to respect aboriginals’ rights now; rather, it would be subversive to show that the Catholic Church has not yet respected such rights although it claims to have done so. It is easier to accept that the Church should recognize the rights of aboriginal peoples than to accept that the Church has not yet recognized their rights, contrary to its own expectations about itself. In the former case, the Church does not have to change; it just has to do something new. If I become convinced that I have not respected someone’s rights because I did not know of such rights, I must now begin to respect such rights. But if I become convinced that although I believed and claimed that I was respecting such rights, in fact I did not, then I have to think more deeply. I have to re-examine not just other beliefs but also the practices that justified or were presupposed by such beliefs. I may even have to admit that I do not know how to respect rights or the people who possess them. Kinds cannot be explained by historical processes because historical processes are also kinds. When Mab Segrest’s insight into racism meant that she had to re-examine ‘everything people had ever told me was “right”’ (Segrest 1985: 20), it included history. Toni Morrison wonders whether ‘the major and championed characteristics of [US] national literature . . . are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence’ (Morrison 1992: 5).

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In other words, she wonders about the racism of central themes, including morality in US national literature and identity, due to ‘what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination and behavior’ (Morrison 1992: 12) of those who are in charge, that is, who write the histories. The challenge for the writer (and critic) is that when the national history and literature are conditioned by racism and/ or sexism ‘there is no available language to clarify or even name the course of unbelievability’ (Morrison 1992: 23). She means that there are no adequate kinds. Some will deny the approximate truth of the judgement that the Catholic Church has been wrong about the history of Latin America or, as in Morrison’s case, that US history and identity are ultimately racist. They will say that whether one accepts one version of history or another is a matter of opinion, not of truths, even approximate ones. But for anyone who commits herself or himself to the pursuit of global justice, judgements about (approximate) truths are presumed, implicitly. This is because, at least occasionally, such a commitment involves judging liberation theologists in Latin America, say, or African American critics in the United States to be telling a better history, which presumes some objectivity (although not absolute truths). And if such objectivity is presupposed, we can ask how it is explained, including how more familiar histories are judged inadequate. Bach’s account of essences loses sight of the forest (of systemic discrimination) while addressing the trees (of the arguments about kinds by analytic philosophers). Essentialism arose in response to a problem of dehumanization, which has, as one of its features, the fact that, as Morrison notes, ‘there is no available language to clarify or even name the course of unbelievability’ (Morrison 1992: 23). As we noted in Chapter 2, philosophers familiar with the dehumanization of imperialism took naming to be a creative and political challenge for this same reason: It was necessary for the believability of the humanness of oppressed people. Essentialism as a feminist political problem had to do with the exclusion from feminist politics and theory of women whose ‘fleshiness’ did not fit expectations. They could not be adequately named. The resolution of this problem, as of the dehumanization of imperialism, points to fundamental questions about the nature of knowledge, particularly radical contingency, as philosophers of the South, unlike Sen, acknowledged. This makes the problem of essentialism in feminist politics, arising from the discounting of those falling outside the ‘ideology of personhood’ (Campbell 2003: 31), more interesting than is acknowledged by Bach’s argument, as will become clearer below.

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Self-sufficiency Self-sufficiency, and reliance upon reason, does not answer the problem of arbitrary interference by mysterious causal forces, including religious ones. This is because reason involves judgements about kinds that are explained by causal forces, only some of which are likely to be identifiable at any one time by any one individual, if at all. But the ideal of self-sufficiency is deep-seated, philosophically and culturally, in North Atlantic societies. One source is philosophical liberalism, a view that arose in the eighteenth century, associated with democracy and self-government. The twentieth century has given rise to neoliberalism and social liberalism, depending upon whether the state plays a lesser or greater role in the economy. In every case, liberal philosophical commitments involve a conception of individual interests as defined, ultimately, ‘from the inside’ (e.g. Kymlicka 1991: 12). For example, there is a popular liberal view of well-being according to which an individual’s best interests are defined, roughly, by deep-seated preferences and desires. John Rawls argues that if I have to act in someone’s interests (if e.g. that person is comatose or incompetent), I had better be able to argue that that person would have taken the action in question if she or he had been able and fully informed (Rawls 1971: 248f). Individual interests are defined by what someone would choose with full information and a capacity for instrument reasoning (with a vivid imagination of consequences). If I cannot argue that the person for whom I have acted would so act if able to do so, and adequately informed, my action on her or his behalf is paternalistic. Such a view of interests is appealing because no one likes to be told what to do or how to live, or to have beliefs or values imposed without one’s understanding or consent. However, it is not always better to live life ‘from the inside’ according to one’s own deep-seated desires, values and life plans, with true beliefs. For one thing, ‘one’s own’ beliefs and values are the result of parents, schools and other social, political, economic and cultural circumstances and conditions. Moreover, acquired beliefs and values may contradict fundamental interests in, for example, dignity. As Fanon said about racism, ‘The occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. . . . The real world challenged my claims. It did not impose itself on me; it is, rather, a definitive structuring of the self and the world’ (emphasis in the original) (Fanon 1967: 109).

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Circumstances and conditions can be systemically unjust, diminishing expectations about who we can be and what aspirations we hold, and even the capacity to form intentions, as Campbell shows. In such cases, living life ‘from the inside’ provides no guarantee of a good life, non-morally. Moreover, in practice, influencing someone’s well thought-out values does not always constitute arbitrary interference in that person’s autonomy and best interests. If a mentally competent person chooses extreme hedonistic values, and decides with full information to take a drug, resulting in temporary happiness but also in death, those who care about that person will intervene. They will stop her or him from living life on the basis of considered values (with true beliefs), and they will do so precisely because they care about that person’s best interests as a human being (Feinberg 1971). We like to think that as long as someone’s choices are informed and consistent with her or his own values, and she or he is well informed, intervention is disrespectful of autonomy. But in practice, occasionally, we are likely to intervene, if we care. Although living life ‘from the inside’ is popular in theory, it is often unacceptable in practice. Education involves moulding people into different beings, making them into better people, better citizens, with more adequate desires, values and preferences, although educators rarely admit this. As such, education is precisely a process of transformation of that ‘inside’ set of desires, values and life plans and anything less, arguably, would be considered training, not education. Another fundamental claim of philosophical liberalism, unsupported empirically, is that it is always better to choose than to be coerced. When J. S. Mill suggests that it is better for people to make their own choices even if they are the wrong ones, the idea is that choosing in itself has positive value (see also Appiah 2005: ch. 1). However, it is not true that it is always better to choose for oneself. Choice constitutes a relationship, involving identification, between chooser and event (Korsgaard 1996: 30–48). Sometimes, although one may cause an event, one is better off not having chosen it. Sophie’s Choice is the story of a woman in a Nazi death camp (Styron 1979). Sophie must decide which of her two children will die; otherwise, the commander will kill both. It is the fact that she chooses that eventually kills Sophie. If she had been coerced, even though the result would have been the same, she may have been better off. Some will say that it was not a real choice. But Claudia Mills argues that it is irrelevant whether a choice is real (Mills 1998). What matters is that it is ours. Mills holds that it is always better to choose than to be coerced because

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choosing provides a sense of authenticity, however minimal, and that sense of authenticity provides greater well-being. She argues that the value of choice consists in being the author of one’s life, and that this involves ‘giving a conscious moment of assent to the way the world is, which need not be the way we chose or would have chosen it to be’ (Mills 1998: 165). But in Sophie’s case, it is precisely that authenticity, or ‘moment of assent’, that eventually causes her to take her own life. Another relevant aspect of choice is the role of social practices in making or eliminating options: if an individual’s way of being and relationships are supported by social practices giving rise to expectations, etc., she or he does not have to choose that life, or set of relations. Some people, for instance, have always been regarded by others as worthy and as a result do not choose selfrespect (Dillon 1997). One has to choose self-respect if it is feasible that one does not possess it. If there is no question about one’s worth, one is, in a sense, compelled towards realizing it. According to Robin Dillon, questions about selfrespect arise more frequently for women than for men because men’s worth is recognized by society, and hence men do not have to raise questions about it (Dillon 1997: 247). Their good fortune is in not having a choice. The point is not that living ‘from the inside’, and having choices, are not important. It is that these are not always and fundamentally important. Certainly, it seems right to say that I am the one who best defines what is good for me, that it is better for me to make my own choices, even if they are the wrong ones, and so on. However, it is not true that it is never better for me to live my life according to values imposed from outside, even without endorsement. Indeed, it is sometimes better for people as individuals with idiosyncratic interests and desires that their situations change so that they in fact possess different interests and desires. This is the case in particular when, as a result of systemically unjust, discriminatory traditions, the ‘best interests’ of some individuals are already deformed by systemic injustice. But philosophical liberalism resists challenge, at least in analytic ethics and political philosophy. Charles Mills claims there are no alternatives to liberalism. He asks: ‘What’s the alternative? Besides, what’s wrong with moral equality, autonomy, self-realization, equality before the law, due process, freedom of expression, freedom of association, voting rights, and so forth?’ (Pateman and Mills 2007: 102). Mills dismissively suggests, within one paragraph, that Marxism is ‘presently moribund’, communitarianism is relativistic and feminists are turning towards liberal justice again after insisting on an ‘ethic of care’

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(2007: 102). Mills defends liberal contract theory on grounds that liberalism has been successful and there are no alternatives. There are alternatives. However, they are not always recognized as such. Nzegwu presents an alternative to philosophical liberalism drawing upon the experience and theories of Igbo women (2006). Nzegwu’s argument about her argument is that precisely because North American and European philosophers, including feminists, are attached to certain philosophical foundations, Igbo women are not philosophically interesting (see also Yancy 2010). It is useful here to refer back to a point made by Hilary Putnam in the 1970s (Putnam 1975a: 33–69): Putnam argues that empirical evidence alone could not disprove Newton’s laws before Einstein. This is because, given that Newton’s laws were well established, such evidence would be implausible. It could be explained away as, for example, experimental error. Only after Einstein’s reconceptualization of the physical universe was such evidence worth considering. Similarly, to the extent that liberalism is well established, no evidence regarding moral equality, autonomy and so on can disprove philosophical liberalism. It will just be assumed that such evidence is not about moral equality, autonomy and so on. Practical deliberation, whether moral or non-moral, scientific or everyday, involves kinds. Yet, such judgements can be arbitrary, depending upon social roles, such as family or ethnic affiliation, and national and global contexts, which give rise to expectations about kinds. Israeli writer and peace activist, Miko Peled, describes the debilitation that results (Peled 2012). Peled is the son of a decorated general of the Israeli Defence Force. Upon retirement, the general became a professor of Arab literature. He opposed Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza because he considered it bad for Israel, generating hatred. His son knew about Arab peoples, history, literature and culture and worked politically for peace and understanding between Arabs and Israelis, even after his niece was killed in a suicide bombing. Despite such knowledge, Peled is almost overcome by a ‘fear virus’: ‘[A]s soon as we entered the city of Nazareth, a sense of alienation descended upon me like a dark cloud. . . . I couldn’t put my finger on it, what it was exactly that I feared. Would they (they!) attack us? Was there a mob somewhere waiting to assault Jews? I realize now that, despite my politics, I was indeed afraid and that this fear existed deep in the recesses of my mind, where I can only guess it was nurtured for years’ (emphasis in the original) (Peled 2012: 235). Peled believed there were no mobs waiting to assault Jews just as there is in fact no ‘they’. He could not explain why he judged Palestinians a group relevantly

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distinct from himself in the first place. When Mills says, as noted above, ‘Besides, what’s wrong with moral equality, autonomy, self-realization, equality before the law, due process, freedom of expression, freedom of association, voting rights, and so forth?’ (Pateman and Mills 2007: 102), he takes it for granted that the meaning of these terms is well established. He has reason to do so because they are considered well established by ethicists and, as he says, successful. Peled could have taken his fear for granted because it is explained by a conceptual framework that is relatively well established. But Peled knows this. This is in a sense what happened to Einstein according to Putnam (1975a). Einstein provided an alternative conceptual framework, which made evidence plausible that was not plausible previously because of background beliefs that were well established. Einstein recognized such contingency, or so we suppose, because he knew that an alternative explanatory framework was worth pursuing. Peled’s identification of the ‘fear virus’ is more significant than the fear virus itself. Social norms and values, explained by history and politics, have the result that Peled on his way to Bil’in saw ‘none of [the] pastoral beauty [of winding hill roads]’ but instead could ‘only see Arabs lurking behind every curve . . . every rise in the land, waiting to harm [him]’. And rationalization fails to overcome Peled’s ‘fear virus’. Peled, however, is able to recognize the ‘fear virus’, just as Morrison was able to recognize that the Blacks were present, and yet invisible, within US national literature (Morrison 1992). Peled might have taken for granted meanings available to him from those deep ‘recesses of [his] mind’. He might have continued to ‘nourish’ such categories by applying them. He might well have acted upon his ‘fear virus’ and never identified it. After all, if one really believes Arabs are ‘lurking behind every curve’ of the road waiting to do harm, there is no ‘fear virus’; there is legitimate fear. The role of kinds in unifying observations and experience indicates an important question: How does empirical evidence count in cases in which one’s attachment to a way of unifying the world makes such evidence implausible, if it is even identified in the first place? Peled knows that Palestinians can be conceived differently than as ‘they’, even if in the recesses of his mind, he was not succeeding in doing so. Herein lies the individuation question that Illich takes from the Samaritan parable. Taylor understands Illich to be insisting upon the ethical significance of connectivity, upon the importance of ‘networks of living concern’ in explaining moral motivation. But networks of living concern must themselves be individuated. Peled’s ‘fear virus’ is explained by ‘networks of living concern’; it is explained by ‘networks of living concern’ in relation to which Palestinians are barbaroi, or alien. Peled’s recognition of the fear virus is also

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explained by ‘networks of living concern’, namely, those in which Palestinians are not barbaroi. The second sort of network is significant to Peled in somewhat the same way that the Jew’s ‘call’ was significant to the Samaritan. And precisely such significance motivates Peled’s memoire. There would not have been a story about the Samaritan if the Samaritan had walked past the Jew and yet that action also would have been motivated by ‘networks of living concern’. According to Illich, the audience hearing the parable would not only have been unsurprised if the Samaritan had bypassed the Jew: the act would have met with approval (2005: 51). So, both the fear virus and the identification of the fear virus are explained by ‘networks of living concern’. Illich’s point in emphasizing the parable is the embodied encounter by which the Samaritan becomes defined and as a result makes meaningful a ‘new sense of fittingness’. That particular instance of individuation, of himself in relation to the Jew, explains judgement that his accepted ethnos is a particular sort of ‘network of living concern’, one specifically to be disregarded. The self-sufficiency ideal is intended to resolve alienation resulting from religion, when the meaning of one’s existence is explained by mysterious forces, like gods and spirits. But kinds are also explained by mysterious forces, not easily identifiable, and beyond one’s control as an individual, as Peled expresses. Nonetheless, Peled’s example shows that the ‘dark cloud’ of alienation can be identified just as can the fear arising from the deep recesses of the mind. Peled’s fear virus is explained by social norms and values; his identification of the fear virus is also explained by norms and values. However, the causal origins of such norms and values differ. Self-sufficiency as an ideal does not help. That Peled is ‘touched in his innards’, as the Samaritan was in hearing the Jew’s ‘call’, is more significant than the arbitrary way that kinds can block understanding of empirical reality. Yet, whatever else is involved in identifying the fear virus causing, or constituting alienation, such individuation is uncomfortable, personally. For it consists fundamentally in understanding the self – especially its deep mental recesses – as unreliable.

The Samaritan and rhinoceritis (again) To pursue this point further, let us return to the Samaritan and Ionesco’s rhinoceroses. The Samaritan parable is well known, even referred to in modern jurisprudence. Dictionaries recognize the Good Samaritan as a friend in need.

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But Illich believes that familiarity ‘disguises the shocking character’ (2005: 50) of the story. Illich carried out a survey from the early third century into the nineteenth century of sermons about the Samaritan. He discovered that most took the story to exemplify ethical duty: One ought to help the injured or the destitute (Illich 2005: 50–3). However, the question the parable answers is not ‘what ought I to do?’ but rather ‘who is my neighbour?’. In other words, the question is about individuation: How do I understand, who do I identify as, my neighbour? The parable is about kinds. Its ‘shocking character’ is that it tells us that ‘[t]here is no way of categorizing who my neighbor ought to be’, that the relationship that is ‘most completely human’ is not one that is ‘expected, required, or owed’ (Illich 2005: 51). The Samaritan story is about the kind, ‘neighbour’. The Samaritan was not of the same sort as the Jew but he felt called by the Jew and responded. He does not act on expectations resulting from his membership in a society divided in a certain way. Instead, he answers a call, an intuitive, emotional call and in so doing brings forth a new sort of relationship and an ‘extraordinary kind of knowledge’ (Illich 2005: 48) based on enfleshment. As we saw in the last chapter, Taylor follows Illich this far. But Taylor misses the individuation issue. The Samaritan would have experienced the same sort of fear ‘deep in the recesses’ of his mind, probably ‘nurtured for years’, which Peled describes. And although we don’t know the Samaritan’s education level, it probably would not have mattered. Anthony Appiah distinguishes between those for whom racism is a matter of belief and those for whom it is due to ‘fellow feeling’. In the former case, racism can be easily corrected by information. But if someone feels a family-like identification with others of her or his kind, education is not necessarily an answer (Appiah 1992: 15). The Samaritan’s ‘gutgiven response’ matters, as Taylor notes, but it does not matter ethically, at least not initially. It matters as a response to unfitted fleshiness through which ‘something comes to me through the other, by the other, in his bodily presence’ (Illich 2005: 51). It matters as grounds for individuation. A remark about argumentative strategy: Self-sufficiency is supposedly linked to autonomy because it is an ideal that responds to alienation caused by reliance upon unidentifiable and unpredictable causal forces, like gods and demons, removing existence, and its meaning, from our control. If self-sufficiency is the goal, it makes sense to ask of Illich: what protects me when I engage with the injured man? A ‘gut-given response’, unjustifiable at the time, may lead to harm. However, if self-constitution does not depend upon meanings

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‘in the mind’, protection from outside forces is not well motivated as regards self-mastery. The Samaritan may be making a mistake but there is no risk of arbitrariness just because Illich offers no specific criteria, defensible a priori, according to which some relations and not others can be known to be selfconstituting. The point is that embodiment challenges a bigger picture of how human beings exist in the world and how we know the world. What questions it makes sense to ask about justification also depend upon such a picture. As was noted in Chapter 1, an argument for embodiment cannot proceed effectively in response to particular objections because it challenges presuppositions of such objections. Rather, it has to pursue a (alternative) larger picture. The nature of individuation, like the nature of justification, is part of such a picture. Illich, for one, knew this to be so. Considering again the rhinoceroses of Chapter 1, Ionesco said his play is about totalitarianism, not in politics, but of reason (Merton 1967a: 30). More specifically, it addresses the totalitarianism of reason when no questions are raised about how human beings (and monsters) are individuated, which is the dilemma with which the play ends. As the town’s inhabitants become rhinoceroses, being a rhino is seductive. Even the town’s logician must ‘move with the times’ (Ionesco 1959/2002: 102). In the end, Berenger is the only human being remaining but now Berenger is the monster. He has to remind himself that ‘[a] man’s not ugly to look at, not ugly at all!’ (Ionesco 1959/2000: 123) but a few sentences later he says ‘I should have gone with them while there was still time. . . . Now I am a monster, just a monster’ (Ionesco 1959/2000: 104). Berenger’s conviction about his humanity waivers and we wonder whether his self-understanding (that he is ‘not ugly at all’) will sustain his broader social understanding (that rhinoceritis is ‘disgusting’) (Ionesco 1959/2000: 123). He might, after all, go with the rhinos without regret, suggesting that rhinoceritis is not as serious a problem as identifying it as a problem, once everyone is a monster. Berenger says about Botard, ‘[g]ood men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately. It is because they are so good they get taken in’ (Ionesco 1959/2000: 104). There is no paradox. As Morrison argues above, even central normative concepts, in the United States, respond to ‘a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence’, namely, racism (Morrison 1992: 5). Berenger can see that human beings are ‘not ugly at all’ and that rhinoceritis is ‘disgusting’. But Berenger now knows he is a monster within the context, wondering whether he should after all have gone with the rhinos. Berenger knows rhinoceritis because he knows himself but he needs to claim this knowledge as knowledge and we don’t know

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whether he will. Moreover, because of rhinoceritis, knowing himself is now all he has to go on. Ionesco objected that in New York his play was produced as a farce. His intention, he wrote, was that spectators should ‘leave in a void [understanding that] . . . it is the business of a free man to pull himself out of this void by his own power and not by the power of other people’ (Ionesco cited in Merton 1967a: 21). He explained further that ‘modern man is the man in a rush (i.e. a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might perhaps be without usefulness . . . [and that] it is the useful that may be a useless and back breaking burden’ (emphasis in the original) (Ionesco cited in Merton 1967a: 21). Ionesco’s statement reminds us of Illich’s emphasis on the vernacular: if meaning is always measured relative to predetermined ends – that is, if it arises out of usefulness – there is no place for the discovery of a more adequate meaning arising, when it does, from activities performed for their own sake. The ‘useful’ is dependent for its meaning on the ends that it serves, defined perhaps by rhinoceritis. Even identifying rhinoceritis requires access to meanings explained, not by predetermined ends, but by fleshiness that, at least initially, will be ‘useless’. It is after all unfitted. The Samaritan’s response to the Jew, in the first instance, was useless. It served no purpose because there was no purpose to be served, the Jew being, at best, barbaroi, not figuring into the calculation of ethical ends. Merton writes, ‘The basic moral contradiction of our age is that though we talk and dream about freedom . . . our civilization is strictly servile. I do not use this term contemptuously but in its original sense of “pragmatic”, oriented exclusively to the useful, making use of means to material ends’ (emphasis in the original) (Merton 1966: 281–2). Like Illich, Merton understands the primacy of instrumental reason, overlooking fleshiness, as undermining humanism: ‘Our professed ideals may still pay lip service to the dignity of the person, but without a sense of being and a respect for being, there can be no real appreciation of the person’ (emphasis in the original) (Merton 1966: 281–2). He might have said: There can be no proper identification of the person, including ourselves. To explore further the values of uselessness, we turn again to pragmatic naturalism.

Pragmatic naturalism (again) According to Kitcher, ethical progress has nothing to do with truths. It has to do, instead, with resolving ‘failures of altruism’ through mutual engagement among

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equals drawing upon existing social values and relevant empirical information. As we’ve seen, Kitcher denies ‘the idea of a special moment (long ago on Mount Sinai, perhaps) when people received authoritative information about how they should live’ or ‘philosophical theories about external constraints discovered by special faculties’. Whether or not the existence of truths depends upon such ‘special moments’ or ‘special faculties’ (Fitzpatrick 2012), let us consider pragmatic naturalism as ‘an egalitarian conception of the good, focusing on equal opportunity for a worthwhile life, and a method for ethical discussion in terms of mutual engagement within a comprehensive population’ (Kitcher 2011: 409–10). Kitcher’s model is not intended to be conservative, addressing also periods of revolutionary change. In such cases, ‘reflective equilibrium’ provides a non-circular method for justification (Kitcher 2011: 330–49), applying to revolutionary change as it does to normal change. The method for resolving a problem is ‘assessed against the standard of replicating the course of an ideal deliberation in which all members of the human population participate’ (Kitcher 2011: 343). Recognizing, of course, that ideal conditions do not exist in practice and that all members of the human population could not actually participate, Kitcher argues that an ideal can nonetheless be applied in practice (2011: 349–60). It is not necessary here to go into detail. What is important for present purposes is consideration of the ‘mutual engagement’ between a person and a ‘non-person’, or ‘leftover’, considered as equals. At least in situations of revolutionary change, such situations would occur. In Chapter 2, I considered Sen’s argument that experiencing ‘shared humanity’ provides better grounds for defining ethical competence than adherence to established rules. This statement is true. But in practice, the experience of ‘shared humanity’ is often disruptive, personally. More significantly, such an experience, identified as such, is likely incompatible with previous understandings, not just of oneself but of one’s national or global situation. For instance, in the example of Even the Rain (Chapter 2), a film about the struggle of indigenous Bolivians against the privatization of water, including rainwater, the protagonist, not initially understanding the ‘Water Wars’, experiences ‘shared humanity’ and learns about ethical competence. But he has to give up his project, in which he has much invested, personally and financially. Of that only is he certain. Recognizing the indigenous Bolivian as an equal, in human terms, was (1) the end of a particular history between two people and (2) indicative of the need to further pursue some aspects of that history.

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What is at stake is not ethical or political. The Bolivian does not know what he will do next, now that the multinational corporation privatizing indigenous resources has been driven out of town: ‘What we do best, I guess, survive’. Does he mean survival in Illich’s sense, with his own identity as a person dependent upon the experience of relevant human connection? The film does not pursue such issues. It ends with the understanding between two people that results from a personal connection, one in which the European risks his life to save the Bolivian’s daughter and the Bolivian is grateful for his response. The European now understands that the Bolivians, fighting for water, are indeed fighting for life. He understands, as he did not before, that some things are more important than his film. But there is no understanding of what happens next, only of what cannot happen, and that is the completion of the film, which is not anti-imperialist, as he previously believed. However, he cannot just understand this anymore than the Catholic Church can just understand that it has not respected the rights of indigenous peoples, although it believes it has. If he accepts that his project was not anti-imperialist, as he expected, he must also ask why he thought as he did, which involves other beliefs including about himself. Badiou argues that universalism depends precisely upon such self-recreation, upon subjectivity. Although seemingly paradoxical, his view makes sense within North Atlantic analytic metaphysics, which ignores him. In epistemology and the philosophy of science, there is a question about how general terms refer to anomalous entities in the world, that is, about how general terms can be nonarbitrarily revised to refer to the world, not just to beliefs about the world. General terms possess content depending upon background theories and practices, and if such terms are not revisable in response to a mind-independent world, scientific objectivity is not possible. Yet, it is possible because the world (the actual world not just the conceived world) regulates the application of such terms. That is, entities in the world possess causal forces that act upon the theories and methods of researchers applying the general terms referring to such objects, beings and events, as we have seen. This includes ‘human’. Kitcher argues that pragmatic naturalism can explain the accumulation of ethical resources not from the discovery of facts but as resulting from the modifications of ethical practice in the search for reflective equilibrium: ‘given the normative judgments currently accepted, one looks for principles subsuming them and perhaps jettisons particular normative

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judgments that do not accord with candidate subsumptive principles’ (Rawls 1999 cited in Kitcher 2011: 255). Yet in Even the Rain, there is no possibility that the film crew can offer up ‘candidate subsumptive principles’ according to which some normative judgements can be jettisoned upon consideration of the counter view of the indigenous Bolivians. The well-intentioned film-makers do jettison some normative judgements in light of their actors’ political priorities, making some concessions to the protesters. But they do not, in doing so, recognize the actors as equals. When such recognition finally occurs, at least by the producer, the film is thrown out and the future is unclear. The relevant sort of equilibrium needs now to be defined and it won’t be primarily as a result of reflection but rather of politics. Majid Rahnema argues that sexist and racist structures subject the ‘participants [in discussions of equality] all over the world to often invisible and destructive processes of addictive manipulation’ (Rahnema 2010: 127). Such ‘invisible and destructive processes’ are among the determinants of kinds which are a constitutive element of any deliberation, scientific or ethical. If so, such structures sometimes need to be changed first before the relevant aspects of equality can be identified, as argued in Chapter 2. As Frei Betto suggests, ‘the mediation of philosophy doesn’t suffice for understanding the political and structural reason for the massive existence of the non-person’ (cited in Castro 1987: 61). For this reason, it was not hard for philosophers like Martí to see that a political programme for Latin American independence made urgent the question of selfcreation, of individuation. It could not be answered by reflective equilibrium because it was a question about adequately identifying the participants in any such process. Kitcher does not tell us how, in situations of revolutionary change, relevant people and evidence become relevant to deliberations about equality. He does not tell us how relevant individual people and events become meaningful as the sorts of individuals and events to which ethics applies. When he argues that ethics progresses pragmatically, without resort to truths, it is because the resources for resolving ‘failures of altruism’ exist within the social values and empirical information embedded in the society, even in revolutionary situations. Hence, no ‘special moments’ are required. Altruism, Kitcher explains, is about adjusting one’s desires, interests and emotions to align with those of the other (Kitcher 2011: 17f.). In reality, though, the other may be a ‘non-person’ in which case, altruism itself does not fail; rather, it does not apply.

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Non-persons Paul’s revelation on the road to Damascus indicated that there was ‘neither Jew nor Greek, . . . neither slave nor free, . . . neither male nor female’ (Badiou 2003: 9). Thus, it had to do with the general term ‘human’ and was, according to Badiou, a ‘genuinely stupefying statement’ within the world of his time. It would be so today. The issue of how to recognize ‘non-persons’ or ‘leftovers’, or even how ‘non-persons’ or ‘leftovers’ recognize themselves, has engaged feminists and anti-racists. But the resources for this question exist within analytic philosophy generally. Sue Campbell draws, for instance, upon Donald Davidson’s triangulation theory: What emotion I express depends not just upon how I understand myself but also upon how others understand me, and how I then understand myself as a result of the reaction (Davidson 1991 cited in Campbell 1997b: 113–23). Davidson, though, does not consider, as Campbell does, that for some people, given their own circumstances and those of their society, this makes adequate self-understanding, including the identification of one’s own feelings, impossible unless personal and social transformation, relevantly named, happen first. In such cases, equal opportunity does not just require social and political change; such change is required in order for ‘equal opportunity’ to apply equally to some people. That is, political change is required in order for ‘non-persons’ and ‘leftovers’ to be appropriately named and to matter within discussion of, say, ‘equal opportunity’. Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara made this point in 1961 at the Organization of American States (OAS) meeting at Punta del Este, Uruguay, at which the United States was presenting the recently proclaimed Alliance for Progress for official ratification (1961/97: 217–56). Guevara noted that it was as if the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean were being made fun of (1961/97: 233) – not Cuba because Cuba was not included but rather the very delegates to the OAS meeting. The Alliance for Progress, a programme for development, offered money for sewers, but not for industrialization: ‘Because it should be noted . . . that the topic of industrialization does not figure in the analysis of the distinguished experts. Planning for the gentlemen experts is the planning of latrines’, Guevara argued (1961/97: 233). One could easily get the ‘impression . . . that your leg is being pulled’, he added. He was not referring to mistaken beliefs about Latin Americans’ real needs. More crucial was the disregard for Latin Americans’ humanity. The report was not

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about Latin Americans’ human development; instead, what mattered was Latin Americans’ hygiene. For Guevara, the meeting, supposedly about economics, was primarily political. His reasons were (1) that all economic conferences are political when the destinies of entire regions are at stake; and (2) that the United States had defined the conference in opposition to Cuba, and its example (Guevara 1961/97: 219). He cited in particular President Kennedy’s claim that the conference would demonstrate the ‘capacity of free nations to meet the human and material needs of the modern world’ with ‘free nations’ referring to those with US-friendly interests. Kennedy identified ‘a new stage’ in relations between the peoples of the Americas but Guevara saw one too, beginning ‘under the star of Cuba, free territory of the Americas’ (1961/97: 220). To the extent that Cuba’s perspective was ruled out from the start by Kennedy’s naming, the conference was, for Guevara, essentially political. Guevara understood that development for Latin America and the Caribbean was not the main issue; rather it was expectations rooted in power, US power, giving rise to a way of unifying the world that included some and not others. According to Badiou, if an event that ‘indexes the real’ is not recognized as being of a certain sort and as contradicting established understanding of such sorts, it will be judged, referred to and analysed according to already existing general terms, undermining its significance. If Paul’s insight about ‘neither Jew nor Greek’ were not supported by ‘subjective recognition of its singularity’, it would be identified ‘within the communitarian space, blocking its universality’ (Badiou 2003: 22). Whatever the explanation of Paul’s ‘subjective upsurge’ (Badiou 2003: 28), it is clear that ‘nothing leads up to it’, that is, that it is unpredictable. For this reason, such an event by itself is not enough to explain insight, being anomalous; instead, such an experience of ‘the real’ must be supported by ‘an immediate subjective recognition of its singularity’ (Badiou 2003: 22). That is, Paul’s insight had to be recognized and claimed as an insight of a certain sort. It had to be recognized and claimed by him personally, not because of Paul himself but because his insight was egalitarian and the world in which he lived was not. Paul is revolutionary here not because of his actions or his lifestyle but because of ‘what a conviction is capable of, here, now and forever’ (Badiou 2003: 30). Thus, Paul did not return to the authorities in Jerusalem but instead set out with his little band. Badiou compares them to ‘the handful of French resistance fighters in the year 1940 or 1941’ (2003: 20). It would not have made sense for

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such fighters to seek confirmation for their insights from the relevant authorities because of the way the world was then divided up. Nonetheless, their insight had legitimacy. Few as they were, ‘it is to them and to them alone, that it is legitimate to address oneself if seeking to indicate a real proper to France’ (Badiou 2003: 20). That is, they were responsible for naming. They named France but they also named the occupiers. They could not do the first without the second for if they had not done the second, at least implicitly, they might have sought the confirmation that would have doomed their radical insight. Badiou’s point is now familiar. We see this ‘immediate subjective recognition of . . . singularity’ in other cases of ethical progress. Mab Segrest recognizes that the Black children are the same as she and at the same time knows ‘I am on my own’. Segrest’s experience of relevant sameness cannot make sense according to her current commitments, which she must now re-examine. She experiences sameness, not because she expects it, but because she is the same in relevant respects, that is, in terms of humanness, as the Black children. Relevant kinds can be introduced but not, in periods of revolutionary change, without challenging the community. And this is a political issue, which is often, initially, a personal one. It is not ethical yet. Campbell, drawing upon the work of Audre Lorde, points out that Black women criticizing racism were considered bitter, not angry. It was not accidental that Lorde wrote that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ (Lorde 1979/84: 110f.). Among the tools are kinds, resulting from poetry, art and politics, that is, from practices, from the vernacular. Such tools – for naming – necessarily challenged the community according to which reference to racism by Black women expressed personal bitterness, not a failure of ethics (Lorde 1981/84b). Pragmatic naturalism is not alone in failing to answer, or even raise, the question of individuation. When Merton says ‘without respect for being there can be no appreciation of the person’, we can understand him as referring to the thoroughgoing dependence of general terms, like ‘person’, upon contingent circumstances and conditions. These include personal circumstances and conditions which, at least occasionally, as for Paul, access ‘the real’. If, as Merton suggests, ‘we are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being’ (emphasis in the original) (1966: 281–2), we may still access ‘the real’ but we may not recognize its importance, ethically or otherwise. In cases of revolutionary change, a ‘subjective recognition of . . . singularity’ is incompatible with the ‘communitarian space’ explanatorily presupposed in pragmatic naturalism.

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Non-religious analytic ethics I have argued elsewhere that when we consider the nature of reason, in particular as it involves the body, non-religious analytic ethics is not a proper resource for secularists pursuing freedom of enquiry and genuine human community (Babbitt 2011). There were three reasons: One is that analytic ethics within the Anglo/American tradition insists on clarity, which is always conservative. When we consider the dialectical nature of knowledge, vagueness and imprecision of kinds are predictable, especially in cases of discovery. New kinds cannot be made completely clear because they are new. Conceptual resources need to be developed, over time. I often encounter students – usually philosophy majors or graduate students – who are incapable of reading Audre Lorde, a poet, philosophically. They say they cannot find the argument. They cannot read José Martí, Latin America’s greatest philosopher, because he wrote poetically. Both Lorde and Martí express valuable insight into the human condition and their vision resists expression in numbered premises precisely because of its depth, at least arguably, for now. Younger undergraduates are often more open, not yet conditioned. The second reason is the philosophical significance of arrogance. The Samaritan could not have judged the ‘call’ from the ditch to be significant if he had been stuck on himself. This is because identifying the Jew as a neighbour contradicted expectations upon which his identity, his sense of self-importance, was based. Humility is required for wisdom, not just or even primarily for morality – epistemic humility. Arrogance is not conducive to the pursuit of wisdom for reasons having to do with the nature of understanding, particularly with the nature of individuation. Yet analytic non-religious ethics has not taken issue with the epistemic impediment of arrogance. If it did, it would give up on liberalism, the view that we live best if we live ‘from the inside’ (with true beliefs). But there is no evidence that liberalism, within analytic ethics, is losing its hold. This brings us to the third reason: North Atlantic academic philosophy is mostly committed to what Merton calls ‘the elephantiasis of self-will’ (Merton 1968: 31), by which he means the idea that I live best when I live ‘from the inside’, pursuing and realizing my own deep-seated dreams, desires and interests as long as I do so with true beliefs and without interfering with others’ rights. Although feminists and anti-racists have argued against the foundations of philosophical liberalism for decades, it is still possible for some political philosophers to assume without argument that there are no alternatives to

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liberalism, that without liberalism we give up on moral equality, autonomy, self-realization, equality and so forth, as if these values are owned by liberals. They are not. But there is a more important reason to be sceptical of non-religious analytic ethics as a resource for secularists: It does not recognize the question of individuation that has to do with identifying persons, as we’ve discussed. It also has to do with self-knowledge, which is intimately connected to questions about knowing others. The point is not that ethics should be about self-knowledge, which it is, but rather that doing ethics should involve self-knowledge, a point suggested at the end of Chapter 2. However, the bigger picture (of cause and effect) needs to be kept in mind. Otherwise, self-knowledge is a ‘thingish’ (Merton 1968: 109) preoccupation. The Buddha, thoroughly acknowledging cause and effect, insisted on anatta, or ‘no self ’. He did not deny that ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’ are terms that refer but he insisted that the referent is not fixable, that it is contingent, radically so. We deliberate more responsively when we recognize anatta because we do not attach ourselves to an arbitrary self-image that not only blocks understanding but constitutes alienation, separating us from (the causal effects of) existence itself. Knowing oneself includes knowing what sort of thing a self is or, better, is not. And for one thing, the self is not buffered, even if we experience it that way. Marxists like Lenin, Gramsci and Guevara have known this to be so. Religious thinkers of both East and West have made this point. Indeed, it is central to both Buddhism and Christianity, according to Merton. For all their differences, they argue against a ‘thingish’ self (Merton 1968: 109) using similar language: ‘It is now “emptiness”, now “dark night,” now “perfect freedom,” now “no mind,” now “poverty” in the sense used by Eckhart’ (Merton 1968: 8). The ‘thingish’ self is a mainstay in analytic ethics for the same reasons that make philosophical liberalism unassailable. As Merton indicates, ‘It matters very much what you are thinking, saying, doing, deciding, here and now. It matters very much what your current commitments are, whom you are with, whom you are against, where you claim to be going, what button you wear, whom you vote for – all this is important. This is obviously important to men of action who feel that there are old structures to be torn down and new ones to be built’ (1968: 29). The buffered self is how we experience ourselves, as Taylor argues, and it would be hard for analytic philosophy to argue against how we experience ourselves which is a matter, after all, of how lives are lived.

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Modern ethics finds it hard to say that the sort of person I see myself as is not the sort of person I ought to see myself as. Such a claim suggests not only that I can be wrong about who I am but that someone else, or some other perspective, perhaps arising from fleshiness, might be more right. Yet if we consider the metaphysical challenges of genuinely mutual engagement, as human beings, such a proposition is at least occasionally required, in order for some people and some issues to matter at all, both humanly and ethically.

Embodied reason To the extent that secularism is a normative concept, promoting rationality, secularists should target philosophical liberalism, not religion. Taylor writes that ‘[o]urs is a civilization concerned to relieve suffering and enhance human well-being, on a universal scale unprecedented in history, and which at the same time threatens to imprison us in forms that can turn alienating and imprisoning’ (2005: xiii). But if we follow Illich, embodiment means recognizing the challenge of self-creation, not as a project of self-realization in the existentialist sense, but of one about how the world divides up, a project of naming, for which the only appropriate resource is fleshiness itself. To the extent that such a view opposes the ideal of self-sufficiency, it may be because ‘ours is a civilization concerned to relieve suffering and enhance human well-being’ that we are imprisoned in ‘forms that can turn alienating and imprisoning’. This would be so if the ‘human well-being’ supposedly enhanced precludes discovery, not only of others but of humanism, disallowing even the identification of those ‘forms that can turn alienating and imprisoning’. Instead, secularists might turn to religion, or at least to important religious philosophers. There are four reasons for thinking religious philosophers provide resources for advancing freedom of enquiry based in reason. First, religious philosophers are much better, in theory at least, at recognizing human reality for what it is, namely, insecure. On all understandings of secularism, religious or not, it is inadvisable to rely upon superstition, arbitrary prejudice and extremism. For Buddhist philosophers, in particular, it makes more sense, in terms of individual empowerment, to recognize that one’s existence or non-existence is, for the most part, beyond our control. Death is part of our reality, at every moment. This does not mean one thinks about death at every moment but rather that one can be aware of the nature of one’s reality, which is contingent, and learn to live with it,

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fully. There is no turning of bad things into good things, as so many seem to try to do with disease and death. Instead, one looks at things the way they are, which is the way of the entire universe, constantly changing. With such awareness, which must be experiential, it makes no sense to subscribe to either desperate hope or desperate fear, both ultimately debilitating in different ways. Einstein knew this to be so, probably because of his own personal experience with the constantly moving particles of physical reality, the same particles making up the human body, including the mind. Einstein said that we fear death because we cling to an idea of ourselves as discrete individuals – that is, buffered selves – and if we could understand ourselves as part of the unfolding of the universe, which is beautiful in its mystery and complexity, we would not be so fearful (Einstein cited in Chodron 2001: ch. 2). This is because we would not be clinging to scientifically impossible illusions, such as that decay, depravity and loss are injustices, essentially opposed to human well-being. Experiential awareness tells us, or could, that it is unreasonable to spend so much energy either trying not to think or talk about death or, alternatively, doing nothing but to think and talk about it (e.g. Doughty 2013). Merton writes that to think that death ‘spring[s] upon life as upon its prey’ is to give death ‘a kind of power over life, at least in our minds’. We end up ‘living mouse lives always waiting for the cat, death’ as a result of which our ‘life is divided against itself. It becomes a tug of war between the love and the fear of itself ’ (Merton 1979: 98). But it is hard to benefit from the experience of the constantly changing nature of the universe, as Einstein suggests, if one is attached to the ideal of selfsufficiency, protected from unidentifiable external forces. Eagleton notes that Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, uses a sanatorium in the Alps – a place devoted to sickness – to illustrate, metaphorically, post-World War I illusions about disembodied reason (Eagleton 2009: 165). Settembrini, the liberal humanist, sees ‘the tie that binds the mind to the physical body, to nature, as a debasement and a curse’ (Mann 1924/95: 246). He upholds the ‘mind’s enmity toward nature’ which should be despised as ‘the principle of gravity and inertia opposing the flow toward the light, insofar as it represents the principle of disease and death’ (Mann 1924/95: 245). Settembrini’s opponent, Naptha, on the other hand, maintains that illness is ‘supremely human’ because ‘man was ill by nature’ and ‘the genius of illness was more human than that of health’ (Mann 1924/95: 456). The young protagonist, Hans Castorp, discovers that ‘[c]onfusion reigned’ when either of such supposedly opposing views was pursued (Mann 1924/95: 457). Instead, he discovers that disease and depravity are constitutive

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of human life not deviations (esp. Mann 1924/95: 478–89). Settembrini, more ill than most at the sanatorium, celebrates mind over nature. However, he ends up pursuing a fabrication of reality incapable of grounding real humanism (Eagleton 2009: 165f.). Yet, Settembrini’s view is still commonplace. Canadian author, literary critic and scholar, David Gilmour, defends assisted suicide by comparing the end of life to a party that has passed its peak (Gilmour 2013): One looks around the party and realizes the best has happened and that only inertia explains sticking around. ‘The party’ has peaked because desires have been fulfilled and aversions so far avoided. All that is likely to remain is unpleasant, involving suffering. His view is not unlike Settembrini’s, namely, that the true humanists, living their human potential, are descendants of ‘those ancient Gauls who shot their arrows against Heaven’, having no truck with nature’s ‘evil, irrational power’ (Mann 1924/95: 247). In Mann’s novel, Hans Castorp is rebuked by Settembrini when he admires his cousin’s quiet dignity in the days before his death (Mann 1924/95: 526). However, it is precisely as immersed in nature’s ‘irrational power’, lost in a dark snowstorm, that Hans Castorp identifies the ultimate irrationality of Settembrini’s refusal to engage, or even acknowledge, life’s contradictions. The life-as-a-party view of meaningfulness seems to do the same. Religious thinkers do better with reality, which is contradictory, involving life and death, because they are not uncomfortable, theoretically at least, with porous selves, ‘vulnerable’ to unpredictable forces. Understanding one’s life as a party gives no place to the process of discovery, within which it matters who one can be and become. Haitian-US writer, Edwidge Danticat, finds it surprising that Haitians live well with much less protection than US citizens from the reality of death (Danticat 2013). Yet, Danticat might have benefited from the aspects of Haitian life she explores in her novels to counter the dogmatic aversion to reality expressed by Settembrini, and characteristic of modern life. Merton, in contrast, suggests that the ‘mature man realizes that his life affirms itself most, not in acquiring things for himself, but . . . [within] a different kind of dialectic of life and death’ (Merton 1979: 102). It is a sensible view. We understand by relying upon universals, and universals gain more adequate content as a result of dialectical engagement with the very contradictions that Settembrini denies. Reliably regulated by cause and effect, more adequate – more real – unifying categories become possible. Thus, Merton writes that ‘[t]hose who love true life . . . frequently think about their death . . . strong thoughts that overcome the fear of misfortune’ (1979: 461). Danticat need not have found the Haitians’

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well-being surprising. She need not, especially given her background and literary insight, have promoted Settembrini-type illusions, long ago exposed in Mann’s brilliant novel. Recognizing death is simply to recognize that one’s reality is, day by day, about loss, disruption and change. When we insist on seeing the world as ‘good’,2 without evil, we have no resources to interpret the events that will, inevitably, contradict that view. Thich Nhat Hanh, using the metaphor of a wave that depends for its identity upon the sea, suggests that ignorance explains aversion to disease and death: ‘A wave in her ignorance is subject to the fear of birth, death . . . and the jealousy of others. But if a wave is able to touch her true nature, the nature of water, and know that she is water, then all her fear and jealousy will vanish’ (Nhat Hanh 2002: 33). The ‘true nature’ is characterized by cause and effect, by contradictions: ‘A wave has the right to live her life as a wave, but she must also learn to live her life as water because she is not only a wave, she is also water. . . . And water lives without the fear carried by the wave’ (Nhat Hanh 2002: 136). What Illich described as the ‘art of suffering and death’, undermined by the ‘total milieu’ (Illich 1976: 40) embracing disembodied reason, is nothing more than the capacity to live well with reality, without illusions, including about illness and death. Second, religious thinkers are often more comfortable with self-dispossession as an inevitable feature of humanist knowledge than non-religious analytic thinkers. Merton wrote, ‘Once you allow yourself to be “leveled” in Kierkegaard’s sense, you become a little tsar in a mass of tsars. . . . In this all our social systems are alike, whether communist or capitalist’ (Merton 1967b: 3). He might have included secularist. The problem is easy enough to understand. As Merton writes: ‘I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honour, knowledge, and . . . I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world’ (Merton 1961/72: 34–5). It is a common enough issue, recognized in modern times by those who pursue ‘mindfulness’ and ‘chirpy discourses’ about connectivity. But the solution is hard, at least for buffered selves. For Philoxenos, the mystic, such a person has ‘life but no identity’. To have real identity rather than defining oneself within the ‘the enclosing womb of myth and prejudice’ (Merton 1967b: 15), we must self-create, as does the Samaritan, who is alienated from the Jew, and himself, because of ethnos. For Philoxenos, ‘[t]o have an identity, [a person] has to be awake and aware. But to be awake, he has to accept vulnerability and death’ (cited in Merton 1967b: 15),

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that is, his ‘true nature’ as part of a changing, often unpredictable, cause and effect reality. Guevara was not religious but he noted the same feature of individuation, arguing that one’s identity as a human being, that is, as an individual sort of (human) being, is always incomplete. What Philoxenos referred to as a ‘womb of myth and prejudice’, Guevara described as an ‘invisible cage’. For the oppressed, the cage is dehumanizing but it is equally so for the non-oppressed because it precludes discovery. This is so simply because our reality is causal, and when we identify ourselves in relation to the ‘cage’ or the ‘womb’, we miss out on reality, our relationship to which is necessarily dialectic. Individuality is incomplete, for Guevara, not for reasons having to do with capitalism or communism or imperialism but with the scientific nature of the universe and what that implies for how to know humanness, even our own. Third, religious thinkers, more than academic philosophers, emphasize silence and solitude. The central insights of Eastern philosophy, particularly Buddhism, are famously difficult to explain within the framework of European philosophy. However, one way to capture the epistemic significance of stillness and quiet, which Westerners consider puzzling, is that ‘as long as you are given to distinguishing, judging, categorizing and classifying – or even contemplating – you are superimposing something else’ onto your own being instead of actually experiencing that being (Merton 1968: 7). Hence, alienation is caused, not by reliance upon religion or ideology, but by uncritical reliance upon meanings ‘in the mind’. For this reason, Merton takes Buddhism to provide a more radical explanation of alienation than either Marxism or existentialism (Merton 1967c). Of course, distinguishing, judging and classifying are required for understanding and action, and the Buddha knew this. The point is that to act effectively in the world we need to revise such distinctions, judgements and classifications and we are better able to do so reliably if, at least occasionally, we experience without distinguishing, judging and classifying in a particular way but instead by responding to cause and effect. This is not to withdraw from the world but precisely to engage, causally. Silence and solitude can be misunderstood. What such emphases do not mean is that ‘the way to sanctity is to lock yourself up with your prayers and your books and the meditations that please and interest your mind, to protect yourself with many walls, against people you consider stupid’ (Merton 1962: 191–2). Such a pursuit would be no protection from the ‘meanings in the mind’ that cause alienation from existence and would provide no answer to the

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problem of individuation. The subversive mystics did not understand solitude as a means of removing oneself from the world but rather as a means of knowing the world better as a result of entering into mystery and acquiring more adequate universals. Solitude is, as Merton suggests, a means of communion with other human beings since it is that which, ultimately, all human beings experience in common (e.g. Merton 1967a). Ionesco commented that rhinoceritis is the sickness that lies in wait ‘for those who have lost the sense and taste for solitude’ (Ionesco cited in Merton 1967a: 21). His remark can be understood to refer to the nature of knowledge: If we are to discover the world, the categories according to which we sort observation and experience must be properly revisable. Some such categories have to do with humanness, which can be accessed causally, sometimes most effectively in silence and solitude. Secularists, to the extent that secularism requires an advance of understanding, would do well to consider religious thinkers for whom, unlike non-religious analytic philosophers, silence and solitude can be epistemically constitutive. That is, silence and solitude, as an experience of human reality, constitute, or can, resources for more adequate deliberation about humanness, which otherwise is uncritically presupposed. The ethical primacy of ‘men of action’, if such action is not defined in terms of, or is even able to tolerate, occasional silence and solitude, religious or not, may be, as Merton warns, ‘simply a new, more fluid, less doctrinal form of conformism’ (Merton 1968: 29). A fourth reason to look to religious philosophers for help with embodied reason is the idea of transcendence. Religions typically involve something like what Albert Einstein calls ‘cosmic religious feeling’ (1954: 38) and Karen Armstrong describes as akin to the Greeks’ idea of ekstasis or standing outside oneself (2009: 319). According to Armstrong’s research on world religions, every religion possesses an idea of transcendence (2009: 319). When we consider how proper individuation occurs, we see that a particular conception of oneself and one’s importance can block access to knowledge of the world. This is because knowledge is radically contingent upon circumstances and conditions, including personal ones. Like any other concept, self-concepts are revisable and are reliably so in relation, not to beliefs (about oneself, for instance) but to reality. But one cannot lessen one’s attachment to a conception of oneself by aiming primarily to do so because any such attempt presupposes the same conception, which is part of one’s ‘Background’. One can, however, engage with cause and effect, a reality beyond oneself. Contrary to Taylor, it is only in regard to transcendence, that is, a causal order beyond what is plausible from the perspective of my self, that real human flourishing becomes discoverable at all.

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Religious philosophers and Marxists provide resources for a more sensible route to secularism if secularism is understood normatively as promoting rationality. Of course, Buddhism like Christianity, has been transformed by institutionalization so that, as Thich Nhat Hanh, writes, ‘half ossified traditionalism identifies “Buddhism” with a decaying social structure’ (Nhat Hanh 1965 cited in Merton 1967b: 287). As Illich writes about Christianity, Buddhism can be understood to have corrupted its most precious insight when considered from the perspective of embodied reason. Like Christianity, Buddhism emphasizes rites and rituals at the expense of experiential awareness of cause and effect, which results in self-dispossession, which is uncomfortable. Twentieth-century Marxists, according to Armando Hart, never bothered with cause and effect, because they never bothered with dialectical materialism (Hart 2006). In the modern North Atlantic world at least, institutionalized Marxism, like institutionalized Buddhism and Christianity, is of little help. But the philosophical resources are there in such traditions, even if ignored. Nhat Hanh writes that the only hope for humanism lies in a ‘radical renewal of the Buddhist experiential grasp of reality within the framework and context of a bitter, agonizing social struggle, and in terms that are comprehensible to those who are most deeply involved in that struggle’ (Nhat Hanh 1965 cited in Merton 1967b: 287). Another way to put this is that the only hope for humanism lies in a thoroughgoing appreciation of the radical contingency of judgements about kinds upon mechanisms of cause and effect that sometimes need to be appropriately claimed and theorized by individuals within an ongoing theoretical and practical movement towards a more genuinely humane world. Put simply, it lies in appropriately reconceiving knowledge and human flourishing, recognizing cause and effect. J. M. Coetzee, in Disgrace, refers to a male dog who was beaten when, on sensing a bitch, he would become excited and unmanageable (Coetzee 1999: 89– 90). With ‘Pavlovian regularity, the owners would beat it’. The result was that the ‘poor dog didn’t know what to do. At the smell of a bitch it would chase around the garden with its ears flat and its tail between its legs, whining, trying to hide’. Coetzee’s protagonist comments that the dog would be better off dead because it had come to hate its own nature. A dog can be punished for wrongdoing, for chewing a shoe, but not for going against its nature. The result is despair and confusion, a dog that punishes itself. Coetzee’s character is controversial. But the suggestion is relevant: Going against one’s nature invites confusion. It undermines knowledge. Marx did not say, as some accuse him of saying, that in a socialist society human beings would

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not be selfish and greedy, prone to aggression, etc. He said that in a society organized to better respond to human nature, aiming to promote essentially human capacities, people would be better able to behave cooperatively, not that everyone would do so (Wood 1981/2004: xxxii). The further point, though, is that if society were organized to better reflect human nature, human beings would be better able to know human nature, better able to know themselves and hence better able to know others. One particularly sad aspect of the living-lifefrom-the-inside view of human flourishing is that, like the dog in the example, we end up hating our own nature, which is vulnerable and impermanent, and punishing ourselves by trying to both deny and escape it, in theory and practice, with unhappy results.

Conclusion Secularists usually value humanism. Often humanism is vague. But in a dehumanizing world, humanism is about individuation, both of other people and ourselves, which must be at least somewhat vague because the categories employed are revisable. Their reliable formulation depends upon fleshinesss, often unfitted. To know humanism, responsiveness to such conditions is more important than possession of truths, which must also be properly classified. However, such responsiveness, fully acknowledging cause and effect, is incompatible with the ideal of self-sufficiency, of living-life-fromthe-inside. Indeed, humanism as the discovery of humanness is incompatible with the security of self and self-knowledge. Importantly, significant religious philosophers and some Marxists have noted, wisely, that insecurity provides a kind of security, or can. This would be so if we conceived of ourselves, not as discrete individuals defined by an ‘inner logic’ but in relation to a causally connected universe. Considering the practical and philosophical implications of such reconception, the Buddha, certain Christian philosophers and Marxist humanists offer a more scientific direction for secularists whose aim is genuine human community and freedom of enquiry.

Notes

Introduction 1 www.cswip.ca/images/uploads/CSWIP2012programFinal.pdf 2 Allen Wood has said this about Marxism (Wood 1981/2004: xiii). 3 Terry Eagleton (2009: 168) argues that the Left should look towards religion, but he does not make this claim in terms of the nature of knowledge and rationality. 4 For example, in a recent much-discussed book about time, Claudia Hammond (2012) argues that mental quiet is not worthy of pursuit. To ‘slow down time’, one should engage in ‘total activity’.

Chapter 1 1 A shorter and earlier version of this paper was published in Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 28(4): 733–48. I am grateful to Wiley-Blackwell Author Services for permission to reuse those arguments here. 2 I am grateful to Richard Boyd for arguments about projectibility, essences, realism and related ideas as referenced below. See Boyd (1979, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1988, 1990, 1999a, 1999b, 2010). 3 Presentation to the philosophy department at Queen’s University in 1991. 4 Although the Buddha also advocated intellectual analysis. See, for example, Boddhi (2005: 79–104). 5 For example, Frederick Engels (1940: 24–5) writes that ‘But however often, and however relentlessly, this cycle is completed in time and space, however millions of suns and earths shall arise and pass away, however long it may last until the conditions for organic life develop, however innumerable the organic beings that have to arise and pass away . . . and therefore also that with the same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest creation, the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time again produce it’. 6 I am grateful to Charlie Popovic for this point.

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7 The encounter, of course, also has a causal explanation but it is not explanatory. Not all causal accounts are explanatory in the relevant sense, as is argued by, for example, Kitcher (1984) and Boyd (1985). 8 Frances Healey (2013) argues that Foucault also does so. 9 I first discussed this example in Babbitt (1996: 118–20). 10 In a paper presented to the philosophy department at the University of Toronto in 1992, unpublished.

Chapter 2 1 For a critique of this direction in Latin America after 1990, see, for example, Robinson (2008: 152–3) and Leiva (2008). 2 Economists who worked on the HDI included Amartya Sen, Gustav Ranis, Francis Stewart, Keith Griffin, Megnad Desai, Azis Khan, Paul Streeten and Mahesh Patel (Veltmeyer and Rushton 2013: 5). 3 Although he defends the idea of moral progress (Sen 1999: 249–81), he does not defend the idea of objectivity or human essence. 4 Of course, some resist. Rosa Parks, however, did not act spontaneously, as is sometimes portrayed. She had a history of involvement in protest during which and as a result of which her understanding grew. See, for example, Theoharis (2013). 5 I discussed this example in Babbitt (2001: 135–42). I am grateful to Rowman & Littlefield for permission to use it again here.

Chapter 3 1 In Pali: Sabbakãyapatisamvedi assasissãmi ti sikkhati; sabbakãyapatisamvedi passasisami ti sikkhati (Goenka 1998: 29). 2 In Pali: Iti rupam, iti rupassa samudayo, iti rupassa atthamgano (Goenka 1998: 66).

Chapter 4 1 Speaking to my classes on various occasions. 2 The fact-value distinction emerged in European Enlightenment philosophy, originating, arguably, from Hume (1711–76) who argued that normative

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arguments (about value) cannot be derived logically from arguments about what exists.

Chapter 5 1 I am grateful to Haideh Moghissi and Saeed Rahnema for the opportunity to engage this topic at the international conference: Retreat of the Secular? Challenges of Religious Fundamentalism’, York University, 1–3 May 2009, later published (Babbitt 2011). As always, I am indebted to Haideh and Saeed for their friendship, as well as for intellectual and moral inspiration. 2 Amanda Lindhout (2013) explained her motivation for humanitarian work, after being held hostage for 15 months in Somalia, as a need to believe the world is ‘good’.

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Index Abbey, Susan E. 75 accommodationism 20–1, 23, 81 Achebe, Chinua 129–30 Achinstein, Peter 113 agency 4, 24, 26, 36, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 68, 77, 82, 95, 110, 124, 134 Alcoff, Linda Martin 1 alienation 33, 72, 79, 89, 93, 101–2, 132, 137–8, 141, 149, 151–2, 162–3, 166–7 Allen, Amy 44 Alliance for Progress 158 analytic realism 15 anatta (no self) 162 Animal Farm (George Orwell) 124 Anthills of the Savannah (Chinua Achebe) 129 anti-imperialism 11, 59, 125–30, 134–5, 156 Antony, Louise 39 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 77, 152 Aquinas, Thomas 103 Armstrong, Karen 5, 168 arrogance 24, 95, 161 authentic humanism 48, 56–8, 64 authenticity 10, 45–6, 48, 56–8, 64, 75–9, 81, 84–6, 91–5, 99, 101, 104, 113, 118, 127–8, 148 Ayant, Gayle 108 Babbitt, Susan E. 74, 141, 161, 172nn. 5, 9, 173n. 1 Bach, Theodore 142–5 Background 30–1, 57, 91, 117, 129, 132, 140, 168 Badiou, Alain 14, 17, 32, 34, 36, 38, 124, 134, 156–7, 159–60 Barnet, Miguel 36 Bartky, Sandra Lee 1 Batista, Fulgencio 123 Becker, Ernest 46, 48

Being Brown (Rosemary Brown) 114 Bentham, Jeremy 48 Berlin, Isaiah 76–7, 79, 87, 89 Berry, Wendell 96 Betto, Frei 11, 47, 123, 144, 157 The Biography of a Runaway Slave (Miguel Barnet) 36 Black, Conrad 98 black hole metaphor 124 Black Skin, White Masks (Frantz Fanon) 140 Blumenberg, Hans 103 Boas, Franz 39 Bobbio, Norberto 127 Bobes, Marilyn 61 Boddhi, Bikkhu 32, 171n. 4 Bolívar, Simón 48–9, 126 Bollaín, Icíar 59 bottom-up approaches 45, 58–64, 68–70 Bourdieu, Pierre 30, 91 Boyd, Richard N. 4, 9, 15–21, 37, 39, 45, 49, 51, 54, 72, 74, 81, 83–4, 112–14, 124, 139, 141–3, 171n. 2, 172n. 7 The Boy in the Moon (Ian Brown) 71, 96 Brandt, Richard 77 Brecht, Bertoldt 21–2 Brison, Susan 82 brokenness 96, 101, 116–19, 125, 128–30 Brown, Ian 71, 73, 96–7, 100–2 Brown, Rosemary 114 The Buddha 3, 28–32, 94, 99, 117, 134, 162 Buddhism 1, 8–10, 35, 93–5, 97–9, 134, 162–3, 167, 169 buffered self 104–5, 109–10, 114–18, 122, 125, 130, 134–5, 162, 164 Butler, Judith 1 Calhoun, Craig 104, 137 Campbell, Richmond 39, 45–6, 50

190

Index

Campbell, Sue 15, 79–80, 89, 91, 118, 125, 145, 147, 158 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 126 capitalism 108, 110, 138, 166–7 Carson, Shelley H. 75 Carter, I. 76–8 Casanova, Pablo González 126–7 Casas, Bartholomé de las 59 Castro Ruz, Fidel 122–4, 144, 157 causality 2, 9–10, 16–18, 20–8, 30, 32, 34, 37, 48–9, 52, 54, 56, 66, 72, 74, 83–4, 87–8, 99, 101, 103–4, 110–11, 113–15, 118–21, 128, 131–3, 135, 142–3, 146, 151–2, 156, 162, 167–8, 170, 172n. 7 causation 16, 23, 52, 54–5, 72, 83, 143 cause and effect 2–3, 9–11, 17, 23, 25, 28–32, 40, 51–2, 54, 66–7, 74, 81, 84–5, 87, 93–5, 97, 99–101, 113–15, 118, 131, 133–4, 162, 165–70 cave art, significance of 5 Cayley, David 107, 110, 119 centaur metaphor 86 Changing Production Patterns with Social Equity (CEPAL) 44 Chodron, Pema 164 Christianity 1, 3–4, 8–10, 14, 29, 32–4, 92–3, 95–6, 99, 103, 105, 116–17, 120, 122–3, 130–1, 133, 135, 138, 162, 169–70 Christman, John 80 Chuang Tzu 28–9, 32 Coetzee, J. M. 83, 169 Cole, Ken 65 colonialism 3, 8, 14, 17–18, 38, 48, 58, 60, 144 Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL)) 44, 69 community types, according to existentialists 66 connectivity 6, 16, 20–1, 26–7, 48, 54, 56, 60–1, 68, 70, 73, 83, 87–8, 93, 99, 101, 113, 117, 119–23, 125, 130–1, 133–5, 137, 139, 142, 144, 150, 156, 162, 166, 170

contemplation 29, 110, 122, 130–1, 134, 167 contingency 9, 16–17, 21, 23, 33, 67, 72–4, 76, 79, 81–5, 88, 93, 97, 99, 102–9, 111, 113, 115, 117–18, 120, 124, 131, 135, 143, 145, 150, 160, 162–3, 168–9 contract of indifference 126 craziness 18, 53, 55, 67–8, 70, 124 Crowell, Steven 75–6, 78 cultural survival 6 Dag Hammarskjold Foundation 8 Danticat, Edwidge 165 Davidson, Donald 158 Davis, Wade 4–7 De Beauvoir, Simone 78 De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés 23–4 De la Luz y Caballero, José 122–3 DeFilippis, James 45 dehumanization 2–3, 8, 10, 13–15, 18, 21, 33, 38, 41, 48, 50, 59, 67, 69, 118, 135, 140–1, 143, 145, 167, 170 The Denial of Death (Ernest Becker) 46 Desai, Megnad 172n. 2 Descartes, R. 13–14, 24, 72–3 Deutscher, Isaac 72 Development as Freedom (Amartya Sen) 46 development, meaning of 7–8, 10, 63, 65 Dewey, John 23 dialectical materialism 25, 85, 95, 97, 169 see also Gramsci, Antonio; Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’; historical materialism Dillon, Robin 52, 148 Disgrace (J. M. Coetzee) 83, 169 Doughty, Caitlyn 164 dualism 1, 2–4, 14, 24–5, 73–4, 84–5, 100, 104, 139 Dunayevskaya, Raya 28 Eagleton, Terry 34, 87, 117, 130, 164–5, 171n. 3 Eastern philosophy 28–32 Eckermann, Liz (n.d.) 1 Eckhart, Meister 104 Einstein, Albert 38, 40, 149–50, 164 embodied reason 163–70 empathy 37, 53, 56

Index empires 128 empowerment 8, 35–6, 43–4, 87, 100, 163 enfleshment 33, 65, 67, 93, 105–6, 120, 125, 152 Engels, Frederick 98, 171n. 5 Enlightenment philosophy 122–3, 172n. 2 epistemic access 17–18, 143 Ereshefsky, Marc 15 essence 6, 15–18, 24, 26, 29, 46, 72, 141–3, 145, 171n. 2, 172n. 3 essentialism 15–17, 25, 38, 85–6, 141–5 Esteva, Gustavo 7, 43 ethnos 91–3, 106–7, 120, 151, 166 European humanism 17–19 Even the Rain (film) 59–61, 64, 155 evolution and practical identity 50–6 existentialism 8, 10, 48, 58, 65–6, 72, 75–6, 78, 84, 89–91, 99–100, 132, 163 Fanon, Frantz 14, 17–19, 38, 48–9, 58, 60, 140, 146 Feinberg, Joel 147 Fischlin, Daniel 127 Fitzpatrick, William 51, 155 Foucault, Michelle 1, 172n. 8 foundationalism 2, 4, 13, 16, 54, 67, 73–4, 79, 83, 107–8, 113, 117–18 freedom 4, 10–11, 25–7, 31–2, 46, 48, 50, 68, 63, 76–81, 84–91, 95–102, 113, 116–17, 122, 124, 126, 130, 132, 154, 161–3, 170 Freire, Paulo 47–8, 58–9, 64, 67–9 Frye, Marilyn 89 fullness 24, 104, 111–18, 120, 125 Galeano, Eduardo 36, 144 García, Felix 38 Gender (Ivan Illich) 108 Gilmour, David 165 global development 43–4, 47, 68 global justice 3, 10, 122, 145 Glover, Jonathan 4 Goenka, S. N. 30, 94, 99, 172nn. 1–2 Goldman, Alvin 20, 37 Goodin, R. E. 77 Goodman, N. 19 Gotama, Siddhartha see The Buddha

191

Gould, Steven Jay 38 Gramsci, Antonio 10, 40, 85–7, 91, 95, 100, 118, 162 Griffin, Keith 172n. 2 Gronemeyer, Marianne 43 Grosz, Elizabeth 1 Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’ 10, 47–9, 58, 68, 85, 87–91, 95, 101, 158–9, 162, 167 Hacking, I. 139 Hale, Ken 5 Hammond, Claudia 98, 171n. 4 Hanson, N. R. 2, 73 Hare, R. M. 77 Hart, Armando 2, 25, 85, 95, 97, 122–3, 169 Hart, William 30–1 Haslanger, Sally 141–2 Hawthorn, Nathaniel 140 Healey, Frances 172n. 8 Hegel, G. W. F. 25–7, 119 Hemingway, Ernest 57 Hendler, Sue 87 Hildegaard of Bingen 131 historical materialism 25–8, 31–2, 34, 88, 115 see also dialectical materialism; Gramsci, Antonio; Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’ Holden, Stephen 60 homeostatic property cluster (HPC) view, of kinds 142–3 humanitarianism 137, 173n. 2 Hume, D. 16, 54, 73, 172n. 2 Illich, Ivan 10, 33, 65, 67, 91–3, 103, 105–10, 115, 119–21, 125, 134–5, 150–4, 156, 163, 166, 169 immanence 103–4, 110, 112, 116, 138 imperialism 8, 18–19, 38, 48–9, 58–60, 63–4, 69–70, 110, 122–3, 126–30, 145, 167 implications, for humanism 21–5 imposter syndrome’ 52 individuation 4, 113, 117, 120–2, 130, 132–3, 135, 139, 142–4, 150–3, 157, 160–2, 167–8, 170 industrialization 158 Inessential Woman (Elizabeth Spelman) 15

192

Index

injustice 22, 36, 47, 50, 68–70, 148 intuitions 6, 16, 19–21, 37, 49, 55, 67, 74, 78, 108, 124, 128, 152 invisible cage 89, 167 Ionesco, Eugène 22, 153–4, 168 issues, of embodiment 35–40 Jackson, F. 77 Jaggar, A. M. 45 John of the Ladder

133

Kant, Immanuel 106 Kennedy, John F. 159 Khan, Azis 172n. 2 Kierkegaard, Soren 66, 75–6, 78–9, 86, 91, 100, 166 kinds 139–43, 150 King, Richard 133–4 Kitchel, Mark 91 Kitcher, Philip 9, 20, 23, 38, 50, 54–9, 68, 154–7, 172n. 7 Koggel, Christine M. 43–4, 80 Korsgaard, Christine 51–2, 54, 58, 68, 147 Kristeva, Julie 1 Kuhn, Thomas 74, 139 Kymlicka, Will 146 Ladder of Divine Ascent (John of the Ladder) 133 Langer Ellen J. 75 Larmore, Charles 77 Leiva, Fernando Ignacio 172n. 1 Lenin, V. I. 9, 26–8, 32, 88, 121, 131, 134, 162 Lewis, Tom 60 liberalism 11, 18, 25, 48, 53, 55, 76, 90, 93, 146–9, 161–3 Lih, Lars T. 26 Lincoln, Abraham 4 Lindhout, Amanda 173n. 2 Linnaeus 15 loneliness 66–7, 70, 116 Lopez de Sousa, Marcelo 44 Lorde, Audre 24, 35–6, 160–1 Lynch, Cecilia 137 Lynch, John 48, 126 MacCulloch, Diarmid 130–1, 133 MacIntyre, Alisdair 82

Madsen, Richard 138 The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann) 164 Mahã satipatthãna Sutta 30, 94 Mallon, Ron 141 Mann, Thomas 164–5 Mannheim, Karl 4, 16 Martí, José 3, 8, 47–50, 58, 68, 100–1, 122–3, 126–30, 157, 161 Marx, Karl 2, 14, 25–6, 28, 31, 46, 48, 68, 79, 85, 88, 97, 117–18, 134, 137–8, 169 Maté, Gabor 24, 73 Mayr, Ernest 15 meaningfulness 29, 41, 46, 65, 68, 75–6, 82, 104, 106, 108–11, 115, 118–20, 122, 125, 128–30, 132, 151, 157, 165 Medical Nemesis ( Ivan Illich) 119 Mendel, Gregor 49 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1, 119 Merton, Thomas 10, 29, 32–3, 40, 66, 90–3, 98, 118–19, 130–1, 133–5, 153–4, 160–2, 164–9 Mészáros, István 75–6, 78–9, 85, 115, 132 meta-ethical view, humanism as 14–19 meta-ethics 10, 13–19, 38, 41, 44, 47, 59 Meynell, Letitia 24, 73 Mill, John Stuart 77, 147 Miller, Richard W. 39, 54, 89 Mills, Charles 125, 148–50 Mills, Claudia 147–8 Minà, Gianni 47, 49, 126 mind/body dualism and contingency 73–4 mindfulness 10, 71–3, 75, 84–5, 94, 96, 99, 101, 119, 166 Moghissi, Haideh 173n. 1 Montesino, Antonio 59 moral agency 36, 52, 56 moral compulsion 52 moral judgements 51 moral motivation 53, 56, 61, 68, 105, 107, 150 moral progress 44–6, 50, 55, 172n. 3 moral realism 3–4, 51 moralism 51–5, 140–1 morality 4, 75–6, 83, 123, 130, 145, 161 Morrison, Toni 56–8, 144–5, 150, 153

Index mysticism 11, 25, 116, 125, 130–5, 166, 168 mystics see mysticism Nandorfy, Martha 127 Narayan, D. 43 Nash, David 137–8 naturalistic realism 4, 21, 66, 139 negative freedom 76–8, 81, 89–90, 97–100 Nehru, Jawaharlal 137 new man’ view 48, 88, 101 Nhat Hanh, Thich 40, 166, 169 Noel, Lise 143 non-persons 15, 59, 127, 155, 157–60 non-religious analytic ethics 161–3 normative ethics 47 normative judgments 156–7 Nussbaum, Martha C. 4, 6 Nzegwu, Nkiru 1, 40, 69, 93, 114, 143, 149 O’Connor, Flannery 78, 90–2 objectivity 3–4, 9–10, 13, 16–17, 20, 27–8, 38–9, 45–7, 49, 51, 68–9, 73, 76, 79, 81, 115, 118, 123, 142, 145, 156, 172n. 3 Ocampo, José Antonio 44 Olivera, Oscar 60 optimism 87, 100 organicism 25, 27, 85–6, 171n. 5 Organization of American States (OAS) 158 Ortiz, Diana 128–9 Orwell, George 124 Parks, Rosa 172n. 4 Parpart, Jane 45 Pasolini, Pier Paulo 34 Patel, Mahesh 172n. 2 Pateman, Carole 125–6, 148, 150 paternalism 76–7, 146 Pausch, Randy 81 Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Paulo Freire) 48 Peled, Miko 149–52 personhood ideology see non-persons Pettit, Philip 72, 76 philosophical liberalism 11, 146–9, 161–3

193

Pickett, Kate 102 Pilger, John 128 political activism 65 political freedom 88 Popovic, Charlie 171n. 6 porous self 104–6, 109–11, 118, 122–5, 165 positive freedom 76, 78, 87, 89–90 positivism 2, 14–17, 23, 54, 73, 79, 81, 84, 87, 107, 112–14, 122–3 Prado, C. G. 30, 72 pragmatic naturalism 50, 154–7, 160 Prakash, Madha Suri 44 Prejean, Sister Helen 140 privatization, of mysticism 133 projectibility 19–24, 30, 32, 35, 171n. 2 public reason 52, 54–6, 58–9, 62–3, 65 Putnam, Hilary 83, 139, 149–50 Quine, W. V. O.

37, 83, 139

racism, struggle against 53 radical contingency 88, 99, 102, 106–9, 111, 115, 118, 120, 143, 145, 169 Rahnema, Majid 8, 69–70, 157, 173n. 1 Railton, Peter 51, 73 Ranis, Gustav 172n. 2 rationality 2, 13, 15–17, 19, 22–3, 25–6, 31, 33, 59, 76, 79, 84, 105–7, 150, 163, 169 Rawls, John 77, 146, 157 real self 71, 78, 82, 89 realism 3–4, 10, 13, 15, 17, 21, 25, 38, 49, 51, 66, 68, 85–6, 98, 102, 113, 139, 142, 171n. 2 reflective equilibrium 155–7 Relational Remembering (Sue Campbell) 80 repression 76–9, 87, 89–90 republican view, of freedom 76–7 Restivo, Nestor 49 Retamar, Roberto Fernández 122 Rhinoceros (Eugène Ionesco) 22 Rich, Adrienne 1, 35 Robbins, Tim 141 Robinson, William I. 172n. 1 Rodríguez, Pedro Pablo 49–50, 58, 123, 127, 129 Rudd, Mark 91

194

Index

Rushton, Mark 44, 172n. 2 Russell, Bertrand 116, 132–4 Ryle, Gilbert 74 Sachs, Wolfgang 19 Samaritan, significance of 33–4, 65, 92, 106–7, 111, 115, 118–21, 125, 135, 150–4, 161, 166 Santucci, Antonio A. 86–7, 95 Saramago, José 22 Sartre, Jean-Paul 15, 18–19, 38–9, 60, 75–6, 78–9, 81, 85, 94, 101, 115, 132 A Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorn) 140 Schechtman, Marya 82 Schulkind, Jeanne 84 Searle, John R. 2, 30, 72, 91, 117, 140, 143 A Secular Age (Charles Taylor) 32 secularism 10–11, 92, 104, 137–9, 161–3, 166, 168–70 Segrest, Mab 36–8, 53–5, 58, 61, 67–8, 90, 134, 144, 160 self-absorption 32, 95, 133 self-awareness 32–3, 41, 72, 93 self-conception 37, 51–2, 60, 80, 84, 88, 92–3, 95, 97, 117, 126, 130, 133, 168 self-constitution 121, 152 self-creation 120, 122, 163, 166 self-determination 25–6, 36, 76, 134 self-dispossession 117, 130, 166, 169 self-image 28, 39, 92–3, 95, 99, 162 self-importance 9, 39, 97, 100–1, 117, 135, 161 self-knowledge 8–9, 70, 78, 91, 95, 97, 99, 101, 123, 130–1, 162, 170 self-making 10, 76, 81, 83, 90–1, 93, 95, 99 self-respect 148 self-sufficiency 137–9, 141, 146–52, 163–4, 170 self-understanding 27, 52, 86, 91, 97, 153, 158 Sen, Amartya 7, 10, 44–7, 49–50, 58–9, 63–5, 67–70, 126, 145, 155, 172nn. 2–3 shared humanity 7, 59, 61, 64–70, 155 Sherwin, Susan 80 Shoemaker, Sydney 54, 113, 131 Shotwell, Alexis 1, 24, 30, 74

Sidgwick, Henry 77 silence 66, 117, 128, 131, 167–8 singularity 34, 76, 86, 125, 129, 159–60 Smith, Adam 126 Sober, Elliott 50 socialism 44, 88, 169 solitude 116, 167–8 Sophie’s Choice (William Styron) 147 Specialty Committee in Psychiatry of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada 75 species consciousness 118–19 Spelman, Elizabeth 15, 141 Stewart, Francis 172n. 2 Stone, Allison 142 storytelling and agency 82–3 Strauss, Lévi 143 Streeten, Paul 172n. 2 Sturgeon, Nicholas 51 Styron, William 147 subjectivity 2, 20–1, 25, 33–4, 36–8, 72–3, 76, 78, 85–6, 113, 123, 134, 156, 159–60 substantive freedom 10, 46, 63 Sunkel, Osvaldo 44 swamp woman 143–4 systemic discrimination 28, 48–50, 143, 145 systemic injustice 22, 50, 69–70, 147–8 systemic oppression 3–4, 19, 41 Taylor, Charles 3, 9–11, 32–3, 45, 65, 67, 92–3, 95, 103–6, 110–12, 114, 117–18, 120, 123, 125, 135, 138, 162, 168 Taylor, Craig 51, 140 Theoharis, Jeanne 172n. 2 Theresa of Avila 104, 134 Thoreau, Henry David 43 Timossi, Jorge 36 To Have and Have Not (Ernest Hemingway) 57 Tobin, T. W. 45 tolerance 23, 137 totalitarianism 22, 153 transcendence 103–4, 132, 138, 168 trauma 82 triangulation theory 158 Truman, Harry 43

Index unfreedom 31 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 8 universalism 34, 156 universality 30, 52, 54, 159 universals 26, 76, 79, 87, 88, 115, 121, 124, 127, 131–3, 165, 168 Vanier, Jean 10, 66–70, 96, 101, 116 Varela y Morales, Félix 122–3 Velleman, David J. 82 Veltmeyer, Henry 44, 172n. 2 vernacular activities 107–10 Vitier, Cintio 3, 122 Waorani culture 6 War on Democracy (John Pilger) Weiss, Gail 1

195

Wilkinson, Richard 102 Wilson, David Sloan 50 Wilson, Robert A. 15, 73, 79, 139 Winterson, Jeanette 67–8 Wolfe, Virginia 84 Wong, David 45 Wood, Allen 2, 25–6, 31, 85–6, 88, 170, 171n. 2 World Bank 44 Wretched of the Earth (Frantz Fanon) 38 Yancy, George 149 yattha butta (as it is) 30, 97–100 The Yoke and the Star’ (José Martí) Young, Iris Marion 1, 142 Young, Valerie 52

128 Zedong, Mao

138

100