Reframing the Masters of Suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud 9781350065178, 9781350065208, 9781350065185

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Suspicious Explanation: A Primer
2. Classic Suspicion: Marx
3. Classic Suspicion: Nietzsche
4. Classic Suspicion: Freud
5. Conclusion: Paradigms of Suspicion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Reframing the Masters of Suspicion

Critiquing Religion: Discourse, Culture, Power Series editor: Craig Martin Critiquing Religion: Discourse, Culture, Power publishes works that historicize both religions and modern discourses on “religion” that treat it as a unique object of study. Using diverse methodologies and social theories, volumes in this series view religions and discourses on religion as commonplace rhetorics, authenticity narratives, or legitimating myths which function in the creation, maintenance, and contestation of social formations. Works in the series are on the cutting edge of critical scholarship, regarding “religion” as just another cultural tool used to gerrymander social space and distribute power relations in the modern world. Critiquing Religion: Discourse, Culture, Power provides a unique home for reflexive, critical work in the field of religious studies. Christian Tourist Attractions, Mythmaking, and Identity Formation, edited by Erin Roberts and Jennifer Eyl Spirituality, Corporate Culture, and American Business, James Dennis LoRusso Stereotyping Religion, edited by Brad Stoddard and Craig Martin

Reframing the Masters of Suspicion Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud Andrew Dole

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Andrew Dole, 2019 Andrew Dole has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. viii-xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Dani Leigh Cover image © Yi Lu/EyeEm/gettyimages.co.uk 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. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-6517-8 PB: 978-1-3501-7006-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-6518-5 eBook: 978-1-3500-6519-2 Series: Critiquing Religion: Discourse, Culture, Power Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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For my parents, who taught me charity (among other things)

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Suspicious Explanation: A Primer 2 Classic Suspicion: Marx 3 Classic Suspicion: Nietzsche 4 Classic Suspicion: Freud 5 Conclusion: Paradigms of Suspicion Notes Bibliography Index

viii 1 23 51 95 135 177 217 236 247

Acknowledgments Mark Fenster describes a childhood literary encounter as the origin of his fascination with conspiracy theories. The reading primer The Secret Three tells the story of a friendship forged among three boys by means of mysterious messages, of codes created and deciphered, of privileged communications inaccessible to outsiders. “Wherever you turn, the book implied,” Fenster recalls, “you might find a possible sign of some secret, a decipherable existence that would potentially fulfill a deep, perhaps unrecognized desire. . . . The Secret Three taught me that learning to read was a process not only of understanding the plain meaning of writing but also of finding and correctly interpreting hidden codes and messages.” The book offered the young Fenster material for both intrigue and envy: “I wanted at once to join the group, to replicate it in my own lonely childhood, and to expose and dismantle it.”1 I have a similar story to tell about the first glimmers of this project. Somewhere around the age of thirteen I happened on the book I Can Sell You Anything: How I Made Your Favorite TV Commercial with Minimum Truth and Maximum Consequences, by Paul Stevens. The book laid out the basic problematic of advertising in clear and accessible terms. On the one hand, consumers who believe, say, that detergent X works better than detergent Y will thereby be motivated to purchase detergent X. But on the other hand, advertisers are by law forbidden from asserting false propositions. The task these parameters determine is that of leading people to believe things without actually stating that these things are the case. Written by a self-proclaimed “insider,” I Can Sell You Anything described a collection of methods commonly used by television advertisers to accomplish this task. Two sections of the book I remember with particular clarity. One was Stevens’s treatment of “weasel words.” Such words as can, helps, like, virtually, up to, and so on, “can make you hear things that aren’t being said, accept as truths things that have only been implied, and believe things that have only been suggested.” Weasel words appear in phrases such as helps keep you young, cleans like a white tornado, and cured for up to eight weeks. Advertisers count on their targets to simply ignore the presence of these qualifiers: “by adding that one little word, ‘help,’ in front, we can use the strongest language possible afterward.

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And the most fascinating part of it is, you are immune to that word. You literally don’t hear the word ‘help.’ You only hear what comes after it.”2 Another was his discussion of “mysterious claims”: Certs contains a sparkling drop of retsyn, for example, or Esso, with HTA. The trick with such terms is that by leaving these terms undefined, advertisers can count on their audience to come to believe that these entities improve the virtue of the product containing them, even if they do not (the term retsyn, according to Stevens, actually refers to vegetable oil).3 I Can Sell You Anything opened my eyes to a dynamic that I continue to find fascinating. There are ways of using language that can produce conviction, and influence behaviors, without actual assertion and everything that it involves; and some of these are so widespread and culturally stable that they form the basis of technologies of persuasion that are the foundations of mighty edifices, such as the advertising industry. And yet these methods are fragile: their greatest enemy is, simply, knowledge of their existence on the part of those who are subject to them. I remember finding intoxicating my newfound ability to discern just how little familiar television advertisements offered in the way of actual reasons to prefer one product over another. The impact of the book has persisted into my later life as an academic in the humanities. I notice, for example, when one of my peers says, in a place where a substantive claim seems to be needed, that something “can be interpreted as” something else, or that something “may be the result of ” something else; and perhaps somewhat more pugnaciously, I ordinarily cannot help but read neologisms as the highbrow equivalent of retsyn unless they are provided with actual discursive content. If such are the distant beginnings of this book, its proximate origin is a set of experiences I had during graduate school. The time period in question was the late 1990s—the tail end of the period during which scholars could describe themselves as “postmodernists” without irony or nostalgia—and the setting was Yale’s departments of Philosophy and Religious Studies, between which I shuttled somewhat uncomfortably. The catalyst for my interest in the phenomenon of suspicion was a newly offered Religious Studies course on “Contemporary Theory” that immersed students in the works of such figures as Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and other challengers of the status quo. One component of my response to work of this sort was puzzlement (I will not describe other components, some of which I have come to regret). This puzzlement was transparently a product of my dual citizenship in philosophy and the study of religion. Across the border I was being trained to distinguish good arguments from bad, with the goal of bringing it about that one had good reasons to believe things or to follow particular courses of action. But here, in

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the realm of Theory, good arguments—in fact any kind of arguments—were thin on the ground. And yet some of my fellow students (and instructors) seemed not only convinced that it was in these texts that the (practical and theoretical) truth was to be found, but passionally convinced, in such a way that generated what I took to be moral condemnation of any who so much as expressed a desire for reasons to share this conviction. My (youthful and ham-handed) attempts to solicit such reasons from my peers and betters were unsuccessful, and this failure, and the sense of alienation that it occasioned, continued to bother me in the years that followed. My first debt of gratitude is to those of my graduate school professors who in various ways helped me in grappling with suspicion— Robert Adams, Marilyn McCord Adams, Keith Derose, John Hare, Serene Jones, Dale Martin, and Nick Wolterstorff—and to my graduate peers, with many of whom I have remained in conversation over the years, including Todd Buras, Andrew Chignell, Shannon Craigo-Snell, Jesse Couenhoven, Eric Gregory, Christine Helmer, Amina Steinfels, Ed Waggoner, and Madhuri Yadlapati. My second debt of gratitude is to those with whom I have discussed this project across its various stages of development. This group includes a number of fellow scholars including Matt Bagger, Steve Bush, Tal Lewis, Kevin Schilbrack, Brent Sockness, Jeff Stout, and Ted Vial. It also includes several cohorts of Amherst College undergraduates in my courses “Suspicion and Religion” and “Religion and Conspiratorial Thinking,” and participants in two conference sessions where I presented early versions of some of the material in this book—one at the American Academy of Religion (Philosophy of Religion unit) in November of 2014, and one at the Boston University Institute for Philosophy of Religion in April of 2015.4 Particular thanks are due to David Eckel and Allen Speight for organizing the latter event and encouraging my work. My third debt of gratitude is to my colleagues at Amherst College, in both the Religion and Philosophy departments, who have been both supporters and keen interlocutors over the too-many years it has taken for this book to take shape. I would not go so far as to say that suspicion and collegiality are polar opposites, but I do not think they naturally cohere. Collegiality is what I have experienced in my professional life to date, and for that I am grateful. My fourth debt of gratitude is to those without whose assistance this book would not have appeared in print. These include Ted Vial (again and for various reasons); Kathryn Lofton, for steering me in the direction of Bloomsbury Academic; Lalle Pursglove and Craig Martin for taking an interest and advocating for the book; two anonymous reviewers for useful feedback; and others involved later in the process.

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My final debt of gratitude is to my parents, to whom the book is dedicated. Their contributions to the whole scope of my academic work are innumerable, but I want to acknowledge them in particular for one thing: they did not raise me to be suspicious of others, but rather taught and modeled the practice of always trying to see the best in other people. And it follows from this that they did not teach me to be suspicious of particular types of people, nor did they model such behavior. Had it not been the case that suspicion was something I first encountered somewhat late, in such a way that it struck me as an optional and rather strange form of life, this book would not have been written. Amherst, Massachusetts January 2018

Introduction

If the genealogist refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics, if he listens to history, he finds that there is “something altogether different” behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms. —Michel Foucault1 For those of us not able to adopt Nietzsche’s perspective and form of valuation it would perhaps be sufficient that his genealogy gives a more plausible and well-supported account of our puzzling history than other available alternatives (if that turned out to be the case). —Raymond Geuss2

Interpretation, explanation, and Paul Ricoeur Paul Ricouer’s Freud and Philosophy was an idiosyncratic book, but not because of its basic project. That project was to offer a philosophically informed reconstruction of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. Ricoeur was neither the first nor the last to engage in this project, but two things set Freud and Philosophy apart from other works in the genre. The first of these was Ricoeur’s treatment of Freud as one of three “masters” of a particular kind of intellectual work, with the other two being Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. And the other was his commitment to a position in the philosophy of science that imposed a sharp boundary between the natural and the human sciences. Ricoeur was very much in the mainstream of certain philosophical circles in regarding hermeneutics as “first philosophy” at this time: a sharp distinction between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften, joined to the claim that the methodology of the latter is at bottom an interpretive one, dates from the middle of the nineteenth century, and was much in evidence in contemporaneous debates surrounding, for example, the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jü rgen Habermas.3 Ricoeur’s primary innovation in this area was to recruit recent work in the analytic philosophy of science to the cause

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of classifying Freud’s work. The result was his positioning of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the three “masters” of a project that fell entirely on the side of the human or “interpretive” sciences—as masters of what he famously termed the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Ricoeur regarded his masters as sharing something of a common method. I think he was right about this, and that project of trying to describe that method is a good and important one. But I think Freud and Philosophy (along with contemporaneous work by Habermas) diverted a significant amount of intellectual energy down a blind alley. The alley in question is, basically, the project of trying to build anything enduring on the idea that what Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud had in common was an interpretive method. My ambition is to back out of that alley and set off again in a more profitable direction, the very one that Ricoeur’s exposure to the philosophy of science motivated him to avoid. In this book I will present Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as practitioners not of a distinct type of interpretation, but of a distinct type of explanation.4 I will refer to this type as that of suspicious explanation, and this term is my proposed replacement for Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion.” If this book is concerned primarily with Ricoeur’s masters of suspicion, my ultimate interest is in a style of academic work. I take it that there is, within the academic literature of the last century or so, a tradition of suspicion, a body of literature subsequent to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, and is indebted in important respects to their work. If the term “hermeneutics of suspicion” has been a prominent label for what defines this tradition—I take this to be the case—then I intend my displacement of this term to have an impact on the project of understanding its methods and its dynamics. I think that the tradition of suspicion can usefully be defined, and critically interrogated, as one dedicated to the suspicious explanation of large-scale social phenomena. My purpose in this book is to explore this type of explanation both in the abstract and in the works of its classical practitioners—Ricoeur’s masters of suspicion. Shortly I will describe the background to Ricoeur’s choice of a hermeneutical framework in more detail, and will also describe the developments in philosophy on which my own work is premised. But before diving into this material I want to put on the table some promissory claims concerning the benefits of the explanatory framework and an initial set of summary claims about my category of suspicious explanation. One benefit of the explanatory framework is that it provides straightforward answers to two questions that are quite difficult to approach on the hermeneutical

Introduction

3

framework. The first of these is, Why might one prefer whatever Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud was offering to other alternatives? Put differently, what reasons might one have for thinking that the claims of the masters regarding their objects of interest are true? Working as he was within the framework of hermeneutics, Ricoeur posed the question as: when should one accept one interpretation— say, Freud’s—over another? I think it does not at all reflect badly on him that (as I will argue below) he was unable to provide an informative answer to this question. In contrast, the explanatory framework casts the issue into the form of a conflict of explanations; and as I will discuss below, the view is well attested in the literature on the philosophy of explanation that in cases of such conflict we ordinarily prefer the best explanation as most likely to be true. Thus, the explanatory framework offers a path to the identification of good reasons why one might prefer the claims of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud over their rivals. The second question is, if anything, of even more fundamental import. It is, Why should anyone care whether the claims of Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud are true? The explanatory framework offers a straightforward answer to this question. As I will note in the first chapter, a prominent view is that quests for explanation are typically motivated by a desire to be able to exert control over the phenomena to be explained; and indeed, some philosophers think that this interest in control is so deeply rooted in the phenomenon of explanation that it is implicated in the very concept of causality itself. On this view one should care about whether Freud’s claims are true because knowledge of, say, the causes of neurotic behavior can be used to improve psychological health; likewise, one should care about whether Marx’s claims about the sufferings of the proletariat are true because knowledge of the causes of such sufferings can be used to reduce or eliminate them. I find it difficult to imagine a better reason to care about the truth or falsity of such claims; in fact I find it difficult to imagine caring about this issue for any other reason. Ricoeur’s hermeneutical framework provides nothing comparable by way of an answer to this question. The framework imposes a complete separation between the act of interpretation and the act of explanation by way of identifying causes, such that whatever Freud has to say about neurotic behaviors, or Marx about the sufferings of factory workers, must be construed as claims about what these phenomena mean and cannot be mistaken for claims about their causes. I submit that there is no obvious reason why anyone should care about what, say, neurotic behaviors mean, if any such meanings are thoroughly divorced from causes.

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The explanatory framework also sheds light on an interesting but elusive relationship, that between the works of the masters of suspicion—and, eventually, works downstream of these—and conspiracy theories. Any number of anecdotes suggest that there is some such relationship. Some of these connected with the works of the masters themselves I will mention in the chapters to follow, including the malevolent and scheming Jews of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and the common suspicion that Marxists have historically been quick to postulate conspiracies on the part of the rich and powerful. Two others that I will mention only here, connected with more recent figures, are interesting partly for their common provenance. In 1982 Bernard Lewis famously opened his review of Edward Said’s Orientalism in The New York Review of Books with a parable about a conspiracy of scholars of Greece “to denigrate the Greek achievement and subjugate the Greek lands and peoples”;5 six months later in the same publication, Lawrence Stone credited Michel Foucault with implying, in Madness and Civilization, “a conspiracy of professionals to seize power for themselves to lock people up and determine their treatment.”6 It is possible to simply dismiss such comparisons as either simple mistakes or invidious suggestions, as Said and Foucault did in their respective responses.7 But I think such dismissals are premature, and the relationship between conspiracy theories and the works of the masters will be a prominent theme in this book.

Suspicious explanations Here is an initial summary of my position on suspicious explanation as a general category. Suspicious explanations in general I take to be defined by two characteristics, hiddenness and badness. Although suspicious explanations can claim simply to present information that is not available to casual observation, more often “hiddenness” is a matter of the available evidence being in some way misleading, such that getting at the truth requires something other than taking the available evidence at face value. And suspicious explanations invoke “badness” in a variety of forms and connections. They can appeal to purportedly universal moral valuations or to recognizably nonmoral values; I will use the term ethical valuations as the general category that encompasses these, and will speak of suspicious explanations as ethically charged. We might say by way of a first approximation (whose limitations will become clear in time) that suspicious explanations postulate hidden bad causes.

Introduction

5

I borrow the term large-scale social phenomena from John Watkins.8 These are, as the term suggests, phenomena that result from the actions of large numbers of persons. Some examples of large-scale social phenomena are Canada, religion, the French Revolution, liberalism, and folk-rock music. The category presents an explanatory puzzle. For since human activity causes (and sustains) large-scale social phenomena, their explanation would seem to involve whatever is required to explain human actions; but since they are too “large” to be the product of any single person’s activity, explaining large-scale social phenomena requires explaining the actions of many persons acting together, and where it is not plausible to suppose that the resulting large-scale phenomenon is the intended result of those actions, it is far from clear that the apparatus we ordinarily use to explain human action is adequate to explain them. So the explanation of largescale social phenomena would seem to require everything we know about why human beings act as they do plus additional principles that would allow us to extend this knowledge to the social realm. A suspicious explanation of a large-scale social phenomenon will be an explanation of some phenomenon that is too large to be the product of any one person’s activity that will traffic in claims of hiddenness and badness. I think it fairly obvious (although devotees of the pure hermeneutical framework will deny this) that Ricoeur’s masters were concerned with the explanation of largescale social phenomena. Marx as I understand him was interested in explaining why material wealth and well-being were so unevenly distributed in his context and why this distribution was so resistant to correction; Nietzsche was interested in explaining the purchase that morality had on his contemporaries; and Freud, working from a theoretical basis concerned with the explanation of individual behaviors, was interested in explaining larger cultural phenomena such as incest taboos, religion, and anti-Semitism. My claim that the explanations they advanced were suspicious ones entails that they involved notions of “hiddenness” and badness. In this book’s three core chapters I will provide support for this claim by reconstructing the explanations of the masters with an eye to these notions. Now I regard conspiracy theories as a type of suspicious explanation of largescale social phenomena. Conspiracy theories postulate coordinated activity among large numbers of persons aimed at some large-scale goal. So, for example, John Robison’s Illuminati aimed at “rooting out all the religious establishments, and overturning all of the existing governments of Europe,” and Nesta Webster’s Jews aimed “to produce revolution, communism, and anarchy, by means of

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which they hope[d] to arrive at the hegemony of the world by establishing some sort of despotic rule.”9 The persons, aims, and modes of action that figure in conspiracy theories are normally bad in quite straightforward ways; as Bruno Latour has put the point, “conspiracists like to portray a miserable bunch of greedy people with dark intents.”10 And of course, it is a signature of the conspiracy theory that participants in the conspiracy conceal that participation from outsiders. The forms of hiddenness and badness that figure in conspiracy theories are in general straightforward; the conspiracy theory is perhaps the most accessible and obvious form of suspicious explanation of large-scale social phenomena. While I will at various points be comparing the explanations of the masters to conspiracy theories (and occasionally pointing out conspiratorial elements within them), I do not regard Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud as conspiracy theorists. There are ways of explaining large-scale social phenomena that traffic in claims of hiddenness and badness without postulating malign conspiracies. As I have mentioned, conspiracy theories make use of accessible devices to extend suspicious explanations to large-scale social phenomena. I think it is heuristically useful to think of the tradition of suspicion generally, beginning with the masters, as a tradition in search of alternative devices—so in search of viable alternatives to conspiracy theories within the overall space of suspicious explanation. I will begin to explore these devices in detail in the next chapter. So I classify the masters of suspicion not as conspiracy theorists, but as sharing a common project with such theorists—the project of generating suspicious explanations of large-scale social phenomena. I intend this classification to be illuminating. Conspiracy theories have been the subject of considerable critical attention partly because of the sharply opposed receptions they typically experience. Some persons exposed to conspiracy theories find them so massively implausible that they do not so much as deserve serious consideration as candidates for truth, while others find them so overwhelmingly convincing that no amount of contrary evidence troubles their acceptance. And one thing that is fairly clear in the literature is that subscription to a conspiracy theory is not a reliable sign of low intelligence or poor reasoning: the personal and social factors implicated in the acceptance of such theories are far more interesting. The features of conspiracy theories that produce, in some rational persons, passionate and stubborn adherence can be described in the vocabulary of the explanatory framework with a fair amount of precision. I think that in many cases non-conspiratorial suspicious explanations have the same features. The

Introduction

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reconstruction I will offer will predict that suspicious explanations crafted in certain ways will have the ability to motivate powerful sorts of conviction on the part of intelligent and attentive persons, while equally intelligent and attentive others find them singularly unpersuasive. I take it that this dynamic is on display in the reception histories of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud; and I hope to shed some light on why this might be the case. I conclude this initial description of my project by recalling one of its more important precursors. In a lecture delivered in Cambridge in 1953, Karl Popper recalled that by the summer of 1919, he found himself preoccupied by the questions, “What is wrong with Marxism, psycho-analysis, and [Adler’s] individual psychology? Why are they so different from physical theories, from Newton’s theory, and especially from the theory of relativity?”11 What motivated Popper’s interest in these questions was, above all, his impression of the effects the theories in question had on persons who subscribed to them. I reproduce his description of those impressions here because it touches on a number of the themes with which I will be concerned in this book. I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to those theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appeared to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still “un-analysed” and crying out for treatment.12

Eventually Popper arrived at his famous position that the theories in question failed to qualify as genuinely scientific because they were formulated in such a way as to make their central claims unfalsifiable. The theories of Freud and Adler had this characteristic from the beginning, he claimed, whereas Marx’s had been rendered unfalsifiable by later Marxists who, in the face of the nonfulfillment of the master’s historical predictions, adopted the “soothsayer’s trick” of “predict[ing] things so vaguely that the predictions can hardly fail.”13 Popper’s position tars the theories in question with the brush of intellectual illegitimacy on formal grounds. There is indeed something wrong with these theories on his view. The question of what exactly is wrong with them can be

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answered by way of a comparison between the structure of those theories and that of theories that commanded the respect of natural scientists. And the one who comes to understand what is wrong with those theories thereby sees that holding them accountable to the proper standards would serve as immunization against their persuasive effects. My work in this book follows the pattern inaugurated by Popper, in that I begin with discussion of a prominent and uncontroversially respectable set of practices (of explanation) which determine the terms of my reconstructive work. And like Popper, I will conclude that the theories in which I am interested have, as it were, “special” formal or structural characteristics. Perhaps the closest point of agreement between my position and Popper’s is that I will claim that suspicious arguments, when properly formulated, impose obstacles to some of the practices of critical assessment on which we ordinarily rely when considering explanations, in ways that give those theories persuasive advantages over more conventional rivals. But the result of my reconstruction will not be that suspicious explanations are intellectually illegitimate, that accepting them always turns on some failure of critical assessment, or that nobody should consider them worthy of serious consideration. In my concluding chapter I will deploy Pascal Boyer’s notion of cognitive gadgetry to describe the aspects of those dynamics that are of interest to me.14 Cognitive gadgetry is a matter of a cultural artifact interacting with the operation of human minds in ways that make it particularly memorable or interesting. Boyer uses the notion as part of his account of why religion is a stable fixture within the various cultures of the world. I will argue that suspicious explanations are powerful cognitive gadgets, and that under the proper circumstances are cognitively ensnaring.15 If I think my work will facilitate critical engagement by pointing out places where suspicious explanations appeal to, as it were, weaknesses in our ordinary practices of critical assessment, I do not think that my account supports any straightforward generalizations about their intellectual legitimacy. But I do think that there are important questions to be addressed in this area. Popper condemned psychoanalysis as pseudoscience and Marxism as soothsaying, and fairly clearly thought that they deserved dismissal by rational persons. And in contemporary life the attitude is widespread that conspiracy theories as a class should not be taken seriously.16 I regard these positions as responses to the features of suspicious explanations that I will describe. Specifically, I regard these responses as attempts to formulate specially targeted policies of assessment

Introduction

9

the following of which would prevent the theories in question from prospering from the exploitation of human epistemic weakness. I regard the policies I have mentioned as unacceptably blunt instruments, but at the end of the day I suspect that a policy approach to suspicious explanation is probably the right one. I leave discussion of this topic for another occasion. I turn now to discussion of the literature that informs my approach to the masters.

The development of the “Hermeneutics of Suspicion” In an essay to which I will return below, Brian Leiter remarked briefly on the hermeneutical reconstruction of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, as Freud himself understood it, offers causal explanations that appeal to unconscious motives, and while the causes are laden with meaning, they are causes nonetheless. To be sure, when philosophers of science thought that all causal explanations had to conform to one model—usually drawn from some idealized version of physics—it seemed that a hermeneutic explanation, one that took seriously the meaningfulness of certain mental states qua causes, was necessarily not part of the causal discourse of science. But that understanding is now, happily, defunct, replaced with a new pluralism that recognizes . . . that “explanatory adequacy is essentially pragmatic and field-specific.”17

Packed into this passage is a narrative concerning the history of discussions in the philosophy of science that is worth rehearsing in more detail. Ricoeur’s choice of a hermeneutical framework for understanding Freud would probably have been a foregone conclusion even absent his exposure to what he referred to, in Freud and Philosophy, as “Anglo-Saxon philosophers concerned with the analysis of language.”18 Ricoeur was embedded in streams of European philosophical reflection that had enshrined hermeneutics as “first philosophy” by the late 1950s. But in fact recent work by “the logicians” did significantly impact his choice to frame up Freud as a “hermeneutician.” By his own confession, Ricoeur’s reconstruction of Freud was aimed at deflecting anglophone criticisms of psychoanalysis as “pseudo-scientific.” Ricoeur had encountered these criticisms in a 1958 essay by Ernest Nagel, who had argued that psychoanalysis could not satisfy the requirements of scientific theories to be susceptible of empirical confirmation that rose to the level of “proof.” Ricoeur found Nagel’s criticisms persuasive, noting his agreement that

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the one who regarded psychoanalysis as an “observational science” would in time be inexorably reduced to “regarding psychoanalysis as a retarded form of observational theory and its hypotheses as metaphors of a phlogistic sort.”19 His response involved turning the concession that “psychoanalysis is not an observational science” into a counterattack.20 For resources for the attempt to say what sort of enterprise psychoanalysis might be, he turned to an exchange among Stephen Toulmin, Antony Flew, and Richard Peters from the journal Analysis, which had been anthologized in 1954.21 Both Toulmin and Flew regarded it as puzzling that Freud spoke both of reasons and motives within his patients and of identifying the causes of their behaviors. In line with a conception well attested at the time among analytic philosophers (but derided as “rather fashionable” by Peters),22 they both subscribed to the view that reasons cannot be causes. On this view it is a hallmark of the natural sciences to seek explanation in terms of efficient causes, whereas in explaining human behavior we have recourse to the language of motives, intentions, and reasons, such that the language of causality is applicable only metaphorically, so to speak, to the realm of the mental.23 Arguing that “our troubles arise from thinking of psychoanalysis too much on the analogy of the natural sciences,” Toulmin proposed that psychoanalysis be understood as a matter of offering explanations in terms of motives and intentions rather than causal explanations.24 According to Flew, Freud was “apparently thinking of unconscious mental processes as the inferred efficient causes which produce obsessive acts as their effects.”25 But this supposes that mental phenomena like “unconscious processes” can act as causes, a capacity Flew associated with material entities. Aside from rendering the nature of the postulated processes mysterious and thus their existence doubtful, this supposition puts psychoanalytic explanation in danger of conflict with causal explanations involving more respectable material entities such as “the myriad neurones [sic] of the nervous system, all the paraphernalia of the neurologists, waiting, solid, visible, tangible, a sight to delight and inspire the experimentalist.”26 Flew saw in Toulmin’s position a strategy for avoiding any such conflict: in assigning to psychoanalysis the task of offering explanations in terms of motives and reasons, it isolated psychoanalysis entirely from the scientific task of offering explanations in terms of causes. For the two kinds of explanation are “so radically different that they are not rivals at all.”27 Ricoeur’s purpose in citing the Analysis debate seems to have been to motivate the idea that psychoanalysis was an enterprise different in kind from causal explanation. But although Ricoeur noted his close agreement with Flew,

Introduction

11

he did not adopt the idea that psychoanalysis offered “explanation by motives.” Rather, he argued that psychoanalysis was a “mixed discourse that falls outside the motive-cause alternative,” with the result that “[psycho]analytic experience bears a much greater resemblance to historical understanding than to natural explanation.”28 And it was at this point that he returned to the European philosophical tradition. The distinction between motive in the sense of “reason for” and cause in the sense of a relation between observable facts in no way concerns the degree of generality of propositions. It is the distinction Brentano, Dilthey, and Husserl had in mind when they sharply distinguished between understanding of the psychical or the historical, and explanation of nature; in this sense motives are on the side of the historical, understood as a region of being distinct from the region of nature and capable of being considered according to the generality or singularity of its temporal sequences.29

Here Ricoeur invoked a position first advanced in 1857 by the German philosopher and historian J. G. Droysen.30 Droysen argued for a single overarching difference between the natural sciences and the human sciences, or between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften, with the goal of the former being explanation and the goal of the latter understanding. Wilhelm Dilthey made this distinction central to his understanding of the Geisteswissenschaften, incorporating as well the view that hermeneutics, or the “science of interpretation,” was the core methodology of the human sciences. Gadamer had raised the hermeneutical dimension of this tradition to prominence, observing in Truth and Method that in the work of Droysen and his intellectual descendants, “hermeneutics becomes the master key to the study of history . . . history, which he sees as acts of freedom, is nevertheless as profoundly intelligible and meaningful as a text.”31 Ricoeur thus pursued a fusion of the tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften with the cause-motive distinction articulated by Toulmin and Flew in a way that further distanced psychoanalysis from the project of explanation. The view of “history-as-text” which Gadamer cited was generally absent from the “AngloSaxon” literature, which was for the most part firmly committed to the idea that the historical sciences are in the business of offering explanations, even as it distinguished this project from causal explanation.32 Ricoeur’s hermeneutical framework obviated the need to postulate a complete absence of conflict between causal and motive explanations by removing psychoanalysis from the space of explanation in the first place.

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I claimed above that within the hermeneutical framework, it is quite difficult to say why one might prefer one interpretation to another. Ricoeur himself called attention to this issue immediately upon introducing his hermeneutical view, saying that “The validity of the interpretations made in psychoanalysis is subject to the same kind of questions as the validity of a historical or exegetical interpretation. The same questions must be put to Freud that are put to Dilthey, Weber, and Bultmann, not those posed to a physicist or a biologist.”33 I will not spend time describing his attempt to develop this position in Freud and Philosophy; suffice it to say that the question of the “validity” of psychoanalysis disappears from the text before it receives anything approaching a solution. More than a decade later Ricoeur returned to this question, offering a (relatively) concise four-part criterion for the validity of Freud’s claims.34 But by that time he had substantially modified his view of psychoanalysis, having been convinced by Michael Sherwood’s The Logic of Explanation in Psychoanalysis (1969) that Freud’s method involves explanation as one of its moments.35 Ricoeur’s clearest response to the problem as formulated in Freud and Philosophy he offered in a 1982 interview with his former student and biographer, Michael Reagan, who asked him simply, “What is the criterion or criteria for choosing amongst conflicting interpretations, say of a text?” If we stay within the limits of a text, I should confess that there are no sure criteria for choosing among the conflicting interpretations. If we are not allowed to say anything we want about a text, there is a kind of space of possibility between the text having just one meaning and just any meaning. There is always a range of plausible meanings, and therefore the question of criteria belongs to a certain kind of interpretation itself, that is to say, to a coming to an agreement between arguments. So it presupposes a certain model of rationality where universality, verification, and so on are compelling. . . . so long as there are texts, maybe that the level of the textual does not allow more than a certain plausibility of several interpretations which have, in a sense, an equal right.36

I would like to think that this answer reflects the considerations that had by that time motivated Ricoeur to abandon the pure hermeneutical framework.

The philosophy of explanation As we have seen, Freud and Philosophy was preceded and in fact motivated by a literature that attempted to make sense of psychoanalysis as an explanatory

Introduction

13

project; and this literature is itself informed by the contemporaneous state of discussions in the philosophy of science. My work is recognizably downstream of this literature, which arguably begins with Popper’s work in The Logic of Scientific Discovery and expanded into The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies. Other prominent contributors to this early literature are Sidney Hook, Robert Merton, Ernest Nagel, and William Dray. Much of this material was in the background of the literature to which Ricoeur referred. My approach is informed by a later stage of work in the philosophy of science. As we have seen, prior to the 1960s, anglophone discussions of the nature of scientific investigation had been strongly informed by logical positivism. And positivism contributed more to those discussions than the notion that reasons cannot be causes. In the person of Carl Hempel, positivism had produced a robust position on the nature of properly scientific explanation, the “deductivenomological” model.37 On this “D-N” model, scientific explanations take the form of a description of a set of conditions and a statement of one or more natural laws, such that the obtaining of the explanandum follows deductively from the conjunction of these. Now if properly scientific explanation requires the identification of exceptionless laws and supposes a causality that produces its effects necessarily, the question naturally arises as to the status of such practices of explanation that seem not to traffic in these. More than “motive explanations” and psychoanalytic explanations fall into this latter category; historical explanations generally do. Thus, historical explanation presented a puzzle for those, such as Dray, inclined to regard Hempel’s model as capturing the essence of scientific explanation. The turning point that matters for my approach is not just the fading of logical positivism, but rather the growth of a recognizably and intentionally non-positivist literature in the philosophy of explanation. An early entry in this literature is Donald Davidson’s 1963 essay “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” wherein Davidson defended “the ancient—and commonsense—position that rationalization [explanation by reasons] is a species of causal explanation.”38 By the end of the 1960s, the project of reconstructing the activity of explanation on non-positivist lines was well underway. And one part of this project was the development of the idea that explanation is central to a distinct form of inference. Early in the twentieth century, Charles Sanders Peirce had coined the term abduction to refer to the kind of inference that explanations motivate; but the post-positivist literature on the subject has for the most part made use of Gilbert Harman’s term of 1965, inference to the best explanation.39

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The literature on explanation that most closely informs my work is downstream of Harman. A good deal of the relevant debates have taken place in journal essays, but a few monographs have served as important touchstones. Alan Garfinkel’s Forms of Explanation (1981) provides a useful overarching framework for understanding the project of explanation generally. Richard Miller’s Fact and Method (1986) is a major treatise on the nature of explanation and of explanatory inference, which is all the more pertinent to my project in view of Miller’s engagements with Marx. Peter Lipton’s Inference to the Best Explanation (2004) focuses on the issue of explanatory inference, advocating what Lipton calls “explanationism” as an alternative to Bayesian confirmation. And James Woodward’s Making Things Happen (2003) develops at length a theme found in both Garfinkel and Miller, that the concept of cause itself is fundamentally tied to the notion of explanation. In addition to the literature in the philosophy of explanation, I draw on three separate streams of work pertaining to Ricoeur’s “masters.” Although Marx was of interest to philosophers fairly consistently throughout the twentieth century, G. A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History (1978) marked a new beginning for Marx among anglophone philosophers. Cohen’s work almost singlehandedly gave rise to “analytic Marxism,” a project among anglophone philosophers to extract from Marx’s work theories that could withstand the most rigorous philosophical scrutiny. Monographs on Marx recognizably influenced by analytic Marxism include Allen Wood’s Karl Marx (1981), Miller’s Analyzing Marx (1984), and Michael Rosen’s On Voluntary Servitude (1996). Philosophical work on Nietzsche has followed a similar pattern. An older tradition of Nietzsche interpretation in English, possibly epitomized by Walter Kaufman, has been largely displaced by a stream of work that begins with Arthur Danto’s Nietzsche as Philosopher (1965). With the passing of time, Danto’s work stimulated a new interest in extracting promising arguments from Nietzsche’s texts, so much so that three decades later David Allison could pull together a number of separate strands of such reconstructive work in Reading the New Nietzsche (2000). Nietzsche has not always been read as a purveyor of causal explanations within this strand of literature, but such a construal has characterized several recent treatments, particularly of the Genealogy of Morals. My approach to Nietzsche is most closely indebted to such works, which include Brian Leiter’s Nietzsche on Morality (2002), David Owen’s Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (2007), and an ongoing series of journal essays by various authors. Literature reconstructing Freud as a practitioner of explanation dates to his own lifetime (fairly clearly, after all, this is how Freud understood himself).

Introduction

15

If the hermeneutical framing of Freud was something of an interruption in this tradition, it also motivated the production of some important reflections among partisans of the explanatory approach subsequent to Freud and Philosophy. One such work was Sherwood’s The Logic of Explanation in Psychoanalysis, which convinced Ricoeur that psychoanalysis involved causal explanation. Adolf Grü nbaum aimed to demolish the hermeneutical framework in its entirety in his The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1983). Grü nbaum’s work stimulated a vigorous discussion among readers of Freud; some essays in the collection Mind, Psychoanalysis and Science (1988), particularly by Jim Hopkins and Frank Cioffi, criticize certain of Grü nbaum’s claims about Freud while at the same time developing the explanatory reconstruction of psychoanalysis further than Grü nbaum had.40 During the same time frame, Malcolm Macmillan was engaged in the composition of his massive Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc, which was first published in 1991 but only became widely available in 1996.41 It is worth noting that this material constituted the background to the Frederick Crews’s infamous essay “The Unknown Freud,” which inaugurated the “Freud wars” of the last several decades.42 My aim is to assemble a coherent and relatively unified method of reconstruction from these four largely independent streams of literature. If this project has not been attempted at length before, I cannot claim that it is entirely original. In an essay published in 2004, Brian Leiter touched on many of the themes I have discussed in this introduction, including the rise of distinctly post-positivist conceptions of causal explanation, in order to argue not only that Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud were all in the business of offering explanations, but also that the explanations they offered have common features.43 I will be referring to Leiter’s essay at several points during this book, but here I want to say in general terms where my project diverges from his. Leiter’s project in the essay was not to displace the “hermeneutics of suspicion” but to revive it. Leiter set himself the task of rescuing Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud from their “moralizing interpreters” within philosophy and political theory.44 His bid to revitalize the hermeneutics of suspicion had as its major premise that Ricoeur’s “masters” were purveyors of specifically naturalistic explanations of beliefs: “When one understands conscious life naturalistically, in terms of its real causes, one contributes at the same time to a critique of the contents of consciousness: that, in short, is the essence of a hermeneutics of suspicion.”45 The critical force of the hermeneutics of suspicion, on Leiter’s view, has to do with issues of the justification of beliefs. By offering “alternative causal trajectories to explain our beliefs,” Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud aim to convince

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us that the causes that have brought about certain beliefs in us are not ones that can confer justification. “Beliefs arrived at the wrong way are suspect”; Leiter summarizes: “that is the epistemological point exploited by the practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion.”46 And Leiter advocates for a revival of this mode of belief explanation as a strategy for returning philosophy to broad public relevance; to cite a passage to which I will refer later, he argues that “Philosophy becomes relevant because the world—riven as it is with hypocrisy and concealment—desperately needs a hermeneutics of suspicion to unmask it.”47 A fairly superficial difference between Leiter and myself is that I aim to displace the term hermeneutics of suspicion rather than give that term a new meaning. The more important differences are three. First, unlike Leiter, I am not primarily interested in distilling from the works of the masters a method of inquiry that can today be used for either philosophy or critique. What I aim to extract from those works is the method that seems to me to be common to them; I have no commitment to that method’s being a usable one. Second, as I have already indicated, I see the masters as concerned to explain more than just states of consciousness; for this reason, I think the critical force of the method in question (whatever one calls it) cannot be captured by talk of the justification of beliefs. And third, because I am interested in the persuasive powers of the kinds of explanation on display in the works of the masters, my reconstruction is aimed at identifying features of their explanations that are relevant to the assessment of their overall value, along lines that I will describe in the next chapter. One might say by way of a summary that if Leiter’s aim in reconstructing the “hermeneutics of suspicion” is to promote it as a working method, my own aim is to promote critical engagement with the work that falls under the label.

Chapter summaries Chapter 1 lays out the apparatus that I will use in the remainder of the book. The purpose of the chapter is to say in the abstract how one might go about generating suspicious explanations of large-scale social phenomena. In the chapter’s first section I discuss causal explanation in general and explanation by reasons in particular. There I will introduce the notion of ethical charge, a feature generated by some appeals to agency in the context of explanation. The second section is concerned with the explanation of large-scale social phenomena, and describes

Introduction

17

different ways in which notions of agency can figure in such explanations, and thus different ways in which such explanations can generate ethical charge. In the third section I discuss inference to the best explanation as a method (loosely construed) for deciding whether to accept or reject explanations, synthesizing (roughly and inconclusively) two competing positions regarding explanatory inference, Bayesianism and Peter Lipton’s “explanationism.” By the conclusion of the chapter I will have outlined the type of explanation that will be the target of my reconstructive work in the three chapters to follow, and will have indicated which features of such explanations I regard as important to note for the purpose of critical assessment. In Chapter 2, I claim that Marx’s texts contain not one but three distinct styles of suspicious explanation. Vulgar Marxism (a term of Karl Popper’s) I describe as the practice of explaining large-scale social events by citing the actions of individual human persons acting from bad desires or for bad ends. Historical materialism is Marx’s formal theory of history, according to which large-scale structural features of particular societies determine what happens within those societies. And vulgar-Hegelian Marxism is the practice of treating groups of people or abstract entities (classes, nations, or capital itself) as agents for the purpose of explanation, for example by attributing chains of reasoning or motivated actions to such entities. I argue that each of these three explanatory modes offers specific ways of describing hidden forces and of invoking negative ethical values. These three modes are interwoven in Marx’s texts, such that it can be quite difficult to disentangle them. And this is a matter of some significance, because the three modes differ with respect to the ways in which they assign responsibility for bad social conditions to human persons, and so with respect to the actions regarding human persons that they motivate. Using Cohen’s seminal work, I make a proposal as to how Marx’s three explanatory modes are related in his texts. The results of my analysis are that Marx’s texts can be used either to assign ultimate responsibility for massive social evils to human persons in virtue of their social identity or, conversely, to absolve such persons of such responsibility, depending on how his explanations are construed. Chapter 3 concentrates on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, the locus classicus of Nietzsche’s contribution to the tradition of suspicion. I argue that each of the Genealogy’s three essays follows roughly the same pattern, wherein Nietzsche offers a historical explanation of the components of morality using three types of similar elements. First, Nietzsche postulates novel psychological dispositions, such as the “will to power,” the “instinct for cruelty,” and ressentiment. Second,

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he describes a number of distinct characters or psychological “types,” such as the warrior, the Jew, and the ascetic priest. And third, he describes events in which (usually) one of his characters acts in ways that change their thinking or the thinking of other persons regarding morality. I then document Nietzsche’s use of these elements in the three essays. In my reflections I argue that it is in general quite difficult to determine which of Nietzsche’s various narratives are best interpreted historically, which as “shorthand” descriptions of more complex sets of events, and which as pure rhetoric; as a result, Nietzsche’s writing rather dramatically under-describes the actual events which his explanations postulate. I also argue that Nietzsche’s narratives draw on at least three distinct sources of valuation in generating negative ethical charge: morality itself, the “chivalricaristocratic” mode of valuation that he associates with the will to power, and popular anti-Semitism. I conclude by expressing the worry that regarding the Genealogy as a methodological archetype has the consequence that that text’s degree of historical specificity and evaluative transparency determines what counts as acceptable practice in these areas for later “genealogies,” a state of affairs that I would regard as unfortunate if it were actual. In Chapter 4, I first describe the general structure of Freud’s theories, according to which the human mind contains separate areas or domains, each of which operates in agential or at least quasi-agential ways and each of which can produce effects in the others. Second, I describe some of his more specific doctrines, particularly his claims regarding fundamental drives, his understanding of repression, and his claim that certain behaviors represent the partial satisfaction of repressed drives. Third, I discuss Freud’s expansion of psychoanalytic theory from the explanation of individual behavior to the explanation of large-scale social events such as religion. And fourth, I describe Freud’s characteristic manner of responding to criticisms by applying his psychoanalytic theories to his critics. His theories entail, without any need for ad hoc modification, that their truth will motivate its own rejection in persons about whom they are true. Freud freely deployed this entailment in engaging both hostile critics and critical friends (i.e., Jung); and the power of this method of engagement, which I term the recursive ad hominem defense, is clearly on display in the history of psychoanalytic theory both during and after his lifetime. I conclude the chapter by pointing out that the features of psychoanalytic theory that make this defense possible can be replicated within other bodies of theory. My goal in Chapter 5 is to say, in broad terms, what difference it makes to regard Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as practitioners of suspicious explanation.

Introduction

19

Following a reprise of the general framework of the book, I offer an overview of the reconstructions in the preceding three chapters, commenting in particular on the ways in which the explanations of the masters traffic in claims of “hiddenness” and generate ethical charge. I then turn to reflections on the dynamics surrounding explanatory inference when suspicion is involved. I argue that, because they traffic in claims of “hiddenness,” suspicious explanations classically suffer from a deficit of plausibility, but there are a variety of discursive strategies for either remedying this deficit or deflecting its force. I then turn to my claim that suspicious explanations are “cognitive gadgets” or “snares for thought.” I develop this claim by calling attention to three distinct ways in which suspicious explanations of large-scale social phenomena can be cognitively appealing and, indeed, cognitively ensnaring. I conclude the chapter with remarks on the ways in which the work of the masters changed the course of theoretical history, identifying in each of the three masters one prominent feature that I think has been appropriated by later theorists working within the tradition of suspicion.

Concluding remarks Before closing this introduction I want to issue a few important qualifiers. First, I hope to have shown, by the end of this book, that suspicious explanations of large-scale social phenomena have characteristics that powerfully motivate assent, whether theoretical or practical, and also characteristics that frustrate our ordinary practices of assessing explanations for their likely truth. The characteristics I will be describing are formal or structural ones, and for this reason, my position will be that the characteristics that make suspicious explanations powerful and popular are independent of their truth or falsity. It follows from this that I will have shown how certain explanations can have powerfully motivated large numbers of persons to accept them, either theoretically or practically, while at the same time being false. But I do not think that my work will have either shown or generated good reasons to think that the claims of Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud are false. Second, to build on claims I have made earlier, my juxtaposition of the works of the masters with conspiracy theories is not intended to motivate the judgment that the works of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are equivalent in value (however one construes this) to conspiracy theories. If one is intended to dismiss

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Reframing the Masters of Suspicion

conspiracy theories as a general class—say, on the grounds that only persons with compromised powers of assessment accept them—I do not think that my arguments will support any such judgment in relation to the works of the masters. I do suppose that some people have been devout conspiracy theorists because they suffer from some cognitive deficiency; I also suppose that some people have been devout Marxists, Freudians, or Nietzscheans for the same sort of reason. But I do not think that cognitive deficiency is the only thing that could bring about conviction in the truth of theories of this kind, and in fact I will have almost nothing to say about the subject in this book. My interest is in the way suspicious explanations, conspiratorial or otherwise, engage our ordinary practices of assessing claims for truth and falsity—practices that, when used properly and successfully, yield good reasons to believe or disbelieve claims. And finally, I will be reconstructing the masters as purveyors of suspicious explanations, but I acknowledge that other kinds of reconstruction are possible, and do not suppose that my reconstructions capture the very essences of the works of the masters. I do think that suspicious explanations are present in those works, and I would even go so far as to say that any reconstruction that would deny this is seriously deficient. But I certainly would not say that explanation, suspicious or otherwise, is all the masters were up to. My reconstruction will pass in silence over much of what is both interesting and important in their works, for the simple reason that my purpose is to follow Ricoeur in isolating one strand within those texts for close examination. I conclude here by describing one evaluative result that I hope the book does accomplish: I hope, in effect, to cut the masters down to size, to reduce them to mere mortals. Consider the quotations that open this introduction. The quote from Foucault is taken from an essay in which he attempted to specify what Nietzsche’s “genealogical” method amounts to. Foucault describes genealogy as a matter of putting aside a particular kind of distorting “faith” and simply “listening” to history, which “listening” produces discoveries concerning the real truth behind appearances. Foucault’s suggestion here, I take it, is that Nietzsche stood out from the ordinary run of human beings in virtue of a unique, or perhaps merely unusual, capability to be properly receptive to the truth that is on display in history. That is, I take it that Foucault’s understanding postulates as the ground of genealogy as a working method a kind of insight that eludes the common person, but which Nietzsche possessed. In contrast, Geuss suggests that the value of Nietzsche’s claims rests on their explanatory value. Nietzsche figures in his approach not as one who simply

Introduction

21

“listens to history,” but as one who postulates the existence of certain phenomena for the purposes of explaining that which is historically observable. If Foucault attributes to Nietzsche special powers of discernment, it seems to me that Geuss attributes to him whatever powers are required for the framing up of hypotheses in the realm of history. In my own terms (terms indebted to Popper), it seems to me that the powers in question are, purely and simply, powers of a disciplined imagination, where the discipline in question is a matter of being able to discern that some claims that are not obviously false would be good explanations if they were true. It should be apparent by now that my position aligns with that of Geuss rather than that of Foucault. One result I hope this work will have, then, is that it will serve as a counterweight to a tendency to treat Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as authorities with respect to “hidden” phenomena that their theories postulate. I think there is little to be lost and much to be gained from resisting such treatment. To refuse to acknowledge an author as an authority is not to raise any specific doubts about the veracity of the claims in question. It is, however, to commit oneself to the policy of regarding the testimonial source of those claims—viz. the person of the author in question—as neither increasing nor decreasing the likelihood of their being true. And for this reason, such a refusal effectively makes obligatory the project of critically assessing those claims in a manner that is agnostic regarding their testimonial source. It is this posture regarding Ricoeur’s masters that I want to promote. As a coda to this introduction I want to offer a counterpoint to a somewhat gnomic claim of Ricoeur’s. “The contrary of suspicion,” Ricoeur remarked in Freud and Philosophy, “is faith.”48 I will not explore Ricoeur’s notion of “critical faith” or “second naï veté,” for my position motivates a different opposition. It seems to me that the opposite of suspicion is not faith but charity.

1

Suspicious Explanation: A Primer

In this chapter I will set the stage for the reconstruction of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as purveyors of suspicious explanations of large-scale social phenomena. These are explanations of large-scale social phenomena that postulate the existence of “hidden” factors and generate negative ethical charge. Over the course of this chapter the senses in which I use these terms will become clear. In the first section of the chapter I will discuss causal explanation in general and explanation by reasons in particular, and will introduce the notion of ethical charge. In the second section I will discuss the explanation of large-scale social phenomena, noting different ways in which notions of agency can figure in such explanations. In the third section I will discuss inference to the best explanation as a method (loosely construed) for deciding whether to accept or reject explanations. I will close the chapter by describing Hegel’s notion of the “cunning of reason,” which I take to be a crucial historical starting point for the tradition of suspicion.

Causal explanation I noted in the introduction that Ricoeur’s decision to reconstruct Freud in hermeneutical terms was influenced by the view that reasons cannot be causes. My rejection of this position marks my single most important point of departure from Ricoeur. Accepting that reasons can be causes erases the puzzlement that motivated the hermeneutical framework in the first place, and opens the way to a reconstruction of the masters as offering causal explanations in which reasons (and other mental factors) figure. Because of the crucial role it plays in my work, I need to justify the idea that reasons can be causes before proceeding; but because the idea is both commonsensical and now well attested among philosophers, only a minimal justification is needed.

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Recall Flew’s puzzlement with the idea that Freud “was apparently thinking of unconscious mental processes as the inferred efficient causes which produce obsessive acts as their effects.”1 Flew subscribed to the conviction that efficient causality, the sort of causality that is thoroughly at home in a materialistic metaphysics, was the only suitable basis for properly scientific explanations. Recall as well that Carl Hempel’s deductive-nomological model of explanation was grounded in the idea that causality operates in accordance with natural laws that admit of no exceptions, such that the true form of a causal explanation will be a statement of a natural law plus a description of the conditions in which that law operated in a specific instance.2 It was only shortly after Ricoeur’s Freud and Philosophy that Donald Davidson issued his first significant defense of “the ancient—and commonsense—position that rationalization [explanation by reasons] is a species of causal explanation.”3 Davidson’s arguments initiated a wave of philosophical discussion, one product of which has been a broad embrace of the idea that mental factors such as beliefs, decisions, and affective states can be causes; and Davidson would eventually point out that accepting this position obviates the need for a construal of Freud’s theories that avoids notions of explanation.4 I am interested in a stream of these discussions that hold, in the words of Tyler Burge, that “the probity of mentalistic causal explanation is deeper than the metaphysical considerations that call it into question.”5 Where positivism assumed what was taken to be a well-understood notion of causality as a basis for reconstructing of the phenomenon of explanation, many post-positivist philosophers have in contrast assumed what are taken to be culturally widespread and stable practices of explanation as a basis for reconstructing the notion of causality. That is, these philosophers understand causes as the sorts of relations that figure in the explanations that we offer and accept in both scientific investigations and in our everyday lives. And given that our ordinary practices uncontroversially allow reasons, broadly construed, to explain events (human actions and the events that these in turn produce), the idea that reasons can be causes is a natural concomitant of this approach. As Jennifer Hornsby has put the point, “Reason explanation is causal in a sense that rules out this idea of causality and explanatoriness coming apart .  .  . reason explanation is causal-explanation (where the hyphen signals that causality and explanatoriness enter the scene together, as it were).”6 The literature since Davidson contains several independent examples in the literature of post-positivist reconstructions of cause and causal explanation. Richard Miller takes explanation generally to be the “adequate description of

Suspicious Explanation: A Primer

25

underlying causes helping to bring about the phenomenon to be explained.”7 Miller argues that causality “has no informative and general analysis”: it is, rather, a “core concept,” possessed of a stable center that has been expanded over time.8 The concept’s “core” is constituted by a number of “elementary varieties” of the causation, including “pushing (for example, the wind’s blowing leaves), giving sensations or feelings (for example, a sting’s hurting) and motivating action (for example, fear’s motivating flight).”9 The concept has over the course of its history been extended to such factors as “entelechies, unconscious processes and structures, action at a distance, electromagnetic fields, and momentum treated as a physical factor involved in the causation of balance points and trajectories”; these extensions partake of historical contingency, and some have been controversial, and some temporary.10 One result of this position, which was particularly important for Miller, is that it allows for the basic notion of explanation as adequate causal description to operate across the natural sciences, the human sciences, and everyday life. It thus allows reasons to be explanatory in a sense that is not fundamentally different from the way that physical forces can be, and allows for consideration of historical explanations, such as figure in the works of Karl Marx, alongside natural-scientific explanations.11 Similarly, James Woodward grounds his account of causality in the idea that explanation and causal inference are “widespread, everyday activities in which most human beings, including people in other cultures quite different from our own, engage.”12 On his account “any explanation that proceeds by showing how an outcome depends (where the dependence in question is not logical or conceptual) on other variables or factors counts as causal.”13 He defends a manipulationist account according to which “the distinguishing feature of causal explanations, so conceived, is that they are explanations that furnish information that is potentially relevant to manipulation and control: they tell us how, if we were able to change the value of one or more variables, we could change the value of other variables.”14 And while explanations that appeal to reasons are not of independent interest to Woodward, his position undercuts the notion that explanations that deploy notions of agency make use of causal concepts in a different way than explanations that do not. My rationale for regarding reasons as possible causes is, then, that it is uncontroversially a part of our ordinary practices of explanation to think that people sometimes act for reasons, and to be a cause just is to figure in a (true) explanation of why something is the case. It is, of course, possible that our ordinary practices of explanation are massively erroneous, and that in fact

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people do not ever act for reasons. But this skeptical worry is not relevant to the project of trying to understand how explanations that appeal to reasons work.15 For the next part of the discussion I will need a few examples of well-formed explanations in both the nonhuman and the human spheres. In these examples, because signifies a claim to explanatoriness. The match is burning because it was struck. The match is burning because there is oxygen in the room. Smith died because he was shot through the heart. Smith died because he seduced Jones’s wife. I would like to make three comments on this list. First, I intend it to be accepted that all four statements are causal explanations, in spite of the fact that there are recognizable differences among the causes they describe: all identify one factor as the one that made the difference regarding some phenomenon’s being the case. Second, note that in the second example, what is identified as doing the explaining is a condition or a state of affairs—there being oxygen in the room—rather than an event or an action. On the notion of a cause as (following Woodward) a variable on which some outcome depends, states of affairs can perfectly well be causes, just because they can be such variables. And third, note that what I have offered is two cases in which a different explanans has been offered for the same explanandum. And it should be apparent that the differing explanations in question are not mutually exclusive: it might be the case that had the match not been struck it would not be burning, and also that were there no oxygen in the room it would not be burning. These examples should make it clear that not just any account of causes, even if true, will count as an explanation. Two commonsense observations about causality are that events typically have multiple “simultaneous” proximate causes (this is obvious in cases where conditions are variables in Woodward’s sense) and that anything that can itself be cited as a cause will itself be, or will have been, caused. Thus if explaining a phenomenon required an account of all of the causes that figure in that phenomenon’s being the case—all of the variables on which its being the case depended—then all explanations would have an infinite number of members. But in fact our ordinary practices of explanation allow single factors to be explanatory. Those practices thus incorporate some features which discriminate among the many causes of a phenomenon, singling out some of these as the ones that explain. As Larry Wright has remarked, “In some contexts, ‘Why the explosion’? is adequately answered by, ‘Some jackass

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left the burner on too high,’ and injecting esoteric microphysics would be an impertinent bore.”16 Miller adopts the term adequacy as a label for the property that makes certain causal claims into explanations. He argues that adequacy in explanation is both field-specific and pragmatic. Adequacy is field-specific in that within particular fields of inquiry, expectations are in place at any given time as to what an acceptable explanation is supposed to look like. Miller labels such expectations standard causal patterns, noting that these are in part “stopping rules,” rules which determine the point at which it is permissible to “break off the work of causal analysis with the remark that the factors described were sufficient in the actual circumstances.”17 And explanatory adequacy is pragmatic in that requests for explanation are frequently directed toward ends which are served by knowledge of only certain of the many causes of a phenomenon. In one of his examples, when asking what caused the car crash in which Jones, driving to a grocery late at night to buy cigarettes, is killed by a car driven by Robinson, it would make sense to say that the crash occurred because Robinson was drunk, or that he was driving at a high rate of speed in the wrong lane; but it would not be adequate to say that the crash occurred because Jones was a smoker, even though Jones’s habit made a necessary causal contribution to the crash. Miller argues that this is so because (or perhaps better, to the extent that) our interest in explaining the crash lies in a desire to reduce the number of such crashes. Knowing more about the role of drunkenness in the crash serves this aim, whereas “No one’s effort to avoid vehicular death is supported by knowledge that Jones would not have been killed if he had not smoked.”18 Miller draws a broad moral from examples of this sort. As complex as the activity of explanation is, we can appreciate its unity and utility “if we view it as the kind of description which is most fundamentally a basis for coping with reality, i.e. for promoting or preventing change.”19 In other words, “Explanation directs us toward those parts of the history of the world that are of most use in coping with the world. . . . This is the point of the activity as a whole.”20 This position is shared by Garfinkel, writing prior to Miller,21 and by Woodward writing afterward, as we have seen. The conclusion that matters for my purposes is that explanatory adequacy is contextual. The project of explanation is often governed by an interest that is only served by some of the true causal accounts that might be offered; and in every case great deal of the causal story of the phenomenon under investigation will, of necessity, be simply taken for granted.

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Agent explanations In this section I introduce the notion of the commonsense belief-desire explanation. We uncontroversially offer and accept claims like these: Jones shot Smith because he wanted Smith to be dead; Jones shot Smith because he believed that doing so would lead to Smith’s death; Jones shot Smith because he believed that Smith had seduced his wife; Jones shot Smith because he was gripped by uncontrollable rage. In my usage belief-desire explanation refers to any explanation that identifies as explanatory some factor within the psychology of an agent. We commonsensically accept that such things as beliefs, desires, intentions, ends, and feelings can be causes in Woodward’s sense—that is, that these can be the crucial variables on which actions, and the events that these in turn cause, depend. We understand that such factors function as causes only when embedded in larger complexes: for example, Jones’s desire that Smith be dead would not have caused him to shoot Smith unless he also believed that shooting Smith would lead to his death. But here as elsewhere, context determines which causes will count as explanatory. For some explanatory purposes it will suffice to know why Jones desired Smith’s death; for others, what he believed about the effects of firearms. It will be useful at this point for me to connect my discussion to a current topic in the cognitive sciences. Cognitive scientists commonly use the term Theory of Mind (ToM) to refer to the ability to represent to ourselves the contents of other minds (whether human or not). Matt Rossano, for example, describes ToM as “a form of causal attribution whereby an organism assigns another’s action to an internal state such as a belief, a desire, or an intention.”22 ToM makes it possible for us to infer (whether correctly or incorrectly) the emotional states or intentions of other organisms from physical cues such as facial expression or bodily movement; it also makes it possible for us to entertain complex thoughts regarding the mental dynamics of other agents, either concretely (“I can see that she has just realized that what her mother is saying has profound consequences for her feelings about her father”) or in the abstract (“whoever killed Smith wanted to cover his tracks”). I take it that ToM is the ground of commonsense belief-desire explanations regarding other persons. And connecting ToM and belief-desire explanations will facilitate the introduction of a theoretically powerful notion: that just as, in virtue of the degree of abstraction of which we are capable, we are capable of extending ToM to entities other than human

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persons, so too we are also capable of extending the range of belief-desire explanations beyond human persons.

Ethical charge Stewart Garfinkel is one of many authors who observe that some explanations condemn and others justify.23 Consider the following examples: Smith died because Jones is a vindictive bastard. Harry left Sally at the altar because he was hit by a city bus. I laughed just now because I misheard what you said. Each of these explanations condemns or justifies in virtue of the cause that it singles out as explanatory. The causes are in each case relevant to the project of making an evaluative judgment regarding some agent. The first explanation condemns by attributing to Smith a bad characteristic possessing sufficient force within his overall personality as to cause him to act. The second justifies by suggesting that Harry’s (bad) action took place for reasons outside of his control. And the third justifies by ascribing my action to a non-culpable cognitive error rather than, say, a desire to mock or to hurt. This idea that explanations can condemn or justify should hardly be controversial; it regularly informs not only our practices in offering explanations but our interests in seeking them out, as for instance when we want to know whether or not Jones shot Smith because he wanted him to be dead. Rather than use the language of justification and condemnation, I prefer to speak of explanations generating ethical charge. I have two reasons for this bit of terminology. First, the bare notion of an “explanation that condemns” obscures the fact that the judgments that an explanation motivates will often depend on the contingent value commitments of its audience. And second, explanations can suggest that some negative judgment is called for, but fail to provide an avenue for the condemnation of specific persons. To the first point: explanations generate ethical charge primarily by associating agents with phenomena that are valued positively or negatively. This association can be a matter of the simple attribution of a characteristic to a person, but in more interesting cases it assumes the form of claiming that an action was caused by this characteristic rather than some other imaginable cause. I use the term ethical rather than moral to signal that the valuations at issue may be specific

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to particular groups. A community of white supremacists, for example, will (I suppose) regard any person’s commitment to racial equality as bad, at least in the sense that such persons cannot be trusted to promote the community’s defining cause; thus for such a community, the claim that Senator Bedfellow voted against the bill because he is committed to racial equality would generate negative ethical charge, whereas it would not do this for persons not committed to a racist ideology. To the second point: if some explanations condemn specific persons, others fall short of this. Consider, for example, the claim that Brown died because somebody wanted the contents of his wallet. This explanation generates ethical charge because it suggests that condemnation is appropriate, but it leaves open the question of who is to be condemned. What makes such a situation possible is the degree of abstraction of which we are capable in our use of ToM. Boyer describes two components of this capacity for abstraction. First, “in many situations our intuitive system can detect this generic form of agency [one that does not discriminate between, say, humans and animals] without having a description of what kind of agent is around”; and second, ToM is capable of operating in decoupled mode, producing inferences about the possible contents of other minds “disengaged from actual external inputs from the environment or external output in behavior.”24 Because we have this capacity for the abstract use of ToM, we are capable of offering and accepting complex and ethically charged belief-desire explanations without having any idea of whom, or even what sort of agent, we are talking about.

Large-scale social phenomena Thus far the explanations with which I have been concerned have been small in scale, and the agent explanations I have used as examples have described the workings of individual minds. The introduction of large-scale social phenomena complicates the project of explanation. There may be large-scale social phenomena that depend, in Woodward’s sense, on complexes of beliefs and desires within specific individuals—kings, CEOs, or “world-historical figures”—and in such cases, an agent explanation may straightforwardly explain the phenomenon (so, for example, one might say that several hundred thousand Iraqis died violent deaths because of some factor within the mind of the US president). But it is plausible that very many large-scale social phenomena depend on the

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actions of no individual persons—that each person involved makes such a small causal contribution that their having acted differently would make no effective difference. This supposition generates an explanatory puzzle: granted that largescale social phenomena are the product of the actions of human beings, the question is what role commonsense appeals to mental factors—ToM—can play in their explanation. And this issue is closely related to the question of whether, and to what extent, explanations of large-scale social phenomena can generate ethical charge. I want to describe four different strategies for grappling with this issue. Each of these strategies applies ToM to the project of explaining large-scale social phenomena in a different way. One embeds ToM in larger causal structures; the remaining three operate by scaling up the explanatory range of ToM. In addition to having different characters as causal explanations, these four strategies generate ethical charge in different ways. The first way to apply ToM to the explanation of large-scale social phenomenon is, I take it, the primary strategy that is used in the social sciences. This strategy assumes that the actions of individual persons are profoundly shaped by the contexts in which they choose among competing courses of action (contexts of decision)—profoundly enough that those actions often depend on specific features of those contexts. Without denying the causal role played by beliefs and desires, one can claim that what explains a person’s action is some aspect of the context of decision—so, for example, Jones shot Smith because there was nobody around to witness the deed, or Russell robbed the store because his children were starving.25 On the plausible assumption that contexts of decision can be shared across multiple individuals, this position opens the possibility that some one feature of a broadly shared context of decision explains the actions of many persons—say, the peasants revolted because of the food shortage. And even where it is clear that a large-scale social phenomenon is a result of different individuals acting differently from each other, reference to the role of contexts of decision offers the possibility of drastically reducing the number of causes that would be required to explain large-scale social phenomena. It is certainly possible that the large number of persons whose actions cause some large-scale social phenomena fall into a smaller number of groups subject to broadly similar contexts of decision; so in place of a description of the beliefs and desires of every one of these individuals, a description of conditions that characterize a much smaller number of contexts of decision may be explanatory.

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This “embedding” strategy can take for granted everything that ToM says about how persons make the decisions they do, in the same way that one might take for granted that a match was struck when saying that it is burning because the room contains oxygen.26 On this approach the kind of information one needs to explain a large-scale social phenomenon is not information concerning mental states or processes, but rather information about matters external to human minds.27 Both Adam Smith’s theory of the “invisible hand” and Marx’s historical materialism are, I take it, a good illustration of this position.28 What ToM says about the workings of human minds serves as background for the theories, which are directly concerned with identifying ways in which contexts of decision are themselves shaped. Smith’s phrase invisible hand refers to a tendency postulated by the theory for the actions of some persons to shape others’ contexts of decision in ways that fall into certain patterns which, over time, produce stability in the operation of the marketplace. ToM is embedded within the theory in the sense that the theory assumes the operation of minds. But the theory does not offer belief-desire explanations for the tendency toward stability; rather, it aims to show “how some overall pattern or design, which one would have thought had to be produced by an individual’s or group’s successful attempt to realize the pattern, instead was produced and maintained by a process that in no way had the overall pattern or design ‘in mind,’” to use the words of Robert Nozick.29 Now this position raises the possibility that some recognizably bad social conditions might be such that no human persons deserve condemnation for their existence, because no human persons either intend that their actions shall produce them or are in fact aware that they will do so. In my terminology, this position makes possible explanations of uncontroversially bad social conditions that acknowledge the causal role played by persons but are devoid of ethical charge. I will return to this point in consideration of Marx’s historical materialism in the next chapter. The second and the two remaining strategies I will discuss here scale up the explanatory range of ToM. I say that this explanatory range is “scaled up” when phenomena that are too large to be caused by some belief-desire complex within the mind of an individual agent are nevertheless explained by way of some such locution as “because X wanted Y.” The most straightforward strategy for scaling up the explanatory range of ToM is by aggregation or simple recursion. It is certainly possible for different persons to be moved to action by the same reasons. So in some circumstances one can plausibly explain the actions of some large number of persons by offering a commonsense belief-desire explanation

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of the actions of one individual, and then simply applying this explanation to all. So, for example, one can explain the destructive actions of a mob by saying that each member of the mob was moved by outrage at some recent event. Or consider a casual example from William Connolly: Early in the presidential campaign of 2004, George W. Bush’s entourage sped around a NASCAR track in front of 100,000 fans. Bush emerged from the only SUV in the entourage to an incredible roar of approval. The crowd responded to the SUV as a symbol of disdain for womanly ecologists, safety advocates, supporters of fuel economy, worry-warts about global warming, weak-willed pluralists, and supporters of international accords such as the Kyoto Treaty.30

Here Connolly explains a large-scale social phenomenon—a crowd’s roar—as the product of a single psychological complex. If such an explanation can be true of any one person in the crowd, it would seem to follow that it could also be true of enough persons to explain the roar. Such explanations can, I think, be adequate in Miller’s sense, just because there are social phenomena that are plausibly the product of the similar actions of large numbers of persons. And it should be obvious that such explanations can generate ethical charge, as I take it that Connolly’s example will do for, say, “womanly ecologists.” The third strategy introduces additional complexity to belief-desire explanations by postulating shared intentionality. If there are groups of persons whose activities run in parallel more or less accidentally (crowds or mobs), a coalition is a group of persons whose activities are intentionally coordinated. The device of the coalition allows for a single complex of reasons to explain phenomena that would be beyond the reach of any single person: it makes possible the claim that the phenomenon is the product of an agreement by many persons to act together toward an end. Coalitional explanations are thus a kind of belief-desire explanation which allows large-scale social phenomena to be explained as the intended results of human action, even in cases where no one person’s intentions could be explanatory. It should be fairly clear that since coalitional explanations just are reason or belief-desire explanations, they retain the full ability of such explanations to generate ethical charge. If it would be bad for an individual person to work toward a specific end (say, white supremacy, or profiting from the sufferings of the poor), other things being equal, it is bad for several individuals to work together toward that end. The fourth strategy for applying ToM to the explanation of large-scale social phenomena differs from the others in that it applies ToM to entities other than human persons, treating these as agents for the purposes of explanation. I want

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to distinguish two variants of this strategy. On the one hand, the heuristic variant uses the language of agency as a kind of “shorthand” for complex processes involving the actions of many human beings.31 And on the other hand, the exotic variant employs agential notions univocally, postulating agents who are not human persons. My purpose in introducing these two variants immediately has to do with the subtle and troubled relationship between them, a relationship that is of crucial importance for my project. Consider the following explanations: Christianity spread throughout Europe because God wanted it to. There are many young women around because the college decided to go co-ed. The United States invaded Iraq because of the cowardice of the media. Women undergo initiation rituals because that is how society makes them subservient. The first example presents a straightforward belief-desire explanation for a large-scale social phenomenon, postulating an agent of the right scale— God—to cause the explanandum singlehandedly. The following two are more naturally interpreted as making heuristic use of the language of agency. They present the idea that “the college” or “the media” are agents, but arguably position the explanation constructed around this idea as a “stand-in” for a different explanation. And I intend the fourth to be ambiguous between the two variants. Three claims about the two variants are important for my purposes. First, they differ with respect to how and even whether they explain. Second, they differ with respect to how they generate ethical charge. And third, as a consequence of these differences, explanations that are ambiguous in the manner of my fourth example present some particularly intractable difficulties regarding interpretation and critical assessment. A passage from Larry Wright will be of help in unpacking these claims. In his 1976 book Teleological Explanations, Wright described explanations that ascribe goal-directed behavior to nonhuman phenomena as metaphors. Regarding such explanations as metaphors both legitimates them for explanatory purposes and highlights the fact that they cannot be taken to be entirely sufficient as presented. Like the more orthodox perceptual aids, metaphors can be good, bad, or pernicious depending on whether they clarify, obscure, or delude. .  .  . It is sometimes not clear which of the inferences licensed by the paradigmatic application of a term are justifiably drawn from the application of that term in a specific instance of metaphorical extension. Virtually any remotely plausible

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metaphor will permit some of the ordinary inferences; and this is the mechanism of insight. But since a metaphor is by definition not a standard, literal application of the term in question, it follows logically that some of the inferences ordinarily explicit in the application of the term are vitiated by the extraordinary context. The value and danger of a metaphor in exposition is crucially dependent on the ease with which we can distinguish the inferences it licenses from those it does not.32

My preference is to describe heuristic big-agent explanations—so explanations that describe big, nonhuman entities as acting for reasons—as models rather than metaphors, because the “standing-in” relationship in which I am interested holds not between single terms but between entire explanations. And if there is a sense in which making sense of this “standing-in” relationship calls for the substitution of literal for metaphorical uses of language, I think it clearer to spell things out at greater length. On my view, making sense of the heuristic use of agential language requires an “unpacking” or translation from the language of “big” agency into language describing the actions of human persons. But as I will make clear below, I think that Wright’s diagnosis of the situation presented by the metaphorical construal of teleological language survives this terminological change unscathed. So an exotic-agent explanation of a large-scale social phenomenon can postulate the existence of some complex of beliefs and desires within an agent who is of the right scale (God, capital or capitalism, the West, society) to bring it about. Exotic-agent explanations are (or at least can be) commonsensical beliefdesire explanations. But an exotic-agent explanation for a large-scale social phenomenon, whether the exotic agent in question is a nonhuman supernatural being (God), a transhuman collectivity (the West), or an abstraction (capital), naturally raises questions about the role of the individual human agents whose actions proximately bring that phenomenon about: specifically, about the status of the reasons they have for acting as they do. I will return to this issue below. In contrast, what a heuristic-agent explanation presents as an explanatory factor is not a cause or a set of causes, but rather non-actual causes that “stand in” for causes that are not described. Our ordinary practices of giving and assessing explanations fairly clearly permit these explanations to actually explain, at least in some cases. But if the proffered explanations do not actually describe—do not pretend to describe—the actual causes of the phenomenon to be explained, then there is a puzzle about whether and how it makes sense to classify heuristicagent explanations as explanations at all.

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Wright’s reflections point the way to the resolution of this puzzle. In the second example above, I can easily supply for myself some account of the causal processes for which reference to the “college deciding” stands in. I take it that a college will by nature have internal processes the purpose of which is to make it possible for multiple persons to make decisions together that shall determine the policies of the institution. It requires practically no effort on my part to supply this translation, and in fact it may even escape my attention that I am even doing so. So it seems to me that accepting the claim that “the college decided” as an explanation is, as it were, a matter of extending a courtesy: I regard it as an explanation just because the sort of explanation for which that claim “stands in” is sufficiently obvious. The legitimacy of this kind of “shorthand” usage, then, I take to be dependent on the ease with which the one can produce for oneself a translation in terms of actual causes. This way of solving the puzzle of whether heuristic-agent explanations explain naturally motivates worries concerning cases in which it is not a trivial matter to translate “big-agent” language into terms that do not imply exotic agency. In my view this worry is a real one that bears remembering. The shorthand usage of agential language effectively “offloads” the task of generating an actual explanation (to the reader, or more generally, to the recipient of the explanation) in the same way that a shorthand transcription offloads the task of reconstructing the discourse it notates. The reader faced with a heuristic-agent explanation who finds herself unable to easily translate the language of “big agency” into other terms, then, is faced with a problem; for she does not actually have the actual explanation for which the heuristic explanation “stands in” available for her consideration. I think it is part of our standard practices of giving and receiving explanations to be generous with respect to heuristic-agent explanations, extending the courtesy I have described in at least some cases in which no particular translation is obvious. But I also take it that this generosity has limits. It is obvious to all of us, I take it, that not all chains of causes and effects can legitimately be “modeled” by descriptions of goings-on within a single mind. But I take it that it is a deeply unsettled question just which chains can be modeled in this way. The net result, in my view, is that heuristic-agent explanations are naturally unstable: in all but those cases in which translation into other terms is trivially obvious, the ability of readers to derive explanatory value from these and to critically assess them will vary considerably from one person, and one interpretive context, to the next.

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To the extent that exotic agents can have the qualities to which ethical evaluation attends, exotic-agent explanations allow for the straightforward generation of ethical charge. Gods, for example, can be benevolent or wicked, can act from generosity or self-interest, and can intend that their actions shall bring about good or bad states of affairs; and so too can nations, classes, races, and other human groups, when these are regarded as possessed of agency in themselves. And an exotic-agent explanation can provide for a straightforward application of this charge by motivating ethical judgments concerning these exotic agents. But what is considerably less straightforward is the bearing of this ethical charge on the human persons whose actions proximately cause the largescale social phenomenon in question. It is certainly possible for an explanation to stipulate that an exotic agent of sufficient power (Satan, say) simply deceives human persons such that they innocently accomplish his wicked ends; in such a case the explanation motivates the ethical condemnation of an exotic agent while insulating human persons from such condemnation. But there is also a wide variety of ways in which the ethical evaluation that is generated by reference to an exotic agent can be transmitted to human persons, the most straightforward of which is simply the claim that human persons share the intentions of the exotic agent (some persons might be willing “agents of Satan”). Heuristic big-agent explanations are particularly interesting in that they have the same ability to generate ethical charge as do exotic-agent explanations, but inasmuch as they offload the translation of the language of exotic agency into other terms, they also offload the task of applying this charge. Consider, for example, a heuristic construal of my fourth example above, according to which “society” refers to a large and complex social phenomenon. I take it that the explanation invites persons who regard female subjugation as a bad thing to imagine a bad agent. But just as this heuristic construal hands to the reader the task of translating the causal claims about that agent into claims about human actions, so too it generates for her the question of whether and how the badness of society itself attaches to those human persons that constitute it. In cases in which it is a trivial matter to translate a heuristic-agent explanation into claims about the actions of human persons, I take it that it may be a similarly trivial matter to answer this question. But in cases in which no such translation is obvious, I take it that no such answer will be obvious. And it is important for my purposes to note that one feature of such cases is that it will not be clear that the human persons involved are insulated from the evaluation that the heuristic use of the language of agency motivates. In other words, heuristic-agent explanations will

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often generate ethical charge and then leave deeply unsettled the question of whether and how that charge attaches to specific human persons. Finally, it should be apparent that in cases where an explanation is ambiguous as regards its use of agential language—ambiguous, specifically, as between exotic and heuristic talk of “big agents”—the difficulties I have described are compounded. This sort of ambiguity will render unclear whether what is on offer is actually an explanation or a stand-in for one; it will also render unclear whether the ethical judgments that the language of agency motivates are to be applied directly to a “big agent” or whether, on the contrary, these are to be translated into ethical judgments concerning human persons. While I will examine the case of Marx in detail in the next chapter, for present purposes a passage from Capital will be useful: Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society. To the outcry as to the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of overwork, it answers: Ought these to trouble us since they increase our profits?33

Suppose that this passage has value as an explanation: suppose, that is, that it explains why the high visibility of suffering among industrial workers does not reliably lead to voluntary reforms on the part of factory owners. What I want to note is that a significant amount of intellectual work takes place prior to the point at which it becomes necessary to distinguish between an exotic and a heuristic interpretation of Marx’s language. Both variants invoke the image of an agent whose action causes (or, in this case, whose lack of action preserves) the large-scale social phenomenon in question; and for both variants this invocation generates ethical charge. Now the way I have framed up the difference between these two styles supports the idea that one ought not to think that one actually has an explanation to consider (and, a fortiori, ought not to think that one is in a position to assess its merits) until one has discerned whether the language ascribing reasoning and ethically charged attitudes to capital is being used exotically or heuristically, because that difference has immense consequences regarding just what causes the explanation postulates. But it seems to me that our ordinary practices of giving and receiving explanations are not so finely calibrated as to be reliably sensitive to this distinction. That is, it seems to me that when faced with explanations that are ambiguous in the manner at issue, we often fail to notice this ambiguity in a particularly noteworthy way: we accept the language of “big agency” as explanatory without translation, while at the same time failing

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to notice that doing so makes sense only if there is in fact the exotic agent in question. I will return to this issue in the next section. Before closing this initial discussion I want to note that thus far I have said little about one important component of my understanding of suspicious explanations, “hiddenness.” In fact I think that there is not much to be said about hiddenness in the abstract, beyond my general observation that suspicious explanations generally claim that the available evidence is misleading in some way. In this book I will describe specific forms that such claims assume. I have touched, very briefly, on three such forms. Two of these are what Nozick termed hidden hand explanations: they involve the postulation of intentional deception, one on the part of parties to a conspiracy, and the second on the part of exotic agents such as Satan.34 The third is the “invisible hand” type of explanation that figures in classical economic theories, according to which large-scale social phenomena that would appear (in some sense) to be the results of intentional activity in fact are not. I will return briefly to the theme of hiddenness in the final section of this chapter. After that, the forms of hiddenness I will explore will be those on offer from the masters of suspicion.

The conflict of explanations In the previous section I drew on claims regarding the existence of a set of common practices around the construction of explanations. In this section I want to draw on similar claims regarding a set of common practices around the assessment of explanations. My goal is to set the stage for a discussion of the dynamics surrounding the assessment of suspicious explanations, dynamics that matter not only for deciding for or against such explanations, but also for understanding how they constitute a distinct and interesting explanatory type. Uncontroversially, our estimations of what is and is not the case are very often predicated on our accepting or rejecting certain explanations. For example, I may become convinced that my car’s battery is drained because I become convinced that my car does not start because its battery is drained; likewise, I might become convinced that Jones killed Smith because I become convinced that Smith died because Jones shot him. In other words, explanation seems central to a form of inference. I will adopt the term inference to the best explanation, coined by Gilbert Harman in 1965 and commonly referred to in the literature by its acronym IBE, as my label for this inferential practice.35 “In making this

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inference,” Harman claimed, “one infers, from the fact that a certain hypothesis would explain the evidence, to the truth of that hypothesis.” But aside from simply licensing this inference, IBE incorporates procedures whereby we assess the value of explanations, and that explanation which has the highest value is the one that figures in the inference: “one infers, from the premise that a given hypothesis would provide a ‘better’ explanation for the evidence than would any other hypothesis, to the conclusion that the given hypothesis is true.”36 An extensive literature, whose beginnings long predate Harman’s essay, has attempted to unpack and formalize the practices whereby we assess the value of explanations. A relatively sparse set of principles from this literature is useful for my purposes. My position will be that explanatory value—that characteristic that figures in judgments of the relative “goodness” of explanations, and so is central to IBE—is a product of two more fundamental characteristics, which I will term explanatory power and plausibility. Both the question of just what these characteristics are and that of how they figure in assessments of explanatory value are troubled ones, and what I will say here will leave many questions unanswered (and will fall far short of the level of precision with which they are treated in my sources). In order to describe these two characteristics I will draw on two distinct but overlapping proposals, Bayesianism and Peter Lipton’s explanationism. My position will, depending on your point of view, either synthesize these two proposals or simply ignore the very real differences between them; in any case I follow Lipton in thinking that “the Bayesian and the explanationist should be friends.”37 Bayesianism takes its name from the work of Thomas Bayes, a seventeenthcentury mathematician and clergyman who first formulated what is now called Bayes’s theorem.38 While formally, Bayes’s theorem is a formula for calculating the degree to which a body of evidence supports a hypothesis, Bayesians frequently describe Bayesian calculation as a method for assessing the likelihood of a hypothesis’ being true and for determining which of several competing hypotheses are to be preferred as candidates for belief. As James Stone puts the point, Bayes’s theorem is “a rational basis for believing things that are probably true, and for disbelieving things that are probably false.”39 The theorem turns around quantified assessments of probability on a scale of 0 to 1. A value of 0.5 represents an equal probability of something’s being the case as of its not being the case (so, say, the probability that a tossed coin will land heads or tails up); values lower than this will represent lower probability, and higher will represent higher. Thus assuming a jar containing one white and

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nine black marbles, the probability of a blind draw yielding a white marble will be 0.1, and the probability of a black marble will be 0.9. Bayes’s theorem is a method for deriving the conditional probability of a hypothesis’ being true—that is, the probability of its being true given a particular evidence base. A usable formulation of the theorem is the following: P ( h | e) =

P (e | h ) ⋅ P (h ) P (e)

The formula establishes a value for P(h|e), the posterior probability of the hypothesis, or the probability (P) of the hypothesis (h) on a given body of evidence (e). In order to do so, it performs a calculation on three assessments of probability. The first two factors are assessments of the probability of the evidence. P(e) is the prior probability of the evidence, or its probability absent consideration of the truth or falsity of the hypothesis; P(e|h) is the posterior probability of the evidence, or its probability if the hypothesis is true. The third factor, P(h), is the prior probability of the hypothesis, or the probability of the hypothesis absent consideration of its bearing on the evidence. All of these assessments take place against background knowledge, or things taken to be the case independently of either the truth or falsity of the hypothesis or the occurrence of the evidence (this will be crucial for a later stage of my discussion).40 Thus the theorem calculates the posterior probability of the hypothesis by multiplying the prior probability of the hypothesis by the posterior probability of the evidence and dividing this result by the prior probability of the evidence. In plainer language, the theorem presents the probability that a hypothesis is true, given a particular body of evidence, as a product of balancing off two different assessments. The first of these (P(e|h)/P(e)) reflects the predictive power of the hypothesis, or the extent to which its truth would make the evidence more probable. And the second (P(h)) asks how probable it is that the hypothesis is likely to be true on background knowledge alone. So a hypothesis is more likely to be true as it makes the evidence more likely to be the case, but this likelihood is also affected by its initial probability on background knowledge alone. It is a commonplace among defenders of Bayesianism that the theorem is likely to be useful for the task of comparing hypotheses to each other regarding probability more often than for the task of establishing the conditional probability of hypotheses in isolation.41 This is because the cases in which we can justifiably be confident in assigning concrete prior probabilities are relatively rare, but considerably less rare will be cases in which we can be justifiably

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confident in thinking that some probability connected to one hypothesis is higher or lower than that of a competitor. James Stone’s “forkandles” example highlights the role played by P(h), the prior probability of the hypothesis, in many such comparisons.42 In the example a customer enters a shop and makes a verbal request of the shopkeeper. The acoustic data or evidence with which the shopkeeper is presented is thoroughly ambiguous: the customer’s utterance can be interpreted as a request for either four candles or fork handles. In the example the shopkeeper interprets the customer’s utterance as a request for four candles, and his reasons for doing so can be cast as an application of Bayes’s theorem. Antecedently (on background knowledge) the shopkeeper regards the notion that any given customer intends to request (any number of) candles as more probable than the idea that he intends to request fork handles. Given that both hypotheses have about the same degree of predictive power—the probability that the customer would produce the acoustic signal in question is roughly equivalent on both hypotheses—it is this difference in prior probability that leads the shopkeeper, rationally, to conclude that it is more probable that the customer intended to request four candles than fork handles. And the shopkeeper, again rationally, acts on this conclusion by producing four candles (rationally, but not infallibly: Stone notes that were you in fact to request fork handles of any given shopkeeper, you might expect to be handed four candles). Bayesianism has its critics. One reason for skepticism about the adequacy of the position as an account of IBE is that in some clear cases, the predictive power around which Bayesian assessment turns has no recognizable explanatory value. Consider a case based on the blind marble draw that I described above. Suppose we observe a black marble drawn, and consider the hypothesis that the vase contained nine black and one white marbles. If that hypothesis generates a high probability that a black marble would be drawn, it does not seem to explain why a black marble was in fact drawn. In this case the Bayesian inference seems at the same time unimpeachable and irrelevant to considerations of explanatory value. Motivated partly by observations of this sort, Lipton attempts to place explanatory considerations at the heart of an account of IBE. The central claim of his Inference to the Best Explanation is that explanatory considerations are a guide to inference or, in his vocabulary, that loveliness is a guide to likeliness.43 Lipton favors a model of IBE as a two-stage process. In the first stage, “a non-explanatory notion of likeliness plays a role in restricting membership in the initial set of potential explanations”; this stage is an “epistemic filter” that depends on judgments of plausibility, whose purpose is to weed out “all sorts

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of crazy explanations nobody would seriously consider” based on an initial judgment of their fit with background knowledge.44 In the second stage, the members of this set are compared with respect to an irreducibly explanatory virtue—“loveliness”—with the “loveliest” explanation being favored as that most likely to be true. Thus Lipton considers “inference to the loveliest potential explanation” a useful synonym for IBE.45 Now having claimed that the second stage of assessment attends to virtues beyond predictive power, Lipton acknowledges that it is difficult to say with precision what “loveliness” amounts to.46 In general terms his view is that the loveliest explanation is “the explanation that would, if true, provide the deepest understanding.”47 In another place he identifies explanatory loveliness with the interest-relativity of explanations generally, arguing that a request for explanation is often motivated by a desire to know why something (a fact) is the case rather than something else (a foil). Thus what counts as a lovely explanation “depends on one’s interests, but this cashes out into the question of whether the cited cause provides any explanation at all of the contrast that expresses a particular interest,” and IBE could perhaps better be described as inference to the “Best Contrastive Explanation.”48 And later still he argues that a set of commonly acknowledged inferential virtues are also explanatory virtues: that “mechanism, precision, scope, simplicity, fertility or fruitfulness, and fit with background beliefs” increase the loveliness of explanations in which they figure.49 Overall Lipton finds that “it is amazingly difficult to give a principled description of the way we weigh evidence. We may be very good at it, but we are miserable at describing how it is done, even in broad outline.”50 There is considerable overlap between the Bayesian and the explanationist accounts. Both present the inference in question as the product of two distinct assessments. One of these seems to me to be basically the same on the two positions: I follow Wesley Salmon in thinking that “a judgment concerning the plausibility of a hypothesis represents an evaluation of the prior probability of that hypothesis. It involves questions about how well a given hypothesis fits with the rest of what we know.”51 And if the two positions offer accounts of the specific content of the virtue to which the second assessment attends, it is possible that the accounts are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. In the second edition of Inference to the Best Explanation, responding to Bayesian criticisms, Lipton suggests as much, remarking that “even if Bayesianism gave the mechanics of belief revision [i.e., inference], Inference to the Best Explanation might yet illuminate its psychology.”52 I take it that this remark licenses regarding Bayesian predictive power as a useful model of loveliness.

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Moreover, the roles played by the two elements in Bayesianism and explanationism are similar. I think it fairly safe to say that on both positions considerations of plausibility, understood in generally Bayesian terms, matter, and that sufficiently low plausibility will motivate rejection. And on both accounts a high assessment of the second characteristic (predictive power or loveliness) increases our estimation of an explanation’s goodness, and so inclines us in the direction of regarding it as true. And if the two notions are conceptually distinguishable, it is not at all clear that making sense of the appeal of any given explanation requires adopting a general policy of attending only to one or the other. Explanationism’s guiding claim does not deny that nonexplanatory considerations, such as assessments of probability, play a role in IBE. Neither does Lipton pretend to offer any kind of general formula for understanding when our ordinary practices attend to explanatory rather than probabilistic considerations. The third formal similarity between the two positions is that both present explanatory assessment as a two-part or two-place process. Where Bayesianism balances off prior probability against predictive power, explanationism positions likelihood as an “epistemic filter” preceding assessments of loveliness; and on both positions, it is the outcome of these two assessments that yields judgments of explanatory value. Here again, it is not clear to me that the need, if there always is one, to choose between Lipton’s two-stage and Bayesianism’s calculative models is one that makes itself felt right at the outset of understanding our practices of explanatory inference. It seems to me that the two models suit different cases differently: while there are cases in which we reject “crazy” explanations without even considering their explanatory power, there are other cases in which explanatory power motivates us to accept claims that we regard as initially implausible. The position I will adopt going forward, then, is that our ordinary practices of assessing explanations attend to considerations of explanatory power and considerations of plausibility, with our overall assessments of explanatory value bringing these two considerations into relationship with each other. The sharpest internal tension that this synthesis incorporates has to do with the question of whether explanatory power can be understood entirely in terms of predictive power; and given that I do not decide between the Bayesian or the explanationist positions, my references to explanatory power will sometimes (more often) read as more Bayesian and sometimes (less often) as more explanationist.

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I have a reason for thinking that my account can afford not to resolve this internal tension. Consider a passing remark by Lipton on conspiracy theories: An explanation can also be very lovely without being likely. Perhaps some conspiracy theories provide examples of this. By showing that many apparently unrelated events flow from a single source and many apparent coincidences are really related, such a theory may have considerable explanatory power. If only it were true, it would provide a very good explanation. That is, it is lovely. At the same time, such an explanation may be very unlikely, accepted only by those whose ability to weigh evidence has been compromised by paranoia.53

Lipton does not expand on this remark, but I take the thought it expresses to be important as a template for my project in this book. I think that I can afford an unresolved notion of explanatory power because I think that for the critical assessment of suspicious explanations, considerations of plausibility are more deserving of careful attention than are considerations of explanatory power. This is because, to put it bluntly, explanatory power by itself, whether understood in Bayesian or explanationist terms, is cheap. No more is required to construct explanations that are merely powerful than a bit of imagination. Particularly on a Bayesian construal of explanatory power, “because God made it so” is perhaps the most powerful explanation of anything whatsoever; close behind are “because the aliens made it so” and “because They made it so” (where “They” refers, quite simply, to some otherwise unidentified agents with the power to make it so). What is considerably more difficult is to combine explanatory power with plausibility. And the dynamics of assessing plausibility, which might at first blush seem relatively straightforward, are in fact anything but, as I hope to show in the following chapters.

The “Cunning of Reason” In the next three chapters I will be reconstructing the works of the masters of suspicion as attempts to explain large-scale social phenomena in ways that fit my category of suspicious explanation. My exposition will largely take the form of identifying the relevant devices in the works of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud: that is, the devices that make possible the explanation of large-scale social phenomena, that postulate “hidden” explanatory factors, and that generate ethical charge. One more piece of stage-setting remains to be done. Earlier I described the conspiracy theory as a distinct type of suspicious explanation, one whose overall

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accessibility makes it a paradigm or attractor position within the overall category. The signature of the conspiracy theory is a particular device—the coalition—for “scaling up” belief-desire explanations such that they can be applied to largescale social phenomena. I want now to introduce a second, somewhat more recondite paradigm. This paradigm employs a different device for scaling up belief-desire explanations, one that I have mentioned above: the postulation of exotic agency. Although the term transhuman agency explanation would serve well enough, to emphasize the historical specificity of the paradigm in relation to the work of the masters I will refer to it as vulgar Hegelianism. Vulgar Hegelianism as I understand it is prominently on display in Hegel’s popularization of his philosophical system, the 1830 Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Therein Hegel claimed that “world history is the record of Geist’s efforts to attain knowledge of what it is in itself.”54 Elsewhere he described the spirits of individual nations as successive embodiments or developmental stages of Geist: Geist is free; and the aim of [the world spirit] in world history is to realize its essence and to obtain the prerogative of freedom. Its activity is that of knowing and recognizing itself, but it accomplishes this in gradual stages rather than at a single step. Each new individual national spirit represents a new stage in the conquering march of the world spirit as it wins its way to consciousness and freedom.55

In these lectures Hegel introduced the crucial idea of the “cunning of reason.” This idea treats “reason,” or the “Idea,” as an entity that manipulates human beings such that their actions serve its ends: Particular interests contest with one another, and some are destroyed in the process. But it is from this very conflict and destruction of particular things that the universal emerges, and it remains unscathed itself. For it is not the universal Idea which enters into opposition, conflict, and danger; it keeps itself in the background, untouched and unharmed, and sends forth the particular interests of passion to fight and wear itself out in its stead. It is what we may call the cunning of reason that it sets the passions to work in its service, so that the agents by which it gives itself existence must pay the penalty and suffer the loss.56

Later in the lectures Hegel cast this conception into the language of intentionality and purpose: This relationship between the subjective consciousness and the universal substance is such that the actions of human beings in the history of the world

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produce an effect altogether different from what they themselves intend and accomplish, from what they immediately recognize and desire. Their own interest is gratified; but at the same time, they accomplish a further purpose, a purpose which was indeed implicit in their own actions but was not part of their conscious intentions.57

Sydney Hook noted that a passage from Hegel’s Encylopädie that compares the abilities of God and “reason” to direct human actions caught the attention of Karl Marx: Reason is as cunning as it is powerful. . . . Divine Providence may be said to stand to the world and its process in the capacity of absolute cunning. God lets men direct their particular passions and interests as they please; but the result is the accomplishment of—not their plans, but His, and these differ decidedly from the ends primarily sought by those whom He employs.58

I take it that taken at face value, these passages postulate the existence of exotic agents—Geist, reason, the Idea, God—for the purpose of explaining the course of human history. The passages claim that human actions are the proximate cause of large-scale events in history, events that are not the intended result of those actions on the part of the humans who perform them but are intended by the exotic “big” agents. I will term this sort of explanation vulgar Hegelianism (repurposing a coinage of Charles Taylor’s59) in acknowledgment that Hegel’s contemporary interpreters now commonly take his use of the language of agency to be heuristic—as, for example, when Allen Wood argues that properly understood, Geist is a certain kind of self-transformative activity “considered socially or collectively.”60 But I will describe such explanations as vulgar Hegelianism because for much of the nineteenth century, Hegel was commonly read as promoting a “collectivist ontology,” or the position that “individuals, taken collectively, form supraindividual entities,” as Michael Rosen has put the point.61 Vulgar Hegelianism is an important historical precursor to the works of the masters of suspicion. During the generation following Hegel’s death, the device of large-scale exotic agency was familiar to many in search of high-level principles for the explanation of the course of history. This device, as we have seen, allows for belief-desire explanations to be applied to large-scale historical events. And it also provides new avenues toward claims of “hiddenness” and toward the generation of ethical charge. Hegel’s public lectures described Geist as an agency that manipulates the actions of human beings such that they serve ends that are not their own, and he indicated that up to the present the human species has

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been largely unaware that this is the case—aware only in the “representational” form of the doctrine of divine providence. And while Hegel did not emphasize the badness of his exotic agents or their aims, vulgar Hegelianism generates some measure of negative ethical charge by describing these agents both as manipulative and as willing to sacrifice the well-being of human persons to its own ends: “The particular is as a rule inadequate in relation to the universal, and individuals are sacrificed and abandoned as a result. The Idea pays the tribute which existence and the transient world exact, but it pays it through the passions of individuals rather than out of its own resources.” Or, as he wrote concerning “world-historical individuals,” those who most represent avatars of Geist at particular moments in history, “a mighty figure must trample many an innocent flower underfoot, and destroy much that lies in its path.”62 I position my reconstruction of the masters of suspicion, then, against a background that contains conspiracy theories and vulgar Hegelianism as important paradigms. Each of these has its particular devices for scaling up the power of ToM to explain large-scale social phenomena, for postulating the “hiddenness” of that which it claims to reveal, and for generating ethical charge and applying this to human persons. Conspiracy theories and vulgarHegelian explanations both make use of ToM in intuitive ways, differing only in the way they extend this to groups of persons: the former attributes a particular complex of reasons to each member of the group, while the latter attributes such a complex to the group conceived as a whole. And the two paradigms differ from some other modes of explaining large-scale social phenomena by providing intuitive routes to holding agents (not necessarily human ones) responsible for social phenomena. My claim going forward is neither that the tradition of suspicion is composed of a mix of conspiracy and vulgar Hegelianism, nor that the works of the masters of suspicion can be positioned on a spectrum of which these are opposite poles. I take the masters as having wanted to provide explanations that were neither simple conspiracy theories nor examples of vulgar Hegelianism.63 But I regard them as working within a conceptual space that contains these two paradigms as centers of gravity or attractor positions, and so the really interesting question is whether they managed to stay entirely clear of them. The importance of these paradigms is highest in the next chapter, where I will claim that both conspiratorial notions and vulgar Hegelianism weave through Marx’s writings. And it will be least important for my reconstruction of Freud, whom I regard as more or less thoroughly avoiding appeals to both conspiracies and exotic agencies.

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Conclusion I close this chapter with a reminder of why it matters that the masters of suspicion be regarded as purveyors of explanations. Regarding them in this way provides a clear answer to the question of why, or when, the claims they make deserve serious consideration as candidates for truth. In general, the fact that a set of claims comprise an explanation that is better than the available alternatives gives us a reason to regard the set of claims as true, or as probably true. A good reason to accept some set of claims advanced by Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud, then, would be that those claims make for explanations that are better than the available alternatives. The explanatory framework also makes it clear why the masters would have thought their own work important. I observed above that projects of explanation are normally governed by some particular interest, and that those interests determine what sorts of causes shall be regarded as genuinely explanatory. I take it that the work of each of the three masters of suspicion was informed by an interest in control over large-scale social conditions. The conditions that occupied Marx were gross inequalities and inequities of material wealth and well-being. Those that consumed Nietzsche were, broadly, the intellectual and physiological health of European culture and civilization. And while Freud’s focus was on the psychological dysfunctions of individual persons, he extended the reach of his theories to certain large-scale social phenomena that he was tempted to classify as collective pathologies—paradigmatically, religion. Each of the masters offered explanations that promised information that would make possible the alteration of the social conditions in question. It is this interest—the details of which vary among the three masters—that explains the choices they made in selecting certain of the causes of their explananda as explanatory. On the position I have developed in this chapter, critical engagement with the works of the masters will, ideally, involve assessments of their value as explanations. But a necessary precondition for such an assessment is the reconstruction of those works as attempts at explanation. That reconstruction will be the work of the next three chapters; and one result will be that however challenging assessments of explanatory value may be under ideal conditions, the generic characteristics of suspicious explanations and certain aspects of the individual masters’ modes of presentation introduce novel complications, and in some cases frustrations, into this project.

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Classic Suspicion: Marx

Introduction: Reconstruction, rational and otherwise My project in this chapter is to say what it means to classify Marx as a “master of suspicion” when that phenomenon is understood on the explanatory model I have presented. Before beginning, I want to offer some remarks about what kind of textual work this project requires. As will become clear below, I have learned much from such “analytic” readers of Marx as G. A. Cohen, Richard Miller, and Allen Wood. But the Marx I will be describing in this chapter is not quite the Marx of their reconstructions. Cohen described his aspiration in Karl Marx’s Theory of History as follows: “The aim is to construct a tenable theory of history which is in broad accord with what Marx said on the subject. While he would certainly have found some of what will follow unfamiliar, the hope is that he could have recognized it as a reasonably clear statement of what he thought.”1 Cohen was able to set himself such a project because Marx’s writings do not, cleanly and simply, present such a theory of history. Many of his writings are occasional pieces; his own thinking stood in complex and constantly shifting relationships to such powerful external sources as Hegel, Feuerbach, classical economic theory, the changing political situations of several European nations, and contemporaneous socialist movements and thinkers; and the conditions of his life and writing were frequently chaotic. Fairly clearly, Marx took his thinking to be informed by theoretical principles, and some of his writings are concerned to describe these. But the character of his textual productions was such that the content, consistency, and coherence of these principles have been matters of debate since his lifetime. Cohen’s intention to extract a tenable theory of history from Marx’s texts gave him reason to attend primarily to materials that look promising when viewed from the standpoint of the late twentieth century, and to arrange the materials so

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extracted so that their logical relations are promising ones—such that they do not conflict with each other, say, and such that accepting some generates reasons to accept others. It also gave him reason to downplay, marginalize, or excise from his account various other kinds of material—that unnecessary to the account under reconstruction, material that conflicts with it, or material that is unpromising from a late twentieth-century perspective. Thus Cohen’s work was extractive in character, leaving behind, as it were, a significant amount of what Marx wrote. My work on Marx will also be extractive and reconstructive in character. But where Cohen and others have seen Marx’s texts as containing a possibly tenable theory of history, I see those texts as containing distinctive patterns or styles of explanation, and my intention is to extract and reconstruct these. I have no stake in whether the results of my work are tenable; what I have a stake in is Marx’s explanations of large-scale social phenomena trafficking in hiddenness and badness, and thus deserving of classification as “suspicious” in character. This stake gives me reason to highlight and to marginalize differently than do Marx’s most capable rational reconstructors. My central claim in this chapter is that Marx’s writings contain not one but three distinct species of large-scale social explanation, each of which can (and often does) conform to the conditions of suspicious explanation as I have defined it. The names I will give the three explanatory styles are vulgar Marxism, historical materialism, and vulgar-Hegelian Marxism. Each of the three has different consequences for both estimates of the value of the explanations involved (theory choice) and the ethical evaluation of human persons. My first task in this chapter will be to provide an initial description of each style and to document the presence of each in Marx’s texts. Following this initial discussion I will turn to the differences among the styles when examples are cast into the mold of suspicion. Each style provides a distinctive way of postulating hidden causal forces and of generating negative ethical charge, and it will be my task to point out the differences among the styles in this regard. Finally, I will discuss the relationships among the three styles and how each bears on the issue of explanatory value. One final remark on the difference between my reconstruction and those of the analytic Marxists is in order. It will become clear below that I intend the term historical materialism to refer to the theory of history that has been the target of the reconstructive efforts of Cohen and others. I think the tenability of historical materialism is purchased at least in part through the marginalization, in the work of reconstruction, of the other two styles I have named. But I also think that if Marx’s texts contained only historical materialism and not also vulgar

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Marxism and vulgar-Hegelian Marxism, it would probably be inappropriate to classify him as a “master of suspicion.” The Marx in whom I am interested is such a “master”; and that Marx is something more than the originator of historical materialism.

Vulgar Marxism My source for the term vulgar Marxism is Karl Popper. Like the later analytic Marxists, Popper was interested, in the second volume of The Open Society and its Enemies, in rescuing a viable understanding of Marx’s Theory of History from the history of effects. Of particular concern to him was a “psychologizing” reading of Marx, according to which his contribution amounted to the fact that he “demonstrated the fundamental importance of such categories as the profit motive or the motive of class interest for the actions not only of individuals but also of social groups; and [that] he showed how to use these categories for explaining the course of history.” Popper coined the term vulgar Marxism as a label for this position, which boils down to the slogan that “economic motives and especially class interest are the driving forces in history.”2 At greater length: The average Vulgar Marxist believes that Marxism lays bare the sinister secrets of social life by revealing the hidden motives of greed and lust for material gain which actuate the powers behind the scenes of history; powers that cunningly and consciously create war, depression, unemployment, hunger in the midst of plenty, and all other forms of social misery, in order to gratify their vile desires for profit.3

Popper’s language in identifying vulgar Marxism is clear and straightforward. But to set the stage for comparison to historical materialism and vulgarHegelian Marxism, I want to unpack the notion a bit. Vulgar Marxism is the product, it seems to me, of the interpretation of Marx’s texts along the lines of least cognitive resistance; it is the most intuitive, most accessible, and least intellectually demanding kind of Marx-inspired social theory. If, as I will claim, historical materialism and vulgar-Hegelian Marxism involve novel or nuanced claims regarding what explains the actions of individuals and where agency is located, vulgar Marxism, in contrast, relies on entirely intuitive positions in both of these areas. First, consider the question of what explains the actions of individuals. As described by Popper, vulgar Marxism postulates as the factors that explain

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large-scale social phenomena (inequality, unemployment, war) character traits such as greed and lack of concern for the well-being of others; motives such as the accumulation of wealth and power; and chains of means-end rationality, as when capitalists reason that they can become richer by exploiting their workers to a greater degree. Both the contents of these factors and the manner of their deployment are entirely intuitive: no particular theory of human motivation or social action is required to render usable the notions that individuals can be motivated by lust for gain, be prone to dishonesty, or be willing to make others suffer for their own benefit. Second, consider the question of where agency is located. Vulgar Marxism requires no other agents than human persons, the ones who possess the character traits of greed and self-interest, and the ones who engage in courses of action calculated to bring them gain. And if, as I have argued, the explanation of large-scale social phenomena requires some device for “scaling up” human agency, conspiratorial thinking provides a ready template for understanding the signature Marxian notion of class interest. Popper associated vulgar Marxism with conspiratorial thinking, and this association seems to me to be correct.4 Vulgar Marxism as I understand it is basically conspiracy theorizing signed by the notion of economic interest, or the idea that advantaged economic classes (rich people) constitute conspiratorial groups. This sort of thinking provides an intuitive way to scale up the agency of individual capitalists for explanatory purposes, by postulating in them a disposition to work together for their mutual benefit, just in virtue of their shared class identity. Marx was not a vulgar Marxist, if what one means by the claim is that he generally regarded historical events as the intended results of conspiratorial activity on the part of capitalists and other groups in positions of power. But vulgar Marxism is present in his texts. Marx was not at all opposed to thinking of capitalists, politicians, landowners, and others as acting conspiratorially, and he did accuse such persons of such activity with some regularity. And one of Marx’s persistent literary habits was to attribute bad characteristics, bad motives, and bad actions to persons, particularly to persons in high social positions. The early Marx was, in fact, so given to such attribution that he came close to defining it as a primitive feature of “criticism”: “Criticism is no longer and end in itself, but simply a means; indignation is its essential mode of feeling, and denunciation its principal task.”5 I will present just a few examples of vulgar Marxism in Marx’s texts. One early text where Marx is at least close to his most vulgar is “On the Jewish Question,” published in 1844 in what turned out to be the sole issue of the

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Deutch-Französische Jahrbücher. In this essay Marx took Bruno Bauer to task for accepting the notion that Jewishness is to be understood in religious terms; for Marx, Jewishness was to be understood differently: Let us consider the real Jew: not the sabbath Jew, whom Baur considers, but the everyday Jew. Let us not seek the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us seek the secret of the religion in the real Jew. What is the profane basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money. The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only by acquiring the power of money, but also because money has become, through him and also apart from him, a world power, while the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves in so far as the Christians have become Jews.6

In these passages Marx describes Jews as possessing certain character traits— self-interest, greed, and dishonesty (“huckstering”). He seems to be claiming that capitalism is the product of these traits as they have motivated the actions of human beings. Marx does not claim that Jews alone possess these traits, nor that Jews alone have brought about the reign of capitalism, although he does claim that Jews have contributed significantly to this development. Furthermore, it is important not to overstate the extent to which this essay grants these character traits explanatory weight. Marx’s concluding words gesture at the position that such character traits are themselves dependent on social conditions: “As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism—huckstering and its conditions—the Jew becomes impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object.”7 But this gesture is both ambiguous and underdeveloped. Six years later, Marx offered the following in the opening pages of “The Class Struggle in France, 1848–50”: It was not the french bourgeoisie that ruled under Louis Phillipe, but one faction of it: bankers, stock-exchange kings, railway kings, owners of coal and iron mines and forests, a part of the landed proprietors associated with them—the so-called finance aristocracy. It sat on the throne, it dictated laws in the Chambers, it distributed public offices, from cabinet portfolios to tobacco bureau posts. The faction of the bourgeoisie that ruled and legislated through the chambers had a direct interest in the indebtedness of the state. The state deficit was really the main object of its speculation and the chief source of its enrichment. At the end of each year a new deficit. After the lapse of four or five years a new loan. And every

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Reframing the Masters of Suspicion new loan offered new opportunities to the finance aristocracy for defrauding the state, which was kept artificially on the verge of bankruptcy. . . . As the state deficit was in the direct interest of the ruling faction of the bourgeoisie, it is clear why the extraordinary state expenditure in the last years of Louis Phillipe’s reign was far more than double the extraordinary state expenditure under Napoleon.8

There is little about this passage that is particularly theoretically complicated or interesting; here Marx describes a group motivated by collective self-interest, operating dishonestly, clandestinely, and against the collective good for private gain. Finally, from the Manifesto of the Communist Party: An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and selfgoverning association in the medieval commune . . . the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.9

Richard Miller writes about this last passage that “talk of an executive committee embodying exclusive political sway suggests a conspiracy theory in which leading politicians and businesspeople regularly meet to decide the course of politics, with the latter handing down orders to the former, when deliberations are done.”10 Miller mentions this interpretation solely to argue that such cannot be Marx’s position. I agree with Miller that a conspiratorial reading—in my terms, a vulgar-Marxist reading—of this passage is the most obvious one. And if I agree with him that Marx cannot legitimately be understood as nothing more than a conspiracy theorist, I do not think it follows that Marx’s historical materialism cannot be made to cohere with vulgar-Marxist conspiracy claims, such that a conspiratorial reading of this particular passage might in fact capture Marx’s intended meaning. I will return to this issue below.

Historical materialism In overview As I have remarked above, I take historical materialism to be the possibly tenable theory of history that Cohen and others have attempted to reconstruct from Marx’s work. My discussion of historical materialism will of necessity be

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selective. What matter for my purposes are those aspects of the theory that make it a resource for the construction of suspicious explanations. A great proportion of the three volumes of Capital are devoted to Marx’s attempts to formulate the “inner laws of capital”; Marx was also concerned to convince his readers that capitalism’s days were numbered, and that the future would deliver societies without class distinctions. These aspects of the theory are less important, for my purposes, than those aspects of the theory that bear on the positioning of human agents within historical explanations, and this topic will be my focus. To realize this focus I will build my exposition of historical materialism around three central claims. First, historical materialism postulates as ultimate explainers of the general course of history factors that reside not within the subjective consciousness of individuals, but rather within the overall organizational structure of particular societies. Second, the theory postulates as mediate explainers of the course of history up to the present the dynamics of class relations, or “class struggle.” And third, the theory positions the beliefs, desires, and reasoning of individual human beings as proximate causes and at best shallow explainers of the course of history. These last mentioned features are explanatorily shallow because historical materialism aspires to explain the beliefs, motives, and desires of individual human beings (in the aggregate, inasmuch as they bear on the course of history) by recourse to the higher levels of the theory.

Top-level explainers Cohen positioned a lengthy passage from Marx’s introduction to A Contribution to The Critique of Political Economy as the epigraph to Karl Marx’s Theory of History. This passage indicates the overall structure of the theory as I will be discussing it. In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite state of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis, on which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.11

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This passage clearly positions the “economic structure of society” as existing prior in the order of explanation to the self-understanding of individuals who exist within that society. It is worth noting that Marx here refers explicitly to the “social consciousness,” which I take to mean not just the self-understandings of individual persons qua individuals, but also their understandings of their social positions, social roles, social responsibilities, and so on, as well as of those of others. On the basis of this general claim about the relation between “base” and “superstructure,” Marx advanced a set of claims about the nature and typical course of social change. Perhaps the most fundamental driver of social change is a basic tendency for productive forces to develop over time: At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations, a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production.12

Here Marx clearly awarded to the economic conditions of production explanatory priority over the whole suite of “ideological” features of a society, describing the latter as “the forms in which men become conscious” of transformations among the former. He also positions the “ideological” features of particular societies as inadequate resources for understanding social change, in comparison to a grasp of the underlying material conditions. Fairly clearly, the passage positions transformations in economic conditions as the real drivers of social change. The self-understandings of the persons who are the proximate agents of social change—their “social consciousness”—are inadequate to explain the changes that their activity brings about, because that social consciousness is itself a

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product of the economic conditions of production, the former changing as the latter develop.

Class struggle The passages from A Contribution to The Critique of Political Economy just cited do not mention class, but do contain resources for understanding that notion. This “mediate” stratum of historical materialism is at the forefront of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, which begins: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to each other, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.13

The Manifesto proceeds to describe the relation of the bourgeois and proletariat classes as the current incarnation of the dynamic of class oppression. But Marx was also concerned to argue that “the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.”14 At greater length: We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the economical and political sway of the bourgeois class.15

Although Marx did not offer a well-formulated account of classes, it is clear that he regarded them as products of the dynamics of the development of material social conditions. Classes are, roughly, groups of people united by shared economic interests, or groups of people positioned similarly within existing economic structures (although in some contexts, Marx stated clearly that some measure of shared awareness of this state of affairs is necessary for the existence

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of a class).16 Classes are only possible in societies whose structure dictates that persons assume specific economic roles; they are neither natural kinds nor constructs predicated on natural differences among human beings. As Marx remarked in Capital, One thing, however, is clear: nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.17

Classes, then, are contingent historical phenomena. They embody specific configurations of relations of production, such that the fortunes of classes, and in some cases classes themselves, rise and fall with changes in those relations. The notion of class is central for understanding Marx’s claim that the course of historical development does not smoothly track the development of productive forces, but is instead characterized by periods of stability bracketed by periods of revolution. In any class-based society, the actions of members of an advantaged class will have a disproportionate influence over both real (political, legal) and ideal (ethical and broadly cultural) social conditions; and they will tend to use this influence to promote those developments that result in an increase of efficiency in the employment of existing relations of production (thus increasing their material advantage), and will tend to obstruct those developments that would result in the loss of the advantageous social position that the class enjoys. In Miller’s words, “while a society is stable, the system of political and ideological institutions and the climate of respectable ideas are such as to serve the function of maintaining the dominance of the economically dominant social group, the group who mainly extract the surplus from those directly engaged in material production.”18 This dynamic is responsible for the “fettering” of productive forces that makes sudden and dramatic social change necessary as these develop. Thus economic development necessarily assumes the form of conflict between social groups defined by different positions within existing configurations of productive relations. As it attempts to manage the ever-developing forces of production under its control (and to structure relations of production in ways that serve its interests), a ruling class becomes at a certain point “like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells” (a description Marx offered of the bourgeoisie in the face of rapid industrialization).19 The political situation of Europe, in Marx’s

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perspective, was such that “The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians.”20

Individual actions Allen Wood has said that “Marx’s theory holds that history is made by human individuals, acting from a wide variety of different conscious motives. But it also holds that history is not to be understood in terms of the motives and acts of particular individuals.”21 With one caveat to be noted below, this statement is a useful encapsulation of historical materialism, particularly in its distinction from vulgar Marxism. If it is the actions of individual persons that produce human history, historical materialism aspires to explain why persons act as they do—perhaps not in fine detail and not in every area of human life, but in the aggregate and in those areas that make a difference for the course of world history. Historical materialism aspires to be a theory of how individual actions are shaped by larger forces, such that conditions that obtain within particular societies channel the activity of the members of that society in ways that lead to such large-scale results as the enrichment of certain classes and the immiseration of others. Thus historical materialism understands factors pertaining to the actions of individual persons—their beliefs, desires, motives, and the like—as proximate causes and at best shallow explainers of the course of history. The most general form of the overall thesis of historical materialism in this area is the claim that situations of choice within a particular society are shaped by large-scale economic factors, such that individuals have the motives they have for acting as they do because of the influence of those factors. We can distinguish at the outset between two ways in which this shaping occurs, both of which are indicated in the passage from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy cited above. The first way economic factors shape situations of choice is through determining relations of production, for example by creating distinctions among different classes, such that what makes sense for individuals to do in order to survive and prosper depends on their location within the class system (“their personality is conditioned and determined by quite definite class relations”).22 And the second way is that economic factors determine the character of a society’s ideological “superstructure,” the suite of ideas and valuations that form

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the parameters for the self-awareness of the members of a particular society. Within this “superstructure” Marx positioned both the political and legal structures of society—which determine, for example, what actions are possible and how policy is shaped—and the more general “climate of ideas” including social mores, religion, and philosophy. With this distinction in hand, we are in a position to turn to a claim about historical materialism that I draw from the work of Cohen. Marx wrote concerning his “materialist” position in The German Ideology that the basis of this conception of history is, therefore, to disclose the real production process, with the material production of immediate life as the starting-point, to conceive the form of intercourse connected with and engendered by this mode of production—hence civil society in its various stages—as the foundation of all history, to represent this society in its state activity and to explain by society all the various theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, morals, etc., and to trace its coming into being to them. . . . It does not explain practice by the idea but explains the formation of ideas by material practice.23

Consider this passage in the light of Marx’s claims that a society’s forms of social consciousness correspond to its economic structure, and that the consciousness of an epoch is explained by the contradictions in its material conditions. Cohen argued at length for the claim that these and other passages commit Marx, and historical materialism, to the functional explanation of a variety of social phenomena.24 Functional explanations are “consequence explanations,” or claims to the effect that the consequences of a phenomenon explain that phenomenon. Construed in functional terms, Marx’s position was that societies have the (structural and superstructural) features they have because of the consequences of those features for the development of productive forces. In slightly more detail, historical materialism is committed, according to Cohen, to the claims that “production relations have the character they do because, in virtue of that character, they promote the development of the productive forces. . . . [and] the superstructure has the character it does because, in virtue of that character, it confers stability on the production relations.”25 Thus on Cohen’s reconstruction (which I follow here), it is the effects of a society’s overall “climate of ideas” that explain why that climate is as it is; and thus historical materialism holds that the situations of choice faced by individuals are shaped in such a way that, with sufficient regularity, they act in ways that make for the continued development of productive forces.

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Now in any society in which relations of production take the form of class divisions, the development of productive forces benefits different persons differently: under capitalism, for instance, productivity increases largely through increasing exploitation of the working classes, and increased productivity delivers increased wealth to the owners of the means of production. Historical materialism is thus committed to the idea that large-scale economic conditions shape the situations of choice of some persons within a society such that those persons act in ways that promote their self-interest and the interest of others in their class and in ways that work against the self-interest of those of other classes, and that these same conditions shape the situations of choice of other persons within that society such that they act contrary to their own self-interest and the interest of others in their class and in ways that promote the self-interest of members of other classes. Specifically, under capitalism, situations of choice encountered by capitalists are so shaped that, with sufficient regularity, their actions increase their wealth and social influence and increase the exploitation and misery of the working classes; and situations of choice encountered by the proletariat are so shaped that, with sufficient regularity, they submit to increasing exploitation and contribute to the increasing wealth and power of capitalists (at least prior to capitalism’s final phase). I want to consider religion and class interest as two topics that will add some detail to this abstract set of claims. Famously, Marx took religion to shape the actions of individuals such that they often act contrary to their real interests (both individual and class). And the term class interest in this section refers to Marx’s understanding of the ways in which situations of choice are shaped in ways that lead individuals to act in ways that benefit other members of their class and work contrary to the interest of other classes. Consideration of these two topics will set the stage for consideration of some subtleties and controversies regarding functional explanation. Marx did not write at great length concerning religion, but his position on the topic can be identified with little difficulty. He wrote in The German Ideology, The phantoms formed in the brains of men are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-processes. . . . Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology as well as the forms of consciousness corresponding to these, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their actual world, also their thinking and the products of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.26

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Marx understood religion to be part of the superstructure of society, and thus to be determined by (and explained by) a society’s conditions of production. And his primary interest (as far as I am aware, his sole interest) in religion had to do with its role in shaping the actions of its adherents. He attributed to religion under capitalism the effect of facilitating the increasing exploitation of the working classes. Religion has this effect in a number of distinct ways. Most obviously, religion discourages workers from violent revolution against the established order: “It teaches, as religion must: Submit to the authority, for all authority is ordained by God.”27 Religion also promises a postmortem reward for submission to injustice in the present life: “The social principles of Christianity transfer the consistorial councillor’s adjustment of all infamies to heaven and thus justify the further existence of those infamies on earth.”28 But religion serves the interests of capital not only through influencing the actions of the lower classes; Marx also saw religion at work in this way at higher levels of society, as, for instance, in his casual reference to a British member of Parliament as “one of those pious persons whose prominently displayed religion makes them always ready to do dirty work for the knights of the money-bag.”29 Insofar as Cohen is correct in reconstructing historical materialism as committed to the functional explanation of “superstructural” phenomena, Marx was a social functionalist concerning religion. That is, he was committed to the idea that societies have the forms of religion they do because these religions shape the actions of individuals so that they act in ways that promote the development of productive forces. Consider a remark from Capital in light of this claim: “For a society of commodity producers, whose general social relation of production consists in the fact that they treat their productions as commodities. . . . Christianity, with its religious cult of man in the abstract, more particularly in its bourgeois development, i.e. in Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion.”30 If the functionalist construal is correct, the “fit” between Protestantism and commodity capitalism is relevant to the explanation of Protestantism. The functionalist construal also illuminates others of Marx’s remarks concerning religion. For example, consider his observation that “Protestantism, by changing almost all the traditional holidays into working days, played an important part in the genesis of capital.”31 This passage portrays the rise of capitalism as a consequence of the rise of Protestantism. But given a general commitment to functionalism about religion, this consequence is also relevant to the explanation of Protestantism itself; thus Cohen cites this passage as evidence for the position that “Protestantism arose when it did because it

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was a religion suited to stimulating capitalist enterprise and enforcing labour discipline at a time when the capital/labour relation was pre-eminently apt to develop new productive potentials of society.”32 In the topic of religion, then, we have an example of the ways in which, according to historical materialism, the actions of individuals are shaped (and thus explained) by large-scale economic conditions. I turn now to the idea of class interest. It is a characteristically Marxist claim that the actions of members of a particular class, other things being equal (i.e., in the absence of ideological distortions of situations of choice), tend to act in ways that promote the social position of that class, at the expense of other classes (thus class struggle as the ground tone of history to date). Above we saw that vulgar Marxism has one theoretical device for explaining why this is the case: the device of intentional collective action, such as is found in conspiracy theories. Historical materialism, with its doctrine that classes and class advantage are alike determined by configurations of relations of production, provides an alternative way of understanding class interest, one that does not require conscious recognition of class relations or explicit agreement to pursue common ends. In a class-based society, the well-being of individuals is overwhelmingly a function of class. Inasmuch as class advantage is a matter of the specific configurations of relations of production that obtain within one’s society, self-interest motivates actions that either preserve or change those relations, depending on one’s class. Thus promoting the fortunes of one’s class is a way of promoting one’s own self-interest; and indeed, in important cases there will be no distinction between self-interest and class interest. As Wood has put the point, “The social relations in a class society serve the interests of some people at the expense of others. The privileged seek ways of maintaining the relations which favor them, while the disadvantaged, who feel chafed, confined and oppressed by these relations, look for ways to modify or overthrow them.”33 We can expand Wood’s description as follows: those who are socially privileged, motivated by a desire to preserve their individual positions of privilege, take actions whose effect is to preserve and magnify the social privileges of others in their class as well as their own; and likewise, the disadvantaged, desirous of improving their individual situations, take actions whose effect is to change the situations of others similarly disadvantaged as well. Even if we deny that a conscious or unconscious desire to promote the fortunes of others of the same class motivates the actions of individuals, there is a point to citing class interest to explain those actions. For if it is class structure that makes it the case

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that actions that promote individual self-interest also promote the interest of others of the same class, reference to “class interest” is reference to the fact that individual self-interest motivates all of the members of a class to act in ways that benefit all members of that class. We can expand this discussion by considering capitalist competition. Prima facie, competition among capitalists would seem to weigh against capitalist class interest, as competing capitalists are trying to succeed at each other’s expense. Marx devoted considerable energy in Capital to the topic of competition. His position was that the one who understands the “inner workings of capital” would see both that competition is an example of the determination of individual motives by higher-level forces and that competitive action ultimately serves the interest of the capitalist class. A passage from the first volume illustrates the first claim. While it is not our intention here to consider the way in which the immanent laws of capitalist production manifest themselves in the external movement of the individual capitals, assert themselves as the coercive laws of competition, and therefore enter into the consciousness of the individual capitalist as the motives which drive him forward, this much is clear: a scientific analysis of competition is possible only if we grasp the inner nature of capital, just as the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are intelligible only to someone who is acquainted with their real motions, which are not perceptible to the senses.34

The topic of competition recurs repeatedly in Capital, and it was a central concern of Marx’s to show in detail how competition among capitalists proceeds by way of the amplification of the exploitation of labor—for example, through the reduction of production costs by means of wage reductions, the employment of women and children, the construction of inexpensive and thus unsafe workplaces, and so on. Thus while competition certainly works contrary to the advantage of some capitalists (those driven out of business by an unwillingness or inability to reduce production costs), in reducing in the cost of labor in general, it benefits those capitalists who remain, and thus the capitalist class generally; and it works directly against the interests of workers, and thus against the interest of the working class as a whole. In the third volume Marx offers a summary statement of his detailed exploration of the dynamics of competition: From what has been said so far, we can see that each individual capitalist, just like the totality of all capitalists in each particular sphere of production, participates

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in the exploitation of the entire working class by capital as a whole, and in the level of this exploitation; not just in terms of general class sympathy, but in a direct economic sense, since . . . the average rate of profit depends on the level of exploitation of labour as a whole by capital as a whole.35

“We thus have a mathematically exact demonstration,” Marx concluded, “of why the capitalists, no matter how little love is lost among them in their mutual competition, are nevertheless united by a real freemasonry vis-à-vis the working class as a whole.”36 Here I want to pull back from the specifics of historical materialism’s claims regarding class interest and capitalist competition to consider the general form of these claims. The theory claims that the actions of individual capitalists, in large numbers, tend to produce specific large-scale results, including the misery of the working classes; and Marx’s detailed explorations of the dynamics of capital are aimed at showing, first, how the actions of individual capitalists produce these results, and second, that no individual capitalist needs to intend or even desire to magnify the exploitation of the working classes or the enrichment of any other capitalist in order for his activity to contribute to these results. Historical materialism does not claim that capitalists do not in fact aim at the immiseration of the working classes, and thus does not claim that the misery of the workers is not in fact an intended result of the activity of capitalists; however, it does claim that this misery is a result of their activity regardless of whether it is intended or not. It is significant that Marx uses the language of “a real freemasonry vis-à-vis the working class” by way of summarizing his position. The point of this usage is, I think, to suggest that capitalists might as well be committed to a conspiracy against workers. I will return to this issue below. Thus far, in discussing class interest I have not invoked the language of social functionalism. The claim in these past few paragraphs has not been that capitalists act in ways that increase the fortunes of the capitalist class and the misery of the working classes because this is required for the development of productive forces. And yet the broadest claim of historical materialism is that it is the development of productive forces that explains economic developments within particular societies; thus historical materialism is committed to the claim that until capitalism’s final phase, the increasing exploitation of the working classes is explained by the fact that it satisfies the needs of productive forces to develop. We seem, then, to find in Marx’s texts both functional and nonfunctional explanations of an important set of actions. What is the relationship between these?

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At this point a bit of Cohen’s terminology will be helpful. Cohen developed his functionalist reconstruction of historical materialism against the background of a long history of debate regarding the legitimacy of functional explanations in the social sciences. With an eye on this history of debate, he introduced the notion of an elaboration of a functional explanation. And since the distinction between a functional explanation and the elaboration of a functional explanation will be crucial for my purposes, I want to take a moment to discuss the distinction in general before applying it to the case at hand. Paradigms of elaborated functionalist explanations, for Cohen, are found in biology. He offered the following illustration: A population of giraffes with a mean neck length of six feet lives in an environment of acacia trees, on whose leaves they feed. The height of the trees makes it true that if they now had longer necks, their survival prospects would be better. They subsequently come to have longer necks. So far all we have is a consequence generalization. But if Darwin’s theory of evolution is true, then the fact that were they to have had longer necks, they would have fared better, contributes to explaining the elongation. The environment selects in favor of variants with longer necks precisely because it is an environment in which longer necks improve life chances.37

According to Cohen, a dispositional fact—that a longer neck tends to improve survival chances—explains why the neck length of giraffes increased over time in this example. Thus we have a functional explanation: the giraffes’ necks lengthen over time because this lengthening functions to improve their chances of survival. Now spelled out in detail, the Darwinian account of the same development makes no reference to the dispositional fact: it explains the change in neck length by describing the displacement of shorter-necked giraffes by longer-necked giraffes over time as a result of competition for resources. The Darwinian account, then, explains the same thing as the functional explanation but makes no use of functional language; and this sort of account is what Cohen termed an elaboration of a functional explanation. It might seem that a full-length Darwinian account of the lengthening of giraffe’s necks displaces the functional explanation of the same result. Crucially (and controversially), Cohen took a different view: “Darwin’s theory is not a rival of functional explanation but, among other things, a compelling account of why functional explanations apply in the biosphere.”38 For Cohen an elaboration “completes” a functional explanation: the elaboration shows in detail why the functional explanation is true.

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We now have an answer to the question posed just above. To say that under capitalism, capitalists act in ways that increase the exploitation of labor because this increase serves to allow productive forces to develop is to offer a functional explanation. To explain the same actions by citing class interest and the “iron laws of competition” is, if we follow Cohen, an elaboration of this functional explanation: it is a detailed account of causes and effects that shows (or at least is intended to show) why the functional explanation is correct. Thus nonfunctionalist explanations of individual actions in Marx’s texts—for example, the claim in Capital that high rates of fatal coal-mining accidents “are due for the most part to the filthy avarice of the coal-owners, who for instance often have only one shaft sunk, so that not only is no effective ventilation possible, but also there is no escape if this shaft gets blocked”39—do not necessarily compete with functional explanations of the same actions; if historical materialism has the contours of Cohen’s reconstruction, the former can be, or be part of, elaborations of the latter. This result is the tip of an important iceberg. For here is one of the most significant results of Cohen’s reconstructive work. As presented by Cohen, historical materialism is a theory that is committed to the idea that phenomena that determine the parameters of social life, including social institutions, class dynamics, and the climate of ideas within particular societies, have functional explanations. Marx’s texts also contain elaborations, in varying degrees of detail and completeness, of some of the functional explanations he offers. But if Marx, in his descriptions of the commitments of historical materialism, provided a template for the functional explanation of large-scale social phenomena, he did not (indeed, could not) supply all of his functional explanations with corresponding elaborations. Thus the project of providing elaborations for historical materialism’s functional explanations of large-scale social phenomena was left (necessarily) incomplete at the time of Marx’s death. And in fact Marx’s corpus is quite uneven in its attention to what Cohen terms the elaboration of functional claims. Marx devoted sustained attention to laying out the “inner laws of capital” and thereby to showing why historical materialism’s functional explanations of the behavior of capitalists is correct. But we do not have in Marx a detailed nonfunctionalist account of the mechanisms whereby societies come to be characterized by the forms of religion they have; there is no sustained treatment in Marx’s texts of the “inner laws” of religion, an account that links the conditions of material production to the circulation of religious beliefs and practices within different classes. In general, Marx’s functionalist position about religion is left unelaborated.

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If it is the case that elaborations of functional explanations show why those functional explanations apply, then the incompleteness of historical materialism as regards elaborations matters for some purposes. “Our experience of the world,” Cohen writes, “assures us that whenever a consequence explanation holds, it has some or other further elaboration.”40 If this is correct and if this experience is a reliable guide to truth, it follows that whenever the functional explanation of a large-scale social phenomena is true—whenever, say, a historical materialist explanation of some social phenomenon is the correct one—there must be some chain of causes and effects linking the explanans and the explanandum, exposition of which will make no reference to dispositions or functions. Thus a functional explanation implicitly postulates the existence of some chain or other of causes and effects that produce the explanandum in question, description of which will make no use of functional language (in the way in which Darwinian explanations make no such use). Later in the chapter I will defend the claim that historical materialism is precarious as regards theory choice inasmuch as it generates unelaborated functional explanations; and at that point it will also become clear that the historical materialism’s incompleteness as regards elaborations provides an opening for vulgar Marxism and vulgar-Hegelian Marxism to become relevant for theory choice. By way of summary, then: historical materialism is committed to the following broad picture. Within any society, the situations of choice that individuals face are shaped, in certain areas and with a certain level of regularity, in such a way that their actions collectively produce results that satisfy the needs of productive forces to develop. For members of the capitalist ruling classes, this shaping leads them to act in ways that increase their collective fortunes and also increases the exploitation of workers; for the working classes, prior to capitalism’s final phase, this shaping leads them to put their labor (and, frequently, the labor of their children) at the disposal of capitalists. Now to advance such general claims is not to say how this shaping is accomplished. Any situation of choice that has been so shaped that it motivates a person to produce a particular result in the future— say, to act in ways that will contribute to lowering the wages of workers, or to refrain from revolutionary activity—has been so shaped by causes operating in the past and the present. If something like omniscience would be required to offer a detailed account of how the shaping of any given situation of choice takes place in ways that produce the results postulated by the theory, some of the ways in which this shaping takes place are not difficult to identify, and careful research

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(of the sort Marx attempted in Capital) can increase the depth and sophistication of knowledge in this area. I pass now to the third and final explanatory mode on display in Marx’s texts.

Vulgar-Hegelian Marxism It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation was taken unawares. A nation and a woman are not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first adventurer that came along could violate them.41

In the previous chapter I defined vulgar Hegelianism as appealing to a transhuman “big agent” to explain large-scale social events. What I will be referring to as vulgar-Hegelian Marxism is Marx’s practice of treating nonhuman entities— groups of human beings such as nations and classes, and on occasion social abstractions such as capital—as agents for the purpose of explanation. Here are a few examples of this sort of treatment from Marx’s texts. But barrack and bivouac, which were thus periodically laid on French Society’s head to compress its brain and render it quiet; sabre and musket, which were periodically allowed to act as judges and administrators, as guardians and censors. .  .  . were not barrack and bivouac, sabre and musket, mustache and uniform finally bound to hit upon the idea of rather saving society once and for all by proclaiming their own regime as the highest and freeing civil society completely from the trouble of governing itself?42 As soon as the working class, stunned at first by the noise and turmoil of the new system of production, had recovered its senses to some extent, it began to offer resistance, first of all in England, the native land of large-scale industry.43 The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value. . . . In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.44 Capital therefore takes no account of the health and the length of the life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so. Its answer to the outcry about the

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Vulgar-Hegelian Marxism might equally well be termed vulgar-Hegelian vulgar Marxism. If vulgar Marxism explains large-scale historical events by appeal to bad individuals acting from bad motives to achieve bad ends, then vulgarHegelian Marxism appeals to the same sorts of factors, but attributes those factors to entities that are of the requisite scale to cause the events in question by themselves. Thus in the first passage quoted above, Marx seems to be attributing a chain of reasoning to the French military conceived as a whole to explain political developments in the years after 1848; in the second, he explains delayed resistance to industrialization as a result of the working class’s being “stunned” and afterward “recovering its senses”; in the third, he attributes a set of actions, with clearly indicated ethical valuations, to the bourgeois class as a whole; and in the fourth, he attributes to capital an uncaring attitude toward the suffering of workers, noting carefully that this attitude on the part of capital itself floats free of the attitudes of individual capitalists. Now I think hermeneutical charity requires us to regard Marx’s attributions of agency to nations, classes, and capital as heuristic. Marx should not be read as claiming that capital itself really is an agent, capable of holding attitudes about the sufferings of workers independent of the attitudes of individual capitalists; rather, he presents the thought of capital-as-agent as a model. Vulgar-Hegelian Marxism thus plays a different role in Marx’s texts than do vulgar Marxism and historical materialism. It seems clear that Marx really did think that the unsafe conditions of English coal-mines were (proximately) due to the “filthy avarice” of the coal-owners; it is also clear that he really did think that the course of world history is explained by the needs of productive forces to develop. But Marx’s vulgar-Hegelian passages require unpacking or translation. So in the first passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire cited above, Marx should be understood to be referring to a set of decisions taken by individuals and decision-making bodies within the French military during the period prior to 1851; and he should be read as claiming that thinking of the French military as a single agent “hitting on the idea of saving society from itself ” provides a useful or illuminating model of those decisions. Likewise, in the passage from the Communist Manifesto,

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Marx should be understood as claiming that thinking of the bourgeois class as an agent acting with consistent intentionality across the centuries provides a useful or illuminating model of a far more complex process involving actions by many individuals across multiple generations. I want to examine one example of Marx’s penchant for vulgar Hegelianism that will be useful at a later stage of the discussion. In the first volume of Capital Marx discusses the “Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation and the desire for enjoyment” that arises within “the breast of the capitalist” as his wealth increases.46 Except as capital personified, the capitalist has no historical value. .  .  . But, insofar as he is capital personified, his motivating force is not the acquisition and enjoyment of use-values, but the acquisition and augmentation of exchangevalues. He is fanatically intent on the valorization of value; consequently he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake. . . . Only as a personification of capital is the capitalist respectable. As such, he shares with the miser an absolute drive towards self-enrichment. But what appears in the miser as the mania of an individual is in the capitalist the effect of a social mechanism in which he is merely a cog. In so far, therefore, as his actions are a mere function of capital—endowed as capital is, in his person, with consciousness and a will—his own private consumption counts as a robbery committed against the accumulation of his capital.47

These passages present individual capitalists as human “embodiments” of the transhuman “big agent,” capital, that works in the world through their agency. A heuristic interpretation would seek for a translation into terms that make no reference to agency on the part of capitalism. A key to such a translation can be extracted from an important statement Marx made in the preface to the first edition of Capital: “Individuals are dealt with here only in so far as they are personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class-relations and interests.”48 Marx held that the motives of individuals are shaped in specific ways by their class identities and the production relations these embody. Thus to speak of the capitalist as “capital personified” (or “embodied”) is, I take it, just to speak of those motivations that the capitalist has in virtue of his class identity; and to speak of capital being “endowed with consciousness and a will” is just to speak of how capitalist social relations shape the minds of members of the capitalist class. Here, then, Marx’s own texts provide resources for constructing translations of his vulgar-Hegelian passages into different terms; and I suspect

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that this translation will be applicable wherever Marx speaks of capitalists “personifying” or “embodying” capital. One of Marx’s purposes in making use of the vulgar-Hegelian explanatory style, then, was to provide models of complex events. I leave discussion of a second purpose to a later section; but a final passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire contains a hint. Small-holding property, in this enslavement by capital to which its development inevitably pushes forward, has transformed the mass of the French nation into troglodytes. . . . The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly arisen smallholding and manured it with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks out its blood and brains and throws them into the alchemist’s cauldron of capital.49

On relationships among the three modes Above I claimed that vulgar Marxism, historical materialism, and vulgarHegelian Marxism are not mutually exclusive. Here I want to expand on this claim. Recall that, as I have claimed, a functional explanation implicitly postulates the existence of a chain of causes and effects, the description of which will make no mention of functions. Recall as well that Marx’s vulgar-Hegelian passages are best understood (I claim) as models of complex processes involving individual agents. These characteristics make it possible for vulgar-Marxist, historical materialist, and vulgar-Hegelian Marxist explanations to overlap or complement each other. Under this heading I have four points. First: vulgar-Marxist explanations can be both translations of vulgar-Hegelian Marxist explanations and elaborations of historical materialist functional explanations. The first claim should be obvious: the claim that the bourgeois class is a vampire can be translated into claims about the behavioral tendencies of bourgeois persons. And to elaborate a historical materialist functional explanation in a vulgar-Marxist way would be to say something like: the needs of productive forces to develop explain the increasing exploitation of the working classes under capitalism in virtue of the fact that capitalists, seeing that the development of productive forces will increase their wealth and social position, and being both greedy and unconcerned with the fortunes of their fellow human beings, act to promote the development of those forces at the cost of the

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immiseration of workers. Such an elaboration might be explicitly teleological and even conspiratorial: one might say, for example, that religion functions to discourage revolution in virtue of the fact that it has been ordained to serve that function by the ruling class. Second: vulgar-Hegelian Marxist explanations and historical materialist functional explanations can refer to each other. A vulgar-Hegelian Marxist explanation can have as its translation a historical materialist functional explanation; such an explanation can also stand in for an elaboration of a historical materialist functional explanation. I say “stand in for” rather than “be” or “serve as” because, as I have argued above, Marx’s use of vulgar-Hegelian language is best understood heuristically, in which case it is this translation that should be regarded as the elaboration of the functional explanation in question. This state of affairs can make for interesting problems of interpretation. Consider, for example, a passage from Capital: After capital had taken centuries to extend the working day to its normal maximum limit, and then beyond this to the limit of the natural day of 12 hours, there followed, with the birth of large-scale industry in the last third of the eighteenth century, an avalanche of violent and unmeasured encroachments. Every boundary set by morality and nature, age and sex, was broken down. . . . Capital was celebrating its orgies.50

Here Marx’s language positions the “encroachments” of industrialization as part of the agenda of capital, which orgiastically “celebrates” its ability to finally bring them about. This language can be taken as shorthand either for a functional explanation of the depredations of rapid industrialization or for a nonfunctional account which could itself be the elaboration of such a functional explanation. Third: if vulgar-Hegelian language can be used heuristically, so too can vulgar-Marxist language. This possibility opens up interpretive problems of its own. Recall Marx’s statement that “the executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie,” and Miller’s observation that this statement can be so read as to imply conspiratorial activity on the part of government officials and businesspeople. Now it is quite possible that Marx did not regard the modern state as by nature involved in conspiracies on behalf of the bourgeoisie, in which case this statement would be a shorthand way of referring to a historical materialist functional explanation, to the effect that government policies are as they are because they serve the interests of

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members of the bourgeois class. But Marx’s claim could also be an elaboration of this functional explanation: government policy functions to serve bourgeois interests in virtue of the fact that agents in control intentionally determine that it will do so. Note that if the language of a “committee” was intended by Marx as rhetoric rather than elaboration, then whatever functional explanation translates this passage will require an elaboration of its own in different (presumably, nonconspiratorial) terms. Fourth: if historical materialist functional explanations and vulgar-Hegelian Marxist explanations implicitly postulate explanations in different terms (elaborations and translations respectively), these do not have to be of the vulgar-Marxist kind. I take Marx to have been in the business, in Capital, of trying to develop non-vulgar elaborations—elaborations, that is, that did not require the imputation of base motives and conspiratorial activity to capitalists. And in fact, as I will remark below, an important issue in the development of historical materialism as a theory to be taken seriously is the extent to which it is possible to provide, or perhaps at least to imagine, elaborations and translations other than vulgar-Marxist ones for its functional explanations.

Marx and suspicion I turn now to the application of the reconstructive work of the previous sections of this chapter to the theme of the book. Each of the three explanatory modes I have described provides resources for appeals to “hidden” explanatory factors and for the generation of negative ethical charge. And given the interpenetration of the three modes in Marx’s texts, these texts provide a rich set of resources for the construction of suspicious explanations of various kinds.

Hiddenness Marx frequently claimed that his contemporaries, along with the mass of humanity preceding his lifetime, were ignorant of the real determinants of human history. And uncontroversially, his project was to describe those determinants and the laws of their operation. Marx accounted for the “hiddenness” of history’s driving forces in two ways. One of these, which I will discuss in connection with historical materialism, appeals to the advance of scientific knowledge. A second, which I will discuss here, appeals to the obscuring of correct understanding by false ideas.

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From The German Ideology: In the whole conception of history up to the present this real basis of history has been either totally disregarded or else considered as a minor matter quite irrelevant to the course of history. .  .  . The exponents of this conception of history have consequently only been able to see in history the spectacular political events and religious and other theoretical struggles, and in particular with regard to each historical epoch they were compelled to share the illusion of that epoch. For instance, if an epoch imagines itself to be actuated by purely “political” or “religious” motives, although “religion” and “politics” are only forms of its true motives, the historian accepts this opinion. The “fancy,” the “conception” of the people in question about their real practice is transformed into the sole determining and effective force, which dominates and determines their practice.51

What is “hidden” from the comprehension of the mass of humanity in this passage is the fact that material factors determine the shape of history; and this state of affairs is hidden in virtue of the dominance of false ideas about history within particular societies (those that assign determining force to ideas themselves). I take this to be Marx’s position fairly consistently across his corpus: that the truth about history is obscured due to the prevalence of false notions within particular societies. The three explanatory modes I have identified provide different ways of accounting for this state of affairs. Given that both vulgar-Marxist and vulgar-Hegelian Marxist explanations make use of ordinary notions of human psychology, it is a simple matter to say what resources these provide for making claims regarding the dominance of false ideas. Both can portray such ideas as having been deliberately promulgated or made dominant by agents in control. The familiar notion of the conspiracy provides the device needed by vulgar-Marxist explanations to advance such claims. A signature component of Marx’s thinking about the social dynamics of ideas can be used to illustrate this point. Consider a canonical passage from The German Ideology: The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it. . . . The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an historical epoch, it is self-evident that

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This passage attributes to the ruling class intentional control over the ideas that circulate within a society, noting in particular that this control extends to the ideas that are available to the lower classes. Here, then, the claim is that false understandings afflict historical epochs because the members of ruling classes disseminate false ideas. Vulgar-Hegelian Marxism can make more straightforward use of intentional language, as Marx in fact proceeds to do: For each new class which puts itself in the place of the one ruling before it is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to present its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and present them as the only rational, universally valid ones.53

Now on my position, a passage such as this one implies a translation that makes no use of the language of collective agency. Inasmuch as they invoke ordinary psychological notions, the most accessible such translations will be into terms implying conspiratorial activity. Thus Marx’s claim that the ruling class promulgates false ideas about class interest in order to carry through its aim translates easily into the claim that members of the ruling classes act together to promulgate such false ideas in order to carry through an aim that they hold in common; and such a translation coheres with Marx’s language of a page earlier. But non-vulgar interpretations of these claims by Marx are also possible; and in fact I am inclined, for reasons having to do with the broader context of these passages in The German Ideology, to regard both the vulgarMarxist and the vulgar-Hegelian language here as shorthand references to more properly historical materialist explanations of the social dominance of false ideas. Inasmuch as historical materialism offers functional explanations of the general “climate of ideas” within a particular society, it offers functionalism as a resource for explaining the “hiddenness” of the true determinants of history. Broadly stated, a functional explanation of this “hiddenness” would be the claim that the members of a society are subject to illusions regarding what drives history in virtue of the effects that the configuration of relations of production has on their thinking—specifically, because their being subject to illusions is

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required for those relations to persist. This seems to be the position behind passages such as the following, from the first volume of Capital: The categories of bourgeois economics .  .  . are forms of thought which are socially valid, and hence objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production, i.e. commodity production. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour on the basis of commodity production, vanishes therefore as soon as we come to other forms of production.54 The religious reflections of the real world can, in any case, vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man, and man and nature, generally present themselves to him in a transparent and rational form. The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-processes. . . . until it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control. This, however, requires that society possess a material foundation, or a series of material conditions of existence, which in their turn are the natural and spontaneous product of a long and tormented historical development.55

Historical materialism can thus avoid appeals to intentional deception or concealment to account for the hiddenness of its explanans. Correct understanding eludes the mass of humanity—previous generations have been subject to the “illusions of the epoch”—because their “forms of consciousness” have been influenced by material conditions so that their actions will promote the development of productive forces. And the relationship between material conditions and the “hiddenness” of the truth is sufficiently tight that the broad mass of human beings will be subject to “illusions” about what really drives history so long as they live in societies divided by class (although Marx possibly included himself among those “bourgeois ideologists” who have “raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole”).56 Now while Marx was not reluctant to portray capitalists as acting from “filthy avarice,” he also frequently portrayed them as in the dark about the true determinants of their actions. In Capital such claims are common, for example: “The practical capitalist, imprisoned in the competitive struggle and in no way penetrating the phenomenon it exhibits, cannot but be completely incapable of recognizing, behind the semblance, the inner essence and the inner form of this process.”57 Thus historical materialism can easily portray capitalists as no less subject to illusions than members of lower classes.

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But if Marx was willing to portray members of ruling classes as subject to illusions, he was also willing to point out conditions under which being subject to such illusions served their self-interest. For example, in the third volume of Capital Marx notes, concerning variations in the way surplus-value figures in different enterprises and branches of production, that “this circumstance misleads the capitalist by convincing him that his profit is due not to the exploitation of labour, but at least in part also to other circumstances independent of this, and in particular to his own individual action.”58 And later in the same text, The actual difference in magnitude between profit and surplus-value in the various spheres of production . . . now completely conceals the true nature and origin of profit, not only for the capitalist, who has here a particular interest in deceiving himself, but also for the worker.59

Cohen has an incisive comment on passages of this sort. For Marx, he writes, “the survival of a class society, in particular of capitalism, also depends on a disparity between what it really is and the appearance it displays to its members, rulers and ruled alike.” At greater length: We must ask why class societies present themselves in a guise which differs from the shape correct social theory attributes to them. Part of the answer is that they rest on the exploitation of man by man. If the exploited were to see that they are exploited, they would resent their subjection and threaten social stability. And if the exploiters were to see that they exploit, the composure they need to rule would be disturbed. Being social animals, exploiters have to feel that their social behaviour is justifiable. When the feeling is difficult to reconcile with the truth, the truth must be hidden from them as well as from those they oppress. Illusion is thus constitutive of class societies.60

If Cohen is right, then the “hiddenness” of the true nature of capitalism is a functional requirement of capitalist society. Capitalism thus tends to produce in capitalists and workers alike the illusion that the actions of capitalists are not exploitative; it thus subjects capitalists to the illusion that they themselves are not exploiters, and workers to the illusion that they are not exploited. There is, however, an aspect of Marx’s treatment of such cases that Cohen’s reconstruction misses. Consider the following passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: What kept the two factions [Legitimist and Orleanist] apart, therefore, was not any so-called principles, it was their material conditions of existence, two different kinds of property, it was the old contrast between town and country,

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the rivalry between capital and landed property. That at the same time old memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and principles bound them to one or the other royal house, who is there that denies this? Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of different and distinctly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and forms of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, to whom they are transmitted through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and the starting-point of his activity. While Orleanists and Legitimists, while each faction sought to make itself and the other believe that it was loyalty to their two royal houses which separated them, facts later proved that it was rather their divided interests which forbade the unification of the two royal houses.61

While this passage is useful inasmuch as it generally supports the account of “hiddenness” I have been developing, I find the final sentence particularly interesting. There Marx portrays the members of the two royal houses as trying to be convinced, and to convince others, of a false notion concerning the causes of their actions. This comes close to portraying such persons as agents of their own deception.62 And if Marx does not say in Capital that capitalists intentionally deceive themselves concerning the true nature of profit for reasons having to do with self-interest, his claim that they “have an interest in being so deceived” suggests some connection between their agency and their sharing the “illusions of the epoch.” And this claim bends, it should be evident, in the direction of vulgar Marxism, inasmuch as it implies intentionality as a cause of the “hiddenness” of the correct understanding that historical materialism reveals. Before turning to the topic of negative ethical charge, I want to note that historical materialism has available a second and very different device for accounting for the “hiddenness” of its explanans. This device is the quite straightforward one of claiming that previous generations have lacked the means of perceiving the truth about history simply because advancing scientific knowledge has only recently made these available. And if in his earlier writings Marx positioned his work as a species of philosophy, in later years he regularly claimed the mantle of science for historical materialism. Late in the third volume of Capital he contrasted his position with “vulgar economics,” which “does nothing more than interpret, systematize and turn into apologetics the notions of agents trapped within bourgeois relations of production,” with the

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remark that “all science would be superfluous if the form of appearances of things directly coincided with their essence.”63 Historical materialism, then, provides two distinct ways of accounting for the hiddenness of the driving forces of history. First, hiddenness can be the result of simple ignorance, one that the advance of scientific knowledge is in the process of remedying. And second, hiddenness can be explained functionally: agents acting within a capitalist society misunderstand the true causes and effects of their actions because that misunderstanding is required for the perpetuation of capitalism. Now Marx also claims that particular cases of hiddenness are products of intentional deception, including in some cases self-deception, on the part of those whose personal interests would be adversely affected by recognition of the truth. According to the way in which I have distinguished between Marx’s three explanatory modes, such cases belong to vulgar Marxism rather than to historical materialism proper. But it should be kept in mind that vulgar Marxism can serve to elaborate functional explanations; if Marx’s references to self-deception are understood in this way, explanations that appeal to self-deception on the part of ruling classes will be contributions to Marx’s properly historical materialist account.

Negative ethical charge Allen Wood offers a useful encapsulation of the main thrust of Marx’s evaluation of capitalism: From one point of view, Marx is very explicit about his reasons for condemning capitalism. He describes and documents the miserable conditions to which the working class is subject: their grinding poverty, the degradation and emptiness of their mode of life, the precariousness of their very existence. And he argues that these conditions of life are by no means natural or unavoidable, but are rather the artificial products of an obsolete and irrational social system which is not recognized as such only because it serves the interests of the privileged minority. But from another point of view, Marx has dissatisfyingly little to say about his reasons for denouncing capitalist society. . . . He takes no pains to specify the norms, standards, or values he employs in deciding that capitalism is an intolerable system.64

If Marx’s ethical judgments of capitalism are clear enough, the grounds of these judgments are obscure. For my purposes Marx’s own ethical views, and his

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reasons for holding them, are only peripherally important, since the author of an ethically charged explanation need not subscribe to the valuations that generate the charge. Here I want to discuss the values that seem to inform the explanations that his texts present. Marx regularly refers to such personal characteristics as “filthy avarice,” stupidity, callousness, and outright wickedness; to states of affairs such as misery and suffering, oppression, slavery, exploitation, and dramatically unequal levels of wealth and well-being, and the domination of the weak by the strong; and to such complex states of affairs as some persons profiting from causing the suffering of others. My position is that his explanations (potentially) generate negative ethical charge for any audience that regards characteristics and states of affairs of these sorts as bad. It seems fairly clear that Marx himself shares these valuations, but whether this is the case is unimportant for my project. The three explanatory styles I have been describing invoke these valuations in different ways. The way in which vulgar-Marxist explanations generate negative ethical charge should be obvious. Conspiracy theories generally portray conspirators as acting from bad motives, in bad ways, for bad ends, and with bad results. It is certainly in line with vulgar Marxism as I have been describing it to generate negative ethical evaluations of, for example, capitalists, on the grounds that their actions are motivated by lust for material gain, that they deceive others (about the actions they take, or about the motives or intended ends of those actions), and that they are willing to cause suffering in order to profit thereby. As we have already seen, Marx was certainly willing to describe the actions of individual persons in ways that associate them with such characteristics, and further examples are not hard to find: In order to get possession of Malacca, the Dutch bribed the Portuguese governor. He let them into the town in 1641. They went straight to his house and assassinated him, so as to be able to ‘abstain’ from paying the £21,875 which was the amount of his bribe. Wherever they set foot, devastation and depopulation followed. Banjuwangi, a province of Java, numbered over 80,000 inhabitants in 1750 and only 18,000 in 1811. That is peaceful commerce!65

The way historical materialism generates negative ethical charge is both more complex and more interesting. And negative evaluations of the sort licensed by historical materialism are far more common, and more important, in Marx’s texts than are condemnations of the vulgar-Marxist type. As a specifically capitalist form of the process of social production .  .  . the division of labour in manufacture is merely a particular method of creating relative surplus-value, or of augmenting the self-valorization of capital—usually

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The valuations invoked in these passages, and thus the ethical charge that they generate, are fairly clear: it is not very controversial to hold that crippling persons for the sake of material gain, antagonism and ‘murderousness,’ and reducing human beings to a state of slavery are bad. And clearly, these passages position such phenomena as results of capitalism—more precisely, consequences of the fact of the capitalist organization of relations of production. Thus these passages motivate the condemnation of capitalism itself on the grounds of its results with regard to human well-being. It seems to me that Marx was a pioneer of what I term social functional criticism. Social functional criticism is criticism of phenomena on the grounds of the social effects that it is their function to bring about. What makes capitalism bad is not just the fact that it immiserates large numbers of persons: it is the fact that it does so nonaccidentally, that its existence requires this immiseration. For illustration, we can compare capitalism to such phenomena as earthquakes. Causing the deaths of large numbers of persons is, let us say, a bad thing; and thus an earthquake can be said to be a bad thing inasmuch as it causes such deaths. But it is in no sense a function of earthquakes to cause large numbers of deaths; such a result is not a requirement for the existence of an earthquake, for an earthquake is no less an earthquake when it causes no deaths at all. In contrast, according to Marx, capitalism could not exist without causing misery; it is, as it were, the nature of capitalism to cause it.

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Now functional social criticism could be discussed at significant length in itself. For my purposes, given that historical materialism shares space in Marx’s texts with vulgar and vulgar-Hegelian Marxism, one remark is particularly important. There is, at a minimum, a close parallel between social functional criticism and the criticism of bad agents. That parallel runs as follows. Social functional criticism is grounded in claims to the effect that some phenomenon produces bad effects not by accident, but in accordance with its nature; we might say that social functional criticism attributes to its subject a disposition or tendency to produce bad effects, and not peripherally or accidentally. There are familiar examples of dispositions or tendencies to produce bad effects in the realm of agency: they are character traits like greed, hatred, unconcern for others, and so on. It seems uncontroversial to me to think that when it is claimed that some agent has by nature such a disposition—that a person’s true character is, say, such that that person tends to act in ways that benefit himself at the expense of others—such a claim provides grounds for the negative ethical evaluation of that person (for anyone who values such actions negatively—perhaps not for cartoon Nietzscheans). And it seems to me that functional social criticism works in this same way: that Marx’s condemnation of capitalism is grounded in the claim that capitalism has by nature a disposition to produce bad effects across society. The fact that the sorts of dispositions that functional criticism postulates are, in a sense, “self-regarding”—that is, capitalism’s dispositions are to produce results that benefit capitalism itself by ensuring that the conditions for its continued existence are satisfied—draws the two forms of criticism together quite tightly. A moment ago I said that at a minimum the two forms of evaluation run in parallel. I think that it is also possible for social functional criticism to simply appropriate ordinary practices of the ethical evaluation of agents and to reapply these to the social realm—to appropriate, for example, the common judgment that a person who acts in ways that benefit himself at the expense of others is a bad person, the more bad the more consistently, intentionally, and harmfully the person performs such acts. In fact it was, I think, a regular habit of Marx’s to appropriate such practices for the purpose of social criticism; this explains, for example, his characterization of capitalism as antagonistic and in fact murderous in the passages cited above. Shortly I will adduce further and more theoretically interesting examples. If historical materialism contributes to Marx’s texts resources for negative ethical evaluation that vulgar Marxism lacks, it also provides resources for

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undermining vulgar-Marxist evaluations. Historical materialism aims to explain why individuals, including capitalists, act in the ways that they do; but elaborations of historical materialist functional explanations do not have to be vulgar, and historical materialism portrays social actors as, in the main, ignorant of the deepest (highest-level) causes of their own actions. This combination of claims opens the possibility that a historical materialist account of some historical development might undermine ethical judgments concerning those individuals whose actions are the proximate causes of bad effects. Consistently, historical materialism undermines such evaluations by treating individual motives as at best shallow explainers of the phenomena it explains. Thus even if some capitalists are motivated by greed to act in ways that increase exploitation, their moral characteristics cannot fully explain that exploitation; for their actions, whatever their motivations, are ultimately determined by the requirements of capitalist social relations. Going further, a historical materialist account might portray capitalists as persons who do not intend to produce the bad effects that result from their actions, and are in fact ignorant of the fact that their actions produce these results (they believe that they are not exploiters). Marx was well aware of this feature of his understanding of history, and spoke to the issue in a passage from the opening pages of Capital to which I have already referred in part. To prevent possible misunderstandings, let me say this. I do not by any means depict the capitalist and the landowner in rosy colours. But individuals are dealt with here only in so far as they are personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class-relations and interests. My standpoint, from which the development of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he remains, socially speaking, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.69

This passage combines two distinct aspects of Marx’s treatment of capitalists. On the one hand, Marx’s theoretical commitments absolve such persons of ultimate responsibility for the depredations of capitalism, and they figure in his texts more often as “personifications of capital” than as concrete individual persons. But on the other hand, his portrayal of them considered as concrete, individual human beings is consistently unflattering. In fact, although historical materialism does not entail that capitalists always act from self-regarding or otherwise ethically bad motives, it is quite difficult to identify cases in which Marx described capitalists in positive terms.

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The functionalist framework of historical materialism opens up one further avenue for ethical evaluation that I think worth discussing—one that I think partly explains his generally negative view of capitalists. According to historical materialism, the actions of capitalists and workers alike are shaped by large-scale social conditions in ways that make for the persistence of capitalism. But Marx designates capitalists and not workers as “personifications of capital.” In spite of the fact that the preservation of capitalism requires both capitalists and workers to play their allotted roles, there seems to be in Marx’s texts an important difference between the roles that capitalists and workers respectively play, one that bears on Marx’s evaluations of capitalists considered as concrete human beings. It seems to me that Marx consistently portrays capitalists as something like willing agents of capitalism where workers are unwilling victims—and this in spite of the fact that he regards capitalists as ignorant of the true driving forces and significance of their actions. I want to venture a formulation of the principle that informs the distinction that Marx seems to draw. Historical materialism envisions social systems the operation of which requires that the actions of specific actors produce specific effects. One can imagine that within some such systems there is a closer alignment between the agency of some actors and their assigned functional roles than is the case with others. More precisely, one can imagine a greater or lesser disparity between the results that agents intend their actions to accomplish and the results that those actions, having been shaped by the larger social system, do in fact accomplish; one can imagine a greater or lesser willingness on the part of agents to play the roles that the system requires them to play; and quite naturally, one can imagine a greater or lesser degree of happiness or satisfaction with existing social arrangements. I think it fairly safe to say that Marx’s texts consistently represent workers and capitalists as far apart along these axes. That is, his texts consistently present capitalists (a) as intending their actions to produce results that are not as different from the functional requirements of the capitalism itself (increasing productivity, greater exploitation) as are the results that workers intend their actions to accomplish (survival, and inasmuch as they adhere to religion, perhaps eternal reward); (b) as more willing to play the role of the owner of the means of production or of member of the “ruling class” than are workers to play their role as exploited sellers of their own labor; and (c) as more likely to be content with existing social relations than are the working classes. I think it is consideration of this sort—considerations of the degree of alignment between personal agency and functional role—that informs Marx’s

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practice of treating capitalists as “agents of capital” in ways that he does not treat workers. And it seems to me that regarding capitalists as “agents of capitalism” in this way motivates the judgment that capitalists bear responsibility for the evils of capitalism in a sense in which workers do not in spite of the fact that both workers and capitalists must play their allotted roles for capitalism to continue. The last topic for this section is vulgar-Hegelian Marxism and negative ethical charge. Inasmuch as vulgar Hegelianism is a matter of the projection of ordinary psychological notions onto groups or abstractions, an obvious way in which vulgar-Hegelian Marxism can generate negative ethical charge is by attributing unsavory personal characteristics to such entities. And Marx certainly does this. Above I cited a passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire in which Marx claims that the bourgeois order in France “has become a vampire that sucks out its [smallholding peasantry’s] blood and brains and throws them into the alchemist’s cauldron of capital.”70 Marx makes use of similar language in Capital: The capitalist has his own views of this point of no return, the necessary limit of the working day. As a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value. . . . Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.71

Above I claimed that one use to which Marx puts vulgar-Hegelian language is to model complex chains of cause and effect involving multiple persons. The second use to which he puts such language is that of expressing evaluative judgments. I take Marx to have ascribed to the bourgeois class the characteristics of a vampire as a shorthand way of expressing an ethical evaluation of actual bourgeois individuals, and to have ascribed vampirism to capital itself in order to express an ethical evaluation of actual capitalists. Inasmuch as the rhetorical use of vulgar-Hegelian language implies a translation into terms innocent of notions of collective agency, vulgar-Hegelian condemnations imply, as translations, negative ethical judgments concerning individuals. This is the distinctive way in which vulgar-Hegelian explanations generate negative ethical charge. My discussion of the relationships among Marx’s three explanatory modes is relevant here. Above I remarked that historical materialism has novel resources for motivating the ethical evaluation of human persons, and that there is, at a minimum, a close parallel between these and modes of evaluation that invoke notions of agency. Marx’s vulgar-Hegelian passages are further examples of cases in which he appropriated practices of evaluation appropriate

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to agents for the purpose of social criticism; thus describing capital as “dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour” motivates the condemnation of capitalists in the same way as describing capitalism, simply, as “murderous.” Now the ethical evaluation of human persons that results from social functional criticism is, I think it safe to say, more cognitively demanding than vulgar-Hegelian condemnations. In fact I think Marx used vulgar-Hegelian language as a way of making the ethical implications of his thinking accessible to his readership. He had recourse to vulgar-Hegelian language as a way of setting out, in vivid summary form, the upshot of his understanding of history as regards the ethical status of persons in different social positions. A crucial statement from the early Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right seems to me to basically describe this strategy: For the revolution of a nation and the emancipation of a particular class of civil society to coincide .  .  . a particular social sphere must be recognized as the notorious crime of the whole of society, so that liberation from that sphere appears as general self-liberation. For one estate to be par excellence the estate of liberation, another estate must conversely be the obvious estate of oppression.72

And certain passages from the Manifesto of the Communist Party are, I think, implementations of the strategy: the bourgeoisie “has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. . . for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”73 I do not want to venture detailed translations of these or other of Marx’s vulgar-Hegelian condemnations into judgments on individual persons. But I think that any plausible translations will have two characteristics. First, they will be negative or condemnatory in character (specifically, for those who disapprove of notorious crimes, oppression, naked exploitation, or vampirism). And second, they will apply to persons just in virtue of their membership in the relevant social group. I do not mean to imply that any plausible translation will simply transfer whatever evaluations are appropriate to the bourgeoisie as a whole qua vampire to each and every bourgeois person. Rather, I think any plausible translation will think of individual persons as contributing to and thus as in some way responsible for those characteristics that appear in the vulgar-Hegelian ethical judgment. But the point is that when he ascribes ethically relevant actions or characteristics

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to the bourgeois class as a whole or to capital itself, Marx motivates the ethical evaluation of human persons not in virtue of their particular actions, but in virtue of their connection to the vulgar-Hegelian entity in question—which is to say, in virtue of their social identity. As shorthand references to the kinds of ethical evaluations that historical materialism generates, it seems to me that Marx’s vulgar-Hegelian passages are not entirely innocent. For we have seen that Marx also acknowledges that, for instance, individual capitalists cannot be held responsible for the productive relations that determine their existence, and that historical materialism permits the thought that capitalists might act from motives that are not bad—thus that if there are wicked capitalists, there may be (at least at a certain level of analysis) morally upstanding capitalists as well. It does not seem to me that Marx’s vulgarHegelian condemnations can plausibly be regarded as adequate models of the sorts of ethical judgments that historical materialism supports, as these are subject to qualifications of various kinds. Rather, negative ethical judgments in the vulgar-Hegelian mode encourage the blanket condemnation of individual persons just in virtue of their social identity. And Marx does seem, as we have seen, to have condoned such blanket condemnation as a strategy for motivating revolutionary activity. Furthermore, we have already encountered a passage from Capital in which Marx turned the theoretical resources of historical materialism to the ascription of responsibility to all of the members of the capitalist class: “Each individual capitalist, just like the totality of all capitalists in each particular sphere of production, participates in the exploitation of the entire working class by capital as a whole, and in the level of this exploitation.”74 This passage does not quite ascribe to all capitalists of an equal share of blame for capitalist exploitation; but neither does it display an openness on Marx’s part to the notion that the degree of responsibility borne by individual capitalists varies according to their moral qualities or their particular choices.

Conclusion Writing in the late 1950s, Robert Tucker summarized his investigation of Marx’s philosophy of history as follows: But the reality that Marx apprehended and portrayed was inner reality. The forces of which he was aware were subjective forces, forces of the alienated human self,

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conceived, however, and also perceived, as forces abroad in society. Insofar as this determined his thinking, it was not “real positive science” at which he had arrived out of Hegelianism. Instead, he had gone beyond philosophy into that out of which philosophy, ages ago, originated—myth. For this is the decisive character of mythic thought, that something by nature interior is apprehended as exterior, that a drama of the inner life is experienced and depicted as taking place in the outer world.75

I take Tucker to be accusing Marx of making use of ordinary psychological notions to explain the course of history, displacing, magnifying, and projecting these notions to render them adequate to that task; and he charges Marx with “mythologizing” on the strength of that accusation (with the thought, I suppose, that myths by nature rely on anthropomorphic projection). My reconstruction diverges from Tucker’s significantly, but I think Tucker hits on something important about Marx’s writing. Both vulgar Marxism and vulgar-Hegelian Marxism, as I have described them, perform the kinds of operation that Tucker describes: vulgar Marxism by supposing that the agency of certain persons explains historical events, and vulgarHegelian Marxism by attributing agential characteristics to groups or abstract entities. But as I have described Marx’s writings, they are not just a collection of devices of this sort; and I take historical materialism, as reconstructed by the analytic Marxists, to be a theory that does not rely on such devices. Rather than projecting agency onto a larger screen, historical materialism aims to assign to human agency a specific place within the operation of a set of broader social forces, thus contextualizing the contribution agency makes to the course of history. But in Marx’s texts, historical materialism is thoroughly intertwined with vulgar Marxism and vulgar-Hegelian Marxism. I think it correct to say that in a wide variety of places Marx made use of ordinary psychological notions, at times magnified or projected, to supplement, elaborate, illustrate, or summarize his more properly historical materialist claims. I think, further, that while it is possible to reconstruct historical materialism in such a way that agential notions are firmly assigned a subordinate and contextualized explanatory role, this is no simple task. There is no “natural” reading that establishes clear boundaries around Marx’s appeals to agency for either the purpose of explanation or the purpose of ethical evaluation.76 Tucker’s diagnosis of Marx’s “mythologizing” tendencies was, for him, grounds for dismissing Marx’s Theory of History as a candidate for truth. I think

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a more modest version of this criticism is appropriate. Consider the following passage from Capital: Thus as soon as the workers learn the secret of why it happens that the more they work, the more alien wealth they produce. . . [as soon as] they try to organize planned co-operation between the employed and the unemployed in order to obviate or to weaken the ruinous effect of this natural law of capitalist production on their class, so soon does capital and its sycophant, political economy, cry out at the infringement of “eternal” and so to speak “sacred” law of supply and demand. But on the other hand, as soon as (in the colonies, for example) adverse circumstances prevent the creation of an industrial reserve army, and with it the absolute dependence of the working class, capital, along with its platitudinous Sancho Panza, rebels against the “sacred” law of supply and demand, and tries to make up for its inadequacies by forcible means.77

On my reading, this claim by Marx cannot be rejected on the grounds that it projects psychological notions onto social reality. Rather, the passage presents the thought of a transpersonal agent—powerful, unscrupulous, and hypocritical—acting with a consistency of purpose in different situations as a good model for those factors that have brought about differences of political and economic practice in different geopolitical contexts. I would not know how to assess the possible truth of the claim that Marx makes here without a translation into terms that make no reference to exotic agencies, and in this case Marx does not supply one. Something similar can be said about the effect of the interweaving of Marx’s three explanatory styles on the ethical charge generated by his explanations. Marx’s writings aim to explain why particular kinds of suffering, exploitation, and oppression are the case. But they do not present a clear and consistent account of human responsibility for these phenomena. Marx routinely describes members of ruling classes in strongly condemnatory terms, and at times seems to hold particular individuals responsible for evils of significant magnitude. But nowhere does he say that full responsibility for the evils of capitalism, say, rests on the shoulders of capitalists; and indeed such a claim is incompatible with his clearly stated position that individuals cannot be responsible for the social conditions that shape them. Marx’s clearest and most vehement ascriptions of responsibility and blame for the sufferings of the many are ascriptions to transhuman entities such as capital, the ruling classes, or the bourgeoisie. His readers are left with the task of assessing whether, and to what extent, these translate into ascriptions of responsibility to concrete individuals.78

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Here is one significant result of this interweaving. Miller observed a tendency in later Marxists to understand class identities as psychological types.79 On his reading this is a mistake, for historical materialism does not claim, for example, that it is by causing them to be greedy, dishonest, and callous that large-scale economic factors bring it about that capitalists act as they do. But it seems to me that Marx’s texts, read as a whole and without the explicitly framed intention to bracket his tendencies toward vulgarity, encourage something close to this. They encourage the ethical judgment of concrete human individuals on the basis of their social identity, in relation to issues of responsibility for heinous and largescale evils. It may have been plausible at some points in recent history to suppose that a theory that encourages the blanket condemnation of human persons just in virtue of their social identity might, in the long run, be the key device for bringing about forms of society free of injustice and oppression. I do not find this principle to be either particularly plausible on its own or well supported by historical evidence. Historical materialism does not encourage such blanket condemnation. But I think that the same cannot be said for the writings in which, canonically, that theory is presented to the world.

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Classic Suspicion: Nietzsche

Doesn’t it seem as if, for eighteen centuries, Europe was dominated by the single will to turn humanity into a sublime abortion? —Friedrich Nietzsche1 The center of Nietzsche’s contribution to the tradition of suspicion is a single text, the Genealogy of Morals. It is the history of effects rather than any efforts on Nietzsche’s part that have made this work stand out from the rest of his corpus.2 Nietzsche originally intended Beyond Good and Evil, which was published in August 1886, to be the capstone of his preparations for his envisioned magnum opus, The Will to Power. But the dismal sales and scanty notice of the book led him to decide, rather suddenly in the following summer, to write an “expansion and elaboration” of Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche wrote the bulk of the Genealogy over a three-week period in July of 1887 and continued working on it through late August; it appeared in print in November; and in early February Nietzsche wrote to his printer that perhaps its title should have been Beyond Good and Evil: An Appendix. Having now completed an “epoch” of his own writing, Nietzsche considered the way to The Will to Power clear. A year later his mental breakdown brought his writing career to an end. I think it unlikely that Nietzsche intended to be remembered primarily for his term genealogy; but his Genealogy is commonly accepted as the “founding exemplar” of a style of academic work that falls under that label.3 Although my project here is to reconstruct Nietzsche’s text as a source of suspicious explanations, in effect this chapter also constitutes an account of “genealogy” as method. This is because I think that defining genealogy as suspicious explanation in the mode of history captures the most important characteristics of that method. That is, genealogy is a matter of offering historical narratives that explain why something is the case, narratives that postulate “hidden” events or forces and generate negative ethical charge. In this chapter I will

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confine myself to reconstructing Nietzsche’s work along these lines, leaving for another time the project of justifying my approach in relation to more recent “genealogical” literature. Most of the commentators on whom I have relied have taken it to be obvious that it was among Nietzsche’s aims to explain Christian morality by offering an account of its historical development; and that Nietzsche intended to motivate his audience to reject morality is, if anything, even more broadly accepted. I will begin my exposition by substantiating the notion that Nietzsche’s project was an explanatory one. I will then speak in the abstract about the “tools” Nietzsche uses, in the work’s three essays, to construct historical narratives that explain three broad features of morality. I will then examine each of the essays in some detail, reconstructing the narratives that Nietzsche offers in terms of the tools I have described. I will then discuss Nietzsche’s narratives as examples of suspicious explanation. There I will pay attention to significant theoretical issues that will have arisen in the course of exposition, including the ways in which Nietzsche’s explanations might motivate the rejection of morality, before offering summary claims about Nietzsche’s work as an exemplar of a style or method.

The explanatory framework In the Preface Nietzsche announced his central concern with “the question of what origin our terms of good and evil actually have” and the question, “under what conditions did man invent the value judgments good and evil?”4 And he narrated the development of his interest in such questions, identifying as a key moment his engagement with Paul Ré e’s On the Origin of the Moral Sensations. Initially enamored of Ré e’s work and close with Ré e himself, by 1887 Nietzsche had come to describe his work as “a back-to-front and perverse kind of genealogical hypothesis, actually the English kind.”5 Nietzsche credited Ré e’s book with stimulating him to advance his own “genealogical hypotheses” concerning morality, beginning with Human, All Too Human, and culminating in the Genealogy. It is clear from the Preface that Nietzsche’s interest was motivated by more than the end of explanation itself: So let us give voice to this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values should itself, for once, be examined—and so we need to know about the conditions and circumstances under which the values grew up,

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developed and changed. . . . since we have neither this knowledge up till now nor even desired it.6

The project of narrating the history of morality, then, is in service to the goal of drawing evaluative conclusions. Nietzsche indicates the trajectory the book will follow: Up till now, nobody has had the remotest doubt or hesitation in placing higher value on “the good man” than on “the evil,” higher value in the sense of advancement, benefit and prosperity for man in general. . . . What if the opposite were true? What if a regressive trait lurked in “the good man,” likewise a danger, an enticement, a poison, a narcotic, so that the present lived at the expense of the future. . . . So that morality itself was the danger of dangers?7

The explanatory thrust of the Genealogy is clarified, I think, by passages early in the second essay, where Nietzsche offers a high-level theoretical claim about cultural development. Opposing views (represented in this instance by the work of Eugen Dü hring) that seek to deduce the origins of practices such as punishment from their utility, he offers a “major point of historical method”: That the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former “meaning” and “purpose” must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated. . . . So people think punishment has evolved for the purpose of punishing. But every purpose and use is just a sign that the will to power has achieved mastery over something less powerful, and has impressed upon it its own idea of a use function; and the whole history of a “thing,” an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves.8

And Nietzsche positions his own work as an attempt to counter the “prevailing instinct and fashion which would much rather come to terms with absolute randomness, and even the mechanistic senselessness of all events, than the theory that a power-will is acted out in all that happens.”9 In these passages I take Nietzsche to be indicating that the Genealogy offers an account of morality as the

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product of the operation of the “will to power” within history, and positioning this account as a rival to alternative explanations. So by his own confession, Nietzsche aims to provide a novel account of the origin and development of morality, an account that will motivate a negative evaluation of that phenomenon. It is, in fact, particularly helpful for my purposes that Nietzsche is explicit about the fact that his explanation of morality is calculated to motivate such an evaluation: it is his intention to point to “bad” explanatory factors precisely in order to motivate his audience to judge “morality” negatively. In the Preface Nietzsche does not signal that he takes himself to be “uncovering” that which has been “hidden”; rather, initially he presents himself as seeking to displace views that have just never been questioned through the production of information that has never been desired. But the theme of “hiddenness” becomes important almost immediately in the opening pages of the first essay. Nietzsche charges the origin stories of the “English psychologists” with two deficits. In the first place they are “historically untenable”; in the second, they suffer from “an inner psychological contradiction.” Nietzsche’s second charge is of particular relevance here: The usefulness of the unegoistic behavior is supposed to be the origin of the esteem in which it is held, and this origin is supposed to have been forgotten:— but how was such forgetting possible? Did the usefulness of such behavior suddenly cease at some point? The opposite is the case: it is that this usefulness has been a permanent part of our everyday experience. . . . instead of becoming forgettable, it must have impressed itself on consciousness with ever greater clarity.10

Here Nietzsche pointed out a defect in the explanation to which he intends to oppose his own: it postulates a hitherto unacknowledged origin to moral valuations, but its account of why this origin has not been acknowledged is deficient. Nietzsche proceeded to offer what was, in his sense, a superior explanation for the fact that his postulated origins are not generally acknowledged. That explanation, which clearly invokes a strong notion of “hiddenness,” I will discuss below. On the strength of the passages I have cited, I think three claims are warranted: first, that Nietzsche intended to produce a better explanation for the content and the prevalence of morality than the explanation currently available to his audience;11 second, that he intended that his explanation would postulate the

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existence of factors that are not evident to casual observation; and, third, that he understood that accepting his explanation would motivate those who accept it to rethink their uncritically positive estimation of the value of morality.

Nietzsche’s toolbox Nietzsche’s narrative unfolds in stages. In each of the three essays that comprise the Genealogy, Nietzsche offers an account of the development of some component(s) of morality: in the first essay, its basic distinction between “good” and “bad”; in the second “guilt” and “bad conscience”; and in the third the “ascetic ideal.” Each of the accounts has a similar structure, in that in each account Nietzsche deploys three distinct kinds of resources arranged in similar ways. First, Nietzsche advances principles of normal tendency (a phrase which I borrow from Richard Miller). For the most part these are psychological tendencies—tendencies for agents to think, feel, or act in certain ways.12 Here I mention a few such principles, leaving detailed exegesis for later: “the concept of political superiority always resolves itself into the concept of psychological superiority”; “only something that continues to hurt stays in the memory”; “to see suffering does you good, to make suffer, better still”; “all instincts which are not discharged outwardly turn inwards”; “every sufferer instinctively looks for a cause of his distress; more exactly, for a culprit, even more precisely, for a guilty culprit.”13 Nietzsche’s most famous principle of normal tendency is not, in the first instance, psychological. The “will to power” is, for him, the “essence of life”: the term refers to “the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, re-interpreting, re-directing and formative forces” that operate within all living beings as such.14 The potential theoretical significance of the will to power in the realm of biology aside, it is the psychological dimensions of the notion—in the form of the “instinct for freedom” and the “instinct for cruelty”—that figure in the arguments of the Genealogy. The will to power is a disposition for living creatures to act in certain ways— in ways that enhance their feeling of power.15 It is a disposition that, according to Nietzsche’s description, is always active. But many of Nietzsche’s principles of normal tendency are conditional in nature. They are tendencies for human beings to think, feel, or act in certain ways under certain conditions: that is, they operate when “triggered.” This feature of Nietzsche’s principles of normal tendency makes it possible for him to invoke them to explain developments at

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particular historical junctures, by claiming that at these junctures conditions that triggered their operation were satisfied. A particularly important kind of principle of normal tendency for the arguments of the Genealogy is the “mode of valuation.” These “modes” are tendencies to generate schemes of valuation of, for instance, persons, actions, or characteristics; and the schemes generated by each mode differ in ways that can be stated formulaically. As we will see, Nietzsche attributes these tendencies to specific kinds of people, and each of the essays of the Genealogy supposes different human populations embodying different modes of valuation. Second, Nietzsche describes several different kinds of human person, which I will refer to as his characters. Here again, I will mention a few of these without going into detail. The first essay revolves around the characters of the “warrior” (Krieger) and the “priest.” Important characters in the later essays are the “man of bad conscience” and the “ascetic priest.” These characters are distinguished from each other by a variety of devices. For the most part these characters are “psychological type concepts”;16 the warrior is cheerful, self-assertive, and none too bright, the priest is “brooding” and “emotionally explosive,” and he “despises more easily than [he] hates.”17 In some instances—the “man of ressentiment” and the “man of bad conscience”—Nietzsche’s characters are just embodiments of one of his principles of normal tendency. But Nietzsche also associated particular characters with different physiological characteristics—the warrior is powerful and abundantly healthy, the priest “powerless” and sickly—and differences of social rank. Nietzsche’s characters appear sometimes as individuals and sometimes as groups or “races.” While descriptions of the psychologies of individual persons are a center of gravity for Nietzsche’s arguments, it is fairly clear throughout that Nietzsche takes himself to be describing developments that extend throughout populations. It seems to me that this practice is a device for “scaling up” the power of belief-desire explanations to encompass phenomena as large in scale as the various components of morality. Third and finally, Nietzsche postulates events. These events are occasions on which changes occurred, the cumulative result of which was that some populations of persons came to accept morality. The majority of the changes that Nietzsche describes take place in the realm of ideas: they are changes in the way some agent or agents thought or felt, or occasions on which some agent or agents decided on a course of action. Thus Nietzsche’s events have a clear “before” and a clear “after”: before the change in question, the agent in question thought or acted in a certain way; afterward, differently.

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The relationship among Nietzsche’s principles of normal tendency, his characters, and his events is fairly straightforward. The events are occasions on which his characters make changes to their thinking, or act in ways that change the thinking of others. And what explains why these characters make the changes they do are the principles of normal tendency that Nietzsche ascribes to them (in virtue of their mere humanity or of their character identity), sometimes alongside or in concert with less exotic motivations (e.g., hatred or the desire for revenge). Given that most of Nietzsche’s principles of normal tendency have “triggering” conditions, Nietzsche devotes significant attention to describing the conditions under which his events are supposed to have occurred. I will use the terminology I have been developing thus far to structure my expositions of the explanations Nietzsche offers in the Genealogy’s three essays. For each of the accounts I will describe the starting condition that Nietzsche describes, or the circumstances in which the event he postulates takes place. These starting conditions typically involve more than one of Nietzsche’s characters, but in each case there is one character or group of characters on which Nietzsche’s narrative centers; I will identify these main characters and the characteristics that Nietzsche ascribes to them. I will then identify the principles of normal tendency that Nietzsche introduces or recalls to explain the events in which his main characters figure (the actions they take or the changes wrought upon them), with attention to their “triggering conditions”; following this I will describe the events themselves. And finally I will describe Nietzsche’s claims about the repercussions or broader significance of the events he has described, which in each case are relevant to the evaluation of the aspects of morality under discussion.

The first essay Nietzsche’s project in the first essay is to explain the origin of the valuations of “good” and “evil” as he takes them to be represented in the morality of his day. The first essay is largely an expansion and re-working of a claim Nietzsche had advanced in Beyond Good and Evil: that “the slave revolt in morality begins with the Jews.”18 The “starting condition” of the first essay is as follows. A “noble race” of “warrior” characters has conquered a different group, whom Nietzsche identifies as “the Jews.” This “warrior race” subscribes to what Nietzsche labels the “chivalric-aristocratic” (ritterlich-aristocratisch) method of valuation, and as a

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result of their social domination, their system of valuation is in some sense the dominant system of valuation. Before proceeding, a word is in order about my decision to retain Nietzsche’s terminology of “Jews” in my exposition rather than, say, speaking of “certain kinds of people who were moved by prudential or other self-interested considerations” (as does Leiter) or “an oppressed populace in an archaic feudal warrior society” (as does Poellner).19 The issue is a delicate one for reasons that have to do with the history of Nietzsche reception. On the one hand, it is now well known that the appropriation of Nietzsche’s work by the National Socialists in Germany required “criminal falsification and manipulation” of his texts, manipulation enthusiastically initiated by his sister following Nietzsche’s mental breakdown.20 It is also well documented that Nietzsche more or less despised the anti-Semites of his day, and looked forward to a future in which a “new kind of European” would arise as the result of the interbreeding of Jewish and nonJewish racial stock; his own attitudes toward Jews aside, he can in some respects be described as an “anti-anti-Semite.”21 In view of these conditions it is safe to say that to assimilate Nietzsche to late nineteenth-century anti-Semitism is not just a mistake, but a mistake with a particular and quite unsavory provenance. But on the other hand, it takes real hermeneutical resourcefulness to avoid the conclusion that in the first essay Nietzsche describes a conspiracy on the part of “the Jews,” motivated by hatred, fueled by ressentiment, and aimed at revenge, as the origin of the distinction between “good” and “evil.” In fact, I would go so far as to say that the problem at hand is basically that the first essay might as well have been written by a conspiracy-minded anti-Semite. My reasons for sticking with Nietzsche’s terminology are three. First and most obviously, I do not want to miss the significance of the fact that Nietzsche makes use of the device of the Jewish conspiracy in his explanation. Second, it is with reference to “the Jews” that Nietzsche provides the most substantive historical tethering in the whole of the Genealogy, and historical tethering matters for considerations of theory choice. And third, Nietzsche’s references to “the Jews” are rhetorically substantive and powerful, and it is both fairly easy and, I think, genuinely illuminating to describe the role they play in Nietzsche’s project of motivating the rejection of morality. It matters for that project that Christian morality be assigned a Jewish origin and that Jews be described in negative terms—in fact, in terms that owe much to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that were in vogue in Europe at the time. To anticipate my later discussion, I think Nietzsche’s friend Franz Overbeck was correct in stating that

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“[Nietzsche’s] position against Christianity is primarily founded in antiSemitism,” but I do not think that this claim entails that Nietzsche himself was an anti-Semite. If the Jew is the main character of the first essay, the role played by the warrior character is almost as important. The best way to come to grips with Nietzsche’s understanding of the warrior is by way of his description of the “chivalric-aristocratic method” of valuation, and in particular of its basic distinction between “good” and “bad.” Nietzsche claims that it was socially dominant races that “first claimed the right to create values and give these values names”: it was the “noble, the mighty, the high-placed and high-minded, who saw and judged themselves and their actions as good.”22 Since the noble person, according to Nietzsche, “conceives of the basic idea ‘good’ by himself, in advance and spontaneously, and only then creates a notion of ‘bad,’” the positive valuations of the chivalric-aristocratic scheme were, in a sense, its fundamental commitments.23 The scheme assigned positive value to just those physical and social attributes that characterize the “well-born.” As its authors were “complete men bursting with strength and therefore necessarily active,” its value judgments were “based on a powerful physicality, a blossoming, rich, even effervescent good health that includes the things needed to maintain it, war, adventure, hunting, dancing, jousting and everything else that contains strong, free, happy action.”24 The negative valuations of the chivalric-aristocratic scheme are, in a sense, secondary: they are parasitic upon the positive valuation of everything “noble” in that they classify as “bad” anything that conflicts with or is recognizably the opposite of the “noble.” Thus “everything lowly, low-minded, common and plebian” is valued negatively;25 so too are attributes that are incompatible with “noble” virtues: deception, for example, and also weakness, poor health, cowardice, and any kind of “unnaturalness.” While much of Nietzsche’s description of the warrior is concerned with this character’s psychological tendencies, the social expression of these tendencies also matters to his arguments. He offers a vivid description of the different behavioral tendencies that the warrior displays in the company of other warriors and outside the constraints of such company: The same people who are so strongly held in check by custom, respect, habit, gratitude and even more through spying on each other and through peer-group jealousy . . . they are not much better than uncaged beasts of prey in the world outside where the strange, the foreign, begin .  .  . they return to the innocent conscience of the wild beast, as exultant monsters, who perhaps go away

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having committed a hideous succession of murder, arson, rape and torture, in a mood of bravado and spiritual equilibrium as though they had simply played a student’s prank.26

Nietzsche’s warrior character, then, is a figure of straightforward power both materially and with respect to valuation. Social relationships among warriors are primarily determined by the dynamics of conflicting wills of comparable strengths bent on self-assertion, and when these constraints fall away, so too do all restraints on self-assertion. The warrior character, then, more or less embodies Nietzsche’s “will to power” in a relatively uncomplicated way both psychologically and behaviorally. Nietzsche offers various characterizations of Jews as a people; I will focus on three claims. First, in the Genealogy the Jews are a “priestly people”; second, the Jews are a “nation of ressentiment”; and third, Jews are distinguished by a unique degree of capability or competence. Nietzsche says relatively little about the “priest” character outside of his discussion of Jews. But it is clear that he thinks that Jews are not the only ‘priestly race’ or ‘priestly aristocracy,’ and he does advance some descriptions of the character as a generic type. The very nature of an essentially priestly aristocracy shows how contradictory valuations could become dangerously internalized and sharpened. .  .  . From the very beginning there has been something unhealthy about these priestly aristocracies and in the customs dominant there, which are turned away from action and are partly brooding and partly emotionally explosive, resulting in the almost inevitable bowel complaints and neurasthenia which have plagued the clergy down the ages.27

One characteristic of the priest, then, is that he is “inward-looking” rather than self-expressive and self-assertive like the warrior. Because priests are “antagonistic toward the senses, making men lazy and refined,” they “make everything more dangerous, not just medicaments and healing arts but pride, revenge, acumen, debauchery, love, lust for power, virtue, sickness.”28 Nietzsche also assigns to the priest an important physiological characteristic with psychological ramifications: As we know, priests are the most evil enemies—but why? Because they are the most powerless (ohnmä chtig). Out of this powerlessness, their hate swells into something huge and uncanny to a most intellectual and poisonous level. The greatest haters in world history, and the most intelligent, have always been priests:—nobody else’s intelligence stands a chance against the intelligence of priestly revenge.29

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Thus far, then, the priest is inward-looking, brooding, complex, powerless, and given to intelligently directed and poisonous hatred because of their powerlessness. Nietzsche also hints that a “priestly aristocracy” will have constructed a scheme of values that differs from that of warriors, one that involves “the juxtaposition of ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ as signs of different estates.”30 But this “priestly-aristocratic” mode of valuation is of little significance for Nietzsche’s argument. His main concern is not the scheme of values that a “priestly people” creates in the “noble mode,” but rather the act whereby a socially dominated “priestly people” created a new scheme of values in a manner explained by the dynamics of ressentiment. I take ressentiment to be a principle of normal tendency that Nietzsche postulates for the purpose of explanation, second in importance only to the “will to power” for the arguments of the Genealogy. Nietzsche’s claims about the nature of ressentiment are unsystematic and frequently elliptical. Perhaps his clearest passage on the topic is the following: The beginning of the slaves’ revolt in morality occurs when ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of those beings who, denied the proper [eigentlich] response of action, compensate for it with only imaginary revenge. Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying “yes” to itself, slave morality says “no” on principle to everything that is “outside,” “other,” “non-self ”; and this “no” is its creative deed. This reversal of the evaluating glance—this essential orientation to the outside instead of back onto itself—is a feature of ressentiment; in order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all,—its action is basically a reaction.31

This passage provides some hints as to what ressentiment as a general psychological tendency is like; but it is difficult to disentangle claims about ressentiment in general from claims about the “slave revolt in morality” which ressentiment is supposed to explain. The contemporary literature offers a range of different reconstructions. Leiter, for example, identifies the “core elements” of ressentiment as “a negative, evaluative reaction to an external state of affairs that is unpleasant but which one cannot address through physical action.”32 R. Jay Wallace expands on Leiter’s description and construes ressentiment as a response to circumstances of “structural deprivation,” under which “the intensification of hatred into which envy grows becomes focused specifically on the persons who are comparatively privileged; though it is occasioned by relative disadvantage, it is no longer really about the fact of relative disadvantage, but about the individuals who are advantaged, whom the unfortunate come to

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despise.”33 And Peter Poellner identifies a core of four “largely uncontested” components of ressentiment. At the core of the phenomenon lies an experience of “pain, discomfort, or frustrated desire” as having been caused by other subjects; ressentiment proper is a particular kind of response to this experience, which incorporates a negative affective response (“Nietzsche calls it hatred”) toward those subjects, a desire for mastery or superiority (over those subjects, or perhaps over the experience of suffering itself); and the subject’s “hitting upon an new evaluative framework that allows him to remove his pain or discomfort by making possible either self-affirmation or mental mastery over the external source of pain.”34 What matters for my purposes is that ressentiment is a tendency that is triggered by conditions that include social domination. When triggered, the operation of ressentiment produces affective responses including hatred and/or despite; it also produces a desire for redress, which in at least some cases takes the form of a desire for revenge. Ressentiment also involves some kind of indirectness or subversion, in that it does not operate in the direct ways that characterize Nietzsche’s warrior character: “the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naïve, nor honest and straight with himself. his soul squints; his mind loves dark corners, secret paths and back-doors. .  .  . he knows all about keeping quiet, not forgetting, waiting, temporarily humbling and abasing himself.”35 Perhaps the most general claim that can be made about this aspect of ressentiment is that it motivates the creation of novel courses of action through the exercise of the imagination: in the passage cited above, Nietzsche claims that ressentiment seeks an imaginäre revenge precisely when the eigentlich (real or true) response of action is unavailable. Nietzsche states fairly clearly that ressentiment is not a narrowly “racial” characteristic. Even “noble natures” can experience it: “When ressentiment does occur in the noble man himself, it is consumed and exhausted in an immediate reaction, and therefore it does not poison, on the other hand, it does not occur at all in countless cases where it is unavoidable for all who are weak and powerless.”36 What makes a person susceptible to the form of ressentiment that “poisons” is powerlessness. Ressentiment is, then, a tendency to which perhaps all human beings are susceptible, but from which only the “weak and powerless” truly suffer. Nietzsche seems to have thought that Jews had become a “priestly people” during the first Temple period; qua priests, they were ohnmä chtig, clever, and given to “interiorization” and hatred. And it was the experience of conquest and political subjection that triggered the operation of ressentiment in the Jews as a people, disposing them to hatred of their conquerors, “vengefulness,” and a search for an “indirect” form of redress. But Nietzsche distinguished Jews from

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other possible “priestly nations of ressentiment” by one additional characteristic. He described premodern Jews in superlative terms. They were “a priestly people with the most entrenched priestly vengefulness,” “a priestly nation of ressentiment par excellence, possessing an unparalleled genius for popular morality”; “Jewish hatred” he described as “the deepest and most sublime, indeed a hatred which created ideals and changed values, the like of which has never been seen on earth”; these Jews practiced “a secret black art of a truly grand politics of revenge, a far-sighted, subterranean revenge, slow to grip and calculating.”37 “Compare peoples with similar talents, such as the Chinese or the Germans, with the Jews,” Nietzsche remarked, “and you will realize who are first rate and who are fifth.”38 It seems to me that the point of Nietzsche’s use of these superlatives is fairly straightforward: it presents the Jewish people as a particularly and perhaps uniquely competent large-scale agency, such that Nietzsche could cite this agency to explain deep cultural change. If qua “priestly nation of ressentiment,” the Jews were filled with hatred and a desire for vengeance, qua Jews they were capable of acting on those motivations in historically unprecedented ways. Another way to put the point would be to say that assigning a unique degree of competence to Jews increases the plausibility of Nietzsche’s claim that they were the agency responsible for changing the course of the history of human values. I turn now to the main event of the first essay: the “slave revolt” itself. As Nietzsche describes it, this “revolt” has two independent components: on the one hand, a revaluation of values, and on the other, a plan for the promulgation of the new values. Here is Nietzsche on the first of these components: Nothing that has been done on earth against “the noble,” “the mighty,” “the masters” and “the rulers,” is worth mentioning compared with what the Jews have done against them. . . . It was the Jews who, rejecting the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = blessed) ventured, with awe-inspiring consistency, to bring about a reversal and held it in the teeth of the most unfathomable hatred (the hatred of the powerless), saying: “Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good.”

In this passage Nietzsche presents “revaluation” as an act carried out by the Jews, without providing this act with any specific historical location. In the Genealogy the oppressors of the premodern Jews whom Nietzsche discusses are the Romans, and thus read in isolation, the text encourages the view that the “slave revolt” took place during the second Temple period. But in other texts Nietzsche ascribed the revolt to the prophets of Judaism, thus locating this event during the times of Assyrian and Babylonian domination.39 It seems to have been his

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view, then, that Jews of the Second Temple period inherited a “slave morality” from their ancestors. It is worth noting at this point that Nietzsche discussed “revaluation” in the mode of ressentiment quite extensively in the first essay, but almost all of this discussion takes place in the abstract. Nietzsche devoted a great deal of attention to providing “psychologically realistic”40 descriptions of ressentiment-fueled revaluation as a general psychological phenomenon. He used a variety of devices in these descriptions. For the most part the descriptions are those of the internal dynamics of individual psychologies, those of the “noble man” and the “man of ressentiment.” But Nietzsche also made use of the device of allegory (“There is nothing strange about the fact that lambs bear a grudge towards large birds of prey”41) and lurid fiction (“‘This workshop in which ideals are fabricated—it seems to me just to stink of lies’”42). These descriptions of revaluation in the abstract vastly outweigh in length the passages in which Nietzsche identifies the “slave revolt” as an actual historical event. When he does speak of the slave revolt as an event, he straightforwardly identifies “the Jews” as its agents; but beyond this he says almost nothing about the details of this specific instance of revaluation. (One rationale for devoting more attention to the abstract dynamics of ressentiment than to “the Jews” in reconstructing the first essay, in fact, is that Nietzsche simply has far more to say about the former than the latter.) The second component of the “slave revolt”—the component that explains the spread of the Jewish scheme of valuation—is Christianity: the historical career of Jesus of Nazareth, including his crucifixion, and its historical after-effects. Out of “the trunk of the tree of revenge and hatred, Jewish hatred,” There grew something just as incomparable, a new love, the deepest and most sublime kind of love:—and what other trunk could it have grown out of? . . . This Jesus of Nazareth, as the embodiment of the gospel of love . . . was he not seduction in its most sinister and irresistible form, seduction and the circuitous route to just those very Jewish values and innovative ideals? Did Israel not reach the pinnacle of her sublime vengefulness via this very “redeemer,” this apparent opponent of and disperser of Israel? Is it not part of a secret black art of a truly grand politics of revenge . . . that Israel had to denounce her actual instrument of revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail him to the cross so that “all the world,” namely all Israel’s enemies, could safely nibble at this bait? And could anyone, on the other hand, using all the ingenuity of his intellect, think up a more dangerous bait?43

Two components of this passage are noteworthy. First, Nietzsche states clearly here (at least, as clearly as the device of the rhetorical question allows) that

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“the Jews” made use of Jesus of Nazareth as an instrument of their plan of revenge against “the masters.” And second, this passage positions the Christian religion as the historical vehicle of the “slave revolt in morals.” I think it quite safe to characterize this account as a conspiracy theory. Nietzsche attributes to a group of people (the Jews) a plan that requires coordinated action, aimed at the achievement of ends (bad ones) that the conspirators conceal from others, the success of which requires that their efforts at deception succeed. The device of the conspiracy also explains why the truth about the origins of morality is not generally known: We know who became heir to this Jewish revaluation. . . . With regard to the huge and incalculably disastrous initiative taken by the Jews with this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I recall the words I wrote [in Beyond Good and Evil]—namely, that the slaves’ revolt in morality begins with the Jews: a revolt which has two thousand years of history behind it and which has only been lost sight of because—it was victorious.44

This is Nietzsche’s counter to the claim by the “English genealogists” noted above, that the origins of morality had simply been “forgotten”: the “hiddenness” of those origins is a result of the success of the Jewish plan of revenge. In the later sections of the first essay Nietzsche offers a sketch of European history as a continual struggle between “Rome” and “Judea.” He thought that the question “Which of them has prevailed for the time being, Rome or Judea?” could be answered clearly: But there is no trace of doubt: just consider to whom you bow down in Rome itself, today, as though to the embodiment of the highest values—and not just in Rome, but over nearly half the earth, everywhere man has become tame or wants to become tame, to three Jews, as we know, and one Jewess. . . . without a doubt Rome has been defeated.45

Nietzsche was clear about his evaluation of the historical effects on “European man” of the success of the defeat of “Rome” by “Judea.” The “noble races and their ideals were finally wrecked and overpowered” by the inheritors of the “slave revolt”—by the bearers of the “instruments of culture,” the purpose of which is to “breed a tame and civilized animal, a household pet, out of the beast of prey ‘man’”: These bearers of oppressive, vindictive instincts, the descendants of all European and non-European slavery, in particular of all pre-Aryan population—represent the decline of mankind! These “instruments of culture” are a disgrace to man,

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more a grounds for suspicion of, or an argument against, “culture” in general! We may be quite justified in retaining our fear of the blond beast at the center of every noble race and remain on our guard: but who would not, a hundred times over, prefer to fear if he can admire at the same time, rather than not fear, but thereby permanently retain the disgusting spectacle of the failed, the stunted, the wasted away and the poisoned?46

The second essay Nietzsche’s second essay is rather loosely organized, and I will follow a fairly selective thread through its narrations. In the essay Nietzsche describes several stages in the development of “bad conscience” and “the guilty conscience.” Purely in the interest of organizational clarity, I will identify one of these stages of development as the essay’s “main event”: this will be the stage at which conscience turns “bad.” I regard this event as a crucial turning point in Nietzsche’s narration: the “turning bad” of conscience represents a development regarding which Nietzsche registered clear disapproval, on the grounds that this development represented for him a turning against life-affirming drives and thus a corrupting of the human species. Two principles of normal tendency play important roles in the narratives of the second essay. The first of these Nietzsche described by means of three locutions among which he moved freely, namely, the will to power, the instinct for freedom, and the instinct for cruelty; because the pleasure of causing suffering plays such an important role in his arguments, I will favor the third of these locutions. “To see suffering does you good, to make suffer, better still,” Nietzsche remarked early in the essay; “this is a hard proposition, but an ancient, powerful, human-all-too-human proposition to which, by the way, even the apes might subscribe.”47 The intimate relationship in Nietzsche’s thinking between acting cruelly and the will to power is not difficult to discern. “An act of injury, violence, exploitation or destruction cannot be ‘unjust’ as such,” Nietzsche claims at one point, “because life functions essentially in an injurious, violent, exploitative and destructive manner, or at least these are its fundamental processes and it cannot be thought of without these characteristics.”48 The second principle of normal tendency Nietzsche postulates is encapsulated in his claim that “all instincts that are not discharged outwardly turn inwards— this is what I call the internalization of man.”49 Nietzsche says very little about this tendency apart from the specific case in which he is interested, and it

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plays a role only in the second essay. His claim supposes a distinction between “outward” and “inward” modes of instinctual action; this supposition will license Nietzsche’s citation of an instinct whose “proper” mode of action is “outward” (the instinct for cruelty) to explain a development in the “inward” realms of psychology and culture. Identifying the “turning bad” of conscience as the essay’s main event positions Nietzsche’s account of the development of conscience in general as a prefatory narrative comparable to the first essay’s account of the development of the chivalric-aristocratic and priestly-aristocratic modes of evaluation. This “original” form of conscience has the following contours. Archaic human beings had the practice of attending to obligations of three distinct kinds: monetary obligations owed to creditors; laws or social norms (“social obligations”); and imaginary obligations owed to supernatural agents. All of these obligations had to do with receiving benefits, and Nietzsche claims that offending parties understood that failure to “make good” on the obligations incurred by receiving these benefits made them liable to suffering at the hands of the giver. But, Nietzsche encourages his readers to believe, nothing about this complex set of practices required that conscience be “bad” or that the bearer of conscience understand himself as “guilty.” Nietzsche describes the ‘turning bad’ of conscience—the second essay’s ‘main event’—beginning in § 16. This development takes place under a condition in which a population possessed of (non-bad) conscience is forced, by “some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race,” into a condition of subjection and “peaceful” socialization.50 Nietzsche did not locate this population historically; he described them, prior to their conquest by the “master race,” as something close to his warriors: they were “semi-animals, happily adapted to the wilderness, war, the wandering life and adventure.”51 This population becomes Nietzsche’s “men of bad conscience” when imprisonment within the “confines of society and peace” triggers the operation of the second principle of normal tendency described above. As Nietzsche describes them, persons so confined are unable to act in the “usual” ways demanded by the instinct for cruelty. And so that instinct “turns inward”: “to the degree that the external discharge of man’s instincts was obstructed,” a novel avenue for causing suffering came into being, an avenue that involved persons causing themselves to suffer “inwardly.” Those terrible bulwarks with which state organizations protected themselves against the old instincts of freedom—punishments are a primary instance of this kind of bulwark—had the result that all those instincts of the wild, free,

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roving man were turned backwards, against man himself. Animosity, cruelty, the pleasure of pursuing, raiding, changing and destroying—all this was pitted against the person who had such instincts: that is the origin of “bad conscience.” Lacking external enemies and obstacles, and forced into the oppressive narrowness and conformity of custom, man impatiently ripped himself apart, persecuted himself, gnawed at himself, gave himself no peace and abused himself.52

It is not obvious why the operation of the “instinct for cruelty” turned inward should have produced the “bad” conscience. This is partly because Nietzsche is not particularly clear about just what distinguishes the “bad” conscience from the non-bad conscience. What seems to be at the center of his position is that bad conscience represents “an animal soul turning against itself, taking part against itself ”: the “man of bad conscience” opposes (parts of) his own self rather than, as would befit the will to power, affirming himself. More specifically, Nietzsche describes the “man of bad conscience” as opposing those aspects of himself that have motivated him to violate his obligations: The bad conscience represents “a declaration of war against all the old instincts on which, up till then, his strength, pleasure and formidableness had been based,” and for this reason represents the introduction into the human species of “the worst and most insidious illness . . . man’s sickness of man, of himself.”53 The statements in which Nietzsche most clearly links this opposition-to-self to the instinct for cruelty are found toward the end of § 18. There he describes the operation of bad conscience as “this secret self-violation, this artist’s cruelty . . . this uncanny, terrible but joyous labour of a soul voluntarily split within itself, which makes itself suffer out of the pleasure of making suffer,” concluding “I do not doubt that we know one thing—, what kind of pleasure it is which, from the start, the selfless, the self-denying, the selfsacrificing feel: this pleasure belongs to cruelty.”54 Nietzsche’s explanation of why conscience “turned bad,” then, seems to be this. Persons newly prevented from causing pain and suffering in the “old ways” were compelled by the instinct for cruelty to find new ways to do so, and they hit upon the device of making themselves suffer. Informed by the “voice of conscience” that there were certain aspects of their own selves that made them prone to violate obligations, they began opposing those aspects of themselves: adopting a negative attitude toward them, trying to expunge them, and so forth. This opposition produced suffering and thereby (and more importantly) the pleasure of causing suffering. And this novel form of self-torture satisfied the instinct for cruelty well enough that the dynamics of “bad conscience” became a fixture of human existence within this population.

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Before moving on I want to note quickly that there is a puzzle concerning the role that ressentiment plays in this explanation. On the one hand, Nietzsche stated without elaboration in § 11 that it is the “man of ressentiment” who “has the invention of ‘bad conscience’ on his conscience.”55 And the primary agents in the second essay are, like those in the first, a people rendered powerless by political domination—people in whom, that is, the triggering condition for the operation of ressentiment is satisfied. But the idea that ressentiment explains the development of the bad conscience does not cohere with the account Nietzsche offered after § 16. He stated plainly that the forcible confinement of the population within which the bad conscience develops “occasioned no struggle, not even any ressentiment” because it was sudden and definitive, “a breach, a leap, a compulsion, an inescapable fate that nothing could ward off.”56 But more importantly, the psychological dynamics Nietzsche described as the origin of bad conscience diverge from those that he attributed to ressentiment in the first essay: for there he had described ressentiment as having an “essential orientation to the outside instead of back onto itself,” and had described ressentiment as motivating first and foremost a negative evaluation of the dominating “other,” and subsequently and secondarily a positive evaluation of the self.57 Simply put, supposing ressentiment to have been operative in the situation Nietzsche describes in the second essay would not lead one to expect something like the bad conscience to result; ressentiment seems rather to be fairly finely tailored to produce phenomena more like the “slave revolt in morals.” This issue matters for my purposes because Nietzsche’s account is the more complex, or the less elegant, the higher the number of independent postulates it requires. Supposing two distinct principles of normal tendency to be operative in the first two essays renders the overall account of the Genealogy less elegant than supposing bad conscience to be a product of ressentiment. In the remainder of the second essay Nietzsche described how, subsequent to its invention, the bad conscience reached its “most terrible and sublime peak” in the Christian religion. Recall Nietzsche’s idea of indebtedness to ancestors, the idea of which eventually developed into the idea of gods. Extending this account into recorded history, Nietzsche stated in § 20 that later generations inherited “the burden of unpaid debts and the longing for them to be settled,” that “the feeling of indebtedness toward a deity continued to grow for several millennia, and indeed always in the same proportion as the concept of and feeling for God grew in the world,” and that finally “the advent of the Christian God as the maximal god yet achieved, thus also brought about the appearance of the greatest feeling of indebtedness on the earth.”58 Nietzsche described Christianity as introducing

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two innovations to the dynamics of the bad conscience: first, the stipulation that repaying one’s debt to God is an “iron impossibility,” a claim which he associates with the idea of eternal punishment; and second, “Christianity’s stroke of genius: none other than God sacrificing himself for man’s debt.”59 Nietzsche offered these claims as his account of the “moralization” of the concepts he had been discussing, “the way they are pushed back into conscience; more precisely, the way bad conscience is woven together with the concept of God.”60 His purpose in describing this process of moralization seems to have been that it would explain why bad conscience would not cease to exist with the fading away of religious belief. More relevant to my purposes are Nietzsche’s claims as to what was “really going on” in these religious developments: You will already have guessed what has really gone on with all this and behind all this: that the will to torment oneself, that suppressed cruelty of animal man who has been frightened back into himself and given an inner life, incarcerated in the “state” to be tamed, and has discovered bad conscience so that he can hurt himself, after the more natural outlet of this wish to hurt had been blocked—this man of bad conscience has seized on religious presupposition in order to provide his self-torture with its most horrific hardness and sharpness. Debt towards God: this thought becomes an instrument of torture. In “God” he seizes upon the ultimate antithesis he can find to his real and irredeemable animal instincts, he reinterprets these self-same animal instincts as debt/guilt (Schuld) before God.61

Here Nietzsche seems to claim that the ideas of the impossibility of repaying one’s debts to God and of God’s repayment of those debts are the result of the operation of the instinct for cruelty: these doctrines are invented by the “man of bad conscience” as instruments of the greatest possible degree of self-torture. We have here a sort of madness of the will showing itself in mental cruelty which is absolutely unparalleled: man’s will to find himself guilty and condemned without hope of reprieve, his will to think of himself as punished, without the punishment ever being equivalent to the level of guilt. .  .  . this will to set up an ideal—that of a “holy God,”—in order to be palpably convinced of his own absolute worthlessness in the face of this ideal.62

It seems to me that this explanation of signature Christian doctrines involves an ad hoc modification to Nietzsche’s conception of the instinct for cruelty. Prior to § 19, Nietzsche had described that instinct as requiring some outlet or other, either outward or inward. He had not attributed to the instinct for cruelty a propensity to motivate ever increasingly cruel acts, acts that cause ever increasing amounts of pain and suffering. After § 19 Nietzsche seems to be describing a

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condition in which the instinct for cruelty has an outlet, the bad conscience. And yet, as I understand the claims following § 19, Nietzsche supposes that the instinct for cruelty continues to motivate changes to existing practices around the bad conscience on the grounds that these changes increase the amounts of suffering that those practices cause; and in fact he seems to describe the instinct for cruelty as seeking out avenues to the cruelest possible practices. It seems to me that absent this modification—when, that is, the “instinct for cruelty” is understood as something that is satisfied or discharged by the performance of acts of cruelty—one would not expect the religious developments Nietzsche describes. In any case, just as in the first essay, Nietzsche expresses his evaluation of this development with vehement language. Here is sickness, without a doubt, the most terrible sickness ever to rage in man: and whoever is still able to hear . . . how the shout of love has rung out during this night of torture and absurdity, the shout of the most yearning rapture, of salvation through love, turns away, gripped by an unconquerable horror. .  .  . There is so much in man that is horrifying! . . . The world has been a madhouse for too long!63

The third essay The third essay opens with what would seem to be a straightforwardly hermeneutical question: “what do ascetic ideals mean?”64 In the body of the essay Nietzsche addresses this question by describing the originating and sustaining causes of ascetic ideals within a certain (loosely described) swath of history. Nietzsche nowhere presents a comprehensive list of the features he includes under the heading of “ascetic ideals,” but the outlines are clear enough. As he describes them in various places in the essay, ascetic ideals (sometimes “the ascetic ideal”) are a collection of valuations and practices that have in common opposition to those characteristics that make for human flourishing as Nietzsche understood it: to good health, sensuality, and to the pleasures of superior social rank, domination, and cruelty toward the less powerful. The “three great catchwords” of the ascetic ideal are “poverty, humility, chastity”; they involve sympathy, compassion, “the pleasure of giving pleasure,” and “the pleasure of ‘loving one’s neighbor’”; those who live in accordance with the ideals Nietzsche described as “hating life, doubting the senses, desensualized.”65 A clearly stated premise of the third essay is that such ideals are much in evidence in human

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culture. “Read from a distant planet,” Nietzsche claims, history would suggest that “the earth was the ascetic planet par excellence, an outpost of discontented, arrogant and nasty creatures who harbored a deep disgust for themselves, for the world, for all life”; in the same passage he describes “the valuation of our life by the ascetic priests” as “one of the most wide-spread and long-lived facts that there are.”66 Nietzsche’s third essay makes clear use of two of the three tools I described above. The main character is that of the ascetic priest, and the short answer to the question of why ascetic ideals are culturally predominant is that ascetic priests have advocated or promoted those ideals. Nietzsche introduces a new principle of normal tendency to explain this action, a “protective instinct” which he associates with the will to power. Nietzsche’s descriptions of the actions of the ascetic priest have no particular temporal specificity; as I understand it, he took those actions to be responses to historically widespread and persistent conditions, and thus to be continuous across the stretch of time in which those conditions obtain. I proceed now to a longer description of these elements. It is tempting to think that the ascetic priest is a subtype of the first essay’s priest character, but in fact the signature characteristics of that character (powerlessness, complexity, inwardness, hatred) do not clearly figure in Nietzsche’s description here. Nietzsche does offer some characterizations of the ascetic priest that are not terribly important for his arguments, for example that he is forbidden by a “deep instinct” from procreating.67 The important features of the ascetic priest are four, it seems to me. First and more obviously, the ascetic priest embodies the ascetic ideal: he “not only rests his faith in that ideal, but his will, his power, his interests as well. His right to exist stands or falls with that ideal.”68 Second, the ascetic priest combines “sickness,” in a sense to be described shortly, and power (he is in fact “unscathed in his will to power”69). Third, this character arises in every age, in every race, and in every social class.70 And fourth, the ascetic priest has a social position that makes it possible for him to influence the thinking of others: he “makes the whole herd of failures, the disgruntled, the under-privileged, the unfortunate, and all who suffer from themselves” adopt him as their “shepherd.”71 I think the last two components matter most for the third essay: Nietzsche’s point in calling the ascetic priest a priest is not so much to recall the first essay’s main character as it is to construct an image of a (relatively) consistent cultural authority dispersed throughout history, and thus to render plausible the idea that the actions of such persons have influenced the moral self-understandings of large masses of people, and so have brought about large-scale cultural change.

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The third essay’s novel principle of normal tendency is an “instinct for self-preservation” in the face of adverse conditions. Nietzsche’s most detailed presentation of this principle is contained in his claim that “the ascetic ideal springs from the protective and healing instincts of a degenerating life, which uses every means to maintain itself and struggles for its existence; it indicates a partial physiological inhibition and exhaustion against which the deepest instincts of life, which have remained intact, continually struggle with new methods and inventions.”72 This passage describes something more specific than simply a desire or a drive on the part of living beings to persist in living; Nietzsche describes this “instinct” as operating in specific ways in response to certain conditions. As it figures in the third essay’s arguments, this “protective instinct” is a tendency to seek novel ways to preserve life in cases where life is, in some way, threatened. As such it shares crucial features with the principles of normal tendency that are central to the first two essays: it has a triggering condition, and it is capable of operating “creatively” or inventively. In virtue of these features, the “protective instinct” can be described as operating only under specific conditions (being, as it were, invisible otherwise) and can be cited as a cause of novel phenomena. In turning to Nietzsche’s description of the actions that result in the cultural predominance of ascetic ideals, I want to take note of an important feature of his argument. Nietzsche offers a two-layered explanation of the ascetic priest’s promotion of ascetic ideals. On the one hand he describes the ascetic priest as acting intentionally (and rationally) in order to achieve certain ends. But on the other hand he describes ascetic ideals as the product of the “instinct of life” that operates “through” the ascetic priest for its own ends. As I read him Nietzsche positions the ascetic priest as lacking a perfect comprehension of the forces that animate his actions; but it is difficult to say with confidence to what extent the two categories of ends overlap. Although Nietzsche did not describe the invention or promotion of ascetic ideals as an event, he did describe those ideals as emerging out of discrete actions taken in response to specific historical conditions. The conditions in which the ascetic priest promotes ascetic ideals are those that trigger the “protective instinct.” “We can regard it as inherently probable,” Nietzsche claims, “that, from time to time, at certain places on the earth, almost from necessity, a physiological feeling of obstruction will rule amongst large masses of people which, however, is not consciously perceived as such, through lack of physiological knowledge.”73 Such a feeling can be a product of a variety of circumstances, including “crossing of races that are too heterogenous,” “faulty diet,” and “corruption of the

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blood.” If the “feeling of physiological obstruction” has no single set of causes, one specific variety matters in particular to Nietzsche: the “sickliness” that has arisen “everywhere where the civilization and taming of man has taken place,” a sickliness he associates “with disgust at life, with exhaustion and with the wish for the ‘end.’”74 Nietzsche offers several different descriptions, in varying degrees of detail, of the ascetic priest’s actions in response to such conditions. His most detailed account returns to the idea of ressentiment. In response to the “sickliness” of his charges (his “herd”) the ascetic priest “defends” this group. Against itself and against the wickedness, deceit, malice and everything else characterizing all those who are diseased and sick, all of which smoulders in the herd itself, he carries on a clever, hard and secret struggle against anarchy and the ever-present threat of the inner disintegration of the herd, where that most dangerous blasting and explosive material, ressentiment, continually piles up. His particular trick, his prime use, is to detonate this explosive material without blowing up either the herd or the shepherd [the priest himself]: . . . the priest is a direction-changer of ressentiment.75

Nietzsche introduces a new principle of normal tendency (as I understand it, an addition to his conception of ressentiment) to explain why ressentiment is socially dangerous (“explosive”): “every sufferer instinctively looks for a cause of his distress; more exactly, a culprit . . . in short, for a living being upon whom he can release his emotions, actually or in effigy, on some pretext or other.”76 An end for the sake of which the ascetic priest acts is that of heading off the social disharmony that this tendency threatens: The sufferers, one and all, are frightfully willing and inventive in their pretexts for painful emotions. .  .  . they make evil-doers out of friend, wife, child and anyone else near to them. “I suffer: someone or other must be guilty”—and every sick sheep thinks the same. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest, says to him, “Quite right, my sheep! Somebody must be to blame: but you yourself are this somebody, you yourself alone are to blame for it, you yourself alone are to blame for yourself.”77

The operative idea in this description seems to be that the ascetic priest encourages his “herd” to adopt a negative attitude toward themselves as a substitute for adopting negative attitudes toward each other. Thus, here as elsewhere, ascetic ideals are a matter of a person’s adopting a stance of opposition in relation to parts of their own selves.

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As the essay progresses Nietzsche describes a different motivation for the promotion of ascetic ideals. When a population suffers from the “physiological feeling of obstruction,” “an attempt is made every time to fight against the feeling of lethargy on a grand scale,” and ascetic ideals are instruments in this fight: more precisely, they are the “methods” in the “fight against displeasure.”78 Nietzsche distinguishes among several broad categories of such methods: those that attempt to “fight against that dominating lethargy with methods to reduce the awareness of life to the lowest point,” “mechanical activity,” and “some kind of excess of feeling,—which is used as the most effective anaesthetic for dull, crippling, longdrawn-out pain.”79 In connection with this last category Nietzsche revisits the arguments of the second essay to explain the origins of the notion of “sin” as the “priestly reinterpretation of the animal ‘bad conscience’ (cruelty turned back on itself)”: “from this magician, the ascetic priest, [the sufferer] receives the first tip as to the ‘cause’ of his suffering: he should look for it within himself, in guilt, in a piece of the past, he should understand his suffering itself as a condition of punishment.”80 Nietzsche describes the ascetic priest as acting for ends in the promotion of ascetic ideals. But it is not clear in every case that the ends for which that promotion takes place are the priest’s ends. And in at least one case Nietzsche describes that promotion as an act by a different agent, acting for its own ends. You can now guess what, in my opinion, the healing instinct of life has at least tried to do through the ascetic priest and what purpose was served by the temporary tyranny of such paradoxical and paralogical concepts as “guilt,” “sin,” “sinfulness,” “corruption,” “damnation”: to make the sick harmless to a certain degree, to bring about the self-destruction of the incurable, to direct the less ill strictly toward themselves, to give their ressentiment a backwards orientation. . . . and in this way to exploit the bad instincts of all sufferers for the purpose of selfdiscipline, self-surveillance and self-overcoming.81

I take this passage to indicate that the actions of the ascetic priest serve ends that are not ends that the priest has in mind: shortly thereafter Nietzsche described “the sick packed together and organized (—the word “church” is the most popular name for it), on the other hand a sort of provisional safeguarding of those in better health, the physically better-developed, thus the opening of a cleft between the healthy and the sick” as consequences of the advance of ascetic ideals (under the aegis of religion) that he regards in a positive light.82

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Here Nietzsche deploys something like Hegel’s “cunning of reason”: a higherlevel agency works “through” human persons, such that their actions serve purposes of which they are unaware. Thus far Nietzsche’s account presents “sickness” as a necessary condition for a person to be susceptible to the ascetic priest’s influence; those who are not “sick” would seem not to be so susceptible. Nietzsche handles this problem in § 14—prior to discussing the ascetic priest’s actions—by claiming that the “healthy” and “happy” are made to be sick, in that they are convinced that they are in fact miserable, by those who are already sick. He describes a “conspiracy of those who suffer against those who are successful and victorious,” a “will of the sick to appear superior in any way, their instinct for secret paths, which lead to tyranny over the healthy,” and a desire for “vengeance” on the part of the miserable that will be satisfied only when these succeed in “shoving their own misery, in fact all misery, on the conscience of the happy: so that the latter eventually start to say to one another: ‘It’s a disgrace to be happy! There is too much misery!’”83 Nietzsche does not describe the ascetic priest as acting from bad motives. But however well intentioned the actions of the ascetic priest may be, and however valuable the quarantining of the sick attempted by the “protective instinct,” the advance of ascetic ideals has bad consequences. “A system like this makes the sick patient more sick in every case, even if it makes him ‘better’”; the progress of ascetic ideals “improved” man in the sense that it “tamed, weakened, discouraged, refined, mollycoddled, emasculated” him; “everywhere where the ascetic priest has prevailed with this treatment of the sick, the sickness has increased in depth and breadth at a terrific speed”; and I can think of hardly anything that has sapped the health and racial strength of precisely the Europeans so destructively as this ideal; without any exaggeration we are entitled to call it the real catastrophe in the history of the health of European man.84

Nietzsche’s evaluation of the dominance of ascetic ideals is not uniformly negative: they have been a source of “meaning,” and have provided an outlet for the will to power. The two sides of his evaluation are on display in the concluding passage of the Genealogy. It is absolutely impossible for us to conceal what was actually expressed by that whole willing that derived its direction from this ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animalistic, even more of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty. . . . all that

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means, let us dare to grasp it, a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental prerequisites of life, but it is and remains a will! . . . And, to conclude by saying what I said at the beginning: man still prefers to will nothingness, than not will.85

To summarize, then: Nietzsche’s central claim in the third essay is that the dominance of ascetic ideals results from the advocacy of these ideals by “the ascetic priest.” This advocacy has several distinct ends: to head off the bad consequences of ressentiment, to fight against “lethargy” and “displeasure,” and to “safeguard” the health of the healthy by quarantining the sick. If the priest’s action serves these ends, not all of them are available to the priest himself: he is also a tool through which the “protective instinct” acts. The end result of the ascetic priest’s actions is the “sickening” and “emasculation” of European man. This explanation provides resources for Nietzsche to make claims about “meaning”: that these ideals express a hatred of the human, a fear of happiness, and ultimately a “will to nothingness” seems to me to be his answer to the question of what they mean.

Nietzsche and suspicion I begin my reflections with three quick claims that generalize over my exposition. First, Nietzsche makes profligate use of the language of agency, treating not only individual human beings but also groups of persons and abstract entities such as instincts and ideals as agents.86 Much of this language is almost certainly rhetorical in nature, but the boundary between rhetorical and literal appeals to agency is frequently unclear. Second, the explanatory heart of the Genealogy of Morals is recourse to what might be termed untethered agency. Nietzsche’s most detailed explanations are presented as descriptions of psychological dynamics or chains of reasoning; when the agents within whom these take place are clearly supposed to be human persons, they are almost always assigned no particular historical location. Historical tethering is not absent from the Genealogy of Morals, but such tethering as it offers is both sparse and loose. Above I claimed that the most robust historical tethering in the entire text is Nietzsche’s description of the slave revolt in morals as a Jewish conspiracy that made use of Jesus of Nazareth as its instrument. But aside from that, Nietzsche does little more than gesture in the direction of historical specificity with his talk of conquered peoples, Jews, Rome, and ascetic priests.

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Third, negative ethical valuation is much in evidence in the Genealogy, but the theme of “hiddenness” is not consistently developed. With respect to each of the discrete explanations Nietzsche offered, the question can be raised as to why it is not common knowledge that events occurred as he described. As we have seen, Nietzsche addressed the subject explicitly in the first essay, offering a claim of conspiratorial hiddenness as a superior alternative to the simple forgetting postulated by “English genealogists.” And elsewhere he mentioned self-deception and simple ignorance from time to time. But on the whole Nietzsche has no well-developed account of why knowledge of the true history of morality is so thoroughly lacking. Correspondingly, Nietzsche also has no well-developed account of why he has access to the truth of the matter; on my reading his occasional references to several of his personal characteristics (bravery, untimeliness, lack of sentimentality) are gestures in the direction of such an account. I turn now to a question that hangs over the project of reconstructing the Genealogy. Consider a claim about Nietzsche’s methodology by Bernard Williams: Now Nietzsche himself gives us, centrally to his story, a phenomenological representation, which seems to present a psychological process leading from the earlier ethical condition to sometime like the outlook in the later ethical condition (the explanandum). If this were a psychological process, it should be recognizable in an individual. But an actual process that led to the explanandum could not happen in an individual, since the outcome consists of socially legitimated beliefs, and they could not be merely the sum of individual fantasies. Rather, this is a social process which in actual fact no doubt has many stages, discontinuities, and contingencies, but which—the idea is—can be illuminatingly represented on the model of a certain kind of psychological strategy.87

Williams suggests that a proper understanding of at least some of what I have described as untethered-agency explanations need to be understood as models, as deliberately simplified descriptions that “stand in” for complex chains of events involving multiple individual persons and their social interaction across ranges of time and circumstance. This seems correct to me. What I want to point out about this result is that in more than one area, the reader of the Genealogy is faced with the question of deciding which of Nietzsche’s descriptions need to be understood as descriptions of events that occurred more or less as described, and which need to be understood as models of events that they do not describe. I have already indicated that I think that this device is required to properly

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understand at least some of Nietzsche’s ascriptions of agency to human groups or abstract entities. Thus, for example, I think that Nietzsche is not best understood as claiming that the “protective instinct” is a transhuman agent that controls the actions of many ascetic priests in order to bring about large-scale social results such as the separation of the sick from the healthy (although I acknowledge that I could be wrong about this); I think a better understanding of the claim he was trying to make requires a translation of these claims into different terms. But given the looseness of Nietzsche’s various appeals to agency, I think the reader faces this interpretive choice with respect to passages in which Nietzsche seems clearly to be describing the psychological dynamics of human persons. Specifically, I think the reader often faces a choice between taking Nietzsche to have employed the device of simple aggregation for scaling up human agency— replicating an individual-scale belief-desire explanation across multiple persons within a population—and, as Williams puts the point, to have presented “a fictional story which represents a new reason for action as being developed in a simplified situation as a function of motives, reactions, psychological processes which we have reason to acknowledge already.”88 There are few places in the Genealogy where it is entirely clear whether Nietzsche took himself to be narrating events that took place more or less as he described them or whether he took himself to be using artistic devices89 to present simplified models of actual events. As a result, there are few places where it is obvious what construal of his language makes for the most charitable reconstruction of his arguments. I want to consider one example that I think shows why it is difficult to settle such questions definitively: the example of “the Jews” in the first essay. I take the majority of Nietzsche’s contemporary interpreters to regard Nietzsche’s references to “the Jews” as something other than an attempt to describe actual historical events. That is, on the view of such interpreters, Nietzsche did not claim the existence of a Jewish conspiracy to wreak vengeance on Rome through the use of Christianity as a vehicle of Jewish values: rather, his talk of conspiracy presents an illuminating model of what he thought really did happen. This interpretive decision clearly has benefits. For one thing, it avoids the risk of presenting Nietzsche as an anti-Semite or a proto-Nazi. For another, it avoids presenting him as a conspiracy theorist. And for the one who, worries about anti-Semitism and suspicions about conspiracy theories aside, thinks that the story of Jews wreaking vengeance on Rome by way of Christianity is just

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hopelessly implausible may also be moved by charity not to read Nietzsche has having intended these claims as factual. But if this way of reading Nietzsche has benefits, it also has costs. One such cost is that finessing Nietzsche’s claims about “the Jews” opens a significant explanatory gap. This result is on display in Leiter’s reconstruction: Why would the masters have been seduced by a morality that requires such profound abnegation on their part? It is perhaps the oddest feature of the First Essay that Nietzsche never addresses this question explicitly, yet it must surely occur to every reader. So slaves suffer from ressentiment and invent new values: why should that have had any effect at all? Why would masters pay this any mind, why would they not view slave morality the way the birds of prey view the lambs’ moral condemnation of them?90

I find it noteworthy that “the Jews” are so thoroughly written out of Leiter’s reconstruction that he does not so much as mention Nietzsche’s description of Jesus of Nazareth as “bait” offered to the “enemies of Israel” as relevant to this question. What makes this omission more striking is Leiter’s observation that the overarching historical frame of the first essay is “the triumph of Christianity and Christian morality in the late Roman Empire,”91 and his remark that for Nietzsche’s readers, “it is not news that Christianity supplanted paganism . . . and that the gradual spread of Christianity throughout the empire . . . marked a major historical transformation in values and attitudes.”92 In other words, Leiter describes Nietzsche as being well aware that the growth of Christianity brought about a “transformation in values,” but does not regard this growth as part of his account of the seduction of the “masters.” This explanatory gap is, I think, a product of Leiter’s decision to marginalize Nietzsche’s talk of Jewish conspiracy in his own reconstruction of the first essay. I find it quite difficult not to see that material as Nietzsche’s account of why the “slave revolt” in morality made any difference to the “masters.” If it is correct to attribute to Nietzsche the position that “Jewish values” originated during the period of exile, then on his understanding this revaluation indeed made no difference to non-Jews for more than half a millennium. As Mark Migotti has put the point, Nietzsche’s location of the “slave revolt” within (pre-second-Temple) Judaism “enables Nietzsche to separate the problem of explaining the origination of slave values from the problem of explaining their successful propagation”; and “precisely because they were not a conquering people, the Jews had no means to spread their novel values, and that is where Christians come in.”93 Following Migotti, I suggest that Nietzsche’s answer to why “master morality surrendered

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its power” is just that the “masters” became Christians. In the first essay Nietzsche portrayed Christianity at its origin as a ressentiment-fueled Jewish scheme of revenge against the “noble races” of Europe, such that the historical success of the Christian religion just was the success of this scheme, and the present-day dominance of Christianity its ultimate product. To be sure, even though Nietzsche seems to want to credit the intelligence of the Jews for designing (or, perhaps more plausibly, choosing) a particularly effective vehicle for the transmission of their values to the “masters,” he did discuss conditions among non-Jews that made them receptive to Jewish values. It is considerably easier to identify passages in which he discusses the receptivity of “weaker” peoples than of “noble races,” for example: “The reason the subject (or, as we more colloquially say, the soul) has been, until now, the best doctrine on earth, is perhaps because it facilitated that sublime self-deception whereby the majority of the dying, the weak and the oppressed of every kind could construe weakness as freedom, and their particular mode of existence as an accomplishment.”94 But I think it a mistake to think that an adequate answer to the question “why would [slave morality] succeed in displacing master morality on the world stage?” (as Lawrence Hatab has put the question) can be assembled from the untethered-agency accounts Nietzsche offers, whether in the Genealogy or elsewhere.95 I take Nietzsche’s answer to that question to have been, if lacking in psychological nuance, at least resolutely historical: slave morality displaced master morality because the Jews hit upon the stratagem of positioning a particularly compelling religion in which these values were embedded as a live option for their Gentile “masters” by concealing their role in its creation. While I have been offering reasons not to construe Nietzsche’s conspiratorial language rhetorically, my real point is that here and elsewhere, it is very difficult to decide among interpretive options that make enormous differences for the project of trying to understand just what, according to the Genealogy, is supposed to have happened in history. One way of interpreting Nietzsche’s talk of Jews avoids what might best be thought of as absolute nonstarters at the cost of opening up puzzling explanatory gaps; another contains fewer such gaps and sticks, I think, closer to Nietzsche’s text, at the cost of yielding an explanation that is less attractive for a variety of reasons (being, let us suppose, less plausible overall, but also depending on objectionable claims about the nature of Jews). Similarly, construing his exotic-agential language figuratively has the benefit of not saddling Nietzsche with vulgar Hegelianism, at the cost of opening up the question of just what in history that language is supposed to describe; the

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alternative avoids this problem and sticks closer to Nietzsche’s text, at the cost of attributing to the Genealogy claims that will be dismissed by anyone who rejects notions of collective agency. Some such choices may effectively be determined by the purposes one brings to the project of reconstruction; thus I think an interest in extracting from the Genealogy an explanation that has a chance of being regarded as promising in our environment militates against a literal reading of Nietzsche’s talk of “the Jews” (and I will return to this point below). But my real point here is that the character of the Genealogy is such that the text does not discriminate among a wide range of possible reconstructions of its historical claims. I turn now to summary remarks on the dynamics of ethical charge in the Genealogy. In Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor remarked that “No one can fail to recognize that, if true, Nietzsche’s genealogies are devastating.”96 I will argue in this section that Taylor is wrong about this. To that end I want to make two broad claims about the dynamics of ethical charge in the Genealogy. One is that Nietzsche appeals to several independent sources of valuation in order to condemn morality. And the second is that just as it is difficult to understand just what the Genealogy claims has happened in history, it is also difficult to understand just how taking Nietzsche’s historical narrations to be correct is supposed to motivate the negative evaluation and rejection of morality. I turn to the first of these claims. One issue that has been debated in recent literature is the place of “immanent criticism” in the Genealogy. Immanent criticism is the criticism of a cultural phenomenon on the basis of principles that are internal to it; thus the immanent criticism of morality would involve arguments to the effect that, as Walter Kaufman put it, “our morality is, by its own standards, poisonously immoral.”97 Noting the device of immanent criticism explains how Nietzsche could think that there would be some negative evaluative payoff for arguing that, for example, moral self-criticism is a product of the “instinct for cruelty,” given that cruelty is not condemnable according to the scheme of valuation Nietzsche himself seems to have accepted (one aligned with the will to power): the explanation in question connects bad conscience to phenomena that those who subscribe to “morality” will be disposed to evaluate negatively. I want to take particular note of Owen’s engagement with this question. Contra Leiter, on whose account Nietzsche was writing specifically for an audience composed of “those who share [his] evaluative taste,” Owen argues (following Aaron Ridley) that Nietzsche makes use of the device of immanent criticism.98 But in disagreement with Geuss, Owen also takes Nietzsche to have intended his arguments not only for Christians, but also for non-Christians who

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accept “morality”: on his reconstruction “Nietzsche is concerned to offer internal reasons to reject ‘morality’ to all of these groups, that is, to the entire body of his contemporaries.” But to say this is not to say that Nietzsche’s explanations did not invoke valuations to which he himself described; Owen proceeds to attribute to Nietzsche a positive valuation of truth that supports the idea that, for example, “the fact that ‘Christianity is a tissue of lies’ is, contra Geuss, a fact of critical significance for Nietzsche as well as for Christians.”99 Owen, then, has Nietzsche writing for more than one audience. I want to draw a generalized conclusion from Owen’s observation. Some of Nietzsche’s arguments have a possible negative evaluative payoff from the standpoint of Christian morality; others have a possible evaluative payoff from the standpoint of a very different scheme of valuation, which I take to be more or less equivalent with the first essay’s “chivalric-aristocratic” scheme. So, for example, when he describes Christian morality as having displaced social conditions in which the “strong and healthy” were separated from and dominant over the “weak and sick,” and even more when he describes morality as “weakening and sickening” these “strong and healthy” types, what seem to be in play are valuations that have their home not in morality itself but in a scheme of valuation derived from a positive evaluation of the will to power. Nietzsche certainly seems to position himself as a proponent of this scheme of valuation: “That the sick should not make the healthy sick . . . ought to be the chief concern on earth:—but for that, it is essential that the healthy should remain separated from the sick, should even be spared the sight of the sick . . . the higher ought not to abase itself as the tool of the lower, the pathos of distance ought to ensure that their tasks are to be kept separate for all eternity!”100 But for my purposes, it does not matter whether Nietzsche himself subscribed to these values; what matters is that his language seems to have been calculated to motivate any reader who subscribes to these values to reject morality. The reason this result is important is because it indicates that if Nietzsche also engages in the immanent criticism of morality, then the critical import of the Genealogy is not dependent on a single set of valuations: morality, properly understood, offends both the moralist and those who fancy themselves Krieger or, indeed, Ü bermenschen. In fact I think that Nietzsche invoked not two but three sets of valuations in the Genealogy. In addition to valuations derived from morality itself and from what I take to be the “chivalric-aristocratic” scheme of valuation, Nietzsche’s arguments invoke what I will provisionally describe as anti-Semitic values. In order to make my case for this claim I will need an account of how Nietzsche’s arguments are best understood to have the kind of critical or motivational

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results that he seems to have wanted them to have. The overarching question in this area is what role, if any, the genetic fallacy plays in the overall architecture of the Genealogy. This question is of prime importance for the project of rational reconstruction. That project centrally asks whether a text offers, or contains the resources for generating, good reasons to accept the conclusions advanced by an author. If some of Nietzsche’s arguments, charitably construed, depend on the genetic fallacy (or any other logical fallacy), then that argument does not generate a good reason to reject morality; if all of his arguments have this character, then none of them offer such reasons. Thus a central question for recent interpreters has been whether the Genealogy offers, or suggests, arguments that motivate the rejection of morality in ways that do not rely on the genetic fallacy. The point I want to make here does not require any particular answer to this question, but for purposes of illustration I want to briefly consider some proposals in this area. In Nietzsche and Morality Leiter took Nietzsche to have been aware of the fallacious nature of the “genetic principle,” citing his statement in The Gay Science that “even if a morality has grown out of an error, the realization of this fact would not so much as touch the problem of its value.”101 Leiter argued that Nietzsche’s central bid in the Genealogy is to convince his audience that “the core of MPS [‘morality’ in Nietzsche’s pejorative sense] is precisely that it has pernicious causal powers: it thwarts the flourishing of great human beings.”102 While this claim has clear evaluative significance (from the perspective of “chivalric-aristocratic” values) and does not depend on the genetic fallacy, Leiter observed that Nietzsche’s arguments for it are incomplete: for “only the genealogy in conjunction with the thesis that the causal powers of the object are stable over time, supports the claim that MPS has the pernicious effects Nietzsche attributes to it. The latter thesis would, of course, require independent defense, a defense absent in the Genealogy.”103 Thus on Leiter’s reconstruction, the Genealogy at best “prepares the way” for the reader to accept Nietzsche’s claim about morality. In his later essay “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” Leiter suggested an alternative reconstruction of the critical thrust of that mode of interpretation. Recalling Edmund Gettier’s famous criticism of the construal of knowledge as justified true belief, he argued that the central critical claim of the hermeneutics of suspicion is that moral beliefs have the “wrong causal etiology”: We should be suspicious of the epistemic status of beliefs that have the wrong causal etiology. That’s the lesson of the Gettier counter-examples, and it is

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the lesson which underwrites the suspicion that Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud recommend by way of providing alternative causal trajectories to explain our beliefs. To be sure, beliefs with the wrong causal etiology might be true; but since they are no longer cases of knowledge, we have no reason to presume that to be the case. To the contrary, we now have reason to be suspicious—nothing more—of their veritistic properties.104

On this construal, what the Genealogy accomplishes is to suggest that awareness of the true causal history of morality should make us doubtful that moral beliefs are true, because the process whereby those beliefs arose seems not to be the right sort of process to yield true beliefs. Construing the Genealogy in this way would make the history of morality relevant to its critical evaluation in a way that avoids appeal to the genetic fallacy. But Leiter notes that this construal as well falls short of yielding good reasons to reject morality; that is, it does not have the result that Nietzsche seems to have wanted the Genealogy to have. The idea that Nietzsche’s arguments undermine the epistemic grounding of moral beliefs also figures, if somewhat differently, in Williams’s reflections on the Genealogy. According to Williams, A truthful historical account is going to reveal a radical contingency in our current ethical conceptions, both in the sense that they are what they are rather than some others, and also in the sense that the historical changes which brought them about are not obviously related in a grounding or epistemically favourable way to the ethical ideas they encouraged. . . . But a sense of such contingency can seem to be in some tension with something that the ethical system demands, a recognition of that system’s authority.105

Williams takes Nietzsche to have aimed at producing such a tension in offering a naturalistic account of the history of morality, which “claim[s] an authority which rejects the appearance of contingency, and so resist[s] being explained in real terms at all”: the Genealogy reveals, in other words, that morality is not “stable under genealogical explanation.”106 Williams, too, finds that this reconstruction (even when it is not regarded as “fictional”) does not motivate the rejection of morality in any straightforward way: Suppose a given value is not stable under genealogical explanation. It does not necessarily follow that we give up on it, or lose confidence in it. We may merely stop reflecting on it, not address ourselves to the explanation, give up on transparency. A basic reason for this is that we have to go on somehow, try to live by something, and if there is no alternative we will try to keep what we actually have, even if it does fail under reflection.107

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So the Genealogy does suggest arguments against morality that do not depend on the genetic fallacy. In fact, it suggests more than one such argument, and the best interpreters are capable of disagreement over which arguments Nietzsche in fact intended. Reconstructing these arguments in ways that make them promising is not easy, and in some cases the results seem not to have a great deal of critical force. The point I want to make in this area follows on a cautionary note Leiter issues in Nietzsche on Morality: We should be careful, at this point, not to overstate Nietzsche’s aversion to the genetic fallacy. For the ultimate goal of the Genealogy, remember, is to free nascent higher human beings from their false consciousness about MPS, i.e. their false belief that MPS is good for them. From the standpoint of that normative end, Nietzsche has no reason to disown fallacious forms of reasoning as long as they are rhetorically effective.108

Here Leiter displays, and recommends, a willingness to interpret Nietzsche as making use of flawed but rhetorically effective arguments to sway his readers against morality. I want to develop this point. Ordinarily, the project of rational reconstruction is guided by the desire to attribute to an author the strongest possible arguments. More precisely, we can think of the rational reconstructor as constantly deciding among different possible reconstructions on the basis of her judgments regarding which of these is the most promising (where “promising” comprises a variety of virtues, including formal validity and reliance on more plausible rather than less plausible premises). The Genealogy poses a problem for rational reconstruction. For Nietzsche apparently thought that the reader who accepted his claims about the history of morality would thereby be motivated to reject it—or perhaps more modestly, to think poorly of it. But if the examples I have presented above are representative, promising reconstructions of his arguments generally fall short of this result: they fail to generate good reasons to think poorly of morality, and more than this, actually make Nietzsche’s apparent conviction that his writing would have this result seem either mistaken or merely puzzling. Now one purpose one might have in reconstructing a work of philosophy is that of understanding how the work is supposed to have the result that its author wanted it to have. Following Leiter, it seems to me that the Genealogy is crafted in such a way that for this purpose, something other than rational reconstruction is required. What is required is a method that discriminates

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among possible reconstructions on the basis of which ones have the kind of evaluative result that Nietzsche seems to have understood his writing to have, if necessary prioritizing this characteristic over those that make for promising arguments. Before concluding this chapter I want to apply these remarks to complete my discussion of Nietzsche’s language concerning “the Jews.” I am now in a position to say how this language contributes to Nietzsche’s case against morality, and thus to make the case that the Genealogy invokes anti-Semitic values. My argument here requires taking Nietzsche’s language concerning “the Jews” at face value, and thus requires construing the first essay as postulating the existence of a conspiracy on the part of Jews to infect “Rome” with “Jewish values.” This postulation accomplishes two important things. First, it positions morality, inasmuch as the distinction between good and evil is essential to it, as Jewish. And second, it positions those (non-Jews) who subscribe to morality as victims of a conspiracy—as “dupes,” if you will—and not just any conspiracy, but in fact a Jewish conspiracy: recall Nietzsche’s statement in § 16 that in Rome itself, today one bows down to Jews. What I have to say here is quite straightforward. Imagine a potential reader of the Genealogy antipathetic to all things Jewish, perhaps exercised about the possibility of being subject to the hidden machinations of Jewish puppet masters, who would find the prospect of “bowing down to Jews” intolerable. Such reader who became convinced, on the basis of Nietzsche’s claims, that moral values are “Jewish values” and that the cultural dominance of morality is the result of a Jewish conspiracy that has enthroned “three Jews and one Jewess” in Rome would thereby be motivated to think poorly of morality. Now it is easy to formulate what I have just described as an argument, and in fact as a syllogism: anything Jewish is bad; morality is Jewish; therefore morality is bad. I would not call this a promising argument. But the argument does produce the sort of critical result that Nietzsche seems to have wanted his writing to have for a broad swath of his reading public: that is, it does motivate the negative evaluation of morality. And reconstructing the Genealogy in such a way that its critical force depends on something like this syllogism also suggests what the point of Nietzsche’s language concerning “the Jews” is, as it assigns this language a constructive role within his overall project. Above I described the values in play in this discussion as anti-Semitic values, but here I want to qualify this characterization. While I could certainly be wrong about this, I doubt that Nietzsche crafted the relevant passages in the first essay specifically for consumption by activist anti-Semites: people who, like his sister

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Elizabeth, were explicitly committed to some public program of opposition to Jews. I have two reasons for this. First, and most importantly, reading Nietzsche as having imagined a future in which his writing would encourage activist antiSemites in particular to reject Christian morality, with its compassion for the sick and the weak, for an ethos of an Aryan-warrior “master race” does not cohere with what we know about his hopes for Europe (that his work in fact had precisely this result does not affect my point, I think). But second, I have no reason to think that Nietzsche regarded distaste for Jews to be the exclusive possession of activist anti-Semites. In fact I suspect that he took such views to be well represented in the culture of his day. Thus I do not take him to have intended to single out activist or self-professed anti-Semites as an audience distinct from those who subscribed to morality and/or Christianity more generally. I also want to note that nothing I have said about Nietzsche’s language regarding “the Jews” requires that he actually shared the valuations I have described. Overbeck can be correct in saying that Nietzsche’s position against Christianity was “primarily founded in anti-Semitism” without Nietzsche himself being an anti-Semite, and on this subject I have no need to take a position.109 And in fact, while I have written of Nietzsche having crafted the first essay with the specific end of motivating the rejection of morality on the part of an audience who held negative attitudes concerning Jews, reference to his intentions is dispensable. If the relevant claims in the first essay give the suitably disposed reader who becomes convinced of their truth cause to think badly of morality, then the text has this effect independently of Nietzsche’s intentions. In fact I find it difficult to suppose that Nietzsche did not intend his language concerning “the Jews” to have the effect I have described; and I think it counts as an independent consideration in favor of the way I have construed his talk of a “Jewish conspiracy” that my account explains why he chose to use this language. But here as elsewhere, the claims I care most about making are not about Nietzsche but rather about the text he authored. So it does seem to me that in addition to invoking valuations derived from morality itself and from his “chivalric-aristocratic” scheme, the Genealogy invokes negative valuations of Jews to link claims about the origins of morality to its critical evaluation. So far as I can see, Nietzsche had no reason to refrain from invoking multiple schemes of valuation or for seeking coherence among these; nor did he have any reason to appeal only to values to which he himself subscribed. The workmanship of the Genealogy is such that on its account, there are things about morality that will offend just about everybody.

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Conclusion The explanations Nietzsche offers for the historical emergence and subsequent development of morality are numerous; they are also consistently both suggestive and underdeveloped. These explanations are suggestive in that Nietzsche’s language makes it fairly clear that accepting them is supposed to sway the reader against morality. But the explanations are underdeveloped in at least two distinct respects: with respect to precisely what they claim has taken place historically, and with respect to how accepting the truth of Nietzsche’s explanations is supposed to lead to the evaluative result that he signals. Just as the Genealogy draws on multiple sources of valuation to link morality to “badness,” it offers (initiates, hints at) a multiplicity of accounts of how the various components of morality came into existence, and of just how knowledge of these linkages motivates its negative evaluation. If some of these accounts are more prominent than others, none are so well developed that it is a trivial matter to spell them out in precise language. Because of their underdevelopment they exist in a sort of limbo with respect to the questions various reconstructors may bring to the text. In many cases it is not possible to judge whether a given account as it exists in the text of the Genealogy is promising or unpromising, valid or fallacious, because such judgments require more in the way of argumentative development than Nietzsche offers. Thus the question for rational reconstructors is not so much whether Nietzsche’s arguments are or are not promising as whether or not they can be made to be promising through reconstruction. Similarly and for the same reason, in many cases it is not possible to say whether or how a given account as it exists in the text has the sort of critical force Nietzsche seems to have wanted it to have. It may be that these two reconstructive tasks must in the end diverge: that any promising reconstructions of Nietzsche’s arguments will not have the right sort of critical force, and that any arguments that do have the right sort of critical force will not be promising. But here I am not claiming whether or not this is the case. What I am claiming is that the Genealogy is written in such a way as to leave this question open. The characteristics I have described motivate a worry on my part. Viewed in one way, the Genealogy of Morals is conceptually and argumentatively underdeveloped, rhetorically top-heavy, and generally undisciplined. But viewed in another way it is rich: rich in the sense of suggesting a wide variety of possible lines of argument and criticism, in the sense of promising (without exactly delivering) a world history–changing account of the “value of values.”

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My worry has to do with the fact that the Genealogy has come to have the status of “founding exemplar” for a discrete academic genre. I worry that so long as the Genealogy is taken to be an exemplary “genealogy,” its “richness”—specifically, the degrees of historical specificity, argumentative development, and evaluative forthrightness that it displays—will tend to mark out standards for what counts as well-executed work in this genre. I think it would be unfortunate for scholars in any field to look to the Genealogy for articulations of standards in these areas.110 For one lesson one could draw from my exposition is that it is not at all clear that the Genealogy should be regarded as a successful work. It is not at all clear that Nietzsche’s text either contains or suggests promising arguments that achieve his intended results; it is not clear whether or not the critical force of the text can survive the closing off of options for rationally suboptimal construals of his claims. The way that the Genealogy is written makes it very difficult to determine whether it succeeds in this way or not. And I think it would be most unfortunate if this particular characteristic were to come to serve as “exemplary” for an academic genre.

4

Classic Suspicion: Freud

Anyone who, like myself, awakens the most wicked demons that dwell untamed in the human breast in order to do battle with them must be prepared to suffer some damage in the course of that struggle. —Sigmund Freud1 I see Freud’s contribution to the tradition of suspicion as consisting of three broad components: a set of claims about the workings of individual psychologies, a set of principles for extending these claims to groups rather than individuals, and a distinctive strategy for responding to criticism. In the first section of this chapter I will offer an overview of the first of these components. Borrowing a distinction from David Sachs, I will first discuss Freud’s claims regarding psychological processes: specifically, his postulation of distinct “zones” or “agencies” in the unconscious mind, and the functions that he assigned to these agencies.2 Turning then to the materials of unconscious thought, I will describe the specific drives, desires, or intentions—or, importantly, the functional equivalent of these— that influence the operation of these agencies in the manner Freud claimed; and I will discuss his postulation of specific kinds of experiences whose later repercussions include specific behaviors. In the second section I will describe the principles that Freud used in applying his psychoanalytic doctrines to groups of persons, including nations, cultures, or groups defined by religious identities. What results from Freud’s deployment of these principles is a set of strategies for explaining large-scale social phenomena as the results of the same sorts of factors that explain individual behaviors, including pathological ones. After discussing these two components I will be in a position to say how my category of suspicious explanation applies to Freud, so I will discuss the dynamics of hiddenness and ethical charge in his theories as I will have described them. I will then take this material into a discussion of Freud’s practice of responding to criticisms of his theories by applying those very theories to his critics. It seems to

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me that this strategy, which I will call the recursive ad hominem defense, is at least as important for the history of psychoanalysis as are Freud’s formal theoretical claims, and more important than these for the broader tradition of suspicion. Before diving into the first topic, I want to locate myself in relation to the “Freud wars” that raged for much of the 1990s. By 2007 Adam Phillips could declare the Freud wars over, and (perhaps with tongue in cheek) describe their outcome as a complete destruction of the credibility of both Freud and psychoanalysis.3 I want to be as clear as possible regarding my relationship to this judgment. The question of whether Freud or his theories are intellectually respectable is of no importance for my project, and the one who reads what I say in this chapter as part of a case against Freud or psychoanalysis will miss what I take to be my purpose (when there are Freudians about, modesty about the reliability of introspection is good manners). The issue is a sensitive one because variants on the ideas that the claims of psychoanalysis are “unfalsifiable” and “self-authenticating”—ideas that have been central to suspicions about the intellectual legitimacy of the theory—will play a role in my arguments.4 It might be the case that Freud’s theories cannot be made to be intellectually respectable on the reconstruction I will offer (although I do not think that I will describe them in enough detail to determine such a result). But I do not want my reader to be distracted by this possibility. For what I am ultimately interested in is describing contributions Freud made to fields beyond psychology proper, and it seems to me that no amount of opprobrium heaped on him or his school(s) could possibly erase these.

Unconscious processes Amy Demorest offers a global overview of Freud’s psychological theories: This approach offers us an image of the human psyche that infers powerful forces battling unseen within us, envisioning an intriguing mystery hidden under that which is apparent. In the view of this approach, unconscious forces in the mind seek a way to be expressed in behavior, yet they run into conflict with equally unconscious forces that seek to deny their expression. Human behavior represents the resolution of this dynamic battle as these various forces are modified, channeled, and given compromised satisfaction.5

Thus summary statement involves two distinct suppositions regarding the structure of the human mind. The first of these is that there are unconscious

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mental processes—goings-on within the mind that escape conscious awareness. And the second is that some of those processes operate in opposition to others— that the unconscious is a locus of conflict. In describing the processes at work within the human mind Freud consistently distinguished among a number of different locations within or parts of the mind. His views regarding the architectonic of the mind underwent significant development over the course of his career. A brief review such as mine cannot do justice to the complexity of his thinking on this subject, and what I have space to say will of necessity be more of a sketch than an in-depth exposition.6 I will restrict my exposition to the partitioning scheme he adopted after 1932 (with the publication of the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis). In Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940) he offered his final formulation of this view. The first and oldest of the “zones” or “agencies” of the mind is the Es,7 comprising “everything that is inherited, everything present at birth, everything constitutionally determined.” The second, the Ich, “mediates between the Es and the internal world” and “has control over voluntary movement.” The third is the “Über-Ich,” a “residue of childhood” that develops within a person originally as an internalization of parental authority, but one that later “absorbs in the same way contributions from the later parental substitutes and other people who carry on having an influence, such as educators, public role models and respected social ideals.”8 This tripartite division yields a basic formula for the conflictual dynamics of the unconscious mind. The Es is a locus of fundamental drives that represent the “actual purpose of the individual’s life,” which consists of “gratifying his innate needs”;9 the Über-Ich, a locus of externally derived opposition and control whose “main function remains the restriction of gratifications”;10 and the Ich, responsible for negotiating a path from these competing internal forces to action. Thus “the Ich has the job of satisfying the claims of its three dependencies—reality, the Es, and the Über-Ich—while still retaining its organization and asserting its independence.”11 In the Outline Freud positions self-preservation, in two distinct forms, as an important goal of the Ich’s negotiations. The Es “obeys the unrelenting pleasure principle,” demanding the gratification of the person’s innate drives.12 But this demand poses two distinct threats. The first of these is to the person generally: “the kind of immediate and heedless gratification of the drives that the Es demands would often enough lead to dangerous conflicts with the external world and to extinction.”13 And the second is to the integrity of the Ich specifically: “excessively strong drives can damage the Ich in a similar way to the excessively

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great ‘stimuli’ of the external world. They can’t, it is true, destroy it; however, they can probably destroy its unique dynamic organization and can turn the Ich back into being part of the Es.”14 The Ich is also responsible to the Über-Ich, both with respect to particular behaviors and with respect to the Ich’s sense of itself;15 and indeed under the right conditions the demands of the Über-Ich threaten the integrity of the Ich.16 Thus, between a drive-demand and a gratificatory action, [the Ich] switches on the faculty of thought, which seeks by mean of trial actions to calculate the success of the intended undertakings according to its orientation in the present and its evaluation of earlier experiences. In this way, the Ich comes to a decision about whether the attempt at gratification should be carried out or postponed, or whether the demand of the drive might not have to be entirely suppressed as something dangerous (this is the reality principle).17

Before moving on I want to call attention to Freud’s clear use of agential conceptions in describing the Ich. The Ich considers whether motives stemming from both the Es and the Über-Ich shall become principles of action, but the Ich has its own motives as well, prominent among them self-preservation. And the Ich decides among different possible courses of action based on its estimation of their consequences. Furthermore, while the deliberations of the Ich are not always available to consciousness (among the decisions the Ich makes are those concerning what elements of the self will be so available), these deliberations do determine some actions of the person, such that persons in some cases act for reasons of which they are unaware. The discussions of the previous two chapters raise the question of whether unusual uses of agential language are best interpreted literally or heuristically, and this question confronts the reconstructor of Freud as well. I will return to this issue below. I turn now to three principles of normal tendency that emerge from Freud’s descriptions of the workings of the unconscious mind, which I will describe as repression/resistance, compromised gratification, and substitution. First: common to Freud’s notions of repression and resistance is the idea that under certain circumstances the mind actively seeks to prevent some part of its contents, be these desires, memories, or connections among thoughts, from coming to conscious awareness. Repression proper is the simple suppression of mental content, a suppression which imparts to that content a “strong upward drive, an impulsion to break through into consciousness,” and Freud ascribed the activity of repression to the Über-Ich, “carried out either by itself or by the Ich in obedience to its orders.”18 And resistance is activity that the mind undertakes in

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order to preserve repression when repressed content threatens to break through into conscious awareness. There are, in Freud’s theories, two broad kinds of reasons why the Ich should seek to keep some of the mind’s contents from consciousness. One is to satisfy the demands of the Über-Ich. As the “voice of conscience,” the Über-Ich is a source of commands to the individual not only regarding what sorts of actions are permissible to undertake, but also what sorts of desires are permissible to have. Freud ascribed significant but not total executive authority to the Ich with respect to both behavior and conscious awareness: the Ich fulfills its appointed task in part by “gaining mastery over the demands of the drives, by deciding whether they should be allowed gratification, by postponing this gratification until the time and circumstances are favourable in the external world, or by suppressing their excitations altogether.”19 But Freud regarded the “innate drives” of the Es as ineliminable; thus conflict arises when the Über-Ich rules against them. The Ich does not have the ability to satisfy the Über-Ich’s demand that the person not have the desires in question. The best the Ich can do is to prevent the desires from coming to conscious awareness. A second broad reason the Ich can have for actively suppressing mental content is self-preservation. This reason bears in particular on the phenomenon of resistance. The active suppression of mental contents is part of the prerogatives of the Ich, the “most difficult demand” on which Freud described as “suppressing the drive-claims from the Es; for this, it has to maintain large amounts of energy in opposing investments.”20 The integrity of the Ich requires the preservation of these “investments.” And when these are threatened, Freud claimed, a desire for self-preservation motivates the Ich to seek means of preserving them: The Ich protects itself against being invaded by undesired elements from the unconscious and repressed Es by means of opposing investments that must remain intact if it is to function normally. The more oppressed the Ich now feels, the more desperately it persists—terrified, as it were—with these opposing investments, in order to protect what remains of it against further encroachment.21

Freud described resistance as something that almost invariably occurs in psychoanalysis, in which the Ich “recoils from apparently dangerous undertakings of the kind that threaten unpleasure.” The overcoming of resistances, he remarked, is “the part of our work that takes up the most time and the greatest trouble.” This dynamic will be particularly important for my later arguments.

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I pass now to compromised gratification. In its negotiations among the competing demands of the Es, the Über-Ich, and reality, the Ich can determine that a desire stemming from an innate drive shall determine behavior, as for example when a person willfully engages in sexual intercourse; or it can determine that the desire shall not determine behavior, as when a person refrains from sexual intercourse contrary to their desire to do so. Freud also postulated a kind of result that falls between these two cases. In his view drives produce desires that make demands on the Ich until these desires are satisfied, at which point the drive is (temporarily) discharged or quieted. But in some cases the Ich has the ability to determine behaviors that “quiet” a drive without actually satisfying the desires that its operation creates—as it were, tricking the Es into thinking that its desires have been satisfied. Freud commonly understood neurotic behaviors as strategies on the part of the Ich to gratify drives in this partial way. The possibility of this sort of action allows the Ich to “discharge” an innate drive while at the same time avoiding the negative consequences that would follow from behavior that fully gratified that drive.22 In substitution, the mind replaces certain mental content with different content. The various mechanisms of substitution make possible novel kinds of explanation—explanations that assert linkages among ostensibly unrelated mental contents in ways that yield causal accounts of acts, as well as of the contents of memories and sensations. Transference is one kind of mental substitution. Transference affects arrangements in which particular mental elements—thoughts, feelings, desires— are attached to a particular object, for example, when a person desires to have sexual intercourse with his mother or feels resentment toward and desires the death of his father. Transference takes place when such thoughts, feelings, or desires come to be attached to a different object—when, as it were, a second object replaces the first. Freud offered some generic examples of transference in his discussion of the process of psychoanalysis in the Outline. During the course of analysis the patient typically comes to see the analyst as “the return— the reincarnation—of an important person from his childhood, his past; and because of this, transfers feeling and reactions onto him that undoubtedly applied to this role model.”23 And also typically, among the feelings involved will be sexual desire: It is almost impossible to avoid the positive attitude towards the analyst ultimately changing into the negative, hostile one. This, too, is usually a repetition of the past. The patient’s tractability vis-a-vis his father (if the father was the person in question) and his courting of his father’s favour were rooted in an erotic desire

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directed towards the latter individual. At some time or another, this demand presses its way forward in transference as well, and will insist on being gratified. In the analytical situation, it can only meet with a refusal. . . . A spurning of this kind is taken by the patient as a reason to change his attitude; the same probably happened during his childhood.24

In this case, Freud explains the development of a hostile attitude on the part of the patient undergoing analysis as a product of dynamics stemming from the patient’s childhood. Absent the notion of transference, it would certainly be possible to explain such hostility as a product of frustrated sexual desire. But transference provides for an account of the sources of such desire, an account that predicts that patients will very often want to have sex with their analysts; and it is also implicated in the hostility that patients almost invariably display toward analysts. Another kind of mental substitution Freud referred to as displacement. This sort of substitution is on display in one example from the case of Ida Bauer (“Dora”).25 Dora underwent analysis with Freud in 1900 at the age of eighteen; Freud’s account of her case appeared in 1905 as Fragment of a Case of Hysteria (prior, it is worth noting, to Freud’s adoption of the Ich-Es-Über-Ich rubric). An event that Dora related to Freud had taken place when she was fourteen years old: an older and married friend of the family, “Herr K.,” taking advantage of a carefully arranged moment alone with her, “suddenly pulled the girl close to him and pressed a kiss on her lips.” “That was surely a situation,” Freud wrote, “that should have produced a clear sensation of sexual excitement in a fourteenyear-old girl who had never been touched by a man. But at that moment Dora felt a violent revulsion, pulled away and dashed past him”; and even four years later, in describing the event “She said she could still feel the pressure of that embrace on her upper body.”26 Freud saw two distinct features of this event as requiring explanation. The first of these was the revulsion Dora experienced at being kissed; “anyone in whom an occasion for sexual excitement provokes predominantly or exclusively feelings of displeasure,” he noted, “I would without hesitation classify as a hysteric.” And the second was the sensation of pressure that Dora associated with memory of the embrace. Freud explained Dora’s revulsion as the product of a pathological disposition to react negatively to sexual stimulation, the details of which explanation need not concern us here. This disposition plays a role in his explanation of the sensation of pressure occasioned by her recollections of the event: I think that during this passionate embrace she felt not only the kiss on her lips but also the pushing of the erect member against her body. This—to

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her—repellant perception was excised from memory, repressed and replaced by the harmless sensation of pressure on the thorax, which draws its excessive intensity from its repressed source. A new displacement, then, from the lower to the upper body.27

Displacement, in this case, involves the mind’s substituting, within a particular memory, one part of the body for another as the locus of sensation: “The pressure of the erect member probably led to an analogous change in the corresponding female organ, the clitoris, and the stimulation of that second erogenous zone has been fixated by displacement on to the simultaneous sensation of pressure on the thorax.”28 The three components of psychoanalytic theory I have surveyed here— repression, compromised gratification, and substitution—each provides a distinct resource for the explanation of actions as the product of factors that are not available to introspection. These components make possible multiple and overlapping kinds of “hiddenness”: Freud’s theories can, for example, explain a particular action as a compromised gratification of a repressed desire that is itself a product of prior events whose effects are transmitted to present circumstances by way of substitution.

The materials of unconscious thought Here is Demorest on the contents or materials of the processes we have been exploring: In Freud’s version of [the psychoanalytic] model, the primary forces motivating behavior are sexual and aggressive impulses and the moral prohibitions with which they conflict. In a successful compromise between these opposing forces, human behavior represents the symbolic expression of sexual and aggressive wishes in a socially acceptable form. Thus, even the most apparently adaptive and rational human behavior rests on a hidden base of passion, conflict, and irrationality.29

I will divide my discussion of these materials into three parts. First, I will describe the “innate drives” that Freud postulated as the primitive source of human desires and motivations. Second, I will discuss the prohibitions that, on his account, obstruct the satisfaction of these drives. And third, I will discuss some examples of principles of normal tendency (such as his the famous Oedipus complex) that he postulated as products of the clash between innate drives and prohibitions.

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I rate the importance of this material for my purposes as fairly low; it seems to me that Freud’s claims regarding the processes of unconscious thought comprise a more enduring contribution to the tradition of suspicion than his claims regarding its materials (in this I am, I think, more or less following Ricoeur). In the first part of his public career Freud defended the position that one drive, libido, powers a great deal of the unconscious life, and in particular is responsible for neurotic behavior;30 but after several decades of insisting on the primacy of the libido, he surprised his followers by embracing a second innate drive.31 In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) Freud spoke at length about the difficulty involved in identifying fundamental drives, advancing as a provisional hypothesis the view that all such drives are “a powerful tendency inherent in every living organism to restore a prior state.”32 This formulation supports the view that, on the one hand, “the goal of all life is death, or to express it retrospectively: the inanimate existed before the animate” while, on the other hand, organisms whose origins lie in biological reproduction “repeat the game to which they owe their own existence, and the outcome of this is that one portion of their matter continues its development right through to the end, while another reverts once more to the beginnings of the development process as a new germ particle.”33 Thus eventually Freud postulated two distinct drives or, more properly, groups of “partial drives,” the “life drives” and the “death drives,” such that there is “a kind of fluctuating rhythm within the life of organisms: one group of drives goes storming ahead in order to attain the ultimate goal of life at the earliest possible moment, another goes rushing back at a certain point along the way in order to do part of it all over again and thus prolong the journey.”34 Drives make “demands for gratification” on the organism in which they operate, and when the path to “full gratification” is blocked these demands motivate behaviors that would only partially satisfy them: The repressed drive never abandons its struggle to achieve full gratification, which would consist in the repetition of a primary gratification experience. All the sublimations and reaction-formations and surrogate-formations in the world are never enough to resolve the abiding tension; and the gulf between the level of gratificatory pleasure demanded and the level actually achieved produces that driving force that prevents the individual from resting content with any situation he ever contrives.35

The theory of drives, then, supports the idea that by nature human beings experience more or less incessant demands to act in specific ways: paradigmatically, to seek out sexual gratification on the one hand, and to work

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destruction on organic life on the other. In the late Outline of Psychoanalysis Freud offered the basic formula that the aim of Eros is “to establish and maintain ever greater unities,” while the aim of the “destruction-drive” is “to dissolve connections and thus to destroy things,” and argued that “[the] way in which the two basic drives work with and against each other gives rise to the whole spectrum of life-phenomena”: “Thus the act of eating means destroying the object with the ultimate aim of incorporating it; and the sexual act is an act of aggression with the intention of creating the most intimate union.”36 I move now to Freud’s discussion of obstacles to the gratification of drives. If human beings are subject to more or less the same foundational tendencies to sexual and aggressive behaviors regardless of historical location, in particular cultures some behaviors are prohibited or regulated in ways that narrow the scope for their occurrence. As we have seen, the influence of parents and other social educators results in the internalization of such prohibitions within what Freud eventually labeled the Über-Ich. Even after embracing the existence of a “destruction-drive” Freud regarded cultural strictures regarding sexuality as the primary driver of pathological behaviors, largely because “no other function has been so energetically and comprehensively rejected over the course of cultural development as precisely the sexual one.”37 At greater length: Theoretically speaking, there is no reason not to suppose that any old drivedemand could give rise to the same repressions with all their consequences; but our observations frequently show us, so far as we can judge, that the excitations that play this pathogenic role arise from the partial drives of sexual life. The symptoms of neurosis are always, so one might argue, either substitute gratifications for some sexual urge or other, or measures to prevent them being gratified; they are as a rule compromises between the two, of the kind that come about according to the laws of oppositions that apply to the unconscious.

What explains the “unexpectedly large role in the causation of neurosis” that sexuality plays, then, is neither a pathological tendency within Eros itself nor a specific tendency toward pathological sexuality within particular individuals. It is the prevalence of external prohibitions against the “full gratification” of sexual desires. Given that such prohibitions are culturally specific, Freud’s theory predicts that cultures with lower levels of such prohibitions will exhibit fewer cases of neurotic behaviors: “We recognize that it is easy for the barbarian to be healthy, whereas it is a difficult task for the civilized human.”38 Thus far we have seen that Freud postulated “innate drives,” sometimes conflicting, operating within the individual, and prohibitions against the

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gratification of the demands of these drives bearing on the individual from without. Freud also postulated the occurrence of a specific set of developmentally related events within individuals, the product of which are complexes, or tendencies toward (sometimes pathological) behaviors. Paradigmatically, these events take place in early childhood, and the complexes they produce persist into adulthood. The net result of this part of Freud’s theory is that adult persons can have tendencies that are not “innate” but are nevertheless both culturally widespread and psychologically deeply rooted, and these tendencies can be cited to explain particular behaviors. Four of Freud’s complexes are well known. The first is the famous Oedipus complex. Freud claimed that typically a boy’s first (external) object of sexual desire is his mother, for “In taking care of the child’s bodily needs, she becomes its first seductress”; and this desire in turn prompts feelings of jealousy toward the boy’s father, “the rival who stands in his way, and whom he wishes to get rid of.”39 The Oedipus complex proper is not just this set of childhood desires: given that both sexual desire for one’s mother and desires for the death of one’s father are assigned negative valuations, these are typically repressed, and so operate alongside “innate drives” as unconscious “motive forces.” The second example is the castration complex. In the Outline Freud described a rather remarkable series of events within the life of a young boy. Subsequent to his mother forbidding him from attempting sexual gratification with her, the boy turns to masturbation, from which his mother is unable to dissuade him; and finally she announces that if he does not cease masturbating “She, so she says, will tell Father, and he will chop the organ off.”40 Particularly if the boy “can recall what female genitals look like . . . where this part of the body, prized above all else, really is absent,” this threat occasions “the most severe trauma in his young life.” The consequences of this trauma run through the rest of childhood and into adulthood; they include an intensification of the boy’s defiance of his father, “one that will obsessively dictate his later conduct in the human community,” as well as an excessive dependence on his mother, “which will persist in later life as servitude towards women.”41 Freud took the events in question to be typical in the lives of young boys (albeit with varying psychological consequences), and had a ready explanation of the fact that adult men typically have no recollection of them: The entire occurrence, which we may very probably regard as the central experience of childhood, the greatest problem of early life and the most powerful source of later inadequacy, is so fundamentally forgotten that when we try to

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reconstruct it in the analysis of adults, it meets with the most decided disbelief. Indeed, they are so averse to it that they want to silence any mention of this taboo subject and, with particular intellectual blindness, fail to recognize the most obvious reminders of it.42

The third example is penis envy. “Right from the start,” Freud claims, a little girl “envies the boy his possession: indeed, one could say that her whole development takes place under the influence of penis envy.” The consequences of the girl’s “attempts to compensate for her defect” can vary, from the development of a “normal female attitude” to an aversion to sexual activity altogether. And if the girl persists in her desire to become male, “she will end up being manifestly homosexual (in the most extreme cases) or will otherwise demonstrate pronounced male characteristics in later life: she will choose a ‘male’ career and suchlike.”43 The fourth complex is the female analog to the Oedipus complex (the “Electra complex”), which is a sometime product of penis envy. Moved by resentment at her mother for “having sent her out into the world so ill-equipped,” the little girl conceives a desire to take her mother’s place in her father’s affections. “Her new relationship with her father may initially consist of her desire to have his penis at her disposal,” Freud wrote; “however, it culminates in another desire, namely for him to give her the gift of a baby.” The persistence of this complex into adulthood, Freud thought, does “little damage” to the female psyche: “Such a woman will go on to choose her husband for his fatherly characteristics, and will be prepared to recognize his authority.”44 These examples display an important feature of Freud’s theories. Freud’s postulation of innate drives and of a typical set of unconscious processes gives the theories a certain explanatory range. Freud’s complexes expand this explanatory range by suggesting motivations for pathological behaviors that are grounded in, but more complex than, these drives. The more central parts of Freud’s theories set the stage for the postulation of complexes. His account of repression licenses the postulation of events (as well as desires) of which persons have no memories, and also renders evidentially unimportant a person’s denial that any such events occurred. And his understanding of the way drives work licenses the supposition that the desires that figure in complexes continue to make demands that eventually result in behaviors that gratify them in compromised form. At this point we are in a position to understand a significant episode in Freud’s relationship to Carl Jung. In the course of a casual conversation in 1909, Jung raised the subject of the discovery of mummified corpses in Irish peat bogs,

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at which point Freud promptly fainted. Freud’s biographer George Makari says about this that Freud interpreted Jung’s remark as an expression of “a death wish against him.”45 The foregoing exposition unpacks the logic of Freud’s response as a product of his theoretical commitments. Freud took Jung to have an Oedipal complex, and thus took it that he (Jung) wished for his father’s death, a wish which (because repressed) continued to make demands on Jung’s psyche even after his father’s death in 1896. Freud also took Jung to have transferred his feelings toward his father onto Freud (i.e., he saw himself as a father-figure to Jung’s unconscious); he had indicated as much to Jung repeatedly, to the latter’s considerable annoyance.46 Thus Freud’s theories predicted that Jung would harbor an unconscious wish for Freud’s death. This example highlights the fact that Freud’s theories open up novel pathways for the generation of ethical charge. On the surface, it would seem that a person’s mentioning dead bodies need not be a hostile action. But from his reaction it seems that Freud attributed to Jung’s ostensibly innocent speech act at least some degree of the ethical significance of acting on a wish for his death, even if he did not regard Jung as having attempted to murder him. Thus Freud’s theories, by making it possible to explain actions as products of desires to which they stand in no obvious relation, render the agents who perform them susceptible to some measure of the ethical evaluation that would be appropriate to acting on those desires. Before concluding this first section of the chapter, I want to deal with an issue of interpretation that I raised above. I have presented Freud as making use of commonsense belief-desire psychology to describe the dynamics of the unconscious mind—specifically, as explaining behaviors as products of trains of emotion, thought, and intentional action unfolding within the unconscious. So described, Freud’s theories seem to understand the human mind as composed of multiple and sometimes conflicting independent agencies, each with their own store of information, desires, and capacities to act upon other internal agencies. The question of whether Freud is best understood in this way has long animated the secondary literature. In an essay published in 1982, Donald Davidson took note of a long-running concern with the fact that Freud’s claims seem to require that “thoughts and desires and even actions be attributed to something less than, and therefore distinct from, the whole person”: But can we make sense of acts and attitudes that are not those of an agent? Also, as Sartre suggests, the notion of responsibility would lose its essential point if acts and intentions were pried loose from people and attached instead to

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semi-autonomous parts of the mind. The parts would then stand proxy for the person: each part would become a little woman, man or child. What was once a single mind is turned into a battlefield where opposed forces contend, deceive one another, conceal information, devise strategies. . . . It is not surprising that doubts have arisen as to whether these metaphors can be traded for a consistent theory.47

I will refer to the reading that animates Davidson’s worry as the homunculus interpretation, with the thought that on this interpretation Freud populates the unconscious mind with distinct agents. I do not think that the homunculus interpretation is the only option for understanding Freud’s position. In some places Freud indicated that he understood the language he used in describing the dynamics of the unconscious to be figurative or metaphorical. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, for example, he took note of the “many strange and impalpable processes” involved in his descriptions of innate drives. “All of this,” he remarked, “simply arises from the fact that we must necessarily operate with the given scientific terminology, i.e. the figurative language specific to psychology (or, more precisely, depth psychology).”48 And he spoke more directly to the issue in the late Outline: Here, as there, the task consists of discovering something else behind characteristics (qualities) of the object of research that are directly given to our perception. . . . We don’t hope to be able to approach these themselves, for we see that everything new that we have inferred has after all to be translated back into the language of our perception, from which we simply can’t escape. But this is just the nature and the limitation of our science. . . . In this way we deduce a certain number of processes that are in themselves “unknowable,” link them with those we are conscious of, and when we say, for example, that “an unconscious memory has intervened here,” then what that actually means is: “something has happened here that’s totally beyond us—but something that could only have been described in such and such a way if it had ever come to consciousness.”49

I take it that these passages count against the homunculus interpretation, and that taking them into account requires treating Freud’s descriptions of the Ich, Es, and Über-Ich having their own desires, ends, and knowledge (crucially, knowledge of means-end relations) as models in the sense in which I have used this term in previous chapters. Thus, as was the case for both Marx and Nietzsche, in some places perhaps Freud is best understood as using agential language to offer not literal descriptions of sequences of events, but rather descriptions that “stand in” for sequences of events that are not described.

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My claim here is that if Freud cannot be read as straightforwardly postulating independent agencies within the unconscious mind, it is difficult to reconstruct his theories in ways that put much real distance between them and the homunculus interpretation. A superficial reason for this is that Freud uses agential language to describe the dynamics of the unconscious so frequently, and in so straightforward a manner, that it is both a demanding and a mystifying exercise to always refrain from taking this language at face value. Consider an example from The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Freud’s sister had remarked that his inkstand was less attractive than the other items on his cluttered writing desk; shortly thereafter Freud broke the marble top of the inkstand by knocking it to the floor with a careless movement of his arm. He wondered, Did I perhaps conclude from my sister’s words that next time she had occasion to make me a present she was going to give me a better inkstand, and had I broken the plain, old one to make sure that she put the plan she had indicated into practice? If so, then my sweeping movement was only apparently clumsy, and in reality it was both dextrous and purposeful, since I contrived to avoid all the more valuable objects standing close to the inkstand. It is my belief that we must accept this judgment for a whole series of seemingly accidental, clumsy movements which appear to be accidents can be explained in this way. It is true that there is something violent and jerky about them, as if they were spastic or ataxic movements, but they betray their intentional nature and fulfil their purpose with a certainty that cannot always be attributed to conscious and voluntary movements.50

If the homunculus interpretation is to be kept at bay, this passage is to be understood as not supposing the existence of a train of thought prompted by the sister’s remark, followed by the conception of a plan of action and its execution by way of a skillful bodily movement, all of this hidden from Freud’s conscious awareness. Rather, reading the passage through the position expressed in the Outline, what occurred within Freud’s unconscious mind is “totally unknown,” but would have to be described in the language he used if it had been conscious. Freud seems in this passage to be arguing for the existence and causal efficacy of intentions of which we are unaware, and to be assigning a particular kind of “cunning of reason” to the unconscious mind; but in fact (I am for the moment supposing) his reflections postulate no such intentions and no such cunning. I think it is possible to read Freud in this way, but not easy to do so consistently, given the great frequency with which he used agential language in a straightforward way; and such a reading leaves it quite mysterious what content can be assigned to his talk of intentionality, certainty, and “dextrousness.”

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A deeper reason why it is difficult to keep the homunculus interpretation at arm’s length has to do with the role that the explanatory value of agential language plays in Freud’s arguments. I take it that the logic of agential explanation—the logic of belief-desire psychology—plays a central role in both many of Freud’s specific examples and his more general theoretical claims. That is, I take it that in very many cases, accepting one of Freud’s explanations is a matter of judging that a particular belief-desire explanation is better than the available alternatives. Thus the example just above turns around a belief-desire explanation of Freud’s arm movement, and I take Freud to have been suggesting to his readers that this belief-desire explanation was better than the available alternative, that is, that the action was accidental. Now under normal circumstances, accepting that a particular explanation is better than the available alternatives is a reason to think that explanation true—a reason, that is, to think that the entities and relations that figure in the explanation are actual. But if the homunculus interpretation is incorrect, that cannot be said about this case. Rather, accepting the explanation to be better than the alternatives is, I take it, supposed to count as a reason to think that some set of entities and relations that do not figure in the explanation (on account of its figurative language) are actual. So far forth, the situation is the same for Freud as it was for Marx, Nietzsche, and any other cases in which the claims that constitute an explanation are best interpreted as offering models. But the present case is further complicated by Freud’s supposition that the contents and processes of the unconscious mind are unknowable. In cases in which a translation of figurative language into more literal terms is available, one’s judgment of the value of the figurative explanation can be critically evaluated by attention to the explanatory value of its translation. Consider, for example, the claim that Donald Trump became president because America chose him in the election of 2016. A plausible translation out of the language of collective agency might run as follows: Trump became president because more Americans voted for him than for Hillary Clinton. But in fact this translation does not explain why Trump became president, since it is false. The lesson to be drawn from this example is, I think, that in this particular case the figurative use of the language of collective agency cannot capture those details of the process whereby Trump came to be president that do explain its outcome, and thus that it would be a mistake to allow one’s assessment of the value of the figurative explanation to determine one’s acceptance of it. If, however, what takes place within the unconscious mind is unknowable, there is no possibility of translating the figurative language of Freud’s beliefdesire explanations into a non-metaphorical idiom. And the important point

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here is not that we thereby have no way to “test” Freud’s explanations by comparing their translations to what actually happened. It is rather that because it is impossible to translate Freud’s belief-desire explanations into any other idiom, there is no other basis for assessing the value of those explanations besides the untranslated belief-desire language. The issue is further complicated by the fact that Freud’s explanations often do involve, irreducibly, consciously available beliefs and desires. In the case of the inkstand, Freud supposed the events that culminated in the movement of his arm to have been precipitated by his hearing and understanding of his sister’s casual remark. This situation presents a difficult interpretive choice. One way to read the example is to allow the content of Freud’s sister’s words to play an explanatory role within Freud’s unconscious mind, at the cost of opening the door to the homunculus interpretation. The other alternative is to claim that what informed the workings of his unconscious mind was “something totally unknown, which would have had to have been described as the contents of his sister’s remark if it had been conscious.” This interpretation would keep the homunculus interpretation at bay, but at the cost of denying an explanatory role to the content of the sister’s remark, the fact that it was conscious apprehension of that content that set the events in motion notwithstanding. At the end of “Paradoxes of Irrationality” Davidson settled on a rendering of psychoanalysis that assigns a particular kind of structure to one or more subdivisions of the mind: a structure similar to that needed to explain ordinary actions. .  .  . The analogy does not have to be carried so far as to demand that we speak of parts of the mind as independent agents. What is essential is that certain thoughts and feelings of the person be conceived as interacting to produce consequences on the principles of intentional actions, these consequences then serving as causes, not reasons, for further mental events.51

This claim by Davidson evinces, I think, the impossibility of doing away with reliance on belief-desire psychology in construing Freud’s explanations: if the parts of the mind are to be understood not as agents in the full sense of the term, they nevertheless operate “on the principles of intentional action,” and Davidson thought that Freud’s theories require seeing thoughts and feelings (not “unknown” unconscious correlates of these) as implicated in their operation. It seems to me that the homunculus interpretation, if it is not a viable “finalvocabulary” reconstruction of Freud’s claims, is an unavoidable and indispensable device for understanding their content and assessing their explanatory value.

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A reconstruction that holds the homunculus interpretation at arm’s length will say that many of the processes that unfold within the unconscious mind are not agential processes, but are just like agential processes in those respects that matter for purposes of explanation. Another way to put the point would be to say that according to Freud’s theories it is as if our unconscious minds contained numerous independent agencies, and that there is no alternative to making use of this as-if cognition when grappling with those theories. I conclude that even if hermeneutical charity motivates a reconstruction of Freud’s theories that avoid the homunculus interpretation, the only avoidance that is really possible is a purely notional one, in which the parts of the mind are described as not just like agents, but as very much like agents. I will return to this point below, in connection with the issue of ethical charge.

Freud’s social extension In this section I will discuss two ways in which Freud applied his theories to large-scale social phenomena. The first kind of “social extension” I will discuss is basically a matter of spelling out some entailments of his claims as I have already described them. The second involves claims we have not yet encountered, and is grounded in his treatment of certain kinds of human groups—paradigmatically, historically extended cultures or races—as analogous to individual persons for the purposes of psychoanalytic explanation. Both of these kinds of social extensions lead to the same result: they allow for the claim that the members of a specific group (all, or perhaps most) have something in their unconscious minds that motivates them to act in similar ways. And claims of this sort then allow for the explanation of certain large-scale social phenomena as the aggregate result of psychological dynamics operating in massively parallel fashion within individuals. It should be apparent that the social phenomena that are the most amenable to this sort of explanation are those in which many persons act (or think, or value) in similar ways. And as we will see shortly, Freud did offer explanations of such states of affairs: for example, of relationships between sons-in-law and mothers-in-law, of Jews’ sense of their own superiority over other peoples, and of anti-Semitic attitudes among non-Jews. But religion is the paradigmatic example of a large-scale social phenomenon for which Freud was concerned to offer a psychoanalytic explanation. After an early treatment of the topic in “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907), Freud first offered a general

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psychoanalytic explanation of religion in Totem and Taboo (1912–13). In his late book Moses and Monotheism (1938) he wrote that since first writing on the subject I have never doubted that religious phenomena are to be understood only on the model of the neurotic symptoms of the individual, which are so familiar to us, as a return of long-forgotten important happenings in the primeval history of the human family, that they owe their obsessive character to that very origin and therefore derive their effect on mankind from the historical truth they contain.52

By the end of this section I will have unpacked this compressed description of Freud’s account of religion, with particular attention to the additions Freud made to his core theories in order to explain a phenomenon of this sort. Freud’s theories as I have described them already provide a device for scaling up mental processes. Recall that the contents of the Über-Ich are determined in part by contingent cultural valuations and prohibitions. Freud’s theories predict that any person who has internalized a cultural prohibition will have tendencies toward specific unconscious dynamics. Thus his explanations can be extended socially through simple replication: if a characteristic of an individual can be explained as resulting from the internalization of a cultural prohibition, that same characteristic within other individuals in the same culture can be explained in the same way. The range of such socially extended explanations can be expanded by means of Freud’s notion of complexes. If the postulation of some event in the life of one individual makes possible the explanation of that individual’s behavior, the postulation of that same event occurring in the lives of many individuals makes possible the explanation of the behavior of those many individuals by way of simple replication. Thus the postulation that certain traumatic events are commonplace (or, indeed, universal) within a particular society makes possible the social extension of complex-based explanations. We have seen that Freud thought that some of the contingent life events his theories postulate were sufficiently widespread that the resulting complexes can be assumed to exist as a matter of course. In Totem and Taboo Freud invoked this idea regarding Oedipal experiences specifically in order to explain the classically troubled relationship between husband and mother-in-law. Freud claimed that the husband, whose original sexual desires for his mother and perhaps his sister have long been repressed as a result of incest dread (which we will encounter below), “now sees the mother-in-law taking the place of his own mother and of his sister’s mother.” This situation poses a dual threat to the husband.

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First, “there develops a tendency to return to the primitive selection, against which everything in him resists,” because “his incest dread demands that he should not be reminded of the genealogy of his love selection.” And second, inasmuch as his mother-in-law has been substituted for the mother/sister in his unconscious, “the mother-in-law actually represents an incest temptation for the son-in-law,” resistance to which contributes “an added mixture of irritability and animosity” to their relationship.53 Thus tensions between men and their mothers-in-law are a cultural fixture in part because so many men repress their sexual desires for their mothers and/or sisters. So far forth, Freud’s theories already provide resources for generating explanations pertaining to religion. In Totem and Taboo Freud explained why the spirits of departed ancestors are so often regarded by the living as animated by a spirit of revenge or hostility, thus as “demons.” Freud postulated among “primitives” the same emotional ambivalence toward parents (both loving them and wishing for their deaths) that he discerned within his contemporaries; demonic conceptions are “mere projections of hostile feelings which the survivor entertains toward the dead,” a projection which is a means of resistance against acknowledging the existence of death wishes against the recently deceased.54 In the same vein Freud noted later in the book that “psychoanalytic investigation of the individual teaches with especial emphasis that god is in every case modeled after the father and that our personal relation to god is dependent upon our relation to our physical father, fluctuating and changing with him, and that god at bottom is nothing but an exalted father.”55 In The Future of an Illusion he deployed this idea to offer one explanation for the origin of theistic religion. The helplessness primitive humans felt in relation to the forces of nature “has an infantile prototype, of which it is in fact only the continuation”; and so “a man makes the forces of nature not simply into persons with whom he can associate as he would with his equals . . . but he gives them the character of a father.”56 The social explanations I have described thus far rely on stories about the psychological dynamics of individual persons, scaled up by simple repetition. Men and mothers-in-law have difficult relations generally because incest dread operates within each man in the same way, and primitive cultures have conceptions of ancestors as demons because the repression of hostility toward parents has operated in the same within many primitives. I say “seems to be” because while Freud does not use the language of replication, neither does he supply an alternative way of extending his psychoanalytic explanations to social groups in the cases under consideration. Rather, his practice is to offer an

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explanation of why an individual displays the phenomenon under consideration as an explanation for its presence within a population. It is also worth noting that even before the introduction of the additional postulates I will describe shortly, Freud’s theories can generate explanations that range across considerable spans of historical time. In the New Introductory Lectures he stated that particular configurations of the Über-Ich replicate themselves across multiple generations.57 The mechanics of this claim are straightforward: if the Über-Ich is the internal locus of culturally specific prohibitions, then inasmuch as these prohibitions remain stable across time, the psychodynamics they generate will tend to recur in each generation. And in a case in which a cultural prohibition has a distinct historical point of origin, this idea licenses the use of Freud’s theories to categorize anything historically “downstream” of such an origin as a potential site for the relevant psychodynamics. For example, early in Totem and Taboo Freud hypothesized that taboos are “very ancient prohibitions which at one time were forced on a population of primitive people from without,” maintained for several generations “perhaps only as a result of a tradition set up by paternal and social authority,” and eventually “‘organized’ as a piece of inherited psychic property.”58 Incest taboos, which I will discuss shortly, are one example. I move now to Freud’s other strategy for extending his theories to the social realm. At a crucial turning point in Moses and Monotheism, after describing the individual-level psychological processes postulated by his theories, Freud addressed his reader directly. Now I will invite the reader to take a step forward and assume that in the history of the human species something happened similar to the events in the life of the individual. That is to say, mankind as a whole also passed through conflicts of a sexual-aggressive nature which left permanent traces, but which were for the most part warded off and forgotten, later after a long period of latency, they came to life again and created phenomena similar in structure and tendency to neurotic symptoms. I have, I believe, divined these processes and wish to show that their consequences, which bear a strong resemblance to neurotic symptoms, are the phenomena of religion.59

The claim Freud introduced here is that within human history, composed as it is of the actions of many human beings across many generations, processes have operated that are analogous to those that his theories postulate within human individuals. This analogy allows Freud to offer a novel kind of psychoanalytic

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explanation for large-scale social phenomena. As I read him, Freud consistently refrained from translating this analogy into conceptions of collective agency: that is, he did not claim that the human species has something like a collective consciousness or a collective unconsciousness. Rather, his developments of the idea took the form of translating different elements of the analogy into claims about the impact of human history on the psychologies of individuals. Structurally, the arguments of Moses and Monotheism repeat in large measure the narratives that Freud had offered in Totem and Taboo. In the earlier text Freud took note of some of the novel (in relation to psychoanalytic theory) ideas around which his explanation of religion turned. One passage offers a useful point of approach to his unpacking of the analogy between the individual and the species. It can hardly have escaped any one that we base everything upon the assumption of a psyche of the mass in which psychic processes occur as in the psychic life of the individual. Moreover, we let the sense of guilt for a deed survive for thousands of years, remaining effective in generations which could not have known anything of this deed. We allow an emotional process such as might have arisen among generations of sons that had been ill-treated by their fathers, to continue to new generations which had escaped such treatment by the very removal of the father. These seem indeed to be very weighty objections and any other explanation which can avoid such assumptions would seem to merit preference.60

I will discuss the details of the narrative to which Freud refers here shortly. But first, I want to note that in responding to the objection he imagines here,61 Freud makes it clear that he does not understand the idea of a “mass psyche” to imply collective agency: “Without the assumption of a mass psyche, or a continuity in the emotional life of mankind which permits us to disregard the interruptions of psychic acts through the transgression of individuals, social psychology could not exist at all.”62 Freud’s invocation of a “mass psyche” amounts to the idea that psychoanalytic explanations can extend across individuals: specifically, as we will see, that the experiences of certain individuals can produce effects, along lines indicated by psychoanalytic theory, within different individuals existing later in time. Here, in overview, is the narrative Freud offers in Totem and Taboo. Freud postulated the occurrence of a particular event unfolding with some regularity63 within the pre-history of the human species. Early humans lived in small kinship groups within which one male was dominant, subjecting the other males

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(his sons) to his will and reserving the sexual use of the tribe’s females for himself. One day the sons banded together, killed their father, ate his corpse, and engaged in sexual relations with the females of the tribe—that is, with their mothers and sisters.64 This event would in the fullness of time cause a host of later cultural phenomena, including incest dread, totemic sacrifice, and eventually patriarchal monotheism. Some of the consequences of this primal murder Freud clearly identified as intentional actions on the part of the sons who had committed the crime. These began to unfold when the sons became overcome by remorse. This remorse moved them to actions “with which the morality of man begins”: “They undid the deed by declaring that the killing of the father substitute, the totem, was not allowed, and renounced the fruits of their deed by denying themselves the liberated women. Thus they created the two fundamental taboos out of the sense of guilt of the son, and for this very reason these had to correspond to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex.”65 From this point we can follow Freud’s explanation of the “incest dread” that troubled sons-in-law up to his day: along the lines described above, the prohibition against sexual relations with mothers and sisters was initially adopted as an explicit policy, but when passed down to later generations, eventually became internalized as a component of the Über-Ich. The extended effects of the prohibition against killing the “father substitute,” however, ran along different lines. In this connection some features were formed which henceforth determined the character of every religion. The totem religion had issued from the sense of guilt of the sons as an attempt to palliate this feeling and to conciliate the injured father through subsequent obedience. All later religions prove to be attempts to solve the same problem, varying only in accordance with the stage of culture in which they are attempted and according to the paths which they take; they are all, however, reactions aiming at the same great event with which culture began and which ever since has not let mankind come to rest.66

Freud’s claim here is that the same internal factor that moved the sons to institute totemic religion—the “sense of guilt of the son”—continued to move later generations to act in a variety of ways. As we have seen, this claim requires supposing that this sense of guilt is transmissible by inheritance, independent of personal engagement in the guilt-producing act and even of conscious awareness that it took place. This novel postulate entails that the non-patricidal descendants of the original brothers experienced a sense of guilt commensurate to the act

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of killing their own fathers. And this allows Freud to offer psychoanalytic explanations that begin with discussion of the internal workings of the brothers’ minds, but culminate in actions on the part of their descendants: The situation created by the removal of the father contained an element which in the course of time must have brought about an extraordinary increase of longing for the father. For the brothers who had joined forces to kill the father had each been animated by the wish to become like the father and had given expression to this wish by incorporating parts of the substitute for him in the totem feast. In consequence of the pressure which the bonds of the brother clan exercised upon each member, this wish had to remain unfulfilled. .  .  . Thus the bitter feeling against the father which had incited to the deed could subside in the course of time, while the longing for him grew. . . . there arose a tendency to revive the old father ideal in the creation of gods through the veneration of those individuals who had distinguished themselves above the rest.67

So one novel postulate that results from Freud’s unpacking of the analogy between an individual mind and the species is that some contingent psychological factors are heritable. In Totem and Taboo Freud classified the “sense of guilt of the son” as heritable in this way; in Moses and Monotheism he made this claim for dispositions and “unconscious memory traces,” supporting the claim that “men have always known—in this particular way—that once upon a time they had a primeval father and killed him.”68 This postulate offers additional resources for the psychoanalytic explanation of large-scale social phenomena by allowing historically extended groups to have the same complexes regardless of temporal location: later generations suffer from the repression of memories of actions committed by earlier ones. A second novel postulate assigns a special place in psychohistory to events occurring in “primitive times.” Freud saw the human species as a whole as having progressed through distinct developmental stages, and positioned the succession of these stages as analogous to the succession of psychological stages in the development of the individual. This makes the earliest stages of human (pre-)history analogous to the earliest stages of human development. From Moses and Monotheism: The processes we study here in the life of a people are very similar to those we know from psychopathology, but still they are not quite the same. We must conclude that the mental residue of those primeval times has become a heritage which, with each new generation, needs only to be awakened, not reacquired.69

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In other words, experiences had by “primitives” have a special status: these, and not the experiences of later, less primitive humans, have generated complexes that have become the common property of the species. Thus in Moses and Monotheism Freud introduced the idea of an “archaic inheritance” as a key explanatory notion: “If we accept the continued existence of such memory traces in our archaic inheritance, then we have bridged the gap between individual and mass psychology and can treat peoples as we do the individual neurotic.”70 In Moses and Monotheism Freud described more than one phenomenon in the history of patriarchal monotheism as the “reawakening” of this inheritance. In addition to explaining the psychological appeal of patriarchal monotheism in general, the existence of this archaic inheritance explains the actions of the Hebrew people after they murdered Moses (an idea which Freud famously adopted from Ernst Sellin71): the repressed memory of this act “at last succeeded in transforming the God Jahve into the Mosaic God,” bringing about distinctively Jewish monotheism.72 Generations later, “a growing feeling of guiltiness had seized the Jewish people—and perhaps the whole of civilization of that time—as a precursor to the return of the repressed material”; and after the death of Jesus, Paul “seized upon this feeling of guilt and correctly traced it back to its primeval source. This he called original sin; it was a crime against God that could be expiated only through death. . . . In reality this crime, deserving of death, had been the murder of the Father who later was deified.”73 Likewise “the Christian ceremony of communion, in which the believer incorporates the flesh and blood of the Redeemer, repeats the content of the old totem feast.”74 The workings of the “sense of guilt of the son” also illuminate some features of Christian antiSemitism: The poor Jewish people, who with its usual stiff-necked obduracy continued to deny the murder of their “father,” has dearly expiated this in the course of centuries. Over and over again they heard the reproach, “You killed our God.” And this reproach is true, if rightly interpreted. It says, in reference to the history of religion: “You won’t admit that you murdered God” (the archetype of God, the primeval Father, and his reincarnations). Something should be added—namely: “It is true, we did the same thing, but we admitted it, and since then we have been purified.”75

To summarize, Freud’s translation of the analogy between the human species and the individual assumes the form of two specific theoretical additions to the core doctrines of psychoanalysis: that some acquired unconscious psychological

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characteristics are heritable, and that it was during human pre-history that a particularly powerful and durable set of such characteristics entered the life of the species. With the help of these claims, Freud postulated the occurrence of the primordial patricide to explain various religious phenomena as expressions of repressed factors in the life of multiple persons, in ways analogous to the way neurotic behavior expresses these in the life of the individual. So in spite of his references to a “psyche of the mass,” Freud did not treat groups as single psychologies. Rather, his extension of his psychoanalytic theories to groups mainly involved the attribution of the same unconscious content to group members considered as individuals, such that group characteristics could then be explained as the product of dynamics set into motion by this content and operating in a massively parallel fashion.76 And if Freud’s explanation of religion involved the deployment of a set of postulates regarding a specific “archaic inheritance,” we have seen that it is possible for cultural phenomena to be explained psychoanalytically without recourse to these. The claim that the contents of the Über-Ich are determined in part by cultural influences makes possible the replication of psychoanalytic explanations across individuals, and thus the psychoanalytic explanation of large-scale social phenomena that can plausibly be regarded as the aggregate result of the same (or similar) actions on the part of many persons. I conclude this section by noting an issue I will discuss at the close of the chapter. In Civilization and its Discontents Freud wondered aloud about the possibility of psychoanalytic diagnoses of human groups. Assuming the soundness of psychoanalytic theory and of its analogical extension to human groups, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization—possibly the whole of mankind—have become “neurotic”? An analytic dissection of such neuroses might lead to therapeutic recommendations which could lay claim to great practical interest. I would not say that an attempt of this kind to carry psycho-analysis over to the cultural community was absurd or doomed to be fruitless. But we should have to be very cautious and not forget that, after all, we are only dealing with analogies and that it is dangerous, not only with men but also with concepts, to tear them from the sphere in which they have originated and been evolved.77

Here Freud resists the idea that his theories support the univocal classification of some human groups or cultures as neurotic. But he does seem to favor the idea

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that something analogous to neurosis can be attributed to human groups. I will comment below on the significance of this result for the project of understanding the dynamics of ethical charge in Freud’s work.

Freud and suspicion Thus far I have been describing the elements of Freud’s theories that generate explanations of individual actions and of large-scale social phenomena. Making the case that my category of suspicious explanation fits Freud’s theories requires showing that they postulate “hidden” factors and generate negative ethical charge. I will discuss these two issues before moving on to Freud’s recursive ad hominem defense. It is obvious how Freud’s theories traffic in claims of “hiddenness.” Freud’s notion of repression is, transparently, a device for postulating the existence of psychological material—desires, memories, decisions, chains of reasoning—that is not introspectively available. And on the view that Freud was in the business of offering causal explanations, such material normally figures as hidden causes of (individual and collective) human behavior. Perhaps the only significant claim I have to add here is that while Freud placed a premium on bringing his patients to acknowledge the existence of repressed material, he did not, in general, expect that analysis would succeed in bringing it to consciousness. Thus Freud’s particular kind of “unmasking” did not extend to the actual undoing of the “hiddenness” that his theories postulated. The topic of negative ethical charge is more complicated and more interesting. Psychoanalytic explanations traffic powerfully in negative ethical valuations in some ways that are fairly obvious, and in others that are more elusive. And the distinctive ways in which Freud’s theories describe the relationships of persons to the contents their own minds generate novel ways to thinks poorly of some persons. Crucially, it also generates reasons to think poorly of those who reject psychoanalytic claims. The most obvious way in which psychoanalytic explanations generate negative ethical charge is by ascribing bad psychological characteristics to persons. Freud’s theories postulate the existence of such things as indiscriminate sexual desire (libido), incestuous sexual desires, and death wishes against parents; and as we have seen, his theories turn on the idea that negative valuations of these sorts of desires and wishes are fixtures within certain cultures. Thus it is fairly

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straightforward to say how psychoanalytic claims generate ethical charge, and for whom. The claim that a person desires the death of their father motivates a negative judgment of that person on the part of anyone who thinks that desiring one’s father’s death is a bad thing. Similarly, anyone who thinks that incestuous sexual desires are bad things to have will be motivated to think poorly of persons to whom psychoanalytic theory ascribes such desires, to the extent that they accept those claims. In Totem and Taboo Freud remarked, “Thus psychoanalysis confirms what the pious are wont to say: that we are all miserable sinners.”78 This quotation and the passage from the Fragment with which this chapter opens, in which Freud characterizes the characteristics in which his theories traffic as “demons that dwell untamed in the human breast,” reflect his acknowledgment of their badness. There is a subtler way in which psychoanalytic explanations motivate negative judgments of persons. It is, I think, a reasonable ethical judgment that it is good for a person who has a bad desire to refrain from acting on it, and that it is bad for such a person to act on that desire. Compromised gratification represents a kind of acting on a desire that is bad (in that it is proscribed); and as such, cases in which a person has partially gratified a bad desire can, it seems to me, be legitimately subject to ethical evaluation. So, for example, consider Jung’s alleged death wish against his friend and mentor. It is not clear whether Freud had antecedently entertained the thought of Jung’s harboring such a wish against him; but if he had, then his casual mention of dead men in bogs, rather than informing Freud of the existence of this desire, counted for him as Jung’s acting on it. The person who thinks that it is better not to act on a bad desire than to act on it will, I think, be motivated to judge the person who acts to gratify her bad desires in a compromised way negatively—even though this kind of action might be thought better than intentional action that aims at the straightforward gratification of the desire. These descriptions of the ways in which psychoanalytic claims generate negative ethical charge require a minor qualification. In general psychoanalytic theory recognizes the status of such factors as bad without thereby endorsing the valuations in question. Freud often took pains to distance himself from the valuations on which his theories depended; for example, in discussing prohibitions against homosexuality in Civilization and its Discontents he remarked that “the insistence that the sexual life shall be the same for all people pathologizes some, and is the source of much injustice” (85). I think it was his expectation that anyone who accepted his theories should also distance

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themselves from the valuations they describe. Thus it is probably correct to say that Freud’s explanations generated negative ethical charge for him to a lesser extent than for others; and I think that the same would be true for those of his followers who accept his valuations along with his theories. But nothing of significance for my purposes hangs on the question of whether Freud’s theories motivated him specifically, or his followers, to think poorly of others. The dynamics of ethical evaluation among persons who are not among Freud’s followers—his patients, say, but more importantly, persons inclined to be skeptical of his theories—are more important. Freud was well aware that such persons attached ethical significance to his explanations in ways he himself did not, and he was much concerned with this dynamic. Consider, for example, a passage from the Fragment in which he anticipates responses to his suggestion that Dora’s spasmodic coughing was the expression of her unconscious fantasies of oral sex between her father and the wife of Herr K: If this little piece of analysis has aroused surprise and horror in the medical reader, quite apart from the incredulity that is his prerogative, I am quite prepared to test the justification of these two reactions at this point. Surprise is, I think, motivated by my audacity in talking to a young girl—or a woman of a sexual age—about such delicate and repellant matters. Horror probably relates to the possibility that a chaste young girl might know about such practices and that her imagination might revolve around them. On both of these points I should recommend reserve and level-headedness.79

I take it that Freud understood himself to be in the business of advancing negatively charged explanations, in that his explanations postulated the existence of factors that most of his readers would be disposed to regard as bad. And he understood that his readers’ valuations of these factors would affect their reception of his explanations. I will return to this issue below. Now if Freud’s theories motivate the negative evaluation of persons whose pathological behaviors are explained by their possession of bad psychological characteristics, they also motivate such evaluation of persons who show no signs of such conditions. Much of Freud’s work centered around persons who were manifestly psychopathological, but his theories also attribute psychopathologies to asymptomatic persons—to the “healthy” (the scare quotes are Freud’s)—as well, by postulating the universality, or near-universality, of such things as the Oedipus and Electra complexes, with their attendant repressions and influences on behavior. For the psychoanalyst much of what passes for psychological health

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is merely a mask for psychopathology; and the converse is that many persons who consider themselves psychologically healthy find that psychoanalysis claims that they are not. Psychoanalytic theory expands the range across which it motivates negative ethical valuation by claiming applicability to just about everybody: “we are all miserable sinners.” If some issues concerning the connection between Freud’s theories and negative ethical charge are clear enough, others are deeply mysterious. Recall that above I cited Davidson’s mention of a concern of Sartre’s in the interpretation of Freud’s theories: to the extent that Freud treated the Es, the Ich, and the ÜberIch as agents in their own rights, his explanations raise the question of what responsibility a person has for desires or actions on the part of these agencies. I do not think that this question is easily answered. In cases where Freud assigned desires, intentions, and choices to such “zones” as the Es or the Ich, he also consistently treated these as desires, intentions, and choices of the person in question (as, for example, he seems to have done in the case of Jung’s expression of his death wish).80 Thus there are grounds for denying that his partitioning of the unconscious mind is a barrier to the ethical evaluation of persons. But what does pose a barrier to such evaluation is the notion that the homunculus interpretation is a mistake. If hermeneutical charity requires regarding Freud’s agential language as figurative when it is applied to the unconscious mind, then it becomes massively unclear whether, or to what extent, ethical evaluations that would be appropriate to a non-figurative construal still apply. Suppose, for example, that it would be a bad state of affairs for a person to have a desire to kill his own father. If a Freudian explanation claims that a person has in their unconscious mind not such a desire, but something that could “only be described as such a desire if it were conscious,” is this is a bad state of affairs? And if it would be uncontroversial to attach a negative ethical evaluation to the person in the first case, to what extent would this be appropriate in the second case? I see no clear answers to such questions. Now I want to discuss a particularly subtle way in which Freud’s theories generate negative ethical charge: they encourage the view that some persons can be held responsible for their psychopathologies. Consider a minimal, and minimally described, sort of valuation: the view that it is better not to suffer from a psychopathology than to suffer from one. I take it that there is an analogy between psychopathology and (biological) illness with respect to valuation: just as one can say that suffering from a disease such as leprosy or tuberculosis is a bad condition, one can say that suffering from neurosis

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or hysteria is a bad condition. I take it that the sort of badness in question does not require thinking that the person in question bears any responsibility for their condition, and is compatible with the explicit denial of such responsibility. I would not classify this sort of valuation as an ethical valuation (although ethical significance can certainly be attached to it—here the history of attitudes about leprosy is worth reflection), but I would guess that the number of persons who do not subscribe to this minimal negative valuation of psychopathology is very low. Under certain conditions psychoanalytic theory implicates the agency of the neurotic in their pathological condition. To the extent that psychoanalytic theory understands repression, for example, as a species of intentional action, it entails that those who suffer from repression are persons who deceive themselves about their desires or their past experiences; it also entails that their pathological conditions are caused by this intentional self-deception, and thus raises the possibility that persons bear responsibility for their pathologies. I take it that psychoanalytic theory does not support straightforward and robust ascriptions of responsibility in cases in which there is no suspicion that a person’s conscious intentionality has contributed to their pathological condition. But it does seem to me that explanations by explicitly unconscious intentionality fall into a grey area, in between cases in which persons are clearly responsible for their actions and cases in which they clearly bear no such responsibility. Thus if, in fact, psychoanalysis requires the postulation of unconscious intentionality, it renders persons ambiguously responsible for their psychopathologies, whether or not they display pathological behaviors, and also ambiguously ascribes to them acts of deception (of self and/or others). If the degree to which persons can be regarded as self-deceptive and held responsible for their psychopathologies when none of the factors involved are available to their consciousness is deeply ambiguous, there is somewhat less ambiguity in cases where such factors are available. The paradigm case in which the repressed contents of a person’s unconsciousness are made available to her consciousness is that of analysis itself. Freud describes many cases in which his patients either rejected his claims about their unconscious dynamics or accepted those claims. He clearly understood the agency of his patients in relation to such claims, when these are true, to be a compromised agency—compromised by the operation of powerful unconscious forces seeking to preserve the repression of painful memories or shameful desires. But unless any sense of meaningful agency is denied to the patient, the conclusion seems unavoidable that a choice

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to refuse assent to the correct claims of the analyst, when the patient could have assented, is a choice to refuse to acknowledge the truth about oneself. And given Freud’s commitment to the idea that conscious assent to the truth of claims about one’s unconscious desires has some therapeutic effect, the conclusion also seems unavoidable that a choice to refuse assent to the analyst’s claims also has the effect of preserving the patient’s pathological condition, such that subsequently the patient’s suffering from this condition is due in some measure to that choice. And insofar as it is made clear to the patient that the acknowledgment of the truth about herself will have such a therapeutic effect (as, I take it, typically occurs in the course of analysis), she cannot be regarded as simply and innocently unaware that her choice would have this result. In other words, there is a fairly clear set of conditions under which psychoanalytic theory positions persons as responsible in some measure for their psychopathologies. The relevant conditions are: that some fact about that person has been kept from conscious awareness by repression; that this repression has in turn caused a psychopathology (whether or not this manifests behaviorally); that a person has been presented with a claim to the effect that the repressed fact is the case (i.e., presented with the truth about herself); that the person was made aware that accepting this claim would mitigate or eliminate the condition of repression and thus mitigate or eliminate the psychopathological condition (and that this is in fact the case); that the person had the ability to accept or reject the claim; and the person has rejected the claim. A person for whom these conditions are satisfied is a person who has refused to acknowledge the truth about herself, when she could have assented, and is a person who could have taken an action that would have mitigated it, and was aware of this fact. Such a person is, it seems to me, a legitimate target for whatever negative evaluations are appropriate to such choices. Now I find it difficult not to think that psychoanalytic theory has the result that almost all those who have considered and rejected psychoanalytic theory bear this kind of responsibility. The only cases in which a person can reject psychoanalytic theory without incurring such responsibility are cases in which either psychoanalytic claims are not true about the person or the person did not have the ability to assent to those claims. All other persons who consider and reject psychoanalysis are thereby persons who have refused to acknowledge the truth about themselves, and are thereby persons who have chosen not to mitigate or eliminate their pathologies (more precisely, they are persons who have not chosen to do so when they could have done).

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I want to note in particular that this positioning is more a product of psychoanalytic theory itself than it is an action on the part of its practitioners. It seems to me that one must, in virtue of subscribing to psychoanalytic theory, regard most of its critics in this way (the exceptions being the psychologically immaculate, if there are any such, and those whose complexes render them simply incapable of assenting to the truth). That a defender of psychoanalysis charges its critics with self-deception is not, I think, necessarily a sign of defensiveness or intellectual dishonesty: it is simply a straightforward consequence of subscription to psychoanalytic theory. What I have been describing is a rather remarkable feature of psychoanalytic theory. Accepting it constrains one to regard those who reject it in a new light. Their act of rejecting psychoanalysis is itself a likely sign of some failing that goes beyond mere incorrect reasoning, and involves intellectual dishonesty, cowardice, shame, or some other characteristic of the self to which can be attached a negative ethical significance (although it need not be assigned such). I consider this feature of psychoanalytic theory to be of historical importance for the broader tradition of suspicion: I regard it as perhaps not a theoretical innovation, but rather as the formalization of an important device which can be applied to the purpose of deflecting criticisms of any body of theory.

Freud’s recursive ad hominem defense In this section I will discuss a practice on Freud’s part that I think important for reasons that go beyond psychoanalysis specifically. The practice in question is one of responding to criticisms of psychoanalytic theory. In 1907 Freud wrote to Jung, The “leading lights” of psychology really don’t amount to much; the future belongs to us and our views, and the younger men—everywhere most likely— side actively with us. I see this in Vienna, where, as you know, I am systematically ignored by my colleagues and periodically annihilated by some hack, but where my lectures nevertheless draw forty attentive listeners, coming from every faculty. . . . My inclination is to treat colleagues who offer resistance exactly as we treat patients in the same situation.81

The last sentence of this quotation describes in nuce the practice in which I am interested: Freud responded to some of his critics by deploying psychoanalytic

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theory against them. This aspect of psychoanalytic theory is well documented and has been the frequent target of criticism; as I have noted, Popper was struck by this dynamic among followers of Freud as early as 1919.82 Frank Sulloway termed this move nihilation, one component of “an elaborate system of selfreinforcing defenses” developed by Freud and his followers; Ernest Gellner coined the term level-twisting for this practice, describing it as a “device which ensures that critical considerations become assigned to the realm of symptoms.”83 I want to offer a reconstruction of this practice in my own terms, beginning with some remarks on its theoretical basis. As he related in the Fragment in the course of analysis Freud put it to “Dora” that she suffered from a repressed passion for “Herr K.,” he of the unwanted kiss and subsequent amorous advances. Consider his response to her rejection of this claim. The most intense denial that I received when I put this interpretation to Dora certainly did nothing to contradict my expectations. The “no” that one hears from the patient when one first presents the repressed thought to their conscious perception merely confirms the repression and its intensity; it is a measure of its strength, so to speak. If we do not take this “no” to be the expression of an objective judgment, of which the patient would not in fact be capable, but instead go beyond it and take the work further, we soon have our first proof that in such cases “no” means the “yes” one is hoping for.84

The mechanics of Freud’s position here should by now be familiar. According to his theories considerable psychological resources are invested in keeping repressed material from consciousness; and these theories predict that defensive measures will be deployed against threats to this repression, a category which would include the analyst’s claims as to the existence of the repressed material. I want to note in particular that this passage implies that a patient’s denial of the existence of repressed material carries no evidential weight for the analyst: as Freud says here, the analyst regards the patient as incapable of an “objective judgment” regarding her desires. In On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914), Freud discussed the difficult period at the beginning of his career when his theories were widely dismissed, describing in particular “the silence with which my addresses [to the Vienna Neurological Society] were received, the void which formed itself around me, the insinuations that found their way to me.”85 He noted that what enabled him to persevere in the development of his theories was an application of the aspect of clinical practice I have noted to his colleagues:

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Many a one is tormented by the need to account for the lack of sympathy or the repudiation expressed by his contemporaries and feels their attitude painfully as a contradiction of his own secure conviction. There was no need for me to feel so; for psychoanalytical principles enable me to understand this attitude in my contemporaries and to see it as a necessary consequence of fundamental analytic premises. If it was true that the associated connections I had discovered were kept from the knowledge of patients by inward resistances of an affective kind, then these resistances would be bound to appear in the healthy also, as soon as, from some external source, they became confronted with what was repressed. It was not surprising that they should be able to justify on intellectual grounds this rejection of my ideas though it was actually affective in nature. The same thing happened just as often in patients, and the arguments they advanced were just the same and not precisely brilliant—reasons are as plenty as blackberries, as Falstaff says.86

Frank Cioffi cites this passage as evidence against Grünbaum’s claim that Freud generally displayed “intellectual hospitality to refutation by others”; and indeed, Freud himself remarked in this passage that “One would hardly .  .  . expect me, during those years when I alone represented psychoanalysis, to have developed any particular respect for the opinion of the world or any propensity to intellectual compromise.”87 My purpose here is not to comment on Freud’s intellectual character. It seems to me that the practice described in this passage at least as much a product of Freud’s theories as of his temperament: for it does seem to me that psychoanalytic theory, as I have described it, undermines the evidential value of anyone’s denial of the existence of repressed material, and predicts that any person about whom certain psychoanalytic explanations are true will be moved to reject them for reasons having to do with the very fact of their truth.88 And given that Freud’s theories postulate the existence of repressed material not just within diagnosed neurotics but within even “healthy” people, those theories predict the same sort of response to the claims of psychoanalysis on the part of such persons regardless of whatever impressive intellectual credentials they may have. I want now to offer a reconstruction of this sort of response to criticism. I label this practice the recursive ad hominem defense. Two of the terms in this characterization are fairly accessible. The practice in question is a defense inasmuch as it is a method for responding to criticisms of a theory in a way that undermines their force. And the practice is recursive in that rather than, say, deploying new evidence or pointing out internal flaws in the criticisms, it simply reapplies the very claims that are under attack. It is the characterization

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of Freud’s practice as a species of ad hominem argument that requires the most in the way of unpacking. In broadest terms, an argumentum ad hominem is a claim about a person calculated to impact the reception of some claim made by that person. This type of argument has frequently been classified as a type of logical fallacy, on the grounds that reasons to accept a claim are frequently independent of any facts about the person who advances it.89 But the ad hominem also has non-fallacious applications; and I want to describe the conditions under which Freud’s defense is not fallacious. Here is an example, offered by Alan Brinton, of a logically unobjectionable argumentum ad hominem: “Don’t believe Joan Jones’s story about experiences with the Mafia. She’s delusional and a habitual liar.”90 In this example, Joan has made a claim to the effect that some specific event has taken place; and a characteristic of Joan herself is presented as a reason not to accept her claim. If Joan is in fact a pathological liar, then the fact that she has claimed that something is the case is not a good reason to think that it is the case. And if the only reason, in the discursive context in question, to think that the events in question have occurred is the fact that Joan has said so, then accepting the claim about Joan leaves the audience with no reason to think that they have. In this example, then, by undermining the credibility of their source, the ad hominem undermines the only reason to think that the events in question have occurred. Under the right conditions, Freud’s deployment of psychoanalysis against his critics has the same character. Consider a passage from Totem and Taboo: We have gone so far as to declare that the relation to the parents instigated by incestuous longings, is the central complex of the neurosis. This discovery of the significance of incest for the neurosis naturally meets with the most general incredulity on the part of the grown-up, normal man. . . . We are forced to believe that such a rejection is above all the product of man’s deep aversion to his former incest wishes which have since succumbed to repression.91

In this passage, I take it, what Freud explains through the deployment of psychoanalytic theory is the sense of incredulity with which many of his contemporaries received his claims. I take the liberty of supposing that in general this sense of incredulity stems from the sense that Freud’s claims are massively implausible—that is, sufficiently implausible as not to deserve serious consideration. I think this reading is supported by Freud’s remark, in On the History of Psychoanalysis, that on the few occasions in which his work was

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acknowledged by his contemporaries in print, his claims were described simply as “‘eccentric,’ ‘extreme,’ ‘very peculiar ideas.’”92 The key to my reconstruction of Freud’s recursive ad hominem defense is the notion that the defense targets such judgments. In chapter 1, I argued that inference to the best explanation balances judgments of plausibility against judgments of explanatory power. I also argued that the judgment that a particular explanans is sufficiently implausible often sways us against even the most powerful explanations, and that this can be the case even where there are no competing explanations of the phenomenon under consideration. It is for this reason that it can be a good strategy to introduce claims regarding background knowledge as background for a suspicious explanation, where the explanation will be assessed as more plausible in relation to these claims than it otherwise would be. If Freud’s recursive ad hominem defense is aimed at judgments that the claims of psychoanalysis are sufficiently implausible as, say, to be safely dismissible despite whatever explanatory power they have, its strategy is not to deploy background knowledge in order to sway those judgments in a favorable direction. Rather, the strategy is to undermine such judgments of plausibility entirely. If we unpack the analogy to the example of testimony in one specific way, it is possible to see how this undermining is supposed to work. What does the work of undermining in the case of Joan Jones is the claim that she is not a reliable source of testimonial evidence. Judgments of plausibility are vulnerable to an analogous form of undermining just in case we understand assent to them as a matter of trust—trust in their source. I strongly suspect that Freud understood the “sense of incredulity” expressed by his contemporaries in this way; I take it that he regarded his contemporaries as having uncritically accepted this sense as a reliable guide to likelihood. And if this understanding is correct, his psychoanalytic explanation establishes that the source of this sense is not to be trusted; for this sense is part of the unconsciousness’s strategy for keeping repressed material from consciousness. Freud’s ad hominem defense, then, portrays the unconscious minds of his critics as analogous to Joan Jones, in that both are pathological sources of untruth. Where Jones is an all-around liar, the unconscious minds of Freud’s critics lie to them specifically about both the existence and the likelihood of the repressed material to which his theories attest. Thus those critics who believe that Freud’s theories are massively implausible are in the same position as those who believe the tales that Jones tells.

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Freud noted that his understanding of his contemporaries’ psychologies allowed him to dismiss their ridicule of his theories as any threat to his “secure conviction” of their truth. The recursive ad hominem defense works as a defense inasmuch as it generates a reason for those who accept the truth of psychoanalytic theory to dismiss judgments of massive implausibility on the part of those who do not accept it, rather than regarding these as potential grounds for reconsidering their own acceptance. It accomplishes this result at a cost, however: the cost of positioning critics of psychoanalysis as incapable of correctly assessing its plausibility, on the grounds of possessing unreliable mechanisms for making such judgments. It thus entails that those who are not yet convinced that psychoanalytic theory is true cannot properly assess it as a candidate for truth unless they accept a revision of their practices of theory assessment: in effect, it entails that judgments of plausibility should be discounted and that explanatory power alone should be the basis for accepting or rejecting psychoanalytic theory. This result, it seems to me, raises a significant obstacle to productive debate regarding psychoanalytic theory between those who accept it and those who do not. I regard this dynamic as particularly important, because I think it contributes much to the particular combination of resilience and insularity that characterizes the history of psychoanalysis. I want to emphasize that to this point I have not described Freud’s recursive ad hominem defense as in any way a sub-par sort of reasoning. But before moving on I want to note one component of Freud’s attitudes toward his critics around which I think there is a real intellectual problem. In On the History of Psychoanalysis Freud remarked that “it was not surprising that [his critics] should be able to justify on intellectual grounds this rejection of my ideas though it was actually affective in nature.” This passage indicates that Freud supposed that in some cases his critics took themselves to have good reasons to reject his theories. And fairly clearly, it indicates that his understanding of the affective causes of their rejection was connected in some way to the fact that he himself was not troubled by whatever “intellectual grounds” that his critics had at their disposal. A genuine intellectual failing lies in the vicinity of this connection. For it does not follow from the fact that a person mistakenly believes a belief to be based on a particular reason that it (the reason) is not a good reason for the belief; and thus it is certainly possible that a person might be affectively moved to believe something while at the same time having a good reason to believe it. It is thus certainly possible that a critic might be affectively moved to reject the claims of psychoanalysis while also having good reasons

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to do so—and even while asserting these reasons in the context of argument. To the extent that Freud’s defense ignores the question of whether criticisms advanced against his theories are valid, it consorts with the fallacious form of ad hominem whose effect is to deflect attention away from criticism toward the person advancing it. It is by no means clear that Freud himself applied his defense in this way. A charitable interpretation of his remarks would take his references to the “not precisely brilliant” nature of the arguments offered by his patients (and colleagues) as an indication that Freud considered those arguments and judged them inadequate independently of psychoanalysing his critics. And this indeed is what is required to avoid a fallacious ad hominem. The claim that critics of psychoanalysis are motivated by their psychopathologies to reject it does not grant a license to that theory’s defenders to dismiss without consideration the reasons such critics might offer for rejecting the theory. But there is an issue in the vicinity that threatens to further depress the potential for productive conversation between defenders and critics of psychoanalysis. For if Freud regarded his patients and colleagues as believing that they had good reasons to reject his theories, even if he had considered those reasons and found them wanting, it would have been reasonable for him to think that there would be little point to describing his own thinking as to their inadequacy; for ex hypothesi his critics’ engagement with any arguments he (Freud) could offer would be distorted by the same forces that caused them to think that those reasons were good ones in the first place. It is difficult to avoid concluding that Freud’s theories entail more than that ordinary practices of estimating plausibility are unreliable when applied to the claims of psychoanalysis: they entail that ordinary practices of reasoning concerning the intellectual virtues of his theories generally are also unreliable when so applied, such that those who reject the claims of psychoanalysis are not competent to reason correctly concerning the theory.93 If Freud’s recursive ad hominem defense does not involve fallaciously supposing that nobody who rejects the claims of psychoanalysis has good reason to do so, it does seem to entail that nobody who rejects the claims of psychoanalysis is competent to judge whether she has good reasons for doing so. If the defender of psychoanalytic theory is not at liberty to dismiss critical arguments without consideration, she is nevertheless, it seems to me, at liberty to refrain from debating the merits of those arguments with critics of the theory. For critics are not discursive peers, and debating them is likely to be pointless.

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Theory and the end of a friendship To close out this section and this chapter, I want to call attention to one other aspect of the way the ethically charged nature of psychoanalytic claims impacts their reception. I observed above that Freud acknowledged that his readers would likely share the negative ethical valuations to which his theories called attention. I want to consider this dynamic from the point of view of such persons when they are the target of the claims of psychoanalysis. In early November 1912, noting the deteriorating state of their friendship, Jung wrote to Freud “I can only assure you that there is no resistance on my side, unless it be resistance to being treated like a fool riddled with complexes. I think I have objective reasons for my views.”94 In early December he complained again about being the target of psychoanalytic explanation: I am forced to the painful conclusion that the majority of [psychoanalysts] misuse [psychoanalysis] for the purpose of devaluing others and their progress by insinuations about complexes (as though that explained anything. A wretched theory!). A particularly preposterous bit of nonsense now going the rounds is that my libido theory is the product of anal eroticism. When I consider who cooked up this “theory” I fear for the future of analysis.95

Following a particularly frank letter from Jung on December 18 (“your technique of treating your pupils like patients is a blunder . . . You see, my dear Professor, so long as you hand out this stuff I don’t give a damn for my symptomatic actions; they shrink to nothing in comparison with the formidable beam in my brother Freud’s eye”96), Freud had had enough: It is a convention among us analysts that none of us need feel ashamed of his own bit of neurosis. But one who while behaving abnormally keeps shouting that he is normal gives ground for the suspicion that he lacks insight into his illness. Accordingly, I propose that we abandon our personal relations entirely. I shall lose nothing by it, for my only emotional tie with you has long been a thin thread—the lingering effect of past disappointments.97

I do not think that Freud’s deployment of the recursive ad hominem defense was the sole cause of the breakdown in relations between him and Jung. But I do want to call attention to three significant contributions that I think his use of the defense made to the breakdown. First, in line with what we have seen above, it is fairly clear that Jung saw Freud as insufficiently attentive to the reasons he (Jung) advanced for disagreeing with Freud’s claims, deploying his diagnostic claims as

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a way to avoid engaging these reasons. Second, in response to Jung’s complaints about being the target of the defense, Freud simply redeployed the defense— or, more precisely, reminded Jung that no amount of impassioned protestation would give him a reason to think that his diagnosis of Jung was mistaken, as the diagnosis simply predicted such behavior. I suspect that it was Jung’s recognition of this state of affairs that prompted him to remark to Ernest Jones that “He [Freud] already ceased being my friend understanding my whole work as a personal resistance against himself and sexuality. Against this insinuation I am completely helpless.”98 Third and finally, the passages cited above from Jung’s letters make it clear that being the target of Freud’s deployment of the recursive ad hominem defense was a highly unpleasant experience for him. Jung, it seems to me, found the claims made concerning his own psychology by Freud and Freud’s supporters insulting; and he regarded Freud’s conduct as incompatible with the requirements of friendship. I think the source of this sense of insult, and perhaps of betrayal, is not difficult to identify. Jung’s experience was that of being accused of having characteristics that he (Jung) valued negatively: an inability to reason competently concerning matters of psychology, pathological animosity toward Freud, and anal-erotic desires so powerful as to determine his theoretical preferences. And given that Jung rejected these claims, he regarded himself as having been falsely accused and personally disparaged. Given that Jung’s ambition (at least in his own estimation) was to engage Freud in reasoned discussion about the merits of psychoanalytic theory, I find the frustration he expressed with Freud’s response understandable. “It is only occasionally,” Jung wrote to Freud just before the end, “that I am afflicted with the purely human desire to be understood intellectually and not be measured by the yardstick of neurosis.”99 Assuming Freud’s claims about Jung to be true gives us one explanation for Jung’s growing hostility toward Freud; assuming them to be false gives us another. But one does not need to take a position on this question in order to find entirely comprehensible the frustration that each man felt for the other. From these considerations I draw the conclusion that psychoanalysis is a body of theory that makes it very likely that its defenders and its detractors will regard each other antipathetically; and it does this whether or not its claims are true. It is a purely formal feature of psychoanalysis—a feature to which the truth or falsity of that theory makes no difference—that the boundary between adherents and dissenters will, in all likelihood, be a hostile one.

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The consequences of Freud’s formalization of the elements of this theoretical device are, I think, momentous. For if there are a finite number of true theories describing the behavior of human beings, either individually or collectively, there are an infinite number of false theories. And if those features of Freud’s theories that generate the dynamics I have been describing can be replicated in other bodies of theory, then there are an infinite number of theories that, if only they have the power to command the assent of some persons, will introduce new interpersonal and intergroup conflicts to our world. Whether its claims are true or false, psychoanalytic theory codifies the elements that produce this dynamic with sufficient transparency and accessibility as to facilitate its replication elsewhere.

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My goal in this concluding chapter is to say, in broad terms, what difference it makes to regard Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as practitioners of suspicious explanation. I also want to set the stage for a subsequent project of reconstructing key examples from more recent literature (including literature in my own field of religious studies) as part of a continuing tradition of suspicion. Following a reprise of the general framework of the book, I begin with an overview of the reconstructions I offered of the “masters of suspicion” in the preceding three chapters, commenting in particular on the ways in which their explanations traffic in claims of “hiddenness” and generate ethical charge. I will then return to the claim I advanced in the introduction that suspicious explanations are “cognitive gadgets” or “snares for thought.” I will develop this claim by calling attention to three distinct ways in which suspicious explanations of largescale social phenomena can be cognitively appealing and, indeed, cognitively ensnaring. This section will devote the most attention of any in the book to the relationship the works of the “masters of suspicion” and conspiracy theories. I will conclude the chapter with remarks on the ways in which the work of the masters changed the course of theoretical history. To recall my overarching framework, the general project to which I have been attending is that of explaining large-scale social phenomena. Even on the assumption that such phenomena are the products of human (rather than, say, supernatural) actions, their explanation requires something more than the explanation of the actions of individual persons. One explanatory strategy attends to the contexts within which large numbers of people make their decisions, as for example, classical economic theory exemplified by Smith’s theory of the “invisible hand,” in which individuals act in response to circumstances that are in part the results of actions by other individuals. A different approach “scales up” the causal power of individual agency, and I positioned my reconstruction of the

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masters against a background of three distinct scaling-up mechanisms. The first of these is aggregation or recursion, in which social phenomena are explained as the result of the actions of large numbers of persons acting in the same way. A second explains social phenomena as the products of intentionally coordinated actions by large numbers of persons; a particularly important variant of this type is the conspiracy theory, which argues that the persons who intentionally coordinate their actions also intentionally keep secret their agreement to do so. And a third is vulgar Hegelianism, which (in my usage of the term) treats groups of persons as “super-agents” with the ability to bring about large-scale social phenomena by organizing the actions of member individuals toward ends of which they are not conscious. I take each of the masters of suspicion to have offered both explanations of certain large-scale phenomena and (with varying degrees of intentionality and completeness) theories, or templates for such explanations, that diverge from these three types. My claim has been that each of the masters, in his own way, built his explanations around the postulation of causal factors that were hidden and bad. There is little uniformity among the three masters with regard to the valuations involved in the attribution of badness to these factors or the precise form of their “hiddenness.” There is also little uniformity among them with respect to devices for “scaling up” human agency.

The masters of suspicion In Marx I identified three distinct patterns of explanation. First, I labeled as vulgar Marxism a pattern that offers conventional belief-desire explanations for social phenomena—paradigmatically, by citing the (usually bad because selfinterested and uncaring) motivations of capitalists, politicians, or members of ruling classes as the causes of bad conditions, such as the suffering of workers. Second, I adopted the term historical materialism to name what I take to be Marx’s formal theory of history, according to which processes operating at the level of entire societies shape the conditions for individual actions through a variety of mechanisms, including by sorting persons into distinct classes, such that individuals of different classes act in ways that promote the continued operation of those processes without intending to do so. And I coined the term vulgar-Hegelian Marxism to describe Marx’s occasional practice of treating groups of persons (particularly classes) as agents for the purposes of explanation.

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The relationships among these three patterns of explanation are neither straightforward nor entirely stable. I take it that historical materialist explanation is the core of Marx’s treatment of history. But if historical materialist explanations do not require claims to the effect that capitalists or members of the ruling classes act out of self-interest and without concern for the well-being of persons of different classes, neither do they exclude such claims; and if (following G. A. Cohen) historical materialist explanations are functional explanations, they can be elaborated in vulgar-Marxist ways. I also take it that hermeneutical charity requires us to think that Marx generally used vulgar-Hegelian language rhetorically rather than substantively—that his vulgar-Hegelian explanations are shorthand for explanations of a different kind, rather than explanations in their own right. But in many cases Marx left to his readers the task of translating his vulgar-Hegelian language into other terms, and different possible translations have different entailments in the areas of explanatory value and ethical charge. The theme of hiddenness is developed in two distinct ways in Marx’s corpus. One relatively straightforward form of “hiddenness” that Marx invoked is the hiddenness of the undiscovered; particularly in the latter part of his career, Marx took himself to be postulating, for the first time, the existence of the dynamics that drive history in a manner analogous to the postulations of natural scientists. But more central to Marx’s historical materialist explanations is the notion that the same social processes that enrich some at the expense of others also bring it about that the persons involved entertain false ideas regarding the dynamics of their societies. The “illusions of an epoch” are functional requirements of existing relations of production; thus Cohen claimed that for Marx illusion is “constitutive of class societies.” Marx regarded religion as a collection of illusory ideas, acceptance of which on the part of workers and capitalists alike impeded correct understanding of actual social relations. And present but relatively underdeveloped in Marx’s corpus are suggestions that members of ruling classes intentionally deceive themselves and others regarding these relations. I take it that such intentional self-deception occupies no stable place in Marx’s theories, as he frequently portrayed capitalists and other ruling class members as no less subject to the “illusions of the epoch” than workers. Marx’s historical explanations generate ethical charge in two distinct ways. First, his explanations invoke social conditions such as vast inequalities of wealth and well-being, widespread suffering, oppression, and exploitation. And second, they invoke personal characteristics such as “filthy avarice,” stupidity, hypocrisy, deceptiveness and self-deceptiveness, and callous disregard for the

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well-being of others. Consistently, his explanations generate negative ethical charge by positioning bad social conditions as the results of the operations of the causal factors they postulate; and consistently, Marx’s explanations attribute bad personal conditions to capitalists, members of ruling classes, and government officials. What requires careful attention is the role that bad personal characteristics play in Marx’s explanations; for they play different roles in each of the three broad patterns of explanation I have described. To claim that, for example, the suffering of workers is due to the greed of capitalists is to offer a vulgarMarxist explanation; thus vulgar Marxism straightforwardly motivates both the evaluation of capitalists as bad people and the ascription to them of responsibility for that suffering. When writing in the vulgar-Hegelian style Marx often seems to cite the bad characteristics of, for example, capital itself, or the bourgeois class as a whole, as causes of bad social conditions; I have argued that regarding such language as rhetorical leaves the reader with the difficult task of figuring out what ethical evaluations are appropriate to the individual persons who constitute these collective or abstract entities. And finally, historical materialism undermines the notion that individual persons can be held responsible for bad social conditions, inasmuch as it claims that high-level social forces shape situations of choice. The result of this shaping is that the actions of individual persons, and thus the factors that figure in belief-desire explanations of those actions, can be at best shallow explainers of bad social conditions. I have argued, following Cohen, that Marx was a pioneer of social functional criticism: that his historical materialist explanations motivate the negative evaluation of social phenomena (paradigmatically, for Marx, religion) on the basis of the role they play in bringing about or perpetuating bad social conditions. But it is also important to note that historical materialism neither completely absolves human persons of responsibility for these conditions nor consistently discourages their ethical condemnation. In addition to consistently describing capitalists in an ethically condemnatory way, Marx frequently positioned them as agents or personifications of capital, thus ascribing them a special measure of responsibility for capital’s social effects. Thus it does not contradict the tenets of historical materialism to say that the suffering of workers within a particular society is proximately caused by the greed and unconcern of capitalists, even if does contradict these tenets to say that full responsibility rests with such persons. I understand Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals to be dedicated to explaining the cultural dominance of morality. Nietzsche offered a broadly historical

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explanation of this dominance, and stated explicitly that he intended his historical explanation to have evaluative consequences. I described a pattern that Nietzsche followed, with some variations, in the Genealogy’s three essays. In each case he described some aspect of morality as the result of actions taken by certain persons; the basic pattern is that Nietzsche described a particular character or kind of person, in whom operates one or more principles of normal tendency, or dispositions to act in certain ways, which are triggered by some historical circumstance. The actions of these characters change the way they think regarding matters of evaluative significance or produced such change within others. The first essay claims that the origins of the cultural dominance of the distinction between good and evil lay in actions by the “priestly people,” the Jews, who invented this distinction and promulgated it through the vehicle of Christianity as a plan of revenge against the (Roman) “warriors” who had forcibly subjugated them. The second essay claims that the phenomenon of the “bad conscience” arose when a principle of normal tendency, the “instinct for cruelty,” prevented within a particular population from “discharging” itself externally due to a historically novel condition of civilization, “turned inward,” motivating persons to adopt a negative and punitive attitude toward their own “life-affirming” drives. And the third essay claims that the dominance of ascetic ideals can be traced to actions of “ascetic priests,” who, motivated by “the protective and healing instincts of a degenerating life,” encouraged “sick” and “weak” persons to regard themselves as responsible for their suffering, and to adopt an oppositional and punitive attitude toward those characteristics of themselves that make for good health. About Nietzsche’s employment of this explanatory pattern I made three general observations. First, the dynamics that are central to Nietzsche’s explanations are the workings of individual psychologies, and although it is clear throughout the Genealogy that he was interested in explaining large-scale changes of thinking, he had no well-developed device for scaling up belief-desire explanations. The device that appears most often in his explanations is that of simple aggregation, where he seems to have assumed that a particular series of psychological changes happened within multiple persons, or perhaps within all persons, within a specific population; and at times Nietzsche simply applied individualpsychological language to groups as a whole and to abstract entities. But he also deployed the device of the conspiracy in the first essay and, in the third essay, gestured in the direction of an account that attributes a high degree of cultural influence to persons who occupy particular social roles (ascetic priests). Second, some of the belief-desire explanations Nietzsche offered are conventional,

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as when the Jews act out of hatred and aim at revenge, or when the “instinct for preservation” aims at the quarantining of the “sick” in churches so that these will not infect the “healthy.” But in some of his explanations, novel principles of normal tendency, such as the will to power, ressentiment, or the “turning inward” of “drives” that cannot be outwardly discharged, explain the changes in thinking that Nietzsche describes. And third, Nietzsche’s explanations are generally very remote from historical specificity; the most robust historical tethering in the Genealogy is found in his talk of the Jews and the Romans in the first essay, but elsewhere he simply provided no indications of what historical populations or persons embodied the psychological dynamics he describes. The theme of hiddenness is not consistently developed in the Genealogy. In the Preface Nietzsche suggested that contemporary ignorance of the true origins of morality is due simply to the fact that those origins have never been the object of proper investigation. But he also ridiculed the idea that those origins have simply been “forgotten”; and in the first essay he argued that ignorance of the origin of the distinction between good and evil is a result of the success of the Jewish conspiracy against “Rome.” He offered no account in the later essays of why the true origins of the “bad conscience” and of the dominance of ascetic ideals are not generally known, and no account of his own ability to correctly describe those origins. I argued that Nietzsche’s explanations generate negative ethical charge by appealing to three distinct sets of valuations. The first of these are moral values themselves; following a number of recent commentators, I observed that while Nietzsche fairly clearly disavows the valuations that comprise morality, part of his project is an immanent criticism, one that shows morality itself to be bad according to its (morality’s) own tenets. A second set of values stem from a positive estimation of the “will to power,” and are possibly those that figure in Nietzsche’s “knightly-aristocratic” mode of valuation. According to this scheme life-affirming modes of thinking and action are good, even where these take the form of visiting cruelty on the weak for the sheer pleasure of doing so; and weakness, sickness, corruption, and self-deception are bad, as are forms of social organization that do not sanction hierarchy based on such distinctions as strong/ weak and healthy/sick. And a third set of valuations are those that we would now associate with anti-Semitism, according to which anything associated with Judaism is bad. I attribute to Nietzsche a desire to have convinced several distinct audiences that morality is bad according to their different senses of badness (including those who regarded Jews with distaste, whether or not these

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were “activist” anti-Semites). And it is not important for my purposes which, if any, of the three schemes of valuation Nietzsche himself accepted. In my reflections I observed that the historical and argumentative underdevelopment of the Genealogy leaves Nietzsche’s readers in an awkward position. I take it that Nietzsche took himself to be describing actual historical events; and fairly clearly, he thought that the one who accepted his claims as to what really happened will thereby have cause to regard morality in a negative light. But it is very difficult to reconstruct Nietzsche’s arguments in ways that allow for judgments as to whether his arguments succeed in these two respects. The almost complete absence of historical tethering in the Genealogy makes it very difficult to discern what actual events would satisfy Nietzsche’s descriptions, and thus makes it very difficult to judge how likely it is that such events have taken place. And it has been a noteworthy result of the work of recent interpreters of Nietzsche that the more promising rational reconstructions of his arguments do not have the sort of critical force that he seems to have wanted those arguments to have. It seems, to me at least, fairly clear that readers who do not reject appeals to the genetic fallacy will be more likely to have the sort of evaluative response that Nietzsche wanted his readers to have; so, too, will readers disposed to evaluate anything associated with Jews in a negative light. And if in places Nietzsche gestures in the direction of less problematic evaluative principles, I think it undeniable that a significant amount of the book’s “critical” force depends on the sort of reading that it is the very project of rational reconstruction to ward against. At the conclusion of the chapter I expressed a worry regarding the status that has been assigned to the Genealogy as the methodological prototype for the contemporary “genealogical” genre in academic writing, a worry premised on my own sense that it would not be a good thing for later scholars to model their engagement with historical information or their appeals to evaluative principles on Nietzsche’s. I take Freud’s theories to comprise a set of principles for explaining patterns of thought and behavior on the part of individual persons and a set of principles for extending these to the explanation of large-scale social phenomena. At its core Freud’s psychoanalytic theory partitions the unconscious mind into several functionally distinct domains. It also postulates a set of novel principles of normal tendency that operate within and among these domains, from among which I selected repression/resistance, compromised gratification, and substitution for discussion. Freud also postulated a set of motivating factors for both thought and behavior, among which we can distinguish his “innate

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drives” (libido and, eventually, the aggressive drive) and complexes, non-innate motivators that stem from life experience. Psychoanalysis makes use of these postulates to produce explanations of both observable behaviors and patterns of thought. The most common pattern of explanation is one that portrays the explanandum as the result of a compromise, brokered by the Ich, between impulses stemming from the Es and the requirements of the Ü ber-Ich. And it is important to note that these explanations typically postulate a negative evaluation of the impulses in question on the part of the Ü ber-Ich, a negative evaluation which accounts for both why the behavior to be explained is not obviously one that stems from this impulse and why the existence of this impulse is not available for introspection. Freud extended his individual-psychological explanations to the social domain in two distinct ways. One principle that sanctions such an extension is Freud’s claim that the evaluations that inform the Ü ber-Ich are typically absorbed from the surrounding cultural environment. This principle entails that any persons who have internalized culturally specific negative valuations of an “innate drive” will have similar dynamics of unconscious repression and compromised gratification; and this idea in turn licenses the replication of psychoanalytic explanations across multiple individuals, thus making possible the aggregate explanation of large-scale social phenomena that plausibly result from multiple persons acting in the same way. The second way in which Freud extended psychoanalytic theory to large-scale social phenomena was by claiming an analogy between the developmental history of individual persons and that of the human species. Rather than appealing to a robust notion of a “collective unconscious,” Freud resolved this analogy into two specific claims: that traumas can produce behaviors within the descendants of those who experience them, and that traumas experienced by prehistoric humans have produced an “archaic inheritance” of psychological dynamics to which the species has ever since been subject. I also observed that Freud’s standard response to criticisms of his theories was to turn psychoanalysis against his critics. I labeled this practice a recursive ad hominem defense. Such a defense draws on the theories being challenged to make claims about the persons who offer criticisms in ways that are supposed to undermine those criticisms. I argued that there are conditions under which it would not be fallacious to deploy this defense in debates around psychoanalysis: specifically, where rejection of a psychoanalytic explanation is grounded in the critic’s intuitive or immediate judgment that the explanation

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is massively implausible. Psychoanalysis predicts that the persons of whom psychoanalytic explanations are true will be strongly inclined to reject them, and that judgments of implausibility are one means that the unconscious has at its disposal for motivating such a rejection. Thus for anyone about whom psychoanalytic claims are true, such things as intuitive judgments of plausibility regarding psychoanalytic claims will not be reliable, as these can be the product of unconscious attempts at self-deception; so the defender of psychoanalysis has at her disposal a set of principles that undermine the evidential value of such judgments on the part of anyone who rejects psychoanalysis. This position has the unfortunate (to my mind) result that even if defenders of psychoanalysis actually consider their critics’ arguments and conclude that they are inadequate, they may feel no obligation to engage those critics in reasoned debate on the topic, as their theoretical commitments will entail that those critics will be incapable of reasoning correctly concerning the theory. Of the three masters of suspicion, it is Freud who most fully develops the theme of hiddenness. While the very notion of unconscious mentation entails a simple (and innocent) form of hiddenness, Freud also postulated a series of mechanisms for self-deception as the core of his account of psychopathology. Some of the psychological factors (drives, desires, chains of reasoning) that explain not only actions but also patterns of thinking and emotion are actively kept from consciousness as a result of (to use language whose status is, in the final analysis, unclear) machinations among agencies operating within the unconscious mind. Such significant deception of others as is found in Freud’s theories is (so far as I have been able to determine) entirely a product of such mechanisms of self-deception: thus when the patient reports falsely concerning their desires, this is not usually a conscious attempt to deceive others but rather a product of the fact that the patient herself has antecedently been self-deceived. Freud’s theories claim further that such self-deception is not easily dislodged. Given that what motivates repression is the judgment that it would be bad to (for example) have the desire in question, repression shields the conscious mind from negative self-evaluation; and threats to repression (i.e., psychoanalytic explanations) are likely to generate a passionately negative defensive response. Such a response is to be expected regarding psychoanalytic claims both as they bear on individuals and as they bear on groups, regarding, that is, both claims as to the contents of the individual’s particular unconscious mind and claims regarding the psychodynamics underlying such large-scale social phenomena as religion.

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Freud’s theories generate ethical charge in two distinct ways. One of these ways is straightforward. Psychoanalytic explanations typically claim that what produces pathological behaviors or thoughts is the operation of desires or other motivations that are valued negatively by the patient’s own unconscious mind; and the valuations in play are likely to be both well represented in the surrounding cultural environment and reflectively accepted by the patient. Thus if psychoanalysis needs to invoke notions of badness for the purpose of explanation, the psychoanalyst need not endorse the valuations in question, and in fact Freud frequently noted his rejection of the culturally prevalent schemes of valuation the internalization of which he believed caused psychopathologies in his patients. I noted that in postulating the universality of such phenomena as the Oedipus and Electra complexes, Freud’s theories motivate this sort of negative ethical evaluation regarding even persons who display no psychopathologies. The second way in which his theories generate negative ethical charge is both subtler and more interesting. Inasmuch as psychopathologies result from a kind of self-deception, persons who suffer from psychopathologies are ambiguously responsible for their pathologies—responsible to the extent that these are the results of intentional actions on their part, and ambiguously so because the ethical status of unconscious actions is deeply mysterious. But there is less ambiguity in cases where persons have consciously considered and intentionally rejected true claims about the contents of their unconscious minds where they could have given meaningful assent. For given that Freud’s theories claim that accepting the truth about oneself has the effect of mitigating the dynamics of repression and so of ameliorating psychopathology, the rejection of such claims amounts to rejecting a proffered curative. Thus those who consider and reject the true claims of psychoanalysis about themselves are responsible for refusing to take actions that could have relieved their condition. And if the most obvious examples of such cases will be patients who reject the explanations proffered by their analysts, Freud’s theories motivate the same kind of negative ethical evaluation of critics of psychoanalysis generally, whether or not such persons display their pathologies openly. I concluded my reflections on Freud by noting that purely formal features of his theory practically guarantee that the boundary between adherents and detractors of the theory will be a hostile one. According to psychoanalytic theory most of us maintain a positive self-image by practicing self-deception motivated by shame and guilt. In the eyes of its adherents, those who have considered and rejected the claims of psychoanalysis are likely to be persons

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who have chosen to reinforce this self-deception rather than acknowledge the truth about themselves. Critics of psychoanalysis, on the other hand, find themselves (likely falsely) accused of harboring shameful desires, and may find reasons they advance for rejecting psychoanalysis discounted on the grounds that they are incapable of distinguishing good from bad reasons when it comes to the theory. It would also seem to follow that inasmuch as critics of psychoanalysis regard its claims as massively implausible, they are likely to regard its adherents as, in a word, credulous. It is important for me to note at this point that I think psychoanalysis has this result regardless of whether or not its claims are true, and that the clarity and transparency with respect to which the theory displays the features that produce this dynamic are historically significant, inasmuch as this facilitates the replication of these features elsewhere. At the close of this overview I want to draw attention to the relationship between the theories offered by the “masters of suspicion” and conspiracy theories. If in general suspicious explanations of large-scale social phenomena are explanations that postulate explanatory factors (paradigmatically, causes) that are hidden and bad, then conspiracy theories comprise a subset of such explanations, inasmuch as they describe large-scale social phenomena as the results of secret agreements among groups of persons to act together in bad ways or for bad ends. I take each of the masters of suspicion to have offered suspicious explanations of large-scale social phenomena, and theories that can be used to generate these, that are not (necessarily) conspiracy theories.1 The broad category of suspicious explanations of large-scale social phenomena contains, then, the theories of the masters of suspicion and also contains conspiracy theories. I mention this here primarily because in the remainder of this chapter I will be interested in the dynamics of suspicious explanations of large-scale social phenomena generally, and one point I want to emphasize is that some of the dynamics surrounding conspiracy theories also surround the works of the masters of suspicion. My claim is not that the works of the masters of suspicion just are conspiracy theories, nor that whatever judgments are appropriate regarding the intellectual legitimacy of conspiracy theories can be applied to the works of the masters. I intend a more modest but still substantive claim: that the works of the masters share some of the characteristics of conspiracy theories that have been grounds for reservations regarding the intellectual legitimacy of the latter.

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Suspicion’s Achilles’s Heel I have reconstructed the masters of suspicions as purveyors of explanations and of theories that can be used to generate these. And I have assumed, as a basis for my reconstructions, the common practice of inference to the best explanation. Inasmuch as an explanation consists of a set of claims regarding what is the case (Smith killed Jones), the fact that if true, those claims would best explain something that needs explaining (Jones’s death) counts as a reason to take those claims to be true. A suspicious explanation, then, will be cognitively attractive inasmuch as it has a high explanatory value: the fact that, if it were true, it would best explain some phenomenon will be a reason to take it to be true. Recall that I take explanatory value to be a function of two independent considerations, explanatory power and plausibility. A set of claims has high explanatory power if the phenomenon to be explained would be more likely to be the case if the claims were true than if they were false. And the plausibility of a claim is a matter of how likely it is that the claim is true independent of what would follow from assuming its truth—that is, its likelihood on background knowledge alone. High explanatory power increases the value of an explanation, and low plausibility decreases it; when we are assessing explanations we routinely make such judgments as that a proffered explanation has such high explanatory power that its low plausibility does not diminish its explanatory value sufficiently to warrant its rejection, or alternatively, that a proffered explanation has such low plausibility that its high explanatory power does not increase its explanatory value sufficiently to warrant its acceptance. It should be obvious that a suspicious explanation will have to have high explanatory power in order to be at all promising. But explanatory power is cheap: it is easy to construct, for any phenomenon that is the case, a set of claims that are such that if those claims are true, the phenomenon would be very likely to be the case. For any actual phenomenon X, any claim of the form “X was brought about by some agent or agents of sufficient intelligence and power to be able to realize their wishes (say, God or sufficiently powerful aliens) who desired that X should be the case” is a powerful explanation—if God or sufficiently powerful aliens desired that X should be the case and acted on that desire, then X’s being the case would be very likely. Anyone’s assessment of the value of that sort of explanation will basically be a function of assessments of plausibility—assessments of how likely they take it to be that God or sufficiently powerful aliens exist, desire that X should be actual, and have acted on that

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desire. High explanatory power will be insufficient for anyone who considers these suppositions so massively implausible that no explanation predicated on them deserves serious consideration. To my mind, the interesting dynamic in the assessment of suspicious explanations is connected with the issue of plausibility. I noted above that Peter Lipton has argued that conspiracy theories ordinarily suffer from a low degree of “likeliness” (which I understand as plausibility) while enjoying a high degree of “loveliness” (which I translate, roughly, as explanatory power).2 I think that Lipton’s point applies to suspicious explanations generally; it seems to me to be a characteristic feature of suspicious explanations that they will suffer from low plausibility just in virtue of the fact that they postulate causes that are hidden. For something to be hidden is, in general, for its existence not to be evident to casual or even close observation; to put the point somewhat differently, it is for the available evidence to suggest the nonexistence rather than the existence of the phenomenon. In the previous chapter the issue of plausibility appeared in the connection with Freud’s recursive ad hominem defense. Freud acknowledged that very many of his colleagues in psychology rejected his theories on the grounds of their implausibility—he ruefully noted the ridicule with which they were frequently received. The issue of plausibility has also been a staple of discussion of conspiracy theories. Brian Keeley, for instance, has argued that conspiracy theories become rationally unwarranted as they require the postulation of everwider circles of deception in order to deal with the absence of evidence for the existence of the conspiracy (i.e., if the media or the government display no awareness of the conspiracy, this must be because they are part of it).3 To my thinking the reason for this is easy to grasp. It is not easy for a conspiratorial group to keep its activities secret; so if the opportunities for a conspiracy to be revealed grow in accordance with the number of conspirators, then larger conspiracies are less likely to remain successfully concealed over time than smaller ones. It seems to me that issues of plausibility also bedevil Marx’s and Nietzsche’s writings, inasmuch as they both claim that the human social life is (or has been) driven by processes whose existence is not evident on the surface of things. It seems to me that the main focus of a critical assessment of suspicious arguments should be this issue of plausibility. Granting that suspicious explanations will generally have a high degree of explanatory power (because this is not difficult to achieve), the interesting question is whether a suspicious

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explanation purchases this explanatory power at too high a price in terms of plausibility. The question, in other words, is whether the claims that comprise a suspicious explanation are so implausible that even its high power does not suffice to make it the best available explanation. Now implausibility is defeasible. As judgments of plausibility are of necessity made against a body of background knowledge, claims that are implausible relative to one such body of knowledge may not be at all implausible against a different body. Richard Miller has called attention to the fact that principles of normal tendency commonly figure as part of the background knowledge against which the virtues of competing evaluations are assessed.4 The one who thinks that conspiratorial behavior is normal—or as Lipton puts it (using terms I would not), the one “whose ability to weigh evidence has been compromised by paranoia”5—will generally find conspiracy theories more plausible than the person who does not think this; and the person who thinks that one specific kind of person is particularly prone to such behaviors will find conspiracy theories featuring that kind of person more plausible than will the person who harbors no such views. If this is correct, then it is to be expected that conspiracy theories featuring Jews will find a more favorable reception in generally antiSemitic circles than outside of these (hardly a controversial notion); it is also to be expected that the one who thinks that it is normal for Jews to be secretive, deceptive, and collectively chauvinistic will find the claims of Nietzsche’s first essay more plausible than the one who does not harbor such a view. In this connection consider a passage from Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: Conspiracy is a natural effect when men of like insight into the requirements of continued class domination get together, and such men do get together. But sentences beginning “The ruling class have decided . . .” do not entail the convocation of an assembly. Ruling class persons meet and instruct one another in overlapping milieux of government, recreation, and practical affairs, and a collective policy emerges even when they were never all in one place at one time.6

I take it that here Cohen is proposing a set of principles of normal tendency regarding members of ruling classes which, if accepted as part of background knowledge, will improve the plausibility of Marx’s claims about how class interest influences public policy; and interestingly, Cohen offers these as an alternative to claims to the effect that straightforward and intentional conspiratorial activity is normal for such persons. But the passage also suggests (correctly, I think) that the plausibility of Marxism is also increased by principles ascribing a tendency to

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conspiracy to ruling class persons;7 and it should not be controversial to suppose that the person who thinks that it is normal for capitalists to be unconcerned for the well-being of workers—or, perhaps, willing to subordinate any such concerns to a concern for profit—will find Marx’s vulgar explanations, and possibly also his historical materialist explanations,8 more plausible than the person who does not. Similarly, the one who estimates the normal prominence of sexual urges as very high will find Freud’s explanations more plausible than the one who estimates these as lower. Miller notes that it is possible for disputes regarding conflicting information to miss the importance of background knowledge.9 I regard this dynamic as crucially important for the critical evaluation of suspicious explanations. For as I have described the situation, whether or not a suspicious explanation suffers from a plausibility deficit will frequently depend on what principles of normal tendency figure in the background knowledge against which its claims are assessed. Thus a strategy for securing a favorable judgment for a suspicious explanation is to bring it about that the background knowledge against which one’s audience assesses the explanation’s claims includes principles of normal tendency that favor those claims. One obvious method for bringing this about is to write for an audience that is presumed to already accept such principles. But another is to advance principles of normal tendency in a manner that produces assent to these independently of assessing the suspicious explanation on offer. While it is certainly possible to offer one’s audience reasons to accept a particular principle of normal tendency, there are other ways of motivating assent to such principles. I want to mention two that I regard as particularly interesting. First, while it would be odd to describe the practice of asserting a claim without providing any reasons to accept that claim as a strategy for producing assent, it is certainly the case that audiences sometimes accept claims made by others in the absence of such reasons—for example, because they regard the one who makes the claims as an authority, or because they interpret the lack of support for a claim as an indicator that it is so obviously true as to need no such support. And so a text that advances a principle of normal tendency without providing any reason to accept that principle can in fact produce assent. And it seems to me that suspicious explanations often present principles of normal tendency without offering any reasons to accept these. Clear examples are found in Nietzsche, in an instructive variety of forms. In some cases Nietzsche offers explicitly formulated principles of normal tendency as part of his argument without offering a reason to accept these (“only something that continues to hurt stays in the memory”;

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“all instincts which are not discharged outwardly turn inwards”). In other cases Nietzsche’s character descriptions, such as his description of priests as the “most evil of enemies” because they are the “most impotent,” offer his readers no reasons to accept the attribution of these characteristics to any actual persons. A second strategy for motivating assent to a principle of normal tendency involves accusations of naï veté. Such accusations have long been a staple of conspiracy theories; but Bruno Latour has trenchantly remarked on the role these play in “critical theory” as well. What has become of critique when my neighbor in the little Bourbonnais village where I live looks down on me as someone hopelessly naï ve because I believe that the United States had been attacked by terrorists? Remember the good old days when university professors could look down on unsophisticated folks because those hillbillies naï vely believed in church, motherhood, and apple pie? Things have changed a lot, at least in my village. I am now the one who naï vely believes in some facts because I am educated, while the other guys are too unsophisticated to be gullible: “Where have you been? Don’t you know that the Mossad and the CIA did it?”10

I take it that to accuse a person of naï veté is effectively to recommend revisions to the principles of normal tendency to which they subscribe. To be naï ve is to be too trusting of other persons, to have a tendency to estimate the values, desires, or intentions of others as better than these actually are. The accusation of naï veté suggests that some entity (a person, a type of person, an institution) is characterized by a principle of normal tendency that is worse, in ethical terms, than whatever principle the naï ve person is inclined to accept, and that the fact that she does not accept this bad principle of normal tendency represents a failure on her part. Thus I take the accusation of naï veté to be the equivalent of the assertion of a hypothetical imperative: lower your estimation of the ethical goodness of the relevant entities if you want to avoid being subject to illusion and deception. These brief references to unsupported assertion and the accusation of naï veté are the tip of a rather large iceberg, this being the whole host of rhetorical strategies that can be used to encourage persons to accept principles of normal tendency. These rhetorical strategies are relevant to the tradition of suspicion because the viability of suspicious explanations very often hinges on what principles of normal tendency figure in their assessment. Given that suspicious explanations as a class postulate the existence of hidden and bad causal factors, negative revisions to the principles of normal tendency that a

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person is willing to accept will serve to increase the plausibility of a suspicious explanation that appeals to these, and so may well make a crucial difference as to whether that explanation is regarded as sufficiently plausible to be worthy of serious consideration or, indeed, accepted as true. Since the crucial role of principles of normal tendency is often overlooked in debates regarding competing explanations generally, it seems to me that a best practice for the critical evaluation of suspicious explanations is to identify the principles of normal tendency that bear on judgments of plausibility and to isolate and assess reasons for accepting these, distinguishing these from rhetorical strategies that motivate assent without supplying reasons. To summarize the discussion of this section: suspicious explanations characteristically suffer from a plausibility deficit due to the fact that they postulate “hidden” causal forces, and given that these forces are “bad,” this plausibility deficit will be lower for audiences who accept or can be brought to accept relevant principles of normal tendency. It should not be controversial to say that conspiracy theories flourish in social contexts in which persons are antecedently disposed to think poorly of those types of persons who figure in the claimed conspiracy (Jews, capitalists, liberals, etc.). I think this observation can be broadened to encompass suspicious explanations more generally: these will find greater acceptance in contexts in which persons are given to thinking poorly of the relevant entities (persons, groups, institutions, social structures, abstractions). And it is particularly important to note that the thinking-poorly that matters need not be discriminatory. It is not necessary to think, for example, that capitalists are unusually bad people in order to find vulgar-Marxist claims plausible: a general-purpose misanthropy will do just as well. I see this dynamic on display in our current literature on the phenomenon of suspicion. In one context Brian Leiter has argued the merits of “Classical Realism,” which he describes as “a certain hard-headed, unromantic, uncompromising attitude towards the world, which manifests itself in a brutal honesty and candor in the assessment of human motives and the portrayal of human affairs,” canonically represented by Machiavelli.11 And as I noted in the introduction, he also has argued that a path to the broad relevance of philosophy involves the revitalization of the “hermeneutics of suspicion”: “Philosophy becomes relevant because the world—riven as it is with hypocrisy and concealment—desperately needs a hermeneutics of suspicion to unmask it.”12 While consideration of this second quotation will extend into the next section of this chapter, for the moment I want to take Leiter’s statements as evidence that the one who is antecedently

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inclined to think that “hypocrisy and concealment” generally characterizes (individual and collective) human affairs will find the claims of “unmasking” on offer in the tradition of suspicion more plausible than the one whose outlook is less Machiavellian.

Suspicion and cognitive gadgetry In the introduction I claimed that suspicious explanations are “cognitive gadgets” or “snares for thought,” borrowing these terms from Pascal Boyer. In this section I return to this characterization. A “cognitive gadget,” as Boyer uses the term, is some combination of elements that “is particularly successful because it activates some of our [cognitive] capacities in a particularly intense way.”13 The most obvious examples are material-cultural phenomena such as music or the use of bright colors for decoration. But cognitive gadgetry is hardly limited to the realm of the material or the sensory: These activities recruit our cognitive capacities in ways that make some cultural artifacts very salient and likely to be transmitted. These salient cognitive artifacts can be extraordinarily primitive, like glass beads or pieces of shiny metal whose only merit is to provide an unusual visual stimulus. But ideas too and their abstract relations can constitute such artifacts. Jokes recruit our reasoning capacities and our expectations about situations, ending with a punch line that forces us to reconsider the whole situation from a new angle; paradoxes fascinate because there seems to be no way of escaping an unacceptable conclusion.14

Building on the work of Steven Pinker, Lee Kirkpatrick offers an example of cognitive gadgetry that is particularly useful for my purposes. Consider the appeal of cheesecake: the human palate is normally gratified by the tastes of both sweets and fats, and the attraction of cheesecake lies in the fact that it combines both kinds of gratification in a single experience. Kirkpatrick, following Boyer, thinks that religion is best understood as an assemblage of cognitive gadgets: religion has become a stable part of human culture because its various components stimulate (activate, gratify, “recruit”) multiple cognitive systems in ways that make these components particularly interesting, memorable, or compelling. Thus Kirkpatrick thinks that religion can usefully be understood as “a kind of socio-emotional-cognitive cheesecake.”15 For both Boyer and Kirkpatrick, ideas about supernatural agents are the core of religion’s cognitive gadgetry: such ideas make possible novel kinds of explanations of both natural and social

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phenomena, as well as ascriptions of responsibility, conceptions of relationship (attachment relations to supernatural agents are central to Kirkpatrick’s work), and thoughts of transactions for a variety of purposes.16 The term snares for thought requires some additional commentary. Boyer’s thinking in this area is premised on a “massively modular” understanding of the human mind that is broadly shared by scholars in the cognitive sciences. According to this conception the mind is composed of a large number of cognitive mechanisms, or “inference systems,” which generally operate below the level of conscious awareness. While these inference systems are subject to some measure of voluntary control, for the most part such control is limited, and many systems operate more or less autonomously (think, for example, of cognitive mechanisms that recognize faces, or that translate facial or bodily postures into signs of emotion). The autonomous nature of complex cognitive mechanisms makes “snares for thought” possible. Imagine some idea or artifact that is such that once one encounters it, it changes the way one thinks in ways that are not entirely under one’s voluntary control: having encountered an idea, say, one cannot choose to forget it, and also cannot choose for that idea not to make a difference to way one thinks. Boyer, Kirkpatrick, and others postulate such effects for some elements of religion. On this line of thinking the power of, for example, ideas of gods who possess strategic information and may be willing to share it, who will be aware of anything one chooses to do, or who are available as the perfect attachment figure or relationship partner lies in ways in which simply encountering these ideas under the right circumstances can produce changes in thinking that escape voluntary control. And it is important to note that this effect does not hinge on cognitive acceptance, in any particularly strong form, of the contents of the ideas in question. The person who finds herself wondering, habitually and involuntarily, what God would make of her actions is a person whose thinking has been “ensnared” by ideas about supernatural agents, whether or not she reflectively accepts that such agents exist. In this section I want to argue that suspicious explanations of large-scale social phenomena have characteristics that make for cognitive gadgetry: that is, they combine a number of distinct cognitive appeals in a single package. And when conditions are right, such explanations can be cognitively ensnaring. In what follows I will discuss three characteristics of suspicious arguments that make them, as a class, particularly effective cognitive gadgets: ethical leveraging, pragmatic weighting, and epistemic siloing. I do not take these to be the only

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features of suspicious arguments that contribute to their cultural staying power; my reason for focusing on these three characteristics is that, in ways I will explore below, they are particularly resistant to correction by means of rational reflection.

Ethical leveraging Reconstructing the tradition of suspicion as a series of explanatory rather than interpretive projects offers the significant benefit of illuminating what is, to my mind, the principal cognitive attraction of the sort of work that the masters of suspicion produced. What I call ethical leveraging is a matter of an explanation’s being positioned in relation to an audience’s ethical commitments such that if that explanation is true, accepting it promises control over whether those commitments are realized or not. I take it that there is an intrinsic value, and hence an intrinsic cognitive attraction, to true explanations. Having a true explanation of something is a more excellent state of affairs than not having one, and I take the excellence of this condition to be fairly deeply embedded in human intuitions cross-culturally; that is, I take human beings cross-culturally to regard the possession of true explanations to be highly desirable in itself. But more importantly, recall that the search for explanation is normally a motivated one: attempts to explain are very often informed by an interest, or a desire to achieve some end, and just how valuable a true explanation is will be a product of how desirable the accomplishment of this end is. We saw in the introduction that one very common reason to want a true explanation is the conviction that it will make it possible to exert control over the phenomenon it explains. This is clearly true in stock cases: having a true explanation of why my car does not start makes it possible for me to remedy the situation by addressing the cause of the car’s malfunction. And fairly clearly, an interest in control informs very many quests for the explanation of large-scale social phenomena such as poverty, poor public health, income inequality, and intergroup hostility. This theme of control is, I think, prominently represented in the tradition of suspicion. In general the masters claim to lay bare the causes of large-scale and undesirable state of affairs: for Marx, inequalities of wealth and power, and the misery of the working classes; for Nietzsche, the enervation and “emasculation” of European man; for Freud, individual neuroses and their collective analogues. And explanations of these phenomena are accompanied, sometimes explicitly, by the promise that being in possession of the truth will

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make it possible to bring about improved circumstances—by, say, working toward a classless society, recovering health and vitality, or undoing (or mitigating) the effects of repression. Conspiracy theories usually display the same features: the explanation describes the causes of some (present or future) undesirable state of affairs, and knowing these causes makes it possible to remedy or prevent this (by interfering with the conspirators’ plan of action). It seems to me that part of the cognitive attraction of suspicious explanations generally is that, if true, they provide information that is relevant to the goal of exerting control over bad social conditions. Following Boyer (but using his terminology in a slightly different context), I will refer to such information as strategic information.17 It is also possible for explanation to be motivated by an interest in evaluation— an interest, that is, in knowing whether some phenomenon is good or bad, or knowing whether it aligns with or opposes a particular collection of values. Courts of law, for instance, typically pursue true explanations for this purpose: for the purpose of issuing an evaluative judgment regarding the innocence or guilt of some person. It seems to me that one of the prominent features of suspicious explanations is that they satisfy such evaluative interests, inasmuch as they (purport to) reveal certain phenomena to be bad; and in fact it also seems to me that in some cases (perhaps Nietzsche and conspiracy theories in particular, but also many passages in Marx) they make a particular point of emphasizing, and even overemphasizing, the badness of the causes they postulate. While it is certainly possible for either an author or an audience to be motivated by a freestanding desire to blame, condemn, or cast aspersions on other persons, groups, or cultural productions (I will return to this theme below), explanations that reveal badness can be cognitively attractive for reasons that have to do with interests in control over social conditions. For example, the interest that a court of law has in judgments of guilt or innocence is transparently a product of an interest in social control: if preventing murders requires preventing those who have committed some murders from committing more (by confinement or reform), then an interest in reducing murders transparently motivates an interest in knowing which persons are murderers. It is worth noting that for this purpose, judgments of guilt matter in a way that judgments of innocence do not, for it is only with respect to guilty persons that the purpose of social control requires that some action be taken. In general I do not take suspicious explanations to be motivated by an independent interest in negative evaluation; rather, I take the interest that

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suspicious explanations have in judgments of “badness” to be indicative of the strategic significance of such judgments. Recall that my term negative ethical charge is intended to describe conditions under which explanations invoke values that are held by some audience, and that I use the term ethical rather than moral in order to include valuations that are plausibly nonmoral—so one of my examples involves an audience of white supremacists, who value racist sentiments positively and racially egalitarian sentiments negatively. Where “badness” is understood in this audience-specific way, explanations that generate negative ethical charge can indicate where collective action can (or must) be taken to promote or to defend positively valued phenomena. So an explanation that claims that a politician opposed a particular bill because he was motivated by racially egalitarian sentiments will have the value, for a white supremacist audience, of showing how increased control over the political influence of white supremacist values might be possible—specifically, by way of opposition to this politician. Thus in this example, commitment to the cause of white supremacy generates an interest in knowing whether certain other persons harbor (bad) egalitarian sentiments. The general point here is that to the extent that persons can be counted on to want their values to be instantiated, it is reasonable to assume that any audience will have an interest in true explanations that would offer improved control over the instantiation of their values. I think it follows from this line of thought that there is a common but hitherto unremarked “stopping rule”18 at play in our practices of explaining many large-scale social phenomena. Recall that if there is no such thing as an all-things-considered adequate explanation because an explanation can be requested for any explanans, then the kind of adequacy that seems to matter is determined by explanatory interests. An interest in control over the instantiation of ethical values will be satisfied by any explanation that indicates how such control is possible; and thus the point at which an explanation provides information relevant to the instantiation of ethical values is a point at which that explanation is adequate (in this specific way) and can cease. One accessible way in which explanations can provide information of this kind is by pointing out a locus of effective opposition to the social instantiation of one’s values. Thus for an audience committed to certain values, an explanation that reveals that some phenomenon is actively opposed to those values has thereby reached a natural stopping point: for this audience’s ethical commitments antecedently generate an interest in knowing which phenomena stand in the way of their realization. It is in this way that an explanation that reveals some influential phenomenon to be “bad” can thereby be a an adequate explanation; and thus revealing “badness” can be the main point of an explanation.

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I think this “stopping rule” plays a central role in the tradition of suspicion. Nietzsche, as we have seen, candidly averred that his interest in narrating the history of morality was connected to the question of its value—that his genealogy would have evaluative results. In fact it seems to me that any charitable reading of the Genealogy of Morals will regard this interest in evaluation as embedded within Nietzsche’s more general set of social aspirations—his aspirations, that is, to promote a future in which European culture, and European health, would be greatly improved. In my terminology, Nietzsche’s purpose in emphasizing, indeed in overemphasizing, the multifarious badness of morality was to convince his audience that morality was inimical to the realization of their values, and thus that the rejection of morality would lead to a better future. Similarly, recall a passage from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: “The bourgeois order . . . has become a vampire that sucks out [smallholders’] blood and brains and throws them into the alchemist’s cauldron of capital.”19 I argued that Marx frequently used vulgar-Hegelian language to express negative evaluations of groups of persons or abstract entities, such as capitalists and capital. Here and in very many other passages, I take it that Marx made use of this charged language for a specific purpose: in order to convince his audience that some group or abstraction was a locus of effective opposition to the realization of their values (well-being, fair political representation, non-predatory economic relations). To these examples we can add any number of examples from conspiracy theories, which typically claim that some group of conspirators are secretly working for the realization of ends opposed to the values held by the target audience. If explanations that increase our understanding of the world have an accessible intrinsic value, and explanations that show us how we might shape the world to our purposes have an accessible instrumental value, then ethical commitments naturally generate an interest in strategic information, information the possession of which would offer control over conditions relevant to the instantiation of those commitments. And the greater the importance for a particular audience is the goal of advancing or protecting the instantiation of its values, the greater will be the cognitive attractiveness of explanations that promise such strategic information. Suspicious explanations, in short, leverage ethical commitments to generate the sense that if they are true, they are importantly true. If it sometimes seems that the interest in unflattering portrayals of persons, groups, or cultural phenomena on display in suspicious explanations approaches the pathological, I think there can be good explanatory

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reasons for this: for the more we prize certain values, the more important it is to know what (or who) opposes them.

Pragmatic weighting When properly constructed, suspicious explanations have a remarkable feature. It can be rational to act on the truth of a suspicious explanation even if one does not accept it, and even when one judges that it would be irrational to accept it. I will use the term pragmatic weighting as my label for this dynamic. The basic idea behind pragmatic weighting is the following: Decisions among different courses of action are sometimes made at least partly on the basis of assessments of the benefits and costs associated with the choices on offer. Where the utility of competing courses of action is contingent on circumstances that are not known, decisions often involve estimates of the risks that would attend making the wrong choice. Given that risks can be asymmetrically distributed among competing choices, in some cases it is rational to base a choice on an estimate of which wrong choice would be less disadvantageous. Thus an asymmetric distribution of risks can motivate one, rationally, to take a claim to be true in the course of one’s practical reasoning20 even when one does not in fact believe it to be true. And this same dynamic can motivate one to take an explanation to be true in the course of one’s practical reasoning even if one does not consider it the best explanation on offer. Suppose a child at my preschooler’s daycare is hospitalized with grievous physical injuries, and two explanations are proffered. On one (“innocent”) explanation, the injuries were the result of a freak accident; on the other (a suspicious explanation), they were the result of intentional abuse at the hands of his care providers (which, naturally, the providers deny committing). In this situation both my attitude toward the suspicious explanation and my actions relating to the persons who figure in that explanation are subject to pragmatic weighting. In this example, in the face of these competing explanations there are choices that I must make among possible courses of action. For one thing, I need to decide whether or not to continue to submit my child to the care of the providers; for another, if there are other parents whose children are also in their care and who are unaware of the suspicious explanation, I need to decide whether or not to make them aware of it. And the risks involved in these courses of action are asymmetric. Should I choose to continue to submit my child for care, then if the suspicious explanation is true, my action will expose my child to

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the possibility of intentional bodily harm; and should I withhold the suspicious explanation from other parents, then if it is true, I will have failed to prevent their children from being similarly exposed. But the risks that attend being wrong on the other side of the question are considerably lower: should I choose to withdraw my child from care and to propagate the suspicious explanation among other parents, then if the innocent explanation turns out to be true, I will have inconvenienced a number of parents and children in a variety of ways, and will perhaps have caused significant harm to the reputations and finances of my child’s care providers, but will not have exposed anyone’s children to the risk of harm. It seems to me that this situation presents me with a hypothetical imperative: if I want to avoid exposing my children to the risk of bodily harm, and if I want other parents to be able to do the same, then I ought to withdraw my children from care and spread the suspicious explanation to other parents. The conditions under which this sort of pragmatic weighting can be defeated I will describe below. It should not be difficult to imagine how pragmatic weighting figures many conspiracy theories and the works of the masters of suspicion. It is a common feature of these explanations that if they are true, then the one who rejects their truth will in some way contribute to either the perpetuation of bad social conditions or the loss of good ones. So, for example, a failure to accept Marx’s theories if in fact they are true will tend to promote the perpetuation of social injustice, a failure to accept Freud’s theories if they are true will tend to perpetuate individual and perhaps collective neuroses, and a failure to accept that a conspiracy exists when in fact it does will tend to allow that conspiracy to continue to operate unseen. The risks of being wrong on the other side of the question are not insignificant (e.g., working toward a Marxist revolution if in fact Marx’s theories are false, or acting against a notional Jewish conspiracy when in fact none exists); but for the most part these seem to me to be of a different and lower order than the risk of facilitating the large-scale social evils that these explanations describe. Recall that, as I argued in the introduction, Ricoeur found himself largely unable to effectively engage the question of what makes one interpretation preferable to another, and thus unable to say why a “suspicious interpretation” might be more attractive than the alternatives. I have been arguing that the explanatory framework makes it possible to engage this question effectively, and in fact to claim that suspicious explanations as a class have features that make them cognitively attractive. To this point I have focused on inference to the best explanation as the standard practice whereby we determine which

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among competing explanations is to be preferred as a candidate for truth. With the introduction of pragmatic weighting we are in a position to see that satisfying the requirements of inference to the best explanation is not the only way in which a suspicious explanation can make itself effective in the lives of those exposed to it. Pragmatic weighting is not just independent of explanatory value: it can also override considerations of explanatory value in the context of practical reasoning. The conditions under which pragmatic weighting has this effect can be described with some precision. A judgment that one among several competing explanations is the best one gives me a reason to take that explanation to be true in the context of my practical reasoning; and absent considerations of pragmatic weighting, this judgment also gives me a reason not to do so with respect to the other explanations on offer. Pragmatic weighting can give me a reason to take a non-best explanation (i.e., an explanation that is either inferior to some or one among those that are better than all others) to be true in my practical reasoning, so long as that explanation is deserving of consideration as a candidate for truth (so long, that is, as it is not massively implausible). So the explanations for which pragmatic weighting makes a decisive difference are those which are, on the one hand, not so hopelessly implausible that the possibility of their being true can be safely dismissed, but on the other hand, recognizably not the best of the available explanations. Here I want to return to a claim I made above, that suspicious explanations can be “snares for thought.” Pragmatic weighting can produce a kind of cognitive ensnarement. I have claimed that in the absence of pragmatic weighting, our practical reasoning tracks our assessments of the value of the explanations on offer. In such cases, a result of inquiry—say, the discovery of relevant evidence— that leads me to relegate an explanation to the status of non-best also removes my reason for taking that explanation to be true in the context of my practical reasoning. But where pragmatic weighting makes the difference I have described, such results of inquiry do not impact my practical reasoning unless they give me reason to think the explanation in question hopelessly implausible. That is, if considerations of pragmatic weighting generate a hypothetical imperative to act as though an explanation is true regardless of whether or not I take it to be the best explanation on offer, no amount of empirical inquiry or rational reflection that falls short of rendering that explanation hopeless or absurd will free me from this imperative. For as long as I find that I cannot safely dismiss the suspicious explanation, I will be under some obligation to act as though it is true.

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Furthermore, this sort of cognitive ensnarement can be extended beyond the domain of the individual to that of the group. Recall that if I judge that I should withdraw my child from the care of the suspected abusers, I also have a compelling (and perfectly respectable) reason to propagate the suspicious explanation to other persons who stand in the same relation to the issue of practical reasoning as myself: that is, the parents of other children under their care. One characteristic typical of conspiracy theories amplifies the extent to which pragmatic weighting motivates the propagation of a suspicious explanation. Typically, avoiding the bad result at which the conspiracy aims requires collective action: there is no course of action, analogous to withdrawing only my own child from care, that will prevent the bad result in only my own case. When a suspicious explanation has this characteristic, I also have self-interested reasons for propagating it, as only if many persons act on the assumption of its truth will I be safe from the harm that the explanation postulates. Uncontroversially, Marx’s theories also display this dynamic; in contrast, Nietzsche’s and Freud’s seem to offer at least the possibility of individuals sheltering themselves from “emasculation” and neurosis by acting in the appropriate ways (rejecting morality and submitting to the analyst). Now it seems likely that there will be very many cases in which the primary practical result of pragmatic weighting will be in the area of propagation. I may decide that the suspicious explanation is poor enough that I am willing to run the risk of continuing to send my child to care, but also decide to repeat the explanation to other parents so that they can make up their own minds. Similarly, I may decide for a variety of reasons not to actively promote a Marxist revolution (perhaps “the time is not yet right,” perhaps I am simply not a violent person, or perhaps in my case pragmatic weighting does not count decisively in favor of Marx because I would stand to lose a great deal if promoting revolution turned out to be the wrong choice), but still propagate Marxism because this propagation, in expanding the number of persons who might be moved to revolutionary action, will “hasten developments which will lead to a society without injustice,” in the words of Max Horkheimer.21 I conclude from these reflections that pragmatically weighted suspicious explanations, so long as they avoid patent absurdity, will be highly transmissible within groups of persons who stand in similar relations to the values around which they are constructed, and that any such explanation that is cognitively ensnaring for any individual is likely, over time, to cognitively ensnare many persons within such groups. And I want to emphasize that the features that generate this dynamic are purely formal ones that an explanation can possess

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regardless of whether its claims are true or false. Given the fact that an infinite number of false explanations of any given social phenomenon are possible, the account of pragmatic weighting I have offered here generates, I think, a prediction: that false, but not patently absurd, explanations characterized by pragmatic weighting will tend to circulate widely within groups defined by commitments to the relevant values, and that the circles within which such explanations are transmitted and taken seriously will be broader than those in which they taken to be true, and also broader than those in which persons act in any other ways on their assumed truth.

Epistemic siloing What I call epistemic siloing is a tendency for suspicious explanations to increase their staying power by changing the ways in which their adherents engage information that bears on their critical assessment. While there is a straightforward way in which suspicious explanations have a siloing effect for adherents individually, the dynamics of group relations produce more interesting and more powerful forms. Imagine a case in which a person believes in the existence of a conspiracy when in fact none exists. In such a case, when suspected conspirators testify truthfully to their noninvolvement in a conspiracy, the adherent of the conspiracy theory will regard their testimony of no evidential value, for the explanation predicts that anyone involved in the conspiracy will deny this involvement when questioned. I consider this a case of “siloing” because accepting the suspicious explanation renders unavailable to the adherent a source of information that is in fact reliable (testimony) regarding the question of the conspiracy’s existence. The general principle at work in this example should be easy to grasp. The one who accepts the explanation thereby accepts that some source of information is misleading. The characterization of information as misleading is hardly confined, in the tradition of suspicion, to conspiracy theories: as we have seen, a cornerstone of Freud’s theory is that introspection (and the testimony of patients) cannot be trusted, and all three of the masters of suspicion subscribed to some variant of the claim that the mass of their contemporaries were mistaken about matters of deep importance because they “uncritically” accepted the way society, morality, or culture presented itself to them. For the one who accepts that “appearances are misleading” in whatever area of life, appearances have no power to occasion a change of views. There is nothing irrational or epistemically suspect about this form of epistemic siloing. For it is, of course, true that conspirators will be

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disposed to lie when questioned; and thus the conspiracy theorist who discounts the testimony of suspected conspirators is behaving rationally. But the rationality of this treatment of information does not change the fact that in cases where the suspicious explanation is false, accepting it impedes one’s access to the truth of the matter, because it leads one to discount the value of evidence that does in fact support what is the case. The first social “siloing” effect with which I am concerned here results from the fact that there is a symbiotic relationship between suspicious explanations and social derogation. The term social derogation refers to the attribution, by members of a particular social group, of unflattering characteristics to members of some other social group. There is some evidence that a tendency toward social derogation is a deeply rooted feature of human psychology in the context of identity formation and maintenance—that there are conditions under which it is very likely that the members of in-groups will express negative views regarding out-group members.22 The actions that constitute social derogation are acts of testimony to the effect that persons of a particular kind (out-group members) have some bad characteristic. It is, I think, hardly controversial to think that exposure to such testimony is a common feature of the dynamics of social identity. And on the plausible assumption that persons have at least some tendency to accept the testimony of in-group members, social derogation is likely to produce at least some degree of acceptance of the attributions involved. Now I take it that principles of normal tendency are the subject matter of social derogation: acts of social derogation commonly take the form of claims to the effect that some type of person has a tendency to think or act in some bad way. Suppose we say that a suspicious explanation depends on a principle of normal tendency just in case only a person who accepts that principle will consider it worthy of serious consideration. I argued above that pragmatic weighting promotes the practical acceptance of suspicious explanations that fall into the zone between simple dismissal and full theoretical acceptance, and also that one of the actions that pragmatic weighting motivates is the propagation of the suspicious explanation. It should be fairly clear that the presence of some specific negative attribution within the discourse of some social group will have a tendency to increase the plausibility of suspicious explanations that depend on the corresponding principle of normal tendency. This, then, is one side of the symbiotic relationship between social derogation and suspicious explanations: when both turn around the same principle(s) of normal tendency, the existence of social derogation will increase the likelihood that a suspicious explanation will be received favorably enough for pragmatic weighting to take hold.

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The other side of the symbiotic relationship consists of a tendency for suspicious explanations to motivate social derogation. It seems to me that to claim explicitly that a person, or a group of persons, has acted in some bad way in some conditions is also to claim implicitly that such persons have a tendency to act in those ways, and that this relationship is the stronger to the extent to which the actions in question are diffused across the social group in question and extended over time. If this is correct, then the circulation of a suspicious explanation that attributes some long-standing pattern of bad action (or desire, or plan of action) to the members of some out-group will increase social derogation: for as the suspicious explanation circulates, so too will negative attributions concerning such persons, whether implicitly or explicitly. Below I will describe the circumstances in which this dynamic makes a particularly strong contribution to epistemic siloing. But here we are in a position to understand how increasing social derogation might by itself produce such an effect. I take it that social derogation sometimes results in decreasing interaction between in-group and out-group members—when, for example, the negative attributions in question have to do with such matters as trustworthiness, or with desires to harm or take advantage of in-group members. With decreasing interaction comes a decrease in one potential source of evidence against socially derogatory attributions: firsthand experience of the behavior of out-group members, including their testimony regarding their motivations. In cases where a suspicious explanation depends on a principle of normal tendency, then, promoting social derogation, if this decreases interaction with out-group members, decreases the availability to in-group members of evidence that bears on the truth or falsity of the explanation. Now the siloing effect I have been describing applies most obviously to conspiracy theories, as these typically are constituted by the ascription of bad desires, plans, and behaviors to some group of persons. One might well wonder whether this dynamic could be a factor in the reception of non-conspiratorial suspicious explanations. The explanations of the masters of suspicion, for example, involve principles of normal tendency that are proposed as universals (think of Nietzsche’s will to power or Freud’s claims about human drives) or depend on claims that are not about human tendencies at all (think of the toplevel claims of Marx’s historical materialism). I do take it to be the case that conspiracy theories are likely to strike up a mutually beneficial relationship with social derogation. But I do not think the dynamic is entirely absent from the works of the masters of suspicion, because all that is required for this dynamic to gain a foothold is some apparatus for

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considering distinctions between groups to be of explanatory importance. Capitalists, members of the ruling classes, Jews, and priests are human kinds that figure in the arguments of Marx and Nietzsche; and I have already argued that the person who accepts certain principles of normal tendency regarding such kinds of person will find the claims of Marx and Nietzsche more plausible than the person who does not. But also, social derogation does not require a preexisting in-group-out-group distinction characterized by potential hostility. One of the lessons of Henri Tajfel’s work in social psychology is that we have a highly developed and easily triggered ability to develop new group identities and to assign psychological characteristics to members of groups, even groups created ad hoc. What one might expect, given this state of affairs, is that one effect of suspicious explanations might be the formation of new social identities and the ascription of new principles of normal tendency to newly defined kinds of person. And it seems to me that the existence of vulgar Marxism, inasmuch as it involves thinking that the members of relatively newly conceived social identities (the capitalists and the ruling classes) have personal characteristics that are relevant to the explanation of the misery of the working classes, is evidence that this dynamic does operate in the history of effects. Marx’s historical materialism was not, I take it, committed to the idea that capitalists are by nature greedy and unconcerned with the well-being of their workers, even if Marx’s writings seem frequently to be informed by the assumption that they are. Where Marx’s theories are discussed in social contexts in which there are not barriers to the free circulation of claims as to the greed and inhumanity of capitalists, I take it that the elements for the symbiotic relationship I have described here are in place. I have just observed that Freud’s claims seem not to promote social derogation inasmuch as the patterns of desire and behavior they describe are taken to be human universals. But it does seem to me that a major distinction of group identity does emerge early on in the history of psychoanalysis: the distinction between those who accept Freud’s claims in relation to their own psychologies and those who reject them. This distinction figures crucially in the second social component of epistemic siloing that I want to discuss. At the end of the previous chapter I raised the idea that Freud’s recursive ad hominem defense might raise barriers to productive exchange between defenders and critics of psychoanalysis. To recapitulate briefly, Freud’s theories provide grounds for the defender of psychoanalysis to think that those who reject psychoanalysis are incapable of reasoning correctly concerning the theory’s merits. This position has a siloing effect by entailing that the only persons whose

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reasoning capacities function properly with respect to psychoanalytic theory are those who accept its truth. If the defense cannot non-fallaciously be taken to entail that any specific reason advanced to reject psychoanalytic theory cannot be a good one, it does have the consequence that the broad fact that critics of psychoanalysis, however numerous these might be, think that there are good reasons to reject the theory carries no weight. And it also has the consequence that dialogue between critics and defenders of psychoanalysis cannot be a dialogue of equals, for critics can be counted on to have reasoning capacities that are crippled by their resistance to the truth about themselves. Reasoned discourse, in the fullest sense, concerning psychoanalysis is only possible among those who accept it; others are, to paraphrase Freud, to be regarded as more patients than peers. The characteristic that generates the recursive ad hominem defense is not the exclusive property of psychoanalytic theory. What makes the defense possible is that among the “hidden” factors postulated by the theory is a mechanism that selectively interferes with cognition. There is a parallel in this area between Freud’s diagnosis of resistance and accusations of naï veté , such as I discussed above. In both cases, failure to accept the explanations in question is taken to be the product of some cognitive disfunction: if resistance leads the critic of psychoanalysis to deny the existence of her desires, naï veté can motivate a person to deny that some group of persons are so bad as to be part of a conspiracy. And just as in the case of psychoanalysis, the conspiracy or critical theorist need not find the fact that some large number of persons reject the explanations troubling, because the reasoning capacities of the persons in question are impaired; further, it can be expected that the naï veté of such persons will frustrate any attempts to convince them of the merits of the explanations in question, because they will resist the attribution of bad characteristics to the persons in question more than they should. I want to note that Freud’s ad hominem defense has an elegance that at least some conspiracy theories lack. His defense is, as I have said, recursive in nature. The person who accepts psychoanalytic theory does not have to accept any additional principles in order to be in a position to deploy the defense. A similar elegance is displayed by Marx’s historical materialism. To the extent that historical materialism includes as one of its basic principles that class-based societies present a false front, such that most persons fall prey to the “illusions of their age,” it already contains resources for diagnosing the rejection of historical materialism as a product of cognitive disfunction. In contrast, the claim that some group has engaged in conspiratorial activity does not entail that any other

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persons suffer from naï veté: conspiracy theories are often accompanied by such claims, but these are often recognizably ad hoc additions to the theory that serve a purely defensive purpose. The second kind of social-epistemic siloing that properly configured suspicious explanations produce, then, encourages those who accept the explanation to discount the capacities of those who do not to reason properly concerning the explanation’s merits, encouraging the constriction of discourse concerning the theory to the circles of its adherents. The final form of epistemic siloing I want to discuss is a synthesis of the two just discussed. A particularly powerful form of siloing results when a suspicious explanation encourages those who accept it to associate cognitive dysfunction with membership in some out-group. Such associations can take at least two different forms. On the one hand, one might think that belonging to some specific social identity causes the sort of cognitive distortion that impairs correct reasoning; I take this to have been Marx’s thought when he remarked casually that the capitalist, unlike the worker, has “a particular interest in deceiving himself ” concerning the true nature and origin of profit.23 But more subtly, such an association might be more purely a product of the social effects of suspicious explanations, inasmuch as the difference between acceptance and rejection comes to constitute an in-group/out-group boundary. These two forms of association magnify the siloing effects of the dynamics I have discussed in distinctive ways. The first form of association, inasmuch as it is parasitic on an existing in-groupout-group distinction, adds to the impediments to constructive dialogue I have discussed above the possibility that in-group members might, for theoretically motivated reasons, come to regard out-group members as incapable of proper reasoning about that matters with which the theory is concerned—as, for example, a Marxist might regard capitalists as incapable of proper reasoning about the merits of Marxist theory. And the second form of association, by effectively bringing new in-group-out-group distinctions into existence, invites the dynamics of such distinctions to play a role in the ways in which adherents of the theory regard nonadherents, introducing the establishment of negative characterizations of out-group members that are less the product of the theoretical commitments that define the in-group than they are the result of the dynamics of in-group discourse generally—in other words, general-purpose social derogation. I take it that the sorts of effects I have described, which are effects of certain structural characteristics of suspicious explanations, contribute to the staying power of suspicious explanations by reducing opportunities for those

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who accept the explanations to encounter grounds for reconsidering their acceptance. In some cases epistemic siloing is a matter of reducing discourse across the boundary that separates adherents from nonadherents; in other cases it is a matter of adherents regarding as evidentially unimportant the fact that nonadherents think that there are good reasons to reject the explanations in question. It is certainly possible for epistemic siloing to assume the stronger form of thinking that there is no point to engaging criticisms because no criticism presented by a nonadherent deserves serious consideration. This form of epistemic siloing is fallacious simply because, to repeat what I have said earlier, it does not follow from the fact that a person is affectively caused to believe that her reason to reject a certain claim is a good reason that it is not a good reason. But while this fallacious application of the general principle can be avoided through a modicum of critical self-awareness, the broader siloing effects of suspicion are less susceptible to rational correction. For even the critically self-aware adherent, to the extent that she regards nonadherents as cognitively impaired, will in general not regard the fact that a nonadherent thinks that she has a good reason to reject the theory as indicative of any need to consider that reason, any more than a conspiracy theorist will regard expressions of what he regards as naï veté as indicative of any need to reconsider his views of the characters and motivations of his suspected conspirators. By way of a summary of this second part of the chapter, I want to recall Lee Kirkpatrick’s “cheesecake” analogy. Cheesecake is particularly appealing because it satisfies a taste for sweets and a taste for fats; similarly, for Kirkpatrick (following Boyer and others), religion is cognitively appealing because it activates a number of discrete cognitive subsystems, including those concerned with understanding the world, navigating intra- and intergroup relations, and finding safe harbor in times of danger. And this characteristic of “cognitive gadgets” such as cheesecake and religion—the fact that they combine different instances of stimulation or recruitment in one cultural artifact—contributes significantly to explaining their cultural stability. In this section I have discussed three different ways in which suspicious explanations generate interesting self-promoting or self-preserving dynamics. I have argued that such explanations leverage ethical commitments to promote the sense that some great good is threatened or that some great evil can be remedied; that pragmatic weighting makes it possible for very implausible explanations to have a reception favorable enough to ensure their own propagation and change behaviors even among the unconvinced; and that suspicious explanations can

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have an isolating or “siloing” effect whereby evidence that is relevant to their truth or falsity becomes unavailable to their adherents. The combination of these three characteristics makes, it seems to me, for a particularly powerful form of cognitive gadgetry. It seems reasonable to me to think that other things being equal, an explanation that leverages ethical commitments, displays pragmatic weighting, and generates epistemic siloing will have a greater ability to achieve cultural stability by remaining in circulation within a population than either explanations that display none of these features or explanations that display only one or two. I take conspiracy theories to display the effects of this cognitive gadgetry fairly clearly, inasmuch as these purport to describe a serious threat to some great good, portray their own propagation as part of what is required to combat this, and delegitimate what would otherwise be sources of relevant information. And I take it that it is because they produce these effects that conspiracy theories flourish—or more precisely, when a conspiracy theory produces these effects within a specific population, it will tend to produce both adherents and nonadhering propagators, and as a result will find cultural success. What I take myself to have shown in the second part of this chapter is, first, that features that make for effective cognitive gadgetry can be displayed by non-conspiratorial suspicious explanations and, second, that these features are displayed in various ways by the works of the masters of suspicion. I conclude this section of the chapter, and set the stage for my closing remarks, with an observation premised on these claims. If the identification of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as “masters” of a particular form of discourse took place back in the 1960s, my reframing of that discourse as an explanatory one makes possible a new claim regarding the historical significance of their work and of the tradition or genre that grows from it. The “masters” embedded, in their non-conspiratorial explanations of large-scale social phenomena, the characteristics that make for a particular form of cognitive gadgetry—that form that is on display in conspiracy theories. Thus one of the things that take place in the history of their work, and of the reception of their work, is the development of a set of techniques for endowing explanations of large-scale social phenomena with the sort of cognitive gadgetry that I have been exploring without appeals to conspiracy. It seems to me that the result of this history has been the development of a recognizable genre of academic work whose prominence is a product of the ethical leveraging, pragmatic weighting, and epistemic siloing on display in its examples. And one way, in turn, to narrate the history of this genre is as a series of experiments—some more successful, some less—in cognitive gadgetry.

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Frankenstein’s theory I conclude with remarks that are intended to set the stage for a later project, one that will extend the sort of reconstructive work I have undertaken here to more recent literature. It seems to me that when viewed in historical retrospect through the lens of cognitive gadgetry, the works of each of the masters of suspicion are more successful in certain areas than in others. In some instances this has more to do with factors that bear on the reception of those works than it does with the way they are internally constructed. For example, the evaluative significance of the sexual motivations to which Freud’s theories attended have changed significantly since the early twentieth century, with the result, it seems to me, that the possible truth of those theories is considerably less interesting than it once was. But the difference between internal and external causes notwithstanding, I think it is possible to identify in the works of the masters some elements that have enjoyed particular success, where success is a matter of appropriation for later episodes in the explanation of large-scale social phenomena. And inasmuch as cognitive gadgetry is a matter of the combination of several devices into a single cultural package, there is the possibility that some elements of the theories of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud might be extracted from their works and combined in novel ways by later authors in ways that make for more effective cognitive gadgetry, or perhaps for cognitive gadgetry suited to different historical circumstances. Here I want to mention one prominent feature in the works of each of the masters that I think has in fact been appropriated by later theorists and redeployed in later works, sometimes in combination with contributions from the others. What seems to me to be the most durable aspect of Marx’s theories is a composite whose first element lies in the realm of valuations. It is the ethical imperative he attaches to remedying the unequal distribution of goods and harms across the different populations of the world. Consistently in Marx’s work, the fact that some persons enjoy ease and luxury while many, many others suffer from deprivations along multiple axes, often to the point of death, is not merely bad: it is outrageously bad, so bad that its badness permeates the entire fabric of society, so bad that the remedying of this inequality is the highest imperative of political action. And the second element of this composite is the implication, which I take to be consistent across Marx’s works, that those who benefit from this inequality bear more responsibility for its existence than do those who suffer

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from it. The product of these two elements is the view that the sufferings of the wretched are an outrage that cries out for correction, and that the balance of responsibility—and, perhaps, of blame—for these lies with the non-wretched. Now I do not mean to claim that Marx invented this position, nor that any work that displays it owes a debt of historical influence to him. I take the position to be intuitively attractive on its own merits, and certainly in evidence in cultural circles far removed from Marx’s influence (and in case it matters, I do not want to be interpreted as claiming that it is false.) But there do seem to me to be three reasons why it makes sense to claim that Marx’s work is important for the role that this position plays in later, and specifically academic, discourses. First, Marx’s identification of material wealth as that which makes some persons more powerful than others (as opposed, say, to hereditary status or intellectual prowess), and his claim that the intellectual dynamics of societies are under the control of the wealthy—two claims that, if they are true, are not obviously true— have been tremendously influential for later thinkers. Second, Marx not only expressed the ethically powerful composite position I have identified, but put it to work for the project of explaining large-scale social realities—thus displaying the advantages, from the perspective of cognitive gadgetry, of building an apparatus of explanatory theory around it. And third, as we have seen, there is a deep-seated ambiguity in Marx’s theory regarding whether the non-wretched can in any stable way be assigned responsibility and blame for the sufferings of the wretched: historical materialism tends to undercut the idea, whereas Marx’s rhetoric and certain of his elaborations strongly suggest it. This ambiguity leaves unsettled what ethical evaluations are appropriately attached to capitalists and other powerful persons—and also what sorts of actions in regards to them are appropriate either before or after the arrival of the classless society. The lack of clarity on this issue makes for a certain flexibility: capitalists, or other vessels of social power, can be by turns condemned as conspiratorial evildoers or exonerated as pawns of forces outside their control. The aspect of Nietzsche’s approach to suspicious explanation that has enjoyed the greatest success is the particular sort of narrative form that his explanations assume. The elements of which his story regarding morality is composed—the Jews and their sublime hatred, the “will to power”/“instinct for cruelty,” the influence of the ascetic priesthood—have not fared particularly well. But episodic origin stories now comprise a recognizable academic genre, that of the “genealogy,” of which Nietzsche’s is the foundational text. I regard the episodic form of Nietzsche’s historical narratives as crucially important:

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following Nietzsche, what is required for the proper assessment (i.e., ethical evaluation) of a phenomenon is not a comprehensive narrative of the entirety of its historical career, but rather knowledge of specific episodes in which it has consorted with phenomena that themselves bear significant ethical valuations (usually negative ones). I think it worth noting that one attraction of this aspect of Nietzsche’s approach to explanation is that its theoretical requirements are minimal. The core device is the description of particular episodes in the history of some phenomenon’s existence, which is more easily done than the construction of more comprehensive narratives. To stay true to form the episodes in question will generate negative ethical charge; there are a variety of ways in which narrative episodes can do this, but the most common one—the claim that some ethically bad factor has made a crucial causal contribution to the existence of the phenomenon under investigation—requires little in the way of theoretical sophistication. Nietzsche’s Genealogy thus models a method that is easily appropriated and can be married to a wide variety of more specific theoretical resources. I repeat here the worry I raised at the end of my chapter on Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s extremely lax historical tethering makes it very difficult to know what actual events he took himself to be describing, and as a result makes it quite difficult to assess how likely it is that his stories are actually true. To the extent that later “genealogists” play fast and loose with historical tethering and thus produce stories of inscrutable plausibility (for the moment I make no specific claims about this), it is possible that such practices are legitimated by the Genealogy’s status as ur-genealogy. And I take this legitimating dynamic to be encouraged by the practice, all too common among commentators on the Genealogy, of bypassing entirely any engagement with the question of whether Nietzsche’s historical claims are in fact true. The aspect of Freud’s work that has made the greatest contribution to the later tradition of suspicion, it seems to me, is its positioning of those who reject his claims as epistemically incompetent, such that the fact of their rejection poses no threat to the theory. Freud’s theories are constructed in such a way that they explain their own rejection as a product of causes that are not truth-relevant and that operate broadly within the living population. Psychoanalytic theory predicts that some persons, perhaps many, will reject those theories, thinking (falsely) that they have good reasons to do so. As a result, the fact that some persons, and perhaps many persons, reject those theories, and think that they have good reasons to do so, provides adherents with no grounds for reconsidering their adherence to them. This aspect of Freud’s theories has an important strategic

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value inasmuch as it facilitates the development of closed circles of adherents who regard nonadherents as epistemically irrelevant. It thus provides both insulation against criticism by outsiders and a defense against the idea that a theory’s marginal status within its own field of research should be grounds to suspect its integrity. There is at least one reason to be skeptical of the notion that it is Freud’s influence that accounts for whatever epistemic partitioning is on display in the later tradition of suspicion: as we have seen, both Marx and Nietzsche portrayed their critics as, in one way or another, in the thrall of the illusions that it was the burden of their work to puncture. I take Freud to have developed more of a formal apparatus to ground this position than either Marx or Nietzsche, one that has been particularly effective in the later history of psychoanalysis; but is certainly possible that later theorists might appropriate from Marx or Nietzsche the idea that objectors are epistemically deficient, and see no need to work out the details of this position as Freud did. For the present I assign the dynamics of epistemic partitioning to Freud more out of convenience than conviction; not much depends on his influence in this area being more important than that of the other masters. My claim here is that while the contributions of each of the masters of suspicion to the later tradition of suspicion are multifarious, one contribution by each stands out as particularly prominent. To conclude I want to remark that I think that it is the combination of these three elements that marks out the main lines of the genre of academic work that is called, variously, critique, critical theory, or genealogy: Marx’s attention to the ethical dynamics of material inequality, Nietzsche’s episodic narrative form, and Freud’s social-epistemic silo-building. For present purposes I intend this remark to be more suggestive than informative: suggestive of a way one might narrate the history of certain streams of academic work over the past half-century, streams that have been much in evidence in recent years within my own field of religious studies. If I am right, such an approach holds considerably more promise than one premised on Ricoeur’s interpretive framework; it makes for more theoretically robust and illuminating description of the argumentative dynamics of the texts involved, and also for more pointed critical engagement with them, than are possible against the theoretical background of a “hermeneutics of suspicion.”

Notes Acknowledgments 1 2 3 4

Fenster, Conspiracy Theories, viif. Stevens, I Can Sell You Anything, 24f. Ibid., 56f. Eventually some of the contents of the former paper appeared as “Contra Penner, What’s Really Wrong with Functional Explanations,” forthcoming in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2018). The latter paper, “Critical Theory, Conspiracy, and ‘Gullible Critique,’” is slated for publication by Boston University in a volume of conference proceedings.

Introduction 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 78. Geuss, “Nietzsche and Genealogy,” 288. See, for example, Habermas, On the Logic of the Social Sciences. I will also occasionally refer to Ricoeur’s masters as purveyors of theories or of theoretical claims. In line with much of the literature on which these two chapters depend, I take theories to be templates for explanations, or sets of general propositions that can be used to generate explanations. So, for example, Marx’s general (theoretical) claims about the economic dynamics of societies can be used to generate explanations of particular historical events—why, for example, capitalists supported legislation outlawing child labor at a particular juncture, or why the military supported the interests of one class over another at different junctures. It will not generally be very important for my purposes to distinguish between explanatory claims, narrowly construed, and theoretical claims. Lewis, “The Question of Orientalism.” Stone, “Madness.” Said, Orientalism, 345; Foucault, “An Exchange with Michel Foucault.” See Watkins, “Methodological Individualism and Social Tendencies,” 734. Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, 12; Webster, The Cause of World Unrest, viii. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” 229f. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 45.

218

Notes

12 Ibid., 45, emphases in the original. Compare Frank Cioffi, writing in 1998: “How are we to account for the fact that after almost a century of discussion there are those who see in Freudian psychoanalysis the greatest contribution to human understanding of our time and others who see it as ‘the most stupendous intellectual confidence-trick of the twentieth century’ (Peter Medawar)?”. Cioffi, Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience, 3. 13 Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 49. 14 Boyer, Religion Explained, 233–36. 15 I base this locution on Boyer’s claim that religious rituals are “snares for thought”; Boyer, Religion Explained, 263. 16 See, for example, Pigden, “Conspiracy Theories and the Conventional Wisdom.” 17 Leiter, “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” 77. The quotation in this passage is from Miller, Fact and Method, 95. 18 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 345. 19 Ibid., 359. 20 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 358. 21 The essays are contained in Macdonald, Philosophy and Analysis, 132–56. 22 Ibid., 151. 23 For discussion of the reasons-versus-causes debate in the reconstruction of Freud, see Grünbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, 59–83. 24 MacDonald, Philosophy and Analysis, 134. 25 Ibid., 142f. 26 Ibid., 143. 27 Ibid., 148. 28 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 374. 29 Ibid., 363, emphasis added. 30 For the material in this paragraph I draw on Wright, Interpretation and Explanation, 5–33. 31 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 217. Italics in the original. 32 The contemporaneous monument of analytic discussions of the methodology of explanations is William Dray’s Laws and Explanations in History. The literature Dray engaged does not include the continental tradition, but concentrates instead on the “covering model theory” advanced by Carl Hempel and recently championed by Patrick Gardiner. In his opening pages (8ff.), Dray notes opposition to the covering-law model from “idealist philosophers” such as Oakeshott and Collingwood. But as he describes it, the idealist position, though it is rooted in claims as to the “autonomy of history,” does not distance historical scholarship from the task of explanation generally. 33 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 374. 34 See Ricoeur, “The Question of Proof in Freud’s Psychoanalytic Writings,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 247–73.

Notes

219

35 Sherwood, The Logic of Explanation in Psychoanalysis. In “The Question of Proof,” Ricoeur credits Sherwood for convincing him that “What is remarkable about psychoanalytic explanation is that it brings into view motives which are causes and which require an explanation of their autonomous functioning. . . . Freud’s use of the idea of cause and motive is perhaps both complex and flexible . . . but he leaves no room for an opposition between cause and motive.” Ricoeur, “The Question of Proof,” 262f. 36 Reagan, Paul Ricoeur, 104f. In the elided section of this passage, Ricoeur acknowledged that “everything is not a text,” and in the vicinity of references to his own work on the masters of suspicion remarked that “they put in question the very idea of criteria, that is, of solving the problem by a good criteriology.” 37 Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation. 38 Davidson, Essays on Action & Events, 3. 39 Harman, “The Inference to the Best Explanation,” 88–95. 40 Clark and Wright, Mind, Psychoanalysis and Science. 41 For a description of the publication history of Macmillan’s book, see Frederick Crews’s review at http://human-nature.com/freud/crews4.html. 42 For an overview, see Forrester, Dispatches from the Freud Wars. 43 Leiter, “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion.” 44 Ibid., 75. 45 Ibid., 77. 46 Ibid., 105. 47 Ibid., 78. 48 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 28.

1 Suspicious Explanation: A Primer 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9

MacDonald, Philosophy and Analysis, 142f. See above, 10, 13. Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” 3. “Freud can be defended on one important point: there is no inherent conflict between reason explanations and causal explanations. Since beliefs and desires are causes of the actions for which they are reasons, reason explanations include an essential causal element.” Davidson, “Paradoxes of Irrationality,” 293. Burge, “Mind-Body Causation and Explanatory Practice,” 118. Hornsby, “Agency and Causal Explanation,” 165. Miller, Fact and Method, 60. Ibid., 6. Miller presents an encapsulation of his position on causal explanation in Analyzing Marx, 284–92. Ibid., 78.

220 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25

26

Notes Ibid., 81. Ibid., 126–35. Woodward, Making Things Happen, 18. Ibid., 6. Ibid. In this connection consider a remark by Jaegwon Kim: “few people are really worried about mental causation, that is, really worried that mental properties are indeed causally efficacious. Instead, the real and philosophically legitimate worry is finding an intelligible account of mental causation.” Cited in Lackey, “Explanation and Mental Causation,” 377. Burge discusses epiphenomenalism at some length in “Mind-Body Causation and Explanatory Practice.” Wright, Teleological Explanations, 62f. Miller, Fact and Method, 87; see also Miller, Analyzing Marx, 287–89. Miller, Fact and Method, 94. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 105. See Garfinkel, Forms of Explanation, 138, who cites R. G. Collingwood in support of this position. Rossano, “The Religious Mind,” 347. See also Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities, 129–36. Garfinkel, Forms of Explanation, 76. The distinction between vindicatory and debunking genealogies is, I take it, conceptually downstream of this distinction; see, for example, Prinz, “Genealogies of Morals,” 191. Boyer, Religion Explained, 144, 149. Both Watkins and Miller understand reference to contexts of decision to be entirely consistent with “methodological individualism.” Watkins, for example, takes methodological individualism to imply that “we may be able to make the [bad social] phenomenon disappear, not by recruiting good men to fill the posts hitherto occupied by bad men, nor by trying to destroy men’s socially unfortunate dispositions while fostering their socially beneficial dispositions, but simply by altering the situations they confront.” Similarly, Miller remarks “what is false about [a construal of the principle of methodological individualism] is the assumption that some network of psychological causes will always serve to explain. Often, though the causes existed and were causally sufficient, the description of these psychological causes is too shallow to explain.” Watkins, “Methodological Individualism and Social Tendencies,” 738; Miller, Fact and Method, 117. Of course such explanations do not need to be restricted to what standard-issue ToM says about how minds work. Watkins, for example, argued that in two historically prominent instances it was “the perception some typical feature of our mental make-up which had previously been disregarded” that led to significant advances in classical economic theory. See Watkins, “Ideal Types and

Notes

27

28

29 30 31

32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42

221

Historical Explanation,” 34f. In later chapters we will see that both Nietzsche and Freud postulate psychological tendencies that go beyond the deliverances of folk psychology, even if they obey the general logic of ToM. So, for example, Peter Manics argues that social explanation requires the notion of social mechanisms that (in my terminology) determine contexts of decision: “Getting a handle on members’ beliefs and understandings of their world is but a necessary first step for both understanding and explanation in social science. Because [the sociologist] can take a second step and provide an understanding of the social mechanisms that explain typical activities in that society, her understanding is still greater.” Manics, A Realist Philosophy of Social Science, 66. On “invisible hand” explanations, see in particular Ullman-Margalit, “InvisibleHand Explanations,” 263–91. Garfinkel offers a helpful overview of the main differences between the “Smith/Locke/Nozick” and “structuralist or Marxist” explanations in Forms of Explanation, 75–88. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 18. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style, 54. See, for example, Pascal Boyer: “people faced with any kind of complex interaction tend to use anthropomorphic concepts. Villages or social classes or nations are described as ‘wanting’ this, ‘fearing’ that, ‘taking decisions,’ ‘failing to perceive’ what is happening, etc. Even the workings of a committee are often described in such psychological terms: the committee realized this, regretted that, etc. To think that a village, a company or a committee is a big agent spares us the difficult work of describing the extraordinarily complicated interaction that occurs when you get more than two people together.” Boyer, Religion Explained, 251. Wright, Teleological Explanations, 15f. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 270. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 19. Harman, “The Inference to the Best Explanation,” 88–95. For a useful discussion of earlier literature on the subject, see Thagard, “The Best Explanation: Criteria for Theory Choice,” 77–82, and Achinstein, “Inference to the Best Explanation, Or, Who Won the Mill-Whewell Debate?” Harman, “The Inference to the Best Explanation,” 89. Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation, 107. I take much of what follows from Sober, “Bayesianism—Its Scope and Limits,” and Howson and Urbach, Scientific Reasoning. Stone, Bayes’s Rule, 128. Some formulations of the theorem use the variable k to represent background knowledge, thus: P(h|e&k)=P(e|h&k)/P(e|k) • P(h|k). See, for example, McGrew, “Confirmation, Heuristics, and Explanatory Reasoning,” 560. Stone, Bayes’s Rule, 16–19.

222 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60

61

62 63

Notes Lipton, “Inference to the Best Explanation,” 61. Ibid., 61, 59, 151. Ibid., 61. “Once one realizes that an interesting version [of IBE] requires an account of explanatory loveliness that is conceptually independent of likeliness, the weakness of our grasp on [sic] what makes one explanation lovelier than another is discouraging.” Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 72f. Ibid., 122. Ibid., xi. Thagard noted that Kieth Lehrer had declared this problem simply hopeless; see Thagard, “The Best Explanation,” 76. Salmon, “Explanation and Confirmation,” 81. Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation, 108. Ibid., 59f. Hegel, Reason in History, 54. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 75. Cited in Hook, From Hegel to Marx, 37. Taylor’s coinage follows mention of vulgar Marxism; “if there were such a thing as a vulgar Hegelian,” he remarks offhandedly, such a person would believe that descriptions of “idées-forces” suffice for historical explanation. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 204. Wood, “Hegel and Marxism,” 427f. Similarly, Thomas A. Lewis prefers a reading according to which “this absolute [i.e., Spirit] is to be understood in terms of the social practices of the human community rather than the superhuman being frequently represented in religious representations.” Lewis, Why Philosophy Matters, 77. Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude, 42. See also 146–51 for a discussion of the different senses in which Geist can be understood as an agent. For a brief overview of the difference between older and contemporary interpretations of Hegel’s philosophy, see Wartenberg, “Hegel’s Idealism,” 117–26. Hegel, Reason in History, 89. See, for example, Rosen: “Although Absolute Idealism does not play a significant role in the theory of ideology itself, it does play a crucial role, a negative one, in the background to it. As we shall see, several important themes—the relationship between individual agents and historical processes and the apparently independent life taken on by certain material objects, for example—are brought out in Hegel’s work. The challenge for the theory of ideology, as it was understood by Marx and later Marxists, was to give an account of such phenomena without commitment to the idealist assumptions with which they are surrounded in Hegel’s system.” On Voluntary Servitude, 42.

Notes

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2 Classic Suspicion: Marx 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory, ix. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. II, 100. Ibid. Ibid., 101. Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” in Early Writings, 46. Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Early Writings, 34f. Ibid., 40. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 10, 48–50. Ibid., vol. 6, 486. Miller, Analyzing Marx, 106. Cited in Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory, xvii. Cited in Ibid., xvii. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6, 482. Ibid., 486. Ibid., 489. See, for example, Wood, Karl Marx, 92f. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 273. Miller, Analyzing Marx, 9. In “The German Ideology” the point is encapsulated as follows: “The conditions under which definite productive forces can be applied are the conditions of the rule of a definite class of society, whose social power, deriving from its property, has its practical-idealistic expression in each case in the form of the state, and, therefore, every revolutionary struggle is directed against a class which till then has been in power.” Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, 52. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6, 489. Ibid., 490. Wood, Karl Marx, 87. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, 78. Ibid., 77. Marxism was associated with functional explanation as early as 1948 by Robert Merton. See Merton, “Manifest and Latent Functions,” 44. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory, 249. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, 36f. Marx, “The Leading Article of No. 179 of Kölnische Zeitung,” in Marx and Engels, On Religion, 37. Marx, “The Communism of the Paper Rheinischer Beobachtung,” in Marx and Engels, On Religion, 83f. Marx, Capital, vol. III, 184.

224 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60

61 62

Notes Ibid., vol. 1, 172. Ibid., 387, n. 92. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory, 279. Wood, Karl Marx, 99. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 433. Ibid., vol. III, 298. Ibid., 300. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory, 269. Ibid., 271. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 182. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory, 271. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 11, 108. Ibid., 118. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 390. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6, 486f. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 381. Ibid., 741. Ibid., 739. Ibid., 92. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 11, 190f. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 389f. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, 55. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 60. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 173. Compare this passage to Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the men, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to give up their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions.” In Marx, Early Writings, 44. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6, 494. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 269. Ibid., 236. Ibid., 268. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory, 400. About this claim Cohen remarks, “Marx never states this explicitly psychological thesis, but it must be attributed to him if we are to make sense of a great deal of his theory of ideology.” Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 11, 127f. Compare this passage from the opening pages of The Eighteenth Brumaire: “In the classically austere traditions of the Roman Republic its gladiators found the ideals and art forms, the self-deceptions that they needed in order to conceal

Notes

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79

225

from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to maintain their passion on the high plane of great historical tragedy.” Ibid., 104–05; cited in Meyerson, False Consciousness, 6. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 956. Wood, Karl Marx, 127. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 916. Ibid., 486. Ibid., 592. Ibid., 723f. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 92. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 11, 190f. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 342. Marx and Engels, On Religion, 54. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6, 486f. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 298. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth, 219. Here see Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude, 216. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 793f. Here a passage from Arthur Danto is relevant: “The psychology of metaphorical address, since metaphor is a rhetorician’s device, is that the audience will itself supply the connection withheld by the metaphor; the rhetorician opens a kind of gap with the intention that the logical energies of his audience will arc it, with the consequence that having participated in the progression of argument, the audience convinces itself.” Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 254. Miller, “Methodological Individualism,” 413.

3 Classic Suspicion: Nietzsche 1 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 57. 2 For the information referenced in this paragraph, see Young, Friedrich Nietzsche, 459f. 3 Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy, 144. Leiter ascribes the popularization of the view that “genealogy” refers to a “historico-philosophical method” to Foucault; Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 166. 4 Nietzsche, Genealogy, 4, 5. 5 Ibid., 5. On Nietzsche’s actual English sources, see Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 197f. For a substantive comparison between Rée’s method and Nietzsche’s, see Prinz, “Genealogies of Morals.” 6 Nietzsche, Genealogy, 7.

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Notes

7 Ibid. Compare Beyond Good and Evil, 6: “It could even be possible that whatever gives value to those good and honorable things has an incriminating link, bond, or tie to the very things that look like their evil opposites; perhaps they are even essentially the same. Perhaps!” Owen cites this passage in a different translation in Nietzsche’s Genealogy, 71. 8 Nietzsche, Genealogy, 51. 9 Ibid., 52. 10 Ibid., 12. 11 P. J. E. Kail also favors a reading of the Genealogy of Morals as representing, globally, an inference to the best explanation; see Kail, “‘Genealogy’ and the Genealogy,” 231. 12 Leiter summarizes the entire project of the GM with reference to such principles: “The focus of most of the argument in the Genealogy is at the psychological level: three fundamental psychological mechanisms—ressentiment (GM I), bad conscience (GM II), and the will to power (GM III)—that are native to creatures like us do all the explanatory work.” Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 221. 13 Nietzsche, Genealogy, 15, 38, 42, 57, 93. 14 Ibid., 52. See also Beyond Good and Evil, 153: “Life itself is essentially a process of appropriating, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker, oppressing, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating, and at least, the very least, exploiting. . . . ‘Exploitation’ does not belong to a corrupted or imperfect, primitive society: it belongs to the essence of being alive as a fundamental organic function; it is a result of genuine will to power, which is just the will of life.” 15 This terminology is from Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy, 34. 16 Anderson, “Nietzsche’s Priests,” 30. 17 Nietzsche, Genealogy, 92. 18 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 84. 19 Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 195; Poellner, “Ressentiment and Morality,” 124. Jesse Prinz inexplicably (to my mind) claims that it was “early Christians” who undertook the work of revaluation (Prinz, “Genealogies of Morals,” 189). Mark Migotti corrects Prinz on this point: see Migotti, “History, Genealogy, Nietzsche,” 221–23. 20 This characterization is Jacob Golomb’s; see his Introduction to Nietzsche and Jewish Culture, ix. 21 On this designation, and on Nietzsche’s hopes for Jewish assimilation, see Yirmiyahu Yovel, “Nietzsche and the Jews: the Structure of an Ambivalence.” 22 Nietzsche, Genealogy, 11. 23 Ibid., 22. 24 Ibid., 21, 17. 25 Ibid., 11. 26 Ibid., 23.

Notes 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

227

Ibid., 16. Ibid. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 20. Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 204. Wallace, “Ressentiment, Value, and Self-Vindication,” 116f. Poellner, “Ressentiment and Morality,” 123f. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 21. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 32, 18. Ibid., 32. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 84. On the chronology of the “slave revolt,” see Young, Friedrich Nietzsche, 462, 510, and Migotti, “History, Genealogy, Nietzsche,” 222f. This term is Owen’s; see, for example, Nietzsche’s Genealogy, 88. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 25f. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 17f. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 42f. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 56. Ibid., 57. Ibid. Ibid., 59f. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 64. Ibid. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 84, 78, 100f.

228 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88 89

Notes Ibid., 85. Ibid., 85f. Ibid., 85. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 85. Ibid., 88. Ibid. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 93. Ibid. Leiter claims that this description is “of a piece with” Nietzsche’s claims in the first essay that ressentiment promotes an “imaginary revenge” against unpleasant stimuli; (Nietzsche on Morality, 259). I think this is a fair characterization; nonetheless this is an ad hoc addition to the notion of ressentiment, in that Nietzsche introduces it solely for the purpose of the discussion at hand, and it plays no role elsewhere in his arguments. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 94. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 99, 101. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 90f. Ibid., 106f. Ibid., 120. See, for example, Geuss: “Nietzsche uses the term ‘will’ in a very flexible and expansive way to refer both to smaller and to larger entities than the will of a biologically individual human being. One can, according to Nietzsche, look at what we would normally call ‘my will’ as a kind of resultant of the struggle within me of various drives, impulses, and desires, and each of these can itself in some sense be called a ‘will.’ Similarly one can attribute a ‘will’ to various entities that are larger than me: the University of Cambridge can have a will, so can the UK, the European Union, etc.” Geuss, “Nietzsche and Genealogy,” 276. Williams, “Naturalism and Genealogy,” 158. Ibid., 159. I follow Owen in thinking that Williams’s term fiction misleads inasmuch as it connotes the absence of intent to offer a truthful description. Owen prefers “artistic devices” to Williams’s “fictive devices,” observing that the fact that a portrait employs a deliberate simplification of perspective does not entail that it is not “a truthful representation of (the character of) the person portrayed,” and that in fact

Notes

90 91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

110

229

deliberate departure from realism can highlight “salient characteristics” of a person that would otherwise be easy to miss. Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy, 141. Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 217f. Ibid., 189. Ibid., 195. Migotti, “History, Genealogy, Nietzsche,” 223, italics in the original. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 27. Hatab, “Why Would Master Morality Surrender Its Power?” 201. Hatab stretches beyond the Genealogy in search of resources to answer this question, making significant use of the Birth of Tragedy. And his discussion is not entirely ahistorical: he attributes to Nietzsche the position that the history of philosophy, in which Socrates played a major role, set the stage for the eventual triumph of “slave morality.” But like Leiter, he largely passes over the Genealogy’s references to Jews and Christianity in silence. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 72. Cited in Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy, 145. Cited in Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 76. Ibid., 150; Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy, 133. Ibid., 135. Nietzsche, Genealogy, 91. Cited in Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 173. Ibid., 178. Young’s proposal in this area is quite similar to Leiter’s; see Young, Friedrich Nietzsche, 484. Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 179. Leiter, “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” 104. Williams, “Naturalism and Genealogy,” 155. Ibid., 159. Ibid., 160. Leiter, “Nietzsche on Morality,” 176. So, for example, I do not need to take sides in the dispute about Nietzsche’s purported anti-Semitism between Robert Holub and Brian Leiter, which is on display in Leiter’s review essay “Nietzsche’s Hatred of ‘Jew Hatred.’” It is germane to my arguments that Holub and Leiter both agree that Nietzsche was powerfully exposed to anti-Semitism; their disagreement turns around the question of whether he himself internalized the anti-Semitism that suffused the world of his social experience. My claim is that Nietzsche made strategic use of anti-Semitism, informed by his experience of its character and prevalence among those who might read his books. So I wholeheartedly approve a remark that Jesse Prinz appends to his argument that the critical force of the Genealogy of Morals depends on its historical accuracy: “If what I have been suggesting is right, then history does matter, and heirs to

230

Notes Nietzsche should try to get things right. Certain details that historians care about (exact names and dates, for instance) may not matter, but Nietzschean genealogists should try to gain accurate historical insight into the factors that shaped and that sustain prevailing psychosocial norms.” Prinz, “Genealogies of Morals,” 195.

4 Classic Suspicion: Freud 1 Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria (Dora),” in The Penguin Freud Reader, 525. 2 See Sachs, “In Fairness to Freud,” 319. 3 “Now that the Freud wars are over it seems a good time for a new translation. This is certainly a good time for psychoanalysis: because it is so widely discredited, because there is no prestige, or glamour, or money in it, only those who are really interested will go into it. And now that Freud’s words are so casually dismissed, a better, more eloquent case needs to be made for the value of his writing.” Phillips, “After Strachey,” 36. 4 See Crew’s autobiographical footnote in The Memory Wars, p. 9, n. 2. 5 Demorest, Psychology’s Grand Theorists, 2. 6 So, for example, I will ignore Freud’s distinction between unconscious and preconscious materials, and will use the term unconscious to refer to mental content of which a person is not aware. 7 I follow the practice of the Penguin Freud Reader in retaining the original German terms here. For a brief discussion of controversies around the English rendering of Freud’s terms, see Makari, Revolution in Mind, 463f. 8 Freud, “Outline of Psychoanalysis,” in The Penguin Freud Reader, 3. 9 Ibid., 4. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 26. 12 Ibid., 52f. 13 Ibid., 52. 14 Ibid., 54. 15 In the New Introductory Lectures Freud wrote that the Über-Ich “is also the vehicle of the Ich ideal by which the Ich measures itself, which it emulates, and whose demand for ever greater perfection it strives to fulfill.” New Introductory Lectures, 81. 16 Freud, “Outline of Psychoanalysis,” 27. 17 Ibid., 53. 18 Freud, New Introductory Lectures, 86. 19 Freud, “Outline of Psychoanalysis,” 2f. 20 Ibid., 27.

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21 Ibid., 33. 22 Freud also allowed, however, that in some cases an instinctual drive might find a “substitutive satisfaction” in neurotic behaviors (symptoms) “without the acquiescence and also without the comprehension of the Ich”; see Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 163f. 23 Freud, “Outline of Psychoanalysis,” 29. 24 Ibid., 31. 25 Makari, Revolution in Mind, 103. 26 Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis,” 452f. 27 Ibid., 453f. 28 Ibid., 454. 29 Demorest, “Psychology’s Grand Theorists,” 2f. 30 So, for example, in 1905 Freud wrote, “The manifestations of the illness are, to put it bluntly, the patient’s sexual activity. No individual case will ever be capable of proving such a general principle, but I can only repeat it over and over again, because I never encounter anything else: sexuality is the key to the problem of psychoneuroses and neuroses in general. No one who scorns this idea will ever be in a position to solve this problem.” Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis,” 533. 31 See Makari, Revolution in Mind, 314–19. 32 Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Penguin Freud Reader, 165, italics in the original. 33 Ibid., 166, 168. 34 Ibid., 169. 35 Ibid., 170. 36 Freud, “Outline of Psychoanalysis,” 5. 37 Ibid., 41. 38 Ibid., 40. 39 Ibid., 44. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 45. 42 Ibid., 46. 43 Ibid., 48. 44 Ibid. 45 Makari, Revolution in Mind, 278. 46 Ibid., 274. 47 Davidson, “Paradoxes of Irrationality,” 291. 48 Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 188. 49 Freud, “Outline of Psychoanalysis,” 51. 50 Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 218. Frank Cioffi discusses this example in Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience, 96f.

232 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76

Notes Davidson, “Paradoxes of Irrationality,” 304. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 71. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 14. Ibid., 51f. Ibid., 126. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 21. Freud, New Introductory Lectures, 60. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 27. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 101. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 135. It is somewhat odd that Freud labeled the claims in question as objections, since they are just summary restatements of his position. I take it that the objection he was imagining is just that those claims are massively implausible—sufficiently so that, as he wrote, “any other explanation which can avoid such assumptions would seem to merit preference.” Freud, Totem and Taboo, 135, emphasis added. See also Moses and Monotheism, 170: “It is not easy to translate the concepts of individual psychology into mass psychology, and I do not think that much is to be gained by introducing the concept of a ‘collective’ unconscious—the content of the unconscious is collective anyhow, a general possession of mankind.” Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 102. See Freud, Totem and Taboo, 122f. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 127. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 125, 120, 129. Ibid., 170. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 113, 87. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 111. Ibid., 114. Later (134f.) Freud offered a different explanation for anti-Semitism: that it is a product of the fact that the Jews “really believe themselves to be God’s chosen people; they hold themselves to be specially near him, and this is what makes them proud and confident.” “When one is the declared favorite of the dreaded father,” Freud remarked, “one need not be surprised that the other brothers and sisters are jealous.” There are places where Freud explored a different path, that of differentiating among the roles different persons play within the dynamics of a society in a manner

Notes

77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

89 90 91 92 93

94 95 96

233

informed by the analogy to an individual mind. For example, in Civilization and its Discontents (143) he attributed to “great men” the function of determining the “cultural superego.” As far as I know, this mode of unpacking the analogy remained relatively undeveloped in his corpus. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 147. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 61. Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis,” 469. An anonymous reviewer for Bloomsbury has emphasized the point that an important part of Freud’s aims was to encourage his readers to take full responsibility for the contents of their minds—or more precisely, to convince them that their lack of awareness of those contents could not justify a refusal to take responsibility for them. I take it that the thought that persons bear responsibility for unconscious mental content depends on a robust attribution of that content to them. McGuire, The Freud-Jung Letters, 18. Cited in Makari, Revolution in Mind, 204. See above, 7. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, 487; Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement, 133. Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis,” 478. Freud, History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, 55. Ibid., 57. Cioffi, Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience, 262; Freud, History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, 58. So, for example, Hopkins: “if psychoanalysis were, as presented here, a theory of wish-fulfillment, it would be resisted whatever its content. It would be in the nature of any such theory to threaten to awaken people to the content of their unfulfilled wishes and the illusory nature of the gratifications which mask but do not finally satisfy them. Any such theory would spawn alternatives which again represent the wishes as gratified and allowed people to sleep on, and so forth. It is possible that this has happened.” Hopkins, “Introduction” to Philosophical Essays on Freud, xliii. See Brinton, “The Ad Hominem,” 216–19. Ibid., 216. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 15. Freud, The History of Psychoanalysis, 56. So, for example, Gellner attributes to Freud a “cognitive daemon supposition,” that “a very powerful spirit is interfering with my logical intuitions, making the false seem luminously true, and vice versa.” Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement, 146. McGuire, The Freud/Jung Letters, 516. Ibid., 526. Ibid., 534f.

234

Notes

97 Ibid., 539. 98 Jung to Ernest Jones, November 15, 1912; cited in Makari, Revolution in Mind, 283. 99 McGuire, The Freud/Jung Letters, 526.

5 Conclusion: Paradigms of Suspicion 1 I have argued both that Marx’s theories can postulate conspiracies as elaborations of historical materialist functionalist explanations and that one of Nietzsche’s explanatory narratives in the Genealogy of Morals is a straightforward conspiracy theory; see above, 74 and 109. 2 See above, 44. 3 Keeley, “Of Conspiracy Theories,” 122f. 4 See Miller, Fact and Method, 208–12. I diverge from Miller’s arguments here somewhat, as in this section he is principally concerned with the impact of principles of normal tendency on assessments not of plausibility but of explanatory depth. 5 Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation, 60. 6 Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory, 290. 7 On the same page as the quote above Cohen opines that “Marxists can be too sensitive to the charge that they perceive conspiracies. There is more collective design in history than an inflexible rejection of ‘conspiracy theories’ would allow.” Ibid., 290. 8 This is because if all functionalist explanations have elaborations, and if one way to elaborate a historical materialist functionalist explanation is in a vulgar-Marxist way, then the one whose background knowledge makes vulgar Marxism plausible is in a position to imagine one plausible (to them) way of elaborating historical materialist explanations, whereas the person whose background knowledge renders vulgar Marxism implausible may not be in such a position. 9 “Sometimes principles of normal tendency are so obvious that they go without saying. . . . But sometimes a disputed principle of normal tendency is a main source of an explanatory disagreement. Often, when this is so, the debate is, nonetheless, conducted on other, less relevant grounds.” Miller, Fact and Method, 211. 10 Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out Of Steam?,” 228. 11 Leiter, “Classical Realism,” 245. 12 Leiter, “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” 78. 13 Boyer, Religion Explained, 130. 14 Ibid., 133. 15 See Kirkpatrick, Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion, 236f. 16 See Boyer, Religion Explained, 298.

Notes 17 18 19 20

235

Ibid., 150–55. See above, 27. Marx, “The 18th Brumaire,” 190f; see above, 74. I borrow this very useful locution from John Bishop, Believing by Faith, in particular 33ff. 21 Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” 221. 22 Here I have in mind social-psychological work informed by Henri Tajfel’s “minimal group paradigm”(See Billig and Tajfel, “Social Categorization and Similarity”). Recently Zhong et al have argued that social derogation is more likely to occur when in-groups define themselves negationally—that is, define themselves as “not like those others”—rather than positively, with respect to characteristics taken to be normal for in-group members. See Zhong et al., “Negational Categorization and Intergroup Behavior.” 23 See above, 80.

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Index ad hominem 170, 173 agency alignment with social function 87f and coalition 33 exotic 34–9, 46f heuristic 34–9, 71–3, 121, 228 n.86, 147–52 untethered 121, 125, 183 analytic Marxism 14, 51f anti-Semitism 102, 123, 131f, 159, 182f, 229 n.109, 232 n.75 background knowledge 41, 190–4 Bayes’s Theorem 40–4 Boyer, Pascal 8, 194f capital 38, 73, 75, 88f capitalism 55, 63, 83–5, 180 capitalists 73–4, 79f, 86–90, 180, 213 causes 24–6 and reasons 10, 13, 23–6 Christianity 108f, 113f, 124f, 159 class interest 65–7 classes, economic 59–61 cognitive gadgets 8, 194–6, 202, 210–15 Cohen, Gerald A. 14, 51f, 68–70, 80, 190, 224 n.60 complexes 145–7, 156–61 compromised gratification 140, 143f, 183 conspiracy theories 4–6, 19–20, 45f, 48, 54, 56, 75f, 77f, 102, 109, 123–6, 181, 187, 189f, 206, 208 cunning of reason 45–7, 120 Davidson, Donald 13, 24, 151 Dilthey, Wilhelm 11 Dora (Ida Bauer) 141f, 163, 168 Dray, William 218 n. 32 drives 142–4 Droysen, J. G. 11

epiphenomenalism 25f, 220 n.15 epistemic siloing 204–10 ethical charge 4, 29f, 32, 37f, 48, 82–90, 126–32, 161–7, 179f, 182, 186f, 213 ethical leveraging 196–200 ethical valuation 4, 29f, 126f, 131f, 162f, 198 explanation adequacy 27, 198f belief-desire 10, 13, 28f, 54, 147–9, 181 causal 23–7 and control 3, 25, 27, 49, 196–200 deductive-nomological model 13 hidden-hand 39 inference to the best 13–14, 39–45, 201f invisible-hand 32, 39 justificatory and condemnatory 29, 197–200 (see also ethical charge) of large-scale social phenomena 5, 30–9 as model 35–7, 72f, 75f, 89f, 122f, 148–52 by reasons (see explanation, beliefdesire) suspicious 2, 4–7 and theories 178, 217 n.4 explanationism 42–4 explanatory power 7, 40, 44f, 188f explanatory value 40, 44, 188 Flew, Antony 10–11 Foucault Michel 4, 20, 225 n.3 Freud, Sigmund ethical views 162f relationship with Jung 174f response to criticism (see recursive ad hominem defense) Freud wars 15, 136, 230 n.3 functional explanation 62–5, 74–6 elaborations of 68–70

248

Index

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 11 genealogy 20, 95f, 128f, 134, 183, 213f, 229 n.110 genetic fallacy 128–31, 183 Geuss, Raymond 20–1, 126f Grü nbaum, Adolf 15 Harman, Gilbert 13 Hempel, Carl 13 hermeneutics 11 of suspicion 2, 15–16, 215 hiddenness 4, 39, 47f, 76–82, 98f, 122, 161, 179, 182, 185 historical materialism 56–71, 83–8, 178 ideology

58, 61f, 222 n.63

Jesus of Nazareth 108f Jews 5, 55, 101–3, 106–10, 123–6, 131f Jung, Carl 146f, 162, 174f Keeley, Brian 189 Kirkpatrick, Lee 194f Latour, Bruno 6, 192 Leiter, Brian 9, 15–16, 124, 128–30, 193, 229 n.109 Lewis, Bernard 4 Lipton, Peter 42–5 Marx, Karl ethical views 82f methodological individualism 220 n.25 Miller, Richard 24f, 27, 56, 93, 190f morality 29f, 96–9, 126–32, 157, 180f Nagel, Ernest 9 naï veté 192 Nietzsche, Friedrich ethical views 127, 132

pragmatic weighting 200–204 primal horde 156f principle of normal tendency 99–101, 110f, 116f, 138–42, 181, 190–5, 205–7 Prinz, Jesse 226 n.19, 229 n.110 Protestantism 64 reconstruction, rational 51f, 128–30, 133f recursive ad hominem defense 167–75, 184f, 207–9 religion 62–5, 69, 152–4, 157–9, 185, 194, 210, 224 n.55 repression/resistance 138f, 183f ressentiment 105f, 113, 118, 228 n.76 Ricoeur, Paul 1–3, 9–12 Robison, Jon 5 Said, Edward 4 self-deception 81, 165, 179, 185, 186f Sherwood, Michael 12, 219 n.35 social derogation 205f social-functional criticism 84f, 89, 180 Stone, Laurence 4 stopping rule 27, 198f strategic information 195, 197–200 substitution (psychoanalytic) 140f, 183 suspicion hermeneutics of (see hermeneutics, of suspicion) tradition of 2, 6, 212–15 theory of mind 28f, 31–4, 48, 220 n.26 Toulmin, Stephen 10–11 Tucker, Robert 90f vulgar-Hegelian Marxism 71–6, 88–90, 178f vulgar Hegelianism 46–8, 125 vulgar Marxism 53–6, 74–6, 83, 178, 207

Owen, David 126f, 228, n.89 Peters, Richard 10 plausibility 40, 44f, 170–2, 185, 188–94, 202 Popper, Karl 7–8, 13, 53f positivism, logical 13

Watkins, John 5 Webster, Nesta 5 will to power 99, 104, 110 Williams, Bernard 129, 228 n.89 Wood, Allen 47, 65, 82 Woodward, James 25