Friedrich Hayek, Jürgen Habermas, and Carl Schmitt do not look like a group of the like minded. Schmitt was the legal and political theorist who emphasised that law and politics rest on the capacity of someone to make a decision.
Schmitt thought that political theory should take sovereignty as its object not the state. If political theory takes the state as an object, it becomes primarily concerned with the institutional and administrative aspects of the state. He took a critical view of confusion of the state with civil society. Where politics itself engages with civil society, the state becomes one of various pressure groups. The order and unity of the state which is necessary to the exercise of sovereignty is undermined in a pluralist view of the state. Democracy itself is not best represented by the divisive nature of parliamentary politics, since the single ruler is much better suited to representing the majority as a unity, rather than as a divided aggregate of many points of view, where no unified will of the majority can emerge. Politics also contains the dimension of struggle between friend and foe, in which we struggle to defend ourselves against the enemy who threatens our existence. Schmitt considered that to be the basis of international relations. Attempts at world confederation, and world government, can only produce new wars with an enemy who inevitably resists other countries ganging up on it.
Habermas, a Marxist in principle but more of a social democrat/left liberal in practice, condemns Schmitt for reducing international relations to this constant war which leaves no room for the just war that enforces international order. One point at which Habermas raises this criticism is when he writes on the NATO intervention in Kosovo. Habermas does not think this intervention can be fully justified by the international law as it previously existed. The UN charter strongly opposes interference in the internal affairs of member states. Habermas did not write to condemn the Kosovo intervention It is an intervention which refers to morality rather than existing law, it is the intervention based on acting as it there is a global civil society, though it does not yet exist. The intervention was not wrong, it was however a precedent that should not be taken as a precedent. Self-legislating improvement should not be accepted. Habermas talks about being between morality and law, but he is halfway between legalism and decisionism. Some force took the decision to intervene rather than follow international law, and that itself is a welcome intervention There is an Enemy, Slobodan Milosevic who must be defeated regardless of previous law. With regard to internal law and administration, Habermas emphasises the difficulties that arise from social legislation This is inevitably administered outside the apparatus of parliamentary supervision. Increased administration is inevitable for these kinds of programs The regulatory nature of social intervention must come into conflict with the universality of law, democracy is fragmenting ştself.
Hayek, the best know advocate of pure free market and an almost non-existent state, condemns Schmitt, like Habermas, always in passing He appears to be condemned but disappears before he contaminates the surrounding text. Hayek thinks democracy should be limited, or should limit itself, in order to restrict the state to state matters, including the foundation of law, a foundation which must also be an apex. The state should not be interfering in society, it should be protecting its own sovereignty from any confusion about its role. The state is most admired before the establishment of mass democracy, and is most legitimate when defending itself against enemies. There is a strong element of elitism in Hayek, who would like constitutional constraints on democracy to the advantage of property owners. Hayek's wariness of democracy follows a tradition that goes back to Humboldt Humboldt recommended the free development of the individual after paying very little tx. Humboldt also opposed democracy, because he thought that would lead to increasing social demands on the state. Humboldt thought there should be just a king, remote from and above society. That itself recalls Hobbes. Hayek, and others with similar views, attack Hobbes as a supporter of a strong state. This misses the point that Hobbes thought the only purpose of the state was to leave people to be free in civil society while defending the state against its enemies. Hobbes preferred monarchy to democracy, a monarchy of the sword unconcerned with social questions, but wielding immense force to protect sovereignty within and without.
This is all consistent with Schmitt's enthusiasm for a separation between the political sphere and the economic sphere. Hayek assumed that since Schmitt refereed to the modern tendency for society and the state to be confused, that he was endorsing that tendency, and saw in the Nazis an ideal aspect of that trend. However, there is no reason to believe that Schmitt supported the Nazis for socialsit or statist reasons. He justified the idea of a Caesar like leader, and the rights of any large nation over its smaller neighbours. That is all. Schmitt was complicit with a totalitarian state, but that should not lead us to the conclusion that totalitarianism was his goal. A post-war speech to business people strongly suggests he though that the state should concern itself with politics without interference from above in the economy.
Like Habermas, Schmitt did not think all war must be founded on existing international law. Like Hayek, Schmitt was suspicious of democracy and particularly of welfarism.
Like both Hayek and Habermas, Schmitt thought that the modern state is fundamentally lost in a contradiction between general laws and administrative bodies which regulate more and more of life.
Sunday, 30 December 2007
Thursday, 27 December 2007
Fear and Trembling: Ethics of Marriage
Further thoughts while teaching Kierkegaard.
Marriage and Ethics
What is the topic of Fear and Trembling? Is it the story of Abraham and Isaac? Yes, but we should not be distracted from the other topic. This is the topic defined in the 'Diapslamata' of Either/Or I, in the first sentence of the section on 'Either/Or: An Ecstatic Discourse'
Marriage and the Daemonic
Fear and Trembling deals with the drama of Abraham and Isaac, but in large part it deals with relations between men and women and the possibility of marriage. There is more to be said about Fear and Trembling but will concentrate on the marriage theme which is deeply embedded. It was published in the same year as Either/Or, so we would expect some common themes. Kierkegaard deals with various ways in which the possibility of marriage, and barriers to such a possibility, are presented. In comedies, Kierkegaard gives Danish examples which seem to correspond with Hollywood Romantic Comedies in structure. A barrier to love and marriage is overcome through happy accident. In the more sombre examples, marriage is related to terrible danger. Sarah and Tobit in the Old Testament/Torah book of Tobit, are married despite the deaths of seven previous husbands of Sarah. Faust avoids marriage with Gretchen in Goethe's poem to protect her from his daemonic side. In a very Danish touch, Kierkegaard refers to the story of Agnes and the Merman in Hans Christian Anderson, the story is non-Danish in origin but given that it was published by Anderson and that it fits with various reference Kierkegaard makes to Nordic myths and monsters, we can see it as belonging to the Danish-Nordic element Kierkegaard regularly introduces. Kierkegaard thinks of various possible alternative versions of the story of the girl seduced by a merman. They all deal with the daemonic in the merman.
Kierkegaard discusses various fictional and scriptural examples of the daemonic in the individual coming into conflict with the desire to marry, in a way which relates to Abraham's choice between ethics and obeying God. Abraham's solution is the paradox in which he obeys both, Kierkegaard recommends the same solution for the marriage dilemma. The ethical relation of marriage is threatened by the daemonic within the individual, the daemonic element within makes marriage apparently unethical for that person because it threatens the destruction of the loved person
Ethics and the Absolute Self
Kierkegaard recommends faith that ethics will not be contradicted in marriage, just as Abraham is a hero because he had faith that God's command could be obeyed while remaining within ethics. Ethics must be suspended in order to preserve it. Ethics rests on the absolute, the absolute self, the absolute capacity of the individual for a decision. Ethics is always suspended in relation to that absolute, the necessity of the judging self.
Hegel
By any standards, marriage can be defined as an ethical relation because it requires two people to think of at least one other person, and because it provides a basic structure for the existence of a society based on ethical principles. This is particularly clear if we think of the way Hegel thinks of marriage, it is the first step of the ethical. For Hegel, the ethical is a social form, a form of life as opposed to nature and as opposed to purely individual morality.
In the very first page of 'Problema 1' in Fear and Trembling, Hegel is referred to with regard to individual conscience as evil. In the section on morality and conscience in Philosophy of Right, Hegel refers to individual conscience as evil in its results, because it is purely individual. Opposing the individual to universality can only be evil. Hegel describes a move from morality to ethical life (Sittlichkeit, which is something like the being of ethos/mores), in which individuals are part of universality through marriage, family, civil society, and the state.
Absolute Individual and Marriage
The project announced in Fear and Trembling is that of showing that the individual is higher than the universal but is not evil. That should encourage us to read the Abraham/Isaac story as referring to individuality rather than God. This is very clear with the accounts of marriage dilemmas which in their most serious refer to the daemonic within an individual.
Fear and Trembling deals with the aesthetic individual who is beneath marriage and the absolute individual who is above marriage. The individual as individual is beneath and above the ethical relation or marriage. There is no complete distinction between the aesthetic individual and the absolute individual. The absolute emerges from the aesthetic through the melancholy of mere immediacy.
Marriage and Ethics
What is the topic of Fear and Trembling? Is it the story of Abraham and Isaac? Yes, but we should not be distracted from the other topic. This is the topic defined in the 'Diapslamata' of Either/Or I, in the first sentence of the section on 'Either/Or: An Ecstatic Discourse'
Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it. Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way (Princeton University Press, edited and translated by Hong and Hong: 38)Either/Or I deals with the aesthetic stage in which marriage is to long term in a perspective dominated by the interest of the immediate. Most of Either/Or II deals with the ethical stage, and that is defined by marriage. The ethical stage is presented by Judge William, the aesthetic stage in the fragments of an anonymous young man.
Marriage and the Daemonic
Fear and Trembling deals with the drama of Abraham and Isaac, but in large part it deals with relations between men and women and the possibility of marriage. There is more to be said about Fear and Trembling but will concentrate on the marriage theme which is deeply embedded. It was published in the same year as Either/Or, so we would expect some common themes. Kierkegaard deals with various ways in which the possibility of marriage, and barriers to such a possibility, are presented. In comedies, Kierkegaard gives Danish examples which seem to correspond with Hollywood Romantic Comedies in structure. A barrier to love and marriage is overcome through happy accident. In the more sombre examples, marriage is related to terrible danger. Sarah and Tobit in the Old Testament/Torah book of Tobit, are married despite the deaths of seven previous husbands of Sarah. Faust avoids marriage with Gretchen in Goethe's poem to protect her from his daemonic side. In a very Danish touch, Kierkegaard refers to the story of Agnes and the Merman in Hans Christian Anderson, the story is non-Danish in origin but given that it was published by Anderson and that it fits with various reference Kierkegaard makes to Nordic myths and monsters, we can see it as belonging to the Danish-Nordic element Kierkegaard regularly introduces. Kierkegaard thinks of various possible alternative versions of the story of the girl seduced by a merman. They all deal with the daemonic in the merman.
Kierkegaard discusses various fictional and scriptural examples of the daemonic in the individual coming into conflict with the desire to marry, in a way which relates to Abraham's choice between ethics and obeying God. Abraham's solution is the paradox in which he obeys both, Kierkegaard recommends the same solution for the marriage dilemma. The ethical relation of marriage is threatened by the daemonic within the individual, the daemonic element within makes marriage apparently unethical for that person because it threatens the destruction of the loved person
Ethics and the Absolute Self
Kierkegaard recommends faith that ethics will not be contradicted in marriage, just as Abraham is a hero because he had faith that God's command could be obeyed while remaining within ethics. Ethics must be suspended in order to preserve it. Ethics rests on the absolute, the absolute self, the absolute capacity of the individual for a decision. Ethics is always suspended in relation to that absolute, the necessity of the judging self.
Hegel
By any standards, marriage can be defined as an ethical relation because it requires two people to think of at least one other person, and because it provides a basic structure for the existence of a society based on ethical principles. This is particularly clear if we think of the way Hegel thinks of marriage, it is the first step of the ethical. For Hegel, the ethical is a social form, a form of life as opposed to nature and as opposed to purely individual morality.
In the very first page of 'Problema 1' in Fear and Trembling, Hegel is referred to with regard to individual conscience as evil. In the section on morality and conscience in Philosophy of Right, Hegel refers to individual conscience as evil in its results, because it is purely individual. Opposing the individual to universality can only be evil. Hegel describes a move from morality to ethical life (Sittlichkeit, which is something like the being of ethos/mores), in which individuals are part of universality through marriage, family, civil society, and the state.
Absolute Individual and Marriage
The project announced in Fear and Trembling is that of showing that the individual is higher than the universal but is not evil. That should encourage us to read the Abraham/Isaac story as referring to individuality rather than God. This is very clear with the accounts of marriage dilemmas which in their most serious refer to the daemonic within an individual.
Fear and Trembling deals with the aesthetic individual who is beneath marriage and the absolute individual who is above marriage. The individual as individual is beneath and above the ethical relation or marriage. There is no complete distinction between the aesthetic individual and the absolute individual. The absolute emerges from the aesthetic through the melancholy of mere immediacy.
Monday, 24 December 2007
Nietzsche against Master Morality
The assumption is widespread that Nietzsche's ethics can be explained as the master morality which he diagnoses in the Essay 1 of On the Genealogy of Morality. The assumption is widespread among those who are semi-informed, and even more disturbingly among those who have some claims to expertise on Nietzsche. As a reaction to Nietzsche, it's not totally inappropriate, the texts do provoke the reader to think of master morality as something better than slave morality. That is somewhat different from a committment to master morality as a form of ethics.
Nietzsche sometime says he is referring to a philosophy of life rather than ethics or morality. I believe it would be going to far to say that there is no ethics, or moral philosophy in Nietzsche. However, it is important toı recognise that Nietzsche is challenging (which is not the same as rejecting) the bases of ethics or morality. What he is doing is to find something like what Hegel calls immediacy, and Kierkegaard calls wonder in a reaction to nature and human nature. Though whether that means we can classify Nietzshe with contemporary Naturalists of a scientistic reductionist orientation is another thing. Nietzsche looks at the wonder, or immediacy of the master's view of the world in the most primitive of moralities, the original master morality. That he explains particularly in relation to Homeric heroes, and in general an approach in which mutual obligations are recognised between masters, but not to those outside the relevant group of masters. From this point of view, the masters define themselves as good, beautiful, truthful and so on. The salves are those who have the opposite of those characteristics.
The slaves are not evil, because they behave according to nature in the master world view, they just behave as they do without evil intention. For Nietzsche, the concept of evil is deeply embedded in ideas of soul, strong personal identity, free will and inner intentions. It is the slaves who have a good/evil dichotomy who assume there is strong personal identity and intentionalism. For the master, there are immediate reactions There is no assumption for strong personal identity and all that might go with that: free will, intentionalism, memory over time. These aspects of master morality are clearly part of what Nietzsche advocates, but it is not what Nietzsche advocates as a whole.
Nietzsche is against a metaphysical theory free will, resting as he sees it on a strong sense of personal identity in which the self is a soul thing rather than a combination of forces as Nietzsche thinks. However, he is not against the ideas of autonomy, sovereignty of the self, or self-creation. These are all given great emphasis. Both art and science are taken as products of the creative self, which creates itself as a it creates a perspective on natural forces in nature or the creation of art. The master is not an artist or scientist. Neither of these would be a complete model for Nietzsche. Nietzsche sees value in the life that is like art, he finds that beauty is a product of the desire for happiness. Happiness comes in life led as self-creating and self-legislating. It is here that Nietzsche sees the origin of value, not in the brutishness and borrishness of the master towards the slave. He does not think that value originates in utilitarian calculations of maximised benefits, or any set of abstract principles or social institutions. Nietzsche refers to the master who forgets offence and only takes revenge where it is immediately possible, but he admires the individual with no need to punish or take revenge at all, much more.
Nietzsche sometime says he is referring to a philosophy of life rather than ethics or morality. I believe it would be going to far to say that there is no ethics, or moral philosophy in Nietzsche. However, it is important toı recognise that Nietzsche is challenging (which is not the same as rejecting) the bases of ethics or morality. What he is doing is to find something like what Hegel calls immediacy, and Kierkegaard calls wonder in a reaction to nature and human nature. Though whether that means we can classify Nietzshe with contemporary Naturalists of a scientistic reductionist orientation is another thing. Nietzsche looks at the wonder, or immediacy of the master's view of the world in the most primitive of moralities, the original master morality. That he explains particularly in relation to Homeric heroes, and in general an approach in which mutual obligations are recognised between masters, but not to those outside the relevant group of masters. From this point of view, the masters define themselves as good, beautiful, truthful and so on. The salves are those who have the opposite of those characteristics.
The slaves are not evil, because they behave according to nature in the master world view, they just behave as they do without evil intention. For Nietzsche, the concept of evil is deeply embedded in ideas of soul, strong personal identity, free will and inner intentions. It is the slaves who have a good/evil dichotomy who assume there is strong personal identity and intentionalism. For the master, there are immediate reactions There is no assumption for strong personal identity and all that might go with that: free will, intentionalism, memory over time. These aspects of master morality are clearly part of what Nietzsche advocates, but it is not what Nietzsche advocates as a whole.
Nietzsche is against a metaphysical theory free will, resting as he sees it on a strong sense of personal identity in which the self is a soul thing rather than a combination of forces as Nietzsche thinks. However, he is not against the ideas of autonomy, sovereignty of the self, or self-creation. These are all given great emphasis. Both art and science are taken as products of the creative self, which creates itself as a it creates a perspective on natural forces in nature or the creation of art. The master is not an artist or scientist. Neither of these would be a complete model for Nietzsche. Nietzsche sees value in the life that is like art, he finds that beauty is a product of the desire for happiness. Happiness comes in life led as self-creating and self-legislating. It is here that Nietzsche sees the origin of value, not in the brutishness and borrishness of the master towards the slave. He does not think that value originates in utilitarian calculations of maximised benefits, or any set of abstract principles or social institutions. Nietzsche refers to the master who forgets offence and only takes revenge where it is immediately possible, but he admires the individual with no need to punish or take revenge at all, much more.
Friday, 21 December 2007
Islam and Kierkegaard: Abraham and Sacrifice of the Son
I've been teaching Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling recently in Istanbul. One advantage of teaching that text in a Muslim country, is that everyone is familiar with the story of Abraham and Isaac.
For those who don't know it, for Jews and Christians, it is the story in Genesis 22 of Abraham commanded to kill his son Isaac by God. Abraham takes Isaac to the place of Sacrifice, but God relieves him of the sacrifice by revealing a sheep for a substitute sacrifice. Sura 37 of the Koran refers to Abraham/Ibrahim nearly sacrificing his son, which is often interpreted by Muslims as referring to Ishmael rather than Isaac/Isak; and it refers to a great sacrifice rather than a specfic animal but it is always understood as a goat or sheep.
In any case, the story is very familiar because one of the major Muslim festivals is the Sacrifice Festival, which started on the 20th December this year. The Sacrifice Festival includes the ritual sacrifice of sheep, goats, and bulls to commemorate İbrahim's obedience and Allah's offer of the sheep as substitute.
From Kierkegaard's point of view the Koran story is significantly different from the version because Ibrahim tells his son of a vision of the sacrifice, and the son is willing to be sacrificed, so the trial is just as much of the son as the father. Kierkegaard emphasises Abraham no telling Isaac, as part of the emphasis on the silence appropriate to the absurd dialectic, the paradox of faith. The tragic hero may explain the problem, but not the Knight of faith.
Even if Kierkegaard had incorporated the Muslim account, I don't think it would have been too much of a problem. Fear and Trembling includes an account of different possible stories to fill in the very sketchy original story. The possibility that the son is Ishmael not Isaac, and that the son knows of the sacrifice would not change the factors Kierkegaard discusses. It would still be a miraculous son of Abraham's old age, and it could still be the case that Abraham did not tell his wife Sarah (mother of Isaac) of his servant Hagar (mother of Ishmael). Kierkegaard makes up the supposed silence of Abraham anyway, and if the silence was directed towards the mother that would fit with the various painful love stories Kierkegaard brings into Fear and Trembling in comparison with Abraham's story.
For those who don't know it, for Jews and Christians, it is the story in Genesis 22 of Abraham commanded to kill his son Isaac by God. Abraham takes Isaac to the place of Sacrifice, but God relieves him of the sacrifice by revealing a sheep for a substitute sacrifice. Sura 37 of the Koran refers to Abraham/Ibrahim nearly sacrificing his son, which is often interpreted by Muslims as referring to Ishmael rather than Isaac/Isak; and it refers to a great sacrifice rather than a specfic animal but it is always understood as a goat or sheep.
In any case, the story is very familiar because one of the major Muslim festivals is the Sacrifice Festival, which started on the 20th December this year. The Sacrifice Festival includes the ritual sacrifice of sheep, goats, and bulls to commemorate İbrahim's obedience and Allah's offer of the sheep as substitute.
From Kierkegaard's point of view the Koran story is significantly different from the version because Ibrahim tells his son of a vision of the sacrifice, and the son is willing to be sacrificed, so the trial is just as much of the son as the father. Kierkegaard emphasises Abraham no telling Isaac, as part of the emphasis on the silence appropriate to the absurd dialectic, the paradox of faith. The tragic hero may explain the problem, but not the Knight of faith.
Even if Kierkegaard had incorporated the Muslim account, I don't think it would have been too much of a problem. Fear and Trembling includes an account of different possible stories to fill in the very sketchy original story. The possibility that the son is Ishmael not Isaac, and that the son knows of the sacrifice would not change the factors Kierkegaard discusses. It would still be a miraculous son of Abraham's old age, and it could still be the case that Abraham did not tell his wife Sarah (mother of Isaac) of his servant Hagar (mother of Ishmael). Kierkegaard makes up the supposed silence of Abraham anyway, and if the silence was directed towards the mother that would fit with the various painful love stories Kierkegaard brings into Fear and Trembling in comparison with Abraham's story.
Philosophy and Gambling: Pascal and Hume
Blaise Pascal and David Hume were united by a love of gambling
Pascal's interest was as far as I understand terminated by his conversion to intense Catholicism, inspired by the Jansenism dominant at the convent at Port-Royal in Paris. Port-Royal produced distinguished philosophers like Pierre Nicole and Nicholas Arnaud and educated the great tragedian Jean Racine. Pascal's interests encompassed mathematics, physics, theology, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, epistemology, and social philosophy.
David Hume was sceptical of all revealed religion though valuing moderate religion as a part of civil society. He certainly did not engage in the asceticism that Pascal followed in his later years, and which may have hastened his death.
Though his attitude to religion was instrumental, Hume has a social philosophy similar in some respects to Pascal. For both, organised society and state institutions emerge through convenience rather than from basic principles. For Hume, this is a happy reality, for Pascal it is part of the view that God is absent from the universe, and from human society. For Hume, humans follow self-interest rooted in 'passions' (Hume used the word in a way that covers all psychological motives), and learn to adopt the rules and institutions which enable everyone's self-interest to flourish enhancing commerce and the arts. For Pascal, this is true but is evidence that humans are half angels half beast, who have lost the grandeur which belongs to divine life.
For both, a godless universe lacks certainty. The world is not guided in every respect by divine purposes, those purposes are distinctly absent. For both, there is a sceptical aspect to their philosophy, for without God's immediate presence what guarantee is there that our perceptions are reliable. Both dealt with questions of probability and chance. Science looks like it contains probabilities, though never certainties. However, some aspects of experience do not even lead us to probabilistic expectations about the future.
Gambling is an obvious example. Hume focuses in his work on knowledge, on the throwing of dice. We know there is a one in six chance of any one side being thrown However, there is nothing we can say about which is more probable, experience does not help ıs, because however many times we throw a die, for the next throw it is still a one in six chance for any one side. For Hume, that is the probabilistic nature of the universe in its most extreme aspect. For Hume, induction establishes probabilities for scientific laws of nature. However, since Hume does not think we know at what the future will be, even at the next moment, his induction has a weak basis, and even more so when we consider that induction rests on a continuity over the mind in time, which Hume thinks has not real justification, since we must regard continuous personal identity as a fiction for unifying states of mind at different times.
By his own account, philosophising brought melancholia to Hume which he relieved by gambling. The gambling, the encounter with uncontrollable chance and intrinsically futile attempts to overcome chance, or to play with chance within a framework of play between individuals which enables us to try and control chance.
Pascal saw the universe as governed by physical laws, but for him they lacked foundations. The only foundation could be God who is absent. Like Hume, Pascal contributed to early probability theory, and as with Hume we can see the gambling as resulting a fear of pure chance, the attempt to control pure chance, or the experience of surviving pure chance. Pascal also emphasised that life could be a dream, that ı could be a king dreaming that I am who I think I am. There would be no difference between being a king and the pauper who dreams vividly half the day of being a king. Our own identity is a matter of uncontrollable chance.
Pascal even produced an argument for religious faith (Pascal's wager) based on chance and simple ideas about probability. Famously, he argued that life without faith is despair. If we have faith, and there is no God, we have lost nothing and gained a life with hope; if we do not have faith but God does exist, we will have less happiness in life and we will suffer damnation in the next life. The rational thing therefore is to have faith. It is a mistake to look at the argument in isolation, as this can make it seem weak and self-deceiving, an argument in which we suppress doubt to make life more pleasant. It is just one part of Pascal's argument about belief and his arguments need to be judged as a whole. I would say that on the whole, he is building up a way of thinking in which we can only grasp reality in any way through an idea of God, which may or may not be correct in the end, but is more than a matter of comforting self-deception.
Gambling, anxiety about reality, and the wish to find a way of contolling chance, of experiencing it as part of a rational universe, or of playing with inner anxiety in order to control it are a strong feature of Pascal and Hume. Where would philosophy be without their interest in gambling?
Pascal's interest was as far as I understand terminated by his conversion to intense Catholicism, inspired by the Jansenism dominant at the convent at Port-Royal in Paris. Port-Royal produced distinguished philosophers like Pierre Nicole and Nicholas Arnaud and educated the great tragedian Jean Racine. Pascal's interests encompassed mathematics, physics, theology, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, epistemology, and social philosophy.
David Hume was sceptical of all revealed religion though valuing moderate religion as a part of civil society. He certainly did not engage in the asceticism that Pascal followed in his later years, and which may have hastened his death.
Though his attitude to religion was instrumental, Hume has a social philosophy similar in some respects to Pascal. For both, organised society and state institutions emerge through convenience rather than from basic principles. For Hume, this is a happy reality, for Pascal it is part of the view that God is absent from the universe, and from human society. For Hume, humans follow self-interest rooted in 'passions' (Hume used the word in a way that covers all psychological motives), and learn to adopt the rules and institutions which enable everyone's self-interest to flourish enhancing commerce and the arts. For Pascal, this is true but is evidence that humans are half angels half beast, who have lost the grandeur which belongs to divine life.
For both, a godless universe lacks certainty. The world is not guided in every respect by divine purposes, those purposes are distinctly absent. For both, there is a sceptical aspect to their philosophy, for without God's immediate presence what guarantee is there that our perceptions are reliable. Both dealt with questions of probability and chance. Science looks like it contains probabilities, though never certainties. However, some aspects of experience do not even lead us to probabilistic expectations about the future.
Gambling is an obvious example. Hume focuses in his work on knowledge, on the throwing of dice. We know there is a one in six chance of any one side being thrown However, there is nothing we can say about which is more probable, experience does not help ıs, because however many times we throw a die, for the next throw it is still a one in six chance for any one side. For Hume, that is the probabilistic nature of the universe in its most extreme aspect. For Hume, induction establishes probabilities for scientific laws of nature. However, since Hume does not think we know at what the future will be, even at the next moment, his induction has a weak basis, and even more so when we consider that induction rests on a continuity over the mind in time, which Hume thinks has not real justification, since we must regard continuous personal identity as a fiction for unifying states of mind at different times.
By his own account, philosophising brought melancholia to Hume which he relieved by gambling. The gambling, the encounter with uncontrollable chance and intrinsically futile attempts to overcome chance, or to play with chance within a framework of play between individuals which enables us to try and control chance.
Pascal saw the universe as governed by physical laws, but for him they lacked foundations. The only foundation could be God who is absent. Like Hume, Pascal contributed to early probability theory, and as with Hume we can see the gambling as resulting a fear of pure chance, the attempt to control pure chance, or the experience of surviving pure chance. Pascal also emphasised that life could be a dream, that ı could be a king dreaming that I am who I think I am. There would be no difference between being a king and the pauper who dreams vividly half the day of being a king. Our own identity is a matter of uncontrollable chance.
Pascal even produced an argument for religious faith (Pascal's wager) based on chance and simple ideas about probability. Famously, he argued that life without faith is despair. If we have faith, and there is no God, we have lost nothing and gained a life with hope; if we do not have faith but God does exist, we will have less happiness in life and we will suffer damnation in the next life. The rational thing therefore is to have faith. It is a mistake to look at the argument in isolation, as this can make it seem weak and self-deceiving, an argument in which we suppress doubt to make life more pleasant. It is just one part of Pascal's argument about belief and his arguments need to be judged as a whole. I would say that on the whole, he is building up a way of thinking in which we can only grasp reality in any way through an idea of God, which may or may not be correct in the end, but is more than a matter of comforting self-deception.
Gambling, anxiety about reality, and the wish to find a way of contolling chance, of experiencing it as part of a rational universe, or of playing with inner anxiety in order to control it are a strong feature of Pascal and Hume. Where would philosophy be without their interest in gambling?
Wednesday, 19 December 2007
Future of British Liberalism
Nick Clegg leader of British Liberal Democrats
A few hours ago Nick Clegg was elected leader of the British Liberal Democrats by a a few hundred votes. I followed the moment of announcement on the Internet, and since then I've been following reaction from Liberal Democrat bloggers on the libdemblogs feed. I rejoined the party, I never left it in spirit, from Istanbul to make sure I could vote for Nick Clegg. After a cautious defensive election campaign against Chris Huhne who grabbed every chance to appeal to party activists with a more left wing kind of liberalism, Nick Clegg just made it to victory. The margin is irrelevant, though I often found Huhne deeply irritating before and during the campaign due to his rather transparent attempts to ingratiate himself with the activist core, his concession speech was admirably gracious and supportive. He has proved he is a great political campaigner, against the advantage Clegg had from overwhelming media support and support of well known party members. To some degree Huhne was benefitting from a deeply inbuilt bloody mindedness amongst the activist core about receiving advice from the party establishment, but it doe stake campaigning and argumentative talent to take advantage. Clegg was annoyingly passive for most of the campaign, but at some moments he showed the mixture of passion and reasoned calm argument he is capable of, and the victory speech was such a moment. The understated campaign cannot be taken as indicative of his approach to inter-party contests, though clearly he does not go in for demagogy as a style.
Which Liberalism?
Another poll I took part in, and I find just as interesting is on Liberal Democrat Voice an activist run news and discussion site. It is a poll which continues on where participants want the Liberal Democrats to be on the political spectrum.
Results so far
As far as I am concerned the Liberal Democrats should be a party of 50% plus Social and Economic Liberals. That in itself covers a wide range of views from Hayek type almost-no-staters to those favoring a modest incremental shift towards open markets and choice in public services. I would place myself somewhere in between, at the point where anti-statist thinking and progressive welfarist liberalism border each other. Huhne's campaign was based on trying to colour even the most modest market based reforms of public services as dangerously right wing. My support for Nick Clegg was based on the belief that the party will move in that direction under his leadership, combined with his various leadership qualities. Clegg has not identified himself in such terms and would be unwise to do so, given that judging by this survey only just under a third of party members would define themselves in that way, though I am sure that is more than 1o years and even more than 15 years ago.
Where Clegg Should Go Further in Free Market/Limited State Liberalism
Certainly Nick Clegg is not calling for a reduction in the proportion of national income that goes on taxes and public spending. On the contrary he attacks the possibility that a Conservative government might reduce spending, though the Conservative leader David Cameron is vague on the topic. The accusation is in any case based on an ambiguity. Cameron has hinted at the possibility that tax/public spending might go down as a proportion of national income, this is not the same as a cut in spending or tax revenues. It is wholly compatible with increasing spending and tax revenues. A properly managed government can secure increased economic growth by reducing the disincentives to growth that are created by taxes.
Where Clegg is Already at the Right Point
It should be noted that the USA with a smaller proportion of tax/spending than the richer parts of Europe, is richer than those countries, has higher long term economic growth and spends at least as much in total public spending per person. Of course there are serious gaps in social provision in the USA, certainly the failure to institute universal health insurance is a scandal. Weaknesses in social provision is in large degree due to the very poor productivity and inefficiency of public services in the USA compared with Europe. Public services are heavily unionised in the USA, those unions have a lot of cash from very high membership subscription, and are brilliant talented lobbyists. We can see what happened in California where a popular persuasive governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was unable to get referendum support for proposals for very moderate public sector reform, such as increasing by one year the probationary period of employment. The public sector in California, and elsewhere, is full of inefficient working practices and staff who cannot easily be sacked regardless of financial circumstances or their personal performance .
Public Services in Britain
The UK, under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, has suffered from growing problems of that kind. Despite mythology about New Labour being the same as the Conservatives, the fact is since 1997, public spending has increased dramatically particularly in health and education. Apart from some politically high profile targets, such as reducing waiting lists for operations, the growth in spending has not been a success. State health services continue to be dogged by poor hygiene in hospitals, a high proportion of new spending has gone on wage inflation. State school education in Britain continues to be very inferior, particularly for low income groups, compared with private education in Britain and state education in other parts of Europe. Though there is not as much room for reform as in the USA, there is plenty of room for greater competition in the provision of public services and the greater efficiency which results from the kind of disciplines that exist in the private sector.
Clegg's Promising Policies
Clegg was rather quiet about it during the leadership campaign, but at some points he made clear that he favours consumer choice in public services, and importantly money following the choice. He hinted at a move away from party policy on favouring free university tuition There is nothing socially progressive n levying taxers on low earners to pay for the relatively week off to go to university and become more valuable commodities on the job market. Making soft long term loans guaranteed by the state creates a reasonable balance between keeping down taxes and making higher education widely available. He has ruled out private insurance funds as contributing to state health services, but past remarks suggest he is open to any reform which would leave health care universally available and free at the point of use. Sıme substitution of competing private insurance funds for general taxation would not block universal access.
Clegg seems to be taking long standing Liberal Democrat committments to localism seriously, he has said his leadership will be active in the localities. Tying this into clear policies to shift taxation and control of public services to the local level could producer a great shift away from central state power, and Clegg has clearly supported such a position. He has shown a committment to reducing unnecessary legislation, as in his proposal for repeal of unnecessary laws, the Great Repeal Act. This proposed title echoes the Great Reform Act of 1832 which spread voting rights and reformed electoral practices, and was a very serious shift away from the previous system of a Parliament of oligarchy, patronage and landed interests, a great moment for liberal reformism.
Summary
My idea of the best results from the Clegg leadership are as follows:
A few hours ago Nick Clegg was elected leader of the British Liberal Democrats by a a few hundred votes. I followed the moment of announcement on the Internet, and since then I've been following reaction from Liberal Democrat bloggers on the libdemblogs feed. I rejoined the party, I never left it in spirit, from Istanbul to make sure I could vote for Nick Clegg. After a cautious defensive election campaign against Chris Huhne who grabbed every chance to appeal to party activists with a more left wing kind of liberalism, Nick Clegg just made it to victory. The margin is irrelevant, though I often found Huhne deeply irritating before and during the campaign due to his rather transparent attempts to ingratiate himself with the activist core, his concession speech was admirably gracious and supportive. He has proved he is a great political campaigner, against the advantage Clegg had from overwhelming media support and support of well known party members. To some degree Huhne was benefitting from a deeply inbuilt bloody mindedness amongst the activist core about receiving advice from the party establishment, but it doe stake campaigning and argumentative talent to take advantage. Clegg was annoyingly passive for most of the campaign, but at some moments he showed the mixture of passion and reasoned calm argument he is capable of, and the victory speech was such a moment. The understated campaign cannot be taken as indicative of his approach to inter-party contests, though clearly he does not go in for demagogy as a style.
Which Liberalism?
Another poll I took part in, and I find just as interesting is on Liberal Democrat Voice an activist run news and discussion site. It is a poll which continues on where participants want the Liberal Democrats to be on the political spectrum.
Results so far
- A socially liberal and economically liberal party
- A socially liberal and economically centrist party
- A socially liberal and economically left-of-centre party
- A socially conservative and economically liberal party
- A socially conservative and economically centrist party
- A socially conservative and economically left-of-centre party
As far as I am concerned the Liberal Democrats should be a party of 50% plus Social and Economic Liberals. That in itself covers a wide range of views from Hayek type almost-no-staters to those favoring a modest incremental shift towards open markets and choice in public services. I would place myself somewhere in between, at the point where anti-statist thinking and progressive welfarist liberalism border each other. Huhne's campaign was based on trying to colour even the most modest market based reforms of public services as dangerously right wing. My support for Nick Clegg was based on the belief that the party will move in that direction under his leadership, combined with his various leadership qualities. Clegg has not identified himself in such terms and would be unwise to do so, given that judging by this survey only just under a third of party members would define themselves in that way, though I am sure that is more than 1o years and even more than 15 years ago.
Where Clegg Should Go Further in Free Market/Limited State Liberalism
Certainly Nick Clegg is not calling for a reduction in the proportion of national income that goes on taxes and public spending. On the contrary he attacks the possibility that a Conservative government might reduce spending, though the Conservative leader David Cameron is vague on the topic. The accusation is in any case based on an ambiguity. Cameron has hinted at the possibility that tax/public spending might go down as a proportion of national income, this is not the same as a cut in spending or tax revenues. It is wholly compatible with increasing spending and tax revenues. A properly managed government can secure increased economic growth by reducing the disincentives to growth that are created by taxes.
Where Clegg is Already at the Right Point
It should be noted that the USA with a smaller proportion of tax/spending than the richer parts of Europe, is richer than those countries, has higher long term economic growth and spends at least as much in total public spending per person. Of course there are serious gaps in social provision in the USA, certainly the failure to institute universal health insurance is a scandal. Weaknesses in social provision is in large degree due to the very poor productivity and inefficiency of public services in the USA compared with Europe. Public services are heavily unionised in the USA, those unions have a lot of cash from very high membership subscription, and are brilliant talented lobbyists. We can see what happened in California where a popular persuasive governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was unable to get referendum support for proposals for very moderate public sector reform, such as increasing by one year the probationary period of employment. The public sector in California, and elsewhere, is full of inefficient working practices and staff who cannot easily be sacked regardless of financial circumstances or their personal performance .
Public Services in Britain
The UK, under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, has suffered from growing problems of that kind. Despite mythology about New Labour being the same as the Conservatives, the fact is since 1997, public spending has increased dramatically particularly in health and education. Apart from some politically high profile targets, such as reducing waiting lists for operations, the growth in spending has not been a success. State health services continue to be dogged by poor hygiene in hospitals, a high proportion of new spending has gone on wage inflation. State school education in Britain continues to be very inferior, particularly for low income groups, compared with private education in Britain and state education in other parts of Europe. Though there is not as much room for reform as in the USA, there is plenty of room for greater competition in the provision of public services and the greater efficiency which results from the kind of disciplines that exist in the private sector.
Clegg's Promising Policies
Clegg was rather quiet about it during the leadership campaign, but at some points he made clear that he favours consumer choice in public services, and importantly money following the choice. He hinted at a move away from party policy on favouring free university tuition There is nothing socially progressive n levying taxers on low earners to pay for the relatively week off to go to university and become more valuable commodities on the job market. Making soft long term loans guaranteed by the state creates a reasonable balance between keeping down taxes and making higher education widely available. He has ruled out private insurance funds as contributing to state health services, but past remarks suggest he is open to any reform which would leave health care universally available and free at the point of use. Sıme substitution of competing private insurance funds for general taxation would not block universal access.
Clegg seems to be taking long standing Liberal Democrat committments to localism seriously, he has said his leadership will be active in the localities. Tying this into clear policies to shift taxation and control of public services to the local level could producer a great shift away from central state power, and Clegg has clearly supported such a position. He has shown a committment to reducing unnecessary legislation, as in his proposal for repeal of unnecessary laws, the Great Repeal Act. This proposed title echoes the Great Reform Act of 1832 which spread voting rights and reformed electoral practices, and was a very serious shift away from the previous system of a Parliament of oligarchy, patronage and landed interests, a great moment for liberal reformism.
Summary
My idea of the best results from the Clegg leadership are as follows:
- A clear shift towards a party that is Socially and Economically Liberal, in other words leaning towards a limited state and free markets.
- Reduction of tax and spending as a proportion of national income in order to encourage economic growth and consequent increases in total public spending.
- Seeking to repeals laws and regulations where the costs outweigh benefits.
- More competition and choice in the provision of public services.
- More privater providers of public services.
- Use of private health insurance funds as a partial substitute for general taxation in funding universal services.
- A big shift towards localism in tax , spending and provision of services; and in the whole political culture.
Monday, 17 December 2007
Kierkegaard's Epistemology
I'm including some Kierkegaard in an Introduction to Philosophy course, where I concentrate on questions of knowledge. Kierkegaard is not obviously a reference for Epistemology for most people, but I believe he made an important contribution. My teaching is drawing on Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments and on Johannes Climacus or De omnibus dubitandum est, and that's what I will mostly refer to here.
Kierkegaard against Descartes and Epistemic Scepticism
Kierkegaard questions the method of doubt in philosophy. He contrasts Cartesian doubt with the 'wonder' with which the Ancient Greeks regarded the world. Descartes claims that philosophy begins with doubt. Kierkegaard's reply is that doubt in Descartes is only possible after philosophy has begun. Descartes' method of doubt casts doubt on previous philosophical positions. Wonder better describes a pre-philosophical attitude of curiosity and questioning with regard to the world. Descartes' claim, or implicit claim, that modern philosophy begins with doubt, leaves two unanswered problems: what was philosophy before doubt? From where did the method of doubt originate? In general the idea of philosophy as the appearance of pure doubt in the mind, leaves finite consciousness in a confrontation with the absoluteness of pure doubt. Consciousness cannot grasp such an abrupt intrusion of an external absolute. That is another reason why we need to begin with 'wonder'. With regard to general positions in Epistemology, Kierkegaard is against scepticism. It should follow that he rejects Foundationalist attempts to find pure foundations, beyond doubt, for Epistemology.
Kierkegaard against Hegel and Epistemic Coherentism or Internalism: Definitions
A lot of what Kierkegaard writes in many texts is directed against Hegel. Where Kierkegaard talks about Hegel, he is also referring to earlier Rationalism, particularly Spinoza. We can also take him to be referring to Kant and to the more recent phenomena of Coherentist and Internalist Epistemology; and Analytic Hegelianism. Coherentist Epistemology argues that the criterion for there being a state of knowledge, is that a set of beliefs cohere with each other. Internalism develops from this position, because it argues that there is knowledge where is agreement amongst inner beliefs. Donald Davidson's paper 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge' is probably the best known argument for Coherentism in recent philosophy. Hegel could be taken as a forerunner of Coherentism, certainly the Preface and Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit are open to that interpretation. Hegel is not so clearly an Internalist, because he takes consciousness is general as what knows. The earlier Fichte (first and second editions of the Grundlage der Gesamten Wissenschaftslehere, mistranslated into English as Science of Knowledge) might be a better example of an Internalist in German ıdealist philosophy, a he takes the 'I' as a starting point for philosophy. We might also think of recent 'Analytic Hegelianism' as a kind of Coherentism (thinking particularly of John McDowell and Robert Brandom).
Kierkegaard against Hegel and Epistemic Coherentism or Internalism: The Critique
Kierkegaard asserts that objective knowledge must be a contradiction. What he is referring to here is knowledge as something outside subjectivity. Since it must be the subject that knows, what is know cannot completely stand outside subjectivity according to Kierkegaard. An object of knowledge is known by subjectivity and therefore cannot be absolutely objective. It mus tbe an object for a subject, though that should not be taken to mean that Kierkegaard is a Solipsist. He is an anti-Solipsist since he shows how the subject can have knowledge, if not absolutely objective knowledge. Coherentism is contradictory because we cannot enter the Coherentist circle of mutually supporting beliefs from outside. The beginning of Coherentist Epistemology cannot be epistemic since it does not already have a set of mutually supporting and connecting beliefs. There cannot be a entry into the Coherentist circles accept by weakening the criterion of Coherentism that there should be a complete set of strong mutually justşfying beliefs. Hegel was aware of this problem, as can be seen in his Prefaces and Introductions, where he announces the Preface of Introduction cannot be part of the system. He leaves open the question of why there is a Preface or Introduction. This will not do for Kierkegaard, it is the subject that knows. Hegel gets into the same problem as Descartes: knowledge is such an absolute it is not possible to understand how to enter it, and it is not possible to understand how one contingent consciousness can come into contact and union with it.
Kierkegaard's Epistemic Alternative: Realist and Subjectivist
Fichte. As was pointed out above, the early Fichte could be taken as a proto-Internalist. Indeed Fichtean has been critically examined by a major Analytic philosopher, RobertNozick as contributing to the internal understanding of the 'I'. I hope to return to Nozick and Fichte at a later date. Fichte was certainly very important for Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard paid exhaustive attention to the internal reflections of consciousness. He also pays great attnetion to similar aspects in the work of other German ıdealists, as in theConcept of Anxiety, where he develops Kant's account of the inner traumas free will in Religion within the Bounds of Reason and Schelling's development of that account in the Essence of Human Freedom. Should we see Kierkegaard as an extension of Fichtean Internalism? Kierkegaard strongly criticises Fichte in his first book, his dissertation on The Concept of Irony. The context is irony in literary aesthetics. The starting point here, and in Kierkegaard's later work is an Ironic Subjectivism, in epistemic terms Internalism. However, this is not enough for Kierkegaard.
The Paradox. Like the method of doubt (and foundationalism), and Coherentism, Fictean Subjectivism runs into paradox. The paradox is good for Kierkegaard, it is the passion of paradox. The point though is to make a 'leap' beyond the paradox. It must be emphasised that the phrase 'leap of faith' is never used and that the leap is a twist in dialectical reasoning rather than an irrational unmotivated jump in to the beyond. There must be a dialectical move to surpass paradox, because the concepts must change. The paradox is never left behind, the existence of the paradox and the surpassing of the paradox belong together. Kierkegaard's Epistemology is Subjectivist. It is strongly Subjectivist, because it is based on a double reflection, in which reflective knowledge reflects on its belief that something is the case.
Time. However, Subjective consciousness escapes from the isolated moment of Subjectivity because that double reflection can only be grasped over time, in a moment known as the leap, as the reflection on the paradox that subjective knowledge is not knowledge of the objective. That movement in time establishes the self as existing over time as well as in moment to moment. The self is aware of something permanent in relation to itself, indepedent in relation to itself, but which is within it What is known is Real though Subjective. It does not disappear in a moment because it can be the object of double reflection, and subsequent indirect communication. It is only grasped through those movements. If what is known endures over time, it is Real and can be known to others, and we can communicate this even if only indirectly.
Kierkegaard against Descartes and Epistemic Scepticism
Kierkegaard questions the method of doubt in philosophy. He contrasts Cartesian doubt with the 'wonder' with which the Ancient Greeks regarded the world. Descartes claims that philosophy begins with doubt. Kierkegaard's reply is that doubt in Descartes is only possible after philosophy has begun. Descartes' method of doubt casts doubt on previous philosophical positions. Wonder better describes a pre-philosophical attitude of curiosity and questioning with regard to the world. Descartes' claim, or implicit claim, that modern philosophy begins with doubt, leaves two unanswered problems: what was philosophy before doubt? From where did the method of doubt originate? In general the idea of philosophy as the appearance of pure doubt in the mind, leaves finite consciousness in a confrontation with the absoluteness of pure doubt. Consciousness cannot grasp such an abrupt intrusion of an external absolute. That is another reason why we need to begin with 'wonder'. With regard to general positions in Epistemology, Kierkegaard is against scepticism. It should follow that he rejects Foundationalist attempts to find pure foundations, beyond doubt, for Epistemology.
Kierkegaard against Hegel and Epistemic Coherentism or Internalism: Definitions
A lot of what Kierkegaard writes in many texts is directed against Hegel. Where Kierkegaard talks about Hegel, he is also referring to earlier Rationalism, particularly Spinoza. We can also take him to be referring to Kant and to the more recent phenomena of Coherentist and Internalist Epistemology; and Analytic Hegelianism. Coherentist Epistemology argues that the criterion for there being a state of knowledge, is that a set of beliefs cohere with each other. Internalism develops from this position, because it argues that there is knowledge where is agreement amongst inner beliefs. Donald Davidson's paper 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge' is probably the best known argument for Coherentism in recent philosophy. Hegel could be taken as a forerunner of Coherentism, certainly the Preface and Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit are open to that interpretation. Hegel is not so clearly an Internalist, because he takes consciousness is general as what knows. The earlier Fichte (first and second editions of the Grundlage der Gesamten Wissenschaftslehere, mistranslated into English as Science of Knowledge) might be a better example of an Internalist in German ıdealist philosophy, a he takes the 'I' as a starting point for philosophy. We might also think of recent 'Analytic Hegelianism' as a kind of Coherentism (thinking particularly of John McDowell and Robert Brandom).
Kierkegaard against Hegel and Epistemic Coherentism or Internalism: The Critique
Kierkegaard asserts that objective knowledge must be a contradiction. What he is referring to here is knowledge as something outside subjectivity. Since it must be the subject that knows, what is know cannot completely stand outside subjectivity according to Kierkegaard. An object of knowledge is known by subjectivity and therefore cannot be absolutely objective. It mus tbe an object for a subject, though that should not be taken to mean that Kierkegaard is a Solipsist. He is an anti-Solipsist since he shows how the subject can have knowledge, if not absolutely objective knowledge. Coherentism is contradictory because we cannot enter the Coherentist circle of mutually supporting beliefs from outside. The beginning of Coherentist Epistemology cannot be epistemic since it does not already have a set of mutually supporting and connecting beliefs. There cannot be a entry into the Coherentist circles accept by weakening the criterion of Coherentism that there should be a complete set of strong mutually justşfying beliefs. Hegel was aware of this problem, as can be seen in his Prefaces and Introductions, where he announces the Preface of Introduction cannot be part of the system. He leaves open the question of why there is a Preface or Introduction. This will not do for Kierkegaard, it is the subject that knows. Hegel gets into the same problem as Descartes: knowledge is such an absolute it is not possible to understand how to enter it, and it is not possible to understand how one contingent consciousness can come into contact and union with it.
Kierkegaard's Epistemic Alternative: Realist and Subjectivist
Fichte. As was pointed out above, the early Fichte could be taken as a proto-Internalist. Indeed Fichtean has been critically examined by a major Analytic philosopher, RobertNozick as contributing to the internal understanding of the 'I'. I hope to return to Nozick and Fichte at a later date. Fichte was certainly very important for Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard paid exhaustive attention to the internal reflections of consciousness. He also pays great attnetion to similar aspects in the work of other German ıdealists, as in theConcept of Anxiety, where he develops Kant's account of the inner traumas free will in Religion within the Bounds of Reason and Schelling's development of that account in the Essence of Human Freedom. Should we see Kierkegaard as an extension of Fichtean Internalism? Kierkegaard strongly criticises Fichte in his first book, his dissertation on The Concept of Irony. The context is irony in literary aesthetics. The starting point here, and in Kierkegaard's later work is an Ironic Subjectivism, in epistemic terms Internalism. However, this is not enough for Kierkegaard.
The Paradox. Like the method of doubt (and foundationalism), and Coherentism, Fictean Subjectivism runs into paradox. The paradox is good for Kierkegaard, it is the passion of paradox. The point though is to make a 'leap' beyond the paradox. It must be emphasised that the phrase 'leap of faith' is never used and that the leap is a twist in dialectical reasoning rather than an irrational unmotivated jump in to the beyond. There must be a dialectical move to surpass paradox, because the concepts must change. The paradox is never left behind, the existence of the paradox and the surpassing of the paradox belong together. Kierkegaard's Epistemology is Subjectivist. It is strongly Subjectivist, because it is based on a double reflection, in which reflective knowledge reflects on its belief that something is the case.
Time. However, Subjective consciousness escapes from the isolated moment of Subjectivity because that double reflection can only be grasped over time, in a moment known as the leap, as the reflection on the paradox that subjective knowledge is not knowledge of the objective. That movement in time establishes the self as existing over time as well as in moment to moment. The self is aware of something permanent in relation to itself, indepedent in relation to itself, but which is within it What is known is Real though Subjective. It does not disappear in a moment because it can be the object of double reflection, and subsequent indirect communication. It is only grasped through those movements. If what is known endures over time, it is Real and can be known to others, and we can communicate this even if only indirectly.
Sunday, 16 December 2007
Kierkegaard Against the Ethics of Aristotle
We are concentrating on Fear and Trembling here, which I am teaching in an Ethics course.
For Kierkegaard, Aristotle defines something accurately, that is the Ethics of the Ancient world. In Fear and Trembling, he does this more with reference to Arisotle's Poetics rather than the Nichomachean Ethics, or any other of Aristotle's texts on Ethics.
What Kierkegaard concentrates on in Fear and Trembling is the recognition of the sin of the tragic hero. There is disclosure and recognition through necessity beyond the control of the hero. Oedipus' tragic error is revealed not by his confession but by the plagues which assault Thebes, where he is King.
For Kierkegaard, Aristotle defines a view in which the individual is not responsible for sin. It is the nation, the family or fate. Greek tragedy in Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides, shows that a sin is inherited from the family , or fate makes the sin inevitable, as when Oedipus actions to avoid the prophecy of his sin, leads to that sin.
In the modern world, it is clear that the individual is responsible for guilt, bears sin. The idea that ethics may contain conflict between the individual and the universal, for the social good, is replaced by an extreme of individual responsibility. The şissue of sin becomes harder to bear than the ethics derived from social habit in Aristotle.
Ethics must refer to subjectivity, Aristotle detracts from that in his view of humans governed by fate. The difficult situation that must be faced now is the melancholic within. The real anxiety we have to face now, on or own, is the need to have faith which will enable us to endanger another person with our melancholia. We can overcome melancholia as an expression of subjectivity that can only see itself as contingent. That may require silence and an inner suffering, which cannot be explained to another person. The universality of Aristotle's ethics is replace by the bond that exists between the melancholic person and the person who might be a sacrifice to that melancholia. The melancholia that mişght lead us to think, Like Abraham that God has commanded him to kill Isaac . Ethics at its highest rests on a subordination of universal rules to the inner struggle to find the absolute within the contingency of the self.
Ethics at its highest is not obeying rules, it is developing the self that rises above itself in the dialectic of the absurd, in the passion for paradox, with regard to the actions in which the subject becomes ethical in the strongest sense. The self that can be ethical must emerge from the paradoxes of subjectivity. The self that is ethical because it has the capacity to be unethical. Ethics emerges fully when we take the risk that the unethical will destroy in our relations with others.
For Kierkegaard, Aristotle defines something accurately, that is the Ethics of the Ancient world. In Fear and Trembling, he does this more with reference to Arisotle's Poetics rather than the Nichomachean Ethics, or any other of Aristotle's texts on Ethics.
What Kierkegaard concentrates on in Fear and Trembling is the recognition of the sin of the tragic hero. There is disclosure and recognition through necessity beyond the control of the hero. Oedipus' tragic error is revealed not by his confession but by the plagues which assault Thebes, where he is King.
For Kierkegaard, Aristotle defines a view in which the individual is not responsible for sin. It is the nation, the family or fate. Greek tragedy in Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides, shows that a sin is inherited from the family , or fate makes the sin inevitable, as when Oedipus actions to avoid the prophecy of his sin, leads to that sin.
In the modern world, it is clear that the individual is responsible for guilt, bears sin. The idea that ethics may contain conflict between the individual and the universal, for the social good, is replaced by an extreme of individual responsibility. The şissue of sin becomes harder to bear than the ethics derived from social habit in Aristotle.
Ethics must refer to subjectivity, Aristotle detracts from that in his view of humans governed by fate. The difficult situation that must be faced now is the melancholic within. The real anxiety we have to face now, on or own, is the need to have faith which will enable us to endanger another person with our melancholia. We can overcome melancholia as an expression of subjectivity that can only see itself as contingent. That may require silence and an inner suffering, which cannot be explained to another person. The universality of Aristotle's ethics is replace by the bond that exists between the melancholic person and the person who might be a sacrifice to that melancholia. The melancholia that mişght lead us to think, Like Abraham that God has commanded him to kill Isaac . Ethics at its highest rests on a subordination of universal rules to the inner struggle to find the absolute within the contingency of the self.
Ethics at its highest is not obeying rules, it is developing the self that rises above itself in the dialectic of the absurd, in the passion for paradox, with regard to the actions in which the subject becomes ethical in the strongest sense. The self that can be ethical must emerge from the paradoxes of subjectivity. The self that is ethical because it has the capacity to be unethical. Ethics emerges fully when we take the risk that the unethical will destroy in our relations with others.
Saturday, 15 December 2007
What's Wrong with Republican Political Theory Today? Force, Conflict and the Moment of Decision
Growth of Republican Theory
There has been a recent growth in Republican political theory, though the earliest aspect of it in J.G.A. Pocock goes back some way now. Pocock worked on Civic Humanism in Renaissance Italy and Early Modern Atlantic Republicanism. In the former field, he worked particularly on Machiavelli; and in the latter on James Harrington and the continuation of Machiavelli. Machiavelli's line of influence obviously goes up to Rousseau, after which the idea of a direct Republican line of influence is harder to maintain.
Kinds of Liberty
More recent work on Republicanism has included Phillip Pettit's work of normative (analytic) political philosophy of that name, Quentin Skinner's work on Roman Freedom/Liberty and Machiavelli, and Samuel Fleischer on a third liberty, between the negative and positive liberty I discussed in a recent post, 'Negative and Positive Liberty: A Short History'. That idea of the third liberty corresponds to the idea of 'non-domination' in Pettit. In a comparable manner, Skinner opposes 'Roman Liberty' to 'Liberalism' which he defines a pure negative liberty, on utilitarian grounds.
Tocqueville and Egalitarian Liberalism
Here I am continuing themes in a recent post on Tocqueville on Republican Politics and the Tyranny of Small Communities, where I suggested that Republicanism recently has been a form of social democracy, a development out of Rawlsian egalitarian liberalism. The recnet Republicans continue Rawls' theme of defining harm resulting from inequality very broadly, and defining necessary compensation very broadly. For Tocqueville Republicanism is more about maintaining institutions that prevent those with lower incomes from seeking to compensate themselves through limiting the property rights of those with property. That goes along with the wish for institutions that prevent a temporary majority from undermining liberty through any kind of attack on unpopular minorities. Tocqueville's version of Republicanism has clear precedents in Montesquieu, Locke, and Aristotle. Considering that Tocqueville was inspired by the emergence of democracy as we know it now, in the USA, we could say that this kind of anti-egalitarian Republicanism is at the heart of modern liberal, or representative, democracy. The issue is somewhat more ambiguous than that. Though Tocqueville was against strong egalitarian social measures, he recognised that modern liberty was democratic in the sense that a broad equality of conditions was emerging between citizens of all classes.
State Force
There is another question here. We can place Tocqueville in the context of more egalitarian style liberalism, but we would still need to notice something else about Republicanism, it does not just uphold moral community action, it upholds the state and the authority of the state as something that rests on force as well as consent. That is the dimension that Lockean liberal republicanism and Rousseauesque egalitarian republicanism are overlooking. The state has a an active role in establishing and maintaining republican beliefs, and it uses force against those who threaten those beliefs. Centralised force is necessary to restrain the conformist force which can build up to an irresistable intensity at the local level. as Spinoza suggests, democracy rests on the force of the majority of the people.
Elites and Aristocracy
The point of Machiavelli's Republicanism is not not just the moral advantage of a community of citizens. While it is important to avoid the still prevalent image of 'evil Machiavelli', we should not ignore that recognition of force and coercion in Machiavelli, which does sometimes have a gleeful edge to it. It can be like Nietzsche' enjoyment of wickedness, which is certainly not an enjoyment of evil for its own sake though. Nietzsche expresses admiration for those states which institute a great political aristocracy, or elite. Tocqueville considered the formation of a modern democratic substitute for aristocracy as necessary in order to maintain liberty under democracy.
Natural and Positive Law
Republicanism in Aristotle is the idea that the political community is a natural good in its own right beyond the aggregation of individual interests. Republicanism in Machiavelli adds the recogniiton that state power is not 'natural' and must be instituted, and maintained by force. Tocqueville's own thought is rooted in Pascal who emphasised that law is based on force in a godless unjust world, as Derrida also emphasises. Pascal finds positive law (law created by institutions, by the sovereign) is not rooted in natural law (objective moral order outside individual interests and historical constructions).
From Mill to Machiavelli
In John Stuart Mill, liberalism retains some elitist-aristocratic aspects, but is on the way to being a doctrine of politics based on consent, discussion and rationality which has difficulty with discussing what makes such activities possible. It is the sociologist Max Weber, who was more able to deal with this because he saw politics in terms of a 'realist' theory of pursuing power. Though current Republicanism emphasises politics as a human activity and goal, it lacks any sense of power and the foundations of the state in force. Despite Skinner's references to 'Roman liberty', it lacks a sense of the absolute devotion of the classical citizen to the sovereignty of the state and its laws. They push the more realist 'wicked' aspects of Machiavelli aside as they see Machiavelli in rather Rawlsian terms. Machiavelli did not see politics in those terms, he thought that interests permanently clash and not in the sense of constant dialogue, just as Tocqueville thought that politics must be rooted in human pride and the necessary conflicts in pursuing pride. There is something Realist in Machiavelli and Tocqueville, and there is something 'decisionistic', that is politics refers to the moment of decision which is never completely justified and is never completely rational.
There has been a recent growth in Republican political theory, though the earliest aspect of it in J.G.A. Pocock goes back some way now. Pocock worked on Civic Humanism in Renaissance Italy and Early Modern Atlantic Republicanism. In the former field, he worked particularly on Machiavelli; and in the latter on James Harrington and the continuation of Machiavelli. Machiavelli's line of influence obviously goes up to Rousseau, after which the idea of a direct Republican line of influence is harder to maintain.
Kinds of Liberty
More recent work on Republicanism has included Phillip Pettit's work of normative (analytic) political philosophy of that name, Quentin Skinner's work on Roman Freedom/Liberty and Machiavelli, and Samuel Fleischer on a third liberty, between the negative and positive liberty I discussed in a recent post, 'Negative and Positive Liberty: A Short History'. That idea of the third liberty corresponds to the idea of 'non-domination' in Pettit. In a comparable manner, Skinner opposes 'Roman Liberty' to 'Liberalism' which he defines a pure negative liberty, on utilitarian grounds.
Tocqueville and Egalitarian Liberalism
Here I am continuing themes in a recent post on Tocqueville on Republican Politics and the Tyranny of Small Communities, where I suggested that Republicanism recently has been a form of social democracy, a development out of Rawlsian egalitarian liberalism. The recnet Republicans continue Rawls' theme of defining harm resulting from inequality very broadly, and defining necessary compensation very broadly. For Tocqueville Republicanism is more about maintaining institutions that prevent those with lower incomes from seeking to compensate themselves through limiting the property rights of those with property. That goes along with the wish for institutions that prevent a temporary majority from undermining liberty through any kind of attack on unpopular minorities. Tocqueville's version of Republicanism has clear precedents in Montesquieu, Locke, and Aristotle. Considering that Tocqueville was inspired by the emergence of democracy as we know it now, in the USA, we could say that this kind of anti-egalitarian Republicanism is at the heart of modern liberal, or representative, democracy. The issue is somewhat more ambiguous than that. Though Tocqueville was against strong egalitarian social measures, he recognised that modern liberty was democratic in the sense that a broad equality of conditions was emerging between citizens of all classes.
State Force
There is another question here. We can place Tocqueville in the context of more egalitarian style liberalism, but we would still need to notice something else about Republicanism, it does not just uphold moral community action, it upholds the state and the authority of the state as something that rests on force as well as consent. That is the dimension that Lockean liberal republicanism and Rousseauesque egalitarian republicanism are overlooking. The state has a an active role in establishing and maintaining republican beliefs, and it uses force against those who threaten those beliefs. Centralised force is necessary to restrain the conformist force which can build up to an irresistable intensity at the local level. as Spinoza suggests, democracy rests on the force of the majority of the people.
Elites and Aristocracy
The point of Machiavelli's Republicanism is not not just the moral advantage of a community of citizens. While it is important to avoid the still prevalent image of 'evil Machiavelli', we should not ignore that recognition of force and coercion in Machiavelli, which does sometimes have a gleeful edge to it. It can be like Nietzsche' enjoyment of wickedness, which is certainly not an enjoyment of evil for its own sake though. Nietzsche expresses admiration for those states which institute a great political aristocracy, or elite. Tocqueville considered the formation of a modern democratic substitute for aristocracy as necessary in order to maintain liberty under democracy.
Natural and Positive Law
Republicanism in Aristotle is the idea that the political community is a natural good in its own right beyond the aggregation of individual interests. Republicanism in Machiavelli adds the recogniiton that state power is not 'natural' and must be instituted, and maintained by force. Tocqueville's own thought is rooted in Pascal who emphasised that law is based on force in a godless unjust world, as Derrida also emphasises. Pascal finds positive law (law created by institutions, by the sovereign) is not rooted in natural law (objective moral order outside individual interests and historical constructions).
From Mill to Machiavelli
In John Stuart Mill, liberalism retains some elitist-aristocratic aspects, but is on the way to being a doctrine of politics based on consent, discussion and rationality which has difficulty with discussing what makes such activities possible. It is the sociologist Max Weber, who was more able to deal with this because he saw politics in terms of a 'realist' theory of pursuing power. Though current Republicanism emphasises politics as a human activity and goal, it lacks any sense of power and the foundations of the state in force. Despite Skinner's references to 'Roman liberty', it lacks a sense of the absolute devotion of the classical citizen to the sovereignty of the state and its laws. They push the more realist 'wicked' aspects of Machiavelli aside as they see Machiavelli in rather Rawlsian terms. Machiavelli did not see politics in those terms, he thought that interests permanently clash and not in the sense of constant dialogue, just as Tocqueville thought that politics must be rooted in human pride and the necessary conflicts in pursuing pride. There is something Realist in Machiavelli and Tocqueville, and there is something 'decisionistic', that is politics refers to the moment of decision which is never completely justified and is never completely rational.
What's Wrong with Republican Political Theory Today? Liber
There has been a recent growth in Republican political theory, though the earliest aspect of it in J.G.A. Pocock goes back some way now. Pocock worked on Civic Humanism in Renaissance Italy and Early Modern Atlantic Republicanism. In the former field, he worked particularly on Machiavelli; and in the latter on James Harrington and the continuation of Machiavelli. Machiavelli's line of influence obviously goes up to Rousseau, after which the idea of a direct Republican line of influence is harder to maintain.
More recent work on Republicanism has included Phillip Pettit's work of normative (analytic) political philosophy of that name, Quentin Skinner's work on Roman Freedom and Machiavelli, and Samuel Fleischer on a third liberty, between the negative and positive liberty I discussed in a recent post, 'Negative and Positive Liberty: A Short History'. That idea of the third liberty corresponds to the idea of 'non-domination' in Pettit. In a comparable manner, Skinner opposes 'Roman Liberty' to 'Liberalism' which he defines a pure negative liberty, on utilitarian grounds.
Here I am continuing themes in a recent post on Tocqueville on Republican Politics and the Tyranny of Small Communities, where I suggested that Republicanism recently has been a form of social democracy, a development out of Rawlsian egalitarian liberalism. The recnet Republicans continue Rawls' theme of defining harm resulting from inequality very broadly, and defining necessary compensation very broadly. For Tocqueville Republicanism is more about maintaining institutions that prevent those with lower incomes from seeking to compensate themselves through limiting the property rights of those with property. That goes along with the wish for institutions that prevent a temporary majority from undermining liberty through any kind of attack on unpopular minorities. Tocqueville's version of Republicanism has clear precedents in Montesquieu, Locke, and Aristotle. Considering that Tocqueville was inspired by the emergence of democracy as we know it now, in the USA, we could say that this kind of anti-egalitarian Republicanism is at the heart of modern liberal, or representative, democracy. The issue is somewhat more ambiguous than that. Though Tocqueville was against strong egalitarian social measures, he recognised that modern liberty was democratic in the sense that a broad equlality of conditions was emerging between citizens of all classes.
There is another question here. We can place Tocqueville in the context of more egalitarian style liberalism, but we would still need to notice something else about Republicanism, it does not just uphold moral community action, it upholds the state and the authority of the state as something that rests on force as well as consent. That is the dimension that Lockean liberal republicanism and Rousseauesque egalitarian republicanism are overlooking. The state has a na active role in establishing and maintaining republican beliefs, and it uses force against those wjo threaten those beliefs. Centralised force is necessary to restrain the conformist force which can uild up to an irresistable intensity at the local level. as Spinoza suggests, democracy rests on the force of the majority of the people.
The point of Machiavelli's Republicanism is not not just the moral advantage of a community of citizens. While it is important to avoid the still prevalent image of 'evil Machiavelli', we should not ignore that recognition of force and coercion in Machiavelli, which does sometimes have a gleeful edge to it. It can be like Nietzsche' enjoyment of wickedness, which is certainly not an enjoyment of evil for its own sake though. Nietzsche expresses admiration for those states which institute a great political aristocracy, or elite. Tocqueville considered the formation of a modern democratic substitute for aristocracy as necessary in order to maintain liberty under democracy.
Republicanism in Aristotle is the idea that the political community is a good in its own right beyond the aggregation of individual interests. Republicanism in Machiavelli adds the recogniiton that state power is not 'natural' and must be instituted, and maintained by force. Tocqueville's own thought is rooted in Pascal who emphasised that law is based on force in a godless unjust world, as Derrida also emphasises. Pascal finds positive law (law created by institutions, by the sovereign) is not rooted in natural law (objective moral order outside individual interests and historical constructions).
In Mill, liberalism retains some elitist-aristocratic aspects, but is on the way to being a doctrine of politics based on consent, discussion and rationality which has difficulty with discussing what makes such activities possible. It is the sociologist Max Weber, who was more able to deal with this because he saw politics in terms of a 'realist' theory of pursuing power. Though current Republicanism emphasises politics as a human activity and goal, it lacks any sense of power and the foundations of the state in force. Despite Skinner's references to 'Roman liberty', it lacks a sense of the absolute devotion of the classical citizen to the sovereignty of the state and its laws. They push the more realist 'wicked' aspects of Machiavelli aside as they see Machiavelli in rather Rawlsian terms. Machiavelli did not see politics in those terms, he thought that interests permanently clash and not in the sense of constant dialogue, just as Tocqueville thought that politics must be rooted in human pride and the necessary conflicts in pursuing pride. There is something Realist in Machiavelli and Tocqueville, and there is something 'decisionistic', that is politics refers to the moment of decision which is never completely justified and is never completely rational.
More recent work on Republicanism has included Phillip Pettit's work of normative (analytic) political philosophy of that name, Quentin Skinner's work on Roman Freedom and Machiavelli, and Samuel Fleischer on a third liberty, between the negative and positive liberty I discussed in a recent post, 'Negative and Positive Liberty: A Short History'. That idea of the third liberty corresponds to the idea of 'non-domination' in Pettit. In a comparable manner, Skinner opposes 'Roman Liberty' to 'Liberalism' which he defines a pure negative liberty, on utilitarian grounds.
Here I am continuing themes in a recent post on Tocqueville on Republican Politics and the Tyranny of Small Communities, where I suggested that Republicanism recently has been a form of social democracy, a development out of Rawlsian egalitarian liberalism. The recnet Republicans continue Rawls' theme of defining harm resulting from inequality very broadly, and defining necessary compensation very broadly. For Tocqueville Republicanism is more about maintaining institutions that prevent those with lower incomes from seeking to compensate themselves through limiting the property rights of those with property. That goes along with the wish for institutions that prevent a temporary majority from undermining liberty through any kind of attack on unpopular minorities. Tocqueville's version of Republicanism has clear precedents in Montesquieu, Locke, and Aristotle. Considering that Tocqueville was inspired by the emergence of democracy as we know it now, in the USA, we could say that this kind of anti-egalitarian Republicanism is at the heart of modern liberal, or representative, democracy. The issue is somewhat more ambiguous than that. Though Tocqueville was against strong egalitarian social measures, he recognised that modern liberty was democratic in the sense that a broad equlality of conditions was emerging between citizens of all classes.
There is another question here. We can place Tocqueville in the context of more egalitarian style liberalism, but we would still need to notice something else about Republicanism, it does not just uphold moral community action, it upholds the state and the authority of the state as something that rests on force as well as consent. That is the dimension that Lockean liberal republicanism and Rousseauesque egalitarian republicanism are overlooking. The state has a na active role in establishing and maintaining republican beliefs, and it uses force against those wjo threaten those beliefs. Centralised force is necessary to restrain the conformist force which can uild up to an irresistable intensity at the local level. as Spinoza suggests, democracy rests on the force of the majority of the people.
The point of Machiavelli's Republicanism is not not just the moral advantage of a community of citizens. While it is important to avoid the still prevalent image of 'evil Machiavelli', we should not ignore that recognition of force and coercion in Machiavelli, which does sometimes have a gleeful edge to it. It can be like Nietzsche' enjoyment of wickedness, which is certainly not an enjoyment of evil for its own sake though. Nietzsche expresses admiration for those states which institute a great political aristocracy, or elite. Tocqueville considered the formation of a modern democratic substitute for aristocracy as necessary in order to maintain liberty under democracy.
Republicanism in Aristotle is the idea that the political community is a good in its own right beyond the aggregation of individual interests. Republicanism in Machiavelli adds the recogniiton that state power is not 'natural' and must be instituted, and maintained by force. Tocqueville's own thought is rooted in Pascal who emphasised that law is based on force in a godless unjust world, as Derrida also emphasises. Pascal finds positive law (law created by institutions, by the sovereign) is not rooted in natural law (objective moral order outside individual interests and historical constructions).
In Mill, liberalism retains some elitist-aristocratic aspects, but is on the way to being a doctrine of politics based on consent, discussion and rationality which has difficulty with discussing what makes such activities possible. It is the sociologist Max Weber, who was more able to deal with this because he saw politics in terms of a 'realist' theory of pursuing power. Though current Republicanism emphasises politics as a human activity and goal, it lacks any sense of power and the foundations of the state in force. Despite Skinner's references to 'Roman liberty', it lacks a sense of the absolute devotion of the classical citizen to the sovereignty of the state and its laws. They push the more realist 'wicked' aspects of Machiavelli aside as they see Machiavelli in rather Rawlsian terms. Machiavelli did not see politics in those terms, he thought that interests permanently clash and not in the sense of constant dialogue, just as Tocqueville thought that politics must be rooted in human pride and the necessary conflicts in pursuing pride. There is something Realist in Machiavelli and Tocqueville, and there is something 'decisionistic', that is politics refers to the moment of decision which is never completely justified and is never completely rational.
Friday, 14 December 2007
Foucault on Knowledge, Discourse and Phenomenology
Some thoughts on Foucault arising from the Methodology course I give to Political Science MA Students.
Foucault: Phenomenology not Constructivism
My main thoughts are that Foucault is not the kind of social constructivist he is often taken to be; and that his epistemology can be better understood if it is interpreted in a Phenomenological context. The Phenomenological aspect of Foucault should orientate understanding away from intellectual construction to embodiment, the extended mind, and perceptibility. All the discussion of archeology, genealogy, the order of discourse and so on, can be better understood as bringing perception into the conceptual than as conceptual construction.
Throughout the phases of his work, there is a constant underlying concern with Phenomenological themes. If he's talking about abstract discourse or about punishment of criminals, Foucault is always concerned with the revelation of truth. Truth is appearing, there is a coming into light. The last phrase is very reminiscient of Heidegger. Heidegger turned Husserl's abstract transcendental forms of Phenomenology into Being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world is a big thought in Heidegger, but here we can say it includes the concrete experience of always existing in a world of care, concern and Being-with.
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Cognitive Science
Heidegger's approach to Phenomenology leads the way to Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty used psychological science and aesthetic references in order to explain consciousness as what is always orientated as a whole to the world, as a part of the way that the body is not just in the world, it is always orientated to the word in the perceptions of time and space, and the experience of the body. Merleau-Ponty introduces a strongly naturalistic element into Phenomenology, which is part of what has made his so influential now that the connections between cognitive science and philoosphy are such a big area. Heidegger has also been taken up in this context by Andy Clarke (his website which is very good for downloads of his work is on a list of links with philosophers, on this blog, who post their work on their website), Michael Wheeler and others.
Merleau-Ponty is dealing with the extended mind, because the mind is entangled with the body in its physical relations with the world. All ideas of isolated consciousness are abandoned. Consciousness and perception exists in the body's relation with the world. Discourse about the world and our relations with forces in the world extend 'consciousness' beyond private experience.
Phenomenology: Naturalistic and Poetic
In later Merleau-Ponty, particularly in The Visible and the Invisible is more concerned with the philosophical discussion of subjective experience than with the naturalistic discussion of the world. It is still concerned with the idea of 'flesh' at what arises where consciousness finds contradiction and uncertainty. This links back to Heidegger and sideways to Maurice Blanchot.
In a very provisional way, we could distinguish between Phenomenology as a Naturalistic account of perception, and Phenomenology as the poetic discussion of the subjective experience of the limits of consciousness. We do not have to see them as contradictory. It is Blanchot's discussion of the experience of writing and of poetry which seems to be indirectly invoked by Foucault sometimes. He sometimes refers to the absence, nothingness from which visible objects emerge. It is discourse which enables objects to emerge against the background of nothingness, and silence
Power, Forces and Nominalism
All of Foucault's discussions of the construction of discourse or knowledge, the order of things, power-knowledge and so on, are concerned with how to make the invisible visible. It is the staging of punishment, its physicality which draws attention to the idea of a truth in the social world. Foucault is not a constructivist when he refers to the way truth appears in the relations of forces which make up power. Power is understood in a slight naturalistic way as the relations between forces, it is which introduces war into social relations; forces and war are always already there in the social world. Discourse shapes this but is also shaped by it, and we can only understand discourse as the making visible of the invisible. The discontinuities of knowledge, the places where theories and concepts break down and give way to new ones, are the product of this relation between the visible and the invisible. Knowledge exists in the difference between them, as what stands out from a blank background.
The assumption by critics and defenders of Foucault that he has a theory of constructed reality is a flawed one. Our knowledge of objects must be constructed in some way and that interacts with objects themselves in a grasp of reality which brings structure and order. We should consdier the widespread misconception that Foucault thinks sexual desire is produced by the prohibitions of law, prohibition produces the excitement necessary to desire. In History of Sexuality, Foucault is very clear that sexuality is shaped by discourse, prohibition and law but in an interactive way with the body, with psychology, with the inherent nature of sexuality. Like objects, sexuality could never exist in a purely inherent form before it is conditioned by discourse, but ıt is not the product of discourse. Something like Putnam or Davidson's or McDowell's mediation between Internalism and Externalism in the meaning of words and the content of beliefs would be an appropriate comparison here, but not one that we can develop right now.
If we adhere to a very rigid direct realism, every word we use, every belief content, refers directly to a real object. In that case Foucault may seem constructivist in a very socially relativistic way. But when Foucault links power and knowledge, he is stating what he considers to be a historical reality, that objects of power become objects of knowledge. That does not deny validity to knowledge, it does not deny some independence of science from social conditions, it does deny an absolute separation. Power is nominalistic in Foucault, it is a term which brings together many situations of conflicts of forces. There is no great abstraction which can be called power in general. There is no abstract discursive shaping of reality in a radically constructivist manner, there is a discussion of the multiplicity of forces, including the forces behind the emergence of psychological or social science. It should be taken as a discussion of how truths appear, how knowledge emerges, not as an attack on knowledge or truth. For Foucault, we are always struggling to bring the dark and obscured things into light as knowledge and truth, we are struggling to make the world perceptible.
Foucault: Phenomenology not Constructivism
My main thoughts are that Foucault is not the kind of social constructivist he is often taken to be; and that his epistemology can be better understood if it is interpreted in a Phenomenological context. The Phenomenological aspect of Foucault should orientate understanding away from intellectual construction to embodiment, the extended mind, and perceptibility. All the discussion of archeology, genealogy, the order of discourse and so on, can be better understood as bringing perception into the conceptual than as conceptual construction.
Throughout the phases of his work, there is a constant underlying concern with Phenomenological themes. If he's talking about abstract discourse or about punishment of criminals, Foucault is always concerned with the revelation of truth. Truth is appearing, there is a coming into light. The last phrase is very reminiscient of Heidegger. Heidegger turned Husserl's abstract transcendental forms of Phenomenology into Being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world is a big thought in Heidegger, but here we can say it includes the concrete experience of always existing in a world of care, concern and Being-with.
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Cognitive Science
Heidegger's approach to Phenomenology leads the way to Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty used psychological science and aesthetic references in order to explain consciousness as what is always orientated as a whole to the world, as a part of the way that the body is not just in the world, it is always orientated to the word in the perceptions of time and space, and the experience of the body. Merleau-Ponty introduces a strongly naturalistic element into Phenomenology, which is part of what has made his so influential now that the connections between cognitive science and philoosphy are such a big area. Heidegger has also been taken up in this context by Andy Clarke (his website which is very good for downloads of his work is on a list of links with philosophers, on this blog, who post their work on their website), Michael Wheeler and others.
Merleau-Ponty is dealing with the extended mind, because the mind is entangled with the body in its physical relations with the world. All ideas of isolated consciousness are abandoned. Consciousness and perception exists in the body's relation with the world. Discourse about the world and our relations with forces in the world extend 'consciousness' beyond private experience.
Phenomenology: Naturalistic and Poetic
In later Merleau-Ponty, particularly in The Visible and the Invisible is more concerned with the philosophical discussion of subjective experience than with the naturalistic discussion of the world. It is still concerned with the idea of 'flesh' at what arises where consciousness finds contradiction and uncertainty. This links back to Heidegger and sideways to Maurice Blanchot.
In a very provisional way, we could distinguish between Phenomenology as a Naturalistic account of perception, and Phenomenology as the poetic discussion of the subjective experience of the limits of consciousness. We do not have to see them as contradictory. It is Blanchot's discussion of the experience of writing and of poetry which seems to be indirectly invoked by Foucault sometimes. He sometimes refers to the absence, nothingness from which visible objects emerge. It is discourse which enables objects to emerge against the background of nothingness, and silence
Power, Forces and Nominalism
All of Foucault's discussions of the construction of discourse or knowledge, the order of things, power-knowledge and so on, are concerned with how to make the invisible visible. It is the staging of punishment, its physicality which draws attention to the idea of a truth in the social world. Foucault is not a constructivist when he refers to the way truth appears in the relations of forces which make up power. Power is understood in a slight naturalistic way as the relations between forces, it is which introduces war into social relations; forces and war are always already there in the social world. Discourse shapes this but is also shaped by it, and we can only understand discourse as the making visible of the invisible. The discontinuities of knowledge, the places where theories and concepts break down and give way to new ones, are the product of this relation between the visible and the invisible. Knowledge exists in the difference between them, as what stands out from a blank background.
The assumption by critics and defenders of Foucault that he has a theory of constructed reality is a flawed one. Our knowledge of objects must be constructed in some way and that interacts with objects themselves in a grasp of reality which brings structure and order. We should consdier the widespread misconception that Foucault thinks sexual desire is produced by the prohibitions of law, prohibition produces the excitement necessary to desire. In History of Sexuality, Foucault is very clear that sexuality is shaped by discourse, prohibition and law but in an interactive way with the body, with psychology, with the inherent nature of sexuality. Like objects, sexuality could never exist in a purely inherent form before it is conditioned by discourse, but ıt is not the product of discourse. Something like Putnam or Davidson's or McDowell's mediation between Internalism and Externalism in the meaning of words and the content of beliefs would be an appropriate comparison here, but not one that we can develop right now.
If we adhere to a very rigid direct realism, every word we use, every belief content, refers directly to a real object. In that case Foucault may seem constructivist in a very socially relativistic way. But when Foucault links power and knowledge, he is stating what he considers to be a historical reality, that objects of power become objects of knowledge. That does not deny validity to knowledge, it does not deny some independence of science from social conditions, it does deny an absolute separation. Power is nominalistic in Foucault, it is a term which brings together many situations of conflicts of forces. There is no great abstraction which can be called power in general. There is no abstract discursive shaping of reality in a radically constructivist manner, there is a discussion of the multiplicity of forces, including the forces behind the emergence of psychological or social science. It should be taken as a discussion of how truths appear, how knowledge emerges, not as an attack on knowledge or truth. For Foucault, we are always struggling to bring the dark and obscured things into light as knowledge and truth, we are struggling to make the world perceptible.
Thursday, 13 December 2007
What's Wrong with Hugo Chavez?
My online Poll
I have had a poll on the right hand column asking visitors to the site whether they welcome or do not welcome the recent defeat by referendum of changes to the constitution of Venezuela, proposed by the President, Hugo Chavez. Strictly speaking the referendum was on changes proposed by Chavez and the National Assembly.
The number of recorded votes was modest, 9, suggesting that traffic would need to become much higher before I post a similar question. The voting was 7 welcoming Chavez's defeat and 2 not welcoming it. A clear victory for the Anti-Chavez camp but from a very small pool of respondents. I was intially thinking that there would be more pro-Chavez votes. This blog does frequently cover Foucault and Derrida. Most students and academics working on them are distinctly left of centre. I thought such people might find Chavez's social programmes and anti-US stance to be attractive and be unconcerned about possible threats to property rights or political constitutionalism. maybe I have more left-liberal readers than vanguardist leftist.
Why the Left should Oppose Chavez
I'm definitely a liberal rather than a socialist, a capitalist libertarian though at he moderate end of that opinion. Nevertheless, I want to put a case to socialist about what's wrong with Chavez on the grounds of shared values around democracy and the restraint of state power.
It seems obvious why conservatives and free market liberals would think Chavez is a bad thing, given that he claims to be leading socialist revolution. The issue is then, should left-winger,including radical socialists support Chavez?
Chavez Fan of One-Party State Socialism
A very obvious point is that Chavez is a supporter of Fidel Castro and of the memory of Che Guevara. Oddly, one of Chavez's left-wing defenders in the British press, Johann Hari of the Independent, has strong condemned Guevara as a Stalinist. If Chavez admires Stalinists, if he purses a special relationship with a one party state which puts its critics in prison, then this must be disturbing.
Chavez's Failure to help the Poorest
Chavez has poured very large amounts of public money into subsidised shops, and other measures to benefit the poor of Venezuela. Supportrrs of Chavez who have checked the effect on living standards have found a shift towards the poorer part of society, but very concentrate on the less desperately poor. The poorest of the poor have not benefitted from this very substantial shift expenditure.
Chavez's Personal Control of Economic Resources
Budget surpluses in Venezuela derived from revenue go into a fund administered by Chavez outside the supervisionof the National Assembly and anyone apart from the President. One of the defeated referendum measures was to abolish the independence of the central bank by placing it under the direct control of the President. There is a clear pattern, economic resources and influenced, are to be directed in a personalised way by Chavez not by other parts of the state or any way of representing the population of Venezuela.
Chavez dictating to the Left
Chavez has pursued a policy of merging the coalition of left wing parties behind him into one party. This is being resisted by some of these parties, who do not want to disappear as an independent force on the left. The left, like everything else in Venezuela has to be under Chavez's personal control. Even Chavez' defence minister has abandoned him and condemned the proposed constitutional changes, many allies are being lost in Chavez' relentless desire to weaken any barrier to his own personalised power.
Chavez bypassing Local Elected Bodies
Some on the left are excited that Chavez wants to bring in direct democracy in some places for local government. This means democracy without secret balloting and is practice a way of putting Chavez's followers into power over their fellow citizens, like 'Neighbourhood Committtees' in Cuba which spy on, and politically control, their fellow Cubans.
Chavez' Attitude to Opposition
The first period of Chavez's presidency led to a computerised list of supporters of opposition parties being used to keep opponents out of public employment. We know that is the case because hard copies circulate in Venezuela and many people have seen the list.
Ending Term Limits
Some of Chavez's supporters claim that the proposal in the referendum changes to abolish term limits on the Presidency are not important, since other countries do not have term limits. However, this is misleading. In most republics, the president is term limited, and usually doe snot have executive power. Heads of government are not term limited, but in a situation where there is a separate head of state, and the head of government is appointed by the national assembly, term limits are not an issue. Chavez is state President and the chief executive who keeps trying to accumulate powers. All other elected offices are term limited. Chavez's failed attempt to be allowed, in principle, to stay President until death is therefore sinister and does indicate a wish for total power for life.
Economic Situation
Chavez's dramatic expenditure of oil revenue at home and abroad, for political and social purposes, conceals and is linked to economic failure. Inflation is 20%, higher than the rest of Latin America. High impact spending, like subsidising oil for some New Yorkers is gesture politics which does nothing for Venezuela 's economy or for its poorest. Chavez' control of food prices had had the highly predictable result of choking off food production, as it becomes uneconomically priced, and the poorest are blighted by food shortages.
Corruption
Chavez appears to be uninterested in accumulating private wealth. Clearly many senior people in the public sector are not so fastidious. The wealth of some officials is great and obvious, this maybe an unintended consequence of Chevez' policies, but it is the consequence of growing arbitrary state power in society and the economy.
No Excuses
Some of Chavez' supporters try to blame the referendum loss and economic problems on American sabotage. It's hard to see how the CIA can make people vote against Chavez in a referendum, unless the CIA and its allies have arguments which make sense to the people of Venezuela and connect with their life experience. Given that public broadcasting completely supports Chavez and his supporters control the state machine, blaming US manipulation for political defeat is a sorry argument. The economic problems in Venezuela are the predictable result of the mixture of extreme state controls and careless pumping of money into the economy. Even Chavez's supporters are unable to explain how the US has created these problems, the excuse comes up in a very rhetorical manner.
I have had a poll on the right hand column asking visitors to the site whether they welcome or do not welcome the recent defeat by referendum of changes to the constitution of Venezuela, proposed by the President, Hugo Chavez. Strictly speaking the referendum was on changes proposed by Chavez and the National Assembly.
The number of recorded votes was modest, 9, suggesting that traffic would need to become much higher before I post a similar question. The voting was 7 welcoming Chavez's defeat and 2 not welcoming it. A clear victory for the Anti-Chavez camp but from a very small pool of respondents. I was intially thinking that there would be more pro-Chavez votes. This blog does frequently cover Foucault and Derrida. Most students and academics working on them are distinctly left of centre. I thought such people might find Chavez's social programmes and anti-US stance to be attractive and be unconcerned about possible threats to property rights or political constitutionalism. maybe I have more left-liberal readers than vanguardist leftist.
Why the Left should Oppose Chavez
I'm definitely a liberal rather than a socialist, a capitalist libertarian though at he moderate end of that opinion. Nevertheless, I want to put a case to socialist about what's wrong with Chavez on the grounds of shared values around democracy and the restraint of state power.
It seems obvious why conservatives and free market liberals would think Chavez is a bad thing, given that he claims to be leading socialist revolution. The issue is then, should left-winger,including radical socialists support Chavez?
Chavez Fan of One-Party State Socialism
A very obvious point is that Chavez is a supporter of Fidel Castro and of the memory of Che Guevara. Oddly, one of Chavez's left-wing defenders in the British press, Johann Hari of the Independent, has strong condemned Guevara as a Stalinist. If Chavez admires Stalinists, if he purses a special relationship with a one party state which puts its critics in prison, then this must be disturbing.
Chavez's Failure to help the Poorest
Chavez has poured very large amounts of public money into subsidised shops, and other measures to benefit the poor of Venezuela. Supportrrs of Chavez who have checked the effect on living standards have found a shift towards the poorer part of society, but very concentrate on the less desperately poor. The poorest of the poor have not benefitted from this very substantial shift expenditure.
Chavez's Personal Control of Economic Resources
Budget surpluses in Venezuela derived from revenue go into a fund administered by Chavez outside the supervisionof the National Assembly and anyone apart from the President. One of the defeated referendum measures was to abolish the independence of the central bank by placing it under the direct control of the President. There is a clear pattern, economic resources and influenced, are to be directed in a personalised way by Chavez not by other parts of the state or any way of representing the population of Venezuela.
Chavez dictating to the Left
Chavez has pursued a policy of merging the coalition of left wing parties behind him into one party. This is being resisted by some of these parties, who do not want to disappear as an independent force on the left. The left, like everything else in Venezuela has to be under Chavez's personal control. Even Chavez' defence minister has abandoned him and condemned the proposed constitutional changes, many allies are being lost in Chavez' relentless desire to weaken any barrier to his own personalised power.
Chavez bypassing Local Elected Bodies
Some on the left are excited that Chavez wants to bring in direct democracy in some places for local government. This means democracy without secret balloting and is practice a way of putting Chavez's followers into power over their fellow citizens, like 'Neighbourhood Committtees' in Cuba which spy on, and politically control, their fellow Cubans.
Chavez' Attitude to Opposition
The first period of Chavez's presidency led to a computerised list of supporters of opposition parties being used to keep opponents out of public employment. We know that is the case because hard copies circulate in Venezuela and many people have seen the list.
Ending Term Limits
Some of Chavez's supporters claim that the proposal in the referendum changes to abolish term limits on the Presidency are not important, since other countries do not have term limits. However, this is misleading. In most republics, the president is term limited, and usually doe snot have executive power. Heads of government are not term limited, but in a situation where there is a separate head of state, and the head of government is appointed by the national assembly, term limits are not an issue. Chavez is state President and the chief executive who keeps trying to accumulate powers. All other elected offices are term limited. Chavez's failed attempt to be allowed, in principle, to stay President until death is therefore sinister and does indicate a wish for total power for life.
Economic Situation
Chavez's dramatic expenditure of oil revenue at home and abroad, for political and social purposes, conceals and is linked to economic failure. Inflation is 20%, higher than the rest of Latin America. High impact spending, like subsidising oil for some New Yorkers is gesture politics which does nothing for Venezuela 's economy or for its poorest. Chavez' control of food prices had had the highly predictable result of choking off food production, as it becomes uneconomically priced, and the poorest are blighted by food shortages.
Corruption
Chavez appears to be uninterested in accumulating private wealth. Clearly many senior people in the public sector are not so fastidious. The wealth of some officials is great and obvious, this maybe an unintended consequence of Chevez' policies, but it is the consequence of growing arbitrary state power in society and the economy.
No Excuses
Some of Chavez' supporters try to blame the referendum loss and economic problems on American sabotage. It's hard to see how the CIA can make people vote against Chavez in a referendum, unless the CIA and its allies have arguments which make sense to the people of Venezuela and connect with their life experience. Given that public broadcasting completely supports Chavez and his supporters control the state machine, blaming US manipulation for political defeat is a sorry argument. The economic problems in Venezuela are the predictable result of the mixture of extreme state controls and careless pumping of money into the economy. Even Chavez's supporters are unable to explain how the US has created these problems, the excuse comes up in a very rhetorical manner.
Negative and Positive Liberty: A Short History
The distinction between negative and positive liberty was famously discussed by Isaiah Berlin in his 1958 lecture 'Two Concepts of Liberty'. The essay is very widely quoted which is very odd in some respects since it is not a very good paper. It is readable introduction to the distinction in very vague terms. It refers to a distinction between freedom from restraint and freedom to improve the self. The essay vaguely gestures at Eighteenth Century origins without explaining them. The essay has a very polemical purposes, delivered as it was 13 years after the end of World War Two and 5 years after the death of Stalin. Berlin emphasises the value of negative liberty in distinguishing liberal democracy from Fascist and Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism, while leaving some room for the idea of liberty as the pursuit of human perfection.
There's a lot more going on, here is a list with so elements of a discussion.
Seventeenth Century.
Hobbes
defines liberty as freedom from physical restraint. The political regime is irrelevant. Ancient ideas of political liberty are an illusion. A regime based on monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy all rest on obedience to sovereign authority.
Eighteenth Century
Montesquieu
distinguishes between Ancient Republicanism and modern Monarchy.
Republicanism is Democratic, resting on the Principle of Virtue Or
Republicanism is Aristocratic, resting on the Principle of Moderation
Monarchy rests on the principle of Honour, which is refers to Ambition.
Monarchy offers freedom absent in Despotism which rests on the principle of fear.
In all regimes Montesquieu is concerned with liberty. Ancient Republicanism gives liberty on the basis of following a character of Virtue or Moderation, linking the right to political freedom with perfection of the self. Monarchy gives liberty through honour, the principle of competitive self-interest detached from political rights.
Kant
Morality refers to positive duties/freedom and negative duties/freedom. There are negative duties limit us from harming ourselves or others. There are positive duties which encourage us to be concerned with the gaols, and ends, of others.
Negative freedom in Kant is freedom from harming the self.
Positive freedom is the freedom to perfect the self from impurity, positive freedom is willing the good of all, the perfection of humanity as a whole.
Constant Liberty of the Ancients and the Moderns Hunboldt Negative Welfare and Positive Welfare
Humboldt: in the Ancient world, the state protected the negative welfare of the population, which refers to protecting its security.
In the Ancient world, the state protected the positive welfare of the people by acting to improve their souls.
In the modern world, state power is more dangerous because the possibilities of control and interference are much greater. In the Ancient world, dependence on the state was limited by the individual's struggle with nature to survive and struggle with neighbouring states as as a soldier. Positive welfare in the modern world means the state bureaucracy interfering with the economy and providing social welfare for the poor. These measures result in a constant increase in the size of the state, and in a growing dependence of individuals on the state.
Hegel
Morality and Ethical Community
In the freedom of private morality and conscience the individual is free from external constraint but has no external constraint on its consciousness and actions which are dangerously self-centred.
In the freedom of ethical community, the individual finds it is free through the family, civil society and the state, which all create the conditions for the individual to enjoy freedom though family relations, the economic corporations of civil society, the way in which the state establishes law.
In the Ancient world, the individual sees itself in the state and community of its limited social world. Following Montesquieu, Hegel suggests that in the Ancient world the state is identical with the community. In the modern world, the state is distinct from the complex structure of the community, which contains a complex civil society.
For Hegel, the complexity of the modern world gives more space for individual freedom, while establishing a a state which is the condition of modern liberty under laws.
There's a lot more going on, here is a list with so elements of a discussion.
Seventeenth Century.
Hobbes
defines liberty as freedom from physical restraint. The political regime is irrelevant. Ancient ideas of political liberty are an illusion. A regime based on monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy all rest on obedience to sovereign authority.
Eighteenth Century
Montesquieu
distinguishes between Ancient Republicanism and modern Monarchy.
Republicanism is Democratic, resting on the Principle of Virtue Or
Republicanism is Aristocratic, resting on the Principle of Moderation
Monarchy rests on the principle of Honour, which is refers to Ambition.
Monarchy offers freedom absent in Despotism which rests on the principle of fear.
In all regimes Montesquieu is concerned with liberty. Ancient Republicanism gives liberty on the basis of following a character of Virtue or Moderation, linking the right to political freedom with perfection of the self. Monarchy gives liberty through honour, the principle of competitive self-interest detached from political rights.
Kant
Morality refers to positive duties/freedom and negative duties/freedom. There are negative duties limit us from harming ourselves or others. There are positive duties which encourage us to be concerned with the gaols, and ends, of others.
Negative freedom in Kant is freedom from harming the self.
Positive freedom is the freedom to perfect the self from impurity, positive freedom is willing the good of all, the perfection of humanity as a whole.
Constant Liberty of the Ancients and the Moderns Hunboldt Negative Welfare and Positive Welfare
Humboldt: in the Ancient world, the state protected the negative welfare of the population, which refers to protecting its security.
In the Ancient world, the state protected the positive welfare of the people by acting to improve their souls.
In the modern world, state power is more dangerous because the possibilities of control and interference are much greater. In the Ancient world, dependence on the state was limited by the individual's struggle with nature to survive and struggle with neighbouring states as as a soldier. Positive welfare in the modern world means the state bureaucracy interfering with the economy and providing social welfare for the poor. These measures result in a constant increase in the size of the state, and in a growing dependence of individuals on the state.
Hegel
Morality and Ethical Community
In the freedom of private morality and conscience the individual is free from external constraint but has no external constraint on its consciousness and actions which are dangerously self-centred.
In the freedom of ethical community, the individual finds it is free through the family, civil society and the state, which all create the conditions for the individual to enjoy freedom though family relations, the economic corporations of civil society, the way in which the state establishes law.
In the Ancient world, the individual sees itself in the state and community of its limited social world. Following Montesquieu, Hegel suggests that in the Ancient world the state is identical with the community. In the modern world, the state is distinct from the complex structure of the community, which contains a complex civil society.
For Hegel, the complexity of the modern world gives more space for individual freedom, while establishing a a state which is the condition of modern liberty under laws.
Wednesday, 12 December 2007
Tocqueville on Republican Politics and the Tyranny of Small Communities
Political Readings of Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville has been taken up within many perspectives: Religious Conservative, Libertarian near Anarcho-Capitalist, Neo-Conservative, Communitarian Left-Liberalism, Any other definition of Liberalism that might exist, Post-Marxist Democratic Theory, and no doubt a few positions I've overlooked. Despite this wide ranging appeal, some Marxists and near Marxists take him as the enemy. His support for, and involvement in the French colonisation of Algeria, and his assumption that Islam is culturally, intellectually and morally inferior to Christianity. are always emphasied by that tendency whoa re rather quieter about the racist and colonialist assumptions that can be found in Marx and other leftists of the time. Foucault's Society Must be Defended provides an account of how left-wing and democratic thought originate in an idea of a kind of 'race war' with a 'foreign' elite.
Universalism and Competition between Nations
The support for colonialism has been regarded favourably by some Neo-Cons as a committment to universalising liberal-democratic ideas, though surely at its best Neo-Conservativism shows more respect for all religions and the right of all nations to self-government, even if with the assistance of US intervention. There is evidently an element of Islamophobia round the fringes of Neo-Conservatism. The Marxists and Neo-Cons are rather too keen to drag support for European colonialism in the 19th Century into another context. Tocqueville's views on international relations were a mix of Realism and idealism. He was a Realist in the sense that he believed that nations conflict around questions of national pride and it is right to support the pride of your own nation. This itself refers to the element of this thought which emphasises the role of pride and the search for superiority in the human imagination, itself rooted in in his reading of Rousseau and Pascal. He was an idealist in the sense he believed that national policy should be directed to moral universalist goals like abolishing slavery, and he was certainly never at all attracted to the idea that any race is inferior or superior to any other. This post is principally concerned with his views on democratic theory and we will progress to that theme.
Tyranny of the Majority
The main concern here is to contest the assumption from a variety of directions that Tocqueville was for localism against the central state. We need to look at what he meant by the 'tyranny of the majority'. Beofre we even consider Tıcqueville's view of the 'tyranny of the majority', we have to deal with the widespread belief that John Stuart Mill coined that phrase. Mill used th phrase in On Liberty, but took it from Tocqueville, who he had met. Their relationship ended awkwardly, but Tocqueville certainly made an impact on Mill, who thought it worth writing long reviews on both parts of Democracy in America. Tocqueville used the phrase 'tyranny of the majority' in the Democracy to refer to local spirit in small town America. Though Tocqueville has enormous respect for the spirit of self-government in small town America, he also had deep concerns about the way that public opinion imposes conformity and crushes individuality in local communities. He thought a strong central state was necessary in order to balance that small town spirit. The inhabitants of the small towns needed to be able to appeal to a federal centre to resist the conformity of small towns. It is important to note that Tocqueville though public opinion could be just as dangerous to liberty as the state. That was the basis of his concern that democracy might lead to the worst kind of tyranny if a government resting on public opinion imposed the majority view in an authoritarian manner. Tocqueville should not, therefore, be invoked in support of the view that local participation in politics or the moral spirit of small communities, is the basis of liberty. This places Tocqueville closer to the more statist aspects of the Federalist Papers, than to the Jeffersonian belief in the absolute value of local community autonomy
Law and Conserving Liberty
Conservatism, in the sense of defending law against the tyranny of the majority, was best upheld by a new aristocracy, of the legal profession, which is necessarily committed to defending law and to its administration in a hierarchical structure headed by the central state. For Tocqueville the aristocracy was important in limiting monarchical power in the pre-democratic world. His
father was deeply connected with the 'ultra-monarchist' current in French politics. This is a misleading label in the sense that this current was for the aristocracy and against strong central monarchical power. Again for a good diagnosis, see Foucault, Society Must be Defended. Tocqueville caused great resentment in his family by adopting liberal constitutional democracy, which in the French context meant accepting the strong sovereignty of the National Assembly. Nevertheless, the concerns of the ultra-monarchists are in some way present in Tocqueville's political thought.
Tocqueville and Republicanism: Politics and Human Spirit
Two points here: Tocqueville provides an alternative to recent Republican theory; Tocqueville cannot be associated with anti-political forms of Libertarianism and archaeo-conservatism. This is also present in the Marxist and anarcho-communist wish to abolish the state. These currents tend to find politics degenerate compared with the emergence of decisions from the 'natural' authority present in established communities. Tocqueville's thought is Republican. He
thought politics was a part of the spirit of human communities and is necessary to liberty. He recognised that it rests on pride, envy, egotism and ambition, within himself and all who participate in politics, but considered competitive politics as the best way of using those tendencies in human character.
Tocqueville and Republicanism: An alternative to Current Republican Theory
The very welcome revival of Republican theory in Phillip Pettit and others, is largely a social democratic theory which places social and economic equality at the centre. Tocqueville recognised the need for state sponsored welfare, but was a lot more cautious about state action to promote equality, he thought the state has a role in preventing destitution not in redistributing property. Tocqueville provides an example of Republican participation as and end of human character, based on moderate welfarism and deep respect for property rights as the foundation of liberty and property, and the necessary basis for the independence of all from the state. Current Republicanism is very close to Communitarianism in assuming moral grounds for collective limitation of individualism, while adding more interest in politics as a part of human life. Tocqueville provides an alternative to the economic egalitarianism and to the moralistic view of politic as an instrument for moral goals.
Alexis de Tocqueville has been taken up within many perspectives: Religious Conservative, Libertarian near Anarcho-Capitalist, Neo-Conservative, Communitarian Left-Liberalism, Any other definition of Liberalism that might exist, Post-Marxist Democratic Theory, and no doubt a few positions I've overlooked. Despite this wide ranging appeal, some Marxists and near Marxists take him as the enemy. His support for, and involvement in the French colonisation of Algeria, and his assumption that Islam is culturally, intellectually and morally inferior to Christianity. are always emphasied by that tendency whoa re rather quieter about the racist and colonialist assumptions that can be found in Marx and other leftists of the time. Foucault's Society Must be Defended provides an account of how left-wing and democratic thought originate in an idea of a kind of 'race war' with a 'foreign' elite.
Universalism and Competition between Nations
The support for colonialism has been regarded favourably by some Neo-Cons as a committment to universalising liberal-democratic ideas, though surely at its best Neo-Conservativism shows more respect for all religions and the right of all nations to self-government, even if with the assistance of US intervention. There is evidently an element of Islamophobia round the fringes of Neo-Conservatism. The Marxists and Neo-Cons are rather too keen to drag support for European colonialism in the 19th Century into another context. Tocqueville's views on international relations were a mix of Realism and idealism. He was a Realist in the sense that he believed that nations conflict around questions of national pride and it is right to support the pride of your own nation. This itself refers to the element of this thought which emphasises the role of pride and the search for superiority in the human imagination, itself rooted in in his reading of Rousseau and Pascal. He was an idealist in the sense he believed that national policy should be directed to moral universalist goals like abolishing slavery, and he was certainly never at all attracted to the idea that any race is inferior or superior to any other. This post is principally concerned with his views on democratic theory and we will progress to that theme.
Tyranny of the Majority
The main concern here is to contest the assumption from a variety of directions that Tocqueville was for localism against the central state. We need to look at what he meant by the 'tyranny of the majority'. Beofre we even consider Tıcqueville's view of the 'tyranny of the majority', we have to deal with the widespread belief that John Stuart Mill coined that phrase. Mill used th phrase in On Liberty, but took it from Tocqueville, who he had met. Their relationship ended awkwardly, but Tocqueville certainly made an impact on Mill, who thought it worth writing long reviews on both parts of Democracy in America. Tocqueville used the phrase 'tyranny of the majority' in the Democracy to refer to local spirit in small town America. Though Tocqueville has enormous respect for the spirit of self-government in small town America, he also had deep concerns about the way that public opinion imposes conformity and crushes individuality in local communities. He thought a strong central state was necessary in order to balance that small town spirit. The inhabitants of the small towns needed to be able to appeal to a federal centre to resist the conformity of small towns. It is important to note that Tocqueville though public opinion could be just as dangerous to liberty as the state. That was the basis of his concern that democracy might lead to the worst kind of tyranny if a government resting on public opinion imposed the majority view in an authoritarian manner. Tocqueville should not, therefore, be invoked in support of the view that local participation in politics or the moral spirit of small communities, is the basis of liberty. This places Tocqueville closer to the more statist aspects of the Federalist Papers, than to the Jeffersonian belief in the absolute value of local community autonomy
Law and Conserving Liberty
Conservatism, in the sense of defending law against the tyranny of the majority, was best upheld by a new aristocracy, of the legal profession, which is necessarily committed to defending law and to its administration in a hierarchical structure headed by the central state. For Tocqueville the aristocracy was important in limiting monarchical power in the pre-democratic world. His
father was deeply connected with the 'ultra-monarchist' current in French politics. This is a misleading label in the sense that this current was for the aristocracy and against strong central monarchical power. Again for a good diagnosis, see Foucault, Society Must be Defended. Tocqueville caused great resentment in his family by adopting liberal constitutional democracy, which in the French context meant accepting the strong sovereignty of the National Assembly. Nevertheless, the concerns of the ultra-monarchists are in some way present in Tocqueville's political thought.
Tocqueville and Republicanism: Politics and Human Spirit
Two points here: Tocqueville provides an alternative to recent Republican theory; Tocqueville cannot be associated with anti-political forms of Libertarianism and archaeo-conservatism. This is also present in the Marxist and anarcho-communist wish to abolish the state. These currents tend to find politics degenerate compared with the emergence of decisions from the 'natural' authority present in established communities. Tocqueville's thought is Republican. He
thought politics was a part of the spirit of human communities and is necessary to liberty. He recognised that it rests on pride, envy, egotism and ambition, within himself and all who participate in politics, but considered competitive politics as the best way of using those tendencies in human character.
Tocqueville and Republicanism: An alternative to Current Republican Theory
The very welcome revival of Republican theory in Phillip Pettit and others, is largely a social democratic theory which places social and economic equality at the centre. Tocqueville recognised the need for state sponsored welfare, but was a lot more cautious about state action to promote equality, he thought the state has a role in preventing destitution not in redistributing property. Tocqueville provides an example of Republican participation as and end of human character, based on moderate welfarism and deep respect for property rights as the foundation of liberty and property, and the necessary basis for the independence of all from the state. Current Republicanism is very close to Communitarianism in assuming moral grounds for collective limitation of individualism, while adding more interest in politics as a part of human life. Tocqueville provides an alternative to the economic egalitarianism and to the moralistic view of politic as an instrument for moral goals.
Tuesday, 11 December 2007
Hegel, Recognition and Assimilation: From Legal Concepts to Biology.
Hegel places recognition at the centre of human personality and social relations. There are various accounts of where recognition arises, and how.
Recognition in the Phenomenology
The most famous discussion takes place in Phenomenology of Spirit. At this point, self-consciousness is where recognition arises. Consciousness requires self-consciousness. Self-consciousness requires awareness that something is conscious of the self. That could be the self becoming conscious of itself and it could be another self that becomes conscious of the first self. The two selves, or aspects of th self, become locked in combat. That leads the way to the struggle to the death in which the winner becomes the winner becomes the lord, and the loser becomes the bondsman.
Recognition in the Philosophy of Right I
The Philosophy of Right takes up at least two forms of recognition. The first arises in instituting private property. The owner of property demands that others recognise the personality of the owner. This seems far from the struggle to the death which institutes social relations in the Phenomenology. Recognition now arises from the tautology that what I won is mine (this is sweeping summary, but I believe it captures the spirit of Hegel's argument.) This tautology, which is never just a tautology in Hegel, because the apparent tautology always states a real difference between two ways of grasping the statement that is repeated.
Recognition in the Philosophy of Right II
Recognition appears later in the Philosophy of Right, when law emerges from the organisation of needs. In general, recognition is a development beyond mere need. Economic needs are organised through political economy, or a market economy. Recognition arises in the legal procedures which settle property disputes. Recognition always exist as a a way of overcoming mere need. It exists in overcoming the merely animal. Law saves us from the mere materiality of pursuing property in the open markets. Law is now emerging though it must already have appeared in the institution of private property. An economy described as political economy, is going to need more and more law to settle contractual issues. The contractualist approach is more appropriate than when law exists as divine will
Struggle of Life with the Non-Organic in Philosophy of Nature
Here life is struggling to overcome the non-organic. This is the part of Hegel which still attracts opprobium, the adventures of the dialectic in the material world of the natural sciences. We can still make sense of this by focusing on the issue of energy, more is required for organic states than non-organic states. This involves Hegel talking about the quantitative becoming qualitative, which is not really something anyone quotes in order to convince someone that Hegl is an important and worthy philosopher. Hegel is still maybe right to emphasise that nature becomes more complex and more self-organising in organic bodies. The defeat and assimiliation of the non-organic really belongs with the struggle of the Phenomenology. The teleology here is maybe not completely absent in Darwinian evolution. This surely rests on a general tendency of nature to become more and more complex and self-organising in the movement from matter to organism. I would not want to endorse all of Hegel's dialectic of nature, or revive vitalism in the philosophy of biology. Hegel does draw our attention to the way that categories of our consciousness inevitably intrude in our analyses of psychology, social thought, politics, economics and so on. Intrude in a way which is productive and enbabes thought to evolve.
Recognition in the Phenomenology
The most famous discussion takes place in Phenomenology of Spirit. At this point, self-consciousness is where recognition arises. Consciousness requires self-consciousness. Self-consciousness requires awareness that something is conscious of the self. That could be the self becoming conscious of itself and it could be another self that becomes conscious of the first self. The two selves, or aspects of th self, become locked in combat. That leads the way to the struggle to the death in which the winner becomes the winner becomes the lord, and the loser becomes the bondsman.
Recognition in the Philosophy of Right I
The Philosophy of Right takes up at least two forms of recognition. The first arises in instituting private property. The owner of property demands that others recognise the personality of the owner. This seems far from the struggle to the death which institutes social relations in the Phenomenology. Recognition now arises from the tautology that what I won is mine (this is sweeping summary, but I believe it captures the spirit of Hegel's argument.) This tautology, which is never just a tautology in Hegel, because the apparent tautology always states a real difference between two ways of grasping the statement that is repeated.
Recognition in the Philosophy of Right II
Recognition appears later in the Philosophy of Right, when law emerges from the organisation of needs. In general, recognition is a development beyond mere need. Economic needs are organised through political economy, or a market economy. Recognition arises in the legal procedures which settle property disputes. Recognition always exist as a a way of overcoming mere need. It exists in overcoming the merely animal. Law saves us from the mere materiality of pursuing property in the open markets. Law is now emerging though it must already have appeared in the institution of private property. An economy described as political economy, is going to need more and more law to settle contractual issues. The contractualist approach is more appropriate than when law exists as divine will
Struggle of Life with the Non-Organic in Philosophy of Nature
Here life is struggling to overcome the non-organic. This is the part of Hegel which still attracts opprobium, the adventures of the dialectic in the material world of the natural sciences. We can still make sense of this by focusing on the issue of energy, more is required for organic states than non-organic states. This involves Hegel talking about the quantitative becoming qualitative, which is not really something anyone quotes in order to convince someone that Hegl is an important and worthy philosopher. Hegel is still maybe right to emphasise that nature becomes more complex and more self-organising in organic bodies. The defeat and assimiliation of the non-organic really belongs with the struggle of the Phenomenology. The teleology here is maybe not completely absent in Darwinian evolution. This surely rests on a general tendency of nature to become more and more complex and self-organising in the movement from matter to organism. I would not want to endorse all of Hegel's dialectic of nature, or revive vitalism in the philosophy of biology. Hegel does draw our attention to the way that categories of our consciousness inevitably intrude in our analyses of psychology, social thought, politics, economics and so on. Intrude in a way which is productive and enbabes thought to evolve.
Sunday, 9 December 2007
Turkish Politics: Society Progresses not the Politics
I have not commented on this since Hrant Dınk was assassinated. I think for one thing, I was rather depressed by the total failure of the the political parties to seize the opportunity for reform. I'm still depressed about it, but I'm used to it. Certainly the economy and society is developing and growing. This process has come about through pragmatic accommodation of reforms which do not originate from within the Turkish political system. There is no real political force on behalf or real reform. The closest thing to that is a mixture of business lobbying, NGO lobbying partly funded by the EU and George Soros, and intellectual-journalistic opinion mongering.
Since Dınk's murder there has been a general election. I am afraid to say that political reform was not at the centre of the election. This reality has been obscured by a seemingly endless number of western commentators who are able to believe that the AKP, the governing party, is a party of modernising liberalising reform. These commentator also include Turks writing in western publications, but since it's difficult to meet Turks who believe such a thing and such a view has become less popular the longer the AKP has been in power, it really has to be concluded that they are fitting into a view that westerners need to believe.
The AKP government is certainly a lot better than might be expected given the Sahria law politics background of most of them. An organicist ideology of a pure Muslim-Turkish nation has involve into a developmentalism which implictly accepts change as defined by the European Union, World Bank, associations orientated to international business and the EU, and the more internationally oriented writers and academics. That is certainly not the platform the AKP compaigns on. It bases its appeal on nationalism, Muslim identity and patronage. Reforms are explain on the explicit level in those terms, not in the way westerners would like to understand them. Every political movement needs a bit of demagogy but the AKP's foundation is in demagogy against the elite and the non-Muslim/Turkic. Despite the western image their plains for political reform do not go beyond a minimalist adaptation to EU harmonisation requirements.
The trouble with the other parties is they are no better. The main opposition which is no better, is the 'social democratic' CHP. They are more a party of the secular state and the established middle and upper classes than a social democratic party. The social democratic element is in a statism and protectionism, expressed in opposition to some of the economic liberalisation of the reform process. This allowed them to be painted as more anti-EU than the AKP. I would say that claim has no underlying relation to reality whatsoever, but expect to hear more of it. I don't beleive the CHP deserve any sympathy. The other thing which has led d western commentators to paint them as less reformist than the AKP is the huge demonstrations for secularism which took place as the possibility approached that the new President of the Republic would be an AKP figure with a wife who wears a Muslim headscarf at all times in public. These demonstrations were seen as expressing an alliance between CHP and the armed forces, well maybe. There was no real chance of a coup, and if they were attmetping to pressure the democratic process they failed miserably. On one level it was all very self-defeating. Demonstrations were dominated by the Turkish flag as secularism was defended with reference to the nation state. The demonstrations looked like demonstrations on behalf of a strong state from a nationalist point of view. The idea that the AKP is any less nationalist or statist is absurd. They are less close to the army, but if they could co-opt the army they would, they are rooted in an Ottomanist ideology in which the state is defined by a father-sultan, sharia law, the Sultan's bureaucracy and the military which originally had a Jihadist function.
The consequence of this movement and subsequent manouvres at the top is that the President is an AKP man with a headscarved wife, but the President is the affable moderate former foreign minister Abdullah Gül, not the strong man of the AKP, Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan who is aggressive and demagogic in manner. This may be bad news for Erdoğan who everyone think longs to be President, but good news for the AKP which keeps its strongest figure at the centre of government and party politics. Whatever the personality of the President, the office inevitably leads to diastance from party politics and most government functions. If AKP lsoes its strongest figure to the Presidency it could well experience political decline, accelerating the disconnection between President and party. As Erdoğan will know have to wait to be President, it is even more likely that his Presidency will coincide with a down turn in the unity and popularity of the AKP. During the manouvres, the AKP managed to look like it had the democratic high ground by declaring it was in favour of the direct election of the President, that idea has disappeared since, maybe it will come back, I'm not expecting it
There is a new constitution being prepared, so that will put the AKP to the test and the CHP. Expect a minimalist adaptation to EU standards, not a big step forward. Things both AKP and CHP have been very quiet about: gay rights, sub-national identity, free speech, limiting executive privilege, university autonomy.
The third party is the ultra-nationalist MHP, who are more of a negative force in Turkish politics. No one expects them to have realistic proposals, they will just create the problem of how to get them to accept changes. The third party in the election was the Democratic Party, whichwas a failed attempt to relaunch the classical Turkish centre-right. Goodbye to them. The fourth party in the election, but the third in the National Assembly is the Kudish autonomy leftist DTP, the most important party in Turkey for many western left-wingers. Contacts with the DTP may, however, not be a successful substitute for interacting with the other 96% of Turkish voters, even including those tiresome ultra-nationalists in the MHP.
Since Dınk's murder there has been a general election. I am afraid to say that political reform was not at the centre of the election. This reality has been obscured by a seemingly endless number of western commentators who are able to believe that the AKP, the governing party, is a party of modernising liberalising reform. These commentator also include Turks writing in western publications, but since it's difficult to meet Turks who believe such a thing and such a view has become less popular the longer the AKP has been in power, it really has to be concluded that they are fitting into a view that westerners need to believe.
The AKP government is certainly a lot better than might be expected given the Sahria law politics background of most of them. An organicist ideology of a pure Muslim-Turkish nation has involve into a developmentalism which implictly accepts change as defined by the European Union, World Bank, associations orientated to international business and the EU, and the more internationally oriented writers and academics. That is certainly not the platform the AKP compaigns on. It bases its appeal on nationalism, Muslim identity and patronage. Reforms are explain on the explicit level in those terms, not in the way westerners would like to understand them. Every political movement needs a bit of demagogy but the AKP's foundation is in demagogy against the elite and the non-Muslim/Turkic. Despite the western image their plains for political reform do not go beyond a minimalist adaptation to EU harmonisation requirements.
The trouble with the other parties is they are no better. The main opposition which is no better, is the 'social democratic' CHP. They are more a party of the secular state and the established middle and upper classes than a social democratic party. The social democratic element is in a statism and protectionism, expressed in opposition to some of the economic liberalisation of the reform process. This allowed them to be painted as more anti-EU than the AKP. I would say that claim has no underlying relation to reality whatsoever, but expect to hear more of it. I don't beleive the CHP deserve any sympathy. The other thing which has led d western commentators to paint them as less reformist than the AKP is the huge demonstrations for secularism which took place as the possibility approached that the new President of the Republic would be an AKP figure with a wife who wears a Muslim headscarf at all times in public. These demonstrations were seen as expressing an alliance between CHP and the armed forces, well maybe. There was no real chance of a coup, and if they were attmetping to pressure the democratic process they failed miserably. On one level it was all very self-defeating. Demonstrations were dominated by the Turkish flag as secularism was defended with reference to the nation state. The demonstrations looked like demonstrations on behalf of a strong state from a nationalist point of view. The idea that the AKP is any less nationalist or statist is absurd. They are less close to the army, but if they could co-opt the army they would, they are rooted in an Ottomanist ideology in which the state is defined by a father-sultan, sharia law, the Sultan's bureaucracy and the military which originally had a Jihadist function.
The consequence of this movement and subsequent manouvres at the top is that the President is an AKP man with a headscarved wife, but the President is the affable moderate former foreign minister Abdullah Gül, not the strong man of the AKP, Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan who is aggressive and demagogic in manner. This may be bad news for Erdoğan who everyone think longs to be President, but good news for the AKP which keeps its strongest figure at the centre of government and party politics. Whatever the personality of the President, the office inevitably leads to diastance from party politics and most government functions. If AKP lsoes its strongest figure to the Presidency it could well experience political decline, accelerating the disconnection between President and party. As Erdoğan will know have to wait to be President, it is even more likely that his Presidency will coincide with a down turn in the unity and popularity of the AKP. During the manouvres, the AKP managed to look like it had the democratic high ground by declaring it was in favour of the direct election of the President, that idea has disappeared since, maybe it will come back, I'm not expecting it
There is a new constitution being prepared, so that will put the AKP to the test and the CHP. Expect a minimalist adaptation to EU standards, not a big step forward. Things both AKP and CHP have been very quiet about: gay rights, sub-national identity, free speech, limiting executive privilege, university autonomy.
The third party is the ultra-nationalist MHP, who are more of a negative force in Turkish politics. No one expects them to have realistic proposals, they will just create the problem of how to get them to accept changes. The third party in the election was the Democratic Party, whichwas a failed attempt to relaunch the classical Turkish centre-right. Goodbye to them. The fourth party in the election, but the third in the National Assembly is the Kudish autonomy leftist DTP, the most important party in Turkey for many western left-wingers. Contacts with the DTP may, however, not be a successful substitute for interacting with the other 96% of Turkish voters, even including those tiresome ultra-nationalists in the MHP.
Saturday, 8 December 2007
Unifying Analytic Philosophy and French Philosophy
This post started off as a comment on Brian Lieter's Blog which I've linked with this blog through an RSS feed, it is one of the best places to follow debates in the philosophical community. The comment became rather long and off topic so I've upgraded. The post I was reacting to was something quoting Jeff Macmahan (Rutgers) on the superiority of Analytic meta-ethics, to anything inspired by French philosophy. For those unfamiliar with metaethics, it refers to foundational issues in ethics (what the basic concepts are, their meaning, their validity, connections between them and so on).
Which French philosophy is opposed to the standards of Analytic Philosophy. The Phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty have been taken up in relation to cognitive science, they are being taken seriously in Analytic Philosophy (overlooking the complication that some define Cognitive Science based philosophy as outside Analytic Philosophy because it does not put the analysis of concepts at the centre). Sartre and Merleau-Ponty did not think philosophy of consciousness should be based on breaking down a state of consciousness into separate parts; and they did not think contents of consciousness should be regarded as representations of ideas somewhere in the mind or of things in the external world. This puts into contact with at least two aspects of cognitive science: work on perceptual illusions which result from the context of a shape, colour patch or line in consciousness, the way we see one part of the visual field is determined by what we see in the rest of the field; work on anti-representationalism which concentrates on consciousness as embodied as a result of neural networks (changing networks of neurons in the brain which evolve according to feedback) in the brain.
Foucault has been discussed sympathetically by Charles Taylor and Ian Hacking, amongst others. Foucault seems to provoke the response either that he is a French charlatan or that he is an exception to French charlatanism because his work is very historical/social scientific in orientation. For Hacking, Foucault provides a model for discussing social reality and the structures of knowledge. Foucault's work includes themes of how knowledge is institutionalised and how those institutions function; the ways in which truths exist in pragmatic contexts; the ways in which knowledge is structured and builds on basic concepts. These can be, and have been, taken up by Analytic Philosophers working on social epistemology, social ontology and history of science.
What about Lévinas, who does not do history or social science of any kind, and who writes in a rather particular and difficult style? He looks like someone outside the scope of Analytic Philosophy, or is he? Hilary Putnam clearly does not think so, the title itself of his book Ethics without Ontology is a tribute to Lévinas. Lévinas favours a first philosophy of ethics, of the supremacy of the other, over a first philosophy of ontology (being). Putnam has something similar to argue, though in more pragmatic terms, in which ethics arises in the externality of language and knowledge to the ego. We do not have an absolute internal grasp of objects, so our perspective is limited and externally caused. Has Putnam degenerated philosophically since he started writing about Lévinas? That is not a widely held opinion.
Maybe Derrida is the antithesis of philosophical good sense. Tom Baldwin, now editor of *Mind* clearly thinks Derrida is worth taking seriously and has found it worth writing, if not very much, on Derrida as have Graham Priest and A.A. Moore. The themes that come up in comparisons of Analytic Philosophy include: impossibility of private language, contextuality and indeterminacy of meaning, the paradoxes of trying to state what absolute infinity is. Derrrida's philosophy is style dominated and this did sometimes become to much of an end in itself as time went on, but he started of with quite substantive discussions of Phenomenology, Structuralism, and post-Symbolist poetics. Despite Derrida's reputation for being all style, he had quite substantive things to say about ethics, law and politics in his later work. His best work maybe includes a meta-narrative of the impossibility of a complete philosophical language, because every such language must include abstractions which can never be complete, which always become contradictory. Abstractions always contain the possibility of becoming contradictory because of the contextuality of language,i and that refers to the impossibility of an infinitely applicable concept, that is any universal concept. This is in line with the paradoxes of trying to asset a complete infinity which always encounters the problem that there could always be an infinity we can construct which is larger than any infinity we have constructed so far. It should also be noted that despite the widespread beleif that Derrida's views on language are a development ıof those of Ferdinand de Saussure, he explicitly referred to Charles Peirce (founder of American Pragmatism) as the greater authority.
It would be difficult to write a truly comprehensive history of recent Analytic philosophy without mentioning some of the above examples. Not everything in French philosophy is equally great. A lot of commentators fail to take a critical distance from French philosophy, or their favourite part of şit, and treat explication of texts as a substitute for arguments. It is still a major area of philosophy. In the unification of French Philosophy from Sartre (or even Bergson) to Derrida with Analytic Philosophy, there is much that has already been gained and much more to come.
Which French philosophy is opposed to the standards of Analytic Philosophy. The Phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty have been taken up in relation to cognitive science, they are being taken seriously in Analytic Philosophy (overlooking the complication that some define Cognitive Science based philosophy as outside Analytic Philosophy because it does not put the analysis of concepts at the centre). Sartre and Merleau-Ponty did not think philosophy of consciousness should be based on breaking down a state of consciousness into separate parts; and they did not think contents of consciousness should be regarded as representations of ideas somewhere in the mind or of things in the external world. This puts into contact with at least two aspects of cognitive science: work on perceptual illusions which result from the context of a shape, colour patch or line in consciousness, the way we see one part of the visual field is determined by what we see in the rest of the field; work on anti-representationalism which concentrates on consciousness as embodied as a result of neural networks (changing networks of neurons in the brain which evolve according to feedback) in the brain.
Foucault has been discussed sympathetically by Charles Taylor and Ian Hacking, amongst others. Foucault seems to provoke the response either that he is a French charlatan or that he is an exception to French charlatanism because his work is very historical/social scientific in orientation. For Hacking, Foucault provides a model for discussing social reality and the structures of knowledge. Foucault's work includes themes of how knowledge is institutionalised and how those institutions function; the ways in which truths exist in pragmatic contexts; the ways in which knowledge is structured and builds on basic concepts. These can be, and have been, taken up by Analytic Philosophers working on social epistemology, social ontology and history of science.
What about Lévinas, who does not do history or social science of any kind, and who writes in a rather particular and difficult style? He looks like someone outside the scope of Analytic Philosophy, or is he? Hilary Putnam clearly does not think so, the title itself of his book Ethics without Ontology is a tribute to Lévinas. Lévinas favours a first philosophy of ethics, of the supremacy of the other, over a first philosophy of ontology (being). Putnam has something similar to argue, though in more pragmatic terms, in which ethics arises in the externality of language and knowledge to the ego. We do not have an absolute internal grasp of objects, so our perspective is limited and externally caused. Has Putnam degenerated philosophically since he started writing about Lévinas? That is not a widely held opinion.
Maybe Derrida is the antithesis of philosophical good sense. Tom Baldwin, now editor of *Mind* clearly thinks Derrida is worth taking seriously and has found it worth writing, if not very much, on Derrida as have Graham Priest and A.A. Moore. The themes that come up in comparisons of Analytic Philosophy include: impossibility of private language, contextuality and indeterminacy of meaning, the paradoxes of trying to state what absolute infinity is. Derrrida's philosophy is style dominated and this did sometimes become to much of an end in itself as time went on, but he started of with quite substantive discussions of Phenomenology, Structuralism, and post-Symbolist poetics. Despite Derrida's reputation for being all style, he had quite substantive things to say about ethics, law and politics in his later work. His best work maybe includes a meta-narrative of the impossibility of a complete philosophical language, because every such language must include abstractions which can never be complete, which always become contradictory. Abstractions always contain the possibility of becoming contradictory because of the contextuality of language,i and that refers to the impossibility of an infinitely applicable concept, that is any universal concept. This is in line with the paradoxes of trying to asset a complete infinity which always encounters the problem that there could always be an infinity we can construct which is larger than any infinity we have constructed so far. It should also be noted that despite the widespread beleif that Derrida's views on language are a development ıof those of Ferdinand de Saussure, he explicitly referred to Charles Peirce (founder of American Pragmatism) as the greater authority.
It would be difficult to write a truly comprehensive history of recent Analytic philosophy without mentioning some of the above examples. Not everything in French philosophy is equally great. A lot of commentators fail to take a critical distance from French philosophy, or their favourite part of şit, and treat explication of texts as a substitute for arguments. It is still a major area of philosophy. In the unification of French Philosophy from Sartre (or even Bergson) to Derrida with Analytic Philosophy, there is much that has already been gained and much more to come.
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