Morality in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Pleasure, Pain, Psychological Health, Richnes of Life

We can examine the views of morality in Buffy the Vampire Slayer with reference to one of the less obviously thoughtful Buffy episodes. In Beer Bad (season 4, episode 5). Buffy is in her first year as a college student, at UC Sunydale. She is very disturbed that a student she spend a night with, Parker Abrams, rejects her afterwards. Some boys in the bar invite her to escape from her sadness by drinking with them. It turns out that the barman, who does not like snotty college kids, added a potion to the beer which turns them all into cavemen.

Before they turn into cavemen, the boys are having one of the conversations that irritate the barman, discussing morality. One of them declares that morality would have been put on a firmer basis under the influence of beer. That would lead to a morality based on what feels good and what feels bad (not the exact wordin g but that undoubtedly is the point).

There is such a morality, since the Nineteenth Century it has been known as Utilitarianism, the position which seeks to maximise the number of states of feeling good. That would be the Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham which rates push pin as equal to poetry, that is 'low' pleasure as equal to 'high' pleasure; and not the Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill who thought there are higher pleasures, so that Socrates unhappy is in a preferable state to a happy pig.

The boys seem to be Benthamites, though their descent into drunken incoherence is not what Bentham thought his philosophy was leading to. The boys progress towards cavemen like prelingualism and rage as a result of drink, could be regarded as a reductio ad absurdum
of Bethamite hedonism, the moral philosophy which seeks to maximise pleasure states. Pursuit of pleasure as a gaol ignores the rational reflective self in theory and leads to its destruction in practice. That may echo arguments of Plato against hedonism, in Gorgias and Philebus. In both dialogues, Plato attacks hedonism by suggesting that it must take the highest state to be that of eating and defecating at the same time, or scratching to relieve a pain. Both arise from seeking pure pleasure but both are repugnant. Pleasure itself can only be acheived in a hedonistic context whichj allows for the rational reflective self.

However, in Buffy, though the morality of hedonism is parodied, the idea that morality is based on feeling good is something difficult to get past. The show is premised on a rejection of moral abstractions. God is out, and so is all religious ethics. There is no absolute standard we can appeal to. The Vampires illustrate this, they defy every moral rule and enjoy the demonic pursuit of cruelty as and end in itself. They represent a logically coherent duty to cruelty as part of nature, which seems reminiscent of de Sade. There is no argument from pure moral reason against the vampires, which is why Buffy has to stake them. She certainly does not have any respect for ideas of moral duty, even if she lives a life of dutgy to her vocation of killing demons.

What makes Buffy different from hedonists turned cavemen? Notions of psychological health come in here, as when Buffy is contrasted with the 'dark' mentally unbalanced slayer Faith. Vampiric duty to kill is resisted with reference to the defence of a rich psychology and a rich way of life which is impoverished by Vampire attacks, and it is a way of life Vampires themselves lack as they are slaves to the lust for pain. The pain they desire is their own as well as that of their victims, they are masochists as well as sadists. One illustration of this is Darla the vampire's wish that Angel, the vampire who gets a soul/conscience should hurt her when he is unwilling to do so. Buffy is also shown to be drawn to the pain and sado-masochism but she also resists it. She resists it from a higher hedonism. Not quite the earnestness of Mill, but an argument for flourishing and richness of life and experience.

Philosophical Myths: Kierkegaard never talked about the 'leap of faith'

The Myth
A student presentation today in 'Introduction to Philosophy' brought up that persistent myth again. The myth that Kierkegaard used the phrase 'leap of faith'. The phrase is often attributed to Kierkegaard but was never used by him.

Irrationality and Subjectivism
This is not just some purely accidental slip in the history of philosophy. There are reasons people can believe that Kierkegaard used this phrase. They are based on a misunderstanding of Kierkegaard's philosophy. The misunderstanding is the belief that Kierkegaard was a subjectivist of an irrational kind who thought that beliefs can and should be adopted without reason, particularly the belief that a Christian God exists.

Fear and Trembling
Kierkegaard never held the view that reason should or could be subordinated to irrationality or that faith is a matter of an arbitrary decision. Part of the problem comes from the way that Kierkegaard's most widely read book, Fear and Trembling, is understood.

Abraham's Paradox
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard refers to the story of Abraham and Isaac. That is the story that Abraham is commanded to kill his son Isaac, by God. Abraham is ready to obey God's command, but at the moment Abraham raises his knife, a sheep appears as a substitute sacrifice. This has been understood as if Kierkegaard justifies anyone committing murder who claims to have heard a command from God. The point is that Abraham does not kill Isaac. The story is contrasted, by Kierkegaard, with the story of Agamemnon and Iphigenia in Euripides' play Iphigenia in Tauris. Agamemnon does sacrifice his daughter so that he can sail to Anatolia and attack Troy. Abraham has a 'teleological suspension of the ethical'. The 'teleological suspension of the ethical' is not permission to ignore ethics. It refers to the 'dialectic of the absurd, 'dialectic of paradox', according to which Abraham must recognise both the following theses:
1. God is absolute, and is therefore above ethics.
2. God will always follow ethics.

From Subjective to Absolute via Anxiety
The context for this dialectical dilemma is not a motiveless subjectivist view of decisions. Kierkegaard does favour subjectivism over objectivism. It is important to follow the argument.

The argument is that objectivism is contradictory because it requires subjectivity to know what is outside itself, which objectivity must be.

The problem of relating subjectivity to something outside itself is dealt with inside subjectivity. Subjectivity can relate to something outside itself because subjectivity can only exist as what goes outside itself.

The argument starts by looking at subjectivity in a rather Humean way, that is subjectivity as a series of distinct moments in time which have different contents and are unconnected. Subjectivity seeing itself as a series of discrete moments and aware of the freedom which comes from its indeterminacy arrives at melancholy and anxiety. These come from awareness of the nothingness in subjectivity and fear of making a decision when free will exists on a premise of non-determinism which means that decisions lack motivation.

Melancholia exists over time, it is in melancholia that we can grasp ourself as existing over time. We grasp the absolute in subjectivity. That is the basis of God in Kierkegaard, not a motiveless leap of faith. Even in his more pious religious texts, Kierkegaard is coıncerned with how a relaiton with God the absolute rests on a relation of subjectivity with the absolute within itself, Love of the neighbour depends on love of the self.

Martha Nussbaum and Michel Foucault on Eros and Ethics in Antiquity

Michel Foucault and Martha Nussbaum covered some similar territory with regard to the ethics of the Ancient world with regard to desire, sexuality, eros and love. In Foucault's case, this was work towards the end of his life in Hermeneutics of the Subject, Uses of Pleasure, and Care of the Self (the last two were volumes two and three of History of Sexuality). In Nussbaum's case, this was the work that really made her name: Fragility of Goodness and Therapy of Desire.

Comparisons of the two are not very frequent. Foucault tends to be best known amongst literary theorists; Nussbaum is known to philosophers (particularly those working in Ancient Philosophy, Philosophy and Literature, and Ethics) and also to people in legal and political theory. There would be great benefits in more philosophers reading Foucault, there would also be benefits in cultural theorists reading Nussbaum.

There are intermittent comments on Foucault in Nussbaum. As far as I know, Foucault never had anything to say about Nussbaum. As far as I know, Nussbaum's major comment on Foucault on antiquity, is that Foucault looked at sexuality with regard to the individual, and paid insufficient regard to the interest in its harmful effects on others in Antiquity. I don't really see a great difference between the fundamentals in how Nussbaum and Foucault present Antique ethics as concerned with the health of the individual.

The underlying difference between the two maybe in what they try to build on Antique ethics. Nussbaum wants to build Aristotelian social democracy, Foucault is concerned with the difficulties of building a theory of political obligation on Aristotle's ethics, or any Antique ethics. For Nussbaum, Aristotle shows a way out of a rigid concern with inner correctness. Aristotle becoems the bearer of an Antique moral externalism (morally significant actions have causes other than inner intentions). Foucault insists on exploring the difficulties Antique ethics poses for generating a sense universality in ethics and politics. The question for Foucault is how a self partly described in sexual terms has the right to sovereignty because it is sovereign over its passions. Upto the Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, this poses difficulty for universalising theory. Aurelius does not even think it worth discussing the state directly, it is his daily rule of his passions which settles the question of the legitimation of his power. Foucault explores to the limit, the idea of particular right to sovereignty. This is important to him as it confirms his libertarian tendency to find all power alien. It should also be said that in Hermeneutics of the Subject that Foucault is working on the distinction between pastoral power and governmentality, which is the difference between state absolutism and limited state. So Foucault is beginning to get beyond the gestures towards libertarianism which leave open the question of what the least bad government is in its exercise of power.

Nussbaum is comparatively indifferent to the problems of power in Aristotle, that it rests on a particularistic understanding of who is fit to govern. Despite her discussions of sexuality and a feminine point of view, there is a Puritan desire for morally perfect government with the right to make people good lurking in Nussbaum. This may look harsh but she clearly does not get why Foucault is suspicious of all power and she is advocating a Communitarian type political theory in which the government is moral in purpose. Some of her reactions show a neo-Puritan political correctness completely lacking in Foucault despite his adoption/kidnapping by the politically correct cultural progressives. In Nussbaum's Neo-Puritanism, consider her support for Cartherine McKinnon's proposal to make pornographers open to civil damages because of the supposed consequences of their publications, or her resentment on video that someone commenting on her position on ethical responsibility to animals referred to her 'hunting bigger game' (than Rawlsian political contractualism). I'm concerned about the same issues as Nussbaum is, but I thought that was funny remark and that her response was slightly sinister in its wish to enforce her own very constrained view of civility. She clearly thought the editor should not have allowed such a remark.

Foucault was an irresponsible provocateur, Nussbaum is the New Engşand moralist. Clearly Nussbaum is the greater scholar of Antiquity, by a very long way, but she is not convincing when she tries to criticise Foucault for emphasising the distance between Antique ethics and general theories of obligation. It is important that at this time Foucault was developing a more nuanced view of different types of political regime. In all cases he was trying to learn from Antiquity how politics always refers to particularistic sovereignty.

Gadamer, Nationalism and a Reductive view of Enlightenment and Romanticism

These thoughts come from an MA class from the Methodology course I give for the MA in Political Science in the Department of Humanities and Social Science where I am employed.

Truth and Method famously rehabilitates the concept of 'prejudice' as a term of legal process rather than as a negative term referring to a bad opinion based on poor reasoning. The use of 'prejudice' as a necessary first stage of a legal process is combined to Germany. Gadamer contrasts German usage with other usages going back to the Latin. What he does not do is consider various contextual issues in history and theory of law: Roman Law and Customary Law (which still existed in Germany in the era of Enlightenment and Romanticism), Roman Law and Common Law (English style law which gives a strong role to judicial precedent and innovation); and all consideration of law not based on a convenient German example. The section on legal hermeneutics has rather more to do with hermeneutics than law, leaving us with Gadamer's privileged example.

The German orientation is also present in his account of Enlightenment. French and 'English' Enlightenment are presented as sceptical in contrast with the historically grounded German Enlightenment. The fşrst point to make her is that the 'English' Enlightenment is better described as 'Anglo-Scottish' since the greatest figures were David Hume and Adam Smith. Other notable Scottish contributors include Adam Ferguson and Thomas Reid. Looking at the great philosopher in this context, David Hume, scepticism is a strong theme in Hume but it has an end. The end is in the habit, or custom, of the mind which provides a reliable basis for knowledge and ethics, though they cannot be based on determinate knowledge. Custom and habit also exist in history, in the accumulation of science, culture and morality. Something Gadamer could have taken into account.

The Italian Enlightenment is also pushed out of account. Vico is put in his place, by suggesting that he has failed to adopt the Hermeneutic method of moving between part and whole. Vico apparently leaves an unbridgeable confrontation between the individual and history as a whole. Another way of looking at Vico is that he shows the individual becoming more universal through history. Somehow Gadamer overlooks Vico's work on language, literature and law, which would disturb his extremely schematic contrast between Enlightenment and Romanticism. His presumed sharp separation ignores the way that Enlightenment includes the centrality of sensibility and imagination. These may have been initially conceived in mechanistic terms but that is something that is always breaking down, particularly if we consider the simultaneous development of the novel of sensibility. Gadamer claims that Romanticism is nostalgic, but the Jena Romantic Ironists in some sense invented Modernity as a value. They opposed the sentimental, romantic, modern novel to the naive, classical, antique novel in non-nostalgic terms.

Derrida French Nationalist and Conservative Europeanist

Loyal Derrideans will now doubt be perturbed to see Derrida accused of positions he rejected at the most explicit level. However, we cannot spare Derrida from the kind of reading that he brings to other people.

Derrida, Hegel and Algeria
The issue of Derrida the French nationalist first occurred to me after a class in which I was teaching 'Onto-Theology of National-Humanism' (available in Oxford Literary Review 14 1992, pages 3 to 23; or in Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings, Routledge, London, 2007). The text is devoted to the discussion of the Germanic tradition of identifying German Nationalism with Philosophical Humanism. Fichte, Heidegger and Adorno feature as might be expected. The less well known figure of Karl Grün features strongly. Grün must be best know for being criticised by Marx in the German Ideology, and that is what Derrida discusses. Bringing in Marx might appear to some people, possibly including Derrida himself, to neutralise anything nationalist looking in his work. However, Marx is full of German-European nationalist universalism. For Marx, Germany is the country furthest from revolution and therefore the closest philosophically. For Marx, European colonialism brings the colonised countries into a world community formed by Europeans.

Grün strongly criticises the French on philosophical and national grounds. He condemns the French interpretation of Hegel, a topic that is of great importance to Derrida when writing about the institution of philosophy in France, and which obviously forms a large part of the background to Derrida's own philosophical formation. He takes a critical view of French colonialism in Algeria, referring to the desirability of Algeria becoming a part of Morocco. The consequence of French colonial policies in North Africa was that the Moroccan monarchy continued to exist but was effectively reduced to a French satrapy.

In my class ( part of a course on Derrida based on the texts I selected for Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings), an International Relations students, in a group that was predominantly philosophy students) was very determined to takes this in the terms of IR Realism. Realism in IR refers to the view that states pursue their own interests and state interests conflict. He picked up on thew territorial issue and the issue of reading Hegel, and argued that Derrida's text was a reaction against both. Derrida was a pied-noir, a colon, in Algeria. That is be was born into a colonial family. As it was a Jewish family, no doubt their position in the pied-noir community was no doubt in some respects marginal, nevertheless they were part of that community, a community of a million white Europeans with roots going back to the 1830 annexation.

Derrida of course never identified with French colonialism but he did identify with his Algerian origin. There is a difference between justifying colonialism and valuing origins in a colonial community, but this can be a tangled issue particularly when we consider the pied noirs, who wished to stay in Algeria and wished for Algeria to be treated as part of France. They were not just a colonial addition on the top of a native community, that was what made their resistance to decolonisation and then de Gaulle (their saviour turned traitor) so bitter, and what made decolonisaiton of Algeria so trauamtic in France and so protracted and bloody in France.

Derrida and Tocqueville
Behind the pious image of progressive Derrida, let us admit there is someone with some French nationalist impulses with regard both to philosophical institutions and to colonial history. Rather tantaslisingly Derrida refers to a coming lecture on Tocqueville. 'Onto-Theology of National Humanism' is a lecture Derrida gave at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales. All of these lectures will be published but it will necessarily be a protracted process. The last I heard Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf will edited the collected Derrida, but the publisher was unclear. Tocqueville was a enthusiast for French colonialism in Algeria and regarded Islam as clearly inferior to Christianity, on the basis that Mahgreb Muslims were less developed than European Christians (on religious-cultural grounds not racial-ethnic grounds). This is invariably the issue with which Marxist, or Marxisant, critics of Tocqueville like to attack with him, and to attack liberalism. Of course in this context they like to forget that Marx supported European colonialism, the rights of great nations and thought that Jews (like himself) should all give up all elements of Jewish identity. What did Derrida have to say about Tocqueville? Would it bring us any close to an understanding of the relationship between Derrida's own French philosophical universalism and the particularistic world view of the pied-noirs.


Europeanism: Plato and Christianity
On the issue of Europeanism, Derrida criticises Husserl's idealistion of Europe as the place of philosophy, and therefore of human goals in Introduction to the Origin of Geometry. What do we see in The Gift of Death in the discussions of Jan Patocka? Patocka was a Phenomenologist oriented to Plato and Christianity, influential on Czechoslovak anti-totalitarians, lie Vacllav Havel, and Catholic theologians including Karol Wojtyla (Pope John-Paul II). Derrida emphasises the Europe of Plato and Christianity in Patocka, a Europe that is identified with Christian spirituality and philosophical truth. Derrida emphasises heresy in Patocka and European responsibility, but the end result is still a taking up of an idea of Europe as a unified entity with a specific philosophical role.

It all looks very much Derrida thinks that Europe is the land which contains the spiritual and philosophical goals of humanity. Derrida would have denied such an ambition. Occasionally he makes gestures to the non-European origins of European culture, as when he refers to 'hetera' (other) as a word of Sanskrit origin in 'Signature Event Context' (though as far as I know it is a word which appears both in India and Europe and could with no clear indication of where it appeared first). Despite himself, no doubt, did not Derrida give way to a Eurocentric form of universalism, a universalism defined by the European philosophy (including Marx) and high literary tradition which forms the basis of his texts.

Greens join Bayrou: A new Movement in the French Political Centre takes shape.

François Bayrou and the Democratic Movement
François Bayrou's Democratic Movement (Modem) shows some signs of insitutionalising itself as a party. It is holding a founding conference this weekend. Bayrou is the only candidate to be party president and the party is very much his creation. Nevertheless it has at least passed the stage of being Bayrou's support organisation for elections in France earlier this year.

The new party has 50 to 60 thousand members which is promising. That's a bit less than the British Liberal Democrats and should be enough for a third party sustainable over time, and which might challenge the two main forces. Sarkozy has tried to seize control of the whole politicalş spectrum between the Socialists and the National Front. Bayrou has at at least succeeded in limiting Sarkozy's hegemonising project.

French greens join Modem
One of the most interesting news items about the congress is that one of the French green parties (CAp21) is integrating with Modem, suggesting a genuine force beyond one individual. CAP 21 is itself a very personalised party led by a former Environment minister, Corinne Lepage, who was allied with the old UDF. Modem has a strange history, or non-history, going back to the non-communist resistance during the Occupaiton of France, post-war catholic centrist politics, Giscard's UDF which brought Catholic centrists into alliance with other parties of the centre and centre right, the evolution of the Catholic centre into a more secular organisation, the absorption of most of UDF into a relaunched post-Gaullist right, and Bayrou's determination that there should be a continuing centrist political force. A party rooted in a tradition of liberal, radical and democratic principles would be preferable but that is not an option in France. Last time I checked Modem could not define a tradition or place itself in history. Maybe that will begin to happen now that Modem is a a fully formed party, already integrating a green party. This move gives Modem the chance to strike a distinctive note as party orientated towards green issues.

Political Traditions in France
Bayrou has some of the disadvantages of a politician from the Catholic centre, for one thing he opposes Turkey's membership of the European Union. The party is still in a very formative stage, we shall see. It's a bit difficult to define a clear liberal and radical (in the oldest sense tradition in France, On the whole liberalism has been applied to a part of the right and the radicals have been a neo-Jacobin statist party, which split between left and right currents in the 1970s.

We might now see a movement emerge that can refer itself to the great intellectual liberal tradition in France: Montesquieu, Benjamin Constant, Madame de Stael,Physicocrats, Alexis de Tocqueville; the moderate parts of the Revolution, Mirabeau the Younger and the Girondins; the most durable parts of the radical and republican tradition: secularism, citizenship, integration of all citizens into common citizenship. The Catholic centre made a great historical contribution, as the pro de Gaulle part of the resistance, as the current which produced Robert Schuman second architect of the European Union after Jean Monnet.

Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Foucault

Foucault's work from Society Must be Defended onwards needs to be understood in relation to Montesquieu and Tocqueville. We could even read Foucault as the third figure in a French liberal triumvirate spanning three centuries. This reading may have some problems attached to it, but no more than the other readings of Foucault around and less than most. Foucault's reputation has been taken over by Post-Marxist/ Post-Modernist/Post-Structuralist leftists for whom liberalism is a dirty word. However, Society Must be Defended coincides with a liberal revival in France which includes a Tocqueville revival. It uses the terms and references of the two great French liberals (and republicans). It's concerned with the kind of liberty that can exist under different kinds of regime. It's concerned with the limitation of society in relation to the state. It uses Montesquieu to establish the evolution of the French state, bureaucracy and aristocracy in the Eighteenth Century. The understanding of the relation between the Ancien Regime and the French Revolution follows the analysis of Tocquville's book of that name. Foucault refers to majoritarian and demagogic aspects of the emergence of left wing and democratic politics, very much in line with Tocqueville's understanding of the possible dangers of democracy.

The reading of Foucault's later work will be very incomplete until it is thoroughly understood and discussed in the terms of his two French predecessors in social and political thought devoted to liberty.

Social Constructivism in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

In 'Life Serial' (season 6, episode 5) Buffy suffers a series of mishaps which the episode strongly hints should be interpreted as examples of social constructivism.

'Social Constructivism' is explained in a sociology class at UC Sunnydale. Buffy is auditing with Willow and Tara while deciding how to plan her life. A charismatic teacher, Mike, gets the clads to participate in a fast moving question and answer session in which he asks class members to explain how reality is socially constructed. Willow herself has clearly gasped the issue and makes a good intervention.

The points that emerge in class include: reality is not independent of our point of view, there are multiple social realities, reality is not neutral.

These kind of points tend to get philosophers working metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science steamed up about the alleged threat to truth, reality, knowledge and all that is good and decent. Maybe they should relax a bit and think about how the points made by constructivists can be taken up. I'm taking Buffy as a paradigm.

What happens in the episode to illustrate constructivism?

Buffy is seeking a life plan. Three very adolescent young men, who are absurdly obsessed with super hero and science fiction popular culture, are plotting to take over Sunnydale and are trying to track and weaken Buffy. The Trio are clearly a parody of Joss Whedon and the other writers on Buffy, this is confirmed on the DVD commentaries.

The trio find three ways to disrupt Buffy's life and monitor her reactions.

1. Buffy is auditing at college. Warren puts a micro transmitter on Buffy which speeds up her perception time. Time rushes past, punctuated by short episodes of normal time. At first Buffy thinks she is passing, which the audience can take as the naturalistic explanation of what happens. She is stressed in general and is stressed by her return to college. Because of this her perception of time changes.

2. Buffy starts working at Xander's building site. The construction workers are bemused and hostile when they meet this small thin girl, but her super hero strength enable her to do the heavy lifting. Her work is interrupted by the Trio. Andrew calls up demons who attack the male workers. Buffy fights them off and kills them. The workers deny seeing the demons and perceive what has happened as Buffy freaking out, it must be 'her time of the month'. Their response is crass but again gives the naturalistic reading, Buffy is unstable and violent because of the stross of being a Slayer.

3. Buffy starts working at the Magic Box co-owned by her Watcher (trainer and mentor) Giles and by fellow Scooby (demon fighter) Anya. The Trio is monitoring the Magic Box through a camera, significantly hidden in a skull. Jonathan uses magic to create a time loop, that can only be broken by satisfying a customer with a difficult request. The customer wants a live Mummy's Hand, but the hand is aggressive and dangerous. Either she gets a deadly hand or she gets a dead hand. Time keeps looping as Buffy realises, and she becomes more and more frustrated. She does eventually fşind the solution, but has a disagreement with Anya and hands back her staff badge. The naturalistic explanation is that Buffy is unbearably bored by retail.

All these misadventures put Buffy in situations where she is not the hero-Slayer-leader. At university Tara and Willow are more in command. At the building site, Xander is the boss not the loyal friend. At the shop, Buffy is the badly treated employee of Anya who is often inclined towards rudeness.

These misadventures leads to Buffy spending an evening with Spike, the semi-reformed vampire who is in love with her. She drinks more whiskey than she can handle and Spike wastes her time taking her to a demon poker game when she asks for his help. That aspect of the episode continues the theme that Buffy is alienated from her friends and from her younger sister Dawn. Spike's evil past and shadowy life make him more able to understand her alienated tendencies resulting from the burden of her mission as a the Slayer, constantly dealing with evil and death (think of that skull in the Magic Box).

Buffy's shifting sense of reality, could be seen as episodes of alienation from reality, rather than shifts of reality itself. However, reality is our sense of reality. The three incidents or reality shift deal with the following
1. Subjective experience is variable
2. Stress can lead to extreme shifts in the sense of reality, to the point where the supernatural becomes real.
3. The alienated experience of the supernatural is also a form of hyper reality, where the experience of some aspect of reality becomes extreme: the passing of time becomes an incomprehensible rush; the boredom of waiting for moments to pass becomes a repeating loop in time; anger with boorish male colleagues resting on restrained violence becomes a violent struggle with demons.

In one way the episode undermines social constructivism, because it makes a distinction between normal reality and alienated experience. However, it also suggests that the sense of reality is extremely variable according to mood, and that fantasy is a way of bringing attention to aspects of reality. The social constructivism is more moderate than Mike suggests. There are different realities according to relations with other people, as Mike suggests, but the variations in Buffy's experience are more about her subjective sense of reality and the changing social context rather than in turning reality into something that is constructed.
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Aristotle, Hume,Kant and Nietzsche on Ethics

Teaching Ethics
I've been teaching Aristotle and Hume (along with Plato, Kant and Kierkegaard) in an Ethics course for non-philosophers at the technical university where I work. Usually I like to teach Nietzsche when teaching Ethics, and reflecting common practice at present, the Genealogy of Morality. Usually I use the Walter Kaufmann edition, but I have also used the Maudmarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen edition. This semester I've give Nietzsche a rest, largely because as my students are not philosophy students they are more likely to pick up on the 'Nietzsche was a Nazi' myth. They are very good science students, but they lack a context to distinguish unreliable rumours in philosophy from genuine interpretation. I'm sure I'll go back to Nietzsche again in a course where I'll think of the best possible way of dispelling the infamous myth, but I'm having a break to get perspective at present.

Aristotle and Nietzsche
In teaching these philosophers I am certainly thinking about Nietzsche at all times (so it's not really cheating on Nietzsche). One thing I'm concerned about is the assimiliation of Nietzsche to Aristotelian Virtue Theory. It's a productive exercise t put Nietzsche in the context of Aristotle and Neo-Aristotelian virtue theory, but the differences are important. There is a bestowing virtue in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but it is egotism. It is true that Aristotle's virtue is egotistical in some way. As with other Antique thinkers, he's concerned with the health of the soul, rather than assuming a burden of moral obligation. But, the Aristotelian Virtue is learned over time and becomes habitual in cognitive process with feed back as immediate knowledge of a principle becomes habitual knowledge of how to follow a principle in practice. But in Nietzsche virtue is the expression of a self which does not accept external legislation. It may be tempting to think of Nietzsche's 'Overman' in terms of the 'Magnanimous' or 'Great Souled Man' in Aristotle. However, the Great Soul man is understood through the mean between excess and lack of virtue in Aristotle. Aristotle prefers the excess of virtue over the lack, so this does lead to some Nietzschean looking thoughts on the virtues of giving and heroism. The Nietzschean Overman experiences great tensions between great conflicting forces and has to be strong enough to integrate them. The Great Souled man follows prudent habits in which we have a set of consistent virtues, which connect with no problem. Nietzsche's ethics must be understood in terms of self-invention, inner conflict and a spontaneous giving from bursting inner strength; together with a strong distinction between inner life and civic life.

Hume and Nietzsche
There are readings of Nietzsche which make him look like Hume based of the claims that both Hume and Nietzsche are: determinists with regard to the will; have a naturalistic view of philosophy and mental contents; follow a empirical-scientific model for philosophy. I doubt that Nietzsche read much Hume, his reading of the history of philosophy was patchy. He knew the Greek and Roman texts very well, and had only seriously read later philosophers in an intermittent way. This is used as argument against reading him in the context of Kant and German Idealism , but strangely not Hume. I suggest that his idea of Hume, as part of a group British psychologists, largely derives from his friend Paul Rée. The empirical-scientific model in Hume is very subjectivist-empirical undermining the objectivity of science, but that seems to be overlooke din the Humean Nietzsche readings. Nietzsche did not abandon an earlier 'aesthetic' view for a later 'scientific view', as he sees continuity between science and art. Hume's ethics of minimising pain and increasing pleasure is reactive by Nietzsche's standards; Nietzsche's ethic is one of a strength which can absorb pain and which creates without regard to a calculus of pain and pleasure; the creative uses and increases pain to increase. It seems to me Nietzsche does have a form of libertarianism with regard to the will, based on the indeterminism of nature; and one might argue Hume shuld have done the same if he had been consistent about the invented nature of causality.

Nietzsche, Kant and German Idealism
This whole topic has fallen into undeserved oblivion. It's true that Nietzsche is against the Idealist view of a strong homology between mind and nature. It's may also be true that Nietzsche's main understanding of Kant was through Schopenhauer's reading, and that he had not read much German Idealism. With Nietzsche though, it is important to realise his talent for strategic reading, on the basis of limited knowledge he was able to grasp the significance of Kant and Hegel for his own ideas, and the conflcits he was interested in. The section on duties to oneself in Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, refers to the human as the individual who commands and obeys the self. This is a very Nietzschean thought, the human strength which grows from inner conflict. The Kantian self legislates from a subjective point of view, it's good for Nietzsche, though the universality of reason is not so good for him.

Asquith vs Lloyd George. Who is the real Liberal Hero?

Party Politics and Historical Debate
This post is inspired by a cross over between party political debate and historical debate. Recently the British Liberal Democrats have debated who the greatest British liberal was, and that discussion has been revised on the Liberal Democrat blog space by a debate in Liberal Democrat Voice, which I access via the LibDemBlogs aggregate about heroes selected by the two current contenders for leadership of the Liberal Democrats. J.S. Mill was a worthy overall winner, regrettably David Lloyd George made it onto the final short list, and H.H. Asquith did not. This is in part a riposte.

Huhne's as new Lloyd George; Nick Clegg as new Asquith?
One contender, Chris Huhne, has identified David Loyd George as his liberal hero. I do not want to deal with the current leadership issue here, I have already given strong support to Clegg in three earlier posts about this election and a post last year hoping for a Clegg leadership to arise. I will comment on LG (as David Lloyd George is often known) and the other main figure in British Liberal politics of that time, H.H. Asquith. However, I see Clegg as very Asquith like, and Huhne as very LG like. Since Huhne has identified LG as his model, this may not be completely fanciful.

The Rise of Asquith and LG
LG rose to prominence as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1908, replacing Asquith who had himself just replaced Henry Campbell Bannerman as Prime Minister. LG was brought up in a small town Wales in a lower middle class background, Asquith was from a more upper class family, studied Classics at Christchurch College Oxford. This was the college of the British political élite at that time. Asquith went on to be a successful lawyer of great intellectual distinction and then a politician. As a politician he continue to have the reputation of intellectual distinction. His views were inclined towards a moderate shift of the Liberal party into 'constructive liberalism', that is liberalism concerned with social goals as opposed to the liberalism of the main figure of Nineteenth liberalism, William Ewart Gladstone, who thought poverty should be dealt with by charity (and he was a very generous donor himself). Constructive liberalism kept Gladstone's commitments to free trade and a government policy oriented to general principles of government rather than sectional interest, but thought the state should intervene socially and economically to prevent poverty. Asquith was a moderate supporter of the British Empire and had no interest in grandiose imperial ideology, and certainly did not think the Empire should interfere with free trade.

L.G. was not completely committed to the Liberal party in several parts of his career. In an early stage, he leaned towards Welsh nationalism. Later on, in the internal currents of the Nineteenth Century Liberal Party, LG was a supporter of Joseph Chamberlain at the time Chamberlain was considered to represent Radicals in the Liberal Party. The 'Radical' label shifted in reference over time. At that point it meant a mixture of constitutional and social reform. Chamberlain was a Radical interested in state led social reforms. Later he moved towards 'Social Imperialism (imperialism, protectionism and social measures), and defected to the Conservative Party. LG did not follow Chamberlain into the Conservative Party at that time, but later was interested in Liberal-Conservative fusion.

Asquith and LG in Government
LG and Asquith benefitted from the collapse of a Conservative Government in 1905, a minority liberal government was followed by a Liberal landslide in the 1906 General Election. The Conservative Party was at that time split over free trade, leading to a promising young Conservative politician defecting to the Liberal Party, Winston Churchill. Churchill and LG were closely associated until Churchill returned to the Conservatives. Like the early enthusiasm for Chamberlain, it shows LG as someone always drawn to people who were not deep liberals themselves.

LG the Radical Hero of 1909
Asquith succeeded Prime Minister in 1908 with LG as his Chancellor. LG's time as Chancellor established him as a Radical hero. This largely came out of the People's Budget of 1909 which proposed redistributive taxation and land value taxation to finance social measures. It was fiercely opposed by the aristocratic interest in the House of Lords, leading to two general elections and the threat of flooding the House with new peers before the Lords backed down. Land value taxation was not implemented but remained an enthusiasm for one current with Britsh liberalism until the present day. At its most modest land value taxation is a way of raising revenue through a tax on the value of land, that may also have the result of leading land owners to make use of land by investing in developing it, or selling it someone who wants toı develop it. For real enthusiasts, this is a whole basis of government referring to the Mutualist philosophy of Henry George, which will end class society and the economic cycle. LG is a heroic symbols for the LV enthusiasts, but LG himself abandoned it as a post-war Prime Minister.

LG and Liberal-Conservative Fusion
At the same time as LG was becoming the Radical hero he was contemplating merging the Liberals with the Conservatives, on a program of anti-socialism, social reform and armament for a possible war. He was greatly taken with a juggernaut political force wielding a huge state power nationally and internationally. Such a huge block devoted to keeping the then emergent Labour Party out of power could not have been healthy for a genuine parliamentary democracy. Though LG was a talented parliamentarian, he had an attraction to forms of hegemonic power which would have made the parliamentary arena marginal. LG was a consistent social reformist and also a consistent enthusiast for the strong state internally and externally. Asquith's views were developed from a clear basis in Gladstonian liberalism, and even his non-Gladstonian 'Constructive' liberalism has something in common with Gladstone's pragmatic measures to ameliorate social conditions, most obviously in the case of reform to ırish tenancy laws. Some continuity with Gladstone is clear in comparison with LG's enthusiasm for the state and creating a crushingly hegemonic political force. LG's basic ideas seem better defined as Progressive Statism than as liberalism. LG's ideal was a dominating leader in charge of a hegemonic party able to introduce polices to improve social welfare through statist means, and building up a strong state machine for imperial and military purposes.

LG and American Progressivism
Comparisons with Theodore Roosevelt in the United States seem apt, and maybe we should bring in Woodrow Wilson as well. Both were part of the Progressive current in early Twentieth Century America which favoured social improvement through strengthened federal government and foreign intervention, though Wilson was more pacific in principle. Roosevelt was a Republican and Wilson was a Democrat, but party distinctions are very fluid in America and the President is much more distinct from the party in comparison with the relation in Europe between the head of government and the party behind that person.

LG becomes Wartime Prime Minister
The First World War led to LG becoming Prime Minister as Asquith lost credibility as war leader by 1916. LG, along with Churchill, is given great credit for improvements in the war effort against resistance from the General Staff. Possibly some of this is exaggerated, and possibly earlier supposed failures of Asquith and the General Staff have been exaggerated, but no one can take away a large part of the credit for leading Britain to a victorious conclusion in the war. Unfortunately LG's contribution to British liberalism at this time is less creditable.

LG and Peacetime Caeserism
LG was determined to be Liberal leader, though this was perhaps more a
desire to have a party to lead than to be a liberal leader. Asquith was not willing to create a vacancy and LG was not strong enough in the Liberal Party to force him out. For LG the solution was obvious, he created an electoral alliance between his supporters ,in Parliament and the Conservative Party. This swept to power and enable LG to keep up a war time style of government dominated by big figures in an inner cabinet, more of the attraction of power with LG as a Caeser like figure dominating everything through his personalised power. LG wanted to turn this into a Centre Party, which would crush the now weak and weakening Liberal Party and the Labour Party which was taking over former Liberal territory. Perhaps fortunately for pluralist politics and British parliamentarianism most Conservative MPs did not see any reason to accept the continuing leadership of someone whose real base was one half of a declining Liberal Party. LG dropped Land Value taxation during this period, one of the sources of his legend. LG's weak political base led him to raise political funds by the sale of state honours, though the dirty work was done not by him but the criminal Maundy Gregory. LG was dumped in 1922, the immediate cause was the presence of British troops in Turkey.

LG, Atatürk and Venizelos
LG's grandiose imagination and fascination with power play led him to support the ill conceived Greek invasion of Izmir and western Anatolia in 1919. The forces of the Turkish National Assembly under Mustafa Kemal Paşa (later Kemal Atatürk) defeated the Greeks, all other occupying forces, the Sultan's government in Istanbul, and the whole Sevres Treaty partition of the Ottoman heartlands which now comprise Turkey. LG had been infatuated with Eletherio Venizelos, the Liberal Greek Prime Minister and his desire to revive Greek dominance in a large part of the Byzantine, Alexandrian and Ancient Greek sphere. LG praised Venizelos as a new Pericles (the most distinguished leader of Ancient Athenian democracy). Venizelos was an admirable reformer and democrat but his grandiose Hellenism and misconceived invasion undermined Greek democracy. Venizelos was later gracious enough to nominate Atatürk for the Nobel Peace Prize, and LG himself referred to Atatürk as a genius. In some ways LG was always trying to be an Atatürk figure, the Caeserist leader of a hegemonic statist progressivist force. The difference is that such a thing was more appropriate to early Republican Turkey, where Atatürk was trying to build new secular modernist state system in an illiterate imam dominated peasant country, out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Britain's Parliament was in its seventh century of existence, and had been the dominant element in the political system since 1688. The country was literate, urbanised, religiously moderate and had a deeply rooted party system and a strong tradition of private assocations, and a developed market economy. Not the conditions for a Caeser.

LG went back to a unified Liberal Party and was able to become leader after Asquith's death. He showed his creative and radical side by becoming an early adherent of the economics of Keynes, they wrote a Yellow Book of liberal economic policy together which resisted a return to the Gold standard for Sterling and advocated state intervention to relieve economic recession. None of this could prevent the continuing decline of the Liberal Party, which LG had set the scene for by splitting the party. The decline was only reversed in the 1950s and it is only recently that the Liberal Democrats have returned liberal parliamentary representation to the level of the 1920s.

LG: Statist, Hegemonist, and Caeserist
LG was a great reformer and leader. He was also a Caeserist in political practice, a hegemonist in his attitude to the party system, and a statist progressivist in ideology rather than a liberal believer in individualism and a limited defined role for the state. LG was more lower class in origin than Asquith, but was much more able to accommodate himself to the party of the upper classes. Early on he admired Chamberlain, the defector to the Conservatives and later he was an associate of Churchill, a Conservative for most of his life. Churchill's mix of social reformism and imperialism, and identification with a strong British state always willing to impose itself by force all seem close to LG.

Asquith: Liberal Loyalty and Principles
Asquith could never have joined the Conservatives, he was a liberal in principles and could only be at home in a liberal political culture, more universalist and individualist than the conservative culture of privileged leaders and special interests in the state and the economy. The conservative political culture certainly never accepted Asquith. It denied him the last role he hoped for, as Chancellor of Oxford University. At Oxford Asquith was a distinguished classics student, he want on to be a distinguished lawyer and then a significant Prime Minister. Nevertheless conservative graduates, particularly clergy could not stand the idea of him as Chancellor and voted him down.

Asquith was always a cabinet Prime Minister, in a full cabinet. He relied on reason and while his speeches may not have been as exciting as LG's they were considered great examples of intellectual construction. He was often under the influence of alcohol in parliament but never failed as a speaker, and never became a strong man bypassing Parliament. There was a lot of the patrician about Asquith, but he never needed to be part of the Conservative establishment and was happier in a party that wanted to constrain and limit institutions and centres of power, not absorb them into a hegemonic party-state system under a strong leader. Asquith never got into the moral catastrophe LG did with regard to sale of political honours, Asquith understood there are moral constraints on the pursuit of power. Asquith was not perfect of course. Sadly he opposed Women's Suffrage before the First World War, which LG did support, and private papers show he could be express himself offensively about those from other ethnic backgrounds. However, there were few who would seem good to us now from that point of view at the time; and certainly attempts to label Asquith as anti-Semitic must be balanced with the large role Jews played in the Liberal Party, sometimes as Asquith's colleagues. LG certainly thought military action to maintain the implicitly racist system of empire was justifiable.

If we look for absolute correctness, we will condemn all the past leaders. In a balanced assessment Asquith emerges as the model British Liberal leader after Gladstone and a Prime Minister of great distinction presiding over a government which reaffirmed free trade, sought a rule governed international order and pursued a major program of social reform, accompanied by major constitutional reform and a decisive defeat of entrenched privilege in the House of Lords.