philosophy

Descartes Before the Horse

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Richard Hanania:

With the benefit of hindsight, one can always find a way to connect the Inflation Reduction Act to Foucault or something, but such theories strike me as both unlikely to be true and practically impossible to falsify. We don’t have recurring moral panics about race and sex primarily because of something any philosopher has said. Moral panics exist in many cultures and the legal regime we live under determines the forms that our own ones take.

To the extent ideas matter, I think what is important is usually more likely to be intuitions and emotions than high-minded philosophy. People feel bad about the plight of black Americans. So they adopt the idea of “let’s help them and be sensitive towards their feelings.” When a bureaucrat twists the law in his preferred direction, thus proving the importance of “ideas” in forming public policy and culture, he is more likely to be relying on simple heuristics like this than any kind of well thought out ideological doctrine.

It’s like the joke about the guy looking for his keys under the streetlight blocks away from where he dropped them, because “the light’s better here!” Writers and philosophers are unsurprisingly prone to overemphasize the historical influence of writers and philosophers. Rousseau is responsible for X, Nietzsche is responsible for Y, etc. But speaking of philosophy, I often think that David Hume’s skepticism about causality might be of use in these cases. It might just be that highly literate, contemplative people are good at discerning and articulating widespread moods and “vibes,” as the kids like to say these days. Maybe they’re simply naming something that has already been born.

The Real Work of Epicureanism

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The real work of Epicureanism, then, is cataloguing, organizing, and minding the store of our desires. Remember that Epicurus doesn’t think happiness results from mere subtraction of corrosive desires. We must keep the store stocked with necessary items, which means devoting the time and energy we once expended in corrosive arenas to cultivating the prudence, habits of mind, knowledge, virtuous dispositions, and close relationships with like-minded people that make tranquility possible for creatures like us.

— Emily A. Austin, Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life

I must admit, my ataraxia had been chronically ruffled by my inability to find a pleasurable book about Epicurus to read. I was being deprived of the literary companionship of one of my closest philosophical friends, you might say, and we know how much value Epicurus places on friendship. Thankfully, Austin’s book came along to calm my troubled waters and serve as a corrective to Catherine Wilson’s book of a few years ago. Austin is conversational without oversharing, funny without forcing it, and thankfully, her attempts to make Epicurean perspectives relevant to current issues are only lightly applied, so we are blessedly spared from hearing what “Epicurus” would have thought of Donald Trump, Black Lives Matter, Greta Thunberg, or Elon Musk’s stewardship of Twitter. This is one of those rare books about philosophy which I eagerly looked forward to picking up again each night.

The Honest Naked Goddess Philosophy

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In an age which suffers from this universal education, to what an unnatural, artificial and in any case unworthy state must the most truthful of all sciences, the honest naked goddess philosophy, be reduced! In such a world of compelled external uniformity it must remain the learned monologue of the solitary walker, the individual’s chance capture, the hidden secret of the chamber, or the harmless chatter of academic old men and children. No one dares venture to fulfill the philosophical law in himself, no one lives philosophically with that simple loyalty that constrained a man of antiquity to bear himself as a Stoic wherever he was, whatever he did, once he had affirmed his loyalty to the Stoa. All modern philosophizing is political and official, limited by governments, churches, academies, customs and the cowardice of men to the appearance of scholarship; it sighs ‘if only’ or knows ‘there once was’ and does nothing else.

— Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, ” Untimely Meditations

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It seems I am destined to become a market philosopher, but it can’t be helped. Philosophy generally seems to be the science of making simple things difficult to understand, but I can conceive of a philosophy which is the science of making difficult things simple. In spite of names like “materialism,” “humanism,” “transcendentalism,” “pluralism,” and all the other longwinded “isms,” I contend that these systems are no deeper than my own philosophy. Life after all is made up of eating and sleeping, of meeting and saying good-bye to friends, of reunions and farewell parties, of tears and laughter, of having a haircut once in two weeks, of watering a potted flower and watching one’s neighbor fall off his roof, and the dressing up of our notions concerning these simple phenomena of life in a kind of academic jargon is nothing but a trick to conceal either an extreme paucity or an extreme vagueness of ideas on the part of the university professors. Philosophy therefore has become a science by means of which we begin more and more to understand less and less about ourselves. What the philosophers have succeeded in is this: the more they talk about it, the more confused we become.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

Verily, Verily, I Say Unto Thee (19)

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Elayne Allen:

In her new book, Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living, historian Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn offers a clear-eyed diagnosis of what she considers today’s culture of therapy. “We live in an era of the aphorism and the several-step program promising to fix everything imaginable,” she writes. But without a deeper vision of what life is about, we are subject to a tyranny of selfhood. Lasch-Quinn explains, “With no vision of the good, we are lost and bereft. All our projects become self-serving.”

…In elegant prose, Lasch-Quinn encourages us to look beyond self-optimization or political activism. At some point, we must ask ourselves: What if there actually is a coherent purpose of existence? What if living is an art? Ancient philosophy, she contends, can help us navigate these questions. She surveys five ancient schools of thought—Gnosticism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, and Platonism—for possible guidance, locating echoes of their themes in contemporary culture.

Sounds interesting. I’ve enjoyed both her and her father’s books. Well, I guess that’s my Christmas present sorted!

A Monster of Falsehood

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Callicles accuses Socrates of exploiting the feelings of shame felt by both Gorgias and Polus. It was shame which led Gorgias to make the tactical mistake of saying he could teach his students virtue. And it was shame that led Polus to make the crucial concession that justice is a good thing and injustice a bad thing. In fact, Callicles says, Polus should have said the exact opposite. It is justice which is bad and injustice good. Justice is merely the set of conventional rules that society uses to keep the strongest people in line. The law of nature says the opposite: the strongest person should get the greatest rewards. What would these rewards consist in? Not the glow of self-righteous justice that Socrates so admires, but what is naturally, rather than conventionally, good: namely, power and pleasure. Callicles thinks then, that justice is nothing but a trick for getting the strong to surrender their natural right to seize as much pleasure as they can handle.

Socrates rightly recognizes that Callicles is raising a serious challenge, one more difficult to defeat than anything Polus has said. Callicles, in fact, bears a striking resemblance to no less a figure than Friedrich Nietzsche, the great nineteenth-century critic of (Judeo-Christian) morality.

— Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy: A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Volume 1

I’ve heard that comparison made before. I’m pretty sure Roger Kimball called Nietzsche both a modern-day Callicles and Thrasymachus. But rather than being a straightforward advocate for “might makes right” and a partisan of power over truth, I think Nietzsche was much more nuanced and interesting than that.

His infamous distinction between “master morality” and “slave morality” is familiar to any student of Philosophy 101. Less well-known is an aphorism like this one from Daybreak:

It goes without saying that I do not deny, unless I am a fool, that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged, but I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto. We have to learn to think differently in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.

One could argue that morality has very little to do with rationality as compared to empathy, and as such, that it’s naïve to imagine that we can rebuild morality on a more stable, rationally justified foundation. But leaving that aside, I think it shows that, even earlier in his writing career, he was not interested in simply inverting traditional moral precepts for shock value. Walter Kaufmann, among others, has argued that Nietzsche is best understood as encouraging a drive for power and mastery over oneself rather than others. Nietzsche, the lifelong admirer of Emerson, may have had an ideal in mind like that of Emerson’s Self-Reliance, the rebel and outsider who nevertheless maintains a higher, more consistent ethical code than his conventional, hypocritical critics. Again, this is almost an adolescent cliché now, but if so, that also blunts whatever radical edge it may have once had.

Yuval Levin published a piece yesterday celebrating the life of the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, in which he says about Lord Acton, the subject of her first book:

Acton’s answer to this problem [of unrestrained individualism] was not to abandon liberalism, but to insist that it be tethered to traditional religion.

This is something I hear often as well. Without a shared religious framework guiding our actions, moral and civilizational decline is inevitable. As a sanguine Epicurean, I can’t help but note that very few of these mostly-conservative laments for a lost religious sensibility even attempt to make the case for its truth. Instead, they imply that it would produce better consequences if most of us could be induced to at least pay lip service to a common ethical outlook rooted in Christianity. Keep clapping so that Tinkerbell might yet live. If not for yourself, do it for the children.

Here, again, Nietzsche is far from the caricature of a gleeful immoralist dancing on God’s grave, happily anticipating the depravity to come. In his famous parable of the madman, in which the madman announces the death of God, he alternates between fear of the immense significance of the deed and disgust at the unworthiness of the murderers who don’t even realize what they’ve done. But earlier in the book, he had already seen it coming. In this aphorism, he offers something of an evolutionary account of truth. Granted that all of our ideas about the world were, strictly speaking, errors, “truth” was the name we gave to those useful, life-preserving errors. But as we pursued Truth, complacently assuming that it would always be identical with the Good and the Beautiful, we discovered that in fact, it is sometimes fatal to those things. We even sacrificed God to Truth, and now we’ve committed ourselves too deeply to go back:

The thinker is now the being in whom the impulse to truth and those life-preserving errors wage their first conflict, now that the impulse to truth has also proved itself to be a life-preserving power. In comparison with the importance of this conflict everything else is indifferent; the final question concerning the conditions of life is here raised, and the first attempt is here made to answer it by experiment. How far is truth susceptible of embodiment? – that is the question, that is the experiment.

The impulse to truth, engendered by Christianity, ironically enough, has also proven to be a life-preserving power, even if it undermines and collapses the old certainties. The pursuit of truth gives renewed meaning to life; many people find a more challenging, heroic mission in attempting to look in truth’s ugly face without flinching. Even in The Antichrist, published in his last few months of sanity, at his most unrestrained and vituperative, we find him in aphorism 38 heaping scorn upon Christianity, not for its defense of the weak and downtrodden, but precisely for its infidelity to the cause of truth, for failing to live up to its own ideals:

And here my disgust begins.—I look about me: not a word survives of what was once called “truth”; we can no longer bear to hear a priest pronounce the word. Even a man who makes the most modest pretensions to integrity must know that a theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs when he speaks, but actually lies—and that he no longer escapes blame for his lie through “innocence” or “ignorance.”

…Everyone knows this, but nevertheless things remain as before. What has become of the last trace of decent feeling, of self-respect, when our statesmen, otherwise an unconventional class of men and thoroughly anti-Christian in their acts, now call themselves Christians and go to the communion table? . . . A prince at the head of his armies, magnificent as the expression of the egoism and arrogance of his people–and yet acknowledging, without any shame, that he is a Christian! . . . Whom, then, does Christianity deny? what does it call “the world”? To be a soldier, to be a judge, to be a patriot; to defend one’s self; to be careful of one’s honor; to desire one’s own advantage; to be proud . . . every act of everyday, every instinct, every valuation that shows itself in a deed, is now anti-Christian: what a monster of falsehood the modern man must be to call himself nevertheless, and without shame, a Christian!

And so we see that even in his final days, his inhibitions weakened by his illness (I’m convinced by the revisionist claim that he was suffering from an undiagnosed brain tumor rather than syphilis), he returned to this stance of outraged idealism, rhetorically overturning tables in the temple of modern bourgeois complacency. In one of the posthumous fragments from his notebooks, we find him spelling out his views on warfare, both literal and metaphorical, while returning again to the fundamental opposition between truth and lies:

I bring war. Not between people and people: no words are sufficient to express my loathing of the despicable interest politics pursued by modern European dynasties—politics which make the incitement to self-seeking arrogance among the peoples, setting them against one another, into a principle, and almost into a duty. Not war between classes, either—since there are no higher classes, and consequently no inferior ones… I bring a war which cuts across all the absurd coincidences of nation, class, race, status, level of education, constitution—a war like the conflict between rising and falling; between the will to live and the thirst for revenge against life, between upright honesty and treacherous lies. If we could do without wars, so much the better. I can think of many more profitable uses for the twelve billion spent every year to maintain the armed peace in Europe, and other means of gaining respect for physiology preferable to field hospitals.

I hope it goes without saying that I’m not trying to offer any definitive interpretation of his philosophy here. As Karl Jaspers and my friend Arthur said, best of luck to anyone who takes on that fool’s errand. I’m only suggesting that the pursuit of that definitive interpretation is far more rewarding than accepting the commonplace caricatures. (Let me also say that I don’t intend to single Adamson out for criticism here; his books in the History of Philosophy series are both informative and well-written, with a spirit of gentle levity not often found in writing on the topic, and I imagine his podcast is similar, though I haven’t listened to it yet. I recommend them to anyone interested in non-academic philosophy. I only excerpted this passage because it was a recent example of something I’d been meaning to gather my thoughts around.)

Epispurious

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James Romm:

A similar bid for relevance gives rise to contemporary discussions of policy or politics, in some of which Ms. Wilson inserts her own views or “reconstructs” what Epicurus might have said. In a chapter called “What Is Real?,” she adduces the idea of “racial inferiority” as an example of an “Unthing,” an illusion without atomic substance. This leads her into a critique of housing and zoning laws that, in her view, perpetuate urban poverty in nonwhite neighborhoods. Abortion, pollution and climate change are also addressed, in ways that feel opportunistic or forced. Ms. Wilson can be an insightful philosophic guide—and Epicurus is a thinker who deserves an insightful rediscovery—but her attempt to address a wide range of modern problems feels inauthentic. From many of these, Epicurus himself would have simply sought to escape.

I assume most authors don’t get to choose their titles, so I didn’t think this would be an actual how-to guide, but I have to agree — I came away from How to Be an Epicurean with the impression that Epicureanism was more or less indistinguishable from progressive liberalism. This would have come as a surprise to the very un-progressive Nietzsche, for one, who generally had only positive things to say about Epicurus — his aphorism from which this very site takes its name is presumed to be in reference to the Epicurean ideal (the “coarser brother” is presumably Stoicism). And my own Epicurean theories about the meaning of life and nonexistence after death certainly haven’t led me to progressive political conclusions. Not that I wanted to see Epicurus viewed through a “conservative” lens, of course, which would have been equally tendentious. I would have just preferred for him to be allowed more opportunity to speak for himself with Wilson providing additional clarifying context, rather than having him sit on her lap like a ventriloquist’s dummy, offering up “his” opinion on climate change.

But if Wilson overshares her personal political views, she under-delivers when it comes to making Epicurus sound insightful enough to read for oneself. Epicurean wisdom here sounds a lot like unhelpful platitudes and truisms. When faced with the intractable problems of the human condition, we apparently should review the evidence calmly and dispassionately. Well, thanks for that. “The answers to many such questions are available to anyone who makes a search for them,” she says after raising hypothetical questions about the costs and benefits of welfare-state programs. Good to know that’s settled! Neil deGrasse Tyson would no doubt agree. Unfortunately, this kind of relevance-seeking will only make Epicurus irrelevant once modern progressive doctrine morphs into its next phase, and he deserves better than that.

Taking Heartache With Hard Work

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In a marvellous short portrait of Conrad, Bertrand Russell said of him, “I felt… that he thought of civilized and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.” Because he saw life in such terms, Conrad emphasized the place and importance of work in life. There was, he believed, a particular kind of dignity in the sober exercise of one’s duty in the service of one’s work, precisely because life is such a perilous affair. Conrad had spent the first part of his life as a merchant seaman, and the kind of work he had in mind was largely active, physical work. In some respects he resembled Wittgenstein, who felt that there was something profoundly unhealthy about life as an academic philosopher and who himself gave up philosophy at various points in his life to work as a gardener. There was for Wittgenstein something honest about the kind of labour characteristic of work in a garden. This honesty derived from the sense that the external rhythm of nature, to which the gardener has to be responsive, helps to provide a kind of order to the inner world of the mind. It was also a matter of the fact that gardening provides a focus for the mind’s energy, helping it to avoid consuming itself in its own anxious self-questionings.

— Christopher Hamilton, Middle Age

I don’t like being pressed for time, but I have to admit I do love being absorbed in work, whether paid labor, routine chores, or even exercise. I remember a busy day recently that extended well into the evening, and rather than feeling exhausted or grumpy afterward from the amount of work that had to be done, I felt a rather meditative calm, in addition to the pride of accomplishment. By contrast, I often feel restless on days with no pressing duties. It’s like being spoiled for choice. I can only read for a couple hours before I want to get up and do something else, which is why I prefer to save it for the time before bed. I suppose Aristotle would shake his head and dismiss me as a born beast of burden unsuited for the philosophical life. Well, at least Wittgenstein would have my back.

Interestingly, Nietzsche had also wanted to be a professional gardener after resigning his professorship, telling his mother in a letter, “There is no other cure for my health. I need real work, which takes time and induces tiredness without mental strain.” His physical limitations forced him to abandon the fantasy after three weeks, but he retained a fondness for horticultural metaphors in his writing. I recall that Phil Oliver was working on a book about philosophers and writers who loved walking; I wonder if anyone has ever done the same for those who favored gardening?

Sowing the Seeds of Love

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Rob Henderson:

It can be hard, though, to accept that morality motivates violence. Maybe there’s something wrong with thinking of violence as moral. Isn’t the point of morality to care for people, or at least not hurt them?

We are told that a “surprising new scientific theory explains why morality leads to violence.” It turns out that people are willing to be violent over the things they care most deeply about, especially if those things are considered rare and irreplaceable. I suppose this is “surprising” to anyone raised in a Skinner box, unacquainted with the great philosopher-poets who already addressed this inherent shapeshifting, transitory, mysterious nature of life long ago:

“How could anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error? Or the will to truth out of the will to deception? Or selfless action out of self-interest? Or the pure sunlike gaze of the sage out of covetousness? Such origins are impossible; whoever dreams of them is a fool, even worse; the things of the highest value must have another, separate origin of their own—they cannot be derived from this transitory, seductive, deceptive, lowly world, from this turmoil of delusion and desire! Rather from the lap of being, the intransitory, the hidden god, the ‘thing-in-itself ‘—there must be their basis, and nowhere else!”— This way of judging constitutes the typical prejudice by which the metaphysicians of all ages can be recognized; this kind of valuation looms in the background of all their logical procedures; it is on account of this “belief” that they trouble themselves about “knowledge,” about something that is finally christened solemnly as “the truth.” The fundamental belief of the metaphysicians is the belief in oppositions of values. It has not even occurred to the most cautious among them to raise doubts right here at the threshold where it is surely most necessary: even if they vowed to themselves, “de omnibus dubitandum.” For one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposites at all, and second, whether these popular valuations and opposite values on which the metaphysicians put their seal, are not perhaps merely foreground estimates, only provisional perspectives, perhaps even from some nook, perhaps from below, frog perspectives, as it were, to borrow an expression painters use? For all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to appearance, the will to deception, self-interest, and desire. It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things—maybe even one with them in essence. Perhaps! — But who has the will to concern himself with such dangerous Perhapses!

Whistling Past God’s Grave

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George Scialabba:

As long as so much of what we see is unnecessary suffering, we cannot be content with the world as we find it. Of course we should keep Gray’s cautions well in mind. The catastrophic revolutionary ideologies of the past were ersatz religions. Scientific utopias and promises to transform the human condition deserve the deepest suspicion. Moral and political progress are always subject to reversal. Humans are animals; human nature is riven with conflicts; reason is a frail reed. But even if we can’t set the cosmos right, we can’t leave our corner of it the way it is. Whatever else may be an illusion, other people’s suffering is not.

I read Scialabba’s book What Are Intellectuals Good For? early last year. I only remembered the title because I looked it up in my Goodreads history. I had totally forgotten it was still on my shelf until I just went and checked a moment ago. Glancing through it, I don’t see any of my telltale marks in red pen for calling attention to thought-provoking passages. In other words, the book didn’t leave much of a lasting impression on me. Lionel Trilling once famously described mid-20th-century conservatism as  a collection of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas;” my vague memory is that Scialabba’s essays were full of potentially interesting ideas which were offset by the irritating rhetorical gestures toward a left-wing sensibility.

Granted, that may well say more about me than him, but I felt the same way again after reading this review of John Gray’s latest book, Seven Types of Atheism. After a fair and respectful consideration of Gray’s argument, the concluding paragraph above just feels perfunctory. Having acknowledged Gray’s point that much of left-wing politics is just crusading Christianity in disguise for people who pride themselves on feeling superior to religious believers, Scialabba simply turns around and reasserts the same perspective as a moral imperative, as if the ongoing metaphysical earthquake which undermined much of the confidence in the old Christian worldview never happened. I’m sure that’s good enough for the choir, but why are the rest of us supposed to be convinced? This is just a refusal to even face the challenge squarely, preferring the comfort of platitudes.

As it happens, I think Scialabba is actually correct, even if the sentiment is shallow. I agree with Anthony Kronman that the tragedy of the human condition is our self-contradictory nature, our inability to ever stop trying to usurp God’s throne and bring every aspect of human existence under our conscious, willed control. The apple cannot be uneaten. Pandora’s jar cannot be resealed. Westerners as a rule cannot stop seeking to abolish the entire painful spectrum between discomfort and agony, even if we understand on a cerebral level that a life without pain would actually be undesirable, not to mention impossible. But Jordan Peterson, to name one contemporary example, also names suffering as the undeniable fact about human experience, the inescapable truth he salvaged from his own period of extreme Cartesian doubt, and yet he has derived a much different (and more interesting) stance toward politics and values than the generic democratic-socialist outlook that Scialabba seems to take as a given. The entire point of Gray’s book is that there is more than one way to disbelieve in God. Likewise, there is more than one coherent perspective to take on the brute facts of existence.

An Orangutan Among Chimpanzees

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Douglas Dalrymple:

I’m a bit worried these days by how little I have, or care, to say. Other people’s words don’t hold much interest either. It feels ridiculous that we should be required to have opinions and perspectives, or that we should need to express them. These days I avoid conversation. I switch off the television and radio and wonder why we can’t be content, like Bertie Wooster in Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen, to “just exist beautifully.” How different – how better –things would be if we could only dial down (by fifty percent, say) the chatty sociability of the species.

I recently read Massimo Pigliucci’s book How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life. I was pretty sure I wasn’t an unconscious or incipient Stoic, but it’s good to reassess these things every so often. Still, to what would surely be the good professor’s chagrin, all this did was reaffirm that I am indeed still the Epicurean I always thought I was. Good friendships, clear thinking, modest desires, intellectual pleasures, gods in name only, and most crucially — or most damningly from a Stoic perspective — a preference for withdrawal from social and political life. Those who espouse “living unknown” as a maxim will always be offensive in the sight of those who believe in performing duty and signaling virtue. “Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.” Pretty much. Still, I reserve the right to hold myself aloof from the fray.

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