ABSTRACT: The Fool offers a famous objection to Hobbesian ethics: if practical rationality is rooted in self-interest, then isn’t it rational to abandon ethical reasoning when doing so “conduces to one’s benefit”? In this paper, I examine Hobbes’ reply to the Fool as it reveals the limitations of the moral theory presented in Leviathan. I begin by sketching out the reply and two traditional ways of interpreting it – the “case-by-case” interpretation and the “rule-commitment” interpretation. I argue that for empirical reasons both these interpretations fail to answer the Fool’s challenge. I then turn to an interpretation that I think a more promising answer to the Fool: Gauthier’s theory of conventional reason. This theory, I argue, contains a crucial insight that the first two interpretations lack: what Hobbes really needs to do to reply to the Fool is not to reconcile covenant-keeping with self-interest, but rather to show how constraints on the pursuit of self-interest can be rationally justified. Gauthier’s attempt to do so within Hobbes’ framework fails, but this failure illuminates a fundamental problem with Hobbes’ moral theory: that moral constraints on the pursuit of self-interest cannot provide reasons to a Hobbesian agent.

At the beginning of Chapter XV of Leviathan, Hobbes introduces an ethical antagonist now famous in the literature on early modern philosophy: the Fool. The Fool says in his heart, “there is no such thing as justice,” and alleges that it is rational to break covenants when doing so “conduces to one’s benefit” (90). That a character who reasons in this manner makes an appearance in Hobbes’ treatise follows in a long tradition; like Plato’s Thrasymachus, Grotius’ Carneades, and Hume’s Sensible Knave, the Fool allows his creator to confront the threat of ethical skepticism head on.

In what follows, I examine Hobbes’ reply to the Fool as it reveals the limitations of the moral theory presented in Leviathan. I begin by sketching out the reply and two traditional ways of interpreting it – the “case-by-case” interpretation and the “rule- commitment” interpretation. I argue that for empirical reasons both these interpretations fail to answer the Fool’s challenge. I then turn to an interpretation that I think a more promising answer to the Fool – Gauthier’s theory of conventional reason. This theory, I argue, contains a crucial insight that the first two interpretations lack: what Hobbes really needs to do to reply to the Fool is not to reconcile covenant-keeping with self-interest, but rather to show how constraints on the pursuit of self-interest can be rationally justified. Gauthier’s attempt to do so within Hobbes’ framework fails, but this failure illuminates a fundamental problem with Hobbes’ moral theory: that moral constraints on the pursuit of self-interest cannot provide reasons to a Hobbesian agent.

The Fool makes two claims, which, when combined, yield a conclusion hostile to the authority of Hobbes’ laws of nature. The first is a claim about practical reason: “every man’s conservation and contentment being committed to his own care, there could be no reason why every man might not do what he thought conduced thereunto” (Hobbes 90). On this view, practical reason is a purely selfish endeavor. The reason you have to do X is determined by the expected utility of X to your interests. This conception is recognizably Hobbesian. As Hobbes explains in Chapter XV, “of the voluntary acts of every man the object is some good to himself” (82), and what is “against benefit” is “against reason” (91). This egoistic theory of practical reason saturates Hobbes’ discussion throughout the Leviathan; he makes use of it especially prominently in his discussion of covenant (82), gratitude (95), and the nature of law (100). On the Fool’s first claim, then, he and Hobbes seem to agree.

The Fool’s second claim is an empirical one: that sometimes violating a covenant is in an agent’s interest. Combining this claim with the egoistic theory of practical reason, the Fool reaches the conclusion that “to make or not make, keep or not keep, covenants was not against reason, when it conduced to one’s benefit” (90). Indeed, as Kavka (1995) points out, the Fool’s reasoning applies not just to the keeping of covenants, but to all of Hobbes’ laws of nature – Gratitude, Complaisance, Equity, and the all the rest (Kavka 3). If the Fool is right, then whenever one of these laws compels an agent to act in a manner contrary to her interests, it is rational for the agent to violate the law.

For Hobbes to refute this reasoning, he needs to show that a rational agent should not break a covenant purely out of unilateral considerations of self-interest. He does not have to show that a rational agent should never break a covenant, period. It is plausible that, at times, other laws of nature will compel a rational agent to break a covenant, or that the spirit of Hobbes’ “easy sum” of all the natural laws – “Do not that to another, which thou wouldst not have done to thyself” (Hobbes 99) – will run contrary to covenant keeping. Indeed, as Kavka points out, Hobbes deems acceptable a particular type of violation of the laws of nature – what Kavka calls a defensive violation (4). A defensive violation occurs in response to a violation undertaken by another party, and it works to protect an agent from being taken advantage of by other violators. An offensive violation, by contrast, is chosen simply because an agent has calculated that violating will be to her advantage. It is this second type of violation that Hobbes is trying to prove irrational.

It is possible to interpret Hobbes’ goal differently: perhaps he accepts the rationality of such offensive violations but simply wants to modify the Fool’s (and the reader’s) calculation of how often a good chance to offensively violate occurs. The problem with this interpretation is that it has Hobbes introducing an antagonist with whom he is in fundamental agreement – a view that clashes strongly with the manner in which the Fool is presented. Hobbes does not say to the Fool, “you’re right, but it happens less than you think,” but rather, “this specious reasoning is nevertheless false” (91). It seems that Hobbes takes the issue to be one of principle, not quantity of cases. In addition, Hobbes’ linguistic choices – naming his interlocutor “The Fool,” referring to the Fool’s reasoning as “successful wickedness” (90) – suggest that he does not consider the Fool an intellectual bedfellow. These texts present prima facie evidence that Hobbes does not want to show the reader merely that the Fool has overestimated a fundamentally sound conclusion, but rather that the Fool’s reasoning itself is misguided.

How does Hobbes attempt to do so? His answer consists of two parts. First, Hobbes provides a clarification about what it means to make a rational decision. This clarification does not contest the Fool’s view that ultimately, practical reason derives from considerations of self interest, but it does introduce an important distinction: “When a man doth a thing which…. tendeth to his own destruction (howsoever some accidence which he could not expect, arriving, may turn it to his benefit), yet such events do not make it reasonable or wisely done” (91). On this view, the reasonableness of an action is not determined by its actual outcome, but rather by the outcome that could be reasonably expected from an agent’s deliberative standpoint. An example makes this distinction clear: imagine a man who, in exchange for 500 dollars, jumps out of an airplane with no parachute. Unbeknownst to him, the plane just happens to be passing over the world’s largest pile of pillows, on which he lands safely. He walks away 500 dollars richer, but the choice he made was not rational, because he could not have reasonably expected to benefit from it (even though, in fact, he did).

The second step in Hobbes’ reply is this: because of the way the state of nature works, violating covenant is the equivalent of jumping out of a plane with no parachute, in that 1) it tends toward the destruction of the person who does it, and 2) the person cannot reasonably expect to avoid this destruction. Hobbes derives 1 from the necessity of cooperation: “In a condition of war wherein every man to every man … is an enemy, no man can hope by his own strength or wit to defend himself from destruction without the help of confederates” (91). But no one will cooperate with someone who breaks his covenants, particularly not in the kind of iterated collective action problems entailed by a confederacy. Therefore, a covenant-breaker can only be received into society “by the error of them that receive him,” an error that “he could not foresee nor reckon upon” (92). Such an error is Hobbes’ version of landing on the world’s largest pile of pillows; it cannot be rationally expected.

Important to this reasoning is the notion of decision under uncertainty. When a choice is being made under conditions of uncertainty, a rational agent must take into account not only the value and probability of different possible outcomes, but also the reliability of her calculations. The evidence she is using might be faulty, or incomplete, or she might be biased, ignorant or deceived in a way that is leading her to misinterpret the situation. These possibilities introduce a degree of uncertainty to the decision-making process that must itself be factored into evaluating a decision’s rationality. Hobbes seems to think that the decision to keep or violate a covenant is made under this type of uncertainty, and that even if all of an agent’s evidence suggests that violation of covenant will be beneficial, the reliability of that conclusion will be uncertain to such an extent that it will not be rational to risk the drastic consequences – in Hobbes’ view, certain destruction – of getting it wrong.

I will examine two interpretations to which this reply has given rise, though there are many others^[1]. One is called the case-by-case interpretation^[2]. On this view, Hobbes is arguing that, given the uncertainty inherent to decision-making and the dire consequences misjudgment, there will be no cases in which you can reasonably expect to benefit from covenant violation. This interpretation is close to traditional readings of Hobbes, and it follows easily from the text of the reply, which is framed in terms of individual decisions. If the reasoning is sound, then Hobbes has successfully answered the Fool’s challenge.

However, one of the reasons this answer has drawn so much attention is that there seem, on the surface, to be obvious problems with it. Are there really no cases in which it is possible to reasonably expect that violating a covenant will be more beneficial than keeping it? They do not seem difficult to imagine. For example, suppose that, while on a trip around the world, your one-person plane breaks down in Egypt, and you hire a nameless, friendless, deaf mute orphan boy to help you fix it, promising him $2,000 in exchange. He does his work beautifully, and once he finishes and you have tested everything to make sure it works, you load yourself into the cockpit. You are about to close the window when the orphan boy holds out his hand, expecting to receive his money. In this situation, it seems reasonable for you to expect to benefit from closing the window, revving the engine, and flying away. No one else knows about your covenant with the boy, and he won’t be able to tell anyone. Even if he could, you would be long gone, and whatever bad reputation you develop in that particular Egyptian town would not touch you in America. Of course, there is some uncertainty (what if you break down in that town again? what if the orphan boy grows up to wield great power and to use it expressly to revenge this offense?), but the uncertainty is not sufficient to undermine the reasonableness of your expectation. Why would it be irrational simply to fly away?

Cases like this seem to be what the Fool is talking about, and they are more common than the strangeness of the example might suggest. All that is necessary is a situation in which, even after considerations of consequence, probability, and uncertainty are taken into account, the risks of covenant-violation are calculably low, and the benefits calculably high, such that it is reasonable for an agent to expect violation to work to her advantage. The frequency of such cases can be disputed; that they do, sometimes, occur cannot. And, on the case-by-case interpretation of Hobbes’ reply, this seems to be all that the Fool needs.

The force of this objection has led some interpreters^[3] to abandon the case-by-case interpretation and present instead a “rule-commitment” reading. On this view, Hobbes is arguing not just against a particular decision – to break covenant – but against an entire paradigm of decision-making – namely, case-by-case reasoning – when applied to covenant-keeping. On this view, Hobbes thinks it irrational to attempt to calculate, in each new situation, whether violating a core moral rule like covenant-keeping will be in your interest. Rather, the best thing to do is to commit to a rule or cultivate a disposition that will govern your behavior in all cases. If this interpretation of Hobbes is correct, then the real disagreement between him and the Fool is about what type of decision-making process is most rational. The Fool implicitly accepts case-by-case decision-making, while Hobbes argues that if you commit to a rule such as “never break covenants,” you will ultimately benefit more.

Why would commitment to this rule yield such a benefit? Interpreters give different arguments. Gauthier focuses on the social benefits: if an agent’s commitment to never break covenants is adequately discernable by potential confederates, then those confederates will have reason to choose partnerships with that agent rather than with others who are suspected of case-by-case reasoning. Indeed, because it is in the interests of potential confederates to become as skilled at such discernment as possible, the easiest way for an agent to withstand their scrutiny will be to actually commit to the rules beneficial to confederacy. This advantage means that rule-committed reasoners will be offered better opportunities for cooperation than case-by-case reasoners, and will therefore do better in the long term, even though they will pass up chances to violate that would have worked to their short-term advantage.^[4]

In addition to these social benefits, committing to rules solves technical problems often encountered during deliberation. Kavka argues that trying, in the face of each opportunity to violate covenant, to systematically anticipate all of the advantages and disadvantages of various possible outcomes, calculate the probabilities of those outcomes, and reckon with the uncertainty of your calculations is a taxing process, and the energy saved by committing to a simple rule can be put to much more beneficial use elsewhere (Kavka 21). What’s more, rule commitment avoids recognized problems in the psychology of human decision making, such as the tendency to succumb to the temptation of short-term reward without adequate recognition of the potential long-term costs. It therefore reduces, in the long term, the number of mistakes that an agent makes, and ultimately yields a net gain (Kavka 21).^[5]

Such considerations may begin to build an argument for committing to rules rather than reasoning case by case. But is it, in fact, the argument that Hobbes makes against the Fool? On the surface, the text of the reply itself suggests otherwise. Hobbes frames his discussion with the Fool as an analysis of which individual actions are most reasonable, not which type of practical rationality. Nowhere does Hobbes mention the notion of rule commitment, nor does he explain why such commitment would be more beneficial in the long term than reasoning case by case – an explanation presumably necessary for showing why the Fool’s approach is wrong. If Hobbes’ real intention in his reply to the Fool is to prove the fallacy of case-by-case practical reasoning, then he is doing so in a manner both singularly indirect and contrary to his usual, geometric style of explanation. Of course, it is possible that Hobbes explains the value of rule commitment elsewhere in Leviathan, or that he simply takes it for granted. Kavka seems to take the former view, and he cites as his evidence the passage in Chapter 15 in which Hobbes explains that the laws of nature are both prudentially grounded and, in Kavka’s language, “general prescriptive rules of conduct” (Kavka 1986, 360). Such textual evidence, however, is far from decisive, as the passages are perfectly compatible with the case-by- case interpretation as well; Hobbes could believe that what makes the rules general and prescriptive is that adhering to them will be more prudent in each particular case.

Nevertheless, a rule-commitment interpretation of Hobbesian practical reason does have a few theoretical advantages to recommend it. For one, it helps explain some of Hobbes’ political doctrines that a case-by-case theory has trouble with, such as the absolute authority of the sovereign and the reasonableness of remaining in the social contract even when it seems against your interest.^[6] It also allows Hobbes both to disagree substantively with the Fool and, at least in Kavka’s view, to defeat him, thus saving Hobbes from the embarrassing choice of having introduced either an opponent he fundamentally agrees with or an objection he fails to meet. For these reasons and others, scholarly debate about the rule-commitment interpretation remains vigorous.

Even if this is the correct interpretation of Hobbes’ reply, however, I believe that, like the case-by-case interpretation, it ultimately fails to refute the Fool. Even if we grant Kavka’s/Gauthier’s empirical claims about the long-term advantages of rule commitment (many of which are open to objection), there will remain situations in which the long- term benefits of breaking a rule are calculably greater than the long-term benefits of keeping it. In such situations, a rule-committed reasoner will be voluntarily doing something that she can see quite clearly is not to her benefit. There are two arguments against accepting this scenario. One, given by Hampton, is that Hobbes’ egoistic theory of motivation renders it impossible.^[7] This first argument, though, may be surmountable by appeal to the agent’s belief that her policy of rule commitment is ultimately in her interest, so I will focus on the second: even if such an action is possible, it is nevertheless irrational, because a much better approach is available. Rather than following the rules rigidly, even when doing so is obviously disadvantageous, an agent will reap much greater rewards by following the rules generally – thus reaping the benefits of rule- commitment – and also remaining able to identify and take advantage of opportunities in which breaking the rules is calculably beneficial. Kavka argues against this conclusion by citing the uncertainty inherent in trying to identify such opportunities (Kavka 1995, 22- 23), but he ends his paper with a question that undermines his argument: “is uncertainty really so widespread, and benefit so unlikely, that we cannot reliably determine of potential rule violations ahead of time when they ‘conduced to one’s benefit’?” (30). The obvious answer seems to be no. Imagine, again, your plane’s break-down in Egypt. While you are watching the orphan boy repair your plane, you have quite a bit of time to calculate whether this would be a good time to break your general rule of keeping covenants. Such situations are common – so common, in fact, that, it may be to your substantial disadvantage to adopt of a mode of practical reasoning that leaves them unexploited.

I conclude, therefore, that both a case-by-case interpretation and a rule- commitment interpretation fail to answer the Fool’s challenge. Case-by-case reasoning leads to the violation of covenant in cases like the breakdown in Egypt, and rigid rule- commitment seems irrational compared to general rule-following and occasional rule- breaking – a policy that also compels leaving the orphan boy empty handed. Either way, the Fool has triumphed, and the boy goes hungry.

In what remains of the paper, I will explore one more interpretation of Hobbes’ reply – Gauthier’s theory of conventional reason. This interpretation has at its core an insight that the other two lack. Both case-by-case and rule-commitment interpretations have Hobbes playing an empirical game with a Fool – a game, I have argued, that the philosopher loses. Gauthier, by contrast, wastes no time with empirical speculation; rather, he focuses on a much more central feature of the Fool’s argument – the egoistic conception of practical rationality. Both case-by-case and rule-commitment interpretations take this conception for granted, and they are thus stuck forever on the Fool’s turf. Recognizing this, Gauthier rightly searches for a new playing field. His failure to find one also compatible with Hobbes’ thought illuminates a fundamental barrier to Leviathan’s moral project – Hobbes’ inability to rationally constrain the pursuit of self-interest.

Gauthier’s move is to attempt to develop a conventional standard of rationality that allows Hobbes a way around the egoistic notion of practical reason that grounds the Fool’s argument. He does so through appeal to Hobbes’ notion of right reason: “when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord set up for right reason the reason of some arbitrator or judge to whose sentence they will both stand” (Hobbes 23). According to Gauthier, this notion contains the “germ” of an adequate reply to the Fool – albeit, a reply that Hobbes does not make explicit (Gauthier 1979, 557). It is this: only in the state of nature do people reason solely for the sake of personal advantage – a type of practical reason that Gauthier calls “natural reason.” Once they come to understand that this manner of reasoning leads to a war of all against all, they agree to renounce it and set up a conventional standard of reason that compels each person to seek something everyone wants – peace. This renouncement, according to Gauthier, is inextricably tied to the limiting of natural right: “if one lays down some portion of one’s right to do whatever seems conducive to one’s preservation and well-being, so that one may find peace, then one renounces preservation as the standard of reason, in favor of peace” (Gauthier 577). This “conventional reason” functions in a manner similar to the judge Hobbes advocates erecting to settle disputes, in that it unites previously subjective, competing “reasons” under a shared standard. On this view, the Fool errs because he appeals to an egoistic standard of reason that the social contract renders obsolete. Once an agent has laid down part of her natural right, she will no longer accept arguments of the Fool’s form: “X is irrational because it doesn’t conduce to an agent’s interests.” Rather, she will only respond to arguments like, “X is irrational because it does not conduce towards peace.”

Gauthier does not claim that Hobbes actually makes this argument against the Fool. He does claim, however, that Hobbes could make it using resources in the text already available to him, and that doing so would be consistent with everything else in Leviathan (Gauthier 548). This latter claim, I will argue, is incorrect; central points of Hobbes’ system cause serious problems for Gauthier’s theory. One is the role of covenants in the state of nature.^[8] According to Hobbes, the capacity to make covenants for the sake of temporary safety and mutual defense is extremely necessary in the state of nature. As Hobbes makes clear in the reply to the Fool, no man can hope to survive without the confederacies that covenants make possible. Granted, such covenants are easily voided by “any reasonable suspicion” (84) that one party will violate, but they are nevertheless valid provided conditions of mutual trust (84). Indeed, covenants had better be possible in the state of nature, because at least one is required to get out of it – namely, the covenant to establish a mutual sovereign. But Gauthier’s “conventional reason” applies as a standard only after agents have left the state of nature. How, then, can he answer Fool-like reasoning about covenants prior to the social contract – in particular, the covenant to establish the contract itself? He cannot appeal to “natural reason,” because that would simply leave us back where we started, and he cannot appeal to “conventional reason,” because such a convention has not been erected. This poses an obstacle to Gauthier’s ability to answer the Fool on Hobbes’ terms.

A bigger obstacle, though, is Gauthier’s need to transition social contractors from natural reason to conventional reason – a transition which seems incompatible with Hobbes’ psychology. For Gauthier’s theory to work, participants in the social contract must actually replace their natural pursuit of preservation and advantage with a new, conventional pursuit of peace. But Hobbes does not present the natural pursuit of advantage as a merely contingent feature of human life that can be discarded at will, like a hat that goes out style. Rather, he presents natural reason as fundamental to human nature – so much so, in fact, that he tries to ground a political system on it. It is therefore difficult to see how the transition Gauthier needs could take place. Man’s fundamental selfishness cannot be simply willed away by the social contract. Indeed, Hobbes’ psychological picture of reason makes this clear. According to Hobbes, reason is simply the “scout and spy” (41) of human desires, which in turn are the result of mechanistic processes in human physiology. Entering into a social contract does not fundamentally alter the physiology of people’s desires, so it cannot fundamentally alter their reason. This suggests the conclusion that Hobbes seems to take for granted throughout his discussion: that people within the social contract retain the same fundamental (selfish) nature that they had outside of it. Unless Gauthier proposes that participants in the social contract undergo some kind of physiological restructuring, then, he faces a serious barrier in explaining how conventional reason can actually replace natural reason.

In response to this objection, Gauthier could argue that the conditions of the social contract, including the mutual acceptance of conventional reason, enable natural desires normally stifled by the state of nature – such as the desire for peace – to take hold over the human will, such that reason will be the scout and spy for a new master. On this view, the peace-seeking standard of conventional reason will retain natural, psychological endorsement so long as the social contract remains intact.^[9] But this view seems to render Gauthier’s whole theory unnecessary. If the social contract is sufficient to create conditions such that the desire for peace holds sway naturally over human psychology, then there is no need to erect a convention. Natural reason will be perfectly sufficient on its own. And then we are simply back where we started with the Fool’s original objection.

Indeed, the persistence of natural reason thus puts Gauthier in a serious and, I think, decisive bind. If the acceptance of conventional reason is perfectly continuous with natural reason, then such a convention is simply the extension of the natural pursuit of advantage. In that case, it does none of the work that Gauthier needed it to do – namely, allowing him to rebuff the Fool’s appeal to the natural pursuit of advantage. But if the dictates of conventional reason actually diverge from natural reason in a manner that would constrain the pursuit of advantage, then natural reason alone cannot compel obedience to them. The Fool would put it thus: if participants in the social contract accept conventional reason only for the sake of their individual advantage, then when such acceptance runs contrary to individual advantage, what reason does an agent have to continue with it? Hobbes’ assumptions about human nature give Gauthier no resources with which to answer.

I conclude, therefore, that because Gauthier cannot escape the fundamental selfishness of Hobbesian natural reason, his innovative approach to the Fool’s challenge ultimately fails. Nevertheless, his insight is keen. Gauthier sees that in order to answer the Fool, what Hobbes really needs to do is not to justify obedience to natural law in terms of self-interest, but rather to justify natural law as a constraint on the pursuit of self-interest. Such a constraint would take Hobbes’ theory beyond the realm of simple prudence and into the realm of actual morality,^[10] thus allowing him to answer the Fool with considerations other than advantage and disadvantage. Gauthier’s conventional reason attempts to ground such a constraint, but Hobbes’ fundamental assumptions about human nature do not allow it traction. Gauthier’s failure is thus illuminating: the text keeps dragging Gauthier back to the Fool’s egoistic arena because, at bottom, it is Hobbes’ arena too.

In a sense, then, the reason Gauthier fails is the same reason that any attempt to constrain the self-interest of Hobbesian agents will fail: the practical rationality of a Hobbesian agent is fundamentally selfish. This assumption cuts down any possibility of a rational constraint on the pursuit of self-interest. If morality dictates something that is not to the long-term advantage of a Hobbesian agent, it will not be rational for a Hobbesian agent to do it. Indeed, even theorists who interpret Hobbes’ morality in non-prudential terms are forced to limit their concept of obligation such that it only applies to acts that can be adequately motivated in Hobbes’ world – that is, only to acts that can be done for the sake of personal advantage.^[11] As Nagel and Plamenatz convincingly argue, such interpretations fail to present a system of moral obligation as it is normally conceived.^[12] Plamenatz puts its forcefully: “when someone is morally obliged, there is something he ought to do, whether it is to his advantage or not” (3). This is precisely the type of rational constraint Hobbes needs in order to answer the Fool, and precisely the kind he cannot have. He is left with only an empirical appeal to prudence – an appeal my discussion of case-by-case and rule-commitment reasoning has tried to show insufficient.

Those of us who regularly get our planes fixed in foreign countries, however, need not worry too much that we are acting irrationally when we choose to pay the orphan boys who help us. Hobbes’ assumptions about practical rationality are deeply suspect. Surely it is possible to act both rationally and contrary to your expected long- term interest. Indeed, any substantive notion of morality will require that we do so, and in some cases will render considerations of self-interest in some sense beside the point. To answer Fool-like challenges to other injunctions of morality – do not murder, do not rape – in terms of prudence is both implausible and almost offensive. The reason you should not rape someone has nothing to do with whether or not doing so would be to your long- term advantage. If we seek a plausible account of the ethical rationality, Hobbes’ reply to the Fool is not the place to look.

Work Cited

Darwall, Stephen. Philosophical Ethics. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998).

Gauthier, David. The Logic of Leviathan. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969).

Gauthier, David. Morals by Agreement. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987) 162-182.

Gauthier, David. “Thomas Hobbes: Moral Theorist,” Journal of Philosophy 76 (1989): 547-559.

Hampton, Jean. Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986).

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. Edwin Curley. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994). Originally published 1668.

Kavka, Gregory. Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986).

Kavka, Gregory. “The Rationality of Rule-Following: Hobbes’ Dispute with the Foole.” Law and Philosophy 14 (1995): 5-34.

Nagel, Thomas. “Hobbes’s Concept of Obligation,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 69, No. 1 (1959): 68-83

Plamenatz, John. “Mr. Warrender’s Hobbes,” Political Studies Vol. 5, No. 3 (1957): 295-308Warrender, Howard. The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of

Obligation. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957).

End Notes

^[2] Hampton, for example, takes this view in Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986) 92-94.

^[3] See Kavka, “The Rationality of Rule-Following: Hobbes’ Dispute with the Foole,” Law and Philosophy 14 (1995): 17-30. Also Gauthier, Morals by Agreement, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987) 162-182.

^[4] For a more detailed explanation of this analysis, see Gauthier, Morals by Agreement, 162-64

^[5] Kavka fails to note the potential disadvantages of rigid rule commitment, such as the inability to adapt to new situations, respond flexibly to nuance and detail, or test out new maxims of action in low-risk situations.

^[6] See Kavka, “The Rationality of Rule Following,” 19

^[7] See Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, 93

^[8] This point was suggested to me Stephen Darwall, who elaborates on it in Philosophical Ethics (Westview Press: Bounder, 1998) 103-104.

^[9] I am grateful to Stephen Darwall for suggesting that I consider an objection of this sort.

^[10] Of course, more work has to be done to build a rich moral system than simply justifying constraints on self-interest. As Darwall points out, real morality constrains not just the pursuit of your own good, but also the pursuit of any good, and such constraints implicate distinctly moral notions of blame and censure. Hobbes may be helping himself to such notions in places in Leviathan, but he has not earned them, and they clash both with his psychology and his deterministic metaphysics.

^[11] See Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 212 and Taylor, “The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes,” 408.

^[12] See Nagel, “Hobbes’s Concept of Obligation,” 68-83 and Plamenatz, “Mr. Warrender’s Hobbes,” 295-308. Indeed, Warrender’s thesis sometimes seems to have given rise to a whole generation of criticism. Gauthier even claims to have been inspired to study Hobbes by its inaccuracy (see Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan, p. v).

Joseph Carlsmith (’12) is a Philosophy and Humanities Major at Yale University

Image taken from DeviantArt.com

(http://wangblad.deviantart.com/art/Selfish-Black-and-White-66265848?q=boost%3Apopular%20in%3Aphotography%20selfish&qo=57)

ABSTRACT: Despite agreeing on the importance of irony, Richard Rorty and William Connolly differ sharply on its role for the individual, and for society more broadly. That is, Rorty understands irony as of strictly personal use, whereas Connolly bases an entire public realm on ironic discourse. I will, in this paper, analyze each thinker’s views on irony’s ultimate function. That is, I will articulate Rorty’s view of ironist theory as problematic, and will attempt to apply Rorty’s claims regarding the ironist theorist to Connolly’s project. Also, I will attempt to support Rorty’s argument for liberal democracy as a savory alternative to public irony.

Despite agreeing on the importance of irony, Richard Rorty and William Connolly differ sharply on its role for the individual, and for society more broadly. That is, Rorty understands irony as of strictly personal use, whereas Connolly bases an entire public realm on ironic discourse. I will, in this paper, analyze each thinker’s views on irony’s ultimate function. The first section will be concerned with Rorty’s view of ironist theory as problematic. This discussion will explicate Rorty’s view both generally and as applied to Heidegger. In the next section, I will attempt to apply Rorty’s claims regarding the ironist theorist to Connolly’s project. Also in this section, I will argue that Connolly’s project suffers from yet another difficulty, namely that it is cruel. In understanding Connolly’s work as ironist theory, and in characterizing it as cruel, I hope to bring out a number of difficulties in Connolly’s  position on irony’s place in the public realm. Finally, in the third section, I will attempt to support Rorty’s argument for liberal democracy as a savory alternative to public irony. The purpose of this paper, in short, is to make questionable Connolly’s extension of irony into the public realm.

The Problem of Ironist Theory: Rorty on Heidegger

Rorty understands theory as pertaining only to the ironist’s personal project. However, within the ironic realm, theory has played a role in broader projects than those concerned only with personal redescription. In attempting to explicate this notion of the ironist theorist, Rorty discusses theory’s function in the later work of Heidegger. Within this discussion, Rorty characterizes Proust as using irony more successfully than Heidegger, due primarily to Proust’s making use of the novel, as opposed to Heidegger’s use of theory.[1] In the end, Rorty understands the novel as a vehicle better suited to the ironist than theory.

Before discussing these specific ironists, it is necessary to elucidate Rorty’s notions of metaphysical theory and ironist theory. Rorty’s notion of metaphysical theory complies with the common view of philosophical discourse. Namely, metaphysical theory is concerned with that which lies behind what is normally perceived as reality, or that on which all things are universally and fundamentally grounded. Ironist theory, on the contrary, does not begin with the idea that there is anything fundamental or universal on which all other things rest. Instead, ironist theory tries to understand and redescribe metaphysical theory, such that it may do away with the necessity for metaphysical discourse.[2] Once this weight of metaphysical theory has been lifted, the ironist is able to create her own final vocabulary, and live on her own terms. The specific topic of ironist theory, then, is redescription of the Plato-Kant canon in order for a redescription of the self.

For Rorty, there are two problems with ironist theory that do not also affect the ironist novel[3]. The first of these problems is given as the problem of self-reference. This problem pertains to a certain paradox that comes from a combination of redescription and finitization. That is, the ironist theorist who is aware of her own finitude does not only redescribe, but finitizes old discourse. However, to finitize this discourse requires a break from her own finitude that the ironist does not want to make. The problem with this leap beyond redescription lies in creating a new set of possibilities out of the old discourse, and outside of that discourse. In doing this, the ironist theorist does not allow for her own reinterpretation, at least not outside of her new discourse.[4] The ironist novelist, however, does not experience the problem of self-reference. That is, she is not concerned with the way that her redescriptions are understood outside of her own project, or in the public realm. Further, she is not concerned with how someone else may redescribe her own view, as this view is only meant to be her own redescription towards autonomy, and is not meant to be universally applicable. The ironic theorist, therefore, falls prey to the problem of self-reference whereas the ironist novelist does not.

According to Rorty, the ironist theorist’s second problem is the quest for the historical sublime. This quest for sublimity entails an effort towards something universal or infinite, which is larger than the theorist herself. The ironist theorist, so as not to fall into metaphysical discourse, understands the necessity of remaining within the realm of history. However,  the sublime that the theorist must relate to in order to claim autonomy entails a clear break from the redescribed past.[5] In contrast, the ironist novelist remains content in her search for beauty, which remains in the realm of the temporal, the private, and the finite. Similar to her ability to avoid the problem of self-reference, the novelist avoids the problem of the historical sublime because she welcomes redescription and finitization within another’s quest for beauty. Therefore, the ironist theorist, once again, is subject to a problem that the ironist novelist may avoid.

Above, I have attempted to elucidate the distinction between the ironist theorist and the ironist novelist, and have also tried to make clear the problems that the ironist theorist is sure to face. Next, I will discuss Rorty’s critique of Heidegger’s ironist theory. This critique is important, as I will later argue that Heidegger and Connolly suffer from similar problems.

Heidegger’s project is not wholly sound as an ironic project, on Rorty’s view.[6] The most important mistake that Heidegger made in attempting to merge metaphysics with irony is his universalization of specific elementary words. That is, the words that Heidegger understood as elementary, those words used by the metaphysicians that have created a certain final vocabulary, were supposed to apply to the final vocabulary of all of Europe. The importance of such a universalization, in critiquing Heidegger’s role as an ironist, is that these words were meant to apply to more than just his own project, or were meant for the public at large. However, for those who do not associate with metaphysics, or those who do not see such discourse as important, there is no way that these elementary words may apply to them, or be vital to their own redescription and self-creation.[7] In universalizing these elementary words, Heidegger suffers from both problems of the ironic theorist. That is, he attempts to reach a sublime foundation from which to make broadly “European” prescriptions, and from which he might not be redescribed. Therefore, in as far as Heidegger aspired to a merging of metaphysics and irony, his project was not wholly satisfactory.

This discussion of Heidegger, and of ironist theory more generally, is important for Rorty’s support of private, not public, irony. That is, the ironist theorist’s failure lies in her necessity to apply ideas further than her own redescription. More explicitly, Rorty understands irony as “of little public use… Metaphysics hoped to bring together our private and our public lives… Ironist theory ran its course in the attempt to achieve the same synthesis…But the attempt was hopeless.”[8]

On Rorty’s view, the ironist should be content with a certain split between the private and public realms, and should not attempt to bridge a gap between these realms. Such a split entails a separation of private and public final vocabularies. The ironist may question and redescribe her private final vocabulary, but may not search for foundational claims as to why, in the public realm, cruelty is the worst thing that can be done.[9] Therefore, for Rorty, the combination of self-creation and politics is destined to be unsuccessful.

Connolly’s Ironist Theory: Explication and Problems

Here, I will explicate Connolly’s view as to how and why irony and self-creation are to be extended into the political, or public, realm. After characterizing Connolly as in favor of public irony, a characterization that he explicitly recognizes, I will attempt to show that Connolly succumbs to the same problems as does Heidegger. If this attempt is successful, Connolly may be understood as an ironist theorist, and as subject to the Rortian criticisms of such a position.

Connolly argues that an ethos of critical responsiveness is necessary in order to enact a pluralization of pluralism. This pluralization is a way in which a new understanding of identity, and this identity’s relation to other identities, may break free from traditional standards of political judgment. That is, within the pluralist framework, certain dominant moral and political relations between constituencies have become impediments on these constituencies’ self-creation. Such an impediment has occurred, at least in large part, due to what Connolly understands as a “primacy of epistemology”. This primacy of epistemology allows a historical regime to be concerned only with a very limited understanding of truth, such that ideas that question the fundamental principles are excluded.[10] Questions regarding the specific onto-political interpretations on which contemporary pluralism is founded, then, are left out of most discourse. Those ideas that rely on notions of truth and falsity are within the accepted epistemological realm, whereas those that rely on “untruth” are not. In clarifying the divide between these ideas, Connolly evokes the Foucauldian concept of the transcendental doublet. This transcendental doublet is that aspect of one’s mode of thought that is, paradoxically enough, always present as a certain governing agent of thought, but is unable to be successfully identified.[11] A pluralization of pluralism, in Connolly’s view, will reduce the gap between the thinking subject and her double, will recognize the paradoxical nature of authentic constituent identities, and will allow for a broadening of the way that these different constituencies may relate to one another.[12]

Connolly suggests a way in which this primacy of epistemology may be re-evaluated, after which a pluralization of pluralism may be sought. This re-evaluation, as I will characterize it, may most succinctly be understood as a combination between Foucauldian genealogy and a democratic reassessment of Nietzschean self-creation. Nietzsche’s influence, first, comes in his profound rejection of commonly held, but historically contingent, moral dualities. For Connolly, this rejection may be adopted as a way to step outside of the paradigm of contemporary pluralism, or that paradigm which is founded on the primacy of epistemology, and work towards an alternative strategy of ethical cultivation.[13] This ethics of cultivation is defined by an engagement with a diversity of life that lies outside of pluralism’s hegemonic modes of identification. In Connolly’s own words, the importance of such an ethics for a pluralization of pluralism is its attempt to

“…Thaw out frozen perspectives, to identify arbitrary threats to difference created by the dogmatism of established identities, and to advance accounts of danger and possibility crowded out by established regimes of thought. You draw from this protean care for difference as you move and you tap into numerous points of resonance and affinity with others as you proceed.”[14]

Another of Nietzsche’s influences on Connolly’s ethics of cultivation, then, comes from Nietzsche’s non-theistic gratitude for a rich diversity of being.[15] This gratitude may be understood in contrast with an atheistic drive towards rationality. From this gratitude comes an explicitly public coexistence between a larger variety of identities, which may be derived from the realm of  “untruth”.

Foucauldian genealogy plays an important role in Connolly’s pluralization of pluralism through its strategy of detachment from the metaphysical. Connolly adopts this strategy of attachment, but refines it in order to establish the concept of “positive onto-political interpretation”. First, Foucault’s genealogies of certain widely accepted concepts and practices, such as madness, sexuality, and medicine, have stripped these ideas of their supposed transcendental grounding.[16] That is, this sort of genealogical investigation locates the establishment of certain conventions within the context of specific events, or other historical and social contingencies. This way of understanding ideas as within the realm of the historical allows Connolly to promote the creation of new identities, which must not rest on universal principles. Further, as no one concept or identity may be understood as more transcendentally valid than another, there is no basis for an appeal to ideological superiority within inter-constituency engagement. However, these new identities, and their engagement with one another, may only come about if genealogy is taken as a necessary, but not as a sufficient, condition for detachment from the contemporary political realm. That is, when engaging in such detachment based on genealogical investigation, it is impossible not to reattach oneself to another set of dispositions.[17] For Connolly, then, it is important to engage in positive onto-political interpretation, or to articulate a certain set of dispositions. This articulation must take place only after acknowledging the inability to prove these dispositions’ universal validity, as well as the irrelevance of doing so. Connolly’s specific, and certainly idiosyncratic, account of positive onto-political interpretation is as follows:

“To practice this mode of interpretation, you project onto-political presumptions explicitly into detailed interpretations of actuality, acknowledging that your implicit projections surely exceed your explicit formulation of them and that your formulations exceed your capacity to demonstrate their truth. You challenge closure in the matrix by affirming the contestable character of your own projections, by offering readings of contemporary life that compete with alternative accounts, and by moving back and forth between these two levels.”[18]

This combination of positive onto-political interpretation, which is derived primarily from Foucauldian genealogy, and an ethics of cultivation, which is derived from a democratized Post-Nietzscheanism, informs the majority of Connolly’s claim for the pluralization of pluralism. That is, in employing ideas, Connolly puts forth a notion of public and political engagement that is influenced by an awareness of contingency, and a respect for ironic self-creation outside of the contemporary pluralist matrix.

As Connolly can now be understood as approving of public irony, I will now compare Connolly’s ideas to those of Heidegger. With this comparison, I hope to show that Connolly suffers from those same problems of ironist theory as does Heidegger. First, both thinkers are quite aware of the explicit problem that they face in doing ironic theory. That is, there always remains the prospect for the ironic theorist, in criticizing and redescribing metaphysics, to engage in metaphysics herself. In both Heidegger and Connolly’s cases, Nietzsche’s sort of “anti-metaphysics” seems to be the paradigm case for such a problem.[19] In his discussion of positive onto-political interpretation, Connolly explicitly articulates ironist theory’s danger of a relapse into metaphysics. Here, Connolly emphasizes a “moving back and forth between these two levels,” where the two levels seem to refer to metaphysics and ironist theory.[20] Such an emphasis is reminiscent of Heidegger’s claim regarding elementary words, which concerns the ability to speak metaphysically and finitely at the same time. Similar to Heidegger, Connolly’s reason for grappling with this problem at all comes directly out of his desire for political, or public, irony. Specifically, if Connolly’s concern for ontological interpretation was confined to the private realm, there would be no need to attach oneself to a certain set of dispositions in order to articulate those dispositions in public discourse. That is, the first step towards a positive onto-political interpretation, which is the detachment from the contemporary pluralist matrix, would suffice for a private redescription. From here, the ironist is able to freely engage, albeit privately, in any ontological interpretation that she chooses. In my understanding, Connolly’s criticism of Foucauldian genealogy, regarding its insufficiency for critical detachment because of a “refusal to affirm any positive directions or reforms of its own,” would not hold from Rorty’s point of view.[21] For Rorty, it is this refusal to make any sort of positive public claim, from the ironic standpoint, that prevents the ironist from contradicting herself. Therefore, both Connolly and Heidegger, in attempting a more careful way of doing ironist theory, remain steeped in metaphysics. For Heidegger, this position involves the use of elementary words, while for Connolly, it involves positive onto-political interpretation.

Heidegger and Connolly both go beyond redescription of small, personal contingencies. Because of this effort to attach himself to a larger project, Connolly, like Heidegger, suffers from the problem of self-reference, as well as from the historical sublime. That is, Connolly makes numerous references to his public project as involving

“…a new possibility of being [which] both disrupts the stability of established identities and lacks a sufficiently stable definition through which to present itself. This is because to become something new is to move the self-recognition and relational standards of judgment endorsed by other constituencies to whom you are connected.”[22]

or

“…the introduction of a new possibility of being…[includes] the drive to recognition…”[23]

Connolly’s attempt to bring about this “new possibility of being” must be understood with regard to his familiarity with the failure of inverted metaphysics, as in Nietzsche’s case.  Like Heidegger, who understood the use of elementary words as a pertinent prescription for all of Europe, Connolly seems to take his Foucauldian-Nietzschean derived project as relevant to all members of contemporary liberal society. Further, as the quotes above clearly demonstrate, Connolly’s project may only be undertaken publicly, as the inter-relatedness of different identities and constituencies is crucial to his notion of self-creation.[24] In attempting to rise above both Foucault and Nietzsche through a publicly and universally applicable extrapolation of their ideas, Connolly goes far beyond private redescription. It is here that his sort of irony suffers from the problem of self-reference, as the success of his new possibility of being, which may only be universally and publicly successful, understands “the realm of possibility [as] now exhausted”.[25] However, this decisive exhaustion’s appearance through a theory based on contingency and irony seems paradoxical. This paradox, similar to that created by Heidegger’s universalization of elementary words, is created by the problem of self-reference.

Similarly, Connolly’s universal and theoretical approach evokes an attempt at the historical sublime. That is, on Connolly’s view, one will cease to find identity within a supposedly natural, already constructed set of identities, and will instead create an identity out of critical engagement with others. This universal prescription involves historical investigation through genealogy, and is employed as a seeming end to metaphysics. Connolly’s task as involving this end to metaphysics, which is applicable to all members of pluralist society, may not be “redescribed except in [his] own terms…[or may not] become an element in anybody else’s beautiful pattern, one more little thing”.[26] Instead of being content to associate with the beautiful, Connolly’s explicit reference to a “new possibility of being” straightforwardly correlates to an attempt at the sublime, or an attempt to “make a pattern out of the entire realm of possibility”.[27] Therefore, in doing a similar sort of self-aware ironist theory as Heidegger, Connolly also succumbs to the problems of self-reference and the historical sublime.

Connolly may, however, argue against the claim that he is engaging in a definitive and universal project, or a project that necessarily implies a complete paradigm shift. Such a defense may rest on Connolly’s emphasis on an “ethos of pluralization”. That is, in suggesting a critical responsiveness towards those who redefine their relational identities, as well in suggesting a resistance to entrenched interpretations of constituencies, Connolly argues for an ethos from which new relations may form.  “Another way of putting this,” Connolly maintains,

“is to say that the recurrent disjunction between the injuries suffered by particular constituencies and that barriers to their reifications posed by cultural codes of morality and normality requires mediation by an ethos of critical responsiveness never entirely reducible to a code.”[28]

This statement seems to exempt Connolly from Rorty’s criticism of the ironic theorist. That is, Connolly’s thrust towards an ethos or critical responsiveness that is not foundationally bound addresses his attempt against a relapse into metaphysics. On my view, however, Connolly’s declaration of concern does not translate into an escape from these problems. Rorty’s account of Heidegger already points to a specific ironist thinker’s inability to remain consistent with his initial, historically contingent project. In particular, Rorty characterizes Heidegger as falling into the role of metaphysician after having previously denounced the legitimacy of such a role. I hope to have already shown, through a critical discussion of Connolly’s project, that Connolly’s initial denunciation of cultural and moral “codes” does not relieve him from the public ironist’s collapse into metaphysical discourse.[29] Indeed, such reliance on the metaphysical can be seen in Connolly’s shared problems with Heidegger, or in the problems of self-reliance and historical sublimity.

My final criticism of Connolly’s public sort of irony is that, on my view, such an extension of irony into the public realm may be understood as cruel. This kind of criticism against public irony is informed by a combination of similar views given by Rorty and by Judith Shklar.  In Connolly’s universally prescriptive application of irony, which must be grounded in interaction between individuals and constituencies,  it seems essential that all members of contemporary pluralist society undergo self-creation. This self-creation, which is necessary for critical engagement between constituencies, occurs before this critical engagement. However, it is also motivated by an urge to interact. That is,

“…the drive to recognition precedes consolidation of the identity to be recognized, and the panic it often induces in the self-confidence of established identities tempts them to judge the vulnerable entry through disabling identifications already sedimented in the old code.”[30]

It appears, then, that the individual is unable to engage with others within a “pluralized” pluralist society if she is not willing, or able, to undergo self-creation.

My previous characterization of Connolly’s view as universal requires that all undergo self-creation, and that no one’s identity is off-limits to critical responsiveness. Rorty addresses the implications of such a situation in which the individual is not taken on her own terms. For Rorty, public redescription is “potentially very cruel” towards those being redescribed, as “the best way to cause people long-lasting pain is to humiliate them by making the things that seemed most important to them look futile, obsolete, and powerless”.[31] Indeed, the very idea of public redescription is an engagement between self-created individuals towards a dialectical transformation of both identities. With this transformation comes new, more informed versions of previously created identities. However, those who believe strongly in their present identities, whether these identities have been self-created or not, do not wish to be redescribed by others. It is, presumably, from these already-present identities that certain individuals derive meaning in life.[32] Here, the cruelty and humiliation involved with such a publicly redescriptive enterprise becomes apparent.

The consequences of Connolly’s project for the redescribed individual may also be understood in light of Shklar’s characterization of humiliation as cruelty. For Shklar, cruelty is “not just a matter of hurting someone’s feelings. It is deliberate and persistent humiliation, so that the victim can eventually trust neither himself nor anyone else”.[33] This characterization of humiliation seems applicable to the content of Connolly’s agonistic politics. That is, the individual who is tied to her identity may very well experience this humiliation at the hands of the ironist. I will, here, apply Shklar’s characterization of humiliation in a step-by-step way to Connolly’s project. That is, as Connolly is explicitly prescribing a publicly critical view of one’s own identity and of the other’s identity, this critical engagement is obviously deliberate. Further, this public criticism, or irony, is sure to be persistent, as Connolly’s agonistic politics are  meant to be pushed “into corners that may seem unnecessary or excessive to liberal perspectives nested within the comforts of the normal individual, the private realm, the neutral state, and justice as fairness”.[34] Finally, the individual’s inability to trust herself or anyone else is not only a product of Connolly’s deliberate and persistent public irony, it is also precondition for this sort of engagement. More specifically, in adopting Shklar’s logic, the deliberate nature and persistence of such humiliating criticism leads to a certain incapacity for trust in the individual against whom this criticism is  directed. However, the individual who chooses to engage in “critical responsiveness” will also experience a certain inability to trust her own place in the public realm, as her place is necessarily unfounded and contingent. Therefore, in using Shklar’s characterization of humiliation as a seemingly adequate standard of judgment, it seems that Connolly’s public irony is cruel and humiliating for both the ironist and her victim.[35]

Private Irony, Public Liberalism: The Rortian Alternative

I have argued above that Rorty’s broad critique of public irony may apply to Connolly, and that Connolly’s public irony engages in Shklar’s and Rorty’s understandings of cruelty. Here, I would like to briefly elucidate Rorty’s vision of the individual’s role in the public sphere.

As previously explicated through a critique of public irony, Rorty understands redescription as a wholly private affair. There is, for Rorty, a definite split between the public and private realms, and this split calls for a separate final vocabulary for each realm. The final vocabulary necessary for the public sphere is founded upon Rorty’s self-proclaimed liberalism, and is that final vocabulary which allows us to avoid engagement with cruel or humiliating acts. This vocabulary, then, pertains directly to our relations with others, and to the effects of our actions on others.[36] Therefore, as cruelty is to be strictly avoided in liberal society, Rorty’s conception of a public final vocabulary is founded upon the avoidance of cruelty, not upon the individual’s personal redescription.

Rorty relies explicitly upon his pragmatism in arguing for a public language that is not grounded in philosophy or ironic redescription. That is, those who share Dewey’s views will say of liberal democracy that

“although it may need philosophical articulation, it does not need philosophical back-up. On this view, the philosopher of liberal democracy may wish to develop a theory of the human self that comports with the institutions he or she admires. But such a philosopher is not justifying these institutions by reference to more fundamental premises, but the reverse. He or she is putting politics first and tailoring a philosophy to suit.”[37]

Fundamental questions are, then, unnecessary for and possibly detrimental to politics. Instead, liberal society is comprised of individuals who find themselves facing the same problems within the same historical context.[38] When discussing social policy within this context, the pragmatist search for efficacy towards a broad, non-philosophical notion of justice takes precedence over philosophical discourse. Even those who engage in a private self-creation of identity must, for pragmatic reasons regarding liberal sorts of freedom, engage in liberal democracy. Further, these self-created citizens are to be grateful that the “models of human self that they develop…are not the concern of such a state”.[39] For Rorty, the active avoidance of cruelty must be the primary goal of public life.

In conclusion, Rorty argues against ironist theory’s aversion to mere redescription. This aversion subjects the theorist to the problem of self-reference, as well as the problem of the historical sublime. Heidegger, through an implementation of elementary words, suffers from both of these problems. As the ironist novelist is content with redescription, and as she does not, then, suffer from the theorist’s problems, Rorty favors the ironic novel over ironic theory. It is my view that Connolly, in advocating the pluralization of pluralism, as well as in outlining positive onto-political interpretation, joins Heidegger as a problematic ironist theorist. It is also my view that, in universalizing a critical responsiveness in the public realm, Connolly’s view suffers from a tendency towards cruelty. This tendency may be brought out through Shklar and Rorty’s common interpretations of cruelty and humiliation. Finally, Rorty’s alternative to Connolly’s public irony entails a grounding of liberal democracy on pragmatist conceptions of progress, and is concerned with the prevention of cruelty. It has been my aim to showcase the inconsistencies and dangers that come with a public utilization of ironic redescription.

Endnotes

[1] Due to the length constraints on this paper, as well as the irrelevance of Rorty’s description of Proust to the overall argument, I will not discuss Proust as the quintessential ironist novelist.

[2] Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University         Press, 1989), 5.

[3] I have explicated the differences between the ironist theorist and the ironist novelist in a longer version of this paper. It enough to say, though, that the ironist theorist engages in grand historical investigation, whereas the ironist novelist is satisfied with personal redescription.

[4] Ibid. 104.

[5] Ibid. 105.

[6] Again, this previous description may be found in a longer version of this paper. It is important only to note that Heidegger suggested a redescription of the “elementary” metaphysical vocabulary towards a description of “Da-sein”.

[7] Ibid. 119.

[8] Ibid. 120.

[9] Ibid. 120.

[10] William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 5.

[11] Ibid. 11.

[12] Ibid. xv.

[13] Ibid. 27.

[14] Ibid. 28.

[15] Ibid. 31.

[16] Ibid. 34.

[17] Ibid. 35.

[18] Ibid. 36, italics mine.

[19] Connolly’s hesitancy to take Nietzsche as having been a theorist without fault can be found in Identity\Difference, as he states: “…I owe my most salient debts to Nietzsche and Foucault. Not to Nietzsche alone or Foucault alone, but to each as a…corrective to the other…A critical extrapolation from this combination is needed after one has linked Nietzschean affirmation of the ‘abundance of life’ to Foucauldian care for identity and difference.” (ID, 10) This Foucauldian care for identity and difference, then, is a corrective to Nietzsche. This correction seemingly alludes to Nietzsche’s inability to take the identity seized from metaphysics’ destruction as merely one of many possible identities.

[20] Ibid. 36.

[21] Ibid. 35.

[22] Ibid. xvi, italics mine.

[23] Ibid. xv, italics mine.

[24] A further discussion of the foundational roles of identity and difference may be found in Connolly’s aptly titled work, Identity\Difference. As identity, for Connolly, is only coherent with regard to the individual’s relations with others, self-creation may only take place if its results are to be extended into the public realm.

[25] CIS, 104.

[26] Ibid. 106.

[27] Ibid. 105.

[28] EP, xvi, italics Connolly’s.

[29] This “metaphysical discourse” includes, as previously alluded to, a post-metaphysical reliance on the prescriptive power of historical investigation. This sort of discourse may be characterized, “ironically” enough, in Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche. Rorty writes: “This was Heidegger’s point when he called Nietzsche ‘merely an inverted Platonist’: the same urge to affiliate with somebody bigger which had led Plato to reify ‘Being’ led Nietzsche to try to affiliate himself with ‘Becoming’ and ‘Power’.” (CIS, 107).

[30] Ibid. xv, italics mine.

[31] CIS, 89.

[32] In fact, on some existentialist views, it is from a self-created identity that one may engage in an existence-justifying free project.

[33] Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 37.

[34] EP, 29.

[35] In regards to the role of one’s self-created identity in the public realm, I will only say that Rorty regards personal irony as a means to autonomy, which must certainly be useful for public engagement (CIS, 97). A similar, yet more eloquently worded view may be found in George Kateb’s discussion of the democratic individuality in Emerson. Kateb argues, in analyzing one of Emerson’s passages, that individuality may be expressed publicly only “when one rids oneself of the possessive grip of those qualities in oneself that one has tried hardest to acquire as distinctive, that one is proudest of. Even if they are not merely socially induced characteristics, but the attainment of positive individuality, they are minor in themselves, and serve only by their alienating effects on individuals…” (Kateb, 345, italics mine).

[36] CIS, 141.

[37] Richard Rorty “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Reading Rorty, ed. Alan R. Malachowski (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 282.

[38] Ibid. 286.

[39] Ibid. 292.

Works Cited

Connolly, William E. The Ethos of Pluralization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Rorty, Richard. 1990. “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy.” In Reading Rorty, ed. Alan R. Malachowski, 282. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell.

Shklar, Judith. Ordinary Vices. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Matt Friberg (’10) is a Philosophy and Politics major at Oberlin College.

Art courtesy of crayon2papier

By Gary Wang

In Hannah Arendt’s earlier work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, imagination is caught by totalitarian ideology leading to a denial of experience and a complicity in evil.[1] In her later work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, she explicitly condemns Eichmann’s “lack of imagination” as evidence of his inability to think and as paradigmatic of her diagnosis of totalitarian evil as banal[2]. In her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt’s discussion centers on how imagination is central to the faculty of judgment to possibly resist evil.[3] The relationship between Arendt’s conceptions of imagination hinges upon the existence of a space of appearances in which speech can extend the possibilities of representative thinking. Otherwise, the faculty of imagination runs amok allowing for logicality to replace thinking.

I. Ideological Consistency

For Arendt, totalitarian ideologies emphasize their internal consistency rather than their subject matter since its “movement does not spring from experience but is self-generated…because it transforms the one and only point that is taken and accepted from experienced reality into an axiomatic premise.”[4] While the factual basis of ideology arises out of specific historical circumstances in Europe, the consistency in which it must be implemented disregards “the fortuitousness that pervades reality”[5]. Reality is fortuitous precisely because “facts have no conclusive reason whatever for being what they are; they could always have been otherwise” meaning that retrospective explanations for facts themselves do not determine why events occurred; rather they reconcile factuality with human comprehension[6]. Ideology assumes and seeks to prove that its explanations for human events are determinate.

However, ideology is not an explanation for the present, or what is, but rather a consistent explanation for “the secrets of the past, the intricacies of the present, [and] the uncertainties of the future”[7]. As a result, there’s no stable basis from which one can begin something new since the foundation upon which to form opinions is “shifting and shuffling in utter sterility”[8]. Since events constantly change, ideology, in order to adapt, must constantly vary its rationalization for events but the ideology’s core premise – such as the existence of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy – remains unchanged since this ‘fact’ is precisely hidden from sensory experience. To uncover the concealment, ideologies appeal to “a sixth sense that enables us to become aware of it…The concept of enmity is replaced by that of conspiracy, and this produces a mentality in which reality – real enmity or real friendship – is no longer experienced and understood in its own terms but is automatically assumed to signify something else.”[9] Ideology perverts common sense, from that which “regulates and controls all other senses and without which each of us would be enclosed in his own particularity of sense data which in themselves are unreliable and treacherous” by denying reality the possibility to appear and instead subsuming all objects in experience to fit the ideological explanation.[10] The connection between devaluing common sense and the uses of imagination will become important later on.

So, the dialectical movement in ideological argumentation explains past setbacks in terms of future success so that the distinction between past and present is erased foreclosing the possibility the present ideological explanation can be contradicted. Any potentially contradictory event is explained in reference to the true conspiracy accessible only to a perverted common sense made possible by historical changes in the subject’s epistemology.

II. Common Sense to Common Sense Reasoning

Arendt traces the distrust of one’s own senses to Galileo and Descartes. The invention and practical success of the telescope proved that all events were valid according to universal laws “beyond the reach of human sense experience” and “beyond the reach of human memory” forming what Arendt terms, the Archimedean point[11]. This epistemological breakthrough occurs when Galileo transfigured geometry to algebra, dominated by internally consistent symbols, which spawned the modern tendency of “reducing terrestrial sense data and movements to mathematical symbols” giving a “non-spatial symbolic language” to scientific discovery[12]. In this new language, nature, to be understandable, has to reflect the logical structures of the mind. So, consciousness transforms sensory data into consistent symbols in order to formulate universal laws to understand nature after the telescope proved that self-evident sense experience was fallible. The key difference between pre-Galilean and modern ways of understanding sense experience is that the former relies on the possibility of nature’s self-evident disclosure and the latter relies on actively subsuming the sense experience of nature under the structures of human consciousness thereby pre-empting self-evident disclosure. The relationship of this new epistemology, where human beings must actively reach into appearance, to totalitarian ideology’s pretension to fashion human nature will become important later on. At this point, Arendt introduces the distinction, which will become critical later on, between “the capacities of the human mind for understanding…without true comprehension”[13] with the former concerned with how an event can be described consistently with respect to language and the latter concerned with the meaning of the event in its particularity. The difference depends on imagination’s relationship to language.

Consequently, common sense is no longer the five senses working together self-evidently and instead is the common sense reasoning of self-evident logic that structures human consciousness indicating the radical flight of self-evidence from the giveness of sense data to the different sense of giveness in the formal rules of logic. This flight – confirmed when the senses common to generations of individuals before the telescope were exposed as fallible – revealed for Descartes and modern science that “intelligibility to human understanding does not at all constitute a demonstration of truth, just as visibility did not at all constitute proof of reality.”[14] The fact that individuals could live their day to day lives believing the sun revolved around the earth and the fact that their belief was demonstrably false indicated that everyday experience can just as likely be a guarantor of fallibility as infallibility. As a result, sense experience and human reason, governing what’s intelligible, are both suspect since “Being…is tremendously active and energetic: it creates its own appearances, except that these appearances are delusions.”[15] Thus, truth becomes hypothetical truth subject to demonstrable confirmation over time rather than truth’s correspondence to a given reality: truth must be continually demonstrated in the future[16].

In light of science’s demonstrations of truth, philosophy withdraws to an analysis of the structures of consciousness in order to analyze sensation not sense data[17]. This retreat to consciousness means that objects no longer have an “unalterable identical shape of its own” since it’s “an object of consciousness on the same level with a merely remembered or entirely imaginary thing”[18]. With the fallibility of the senses and understanding established, the only sense that individuals have in common is “their faculty of reasoning”[19] or the deduction of conclusions by applying axiomatic rules of logic such as the law of non-contradiction in thought and language. The movement of logic is embedded within the structures of consciousness but not what’s contained in consciousness. Its coherence is strictly the internal consistency of its symbols. The force of logical movement arises from the fact that “the structure of one man’s mind is supposed to differ no more from that of another than the shape of his body.”[20] Thus, common sense reasoning, or logicality, coerces the Cartesian subject into accepting its conclusions by rooting itself in the Cartesian subject’s identity as a human being solely on its common and self-evident capacity to reason. The way in which the consistency in logical language can foreclose the possibility of meaning will become important later on.

III. Loneliness and the Space of Appearances

The emergence of Cartesian doubt within the subject, the heralding of demonstration as the criterion for truth, and the historical developments in Europe during the 19th and early 20th century, constituted the genealogical elements of the modern experience of loneliness that is the “essence of totalitarian government”[21]. The breakdown of classes into masses, the loss of authority in traditional institutions, and the denigration of social relationships, leads to an atomized society of mass, as opposed to isolated, loneliness[22].

The fundamental structure of consciousness is the two-in-one where the self recognizes its own internal difference as the basis for its own identity.[23] Consciousness becomes actualized, or made real, in the activity of thinking which is the self’s dialogue with itself. This occurs under the existential condition of solitude, where the self withdraws from all worldly activity in order to think. However, the self’s two-in-one dialogue in solitude is also lost under the condition of loneliness because the reality of the self and the world as a space of appearances are interrelated. Given that thinking – an equivocal dialogue of the self with itself – is a private experience without certainty nor necessary conclusion, the self is confirmed “through the spoken word in which he identifies himself as the actor, announcing what he does, has done, and intends to do” or when the self’s actions can be described by others.[24] Language then must not be used “to veil intentions but to disclose realities” because without trust between individuals, the degree to which reality is intersubjectively valid will be limited. Without the possibility of being recognized as the speaker or actor, the self loses trust in oneself since there’s no escape from the equivocality of thinking. One is not sure if what one is thinking is real or if sensations correspond with reality since one’s sensory experiences are suspect without intersubjective confirmation[25]. However, when the self appears in the presence of others, it confirms its identity as one because its very appearance, by speech or action, necessitates the cessation of the two-in-one split of thinking. The stream of consciousness by itself cannot deduce the body or the validity of one’s thoughts; it can only deduce the certainty of doubt.

The space of appearances is not physically limited or purely subjective. Even in solitude, the self can imagine the possible positions of others and thus move “in a space that is potentially public”.[26] However, under conditions of loneliness, individuals are susceptible to the temptation to find meaning in ideology by exchanging one’s capacity to think about oneself in the past, present and future for one’s capacity to grasp certainty for all time.

IV. The Appeal of Ideology

Just as Cartesian doubt and scientific rationality define what constitutes truth as active experimentation with appearances, ideological mental activity collapses the past and present into the potentiality of the future in the attempt to actualize its already given claim to universal validity precisely by mastering all human affairs[27]. Thus, ideology relates to reality, a set of haphazard events, in the same way modern science relates to nature, a seemingly random set of sensory data. Both impose a law of their own, born from the structures of consciousness in the form of logical reasoning, onto reality in order to explain it. The totalitarian elite don’t accept the ideology they propagate as factually true or false but have in common with modern science, the hypothesis that everything is[28]. Both seek to persistently test the hypothesis of omnipotence. Without the possibility for sensation or understanding to be self-evident, logicality is elevated since it “is as independent of experience as it is of thinking” since its premise is self-evident[29].

The question becomes what sense of self, does the consistency of logic appeal to? What Cartesian Doubt leaves unscathed are the structures of consciousness themselves, the rules of logic guiding the deduction from premises to conclusions. So when one asserts A is B and that B is C, the concept A already contains within itself the concept C given the acceptance of the first two premises. This example, the transitive property of equality, is consistent with itself in the mind regardless of sensations and thoughts. A, B, and C are symbols that can represent any object provided they represent them accurately. Yet, it’s impossible to evaluate if the symbols of logic represent reality merely based off the consistency of symbols with each other.

So, the sense of self that grounds the self-evidence of logical thinking are the structures of one’s consciousness supposedly common to all human beings and are valid regardless of the specific thoughts, desires, and sensations appearing in consciousness itself. It’s this very commonality that allows for Stalin’s secret police to extract false confessions[30]. Arendt writes:

“Before the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses probably will always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual sacrifices …because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self-respect.”[31]

The structures of consciousness are self-evident while sensations and thoughts are suspect. This means, the consistency of the structures of consciousness become more important than what’s contained in consciousness since logical consistency can’t be doubted. As Arendt writes, “the inner coercion whose only content is the strict avoidance of contradictions that seems to confirm a man’s identity outside all relationships with others” is self-propelled logical deduction.[32] This indicates that what makes loneliness unbearable is that it intensifies the equivocality of thinking and denies the human need to confirm one’s senses, thoughts, and ultimately, one’s identity. Given the loss of self-evidence and the possibility for the intersubjective confirmation of one’s own sensations and thoughts, individuals tried to escape loneliness by replacing the uncertainty equivocal nature of thinking with dogma. As a result, the first premise of totalitarian logic must remain axiomatic and ignore contrary evidence because it is the foundation for the totalitarian subject to confirm its senses, thoughts and identity to itself.[33]

The blindness to receiving new experiences are manifestations of a lonely self searching for confirmation and coincidentally, the internal consistency of totalitarianism appealed to that search by virtue of its coherence in explaining the past and present in terms of a future that can never be validated by experience. In these instances, logicality does not regulate thinking but exploits the uncertainty of experience to fashion the meaning of all events consistently in order to self-referentially reconcile the sensations with one’s identity.

This identification of the self with an abstract ideology results in fantastical delusions of grandeur: the appeals to History and Destiny. The language of ideology appeals to a transcendent ‘meaning’ that serves to interpret reality consistently. Ideological language divorces itself from experience and the finality of the past. No events can interrupt the self-consistency of the language because the appeal of the language itself lay in its internal consistency. However, in order for people to function in everyday life under ideological conditioning, they, “through sheer imagination” were “spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experience deal to human beings and their expectations.” That is, the faculty of imagination can make present in the mind, what is sensually not present, because Cartesian Doubt has “processed into an object of consciousness on the same level with a merely remembered or entirely imaginary thing” the actual objects given to the senses[34].

The masses, via sheer imagination, reinforce the internal consistency of totalitarian language precisely by giving leeway for euphemisms of ‘History’ and ‘Superhuman’, to mean anything and therefore nothing minus something transcendent with no regard for particulars. Ideological language gave people “the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, [and] unique” indicating that lonely individuals willingly had the illusion that their actions would be remembered and thus confirmed in their reality[35]. People used imagination to confirm the reality of their identity by identifying themselves with totalitarianism’s transcendent meaning in order to try and escape from the painful uncertainty of loneliness.

V. Representative Thinking

Imagination could also provide the means to escape blind ideological indoctrination. Arendt, drawing on Kant, locates imagination as the faculty that synthesizes the already ordered manifold of intuitions and then renders that manifold intelligible by synthesizing it with a concept.[36] In order for the manifold of intuitions, ordered by the concepts of understanding, to be recognized under a concept, the imagination already has to produce an image or schema for the concept to subsume the manifold of intuitions.[37] It allows for the collection of colors in the shape of a tree to be to be called a tree by bringing the manifold of intuitions under a concept but prior to the intuitions there must have already been an image in the mind associated with the concept that allows the intuitions once given to the senses to be connected with the concept.

Imagination is also the first step for the possibility of impartial and reflective judgment. But first, thinking precedes judgment under solitude.[38] Thinking, as exemplified by the Socratic dialogues, has a tendency to “‘unfreeze’… words (concepts, sentences, definitions, doctrines)” by undermining the applicability of concepts to describe all the particulars supposedly beneath them.[39] Thinking exposes this gap between the general concept and various particulars since Being is never totally manifest in appearance but only reveals hints of itself.[40]

For Arendt, representative thinking (political judgment) involves imagining “how I would feel and think if I were in…” the position of another but not as if one were the Other; the distinction being the difference between representing the Other’s possible standpoint in imagination and blindly adopting the Other’s actual perspective or trying to adopt their private mental states[41]. To even have a standpoint implies having a basis to stand from – the facts and experiences informing opinion and action – but the “experience of trembling, wobbling motion of everything we rely on for our sense of direction and reality” under totalitarianism perverts the use of imagination by constantly shuffling the ground underneath judgment precluding the development of a standpoint and the recognition of another’s standpoint.[42] Under conditions of loneliness, judgment is impossible since there is no one to hear them and no one to validate them.

For Arendt, the more positions represented in imagination, the more impartial the judgment[43]. Without the spectators to constitute a space for appearances, no action or speech could appear meaningfully because they could never survive their ephemeral existence. Yet, Arendt’s account of representative thinking describes how representing another’s possible standpoints informed by their physical characteristics, desires, or experiences could generate within the spectator a new experience of thinking because a different set of particulars are the object of thought. For example, if the spectator imagined herself as another race, her opinion of affirmative action may be enlarged. However, Arendt’s own account of representative thinking lacks a way to weigh between different positions and instead asserts that imagination “ascends from these particularities to some impartial generality” (italics mine).[44] What follows is an attempt to highlight the differences between Arendt’s account of representative thinking and her account of reflective judgment in order to then modify her account of representative thinking. The crucial difference will be Arendt’s assumption that impartiality means reflecting on possible standpoints rather than actual ones.

VI. Representative and Reflective Judgment

Normally, judgment involves the application of concepts to particulars but in the judgment of the unprecedented imagination becomes important. According to Arendt’s reading of Kant, reflective judgment – when the concept is derived from the particular rather than applied onto it – discriminates based off the inner senses (smell and taste) because “the it-pleases-or-displeases-me is immediate and overwhelming” meaning the inner senses judge objects in their particularity.[45] On the other hand, the objects of the three outer senses (hearing, sight, touch) can be represented by imagination because they “share their properties with other objects”[46]. The representational nature of the outer sense and the discriminatory nature of the inner senses combine to create the experience of reflective judgment where one’s immediate pleasure at the perception of an object is subject to “another choice: one can approve or disapprove of the very fact of pleasing”[47]. The emphasis is on taste rather than logic because then debate, the defining feature of politics for Arendt, would be compulsive rather than persuasive. Imagination functions by removing the object from direct sense perception and instead subjecting it to inner sense, which is necessarily discriminatory.

Here, the second order reflective judgment is ultimately governed by communicability which presupposes common sense or the “sensus communis”[48]. In the context of judgment, common sense is broadly understood as “an extra mental capability…that fits us into a community” implying the possibility that judgments can be validated intersubjectively.[49] The sensus communis assumes a distinction between communication and expression.[50] The latter is the ability to let others know one’s needs, desires, and wants or all the What attributes of a person, but the former is the ability to persuade others requiring an ability “to think from the other person’s standpoint; otherwise one will never meet him, never speak in such a way that he understands.”[51] The possibilities of language will later illuminate the relationship between communication and imagination in terms of thinking from the standpoint of a possible Other.

The judging spectator represents another’s possible position and then must weigh the pleasure arrived at that position with her own position in terms of communicability which tests the degree self-interest that must be removed in judgment. The less partial the judgment, the more intelligible it will be to others and more intersubjectively valid it will be. What guides the spectator’s own weighing between various possible standpoints and her own are the examples the spectator imagines.[52] The example can be “some incident and some person” and they are valid only within a particular community of spectators.[53] Specifically, their actions don’t provide a general rule to apply to all particulars but rather manifest, in their enactment, a principle that inspires. Arendt writes:

“Principles do not operate from within the self as motives do…but inspire, as it were, from without; and they are much too general to prescribe particular goals, although every particular aim can be judged in the light of its principles once the act has been started. For, unlike the judgment of the intellect which precedes action, and unlike the command of the will which initiates it, the inspiring principle becomes fully manifest only in the performing act itself.”[54]

Socrates and Jesus manifested their principles in their action, speech and lives. Hence, the communicability of one’s reflective judgment is governed with reference to which examples the community of spectators has in their minds[55]. Just as the ‘image’ or schema of the tree must be imagined in a community, in order to recognize a manifold of intuitions as a tree, the example must be present in the minds of the spectators to guide the discussing the relative merits of everyone’s judgments.

VII. Speech in Judgment

However, there’s a tension between Arendt’s account of representative thinking (‘Truth and Politics’) and reflective judgment (Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy) in terms of the context in which the judgment or opinion occurs. As Roland Beiner writes:

she is tempted to integrate judgment into the vita activa, seeing it as a function of the representative thinking and enlarged mentality of political actors, exchanging opinions in public while engaged in common deliberation. On the other hand, she wants to emphasize the contemplative and disinterested dimension of judgment, which operates retrospectively, like aesthetic judgment…Arendt, achieves a final resolution by abolishing this tension, opting wholly for the latter conception of judgment.[56]

On one hand, the representative thinker is forming an opinion to act. On the other hand, the spectator judges retrospectively without aiming to act. If Beiner is right, then Arendt lacks an account of political judgment except “when the chips are down”.[57] Her analysis of conscience occurs in marginal situations[58] and the spectator imagines the possible rather than actual judgments of others[59]. Moreover, there’s no mention of examples to guide representative thinking.

However, Arendt’s articulation of political speech is central to modifying her account of judgment in order to describe the conditions of representative thinking. The key is her emphasis on representing the possible standpoints of others as opposed to adopting the “actual views of those who stand somewhere else” since the former is the movement of impartial judgment and the latter is blind empathy.[60] However, her distinction means that the judging citizen does not pay attention to any actual standpoints articulated in anyone’s actual speech but imagines their possible standpoints which are “the conditions they are subject to, which always differ from one individual to the next, from one class or group as compared to another.”[61] However, could the range of possible standpoints be limited by self-interest in ways that are impossible to remove without actually listening to the standpoints of Others?

Arendt assumes the space of possible standpoints comes into being in the absence of self-interest by letting imagination automatically create the possible positions of others to then be reflected on. For example, the citizen, in judging from the hypothetical position of a black college student, could support affirmative action on the basis that they are black but just as validly oppose affirmative action because others wrongly attribute their accomplishments to race. Either way, by assuming that all possible standpoints are determined by attributes, the citizen can inadvertently import her own biases, even biases unrelated to self-interest, onto the range of possible standpoints which limits the variety of viewpoints considered. If attributes don’t imply interests or standpoints, how can imagination in the absence of self-interest fill the space with other possible standpoints?

VIII. Language and Imaginative Imitation

Arendt’s account ignores the possibility that the Other’s speech can extend the citizen’s imagination by undergoing an event of disclosure. She assumes the “only condition for this exertion of the imagination is disinterestedness” and concludes paradoxically that not listening to the actual positions of other’s is somehow impartial.[62] The range of standpoints considered in representative thinking must be actual rather than possible. First, thinking in solitude has already liberated the citizen from her interest by removing her from being directly affected by the particular. In the Socratic dialogues, thinking loosens the meaning of concepts by exposing the inconsistency between them and the particulars they are supposed to describe. Thus, to be disinterested is to loosen the way one thinks words mean so that one can be open to the other possible meanings.

Now, the citizen exerts her imagination by representing the Other’s speech in the inner sense. Here, she can imagine herself as the speaker of the Other’s speech thereby thinking from her identity where she is not. Since Arendtian speech discloses the Who of a person not the What, imaginatively imitating the Other gives the citizen the possibility to expand what words could possibly mean for her by seeing its use by the Other. This attempt is neither fruitless nor blindly empathic because she’s not trying to understand the Other’s speech through her own understanding of the possibilities of meaning in language. Rather, imagining oneself using the Other’s words generates new possibilities of meaning since one is necessarily exposed to previously discounted or ignored uses of language.

Analogously, in the experience of reading a text, words appear in the inner sense when imagination takes the literal sight of the letters on the page and reproduces them as sound in the inner sense. This use of the imagination stages a confrontation between the reader’s personal configurations of words and the text’s new configuration and it’s up to the reader’s inner sense to feel comfortable with the way language is used in the text. To comprehend what an author means is to already to have imaginatively imitated his or her words in your voice.

The degree one feels comfortable speaking in one’s voice the words of another indicates how meaningful the others words are. In the same way, the degree to which the citizen can comprehend the perspective of the Other is how easily the citizen can use the Other’s configuration of words in her own voice. This is because the speaker may not know all the possible meanings of his speech, but his speech already has to be meaningful to him when he speaks it. The irreducible gap between the meaning of the speech to citizen and the way in which the speech makes sense to the speaker is what imaginative imitation seeks to bridge in order to expand the possibilities of language for the citizen.

Arendtian speech is “finding the right words at the right moment” because persuasion relies on the possibility for meaning to be shared.[63] Unlike the impersonal consistent rules of logic, the language in an Arendtian speech emphasizes eloquence by constantly transgressing the boundaries of the consistency between concepts.[64] By contrast, Himmler’s language rules were dangerous not because they were hateful but because they prevented people from thinking in their own language by prohibiting people from describing particulars outside the terms of the language rules.[65] Thus, clichés are meaningless because their indiscriminate usage prevents them from being meaningful to anyone; no one’s inner sense discriminates when hearing a cliché because the configurations of words in a cliché aren’t unique to anyone. Paradigmatically, “Eichmann’s inability to think was closely connected to his in ability to speak” because his impoverished stock phrases guarded him from reality by precluding him from being able to describe particulars in his own voice.[66] His euphemisms were so successful that they prevented him from recognizing or judging the abhorrent situation he was in the midst of. The language rules closed the space of appearances between individuals and within them by denying them the conceptual resources to distinguish themselves in their speech. Hence, the possibilities for thinking and speaking mutually presuppose each other.

In this way, the absence generated by disinterest entails being receptive to the ways other perspectives describe particulars. As such, Arendt’s argument that sign language cannot substitute itself for speech presupposes that the meaning in language can be shared amongst people whereas a sign language is purely expressive and therefore its meaning can’t be shared[67]. Indeed, the sensus communis presupposed by Arendt and Kant is really the stock of common words, phrases and sentences used by a community to describe particulars. In order to for one to persuade, it must be possible to be think in a language that others can comprehend, which presupposes already imagining oneself using language in the ways the Other does. Therefore, impartial judgment considers the actual judgments of others in order to expand the meaning of one’s own concepts in describing a particular. The comfort in which one can do this is the second order judgment that is subject to intersubjective communication.

By contrast, the emphasis on consistency in totalitarian ideology suppresses the possibility for language to be meaningful. Deduction guides the analysis of concepts but the meaning of those concepts depends on the limits of one’s own imagination. Without a space of appearances, imagination has no experience of language to draw upon since no one’s Who can be disclosed. Moreover, the emphasis on consistency, as opposed to creativity, as the fundamental relation between words tends to limit what can be communicated as well as the ability to comprehend the unprecedented. Most importantly, the way in which loneliness is unbearable reflects an inability for one’s words to be meaningful since one’s speech can’t be heard and therefore one’s thoughts lack the confirmation needed to trust them. The ability to impartially judge then is closely related to the ability to imagine other possible meanings in language.

Footnotes

[1] The Origins of Totalitarianism pg 351

[2] Eichmann in Jerusalem pg 288

[3] Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy pg 68

[4] The Origins of Totalitarianism pg 471

[5] Ibid pg 352

[6] Between Past and Future “Truth and Politics” pg 242

[7] Origins of Totalitarianism pg 469

[8] Between Past and Future “Truth and Politics” pg 258

[9] Origins of Totalitarianism pg 471

[10] Ibid pg 476

[11] The Human Condition pg 263

[12] Ibid 265

[13] Ibid pg 270

[14] Ibid 275

[15] Ibid 276

[16] Ibid 278

[17] Ibid 280

[18] Ibid 282

[19] Ibid 283

[20] Ibid 284

[21] The Origins of Totalitarianism pg 475

[22] Ibid pg 317

[23] Responsibility and Judgment “Thinking and Moral Considerations” pg 184

[24] Ibid pg 179

[25] The Origins of Totalitarianism pg 477

[26] Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy pg 43

[27] The Origins of Totalitarianism pg 469

[28] Ibid pg 387

[29] Ibid pg 477

[30] Ibid pg 473

[31] Ibid pg 352

[32] Ibid pg 478

[33] Ibid pg 478

[34] The Human Condition pg 282

[35] Eichmann and Jerusalem pg 105

[36] Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy pg 81

[37] Ibid pg 81

[38] Responsibility and Judgment “Thinking and Moral Considerations” pg 165

[39] Ibid pg 175

[40] Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy pg 80

[41] Between Past and Future. “Truth and Politics” pg 241

[42] Ibid 258

[43] Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy pg 43

[44] Between Past and Future. “Truth and Politics” pg 242

[45] Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy pg 64

[46] Ibid pg 66

[47] Ibid pg 69

[48] Ibid pg 70

[49] Ibid pg 70

[50] Ibid pg 70

[51] Ibid pg 74

[52] Responsibility and Judgment. “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy” pg 145

[53] Ibid pg 145

[54] Between Past and Future “Truth and Politics” pg 242

[55] Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy pg 84

[56] Ibid pg 139

[57] Ibid pg 139

[58] Responsibility and Judgment. “Thinking and Moral Considerations” pg 188

[59] Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy pg 43

[60] Between Past and Future “Truth and Politics” pg 241

[61] Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy pg 43

[62] Between Past and Future “Truth and Politics” pg 242

[63] The Human Condition pg 26

[64] Ibid pg 180

[65] Eichmann in Jerusalem pg 106

[66] Ibid Pg 49

[67] The Human Condition pg 179

Works Cited

1. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace. Jovanovich, 1973. Print.

2. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1958. Print.

3. Arendt, Hannah. ed. Kohn, Jerome. Responsibility and Judgment. New York: Random House Inc. 2003. Print

4. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann and Jerusalem. New York: Penguin Group. 2006. Print

5. Arendt, Hannah. ed. Beiner, Roland. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1982. Print

6. Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future. New York: The Viking Press, Inc. 1968. Print.

Gary Wong (’11) is a Philosophy major at Whitman College.

Art courtesy of quaerion.

Both the philosophy of Epictetus, stoicism, and the psychology of Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis, offer their own unique insight into the phenomena of desire, attachment, loss and mourning. However, because Epictetus is historically and theoretically situated pre-Freud, and because psychoanalysis offers in many ways a crippling critique of stoicism, Epictetus can be too easily disregarded. However, in an effort to gain a better understanding of Epictetus and come to appreciate his unique contribution to the above phenomena, this paper will examine Freud’s “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” in light of his philosophy. Essentially, what is required of the woman Freud’s case history centers on is a total transformation of self, for she must come to redefine not only herself and her conceptions of attachment and loss, but also her relationship to her mother and, particularly, her father.

Freud’s “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” centers on a lesbian girl who, although seeing no need for herself to be treated as she was neurotic in no way, shape, or form and didn’t voice any displeasure about her “condition” (127), acquiesced to analysis out of consideration for her parents-particularly her father who grew increasingly infuriated with her homosexuality over time (130). The specific event that triggered her father’s displeasure with her was her relationship with an older woman who in spite of her high social status was described by the parents as a cocotte (Freud 123). Despite this, and despite the woman receiving the girl’s advances in a cold manner, the girl developed an infatuation with her, taking advantage of every opportunity in order to enjoy her company. While the mother was not too terribly incensed over her daughter’s love affair, the father was consumed with rage (Freud 125-6). Freud writes, “There was something about his daughter’s homosexuality that aroused the deepest bitterness in him, and he was determined to combat it will all the means in his power” (125). As Freud’s analysis reveals, the turning point in the girl’s case history occurred after the birth of her brother when she was sixteen. Previous to this, Freud discerns that her affection for a small boy developed out of a wish to bear a child and be a mother herself. She had, in fact, developed a love for her mother, a love displaced onto the adored woman (Freud 132). This love was facilitated during a revival of her Oedipal feelings for her father when, desiring to have a child by her father, she discovered that her mother, her rival, was pregnant. “Furiously resentful and embittered,” Freud notes, “she turned away from her father, and from men altogether. After this first great reverse she forswore her womanhood and sought another goal for her libido” (134). Thereafter she, as Freud writes, “changed into a man,” directing her love towards her mother through reviving her pre-Oedipal love for her (134). Formulating the mechanism of “retirement,” Freud argues that the girl sought through her homosexuality to avoid conflict with her mother by “retiring” in favor of her, forswearing all men (135). By doing so, “she removed something which had hitherto been partly responsible for her mother’s disfavour” (Freud 135). Freud explains the mother’s implicit acquiescence to her daughter’s homosexuality as a function of the mother’s appreciation of her daughter’s “retirement” (136). For her father, however, the girl showed nothing but hatred for his betrayal, at least as she saw it, quenching this desire by making sure he saw her with the woman, for she knew this would drive him mad with anger-an anger determined, Freud speculates, by the premonition of his daughter’s motives. Thus, “she remained homosexual out of defiance against her father” (Freud 136). As this summary makes clear, the girl’s Oedipal attachment to her father forms the foundation of her condition. In light of this, the following stoical analysis will center on this relationship.

An ideal place to start with Epictetus’ probable response to this girl is with the opening words of The Handbook: “Some things are up to us and some are not up to us” (11). For Epictetus, while all that springs from our own agency, or our “own doing,” is up to us and under our control-such as our desires or aversions, or whatever is internal to us-all that isn’t determined by our own agency isn’t up to us and is, hence, out of our control-for example, our bodies or possessions, or whatever is external to us (11). This distinction is crucial for Epictetus because she who is guided by it ensures herself a tranquil, peaceful life. He writes:

[...] if you think that only what is yours is yours, and that what is not your own is, just as it is, not your own, then no one will ever coerce you, no one will hinder you, you will blame no one, you will not accuse anyone, you will not do a single thing unwillingly, you will have no enemies, and no one will harm you, because you will not be harmed at all. (Epictetus 11)

Thus, in the case of desire, if a person desires only that which is under her control and never that which isn’t, she will never be frustrated as all her desires will be met. When such a person faces what is external to her, she remains completely indifferent. Epictetus makes precisely this point: “And if it is about one of the things that is not up to us, be ready to say, ‘You are nothing in relation to me’” (12). However, the person who muddles this distinction and, for instance, desires that which she cannot have, will inevitably find nothing but sorrow for her desires will always be unmet, resulting in a chronic condition of dissatisfaction. Hence, Epictetus relates that “if you desire something that is not up to us, you are bound to be unfortunate” (12).

Unfortunately, the girl under analysis is operating from a maxim antithetical to Epictetus’ as she is attaching her desire to that which isn’t subject to her control-her father. Because of this, it was inevitable that her desires would be hindered and that she find nothing but unhappiness. Thus, the first task that Epictetus would set this girl is to reorient her psychology, using the above distinction as the touchstone with which she approaches everything, doing so utilizing her faculty of choice. Operating from this distinction, she will realize that because her father is external to her and an object not under her control, she will no longer choose to unreasonably invest her desires in him.

In regard to the woman’s mother, her pre-Oedipal love for her, her fear of her mother’s displeasure and her desire to “retire” in favor of her are all just unreasonable as her desire for her father. This is so because all are symptomatic of her attachment to her mother, a state of affairs that is just as liable as her attachment to her father to result in her discontent, for her love and desire for her mother are never going to be able to be satisfied because her mother’s love is not up to her. As well, the girl should recognize that her happiness won’t be secured by attempting to win her mother’s favor through “retirement” as tranquility isn’t dependent on externals but is a condition to be attained by following through on Epictetus’ above maxim. Thus, the girl should detach her desire from her mother just as she should do with her father.

Epictetus would further advise the woman to not attach her aversion, or the faculty which prevents one from “[falling] into what [one] is averse to,” to that which isn’t up to her-namely, her father’s lack of affection and her mother’s pregnancy (12). Her detachment of aversion from what isn’t up to her is just as crucial as her detachment of desire, for, Epictetus observes, if one is averse to uncontrollable phenomenon, such as illness or death-as well as, in the present case, another’s love-one “will meet misfortune” (12). However, if one is only averse to what is within one’s control, “then [one] will never fall into anything that [one is] averse to,” thus ensuring that one’s wishes will always be satisfied (Epictetus 12).

Unfortunately, the girl’s wishes are meeting nothing but frustration, and for precisely the reason that Epictetus states here. Because her aversion is invested in phenomena that are outside of her agency, the independence of those phenomena was bound to assert itself and cause her distress when they didn’t act according to her wishes. Hence, in order to further secure her tranquility, the girl needs to detach her aversion from losing her father’s love and her mother’s pregnancy as well as her fear of falling out of disfavor with her mother.

In her accomplishing the total detachment of her desire and aversion, her father as well as her mother will become objects indifferent to her. In this way, her happiness won’t depend on them satisfying her desires and she will not only be able to bring about in end to her need to spite her father through pursuing the older woman’s affections, but also she can end her harmful attempts to secure her mother’s love. In this way, her lingering Oedipal complex will have been abolished. In fact, it is questionable whether Epictetus would even have recognized the Oedipus complex with its implication that attachment is a primary as well as inevitable condition. Indeed, to acknowledge the inevitability of attachment is to acknowledge the inevitability of pain and suffering. Such an admission, however, overlooks the fact that attachment is neither primary nor inevitable but an unnecessary and harmful condition that is symptomatic of an agitated soul that masochistically avoids the serene state of tranquility.

Through her self-realization that her soul needn’t be determined by her desires and aversions, the woman will have recognized the fundamental Stoic saying that “Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead what them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well” (Epictetus 13). Whereas before she clung to her fantasy about having a baby by her father, expecting reality to follow her wishes but then becoming unhappy when it didn’t, she will align her psychology with concrete reality, accepting events as they happen, accepting the fact that her father had a child with her mother. And, in doing so, she will secure her happiness.

However, the girl might point out that desire isn’t a process subject to conscious control. That is, because of desires independence, unconsciousness and intractability, she will argue that it is impossible to follow through on Epictetus’ advice of consciously reorienting her desire away from her father. Indeed, she might argue, taking her love for her beloved as an example, that she has no control over the part of herself that desires, for her homosexuality is, in fact, constitutionally determined. She could even continue that even if her orientation wasn’t constitutionally determined and only determined by the trauma of her brother’s birth, her libidinal reversal was accomplished on an unconscious level and not the result of a conscious decision. And, insofar as the processes of her unconscious are out of her conscious reach, it would be presumptuous, she explains, to assert that she consciously direct her libidinal energies. But, the very concept of the unconscious, the Stoic might argue, is untenable as it facilitates the belief that one isn’t in total control of one’s psychology, and this ultimately impedes the goal of self-control and tranquility.

As well, such thinking about the intractability of desire is misguided because desire is, according to Epictetus, malleable. This is evident in his suggestion that we act in life as if we are at a banquet. He writes that if a dish of food is passed to you then feel free to take from it. However, if it passes you by don’t prevent it from going on. And, if the dish hasn’t yet reached you “do not stretch your desire out toward it, but wait until it comes to you” (Epictetus 15). In life then, one shouldn’t extend one’s desire toward that which hasn’t yet come to one. Underlying this advice is the view that desire is, contrawise to what the girl would perhaps suggest, subject to one’s control. In her case, however, it isn’t appropriate to wait until her father is receptive to her affection to attach her desire to him because this would still be to mistakenly hinge one’s happiness on another. Thus, not even is it advisable to approach her father with a desire that is moderate. Instead, she should follow Epictetus’ counsel that to assuredly secure happiness one must “eliminate desire completely” (12). Consequently, she must, as Epictetus sees it, “let some things go completely”-namely, her attachment to her father (11). The advice to inhibit desire to the point of abolishing it is echoed again by Epictetus in his banquet metaphor where he states that “if when things are set in front of you, you do not take them but despise them, then you will not only share a banquet with the gods but also be a rule along with them” (15). Thus, while it is good to desire what one has within one’s reach, it is to approach the level of divinity to refuse even that which one can desire. Thus, just as the Stoic refuses what’s in reach at the banquet, the girl should approach her father in a similar way.

This plan of action is, admittedly, quite difficult the girl might respond. If she asks for the concrete steps that she can take to attain the level of self-control the Stoic advises, Epictetus offers her a simple way to do so. “In the case of everything attractive or useful or that you are fond of,” Epictetus relates, “remember to say just what sort of thing it is, beginning with the least little things” (12). Hence, if one cares for a jug, one should acknowledge that it is simply a jug that one cares for. By doing so, if the jug should happen to break, one won’t be upset. Next, Epictetus suggests that one should adopt this approach to more significant objects -a loved one perhaps. “If you kiss your child or wife, say that you are kissing a human being; for when it dies you will not be upset” (12). Thus, if one acknowledges the finite nature of one’s loved ones and recognizes that it isn’t in their nature to live forever, one will not become distraught after they die. Although in the case of the girl it is not a question of grieving the death of her father, there is a form of loss involved-namely, the loss of him as a loved object. Hence, whenever she approaches him, she should acknowledge his nature as her father and by doing so she will come to realize that insofar as she is his father her desire for his love and a baby by him are unrealizable.

Paralleling the recognition of her father’s nature should be the recognition of her own nature as a daughter and the realization that to be her father’s lover isn’t the role proper to her nature. If she protests against this, asserting that she can be both daughter and mother, she should remember Epictetus observing that one should conceive of life as a play and one’s purpose in life as rightly playing the role assigned to one as an actor in the play. He states, “What is yours is to play the assigned part well. But to choose it belongs to someone else” (Epictetus 16). Thus, the girl needs to become reconciled to the fact that she was assigned the role of daughter to her father and to want to change her role to mother is to megalomaniacally assume the power of the gods. All that is in her power to do is to play her role of daughter well. This would, of course, entail her relinquishing her incestuous desire for her father.

If she still finds herself in pain whenever she perceives that her father’s slights her, she should repeat to herself “‘This is the price of tranquility; this is the price of not being upset’” (Epictetus 14). That is, her tranquility is dependent on sacrificing her illusion of control over her father. Indeed, tranquility is an inner experience and not something that should be externally constituted. This is a point made by Epictetus when he says that the inattentive slave boy, for instance, “is not in such a good position that your being upset or not depends on him” (14). In the same way, the girl’s tranquility needn’t be-and shouldn’t be-affected by an object external to her.

But, if she still finds herself being carried away by the appearance that it is, Epictetus would advise that through habituation and relying upon her own inner capacities she can learn to cope with her loss. This is indicated when Epictetus advises that in the face of difficulties one can rely upon one’s capacities of self-control, endurance and patience (14). Thus, the girl must rely upon her capacity of self-control to reign in her incestuous desires, her endurance to withstand the continued hardship that her father doesn’t reciprocate her feelings, and her patience to learn to deal with this difficult fact. When you does this habitually, Epictetus concludes that “you will not be carried away by appearances” (14). Hence, by relying upon her inner capacities and habituating her reactions, the girl will no longer be carried away by the external appearance that her tranquility depends on her father. In doing so, she will be a philosopher in Epictetus’ eyes, or one who pays no attention to externals and instead concentrates on rightly ordering one’s internal world (20).

If the girl should protest that to do this would amount to losing her father and that this would be unbearable, Epictetus would offer a different interpretation of her “loss.” He writes, “Never say about anything, ‘I have lost it,’ but instead, ‘I have given it back’.” Thus, if one’s wife or child has died or one’s property has been taken, one’s shouldn’t meet these events with the perception that one “lost” something. Instead, one should see that one ‘gave it back.’ As far as the manner in which the giver took back the object, Epictetus regards this as an indifferent question, writing that “How does the way the giver asked for it back concern you?” (14). However, as long as the giver gives it, “take care of it as something that is not your own, just as travelers treat an inn” (Epictetus 14). Thus, insofar as the object is given to one, one never has possession over it for it is on loan. Hence, to “lose” the object is simply to return what was never one’s to begin with. To think otherwise, as the girl might, and argue that one has “lost” an object implies that one possessed the object in question whereas Epictetus has clearly shown we never control or possess such objects and that to think otherwise can only lead to suffering. Epictetus would thus suggest that the girl shouldn’t consider what is required of her as a loss.

If the girl should still protest against this advice and come to the conclusion that it is her father’s fault that she is suffering so much, Epictetus would caution her against blaming her father. As he notes, “What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about the things” (Epictetus 13). He cites the example of Socrates in support of this maxim, observing that death, for instance, isn’t dreadful in-itself, for if it was Socrates would have been petrified when his sentence of death was handed down. Instead, it is “the judgment about death that is dreadful-that is what is dreadful” (Epictetus 13). Thus, if one finds oneself upset, one should never blame another for one’s condition, but, instead, one should blame oneself, that is, one’s judgment. This advise is repeated again by Epictetus in relation to death. Although he acknowledges that we should sympathize with one who has lost a loved one, Epictetus argues that such sympathy should only be expressed outwardly and not inwardly for inwardly we should recognize that the death in-itself wasn’t bad. Indeed, we should repeat to ourselves “‘What weighs down on this man is not what has happened (since it does not weigh down on someone else), but his judgment about it’” (Epictetus 15). Thus, the girl would be wrong to blame her father for her condition because it is really her internal judgment that “losing” her father is bad that is causing her pain. This recognition would then demand a change of judgment on the girl’s part as she comes to see that her father isn’t to blame for her suffering but she herself. To do otherwise is analogous, as Epictetus sees it, to allow someone to turn one’s body over to another. Of course, one would be incensed over this-just as incensed as one should be if one turns over one’s “faculty of judgment to whoever happens along,” so that if one is abused by another one “is upset and confused” (Epictetus 19). Instead, the girl must take charge of her faculty of judgment, using it to recognize that insofar as she is in control of her judgments she is in control over her emotional life and well-being. In fact, according to Epictetus, a person should always strive to focus all their energies on attending to one’s faculty of judgment, never concerning oneself with externals such as the body. Indeed, “It shows lack of natural talent to spend time on what concerns the body [...]” (Epictetus 25). This is because the physiological phenomena of the body aren’t within one’s power to control and, hence, should be neglected in favor of working on what is within one’s power-one faculty of judgment. Thus, the girl should cease focusing her attention on bodily affairs-i.e., having a baby by her father-and spend her time focusing on her faculty of judgment and how she can attain tranquility through aligning it with nature and the fundamental Stoical distinction between what’s in and out of one’s control.

For the girl to follow through on Epictetus’ analysis is no small task. Indeed, it would entail a radical psychological transformation as she comes to reorient her internal universe and redefine not only her relationship to external reality, but also her conceptions of desire, attachment, loss, morality, and the gods. This would entail reversing the psychological trends that have led her to the point she is at as she defines herself anew and comes to a new sense of self. This is, in the end, what Stoicism demands. Of course, it is understandable-though not condonable-if she wavers in the face of this task. However, if she does, she would do well to remember the words of Epictetus:

And if you meet with any hardship or anything pleasant or reputable or disreputable, then remember that the contest is now and the Olympic games are now and you cannot put things off any more and that your progress is made or destroyed by a single day and a single action. (28)

Thus, her progress isn’t to be put off to another day as her tranquility is at stake every day and in every action. And, it is with an eye toward evaluating herself every day of her life and at every action she performs that she must begin.

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman.”

Sexuality and the Psychology of Love. Ed. Phillip Rieff. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. 123-149

Epictetus. The Handbook. Trans. Nicholas P. White. Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983.

Chris Graves (’09) is a Philosophy major at The University of Houston-Downtown.

Ethical Subjects, Empowered Subjectivities:
Individuality, Agency and Interpersonality in the late Foucault

ABSTRACT

This essay will focus on the Foucauldian notion of the ‘care of the self’, wherein care is defined as the process undertaken by the self to perpetually regenerate its own unique ‘aesthetics’ that best informs and enriches its everyday life. Foucault’s insistence on a perpetual self-regeneration hinges upon a problematization of the pre-established criteria of normality structuring the context: it involves a mode of thinking that scrutinizes the relation of the self to such yardsticks and resists the passive acceptance of their prescribed normative blinders. In the case of individual subjectivity, such critical thought discovers and highlights a heterogeneous plurality at the very heart of the unified concept of the Subject pervading normative discourses, and encourages a development of various forms of subjectivities from the site of individuality. In the case of politics, Foucault’s account of this individual ‘aesthetics of existence’ – which is also an implicit insistence on the fundamental co-existence of difference(s) – can be productively extended to develop both an ethics of relationality with the Other, as well as a political theory of reciprocity that serves to inform the praxis of social activism. In other words, it is this ethical relationship with the Other – which, in turn, is predicated upon the care of the self – that constitutes the condition of possibility for a reciprocal politics to emerge – a politics involving ‘loci of mutual recognition’ wherein commonalities can emerge between individuals, not subjects; wherein the strategic affinities developed to resist normativity serve as the gateway for rearticulating the categories of intelligibility; and wherein this critical re-articulation gives rise to the radical action that has the potential to unmoor the nodes of hegemonic power and transform the very fabric of everyday sociality.

Replaying the Games of Truth

In contrast to various a priori models of subjectivity that hinge upon a biological, cultural, or historical essence, Foucault’s account reveals no such irreducible core at the heart of subjectivity. His is an analysis that is often (mis)taken as fixating on an immaterial ‘fiction’, a ‘text’ that is ‘stored’ in the various categorical axes of a normative discourse and imposed upon unwilling, imprisoned subjects. Foucault’s claim, however, is more complex. He does contend that the pre-established barometers of meaning and intelligibility are crucial in informing and upholding the (regulated) concepts of normative discourse; he also contends that the play of such discourses of knowledge – be they medical, economic, sexual, or historical – upholds the concept of the unified Subject, normatively regulating its contours and perpetuating this concept as the prescribed model for (all) individual subjectivity. Yet Foucault vehemently insists that this ‘immaterial’ category of the Subject has a material dimension, one that is essential for its sustenance. By regulating the boundaries and criteria of ‘intelligibility’, discursive ‘fictions’ like the Subject continually normalize the material possibilities of the everyday, thereby structuring the very fabric of life by disciplining it to unfold in accordance with a hegemonic criteria of meaning and knowledge. This regulation of everyday life and individual actions is the necessary condition for the perpetuity of the dominant discourse. For it is only via the perpetually reiterative and normative behaviour of the individual – the disciplined exercise of the docile body – that the abstract referent of Subject can be upheld as the discursive universality that all particular individuals must emulate.

Under such a regime of knowledge, the material place of the individual in the social hierarchy and their intelligible ‘value’ in the local discourse is sustained through her numerous ‘correct’ performances of the discursive ideal. Discipline is not imposed upon the individual, but is internalized and performed voluntarily: through her repetitive performances, she willingly seeks to uphold her value as defined by the current hegemony, daring not to risk ‘abnormal’ behaviour that could result in her marginalization from the dominant discourse. As a measure of her intelligible identity under this dominant discourse, an individual’s ‘subjectivity’ therefore emerges through a perpetual, material, and often voluntary subjection to the categorical axes of this hegemony. In other words: individual subjectivity, normatively conceived under the category of the normal ‘Subject’, only materializes out of a daily and perpetual subjection – a subjection into which most individuals enter willingly.

Such subjectivity is akin to the performative role assigned to a player (trapped) in the ‘games of truth(s)’ that grid society, the realm of play that all individuals must participate in by the very dint of their socio-discursive existence. All possible actions in this discursive realm are branded as valid or invalid to reflect their success or failure in embodying a dictated ideal. A game of truth, then, is an arena with its own set of procedures and results, a space wherein a prearranged set of disciplined behaviours are prescribed for pursuing pre-established ideals (Ethics of Self, 445). It is important to note that, more often than not, the ideal(ized) truths that structure these enclosures of play are “produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint” and thus often devoid of any ‘positive’ content; such discursive concepts of Truth are “subject to constant economic and political incitement”, are policed, controlled and transmitted by various institutions and apparatuses – under the guise of a unified, homogeneous Truth, the fragments of heterogeneous truth-concepts pervade the social realm “under diverse forms, continuously undergoing] immense diffusion and consumption” (Truth and Power, 131-2).

The dissemination and imposition of normative knowledge within the boundaries of the truth-games amounts to the regulation of discursive and material spaces of possibilities available to the individual who seeks to embody the Subject through his or her subjectivity. But where exactly are the boundaries of these enclosures, and just how rigid are they? How, where and why are the limits drawn between which acts are possible and which are prohibited, between what is problematic and what is simply unintelligible? (Genealogy of Ethics, 237) More importantly, how does regulating individual action in accordance with a yardstick of ‘Truth’ structure and sustain the status quo? In short, how are games of truth connected with relations of power and/or domination, which in turn, demarcate and restrict possibilities for social agency?

Such are the questions Foucault hopes to address in investigating the relations between Subject and Truth, player and game, exercise and intelligibility (Ethics of Self, 439). By problematizing the narratives of Truth, considering ‘alternative’ ‘stories’ and reviving excluded fragments, his genealogical approach seeks to lay out the historical emergence and intensification of the disciplinary triad of power / knowledge \ discourse: an attempt at (i) explicating the tether between individuals and a (hegemonic) knowledge as the relation through which intelligible subjectivities emerge; (ii) analyzing the paths and possibilities of power between such individuals in given contexts; and (iii) investigating the limits of performative discourses (such as ethics) which are practiced, exercised and upheld by (morally) disciplined agents (Genealogy of Ethics, 237). The modus operandi of his critical historicity is, first and foremost, a creation of possibilities previously thought impossible or unintelligible, accomplished through the recognition of the arbitrary nature of ‘obligatory’ actions and ‘natural’ habits, and the consideration of the particularities repressed or marginalized by hegemonic universality. Foucault’s is not an attempt at a transhistorical or metaphysical transcendence of the lived everyday or an anarchic nihilism that simply, and only, refuses to obey the rules of the game; nor is it some kind of revolution that installs or instills a ‘true’ set of parameters governing play. Rather, his critical historicity is a reflection on, and a creative engagement with, the limits and thresholds of a discursive and material present in light of its sedimented past. In effect, Foucault espouses

an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them (Enlightenment, 50).

Foucault’s “hyper- and pessimistic activism”, then, is firmly situated in its material sphere and discursive context, recognizing that “not everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad” (Genealogy of Ethics, 231-2). It involves a “problematization of something which is real, but that problematization is something which is dependent on our knowledge, ideas, theories, techniques, social relations and economic processes” (Problematics, 418). It encourages present ‘subjects’ to consider the potentialities of agency and the lines of flight that arise from a problematization of the present hegemony. In becoming actively creative, this philosophical attitude constructs, out of its own emergent (and disciplined) conditions, a temporary and strategic universality as a ‘homogenous domain of reference’, forming its own (revisable) rationality that it can deploy to create new possibilities for expanding social agency (Enlightenment, 48). The aim of the Foucauldian critique, then, is to allow for the development of heterogeneous forms of self-reflexive knowledge in order to build an ethico-political framework that is voluntarily upheld and creatively regenerated, not by its disciplined subjects, but by its empowered agents.

Caring (for) Individuals

The Subject is not a substance, Foucault contends, for it is a form that is “not primarily or always identical to itself” (Ethics of Self, 440). Further, “the self is not merely given but is constituted in relationship to itself as subject[ivity]” (Genealogy of Ethics, 252, emphasis added). The un/reflexive relation of self to self – the governmentality of self by self – is of utmost importance in Foucault’s thought. This relation can take the form of either (i) the disciplined self embodying the normative concept of Subject or (ii) the reflexive, creative self that generates its own ethics and aesthetics of self-actualization. Inevitably, both dynamics are situated in, influenced by and made intelligible through their discursive contexts. But just as creativity gets its impetus from the very conditions that seek to normalize it, it is the examination of the first, ‘normal’ relation between disciplined self and normative Subject prevalent in contemporary hegemonic contexts that serves as a productive catalyst for explicating the second relation of a creative individual ethicality.

Caught in the normative matrix of hegemonic discourse, the disciplined self is shuttled between distinct but overlapping discursive spaces, each enclosure demanding the policed performative reiteration of its imposed regimen. These performances are meant to furnish individuals with a definitive subjectivity, but since they strive after an amorphous ideal regenerated from truths whose negative content is born of multiple constraints and transformative diffusion, their performances can never be complete(d): the mechanisms of normativity perpetuate themselves by ensuring that the individuals are never fully ‘normal’, never fully disciplined and are always in need of further normalization and regulation. Herein emerges the formula for the vicious circle of discipline: the perpetuity of exercise is guaranteed by the uninhabitability of the ideal, and vice versa.

Three points are essential here. First, much like Truth, the Subject, as the (abstract) model for individual subjectivity in any given discourse, is not clearly defined. Transgressions and abnormalities are catalogued as unacceptable or unintelligible behaviour, indirectly constituting the vague boundaries of the Subject. As such, the concept of the Subject emerges through a constant negation – being continually re/defined by what it is not – and comes to acquire only a semblance of fixity. In being primarily defined negatively, the abstract category of the Subject remains a nebulous silhouette, its boundaries and its ‘content’ being malleable enough to be exploited or manipulated by various discourses. The desirable ideal, then, is fundamentally unattainable: the void at its very heart means that there is nothing to attain, nothing that can be attained to embody the ideal once and for all. Secondly, and as a consequence of the first point, one’s individual subjectivity arises from performing the prescribed concept of the ‘Subject’ that is purportedly common to all normative discourses: it is a performance through which one approximates the concept ‘Subject’ that resides in the common realm of various intersecting discourses such as those of psychology, biology, sexuality. Yet each of these discourses brings into the mix its own ideal Subject. The prescribed ideal (Subject) to be attained under such a hegemony is not the unified Subject – the purported commonality of all discourses, their point of convergence – but, rather, is the residual flux of the negating play of the Subject-concepts of these various discourses: an inherent plurality of difference that is homogenized into an illusory unity under the archetype called Subject. What follows is that the ‘subjectivity’ of an individual – an individual ‘value’ only intelligible in relation to the Subject-concept – is not the manifestation or reflection of an individual’s ‘true essence’, but is, in fact, the unstable result of a perpetual, schizophrenic performance that tries to approximate a multitude of complementary and contradictory ideals, none of which are attainable. Vitally: a singular, unified, lived subjectivity does not and cannot exist. Thirdly, it is individuality that emerges as the bodily site that grounds the disciplined exercise of multiple, jostling subjectivities, always exceeding the categories of normative discourse with its performance. The paradox here is that this excess serves both as the condition of possibility for the perpetual disciplining of the body and its liberation from hegemonic inscription – an incessant tension always regenerating that moment of possibility which continually oscillates between creative thought and un-reflexive repetition.

By exposing the unattainable ideals inherent in the dead-ended practice of hegemonic normative subjectivity, Foucault seeks to free the self from the enclosures of categorical discourse of institutional discipline and allow it the possibilities for actualizing various models of individualization born of its own choosing. He insists: “the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our day is not to try to liberate the individual from the state, and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state” (Subject & Power, 216). Fittingly, he assigns the individual the responsibility of creativity – to encourage it to develop its own disciplinary paradigm of exercise in accordance with its own ideals. Creativity here is not a kind of relation one has to oneself; rather, Foucault asserts, “the relation one has to oneself is a creative activity” (Genealogy of Ethics, 237, emphasis added). As an analogy to this intrapersonal relation, Foucault points to the hypomnemata that arose in the Greek age, personal notebooks which functioned as a ‘material memory’ of facts and thoughts to be pondered over, reassembled and reassessed. They were not a collection of confessions, but rather texts that contained what had already been said, thought, or heard; their primary function was to recollect the fragments of self to oneself, to attempt to approximate a perfect relation between self and self – to carefully chart and (self)regulate the development of the constitution of self (Genealogy of Ethics, 247). This textual mirror of the self was essential in developing a material exercise unique to oneself, for self-generating the normative universality for one’s idea of ‘subjectivity’, for fueling the transformation of self to “attain a certain mode of being” (Ethics of Self, 433). This practice was not carried out in isolation: acquiring knowledge of the contextual moral framework was a precondition of this self-exercise, but life did not amount to a material existence that simply, and blindly, obeyed legal codes of conduct, or the normative rules of society. Instead, the individual had to creatively interpret, and freely exercise, these recommendations to develop an ‘art of life’.

As Foucault suggests, the discourse governing the self can only be understood if considered in relation to the subjective practices that seek to emulate the Subject, for “there is a technology of the constitution of the self which cuts across symbolic systems while using them” (Genealogy of Ethics, 250, emphasis added). Discursive and/or symbolic performativity is fundamentally intertwined with its discursive and/or symbolic context but is not reducible to it. Taking care of oneself, both then and now, involves an immersion into the context, knowing “the rules of acceptable conduct or of principles that are both truths and prescriptions”, and critically investigating the various possibilities that are marginalized by hegemonic normativity (Ethics of Self, 435). This conscious practice is undertaken by oneself in accordance with one’s own ideals which are informed by, but not reducible to, one’s context – this incessant practice of self-reflexive agency is nothing other than what Foucault calls the ethics of freedom (Ethics of Self, 434-5). Herein, ethics is to be thought of as that critical, interpretative gesture that one must actively undertake in order to actualize one’s universality into the realm of the particular contingencies of the everyday. Foucault’s attempt thus highlights ethicality as a perpetual exercise of interpretation: for “no technique, no professional skill can be acquired without exercise; neither can one learn the art of living without [...] a training of oneself by oneself” (Genealogy of Ethics, 246). Reiterative and performative, this ethical paradigm allows for the cultivation of a skill for re/generating a subjective aesthetics of existence, an evolving universality that becomes manifest via the reflexive actualizations of that individual’s performative agency. Foucauldian individuals qua creative agents, then, do not fixate on the Subject of the categorical axes of hegemonic discourse, nor do they subject their selves to the exercising of such disciplined subjectivities; rather, they wend their way through the complementary and contradictory amalgamation of various S/subjectivities, strategically appropriating and exacerbating the excess of normativity in order to multiply and embody those avenues of reflexive thought and agency that can best serve to empower their creativity.

Power, Agency and Other Ethics

Despite its obvious importance, the status of the social Other in Foucault’s thought is somewhat marginal: to whit, he emphasizes the ‘ontological priority’ of the Self over that of the Other while conceding that the techniques and exercises of the Self are irreducibly intertwined with those of the co-existent Other(s) that co-inhabit the social realm (Genealogy of Ethics, 250; Ethics of Self, 437). For Foucault’s account of the care of the self to be ethically practiced in this fundamentally interdependent realm, one must therefore extend his account to include the social Other. This is a move best accomplished by shifting the emphasis from the ‘freedom’ that informs Foucault’s conception of a self-disciplined aesthetics to the concept of ‘agency’. It is this conceptual re-orientation that can productively extend an intra-personal aesthetic ethics to an inter-personal, socio-political ethics.

The shift from freedom to agency is mainly employed to resist the totalizing bent of the language of absolute freedom, where freedom is taken as the desire to fully transcend (and perhaps dominate?) the network of sociality. One cannot be ‘free’, be ‘free’ of the Other (individual), be ‘free’ to do (to the Other) as one pleases; one can only be ‘free’ relative to the social Other. Self and its co-existent Others are always part of an interdependent realm, perpetually engaged in a reciprocal dialogue with each other and their common discursive and material environment. In effect, one does not ‘possess’ freedom, but rather is ‘free’ to exercise social agency.

It is this interdependence that constitutes the latent backdrop for Foucault’s account of power. Power, according to Foucault, is not a ‘possession’ in a zero-sum game, nor does it get ‘shored up’ in scenarios involving ‘top-down’ or ‘vertical’ domination. Rather, power is a fluid relation which is slowly repeated, sedimented and entrenched in the lateral networks of sociality. Inextricably intertwined in any given power relation is struggle, continually constituting a possibility of escape, a line of flight. Despite being fundamentally interwoven, both forces retain their distinct shapes, for “each constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point of possible reversal” (Subject & Power, 225). In this relation of a reciprocal struggle, resistance is constitutive of power, and vice versa; neither is in a “position of exteriority” but incessantly surfaces as ‘permanent provocation’ for the other, thereby continuously destabilizing the relation from within (History of Sexuality I, 95; Subject & Power 222). What is essential to note that this simultaneous resistance that continually reconstitutes the power relation can only be present between two potentially creative individuals (or, in Foucault’s terms: ‘free’ subjects), where both have, at the very least, a degree of agency (Ethics of Self, 441). The reciprocal nature of the power relation means that it does not involve possession but revolves around a “mode of action” wherein one acts upon (and, in most cases, strives to limit) the present and future actions of the Other, who subsequently returns the favour, which, in turn, is answered as well and so on ad infinitum: the inherent reciprocity of the power relation is made possible by the perpetual reversal of a “set of actions upon [O]ther actions” (Subject and Power, 220). Rethinking power along Foucauldian lines therefore means nothing less than realizing that the inherent reciprocity of the power relation involves a fundamental recognition of the active agency of the Other.

It is this recognition that unveils in the power relation the latent potential for interpersonal ethicality. Here, the latter relation echoes the model of reciprocal friendship as developed by the authors of classical antiquity (most notably, by Aristotle), wherein the intra-personal regulation of the Self must be extended to bring about a loss of Self in the face of the Other, where the (included) Other is recognized as a creative agent worthy of respect and friendship, and where the Self is de-prioritized in an attempt to negotiate commonalities and affinities between one-Self and an-Other. This is a properly creative and reciprocal relation of re/generating ideals through the dialogue of its self-reflexive participants. It is this loss of Self and the subsequent dialogue with the Other that constitutes the gateway for interpersonality in Foucault’s work, without which his ‘care of the self’ could easily slide into a purely aesthetic solipsism. Strictly adhering to an intra-personal valorization of the aesthetics and ethics of Self over all Others would repeat the normalizing and normalized structure of the (ideal) Subject. And it is easy to see how this could be extended into a scenario where this ideal becomes the norm for all Others, where the Self obsessively strives to become a Subject that ‘possesses’ the power required to lord over the powerless, the freedom to subject them to its universality. In contrast, the development of an interpersonal relation allows for the emergence of a commonality that fundamentally involves the Other, and is only made possible with the inclusion of the Other. With the recognition of the reciprocal nature of relationality also comes the re-cognition of agency as a capacity cultivated at the site of an individuality that is invested in a lateral network of reciprocal power involving various Others. In terms of hegemony, agency is the capacity to exacerbate the excess of performative exercise and radically exceed the normalized avenues of a given regime of power/knowledge, thereby creatively generating the possibilities for vastly increasing horizontal and lateral movement among the nodes of the social network. Importantly, agency is a capacity best cultivated via an interdependence with the Other: instead of the misguided attempt to extract oneself from the reciprocal relation in order to dominate the Other or ‘free’ oneself, the creative potential for agency is best developed through an intensification of the interpersonal relation, forging affinities with the Other so as to transform an intertwined relation of reciprocal struggle into an interdependent relation of mutual empowerment.

The issue here is not a temporal sequence of different mentalities, where one deals first with the Self and then with the Other, but rather a mutual and reciprocal co-existence of complementary attitudes where both Self and Other are simultaneously considered, where both interpersonal and intrapersonal realms are inhabited. By recognizing the Other as a Self, by incorporating the Other into the realm of the Self (and vice versa), an individual ‘aesthetics of existence’ is interpersonally extended to allow for a creative and reflexive co-inhabitance that can interact with, embrace and embody the plurality of difference. Difference here is not to be taken as the antithesis of a self-same, static essence of the individual, but is instead the recognition of the agency of various Others to develop particular subjectivities, orientations, and interpretations – their own ‘art of life’ – which, in turn, contribute multiple possible avenues for the exercise of agency that exceed the normative channels of hegemonic discourse. For just as the individual agent re-cognizes the multiplicity of possible subjectivities inherent in its lived discursive materiality, the plural re-orientations that emerge from the interaction with and inclusion of the Other amplify the creative potential of thought, allowing for various ways to address, accommodate, and articulate difference in both intrapersonal and interpersonal planes, and generate the conditions of possibility for employing and deploying the creative agency of empowered subjectivities.

Towards Strategic Resistance

Despite its lateral fluidity, the flux of power is not completely alien to domination: in fact, the negative force of oppression in the latter is a ‘terminal form’ of the former (History of Sexuality I, 92). In the hegemonic paradigm of power-knowledge-discourse, there is a “conditioning-conditioned relationship” between meta- and micro-powers: the former “can only take hold and secure its footing where it is rooted in [the latter – ] a whole series of multiple and indefinite power relations … supply the necessary basis for the great negative forms of power” (Truth & Power, 122, emphasis added). To consider the flow of power vertically, the hegemonic normativity of the State finds its roots in the institutional disciplines that permeate society, which, in turn, discipline individuals, whose regulated docility serves to perpetuate the institutional legitimacy of state-domination. Overall hegemonic domination, then, is a generalized effect of the attempts to render static the fluidity of power, to blockade its avenues and choke its flows at local points in the network of sociality. In other words, domination is the hegemonic, vertical normalization of the different/creative possibilities of (exercising) lateral power.

Foucault’s critical work, and its interpersonal extension, is well placed to undercut the normative discursive mechanisms that legitimize and perpetuate the hegemony of power/knowledge. Intra-personal aesthetics, dialogic models of ethicality and a politics of affinity all create productive theoretical vehicles that can help norm the action of socio-political activism(s). They are starting points at an attempt to develop a theory for a micro-political praxis of empowered resistance, wherein creative agency is strategically exercised at the local nexuses of the power/knowledge network in order to disrupt the normalized channels of power and short circuit the feedback mechanisms fueling hegemony. Indeed, as Foucault asserts, it is the “strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible” (History of Sexuality I, 96). Even in the ‘terminal’ form of power that is domination, the possibility of resistance is always present: the very open-ended, shifting, and reiterative nature of hegemonic discourse makes it “both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy” (History and Sexuality I, 101). Resistance, then, is the attempt at subversively rearticulating the categories of normative discourse, an attempt that disavows the Subject as the only discursive ideal that can inscribe material lives and rejects the false dichotomies of Truth and error, ruler and ruled, Subject and abject, and Self and Other. It is the attempt to accelerate the various contradictions inherent in a given regime of truth by actualizing possibilities that were previously thought unintelligible, illegitimate and otherwise impossible. It is the attempt to develop avenues of agency by creating and reinforcing interdependent commonalities and affinities with the multitude of Others who co-inhabit the social. It is the attempt to regenerate loci of mutual recognition as spheres of activity for reflexive agents who choose to participate and negotiate, who acknowledge their distinct particularities while negotiating their commonalities, all the while pursuing the collective universalities of the creative resistance of their activism. In Foucault’s words, it is when actors

participate [both] collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally … [they are] at once elements and agents of a single process. They may be actors in the process to the extent that they participate in it; and the process occurs to the extent that [they] decide to be its voluntary actors. (Enlightenment, 35, emphasis added)

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. (1996) “An Aesthetics of Existence” in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), ed. Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), Columbia U., 1996.

——————– “The Ethic of the Concern for the Self as a Practice of Freedom” in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), ed. Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), Columbia U., 1996.

——————– “Problematics” in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), ed. Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), Columbia U., 1996.

——————– “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press: W.W. Norton, 1997.

——————– “What is Enlightenment?” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press: W.W. Norton, 1997.

——————– “Truth and Power” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-9777 by Michel Foucault, ed. Colin Gordon. Harvester Press,1980.

——————– “The Subject and Power” Afterword to Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. University of Chicago Press, 1982.

——————– The History of Sexuality, Vol 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

1. The use of ‘individual’ in this essay is different from Foucault’s use of the term which he often conflates with self, subject, subjectivity and other such concepts; indeed, at times, he contends that the ‘individual’ does not exist. By the ‘site of individuality’, I simply wish to articulate that phenomenologically felt, materially lived entity-in-flux or bodily site that grounds one’s emotions, thoughts, habits and feelings. The ‘individuality’ used in this essay approximates the notion of ‘oneself’ that Foucault advances as the ‘ontologically prior’ relation one has to oneself.

American political philosopher John Rawls developed a concept of justice as fairness in his influential work, A Theory of Justice, to answer the existing question: what is just or right with respect to the allocation of goods in society.  This conception of justice as fairness borrows elements from Kantian philosophy to justify the method of morally evaluating political and social institutions.  Rawls argues that individuals would intrinsically support the proposal of distributive justice for a variety reasons.  Primarily, Rawls suggests that individuals in a given society would agree on the equal distribution of goods if they were placed in a “neutral and fair situation.”  This neutral and fair situation is coined by Rawls in Part Two of A Theory of Justice as the “original position.”  The original position plays a similar role to that of “nature” in the social contract tradition of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Rawls hypothesizes that all individuals placed in the original position would be bothered with the negative consequences of being the worst off and would create a system which would require a distribution of resources in order for everyone to benefit from any possible social inequalities.  Though Rawls provides a valid argument for just distribution of goods, philosophers Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel raise interesting questions opposing his conception of distributive justice.  Both Dworkin and Nagel have deep reservations about the original position, which Dworkin describes as “ignorant of interests beyond a chosen few” (Dworkin 292).  This response will evaluate Rawls’ conception of justice as fairness and the critiques of Dworkin and Nagel.  I will then continue Dwork and Nagels’ critique of Rawls’ theory of distributive justice from the standpoint of egalitarianism.

The original position continues the tradition of social contract theory established by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.  In social contract theory, individuals within the state of nature agree to conditions that define fundamental rights and duties of citizens within civil society.  In Rawls’ theory, Justice as Fairness, the original position is akin to his state of nature.  It is hypothetically designed to reflect the principles of justice that would be formulated in a civil society founded on fair and free cooperation between individuals.  In the original position, individuals are placed behind a veil of ignorance where no one knows anything about themselves, their natural abilities, or position in society.  Individuals know nothing of their race, gender, nationality, or personal tastes.  Behind the veil of ignorance, individuals are morally equal and rational beings.  Though individuals within the veil of ignorance know nothing about themselves, they do know that beyond the veil of ignorance, individuals will be different from one another by characteristics such as natural ability, wealth, gender, race, and culture.  We have to ask ourselves, given such little information, how would these individuals reach an agreement and what possible principles of justice would they devise and agree with?  Rawls argues that these individuals would agree on two principles of justice: the Liberty Principle and the Difference Principle.  Both principles are, in a sense, along Kantian justifications since autonomy is the foundation for both principles.  The Liberty Principle states “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with similar liberty for others” (Rawls 282).  The Difference Principle states “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all (Rawls 283).  These principles demonstrate the desire of individuals to select a course of action which minimizes the negative consequences of any worst possible outcomes.  Both the Liberty Principle and the Difference Principle correlate to justify equal liberties within this hypothetical civil state.

Dworkin, in “Justice and Hypothetical Agreements,” questions the practicality of the original position with regards to justice as fairness.  Under Rawls’ view, justice is an agreement between individuals behind the veil of ignorance.  But is justice merely an agreement?  Dworkin refutes Rawls’ claim that justice is not an actual agreement.  In hindsight, it is a hypothetical one.  The very notion that justice is conceived under a hypothetical agreement raises questions about the practicality of the original position and veil of ignorance.  “A hypothetical contract is not simply a pale form of an actual contract; it is no contract at all” (Dworkin 289).  Dworkin states that hypothetical agreements, unlike actual agreements, have no binding force to make sure individuals comply with the agreements they have made.  Dworkin’s rationale makes a lot of sense.  Philosophers create hypothetical situations and ideals thought experiments that always work under the special circumstances philosophers impose but generally fail in the context of reality.  Is there any redeeming quality of Rawls’ original position and veil of ignorance than in understanding justice as fairness?  Rawls conception of justice as an agreement (or contract under classical social contract theory) should not be seen as the foundation of Rawls’ theory but rather as a guide towards the principles of justice.  In this situation, Rawls views the principle as the natural right of all people to equal concern and respect.  The original position and veil of ignorance plays a vital role in guiding one towards the principle of justice because it provides a better understanding of this right to equal concern and respect.

The original position may now be seen as a device for testing these competing arguments. It supposes, reasonably, that political arrangements that do not display equal concern and respect are those that are established and administered by powerful men and women who, whether they recognize it or not, have more concern and respect for members of a particular class, or people with particular talents or ideals, than they have for others (Dworkin 294).

In his article, “Internal Difficulties with Justice as Fairness,” Thomas Nagel similarly critiques justice as fairness by attacking Rawls’ original position.  Unlike Dworkin who questioned the practicality of the original position, Nagel questions the strength of the constraints placed on the original position.  In justifying the restrictions on the original position, Rawls characterized the limitations as weak and controversial, and thus the only principles individuals behind the veil of ignorance could agree upon were the liberty and difference principle.  Rawls states the aim of the veil of ignorance is “to rule out those principles that it would be rational to propose for acceptance, however little the chance of success, only if one knew certain things that are irrelevant from the standpoint of justice” (Nagel 297).  One of the constraints in the original position, ruling out the knowledge of ones conception of the good, seems neither weak nor uncontroversial.  In fact, it creates an imbalance by favoring a certain type of morality.  Nagel argues that this constraint of the original position establishes favoritism for individuals whose conception of the good is more individualistic.  “The refusal to rank particular conceptions of the good implies a very marked tolerance for individual inclinations” (Nagel 298).  If the constraints that Rawls applied to the original position in which a bias is implied, then justice is not achieved from the agreement within the veil of ignorance.  The only thing achieved is an unfair doctrine easily described as “injustice.” “The suppression of knowledge required to achieve unanimity is not equally fair to all the parties, because the primary goods are not equally valuable in pursuit of all conceptions of the good” (Nagel 299).

Like the critiques of Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness by Dworkin and Nagel, I also find considerable flaws with the original position, the foundation of Rawls’ theory.  Unlike Dworkin, who considers the original position to be impractical, and Nagel, who considers it to be biased, I feel there is an underlying hypocrisy with the original position, justice as fairness, and Rawls’ egalitarianism.  The original position is a thought experiment created by Rawls to substantiate justice as fairness.  I agree with Nagel that ruling out knowledge of one’s conception of the good is a poor constraint that makes original position favor individualistic conceptions of the good rather than the good for everyone.  Under the political doctrine of egalitarianism, individuals should be treated as equals from birth.  If that is so, then Rawls’ egalitarianism is in direct conflict with the principles of justice he created.  Rawls is essentially justifying and endorsing inequalities if and only if they are to benefit everyone in the civil society (if he is to maintain the premises of the original position).  But are the inequalities created in direct violation with the very idea of justice as fairness?  How could a theory coined justice as fairness endorse any sort of equality whatsoever?  The theory promotes just distribution of social goods and equal liberties, yet it allows and endorses the inequalities for the greater good of just distribution.  For a theory of distributive justice to have legitimacy, it cannot allow injustices of inequality to promote justice and equality.  Doing so would merely be hypocritical.  “Why should parties in the original position be prepared to commit themselves to principles that may frustrate or contravene their deepest convictions” (Nagel 299).  Justifying inequalities is a dangerous slippery slope and, by definition, not egalitarian.

In conclusion, Rawls theory of justice as fairness is considerably weakened by the original position.  Philosophers Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel provide clear and reasonable arguments to show the weaknesses of Rawls’ thought experiment.  In hindsight, the original position fails due to the impracticality of the ideal fair situation and the bias created by the constraints on the original position.  Though I believe Rawls’ distributive theory of justice to be folly, the original position beautifully continued the social contract tradition founded by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau and influenced a variety of philosophers and other intellectuals today.  I believe that if philosophers were to review Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness and considered changing the constraints of the original position to eliminate the inequalities created by the bias for individualistic conceptions of good, there is a possibility of justifying just distribution of social goods.

Works Cited

Dworkin, Ronald. “Justices and Hypothetical Agreements,” from “The Original Position,“ in What is Justice, edited by Robert C. Solomon & Mark C. Murphy.

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Rawls, John. “Justice as Fairness,” from “Justice as Fairness” and “A Theory of Justice,” in What is Justice, edited by Robert C. Solomon & Mark C. Murphy.

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Nagel, Thomas. “Internal Difficulties with Justice as Fairness,” from “Rawls on Justice,” in What is Justice, edited by Robert C. Solomon & Mark C. Murphy.

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Cuong Q. Nguyen (’12) is a Philosophy major at Johns Hopkins University.

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Note: Homepage thumbnail taken from ~TheWhiteLight’s deviantART.

One part of Obama’s victory speech that stood out was his comparison of the USA to an evolving being:

And to all those who have wondered if Americas beacon still burns as bright – tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

For that is the true genius of America – that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

This inspiring rhetoric, however, reveals a key Obama’s success: his philosophic idealism. Obama is ushering in a new common conception of our belief systems, encouraging that there is a greater good to which we can all contribute by participation.

Accepting that our union can change, what does it mean for our union to be perfected by such process?  Obama is implying that there are certain attributes which render a union perfect. Through exercising our democratic ability to change our government, we are helping render our union more perfect.  This seems to imply that Obama’s definition of a perfect union is roughly that which “reflects the beliefs common to the most people in said union.”

Obama, unlike many politicians in recent memory, brings about a sense of unity behind a cause and argues that therefore this cause is the right cause.  This idea seems to agree somewhat with the natural rights’ philosophers, who argue that government exists only to protect a few rights natural to all men, the ideas of whom our nation is founded upon.  Obama seems to be arguing for a similar brand of “justice by convention.”

While words like “by convention” upset many libertarian and other individualistic people, this belief rests at the core of a representational democracy such as America. The acknowledgement that representatives need exist in a government as large as ours helps define the government’s purpose as representing the beliefs of as many of its constituents as possible. This definition is justice by convention as above.

Given that our founding fathers were hardly socialists, I find it shocking that Obama is being accused of being one.  When one analyzes the philosophical foundations upon which his belief system rest, it appears that Obama believes in the same brand of minimalism for which most natural rights philosophers argue.  In fact, Obama’s ideals appear to be taken almost directly from the Declaration of Independence:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…

This quotation still leaves partially open the question of justice as absolute or as convention.  In the Declaration, Justice is capitalized as if an absolute ideal, but it is also established by and for the people.  What does everyone think? Should our union be aspiring to achieve an absolute ideal of things like Justice and Liberty or does a union exercise its perfection by molding to the current will of its constituents?

Political philosophers acknowledge that culture plays a powerful role in systems of governance. It is debatable whether it should or not, but it is usually granted that the customs of a society are crucial to the development of a political system. What isn’t always acknowledged is the role of historical creation in the development of political systems. The recent United States presidential election illuminates the importance of history and the historic event as related to political philosophy. I argue Obama’s rise to power indicates Americans’ willingness to fulfill the historical narrative they’ve created. First, let me explain what is meant by “history”.

Keith Jenkins makes the distinction between the past and history. Simply put, the past is what actually happened, and history is what historians produce (Jenkins 6-7). History is what you find on library shelves; “[it] is the labour of historians” (8). To understand what is meant by “past,” imagine a geographer looking out to a landscape where there are houses, roads, and a town. The landscape the geographer sees may be explained in geographical terms, using the methodologies of geography, but no one would refer to the landscape as geography (10). This is what happens when a historian looks at the past. To depict the past, the historian makes use of narratives. A narrative is a story of any type. We use narratives to make sense of our lives, but given we have limited time to spend, we outsource some of our narrative-creating responsibility to historians. Historians are people hired to make sense of the past. The common objection to a past-history distinction is that it would lead one to conclude history is, as Winston Churchill once said, “written by the victors.” Without the strength of objective validation, it is said, history would inevitably become the playground of Holocaust deniers and other revisionist ideologues. People interpret the past differently, but does that always lead to a past that doesn’t make sense? People already have conflicting views of the past, yet Holocaust Denial is an unpopular view and is even banned in some countries. The only way we can understand the past is if we interpret it on our terms. It must be intelligible to our modern sensibilities.

Let’s examine a recent narrative:

Barack Obama ascends to presidency in picture perfect fashion, defeating his rivals by a Reagan-like margin, using his message of hope and compassion to bring America back to its original values. He’s an African-American who, despite being of an ethnicity that has been historically oppressed, has made it into the driving seat of world affairs. He’s the President of the United States-the most powerful man in the world. He’s young. He’s hip. He has a way with words. He’s the Reagan of the Left. The election of Barack Obama signals progress. The American people are on the way to overcoming Bush’s neoconservative legacy and making America a beacon of liberty once again.

If you subscribe to this narrative, it is clear electing Obama isn’t simply a wise choice, but it is the natural choice. American history is backed by Enlightenment values of overcoming, of rights and liberty, of justice and rationality. John McCain could never properly demonstrate his knowledge of these values to the American public. In contrast, Obama appealed to the social justice crowd by standing up for those on Main Street. He also made an appeal to civil libertarians by claiming he will overturn all executive orders Bush passed that violated the constitution. The kind of progress Obama speaks of is truly non-partisan, as his approach is more in the Enlightenment tradition than McCain’s, viz. idealistic, optimistic, and non-combative. American citizenry voted for Obama because of his political platforms in addition to his contribution to history. The Obama Narrative fits nicely into the American Narrative, which is why Obama’s election was said to be “historic” long before it ever occurred. It makes sense to many Americans for history to proceed in this way, for the Obama Narrative is an appealing one. The truth of the narrative is irrelevant. What matters is how it fits into the American-and overarching Enlightenment-narrative.

George W. Bush didn’t fit in with the American Narrative, or at least that was the consensus of most Americans. He deprived Americans of the thematic content of their country by bucking national customs in the risky pursuit of a new conservatism. For example, he often spoke about America’s interests, as if our country was more pragmatically self-interested than idealistically altruistic. America is steeped in the discourse of universal human (and soon to be animal) rights. Rights are universal, yet the Bush Administration made no qualms about the fact that America is self-interested. That assertion undermined the moral credibility of America in the eyes of those familiar with the American Narrative. This explains the reason whole swaths of the public were ashamed to be American during the Bush era. Conservative commentators were alarmed by the self-loathing among Americans-what they saw as Anti-Americanism. What they were really seeing by this behavior was an inversion of old theses in order to meet the demands of the American Narrative. Previously, those foreign to the American Narrative were seen as inferior; but now that we’ve defied our own historical narrative, we are no better than the other “bad” countries that don’t value human rights, civil liberties, or democracy. Those loyal to the American Narrative thought of themselves as patriotic for standing up to the injustices and unconstitutional measures of the Bush administration. They were. Bush’s actions during his term were uncharacteristic of the American Narrative. Today, the angst caused by the distortion of the American Narrative is now being relieved by Bush’s polar opposite, Obama.

I’ve mentioned that the masses designate history to historians. But the masses do a large part on their own. When the masses retake the role of the historian, history becomes a democratic process. Everywhere amateur historians spoke about an election that hadn’t occurred, yet was inevitable considering the theme of the American Narrative. An overwhelming win by Obama signaled a clear consensus among Americans: America should return to their historical narrative. Americans came together to decide not only the future (and subsequent past) of the country, but also the history of the country. They elected a president and also integrated the Obama Narrative into the American and Enlightenment Narrative. History was decided by the American people-a fact so in-line with our ideal of democracy that it’s no surprise it happened. The simultaneous democratization of history and politics produces the historic moment.

The historic moment is powerful; it causes people to mistake the past for history. Obama’s election was a clear demonstration of this. To see one’s historic moment fulfilled, one has to change the past (by changing the future). The lack of a past-history distinction is the result of faith in traditional historic methodology-primary sources, empirical or analytic knowledge, objectivity and reason. Political philosophy in the twenty-first century is couched in the admittance that “the past is history,” with the caveat that sometimes the past is distorted by historians with ideological motives, who can approximate the truth but either maliciously or mistakenly don’t. Rarely is history talked about in distinction to the past. By believing they are the same thing, the political philosopher refuses to recognize the narrative he or she is likely apart of. It is tempting to object to narratives because they seem to neglect the intellectual reasoning and thought behind the votes of Americans. After all, it seems implausible that people voted for a story. However, this attitude is characteristic of the Enlightenment Narrative. Without the prestige of objectivity, narratives are thus reduced to the status of fairy tales. But they are more serious than that; they are not told for entertainment but for understanding and purpose. Whether they are true or false, narratives do exist. People live by them, and there is nothing trivial about how people live their lives.

The political philosopher must deal with the problem of history. Initial questions may be: What should be done about it? Who should control it? Who should be in charge of creating these historic moments? The narratives forged by historic moments strongly affect political developments. If it weren’t for the Enlightenment Narrative, perhaps the West would have a greater tradition of authoritarian government; an alternate narrative could support a people more obsessed with peaceful living than human rights. The political philosopher should look at the narrative being installed as of late-the Obama Narrative. It is characteristic of the American Narrative, which is why it is embraced with open arms by the American people. However, the question should now be: How much of the Obama Narrative gets us closer to the good life, and how much exists only to affirm our narratives?

Works Cited

Jenkins, Keith. Re-thinking History. London: Routledge, 2003.

Kevin Richardson (’12) is a Philosophy major at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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The recent election of Barack Obama was certainly an historic moment for the United States, but for those who carry an affinity for the concept of freedom, its symbolism is rather disheartening. While the majority of libertarians (even at more traditionally mainstream outlets such as Reason Magazine) rightly preferred Obama to that neocon sycophant, John McCain, this election witnessed the triumph of a man who campaigned on the promise of a benevolent activist government. From the libertarian perspective, there are scant words in the English language more frightening to emanate from a politician’s mouth.

Yes, Obama’s political character of spirited statism poses some major problems for the cause of liberty. The state is, by definition, a coercive entity that operates through the use of force; its supposed benevolence is undermined by its history of cruelty and disruption of the natural social order. To place one’s trust in the state is to the ignore the context by which it maintains and asserts its full authority. Furthermore, the use of compulsion is in clear violation of one of the foundational principles of natural-rights libertarianism, the non-aggression axiom. Murray Rothbard, the standard-bearer of 20^th century market anarchism, went as far as to cast the it as the sine qua non of libertarian theory. To summarize the spirit of it briefly, the non-aggression principle dictates that initiatory force enacted against another is fundamentally wrong, and should be opposed by any libertarian worth his salt.

While any action by the U.S. government rests on the use of coercive authority drawn from the collection of taxes (or similar means), it stands to reason that there are different degrees of force, with the act of warfare being one of the most grotesque expressions of the state’s violent nature. Obama’s willingness to use this initiatory force abroad to “secure our freedoms” violates any interpretation of non-aggression principle. His foreign policy is that of the vulgar authoritarian, marked by interventionism and maintenance of American hegemony abroad. Aside from his calls for increasing military presence in Afghanistan, Obama has made veiled threats toward Pakistan and Russia, with explicit ones directed at Iran (“Afghanistan Urgent”; Holland, “Tough Talk”; Dreyfuss, “Rise and Mcfaul”; Newbart “Iran Threatens”). Exacerbating this potential for the immiseration of millions under America’s iron fist, youth support is more feverish for the incoming president than any time since the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The frightening implications that follow from this are numerous: chief among them is that many Americans will be far more receptive to proposals toward the doctrine of war under an Obama administration, acting as willing sheep for the American empire.

Of course, the use of coercive initiatory force is a far cry from the principles upon which liberalism stands, but this fact doesn’t deter Obama, who manages to get everything backwards in the following:

The Founders recognized that there were seeds of anarchy in the idea of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality, for if everyone is truly free, without the constraints of birth or rank or an inherited social order – if my notion of faith is no better or worse than yours, and my notions of truth and goodness and beauty are as true and good and beautiful as yours – then how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres? (86-87)

There certainly is anarchy in the notion of individual freedom, since liberty taken to its logical conclusion can only result in the rejection of all rulers, but the wording in the above passage clearly intends to display lawlessness as the inevitable result of “too much” freedom. Why is this so? Without the power structure that enables the consistent exploitation of others, alternative orders would necessarily and spontaneously develop, springing from the innate nature of mankind. Yet if this nature is savage and inclined toward brutality as described by Thomas Hobbes, why would it be any more logical to support a system that feeds into it by further empowering the strong through political means? Fortunately, I do not believe that the only thing that prevents you from killing your neighbor is the threat of retaliatory force, but the anarchists have always maintained society has the right to protect the greater community, if necessary.

Regardless, Obama’s negative view of humanity’s unfettered potential is further evidenced by his abject rejection of social equality, or the idea that people should be treated without deference to societal status. In fact, Obama’s writing (see above) and recent repudiation of his supposed left-wing sympathies indicate that his so-called progressivism is merely concealed communitarianism (1). His acceptance or indifference toward a concrete, hierarchical social order combined with the stated willingness to use force stands in dark contrast to Lockean-based liberalism or any of its derivatives.

His economic proposals are similarly opposed to the libertarian preference for decentralization. While it is true that his short-term plans were superior to those of McCain in that it certainly isn’t any less “laissez-faire” to remedy the accumulated ills of massive state intervention via progressive taxation than to maintain the status quo, Obama continues to fill his staff with Wall Street insiders in a desperate attempt to maintain corporate capitalism through increased state power at the expense of the American citizenry (Pryzbyla “Obama Embrace”). As such, his repeated appeals to the wisdom of the free market (undoubtedly to court the distinct American individualist character) are exposed as nothing more than a sham. Rather, his policy of maintaining Keynesian principles fails to recognize that the system was very nearly designed to collapse at some indeterminable point in the future (hint: the solution to over-accumulation is not more accumulation) due to its neglect to take into account long-term effects. After all, according to the famed economist John Maynard Keynes himself, “In the long-run we’re all dead.” Well, we’re fast approaching the long run, and the living seem to prove an exception to Keynes’ rule.

Whether its his apparent willingness to use force so as to violate the non-aggression principle, his acceptance of the justice of an inherited social inequality, or his clinging to eroding state-supported economic theories, there exists is a clear separation between the notion of liberty and the plans of Barack Obama. While we may celebrate this election as a representation of America overcoming the obstacle of lingering bigotry, there is nothing about an Obama administration to get libertarians optimistic for the scaled reduction of the hypertrophic state. That change will have to arise from external sources acting in opposition to the government’s desires.

Works Cited

Dreyfuss, Robert. “The Rise and McFaul of Obama’s Russia Policy.” The Nation. 2 Jul. 2008 23 Nov. 2008 <http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/334120>.

Holland, Steve. “Tough Talk on Pakistan from Obama,” Reuters. 1 Aug. 2008 23 Nov. 2008 <http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0132206420070801>.

Obama, Barack. The Audacity of Hope. Crown, 2006.

“Obama Calls Situation in Afghanistan Urgent.” CNN. 21 Jul. 2008 23 Nov. 2008 <http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/20/obama.afghanistan/>.

Newbart, Dave. “Obama: Iran Threatens All of Us.” Chicago Sun-Times. 3 Mar. 2007 23 Nov. 2008 <http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/281249,CST-NWS-OBAMA03.article>.

Pryzbyla, Heidi. “Obama Embrace of Wall Street Insiders Points to Politic Reform.” Yahoo News. 19 Nov. 2008 23 Nov. 2008 <http://news.yahoo.com/s/bloomberg/20081119/ pl_bloomberg/awsz2kuxdtiu>.

“Who’s Getting your Vote?” Reason Online. 29 Oct. 2008. 19 Nov. 2008 <http://www.reason.com/news/show/129640.html>.

Footnotes

(1) While nearly every presidential candidate over the last century has supposedly “moved to the center” in order appeal to the undecided moderates, the majority of Obama’s shift has been in the general class of executive power. This is an area where authority figures are unlikely to retract their campaign themes.

Matthew Ignal (’11) is a History major at University of Connecticut.

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By PAUL SCHWEIKER

On November 4^th, our nation was brought face to face with two manifestations of its own ideals in the emotionally charged election of Barack Obama. Although there has been significant discussion about the election’s implications on race relations, I believe Obama’s election more broadly indicates that our culture is experiencing a democratic moment, and that Obama has become an effective embodiment of this moment by occupying a position from which he can affect the course of social change. Before I can explain the implications of this moment and Obama’s position, I must explain what a democratic moment is and what it means to articulate one.

A democratic moment is a self-reflective instance of politics (politics defined herein as the assertion of an ideal by a social group) in which a culture attempts to redefine and reinterpret the ideals which constitute it. This definition does not mean that each social group within a larger culture will interpret this moment in the same way; rather, it implies a will to affect change to central ideals. A previous example of such a moment is the sexual revolution, which altered gender relations. Democratic moments are not frequent because they indicate that a culture is challenging its most fundamental ideals. However, they are the defining aspects of an effective democracy.

What we are witnessing is just such a democratic moment. Because of a variety of factors, our culture has begun to re-interpret three central ideas: the meaning of the American Promise, the purpose of government and its relation to individuals, and the ideological systems behind socio-economic distribution in the United States. These ideas constitute our conception of what it means to be American. The specific articulation of this democratic moment can steer its course.

Obama has become the most important articulator of the democratic moment. To articulate in this sense means something more than merely to bring to words; it also means to become a symbol of the culture’s newly formed conceptions of itself. Obama does this in his speeches by discussing those central ideas which are the subject of the moment and by acknowledging the importance attached to him by the culture – for example, the importance of his race. The emotional investment of his supporters in his campaign renders him a particularly effective articulator by turning him into an embodiment of many individual influences.

With all of this stated, we can return to the question of what Obama’s election implies or foreshadows. Obama does not represent significant change to government; he represents a will to change our cultural understandings. Obama’s election implies that the people are reinterpreting those three cultural ideals–the American Promise, the purpose of government, and socio-economic distribution–in new ways. I will address each of the three in turn.

In each of Obama’s speeches we have seen an allusion to the meaning of the American Promise, the foremost ideal challenged by the democratic moment. Up until this point, the American Promise has always been focused on the material advancement of an individual without regard for others. In Obama’s speeches, however, we hear something different and new. In his acceptance of the Democratic Nomination he stated that “[The American Promise is] a promise that says each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will, but that we also have obligations to treat each other with dignity and respect.” In this articulation we see a new conception of the American Promise, which is now tied to concern for others. Reinterpretations of this ideal might originate in the economic crisis prompting questions about the viability and purpose of material advancement.

A reinterpretation of the purpose of government and its relationship to individuals, is shown most obviously in the people’s desire to see the government solve social problems, such as healthcare, which it was previously not expected to address. It would seem that Obama’s emphasis that our hopes can be fulfilled by the government stems from a redefinition of what it means to have a government for the people. That is, Americans are whittling away at the idea, most prominent during the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, that the government exists principally for defense. Americans are instead positing that government is truly for the people when it insures our inalienable rights-life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness-by guaranteeing the means necessary for us to manifest them.

The ideological systems behind the socio-economic distribution of the United States are being challenged by national pride in electing an African-American, a challenge that Obama acknowledged best in his speech about race. These systems are also being challenged by a new understanding of the purpose of tax policies as ensuring the economic viability of the middle class due to a concern for what Joe Biden calls “fairness, just simple fairness.” These two instances point to a radical new understanding of the idea that all people are created equal. The idea of fairness offers an avenue by which the American populace can conceptually alter and break race boundaries and demand that responsibilities be allocated such that all Americans have equal opportunity.

Obama is able to articulate a will to reinterpret the American Promise, the purpose of government, and the reasons behind our socio-economic distribution. He does not necessarily give a conclusive articulation, but the act of articulating has given him this amazing position of power. This poses a question: what can we expect to see from an Obama administration? I do not believe we will see significant change in the way the government functions (we will not see something akin to the New Deal) but we will see something more fundamentally important: depending on how Obama articulates the democratic moment, we may see significant ideological changes in American culture. Obama’s election implies change–just as his motto states–but it indicates a will towards cultural change which originated in the American people, not in him. The task of this administration is to articulate this moment to maintain the fervor for self-reflection in the United States, because this fervor is prerequisite for an effective democracy. In other words, Obama must be a true public servant in order to maintain this moment. If he can be, he will be remembered as one of the most important political figures in our history.

Works Cited

Barack Obama “Barack Obama’s Acceptance Speech” New York Times. August 2008, 7 November, 2008. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/us/politics/28text-obama.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1>

Joe Biden “Transcript: the Vice-Presidential Debate” New York Times. October 2008,7 November, 2008. <http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/president/debates/transcripts/vice-presidential-debate.html>

Paul Schweiker (’11) is a Political Science major at Johns Hopkins University.

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