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Philosophy Now, EDITORIAL & NEWS
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Contributing Editors 34 Kant’s Opus Postumum
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Editorial
Greeks Bearing Gifts
n this issue we’ll be looking at ancient Greek philosophy as a
I guide to modern life.
The philosophical tradition of Ancient Greece lasted many
hundreds of years and went through various phases. The first
Greek philosophers – the ones we now call the pre-Socratics –
thought mainly about metaphysics. They wanted to under-
stand the nature of change, to know how the universe worked,
and to find out whether there was a single substance underly-
ing everything. In this way their ideas were the distant ances-
tors of modern science. It’s all made of water, said Thales.
Nonsense, it’s all made of fire, said Heraclitus. No actually,
said Democritus, it’s all made of little particles which are indi-
visible (a-toms). And so on.
Socrates broke with this tradition in being much more inter-
ested in questions about how we should live. After his execution,
his followers continued his investigations, and over the next
couple of centuries a whole range of different philosophical
schools took shape, each with their own approach but often
taking inspiration in some way from the memory of Socrates.
There were Stoics and Cynics and Skeptics and Epicureans and
a few more as well. It’s interesting that well over two thousand
years later, these names continue as everyday words in our lan-
guage (and many other languages) used even by people who
don’t realise that they were ancient Greek philosophical schools.
4 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020
ARISTOTLE © CLINTON INMAN 2020 FACEBOOK HIM AT CLINTON.INMAN
It’s mainly from this latter period that the articles in this
issue draw their inspiration.
In this issue we look at ideas and arguments from Greek
philosophy that might be useful to people in terms of their
lives today. Many of the metaphysical speculations of the pre-
Socratics just look quaint today, in the light of modern sci-
ence. By contrast, the Greek philosophers from Plato and
Aristotle onwards – the post-Socratics, as it were – still have
plenty of useful wisdom to impart to modern people about
moral and social issues and the nature of the good life. Ask an
ancient Greek philosopher about virtue or friendship and
they might well have some very useful suggestions. They’re
all dead, of course, but we have their books (or else books
written by their followers) so luckily we can still benefit from
their considered opinions and the reasons they gave for those
opinions.
So what gifts do the ancient Greeks have to offer us? This
issue can provide only a taste, but our opening article con-
cerns friendship, comparing the way Aristotle developed the
notion of fellowship to the way it appears in The Lord of the
Rings. Other articles consider the benefits of Socratic igno-
rance; the advice Stoics might have offered concerning the
climate crisis; tragedy and political life; and of course, how to
organise a Platonic wedding.
• Charred scrolls yield Philodemus’ notes
• French philosophers debate their future
• A ‘philosophical belief’ wins legal protection
News reports by Anja Steinbauer
Down Girl wins APA Book Prize
The American Philosophical Association
awards a biannual book prize to the best
published book written by a younger
philosopher. It has just been announced
that the 2019 prize goes to Kate Manne,
associate professor of philosophy in
Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, for
her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny
(see review in Issue 133). The book is a
study of why even supposedly ‘postpatri-
archial’ cultures, such as the US, struggle
to truly leave misogyny behind. Manne,
referred to by the Chronicle of Higher
Education as the “Philosopher of
#MeToo”, explained: “My dearest hope is
that, whether or not readers agree with it,
my book will help to improve the conver-
sations we are having about misogyny,
sexism and related social ills.”
MBE for Emma Worley
Emma Worley, co-founder of the The
Philosophy Foundation with her husband
Peter, has been awarded an MBE in the
Queen’s New Year honours list. The
Philosophy Foundation trains philoso-
phers to teach philosophy and Critical
Thinking to children of all ages, in
schools and beyond. Worley remarked: “I
am of course proud to be honoured in this
way, but it really is a reflection of the
charity’s innovation and all the hard work
of the philosophers who work with us
every day, and those who have supported
us over the years, from our Trustees,
Patrons and funders to organisations such
as Philosophy Now who have championed
our work from the beginning.”
Veganism is ‘philosophical belief’
Ethical veganism is a ‘philosophical belief’
and consequently merits protection under
UK law, a tribunal has ruled for the first
time. A milestone legal case was brought
by Jordi Casamitjana, who says he was
fired by the League Against Cruel Sports
because of his ethical veganism. His
former employers disagree, claiming his
veganism was irrelevant to his dismissal.
However, the case was ground breaking in
that it makes a determination about the
status of veganism. The judge ruled that
ethical vegans should be entitled to similar
legal protections in British workplaces as
those who hold religious beliefs. “Religion
or belief” is one of nine protected charac-
teristics under the Equality Act of 2010.
Judge Robin Postle decided that ethical
veganism qualifies as a philosophical belief
under the meaning of the Act because it
satisfies several criteria, including being
worthy of respect in a democratic society,
not being incompatible with human
dignity and not conflicting with the funda-
mental rights of others.
The Archaeology of Knowledge
There once was a philosophy library in a
villa in Herculaneum, at the foot of Mount
Vesuvius. This was a bad place to be when
the famous eruption of that volcano nearly
2,000 years ago buried Herculaneum and
Pompeii. Remains of ancient papyrus
scrolls were found by those tunnelling
down into the ruins in the 18th century. In
1795, scholars carefully unrolled some of
the scrolls and glued them onto cardboard
to preserve them. Papyrus scholar
Graziano Ranocchia from the Italian
National Research Council explains that
the same processes that charred the scrolls
also preserved them. “Unless Vesuvius
erupted, they would never have survived,”
he claims. One such scroll, charred and
tattered, was a history of Plato’s Academy
written by Philodemus, in Greek. It also
had writing on the back, which then of
course could not be read. Now scholars
have deployed imaging technology to read
the hidden side. It had been impossible to
detach the papyrus fragments from the
cardboard, Ranocchia said. “You see, this
would destroy them. They are extremely
frayed.” His research team used shortwave-
infrared hyperspectral imaging to decipher
the writing on the back
Ranocchia said the huge spectrum
range allowed them to penetrate the layers
of the papyrus. “So with a huge penetra-
tion capacity, this is why we are able to
read what our predecessors weren’t able to
February /March 2020
News
read through conventional multispectral
imaging or infrared photography.” They
found notes made by Philodemus himself
during the compilation of the book. Kilian
Fleischer, a classicist at the University of
Würzburg, explains that they offer a
unique insight into an ancient philoso-
pher’s writing process. An unforeseen
bonus was that more of the text on the
front also became legible: “It was a bit like
Columbus, who went out to find India but
at the very end he ended up in America.
We wanted to make the back visible but
the front of the papyrus is displayed much
better.”
The Future of French Philosophy
An ambitious conference is being held in
Paris, bringing together dozens of philoso-
phers to discuss the future direction of
French philosophy. Appropriately titled
Où va la philosophie française? it will be held
from 16-18 January. For the first two days
it will be hosted by the Université Paris I
Panthéon-Sorbonne, and the last day will
be at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Sessions
will cover metaphysics, phenomenology,
ethics, technology and philosophy of reli-
gion. The organisers and participants
include many of the current French philo-
sophical luminaries and also Dr Joseph
Cohen, of University College Dublin. One
of the main sponsoring organisations is the
College International de Philosophie, co-
founded by Jacques Derrida in 1983 to
shake up the teaching of philosophy in
France.
Roger Scruton 1944-2020
As we were going to press, word came
through that the English conservative
philosopher Sir Roger Scruton had died.
As well as political philosophy, he was
renowned for works on aesthetics, sex and
animal rights. At some personal risk, he
held underground philosophy seminars in
Eastern Europe during the Communist
era, personally smuggling books, teaching
materials and exam papers across the Iron
Curtain frontiers. We will bring you a full
obituary in our next issue.
 Philosophy Now 5
 Greek Wisdom
IMAGE © VENANTIUS J PINTO 2020. TO SEE MORE ART, PLEASE VISIT FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/VENANTIUS/ALBUMS

Fellowship For
Aristotle & Tolkien
Andy Owen explains what Aristotle was tolkien about.

“Without friends no one would want to live, even if they had all other take the fact we have friends for granted without thinking too
worldly things.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VII much about what type of friends they are. When we get older,
we let work, distance and family get in the way. It is maybe only
n my early twenties a close friend committed suicide. He when we are much older and there is no work, family disperse,

I was a beautiful soul and I will always question myself as

to what, as his friend, I should have done to help him. As
Henry James advised; “Never say you know the last word
about any human heart.” Maybe there was nothing, maybe there
was something. At the time I had never really thought too much
about what being a friend meant. I don’t think we reflect about
the idea of friendship too much today. When we are young, we
and our world gets smaller that we realise what we are missing.
One of Western philosophy’s greatest figures, Aristotle, spent
a lot of time thinking about friendship. For him philosophy
meant thinking about how we should live, and friends were cen-
tral to the good life. He was not the first philosopher to value
friendship so highly – Socrates is quoted as saying that friend-
ship meant more to him “than all Darius’s gold” – but Aristotle

6 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020


was the first to dedicate sustained attention to the subject. In
his Nicomachean Ethics, no less than two whole books are devoted
to the topic. Even justice, in Aristotle’s view the highest virtue,
only gets one book.
The classicist Edith Hall believes that for Aristotle, “the goal
of life is to maximise happiness by living virtuously, fulfilling
your own potential as a human, and engaging with others –
family, friends and fellow citizens – in mutually beneficial activ-
ities.” (‘Why Read Aristotle Today?’ Aeon magazine). We are
animals, so we get pleasure from the fulfilment of our physical
needs; but we are also naturally inclined to live together in com-
munities – so we are, in Aristotle’s own phrase, ‘political ani-
mals’. He claimed, “no one would choose the whole world on
condition of being alone, since man is a political creature and
one whose nature it is to live with others.” (Nicomachean Ethics
Book IX). There’s a good reason solitary confinement is a brutal
punishment.
Neuroscientists search our brains to locate our conscious-
ness, but for me consciousness is not within, but in the space
between me and you: what holds us together as persons are our
interactions with those who know and love us. Accordingly, one
of the great joys of life for Aristotle was friendship. He felt that
a life well lived needed to be built around friendship through-
out one’s life:
“In poverty as well as in other misfortunes, people suppose that
friends are their only refuge. And friendship is a help to the young,
in saving them from error, just as it is also to the old, with a view to
the care they require and their diminished capacity for action stem-
ming from their weakness; it is a help also to those in their prime in
performing noble actions, for ‘two going together’ are better able to
think and to act.” (Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII).
Aristotle’s Associations
Yet for Aristotle not all friendships are the same. He identifies
three distinct types. The first is a friendship of utility. In this
kind of friendship, the two friends are not in it for the sake of
any affection for one another, but because each receives a ben-
efit from the relationship. This type of friendship is often tem-
porary and due to a shared situation. When the benefit ends,
so does the friendship. An example of this would be a work rela-
tionship. You might enjoy the time you spend together, but
once the situation changes, so does the nature of your relation-
ship. When you leave the business, despite the promises to keep
in touch, you don’t. The second kind of friendship is based on
pleasure in the friend’s company. Again, this is often a tempo-
rary friendship. It’s fine for as long as the two parties gain enjoy-
ment through their friendship, but ends when tastes or lifestyles
diverge. It’s seen with the old college friend you meet years later
who was the life and soul of the party back in the day, but with
whom you now find you no longer have anything in common.
For Aristotle, most of the friendships we have fall into one of
these first two categories. Whilst neither of them is necessarily
bad, they can lack depth and be limited in their quality.
The third type of friendship, which I am going to call fellow-
ship, is the most valuable. This type of friendship is based on a
mutual appreciation of the character and goodness of the other
Greek Wisdom
rather than on transactional value or a shared pleasure. Here it
is the qualities of the individuals themselves that bind them
together as friends. To Aristotle, few things came close to the
value of such a relationship. As he puts it in Nicomachean Ethics
Book VIII:
“But complete friendship is the friendship of good people similar in virtue;
for they wish goods in the same way to each other insofar as they are good,
and they are good in their own right. Now those who wish goods to their
friend for the friend’s own sake are friends most of all; for they have this
attitude because of the friend himself, not coincidentally. Hence these
people’s friendship lasts as long as they are good; and virtue is enduring.”
The depth and intimacy of such friendships means that they
most likely include the rewards of the other two kinds of friend-
ship: there is utility and pleasure, too. When you respect and
care for someone, and they do the same in return, you gain joy
from being with them. When they’re a virtuous person, and you
start to become so with their help, there is utility, too. The idea
of mutual improvement was key for Aristotle in this type of
friendship. Such friendships can last for a lifetime, but they take
time and trust to build, or as Aristotle writes, “Wishing to be
friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.”
I think there is much value in understanding what type of
friendship you’re engaged in with each of your friends. It helps
you understand what you should expect from each of them, and
what you should give. When you realise that your friendship is
based on pleasure, you can resist the need to share the values
of that friend and manage your expectations concerning the
depth of emotional support you should expect. When your
friendship is of the third type you should be prepared to invest
the time and emotional support to help them become who they
can potentially be, for themselves and for you.
This third type of friendship can develop even if on the sur-
face two individuals don’t seem to have much in common, as
long as there is an underlying respect and appreciation of their
virtues. This was the case with one of the twentieth century’s
more unusual friendships, between the conservative poet and
Nobel laureate T.S. Eliot, and the cigar-chomping comedian
famous for his bawdy humour, Groucho Marx. Despite their
obvious differences in character, in 1961 the two men bonded
over their mutual respect for each other and their shared love
of literature, and remained friends until Eliot’s death in 1964.
Aristotle believed that you’re more likely to develop the fel-
lowship type of friendship with someone when you’ve seen them
at their worst and watched them grow from there, or if you’ve
endured mutual hardships together. This idea is supported by
Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union Army during the
American Civil War, who wrote, “The friend in my adversity I
shall always cherish most. I can better trust those who helped
to relieve the gloom of my dark hours than those who are so
ready to enjoy with me the sunshine of my prosperity” (Personal
Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, CreateSpace Publishing, 2018).
There can be an immediate bond between strangers who dis-
cover they have suffered in the same way: just witness the meet-
ing of two old soldiers who fought in the same campaign. Maybe
this is the flip-side of the idea that what holds people back from
February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 7
Greek Wisdom
“ Wishing to be friends
is quick work, but friendship is a
slow ripening fruit.
Aristotle
”
close fellowship, particularly young men, is a fear of revealing
vulnerability. In hard circumstances your vulnerability is
exposed whether you like it or not. Personally speaking, as a
young man I believed that the route to friendship was to prove
my usefulness, or prove I was entertaining, not because I
believed that, beneath the bravado, I shared the same virtues
and values. As a young man, revealing your true self to another
can be a terrifying prospect.
Famous Friends
This was something that French sixteenth century essayist
Michel de Montaigne understood. Like Aristotle, Montaigne
believed friendship to be an essential component of happiness.
Montaigne had just this sort of friendship with fellow writer
Étienne de La Boétie [see this issue’s Brief Life, Ed]. Of him
Montaigne claimed that “He alone had the privilege of my true
portrait.” He means that when they were together, he allowed
himself to be himself. In fellowship our friends understand us
for who we are. We can reveal our true selves and be accepted.
As the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed,
“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to
be stupid with them.” (Journals & Miscellaneous Notebooks of
Ralph Waldo Emerson 1838-1842, Harvard Univ. Press, 1969).
As Aristotle identified, true fellowship also involves helping
each other grow. La Boétie died just four years after he met Mon-
taigne, and Montaigne was hit by periods of grief for his lost
friend for the rest of life. But even beyond his death La Boétie
allowed Montaigne to become the same true self on the page that
he had been in the company of his friend. La Boétie wrote a sonnet
making it clear what he thought Montaigne needed in way of
improvement. In this way their friendship helped Montaigne
become the writer he had the potential to become. Montaigne
replaced his dear friend with unmet multitudes who would read
his work for centuries after his own death in 1592.
Mutual nurturing is evident in more of history’s most famous
friendships. Twentieth century writers Virginia Woolf and
Katherine Mansfield provide another such example. When the
pair first met, in 1916, Woolf, at thirty-four, was the author of
just one novel, whereas Mansfield had carved out more of a
name for herself despite being six years younger. They became
close friends, but also jealous rivals. They would discuss their
projects over tea and write thousands of letters to each other,
pushing each other to be the best that they could be. Mansfield
even wrote a negative review of Woolf’s book Night and Day
8 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020
(1919): she complained that the novel failed to address the
damage that was felt after World War I, comparing it to a ship
returning from a perilous voyage with a curious ‘absence of any
scars’. After an honest discussion over lunch, Woolf accepted
some of Mansfield’s criticisms and went on to write the first of
three war novels, Jacob’s Room (1922), which would mark
Woolf’s transition to the Modernist style for which she has
become best known. She followed it up with two of her most
celebrated books, Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse
(1927).
Writing about the friendship between La Boétie and Mon-
taigne, Sarah Bakewell highlights an interesting tension that
can appear in friendships. She notes that “The Renaissance was
a period in which, while any hint of real homosexuality was
regarded with horror, men routinely wrote to each other like
love-struck teenagers” (How To Live: A Life of Montaigne, Vin-
tage 2011). Bakewell argues that such couples were usually not
in love with each other, but were operating under an elevated
ideal of friendship absorbed from Greek and Roman literature.
Such a bond between two well-born young men was the pinna-
cle of virtuous philosophy, but when friendship was as close as
that there was also the risk of rumour. In my time in the army,
and in sports team dressing rooms, I have seen behaviour less
influenced by Greek and Roman literature that would not seem
out of place in a gay sauna – while at the same time genuine
homosexuality was still treated as a sign of weakness. A fear of
being accused of being in a sexual relationship can discourage
friendship to develop into fellowship: this is particularly acute,
but not exclusive to, friendships between young men in envi-
ronments where homophobia is also toxically present.
Talking Tolkien
I am very lucky. I have several close friends from university, the
army, and through life’s other contact points; but also many
whom I have known since I started secondary school. They
know me probably better than I know myself, and they allow
me to be myself and forgive me for all that entails. Their friend-
ships fall into Aristotle’s third category, and have made me a
better person. These friendships have provided me with joy and
utility, too.
In 1911, eighty-four years before we left school together, a
writer who would famously write about a fellowship left the same
school with his own group of close friends. They would not get
the chance to see each other grow into middle age. The group
of friends were Christopher Wiseman, Robert Gilson, Geoffrey
Smith, and John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who would go on to write
The Lord of the Rings (1954/5). They had formed a secret society
they called the ‘Tea Club and Barrovian Society’ (TCBS), due
to their fondness for drinking tea in the school library and in the
nearby Barrow’s Stores. Others joined this society, but Wiseman,
Gilson, and Smith were Tolkien’s closest friends. Gilson dreamed
of becoming an architect; Wiseman a musician; Smith a poet;
and Tolkien had already begun to invent his own mythic lan-
guages and write stories of elves and dwarfs. But as the four
reached their early twenties and were taking the first steps towards
realising their ambitions, the First World War began.

by Melissa Felder
SIMON & FINN © MELISSA FELDER 2020 PLEASE VISIT SIMONANDFINN.COM
By 1915 all four had signed up; Wiseman in the Royal Navy
and the other three in the Army. By 1916 all three were in France
preparing for most catastrophic, bloody battle in the British
Army’s history, the Somme. Lieutenant Gilson was killed on the
first day of the Somme, on 1 July 1916, leading his men in the
assault on Beaumont Hamel. Lieutenant Smith was killed on 3
December 1916 when a German artillery shell landed on a first
aid post. Both were twenty-two years old. On 27 October 1916,
as his battalion attacked Regina Trench, Tolkien was struck
down by trench fever. He was invalided to England on 8 Novem-
ber. Tolkien’s battalion was subsequently almost completely
wiped out.
Tolkien survived the war, as did Wiseman, but they were
never able to rebuild their close friendship in the shadow of the
Greek Wisdom
loss to their fellowship created by the deaths of Smith and Gilson
and other members of the TCBS. Tolkien instead created a new
fellowship on the page and sketched out his idea of loyal, last-
ing and deep friendship in the face of adversity in honour of
those close friends he had lost. From beyond the Somme they
inspired him to flourish.
Tolkien once claimed, “I have always been impressed that
we are here, surviving, because of the indomitable courage of
quite small people against impossible odds.” Just so, the hob-
bits of his books were “a reflection of the English soldier”, their
smallness emphasizing “the amazing and unexpected heroism
of ordinary men ‘at a pinch’.”
In The Lord of the Rings, the group of nine that undertook the
epic journey to cast the One Ring, the most powerful magical
ring, into the fires of Mount Doom, so ending the Dark Lord
Sauron’s power, were known as the companions of the fellow-
ship of the ring. Over the course of the story this fellowship
breaks down into smaller friendships, the most famous being
that between the hobbits Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee.
They are not fighters, and never display more than a simplistic
understanding of their task, but their friendship meets all the
criteria of Aristotle’s third type. They grow together through-
out the story and its adversity. They are dedicated to each other
and love each other dearly for who they are. Indeed, as the Ring
casts a malignant influence on Frodo, it is Sam who keeps him
true to himself: “It’s like in the great stories, Mr Frodo. The
ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they
were... Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant
something, even if you were too small to understand why. But
I think... I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had
lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept
going. Because they were holding on to something.”
I think for Tolkien, like so many who experienced the horror
of war, the friendships he had in his life were the thing that he
was holding on to.
I am lucky as I have been able to see nearly all my close
friends grow into middle age. I have not had to cope with the
scale of loss that my fellow alumni the TCBS did. Now, watch-
ing my children play with the children of my friends makes me
think about the friendships they will make in their own lives. I
hope they will have friends that are useful to them, and I hope
they will be useful back. I hope they will have friends that will
bring them pleasure, and I hope that they will bring joy in
return. Most of all though, I hope they find fellowship with a
few friends, and understand the difference. Maybe by doing so
they might one day be able to provide what one of their friends
needs in their darkest hour. I hope when they find friends that
let them be who they are and help them become who they can
best be, they are as grateful as I am for my friends. As Marcel
Proust urges us, “Let us be grateful to people who make us
happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls
blossom.”
© ANDY OWEN 2020
Andy Owen is the author of the novel East of Coker (2016) and
the biography All Soldiers Run Away: Alano’s War, the Story of
a British Deserter (2017).
February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 9
Greek Wisdom
The Wisdom of Ignorance
Daniel Silvermintz wants us to rediscover the virtue of Socratic ignorance.
gnorance may be bliss, but that doesn’t mean we should argues that we must know what ‘success’ means before we can

I celebrate stupidity. Ignorance has never been a good

excuse, but it is even less so today, when anyone with a
question can simply google an answer. How much more
do we expect of our experts when even a schoolchild has access
to the vast storehouse of human knowledge? Even in this age of
figure out how to achieve it. After all, one would need a quite
different gameplan depending on whether one was striving to
be like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos or Mother Theresa. Meno’s
question presumes that he already has a good idea of what suc-
cess entails – which turns out to have more in common with
participation trophies, we would be shocked if the Nobel com- amassing money and power than helping the poor and needy.
mittee decided to award a prize to a team of scientists whose Socrates, however, admits that he is completely clueless about
research was a complete failure, regardless of how many years the subject: “I have to reproach myself with an utter ignorance
they’d worked on it. The case is, however, quite different in phi- about virtue” (71b). Meno is shocked by this response, given
losophy, where Socrates (470-399 BC) is celebrated for an odd Socrates’ reputation for wisdom. “But is it true, Socrates,” Meno
claim to fame: “The one thing I know is that I know nothing.” retorts in disbelief, “that you do not even know what virtue is?
Why in the world would we continue to venerate Socrates as Are we to return home with this report of you?” (71c).
one of the greatest thinkers in the history of philosophy when Why would Socrates’ admission of ignorance provoke such
he admits to being a complete ignoramus? moral outrage in Meno? Certainly Meno would excuse Socrates’
We should, of course, keep in mind that Socrates’ ignorance ignorance regarding a whole range of subjects; however, one
did not go over so well with his contemporaries. They were so might expect everybody to know what it means to be a good person.
frustrated by his philosophical investigations that they sentenced Even the Sophist Protagoras (490-420 BC), who was notorious
him to death. During his trial Socrates claims that he pursued for promoting unethical ideas among his students, was more judi-
wisdom at the expense of all his other responsibilities, and he cious about professing his ideas publically: “Everyone, they say,
appeals to his poverty as a validation of his professional integrity. should profess to be just, whether he is so or not, and whoever
Callicles, one of Socrates’ most ruthless critics, was less than does not make some pretension to justice is mad,” (Plato, Pro-
impressed by this attempt at defending the philosophic life: tagoras 323d). Socrates not only professes his own ignorance, he
“When I see philosophy in a young lad I approve of it,” begins goes even further by insisting that he has never met anyone who
Callicles, before unleashing his rebuke, “But when I see an knows the meaning of ‘virtue’. With this casual aside, Socrates
elderly man still going on with philosophy and not getting rid not only dismisses his contemporaries, but his entire civilization.
of it, that is the gentleman, Socrates, whom I think in need of a Stories about heroes such as Achilles were not merely captivat-
whipping” (Plato, Gorgias 485c-d). ing entertainment for the Greeks, they presented role models
Although relatively few individuals in Athens were engaged in for the cultural formation of the next generation of warriors and
studying philosophy, everybody in the city seems to have known statesmen. Once again it is Protagoras who reminds Socrates
about Socrates. When the comic playwright Aristophanes wanted that he should know better, since every schoolchild can recount
to lampoon scientific thinking in his play Clouds, he depicted
Socrates as an absent-minded professor conducting preposterous
experiments: his student reports that the master was trying to
figure out whether a gnat hums through his mouth or through
his anus. The play opens with the country bumpkin Strepsiades
trying to convince his good-for-nothing son Phidippides to better
himself by enrolling at Socrates’ Academy. “I know that lot!”
exclaims Phidippides in disgust, “Sly, shifty bastards! Anaemic,
barefooted fools, like that Socrates and his mate, that Chaerephon
guy! Bundles of misery and nothing else” (Clouds 103).
Socrates’ reputation appears to have extended far beyond his
home in Athens. Plato preserves the encounter between
Socrates and the young and ambitious military leader Meno,
who hailed from the neighboring city state of Thessaly. Having
studied with other famous intellectuals, notably the Sophist
Gorgias, Meno appears to have sought out Socrates for advice
regarding how he might best achieve what the Greeks called
arête, which we can translate either as ‘success’ or ‘virtue’. “Can
you tell me, Socrates,” inquires Meno, “whether arête can be
taught, or is acquired by practice, not teaching?”(Plato, Meno
70a). Rather than answering the young man’s question, Socrates

10 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020


the deeds of the great men of the past: “The children, when they
have learnt their letters… are furnished with works of good poets
to read as they sit in class, and are made to learn them off by
heart,” replies Protagoras; “Here they meet with many admoni-
tions, many descriptions and praises and eulogies of good men
in times past, that the boy in envy may imitate them and yearn
to become even as they” (325e). How then can Socrates say that
he has no clue what it means to be virtuous, when he has, along
with all his countrymen, been raised on the works of the poets?
We begin to see how Socrates’ declaration of ignorance could
get him into a lot of trouble. Despite testimony that he observed
traditional Greek religious rituals, the charge brought against
him by the Athenian court was that he held unorthodox beliefs:
“Socrates is a wrongdoer,” reads the indictment, “because he
corrupts the youth and does not believe in the gods the state
believes in, but in other new spiritual beings” (Plato, Apology
24b-c). Socrates responds to the charges by arguing that far from
being sacrilegious he has been on a mission from god. He testi-
fies before the court that the oracle at Delphi had told his friend
Chaerephon that Socrates was the wisest man in the world.
Socrates then reports that he devoted the rest of his life to inves-
tigating others to see if he could find someone wiser (whether
out of humility, or the pride of disproving the god he doesn’t
say). In the end, Socrates confirms the oracle and declares him-
self the wisest man in the world, since he is the one person who
admits his own ignorance. “I am wiser than this man,” as Socrates
says of one of Athens’ respected politicians, “for neither of us
really knows anything fine and good, but this man thinks he
knows something when he does not, whereas I, as I do not know
anything, do not think I do, either” (Apology 21d).
Socrates’ claim to be doing the god’s work didn’t go over so
well with the jury, who were less than impressed by his boast-
ful claim to know nothing, and even less by his attempt to make
others look like fools. They found him guilty; but offered him
a last chance to redeem himself by telling the court what would
be an adequate punishment to fit his crimes. In his final act of
protest, Socrates suggested that he be celebrated for his intel-
Greek Wisdom
lectual labors in the same manner as an victorious athlete at the
Games: “What, then, does such a man as I deserve?” asked
Socrates indignantly: “There is nothing, men of Athens, so fit-
ting as that such a man be given his meals [free for life] in the
Prytaneum. That is much more appropriate for me than for any
of you who has won a race at the Olympic Games with a pair
of horses!” (Apology 36d). The jury was not amused by Socrates’
proposed punishment and sentenced him to death by drinking
hemlock. However, not long after his death, the Athenians real-
ized that they had wrongfully convicted him. History has fur-
ther vindicated Socrates’ good name. But the question remains
– why should we venerate someone on account of his ignorance?
In Plato’s dialogues we are the beneficiaries of a few thou-
sand pages that preserve, with more or less fidelity, Socrates’
conversations with his contemporaries. Over and over again
Socrates declares that he knows nothing about the subject he
and his companions are discussing. An extraordinary passage
among those thousands of pages has preserved one of the few
occasions in which Socrates affirms something he claims to know
with absolute certainty: “that there is a difference between right
opinion and knowledge is not at all a conjecture with me but
something I would particularly assert that I knew: there are not
many things of which I would say that, but this one, at any rate,
I will include among those that I know” (Meno 98b). Mistaken
for a fool or a moral reprobate, Socrates’ profession of igno-
rance was actually a provocative way to get people to think about
the distinction between an opinion (which can often be wildly
misguided) and a logically proven claim. In other words,
Socrates may have had many good opinions, but he realized that
this could not serve as the basis for wisdom.
Even though there were philosophers who preceded him,
Socrates is the true founder of the Western philosophical tra-
dition because he was the first to investigate human affairs sci-
entifically. “Socrates was the first to call philosophy down from
the heavens,” writes the Roman statesman Cicero about his
monumental achievement, “and compel it to ask questions about
life and morality” (Tusculan Disputations 5.10-11).
Many people still regard ethics merely as a matter of opinion.
A 2015 study conducted by the Barna Research Group reports
that 74% of millennials agreed with the statement: ‘Whatever is
right for your life or works best for you is the only truth that
exists’ (‘The End of Absolutes: America's New Moral Code’
barna.com). In contrast, Socrates staunchly believed that human
affairs are governed by absolute principles and thus can be inves-
tigated like other fields of knowledge. Despite devoting his entire
life to these studies, he was forced to recognize the limits of his
knowledge. But just as cancer research will not stop until it finds
a cure, we must continue the work that Socrates initiated, for no
other reason than our lives depend on it. “The duty of inquiring
after what we do not know,” charges Socrates to future genera-
tions in the Meno (86b), “will make us better and braver and less
helpless than the notion that there is not even a possibility of dis-
covering what we do not know.”
© DANIEL SILVERMINTZ 2020
Daniel Silvermintz is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Uni-
versity of Houston, Clear Lake. His book on the founder of the
Sophist movement, Protagoras: Ancients in Action, was published
by Bloomsbury Academic in 2016.
February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 11
Greek Wisdom
What Philosophy Does To Philosophers
Rohan Somji looks at the consequences of thinking for three antique thinkers.
philosopher is someone who
A sees deep questions where
others find things straightfor-
ward. This I call ‘problematis-
ing’, or, as Plato called it, ‘the search for
essence’. In any case, it instills a sense of
mystery, awe and wonder. Now, there
are numerous ways of problematising
and dealing with it; but rest assured, the
consequences it has on the problema-
tiser are definite and enduring.
Where better to look for examples of
the impact of philosophy on life than
three fathers of Greek thought: Socrates,
Diogenes, and Pyrrho? They had widely
different, highly eccentric personalities
(the price of authenticity, perhaps?).
Although they differed in their philo-
sophical approaches, they are all excel-
lent examples of the impact philosophy Socrates Examined by Clint Inman 2020
has, for better or worse.
The last words of Socrates (470-399 BC) were “Crito, we
owe a rooster to Asclepius. Please, don’t forget to pay the debt.”
Ironic, given that Asclepius was the god of medicine and
Socrates had just drunk hemlock. Was he implying that the
poison was the cure for life? Or was he just displaying humour
and insouciance, even at the brink of death?
Socratic enquiry consisted of the disciplined questioning of
things taken for granted by others. But it’s interesting that
though the task is to dissect a complex idea, none of Plato’s dia-
logues actually end with Socrates satisfied that he has reached
the heart of the concept. Socrates displays great patience, and
is noteworthy for his ability to recognise and point out igno-
rance. How ironic that the first great philosopher in the West
was also the first to claim true ignorance. The humility and the
passion to know that proceeds from such a state is evident.
It is said that Diogenes (412-323 BC) was once seen rolling a
barrel up and down a hill from sunrise to sunset. When asked
why, he said that when the citizens heard that invaders were
marching towards them the city began to hustle and bustle. Dio-
genes concluded, “I wanted to look as busy as they.” This kind
of mockery was typical of Diogenes the Cynic.
Nietzsche once remarked, “Make your life a work of art”,
and maybe his words travelled back through time, because that’s
precisely what Diogenes did. He was an ascetic, living a life of
virtue over pleasure. He claimed he was “a citizen of the world
rather than a place,” so was the first recorded cosmopolitan.
He challenged every moral, custom, and regular way of life
without regard to the consequences. This challenging came
from his acute sense of seeing problems in Greek society.
Although very apocryphal and there being little more than
a few anecdotes about him preserved, Diogenes nevertheless
was a master problematiser. He could see that the way of life
of people in the cities had strayed far away from virtue, main-
taining only a façade of behaving appropriately, without any
12 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020
concern for cultivating virtue within. In
the case of slavery (an integral part of
Greek society), once Alexander the Great
PORTRAIT © CLINTON INMAN 2020 FACEBOOK HIM AT CLINTON.INMAN
found the philosopher looking atten-
tively at a pile of human bones. Diogenes
explained, “I am searching for the bones
of your father, but cannot distinguish
them from those of a slave.”
Pyrrho of Elis (c.360-c.270 BC)
accompanied Alexander the Great in his
invasion of India. There, he encountered
the gymnosophists – naked wise men. This
exposure seems to have inspired him to
live a life of solitary inquiry.
Considered the father of Skeptical
philosophy, Pyrrho lived a radically skep-
tical life. He doubted pretty much every-
thing, essentially problematising the very
possibility of knowledge, as well as the
possibility of any stable unchanging
nature that could be studied or known.
His approach was based on epoche, a suspension of judgement.
The effect of this thinking was, first, inducing a stunned silence
or non-assertion known as aphasia, subsequently leading to
ataraxia, or freedom from worry. For Pyrrho, the way to a happy
life was by ridding oneself of the suffering caused by worry. This
meant recognising the illusory nature of knowledge itself and
coming to terms with the inaccessibility of any knowledge at all.
Someone needs to go through a deep shift to allow such a state
to be realised in terms of lifestyle.
The lives of these three philosophers show that philosophy
can be far from just theoretical speculation. The father of moral
philosophy, the father of Cynicism, and the father of Skepticism,
each lived a philosophical life as well as initiating a discourse.
Their lives embodied the truths that they proclaimed. For each,
philosophy was a practice more than a teaching – or rather, their
way of life was the teaching. Interestingly, none of the three
philosophers I’ve discussed wrote any major works themselves.
We know of them mostly through the writings of their pupils.
In an age of information and an abundance of the tools of
pleasure, it is time we learnt again from those who knew how
little they knew. Problematising may be the antidote to our
vanity, inculcating humility and curiosity. It prevents us from
being satisfied with spoon-fed oversimplified ideas about our
world. It makes us seek restlessly for clearer, deeper answers
about reality and about ourselves. Seeking begins only when
there is something to be sought.
Above all, philosophy is about enhancing awareness, which
is perhaps the key trait defining humanity. If philosophy has had
one influence on peoples’ lives, this is the only influence it needs.
To be aware is to be human.
© ROHAN SOMJI 2020
Rohan Somji is a postgraduate from the University of Mumbai,
currently working towards applying Continental philosophy’s insights
to developments in AI.

A Stoic Response To
The Climate Crisis
Matthew Gindin thinks that the Stoics have useful advice for us right now.
he Stoic philosophers, who flourished in the Graeco-
T Roman world between the third century BCE and
the fourth century CE, were profoundly interested
in the natural world, and considered science essen-
tial knowledge for a philosopher. It’s likely that a Stoic time
traveller, transported into the early 21st century, would initially
hesitate to believe that humans could remake the climate of the
Earth and in doing so threaten the future of the entire bio-
sphere. I think we can be confident, however, that once pre-
sented with the scientific evidence our devotee of Hellenic
reason would embrace the consensus and agree we are facing
an incomprehensibly dangerous emergency.
It is now widely agreed in the scientific community that we
are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s
history – and that this one has been triggered by human activ-
ity. Due to the way we live, much of the biodiversity of the
world has disappeared over the last hundred years, and more
of it will go in the next hundred. At the end of 2018 the Living
Planet Index of the World Wildlife Fund reported that from
1970 to 2014 there was a 60% decline in the overall numbers
of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish. Another recent
report, published in the journal Biological Conservation (Vol. 232,
April 2019), found that more than 40% of the world’s insect
species are dramatically declining and a third are endangered –
risking what the report’s authors call a “catastrophic collapse
of nature’s ecosystems.”
How would the Stoics have responded? I’m not asking this
question merely as an interesting intellectual exercise, but
because I think Stoic philosophy has key intellectual resources
to help us face our growing ecological crisis. With that in mind
I’ll outline what I think are a few useful pieces of advice from
the Stoic arsenal. I want to begin first with Epictetus, who I think
has the most powerful and important guidance to offer us, and
then add supplementary ideas from Marcus Aurelius and Seneca.
Epictetus
Epictetus (55-135 CE) was a freed slave born in what is now
Turkey. He taught Stoicism in Rome before being banished in
about 93 CE by the Emperor Domitian, along with the other
philosophers. He went to Greece and continued to teach there.
Epictetus’ prescription for freedom can be simply explained,
despite its power. Our desires should only be directed towards
what’s possible, because desiring what’s impossible will
inevitably produce frustration and unhappiness.
This seems to be common sense; but things get interesting
as a result of Epictetus’s conception of possibility: we should
get our happiness from thinking and choosing well (which is
within our power), not from getting what we want (which isn’t).
Greek Wisdom
So for Epictetus our desire for happiness should be directed
towards knowing that we understand and choose well. In other
words, our pleasure should be in our rationality and the good
character that follows from it. We should not seek happiness in
things we want but which are impossible to control, even good
things: our health, wealth, reputation, relationships, or even
whether we continue to live or die. A moment’s reflection will
confirm that all of these latter things (which Stoics call ‘exter-
nals’ or ‘indifferents’, or sometimes more charitably, ‘prefer-
ables’) are outside our control. A chance encounter with an
ebola-carrying passenger on a jet could eliminate all of them in
short order. Epictetus’s vision of the Stoic sage is of someone
who restricts the lion’s share of their desire towards refining
their own rationality, knowledge, and wise choices, and takes
pleasure as much as possible in those accomplishments.
How does this apply to facing the climate crisis?
I think applying Epictetus’s advice to our global situation
would mean first of all ending our desire to save the planet.
More accurately, since the planet itself will, as some enjoy point-
ing out, be fine, it means ending our desire to save human global
civilization and the current biosphere. We may succeed in saving
those things, but according to current projections there is a very
real possibility that we won’t. Epictetus would say that we should
not desire what may be impossible, and certainly nothing which
is out of the sphere of our control. Rather, what we should desire,
is that we choose and act well. In the climate context this would
mean seeking to understand what is happening and making the
most rational choices we can as a result. Our individual choices
might range from trying to change government policies to
reduce the scale of the damage, to acting individually in ways
that protect ecology, to moving to higher ground, among many
other things. Primarily, though, it means directing our atten-
tion to building strong and serene characters to withstand the
full impact of the coming crisis, something Epictetus claims it
is actually in our power to do.
It might seem that Epictetus is preaching an inward-focused
quietism or navel-gazing self-development, unmoored from the
wider world, but he’s not. Stoics, unlike Epicureans, were civic-
minded, and saw the person’s role in the universal city of human-
ity – the cosmopolis – as being of central importance. For Epicte-
tus, all people have multiple roles to fill in the cosmopolis, each
of which should be embodied with excellence. For example,
being a good father requires certain choices and types of
behaviour, and a father should enact those. A key element of
this doctrine is that one’s obligation is to fulfill one’s role as
best one can – which is different from succeeding in it or being
rewarded for it. For our purposes though, the really useful
insight comes from what Epictetus said to a student who com-
February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 13
Epictetus, Seneca & Marcus Aurelius
by Gail Campbell, 2020

14 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020


plained that his brother mistreated him. Epictetus’s answer can
be summarized as: “So what? Your task is not to have a brother
who loves you, which you cannot hope to succeed in, but to be
a good brother yourself, which you can.”
When applied to climate change, this can be powerful guid-
ance. What is our role as intelligent animals whose well-being
is dependent on the integrity of their ecosystem? One would
think it obvious (although one would be wrong about that,
apparently) that we should first and foremost study how not to
disrupt the web of relationships that humans so need to survive
and thrive. The Stoics, who sought both honourable and respon-
sible behaviour, would certainly counsel living lives permeated
by care towards the natural world. So perhaps Epictetus would
say that in the face of the climate crisis, our primary task is not
to save the ecosystem, which individually we cannot hope to
succeed in doing, but rather to fulfill our roles as good citizens
of the earth, doing what we can, even if everything goes to hell.
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE) was Roman Emperor for nearly
twenty years. He was also a Stoic philosopher who kept a note-
book of advice from himself to himself (a practice recommended
by other Stoics too). This notebook, disseminated after his death
as his Meditations, is still a bestseller. In it Marcus Aurelius
focuses on the cultivation of virtues such as fortitude, serenity,
and amiability, and reminds himself repeatedly of such things
as the impermanence of life, the need to be mindful of our inter-
dependency, and our responsibilities to the communities of
which we’re inescapably a part.
I want to highlight just one remark from this book: “The
foolishness of people who are surprised by anything that hap-
pens. Like travellers amazed at foreign customs” (Meditations
12.13, tr. Gregory Hays). Here Marcus Aurelius gently mocks
our tendency to be shocked by events. I imagine he had in mind
all the irrational extremes of human experience, as well as nat-
ural disasters, wars, or stunning twists of fate. All of these things
are intrinsically part of the fabric of our social and natural lives,
and to suggest otherwise is to believe things to be other than
they actually are, which is dangerous.
There is a lot to learn from this one saying. Firstly, we should
not think that a catastrophic climate change will not occur.
Global extinction-level crises have happened before, at least five
times, wiping out between 75-96% of life on Earth each time.
And there is no reason to think that the conditions which pre-
vailed the last time that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere
were this high – such as trees growing near the South Pole and
sea levels twenty metres higher than now – will not happen again.
On the purely human level, it’s also time to stop being shocked
by our failure to adopt long-term thinking and act to halt the
disaster now unfolding. Throughout history elites have acted to
preserve their own interests while the world burned around them,
and the common folk have been so fooled by propaganda that
they have been unable to see what was happening until it was
too late. Nazi Germany is only one of many examples of both
tendencies; members of the intelligentsia around the world wrote
of what was happening and would happen, but the high cost
activities needed by the Allies to halt disaster were not under-
taken until catastrophe demanded them and it was almost too
Greek Wisdom
late. Why should we think things would be any different now?
The drastic reforms needed to halt climate change are difficult
and expensive, and will take a long time to implement. During
that time, climate change will advance and quite probably acquire
irreversible, self-sustaining momentum.
The lesson from Marcus Aurelius here, then, is twofold: stop
wasting mental energy being shocked or offended by human
inaction on climate change. Do not assume that humanity will
take upon itself timely and wise actions, or that some mysteri-
ous force will protect us from the results of our own behaviour,
or soften the horrific blows when they come. Shock and
incredulity are not worthy of anyone who studies history or the
natural world. Don’t be like a traveller unfamiliar with how things
go here. It’s time for us to face what is happening, and to pre-
pare. Facing reality is the first step in figuring out how to handle
it well.
Seneca
Seneca the Younger (4 BCE -65 CE) was a statesman, playwright,
and tutor to the powerful. He was also a Stoic philosopher. Like
other Stoics he counselled a focus on the perfection of character,
and cultivation of peace and strength of mind in the face of adver-
sity. One frequently-mentioned piece of advice in the letters he
wrote to his friend Lucilius, is to learn to live with poverty and
hardship before they happen, as well as to cultivate independence
and self-sufficiency. As he wrote in his inimitable style, “Trim
yourself back to that small fortune that chance cannot take away”
(Letter 20). By saying this, Seneca did not mean that one should
throw away, or even radically pare down, one’s possessions (he
didn’t, as is well known), but rather that one should intention-
ally cultivate the ability both to be happy with less, and to rely
only on that which one can find in oneself. As he wrote in the
same letter, “So I think it is really necessary to do what I told you
in my letter great men have often done: set aside some days when
by making a pretence of poverty we train ourselves for the real
thing. We should do it all the more since we are steeped in luxu-
ries, and think everything harsh and difficult. Better to wake the
mind from sleep; pinch it, and remind it of how little our nature
actually requires. No one is born rich: everyone who comes forth
into the light is ordered to be content with milk and a bit of cloth.”
Considering the uncertainties that face us, particularly eco-
nomic and technological disruption in unpredictable ways, this
idea of preparing ourselves might be good advice: a sort of work-
out before the fight.
So our Stoic advisors, who intended their philosophy to speak
eternally across the ages for any human exigency, say: do not
waste time in being shocked at human irrationality; do not be
naïve about how bad things can get; and begin training for a
world of lack and hardship. Restrict your desire to perfecting
your own understanding and good choices, and fulfill your role
as an rational animal on the Earth regardless of whether global
civilisation can be saved or not.
© MATTHEW GINDIN 2020
Matthew Gindin is a former Buddhist monk, teacher of Jewish his-
tory and culture, journalist, writer and meditation instructor in Van-
couver. He is currently launching a Philosophy Club for children. He
writes regularly for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, as well as for
several other publications, and can be followed at matthewgindin.com.
February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 15
Greek Wisdom
The Tragedy That Was Athens
Alex Holzman sees the history of Golden Age Athens as a play
with Pericles and Socrates as its tragic heroes.
he most prominent dramatic distinction we’ve inher-
T ited from the Greeks is that between comedy and
tragedy. Comedies end in marriages and happily-
ever-afters. Greek tragedies are also easy to iden-
tify, as they usually end with the death, imprisonment, despon-
dency, or some other unraveling of the principal character(s).
This is almost always due to some set of character flaws, or
hamartia, from the Greek meaning ‘to err’.
One recurrent tragic set of character flaws revolves around
hubris, which refers to an over-reaching mixture of pride and
arrogance, generally against some divine force, entity, or hier-
archy (it originally meant the use of bodily violence to shame a
victim). Icarus is perhaps the most straightforward example of
hubris. He’s a boy whose brilliant (and equally hubristic) father
Daedalus crafts for him a pair of waxen wings in his desire to
seize the power of flight from the gods, in order for them to
escape imprisonment. But Icarus flies too close to the sun, his
wings are melted, he falls, and is swallowed by the sea. Either
ignorant or unconcerned with his mortality, in flying too close
to the sun he has encroached upon the realm of the gods, and
in doing so has lost touch with his own rationality, duty, and
life. Icarus attempts to seize the heavens, and for this is lost for-
ever to the depths. Similarly, Daedalus’ flight to freedom results
in his losing his ideals and plunges his spirits to the depths: his
16 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020
The glory that was Athens
by Leo von Kranze
son is dead, his invention destroyed, and although his body is
freed, his spirit is broken.
Here we can see that the punishment for hubris is often mired
in irony, another device central to Greek storytelling. If hubris
is born from the ignorance of a character – from their being
unaware of their limits, and proudly so – then irony grows out
of their ignorance of their ignorance. The word ‘irony’ itself
comes from the Greek eirōneía, meaning ‘feigned ignorance.’
This is a reference to the stock Greek comic character the eirôn,
whose tongue-in-cheek self-effacement really directed towards
blowhards usually won him the day. In tragedy, this character
is inverted into someone whose ignorance is not feigned, lack-
ing the self-awareness of the eirôn: he cannot help but stray into
hubris, and thereby into tragedy. The thematic consequences
they suffer serve to highlight their ignorance, and caution the
audience against reckless pride. Another example is Midas’s
desire for a golden touch, turning his true treasures – his wife
and daughter – to cold metal.
Since the ironic cycle of action and reaction culminates only
at a story’s end, even when it’s predictable irony is inherently
retrospective. So it ensnares the hubristic in a dramatic trap,
depriving them of agency in return for the audience’s emotional
catharsis or cleansing.
This entrapment in time and space – this subjugation to story

– is core to Greek narrative notions of human life, mortality,
and fate. At the center of the most famous Greek stories is a
single man or woman into whose narrative orbit fall people,
monsters, and gods. Obviously, the public will relate readily to
stories of common people (or highly anthropomorphic deities)
overcoming Herculean struggles. The anthropocentrism also
reinforces the importance of human life and of human mortal-
ity. The archetypal Greek tragedy is both an affirmation of life
and an acquiescence to death, for to live and to die is the lot of
(wo)man, and to live honorably and die humbly is the lot of a
great (wo)man. Those characters who do not recognize this (and
most, in the end, do not) are doomed by their hubris to ironic
destruction. They will achieve immortality in a sense, but only
through the denial of their selves.
Let’s see how these ideas apply to Golden Age Athens.
Pericles’ Tragic Monologue
Both Pericles’ (c.495–429 BCE) and Athens’ hubris are as dra-
matic and complete as that of any mythical figures. Pericles, the
great leader and statesman of Golden Age Athens, would be
claimed by a ravenous plague that decimated the city as a result
of the Peloponnesian War with Sparta of 431–404 BCE. Con-
vinced though it was of its inevitable victory, Athens lost the
war, along with its democracy, its empire, and its cultural pre-
eminence. The war entangled every major power on the Greek
peninsula, along with their overseas colonies and military
alliances. By the end, poverty and disease ran rampant across
the city-states. Religious taboos were shattered as Pan-Hellenic
festivals were invaded and temples sacked and burned. Devas-
tating civil wars and revolts proliferated, some of which would
last until Phillip II, father of Alexander the Great (but viewed
by the Athenians as little more than a barbarian warlord) easily
conquered the peninsula in 337 BCE.
The Peloponnesian War marked nothing less than the com-
plete upheaval of the social order so beloved by Pericles. Even
as its greatest leader extolled Athens’ virtues in a funeral speech,
the city was embarking upon a conflict that would forever end
its self-styled hegemony. Athenians were, in the end, ignorant
of their own fate and unheeding of the very legends that
described their proclivity towards greatness and the downfall
that might result.
In Pericles’ famous funeral oration in Athens, he is so con-
vinced of Athens’ self-evident greatness that he slips into hubris
and irony, and in so doing becomes as tragically immortalised
as Medea or Orpheus.
A few lines of his speech demonstrate the irony particularly
well. First is his admonition that “We do not need Homer, or
anyone else, to praise our power with words that bring delight
for a moment, when the truth will refute his assumptions about
what was done.” In demeaning storytelling as a way of captur-
ing truth, Pericles ignores the obvious fact that his own words
are scarcely different: his oration is itself little more than ‘words
that bring delight for a moment’, especially considering the lin-
gering despair that would soon descend upon Athens. He is cor-
rect in that the truth will refute the assumptions of the story-
teller; he was wrong, however, about who that refuted story-
teller would be – himself. He is correct (as even tragic heroes
can be), that Athens will be the “admiration of people now and
Greek Wisdom
Pericles:
glory or bust
in the future.” But that which we admire today is exactly that
which Pericles dismisses: the delightful words of Homer, and
more relevantly, that other wordsmith Thucydides, who records
Pericles’ oration in his History of the Peloponnesian War. (Even
calling it ‘Pericles’ funeral oration’ is somewhat disingenuous
because it is in reality Thucydides’ oration, since he doubtless
edited the speech to put the dramatic spin on history he wanted.)
Similarly telling is Pericles’ claim that Athens has “set up
eternal monuments on all sides, of [its] setbacks as well as of
[its] accomplishments.” This is a less than subtle political flour-
ish, aimed at reminding his listeners of his own building pro-
gram, responsible, among other things, for the reconstruction
of the Acropolis during Athens’ zenith.
At the heart of this program, of course, is the Parthenon, the
highest achievement of the Doric architectural order, and
symbol of both Athenian and Greek cultural supremacy. Built
and decorated by 432 BCE, the paint would barely have been
dry when Pericles gave his funeral oration at the end of 431.
Neither a traditional Hellenic temple nor a cult sanctuary, the
Parthenon was, as Pericles suggests, a victory monument, actu-
ally to the Battle of Marathon against Persia. Marathon was
doubtless the greatest military accomplishment in Athens’ his-
tory, if not all of Greek history, and it was worth remembering
at the outset of a grueling new conflict.
Pericles’ political nous in evoking Athens’ past glories, as
well as reminding his audience who it was who built these ‘eter-
nal monuments’, is unquestionable. So too is the arrogance and
irony belying it. The Parthenon was not, after all, eternal in the
way Pericles certainly presented it, and possibly imagined it, to
be. It still stands today, but it was horribly burned in the third
century AD, as well as sacked by mere pirates. Pagan worship
there was banned by Theodosius II in 435 AD, and its great cult
statue of Athena was spirited away and destroyed on foreign
soil. It was converted, first to a Catholic church, and then into
a mosque by the Ottoman Empire, whose war with the Vene-
tians caused it catastrophic damage. Then, as it lay in ruins,
much of its statuary was carted off by Lord Elgin to the British
Museum. It is true that the Parthenon is eternal in what it has
come to more broadly represent: namely the aesthetic, archi-
tectural, and intellectual majesty of the Ancient Greeks. Yet this
is itself an ironic twist of fate for Pericles and Athens: the same
February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 17
Greek Wisdom
© GUTO DIAS 2019. PLEASE VISIT FACEBOOK.COM/PG/GUTOZDIASSTUDIO/
longevity that enabled the Parthenon to
outlive Alexander and Rome and to dazzle
modern tourists also allowed its appropria-
tion for long centuries by nations who cared
nothing for Greece’s ancient gods or
Athens’ glory.
The Irony of Socrates
Unfortunately, it would be wrong to think
that the tragic story of Athens ended after
Pericles’ hubris and the Peloponnesian
War. Every good tragic hero needs an
opportunity for redemption, or at least the
emotional release of catharsis. For Athens,
this comes in the form of the strange,
18 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020
impossible man known as Socrates. But this
story also ends tragically.
As presented by Plato in The Apology,
Socrates (470-399 BCE) is a man of contra-
dictions who embodies a peculiar type of
irony. After learning that the Delphic oracle
considers that no-one surpasses him in
wisdom he is perplexed, since he considers
himself anything but wise. He attempts to
prove the oracle wrong by speaking with all
those considered wise, only to find out that
they were in fact deeply ignorant. Concern-
ing one such exchange he concludes that “it
is likely that neither of us know anything
worthwhile, but he thinks he knows some-
thing when he does not, whereas when I do
not know, neither do I think I know, so I
am likely to be wiser than he to this small
extent” (Apology 21a, trans. G.M.A Grube).
In thinking like this Socrates becomes a
profound subversion of the hubristic char-
acter. He is convinced that the gods must
be wrong; but this belief is based on his own
humility. Similarly, he believes his investi-
gation to be ‘in the service of the god’, even
while making the purpose of that investiga-
tion to ‘refute the oracle’ (21b-22a). So he
is at once deeply hubristic – denying the
gods’ wisdom, stepping outside the social
order, unaccepting of his fate as the wisest
man of all – while still lacking the self-cen-
teredness and arrogance typical of tragic fig-
ures.
Unfortunately, Socrates is also deeply
ironic, his fate equally so. As with the eirôn,
it ought to be clear that Socrates’ compar-
ative ‘ignorance’ is to an extent feigned. The
oft-mentioned ‘impossibility’ of Socrates is
in part due to the unrealistic psychology of
believing that you know nothing, since
‘knowing that you know nothing’ is a con-
tradiction in itself, is incoherent. Socrates
also says that he knows more than everyone
else in Athens, thereby admitting that he is
the wisest of all. The Apology is a dramatic
presentation of Socrates’ defense while on
trial for corrupting the youth of Athens by
introducing new beliefs to them; and his
tone towards his accusers and even the jury
is nothing short of condescending. He is
openly insulting towards Meletus, an oth-
erwise respectable Athenian, and is implic-
itly critical of the entire trial, as farcical as
it is. And why should he act otherwise? It is
clear that his true crime is saying what
people do not wish to hear while playing
the innocent naïve. His propensity to do
this is at the heart of what is now aptly called
‘Socratic irony’. Like the eirôn, then, there
is a comical quality to Socrates’ argumen-
tative technique, which was satirized by
comic works such as Aristophanes’ The
Clouds. But Socrates owns his hubris, as well
as his irony. He is conscious of his igno-
rance – in contrast to the Athens of Peri-
cles’ time, whose assuredness can yield
nothing but disappointment.
Socrates’ treatment of mortality and fate
also distinguishes him from the dominant
thinking of Athens. When asked by the
court to suggest a punishment for his
‘crimes’, Socrates recommends that he be
given free meals at public expense in return

for what he views as a public service. This is little more than a
sneering joke, for his fate was all but decided: it would be death.
Yet unlike so many other tragic heroes, for whom death is the
ultimate fear, Socrates fears it not at all. Death is frightening
only to those who expect to live forever; to those who feel enti-
tled to immortality and view death as its thief; to those who have
not truly lived the good life. In fact, Socrates views death as
entirely preferable to the alternative, which is to have to stop
asking those annoying questions, and so to live a life of true and
imposed ignorance. “The unexamined life is not worth living,”
he famously concludes (38a).
During Socrates’ lifetime Athens had lost the vast majority
of its prestige, wealth, power, and moral superiority. The con-
fidence of Pericles could no longer be justified. Athens’ lashing
out against Socrates was symptomatic of an insecure society
faced with a reality incongruous with their historical self-esteem
and a slow decline undeserving of their past glory. Their beliefs
had been forcibly questioned by decades of struggle and suffer-
ing: they had little patience for a condescending vagrant’s fresh
insults. Yet in a final ironic twist of fate, it would be Socrates’
philosophy that would immortalize Athens. Socrates was the
last true Athenian, and for this his fate was a belly full of hem-
lock and a spirit full of wisdom.
Summating History
A classical tragedy consisted of four parts: a valorous beginning
establishing the character’s daring or worthiness; the subse-
quent descent of the hero into folly and hubris; a climactic pun-
ishment befitting their pride; and finally a cathartic finale, enun-
ciating the error of the antagonist’s ways. The oration of Peri-
cles and the outcome of the Peloponnesian War as told by
Thucydides, and the defense of Socrates as told by Plato,
together map perfectly to this narrative schema.
First, Pericles’ oration sets out the assured magnificence of
Athens.
The inner frieze of the Parthenon demonstrates this mag-
nificence well. If Joan Breton Connelly in ‘Parthenon and
Parthenoi’ (American Journal of Archaeology 100.1, 1996) is to
be believed (as she ought to be), part of the frieze depicts the
founding myth of Athens, in which the king Erechtheus and his
wife Praxithea prepare to sacrifice their daughters to save Athens
from war. This act establishes both Athens itself and the city’s
claims to divinely ordained distinction. The myth suggests that
as long as Athenians remember and emulate Eretchtheus’ family
and their sacrifices, they will continue to be looked upon kindly
by the gods. The glory of Athens’ in its founding as presented
in this myth consists in how it is at once honorable and strong-
willed, as well as pious, humble, and self-sacrificing. This is a
highly hubristic design choice, but an unsurprising one, con-
sidering that Pericles himself oversaw the project.
But the very same assuredness of Athens would lead inevitably
to hubris. Athens had enjoyed so much success for so many gen-
erations that it became inconceivable that things could ever be
otherwise. Just as Xerxes and his father were so convinced of
their unstoppable military power, until it was stopped at
Marathon, so too was Pericles beguiled by Athens’ triumphs.
When Athens suffers defeat after defeat in the Peloponnesian
War; when it loses a significant portion of its male population
Greek Wisdom
in a disastrous invasion of Sicily; when its democracy is disman-
tled by its Spartan enemies and a puppet tyranny is installed, the
Athena
punishmentattacks!
of Athens’ pride reaches its climax. All that is left is
for Socrates, a peculiar, misanthropic, gadfly of a man, to put
them in their place and offer us, the audience, a semblance of
catharsis. Socrates’ willing acceptance of his sentence shames
Athens; for where the city implicitly fears its demise, Socrates
accepts his own with dignity, humility, and virtue. In acquiesc-
ing to death, Socrates affirms life – most of all, the examined life.
So what can be taken away from the tragedy that is ancient
Athens? Surely there must be something. After all, modern
Western civilization seems every day to slip further into Peri-
clean hubris, even as the consequences ratchet ever upward.
Thucydides’ cynicism towards human nature predicts as
much. But perhaps Thucydides is correct to doubt humanity’s
ability to overcome our tragic collective propensities. It is no
coincidence that Greek tragedy and its modes remains so
engrained in what is now rapidly becoming a global culture, for
we seem to have learned little from their examples. Yet at the
same time, our ability to capture our less savory habits in art
and science suggests that we, like Socrates, at least stand a chance
of recognizing those limitations in ourselves.
Athens and its democracy disappeared, true; but its values
and philosophies lived on in Rome, Europe, then in North
America, Asia, and beyond. The world never forgot Athens.
Pericles may have been arrogant to a fault, but he was far from
wrong: Athens was a shining city on the hill, a testament to
humanity’s lofty achievements, a beacon of culture in a world
of barbarism. And like a tragic heroine, it slipped all to easily
into greed, hypocrisy, egoism, and pride.
We must learn to appreciate both the Athens described by
Pericles and that chronicled by Thucydides: we must surren-
der to fate as did Erechtheus, and ridicule those who do not, as
did Socrates. The wisdom of the ancients is all that remains of
their civilization, in scraps and fragments though it is. We owe
it to them as much to ourselves to not follow in their footsteps
but instead read the maps of history they left behind.
© ALEX HOLZMAN 2020
Alex Holzman is a former student of philosophy and current staff
member at The College of New Jersey.
February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 19
Greek Wisdom
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20 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020
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 PLATO’S HEAD IN THE CLOUDS BY RON SCHEPPER 2020 YOU CAN CONTACT HIM AT EDITOR@TEXTURA.ORG

February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 21

Greek Wisdom

Gary
Cox
is the author of several
books on existentialism
and general philosophy.
The 10th anniversary
edition of his bestselling
self-help book How to
Be an Existentialist was
published recently.
Gavin Smith
talks with him about
existentialism.
22 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020
You begin your introduction to the anniver-
sary edition by talking about the truths of
existentialism being timeless. But do you
think the heightened anxieties that seem so
prevalent make existentialism especially
relevant now?
To answer your question I need to set
out briefly what the timeless truths of
existentialism are. Basically, they’re the
timeless truths of the human condition.
Specifically, these are that we’re inalien-
ably free in that we are constantly con-
fronted by the requirement to choose
who we are through choosing what we
do. We are responsible for the choices
we make. It is often recognised that
existentialism is a philosophy of free-
dom, less so that it is a philosophy of
responsibility. Our inalienable freedom
makes us anxious. In The Concept of Anxi-
ety (1844), the original existentialist
Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “Anxiety is
the dizziness of freedom”. It is the result
of responsibility. Fear is the possibility
that I might fall; anxiety is that there is
nothing to stop me from jumping.
At any given moment, we are indeter-
minate in the sense that we are no
longer what we were and not yet what
we hope to become through our cur-
rent actions. We always lack in the pre-
sent what we hope to gain in the future.
This lack is the basis of desire.
We are embodied. We seek to tran-
scend and surpass what we are now
through our actions but we can never
transcend our bodies. The body is an
ever-present set of facts – a ‘facticity’, as
Sartre calls it – that challenges us, limits
our freedom, presents possibilities, lets
us down. We are also constantly con-
fronted by the existence of other people
as beings that constantly look at and
judge us: we have a being-for-others that
is a key part of who we are. We are con-
tingent in that our existence is not nec-
essary. That we need not be, renders
our existence absurd, and life has no
other meaning than the one we choose
to give it. Moreover, each moment of
our life is defined by our mortality, by
the fact that life is a finite project. Our
death is ‘our ownmost possibility’:
nobody else can die your death for you.
It’s a grim list for sure, but to seek to
fool yourself that life is not governed by
these truths is to be inauthentic, is to
live in bad faith. Bad faith is basically
acting as though one has no choice, as
though one’s life is on rails, or general-
ly, exercising one’s freedom negatively
to deny or stifle it. It’s choosing not to
choose. We are all guilty of bad faith to
some extent. It’s difficult to entirely
avoid, and maybe it has practical uses;
but to overcome bad faith and fully
recognise in one’s thought and actions
that one is inescapably free, not a fixed
entity like a chair or a stone but the
growing sum total of one’s ongoing
choices, is to achieve the existentialist
holy grail of authenticity.
So the main focus of the book is to
show how a worthwhile life is possible
in the teeth of the inescapable truths of
the human condition. And existentialism
is always highly relevant because these
truths, our all-too-human lot, remain
the case at all times and in all places.
Given that existentialism is always maxi-
mally relevant, it cannot be more rele-
vant at one time than another. But
although it is not especially relevant now,
it is highly relevant now.
If this is an age of heightened anxiety,
it is not because there is more to be anx-
ious about now than in the past. Perhaps
we simply hear more about anxiety
because of social media, and our
increased awareness of it creates the
impression that there is more of it
about. But a huge fuss is made about
anxiety these days to the extent that it
has become fetishized. Certainly there is
a trend, largely due to an exponential
growth in the number of ‘support’ pro-
fessionals of all kinds, towards treating
any level of anxiety as a medical prob-
lem, when fundamentally, anxiety is part
and parcel of what it is to be human. I
worry about global warming; my par-
ents worried about nuclear holocaust;
their parents worried about TB. For
most people, certainly in the developed
world, modern technology has eliminat-
ed the worries caused by a hand-to-
mouth existence, but we all still have to
contend with the existential issues of
other people, risk, ageing, and death.
And still above all it is the responsibility
of our freedom that makes us anxious,
not the world itself. We will always be
anxious because we will always be free.
What else can existentialism teach us about
the world of social media?
If existentialism is about getting real,
then the first thing it teaches us about
social media is that we cannot wish it
away, that most of us cannot entirely
escape it and its many challenges, that it
must therefore be dealt with. Existen-
tialists talk about recognising our being-
in-situation – recognising our reality for
what it is and dealing with it positively
rather than wishing we were someone
else somewhere else. Social media now
definitely belongs to our being-in-situa-
Interview

tion. Existentialism also has much to
say about the phenomenon of being-
for-others: how part of what we are is
unavoidably shaped and influenced by
other people and the opinions they
form of us – opinions we cannot con-
trol. An understanding of our being-
for-others as part of the human psyche
sheds light on why we find social media
so attractive, addictive, and troubling.
Thus it provides a useful guide to how
social media is best dealt with: how best
to behave when using it to maximise
pleasure and opportunity while min-
imising anxiety and paranoia. Sartre
famously wrote, “There is no need for
red-hot pokers. Hell is other people!”
(In Camera, 1944). Yet surely, other
people – even people on social media –
can often also be heaven, if dealt with in
the right way.
Given that existentialist themes were
addressed by the Greeks two and a half mil-
lenia ago, is it not reasonable to argue that
existentialism is an exploration of themes
that have always existed?
As you say, what might be broadly
called ‘existentialist themes’ have been
around for thousands of years. The list
of timeless existential truths I just gave
clearly shows that much of existential-
ism is really a matter of taking an hon-
est and courageous look at the funda-
mentals of the human condition. The
ancient Greek philosophers were bound
to draw many of the same broad con-
clusions about human reality as philoso-
phers draw today; as Shakespeare drew
in his day; as future thinkers will draw
in their day. If existentialism as a specif-
ic relatively modern philosophical
school did anything original, it was to
systematically explain the existential
truths of human reality, our being-in-
the-world, as a coherent whole – not
least by employing many of the best
ideas relating to the nature of con-
sciousness and freedom that had accu-
mulated in Western philosophy by the
nineteenth century. This comprehen-
sive holism is seen in such major exis-
tentialist works as Heidegger’s Being
and Time (1927), Sartre’s Being and
Nothingness (1943), and de Beauvoir’s
Ethics of Ambiguity (1947).
Is it hard to free existentialism from the
myths and images of post-war Left Bank
Paris?
On one level existentialism is intimate-
ly bound up with wartime and post-war
Paris because several of the major exis-
tentialist philosophers – Sartre, de
Interview
Interview
Beauvoir, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty
– coexisted in that time and place and
were profoundly shaped by it. I sought
to capture that time and place, and the
philosophy, literature and art it
inspired, in my biography of Sartre,
Existentialism and Excess (2016). For
some, existentialism is synonymous
with the romance and eroticism of that
era, its heady intellectual atmosphere
supercharged by the backdrop of a war-
torn Europe. However, given that exis-
tentialism is a philosophy for all time,
it need not be associated with that era.
Perhaps an excessive association with
that era wrongly leads some to suppose
that existentialism was merely a philos-
ophy of that time, a fad that it is now
well past its sell-by-date, which is not
true. Nazi-occupied Paris may have
provided the existentialist philosophers
who endured it with dramatic illustra-
tions of their philosophical points –
Sartre for example was exercised by the
choice between cowardice and courage
in the face of torture – but absolutely
any time or place will provide illustra-
tions to support existentialist claims.
Moreover, although Sartre thought
that existentialism should and could be
synthesised with Marxism, it is not at
all certain that it is a particularly left-
wing philosophy. Existentialist argu-
ments can also be used to support
broadly so-called centre-right views
concerning individualism, personal
aspiration, personal responsibility, self-
reliance, limited altruism, and our
oversensitive blame and excuse culture.
Certainly, How to Be an Existentialist
has been criticised by some and praised
by others for lacking the arguably
excessive sympathy bordering on
mawkishness that to some extent char-
acterises the modern left. I leave people
to make up their own minds by actually
reading the book.
So, yes, it is hard to free existential-
ism from the myths, images, and even
politics of Left Bank Paris, but not
impossible. Existentialism can be pre-
sented as a coherent and useful philoso-
phy without mentioning war-torn Paris,
Parisian intellectuals, or even Parisian
cafés.
Will the bleak realism of existentialism
ever replace the comfort offered by religion,
whether traditional or New Age?
Many religious people are simply not
willing to go out of their comfort zone
to contemplate the stark, mostly atheis-
tic realism of existentialism. Indeed the
church has actively discouraged them
February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 23
from doing so by
preaching that exis-
tentialism is a heresy,
which of course from the
point of view of orthodox
religion, it is. In 1948 the Catholic
Church added Sartre’s complete works
– even those not yet written – to its list
of forbidden books.
Existentialism is not for the faint-
hearted. Not all existentialism is atheis-
tic, but most of it is, and as Sartre said
in his autobiography, Words (1963),
“Atheism is a cruel, long-term business”
(p. 157). Existentialism is for people
who demand the truth however dark
and uncompromising that truth may be.
It is often thought that, because it
dwells on harsh realities – anxiety,
absurdity, death, and so on – existen-
tialism is a pessimistic, nihilistic philos-
ophy, but this is to profoundly misun-
derstand it. How to Be an Existentialist
seeks to show how it is possible to live a
worthwhile and rewarding life on the
basis of a full recognition of the tough
existential truths. If religion is often
about wishing, then existentialism is
about willing. It is about getting real
and acting decisively towards reason-
able, worldly goals. As I wrote in the
book, “You have to build your life on an
understanding and acceptance of how
things really are, otherwise you will
always be fooling and deluding yourself
as you hanker after impossibilities like
complete happiness and total fulfilment.
Ironically, existentialism is saying, if
you want to be happy, or at least be
happier, stop struggling to achieve
complete happiness because that way
only leads to disappointment.”
Existentialism is not in the business
of replacing religion. Unlike religion,
existentialism does not tell people how
to live, what to eat, what to wear, who
to marry. It instead urges people to
recognise that they and others are
inalienably free, and to embrace their
freedom in a positive, courageous, and
moral way rather than act in bad faith
and deny their freedom. The most
rewarding thing for me about writing
How to Be an Existentialist is the wealth
of correspondence I have received over
the past decade from people who tell
me it has helped them to find or recov-
er their self-esteem, to confront reality,
and to get their life together. PN
• Gavin Smith is a novelist and an English
lecturer for the Open University. He
received his PhD from the University of
Exeter in 2010.
 An Essay on Nothing
Sophia Gottfried meditates on the emptiness of non-existence.
I
n philosophy there is a lot of emphasis on what exists. We
call this ontology, which means, the study of being. What is
less often examined is what does not exist.
It is understandable that we focus on what exists, as its
effects are perhaps more visible. However, gaps or non-exis-
tence can also quite clearly have an impact on us in a number
of ways. After all, death, often dreaded and feared, is merely the
lack of existence in this world (unless you believe in ghosts). We
are affected also by living people who are not there, objects that
are not in our lives, and knowledge we never grasp.
Upon further contemplation, this seems quite odd and raises
many questions. How can things that do not exist have such
bearing upon our lives? Does nothing have a type of existence all
of its own? And how do we start our inquiry into things we can’t
interact with directly because they’re not there? When one
opens a box, and exclaims “There is nothing inside it!”, is that dif-
ferent from a real emptiness or nothingness? Why is nothing-
ness such a hard concept for philosophy to conceptualize?
Let us delve into our proposed box, and think inside it a little.
When someone opens an empty box, they do not literally find it
devoid of any sort of being at all, since there is still air, light, and
possibly dust present. So the box is not truly empty. Rather, the
word ‘empty’ here is used in conjunction with a prior assump-
tion. Boxes were meant to hold things, not to just exist on their
own. Inside they might have a present; an old family relic; a
pizza; or maybe even another box. Since boxes have this pur-
pose of containing things ascribed to them, there is always an
expectation there will be something in a box. Therefore, this sit-
uation of nothingness arises from our expectations, or from our
being accustomed. The same is true of statements such as
“There is no one on this chair.” But if someone said, “There is no
one on this blender”, they might get some odd looks. This is
because a chair is understood as something that holds people,
whereas a blender most likely not.
The same effect of expectation and corresponding absence
arises with death. We do not often mourn people we only might
have met; but we do mourn those we have known. This pain
stems from expecting a presence and having none. Even people
who have not experienced the presence of someone them-
selves can still feel their absence due to an expectation being
confounded. Children who lose one or both of their parents
early in life often feel that lack of being through the influence of
the culturally usual idea of a family. Just as we have cultural
notions about the box or chair, there is a standard idea of a
nuclear family, containing two parents, and an absence can be
noted even by those who have never known their parents.
This first type of nothingness I call ‘perceptive nothingness’.
This nothingness is a negation of expectation: expecting some-
thing and being denied that expectation by reality. It is con-
24 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020
structed by the individual human mind, frequently through
comparison with a socially constructed concept.
Pure nothingness, on the other hand, does not contain any-
thing at all: no air, no light, no dust. We cannot experience it
with our senses, but we can conceive it with the mind. Possibly,
this sort of absolute nothing might have existed before our uni-
verse sprang into being. Or can something not arise from noth-
ing? In which case, pure nothing can never have existed.
If we can for a moment talk in terms of a place devoid of all
being, this would contain nothing in its pure form. But that
raises the question, Can a space contain nothing; or, if there is
space, is that not a form of existence in itself?
This question brings to mind what’s so baffling about noth-
ing: it cannot exist. If nothing existed, it would be something. So
nothing, by definition, is not able to ‘be’.
Is absolute nothing possible, then? Perhaps not. Perhaps for
example we need something to define nothing; and if there is
something, then there is not absolutely nothing. What’s more,
if there were truly nothing, it would be impossible to define it.
The world would not be conscious of this nothingness. Only
because there is a world filled with Being can we imagine a dull
and empty one. Nothingness arises from Somethingness, then:
without being to compare it to, nothingness has no existence.
Once again, pure nothingness has shown itself to be negation.
A world where there is nothing is just an empty shell, you
might reply; but the shell itself exists, is something. And even
if there were no matter, arguably space could still exist, so
could time; and these are not nothing.
Someday we may come face to face with pure space, that is
a nothingness waiting to be filled. Possibly, when scientists find
a way to safely pilot spaceships into black holes, or are able to
create a pure vacuum, we will be forced to look straight into the
void. But even if that really is nothing, by entering into that
nothingness, humans will destroy it by filling it. Or perhaps we
will be consumed by it and all traces left of our existence will
be erased.
Death, the ultimate void for humans, makes people uneasy
for obvious reasons: all that they are will be forever reduced to
a blank space felt only by loved ones, and even that absence
will be forgotten someday. However, let us not steer away from
these questions about nothingness, even if they may take us to
bleak places. When one looks a little closer at the big questions,
even though it may seem contradictory, nothingness appears
everywhere. And if we want to learn how something came
from nothing, or if there ever was nothing, we can not shy away
from looking into the scary void a little closer.
© SOPHIA GOTTFRIED 2020
Sophia Gottfried is the philosophy club president at the Harker
School in San Jose.
 The Democracy of Suffering
Life on the Edge of Catastrophe,
Philosophy in the Anthropocene
Todd Dufresne

Rethinking Humanity
in the Twenty-First Century

Dog’s Best Friend?

Rethinking Canid-Human
Relations
Edited by John Sorenson
and Atsuko Matsuoka

Wish I Were Here

Boredom and the Interface
Mark Kingwell

Zoo Studies
A New Humanities
Edited by Tracy McDonald
and Daniel Vandersommers

McGill-Queen’s University Press

mqup.ca
Follow us on Facebook and Twitter @McGillQueensUP
Francis Fukuyama
& the Perils of Identity
Peter Benson critiques a liberal but nationalistic brand of identity politics.
he American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama
T is still best known for his 1992 book The End of His-
tory and the Last Man. It was written in response to
the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent col-
lapse of the Soviet Union. Those events, he contended, consti-
tuted the triumph of liberalism, democracy, and capitalism over
the alternative social model provided by communist totalitari-
anism. “For a very large part of the world,” he wrote, “there is
now no ideology with pretensions to universality that is in a posi-
tion to challenge liberal democracy” (p.45). From today’s per-
spective, this triumph seems a good deal less definitive. Various
forms of totalitarianism remain alive and well: in China, North
Korea, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. And the rise of populist
politicians in the West has placed strains on the continuance of
recognizable liberal democracy. Fukuyama’s latest book, Iden-
tity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition
(2018), was written as a reaction to the unexpected election of
Donald Trump. Like many people, Fukuyama feels troubled by
the fact that a liberal democratic society could elect as its leader
a man so notably opposed to liberal values and often openly con-
temptuous of democratic processes. How could this happen?
What does it tell us about our world?
Curiously enough, Trump had already been mentioned
briefly in The End of History (on p.328). At that time, he was
merely a well-known tycoon in the building trade, and
Fukuyama referred to him as a representative example of driv-
ing ambition. Fukuyama’s concern was whether a stable liberal
democracy could provide adequate satisfactions for such hugely
ambitious people. Clearly, for Trump, the mere acquisition of
large amounts of money did not in the end fully gratify his striv-
ing for success, which drove him on into the political sphere.
Fukuyama uses the Greek word thymos for this ambitious drive.
He takes it to be a universal feature of humanity, to which any
possible social order will need to accommodate itself. He derives
this idea in part from his interpretation of Plato’s tripartite divi-
sion of the human soul in Book IV of Republic. According to Plato
the three parts are Reason, Desire, and Thymos. This last word
unfortunately does not have any very exact English equivalent,
but combines notions of drive, ambition, spiritedness, courage,
and determination. Fukuyama’s use of the term, however,
includes in addition a characteristic not present in Plato’s descrip-
tion, a desire for public recognition. Here Fukuyama blends ideas
from Plato with those of Hegel, who is a more central and defin-
ing influence on Fukuyama’s thought. The desire for recogni-
tion by another is the central motivation propelling the dialectic
of the master and bondsman in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
(1807), and so propelling history itself, and it underpins many
aspects of Hegel’s account of history. But Plato’s understanding
of thymos did not acknowledge a need for public recognition. It
26 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020
is easy to see this if one thinks of Socrates, presented by Plato as
an embodiment of humanity at its best – a role model, as we might
say. Far from recognizing and rewarding his qualities, his own
society sentenced him to death, for the alleged crime of encour-
aging the youth of Athens to think for themselves. Socrates’ unruf-
fled acceptance of his condemnation exemplifies thymos in Plato’s
sense of the term – courage, steadfastness – whilst displaying a
notable indifference to the opinion of others, and a freedom from
any craving for their recognition. So Fukuyama is wrong in assert-
IDENTITY POLITICS BY CAMERON GRAY 2020. PLEASE VISIT PARABLEVISIONS.COM AND FACEBOOK.COM/CAMERONGRAYTHEARTIST
ing that “Plato’s thymos is… nothing other than the psychologi-
cal seat of Hegel’s desire for recognition” (End of History, p.165),
concluding that “thymos typically, but not inevitably, drives men
to seek recognition” (p.166). Fukuyama subsequently gives no
serious consideration to the human capacity to reject the need for
recognition. Instead, he judges that thymos (in his sense) “is the
seat of today’s identity politics” (Identity, p.18) – which politics
are indeed notable for their insistent demands for recognition.
The History of Identity
Pursuing further his enquiry into the factors that have led to
our contemporary notion of personal identity, Fukuyama offers
the following account of the relevant historical developments:
“The modern concept of identity unites three different perspec-
tives. The first is thymos, a universal aspect of human personal-
ity that craves recognition. The second is the distinction between
the inner and outer self, and the raising of the moral valuation
of the inner self over outer society. This emerged only in early
modern Europe [with Luther’s Reformation of Christianity].
The third is an evolving concept of dignity, in which recogni-
tion is due not just to a narrow class of people, but to everyone”
(Identity, p.37). He then subjects the second of these factors to
the same kind of modification he performed on thymos: “In
modern times the view has taken hold that the authentic inner
self is intrinsically valuable… The inner self is the basis of human
dignity… [But] the inner sense of dignity seeks recognition. It
is not enough if I have a sense of my own worth if other people
do not publicly acknowledge it… Self-esteem arises out of esteem
by others” (p.10, my emphasis). If this last statement were true
in any significant sense there could never be a fundamental con-
flict between our inner and outer selves, because our own valu-
ation of our characteristics would always be an internalisation
of our evaluation by others. Society, not individuals, would then
be the only source of values. Fukuyama concludes, “Because
human beings naturally crave recognition, the modern sense of
identity evolves quickly into identity politics, in which individ-
uals demand public recognition of their worth” (p.10).
The alleged reasons for the expansion of identity into the
political sphere are clarified by the third of Fukuyama’s postu-
lated origins for the modern concept of ‘identity’; the extension
February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 27
of the idea that some people are due recognition from some people,
to the idea that all people are due recognition from all people, so
that, for example, human rights become applied universally. This
is universal legal recognition.
Fukuyama closely follows Hegel in regarding the right to uni-
versal recognition as having been announced in principle in the
French Revolutionaries’ 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen. Subsequent history has then been an uneven process of
actualizing this project. But Fukuyama also notes a later bifurca-
tion in this demand for universal human rights – a split between
the original aim of giving the same rights to every individual and
the specific pleas made for the rights of different groups of people.
Over time a conflict arises between these two projects. Fukuyama
is at his best in elucidating this division.
In the abstract it may not seem obvious that any conflict could
arise from such closely-related goals, but in practice the distinc-
tion can become very evident. Fukuyama gives an illuminating
example from the politics of race in the US from the time of the
civil rights movement of the 1960s to the present day. He com-
ments on p.107, “The early civil rights movement of Dr Martin
Luther King Jr simply demanded that American society treat
black people the way it treated white people.” Later groups, how-
ever, argued that “the authentic inner selves of black Americans
were not those of white people, but were shaped by the unique
experiences of growing up black in a hostile white society.” In
this way, “each marginalized group had a choice… It could
demand that society treat its members identically to the way that
the dominant groups in society were treated, or it could assert a
separate identity for its members and demand respect for them
as different from the mainstream society. Over time, the latter
strategy tended to win out.” Similar splits emerged from the self-
assertion of other ethnic minorities, in feminism, and in the cam-
paign for gay rights.
The ideology of ‘multiculturalism’ arose as a reaction to these
demands. About this Fukuyama writes with acute insight:
“Multiculturalism was a description of societies that were de facto diverse.
But it also became a label for a political program that sought to value
each separate culture… equally… While classical liberalism sought to
protect the autonomy of equal individuals, the new ideology of multi-
culturalism promoted equal respect for cultures, even if those cultures
abridged the autonomy of the individuals who participated in them.”
(p.111, my emphases).
Identity Today
More generally, ‘Identity Politics’ has become one of the most
distinctive features of contemporary political debate. It has dis-
placed more traditional areas of political disagreement, such as
over economic policies, and has contributed to a fractious ideo-
logical landscape with little sense of consensus. On the Left, a
historical concern for the working class has been overtaken by
responses to more specific oppressions suffered as a result of race,
gender, sexual orientation, etc. On the Right, a resurgent sense
of national identity has risen in reaction to the globalisation pro-
pelled by capitalism.
This is the historical juncture at which we now stand. It has
little resemblance to any imagined ‘end of history’. Any thoughts
we now have about endings tend to revolve around an approach-
28 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020
ing climatic apocalypse which will leave all of us in the same
sinking boat. Otherwise, unresolvable conflicts between mutu-
ally exclusive viewpoints dominate the political landscape. This
is how as divisive a figure as Trump could become US Presi-
dent – with the votes almost equally divided for and against him.
A similarly almost equal division of views has propelled Britain
into Brexit chaos.
In this context Fukuyama understandably feels the need not
merely to describe our situation but to ask ‘What is to be Done?’,
which is the title of his last chapter. Unfortunately, I find his
proposals here both dispiriting and unconvincing. “We cannot
get away from identity or identity politics,” he writes (p.163)
because “identity builds on the universal human psychology of
thymos.” I have already questioned whether thymos in his sense
is really as universal as he thinks. He goes on, “But if the logic
of identity politics is to divide societies into ever smaller, self-
regarding groups, it is also possible to create identities that are
broader and more integrative” (pp.165-6).
His major vehicle for integrative identity is nationhood: “We
need to promote creedal national identities built around the
foundational ideas of modern liberal democracy” (p.166). By
‘creedal’ he means the central values and principles of each par-
ticular nation state. So he is promoting nationalism as a cure for
the ills of identity politics – one of which ills, by his own admis-
sion, is the resurgence of nationalism itself! Those of us who
have experienced the various angry phases of current political
events may well feel that passionate nationalism is more likely
to be divisive rather than unifying. In the book’s final lines
Fukuyama concludes: “Identity can be used to divide, but it can
and has also been used to integrate. That in the end will be the
remedy for the populist politics of the present” (p.183). So his
suggested cure for the problems of identity would be a higher
identity. But which features most characterize a nation (its
‘creedal commitments’) are rarely readily agreed upon by all its
citizens. Hence assertions of national identity cause splits even
within the nation itself, let alone between that nation and others.
Identity & Ideals
Liberalism is intended to offer an alternative to fractious cul-
tural splits.The characteristic feature of a liberal society has
been best expounded by the American philosopher John Rawls,
as the ability of people with radically different conceptions of
the Good to live together – not in a state of agreement, but
without hostility. Thus, the liberal state must remain neutral
with respect to these divergent views. (It follows that participa-
tion in the civil life of the state cannot be founded on one or
more specific identity.)
As Fukuyama recognizes, our democracies can only survive
on the basis of this pluralistic liberalism – which current iden-
tity politics tend to undermine. Without a pluralistic basis,
democracy becomes the tyranny of the majority – with ‘major-
ity’ given a purely mathematical definition electorally. So I am
highly sceptical of Fukuyama’s advocacy of a renewed nation-
alism – which he supplements with a call for compulsory
National Service (civil or military) as an aid to integration. This
would be a very unlikely policy to be widely accepted in either
the US or the UK.
It would seem to me more useful to study the mutations already
taking place within our concept of identity, which is itself a far
more recent notion than Fukuyama seems to realize. The first
use of the word ‘identity’ in this current sense quoted by the
Oxford English Dictionary only dates from 2005. This suggests that
the concept is not, in fact, as deep rooted in Western thinking as
Fukuyama believes, but is a relatively recent mode of self-descrip-
tion, and one which is already beginning to take new forms within
the political discourses it has enabled. I am thinking particularly
of the formulation “to identify as [a member of a particular
group]”. The addition of the simple word ‘as’ shifts identity from
a given to a choice. It refers to an identity as willingly assumed
rather than imposed from without. This linguistic use has been
particularly prominent in recent years among LGBT people.
Indeed the ‘T’ of this acronym (for ‘transsexual’) designates people
whose bodies might appear to assign them as one gender but who
self-identify as another. An even more common designation is
LGBT+, the ‘+’ indicating the inclusion of all additional possi-
bilities, either known or yet to be discovered. A few brave souls
have already begun to claim that they identify as ‘+’: the opening
to unspecified possibilities. Needless to say, this is controversial,
and divisions of outlook have formed around whether one thinks
of oneself as born with a certain sexuality or as discovering differ-
ent options. But my concern is with the developments in our ter-
minology that allow possibilities to be envisaged that were previ-
ously unimaginable because unnamed.
The Future of Identity
It is a feature of human beings that the way we think about our-
selves can change the kind of selves we are.
There is a history to the various concepts that humans have
used to describe themselves. This indicates not merely a suc-
cession of different theories about human nature, but also a
series of different ways that life has been experienced and lived
by people. In medieval times, a person might typically have
thought of themselves as a pilgrim soul, seeking the path towards
their heavenly reward. In the twentieth century, many people
sought to balance within themselves the conflicting claims of
ego, superego, and id, as propounded in Freud’s picture of
humanity (with its obvious echoes of Plato). Our current, indeed
very recent notion, is of overlapping identities – of social roles
both imposed on us and accepted by us as constitutive of our
subjectivity. This is a sociological notion of the self. The con-
cept of ‘social identity’ was introduced into sociological theory
in the 1950s. Such a concept lacks any criterion of individual-
ity: for in each of these categories one is by definition a member
of a specified group. Hence in this theory our identities are
always collective, not individual.
Here we must return to the important historical split
Fukuyama discusses between thinking in terms of universal indi-
vidual rights or in terms of group rights. Universal rights treat
every individual as separate and equal. Group rights, on the other
hand, treat people as members of specific collectives. The con-
cept of the Universal thus paradoxically becomes closely allied
with the notion of the Individual. Group identities, on the other
hand, can never generate a sense of universality, because any
group is always defined by a barrier separating ‘us’ from ‘them’.
To move beyond this viewpoint would be to recognize “There
is no us and them, there is only us” , as Ali Smith beautifully puts
it in her novel Winter (2017).
The major crises facing the world today, such as global warm-
ing, cannot even begin to be tackled unless we take a universal,
non-partisan, perspective. Some countries are going to be more
severely affected by the changing climate than others, and far
sooner. Yet if our automatic assumption is that it will affect others
but perhaps not us, our approach will inevitably lack the neces-
sary urgency. For this reason, Fukuyama’s prescription of a
renewed sense of national identity is the last thing we need.
Almost every political problem in today’s world results from per-
ceived divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ based on group loyalties
which are bolstered by modern notions of identity. Only when
we stop having identities in the group-defined sense can we return
to being individuals.
It was on the idea of humans as separate individuals that liberal
political theory was originally established. In our divisive times these
are the only acceptable grounds on which liberal democracy, with
its many advantages, can stand. The numbing possibilities of total-
itarian alternatives, fascist, religious fundamentalist, or ethnic,
should alert us to the dangers if this mode of society – apparently
so successful until recently – should collapse.
As I’ve suggested, some people are beginning to think of their
identities as self-chosen rather than determined by nature or his-
tory. This is a sign that the concept of identity as elucidated by
Fukuyama, as being defined by society, is already beginning to
disintegrate, making space for new ways of thinking about our-
selves and our relations to others. Now when someone says,
“That’s part of my identity; it’s a central component of my sense
of self!” they’re not reporting a fact in the objectively observable
sense, but rather giving an interpretation of their life. It’s a his-
torically specific conception of human selfhood. There have been
in the past, and will be in the future, alternative ways of thinking
about our selves. In Sartre’s existentialism, for example, the cen-
tral characteristic of human life is freedom, and any of our choices
for self-identification could only be pasted over this ineradicable
freedom. A fixed or ‘essential’ identity is ruled out by his theory.
In Buddhist meditation, an important practice involves detaching
oneself from each category of identification we possess (gender,
age, race, even being a Buddhist) in order to reach the unencum-
bered consciousness lying behind all these veils. Maybe if we could
do that in our lives, some of our conflicts with others would evap-
orate. The politics of identity, on the other hand, can only multi-
ply conflicts and divisions.
Finally let us return to the figure of Socrates as the exemplary
embodiment of Platonic thymos. What kind of identity did he have?
Plato’s dialogues make it clear that it was never Socrates, but rather
his interlocutors, who had definite ideas about who they were, what
they believed, and where their allegiances lay. Socrates, on the
other hand, took on the role of asking questions about their assumed
certainties, thereby undermining their complacency. His provoca-
tions put their allegiances into flux, and people would feel their
senses of identity quivering and becoming insubstantial. This, I
would suggest, is the very role that philosophy should still play in
contemporary disputes about identity.
© PETER BENSON 2020
Peter Benson would prefer not to be defined by such identities as ‘philoso-
phy graduate’; ‘regular contributor to Philosophy Now’; ‘devoted fan
of Miley Cyrus’; and other such contingent facts about his life.
February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 29
 How To Change Your Mind
Steven Campbell-Harris tells us how philosophy can change thinking.
id you know that the Dalai Lama is afraid of cater-
D pillars? Have you heard that the first passport hold-
ers had to give written descriptions of themselves
instead of photos?
If you are like most people, reading these facts from 1342 QI
Facts To Leave You Flabbergasted has changed your mind. Granted,
you haven’t had to upturn your worldview and reexamine every-
thing you thought you knew. Nonetheless your perception of
passports and of the Dalai Lama ever so slightly altered. We
might call this the adaptation model of changing our mind; we
reshape our beliefs in the light of new information.
However, we don’t only change our minds in this way. As
the Dalai Lama himself put it, change also comes from within.
Take the following statement. Would you agree with it? ‘You
can be a good person and have friends’. If you do, consider this
quote from the French Enlightenment statesman and philoso-
pher Montesquieu, “a truly virtuous man would come to the
aid of the most distant stranger as quickly as to his own friend.
If men were truly virtuous, they wouldn’t have friends” (Pen-
sées et Fragments inédits de Montesquieu, I). Montesquieu doesn’t
try to persuade us that friendship is morally problematic by pre-
senting new information about the world. Instead, he appeals
to a principle of impartiality that many of us already share, leav-
ing us to carry on the work of persuasion by ourselves. Are
friends more deserving of our help than strangers? If not, why
should we assist them more? As we question ourselves, we might
think differently about the original statement.
Practitioners of the Japanese martial art Ju-Jitsu are trained
to use an opponent’s energy against them instead of directly
opposing it with their own force. Montesquieu appears to be
doing something similar here; practicing a kind of argumenta-
CONTACT HIM AT JONNYHAWKINS2NZ@YAHOO.COM
CARTOON © JONNY HAWKINS 2020
30 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020
tive Ju-Jitsu. He tries to awaken a dormant belief in us, then
steps back and allows the force of our own beliefs to work against
us. This technique for argument doesn’t apply exclusively to
matters of morality. For example, the following belief is quite
common: ‘The present exists’.
The argument below aims to refute this claim:
1. If the present is of any length, some of it will be in the past
and some will be in the future
2. But the present can’t be in the past or the future, by definition
3. So, the present can’t have length
4. But if the present can’t have length, the present can’t exist
Once again, this argument presents no new data or informa-
tion. Instead, beliefs we already hold (consciously or not) such
as ‘the present moment has some duration’ and ‘the present can’t
be in the past’ are tested against each other to see if they make
sense. If we are to change our minds as a result, it will come
from an acknowledgement that what we thought we knew is
more problematic than we had anticipated. Our present self is
aghast at the complacency of our past self.
Thinking in Crisis
When I teach philosophy in schools I often see children chang-
ing their minds in this way. Throughout the enquiry they become
clearer about the principles to which they are already committed
and notice apparent conflicts with them. There the work of phi-
losophy begins, with greater self-knowledge and the drive for
consistency.
The English historian and philosopher R.G. Collingwood
once claimed that philosophy “does not, like exact or empirical
science, bring us to know things of which we were simply igno-
rant, but brings us to know in a different way things which we
already knew in some way” (An Essay on Philosophical Method,
1933, p.161). Collingwood is right to say that the work of phi-
losophy is to shed new light on old beliefs: by seeing something
familiar in an unfamiliar way we can relearn it. However, he
doesn’t adequately address the sense of confusion that follows
this. Philosophy is thinking in crisis. When we revisit our beliefs
we find ourselves stuck, imperilled, lost. We need a way out.
Many of the classic problems of philosophy come from jux-
taposing different beliefs. I believe both that ‘the River Thames
today is the same River Thames from last year’ and that ‘the
water in the Thames is always changing’. But if the water in it
has all changed, in what sense is it the same river? I am told that
‘time and space began with the Big Bang’, but also believe that
the claim that ‘time began’ is paradoxical because for something
to begin presupposes time. So must time therefore be eternal?
These and other problems of philosophy are spring cleaning
for the mind. Perhaps this is why the Austrian philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein described philosophy as “a work on one-
self, on one’s own interpretation, way of looking at things” (Cul-
 Philosophical Haiku
ture and Value, 1970, p.16). Interpersonal disagreement, or dis-
agreement between people, is incidental. The real work is in
resolving our intrapersonal disagreements: our disagreements
with ourselves. Socrates concurred, “It would be better for me…
that multitudes of men should disagree with me than that I,

PORTRAIT © CLINTON INMAN 2020 FACEBOOK HIM AT CLINTON.INMAN

being one, should be out of harmony with myself” (Gorgias,
482c). The ‘being one’ in Socrates’ statement is both aspira-
tional and declarative. We are a hodgepodge of different desires,
thoughts, and feelings, and yet somehow aim to present our-
selves as, and to be, one person. Part of the goal of philosophi-
cal thought is to reconcile our many views into a coherent whole
and so act and be as one in the world.

Motivations for Self-Examination

When we recognise an inconsistency in our beliefs we may find
this irresistible to puzzle over. The possibilities on offer can
elicit a childlike wonder. The feeling is akin to that described
by Arthur C. Clarke who, in contemplating the possibility of
alien life, wrote “two possibilities exist: either we are alone in
the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying” (quoted
in Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the Twenty-First Cen-
tury, 1999, p.295). We can be drawn to philosophy by a sense
that the different possible answers on the Big Questions are
equally compelling, terrifying, and awe-inspiring. Questions
such as: Do we have free will or not? Are there moral facts? Is
time an illusion? Regardless of the answers we reach, they will
have a profound impact on how we think about the world.
HERACLITUS
Nevertheless, we may feel this sense of wonder and deep
intrigue when considering philosophical possibilities and still not (c.535-475 BCE)
be moved to investigate. We may instead choose to stay in a state Speak not, but say much
of detached perplexity, not seeking any resolution. This was the Eternal change is constant:
avowed goal of the school of Pyrrhonian scepticism founded by Nothing understood.
Pyrrho of Ellis (c.360-c.270 BCE). According to the Pyrrhon-
ists, when we are pulled in different directions by our beliefs or

reason or evidence, we should choose to stay in a state of sus-
pended judgment. When we are not committed to anything, we
don’t have to be defensive about our beliefs and we can be even-
keeled and non-dogmatic in our dealings with others. This way
we can achieve a freedom from mental disturbance (ataraxia in
Greek). The suspension of the desire for truth can set you free!
While the Pyrrhonian way may be tempting, for many it
amounts to an evasion of responsibility. We shouldn’t prema-
turely decide that some matters will never be settled. They might
not be; but the only way to put this daily to the test is by con-
tinuing to strive for maximum coherence from our beliefs and
the evidence.
In the end, then, it seems we are left with a fundamental
choice. Either we can leave this potential disharmony with our
beliefs alone by ignoring it or developing a deep skepticism for
the truth; or we may find that these conflicts prompt a quest
for invention and a desire for new ways of viewing the world
and ourselves. In the process of destroying old beliefs, the hope
is that something more durable will emerge. And along the way,
we might just change our minds.
© STEVEN CAMPBELL-HARRIS 2020
Steven Campbell-Harris is a philosophy specialist and teacher trainer
at the Philosophy Foundation, an award-winning charity that brings
philosophy to schools and the wider community.
H
eraclitus had a pretty dim view of humanity; so much so that he
spent a great deal of time crying over it. For this reason he is some-
times referred to as ‘the Weeping Philosopher’. One assumes he
was not invited to many symposia (symposium literally means a ‘drinks
party’). Heraclitus was also known as ‘the Obscure’, because he enjoyed
writing in an incomprehensible fashion. Phrases such as ‘Souls have a
sense of smell in Hades’ don’t readily lend themselves to clear interpre-
tation, although it is possible he simply meant it as a literal observation. It
is surely no coincidence that three of the most incomprehensible philoso-
phers of the modern age – Hegel, Heidegger and Wittgenstein – all
(metaphorically) had posters of Heraclitus on their walls.
Heraclitus believed that people were sleeping-walking through their
lives, when what was needed was careful introspection. To this end he
states, “I went looking for myself.” It is not known if he found himself;
but he did conclude that the defining feature of existence is change –
‘everything is in flux’ (panta rhei)– as summed up in his famous apho-
rism, “You cannot step into the same river twice.” Honestly, you can’t,
give it a go.
Loathing people so much, he took to wandering alone in the moun-
tains eating nothing but grass and herbs, which alas gave him dropsy.
He sought to treat this by covering himself in cow manure, but to no
avail, surprisingly.
© TERENCE GREEN 2020
Terence is a writer, historian, and lecturer, and lives with his wife
and their dog in Paekakariki, NZ.

February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 31

Kant Now
Immanuel Kant’s Globalization Program
Dan Corjescu looks at how Kant wanted to unite the world.
lobalization, democracy, and migration are themes
G which continually ignite debate, both scholarly and
non-scholarly. None of this is new. In his own inim-
itable way, the German Enlightenment philosopher
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) touched upon all these political
hot topics, and more.
Over the last few decades Kant’s political writings have been
increasingly appreciated by political philosophers in the
English-speaking world. This acknowledgement was given a
significant boost by John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice (1971)
and The Law of Peoples (1993).
The Development of Humanity
In 1784, Kant famously wrote: “Out of the crooked timber of
humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” He nevertheless
believed that humanity’s imperfect nature can be improved
through institutions such as republican (or to modernise Kant’s
terminology, democratic) government, international laws, and
treaties.
If humans are indeed capable of social and political improve-
ment, then Kant thinks the psychological engine of that
improvement will be what he calls their ‘unsocial sociability’
(‘ungesellige Geseligkeit’). He sees man (and it was man for Kant)
as experiencing a fundamental tension between his desire to live
in community with others and his strong desire to be left alone.
This tension leads to, among other things, a competitive rivalry
for prestige and material goods between individuals. However,
this cardinal and at times violent struggle also leads to the
unfolding of man’s telos, or purpose. Humanity’s purpose,
according to Kant, cannot be realized in one single individual,
but only in the species as a whole. So it is that through the core
‘unsocial sociability’ conflict humanity’s ‘species-being’ (Gat-
tungswesen) develops over time. (This idea is clearly echoed in
the political theories of first Hegel and then Marx.)
What does Kant see as mankind’s end goal? It is the achieve-
ment of reason and reasonableness, first within the individual
himself; then with other individuals in a rationally organized
community or state; and, finally, between different communi-
ties or states.
Now for Kant, a mature individual is not to have his reason
dictated by authorities outside of himself, whether this is based
on religious doctrine, customs and traditions, or political author-
ity. Human reason is instead to be unfettered to its utmost, and
then put to use to serve ‘man as man’ – which ultimately means
an increase in the general welfare and common good of all
humanity. In the final situation, humanity will have liberated
itself through a long historical period of trial-and-error and much
sorrow, and achieved an equilibrium of wisdom for human affairs
32 Philosophy Now  February/March 2020
Kant examines
the crooked timber
of humanity.
on both the large and the small scale. Ultimately, world peace
and ‘gentle commerce’ are to reign as an end state.
Crucial to this outcome is humanity’s construction of repub-
lican (ie democratic) states which are able to organize them-
selves together on a global basis, preferably led by a large ‘lead-
ing power’. This is seen as a result of humanity’s rational devel-
opment. States that are rationally constructed to serve the ratio-
nal goals of the majority (including life, liberty, and the pursuit
of property) see no intrinsic, rational benefit in destroying these
common goods equally being pursued by the other rationally-
organized states. The logic here is simple: people do not know-
ingly will their own destruction, and so, if possible, will resort
to arbitration, treaty making, and other peaceful methods of
conflict resolution if they are able to erect national or international
structures that will permit them to do so.
As has been frequently noted – most recently by Steven Pinker
in Enlightenment Now (2018) – Kant was the first to hit upon the
notion that democracies do not fight each other. It took Thomas
Friedman to present its corollary, known as the ‘Golden Arches’
doctrine: the idea that no two countries with McDonalds fran-
chises have gone to war (The Lexus And The Olive Tree, 2000).
Yet, the hypothesis that ‘gentle commerce’ brings with it a soft-
ening of international relations and a binding of political inter-
ests was a common theme even in the seventeenth century – see
for instance Jacques Savary’s The Perfect Merchant (1675). How-
ever, this opinion has been often challenged by commentators
who have pointed out that the high level of trade and commerce
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did precious
little to stave off the calamity of the First World War.

Clearly, Kant has located a kind of globalism within the psy-
chological tensions of man himself. Man struggles to satisfy his
inner self, which is disinclined to combine with others but which
nevertheless grasps that without the others his ultimate reason
for being, his telos, cannot be fully satisfied. His task is to find
rational ways of organising cooperating with others, on a local
level, and on a global level too. The key is the global spread of
democracy. This allows the effective and stable construction of
global guarantees for security and prosperity. And so Kant
derives the idea or perhaps even prophecy of an eventual ‘per-
petual peace’.
The Right To Hospitality
The presumption of perpetual peace ties in nicely with another
idea of Kant’s: that of the ‘universal right of hospitality’. This
cosmopolitan conception is based on the idea that human beings
have at least a weak right to inhabit any part of the globe, and,
as such, should be offered the opportunity of help or at least
non-harm while temporarily sojourning in other lands.
This right of individuals and peoples to move to any place they
choose is, in principle, a result of a rational right to a better life,
and so it can only be restricted in principle by the equally ratio-
nal claim of a need to maintain the economic, political, and cul-
tural stability of the desired country. Not surprisingly, in between
these two rational claims heated political debates often unfold in
countries which may or may not be fully democratic.
The Kantian germ of universal cosmopolitanism and a uni-
versal right of hospitality can be brought together with his vision
of the spread of republicanism and the setting up of a ‘league
of nations’, for us to glimpse the emergence of a kind of global
feedback loop. The more that democratic and cosmopolitan
ideas and rights spread throughout the globe, the wider are the
doors opened for the migration of both individuals and groups,
in turn strengthening cosmopolitanism and the spread of new
ideas. And so on. Thus, perhaps unknowingly, Kant laid the
groundwork for the idea that democratization may lead to
greater levels of global integration based on ever-widening cos-
The Death Star? No!
Kant’s cosmopolitan dream.
Kant Now
mopolitanism and concomitant rights of hospitality. If every
place on earth becomes rationally organized into republican
spaces, what is to prevent a rational individual from situating
him or herself within his or her chosen space?
Or is the future of the global movement of peoples some-
thing else? For instance, it is conceivable that if the world
becomes politically and economically homogenized (as Francis
Fukuyama also famously prophesied), this would perhaps lessen
the incentive for the flow of peoples between borders. Why
would you need to migrate, when your country’s political and
economic system is more or less the same as that of every other
country? So, through a process of greater democratization, the
world might reach a stage of political development that would
decrease the need for economic/political migration. This would
perhaps eventually leave only non-urgent reasons for departing
one’s land of origin, perhaps even just aesthetic ones – the pref-
erence for a particular landscape or culture, for example. ‘Peak
Migration’ would then have past.
Greater Togetherness Through Democracy
One could say that the spread of democratization fuels globaliza-
tion. Therefore it is not surprising that the fear of globalization
expresses itself, as often as not, in anti-democratic, illiberal polit-
ical movements. But allow me to myself dabble here in the dan-
gerous art of prophecy: this will be a temporary political reac-
tion, lasting only as long as the democratization process takes
to spread to places where it’s needed most – such as sub-Saha-
ran Africa. Happily (at least according to Steven Pinker’s rather
Kantian recent bestseller Enlightenment Now) the historical odds
and data trends say that democracy will spread.
We could say that modern Western democracies are at the
moment showing themselves true to Kantian anthropology:
they wish to remain alone in a world that wants to join them.
We can see that, in a sense, globalization is also the greater ful-
filment of the Kantian principle of the broadening of the possibili-
ties of the individual imagination. A closer world means that I can
come closer to you, not as an inscrutable stranger, but as a poten-
tial co-national, a friend, or even a lover.
Globalization means that the potential for intimacy with the
‘other’ increases dramatically. This fact makes a lot of people
uncomfortable. However, the forces of reaction cannot ulti-
mately win unless they are willing to reject the process of democ-
ratization, since globalization is a result of that process. With-
out democratization, globalization will cease to exist or will
become dangerously unstable, as it was in the nineteenth cen-
tury, when commerce was mistakenly considered sufficient for
world peace. As Norman Angell once wrote, that was indeed a
‘great illusion’ (but ironically, not as Angell meant it).
In conclusion, I might offer the not altogether original insight
that it is democratization rather than the spread of ‘gentle com-
merce’ that offers the more secure prospect of peaceful global-
ization, and along with it the general resolution of the move-
ment of peoples, with greater cosmopolitan rights, and/or the
gradual, necessary dissolution of their reasons for moving in
the first place.
© DR DAN CORJESCU 2020
Dan Corjescu teaches Political Philosophy in Zeppelin University,
Friedrichshafen, Germany.
February/March 2020  Philosophy Now 33
Kant Now
Kant’s Opus postumum
Terrence Thomson wrestles with Kant’s unfinished work
to ask what we should expect from philosophy books.
have recently been immersed in trying to understand
I Immanuel Kant’s last text, his so-called Opus postumum. It is
composed of sheets (or ‘fascicles’ or ‘convolutes’) that Kant
began writing in the mid 1790s, continuing to a year before
his death in 1804. It is not easy to summarize, but I can start by
observing that it contains a vast array of thoughts, notes, drafts,
and marginalia at varying levels of completion. Attempting to
make sense of Opus postumum presents an especially challenging
task since it throws up all manner of perplexing material, which
sometimes morphs the philosophy in the three Critiques [of Pure
Reason, of Practical Reason, and of Judgement, Ed] that form the pil-
lars of Kant’s thought; sometimes does not relate to it at all; and
sometimes contradicts it entirely.
At its root (if we can talk in such a way about Opus postumum)
is a work Kant provisionally titled Transition from the Founda-
tions of Natural Science to Physics, which attempts to construct a
bridge to empirical physics from the ‘special’ metaphysics of
nature partially explored in his Metaphysical Foundations of Nat-
ural Science of 1786. Whilst this is the initial project Kant focuses
on, as the fascicles progress various topological shifts take place.
Kant begins to rework his whole theory of matter into a more
precise element of the metaphysics of nature, capable of taking
into account the density of matter alongside attractive and repul-
sive forces. Apparently this reworking was a response to a prob-
lematic part of Metaphysical Foundations that was pointed out to
Kant after its publication.
If this seems like a strange diversion for Kant, it pales in
oddity to his discussion of ether in the central fascicles. Labelled
Übergang 1–14, these fascicles contain an attempt to ‘transcen-
dentally deduce’ an invisible yet material medium through
which all matter travels. This dispersed ‘world material’ (which
was not an uncommon conjecture in eighteenth century natu-
ral science) is one of the most discussed parts of Opus postumum,
since it challenges what Kant scholars previously held his
method of transcendental deduction to be capable of. More-
over, the idea of ether seems contradictory – it is material and
yet invisible; it is everywhere yet impermeable – but Kant
nonetheless affirms that a transcendental deduction of it is pos-
sible, even necessary. This is only one of the many complexi-
ties jutting out from Opus postumum. There are plenty more.
I must admit that this is only one interpretation of what is
happening in Opus postumum. Indeed, every one of the few theses
put forward about Opus postumum has been regarded by Kant
scholars as highly debatable. There aren’t that many: as of 2020
only three English monographs and a handful of journal arti-
cles. It seems that we do not know how to begin understand-
ing such a curious amalgam of material. Why is this the case?
Ever since some fragments were first published in journals in
1882, Kant’s Opus postumum has been considered something of
an interloper in his body of writings. Terms such as ‘senility,’
34 Philosophy Now  February/March 2020
‘marks of decrepitude’ and ‘Kant’s weakening faculties’ were
common even in the reviews of the first Akademie Ausgabe version
of Opus postumum (in two volumes, in 1936 and 1938). Yet between
the fascicles being found on Kant’s desk and the publication of the
Akademie edition, 132 years had elapsed, and the loose pages had
already suffered some complex, even catastrophic, events, includ-
ing being dropped in a puddle and coming out of order, forever
leaving us in the dark about how they should be arranged. Kant
did not number his sheets. Once they were published, no reviewer
failed to note the eerie, unknown nature of the new Kantian land-
scape, and most opted to simply not take it seriously at all. One
reviewer, Kuno Fischer, famous for how critical he was toward
Opus postumum, said, “one may doubt the value of [Kant’s last]
work… if one considers both the frail state in which Kant was at
the time and the completion to which he himself had brought the
philosophy he had founded” (Quoted from Kant’s Final Synthesis,
Eckart Fӧrster, 2000, p.49). The clear implication was that the
manuscript is a waste of time, not to be bothered with, and that
the real scholarship is in studying Kant’s previous work.
These points of view have cast a deep shadow over the Opus
postumum.There have also been brilliant attempts at reintegrat-
ing Opus postumum into Kant’s philosophy (Gerhard Lehmann,
Burkhard Tuschling, Vittorio Mathieu and Erich Adickes pro-
vide some of the most detailed scholarship), as well as fantastic
hermeneutical proposals designed to critically reconstruct it.
But these attempts have all been dogged by the subterranean
negative idea that Opus postumum is simply not worth the trou-
ble; that it is best to stick to the Kantian edifice we know and
love.
However, more recently, many scholars have cast off this
prejudice and returned to Opus postumum in a sustained attempt
to investigate what’s going on and how it may provide a key to
understanding Kant’s previous work in a new light. The three
monographs in English fall under this category: the aforemen-
tioned Eckart Fӧrster’s Kant’s Final Synthesis in 2000, Bryan
Wesley Hall’s The Post-Critical Kant in 2015, and Oliver
Thorndike’s Kant’s Transition Project and Late Philosophy in 2018.
All three are fine scholarly works, destined to contribute to
the future reception of Opus postumum. Yet it cannot be denied
(and I don’t think anyone does deny it): Opus postumum is filled
with problems and contradictions. Even decisions around edi-
torial form are problematic; how do we decide whether to keep
the deletions and correct the 'mistakes'? Yet recent scholarship
on the text, particularly Hall’s masterpiece The Post-Critical Kant,
suggests that there is a unique thread running through Opus pos-
tumum, and if a few simple rules are followed we can find in the
text an argument that makes sense and even convincingly cri-
tiques the philosophy of Kant’s three Critiques.
Accordingly, Hall gives four rules for a ‘good interpretation’
of Opus postumum. First, be consistent with the text; second,

PLEASE VISIT WOODRAWSPICTURES.COM
UNFINISHED KANT © WOODROW COWHER 2019
make Kant consistent with himself; third, be philosophically
plausible; and fourth, give Opus postumum the respect it deserves
– after all, Kant considered it the ‘keystone’ of his philosophy.
These rules are evidently excellent guidelines for navigating
through any complicated text, not only Opus postumum. But
something about them bothers me. Why should we make Kant
consistent with himself? Why should we erase any trace of con-
tradiction? I cannot recall coming across a similar set of rules
for reading other philosophical books; nor do I recall the need
to adopt similar rules for Kant’s other work – even the notori-
ously difficult Critique of Pure Reason, which contains contra-
dictions too. So why the need for such rules with this ‘keystone’
of Kant’s philosophy?
Before staking a possible answer, it is worth making a few more
observations about Opus postumum as a book. To begin with, it is
unfinished, which means that we interrupt Kant in his thinking
process. So whereas in his Critique of Pure Reason, for example,
we have an orderly layout presenting the argument – for instance,
a Doctrine of Elements and a Doctrine of Method; or the divi-
sion of the argument into a Transcendental Aesthetic, Transcen-
dental Analytic, Transcendental Dialectic, and so on – there is
no equivalent layout in Opus postumum. We catch Kant in the act,
so to speak. This gives rise to the enormous difficulties in inter-
preting the text; but it also inadvertently gives rise to enormous
opportunities. Instead of ascertaining Kant’s analysis and recon-
structing it in our own conference papers, essays and books, we
join him in thinking.
This, inevitably, is a painful experience. In an oft-quoted letter,
Kant remarks that writing the fascicles was “a pain like that of
Tantalus” (Correspondence 12:257): so it’s no wonder that we too
also feel pain when we try to reach out and grasp the core ideas
Kant Now
of Opus postumum, only to find that we have grasped nothing. This
pain is provoked by Kant’s repetition, restatements, over-meticu-
lous descriptions, the sudden shift from one subject to another,
deletion of important sentences, paragraph-long sentences, irrel-
evancies (for example, shopping lists, to do lists, dinner party guest
lists…), and the general disorder of the work. But, this pain is actu-
ally a ticket into a remarkable world: it is an invitation to think in
an authentic way with Kant, warts and all. Opus postumum truth-
fully mirrors the act of thinking: it misses nothing out, not even
the myriad repetitions, deleted passages, and contradictions. In
the same way, rarely are our own thoughts immediately clear.
Rather, they are often repetitive, contradictory, multifaceted, and
unstructured, until we actively organize them, redraft them, res-
culpt them, polish them, and so laboriously make them clear. It is
even rarer to be publically presented with raw thinking. On the
contrary, the organization of ideas, especially when presented in
book format, directly influences our notion of what thought is. So
in a book of philosophy, we are typically not invited to think with
the author, only to think about his or her perfected thoughts. Opus
postumum is the opposite of this standard format, and with it we
are presented with nothing less than a challenge to how we read a
philosophy book. It unintentionally demonstrates that the expec-
tation of a smooth, linear, rational line of argument in a philoso-
phy book (analytic and continental) is so ingrained, that when we
encounter something authentically different, the immediate reac-
tion is to overlook it or discount it. And Opus postumum is not per-
fected; nor does it contain a smooth, linear, rational line of argu-
mentation. Rather, it is rough terrain – non-linear, and jutting out
in many directions.
This brings us to a possible answer as to why we need rules
for interpreting Kant’s last text. Perhaps the problem does not
lie in Opus postumum at all, but in our expectation of it as a book.
Perhaps we are so used to philosophy books presenting their argu-
ments in a smooth way that when we’re confronted by something
irregular, our instinct is to try to make it fit, to transform it into
a work with a rational arc. Perhaps without rules we are left with
merely the raw contradictions of the book, a scattered tangle of
arguments without conclusions, and conclusions without argu-
ments. But so what? Why can we not read Opus postumum in this
way, respecting its contradictions and admitting that, yes, it is a
rough ride; yes, there are problems with it; and yes, it is perhaps
one of the most difficult documents by one of the most difficult
philosophers; but also, yes, it challenges us to think for ourselves
in the most rigorous way. It challenges our expectation of what a
philosophy book is and what a philosophy book is supposed to
do, by showing us what a philosophy can be, and by doing what
a philosophy book is not ‘supposed’ to do.
Whether we continue to try and fit this irregular oddity into
the regular framework of philosophical argumentation, or
whether we try to account for the contradictions and problems
in a different way remains to be seen. But I’m sure of one thing:
if ever Saul Bellow’s words were appropriate when he wrote, “I
have always been a believer in an unfinished work to keep you
alive” (Ravelstein, 2000), they are so with regard to Kant and his
Opus postumum.
© TERRENCE THOMSON 2020
Terrence Thomson is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research in
Modern European Philosophy in Kingston University, London.
February/March 2020  Philosophy Now 35
 AMBIVALENCE
E.T. Urso has some philosophical ambivalence for
us especially for Valentine’s Day.
ssuming you’ll get married, choosing the right part-
A ner will be the most important decision in your life.
The choice is so consequential that even the least
romantic person – she who dismisses feelings as ter-
rible guides to action – must take seriously the quest to iden-
tify the one. On pragmatic grounds, we’ll spend more time with
the one than with anyone else, so we’d better like them. As imi-
tative beings, we’ll absorb the one’s mannerisms, so we’d better
esteem them. Our conversations will be limited to our com-
bined capabilities, so we’d better pair well. In short our lives
will blend. We may also biologically fuse through parenthood,
spawning crawling creatures made from both of our identities.
Naturally, then, the question ‘Who will we marry?’ excites us
(if we’re optimistic) and stresses us (if we’re not). And as time
passes and pairing prospects dwindle, whether from lack of
opportunity or from our own ineptitude, we might worry if we
haven’t fallen in love, which is the generally accepted Western
method for identifying the one – a method so insane that it
makes Berkeley’s idealism look super solid.
We glorify this phenomenon of falling in love so much that
those still standing may feel inadequate. Impatiently we wait for
our secular savior. Expectation likely contributes to our propen-
sity to fall in love. But whether we’re primed for it or not, I’m
not denying the reality of the phenomenon. The novels and
movies are right. Falling in love is the most rapturous experience
in life. But this rapture is often ill-expressed. In art, falling in love
is described as a sort of whirlwind, a flaming passion that over-
whelms reason; but in reality, I’ve found that the distinctive rap-
ture of falling in love is an intense inner serenity. This serenity I
believe derives from certainty. “This is it,” we think as we gaze
into our lover’s gaze, like mirrors infinitely reflecting one another.
“This is the person for me.” This certainty that they’re the one –
is bliss. So there’s a sort of analytic truth aspect to love: like 2=2,
36 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020
it’s true because it’s true. We know they’re the one because they’re
the one, without having to empirically test all particulars.
Then it happens. Gradually, almost imperceptibly… but at
some point it becomes undeniable: the unshakable conviction that
we had about our partner has given way to doubt, and we ask our-
selves whether this person truly is the right person for us.
The reasons for questioning will be unique to each case, but
they’re often a mixture of considered reflections and vague dis-
content. We’re just not as excited about it all as we used to be.
Or often it’s an absence of feeling. We’re not disillusioned yet,
we just sort of ... sigh. Perhaps we’d pictured ourselves with
someone more adventurous. Maybe we find ourselves reminisc-
ing on an old friendship that could have been more: how our
conversation flowed, tending toward topics of greater interest
to us. Or maybe we’ve discovered that our partner is ‘fiscally
shortsighted’, and we suddenly fear our financial future with
them. Or maybe our partner is too judgmental; or too meek. Or
they’re too uptight; or too wild – which was exciting at first, but
we can no longer allow ourselves to love them unrestrainedly
because part of us knows they’ll drag us into a dark place. The
reasons for questioning will vary, but what I want to highlight
is something more universal: a fundamental change in attitude.
While before we were in a state of certainty about our partner,
now we are in a state of uncertainty. The very question, ‘Is this
person the right person for me?’ marks a fundamental change
from when we fell in love. I’m not saying we no longer consider
them worthy. In fact, we still believe they might be the one. But
part of us questions that belief, and considers the contrary pos-
sibility. We’re suddenly unsettled, pulled in both directions and
inwardly torn, and so in an entirely new state, no longer unques-
tioningly wholehearted. I’ll call this state ambivalence. Ambiva-
lence has destroyed every relationship I’ve ever been in.
So I’ve started to wonder, does the very presence of ambiva-
lence presage the failure of a relationship? Is ambivalence, by
definition, the death of love? Or can love withstand profound
doubt? Is it possible to deliberate about being with someone,
and happily live with that decision, even if we’ve lost our rap-
turous certainty?
My belief, unfortunately, is that the ‘death of love’ option is
true. If I’m being empirical, in every instance so far observed
by me, ambivalence has proven toxic. Indecision seems to indi-
cate that I’m no longer devoted: it doesn’t feel right anymore;
doesn’t feel pure, it feels forced, untrue. And so alienation
begins. And ultimately, I can’t deal with the dissonance. My
inner schism is projected outward, and in one way or another,
the relationship ends.
Thinking versus Feeling
I’m stoical by nature, and probably as a reaction to this, I’m
strangely reverent of emotions. I care about how stuff feels. But
it might help us to question the romantic notion that feelings
are foundational in relationships. To do so, let’s return to the
Least Romantic Person mentioned earlier, and ask what she
thinks about certainty and ambivalence. Let’s first examine that
rapturous certainty experienced when we fall in love. Our Least
Romantic Person would ask:
“What do you mean by ‘certainty’? It sounds like it was a feel-
ing of certainty, or at most an intuition or a sense of conviction:
but it definitely wasn’t an analytic certainty like those of mathe-
matics, as cute as your earlier simile was. ‘2+2=4’ is an analytic
truth – essentially a tautology – in which the truth of the state-
ment is determined simply by the meaning of the terms in the
statement. Unfortunately, other than by this kind of ‘certainty
by definition’, absolute certainty is impossible to attain. Even the
most rigorous scientific theories, with loads of supporting evi-
dence and double-checked sound reasoning, can only claim to
be probably true. Certainly, your conviction that you’d found ‘the
one’ met neither of these criteria. In fact, when you started asking
yourself ‘Is this person right for me?’, that was the first time you
started thinking properly. Only by questioning can you deter-
mine whether your partner is right for you – not through mys-
tical intuition and fickle feelings, but by inquiry and reasoning.
Don’t you find it suspicious that you were so sure, early on, when
you didn’t know them as well as you do now? And only after
knowing them more, empirically, through prolonged contact,
do you begin to wonder... Ambivalence, this new state that you
fear has spoiled everything, is actually allowing you to ask the
right questions with a cool head – to make a reasonable choice.
Don’t despair. Be grateful that you can think and determine your
fate. I cannot help you with the ultimate deliberation, because
each case is different and the details matter; but I can tell you
that you can decide. And in my opinion, this thoughtful delib-
eration is a more substantial form of love in any case. If you care
about each other, you’ll think about whether you’ll make each
other thrive. You can analyze your partner; you can analyze your-
self. I’m not a feelings person, but if that magic matters to you –
the spark, the spell, the connection – who am I to contest it? Use
this moment of uncertainty – which is the first step toward knowl-
edge – to reflect, project, and discuss, with no hard feelings: are
you right for each other?”
Thank you, Least Romantic Person. We appreciate your take,
and kind of like it, too, for it frames ambivalence more opti-
mistically. But I’ll tell you, Least Romantic Person – as a roman-
tic myself, I love the feeling of being in love. Sure, you might
call it a reckless intuition, but there is something valuable in it,
which might not matter to a rational spirit, but which is lifeblood
to me. Moreover, I think reasoning is subservient to our long-
ings. Even scientists working meticulously in the lab must be
driven by some desire – by their passion for discovery. We cure
diseases because we value life. And for me life’s most rapturous
experience is falling in love. Now that I’ve become ambivalent,
something primal is lacking, and the drive, the desire, is dulled.
I can make a list of pros and cons about my partner, and turn
out a negative or positive sum, but in either case I’ll feel the
same. Something’s been lost. And in my blunt days I’ll think, ‘If
I’m not feeling it anymore, what’s the point?’ I’ll wonder if
there’s someone out there I’d be in love with forever. After all,
we hear of those couples for whom that special thing remains
throughout their lives. Is it possible that our bodies know some-
thing about love before we’re able to articulate it – in other
words, before we’re able to provide reasoning? When we fell
in love, we experienced with our entire bodies a conviction that
gave us peace, unity, drive. Now that peace is lost. We’re frag-
mented and full of doubts. Does our body know it’s over, and
now the intellect is merely appointing reasons?
The Least Romantic Person is wary of sweeping feelings, and
suggests for us to mind the details. We can ponder points of
compatibility, and if they’re substantial, choose our partners anew,
deliberately, gaining a new kind of logically-induced peace
which admits imperfections such as dissimilar interests. Take
hiking for example – a notoriously polarizing activity. Some
people love it; some people hate it. It sounds trivial: but what if
to our partner hiking isn’t just the pain-in-the-ass-walking-to-
arbitrary-points-in-mountains that it is to us? For them it’s more
the conversation, the shared sensations, the connection to
nature. This divergence may be one of several, but perhaps our
partner (who we’ve discovered is also now feeling ambivalent)
decides they can keep that part of life to themselves, and that
our relationship is valuable for other reasons. Couples can con-
sider all the variables, the traits we admire and disapprove of in
each other: temperaments, shared memories, family, level of
mutual respect, loyalty, intelligence, beauty, natural affinity,
moral values... We can think about it all to make the most impor-
tant decision in our lives. But then there’s that feeling – the
aforementioned vague discontent, or lack of feeling, which has
recently dulled our relationship. This feeling is significant to
me, while the Least Romantic Person doesn’t trust feelings at
all – they’re volatile and flimsy and can’t be the foundation of a
committed relationship. And yet. And yet… We may choose to
end a relationship because of lack of feeling, or as they say,
because we’re not in love anymore. We can do it, and depend-
ing on our disposition, it might even be the right thing to do.
As long as we’re aware that we’re ending things quite simply
because we’re not feeling it anymore.
© E.T. URSO 2020
E.T. Urso is a Honduran-American screenwriter. Author of The
Folly of Faraway Things, Urso is currently working on a philosoph-
ical novella inspired by Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.
February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 37

Press (For) Freedoms
DEAR EDITOR: I found Professor Schö-
necker’s article in Issue 135 defending
academic freedom interesting, but I
believe that he has neglected to take
something important into account. We
must bear in mind that many opponents
of free speech don’t share the same lib-
eral values, preferring a more markedly
left-wing approach. This approach
includes the idea that ‘freedom of
speech’ is a means for an established,
dominant, privileged class to maintain
hegemonic power over minority groups.
(I should point out that not all on the left
think this). Those who hold this belief
oppose freedom of speech by claiming
it’s not possible: rather, speech is always
subject to the interests of the dominant
class. Put simply: what’s lacking is an
argument in favour of freedom that
accepts an inequality of power exists, and
that those who benefit from this are
always in a position to make use of ‘free-
dom of speech’ in an attempt to domi-
nate all corners of society.
Let’s assume we accept the claim that
modern liberal society is fundamentally
unequal, and that these inequalities are
maintained via a kind of manipulation. By
accepting this claim (I realise it’s con-
tentious), we agree that there’s some kind
of hidden power at work in society. If so,
not only can no-one claim to know social
truth, but no-one can claim to be entirely
free from the effects of the hidden power.
Anyone who claims to know what the
problems are and how they might be
engaged with must admit that their ideas
might be a product of the ruling hege-
mony. On these grounds, no-one can
assume any idea to be free from the
sphere of influence of the ruling power.
There are three major possible
responses to this: the first is that we
engage with each other in constant dis-
cussion; the second, that we go to war
with each other to decide which view
should dominate; the third is that we
acquiesce in the belief that we can never
38 Philosophy Now  February/March 2020
Letters
When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up.
Email me at rick.lewis@philosophynow.org
Keep them short and keep them coming!
be free from the effect of power, and
give up political activism. The first is
infinitely preferable, on the grounds that
neither of the other options offer a way
to begin to work out whether any ideas
are a genuine alternative to a dominant
system of thought. It might be objected
that we shouldn’t feel that we need to
include in our discussion whatever ideas
the rulers espouse. If the point is to
work out how to free ourselves from
such authority, it seems reasonable to
exclude the ideas it uses to maintain its
dominance. Unfortunately, if we have
accepted there’s some kind of hidden
power at work, we can’t assume to know
in advance what form it takes or what
ideas it has produced. For all we know, it
may espouse its own ideas superficially,
and its real dominance is established by
the inadequacy of alternatives. To put it
simply: anyone who believes that hidden
power is at work in society should also
believe that any ideas about how it
works, along with ideas of how it can be
resisted, may themselves be products of
hidden forces. Such people should wel-
come free discussion. If power is every-
where there’s no reason to believe that it
hasn’t found its way into the more attrac-
tive alternatives. I believe this is a good
left-wing case for academic freedom.
ALASTAIR GRAY, BRIGHTON
DEAR EDITOR: The article ‘Protecting
Academic Freedom’ by Dieter Schö-
necker in Issue 135 raises a number of
issues. Firstly, in exercising a right, one
has the accompanying responsibility of
giving due consideration to likely conse-
quences. Schönecker’s article does not
present any assessment of consequences
of holding seminars with right-wing
politicians such as Jongen and Sarrazin.
There is also the need to separate
Schönecker’s personal justification for his
actions from his attempts to defend aca-
demic freedom. There are a number of
questions to which I would like an answer
before making any judgement as to
whether he is justified: Who were the
other speakers invited to the seminars
(i.e., is his claim of overall balance justi-
fied?); Who was the intended audience –
the public, undergraduates, or post-grad-
uates?; Was this the first time he had
been involved in such a controversy? Fur-
ther, it would be reasonable to seek a
counter account of the same dispute from
the Dean or Rector of his school.
Schönecker refers to the ‘alleged’
right-wing backgrounds of Jongen and
Sarrazin. The use of the term ‘alleged’
implies that Schönecker is not convinced
that either has such a background. How-
ever, Schönecker also informs us that
Jongen is a senior figure in the Alternativ
für Deutschland. It is known that a consid-
erable proportion of the membership of
the AfD hold racist views. Hence, to have
achieved his position, Jongen either holds
racist views himself or is tolerant of AfD
members who are racists. In that light,
Schönecker’s doubt over the politics of
Jongen must also be questioned.
MICHAEL SHAW, HUDDERSFIELD
Sleepy Security
DEAR EDITOR: Brandon Robshaw’s article
on burqa banning in Issue 135 mentions
that in Aesop’s fable the sun was better
than the wind in getting someone to take
their coat off. This jogged an old mem-
ory. Some years ago, one of my Saudi stu-
dents turned up with her male guardian in
tow. I thought his auditing the course
without paying a fee was a bit of a cheek;
but before I could confront him, he fell
asleep in the first seminar, and then was
never seen again. I thank Dr Robshaw and
Aesop for assuring me that it was the sun
shining in my classes and not my delivery
that got him off my hands.
MICHAEL MCMANUS, LEEDS
Denier-Denier
DEAR EDITOR: I wish to express my con-
sternation that a professor of philoso-
phy, Wendy Lynne Lee, should support
the value-laden term ‘climate change

denier’ (‘Dewey & Climate Denial’ in
Issue 135). She does not define this con-
cept, but a ‘climate change denier’ would
appear to be anyone who questions the
assumptions that (a) the planet is heating
up unusually, and (b) that this is caused
primarily by CO2 emitted by the burn-
ing of fossil fuels. These are matters of
scientific observation which may or may
not be true. However, if a person may
not question them without condemna-
tion, what becomes of Karl Popper’s
principle of falsifiability ?
Worst of all, perhaps, the word
‘denier’ is habitually associated with
‘holocaust denier’. The application of
the term is to imply an appalling moral
deficit.Those who wish to live in a
peaceful, reasonable and rational world
should decry the use of the term ‘climate
change denier’.
ROSIE LANGRIDGE, LONDON
Viva Santa!
DEAR EDITOR: We live under the
tyranny of ‘the offended’, so bravo to Joe
Biehl (PN 135) for exposing the
Grinches who feel the need to ‘out’
Santa. In any case, the existence of Santa
Claus was legally confirmed in a US
court case, which can be followed in the
1947 documentary, Miracle on 34th Street.
TERRY HYDE, YELVERTON, DEVON
The Author Strikes Back
DEAR EDITOR: I am replying to two letters
that appeared in Issues 134 of PN, appear-
ing under the title ‘The Clone Wars’; and
to three in 135 entitled ‘I Do Not Agree’.
I wish to point out that most of the mat-
ters they raise are resolved by carefully
considering the definition of ‘identity’
provided in my article, ‘DNA & The
Identity Crisis’ (Issue 133). ‘Identity’ is the
sameness of a person at all times or in all
circumstances; the condition or fact that a
person is itself and not something else. In
the case of clones, the nuclear DNA may
be identical, but it reacts differently if the
cellular fluid (cytoplasm) into which it is
embedded (i.e., the host) differs from that
of the donor. Even in cases where the
same nuclear DNA is introduced into sim-
ilar host cells, subsequent development
will differ as the environment encountered
by the developing cells differs. Consider,
for example, epigenetic reactions. In short,
even cloned individuals will never be iden-
tical. With DNA, science provides a
means of defining sameness in the individ-
ual, as well as answering the conundrum
provoked by the Ship of Theseus about
the replacement of physical constituents.
This does not assume that questions about
the nature of consciousness, or the soul
are answered. Nor does it assume any-
thing about nature versus nurture.
RAYMOND M. KEOGH, IRELAND
Artful About Arthur
DEAR EDITOR: With reference to Dennis
Vanden Auweele’s excellent article on
Schopenhauerian ethics in Issue 134, as a
terminal optimist I would to like to offer
an alternative ‘glass half-full’ interpreta-
tion of some of the essential contentions.
Schopenhauer’s depiction of the
human condition as being driven relent-
lessly by insatiable desires (or to quote
Jefferson, ‘the pursuit of happiness’),
might more appropriately be described
as a drive for ‘purpose’. Hedonistic
desires are merely one of a range of pur-
suits that people may take to this end.
Schopenhauer viewed our perpetually-
tortured ‘willing self’ as the only know-
able part of the greater world or ‘atma’.
He saw solace therefore as coming either
from the temporary distraction provided
by art, or through compassion, which he
rather jovially depicted as the recognition
of being part of all suffering, not just
one’s own. But to suggest that time spent
with art offers a brief reprieve from our
relentless pursuit of desire misses, I
think, an important point. From personal
experience I would speculate that art in
its highest form can provide a platform
by which our separate ‘willing selves’ can
experience a taste of our unified common
self (atma). Although Schopenhauer
advocated pursuit of ‘inner warmth’ to
avoid the need for closeness with other
human beings, perhaps unwittingly he
sought out art not for distraction but
because the sense of connectedness to
that which is greater than the individual
mortal self was profoundly consoling.
The suggestion that mere recognition
of the suffering ‘other’ could bring conso-
lation has again somewhat missed the
point. The linking of the individual’s
inherent drive for pleasure to a ‘purpose’,
namely addressing the desires of others –
of separate beings who are nonetheless
fellow parts of the atma – can provide us
with a sense of transcendence beyond our
isolated, finite selves. By serving to meet
even one of a fellow being’s desires, we
can create a positive legacy to the whole
February/March 2020  Philosophy Now 39
Letters
beyond our own brief existence – and
herein lies a path to human satisfaction.
Let’s drink to that.
MARY JANE STREETON, BRISBANE
DEAR EDITOR: In Sam Woolfe’s article,
‘Philosophical Outlook & Mental Well-
Being’ in Issue 134, it’s virtually a given
that pessimism is an accurate assessment
of reality, in contrast to rose-tinted
Pollyanna glasses. Woolfe doesn’t even
acknowledge an opposing view. Rather,
pessimism has an air of moral seriousness.
Woolfe discusses ‘anti-natalism’, the
idea that, given the supposed preponder-
ance of suffering over pleasure in life, one
would have been better off never having
been born. I attended a talk by an author,
Peter Heinegg, making this very argu-
ment. In the question period I asked him,
“So why not just kill yourself?” His reply
was, “Squeeze the damn fruit till it’s dry –
why would I throw it out before I’m fin-
ished?” So this nattering nabob of nega-
tivism found life worth living after all!
Pessimism may have been realistic in
the 1819 of Schopenhauer’s book, when
the vast majority of people did live in
abject squalor, with all the suffering he
talked about. If you look at graphs of
human lifespans, average incomes, etc.,
they’re virtually flat for millennia, up till
then. But after that, they go practically
vertical. So there has in fact been tremen-
dous progress, giving most people today
far better quality of life; as thoroughly
documented in Steven Pinker’s recent
book, Enlightenment Now. Pinker shows
that today an optimistic outlook better
reflects reality, whereas pessimism is actu-
ally grounded in misconceptions about
our world. This was also shown in an
excellent 2009 book, The Case for Rational
Optimism, by Frank S. Robinson.
FRANK S. ROBINSON, ALBANY, NY
Pointing Out the Obvious To Tallis?
DEAR EDITOR: I read Raymond Tallis’
article on ‘Religion & Evil’ (#134) with
much sympathy and interest. I would
like to add a few remarks under the
heading ‘Pointing Out the Obvious.’
For a person with an active religious
faith, the only reasonable reply to the
association of religion with the history of
human wickedness is to say that any reli-
gion which sanctions or inspires wicked-
ness is bad religion; and bad religion is
failed religion, in the same sense that bad
science is failed science and bad philoso-
Letters
phy failed philosophy. We must distin-
guish religious practices from religious
ideals. Prof Tallis’s essay is mostly con-
cerned with religious practices; but he
does fairly point out that history has as
many examples of good religious prac-
tice as it has of bad. He also points out
that much of our history of wickedness is
the result of political ambition and other
factors, combined with nominal religious
faith (the two often go hand in hand).
We know that politics is not going away,
and we can be reasonably sure that reli-
gion is not going away anytime soon,
either, so our task must be to think more
carefully about our ideals, and try to
improve our practices. We have made
real progress, but much work remains.
For a philosopher of religion, the task is
to think as clearly and carefully as one
can about the question of the existence
of God, of the possible definitions of
God, and whether any God is necessary.
Religious freedom is intimately related
to intellectual freedom. What is the
point of having either freedom, if one is
not willing to exercise it?
My political philosophy is progressive
conservatism. We should conserve those
values which we have learned from his-
tory to be worth protecting, while at the
same time working to create a better
society to pass on to the next generation.
I have decided that my philosophical
thinking should have the same character
and intent. And my reading of Raymond
Tallis’ article has led me to think that he
holds the same general conviction.
D.N. DIMMITT, LAWRENCE, KANSAS
DEAR EDITOR: I invariably find Ray-
mond Tallis’s ideas and arguments stim-
ulating. ‘On Measurement’ in Philosophy
Now Issue 133, about the human ability
to comprehend the Universe to the
degree that we do, was no exception.
Tallis rightly points out that without an
ability to measure natural phenomena
the task of science would never have got
off the ground, let alone reached the
heights of finesse with which we are all
familiar. I have a slightly different per-
spective, however. There are relation-
ships inherent in the natural world that
have deep significance, and without our
comprehension of the often complex
mathematics that underpin these relation-
ships, our comprehension of the natural
world would be deficient. Without mea-
surement the relationships would be
40 Philosophy Now  February/March 2020
unknown; but they exist independently of
our measurements, in the same way that
mathematics itself exists independently of
our minds. Tallis gives us a discourse on
the evolution of units of measurement
based on human attributes such as arms,
feet and hands. But the discovery of con-
stants of nature led to so-called ‘natural
units’ which underpin our comprehension
of the Universe at all scales from the cos-
mic to the infinitesimal. Mathematics has
uncovered secrets of the Universe that
defy our common-sense view of the world,
and measurements confirm their veracity.
PAUL P. MEALING, MELBOURNE
Epistolary Enhancements
DEAR EDITOR: While reflecting on the
topic of human enhancement, as dis-
cussed in Issue 134 by Susana Badiola
and Daniel Faggella, I came across this
passage in The Perennial Philosophy
(1945) by Aldous Huxley: “Because
technology advances, we fancy that we
are making corresponding progress all
along the line; because we have consid-
erable power over inanimate nature, we
are convinced that we are the self-suffi-
cient masters of our fate and captains of
our souls; and because cleverness has
given us technology and power, we
believe, in spite of all evidence to the
contrary, that we have only to go on
being yet cleverer in a yet more system-
atic way to achieve social order, interna-
tional peace, and personal happiness.”
The idea that we can make ourselves
happier by incorporating tools into our
bodies is similarly a mirage, I think. Like
any new technology (or like a new tat-
too) the excitement lies mainly in the
novelty. Soon enough, this wears off,
and we’re back where we started. The
‘human enhancement’ project may be
stopped cold when the first lawsuits
come in from people who discover that
they aren’t, in fact, any happier; or from
designer babies who resent having been
treated as accessories by their parents.
PAUL VITOLS, NORTH VANCOUVER
Far Right? Very Wrong
DEAR EDITOR: The review in Issue 134
by Joe Smith of the book, Dangerous
Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, & the Return
of the Far Right leaves me baffled. Smith
explains that the book’s author defends
his stance against those who suggest that
Nietzsche was apolitical. Personally I do
find Nietzsche apolitical, and that most
who argue the opposite base their opin-
ion on a false image of him (corrected by
the work of Walter Kaufman). So I pre-
pared to write this letter, and in doing so
re-read the review. But wait! Smith, in
his own review, offers statements about
Nietzsche that demonstrate very well
the absurdity of aligning Nietzsche with
the Far Right. He tells us that, “Nation-
alism draws [Nietzsche’s] ire as much as
anything else; he found anti-Semitism
ridiculous, and he recommends continu-
ally seeking new, shifting perspectives to
understand the world. Most fundamen-
tally, Nietzsche is clear in his firm rejec-
tion of any kind of herd mentality, left,
right, or center.” Smith is correct. So he
should rewrite the review and speak the
truth: as for Nietzsche (but not Heideg-
ger), the premise of the book is a crock!
DAVID WRIGHT, SACRAMENTO, CA
DEAR EDITOR: Using Leni Riefenstahl’s
film Triumph of the Will as an example,
Stuart Greenstreet makes a case that a
work of art which expresses values with
which we disagree is bad art (Issue 132).
Greenstreet argues that form and con-
tent are bound together in a work of art,
and so a work cannot be judged without
considering the moral value of its con-
tent. He also claims that to evaluate a
work on the basis of its formal properties
without discussing its content is not
‘morally acceptable’. I agree that both
form and content must be taken into
account. Greenstreet proposes that ‘for-
malism’, where a work is judged on tech-
nique, organisation, production values,
creativity, and innovation, is a way of
avoiding taking the subject matter into
consideration when assessing the artistic
value of a work. I concur. However, tak-
ing into consideration the content as well
as the form of a work does not entail
making a judgement on the moral, intel-
lectual or social worth of the matter pre-
sented: it means determining what the
content is, then assessing how success-
fully the manner in which it is presented
conveys it to the audience. So I disagree
with Greenstreet that a work should be
judged on its ‘moral vision’. Even if the
values it expresses are abhorrent to us, its
value as art rests on the skill with which
it expresses those ideas. It can be
‘morally’ bad, socially objectionable, or
intellectually deficient, but still great art.
PATRICK O’CALLAGHAN
BRAY PARK, QUEENSLAND
IMAGE BY CAROL BELANGER GRAFTON
The Pleasure Principle
Peter Adamson takes pleasure in
pondering ancient hedonism.
S
pare a thought for the Cyrenaics.
Their name remains obscure
while those of other Hellenistic
philosophical schools – the Stoics,
Epicureans and Skeptics – have entered
our everyday language. This is a shame
because among those schools, it was the
Cyrenaics who defended an understand-
ing of the good life that many of us would
find quite appealing: that it is natural to
pursue pleasure, so that it makes sense to
take pleasures as they become available.
The school’s teaching can be traced
back to Aristippus, who hailed from
Cyrene, in what’s now Libya (hence the
school’s name). Aristippus was notorious
for his self-indulgence. Anecdotes have
him, for instance, saying that there’s noth-
ing wrong with going into a whorehouse,
as long as you can get out again. But it was
his grandson, also named Aristippus, who
made hedonist (pleasure-seeking) philoso-
phy into the family business. He conceived
pleasure as a ‘smooth’ movement in the
person experiencing it, and pain as
‘rough’, and said we have an instinct to
seek the smooth, as we can see from the
behavior of newborn children.
This so-called ‘cradle argument’ would
be used by other Hellenistic schools, with
both Stoics and Epicureans agreeing that
whatever we pursue by nature, that is,
before we are corrupted by society, must
indeed be good, as natural goals are ‘appro-
priate’ for us. The Epicureans even agreed
with Aristippus that pleasure is the sole
natural good. But they disagreed sharply
when it came to the pursuit of that good.
The Cyrenaics put all their emphasis on
present pleasures: those we can have now.
After all, I cannot enjoy my memory of an
almond croissant the way I’m enjoying the
one I am eating right now, and the prospect
of a future croissant will always be uncer-
tain. As a support for this focus on immedi-
ate pleasures, Aristippus developed a whole
theory of knowledge prioritizing the way
things currently seem to us. Here too there
was a degree of agreement with Epicure-
anism, which also grounded knowledge in
Philosophy Then
sense-perception. But Epicurus thought
that a tenable hedonism would take a
broader view of life and include taking
comfort in past pleasures and looking for-
ward to the prospect of future ones.
In developing his own brand of hedo-
nism, Epicurus sought to block various
objections that had been raised against
pleasure as the highest good. With their
advice to seize available pleasures, the
Cyrenaics were in danger of being dis-
missed as brutish. As Aristotle says, such
crass priorities seem more apt for cattle
than humans. Epicurus cautioned that he
was not recommending a blind pursuit of
sensory indulgence – the pleasure he had
in mind was not of the sort that can be
found in ‘boys, women, and fish’ (in other
words, sex and culinary delicacies). Nor
should we seek after honors, such as
having statues erected in our name.
Instead, invoking the cradle argument,
Epicurus encouraged the enjoyment of
pleasures that are ‘natural’, like simple
food and drink. These natural pleasures
are relatively easy to acquire. His rationale
was that if we put a high value on expensive
luxuries, or the fickle admiration of other
people, then we are bound to suffer pain
when these pleasures are unavailable.
The Cyrenaic advice was not to con-
cern ourselves with the future, but Epicu-
rus thought we should do exactly that.
Focusing too much on present pleasures
might sometimes cause future pains, as
when overeating gives you a stomach ache.
Or we might endure pain to avoid greater
pain later on, as when we have a small fill-
ing done today to avoid major dental
surgery in the future. By taking this
longterm perspective, Epicurus could
defuse another argument against straight-
forward hedonism, suggested in Plato’s
Protagoras. Even if all we are trying to do is
maximize pleasure, then we need to
develop an ‘art of measurement’ – an intel-
ligent strategy to ensure our choices really
do give us more pleasure than pain in the
long run. So even the hedonist must rec-
ognize that wisdom and self-control are
February/March 2020  Philosophy Now 41
valuable. Epicurus accepts this conclusion,
endorsing a sophisticated hedonism that
calls for foregoing some available plea-
sures for prospective gain. In fact – and
rather ironically, given the way we use the
word ‘Epicurean’ nowadays – his hedo-
nism did not so much focus on the enjoy-
ment of pleasures, but on the avoidance of
present and future pain. He claimed that if
all pain is absent, including not just obvi-
ous physical pains, hunger, thirst, and the
like but also fears of future suffering, then
one is already in the best possible state.
Someone who is entirely free from pain is
already as happy as Zeus.
Of course it is hard for us to achieve
such a state, even for a short time, never
mind over a whole life; but Epicurus’
teaching was designed to help us come as
close to it as possible. Hence his advice to
practice self-restraint: by training oneself
to need less, one is protected from the suf-
fering due from wanting more. Hence also
Epicurus’ famous praise of friendship.
Having friends is a powerful protection
against suffering, and can be a compensat-
ing comfort when one suffers – as when
Epicurus consoled himself during his
painful death by remembering conversa-
tions with friends.
Epicurus’ style of hedonism seems
better able to withstand objections from
rival philosophies. But in making his hedo-
nism more sophisticated, he considerably
reduced its intuitive appeal. While it is
immediately plausible that pleasure is
good, given that babies and even animals
naturally seek it, it is downright implausi-
ble that the highest pleasure consists in the
mere absence of pain. Also, which plea-
sure-seeker wants their life to be devoted
to rigorous self-discipline? I tend to side
with the Cyrenaics here: if I’m going to
lead a life devoted to pleasure, and not, say,
virtue or wisdom, I want to have some fun.
© PROF. PETER ADAMSON 2020
Peter Adamson is the author of A History of
Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Vols 1-5,
available from OUP. They’re based on his pop-
ular History of Philosophy podcast.
 We explode your thinking this issue as Scott Parker looks at
Sue Prideaux’s (armour) penetrating biography of Friedrich

Books Nietzsche; Roger Caldwell scrutinises philosophical revolu-

tions; & Joshua Schrier is approximately correct, probably.

I Am Dynamite! him to leave his position as

by Sue Prideaux
THE TEMPTATION FOR ANY
biographer of Friedrich
Professor of Philology at the
University of Basel, and
wander in search of climes that
might alleviate his symptoms.
“On several occasions,”

DYNAMITE DIAGRAM © PBROKS13 2018

Nietzsche must be to begin in
Turin, with the madman sobbing, his arms
draped around a horse’s neck. He sinks to the
flagstones of the Piazza Carlo Alberto. We
learn that he is never to recover. The scene
fades out, and we are whisked back to his
childhood, to proceed with the tale of how the
‘philosopher of the future’ reached this break-
ing point. Prideaux instead opts to build her
first chapter around Nietzsche’s first meeting
with Richard and Cosima Wagner in 1868,
when Nietzsche was an undergrad at Leipzig
University. This meeting initiated two of the
formative relationships in Nietzsche’s
personal as well as intellectual life, and allows
Prideaux to introduce the reader to her
subject at an important turning point for him.
Yet in order to contextualize the meeting
sufficiently, Prideaux must strain to cram
biographical information and historical
weight into the early pages, resulting in a
muddied narrative. This attempt to seize the
reader’s attention with drama serves neither
readers new to Nietzsche, for whom it is
insufficient, nor readers who are familiar with
the philosopher, for whom the hook is super-
fluous. Starting with the Wagners is no more
unnecessary than starting with the horse; but
it’s no less unnecessary either.
Now that I’ve delivered my harshest crit-
icism, let me strongly encourage you to stick
with Sue Prideaux beyond the first chapter.
If you do you’ll be rewarded with a lively and
informative account of Nietzsche’s life.
Prideaux conveys a sensitive feel for her
subject that will inform any reading of Niet-
zsche’s resounding prose.
Prideaux takes her title from Nietzsche’s
announcement in his autobiography Ecce
Homo (1888), “I am not a man, I am dyna-
mite.” She gives us the man who would make
such a claim – the very thing that draws read-
ers of Nietzsche to a biography about him.
And who was that man?
Often, a sick one. Headaches, nausea, and
trouble with vision incapacitated him for
days, sometimes weeks, on end. Illness forced
Prideaux tells us, “he thought
his last hour had come” (p.125).
Her account of his ongoing
sickness serves to illustrate
Nietzsche’s aphorism, ‘That
which does not kill us makes us
stronger’ by allowing us to understand
his life through his suffering and what he
accomplished despite his suffering. Or was
it because of what he suffered? There’s
scarcely a better example of making a virtue
of necessity than Nietzsche’s distinctive writ-
ing style. His headaches, nausea, and bad
vision limited his capacity for reading and
writing, so he developed the skill of compres-
sion. According to Prideaux, brevity became
“an increasingly valuable power as the
creative intervals between his bouts of illness
became shorter, leaving him with the prob-
lem of how to communicate his thoughts
speedily and to maximum effect before the
next attack” (p.34). This casts a very different
light on Nietzsche’s explosive aphorisms.
Lou Andreas-Salomé, a love interest, and one
of the most complex characters in Niet-
zsche’s life, read even more into the effect of
Nietzsche’s illness on his writing. As
Prideaux notes, she thought it “enabled him
to live numberless lifetimes within the one.
She noticed how his life fell into a general
pattern. A regular recurrent decline into sick-
ness always demarcated one period of his life
from another. Every illness was a death, a dip
down into Hades. Every recuperation was a
joyful rebirth, a regeneration... During each
fleeting recuperation the world gleamed
anew. And so each recuperation became not
only his own rebirth, but also the birth of a
whole new world, a new set of problems that
demanded new answers” (p.202). Such
rebirths in Nietzsche’s thinking are sketched
rather than detailed by Prideaux – which is
not a knock on the book but a reminder that
it is not a primer on Nietzsche’s philosophy
but a biography.
In Beyond Good and Evil (1886) Nietzsche
wrote that all philosophy is unconscious
autobiography. What then is the biography
of a philosopher? To what should such a
biography aspire? In Nietzsche’s case at
least, the biography is a genealogy of his
writing, rounding out and contextualizing
the autobiography. If we come to Prideaux
knowing who Nietzsche is through his writ-
ing, whether we are thrilled or offended by
him, we still might come asking from what
context such a writer emerged. His illness
was, of course, only one of the contingencies
around which his life and his writing grew.
For another, Prideaux offers Nietzsche at
eleven, when he had his own bedroom for
the first time. It was then that “he quickly
fell into the habit of working till around
midnight and getting up at five in the morn-
ing to resume” (p.23).
Knowing some of the key contingencies
surrounding a writer’s work can help us to
appreciate the work itself; and, as in the case
of Nietzsche’s misogyny, perhaps under-
stand it. He was not above letting his humil-
iation at being rejected by Lou, with whom
he shared “the most exquisite experience of
his life” (p.204) – an ascent of Monte Sacro
– and his frustration with his mother and
sister, affect his attitude toward women
generally. In less reactionary periods,
though, as Prideaux writes, “his sympathy
for women and his insight into their
psychology is remarkable for its time”
(p.201). Prideaux points her readers towards

42 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020 Book Reviews


1882’s The Gay Science for examples of the
more forward-thinking Nietzsche. In Apho-
rism 71 of Book Two he criticises the “amaz-
ing and monstrous… upbringing of upper-
class women” that involves linking sex with
shame before sending them ignorantly into
a marriage.
Unlike the charge of misogyny, acquit-
ting Nietzsche of anti-Semitism is easily
accomplished, and Prideaux continues her
timeline beyond Nietzsche’s death to do so.
That this must be done again and again is
largely due to Nietzsche’s state after his
nervous collapse in Turin, where he became
largely unable to communicate coherently.
He understood throughout his life that
madness was a possibility. But more than
that, he also understood madness as “the
only engine strong enough to drive change
through the morality of custom” (p.335).
Nietzsche’s men of the future, the Übermen-
schen, were those who could escape the grip
of conventional moral codes and find their
own individual meaning. Anyone who
aspired to such greatness must be willing to
pay a price – either accepting madness or at
least pretending to be mad. Nietzsche was
always ready, perhaps eager, to do so, even
if it could leave him at the mercy of his
cunning, anti-Semitic, Nazi-sympathising
sister Elisabeth.
Over the past half century Nietzsche’s
legacy has increasingly shaken off the image
his sister created of him, and his influence
has grown accordingly. Prideaux is near her
best when she demonstrates Nietzsche’s
ongoing appeal by simply voicing some of
his deepest concerns in her own words:
“What happens when man cancels the
moral code on which he has built the edifice
of his civilisation? What does it mean to be
human unchained from a central metaphys-
ical purpose? Does a vacuum of meaning
occur? If so, what is to fill that vacuum? If
the life to come is abolished, ultimate mean-
ing rests in the here and now. Given the
power to live without religion, man must
take responsibility for his own actions”
(p.375). As long as Nietzsche’s ideas
resonate, the fascination with him will
remain. And as long as it does, I Am Dyna-
mite! will find a much-deserved readership.
© SCOTT F. PARKER 2020
Scott F. Parker’s most recent book, A Way
Home (Kelson), explores time, home and self-
hood in a series of personal essays.
• I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche, Sue Prideaux,
2018, $30 hb, Tim Duggan Books, 464 pages, ISBN:
978-1524760823
Book Reviews
Nihilism & Philosophy
by Gideon Barker
THE PHILOSOPHER as nihilist
is a destroyer of worlds, a
revolutionary who comes to make us see with
new eyes and radically change how we live.
The nihilist philosopher uses words, not
bombs; but not simply to offer us new
doctrines or facts. This is philosophy not as
a matter for contemplation, but as something
to be lived – and if we are to live in a new
order, the old one must first be dismantled
or destroyed. The question is, once the
cobwebs and lies are swept away, what are we
left with? Once all our old values and ways
of life are gone, do we still have a world at
all, and not chaos?
Typically, however, this going forward
into a new world also involves a sort of going
back. Gideon Barker’s book Nihilism and
Philosophy deals with four such instances. In
ancient Greece, the Cynics rejected what
they saw as the artificial world of the city-
state in the interest of a return to nature.
Then, with the rise of Christianity, the hier-
archical order of the Roman Empire was
rejected in favour of a world in which, in St
Paul’s words, there would be “neither
Greek nor Jew, slave or free, male or
female” but all standing equal before God.
In modern times, after the ‘death of God’,
Nietzsche declared the end of what he calls
Christian ‘slave-morality’, trusting to the
Übermensch or ‘Over-Man’ to bring back an
Books
heroic age that valued courage and caste.
Then Heidegger, seeing the present tech-
nocratic age as a result of more than two
thousand years of forgetfulness of Being,
tried to return us to a long-forgotten way of
understanding and living in the world, to
recover a more ‘primordial’ thinking.
Baker’s account of the Cynics is heavily
indebted to Michel Foucault, whose lectures
on the subject (translated into English as The
Courage of Truth) were the last he was to
deliver before his death in 1984. The Cynics
had not previously been accorded much
space in the history of philosophy: their
doctrines were sparse, their writings have
not survived, and what we know of them
comes down often in jokes and anecdotes.
They were shocking to the society of their
day, in that their way of life involved a rejec-
tion of all conventional values. They would
do in public what most people thought it
proper to do only in private; they acknowl-
edged no family, home, or state, but will-
ingly embraced a life of begging and desti-
tution. If this was a sort of asceticism, it was
a cheerful one: the Cynics showed that you
could be happy without material posses-
sions, and that care of the body is less impor-
tant than care of the soul. There is nothing
‘other-worldly’ in this.
In Plato’s dialogue The Sophist, Socrates
says the real philosopher is one who ‘lives
the philosophical life in truth’. For Baker,
Cynicism is the first philosophy to have
actively tried to put this vision into action.
Image from
the Zoroaster Clavis Artis
1738
February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 43
 Books
The Cynics radicalized the Socratic simplic-
ity of life. After all, Socrates went home each
night to bed; the Cynics by contrast often
didn’t have homes. Socrates didn’t take part
in politics: the Cynics didn’t even acknowl-
edge the city-state (polis) to begin with. It was
necessary for them to keep a distance from
the exercise of political power if they were
to say what they thought needed saying.
ETERNAL FORMS © PAUL GREGORY 2020
They aimed to speak truth fearlessly
whether to fellow citizens or to a mighty
tyrant, to expose lies or wrongdoing. Most
Greek philosophy was for an elite, but Cynic
philosophy was available to all.
The parallels with Christianity are strik-
ing. In both there is a rejection or inversion
of conventional values. In both the call is a
radical one. The Jesus of St Paul’s writings
is a destroyer of the Jewish law; he and his
disciples lead a wandering life, taking ‘no
heed for the morrow’, leaving family and
possessions behind in order to embrace a life
of poverty and to live in what is seen as the
truth. The lowest are raised up, the highest
brought down. Both the Cynic and the
Christian are concerned with the care of
souls; although, for the Christian this is in
preparation for another world, whereas for
the Cynic it is in this world alone that we
must struggle to achieve the true life.
For Nietzsche, Christianity is Platonism
for the masses, promising us an eternal
world where all is truth and light in place of
this world, which Plato called “the twilight
world of change and decay”, where
mankind could only live to die. For Niet-
zsche, however, it is not our everyday world
of appearances that is the illusion, but the
Platonic-Christian heaven. His declaration
of the death of God is directed not only at
Christianity, but at any claim to the exis-
tence of another world. This world in which
we live – the only world there is – is not only
subject to change but is also without goal or
purpose. It is also subject to eternal recur-
rence. The challenge for us is to embrace
what seems the ultimate pointlessness: the
prospect of repeating our lives in every
detail forever.
For Heidegger, that philosophy is not
the overcoming of nihilism Nietzsche had
intended. On the contrary, it is “the ulti-
mate entanglement in nihilism”, and fails to
escape from the metaphysical prison. In
effect, Nietzsche remains caught up in
Platonism. If the true world is one of eternal
Becoming for Nietzsche, as compared to
one of eternal Being for Plato, it is still, for
all that, a true world: all that’s happened is
that Being and Becoming have changed
44 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020
places. But in Nietzsche’s doctrine of the
will to power, Heidegger sees the end of
metaphysics, the completion of a history of
forgetfulness of Being lasting more than
two thousand years: with the essence of
knowledge as will to power comes “the
unrestrained exploitation of the earth” even
“the thrust into outer space”, confirming
mankind’s sense of homelessness.
The ‘essence of metaphysics’, Heidegger
tells us, is nihilism. If so, how do we escape
it? If Nietzsche remains the last metaphysi-
cian despite his repudiation of all philosophy
since Plato, what of Heidegger himself?
Arguably he is in no better position. Niet-
zsche awaits the Übermensch for the transval-
uation of all values. Heidegger, seeking to
recover a sort of poetics of Being in a time
when instrumental (practical-goal-directed)
reason has strangled thought, vainly evokes
what is, in effect, a return of the gods.
These are some – but only some – of the
themes explored in Baker’s interesting,
informative, but somewhat unwieldy new
book. In particular I have said nothing about
Nothing, with which Baker, following
Heidegger and other thinkers, is much
concerned. But if Baker is advancing a thesis,
it is hard to see what that thesis is. In this his
brief Conclusion fails to enlighten. Indeed,
I am not sure that it fully makes sense: he
tells us that “finitude is an aborted nihilism”,
but I fail to see quite how this statement
cashes out.
By the end of the book I’m little clearer
about what nihilism is than I was at the
beginning. The journey has been an exciting
one; but has it in the end led round in circles?
Philosophy has again and again claimed to
start from the beginning, in effect discarding
its own tradition. Is this in itself a nihilistic
gesture? Is a new beginning even possible?
The Cynics, St Paul, Nietzsche, and
Heidegger, were all adept at tearing down
old beliefs, and all also have a positive end
in view: that of getting us to live true,
authentic lives. But the true nihilist is surely
one who believes in nothing.
Is it possible to live without values? If
possible, could it be desirable? The painter
Francis Bacon once proclaimed in an inter-
view: “I believe in nothing. I’m an optimist.”
© ROGER CALDWELL 2020
Roger Caldwell is a writer living in Essex. His
latest collection of poetry, Setting Out for the
Mad Islands, is published by Shoestring Press.
• Nihilism in Philosophy: Nothingness, Truth and
World, Gideon Baker, 2018, £85, 239 pages, ISBN:
978 1 3500 3518 8
Probably Approximately
Correct by Leslie Valiant
“ALL BY NATURE desire to
know,” said Aristotle, in one
of his less contentious remarks. Epistemology
is the study of the validity and scope of meth-
ods aiming to satisfy that desire to know,
including how one distinguishes between
knowledge and mere opinion. Being able to
make reliable inferences and deductions is
quite useful, so epistemology has been central
not only to the Western tradition of philoso-
phy but to philosophy globally (For classic
non-Western examples, see the Nyaya Sutras,
or the works of Dignaga). Also, philosophers
of mind as well as religious apologists debate
how the capacity to learn (or for that matter,
any rational faculties) could possibly emerge
from an entirely undirected, that is, irrational,
evolutionary process. Computer science may
provide new insights into all these philosoph-
ical problems, by discovering fundamental
limits to the sorts of processes by which a
system can learn to predict its environment.
I’m not talking about the recent computer
programs that can outperform human experts
at chess, Go, poker, diagnosing illnesses, or
predicting chemical reactions. It has been
quipped that computer science is neither
about computers (the electronic gadgets
themselves) nor a science (no laboratory).
Rather, theoretical computer science is more
akin to mathematics and formal logic, consist-
ing of formal proofs of how processes behave,
independent of any particular hardware or
software implementation. In this book, Leslie
Valiant, the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor
of Computer Science and Applied Mathemat-
ics at Harvard University, presents a readable
introduction to his work on ‘probably approx-
imately correct’ learning algorithms – PACs.
Most decision-making algorithms are care-
fully designed to never make mistakes. In
contrast, PACs are less stringent, allowing for
noisy input data and somewhat faulty, ‘good
enough’ outputs. ‘Probably approximately
correct’ quantifies the extent to which a learn-
ing process with no underlying theory about
the problem, finite computational resources
and limited access to data, can make infer-
ences. PAC systems also allow one to diagnose
how a learner can fail. For instance, a given
task may be fundamentally too random to be
learned; or it may be too complex to extract a
prediction even in principle, even if there were
perfect information; or the learner may be
using the wrong algorithm or data. Moreover,
what PACs tell us is not limited to the partic-
ular physical or biological mechanism by
Book Reviews

ROBOT © MARCIN WICHARY 2009
which the learning process occurs. Instead it
can place bounds on the types of problems any
physical system with finite resources can
perform, including human brains. Evolution
is by its nature theoryless (as Valiant puts it,
one can find a mate without having a theory
of mating), so the PAC model lends itself to
studying evolutionary ‘ecorithms’.
One of Valiant’s major scholarly contribu-
tions (and the topic of Chapter 6) is indeed
the description of evolution as a restricted
class of probably approximately correct learn-
ing algorithms in or by which a population
learns to respond to its environment. The
limited types of evolutionary processes each
individual can perform (for example, having
reproductive success, or not dying), and ways
populations can learn from the environment
(for example, through mutations in DNA),
limit the types of learning tasks that evolution
can perform. Framing evolution as a compu-
tational problem enables proofs that rely only
on very general limits concerning the compu-
tational complexity of what organisms can
perform and the types of feedback they can
receive. Valiant’s conclusions are more
general than typical biological treatments of
evolution, as they do not rely upon any partic-
ular physical mechanisms.
Chapter 7 focuses on the classical episte-
mological topics of deduction and induction
as viewed through this ‘probably approxi-
mately correct’ lens. Valiant argues that
deductive logic, including probabilistic
modelling and computer programming, is
fragile. In other words, there is no guarantee
that the answer will be correct if the under-
lying theoretical model is incorrect. In
contrast, inductive learning – that is, learn-
ing from repeated experience – can occur in
the absence of any theory. PAC-style induc-
tion can quantify the uncertainty of the
Book Reviews
The robots are still coming
predictions one generates from experience,
and can even provide some guide to its own
predictive accuracy for theoryless problems.
This provides an interesting twist on
Hume’s critique of induction as having no
ultimate theoretical justification (although
Valiant does not pursue this).
Chapter 8 makes some appropriately
cautious speculations about the implications
of PAC for human cognition. Probably
approximately correct learning algorithms
can establish a continuum of learning (or
broadly characterised, ‘thinking’) capabili-
ties that encompasses the whole natural
world, through what Aristotelian or
Scholastic philosophers would have called
the vegetative and animal faculties, up to
rational human capabilities. Valiant even
claims that he can use PAC to establish the
mathematical inevitability of materialistic,
undirected evolutionary processes resulting
in a rational faculty. Moreover, the limits on
energy, time, and memory in a PAC process
also give insight into the origins of the
cognitive biases and logical fallacies so
prevalent in human thinking.
Why might this book be interesting for
philosophers? Valiant engages with episte-
mology and theory of mind only in passing,
making a few nods towards the usual suspects
– Sextus Empiricus, Aristotle’s Posterior
Analytics, and Ockham’s Razor – without
drawing out many of the philosophical impli-
cations. However, a philosophically inclined
reader will find many other ways PAC might
illuminate classic problems. For example,
Valiant criticizes philosophical thought
experiments on the grounds that probably
approximately correct learning only works if
the data one learns from is generally repre-
sentative of what one is trying to predict.
Thought experiments violate this condition
Books
by generally considering unusual cases; there-
fore PAC predicts human reason to perform
poorly on them. For instance, consider the
famous sorites problem: how many grains
make a heap? Since our previous experiences
of heap- and not-heap-like piles are very
distinct, attempting to classify an intermedi-
ate pile is ill-defined: it violates the ‘represen-
tative data’ assumption.
Although unmentioned by Valiant, seeing
evolution as a learning process provides a
novel perspective on entire schools of philo-
sophical thought. For instance, the PAC
theory of evolution might reduce Schopen-
hauer’s ‘will to life’ to a more fundamental
‘will to learn’. The ‘turning of the will upon
itself’ – the development of rational capaci-
ties whereby the will critiques itself – occurs
merely accidentally in Schopenhauer’s
theory, but is an almost inevitable conse-
quence of PAC. Predicting the future by
using a PAC process is moreover how organ-
isms exert power over the world; and thus the
‘will to learn’ also encompasses Nietzsche’s
‘will to power’. Perhaps the closest philo-
sophical connection is seen in Michel
Foucault’s inaugural College de France
1970-1971 lecture series, which framed a
legal perspective on a ‘will to know’, connect-
ing the Aristotelian desire to know to Niet-
zsche’s desire for power. Is legal process –
that bureaucratic Leviathan – a consequence
of a probably approximately correct learning
algorithm for human societies?
This is an enjoyable, well-written book
for a general audience describing a compre-
hensive mathematical theory of adaptation,
evolution, learning, and cognition. It is
accessible to such an audience, while provid-
ing sufficient references into the primary
literature for further study. The essential
points are illustrated with conceptual and
pictorial examples of simplified versions of
the algorithms, and example problems that
demonstrate the logical underpinnings,
without getting bogged down in formal
mathematical proofs. The book also
provides interesting material for philosoph-
ically speculation. The conclusions may be
simplistic, but they’re probably, approxi-
mately, correct.
© PROF. JOSHUA SCHRIER 2020
Joshua Schrier is Kim B. and Stephen E. Bepler
Chair Professor of Chemistry at Fordham
University in New York.
• Probably Approximately Correct: Nature’s Algo-
rithms for Learning and Prospering in a Complex
World, Leslie Valiant, New York, Basic Books, 2013,
x+195 pages, $26.99, ISBN 978-0-465-03271-6
February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 45

Film
M
ost of us possess a sense of real-
ity, but what if our senses
deceive us? Would I still know
what was real if, for instance, I
had a microscopic brain tumor that made
me hallucinate that the people around me
were devils, or that a beautiful sunny day
was a dark nightmare? What if I then felt the
urge to start shooting people?
Joker, a psychological thriller directed and
co-written by Todd Phillips, is a meditation
on this disassociative sort of madness. It
emphasizes the philosophical problem of the
‘liquid’ divide between perception and real-
ity: if my perception is biased, then my reality
transforms as well. A second, connected,
problem of madness, is the dissolution of the
distinction between inside and outside. I can
project my inner being onto the world,
changing its color and tone. If I can’t tell that
I’m doing this then I’ll live in a labyrinthine
inferno, a prison of my own projections. No
one can reach out to somebody with this kind
of insanity. No one really exists for them, and
after a while their own broken mirror reflects
no one. The subject devours the world, also
disintegrating in the process.
JOKER IMAGES © WARNER BROS. PICTURES 2019
Don’t kick a clown
when he’s down
46 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020
JOKER
Stefan Bolea meditates on madness at the movies.
Joaquin Phoenix portrays Arthur Fleck, a
failing stand-up comedian with a psycho-
logical disorder that causes him to laugh at
inappropriate moments. The film provides
a backstory for the character of the Joker in
the Batman stories. Under the pressure of
successive disasters and injustices, Fleck
descends into madness and goes on a killing
spree. In the process, though, he adopts the
persona of Joker and becomes the symbol of
a revolution against privilege in Gotham
City, and a hero to rioters who fail to grasp
the depth of his disorders. Madness is noto-
riously difficult to perform, because, on one
hand, the actor must keep his emotions in
check while acting as if they are out of
balance, and, on the other, his exaggerations
must be credible, otherwise the movie
becomes a melodrama or caricature. But
watch, for instance, arguably the most
disturbing scene of the movie, in which
Arthur smothers his mother with a pillow as
he delivers the crucial line: “I used to think
that my life was a tragedy, but now I realize
it’s a comedy.” Arthur’s tone is neutral, as if
his actions are completely severed from any
emotion. The scene is a cold description of
gestures with no reference to sentiment.
The apathy of the murder is chilling. The
brilliance of Phoenix’s performance of
madness makes me think of other great
deranged villains from past decades: Jack
Torrance (Jack Nicholson) from The Shin-
ing; Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe) from Wild
at Heart; John Doe (Kevin Spacey) from
Se7en.
Closely linked to the central theme of
madness in Joker is the idea of the ineffec-
tiveness of psychotherapy. “You never
listen,” complains Arthur to his therapist,
“All I have are negative thoughts.” Dialogue
is seen as fake, and because access to the
awareness of others is blocked, one enters
the realm of solipsism, where pain is incom-
municable. The other person may be falling
apart, yet I cannot see through his mask. So
Joker is also a meditation on ‘ontological
insecurity’, as R.D. Laing put it, and on a
sort of existential paranoia. If I lack empa-
thy, the other may seem to me like a robot,
a computer program, or a ghost. I may even
doubt the existence of the other person. I
may even come to doubt my own existence:
the other never sees me, therefore I fail to
see myself, therefore I fail to exist. Invisibil-
ity is a socio-political problem: many may
feel that they don’t have a place, that they
are worthless, that they don’t mean noth-
ing, that their lives make no ‘cents’, as
Arthur writes in his journal.
Which brings us to the idea of the
‘damnation of the poor’. A society for which
money is god always ultimately equates fail-
ure with death. There are many ways in
which the poor are put to death by such a
society, and one is the denial of healthcare.
Arthur’s access to therapy and medication
becomes hindered on account of welfare
cuts, precipitating his insane behaviour. I
might even infer that the motif of rats,
which occurs a few times in the movie, is a
symbol of the great mass of the poor, which
Karl Marx called the lumpenproletariat,
resistant to the systemic extermination
machine.
Two religious ideas come to mind. First,
I think of the Hindu principle of tat tvam asi
(‘thou art that’), which states that we should
try to recognize the same essence in the

other, since we are essentially the other.
Failure to recognise ourselves in the other
means that ‘man is wolf to man’; that
exploitation never ends; that ‘the boot
stamping on a human face’ (to quote
Orwell’s 1984) forever remains the symbol
of our never-ending civil war. This lack of
empathy is another motif throughout the
movie, and it leads to mass destruction.
Second, I think of the Christian idea that
greatest are those who serve; “they and not
the strong being pointed out as having the
first place in God’s regard” (in John Stuart
Mill’s words). So contempt towards the
lowly in the movie is not merely a symptom
of fascistic indifference but of satanic arro-
gance. Like Hamlet’s play-within-a-play,
the Joker scene where the wealthy are seen
amusing themselves while watching Chap-
lin’s Modern Times, a film about the hardship
of life during the Great Depression,
I wouldn’t get on that
train if I were you
discloses the sadistic sense of superiority of
the ruling class, who observe the drama of
the disadvantaged from the heights of their
contempt. When the most advanced soci-
eties treat their most disadvantaged
members as ‘rats’, one may say that
pessimism becomes a valid interpretation of
life and that optimism is wicked, as Arthur
Schopenhauer argued. In the movie, many
respond to Joker as people respond to
Schopenhauer or to the nihilist philosopher
Emil Cioran: they are so sick of being lied
to that accepting even an inconvenient or
toxic truth is better than believing the lie.
We come to a central problem of humor.
We are trained to laugh only when it is
appropriate. “We enjoy ourselves and have
fun the way they enjoy themselves” is how
Martin Heidegger puts it in Being and Time.
Joker has his own particular humor, and
laughs when things aren’t funny, so harass-
Film
ing the dictatorship of conformism. Gener-
ally, he can be seen as an educator of the
sense of humor. One might distinguish
between fake laughter – the appropriate
laughter of the ‘they’ – and Joker’s super-
fake laughter that becomes authentic
because it is his own original expression,
uninfluenced by social imperatives. His
vision of life as a comedy which is darker
than a tragedy reminds us of the absurdist
playwright Eugène Ionesco’s reflection
regarding the hopelessness of the comic.
When we enjoy watching a performance of
Ionesco’s Exit the King, we are laughing at
the tragic aspect of existence – we laugh at
our lives and our deaths. Joker’s vision of life
as comedy is also connected to his mental
illness, and so raises the question from
Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: is
laughing demonic or divine? According to
some theologians, the devil – the first paro-
dist – is simia Dei (‘God’s ape’). People are
sadder than they declare, sadder even than
they think they are. “I’ve never been happy,”
declares Fleck ironically, upon explaining
that his childhood nickname was ‘Happy’.
Finally, one of Joker’s central ideas is
reminiscent of Fight Club or Mr Robot: a
schizoid character sparks the flame of insur-
rection. One question we might ask here is,
do I have to fight myself, or the world? In
other words, should I attempt to master
myself, as the Stoics urged, or should I
attempt to conquer the world? And is the loss
of myself acceptable if I gain the world in
return (cf Matthew 16:26)? When he
becomes Joker, Arthur becomes the worst
possible version of himself; but he gains the
world, or at least the acceptance of some part
of it, turning into a symbol of the revolution.
If I’m fighting evil, I cannot be good,
because then I would surely lose. Sadly, I
must become more evil than evil. Para-
phrasing Nietzsche, we might say that
whoever fights monsters will surely become
a monster.
© DR TEFAN BOLEA 2020
Dr tefan Bolea earned 2 PhDs, in Philosophy
and in Literature, from the University of Cluj-
Napoca, Romania. He is also the editor-in-chief
of the magazine egophobia (www.egophobia.ro)
and the editor of Apostrof.
February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 47
Street Philosopher
Destined In Delhi
Seán Moran contemplates kismet and choreography.

T
his girl lives in an artists’ colony (Between the Species, 2018). But neither her chance upon a poor start in the lottery of life;
in Delhi. Although her DNA nor her upbringing fully ‘chore- they’re also hampered by an inherited inabil-
makeshift water bucket says ographs’ or determines her life, since she is ity to do anything about it. Others win a
‘Power Supreme’, India is a also a ‘caring purposive subject’, not just an grand start plus the genetic endowment to
country where many people are disempow- object of genetic and social compliance. make the most of their early privilege. Let’s
ered, by both gender and caste. This is not All she can do – all any of us can do – is not be too pessimistic, though: neither
America, where anyone can be President. play the hand that fate has dealt us. However, genetic nor social determinism is the whole
The odds are stacked against a poor girl the card game metaphor is inexact, because story. We can sometimes rise above our
becoming the Prime Minister of India, or our ability or inability to play the hand is part initial circumstances. Moreover, being a
attaining any position of power, supreme or of the hand itself. Some people not only duke or a president is no guarantee of happi-
otherwise. She’s carrying water because her
home has no plumbing. Her mother cooks
out in the open air, over a fire on the ground.
I hope that the girl has a flourishing life,
whatever direction it takes.
The artists in the colony are professional
snake charmers, magicians, drummers and
dancers. Despite their grim living condi-
tions, the residents were welcoming. I was
offered home-cooked food by people who
probably didn’t have enough to eat, but I
didn’t insult them by refusing.
I was there to teach local children some
Irish jigs and hornpipes on the tin whistle.
(The next time you’re in Delhi listen out for
any Indian street musicians playing jaunty
Irish tunes – and maybe give a decent tip to
one of my former students.) In return, they
taught me a Hindi song made famous by

© SEÁN MORAN 2020

Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan. I
performed it on a bridge in Paris recently
and some Indian tourists filmed me on their
phones. There are some self-righteous folks
who would complain about my ‘appropria-
tion’ of Indian culture, but such sniping is

PHOTO
never from Indians. In fact, Shah Rukh Khan
himself retweeted the video of me singing
his song, playing the flute, and dancing. It
went viral for a while, earning the approval
of an astounding number of Indians. My
musical performance was rightly seen as
homage, not appropriation. But I enjoyed
the absurdity of achieving brief international
fame as a clodhopping dancer.
Unlike me, the girl in my photograph has
such grace, balance, and poise that she could
make a living as a dancer, as do many of her
friends and neighbours in the colony. There
are genetic and environmental pressures
nudging her towards such a life. As
Josephine Donovan wrote, shaping her
future is an “intrinsic teleological choreo-
graphic program – whatever one may call it
(entelechy, psyche, soul, or DNA code)”

48 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020

 Street Philosopher
ness, either for themselves or for those whose Socrates. In other words, we shouldn’t judge a book
paths they cross. Nevertheless, blaming the Or Silenus. by its cover. Some of the least likely people
underprivileged for their plight, or praising are touched by divinity. If we could see
the successful for their achievements, is like beneath their carapace, maybe everyone, no
chastising dice-players for throwing a one, or matter how mired in the gutter they seem to
congratulating them for a six. Sheer deter- be, would reveal a divine spark. And those
mination or a kind mentor can help to over- whose circumstances are grim need not be grim.
come disadvantage; but chance is still a major Oscar Wilde captures the human predica-
factor – including being genetically predis- ment pithily in his play Lady Windermere’s Fan
posed towards resilience in adversity, or (1892). The caddish Lord Darlington, with
being lucky enough to find the right mentor. his hereditary advantages, says, “We are all in
Every one of us is dependent on random the gutter, but some of us are looking at the
events which shape our trajectories. Given stars.” We can all raise our eyes to the stars –
slightly different circumstances, we could all to the transcendent – or even dance in the face
have turned out to be a rich (wo)man, poor of adversity. Socrates danced in his old age,
(wo)man, beggar (wo)man, or thief. The last and went to the higher world with equanimity
possibility is unsettling. But if we were when he was unjustly executed.
brought up in a family of pickpockets, would
we necessarily have the independence of The Way We Roll
mind to reject our domestic ethos and follow guide their route. But, even more fascinat- This line of thinking is rejected by the
another path, like Billy Elliot dancing his way ingly, before they set off, they climb on top French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus
out of a mining family? of their dung-ball and perform an ‘orienta- in his book The Myth of Sisyphus (1942).
tion dance’ to align themselves with celestial Camus feels that rather than take a leap of
La Danse Voleur features in the night sky. I just love the faith and rely on God to provide meaning in
Talking of which, have you ever seen a pick- symbolism of the whole fol-de-rol: gazing up an otherwise meaningless life, as another exis-
pocket dance? I have; and it was strangely at the stars and dancing, in-between scrab- tentialist, Søren Kierkegaard advocates, we
moving. I was playing my flute and singing bling about in the dirt. should embrace the absurdity of the world
the popular French song Aux Champs Élysées Although the diet of nocturnal scarab heroically, as Sisyphus did in legend. In the
in Paris one day (what better way to fund beetles may be distasteful to us, these crea- ancient story, Sisyphus is condemned by the
street philosophy research than street tures were sacred to the Ancient Egyptians. gods for all eternity to push a boulder up a
performance?). Just as I started belting out After all, the god Khepri’s night-time mountain, watch it roll down, and repeat, ad
the chorus a gang of teenage pickpockets mission was to roll the setting sun through infinitum. However, by recognising his task as
walked past, looking for tourists to rob. They the underworld, to be ready for sunrise on futile, Sisyphus defiantly ‘owns’ it, without
took a furtive peek at the contents of my hat the opposite horizon the next day. the consolation of belief in a more transcen-
and… started to dance. dent narrative. Camus admires Sisyphus’s
I have no affection for pickpockets – my Socrates As Satyr acceptance of his meaningless plight, and his
phone was stolen at Pigalle Metro station – but If an insect satyr, Scarabaeus satyrus, was seen determination to carry on regardless. Person-
this little vignette made me realise that they as divinely gifted, so too was a human satyr: ally, I would love to see Sisyphus take occa-
were just innocent children at heart. Well, Socrates. The politician Alcibiades describes sional breaks from his labours and lift his eyes
not innocent, perhaps; but children nonethe- Socrates as being similar to: “the Silenus- up from the boulder: he might even dance –
less – taking a break from their child labour figures that sit in the statuaries’ shops; those, to the music of the Rolling Stones, perhaps –
to perform a playful, spontaneous dance. I mean, which our craftsmen make with pipes with some Bollywood choreography and Irish
Some of those youngsters may graduate or flutes in their hands: when their two halves hornpipe steps just to add a bit of variety.
to more serious crime, while others could are pulled open, they are found to contain Life is not usually as bleak as Sisyphus’s
conceivably earn a more honest living, images of gods” (Plato, Symposium). In myth, drudgery, but we’re all condemned to push
perhaps as lawyers. The ‘intrinsic teleologi- Silenus was an ancestor of the satyrs: ugly, our dungy little spheres along, whatever that
cal choreographic program’ of humans is not bawdy, drunken wild men of the woods. allegory actually involves for you. As a revolt
a fixed algorithm, but can be over-ridden by Alcibiades, who was not ugly, but did have against the absurdity of our situations, we can
the individual. Not so in the case of other a thing for Socrates, and was far from sober pause to gaze idly at the heavens, and do a little
animals, whose ‘choreographies’ are pretty at the time, tells the assembled drinkers not dance, metaphorically or literally. Our ‘power
much fixed; their behaviour genetically to be fooled by Socrates’ appearance, for it supreme’ as humans is to reject both the
shaped by their survival value. For example, conceals a divine interior: intrinsic and the extrinsic choreographies
nocturnal dung beetles of the species imposed on us, and go freestyle for a while.
Scarabaeus satyrus have a remarkable gift. To “Again, he is utterly stupid and ignorant, as Then we can return to our water-carrying,
survive, they must roll a ball of dung away he affects. Is not this like a Silenus? It is an dung-rolling, pickpocketing, or lawyering,
from the dung-heap quickly, or rival beetles outward casing he wears… Whether anyone refreshed and empowered.
will steal it. So, according to Foster et al else has caught him in a serious moment and © DR SEÁN MORAN 2020
(Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society opened him, and seen the images inside, I Seán Moran teaches postgraduate students in
B, 2017), they give a ‘stellar performance’ of know not; but I saw them one day, and Ireland, and is professor of philosophy at a
navigating in a straight line. That’s no empty thought them so divine and golden, so per- university in the Punjab. He is available for
phrase: the beetles actually use the stars to fectly fair and wondrous.” weddings and other celebrations.

February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 49


T allis
in
Wonderland
G
iven the hours your columnist
has spent thinking about the
nature of human consciousness,
it is surprising that he has not
until now paid much heed to a crucial
dimension of it: attention.
The prompt for my recent switch of atten-
tion to attention itself was an illuminating
paper published in Mind, Tom McClelland’s
‘The Mental Affordance Hypothesis’ (2019).
‘Affordance’ was a term introduced by the
American psychologist J.J. Gibson nearly half
a century ago. Gibson wanted to remind
psychologists of the extent to which percep-
tion is interwoven with action. The salient
part of our environment is experienced as a
shifting set of affordances. Affordances are
perceived items that increase the disposition
to certain actions, and, indeed, may gird us up
for such actions (a phenomenon described as
‘potentiation’). Artefacts are obvious affor-
dances: they have been manufactured to serve
a certain purpose. A teapot, for example, is a
‘grippable’. But naturally occurring objects
may also be experienced as opportunities for
action. A tree may be a ‘climbable’, or a cave
may be encountered as a potential hiding
place – a ‘me-hideable’.
At any given time only a proportion of the
items that surround us are experienced as
affordances, because most of the things in
our environment are irrelevant to our ongo-
ing concerns. The trees whizzing by the train
window as I write this sentence do not invite
me to engage with them. That is to say,
opportunities for action depend on your
current preoccupation or agenda. A book on
my shelf may be promoted from mere back-
ground to an affordance when a need arises
for me to consult it. The decision to climb a
mountain transforms its surfaces into
footholds and handholds. Affordances are
not confined to individual material objects:
they also include scenarios such as deterio-
rating weather or the crowdedness of a room.
Fans of Heidegger’s classic 1926 book
Being and Time may be sympathetic to
Gibson’s rejection of a tendency among
psychologists to regard our mode of being in
50 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020
Paying
Attention to
Attention
Raymond Tallis becomes aware
that he can’t afford to ignore attention.
the world as merely spectatorial. To use a
distinction that Heidegger elaborated, we
interact with the entities in our environ-
ment not as items that are merely ‘present
at hand’ (Vorhanden) but as things that are
‘ready to hand’ (Zuhuanden) – not just visi-
ble, but useable. Ready-to-hand items
belong to a world of opportunity – or in
Heideggerian terms, as possibility-for-me
or possibility-for-us, as when I or we see
something that I or we might be able to use.
Alternatively, affordances may be present
under the guise of necessity, as when I see
something such as an onrushing elephant
that I must avoid. In sum, whether an item
out there qualifies as a full-blown affor-
dance will depend on its salience to the tasks
I am engaged in doing or have in mind to
do. What makes McClelland’s paper of
particular interest is that he extends the
notion of an affordance beyond affordances
for bodily actions, such as gripping, walking,
eating, and fleeing, to affordances for mental
actions, such as imagining, counting, and
most importantly, attending.
Mental actions are mental events that are
under our own control. Among events or
scenarios that afford attention, McClelland
distinguishes those that we attend to delib-
erately from others which press themselves
on us and insist on being attended to. Atten-
tion to a pain or a loud bang is involuntary:
we are ‘hailed’ (to use McClelland’s term) by
such events. By contrast, focusing on some-
thing in response to one’s own or another’s
instruction seems to be voluntary and may
involve mental effort. Attention, it is clear,
spans a wide zone between passive/receptive
aspects of mind and active ones.
The gradient of the activeness of atten-
tion may be illustrated by vision, when we
pass from involuntarily registering a flash;
to looking; thence to watching; peering;
scrutinizing; interrogating; and, finally, to
making formal observations, including
measurements. Active attention – as when
we’re waiting for something to happen or
someone to turn up – being on the look-out
for possibilities, actively differentiates what
count as information from what’s discarded
as mere noise.
This is where the idea of mental affor-
dances gets particularly interesting, because
it is relevant to wider issues of human
agency, volition, and the philosophy of
action. The regulation of attention is neces-
sary for the exercise of free will, and indeed
for a coherent life.
Attending To Action
Action seems to be most clearly voluntary –
something that’s done – when we pay atten-
tion to at least some of its elements, namely
those which are explicitly connected both
with the goal of the action and the circum-
stances in which it is taking place. (Attention
to our goals, more than anything, distin-
guishes action from mere reaction. The
latter is closer to a happening than a doing,
as when we duck to avoid a missile or jump
in response to a loud bang.) But the more
carefully we inspect it, the more complex
appears the relation between attention and
the exercise of our agency. Consider some-
thing pretty quotidian: walking to a pub to
have a conversation with a friend. During
the journey we’re bombarded by sensory
stimuli. Only a small subset of them are
relevant to our journey and count as mental
affordances, seducing or requiring our
attention. There will be some stimuli that
force themselves upon us, but we reject
them as mere distractions unless they are
salient, as when a hoot warns us that we are
about to step into the path of a car. Other-
wise, we choose to pay attention only to that
which our action demands.
The attentional affordances that shape,
guide, or energize voluntary actions are
often prescribed in advance. What makes
street signs or pub names privileged mental
affordances is their relevance to our goals.
Behind this is a network of what we might
call ‘becausations’: my going to meet you in
the pub, for example, to discuss a joint plan,
draws on a multiplicity of sources that make
sense of the action as something that fits
into my life insofar as it overlaps with yours.
Our purposes shape our attention, and our
choice of attentional affordances keeps us
on what right now counts as ‘the straight
and narrow’ as we endeavour to fulfil those
purposes. If we are to respond to the unex-
pected but salient we must also strike a
balance between focused and open attention
– between inwardly regulated concentra-
tion, and responsiveness to happenstance
events. Voluntary attention is dappled with
inattention. Because I do not usually need to
do, as consciously-intended actions, most of
the movements involved in walking to the
pub – maintaining my balance, putting one
leg in front of the other – I don’t have to
attend to most of my perceptions associated
with them, unless something goes awry.
The automatic manufacture of off-the-shelf
steps is to be contrasted with the bespoke
action of consciously navigating myself to a
particular destination, in the service of a
singular goal, executed with the aid of street
signs that are consulted to support a deci-
sion to turn left or right or carry straight on.
The distribution of attentional affordances,
and the balance between doing and happening
in an action, will be radically different when
I am learning to walk again after a stroke
(when I will need to concentrate on my
balance), or when I am taking a route I could
follow in my sleep (when I have no need to
consult street signs). And attentional affor-
dances will evolve during an action as we
judge what has still to be done and how, and
monitor our performance in ongoing
actions: whether we are ‘on course’, or have
arrived at our goal.
Attending to affordances whilst
walking down the street.
Self-manipulation is one of the most inti-
mate aspects of the exercise of volition.
Training and practice will enable us to do
automatically things which at first have to be
enacted consciously, painstakingly, and
attentively. They are perhaps the most obvi-
ous aspects of our capacity to focus on certain
things and safely ignore others. And learning
how to attend in a certain way is a particularly
striking expression of our capacity to position
ourselves in order to exercise our freedom. It
reminds us of the extraordinary extent to
which we have a hand in creating the percep-
tual opportunities we take advantage of in
furthering our interests. We can do this
directly or indirectly, immediately or after an
appropriate interval of time. We can set traps
for our attention, ambushing ourselves with
reminders to look, listen, or read. We can
even manipulate the conditions for the very
possibility of attention – namely, at the very
least, being sufficiently awake – by a variety
of means, such as pinching ourselves, taking
a breath of fresh air, drinking a coffee,
making sure we had a good night’s sleep,
setting an alarm, or asking someone else to
wake us up in the morning.
At t’End
It’s easy to overlook the extent to which
manipulating our own attention – obeying
the strange inner command ‘to pay atten-
tion’ – is central to self- and world-control,
and to the creation of an ever-increasing
distance between a train of reactions driven
by a torrent of unsolicited experiences and
carefully tailored journeys undertaken in the
T allis
in
Wonderland
interval between the womb and the tomb.
Transforming your world into a source of
solicited, planted, or rigged attendibilia is
one of the keys to moving from a life that is
a mere succession of moments, to a vita that
has a curriculum.
Many ethologists have highlighted the
extent to which the unique capabilities of
human beings are rooted in collective atten-
tion, maintained between groups of differ-
ent sizes and durations. This collective
attention enables modes of cooperation and
self-development unknown even in our
nearest primate kin. Our public spaces are
crammed with ‘notices’ that directly or indi-
rectly solicit attention, and our communal
lives require convergent attention. A strik-
ing example is what we may call ‘institution-
ally prescribed attention’. In my professional
life as a doctor, most of my waking
consciousness was directed towards atten-
tional affordances that I was obliged to seek
out, respond to, and interpret. My relatively
expert, technologically-trained attention
would alight on attendibilia such as elements
of the history of the illness, or signs ranging
from the demeanour of the patient to subtle
changes in movements or the appearances of
scans that might indicate neurological
disease. My years of training and (alas)
mistakes transformed aspects of the
perceived world into ‘signs’ for me – mental
affordances that would require my response
and provide at the very least a first interpre-
tation of what they might signify.
Many philosophers of mind have identi-
fied intentionality or ‘aboutness’ as a unique
mark of the mental. But it is only part – the
ground floor – of the story of human
consciousness. Attention and its individual
or shared control is intentionality in italics.
It is central to the many shared worlds in
which we achieve things far beyond the
scope of other living creatures. Time to
meta-attend to it.
© PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2020
Raymond Tallis’s latest book, Seeing
Ourselves: Reclaiming Humanity from
God and Science is out now.
February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 51
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February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 53

Brief Lives
Etienne de la Boétie (1530-1563)
Martin Jenkins looks at the life of an influential early political philosopher.
E
tienne de la Boétie is probably best known in the
English-speaking world through a footnote in his
friend Michel de Montaigne’s essay ‘On Friendship’
[see last issue for Montaigne’s Brief Life, Ed]. Even in
France, La Boétie is a shadowy figure. No portrait of him sur-
vives, though Montaigne compares him to Socrates as a beautiful
soul behind an ugly face. His life is poorly documented. Yet he is
arguably the most influential French political theorist of the six-
teenth century.
La Boétie was born in 1530 at Sarlat-la-Canéda in Guienne in
south-west France. Orphaned at the age of ten, he was then
brought up by his uncle, a priest also named Etienne. Nothing is
known of his schooling. We know he studied law at the Univer-
sity of Orléans, which was the most prestigious law school in
France. On graduating in 1553 he secured a position as a magis-
trate in the Parlement of Bordeaux.
The Parlements were the superior law courts of France. Their
members enjoyed all the privileges of nobility and were known
as the noblesse de robe (as opposed to the noblesse d’épée, the warrior
nobility). They considered themselves the repositories of the
fundamental law of the realm – for instance, the Parlement of
Paris claimed, and exercised, the right to ‘verify’ royal edicts,
that is, to confirm their conformity with the law, and if they
wished, to refuse to register them, making them ineffective. The
54 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020
Parlements were the only government institutions with any inde-
pendence from the throne. As a group of educated men of inde-
pendent means, the Parlements represented the sole focus of
political debate outside the royal court.
About this time La Boétie married Marguerite de Carle, a
widow with two young children whose brother was President of
the Bordeaux Parlement. Then he became friends with Mon-
taigne. The latter was also a member of the Parlement, and he
claimed to have become interested in La Boétie after reading
some of his unpublished works. La Boétie was a mildly prolific
writer, but published nothing in his lifetime. He wrote poems in
Latin and French (Montaigne included twenty-nine of his son-
nets in his Essays); he translated from Plutarch, Xenophon, and
the Italian poet Ariosto; but his most important work of this
period was the Discours de la Servitude Volontaire (Discourse on Vol-
untary Servitude), published in 1574.
La Boétie Considers Voluntary Servitude
There is uncertainty as to the date of writing and the nature of
this work. Montaigne originally claimed that La Boétie was
eighteen when he wrote it, but in the final edition of the Essays
he changed this to sixteen. However, some internal references in
the Discourse seem to date the text to about 1552, making La
Boétie twenty-two. Moreover, Montaigne hints that it may have
The St Bartholomew’s Day
Massacre of 1572
by François Dubois

Possible sketch
of de la Boétie
been a rhetorical exercise, a defence of a hypothetical position;
but he then undermines this idea by asserting that La Boétie
would never assert a view in which he did not believe.
In this short work La Boétie addresses an important political
puzzle: why do human beings submit to the rule of tyrants? He
argues that freedom and the desire for it are the natural states of
humanity, and that even under tyranny freedom is easily
regained:
“Be resolved to serve no more, and there you are, free. I do not want
you to push him or topple him, but merely no longer hold him up, and
you will see him, like a huge colossus with the base taken away, collapse
under his own weight and break up.”
So why do people submit voluntarily to a tyrant?
La Boétie distinguishes three kinds of kings: those elected by
the people; those who rule by right of conquest; and hereditary
monarchs, but in practice he only considers the last case. He says
that hereditary monarchs consider their subjects to be hereditary
slaves, and that their subjects often accept this status because it is
customary. (This very much was the case in sixteenth century
France.) However, he also recognises that self-interest can lead
to collaboration with a tyrant. He describes how half a dozen
self-interested cronies gather round a king, then six hundred
more attach themselves to the cronies, and eventually, thousands
of people exercise power on behalf of the dictator. But, he points
out, none of these people are friends of the tyrant: the tyrant has
no friends (he cites a number of Roman emperors who were
assassinated by those closest to them). A tyrant, he says, ‘is nei-
ther loved nor loves.’
One might expect a work of this nature to end with a defence
of liberty. Instead, La Boétie exalts friendship, writing “L’amitié,
c’est un nom sacré, c’est une chose sainte” – “Friendship is a sacred
name, a holy thing”, and concludes by arguing that the effect of
tyranny is to corrupt human relationships:
Brief Lives
“There can be no friendship where there is cruelty, where there is dis-
loyalty, where there is injustice; and among the wicked, when they come
together, it is a conspiracy, not a company; they do not love each other,
but they fear each other; they are not friends, but they are accomplices.”
La Boétie’s political thinking appears to have been republican
in nature. He makes a positive comparison between the Republic
of Venice (“a handful of people living so freely that the most
wicked among them would not wish to be king of all”) and the
Ottoman tyranny; and Montaigne remarked that he would
rather have been born at Venice than at Sarlat.
Remembering a Mémoire
In 1560 La Boétie was sent to Paris by his Parlement. His official
mission was to discuss his colleagues’ salaries; his real job was to
raise the question of relations between Catholics and Protestants
in south-western France. This was the major political issue of the
day, confused by the weakness of the French monarchy. France
was suffering from three ineffectual Valois kings, all under the
thumb of their mother Catherine de Medici, despised by the
nobility as an Italian bourgeoise, and lacking the skill in political
manipulation which should have been her family inheritance.
Three factions of the noblesse d’épée were jockeying for influence
at the royal court when La Boétie arrived there. This surely con-
firmed him in his view about how tyranny operated.
La Boétie met and became the friend of Michel de l’Hôpital,
the moderate Chancellor of France. L’Hôpital sought peace
between Catholics and Protestants. Initially La Boétie supported
him. But in January 1562 the government issued an edict grant-
ing limited toleration to Protestantism, which satisfied neither
party. It did however provoke La Boétie’s second great work, the
Mémoire touchant l’édit de janvier 1562 – Reflections on the Edict of
January 1562.
There is some dispute as to whether the Mémoire contributed
to the debate leading up to the Edict, or whether it was a later
response to it. Whichever it is, the Mémoire has a poor reputa-
tion. Annie Prassoloff, a recent editor of the Mémoire (Galli-
mard, 1993), contrasts the ‘fireball’ of the Discours with the
Mémoire’s ‘cold light of this burnt-out star’. However, this is to
overlook the different natures of the texts. The Discours is a
youthful private theoretical work: the Mémoire is a mature public
document addressing a problem of practical politics. In it Le
Boétie considers the question Machiavelli asked: How can the
state secure the obedience of its members?
La Boétie effectively starts in the Mémoire where he left off in
the Discours. He says that in a state with two religions (in this case
meaning Catholic and Protestant), human relations are cor-
rupted. The result “is almost universal hate and malevolence
between the king’s subjects, which in some places feeds secretly,
in others declares itself more openly, but everywhere produces
sad results… It divides citizens, neighbours, friends, parents,
brothers, fathers and children, husband and wife.” How, he asks,
did we get to this state? He blames the corruption of the Church;
Luther and Calvin, he says, would not have begun their reform-
ing action if the Catholic church had not been corrupt. Although
aware of the doctrinal differences between Catholic and Protes-
tant, La Boétie considers them relatively unimportant; out of
100,000 Protestants, he says, only 200 actually understand them.
He considers three options to remedy the division in the coun-
February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 55
Brief Lives
try. The first, going over entirely to the new (Protestant) church,
he rejects as impractical in France, although he acknowledges that
it has worked in England. The second, religious toleration, is also
rejected. He points out that it has not worked in Germany, where
there was still conflict between the different forms of Christianity.
Also, it leads to further division; for example, between Lutherans,
Calvinists, Zwinglians, Anabaptists, and so forth. La Boétie recog-
nises that different religions coexist successfully in the Ottoman
Empire, which contains Muslims, Jews, and Christians among
others, but he doubts that different forms of the same religion can
live together peacefully in a single state. He also warns that the
enemies of France will take advantage of her religious divisions. So
his solution is to insist on adherence to the Catholic Church – but
not as it currently existed. First, he says, order must be restored. By
this he means those who have committed violence in the name of
religion must be punished. This he proposes to entrust to the Par-
lements. The monarchy had attempted repression intermittently,
through the noblesse d’épée. La Boétie observes that repression only
works if combined with justice – in which, of course, the noblesse de
robe is expert. He is in favour of severe exemplary justice, but for
acts against the community, not for belief itself.
Then the Church must be reformed, so that it becomes so
attractive to those repelled by its abuses that they return to it
willingly. La Boétie sets out a programme of reform which
would effectively have transformed the Catholic Church into
what reformers such as Martin Luther (who had originally been
a Catholic monk) had wanted. He echoes those reformers by
continually citing the example of the early church.
But how will this reform come about? La Boétie has no con-
fidence in the church to reform itself. Instead he looks to the
King, ‘protector of the Gallican church’, to carry out this reform
within France, supported by the Parlements, which will appoint a
coadjutor for each bishop to ensure that it happens.
As a final nail in the coffin of corruption, the Church will lose
its right to raise revenue directly. Instead the state will raise the
money to fund its needs, and in the case of absentee priests that
money will be administered by the public authorities.
In effect, La Boétie set out a programme for a national
church, nominally Catholic but under state control. He
acknowledged that some aspects of his programme would
require the approval of the Pope, but was confident that the Pope
would cooperate, as he did in Germany.
Death & Afterlife
La Boétie died on August 18th 1563 from an intestinal illness,
possibly a form of plague. Montaigne recorded his last days in an
eloquent letter, and was at his death-bed. La Boétie bequeathed
his library to Montaigne, who also acted as his executor.
Now begins La Boétie’s curious afterlife. Montaigne pub-
lished La Boétie’s other works in 1571 but omitted the Discours
and the Mémoire. By now the wars of religion had started and
both texts were controversial.
If we only had Montaigne’s edition, we would probably
regard La Boétie as a minor Renaissance humanist. However,
the Discours was circulating in manuscript, and an extract was
published in 1574, followed in 1577 by a complete text, under
the title of Le Contr’un. Both these versions were published in the
Protestant interest. It is one of the numerous ironies of La Boétie
56 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020
Achilles and the Tortoise
I entered in and took my place
Ready to cheer the tortoise race.
My drachma says that number nine
Is first to cross the winning line.
At last they’re off and in slow motion,
But what’s that noise and great commotion?
The door flung wide, a mighty sound
Hilarity all round the ground:
Achilles is entering the chase,
Which surely will increase the pace!
My tortoise nine is in the lead,
But great Achilles has the speed
To overtake him, take the cup
But first he has to catch him up:
Impossible, against all clocks
Because of Zeno’s paradox.
© REV'D DR PETER MULLEN 2020
Peter Mullen is a philosopher and Anglican priest. His last
cure of souls before he retired was Rector of St Michael's,
Cornhill in the City of London.
scholarship that the best manuscript of the Discours, on which all
modern versions are based, was owned by Henri de Mesmes,
who drafted a text called Against La Boétie.
La Boétie’s influence seems to have crossed the Channel. In
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Cassius uses the image of the Colos-
sus to describe the tyrant Caesar, and adds, “The fault, dear
Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are under-
lings.” This might have come straight out of the Discours.
Then La Boétie more or less disappears for over a century.
There is an English translation in 1733, and in 1727 the Discours is
reprinted in an edition of Montaigne’s Essays. It also reappears in a
couple of editions in the 1790s; but the idea that the citizen might
refuse the demands of the state was probably as obnoxious to
Robespierre’s French Republic as it had been to the ancien régime.
As the nineteenth century moved on, the thoughts which La
Boétie had articulated became attractive to anarchists including
Thoreau, the Christian anarchism of Tolstoy, and finally Gandhi.
The rediscovery of the Mémoire in 1917 should have brought
about a reassessment of La Boétie. Instead, the Discours has been
edited and reedited, while the text of the Mémoire is only readily
available as an appendix to the Gontarbert edition of the Dis-
cours. I suggest that only in reading the two texts together is it
possible to understand the idealistic thought of La Boétie. Both
are based on the Renaissance humanist idea that man (excuse the
anachronism) is master of his fate and of his institutions.
© MARTIN JENKINS 2020
Martin Jenkins is a Quaker and a retired community worker. He lives
in London and Normandy.
A Note on Texts
The Discours is available in English in Atkinson and Sices’s edition (2012). The
commentary is mostly good but contains a few errors, and the English ver-
sion is often more of a paraphrase than a translation. The Mémoire is, to the
best of my knowledge, only available in French.
PLATO LOOKS TOWARDS THE CAVE BY RON SCHEPPER 2020 YOU CAN CONTACT HIM AT EDITOR@TEXTURA.ORG

Fiction

Vincent Kavaloski modernises

Plato’s allegory of the Cave.

What is Freedom?
nce, in a faraway land, there was Cave World Cor- flickering silver screens upon which endless dots and lines

O poration. A dank and cheerless building, vast and

cavernous, its open-plan halls housed hundreds of
workers who sat in individual booths chained to
formed moving pictures of great fascination. The figures on the
screens moved according to the commands of distant Program-
mers. But the watchers knew nothing of the Programmers: they

February /March 2020  Philosophy Now 57

Fiction
knew only the enticing, bright-lit screens. Having seen noth-
ing else, the people believed the electronic figures and shapes
and graphs they were seeing were Reality; and they believed
that they were free.
Life in Cave World was a contest. Those who could
quickly identify the most shapes were given honors by the
Programmers. They were called Executives, or Officers, or
VIPs. They were given extra dots for their screens, and flash-
ing signs that said: ‘I am happy!’ or ‘I am free!’ or ‘I am some-
body!’ All the signs flashed at exactly the same moments, so
that the VIP section seemed engulfed in a great pulsing elec-
tronic wave, reading ‘I am happy, I am free, I am happy, I
am free, I am Somebody!’ To sit in the wash of these bright
lights was exciting, envied and sought by everyone. “Some-
day,” the others thought, “if I work hard and follow the dots
correctly, I will get a flashing sign on my screen telling me
‘I am happy, I am free!’, and then I will be Somebody!”
One day a young woman became tired of the little flash-
ing dots and the endless contests. The figures seemed so pre-
dictable, so routine, so boring. “Surely,” she thought, “there
must be more to life than this? Besides, who is Somebody?”
With great effort she tore her eyes loose from her screen
and glanced around. She turned slowly around and in doing
so made a great discovery: the chains that held her existed
only in her mind!
Her screen began to flash furiously: “Stop! Return to
Reality. Repeat. Stop! Return to Reality.” But she stood up.
She was afraid from the strangeness of it all, but she contin-
ued to turn. There, beyond the rows of identical screens, she
saw something amazing – distant people madly typing at key-
boards. They were the Programmers, controlling every
aspect of the only world she knew, but she could not under-
stand. She wondered whether they were an illusion. They
looked strange to her, and menacing. She stumbled back into
her seat, turning back fearfully to her screen. It flashed furi-
ously at her: “You are beginning to recover from a psychotic
episode. Repeat. You are now returning to Reality.”
Later she was given some extra colorful dots, then even a
flashing ‘happiness’ sign, but life could not be the same as
before. An insidious doubt had seized her mind. She was
infected with the terrible disease called ‘Questioning’. So
not long after, the young woman grew restless once again.
She could no longer be absorbed in the allure of moving
dots, no matter how colorful. One day she even blinked! Her
screen went blank for a brief moment. In that moment she
leaned forward, stood up again, and turned around. This
time her screen flashed even more furiously at her. But she
decided to follow her questions, and to explore.
Off in the distance, beyond the Programmers, she saw a
dim sign saying ‘Exit’, and beyond it a light. She began to
walk towards it, hearing around her waves of contemptuous
laughter from the Programmers. But even louder was the
derisive, cutting laughter of all the VIPs, who were watch-
ing her shaky, tentative struggle on their screens. But their
happiness signs had grown dim.
The woman fled through the Exit and up a steep stair-
58 Philosophy Now  February /March 2020
way, bruising her knees and hearing only the rumble of laugh-
ter behind her. Yet stronger than this laughter was a gentle
presence that seemed to guide her in her ascent. She followed
the fractured, distant light always upward. After a long,
exhausting ascent she reached a glass door shimmering in its
brightness. She hesitated, then threw open the door and
walked out into a glorious springtime.
The hard, brilliant light struck her with such force that she
became painfully blinded. She writhed under it, and part of
her began to long for the dark safety of the Cave. It was com-
fortable there, while here she was alone and vulnerable, with
no flashing signs to tell her what to do or how to feel. She felt
the great fear of freedom.
She looked down to avoid the direct light. At first she saw
only shadows and reflections in water. But after a time her
eyes began to adjust, and she saw the true glory of that sunlit
world. What magnificence! The utter miracle of lush green
plants, the mystery of white clouds floating in the deep blue
dome of the sky… and everywhere, everything saturated in
light: wave upon endless wave of voluptuous, buoyant light.
She wandered as if newborn, in wonder and delight, trying to
touch every leaf and fragrant flower and blade of green grass
she passed. She danced wildly in the sea of sunlight for the
sheer joy of being alive. Alive! As if for the first time! Joy lifted
her thoughts higher and higher like a red-tailed hawk soaring
on an updraft to heights of ecstasy, to the burning beauty of
the sun itself. Her soul was consumed by fire!
Later, exhausted by this outpouring of ecstasy, she lay rest-
ing in the soft grass. Her thoughts turned to her former com-
panions, locked away in dingy Cave World below, manipu-
lated like puppets by the Programmers. She must tell them
the truth! The world of flashing dots was a cruel lie!
Hard as it was to leave the World of Light, she turned back,
journeying down, down to the Cave. She strode in and
shouted: “Friends, come with me out into the sunlight! The
true world is brighter and bolder than you’ve ever dreamed!
Come out from your prisons of flashing screens!” But the
people loved the prison of their illusions and they feared the
new and different. Their screens flashed with angry epithets.
When she persisted, trying to shake them from their trances,
the Programmers pressed buttons to destroy her image on the
screens. But although they could erase her from their
machines, they could not extinguish her or her message. She
walked through the Cave, singing of the wonder and freedom
and joy of the World of Light; but the Cave Dwellers tuned
her out – all except a boy in the back corner. As he glanced
up at her, a question entered his mind. At that precise moment,
his screen went blank and she reached out her hand to him.
He grasped it, and rose slowly, like a morning star. Together
they turned and began the long journey toward the light. A
new day was dawning.
© VINCENT KAVALOSKI 2020
Vincent Kavaloski is Professor of Philosophy and Integrative
Studies at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin. He also
facilitates Socrates Cafés and public discussions on peace, justice
and human rights.
 Professor Daniel Dennett
Visiting Professor of Philosophy at
New College of the Humanities

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