Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 11 August 2021

 

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

I’ve been saying since the beginning that liberal humanism is a whole, and it is. But it is a whole because we have made it a whole, and it can only continue to be a whole if we go on doing it. That’s the liberal task, the liberal project, the liberal preoccupation. Humanism may historically precede liberalism—but liberalism can’t mechanically produce humanism. It’s a task of mental effort, adjusted to new circumstances. The reality of science doesn’t guarantee the primacy of love. What science shows us is the world as it is. We choose to make the world as we want it.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

Like the civil discourse approach, this psychological-rhetorical persuasion strategy for building political agreement is also well-meaning. But in practice it can quickly become condescendingly manipulative and even disturbingly Orwellian in its implications. Because of its inherent deviousness, this approach is ultimately misguided. Increasing sympathy for a wider spectrum of values requires a persuasion strategy that is fundamentally transparent and sincere.

N.B. I find this too pejorative toward the rhetorical tradition. Rhetoric, to succeed, depends on building bridges, via logos, ethos, and pathos. It can be unethical, but not necessarily so.

Doom

Niall Ferguson

The population of the Eternal City itself fell by three quarters in the space of just five decades. Archaeological evidence from the rest of Western Europe—inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle—suggests that “the end of civilization” came within the span of a single generation.99 And all this was long before the Plague of Justinian, in the mid-sixth century.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

With similar suspicion Wittgenstein may have heard, by the time of his stay in Vienna on holiday in August 1923, that his Tractatus was now also beginning to inspire seminars and discussion groups (later known as the “Vienna Circle”) at the city’s university. The Vienna group wanted to save and heal society by adhering to a strictly scientific view of the world. This certainly did not correspond to Wittgenstein’s approach, since he saw the purely scientific worldview as yet another wrong track that his era had placed itself upon, and one that was, in its supposedly value-free and enlightened clarity, based on particularly stubborn misunderstandings.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Each generation has to learn anew the importance of Aristotle and the Scholastics in the history of ideas. Each generation is as surprised as the one before, for everyone approaches the Aristotelians through certain myths. Even now, the only factoid “known” to many people about the medieval theologians is that they debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Because, Morgenthau answered, there was no such thing as an international community. Domestic disputes could be resolved—not solved—through discussion and negotiations, or when negotiation failed, by appeals to the sovereignty of the state and the authority of the law.

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

In every human case, identity turns out to be porous and inconsistent rather than fixed and discrete; and prone to get confused and lost in the play of mirrors. The cross-currents of ideas and inspirations – the Nazi reverence for Atatürk, a gay French philosopher’s denunciation of the modern West and sympathy for the Iranian Revolution [Foucault], or the varied ideological inspirations for Iran’s Islamic Revolution (Zionism, Existentialism, Bolshevism and revolutionary Shiism) – reveal that the picture of a planet defined by civilizations closed off from one another and defined by religion (or lack thereof) is a puerile cartoon.

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Grove Press edition, 1968, p. 61. I am using this work because of its great influence on the present student generation. Fanon himself, however, is much more doubtful about violence than his admirers. It seems that only the book’s first chapter, “Concerning Violence,” has been widely read. Fanon knows of the “unmixed and total brutality [which], if not immediately combatted, invariably leads to the defeat of the movement within a few weeks”

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 8 July 2021

 

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

The reality-based community would not have endured and expanded for four centuries unless it possessed formidable strengths: its institutional depth, its vast networks, its reserves of integrity. It can use those strengths to build resilience and resistance, and, after initially reeling from the shocks of the Trump era, it set about doing so.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton warned of the dangers posed by men with “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity”—men who commence as demagogues and end as tyrants. Later, in a letter to President Washington, Hamilton warned that the “only path to a subversion of the republican system of the country” is by way of the ruthless demagogue who uses fear and flattery to “throw things into confusion [so] that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’ (Location 2930) 

Have you ever read such an apt description of . . . .? [Fill in the blank.] (I didn't have to think twice about my answer, although he has many imitators now waiting in the wings.)

Philosophical Intimations

James Hillman

I have not yet made clear what I mean with our two terms: civilization and culture. For the sake of not imposing a major philosophical position, let us simply say civilization gets the job done as best it can. Culture is song, the song that breaks out in the midst of the job. Civilization needs tools and passes them forward. Civilization looks back to learn. Culture pops up, sprouts in a petri dish. It can be helped or hindered by civilization, but culture can also be utterly autonomous. Culture is surprising, inexplicable, unpredictable, and largely unlearned. Culture breaks into civilization and is often assimilated by it — even the counterculture, avant-garde art, street fashion, pop music and dance, slang — become appropriated by civilization.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

Western scholars have complained that when Socrates says that knowledge is virtue he asserts “the conjunction of two logically distinct things, an intellectual state (knowing …something), and an emotional one (one in which there is affective backing for doing the thing one knows one ought to do).”

He

Robert A. Johnson

The origin of the word ‘humble’ traces back to ‘humus’—it means of the earth, feminine, unsophisticated. This reminds us of the biblical injunction, “Except ye become as a little child, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

The philosophical origin of [Wittgenstein's] Tractatus lies in an unsharable experience, given as a gift, rather than an argument that could somehow be reconstructed with transparent clarity.

Collingwood's The Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Propositions cannot contradict one another unless they are answers to the same question.

Thoughts for the Day: 26 June 2021

 

Beyond the Robot

Gary Lachman

Simply put, immediacy perception gives us the bare facts of experience, the discrete bits and pieces that enter our awareness. Meaning perception is a kind of glue that holds these pieces together and makes them a whole.

Time and Narrative, Volume 1

Paul Ricoeur

“An intention,” we are told in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (section 337), “is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions.”

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

For Merleau-Ponty the ‘object’ of perception cannot be viewed in isolation, because is in reality embedded in a context, the nexus of relations among existing things which gives it meaning within the world. Thus no one object exists independently of others, but reflects a part of whatever else it co-exists with, and in turn is itself similarly reflected there.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

There is nothing in the case of feeling to correspond with what, in the case of thinking, may be called mis-thinking or thinking wrong. The most general name for this thing is failure. Failure and its opposite, success, imply that the activity which fails or succeeds is not only a ‘doing something’ but a ‘trying to do something’, where the word ‘trying’ refers not to what is called ‘conation’, but to an activity which sets itself definite tasks, and judges itself as having succeeded or failed by reference to the standards or criteria which it thereby imposes on itself.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Strauss said that “a tribal community may possess a culture, i.e., produce and enjoy hymns, songs, ornament of their clothes, of their weapons and pottery, and enjoy fairy tales and what not; it cannot however be civilized.” For that, you needed the “conscious culture of humanity,” to be found in the works of writers like Plato and Aristotle, Spinoza and Nietzsche.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

“Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” according to a universal legal maxim. It is asking a great deal, both of legal insiders and of those without. It demands that ordinary persons have a general understanding of legal principles, at least as far as their own affairs are concerned. The Digest [Roman legal precepts] and the Talmud are huge storehouses of concepts, and to be required to have even a sketchy idea of them is a powerful stimulus to learning abstractions. What is less obvious, but equally important, is that the maxim imposes a heavy burden on the law itself. Legal concepts must be, in some sense, comprehensible at large. No formulas, no flow charts, no diagrams. Despite a common impression to the contrary, the law cannot possibly be a tangle of esoteric rules that invariably need resort to a lawyer to understand or to have understood on one’s behalf. Since the point of the law is to order ordinary affairs, the language in which the rules are expressed must be substantially that of ordinary life.

The Price of Peace by Zachary Carter & The Time of the Magicians by Wolfram Eilenberger

One of the best books of 2020

 Normally I don't review two books in the same article. And on the face of it, these two books would seem to create an odd tandem. The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes centers on the life and work of John Maynard Keynes and his intellectual progeny in economics, while The Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy deals with the work of four German-speaking philosophers during the period from 1919 to 1929: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Cassirer. There is some overlap of personages: Keynes, as a Cambridge intellectual and would-be philosopher makes an appearance in The Time of the Magicians as an acquaintance of Wittgenstein via their shared Cambridge connections and Keynes was scared off (as it were) from philosophy by his encounter with Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus, published in 1922, after Keynes has served as a courier to get the draft into the hands of Bertrand Russell for publication in Britain. The other common figure is (at least to me) a little known Italian economist named Piero Sraffa, who collaborated with Keynes for many years and who also understood Wittgenstein--according to Wittgenstein--and who influenced the shift in Wittgenstein's thinking from that of the Tractatus to that of his Philosophical Investigations. But other than these coincidental overlaps, what ties these two books together in my mind? 

In short, both books begin at the end of the First World War--the Great War. Carter does begin his portrait with Keynes with the financial panic in Britain at the outbreak of the war and with Keynes's life as a Cambridge Apostle and then as a charter member of the Bloomsbury group that focused on aesthetics and---by the standards of the time--uncommon sexual mores. But it's not until his participation in the Versailles Conference and his subsequent appraisal of the Conference in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, that Keynes hits his stride as a public intellectual and as an influential (although often ignored) influence on government policy. Keynes and his intellectual legacy arose during the inter-war period that was so marked by economic and political turmoil. Keynes became an economist dedicated to preserving the liberal, market-oriented democracies. His focus becomes overwhelmingly practical, even when he delves into more esoteric topics, like theories of probability or ancient monetary regimes. 

Before moving on to The Magicians, let me pad this review with some further quotes from The Price of Peace. Not a cool move for a reviewer, but still, to bring this to a conclusion and to add some spice, I'll share them: 

"The real struggle of today…is between that view of the world, termed liberalism or radicalism, for which the primary object of government and of foreign policy is peace, freedom of trade and intercourse, and economic wealth, and that other view, militarist, or, rather, diplomatic, which thinks in terms of power, prestige, national or personal glory, the imposition of a culture, and hereditary or racial prejudice. . . . The great threat facing liberalism was not socialism but the thirst for military domination. “Soldiers and diplomatists—they are the permanent, the immortal foe.” (John Maynard Keynes, “On the Way to Genoa: What Can the Conference Discuss and with What Hope?,” The Manchester Guardian, April 10, 1922; CW, vol. 17, 373.)

The Price of Peace (p. xvii-iii). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Keynes was a philosopher of war and peace, the last of the Enlightenment intellectuals who pursued political theory, economics, and ethics as a unified design. He was a man whose chief project was not taxation or government spending but the survival of what he called “civilisation”—the international cultural milieu that connected a British Treasury man to a Russian ballerina

Id.(p. xviii). 

[S]o the manuscript Keynes had helped salvage from a POW camp in Cassino, Italy [Wittegenstein's Tractatus], pushed Keynes out of the philosophy business. A Treatise on Probability was debated avidly by the leading lights of Cambridge philosophy but quickly fell out of favor. Wittgenstein’s work, meanwhile, became the foundational text of analytic philosophy—a school of thought that still dominates English-speaking philosophy departments, in which language itself is understood to be the source of all truths that philosophers can uncover.

Id.(p. 116). 

Price instability undermined the public’s faith in its government and its institutions; failing to control it would, Keynes told the Treasury, “strike at the whole basis of contract, of security, and of the capitalist system generally.”

Id. (p. 129). 

Governments would find themselves forced to choose between maintaining a stable exchange rate and a stable price level. When the choice came, Keynes argued, there should be no hesitation: Keep prices stable, and adjust exchange rates. It might be true that “over the long run,” rashes of inflation and deflation would burn themselves out. “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs,” Keynes observed. “In the long run, we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.” (A Tract on Monetary Reform (London: Macmillan, 1924, p. 80.)

Id. (p. 130). 

Money existed to be spent on finer things: the pursuit of Apostolic “good states of mind.” From his undergraduate days to his deathbed, Keynes believed that these were not exclusive goods. One man living a good life did not detract from another’s ability to live well any more than one person’s enjoyment of a painting would ruin another’s ability to appreciate it.

Id. (p. 146). 

[A] snapshot of Keynes’ view of economics in the hierarchy of intellectual pursuits. Ethics—by which Keynes meant the elements that made up a good life—were a more important consideration for public policy than economics, the field that had made Keynes famous. The remains of his early reverence for Edmund Burke is evident in the note’s distinct modesty of ambition. Even when imagining the “ideal future of society,” Keynes could only envision striking a balance between what was “tolerable” and what was “not intolerable.” Keynes had in truth already been working on his political theory project for some time.

Id. (p. 149). 

He was forging a new set of philosophical foundations for twentieth-century society. He announced the program across the top of the page: “Prolegomena to a New Socialism—The Origins and End of Laissez-Faire.” Keynes had an ambiguous relationship with the word socialism. Sometimes he deployed it as an epithet; in other moods, he used it to describe a progressive ideal.

Id. (p. 149). 

The Time of the Magicians, on the other hand, deals with four thinkers who made their mark on post-war culture in ways that are, on the whole, quite apart from politics. Wittgenstein spent his time in an Italian POW camp (he was an Austrian soldier) writing the Tractatus, which attempts to resolve some of the most vexing issues of philosophy by his analysis of propositions. Heidegger, on the other hand, after his service in the German military, sloughs off his prior train of thought and delves into what he labels Dasein, our "being-there" in this world. Despite its immediate impact and its concern with human placement, his thought--like Wittgenstein's--held no immediate political implications. (But more on this later.) Benjamin was an itinerant (meaning often broke and without a position) scholar who wasn't a systematic thinker but who made penetrating (according to some) observations about intellectual topics that he investigated. Again, no immediate political implications arise from his work. Finally, Ernst Cassirer is the oldest, most established, and most "bourgeois" of these four. He, too, was a philosopher obsessed with issues surrounding symbols, language, art, and such, but he pursued his project within the context of Neo-Kantianism, then the reigning school of philosophy in Germany. In this period (1919-1920) he didn't write directly about politics (although after the Second World War he published The Myth of the State). But while none of these four directed their thinking toward politics, all three deeply influenced the course of philosophy and high culture during this period and beyond. 

I would be remiss, however,  to suggest that the only impetus for a new philosophic perspective represented by The Magicians arose only from the War and the consequent social, economic, and political dislocation that it wrought. Even before the war, the world of Newtonian physics had been crumbling under the weight of Einstein's new theories of relativity, which were soon followed by theories of quantum mechanics. In philosophy itself, there was a strong movement, such as found in the Vienna Circle and via Moore and Russell at Cambridge, to anchor philosophy in science and logic and to jettison the rest of traditional philosophy, such as metaphysics and ethics. And the arts, which had experienced profound changes before the war, continued down new and often disorienting experimental roads. Change was happening in all walks of life, and The Magicians were responding to these changes. 

Both books are exceptionally fine and important works of intellectual history. Thinkers who worked and struggled with the realities of the inter-war years, such as those listed above, and others, like R.G. Collingwood, Hannah Arendt, and others, have a renewed value today as we experience democracy under attack and the world haunted by irrational spirits among the people. History doesn't offer answers, but it does provide lessons, hints about the future, that we ignore at our peril. 

H

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 14 June 2021

 

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

Marx may have said that the proletarian has no country; it is well known that the proletarians have never shared this point of view. The lower social classes are especially susceptible to nationalism, chauvinism, and imperialistic policies. One serious split in the civil-rights movement into “black” and “white” came as a result of the war question: the white students coming from good middle-class homes at once joined the opposition, in contrast to the Negroes, whose leaders were very slow in making up their, minds to demonstrate against the war in Vietnam This was true even of Martin Luther King. The fact that the army gives the lower social classes certain opportunities for education and vocational training naturally also plays a role here. The fact that the army gives the lower social classes certain opportunities for education and vocational training naturally also plays a role here.

The Idea of Nature

R. G. Collingwood

Just as the stream of life presupposes the topography of a material world through which it flows, so the stream of consciousness presupposes the topography of logical and conceptual forms, categories, or ideas in the Platonic and Hegelian sense; and Bergson’s attempt to deny these two presuppositions leaves him in the dilemma of either tacitly asserting what he professes to deny or else asserting nothing except the existence of a force which does nothing and of an intuition which apprehends that nothingness.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

These were things that could be proved to exist using the methodical foundation of this essentially scientific vision of the world—logical analysis. That is, so-called facts. But Wittgenstein was able to show that the truth was in fact precisely the reverse. Everything that gives meaning to life, and the world in which we live, already lies within the boundaries of what can be directly said.

The Wedge

Scott Carney,

We’ve seen these values before in how people who are over-sensitive to CO₂ reinforce constant feelings of anxiety. This internal awareness is what neuroscientists call interoception. It’s a critical sense to hone the Wedge because it allows people to identify subtle sensations inside their body that they don’t often notice consciously. Feinstein’s research indicates that even brief periods of turning down external stimuli can force people to turn their attention inward—heightening their interoceptive abilities—and break the feedback cycle that reinforces anxiety.

Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson 

Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 9 June 2021

 

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

Wittgenstein called upon one of philosophy’s most distinguished images of the inescapable problem of epistemology: the extent to which we, trapped as we are entirely within the internal space of our own experiential subjectivity, can have any reliable knowledge whatsoever of the outside world, or connect with the interiority of others.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

What Collingwood tends to think of as the animal side of human nature – feelings, appetites, desires and, even, more contestably, the emotions – is something which it is not possible to know historically. There can be no history of love, only a history of thought about love; no history of dreams, only a history of dreams as consciously recounted. A history of the feelings is, then, close to being an oxymoron, since, as Collingwood writes in a dramatic passage, ‘we shall never know how the flowers smelt in the garden of Epicurus, or how Nietzsche felt the wind in his hair as he walked on the mountains; we cannot relive the triumph of Archimedes or the bitterness of Marius’ (IH 296).

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

“There exists in our society,” Arendt complained, “a widespread fear of judging.” The genuine statesman had no choice but to judge, and judgment, Kissinger said, demanded “character and courage . . . vision and determination . . . wisdom and foresight.” And where did correct judgment come from? Insofar as policy depended on nonquantifiable choices, there was no avoiding questions of morality. “All political action,” Strauss said, “implies thought of the good.” Kissinger wrote that “the great human achievements must be fused with enhanced powers of human, transcendent and moral judgment.” If artificial intelligence came to dominate or replace human thinking, “What is the role of ethics?”

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The term “individualism” had no settled use. As an innocuous moral shorthand, it picked out four profound and well-attested convictions with long pedigrees in the common tradition. First of all, morally speaking, people mattered as people, not as men or women, Jews, Christians, or Muslims, blacks or whites, rich or poor. Nobody went naked in society. Everyone had to wear something. Their particular social clothes, however, were morally irrelevant. Second, everyone mattered equally. If social clothing was morally irrelevant, nobody could properly be excluded from society’s concern, denied its protections, or exempted from its demands. Third, everyone had a sphere of privacy that was no one else’s business and on which neither state nor society might intrude. And fourth, everyone had in them seeds of capability and personal growth, which could not be left untended without moral loss.

David and Goliath

Malcolm Gladwell

Arreguín-Toft then asked the question slightly differently. What happens in wars between the strong and the weak when the weak side does as    David    did and refuses to fight the way the bigger side wants to fight, using unconventional or guerrilla tactics? The answer: in those cases, the weaker party’s winning percentage climbs from 28.5 percent to 63.6 percent. To put that in perspective, the United States’ population is ten times the size of Canada’s. If the two countries went to war and Canada chose to fight unconventionally, history would suggest that you ought to put your money on Canada.

The Three Languages of Politics

Arnold Kling

The three axes allow each tribe to assert moral superiority. The progressive asserts moral superiority by denouncing oppression and accusing others of failing to do so. The conservative asserts moral superiority by denouncing barbarism and accusing others of failing to do so. The libertarian asserts moral superiority by denouncing coercion and accusing others of failing to do so.