Justin Erik Halldór Smith

A Five-Year Report

I have been a professor of philosophy and a fonctionnaire in Paris for five years. I think by now this gives me at least some credibility as a participant-observer (Lévi-Strauss never spent more than two years at a time in the Amazon). I pass my days mostly around people who talk about figures and ideas that proved their worth centuries ago, and that will not be forgotten centuries from now, but because I am American and I talk to Americans with peculiar ideas about French philosophy, I am often asked to comment on whatever remains of the Parisian intellectual style from the past century that gained some considerable popularity abroad and that still survives in some pockets, like Christian Audigier car freshener on sale at an Indiana truck stop.

So here is my quinquennial report: the more I learn about the functioning of high-mandarin French academia (I mean the functioning of the actual institutional gears and levers that cause the relevant actors to say the things they say in the way they say them), the more I see the history of the importation of French 'theory' into the United States for what it is-- a farce, a systematic misunderstanding of vast comic proportions. 

My Preferred Pronouns?

I was at an academic conference last week, somewhere in America, where we were invited by our hosts to place a 'preferred pronoun' sticker on our nametags. "If you could pick one of those up during the next break, we'd appreciate it." The options were, 'He', 'She', 'They', 'Ask Me', and one with a blank space for a write-in. Coming from my adoptive France, I had heard of this new practice in my country of origin, but somehow I had convinced myself that it was mostly mythical. Yet there were the stickers, and there were all my fellow participants, wearing them with straight faces. 

I did not pick one up. As is my practice at these events, I do not even wear the nametag that has been provided for me, so there would have been nothing to put the sticker on. But if there had been any direct and explicit pressure on me to wear one, rather than just a general announcement, I would have been constrained to explicitly refuse to do what was being asked of me. I would have been a conscientious objector. 

In the future I will avoid meetings at which I know in advance, or I have a reasonable expectation, that there will be such stickers. I am strongly opposed to this convention, I think it is ridiculous and offensive, and I am only thankful that, for now, it is only a convention and not a compulsion. But the line is not so clear. It is not a compulsion for me to wear a sticker, because I am privileged and basically indifferent as to whether I ever get invited to an academic event again. The quality of my life is enhanced by not going to academic events, and reduced by going to them. If I can't go because social pressure would require me to wear a sticker, well, tant mieux. But this is not the case for younger scholars who are precariously employed. It is in part for their sake that I feel the need to make explicit my opposition to this practice. 

The reasons for this opposition are simple. If to be cisgender is to be such that your gender identity as you experience it matches with the gender identity you are assigned at birth, then I am not cisgender. What it would be like to feel at home with your assigned gender identity is something I cannot even imagine, but I take it that whoever is at home in this way is an utter dullard, an unthinking fool, and definitely someone to avoid. I for my part cringe whenever I am called a 'man'. Even 'person' and 'human' seem rather too confining for my sense of the true nature of my being, but I usually let these slide. 

At the same time, I take it that if we are, as Heidegger said, geworfene Entwürfe, 'thrown projects', then the fact that members of my society find it reasonable to call me a 'man' is part of my Geworfenheit, and not something it is within my conception of my life project to change. I do not feel like a man, but I also do not feel I have it in me to bring about, by my will and by my presentation of self in everyday life, any other social fact as to what sort of being I am. In other words, whatever my preferred pronouns might have been in some imaginary Rawlsian original position, I do not feel I have a reasonable expectation of others that they use them in my non-imaginary present position.

The fact that I do not feel this way is something very deep about my identity: the mismatch between what it is I feel I am, and what it is I feel I can expect others to recognise me as being. This mismatch is philosophically interesting to me, and it is also an unhealing wound at the core of my identity. Again, I suspect that anyone who does not perceive this wound in them, in some way or other, is an uninteresting, unthinking person.  

I expect to be called 'he', because it is into he-ness that I have been thrown, but no, I insist, I do not 'prefer' to be called 'he'. I have a strong preference, in fact, that I not be expected to expect others to use my preferred pronouns, and it is a violation of my own sense of who I am to be called upon to state my preferences in this matter as if they were, to me, some kind of easy and painless and wholly worked out fact. 

There will always be unthinking and uninteresting people in the world. But let us not enforce this way of being by bullshit new social conventions or, worse still, by oppressive new bureaucratic demands.

 

Why Cosmism? Why Now?

I wrote about the recent revival of Russian cosmism by the techno-futurist intellectual dabblers of Silicon Valley, for Tank Magazine. To read the whole piece, go here. 

Russian cosmism, it seems, is having its moment. In Paris I recently met a friend who edits a certain glossy magazine devoted to “men’s style and culture”. He told me his editorial team had just closed a special issue on the topic. That’s strange, I said, I’m writing about Russian cosmism right now for Tank. “Well,” he replied contentedly, “we beat you to it.”

What is going on here? Why are even the glossies getting in on the action?

The eminent Russian-German art historian Boris Groys has done much to resurrect this lost current of thought, and was a key participant and organiser of the exhibit, Art Without Death: Russian Cosmism, hosted by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in autumn 2017. Arts-publishing and curatorial platform e-flux has also devoted considerable attention to the topic, including its publication in 2016 of a translation of an article by the Russian critic Marina Simakova, in which she identified cosmism as being “extremely attractive to supporters of various ideological views”, and “the site of an impending war”. As early as January 2017, cosmism was also being invoked as a harbinger and prophecy of ideas that would become popular in early 21st-century Silicon Valley. On the tech website Digital Trends, Douglas Rushkoff wrote that such things as algorithms, automated processes, and artificial intelligence that suppose our cognitive abilities may “be blamed on the Russians. No, not Putin and the oligarchs, but a little-known line of early 20th-century Russian occult philosophers called the cosmists”.

As is typical in writing on Russia, anything that happened much before the early 20th century, or at least before the rumblings of revolution began in the 19th century, is considered mere prehistory. But in order to appreciate the context of cosmism’s emergence, we need to pay attention to the longue durée, and to understand what first set the Russian imagination, and indeed the Russian will, on its course towards a brave future of automation, space travel, Sputnik, nuclear missiles, Twitter bots and other weapons of mass destruction...

To read more, click here.

The Anthropocentric Idealism of Judith Butler

Those who, with Judith Butler, deny a distinction between sex and gender, however they may think of themselves, are either classical philosophical idealists, or they are anthropocentrist human-exceptionalists, and thus heirs to the legacy of the Christian theological model of the human being.

Consider this from a recent online ‘syllabus’: "Butler proves that the distinction between sex and gender does not hold. A sexed body cannot signal itself as different sexually without cultural gender categories, and the idea that sex comes before cultural factors (which are believed to be only overlaid on top of sex), is disproven in this book. Gender is performance, there’s no solid universal gender basis beneath these always creative performances. There is no concrete sexed body without constructed human categories to interpret it."

At least since Fichte dispensed with the Kantian thing-in-itself, we have been aware of the possibility that there is no concrete external world without human categories to interpret it. That is, if we acknowledge that the world beyond our experience is entirely inaccessible to us by definition, then there are good arguments to the effect that we should not believe it exists at all.

But the philosophical possibility of absolute idealism in no way prevents us from continuing on with our research programmes in, say, fluid dynamics or vulcanology. What makes the human body so different?

The concrete sexed human body is, alongside volcanoes, worms, etc., a thing of nature-- unless, that is, you are an idealist and you think there is no such thing as nature at all. But in any case, the sexed human body, the volcano, and the worms, whether ‘constructs’ or natural objects, can only have the same ontological status-- unless, that is, you are a human exceptionalist.

Which brings us to our second point. Let’s take a purportedly natural object that is somewhat closer to a human, in the classical scale of being, than it is to a volcano: the male of some species of anglerfish (e.g., Haplophryne mollis). It is several times smaller and vastly weaker than its female counterpart. In order to mate, the only option it has is to bite into the side of the female’s body, to pass its seminal material into her blood stream, and then slowly to wither away, eventually becoming a tiny appendage of its polyandrous spouse.

Now, is there anything ‘constructed’ about this? Anglerfish sexual dimorphism is extreme, but it is not different in principle from that of mammals. And if we insist that anglerfish reproduction is just a natural fact, while human sex and sex difference is ‘constructed’, then we are more or less explicitly claiming that human beings are not animals alongside others, but that their essence is non-natural in origin. 

This is a fundamentally conservative stance to take, and Butlerites share it with traditional Christian theology, among other currents of thought. Butlerism buys its sex constructionism by means of a deepened commitment to species essentialism-- and at a terrible exchange rate.

I am not saying this view is wrong, or right. I enjoy reading both Thomas Aquinas and Charles Darwin. But to the extent that I take up positive stances on substantive philosophical issues, I do like to be clear on who my associates are.

I know Butler has distanced herself from the more simplistic versions of her own theory, and in one interview I have seen her affirming the truth of Darwinian evolution, and of human kinship with apes. But this only sharpens the question: is sex difference in apes constructed? If it is not in apes, yet is in humans, what happened in the past five million years to make humans such exceptional creatures? No defender of the basic thesis of Gender Trouble has ever coherently addressed these questions. 

I have been going back to this book periodically for twenty years now, to see whether there is something I've missed. The problem seems too glaring to go unadressed. But Butler's critics are for their part generally too scoffing and dismissive to address particular problems of her work at all, while her supporters probably assume that such a big problem must have been taken up somewhere or other.

Butler herself has, since the late 1980s, matured into a towering and authoritative intellectual, but this doesn't mean that all who invoke her are in a position to share that authority, and it remains reasonable to ask them for clarification.

Look at that syllabus again. It says that Butler has proven that the distinction between sex and gender does not hold, while gender, in turn, is constructed. Therefore, sex is constructed. But again, does this include ape sex, anglerfish sex, etc., or only human sex? And if only human sex, does it follow that human beings are not part of the same natural order that includes apes and anglerfish?

None of these questions are meant to suggest that sexual dimorphism in the animal world is simple, obvious, or universal. We know there is tremendous variety out there, and this variety is frequently invoked by neo-Butlerites as biological evidence for the constructedness of human sexual binarism. But invoking this evidence, they only complicate matters. If it is true that a number of species of lizards can switch from sexual reproduction to asexual parthenogenesis in the absence of suitable mates, then there is at least some natural fact about lizards and sex. But the neo-Butlerite claim is that there is no natural fact about humans and sex ('there is no concrete sexed body'). What is the difference between humans and lizards that justifies this distinction?

Orangutans show not so much a high degree of sexual dimorphism within the species, between male and female, as a dimorphism between males: some mature males get 'flanges', that strange condition that makes their faces into enormous discs, while others remain as they all had looked in adolescence, which is also the way female orangutans look across the life-cycle. Look at a flanged male orangutan and tell me there is something performative about that. You'll know I know you know you're bullshitting. The flanges are there. They are there, that is, unless nothing is really there, including also volcanoes, galaxies, &c. 

In the history of hominid evolution, dimorphism is clearly diminishing. Males of the Australopithecus genus were on average around 50% larger than females. In modern Homo sapiens, the disparity is closer to 15%. That is still not insignificant. (It is, for one thing, enough to yield the physical difference that gets translated into social reality as patriarchy.) A moderately well-trained physical anthropologist can look at the pelvis of a human skeleton and tell you instantly whether it belonged to a man or a woman. The pelvis, like the living male orangutan's flanges, is a plain giveaway.

Let us grant that all of the social and symbolic dimensions of womanhood that have been assigned to bearers of the one sort of pelvis throughout history have been completely and utterly arbitrary. It cannot follow from this that the perception of an anatomical difference so deep as to be immediately evident in the skeleton is nothing more than an illusion. 

Perhaps in contemporary reflection on sex and gender there is a dim awareness of the past few million years of evolution, of the progress we have made from 50% to 15%, and a sense that this trend towards non-dimorphism can be hastened by collective political will. Perhaps it can be. Still, flat denial of dimorphism is an expression of how one would like things to be, not a description of how things are. And when dimorphism is finally reduced to 0%, and reproduction is taken care of by technicians in laboratories, and patriarchy is banished to the past, the claim that there is now no sex difference will still be a factual claim about certain entities in nature (entities that have arrived in their present condition by a combination of evolution and technocultural innovation). 

Imagine that our species had developed in such a way that males were not on average 15% larger than females, but, like the Lamprologus callipterus species of fish, 60 times or so larger. Suppose that nonetheless we managed to develop into a technologically complex, liberal-democratic society that put a high premium on individual thriving, on freedom and equality. Suppose that within that society a school of thought and a political movement emerged that held that, even though men are 60 times larger than women, both sexes nonetheless have the same basic neural equipment to thrive, to the extent that their physical dimensions permit, in more or less the same way.

But suppose then another school of thought emerged, which said that this first one did not go far enough, and insisted that men are not actually 60 times larger than women, and that it is only a result of ideological indoctrination that we have believed they are up until now. "But my mate can only fit a single tip of an antenna into our home," some traditionalist woman might protest, "while I can swim around inside freely. He keeps accidentally eating me and having to spit me back out because I’m literally too small for him to detect, while when I’m with him he literally obstructs everything else from my field of vision. I think he's gaining weight-- at this point it takes me more than a day just to circumnavigate him. Surely I’m not imagining that." And then of course she would be mobbed on Twitter for these heresies.

The thought experiment starts to founder when we note that such a species would never have ‘homes’, and almost certainly not monogamous mates either, while our species in turn never would have developed into a complex, liberal-democratic, egalitarian society if males had been, or had remained, 60 times larger than females. Culture, with the innovative technological work-arounds that it has come up with to break the stranglehold of the sexual division of labor, and all the other ways it has been able to some degree to assure that biology, for men and women alike, is not destiny, has been the principal motor of our motion towards non-dimorphism over the past few million years. Behind a veil of ignorance, you could surely know in advance that a species in which the males are 60 times larger than the females is not a species with automated payroll systems, cosmetic surgery, Twitter, or its own version of Judith Butler.

Again, it is likely that some dim awareness that this is the direction culture is pushing quite unsurprisingly leads some to suppose that culture must be pushed in turn, and we must eradicate whatever similarities remain to the L. callipterus. This is an understandable desire, but one also feels the need to warn against undue rashness. Biology may not be exclusive destiny, but it does dictate the terms under which the will is free to do its work. Will is not exclusive destiny either, and you are setting yourself up for ideological extremism, followed by disappointment, if you pretend that it is.

But forget about sex and gender for a second and focus on the more general question: What is a human being?

For Thomas Aquinas, even though we are contingently lodged in a mortal corruptible animal body, our true nature is eternal, and comes from the divine order of things, not the natural one. Later German idealism may be seen in important respects as the project of preserving the non-natural character of human geistlich existence, while removing its theological underpinning. French poststructuralism inherits this project, willy-nilly, as you will surely know if you ever, say, go to a fine restaurant with a high-mandarin Parisian philosophy professor and ask him what he thinks about the moral implications of eating meat. And posturing American radicalism, with its roots in French poststructuralism, inherits these conceits in turn, but with an ever decreasing level of historical self-consciousness, of appreciation of the millennia-old ideas blowing through it like a wind-sock.

William H. Gass, Philosopher (1924-2017)

I wrote a commemoration of William H. Gass for n+1, focusing in particular on his training as a philosopher and on the significance of this training for his life's work. To read the whole thing, go here. 

William Howard Gass, who died on December 6 at the age of 93, is one of the very few philosophers of the 20th century to transcend the essential boringness of that social identity. What university committees did he serve on? What was his teaching load? What was the “impact factor” of the journals he published in? Who cares. Gass, who completed his dissertation under the supervision of the analytic philosopher Max Black at Cornell University in 1954, and who worked for a short time with (to the extent that one could work with) Ludwig Wittgenstein, also wrote what is perhaps the greatest, bleakest, most rigorous, and finely calibrated American novel of his era, 1995’s The Tunnel. Impact factor: either “incalculable,” or “n/a,” depending on your view of disciplinary boundaries.

Yet his literary output must not be seen as an abandonment of his earlier trajectory. Idiosyncrasy is the integrity of genius, it is sometimes said. Gass was writing philosophy the only way he could. His principal preoccupation in philosophy was with metaphor, which you might think is a perfect point at which to bring philosophy and literature into conversation. You might think this, until you read Black on the subject, writing around the same time Gass was completing his graduate work under him: “To draw attention to a philosopher’s metaphors,” Black observes, “is to belittle him—like praising a logician for his beautiful handwriting.” He concludes that while metaphors are unavoidable and might sometimes be harnessed for salutary ends, they are, in general, dangerous, “and perhaps especially in philosophy.”

It is not hard to imagine young Gass chafing at the bit that midcentury analytic philosophy had sought to place in his mouth...

Continued here.

Notes on Social Media and Autocracy

[To appear, in some modified version, in my forthcoming book, Irrationality: A History (Princeton University Press, 2018)]

Over the last few weeks we have learned that part of Russia's intervention in the 2016 US election included placing ads on Facebook that spanned the political spectrum: some were in support of Black Lives Matter against police brutality, others were in support of 'Blue Lives Matter', defending the bravery of police officers who put themselves in harm's way. Some were in support of crackdowns on illegal immigration, while others promoted LGBT rights. Some pretended to be pro-Sanders, and others pro-Trump. None, however, were straightforwardly pro-Clinton.

What exactly was the strategy here? Some people have taken this willingness to play both sides as evidence that the Russian regime could not have been straightforwardly pro-Trump. But it seems to miss the point to suggest that that regime's responsibility in Trump's victory must have had anything straightforward about it, or that its support of Trump must have been in the same spirit as the support expressed by a misguided but nevertheless sincere American voter. The purpose of the Russian operation was to sow disorder and to weaken the American political establishment, and its agents understood that supporting left causes at the same time as they supported Trump was the best way to do this. In this far Russia was following the exact strategy already worked out during the Greek crisis, in which its agents supported both the far-left Syriza party and the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn. They didn't want the Republicans to triumph as an end in itself; they wanted chaos to triumph, and here they clearly succeeded. Unlike misguided American voters, they understood that Trump is not in any meaningful sense a Republican, but rather an agent of chaos.

And so the Russian intelligence agents took to social media, or, more precisely, they paid young Russian college graduates to work for their cause by farming 'likes' from a troll farm in St. Petersburg. And soon enough Russian trolls were successfully goading Americans on Twitter and Facebook into debating, sharing, liking, content on all manner of distractious hot-button issues. At least one social-media user by the name of Jenna Abrams turned out not to exist at all, but to have been invented as a false identity for one or several Russian trolls. Before being exposed she had succeeded in riling Americans into engaging with her on the meaning of the Confederate flag, on Rachel Dolezal, and on 'manspreading', the recently concocted transgression by men on public transportation who do not hold their legs sufficiently close together.

Social pressure, largely generated by social media, had by 2015 pushed New York City to make sitting with your legs too far apart an arrest-worthy offence, and that same year the Police Reform Organizing Project released compelling data showing that arrests for this new crime overwhelmingly swept up black and Latino men. Yet in social media, any acknowledgment of anything that looks like an objective dilemma is more or less impossible, as for example that there might be a conflict between the imperative to eliminate patriarchy as manifested in the microagressions of male fellow citizens, on the one hand, and the imperative to combat police persecution of marginalized communities on the other. Acknowledgment of the complexities of reality is impossible, and so the social-media-based left came down decisively in favor of wiping manspreading from the face of the earth, and doing its best not to see the downside of this campaign.

A society that spends its time talking about manspreading cannot be doing well. Jenna Abrams' role in keeping that particular conversation going was part of a broader campaign to ensure that public discourse not improve, at least long enough to whisk into office a new American president who is himself the personification of this sickness, whose own orally produced speech sounds, in style and grammar and syntax, more or less like his textual interventions in social media. The intelligence operation did not require any ingenious back-channel maneuvering, or any intelligence at all of the sort that we have traditionally expected spy agencies to excel in. In order to do their part in making a social-media celebrity the president of the United States, foreign intelligence operatives had only to get into the spirit of social media itself, to master the English lingo, become fluent in meme-making, and in general to adopt and promote the norms of discourse that in any case had already triumphed in the United States. Russian intelligence agents did not invent manspreading-- on the Moscow metro in fact a man is much more likely to be confronted for the opposite transgression of crossing his legs, which is perceived as feminine (I should know: I myself have been assaulted in Moscow for this very thing). But they did understand how to weaponize this American invention and use it for the further corrosion of public discourse.

Nor, of course, did Russian intelligence come up with the new economy of 'likes', but this did not prevent its agents from incentivizing the work of its trolls by measuring their success in this new quasi-currency. As one troll told an interviewer about their work: "You should always write that sodomy is a sin, and that will bring you a couple dozen 'likes'." This economy was devised in the United States (the inventor of the 'like' button, Justin Rosenstein, born in 1983, has deleted his own Facebook account out of concerns about its addictive power). But unlike the attempts in the 1990s of Jeffrey Sachs and others to export economic expertise to a system that did not wish to receive it, like-seeking, though of course only in its early stages, appears ideally poised to take over the world. It is particularly well-suited to regimes, and to those sectors of society that serve them, that are intent on fostering chaos, precisely because, where likes are being sought, the goal of tolerance and understanding has almost certainly already been abandoned. In online discourse, to cite a well-known critic, "measured speech is punished by not getting clicked on, invisible Facebook and Google algorithms steer you towards content you agree with, and nonconforming voices stay silent for fear of being flamed or trolled or unfriended." To certain hold-outs from the old world, these punishments might seem to have to do only with such relatively unserious matters as our circles of friends and our self-esteem. But the emerging reality, a reality the trolls knew how to exploit, is one in which what gets liked, and what gets flamed or trolled, is not just a concern that we have in our personal lives and that we leave behind when we move to think about political and economic matters. What gets liked or clicked or trolled, rather, is now, suddenly, at the very heart of politics and economics.

The internet is destroying everything. In the aftermath of its Shiva-like arrival, the rest of the world, all that was here before, can easily appear as a ruin. It has destroyed or is in the process of destroying long-familiar objects: televisions, newspapers, musical instruments, clocks, books. It is also destroying institutions: stores, universities, banks, happy hours, movie theaters, democracy. Some findings indicate that it is even bringing down teen-pregnancy rates and, in Japan, fertility rates in general. Shiva, traditionally called 'the destroyer', is not for that reason an entirely negative force. It is good and natural to raze down the old, to slough off what is no longer vital or useful, as hunter-gatherer cultures understood already in deep pre-history when they mastered the practice of controlled burning. Fire, in fact, seems like the most suitable comparison in the prior history of technology: when our hominid ancestors learned to use it at least 400,000 years ago, the suite of changes they initiated was immense. It brought cooking and heating, and it also brought countless deaths and immeasurable environmental destruction. It made us what we are, and the internet is already in the course of making us what we will be.

If we think this is unjust, this cannot be because it does not continue the general course of human history since the Paleolithic, but rather because it is a sudden transformation that has taken place without any collective decision having been made about it, in an era in which we had come to believe that great transformations required, and deserved, collective rational deliberation, followed by a vote, followed by citizen oversight. The fact that there has never been any question of such a procedure for determining the way the internet is to be incorporated into our lives, is in itself a clear indication of how much more powerful it is than liberal democracy. The internet trumps liberal democracy, as fire surely burned right through the myths and practices of hominid groups that had previously got by without it.

This in turn helps to explain why, even though it was still being heralded just a decade ago as the bringer of a new liberal-democratic utopia in the very near future, when Twitter was still winning awards for its role in bringing the Arab Spring, it nevertheless could reveal itself to be doing exactly the opposite in such a short period of time. After all, its destructiveness has consisted largely in amplifying the very powers that had long been taken to be the bedrock of liberal democracy-- most notably free speech. Billions of people now have a sort of free speech, in the sense that they have the power to say more or less whatever they think they want to say, and generally to get at least a few likes for it.

But they have this power in a new and mutated form, where it is disconnected from any obviously binding standard of truth, or any expectation that it will be deployed for the purpose of sincere communication, that computers, in sum, will be used in anything like the spirit Leibniz had in mind with his irenic-rationalist hortation, "Let us compute!" The new free speech is only free, moreover, in that it seems to flow directly from the desire of the speaker (or writer, or tweeter), yet once it is released it is channeled by secret algorithms (on which, again, we have made no collective decision and in relation to which we have no oversight) along pathways where it is practically guaranteed not to bring any more light to anyone regarding the subject of interest, but only to reinforce group solidarity in an online community, or to accost and attack an outsider to that group, usually by means of ad hominems and in total ignorance of the past few millennia's hard-won effort to lay down rules for the avoidance of informal fallacies.

Online discourse feels free, to the extent that it is pleasing to the individual who puts it out there, but it is more or less always channeled either down the path of like-seeking, or down the path of trolling. This pseudo-freedom affords authoritarian leaders, in turn, the appearance of at least a vestigial concern to protect the core values of liberal democracy. As long as individual citizens continue to believe that democratic citizenship has attained its full realization in an unending online argument about manspreading, the autocrats, as they say, have won.

Nor is it the case that within a bubble, that is, within an algorithmically generated imagined community, all is peaceful and stable. Bubbles are fragile, and soap gets in your mouth. This is particularly so when other members of the community are constantly seeking to wash the mouths of those whose speech they deem insufficiently pure. This dynamic seems to be intrinsic to left-wing debate online, to the so-called 'call-out culture' that reigns there. As the critic Mark Fisher wrote, this culture is "driven by a priest's desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant's desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster's desire to be one of the in-crowd." Thus, to return to the issue of manspreading, it is not just that the left is exhausting itself arguing with Russian trolls pretending to be American conservatives who think it is a man's right and an anatomical necessity that he spread his legs as widely as he wishes; but the left is also exhausting itself, and needlessly and destructively hardening itself where obviously some flexibility is in order, to the extent that its members are perpetually seeking out and condemning any hesitation, uncertainty, recognition that sometimes legitimate desiderata are mutually exclusive.

When expressions of such things are essayed online, the enforcers of the community are ready to pounce, and to make the doubter know he is not in the in-crowd. This may be a small punishment, compared to public stockades or flogging, but it adds up to real-world effects. It is not the Cultural Revolution, but that does not mean that its spirit is not fundamentally Maoist. The fact that Maoism can thrive at a sub-state level, and have real political consequences, even in a world that is governed by right-wing populism, is a significant lesson, and one Mao himself surely could not have predicted. In the UK police forces are now sending out officers who are purportedly specialized in LGBT issues to exert pressure on supermarkets that guide customers towards products using language that is deemed too gender-specific, and thus 'transphobic'-- for example, associating tampons with women. Thus the state apparatus of a country now governed by craven populists who have come to power by exploiting ethnonationalist ressentiment and fear of immigrants is also using its power to impose norms of language that are, first of all, patently against the will, the sensibility, and the understanding of the vast majority of citizens, and, moreover, that have emerged out of the online activity of a small minority.

Meanwhile, back online, it is typically the most cut-throat and unflinching personalities who thrive, the Robespierres and the Berias. Virtually no one whose public reputation was built up entirely in social media can be said to be noteworthy rather than notorious. It is an ugly dystopia, and has utterly failed to deliver on its promised goods.

Le Naturel et l'inné

Résumé d'une conférence donnée au colloque de rentrée du Collège de France, le 20 octobre 2017. Pour voir le programme du colloque, cliquez ici.

Jusqu’à présent, la collision de la philosophie européenne avec des systèmes de savoir indigènes à l’âge classique a été peu étudiée. Je propose ici d’examiner la philosophie de Leibniz comme chapitre particulièrement important dans l’histoire de l’échange épistémique globale qui est l’histoire cachée de la philosophie européenne moderne.

En 1695, la même année où G. W. Leibniz introduit son système d’harmonie préétablie, le philosophe allemand consacre la plupart de ses efforts intellectuels à étudier les vertus de la racine d’ipecacuanha, ramenée du Brésil quelques décennies auparavant par Wilhelm Piso. Leibniz veut extraire de cette plante, non seulement des remèdes médicinaux, mais également, dans la mesure du possible, des savoirs indigènes brésiliens. Il rejette l’opinion de certains autres qui « condamnent tout ce qui est exotique comme inutile pour nos corps [européens] ».

Sur ce point, Leibniz peut être caractérisé comme naturaliste dans le sens de Philippe Descola : la conformation externe des Brésiliens et des Européens est la même. Mais où en est-il en ce qui concerne l’intériorité des uns et des autres ? Déjà au XVIIe siècle, en Europe, les systèmes de savoirs indigènes du monde extra-européen représentaient une sorte de tertium quid entre l’a priori et l’empirique. Il s’agissait de la connaissance des faits singuliers qui porte sur le monde naturel – les propriétés médicinales de telle ou telle racine ou les puissances du vénin de tel ou tel serpent – mais cette connaissance n’était pas apprise, au moins pas dans la même façon qu’un Européen décide de se mettre à apprendre la science chimique ou botanique. Elle était plutôt censée naître ensemble avec l’individu, simplement en vertu de son intégration dans une société qui était, elle, intégrée dans la nature.

Une telle société était supposément sans connaissance des vérités éternelles et inchangeables – l’existence de Dieu notamment – mais en même temps ses membres avaient ce que la plupart des philosophes européens ont considéré comme une contradiction en termes : la connaissance innée des faits singuliers et contingents. L’une des innovations les plus étonnantes de la philosophie radicalement rationaliste de Leibniz a été de montrer comment ce genre de connaissance est possible, et même nécessaire, pour tous les êtres humains en tant que humains. Même si cela prendra quelques siècles encore pour se développer en programme de recherche mûr, à la fin du XVIIe siècle, donc, les systèmes de savoir indigènes offraient déjà un modèle pour étudier l’esprit comme essentiellement enraciné dans l’environnement naturel.

Si cette innovation deviendra plus tard le fondement des approches théoriques en anthropologies structuraliste et cognitive, en philosophie de l’esprit enactiviste ainsi qu’en d’autres champs de recherche semblables, dont tous présupposent l’égalité absolue de tous les êtres humains, à l’âge classique elle servait souvent (si non pas pour Leibniz lui-même) comme critère épistémique pour déterminer la frontière dans le grand partage entre eux et nous, entre les « naturels » et les rationnels. Avant qu’il y eut des catégories raciales ancrées dans des traits physiques observables, interprétés comme signes externes de différences essentielles internes, il y avait une distinction peut être plus fondamentale encore entre deux « espèces d’esprit » : les uns qui se sont pour ainsi dire figés de la terre ; les autres qui dérivent leur nature des cieux, c’est à dire d’une source divine ou externe au monde naturel. Leibniz, même s’il n’en était pas pleinement conscient, nous offre un modèle de l’esprit humain dans lequel tout esprit participe dans les deux espèces, dans la mesure où le savoir naturel est inné en lui, sans être fondamentalement différent de la connaissance de Dieu et d’autres vérités a priori non-naturelles.

Punching Down

From the most recent issue of The Point Magazine. To read the whole piece, go here. 

I recently found myself at an academic conference that featured a presentation by graduate students on “combating racism with humor.” We were made to watch a video clip of a theater piece they had performed in connection with an anti-racism event. The skit depicted corporate executives planning an ad campaign associating the efficacy of soap products with their power to make people of color white. I found myself pitying the students. They had obviously overestimated their ability to change the world. But they were also, it seemed to me, tragically unaware of what humor is. They were mistaking it for a tool to be deployed in the pursuit of real-world ends: closing the gap between the powerful and the powerless, ensuring payback time for the fat cats, sticking it to the man.

It is hard to blame them. They were under the grip of a widespread illusion, expressed by Garry Trudeau along with countless others after the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in 2015, that humor only achieves its highest purpose when it “punches up”—that is, when it involves the powerless kicking back against the powerful. But to insist that a joke is not funny because it punches down is a category mistake. It is to deploy standards of justice where justice is not at issue. We see an analogous mistake when philistines judge that, say, a crucifix photographed in a jar of urine is, to the extent that it is offensive, not art. “That’s not funny” is the comedic equivalent of “that’s not art”—both are statements that can be made only by people who don’t understand the thing they are talking about.

I am entering the silverback stage of life, and at this point it is surely a variety of punching down—or, as we used to say, it is undignified—to berate graduate students. It is getting to be time for me to cede my place to them, I know, and to acknowledge that other meaning of “humor,” according to which young people’s internal passages are coursing with fluids, while the old, as Robert Burton said in The Anatomy of Melancholy, are quite dry. We have different humoral constitutions than the young, and so it is fitting that we should also have a different sense of humor. I happen to be dessicating moreover in a critical moment of history that has compelled me to rethink everything I long took for granted about humor: what it is, what it is for and whom it should target...

Continued here. 

The Stockholm Conspiracy

(A translation of Gabriel Daniel, Histoire de la conjuration faite à Stokolm contre Mr. Descartes, Amsterdam, 1696).

While Monsieur Descartes was living peacefully at the Court of Sweden, whither his virtue, his dedication to the truth, his great genius in the sciences, and the high reputation that he had acquired, had caused him to be called by Queen Christina, there formed against him one of the most dangerous conspiracies of which we have, perhaps, ever heard spoken.

As he rejected from his philosophy several Qualities and Accidents, of the existence of which no one had been accustomed to doubt, the Cold and the Dry, two of the four Primary Qualities, outraged with pain by the fact that he had made them out to be chimerical beings, resolved to take revenge for this affront, and to make their power felt by this proud philosopher (this is how they called M. Descartes). But before executing their plan, these Qualities deemed it appropriate to confer on the subject with all of those who, having been outraged by M. Descartes, were riled up against him.

The Substantial Forms of all kinds belonging to this group, as well as the Accidents, along with the Virtues and Occult Qualities, were called upon by Heat, who took the trouble to propose to them a conference, in order to deliberate on the way to retaliate against the audacity of their enemy, and in order to take the right measures in such an important affair. All of them promised to show up; they settled on a date, and chose a suitable place for this famous assembly, so that what had at the outset been nothing more than a little plot among a couple of Qualities, transformed into a general conspiracy.

They were so agitated against M. Descartes, that not one of them failed to show up to the meeting. However, as not all of them had been able to find a comfortable spot, in view of the darkness of the place, there was at first a great confusion. And several beings that have an antipathy the ones for the others, having unfortunately encountered each other, fell into furious combat, which seemed that it could only finish with the total destruction of the party who turned out to be the weakest. Already the Form of Fire, stern enemy of the other Forms, had reduced several of them to howling. Already sundry Accidents were feeling the effects of his violence, and there was only the Form of Water that dared to oppose him. Regrettably the whole place had been closed up, for fear that Sound, who has trouble keeping a secret, might escape, and tell the first person he might encounter what had happened at the conference. But as someone had opened the windows, Light entered, who by her agreeable aspect and brilliant shine brought joy to the whole assembly, and brought out what there was of beauty in that place. The combattants were separated, and each was put in the place that was suitable for him.

Everyone was not yet in his place when Heat declared to the whole company, with much vehemence, that no one knew any longer what to hold to since M. Descartes had published his Roman de la Nature, and had dared to remove from the categories virtually all beings that had been present there; that it was a shameful thing that they had suffered for such a long time, since a new philosopher, disdainful of the whole of wise antiquity, had the resolve to treat as chimerical everything that had been believed up until then about their being and their functions; that it would be necessary to punish this foolhardy man as soon as possible, who had called for their ruin, and to give him to know not only that they existed, but that they had the power to make him perish himself.

The assembly was applauding this plan, when Cold said, with a trembling voice, that we should not move so fast; that M. Descartes had not treated them as badly as they thought; that he had let all of them go on with the same privileges as before; that he was only trying to explain their nature in a more simple and easy manner than those who had preceded him; that he therefore did not understand what this philosopher was guilty of.

Barely had Cold finished speaking, when Heat, his mortal enemy, exposed his error. She maintained that, seeing the matter clearly, M. Descartes was absolutely destroying all the beings that constituted the assembly. For he did not give them any other existence than that of Modified Matter, and of Local Motion, while other philosophers granted truth to Substantial Forms and to the Accidents of material entities, even though they were distinct from Matter and Motion.

As this reasoning appeared decisive, the Occult Qualities stood up in turn, and complained that this new philosophy deprived them of their principal privilege, which consisted in being unknown by learned men. They said that they had always peaceably enjoyed this, and that the great men had never dared to examine the secret channels by which they produced so many wonders; that on the contrary they admitted their ignorance on this subject; that however M. Descartes, being more reckless, or rather less wise than his masters, pretended to discover what had been hidden for so long, and wished to make known and easy to understand everything that was most surprising in the actions of the Occult Qualities: which was properly to deprive them of the admiration that they had won for themselves.

As each one had their reasons for favoring the Occult Qualities, their complaint seemed just. But the one made by Light was judged to be more reasonable still. Who would have thought, she said, that a philosopher would dare to take me on, to deny my existence; can we open our eyes without recognising that I exist? And is it not surprising that there are men who are so ungrateful as to work towards destroying me, even as they are taking advantage of my benefits?

Interrupting Light, Darkness said to her: Descartes never doubted your existence. How could he deny it, since it is about you that he composed his most beautiful Traités de Physique? How then can you then be so indignant against him?

Light replied: It must be that you are very little enlightened, not to see that my complaint is just. I acknowledge that M. Descartes agrees that I exist. He also recognises how useful I am to men and to the other animals. But please, ask him what he thinks of me, and he'll boldly tell you that I am nothing other than an inclination to motion, or an effort that is made, in order to move, by certain little balls that he imagines are spread around the sun, and in the whole vortex of which this star occupies the center. Is it not, I ask you, to banish me from the universe, when he has me exercise my functions by means of these little bodies, which only subsist in the brain of M. Descartes? Do I not have a being distinct from Matter, and from Motion? And of all the Qualities, is there one that could be compared to me? It is thus with reason that I complain of this new physicist, who does not see as clearly as he thinks, since his eyes are so bad as to attribute to Modified Matter what arises from a Quality as noble and indeed illustrious as I am.

The Colours, those lovable daughters of Light, which derive from their brilliant mother everything they have of radiance and beauty, joined their complaints to hers. They inveighed against M. Descartes for daring to exclude them from the society of beings, and even tried to turn his opinion into something ridiculous. He wishes, they said, that the grass of the fields should be green only during the day, and that the enamel of flowers no longer survive once the night has come. He imagines that the shine of gold, of diamonds, and other precious stones, and every individual colour, is nothing other than a certain sentiment caused by the stronger or weaker reflection of the matter of the second element, and a thousand other similar chimeras that this great philosopher spouts, as so many truths that he pretends to have thoroughly proven. It is in this way that the Colours rejoiced, at the expense of M. Descartes, and it is also here that they were able to turn the entire assembly to their favour, not so much by their reasons as by their liveliness and their agreement.

It was at this point in the conference that there suddenly arose a confused noise, which left everyone stunned. It was Sound, who, wishing to make his own complaint, was only able to groan. They asked him to speak more clearly; and then he said angrily that M. Descartes had caused him to lose his reputation with the philosophers; that among practically no one spoke any more of Sound as a Real Accident; that they attributed all of his actions to certain undulations of the air, or rather to the direct motion of its parts, caused by the agitation of the insensible particles of resonant bodies; and, finally, that everywhere he had been placed at the level of the useless things of nature.

With these words, the Smells, the Tastes, Lightness, Heaviness, and many other Virtues, Qualities, and Accidents rose up; and after having affirmed Sound's complaint, one of them, speaking in the name of all the others, related the affront that had been done to them in several schools in which the new philosophy had been introduced, where, after having expelled them from among the categories, the philosophers dared to boast about it in their public declarations. He added that these continual encroachments upon their rights was leading to their total ruin, and that such a rebellion against the opinions of the ancients would undoubtedly have dangerous consequences if it was not repressed soon.

The Forms of the Elements, and those of the Mixtures, said that recently they had been treated with the deepest contempt, to the point where they had been relegated to imaginary spaces; that a defender of the ancient doctrine had well said, that what it is that brings it about that each thing resists its contrary, tends to maintain itself in its natural state, and to conserve the qualities that are proper to it, is the Substantial Form; that the others had paid no attention to his reasons, and had asked him, laughing, whether the Form of the magnet had been well instructed as to what it should do in order to conserve its admirable virtue; and that this philosopher, having responded that it knows very well, was asked to consult with it, in order to clarify a number of difficulties concerning this stone that they had proposed to him, and which he had never been able to explain adequately. As the Forms, who were speaking in this way, do not always agree amongst themselves when they meet in the same subject, they thought they might be falling out with one another once again, for the disgrace that they had endured had unconsciously induced them to argue over their privileges. But after a certain number of contestations they came together, and resolved to relinquish their particular interests to the good of the common cause.

The Vegetative Souls, whose party was very considerable, did not content themselves with complaining in their turn; they sought to prove their existence. How, they said, could one explain how a tree or a flower produces a being that is like it, without us? Imagine so many fibres in a plant, or tubes if that pleases you, for the circulation of the juices that ascend in it, you will never be able to conceive how, by this circulation, such a plant could be formed from a seed, if the Vegetative Soul had not taken care of this. This reasoning was found to be solid. And indeed, what could be said in response?

But of all the complaints that had been made up until then against M. Descartes, and against his doctrine, there was none that seemed better founded than that of the Substantial Forms of animals, which are commonly called Sensitive Souls. After these Forms had let loose against the philosopher, without sparing him insults, they mocked his opinion that animals are only machines: as if, they said, nature had made of the bodies of every animal so many marionettes, only moving about by springs. They made use of the reasoning that the Vegetative Souls had brought to bear, and maintined that a horse, for example, could not produce a being that is like it without the aid of the Form. They dilated next upon the industry of birds in making their nest, of the spider in making its web, on the skill of the hare in avoiding the hunter, of the cat in catching the mouse; on the faithfulness of the dog, on the generosity of the lion, and on a thousand other similar examples. Whence they concluded that so many marvellous actions could have no other principle than instinct, or the Substantial and Material Form of these animals.

This discourse was widely applauded. They spoke in the assembly only of the blindness of M. Descartes, and of his stubbornness in holding, with regard to the soul of beasts, to a paradox that is contrary to experience, and to the common view of all times and places. They regarded him as an enemy of the public good, who, in following only his own ideas, had contempt for those great philosophers whose authority alone was of equal weight to the best reasons, and they were on the point of taking up some violent resolution against him.

But Motion --who had been called to that assembly, since nothing could be done without him--, breaking the silence, felt it necessary to oppose the injustice they were about to commit. He said, to begin, that he had no interest in defending the doctrine of M. Descartes; that in any case all of his opinions would be rejected, as philosophy cannot do without Motion; that there was thus room to hope that they would listen to him the more favorably, as he had taken no side; that, moreover, as they were the judges and victims at once, their judgment would appear to have been delivered against all of the rules, if there was no one who had spoken for the accused; that, finally, they should not be offended by what he might say to them, since he was only attempting to give the reasons that had been alleged against their existence, in order to explain the truth. Next he took up in detail what diverse beings of the assembly had put forward in defense of their rights:

If men, he said, were obliged to attach themselves to the opinions of the ancients, it would be impossible for them to perfect the arts and sciences. As they are able every day to make new discoveries, nothing is more advantageous to them than to leave it to the liberty of each person to embellish or correct what their fathers left to them. Thus however guilty M. Descartes is of having abandoned the ancients when he believed them to be in error, he is to be praised, on the contrary, for having set out to scrutinise his reason in the aim of establishing philosophy on solid foundations. He appears to have had no other plan than to lead men to knowledge of the truth, and to provide them the means of finding it.

In this way he showed them the path of his method, and he then proposed an ingenious system for explaining all the phenomena of nature. It is without doubt by this means, and by the experiences that it would be necessary to do every day, as he did, that there are things we may be certain of in physics. And the Occult Qualities make fun, finding it bad that he wished to penetrate into the principles of natural things, without stopping at confused ideas or at the obscure terms that people were in the habit of using.

Why, this philosopher asks, should beings be admitted into the world of which we have no idea, and without which we can do perfectly well? Why do we bother with the Hot, the Cold, the Dry, and the Humid; with Light, Colours, Sound, Odors, Liquidity, Fluidity, Lightness, Heaviness, and an infinite number of other Qualities and Accidents, if all of the actions that we attribute to them can be explained, as it is easy to show, by the various movements and the different figures of the parts of Matter? Moreover who has ever conceived of the nature of these Qualities? What produces them in the body in which they had previously not been? What do they become when this same body acquires the contrary qualities, or is reduced to ashes?

It is a Form that gives rise to them, someone replies; it is another Form that causes them to die.

But what is this Form itself? Motion interjects. Is it a Substance? Is it an Accident? Is it a Mind? Is it a Body? Is it produced anew? What is it composed of? What is it to become? Let us extract ourselves from these difficulties, if we can. And if we cannot, let us admit that these Qualities, and these Forms of Elements, of Mixtures, and of Vegetables, such as they are ordinarily conceived, are fictions and chimeras.

Judging from the air of confidence with which you speak, replied Heat, we see very well that you are persuaded that we have nothing solid to reply to you in favour of Form. Know however that it is better known than you believe. And if you find obscurity in the definitions that are ordinarily given of it, you have only yourself to blame. Form, speaking in general, is the first act of the body that it informs; it is an imperfect substantial act; it is an incomplete substance drawn out of matter by eduction, maintained by this same matter, and essentially destined to constitute a substantial whole with it. The action of another Form brings about this incomplete substance in matter, where it previously was not in actu, but only in potentia. The matter that contained it in potency, received it in actuality, and conserves it after having received it, not by giving it being at each moment, as the First Cause does, but rather in sustaining and conserving the being that it already has. I do not know what happens to it when the composite is destroyed; one could say however that it goes to look for a place in some other portion of matter; or that it dissipates, that it evaporates, that it... in a word, that it ceases to be, since the whole of which it was a part no longer exists.

What light this explanation brings to the mind! shouted Motion. How clear and intelligible these terms are: first act of the body, imperfect substantial act, incomplete substance drawn from matter by eduction, etc. Of course one would be wrong to say that this doctrine of Forms, as well as that of Qualities, is pure gibberish, and a shadowy chaos in which one cannot make anything out.

It is true, Heat interrupted, that the defenders of the three elements, of vortices, of indefinite extension, and of automata, have the right to reject obscure and uncertain principles, those of which the hypothesis is so clear and so solidly established. Whatever the case may be, when we do not know the Form in itself, it is nevertheless plain that it exists. For, again, how do you want a tree to produce another tree if the Form, or the Vegetative Soul, is not involved?

And how is it that you yourself, Motion replied, want such an effect to be able to come from this pretended Soul? Does it know the disposition or the arrangement of the vesicles, the fibres, and the other little vessels of which the body of a plant is composed? Does it know the figure and the motion of the insensible parts of the juices that circulate there in order to nourish it? And if it should know this, does it have the power to move the body, and to arrange the parts as it finds pleasing? And do you take it to be so industrious as to wish to attribute to it the beauty and the inimitable artifice that we notice in the composition of certain flowers?

Do not tell me that one must at least have recourse to a Sensitive Soul in order to explain the propagation of species among animals, the conformation of their organs, and the various motions that they make with so much skill and subtlety. For do you not know that the body of man is formed in its mother, and he believes that it gains strength there, and becomes as perfect as it is when we see it, without the soul contributing anything, at least not directly, and without even knowing its secret springs, its proportions, or its symmetry?

I admit however, without going into any detail, that there is much wisdom and reason to be found in the admirable structure of the bodies of animals, and in many of the actions that they undertake to conserve themselves. But it is this very thing that, proving too much for you, does not prove anything: for it proves that if the Form is the principle that makes the bodies move, it must be reasonable, which the defenders of the Sensitive Soul would not dare, I believe, to maintain. The Form that you suppose is in animals is thus not the cause of their motions. One must agree that this can only be an intelligence that acts in them; I mean that it is the Author of Nature who has disposed the bodies of animals with such a marvelous artifice, that they execute, by the action of exterior objects and according to the laws of mechanics, these motions that are so correct and so ordered that one attributes them to an imaginary Form.

Motion wanted to continue, when someone of the company, outraged with anger from seeing him maintain with so much force the position of M. Descartes, replied that the philosopher, taking his imaginings for certain knowledge, promised more than he could give; that after having made us hope that he would explain everything in a simple and natural manner, he gave an account of physical effects only by certain elements, a certain assemblage of parts, certain motions and certain figures; that this was hardly different from certain Entities, certain Forms, certain Virtues, and certain Qualities. And that after all, by the right of seniority, the Scholastic je-ne-sais-quoi should win out over the Cartesian one.

What? replied Motion. Did M. Descartes not indicate in his system what the figure, the motion, and the order of the three elements is, the first being of which formed the universe? And would it not be better to explain the phenomena of Nature by the situation, the figure, the order, and the motion of the parts of matter, than to take recourse to unknown beings, which would never have had a name, nor a place in the categories, if the ignorance of the philosophers had not taken care to give them one? In the same way, he added, that he who does not know the springs of a watch nevertheless does not believe that there is in this little machine some other thing besides Matter and Motion, similarly one should not look for a principle of many surprising effects other than matter that is figured and disposed in a certain fashion. If we do not know the cause of the actions of animals as perfectly as we know the motions of a watch, this is because these natural machines are moved by a matter so subtle and so agitated that it escapes from the view of even the sharpest eyes; and moreover these machines are made by a hand that is infinitely more excellent than that of the artisan who is most able to make his skill and his invention the object of admiration in artifical machines.

All of Motion's responses displeased the assembly very much. They could not stand the zeal with which he defended opinions that were so insulting to them. But in order to make him change his view, and to draw him to their side, they made the case to him that he did not know his true interests; that M. Descartes had spared him no more than the others; that he maintained that Motion was not a being distinct from Matter, but only a Mode that was accidental to it; that this was one of the principal points of his system, and that he would never change his view on this matter.

Motion was shaken by this objection that touched him so closely; he tried at first to elude it, but after arguing for a while, finding himself enthusiastically pressed by the others, he admitted that he indeed felt that M. Descartes's great reputation had blinded him; that he had never really thought about the insult that he had received from this philosopher; that he finally understood the consequences of his doctrine; and that he did not claim to support it in public, nor to approve it in private.

Now that M. Descartes had no more defenders, his defeat was assured. And with their voices gathered together, this unfortunate philosopher was declared the founder and head of a sect in rebellion against the laws of the ancient and true philosophy; a disturber of the order of the Categories; an enemy of the Virtues and Occult Faculties, of Absolute and Non-Absolute Accidents; of Primary and Secondary Qualities; of the Forms of Elements and of Mixtures; of Material Souls either Vegetative or Sensitive, of the Instincts, Incomplete Substances, and in general of all of the Forms both Substantial and Accidental. And as such, he was condemned to endure the punishment that the assembly was to judge appropriate to impose upon him.

With this judgment solemnly pronounced, the only question that remained was the choice of the punishment that the criminal should undergo. The Forms of the most ferocious beasts in the land at first offered to tear M. Descartes to pieces, and to go and rip into him right inside the palace of the queen. But as this approach could have spun out of control, and proved fatal to the conspirators, they rejected this proposition, and resolved to avenge themselves in such a hidden manner that no one would be able to impute the deed to them.

It was at this point that Sound said that if Light wanted to work together with him, the two of them could easily bring it about that the so-called philosopher no longer be seen nor heard, and that he himself could no longer see nor hear.

But Heat did not go in for this idea, and in her impatience to appease her hate and her vengeance, she said to the conspirators: If you wish to permit me, I will act upon the body of M. Descartes with so much violence, and I will bring about such a disorder in his humours, through the combat that I will excite in him between contrary Qualities, that in no time I will be able to liberate you from this formidable enemy.

This was approved by the entire assembly, and it was decided that they would stick with this proposition. They asked Heat to execute this plan as soon as possible, after which each left in turn, according to his rank, and in careful order, so as to avoid further conflicts.

Heat could not have been more diligent. It was soon reported that M. Descartes had a high fever, with inflammation of the brain. And some hours later it was reported that he had died, and all the knowledge that he believed himself to have acquired was unable to prolong his life.

A terrible example, Monsieur, that should make you fear for yourself, if you dare to entertain any longer opinions for which their author paid such a high price. I hope that the story of this fatal conspiracy, about which you wished to learn in detail, has made an impression on your mind, and that it compels you to recognise that it is better to follow safely upon the path that the Ancients have carved out, than to expose ourselves to a thousand dangers in going down new roads.

On Plants / De Stirpibus

Wolfenbüttel, 27 May, 2017. How many beings are in this picture?

Imagine you are in an urban park. Look around. How many animals do you see? I’d imagine you see a few birds, a dog or two, perhaps some insects, and a dozen or so humans. Now how many plants do you see? You could not even begin to count, nor to say where one leaves off and another begins.

I am standing in the train station in Karlsuhe, on my way back to Paris from Wolfenbüttel. Even here I see: a few dozen humans, about as many pigeons, a good deal of concrete and iron. And off in the distance I see, again, countless trees, defining, in more ways than one, the horizon of my perception. I see grass pushing up through the gravel between the tracks. Over a stone wall bounding the station to one side an ivy or vine plant of some sort tumbles: it is not moving, visibly, but one might easily imagine it striving, grasping its way toward our platform. And this is a completely dominated space, this is nearly as close as we can get to the longed-for suppression of the vegetal.

We passively suppose that plants and animals are the two equal parts of living nature, the two kingdoms, two moieties each taking half the territory. Of course this does not stand up to scrutiny. I read somewhere that in terms of biomass Earth’s aquatic life is around 90% animal (and this mostly krill), and 10% vegetal, while among the terrestrials it is roughly the reverse. But this seems to give far too great a share to land animals.

Wherever there is a portion of the Earth’s surface that is covered predominantly with animals, there is a problem, an ecological anomaly. Even pods of gregarious walruses need to clear off the beach before too long, lest they destroy whatever balance was there before them. And this is not to mention factory farms with their billions of cows, or cities with their billions of people. Yet wherever there is a portion of the Earth’s surface that is covered predominantly with plants, there is, simply, nature.

Plant life is the paradigm and the general rule of life itself; animal life is the exception.

Aristotle thought animals are more perfect than plants, because they are capable of locomotion, and so form is able to separate from matter in them to a certain degree. He left it to his disciple Theophrastus to do the systematic botanical work that he himself had neglected for zoology. In 1699 Edward Tyson complained that Europeans were now ransacking 'both the Indies' in search of medicinal plants to feed the nascent pharmaceutical industry, rather than paying attention to nature’s most excellent productions, the animals. We’ve shifted to plants as the primary focus of our interest, perhaps, Tyson complains, but only in view of what we can get out of them, not in view of what they are. Aristotle said in defense of his researches in marine biology: ‘Here too dwell gods’. No one who descends from him has yet said such a thing about plants.

What is ontologically distinctive about plants is that they can be cut up in all kinds of ways without thereby ceasing to exist. If you cut off my arm, I am not 10% less the person I was before, and in that respect I am ontologically quite distinct from a sack of flour or any other aggregate; but if you cut off my head, I am 100% less the person I was before. A branch is not analogous to an arm, and there is nothing in a plant that even suggests itself for analogy to the head. Evolutionary theory suggests that this diffuseness, and this full perfection of the pars pro toto principle, whereby any part is as useful as any other for yielding up a complete and perfect representative of the kind, is simply an adaptation to what would otherwise be the disadvantages of sessility: plants have no brain or central nervous system, or any absolutely crucial organs of higher functioning at all, but this saves them the trouble of having to run away from predators without end, protecting their precious jewels. They can stay where they are, be chewed down to a mere sliver of what they were before, and go right on living and growing.

Plants do not have nerve ganglia. But whatever it is about nerve ganglia that makes us sentient is underlain by chemical activity. There is no reason in principle why the chemical transmissions in plants could not be their own neurophysiology.

But, some will insist, it is willed motion, going this way rather than that, that makes a being a being of moral interest, and plants, as we’ve noted, just stay where they are. Well, the boundary between locomotion and change of quantity is not so clear. Plants do get around. Just make a quick biodiversity survey, again, of your local park.

We can’t individuate them, and that troubles us, causes us to look away, or to filter them out. Plants do not so much outnumber animals, as outspread them. The dramatis personae of nature are the animals — this lion, that peccary — and plants are only the stage-setting. Sometimes we can make out what look like individual trees (we even call them ‘proud’), but that’s just a stroke of ecological luck for us, and it hides what is really going on. We know that individuality is not what is really going on with animals either — we are not individuals, but biomes —, yet our ability to move around as one, our ‘proportion of rest and motion’, gives us a sort of unity that makes our talk of this lion, that peccary, seem to reflect the true order of things.

But look around the park again. How can the true order of things be represented by such a vanishingly small share of living nature?

We force plants into the background, pretend not to notice them, because we have no clear way, yet, of speaking about a morally relevant nature except as an assemblage of morally relevant individuals, moving around on their own and pursuing their own interests: earthly gods. If we were to say, of plants, ‘Here too dwell gods’, this could only be in the spirit of pantheism: ‘Here too dwells of god’, in the partitive genitive sense in which one can say, in French, du thé, de la boue, des fleurs.

Plants are there for their own sake, though in recent evolutionary history they have made some overtures to animals, to appeal to animals on terms that animals, whether bees or humans, seem to get. For 400 million years or so there were animals, but still no flowers. And now today we can say: ‘Look at that beautiful rose!’, ‘What a lovely tulip!’

Most of us are not ready for pantheism. We are prepared to see God in a rose, but really would rather not experience the god of the rainforest, of the whole great thing. We rationalise this avoidance as if it were a particular fear of particular dangers, of spiders or snakes. We turn ecology into a practical concern to keep the planet in a condition that can continue to sustain us, and in order to convince others of the importance of plants in this balance we transform them rhetorically into animal organs: the ‘lungs’ of the Earth.

It is reasonable to suppose that the ransacking will go on for as long as plants are conceptualised only as the life-support system of animals, whether this is in terms of pharmacology or of ecology. Somewhat more speculatively, it does not seem implausible that evolution should have contrived a way for them to derive something like joy from the chemical transmissions that keep them doing what they do: putting out their pollen and their roots, absorbing the light of the sun and transforming it into what makes up their own nature: eating light, as has been said.

It seems phenomenologically undeniable, if you will just stop and look, that this planet is theirs.

What I am saying can only come across as foolish, like the effusions of an investment banker just returned from an ayahuasca retreat, or the small-talk of a 1970s suburbanite who has just read The Secret Life of Plants; like the philosophers who are bracketed by many as fun or zany, who speak of 'rhizomes', and who in the end turn out to be interested in plants more as metaphors for something else than in plants as plants. Is this not always how it is with the fun and zany philosophers? Just when you think they are talking about something that interests you, it turns out they were only riffing on it, on the way to talking about something altogether different; well, me, I want to talk about plants. Deleuze speaks of rhizomes and wants to tell us that society is like a field of grass, but in the end this is not so different from a medieval courtier who might have declared that the sovereign, the embodiment of political power, is mighty like a lion. We would be mistaken to take this as a lesson in zoology.

Kant said that there would never be a Newton for the blade of grass, and a strong case can be made that this point was not simply an expression of the relative primitiveness of the life sciences in the late 18th century (he speaks as though what interests him are 'organised beings' in general, yet whenever he goes in search of an example of what it is that makes these so unfathomable, it is the blade of grass or the tree --and not the parrot or the crustacean, which he treats rather as irreducible 'works' of nature than as representatives of life as such-- that comes to mind). It may be that he meant that, even when we understand the nature and causes of grass, thanks to Darwin and Mendel and Watson and Crick and all the other successors, we will still feel certain that we have not really comprehended the thing in question. Philosophy since Kant has had trouble knowing what to do with those things for which there can be no Newton. I take it that Kant's general line, though, was that it is a tremendous mistake to leave what cannot be comprehended to those who don't understand or respect the limits of comprehension.

I am aware that to insist on the importance of plants is a species of Schwärmerei. But that something that is patently true, phenomenologically and scientifically, can only sound foolish when it is made explicit, is itself a measure of the impoverishment of what I might dare to call our natural philosophy, not a judgment of the quality of the observation. Plants would be at the center of any adequate natural philosophy, not off on the fringes with the stoners and the enthusiasts. And natural philosophy would be at the center of any adequate philosophy: an analysis of what earthly existence is really like for us, and of what is to count as ‘us’.

*

Further reading, strongly recommended: Emanuele Coccia, La vie des plantes. Une métaphysique du mélange, Éditions Payot & Rivage, 2016.

The Art of Moulting

(Forthcoming in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics)

Can we easily distinguish between what the scorpion does when it moults, and what we human beings do when we, say, sculpt the human form in stone?

The most common means of distinguishing between the two sorts of production is that the human sculptings are representations of human forms, whereas moulted exoskeletons or shells are not representations, but rather the things themselves, or at least vestiges of the things. We all know that in fact the scorpion looks on its moulted exoskeleton with neither admiration nor disgust; it is in no sense a ‘work’ of the scorpion, any more than the shorn hair or nails of an artist are part of his or her oeuvre. The fact that the discarded shell retains the shape of the creature, while the discarded toenails do not, is irrelevant: it is bio-waste, chaff, slough. Nothing more.

Or is it? ...

Embodiment: A History

This book is now available for order from Oxford University Press. I would add it to the sidebar to the right of this page, along with the Italian translation of The Philosopher, if I knew how. This task would involve some fairly complex html coding, which I always left to my father, who died in September of last year. Death is a mystery, and understanding it in the negative is inseparable from reflection on the problem of embodiment (in Homer, the word we translate as 'body' in fact only means 'corpse'). But where death's true nature comes through most sharply is in small things like this: the impossibility of further routine website maintenance. 

Louis Riel, "Dissertation on Monads" (1885)

Signed “Louis ‘David’ Riel,” this short text, titled “Mémoire sur les Monades,” was written when Riel was in prison awaiting execution in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1885. Translation originally published in Cabinet Magazine, Issue 49.

What is there? There is God. What else is there? There are the things that God created.

The essences of created and possible things have always been.

Essences are composed of “Monads.” “Monads” are of such a fineness that they are imperceptible to our senses.

“Monads” are tender, soft, and polished. These three qualities, combined in “Monads,” are the principle of sensibility.

“Monads” are of two genders; some are male, and others female.

For each male monad, there is a female monad. That is to say that there are in these essences as many males as there are females.

A monad is an electricity. Certain monads are certain electricities. Monads are electricities.

A male monad is a positive electricity.

A female monad is a negative electricity.

Male monads are more firm. When they touch, their firmness even causes them to repel one another. This is what science discovered when it established that elec- tricities of the same name repel one another.

Female monads are softer, more polished, and more tender. When they come into contact with others, their sensibility is affected to such a degree that at first they experience a quiver that soon transforms into a stirring. When it is prolonged, this stirring itself becomes intolerable. In this way repulsion occurs between female monads.

This is what science found when through experimentation it saw that negative electricities repel one another.

Male monads and female monads attract one another.

Because male monads are less soft, less polished, less tender, they do not offend the sensibility of female monads when they encounter them. Female monads are at ease in their presence. It is for this reason that they seek out male monads.

Because female monads are less firm, they do not push the firmness of male monads to the limit when they touch them. Thus male monads conserve a surfeit of energy in their contact with female monads. This surfeit of energy or of firmness is the cause of their well-being. This is what makes male monads seek out female monads.

The male monad experiences an initial affection in touching the female monad, and a second affection in being touched by it. But between these two affections, there is a difference. Sensibility causes it to grasp this difference. Here lies the principle of pleasure between male and female monads.

The male monad experiences an initial affection in touching another male monad; and it experiences a second one in being touched by it. Now between these two affections, there is no difference. Sensibility causes it to grasp this absence of difference. And as in this case the sensation received does not differ from its own per- ception, the male monad does not find any additional pleasure in its relations with the monad of its gender; it does not seek it out.

Monads are luminous. This is the principle of intelligence.

The fineness of monads is the principle of their extreme mobility . Their mobility is itself the principle of their will.

Monads are of the same size. This is the principle of their liberty.

Monads are tenacious with respect to impressions; this is what constitutes in them the principle of memory.

Monads are of two sorts. Some are active and the others passive.

Passive monads have all the properties of active monads, but at a much lower level.

Every active monad has a passive monad that belongs to it. And with which it does what it pleases.

Active monads constitute active essences. Active essences are of an infinite number. The active monads that compose each essence are themselves infinitely numerous.

Every monad has its splendor as well as the splendor it receives from another monad. Now between these two brightnesses, there is a difference that sensibility makes them grasp. This is the principle of vision

Every monad vibrates when acting. Now between its own vibration and that which happens to it there is a difference. Sensibility makes it grasp this difference. This is the principle of touch.

Every monad that is in contact with another makes a noise; now between the noise that it makes and the one it receives, there is a difference that sensibility makes it grasp. This is the principle of hearing.

Every monad has a scent. Between its own scent and that which it encounters there is a difference that sensibility makes it grasp. This is the principle of smell.

Every monad has a taste. Now between its own taste and the one it encounters, there is a difference that sensibility makes it grasp. This is the principle of taste.

Monads have an affinity for each other. This is the principle of love.

Essences feel for each other an attraction, whose force is beyond all other forces; this is indivisibility.

Essences are married together in a very intimate way and in perfect proportion. This is what causes them to be one, but their unity is infinite.

I’m only touching here, so to speak, on the subject of primordial essences. I would like to be able to lay out this revelation in all its beauty!! If God, whose power is infinite, deigns to come miraculously to my aid ... as I have the undying confidence he will do; and if our holy Father the Pope, to whom I submit everything I write through the intervention of the Monseigneur, allows me to continue; then I will attempt to realize this with his holy benediction. For my mission is also to explain the existence of God, creation, and the plan of creation itself, but since obedience to the authority of the church has a continual relation to my sanctification, my mission consists above all in obeying.

The Philosophy Medal

(From The Philosopher: A History in Six Types)

I recall trembling with excitement that first day last February, as I ran down the icy sidewalk toward the General Secretary’s apartments. It’s hard to believe, this sudden turn of events. There I was, a few months ago, the author of a single monograph on the sources of Klopp’s doctoral dissertation on the concept of inertia. And now, here I am, the homeland's most renowned expert on Kloppism-Noginism, called by the GenSek himself to serve as his loyal tutor! After he was humiliated at the Security Council meeting when the ambassador from the United Provinces of C**** dropped that unscripted question about Klopp’s debt to Epicurus, the GenSek's councillors decided it was time for a crash-course in Kloppist-Noginist philosophy. As if that had anything to do with revolution and state-building!

You have to understand, the GenSek is a fine Kloppist-Noginist, but books just aren’t his forté: he was too busy making revolution back when others were preparing for their exams. His first exposure to Klopp was in prison, where he wound up in the aftermath of some low-level, hunger-driven chicken thievery. He never got his Klopp from a leather-bound volume in the collected works at the Philosophy Faculty. No, that was a luxury reserved to me, and others of my class. The GenSek got it from poverty, from life, from the dank prison air. Now it’s time for me to give him what I can from my world, so that I may thrive in his world. Because it is his world now.

At our first lesson we talked about Epicurus, and atoms: not the kind you can harness, so the scientists now say, to make apocalyptic weapons, but the kind that exist only as concepts, the kind that must be posited, some thought, so I tell the GenSek, in order to avoid logical pitfalls, such as, that bodies having dimension could be composed out of constituents lacking dimension. The GenSek interrupted, said that whatever only exists as a concept doesn’t exist at all, and so there’s no use talking about it. He said this with an intentional exaggeration of that folksy South-Eastern accent of his, and I couldn’t help find it endearing, even as it caused me to worry that he was really not catching on to the spirit of our lessons. I will have to try, I thought, to make it more relevant to the GenSek’s life and concerns.

At our next meeting the following week I told him to review Klopp’s 1857 manifesto, and to learn by heart the basic principles of Kloppist diacritics: that the basis of reality is body, which contains the principles of life and change; that the survival of the self does not depend on memory, and therefore each self is immortal simply in the constant permutations of body; and so on. There are four principles in all, the ‘Core Four’ we’re all supposed to know by heart, these days, by the end of primary school. What ten-year-old does not dream of being selected to recite the Core Four, green bandanna around his little neck, before a committee of local party functionaries, to display his perfect diction and to be crowned by a fully costumed Madame Elektrika, if he is lucky, with a wreath of yew leaves? The GenSek never went to primary school, and even if he had gone, that was before the revolution, and he would have heard nothing but stale old doctrine about the finiteness of the soul, the singular importance of what happens over the course of our mortal life, and the ultimate ground of all reality not in body, nor yet in matter or in spirit, but rather in various combinations of light and water. Reactionaries!

When we next meet he is beaming with self-contentment. He tells me he has mastered the Core Four. “See,” he says in an uncharacteristically playful tone, “it’s never too late to learn.” He recites them to me a couple of times, One through Four, and then announces that this will be enough as a lesson for today. I had intended to introduce some new material on Chesterville’s three laws of inertia, but the GenSek is in charge, of course. He asks me about my childhood. I tell him the truth. My political record is solid and I’ve got nothing to hide. I tell him all about my French nanny and my disciplinary problems when Mum sent me away to boarding school at Le Rosey: it was, I explain, my delinquency in that staid environment that helped me to convince the nomination commission at the university of M**** that, in spite of my privileged background and my bookish habits, I had my share of revolutionary spirit too. The GenSek was silent, reflective, and so I kept on talking. I told him of how I eventually earned my degree in philosophy in the provincial University of G**** way out east of the Y**** Mountains where it’s always frozen. I told him my first intellectual love was the work of Rabelais, in which I admired the unabashed celebration of freedom and excess, but that I matured quickly when I took my first course on diacritics under the renowned Academician Korff. The GenSek had never heard of Academician Korff. Enough for today, he said.

When I next see him I come prepared with an elaborate lesson on Nogin’s 1907 ‘Letter from the Corn Exchange’, but the GenSek has other ideas. “I will give a speech on philosophy,” he announces. “It will be a grand speech, with electronic amplification, and it will be recorded on the best spools. I will speak of the Core Four, and inertia, and atoms. All the men of the Academy will be in attendance, especially this Korff.” Korff died some years ago, I tell him. “Well then whoever replaced him,” the GenSek continues, “and it will be made known that philosophy is a great priority in the construction of our Kloppist-Noginist society, and there will be much applause.”

The lessons continue, officially. Once a week I go the GenSek’s apartments to tutor him in philosophy. But most often I just sit there drinking strong black tea straight from the saucer as he paces back and forth, regaling me with disjointed stories about the revolution, or about the growth of industry in the next five years, all peppered here and there with allusions to atoms, or Chesterville’s three laws, or Klopp’s four principles. One grey afternoon as I was sitting in the GenSek’s favourite divan, dipping a beignet in clotted cream, he paced back and forth and blurted out to me, suddenly: “You know I’ve done away with Korg, don’t you?” ‘Done away’, Mister Secretary? I squeaked. “That’s right. I disassembled the atoms that once constituted that grovelling traitor.”

I can’t complain, I tell myself. I’m still alive.

He really surprises me sometimes. Just this last week he interrupted some tale of derring-do, how he and his comrades dynamited the railroad tracks outside of T**** or some such thing, in order to tell me of his plan to establish, at the end of his upcoming speech, a ‘philosophy medal’, to be handed out annually by the GenSek himself, in honor of philosophical contributions to the glory of our great revolutionary Kloppist-Noginist homeland. And do you know who is going to be the first recipient of said medal? You guessed right.

But there’s still more work to be done, if this is not to be a total wash. For one thing, I must see to it that the audience knows when to applaud, and more importantly when to stop applauding. It would be a disaster if the academicians failed to detect a profound philosophical observation the GenSek had just made, especially if this is an observation he associates with the lessons he has had from me. I would therefore like very much to rehearse with him, but he is intent on lecturing me, now, about the boons of automated sheep-shearing.

I place a sugarcube between my front teeth and allow the black tea to filter right through it. I really should try to get through to him somehow. There is much more than my philosophy medal on the line. I crunch the cube between my teeth and I replace it with a new one.

Things could be worse, and they may get worse soon. But I’ve made it this far. I’m being fed sugarcubes by the Basilisk (as he’s called in the streets). Hah! ‘The philosopher is an ass’, as that example from my logic textbook had it, so long ago. But what can I do? There is so much that is beyond my power.

Interview in the Corriere della Sera

Marco del Corona interviewed me for the Corriere della Sera last month, in timing with the release of the new Italian edition of my most recent book, Il filosofo. Una storia in sei figure. You can read a pdf of the interview here. 

Philosophers, Neighbours, and Tartars

(This is a recent guest post from Daily Nous).

In this post I would like to develop one of the central questions of my recent book, The Philosopher: A History in Six Types: Who is to count as a philosopher, and why?

In his 1762 Émile, ou De l'éducation, Jean-Jacques Rousseau criticises those philosophers who “will love the Tartars in order to avoid loving their neighbour.” The ethnic group in question would be more correctly called the ‘Tatars’, a wide family of Turkic groups living throughout the broader Black Sea region, and often invoked by Western Europeans in the Enlightenment as a stock example of savage peoples. (In what follows I will include the superfluous 'r' when it is Rousseau's point of view that is at issue.)

Rousseau’s critique is directed at those cosmopolitan thinkers who turn their attention away from the concrete human reality that surrounds them, and towards what he sees as abstractions and fantasies of what human beings are like, or could be like, in far-away settings that we, here in 18th-century Geneva, will never encounter.

Though Rousseau could have relied on another example to make his point, I take this particular one to heart because I do in fact love the Tatars. I am a novice student of the grammar of the Volga Tatar language, an occasional defender of the rights of the Crimean Tatars who precede both the Ukrainians and the Russians in that disputed peninsula, and in general someone who comes to attention whenever that ethnonym appears in my newsfeed. So I am sensitive to Rousseau’s accusation that this attention of mine comes at the expense of concern for my neighbours here in 21st-century Paris, some of whom could indeed use some more neighbourly care than they are currently getting.

The realities of my place and time have also got me thinking recently about certain possibilities, two in particular, that may have escaped Rousseau’s attention. These are, namely, that the neighbours are themselves Tartars, and that the Tartars are themselves philosophers. According to the stereotype that makes Rousseau's example work, Tartars are by definition far away, and by definition unphilosophical. But why suppose as much?

I have known at least two academic philosophers of Tatar ethnic background; both I can think of at the moment were formal logicians. But there is another sense in which a Tatar might be a philosopher, though, and this is the one taken seriously by Johann Jakob Brucker in his Historia critica philosophiae of 1744. Here Brucker, in his survey of the history of philosophy, speaks not only of the philosophy of the Greeks and the Romans, but also that of the ancient Celts, and indeed of the Scythians, who in the Enlightenment were often taken as the ancient ancestors of the modern world’s Tartars.

For Brucker, Scythian philosophy is nothing other than the sum total of expressions of Scythian culture: religious rites, rules of interaction, popular sayings, decorative motifs. Such a conception of philosophy as embedded in culture, in the way a pure element might be embedded in an ore, will in turn inform many of the attempts to articulate new understandings of philosophy in the context of the movement for decolonialisation in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Thus at the Second Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Rome in 1959, a special commission on philosophy would urge that “the African philosopher should learn from the traditions, tales, myths, and proverbs of his people, so as to draw from them the laws of a true African wisdom complementary to the other forms of human wisdom to bring out the specific categories of African thought.”

Influenced by this decree, a number of innovative works would appear over the next decades which sought to study diverse cultures and natural languages of Africa as the vehicles of an implicit philosophy. Notable among these is Alexis Kagame’s La philosophie bantoue (1976), which itself credits Louis Hjelmslev’s dictum that ‘there is no philosophy without linguistics’. Kagame took this to mean that because we can engage in a formal study of the semantics of the Bantu languages, we are thereby given access to the Bantu philosophy that has been there all along, without ever being called by that name.

One might worry that Kagame’s approach creates a double standard: if cultural expressions such as proverbs are to count as philosophy in Africa, then we will need a good argument as to what it is that makes these proverbs substantially different from the ones passed down in the extra-institutional oral traditions of Europe, such as those associated with agriculture, and as to why an African should be said to be participating in philosophy simply to the extent that he or she is a transmitter of a culture’s proverbs, while by contrast a European, in order to be a philosopher, has to leave the farm, go to the city, master Latin and the forms of the syllogism, and in general learn to stop being so folksy.

And yet the expansion of philosophy to include the study of culture, as urged at the 1959 congress, has obvious benefits, even if it stopped short in supposing that European thought somehow constitutes an exception, that it is somehow independent of culture, and that the study of European philosophy is not, in the end, a branch of anthropology. For one thing, it enables us to see how Rousseau’s stark contrast between the ‘philosopher’ and the ‘Tartar’ might not match up with reality, even if the Tartar in question is not lecturing on polyvalent logic at the Academy of Sciences, but is simply excelling at whatever tasks it might be expedient or laudable to pursue within the context of traditional Tartar culture: war-making, metallurgy, the recitation of oral epic.

Beyond any concern we might have about double standards, there is good reason to suspect that these things should not be entirely neglected by philosophers (in the narrower sense in which Rousseau understands the term). They offer points of entry to the variety of expressions of human ingenuity, which taken together surely may be expected to reveal something of what being human is all about. And if that’s not a philosophical matter, it would be difficult to say what is.

So, pace Rousseau, the categories of ‘Tartar’ and of ‘philosopher’ are not opposed. But what about ‘neighbour’? As in the 18th century, one recurring criticism of cosmopolitanism today is that it exchanges real, affective commitment to a real community of shared interests and values in favour of an abstract commitment to a mostly fictional global community of all human beings. It is mostly fictional, critics suppose, because what we are doing when we speak of ‘humanity’ is simply projecting our own very local sliver of values and tastes out into the world, and avoiding contact with members of other cultures who might complicate matters for us by failing to share these values and tastes.

But that’s the thing about neighbours: unless you live in some gated community or selective co-op or village full of like-minded bigots, the chances are quite high that you have very little in common with the person living next to you. I don’t know whether any of my neighbours in Paris are Tatars, but I am certain that many of them are different from me in precisely the way Rousseau imagined that Tartars are different from him, and therefore, so he imagined, from ‘Europeans’. This presumption was dubious in 1762, and in the era of mass immigration it is all the more so.

Rousseau is in a certain sense right: you should of course take an interest in the well-being of your neighbour, and try to understand what it is that gives meaning to their life. The fact that you are yourself a philosopher shouldn’t make doing so any less urgent. But nor should you presume that the categories of ‘philosopher’, ‘neighbour’, and ‘Tartar’ are distinct. Their overlap with one another, in fact, constitutes both a powerful response to Rousseau, as well as an argument in itself for cosmopolitanism. Philosophy is everywhere, and so are neighbours, and interest in what the Tartars are doing is as neighbourly as it is philosophical.

Grammatical Gender and Transgender Identity

Some English-speakers have been hailing the recent mainstream campaign to eliminate gender-specific pronouns in Swedish. A few Anglophones, though far from the mainstream, have also been seeking for some years now to implement neologistic gender-neutral replacements for ‘he’ and ‘she’. The Swedish case in particular has been held to be a reflection of that society’s relative progressiveness in the politics of gender. What is missed here, out of ignorance or wilful avoidance, is that there are many languages in which gendered pronouns have either gone extinct or were never used in the first place, and which are spoken in societies that are hardly known for their gender egalitarianism: for example, Persian or Turkmen. Somehow, even without access to ‘she’ or ‘her’, but only an all-purpose ‘he/she/it’, Iranian courts manage to sentence women to death by stoning for ‘adultery’. We might just as well predict that Swedish society would take up lapidation and anti-adultery laws as a result of the elimination of gendered pronouns, as that it would thereby draw closer to full gender equality.

Both predictions are absurd. And yet, this interest in gendered personal pronouns does at least remind us of a way of thinking about grammatical gender that is generally underemphasised by linguists and language instructors: that the masculine and feminine genders of pronouns, and more interestingly of nouns, reflects a division of the cosmos into categories that radiate out from the sexual dimorphism of human bodies. In English there is only vestigial gender for substantive terms for non-biological entities: ships, sometimes countries, sometimes sportscars, are ‘she’. In French, every noun is masculine or feminine, sometimes in ways that seem arbitrary. What is it, for example, about abstractions, such as those words ending in -ité or -tion, that is inherently feminine? And why is the word for ‘vagina’ masculine, or the most common slang term for ‘penis’ feminine? Yet there are also some ways in which the non-arbitrary ideology of gender is reflected in grammatical gender: the words for ‘father’, ‘son’ ‘god’, etc., are all masculine, which seems obvious of course, but which would not be obvious if, as we are sometimes told, there were no connection between grammatical gender and the presumed biological (or in the case of God, spiritual) sex of the entity in question.

In modern French the masculine has absorbed the neuter, which was the third gender in Latin, the principal ancestor language of French, as well as in Greek, Sanskrit, and Proto-Indo-European, and which remains the third gender in living Indo-European languages such as German and Russian. What is the neuter, and what does it reveal about the cosmology of those language-users who divide the world not just into masculine and feminine entities, but also into entities that are neither/nor? It may be that this category is not simply for the leftover entities that are neither masculine nor feminine, but rather is the vestige of an archaic system of noun classes in which the masculine and the feminine were only two instances of a much richer and more diverse way of carving up the world.

When I studied Old Church Slavonic with Boris Gasparov in the 1990s, he was actively interested in the noun-class system of the Niger-Congo languages, which include up to 22 nominal classes based on semantic hyperonymy in which more specific categories of being are grouped in more general nominal classes. Place, animacy, number, and so on exist alongside gender as basic noun forms. If I recall correctly, Gasparov was drawing on the work of some earlier formalist from Prague or Tartu who argued that the distinct declensions for animate and inanimate nouns in Slavic languages (in the masculine accusative singular for example) reflects an earlier system akin to the Niger-Congo languages in which masculine and feminine in no way exhaust the possibilities for carving up the world of things named by nouns, as they do, say, in modern French. On this view, then, the neuter could be the residue of what were once several different gender-like noun categories that unlike the masculine and feminine genders have not even a putative grounding in biological sex. These all could have been folded into the neuter gender in the same way that the neuter was in more recent times folded into the masculine in French.

Recent desultory clicking brought me to the website nonbinary.org. This organisation, I think, offers the purest expression I have seen of contemporary transgender ideology. I will make no secret of my inability to accept, or understand, certain elements of this ideology, nor will I hide my horror at the quickness with which inability such as mine is denounced these days as ‘transphobia’. I take it rather that the inability results from real inconsistencies in the ideology. In particular it is not at all clear to me how human social reality can be carved up into ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ if we are in fact committed to non-binarity. You can argue that ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are just the tip of the iceberg, that one can also be, to take an example from nonbinary.org, ‘frostgender’. But if this is your view, if you think there are countless ways individual human beings might discover within themselves an inward affinity to some entity, process, or phenomenon in nature or in abstraction, and that the acknowledgment of such affinity is the only adequate account of gender, then don’t you dare tell me I’m ‘cis’. How on earth would you know?

It seems to me very plausible that such affinities are indeed the expression of a richer system of placing human beings within a cosmos of classes of entities than the one that divides everything into masculine and feminine. If it seems too fine-grained to believe that a person might truly be ‘frostgender’, by hyperonymy we might still be able to imagine a system in which some people affiliate with the class of water-based entities, or the class of cold things. Acknowledging our affinity to the animal world in particular, and expressing this affinity through our social identities, seems a particularly natural and appropriate thing to do. I am confident in fact that there is just as much sense in a human being saying that, though they were born in human form, it is to the class of jaguars or crows that they truly belong, as it is for, say, a human being born biologically a male to say that it is nonetheless to the class of human females that he truly belongs. At present the latter statement is supposed to command our full and unquestioning respect, while the former would be received at best with curiosity and most likely with unsanctioned ridicule. This distinction is arbitrary and culturally specific in the extreme.

The only social outlet the person who identifies with an animal has in our society is in outward affiliation to shabby sexual subcultures like the ‘furries’ or the ‘pups’. The profound truth that these subcultures skim seems to go unnoticed either by their members or by their mockers: that we are, not just in our ‘fetishes’ or ‘kinks’, but in our deepest natures, the kin of other living beings. Our historical bond with them is older even than sexual dimorphism, and it is not at all surprising that it moves some people to commit themselves in their social comportment to not just kinship, but inward identity, with a given animal kind. They do not need to go out and buy some rubber costume in order for the claim of identity to be veracious, either, any more than someone who claims to be frostgender needs to dress up as a snowflake. And mistaking the trouble one is willing to go through to manifest themselves socially as a member of this or that trans identity with trans identity itself is to mistake the trivial appearances for the fascinating and important metaphysics at work in human identity. We are, none of us, ‘cis’.

But back to grammar. There are vestiges in many languages of a vision of the world in which gender is largely ungrounded in biological sex: the vast majority of gendered entities —stars, houses, rocks, and so on— plainly have no biological sex at all. In languages such as English, gender has mostly retreated to those entities that are thought to have a sex, and until recently it was supposed that the classification in terms of gender was grounded in that sex. This grounding has been called into question in the past few decades, but if grammatical gender for pronouns withers away or is abolished by decree, this will only be the completion of a process of de-gendering that has already occurred for the vast majority of entities in the world. There was a time when stars and rocks could be masculine or feminine, with no expectation that this classification be grounded in biological sex. And now we have arrived at a point where even biological sex is not enough to ground gender, but what is forgotten here is that for most of human history, if natural language is any indication, there was no expectation of such a grounding.

Now we might say good riddance to grammatical gender, we might say that English is ‘more evolved’ than French to the extent that it mostly lacks gender. But we might also look back to richer systems of noun classes in other more distant languages as holding out for us a more adequate expression of the non-binarity we now claim to be seeking in the social expression of gender. What if we could find, in natural language, the elements for a conception of gender-like classes that do not stop at masculine and feminine, that presume no grounding in biological sex, and that help us to make sense of the sort of affinities, for example to entities in the natural world, that the new non-binarity is asking us to recognise? What if the best hope for progress is in archaicism, finding those old ways of speaking in which my inward affinity to another being can be expressed as true, even if my outward form is nothing like that being? Une étoile is not really feminine, and no human being is really a jaguar; it is also likely that no human being is a ’man’ or a ‘woman’ in any clear and incontestable sense. But these are all ways of talking, of making meaning in our human lives.

We Are Not Living in a 'Video Game Simulation'

Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor and amateur futurologue, has recently taken to the idea that we may all be living in a simulation akin to Second Life. He has been influenced in his thinking by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, though something of the latter's rigour has been lost as the argument is translated into a version suitable to capture the imagination of a global 'thought leader', who, in turn, is positioned to get the rest of us talking about it. Of course some of us can remember talking about it before either of these men forced it into the zeitgeist, perhaps in an informal setting where the exploratory mood was enhanced by a joint and we found ourselves starting our sentences with, "Whoah, what if, like..." But now the adventure of ideas, of which any stoner is capable, and indeed of which our ancestors millennia before the invention of video games were capable, has been given weight by the interest of an Oxford philosopher, and cachet by the derivative interest of a rich person. And now when people talk about it they will not say, "Whoah, what if, like..." and they will probably not have a joint in hand. They will soberly, straight-facedly say to their coworkers, "I read this one expert who..." or, more succinctly, "They say that..." 

You do not need to be a Heideggerian to be wary of 'the they'. 

It is certainly possible that we are living in a simulation, if by this we mean that things are not as they appear, that reality is not just brute stuff sitting there on its own. This is a possibility that has been contemplated in various ways by great minds for quite some time now, and that has provided fuel for the wild speculations of not-so-great minds for just as long. What is new is the way in which one manoeuvres into the appearance of expertise by doing nothing more than being very wealthy and deciding to take up the social role of a visionary. What Musk has done is to update an ancient possibility, to cause it to appear as something never-before-thought when in truth it is only a repackaging and a re-enchantment.

The particular form the new version takes offers a vivid case study in the consequences of historical and anthropological ignorance. How self-congratulatory and parochial does a member of a given culture, at a given moment, have to be, to suppose that reality itself takes the form of a particular technology developed within that very culture in the course of one's own lifetime? Consider the familiar claim that 'the brain is like a computer', or, switching the comparative 'like' for the stoner one, that 'the brain is, like, a computer'. Is this not effectively to say that this thing that has been around in nature for hundreds of millions of years turns out to in fact have been, all along, this other thing that we ourselves came up with in the past few decades?

Wouldn't it, I mean, be a remarkable coincidence to find ourselves alive at just the moment where technology finally shows itself to be adequate to reveal to us the true nature of reality? And how are we supposed to interpret the equally certain claims of people in other times and places, who believed that reality in fact reflected some device or artifice of central importance to their own culture (e.g., horologia, mirrors, puppets, tjurungas...)? Are we really to believe that it was not the light-and-shadow theatres of the ancients or the hydraulic automata of the early moderns that revealed the true nature of things, but that instead humanity would have to await the eventual advent of... Pong? And might the key cosmic-historical significance of this technological moment have something to do with the fact that it is simultaneous with the formative early experiences of the man-child Elon Musk? 

If you are like Musk, or Bostrom, then you will probably consider these historical and culture-comparative considerations irrelevant to the question at hand. Fine, then. Let's talk about the argument. One notes, first, that it relies on a crucial but unexamined premise, that the simulated characters of video games, if they keep developing in the way they have been developing since the 1970s, will eventually become conscious. But there is just one small problem: we don't know what consciousness is yet. We don't know how it is grounded in brain activity, nor whether it is an emergent capacity of the evolution of organisms at all, so we can't possibly know whether it is bound to emerge from the evolution of other physical systems.

Some people are strongly committed to the view that consciousness is just the result of the way brains are structured, and there is nothing categorically special in the physical world about how brains are structured. But they cannot give an account, at least not yet, of how this works, how we get thoughts and feelings and memories from the firing of neurons, let alone positively establish that it works in the same way as our computers work. And if we do not know that brains are computers, then we definitely don't know that computer programs, or indeed the special parts of programs responsible for the production of simulations of characters that seem to bear some analogy to us (Ms. PacMan, the Sims, etc.), are on their way to becoming conscious. 

But let's suppose for the sake of argument that our brains are computers, and that our consciousness is the result of the fact that we are 'running a program'. It does not follow from this that wherever in the universe there is natural computational activity, given enough time this activity will in turn result in the production of artificial systems that simulate what had already emerged naturally. In other words, there is no reason to think that wherever there are naturally evolving brains there are likely to be, given enough time, artificial ones too.

The presumption of the high probability of such an outcome is perhaps what is most new about the new repackaged version of the argument. It appears to be borrowed from some recent speculations in xenobiology, triggered by the recent recalculation, by several orders of magnitude, of the likely number of habitable planets in the universe. But this speculation is based on a misunderstanding of evolutionary biology, and pumped up on a fairly large dose of smuggled teleology. There is no reason why biological evolution should move from lower to higher, from dumb fish and worms to ingenious toolmaking and abstract-thought-using beings. This is for the simple reason that there can be no lower or higher at all in evolution. I am worse than a fish if we're having a contest in underwater breathing, but better if it is typing that interests us. And this is all evolution does: it yields up organisms that are fitted to their environments; it does not yield up absolutely ever-better organisms, nor is tool-making and abstract thinking any better, absolutely, than breathing through gills.

Even given the astoundingly large number of habitable planets in the universe and the likely passage on at least some of them from inorganic molecules to living systems, there is no compelling reason to think that a large number of these systems, or even more than one of them, must ever have resulted in a species such as ours that builds tools we would recognise as products of technology. There could for example be a species of electric eel-like creatures that develop a flourishing culture of abstract self-expression, in which some become legendary, like eel Mozarts, for their ability to control the currents coming out of them. Such a thing could evolve without giving off any technological traces. Such a thing, indeed, may even be going on right now among some terrestrial non-human species. But not only do we not detect it, we are not even interested in it, as we are certain, without argument, that intelligence is coextensive with making stuff.

If there is no necessity or high probability that the passage to what we would recognise as technology should have occurred more than once, then a fortiori there cannot be a high probability that one or many other living systems in the universe ever came up with a technology similar to Second Life (in which the little avatars eventually become conscious, mistake their simulation for reality, etc.).

There are two instances of one and the same error in the argument that we might be living in a video game simulation. It is supposed that given enough time any living system will become like us in that it will begin using abstract thought and building tools, which tools will eventually become the loci of abstract thought themselves. It is supposed, further, that these thought-tools will eventually take a form that looks recognisably like the thought-tools we have started to develop over the past half-century or so. The second inflection of the error only looks more absurd in view of its greater specificity. Both, again, are based on the ungrounded claim that thought-tools not only help us conscious beings to think, but also, as they become more complex, begin thinking themselves. 

This speculation has become 'a thing' recently not because it has finally been grounded in a compelling argument, but because Elon Musk occupies a social role in which he need only dream out loud in order for his 'he' to become a 'they'. The argument is a matter of interest, like the horoscopes once so lucidly studied by Adorno, mostly because of what it says about the sociology of authority, not because of what it, well, says. And yet one fears that in the Internet era, though we are now offered infinite space to say things, there is somehow nonetheless vanishing space for critical analysis of the declarations of the powerful. The powerful maintain a pretence of reasonableness by speaking in terms of what is 'probable'. But speaking in this way translates just as easily into Google hits as does speaking of what is 'true'. And Google hits are more interesting than truth anyway, so why not just dream out loud? 

Ongian Meditations

I had a piece in Aeon Magazine on the relationship between literacy and philosophy. It was really a sort of summary of a recent line of reflection occasioned by my reading of Walter J. Ong, S. J. (1912-2003). His work in communications theory has been hailed by commentators over the past few years as providing a clear early articulation of many of the conceptual problems that the rise of the Internet has imposed on us. Having written this work from the 1960s to the 1980s, he's thus hailed as a 'visionary', 'before his time', etc. I tend to see him rather as perhaps the last in a long line of Jesuit polymathic weirdos, sharing in the same spirit as Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), and being, like Kircher, motivated to reflect on the natural of language and writing, and on the possibility of artificial languages or codes or programs, out of a fundamental theological commitment to the power of what they call 'the Word' to render all of nature into a rational order. In this respect for them the world is God's writing, and the eventual development of literacy in human history is thus a sort of moral progress to the extent that it aids humanity in achieving its divinely implanted potential to reflect the order of the world as God created it. 

But these considerations do not enter into my own essay, nor for that matter into Ong's rigorous scholarly work. My full essay can be found here. Below is an excerpt. 

*

A poet, somewhere in Siberia, or the Balkans, or West Africa, some time in the past 60,000 years, recites thousands of memorised lines in the course of an evening. The lines are packed with fixed epithets and clichés. The bard is not concerned with originality, but with intonation and delivery: he or she is perfectly attuned to the circumstances of the day, and to the mood and expectations of his or her listeners.

If this were happening 6,000-plus years ago, the poet’s words would in no way have been anchored in visible signs, in text. For the vast majority of the time that human beings have been on Earth, words have had no worldly reality other than the sound made when they are spoken.

As the theorist Walter J. Ong pointed out in Orality and Literacy: Technologizing the Word (1982), it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, now to imagine how differently language would have been experienced in a culture of ‘primary orality’. There would be nowhere to ‘look up a word’, no authoritative source telling us the shape the word ‘actually’ takes. There would be no way to affirm the word’s existence at all except by speaking it – and this necessary condition of survival is important for understanding the relatively repetitive nature of epic poetry. Say it over and over again, or it will slip away. In the absence of fixed, textual anchors for words, there would be a sharp sense that language is charged with power, almost magic: the idea that words, when spoken, can bring about new states of affairs in the world. They do not so much describe, as invoke... 

The Problem with the 'Deep Roots of War' Debate

Some new research has been added to the pile of work purporting to show that human warfare is a relatively recent development. Somehow, we've arrived at a strange point in the history of speculation on 'human nature', where the 'conservatives', such as Steven Pinker, wish to argue that war has primal roots in human evolution, and that we share our bellicosity even with other primate species such as chimpanzees. Thus, to the question, for how long have human beings been war-makers? their answer is: at least since what would later become Pan troglodytes and Homo sapiens both split from their common ancestor between 5 and 7 million years ago. The 'progressives', in turn, say that war is a recent development and an indication that human society has at some not-too-distant point taken a turn for the worse.  

The latest study favouring the 'progressives', like all work in this genre, takes for granted that war and violence are by definition an intra-species affair. Aristotle seems to be one of the few authors ever to have understood that 'hunting is a form of war' (Politics Bk. 10), and we would do well to learn from him. In the time-period and region described in the study (Japan, 7,000-12,000 years ago), that war had by no means been decisively won by human beings, though it will have been by the time of the foundation of city-states (which are among other things barriers against the encroachment of other top predators). There is something astoundingly oxymoronic about the claim that 'hunter-gatherers were not violent', as if, e.g., shedding the blood of bears had nothing in common with human-on-human bloodshed. This separation of the two sorts of activity presupposes an ontological and moral divide between animals and human beings, which there is no evidence Palaeolithic human beings shared with us. It seems more correct to say that human warfare really gets going at the moment human domination of other megafauna becomes certain and total, which is, not coincidentally, also the beginning of the period of urbanisation and animal domestication. However much we would like to go it alone, political theory and debate about 'human nature' simply cannot be done without taking seriously the role of non-human animals in human political life.

Both sides are wrong, since both sides are operating with a definition of violence that really only makes sense on the presupposition of human exceptionalism, which seems to be the product of a rather late-coming and parochial ontology.