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Hobbes, Biopolitics, Security, part 2: Spinoza

By Gordon Hull

Last time, following a new paper by Andrea Rossi, I suggested that Hobbes’s reformulation of the Stoic “security” in terms that we would recognize as biopolitical – oriented toward human flourishing, and not just survival – enables him to reformulate the Ciceronian salus populi suprema lex (“the welfare of the people is the supreme law”).  As I suggested, this renders Hobbes a different thinker from what Foucault thought he was.  Here, I want to suggest that it also shows that one of the usual divisions between Hobbes and Spinoza (roughly: Hobbes is a juridical absolutist and a theorist of potestas; Spinoza is a democrat and theorist of potentia) just doesn’t hold much water.  In other words, the sharp division drawn by Negri regarding the “permanence and opposition of two lines” in modernity, “the absolutist one, following Hobbes, and the democratic one, espousing Spinoza” (Porcelain Workshop, 52) – gets in the way of a more productive engagement between the two.  It’s not that Hobbes and Spinoza come to the same political conclusions (they clearly do not) – the interest is in how similar they are  prior to those conclusions.

Shameless Self-Promotion Dept: Papers on Foucault, and on Spinoza

I've just uploaded a (relatively minor) revision of my SPEP paper from this fall in Salt Lake City to SSRN.  The paper is ""Confessing Preferences: What Foucault’s Government of the Living can tell us about Neoliberalism and Big Data," and the abstract is:

Foucault’s 1979-80 Collège de France lectures, On the Government of the Living, offer one way to situate the development of his later work, and in particular to understand his supposed turn away from biopolitics and governmentality to ethics and subjectivity.  In this paper, I argue that (1) a unifying thread in most of Foucault’s work from the late 1970s onward is an increasing concern with the centrality of confession as a primary technology of power in the Christian West; and (2) Neoliberalism is deeply confessional, and therefore highly suspect from a Foucauldian standpoint.  (3) These connections are particularly evident in a Foucauldian reading of data analytics (“big data”).

 

I've also uploaded a somewhat older paper on Spinoza and finitude.  The  paper is "Of Suicide and Falling Stones: Finitude, Contingency, and Corporeal Vulnerability in (Judith Butler’s) Spinoza," and the abstract is:

This paper juxtaposes Judith Butler's reading of Spinoza with the commonly-received, originally Deleuzian, presentation of Spinoza as the "anti-Hegel" or as the presentation of "positivity" against Hegelian "negativity." Working via the key commentary by Pierre Macherey in Hegel ou Spinoza, I argue that, once we no longer are compelled to read Spinoza as Hegel's negation or opposite, the way is open to see a Spinoza who is profoundly concerned with human fragility and finitude. the Spinoza that emerges presents a more cautious, but also potentially more generous, approach to emancipatory politics.

To put the point too schematically, readings of the affirmative Spinoza tend to develop the importance of conatus as resistance, at the expense of developing an understanding of the importance of limitations imposed by our own finitude. It seems to me that much of Butler’s thought can be read as bringing those elements together. How do we understand conatus, and marshal it as resistance, given the inevitability of finitude and constraint as factors that structure the desires through which we actually live?

 

On Sudden Death

“Rehearse this thought every day, that you may be able to depart from life contentedly; for many men clutch and cling to life, in the same way that those who are carried down a rushing stream clutch and cling to briars and sharp rocks.” -- Seneca, Letter 4

 “A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.” -- Spinoza, Ethics 4P67

 “One would require a position outside of life, and yet have to know it as well as one, as many, as all who have lived it, in order to be permitted even to touch the problem of the value of life; reasons enough to comprehend that this problem is for us an unapproachable problem.” --Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

It’s been more than ten years, but the memory is very much alive of the night my stepmother called to tell me that my father had died, suddenly, while on a run the day before he was to race in the L.A marathon. Of the many overwhelming thoughts and emotions that came upon me that night, one of the first was the realization that everything had suddenly and irreversibly changed; things, I realized, will no longer be the same. This thought was much more than an intellectual grasp and insight; it felt much more real than that. Within 24 hours I was on a plane and back home in Laguna Beach. Walking in town that beautiful March night I couldn’t help but think of how, despite the fact that my father was no longer walking the streets of Laguna, the moon and stars that lit up the night sky were the same as the night before and will continue to be the same long after I succumb to the same fate as my father, the night sky being implacable and unaffected by the changes that affect our lives. It is no wonder the Ancients referred to the night sky as the heavenly sphere, the eternal realm distinct from the earthly sphere of changing human affairs.

I know that my thoughts and feelings regarding my father’s death are not unusual – it is from what I can tell a very common reaction to the loss of a significant person in one’s life. My reaction is also probably not unique to sudden deaths either. I had a similar reaction to my stepfather’s death from colon cancer. Although we knew his death was coming, the actual event of his death left me with a similar feeling of the transformative nature of what had happened. But there is something about sudden deaths that accentuates, or brings to an extreme, an important truth about our relation to death.

It is this truth about our relation to death that motivates, I would argue, the claims made in the quotes that lead off this post.

Mind the Gap: Hume meets Spinoza

As I concluded the previous post, I argued that the Deleuzian extension of Hume’s project entailed both the affirmation of monism (Spinoza) and multiplicity (Hume). This point is made crystal clear in A Thousand Plateaus when Deleuze and Guattari announce that “pluralism = monism” (ATP, p. 20; see this earlier post where I discuss this theme in the context of William James’ radical empiricism). This effort to bring Hume and Spinoza together, however, is fraught with difficulty, or at least apparently so, in a philosophical landscape that has been forever altered by Kant’s project.

But it is just this bringing together of Hume and Spinoza that a Deleuzian metaphysics accomplishes.

On the "inexplicability" of the Holocaust

Every advance in research that adds a new complication to our understanding of what happened on the Nazi side, or on the victims’, can potentially threaten our moral clarity about why it happened, obscuring the reality and fundamental inexplicability of anti-Semitic eliminationism.--Mark Lilla, NYRB, 21 November.

In a two-part article, which is a review of two films and some books, Mark Lilla presents us two competing approaches to the Holocaust: one -- represented by the author Hannah Arendt -- attempts "to find a schema that would render the horror comprehensible and make judgment possible;" the other -- represented by the film-maker Claude Lanzmann prior to the film (The Last of the Unjust) under review -- embraces a "refusal to understand." Without wishing to obscure the differences between Arendt and Lanzmann as presented by Lilla, the point of aiming and obtaining understanding, or not, is in some sense moral on their views. (I return to this below.)

As the passage above reveals, Lilla's position also embraces the "fundamental inexplicability," of "anti-Semitic eliminationism" by which he appears to mean the Holocaust of the Jews.* But in Lilla's approach the inexplicable has no stated moral purpose. In fact, in the passage above, Lilla offers us an asymmetry in the possible consequences of obtaining new facts, insights, even "understanding" of a historical event: (i) in the moral sphere they can undermine (or fortify) "moral" judgment; (ii) in the epistemic sphere, they leave untouched what is fundamentally inexplicable. To be sure, in the moral realm certain forms of historical explanation are presupposed; in particular, one needs a functional or teleological account why something happened before one can obtain "moral clarity" or not.  But Lilla's position also involves the further claim that even with some such "understanding," an event can  remain fundamentally inexplicable. We are not told much about what remains elusive such that a functionally or schematically understood event is still not just a mystery, but at bottom a mystery.

Spinoza, Newton and the Clarke/Toland debate

“No variation of things arises from blind metaphysical necessity, which must be the same always and everywhere.” [A cæca necessitate metaphysica, quæ utique eadem est semper & ubique, nulla oritur rerum variatio.]--Isaac Newton, General Scholium (1713), Principia.

This week we're celebrating three hundred years since Newton published the General Scholium, attached to the second edition of the Principia. The passage above was only inserted in the final (1726), third edition. The argument of the sentence seems to be something like this:  

• A1: (Metaphysical) Necessity <--> Homogeneity
• A2: Homogeneity and Variety are disjunctive alternatives (suppressed premise) 
• P: We observe variety
• Therefore, no metaphysical necessity

From textual context it is very clear that Newton wants to defend the legitimacy of final causes. In particular, in circles around Newton it was common to refer to Spinoza as having defended the system of “Blind and Unintelligent Necessity” (S. Clarke (1705) Demonstration, 12.102); or “A Blind and Eternal Fatality” (S. Clarke, Demonstration, Intro.8); or "blind mechanical necessity” (H. More, Confutation of Spinoza, 91). In fact, More refers to Spinoza as that “completely blind and stupid philosophaster” (H. More, 91; recall!) So, because Spinoza's denies final causes, the necessity he defends is unguided and undirected, that is, "blind." In the quoted passage above, Newton is, thus, offering an empirical argument against a metaphysical thesis: observed variety is not compatible with Spinoza's proposed system of nature. Moreover, the General Scholium argues more generally that we do not just observe variety, we observe quite determinate and peculiar variety (of the sort that leads Newton to offer his famous argument to a designer).

On Norms, blushes, and impartial spectators.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.--Kant
Quaere quid est virtus, et posce exemplar honesti.--Lucan (quoted by David Hume as epigraph to Treatise 3.)

Our bodies can betray us. The main ploy of Seneca’s eleventh Letter is to use the all-too-human-phenomenon of blushing to talk about the limits that nature and our natures put on any philosophical wisdom. Seneca relies on the idea that blushing cannot be controlled even if one has completed an training in philosophical emendation of the mind.  One aim of such a course is a kind of self-mastery, that is, to be composed. Seneca uses blushing as a metaphor for all the ways in which there are limits to our abilities to control nature more generally. Ever since Bacon and Descartes this outlook has been on the defensive, but if we are really heading toward an era of Environmental disasters, recognizing limits may well return to favor before long even if there might be over-the-counter pills against blushing.  

Above, I use the plural “our natures,” not just because in an earlier letter Seneca had already implied there are a variety of kinds of souls (recall), but also because in the eleventh letter Seneca insists that our characters are, in part, the product of varying natural endowments. This sheds some light on the point of the little mystery at the start the eleventh Letter. For, Seneca introduces a third party, Lucilus’s “friend,” but does not reveal his identity. Presumably this is the same “friend” that had acted as (postal) messenger between Lucilus and Seneca  before (recall the third letter). This time Seneca reports a conversation he had with the unnamed friend, and it reveals something about the qualities desired in a philosophical apprentice. It seems the friend has also started a course in philosophical improvement in which Seneca judges that he has progressed.)

On the demise of the PSR and The Nature of Analytical Philosophy

One attractive story about the demise of the Principle Sufficient Reason (PSR) is that it was discarded in the founding of analytical philosophy together with the heritage of British Idealism and related polemics against Spinoza (and Bergson) by Bertrand Russell. When Russell was given the option, accept (a) Bradley's Regress or (b) the PSR, he chose neither; and he opted, instead, for (c) submission to scientific fact: "The scientific philosophy, therefore...aims only at understanding the world... without being turned aside from that submission to fact which is the essence of the scientific temper." (On Scientific Method In Philosophy [recall my discussion and Jeff Bell.] If the to-be-explained-facts are brute, then it is possible that even if they can be fully captured by integrated into a theory/model (etc.) some arbitrariness is inevitable (in, say, initial conditions). One might even think that this stance is (informally) justified by the "principle of indifference" that accompanies the embrace of a classical probability theory in one's inductive logic (see, Carnap).

On Fossils and Economists (and Spinozistic Anti-Mathematics)

"I have no great faith in political arithmetick, and I mean not to warrant the exactness of either of these computations." Adam Smith (1776) Wealth of Nations.

While Ancient writers (Pliny) certainly noted the existence of fossils, the meaning of the existence fossils was explosive during the eighteenth century. In posthumously published work on Discourse on Earthquakes (1705), the secretary of the Royal Society, Robert Hooke, had while surveying fossil evidence suggested that "There have been many other Species of Creatures in former Ages, of which we can find none at present; and that 'tis not unlikely also but that there may be divers new kinds now, which have not been from the beginning." (here)

As it happens, Adam Smith's two best friends in old age, James Hutton and Joseph Black, the editors of his posthumous (1795) work, Essays on Philosophical Subjects (EPS), understood what was at stake. For, in 1785 Hutton gave a public lecture, “Concerning the System of the Earth, Its Duration, and Stability,” at University of Edinburgh. Due to Hutton's illness, Black gave the lecture on Hutton’s behalf. In the lecture Hutton used geological and fossil evidence to argue that the Earth was almost certainly older than 6000 years. We do not know for sure if Smith attended the lecture, although he was in town.The argument was elaborated in far greater detail in Hutton's (1788) Theory of the Earth, which made him an international celebrity. The significance of this episode to the history of geology and Darwinism is much studied.

But what does this have to do with the history of economics?

Smith's closeness to Hutton may provide additional clues for one of the enduring mysteries of the history of economics: why did Adam Smith forsake the deployment of a mathematical model in the Wealth of Nations (1776)?

On Being a PhD Supervisor (or Spinoza and Seneca on Equanimity)

Childhood is abundant in fruits, but infancy is sweeter [Fructuosior est adulescentia liberorum, sed infantia dulcior].--Seneca, Letter 9.

I am very bad at being powerless when I really want to help another that I care for who is self-undermining. I find it vexing, and because of the intensity of the passion, I am perfectly capable of making a situation worse--thus, not helping the person in need and frustrating my aims. Recognizing the pattern and even the fact that I re-enact childhood experience, has helped to some degree. But nobody that knows me will call me "unflappable" in such circumstances. (By contrast, I have remained unperturbed when I have been amidst gunfire and scary aircraft failures.) This particular incapacity has a work-place consequence: it makes me a less than ideal PhD supervisor for people that are self-undermining and it influences how we can do philosophy together.

In her best-selling and philosophically subtle book on Spinoza, Door Spinoza's Lens [full disclosure: I wrote a brief "afterword" to it, but that is obviously not why it is selling!] the Flemish scholar-public intellectual, Tinneke Beeckman, emphasizes the significance of equanimity. When one first encounters it in the Ethics, it seems to council resignation: "we should await and endure fortune's face with equanimity" [utramque fortunae faciem aequo animo exspectare et ferre]. E2p49S It is easy to mistake this for passivity in the face of harms done by others to us (as E4Appendix, ch. 14 suggests).* But in chapter 32 of the appendix to Ethics 4,   Spinoza makes clear that equanimity is consequent to being conscious of having done one's duty [si conscii simus nos functos nostro officio fuisse]. Given that Spinoza uses here the Ciceronian "officio," he means this in terms of meeting the obligations of one's public station or social role. Spinoza's version of equanimity is a public virtue, one that emphasizes a notion of duty that we can capture by way of 'public spiritedness.' As we know from Hutcheson this entails all of us can be heroes in modern times.

Copernicus, Spinoza, Rheticus, and Accomodation

True understanding of everything contained in the sacred writings is to be sought from them, and not elsewhere...we do not study the passages about nature as if Scripture were a philosophical textbook [of nature], but rather as books in which the Holy Spirit desired to teach us something necessary for our salvation...For who would deny that if God, the creator of nature, had desired to describe the nature of things for us by His Word, nothing in the whole world could have remained hidden to us, of which we now would not know exactly, the nature, causes, and powers?--G.J.Rheticus, translated by R. Hooykaas.

Rheticus is Copernicus sole student. I was reminded of his significance by examining a PhD dissertation, "Lutheran Astronomers after the Fall (1540-1590): A reappraisal of the Renaissance dynamic of religion and astronomy," by the Ghent historian of science, Dr. Nienke Roelants (recall here and here). The quoted passage was probably written around 1541 (so before Copernicus death and the publication of On the Revolutions) as part of a short treatise on biblical interpretation in light of the embrace of mobility of the earth. It was only published as an addition to Gorleaus Idea Physicae in Utrecht in 1651.

On being a Celebrity Philosopher

Reflect that nothing except the soul is worthy of wonder; for the soul, if it be great, naught is great.—Seneca, Letter 8.

Over half a decade ago I invited Peter Sloterdijk to a workshop; twenty-four days later, I inquired if the invite was received. I went ahead and planned the workshop without him. Not long before the workshop I heard from his 'assistent,' who was volunteered by Herr Prof. Dr. Sloterdijk to take his place. I felt bad for the 'assistent,' who confessed to having lack of time to prepare. I declined to put him on the program. But I did ask him to convey to Prof. Sloterdijk the thought that "he needs to realize this is no way to treat a colleague who (for example) may write his obituary one day."* (Not nice, admittedly, but it captured my outrage.) Much to my surprise, Sloterdijk answered the following week that there must have been a confusion because he had already written me a letter to inform me of his absence. After a round of apologies, we left it at that.**

By 'celebrity philosopher' I mean to convey a philosopher whose name is familiar beyond her own academic milieu; possibly her ideas and works are discussed not just in professional venues, but also in a wider context. So, I am not talking about somebody who offers a 'philosophy' to media-stars nor does a 'celebrity philosopher' have to possess mass fame. In our day, my old teachers, Daniel Dennett and Martha Nussbaum are paradigmatic celebrity philosophers. When I label somebody a ‘celebrity philosopher’ I do not intend to convey a judgment of quality one way or another.

Toland on Spinoza and Newton

There is a new edition of Toland's (1704) Letters to Serena, edited by Ian Laesk. It is the first modern, English language edition. (I have not read it yet.) In order to celebrate this great news, I want to point to one non-trivial, generally overlooked feature that helps to explain the enduring significance of Toland's Letters (for other features, recall here, here, here, and here). 

The official aim of the fourth (out of five) of Toland’s rhetorically complex Letters is to show that Spinoza’s “system is without foundation.” While there may be “incidental truths” to be found in Spinoza’s system, it is “false” (Letter 4.4, p. 135 [I quote by letter, paragraph, and page-number). In particular, throughout the fourth letter, Toland echoes Henry More’s criticisms of Spinoza[or so I claim] and argues that Spinoza’s account of motion and its relationship to matter is confused.  Toland claims this criticism sets up his own positive argument, to be offered in the fifth letter that matter is “necessarily active as well as extended.” (Letter 4.17, 161; repeated in Letter 5.1, 164). In particular, he praises those mathematicians, which

“compute the quantities and proportions of motion, as they observe bodies to act on one another , without troubling themselves about the physical reasons of what every person allows, being a thing which does not always concern them, and which they leave to the philosophers to explain.” (Letter 5.9, 177).

To this claim Toland attaches without comment a quote in Latin from the scholium to proposition XI of Newton’s Principia.  An innocent reader could not avoid thinking that Newton endorses Toland’s stance.

The Double Life of Philosophers

It is the profession of philosophers to question platitudes that others accept without thinking twice. A dangerous profession, since philosophers are more easily discredited than platitudes, but a useful one.--David Lewis, Convention.

Of course, as philosophers, our commitment to challenging and questioning norms is real, and important. Far be it from me to claim that we’d be better off if we all had to be more conventional or couldn’t play around with taboos. Doing so is essential to both the philosophical method and the high quality of life we enjoy as philosophers.--Rebecca Kukla.

Recently, Rebeca Kukla published an insightful post at Leiter on the significance of the norm of social-norm violation among philosophers, including the one that encourages avoiding the appearance of concern with looks and dress.  She argues that the benefits (i.e., "high quality of life") of the norm of social norm violation are unevenly distributed within philosophy. Her cogent argument against the norm turns on "the cost of the most vulnerable members of the profession." While Kukla does not spell it out entirely, it seems she thinks that if we adjust the internal-to-philosophy norms we could distribute the current benefits to philosophizing more widely within philosophy without "undermining our commitment to challenging and questioning norms." She, thus, views philosophy as a moral or at least professional community.

Seneca, too, is concerned with the norm of social norm violation and warns against "repellent atire, unkempt hair, slovenly beard..." (Letter 5.) Seneca rejects the excesses now associated with the Cynics, but apparently commonly thought to be the 'philosopher's way' (even if "discretely pursued").  Anticipating Mandeville and Veblen, Seneca treats these instances of social norm-violation as expressing the desire to be conspicuous [conspici]. The "self-display" associated with self-punishing [poenam] norms (or what Hume would label 'monkish virtues') comes at the expense of making a contribution to society [proficere].

The Lutherans, Descartes, and Spinoza on Innate Ideas

Cuiuscumque humanae mentis ideae aliae adaequatae sunt, aliae autem mutilatae et confusae.--Spinoza, Ethica 3p1dem

Last week I had the good fortune to examine a PhD dissertation, "Lutheran Astronomers after the Fall (1540-1590): A reappraisal of the Renaissance dynamic of religion and astronomy," by the Ghent historian of science, Nienke Roelants (now: Dr. Nienke Roelants). One thing (among many) that I learned is that Luther and Melanchthon promoted an epistemology that includes a doctrine that has something like these five components: (i) in our Post-Lapsarian state, we need (ii) a mental emendation, that (iii) makes exact/clear (iv) the (innate) confused idea [of God] we already posses; (v) this emendation is rarely complete in an ordinary life.  Part of the process of such emendation is (a) by way of the rigorous (mathematical) study of nature, and (b) by copying the right sort of exemplars.

Descartes' version of the doctrine of innate ideas is that these are always clear and distinct in us. (Is that so? Descartes scholars should feel free to correct me.) So, that once one learns to recognize what is already in one's mind by way of the study of geometry, one has access to clear and distinct ideas. (He attributes a version of this to Plato's Meno in a letter, I think, to Voetius.)

The State of Nature and Emendation in Seneca (and Spinoza, and Adam Smith)

No man has ever been so advanced by Fortune that she not threaten him as greatly as she had previously indulged him. Do not trust her seeming calm; in a moment the sea is moved to its depths.—Seneca, Letter 4. 

In context, Seneca’s acceptance of epistemic uncertainty (or here) is as much about natural events (the sea) as political events—in the previous line we’re reminded of the fates of Pompey, Crassus, and Lepidus. Political mastery does not guarantee immunity against a violent end. Seneca is not blind to the probable destination of his political fall. More important, the violent underpinning of Roman political institutions means that nobody is truly master [dominus] in their “own homes” [domesticis]: “just as many have been killed by angry slaves as by angry kings.” Somebody that “scorns his own life” [vitam suam contemptsit] will not be afraid to die, in order to kill. Seneca offers a veritable picture of a state of nature under the rule of law: “every one possesses the power which you fear.”*

One might think that Seneca is anticipating Spinoza: the state of nature is never fully absent in civil society. But Seneca’s position here is compatible with a more optimistic possibility: if one can remove the sources of anger and scorn of self, one might have a more secure and, perhaps, even less uncertain environment. One may not be able to calms the sea, but the ship of state might be made more even-keeled. It is an open question if Seneca’s proposed emendation of minds [emendato animo] is strictly limited to a kind of enjoyable [freuris] self-help (recall), or (if we cheating-ly glace ahead toward Letter 7) also by way of improved state institutions and social norms.   

How to become Canonical

Why write at all if one respects the authority of canonical texts?

Our reading habits reveal our minds; reciprocally, the way and what we read can also shape, even nourish our minds. The words we read are not merely, as the saying goes, food for thought (and sometimes, thus, the semblance of thought), or trusted friends, but they can even be medicine of the mind. Seneca's second letter thus, takes for granted that words can impact us greatly. (The letter -- a compact 321 words -- turns on a series of equations among words, potions, nourishment, friendship, and location.) As we have already seen, this fact is crucial to the very possibility of escaping the ordinary exchange economy.

In the second letter, Seneca distinguishes sharply between unsteady, wandering minds and firmer ones. Now, it is possible that these are so by nature. But even the better sort of minds need cultivation; Seneca suggests that one can copy better readers (like him) and by imitating these good habits improve our minds. The better sort of readers have a limited set of enduring [certis] books that through repeated rediscovery nourish. By example Seneca shows that the better sort of reader is willing to be critical of such, canonical works--he makes a point of criticizing Epicurus. It's not that he disagrees with what Epicurus wishes to convey -- the opinion of the market-place can be wrong in rejecting all what it takes to be poverty --, but Seneca also criticizes Epicurus, in part, for embracing the axiology and conceptual apparatus of the market-place: Epicurus mistakenly treats poverty as something substantial that can be the subject of predication (such that there can be contented and miserable forms of poverty). Famously, Seneca insists that if one is cheerful, that is self-sufficient (i.e., one's needs do not go beyond one's possessions), one cannot be poor [Illa vero non est paupertas, si laeta est.], a position he already announces in his first letter.

American football and CTE: it's not just about concussions in games (with some speculation about political affect and Spinozist passive joy at the end)

The NFL recently settled a lawsuit by former players for $756 million for witholding evidence of the dangers of football-related brain injuries. There's a lot to say about this issue, but I'll limit myself to this: the contribution to CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) of very numerous sub-concussive hits sustained in practice (as opposed to the specactular* and relatively rare concussions in games) is under-played in the media. But here's a disturbing angle: the NFL now limits live contact practices more than does the NCAA.

[UPDATE, 3 Sept 2013, 8:20 am CDT: Because the NCAA was not grotesque enough, here's a CHE piece on the power plays between coaches and trainers over player brain safety.]

I think this shows two things, neither of which puts the NCAA in a good light. (After these points, I have some thoughts on the political affect of football fandom.)

The Spinoza question

But if, in despotic statecraft, the supreme and essential mystery be to hoodwink the subjects, and to mask the fear, which keeps them down, with the specious garb of religion, so that men may fight as bravely for slavery as for safety, and count it not shame but highest honour to risk their blood and their lives for the vainglory of a tyrant; (Spinoza, TTP, Preface)

In The Evolved Apprentice Kim Sterelny claims there has been an over-estimation of the difficulty of cheater detection in small groups. (Hence he is not a supporter of Machiavellian Intelligence theories alone; in fact, cheater detection is less demanding than coordinating cooperation [2012, 7-10].) The real issue for him is to explain how cooperation in complex tasks works. His answer, apprenticeship, is fascinating in its own right, but what I want to concentrate on here is the way in which at the end of his book Sterelny poses the question of functionalism, or if you prefer, the Spinoza question: why do people go along with hierarchies when they are at the bottom – or at least not at the top?

Against Williamson's anti-grand-narrative

The usual stories about the history of twentieth-century philosophy fail to fit much of the liveliest, exactest, and most creative achievements of the final third of that century: the revival of metaphysical theorizing, realist in spirit, often speculative, often commonsensical, associated with Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Kit Fine, Peter van Inwagen, David Armstrong, and many others: work that has, to cite just one example, made it anachronistic to dismiss essentialism as anachronistic. On the traditional grand narrative schemes in the history of philosophy, this activity must be a throwback to pre-Kantian metaphysics. It ought not to be happening; but it is. Many of those who practice it happily acknowledge its continuity with traditional metaphysics; appeals to the authority of Kant, or history, ring hollow, for they are unbacked by any argument that withstood the test of recent time.--Timothy Williamson (2004).

Philosophy is not easy.

Judging where 'we' are 'in' philosophy's development is also not easy. The twenty-year data-set (1993-2013) deployed by Healy (here and here) cover much of my time in philosophy. My progress through the discipline (Tufts BA, Chicago PhD, Wesleyan, WashU) meant that until I arrived at Syracuse in 2005, I was oblivious about the dominance of David Lewis. Obviously, I had read some Kripke and Lewis along the way; if my memory doesn't deceive me, Van Inwagen had visited Tufts to give a lecture, and, while I found him impressive, I had thought Dennett had gotten the better of the exchange. Ever since 2005 I have been playing catch-up on recent metaphysics (which I adore). I have been taking comfort from the fact that around the same time even Brian Leiter missed how significant Lewis's legacy was radically reshaping philosophy. For Lewis and the "wave of "old-fashioned" metaphysical theorizing," (Leiter: 6) he inspired is, in fact, a very minor presence in Leiter's entertaining volume (2004) The Future For Philosophy, from which I quoted Williamson above (recall my post, and Mohan's).

Spotting self-serving narrative is easier. Here's a formula: when folk that pride themselves on "logical rigour and semantic sophistication," (Williamson: 128) trot out metaphors ("the test of recent time"), you have a good chance of being served disciplinary-boundary-engendering myth. Above Williamson implies that somehow (Kantian) arguments against metaphysics were shown wanting (by argument). Williamson does not even provide a pro forma reference to an authoritative place where metaphysics was made safe from Kantian criticism. Given that it would be surprising if the Wykeham Professor of Logic were merely bluffing, I welcome suggestions from readers that can direct me to the appropriate place where I can find a decisive refutation of transcendental idealism (say, as reformulated by Langton or Allison).

It Must Give Pleasure

Argument is, of course, the life-blood of professional philosophy. I wouldn't want to do away with argument, or professional philosophy; I am no traitor to my trade! But when I am told -- as is often the case -- that  argument is intrinsic to philosophy, I get rebellious.  Take, for example, this poem:

"To sing jubilas at exact, accustomed times,
To be crested and wear the mane of a multitude
And so, as part, to exult with its great throat,

To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on
The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart
That is the common, the bravest fundament,

This is a facile exercise. Jerome
Begat the tubas and the fire-wind strings,
The golden fingers picking dark-blue air:

For companies of voices moving there,
To find of sound the bleakest ancestor,
To find of light a music issuing

Whereon it falls in more than sensual mode.
But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,
On the image of what we see, to catch from that

Irrational moment its unreasoning,
As when the sun comes rising, when the sea
Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall

Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason." Wallace Stevens

The ultimate conspiracy secret...

Uncovered! [HT: Alison Peterman]

Wollstonecraft's Spinozism...

[The prevailing opinion, that woman was created for man, may have taken its rise from Moses's poetical story; yet as very few, it is presumed, who have bestowed any serious thought on the subject, ever supposed that Eve was, literally speaking, one of Adam's ribs, the deduction must be allowed to fall to the ground; or, only be so far admitted as it proves that man, from the remotest antiquity, found it convenient to exert his strength to subjugate his companion, and his invention to shew that she ought to have her neck bent under the yoke; because she, as well as the brute creation, was created to do his pleasure.--M. Wollstonecraft (1792), A Vindication of the Rights Woman (hereafter Vindication), Chapter 2. (25). [Here and below the page-numbers refer to the Dover Thrift reprint, while the provided links refer to the third (1796) edition.--ES]

"Nature, or, to speak with strict propriety, God,"--Vindication, chapter 2, (29).

Upon re-reading the Vindication in preparation for a class discussion, the second epigraph to this post, which we may loosely translate as Natura sive Deus, startled me. Could Wollstonecraft, who so often sounds like a Deist, be a kind of Spinozist? For, Wollstonecraft is quite clear that "propriety" is just "another word for convenience." (106) So, the substitution of "Nature" by "God" is really an act of social expedience. Yet, could this really be so? For, so much of Wollstonecraft's argument seems to rely on commitments that require commitment to immortal souls and, presumably, a judging God (and one can find other Deist commitments).

The Genealogy of Genealogy (II): Diderot and the Pursuit of Truths

Recall that in Letters to Serena (1705), Toland’s genealogical method is a debunking enterprise; it is applied only to concepts whose truth cannot be secured by natural methods of inquiry. (Toland graciously or prudentially allows that revelation may secure truth.) In Toland-style ‘genealogy’ a concept is treated "like some others in philosophy, had a beginning at a certain time, or from a certain author who was the inventor thereof, and which was favoured or opposed as peoples' persuasion, interest or inclination led them." I have been unable to find an instance where Toland applies this genealogical method to concepts whose truth, if any, can be secured by natural methods. This move was left to Diderot (also to Adam Smith, but he delayed publication of his History of Astronomy by half a century).

At the start of Diderot’s (1754) Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature, Diderot offers a ‘natural history’ of each of the individual sciences; he treats “geometry,” by which Diderot means – judging from the names he associates with it (e.g., “Bernoulli, Euler, Maupertuis, Clairaut, Fontaine, and D’Alembert”) – mathematical physics or, especially, rational mechanics, as the exemplary science. In section 5, Diderot divides the life-cycle of a science into three stages: (i) a "birth;” (ii) a period of high prestige; and (iii) a decaying period when there are diminishing returns of enquiry within it. Finally, there is (iv) the completed edifice—confusingly, already discussed in the previous section (4; all my references below are to sections).

Historians of Philosophy serve the undergraduates

'The history of philosophy as practiced by professional philosophers [hereafter HOPPP] is a service to the rest of the profession; HOPPP's scholarly output is primarily geared to facilitate (undergraduate) teaching.' This suspicion [hereafter HOPPPS2P] had lodged in my mind when a few years ago I started to reflect on (a) the extremely low citation rates for journal articles in HOPPP, which suggests that there are no genuine controversies nor classic papers that ground future research; (b) the lack of concern about the proliferation of Handbooks and Companions that are effectively slowing down research in HOPPP; (c) the extreme difficulty of getting a position in HOPPP if one is not working on a canonical figure. (There are, of course, extreme regional differences on (c); in some places there are no positions for HOPPPers; in other places so-called 'systematic' and 'practical' philosophers do not even regard HOPPP as philosophy, but let it exist out of institutional inertia, benign neglect, etc.) But I wondered if I could ground ground HOPPPS2P in hard data.

Luckily, Michael Beaney, the thoughtful editor of British Journal for the History of Philosophy (BJHP), wrote a review of the last 20 years of the BJHP, with some recommendations for the future. Now BJHP is a young journal, but it has become one of the top venues in the sub-field. (In Europe it certainly also helps that it is listed in Thompson's Web of Knowledge/Science index so that publication can count in the right metrics.) Beaney and his team compiled data on the contents of the first twenty years.

"What this shows is that almost half the journal has been devoted to the work of just seven philosophers – the ‘big seven’ of early modern philosophy – and that around two-thirds of the journal has been devoted to the work of just sixteen philosophers, with three more early modern philosophers included as well as Plato and Aristotle from the ancient period and four [Hegel, Mill, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche--ES] nineteenth-century philosophers.

Weekly Philo of Economics: Spinoza, Hume Adam Smith, and the "Love of System" (with help from Toland)

The same principle, the same love of system, the same regard to the beauty of order, of art and contrivance, frequently serves to recommend those institutions which tend to promote the public welfare. When a patriot exerts himself for the improvement of any part of the public police, his conduct does not always arise from pure sympathy with the happiness of those who are to reap the benefit of it. It is not commonly from a fellow-feeling with carriers and waggoners that a public-spirited man encourages the mending of high roads. When the legislature establishes premiums and other encouragements to advance the linen or woollen manufactures, its conduct seldom proceeds from pure sympathy with the wearer of cheap or fine cloth, and much less from that with the manufacturer or merchant. The perfection of police, the extension of trade and manufactures, are noble and magnificent objects. The contemplation of them pleases us, and we are interested in whatever can tend to advance them. They make part of the great system of government, and the wheels of the political machine seem to move with more harmony and ease by means of them. We take pleasure in beholding the perfection of so beautiful and grand a system, and we are uneasy till we remove any obstruction that can in the least disturb or encumber the regularity of its motions. All constitutions of government, however, are valued only in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them. This is their sole use and end. From a certain spirit of system, however, from a certain love of art and contrivance, we sometimes seem to value the means more than the end, and to be eager to promote the happiness of our fellow-creatures, rather from a view to perfect and improve a certain beautiful and orderly system, than from any immediate sense or feeling of what they either suffer or enjoy. There have been men of the greatest public spirit, who have shown themselves in other respects not very sensible to the feelings of humanity. (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, IV.1.11, 185)

Smith identifies a particular intellectual, even theoretical feeling: the so-called, "love of system." In the passage above, "the love of system" is mostly identified with positive consequences through its ability to compensate for our all-to-human lack of emotional interest in the well-being of others. It do so, especially, when such love of system slides into the spirit of system and when that, in turn, is mixed into public spiritedness. However, as most readers of Smith have noticed later in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) in passages added to the sixth edition of TMS (1790), Smith emphasizes the horrible things that can occur when this love of system is transformed into a "spirit of system" and turns into the ideologically-driven "madness of fanaticism." (TMS VI.2.2.15, 232) Commentators tend to discern in this allusions to the unfolding French Revolution. And it might be thought that what is being targeted is the influence of Rousseau, who as many commentators have noted is, in fact, clearly alluded to in the pages just before the passage quoted at the start of this post. (TMS IV.1.8-9, 182-3)  But nowhere does Smith refer to Rousseau's philosophy, which with he was very well acquainted, as a "system," and it has never been satisfactory shown why from Smith's vantage point the French Revolution would have involved "love of system."

The Genealogy of Genealogy

We tend to associate the practice of genealogy, especially in its unmasking variety, with Nietzsche (or the emulators of Foucault). But teaching Toland's (1704) Letters to Serena reminded me that genealogy has a genealogy that precedes Nietzsche. One of Toland's genealogies focuses on the idea of the immortality of the soul, (the subject of the second letter). In paragraph 1, of Letter 2, the "immortality of the soul" is treated as a "truth" known to classical sources independent from and preceding Biblical revelation (p. 20; in fact, he insists that the doctrine is unknown to the Hebrew Bible (Letter II, p. 56)). In the very next paragraph (2) on the very next page, Toland speaks in his own voice and offers a concise statement of his methodology:

To persons less knowing and unprejudiced than Serena, it would [be] found strange perhaps to hear me speak of the soul's immortality, as of an opinion, which, like some others in philosophy, had a beginning at a certain time, or from a certain author who was the inventor thereof, and which was favoured or opposed as peoples' persuasion, interest or inclination led them. Letters II.2 (p. 21 [I have modernized spelling to some degree--ES].)

Serena is the official addressee of the Letters; she is a high status, educated interlocutor. The preface to the Letters has, in fact, a resounding defense of intellectual, gender equality. Toland suggests that it is either "inveterate custom" or the "design in the men" that causes female exlusion from the "world of learning." In general, Toland thinks nurture is responsible for much of our (very flawed) "second nature" in women and men. So, while Toland accepts a universal human nature, it is according to him extremely plastic. Echoing Plato and Malebranche, he suggests that belief and character formation starts in the womb and is developed (or degenerated by) our major social institutions (family, church, universities, etc.)--he treats our acculturation as inevitable, but as practiced as a form of social disease (cf. "infection.")

Humanist Spinozism (Thomas More, Utopia)

Recently I posted about some fine 'law & economics'-style reasoning in Thomas More's Utopia. In the midst of a critical treatment of the practice of executing convicted thieves, a further argument is added (during an exchange between Raphael Hythloday and John Morton, Archbishop and Cardinal of Canterbury, and at that time also Lord Chancellor of England):

To be short, Moses' law, though it were ungentle and sharp, as a law that was given to bondmen; yea, and them very obstinate, stubborn, and stiff-necked; yet it punished theft by the purse, and not with death. And let us not think that God in the new law of clemency and mercy, under the which he ruleth us with fatherly gentleness, as his dear children, hath given us greater scope and license to execute cruelty, one upon another. Utopia

In context, Hythloday ("talker of nonsense") offers a battery of arguments against the severity of the criminal law of England. Now one of these arguments appeals to the authority of revelation to insist that much capital punishment may be immoral. As if Hythloday is a traditional natural law thinker, he claims that even a "law made by the consent of men" does not make it moral. (More is writing in a period in which the Tudor dynasty has just consolidated its rise to power by the force of arms.) After all, "why may it not likewise by man's constitutions be determined after what sort whoredom, fornication and perjury may be lawful?"

But Hythloday's appeal to revelation is also a bit unusual. For, in the passage quoted at the top of this post Hythloday relies on an explicit and a more daring implicit contrast. The official contrast (i) is between Moses's legal code and the more gentle rule of Christianity. But there is also an implied contrast (ii) between the way one rules a barbarous people (recently liberated from tyranny) and the way one rules a more civilized people. (The implied contrast between the barbarous and civilization, which is extremely popular in later early modern writing, would have been familiar to More from Aristotle's Politics.) The implied contrast (ii) effectively historicizes the Bible, whose commandments are now understood as fitted to a people at a particular time and place in need of strict rule. This strategy is pursued more relentlessly in Spinoza's Theologic0-Political Treatise (e.g., chapter 5; III/75).

On Sensus Divinitatis in Plantinga, a footnote to Dutch Spinozism (Van Eeden & Dooyeweerd)

Dooyeweerd rightly rejects any dictation to philosophy on the part of theology; and where he thinks that traditional Reformed thinking deviates from the truth, he does not shrink from suggesting revisions. One of his virtues as a philosopher, I take it, is his refusal to be bound by all the formulae of past Reformed thinking. Still, however, if the total result is to be called a Christian philosophy and in particular a Reformed philosophy, it must be consistent with the spirit and the main doctrines of the Reformed and Christian tradition. And if his doctrine that meaning is the mode of being of created reality does imply that the relation between God and creation is like that between a thinker and the meanings he entertains, then at this point the accusation of a really significant departure from the Reformed and Christian tradition would be justified. For then created reality becomes constitutive of God's mind and thus of God.

And this is clearly to controvert the Christian conception of creation with its ontological chasm between God and created reality. But to have such a chasm seems to presuppose being on the part of creation as well as on the part of God. How, for example, can we conceive of sin in the context of a creature that is merely meaning? Can a meaning sin? What would an evil meaning be like, unless it is thought of as entertained by an evil being? The Christian philosopher must steer a nice course between the Scylla of giving finite reality too much self-sufficiency and power, and the Charybdis of altogether divesting creation of distinctness and "over-againstness" with respect to God. The first alternative threatens God's uniqueness and sovereignty; the second courts pantheism. Rightly determined to avoid Scylla, Dooyeweerd steers perilously close to Charybdis; for the very attempt to emphasize God's transcendent uniqueness and sovereignty may end by making him the author of evil in a very intimate sense and by denying an ontological distinction between Creator and creation altogether.--Alvin Plantinga (1958) "Dooyeweerd on Meaning and Being" (reprinted here [HT to Ingrid van Laarhoven, who helped me track this down.]; emphases in original.)

The quoted passage is the surprising conclusion of Plantinga's "first serious article." (Hengstmengel, (63)) It is surprising because Plantinga had begun the (short) article with the claim that "a slavish adherence to traditional modes of thought can discourage and stultify intellectual progress." (10) Yet, here Plantinga is quite clear that Dooyeweerd has deviated too far from the "spirit and main doctrines" of their shared tradition. While (the proto-Kuhnian) Plantinga clearly allows that "progress" within the "tradition" is possible and desirable, he basically insists that Dooyeweerd's Spinozistic doctrines are simply too revolutionary and disruptive, even though an outsider to the tradition, while drawing on, say, Susan James's recent book, might point to the considerable continuity between Spinoza's philosophy and Reformed doctrines, especially if one thinks (as the far more mature Plantinga footnotes against the authority of his father) that it "is by no means obvious that the right side won at the Synod of Dort." Either way, in the body of his paper, Plantinga offers a number of philosophical arguments (including some from "common experience" and another that anticipates Meillassoux's arche-fossil strategy against correlationism) against Dooyeweerd's position; nevertheless, in his conclusion Plantinga makes clear that to be called "Reformed," one cannot just follow the arguments come what may to their conclusion. I call the authority of tradition over the possibility space of philosophical thought an instance of the "Socratic Problem."

Searle on Panpsychism: not even false

"The problem with panpsychism is not that it is false; it does not get up to the level of being false. It is strictly speaking meaningless because no clear notion has been given to the claim. Consciousness comes in units and panpsychism cannot specify the units." John Searle, NYRB, 10 January, 2013, 55, reviewing Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of A Romatic Reductionist.

So, take that, Mr. Spinoza!