"The world explored, the world suffered" Philosophy Blog:-Lectures, Journals, Book Reviews, and Discussion forums(MichaelRDJames)

July 31, 2017November 17, 2021

Montesquieu, Arendt, The Principle of action, Existentialism, Loneliness and Totalitarian Government.

Both Montesquieu and Hannah Arendt claimed that the law has an essentially negative function, it tells you what you ought not to do but not what you ought to do(Kant’s categorical imperative in the realm of ethics, on the other hand, focuses on what we ought to do). Governments in turn are defined by a principle of action defining what is valued in the sphere of the public space that political acts occur in. Montesquieu in his political reflections, considered monarchies, republics and tyrannies which appeared to be the only alternatives available during the 1800’s. Arendt’s Principle of action, complements these reflections by defining ultimate values for a particular people/government. Monarchies, Montesquieu argued, value honour, Republics value Virtue, and Tyrannies value fear.

Hannah Arendt takes up this thread in order to analyse totalitarian forms of government which according to her are an original and unique form of government that emerged during the last century and manifested itself most clearly in the Nazi and Stalinist regimes in Germany and Russia. Now on Montesquieu’s analysis, we probably would have to characterise these latter regimes in terms of the characteristics of tyranny and these seem not to do justice to the world wide consequences we experienced at the hands of totalitarian regimes. Tyrannies, for example, were destined to destroy themselves from within, in a relatively short period of time, and the activity we witness in such regimes have an interesting relation to principles of instrumental action, instantiated in particular by citizens acting out of a sense of political fear. Citizens of these kinds of regimes should not criticise government for fear of their lives, otherwise they were actually allowed to exercise their freedom in the available political space. Arendt points out that this account is an inadequate analysis of totalitarian forms of government which did not merely adopt an irrational principle of action but rather abandon the very concepts of action and freedom in favour of an attachment to so called Darwinian laws of nature or Hegelian laws of history. These laws were in the process of shaping man to be a different being to the being he thought he was, namely, valuing freedom, pluralism and democracy. Their tool was “terror”. A terror which destroyed the public political space which existed between people, a public space, viewed as the medium by which to achieve political goals which made reference to individuals and their differences. Totalitarian governments believed in the laws of nature(The Aryan race was the chosen race, the one destined to inherit the earth) or the laws of history(Communism will replace democracies because of its superior political values) and the citizens involved in these “shaping” processes did not need to understand what it was which was bearing them forward to their destinies. The only public political space belonged to the head of the government and he used it as whimsically as he pleased because even he did not fully understand where the process was headed. Totalitarian government must have its source in one individual for only then can some form of continuity be guaranteed. Of course, this continuity could be absurdly irrational. Stalin’s supporters could suddenly be assassinated en masse if Stalin happened to change his mind about a government policy. The laws and ethics of the Weimar Republic could be ignored if the Fuhrer chose to ignore or even reverse their principles. With the disappearance of the ethical demands that people make upon each other, on command of the totalitarian leader, it was a short step to commanding the illegal murder of a whole once chosen but now corrupted race(the Jews). Underlying global movements of Anti-Semitism could dominate the public space and receive justification via the “truths” of the laws of nature and history, which for Hitler were one and the same. For the communist regimes, the underlying global movements of distrust for Capital and the capitalists, turned the laws and ethical principles into laws and principles not governing races but rather classes. Insofar as the working class was the only creator of value in the society their destiny was to inherit the power over the society and dominate the public political space which, when nation states, the servants of capital, withered away, would create a global communist society. The most irrational political principles and outcomes were suddenly possible and even probable under the banner “anything is possible”. Only the leaders acted as if they knew what was going to happen and the resulting consequences of their policies. The Russian form of totalitarianism in fact engaged more directly with one of the major irritants of democracy, namely the accumulation of capital that does not work for the people who helped the capitalists to accumulate their wealth and which, because of this fact was making large numbers of working people superfluous to the economic needs of the country. This according to Arendt was one of the major factors behind colonisation which was merely the attempt to use this accumulated capital in other countries where labour was cheaper and this use was of course merely to accumulate even greater amounts of capital.

Hannah Arendt has an interesting analysis of the conditions necessary for totalitarianism to succeed apart from these structural economic factors which she touches upon. A man is naturally and ethically a being that thinks in solitude, i.e. he is what Arendt calls a two-in-one soul: two voices conversing about what is to be believed or done. His political and community identity is important to him because these two voices make him feel like a divided and dualistic being. It is the public space where the voices find expression and which enable the citizen to identify the values his inner conversation is striving toward. The citizen acquires his identity, and a sense of community is established among friends and kindred spirits who identify this being with two voices, as one unified being, possessing one set of values. All this work is done in the public space and it is this which is destroyed by totalitarianism. The condition for this to occur, according to Arendt, is that the masses no longer engage in this inner conversation striving toward the truth and values and manifesting itself in the public space. Their souls are not engaging in this inner conversation, they are lonely. It is the role of education, of course, to install this inner dialogue in us all. If that education is predominantly scientific this conversation is truncated in its form and the lonely search for the truth of the laws of nature and history is the norm. Once this has happened, and it happened in Europe, the major condition for totalitarianism exists. Humanistic voices both within and without fall silent. The universal habit of reading good and difficult to understand books of humanistic significance is, of course, a natural agent provocateur of this inner and outer conversation. Education is also another agent provocateur of this inner conversation which encourages manifestation in the political public space and should be the source of these good and difficult works of human significance. But is not our public space filled with conversations on facebook, linked in, and social media? But these conversations are not challenging difficult-to-understand affairs. They are rather superficial events. covering up an incredible existential loneliness most of the time. We need a Freud of the internet, an interpreter of human behaviour which can diagnose loneliness behind all this furious finger tapping and flicking in relation to our mobile phones and computers. There is difficult to understand material on the internet but it is not that difficult and most of it does not require the dedication required to understanding Kant or Aristotle or Wittgenstein. Indeed I would go so far as to claim that even the Bible with its narrative structure and parables are beyond the understanding of most of the younger generation. Something has gone seriously wrong with our educational systems if this is true.

July 26, 2017June 12, 2018

Freud, Philosophy, Humanism and Science.(Philosophical Psychology)

Freud’s writings over 50 years corrected themselves and changed systematically from a clinical/scientific approach in relation to the analysis of patients with mental illness to a more philosophical approach to the individual, society and culture. I use the word “systematically” to demarcate the fact that in the move from his earlier approach to his later theorising there is no contradiction. Indeed although Freud systematically moves toward a Platonic view of the psyche I would argue that Freud’s theories are more Aristotelian, i.e. in many of his comments such as the ego contains the idea of the body, the ego is composed of precipitate of lost objects, there is a hylomorphic foundation working. Now I am not sure that Freud was familiar with the works of Aristotle but we do know that he was a vociferous reader and that he was very familiar with the works of Kant and even claimed on one occasion in his later works that his Psychology would be the Psychology that Kant would have written had he interested himself in the area. We know Kant wrote a work entitled Anthropology and this work had clear Aristotelian affiliations.

Now we also know that Freud did not have much time for the philosophers of his day who were much influenced by the concept of consciousness that had been developing since Descartes “epistemological revolution” in Philosophy. Some commentators superficially believe his opposition was grounded simply in Freud’s “re-discovery” of the realm of the unconscious mind but I believe his opposition ran deeper. That is, I believe that in spite of his claim to be a “scientist” we see in his later work, if I am right, that the metaphysical hylomorphism of Aristotle was steering his choice of concepts and his famous three principles of psychology: the energy regulation principle, the pleasure/pain principle and the reality principle. From a Kantian point of view he was working in the area of the mind Kant thought of as sensibility, in the area of self -love, but Freud’s theories have a grasp of the function of understanding and reason which is also, I would argue, Kantian. His reasoning, of course, falls into the arena of practical rather than theoretical reasoning much of the time but we should really pay attention to the Freudian mechanisms which are psychologically causal, e.g. repression, identification, sublimation, projection, all of which fit very neatly into the very practical idea he has of the reality principle. There is also his unique contribution to psychology in the form of the primary and secondary processes of the mind which are intimately connected to his three principles.

His idea of “object” is clearly Aristotelian, rather than scientific in the narrow sense, and not just backwards looking to the causes of physical events but teleological, forward looking to the end which an action is striving toward. Now there are speculations in some of his later works such as Civilisation and its Discontents which seem unscientific because unverifiable, e.g. the band of brothers thesis. He sketches a Hobbesian scenario of a state of nature in which all are at war against all and even the band of brothers kill the tyrannical father but regret their action and establish a rule of law and perhaps the dawn of self-consciousness, to move civilisation forward.Now these are his “scientific speculations”: looking backward for the causes of phenomena and perhaps he does so without sufficient care for marshalling the totality of facts. I am not saying that this is necessarily so, because even today I do not believe we are anywhere near accumulating the necessary facts which would allow us to pontificate one way or the other but I do think that those commentators that fixate on the Oedipus complex and see this scenario as the blueprint of his speculations in this domain are reading Freud too narrowly.

Freud bashing in the name of science has become a professional activity for some academics and a hobby for many others who have views of science that in the urge to purge our thought of all things metaphysical and ethical would in Freudian, Kantian and Aristotelian terms be regarded as “epistemological” in a pejorative sense. The sense that has dogged Philosophy through all the modern “isms”: positivism, naturalism, materialism, pragmatism, behaviourism, utilitarianism.

Freud bashing is just of a course a part of the sport of humanist bashing and all that it requires is a very limited knowledge of a methodology which applies only to one aspect of our world and a willingness to colonise the domain of the humanist with this limited methodology and wonderful technological inventions, e.g. the invention of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, television, computers, and robots.

July 21, 2017June 12, 2018

Modern Times and Representative versus Direct Democracy

Aristotle and Plato were very sceptical of the democracy of their day. For Plato it was the second worst form of government, tyranny being the worst. For Aristotle, democracy was a perversion of the forms of government seeking the common good. According to him, the democracy of the day, which was a direct democracy, served the good of the poor often at the expense of the good of the city state. It paled in comparison with the constitutional form of government he suggested which would serve the interests of the city as a whole. We should also remember in this context(Ancient Greece) that we are witnessing both in practice and in theory the beginnings of systematic thought and practice in the realm of politics. There was, for example, a fragile realisation, that perhaps religion(derived from “ligare” which means to bind or connect according to St Augustine) had something in common with the law which also was a mechanism of binding or connecting people. In both cases, the binding or connecting mechanism was related to obligation, an ethical concept. Being connected together entailed obligations on the citizens or members of the community. Philosophy was just emerging as a critical force and the ideal of an individual reasoning his way to the idea of the good or from the idea, to its political and logical consequences , was only being suggested by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

Indeed one of the problems with the Greek direct democracy of the time is that it failed to respect the law. Plato’s characterisation in the Republic is a chilling account because it points to phenomena we are witnessing today. When parents are ruled by their children and teachers are ruled by their students and when murderers can walk free in the agora after having been sentenced in the courts we see a city in disarray. Indeed it is in this environment that a member of the oligarchy will point out the disarray and promise a better future for all, probably well aware that he is not being truthful. An oligarchy according to Plato and Aristotle is marginally a better form of government but it will not unite the city. It will rule in the interests of the few, the oligarchy, which is often corrupt and will pass laws in its own interests. Indeed the problem that both Plato and Aristotle saw was the pendulum like polarisation of political rule between these two types of government. When the Democrats were in power they would as a matter of pride repeal the laws of the oligarchs and vice versa thus preventing an appreciation of the binding and connecting function of the law as well as removing the motivation of being obligated to anything. Plato’s response to all this was to point to the philosophical role of the idea of the good which the philosopher with his training in mathematics and dialectic can develop a full awareness of.

There were no institutions of education to speak of during this time so it was natural that Plato should come up with his famous formula in order to avoid misery and tragedy and ultimate ruin in the city state: the city will not flourish, he argued until kings become philosophers or philosopher become kings. Aristotle saw the difficulties of such a proposal in its fixation on kings or an upper ruling class and suggested a constitutional/representative form of government in which the middle class would steer a middle path between democracies and oligarchies adopting the best aspects of each. This middle class would through its practical wisdom over eons become motivated by knowledge and ethics. The institutions it would develop would be in accordance with the Greek concept of areté which means both excellence and virtue. The democratic practice of electing political officials by lottery would be replaced by a meritocracy where people with the requisite knowledge and ethical character would be appointed. Both Plato and Aristotle shared the Greek suspicion of the wealthy life as an ideal of the good life not just because of the inevitable corruption of the spirit such a life entailed but because the Greeks were very aware of the different principles needed to rule one’s private household and family(oikos) and the city state(politikos). For them, our modern political obsession with economics would have been a perversion of politics.In Hannah Arendt’s terms, there are important distinctions between types of activity which operate in accordance with different principles. Labour is the kind of work that was typical for the household and was cyclical and biological in nature, serving our survival needs. Work was an activity in which one produced results in the public domain in accordance with instrumental standards: a good house, a good treatment from the doctor etc. Action was the type of activity typical of politics and it was aiming at Aletheia, a Greek word, in this context, for the disclosure of the truth about the common good. Work and labour were inappropriate forms of activity for the political arena.

Anyway the moral of this Greek tale should be obvious. Both in the case of the election of the current President of the USA and Brexit we can see a return to the concept of direct democracy. In England, it was the referendum about an issue that neither Aristotle nor Kant would have hesitated to venture an opinion upon. The “experts” on both sides plus the media coverage literally did not know what they were talking about. This can be seen in the opening of the negotiations in Brussels where one hundred experts from the English side are attempting to clarify the British interpretation of what is entailed by the decision to leave Europe. In the USA the system of the primaries and the intense media coverage momentarily turned the country into a direct democracy. There were promises made that could never be kept and there were lies told which were believed because all the Greek requirements had been met. There stood the oligarch/tyrant promising better deals from the artisan of the deal. There was the promise to undo most of the work of the previous democratic president, the promise to put America first. There we could witness the three-word slogan chanting, Make America great, build the wall, lock her up, USA. It all felt very uncomfortable and we were only at the beginning of the process. The process has now been going on for 6 months and though there are a number of accusations of breaking the law and not acknowledging the independence of the law from the executive branch of government laid down in the Constitution, there is still extensive support from the Republican party the tyrant represents. Thankfully there are many many people that recognise what is happening and are speaking up courageously. There is a chance that hopefully, we are witnessing misery but not tragedy or ruin just yet.

July 18, 2017June 12, 2018

Political identity and Common Sense

The identity of limestone, gold, a plant or a bird is a rather pedestrian matter unless one wishes to scientifically explore the constitution and function of the material that composes these items. If one wants to know what these things are in their nature, the analytical method of dissecting something into its parts is unquestionably the route to understanding the objects identity, even if that “dissection” is as abstract as the division of Gold and limestone into their chemical elements. The ability of these objects to remain the same through change will be primarily a question of the constitution and function of the material they are composed of.

The identity of a human being cannot however be reduced to the constitution and function of their physical matter/body although this material identity will certainly be a part of the story of that human being: of how they came into existence, where their bodies moved during their lifetime, what those bodies did and how they ceased to exist. I would maintain that what those bodies did would be very difficult to characterise without reference to non material , non functional characteristics: characteristics we normally call mental or “psychological”. Personal identity requires perhaps two or three types of non material component which if we are to understand them requires a conceptual method rather than a scientific one. The method must relate to the non observational form of awareness that we have of ourselves and our actions. Action,indeed, is one of the central pivots of the account of personal identity because it is quite clear from both a Philosophical and common sense point of view that our destinies are shaped by what we choose to do, how we choose to act. This concept of destiny is crucial to the way in which we characterise personal identity for two reasons: one classical and one modern. The classical reason is Aristotelian: we are fundamentally ethical beings and ethically we seek to lead and have led(after death), flourishing lives. The modern reason comes from the Analytical Philosophy and the work of O’Shaugnessy(The Will: A Dual Aspect Theory). O’Shaugnessy claims that a fundamental aspect of being human is to posses a mind which is temporally oriented toward the future. Combining this with the classical reason we could say that one of the characteristic properties of the mind is its teleology, that is, that it is directed toward an end or a “telos”. The teleological explanation of action or the mind is one of the 4 kinds of explanation Aristotle refers to in his Metaphysics. The scientist, of course, thinks of this aspect of the mental as “psychological” and this is a term O Shaugnessy uses. His use of this term, however, does not correspond with the idea that the scientist has of the “psychological”. For the scientist polarises the realm of explanation into the objective and the subjective and praises the objective and blames the subjective for not being objective. In Aristotelian and Kantian accounts the psychological is divided into what is empirical and related to subjective experience whereas the objective is related to the philosophical or the conceptual . There is that is that which is subjectively psychological and that which is objectively, philosophically, or conceptually psychological. This distinction illuminates the reason why science cannot talk sensibly about the realm of ethics because this falls within the realm of the philosophically or conceptually psychological. Ethics and politics for both Aristotle and Kant are intimately related to this realm of the philosophically or conceptually psychological which Kant preferred to call “anthropology”.

Plato maintained, and Aristotle probably agreed that there is a fundamental analogy between the way in which we conceptually characterise the minds or souls of the person and the way in which we characterise the nature and essence of the state. In modern terms we would say that the Political must be characterised in terms of the conceptually or philosophically psychological.

Hobbes attempted to apply the Scientific method, concepts and explanations to the political world and was unable to provide an account which allowed room for ethical or human values. Hobbes, that is, gives us a good material account of the body politic but significantly fails to help us to understand the non substantival “substance” of the political world. For him the actions of a man or a state are just like the mechanical working of springs and cogs in a watch. The ultimate political consequences of such a materialist metaphysics is encapsulated in his quote that “Covenants without the sword are just words”. Covenants that are written down are to be defended with the sword because words are “psychological” in the sense that the scientist understands the term(not in the sense in which the philosopher understands the “conceptually psychological”). Words are just behaviour for the scientist. For the philosopher action is a concept which incorporates behaviour as characterised by the scientists but also incorporates another aspect which refers to the role of consciousness or non observational awareness in the process. Words are actions and political words are political actions. The best account of the difference between mere behaviour and action occurs in Hannah Arendt’s work “The Human Condition”. She differentiates between three levels of human activity: labor, work and action. Labor is that which typically is automated, almost machine-like/instinctive and is repetitive cyclical and habitual requiring little or no thought. Work is typically characterised by activity which requires more thought and judgment , and is therefore more psychological because it is instrumentally directed toward the fabrication of something which can physically stand in the world as a result of the activity. We speak of a house in different terms to the way in which we speak of a consumer goods produced by labor in a factory,e.g. a box of corn flakes whose lifetime is to be probably measured maximally in terms of months. There are also works of art which are the result of value-judgments which are more complex than those which are involved in the building work that results in the building of a house. But above these two forms of activity is action, and Hannah Arendt thinks that political action is one of the paradigmatic forms of human action.

Political action is of course going to be crucial to the idea of political identity which I wish to discuss. Political action is twofold: there are words and the actions which are based on the words, namely the voting for the passing of laws. Now, if Hobbes is correct and words are nothing without swords then we will not understand what is happening in a political debate. Nor will we understand what Hannah Arendt has to say concerning political action. For her political action is fundamentally teleological. The point, that is, of political debate and deliberation is to seek the truth, is to reveal the political truth of the issue one is discussing. This is done by coordinating complementary and conflicting viewpoints not into a compromise but into a synthesis of thesis and antithesis. This process may require that each synthesis becomes a thesis and is confronted by an antithesis until a final synthesis is arrived at and the law is voted on and passed into law. Now this process cannot be characterised by the methods, concepts and explanations of science. The kind of explanation required to characterise it is conceptual or philosophical. Even the application of the law cannot be characterised in scientific concepts. Take the example of the thief who is caught and prosecuted for the stealing of a car. Thinking like a true scientist he will try to defend himself by claiming that he could not help himself. The theft “happened to him” because his mother left him when he was 6 months old, his father became an alcoholic, he played truant from school and became involved with criminals, needed money to pay his rent: therefore he stole the car. The judges response to this is in terms of the philosophical conceptual psychological point of view. He will claim that the psychological is divided into two aspects: that which happens to one(in accordance with the principle of causation) and that which one does. Whenever one decides to do something one overrides what has happened to one because of the value of what one is doing. Confronted with the events of his life the criminal ought to choose what is right(not steal the car) and ignore what is wrong(steal the car). In ethical terms the judge will claim that the criminal is “free” to choose what is right: he is not an animal directed by causal factors such as instinct. The self consciousness humans enjoy enable them to transcend causal agencies with their ideas of what is right and wrong. Determinism reigns in the physical world of the scientist but not in the human world of the politician and the judge. The way in which the judge thinks about human action is the way in which the politician ought to think about human action: in conceptual terms, in terms of the ideas of what is right and what is wrong.

In talking of the politician and how he self consciously and ethically ought to think about human action we are now raising the question of political identity. The Politician belongs to a party and relates to the manifesto of his party in an analogous way to the way in which the judge relates to the written law the politician is responsible for. Written law of course takes three forms: criminal law, civil law regulating contracts, and law regulating governmental distribution of benefits and burdens in the society. The action of promising is central to the second two forms of law which are not regulated by the sword as is criminal law. These latter two forms of law are fundamentally humanistic and ethical entities and Kant’s categorical imperative is central to analysing what is involved in these cases. So ethics is a central aspect of the politicians identity. What he promises(as distinguished from that he promises) is related to the party manifesto and central value system. An important part of personal identity is the Aristotelian idea of continuity. A persons identity is what stays constant throughout change. Similarly a party’s identity depends upon the continuity of its value system(what it promises) as well as its substance(its relevance to the idea of a future flourishing society).

Common sense, for both Arendt and Kant is the name for what was referred to above as the process of coordinating compatible and conflicting perspectives which in its turn is a natural result of the pluralism of our modern societies where a manifold of forms of life thrive and prosper. A political party identifies itself with a set of perspectives instantiating a set of values which typically conflicts with the set of values other parties choose and this is an important aspect of a party’s identity. These values can change and we characterise this in terms of its shifting position on the political spectrum. It has, for example been observed that parties traditionally placed on the right or left of the spectrum have moved into the political middle ground to compete for the votes of the growing middle class. If there are more than two or three parties competing for the middle ground it becomes very difficult for the voters to identify the difference between the parties: the political identity of the parties is not clear. The voters are confused. This of course is the natural consequence of chasing voters instead of initiating them into ones value system. If ones value system(workers rights) becomes antiquated there may of course be no choice but to formulate a new value system(human rights) but this is a difficult business and can not be done without thinking philosophically about values, and of course counting the people to whom the new approach appeals

All parties, of course have to, on universal ethical grounds, make and keep the promises they make. This looks simple and obvious but common sense often points to the phenomenon of politicians promising to do things which for various reasons do not get done. When mistakes like this occur and the issue is an important one , one does not meet with confusion but rather with ethical indignation. This is a powerful political force. If the society is undergoing significant change(increasing climate consciousness, increasing automation, increasing corporate dominance, movement from a manufacturing to a service economy) and a large percentage of voters are left behind in this process this ethical indignation will become a highly emotional affair and be dominated by fear and impulse. Voting will not be positive and for anything but rather negative and against something and if someone in the political sphere begins to speak the language of these voters they will find themselves in power irrespective of whether they are competent politicians or not . Here common sense will not reign. The rules of politics will be changed. Promises, for example will not need to be kept(we are all against the same things)and there is a danger that serious politics will have difficulty in re-establishing itself in such an environment. Understanding the concept of political identity is therefore essential in such circumstances.

June 11, 2017June 12, 2018

Expecting the unexpected: the UK elections and the absence of the middle ground

Following the UK elections called by Therese May has been a strange experience. The policies of the left and the right were clearly recognizable but with the exception of one policy which may have accounted for the unexpectedness of the result of the election, namely the pork offering of tuition fees to students, the middle ground was almost unoccupied.

Tony Blair, it has been argued modernized the Labour Party and made it electable by moving policy orientation to the middle ground and Corbyn’s unpopularity with his colleagues has been partly due to the fact that he has deliberately wanted to abandon Blair’s colonization of the middle ground and re-explore the territory of the left.

Cameron’s cataclysmic mistake of calling a referendum over the Brexit issue of course was a contributory factor to the phenomenon of Corbyn and the recoil of his successor May from the middle ground. In spite of Blair’s efforts, the British middle class was simply not large enough to ensure the continuity of commitment to the European project which is so much more than its economic dimensions. The youth, especially the students, hopefully the middle class of the future, largely stayed home for this Brexit election, trusting in the older middle class to ensure their futures. They were, however, galvanized into action by Therese May’s call for an election perhaps partly by being let down by the older generation and partly by the promise of the pork of tuition fees but on a deeper analysis perhaps partly by the thought of the consequences of Therese May’s so called “hard Brexit”, following closely on the heels of years of austerity politics.

Indeed the hung Parliament which resulted and the inevitable chaos which follows, perhaps another possible election looming on the horizon, may bring something good in its wake, namely a second referendum on Brexit which will be needed if the EU refuse to budge on the 4 freedoms principle. This second referendum seems impossible at the moment given Corbyn’s commitment to Brexit after having fought a poor campaign to remain. It will indeed take a dynamic leader to bite the bullet and argue for a position which runs counter to the wishes expressed in the first referendum. The Remain/Leave campaign was a strange series of events, the form of which violated one of the first philosophical assumptions of politics, namely to expect the unexpected. Each side was categorically stating the anticipated consequences of an enormously complex process in a fragile environment in which literally anything could happen to falsify their predictions. The impression that the campaigners knew what they were talking about was created by rhetorical arguments which much of the time verged on propaganda: indeed the campaign created its own populist dynamic and forced people to choose between two different castles in the clouds constructed in the imaginations of the campaigners.

In relation to this point there is also an ethical principle that Psychologists use when conducting experiments on volunteer subjects namely the informed consent principle which entails that the subjects must be given full information concerning what they are about to undergo in the experiment. In the light of the experience we had of the Brexit campaign, can anyone honestly maintain that Brexit is anything more than an experiment and that we the subjects have been given necessarily incomplete information? The leave campaign were appealing to the maxim that anything is possible for the British people if they put their hearts and minds into it. The remain campaign were pretending to be able to predict the unpredictable future and pointed to a dark and dismal future. No middle ground appeared to be possible. This in itself ought to have raised suspicions since political institutions are dialectical in their very nature.

Extremes with an excluded middle, in the realm of practical reasoning, are theoretical and assume that the alternatives are either entirely true or entirely false. This assumption assumes a position of certainty which we very rarely encounter in practical contexts. Indeed theoretical reasoning in Science does not even aspire to the certainty of logic and truth and rests its case on its endless method of observation and experimentation in the court of the hypothetical judgment.

But the really interesting point to make was that at the time of the Brexit campaign the majority of MP’s in Parliament were for the UK remaining in the EU. Now if we were as was maintained, a representative democracy, then surely these MP’s were elected as our representatives, our lawmakers and their expert opinion should have forced Cameron to pause before unleashing the dogs of the referendum?

In a relatively short period of time the Conservative party have learned the value of not gambling on the expected in the much simpler processes of a referendum and a premature election. It will indeed be interesting to see how the historians record these two events. If there is philosophical justice in the world the cause of both events will be recorded as “in the interests of the Conservative party but not in the interests of the country”.

Aristotle saw clearly the dialectical structure of human action and human institutions and also saw a continuity between ethics and politics which many modern politicians fail to appreciate. His concept of the Golden mean involved navigating a course of action in the middle ground between two extreme alternatives: a brave man does not rush into battle like a bull in a china shop or refrain from doing what ought to be done in battle like a coward. His rationality curbs his foolhardy impulses and irrational fears and Aristotle thinks of such a considered choice of action as golden, as worthy of praise, as rational. The two choices of the Conservative party to hold a referendum and a premature election were born of impulsiveness and fear and were therefore on his account, irrational. The electorate may have sensed this fact and consequently withdrew their previous levels of support. For Aristotle there was another political reason to favour the middle ground and that was because of a dialectic he was witnessing and we are still witnessing in our political arenas today, namely, the conflict between the rich and the poor on the battlefield of economics. Only a middle class, argued Aristotle would be able to stop the inevitable political divisiveness of such a conflict. The middle ground of such conflict would not perhaps paradoxically concern itself with ekonomos which the Greeks thought to be a purely regulative activity that should be restricted to the running of households. The middle ground for Aristotle would be ethical and not economical but unfortunately he did not elaborate upon what this entailed and perhaps we have only become clear about this issue since Kant gave us a clear account of our ethical duties and Hannah Arendt gave us a clear account of the human condition and its political constitution. For Kant the essence of ethical judgments, which we can be certain of, is that they are imperatives, which differ from declaratives in that they do not state what is the case which is the province of the declarative statement, but only what ought to be the case. This certainty is based on intentions which are embedded in acts of practical reasoning that are purely logical and universal. The ethical judgment par excellence for Kant was that it is our duty to keep promises. The argument for this was in terms of the logical consequences of failing to do so, namely that the very human institution of promising would be abandoned if it became a universal practice that people did not keep promises. Now Arendt, though not in agreement with everything Kant said, thought that many of our human and political institutions are founded upon the premise that promises ought to be kept and that this was an important feature of the stability of our world which provided the framework for everything important in our society. Aristotle would of course regarded the act of promising in accordance with the ethical judgment that promises ought to be kept, as a virtue, and he would no doubt have thought of his ideal of the middle class as possessing all the virtues necessary for a flourishing life.

If the above reasoning is correct then it may be that one of the deep processes of globalization is this movement away from extremes and toward the middle ground, away from a primary focus on the economical and toward a focus on the ethically grounded political activities that will provide us all with a flourishing life. Also if the above reasoning is correct the middle ground is that which is quite often occupied by the students who absented themselves in the Brexit referendum which in turn is an indication that the middle class in England is still too small to accomplish complex global goals.

May 18, 2017June 12, 2018

Cosmopolitanism, Globalization, Human Rights and Immigration.

Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy is systematic. It ranges over all the traditional divisions of philosophy and integrates them into a systematic whole. He brings metaphysical considerations concerning man and the cosmos to bear on ethics, political philosophy epistemology, aesthetics and religion. The resultant product is a Philosophy that rivals Aristotle’s in its scope and reach. Kant had the ability as did Aristotle to see a simple phenomenon woven into an integrated system of propositions: touch one strand of the complex and the reverberations would resonate harmoniously and holistically throughout the system producing a sound as beautiful as the sound of pure knowledge.

I have argued elsewhere that Kant’s Enlightenment philosophy provided the ethical foundations for human rights. It can be further argued that Kant’s article on a universal history provided the blueprint for the organisation which would, after the second world war, become the United Nations, the champion of universal human rights. Kant did not only have ethical arguments for the existence of human rights, he also had arguments that are difficult to classify and which enable one to embrace the phenomena of globalization and immigration, positively, from a philosophical perspective. One of Kant’s basic arguments is that every human being on earth possesses a right to roam the earth and pursue their peaceful activities and the consequence of this cosmopolitan and global right is the right of everyone to expect hospitality wherever they may roam. In an earlier essay I spoke about how Kant viewed the nation state as pathological(as did a number of other philosophers) during a time in which it was not yet clear that the European nation state system in Europe would bring actual devastation to the world. Devastation firstly, in the form of two world wars and a holocaust, and secondly, in the form of threatened catastrophe on a scale never before witnessed or even imagined: post war nation state alliances and enmities would for a long period of time promise to outdo the malevolent social engineering project of the Nazi’s with a nuclear holocaust which would threaten the very existence of the world. That this latter phenomenon did not occur, in my view, may have been attributable to a deep process of globalization, a cosmopolitan attitude towards and knowledge of the world and its people which Kant expressed in his Philosophy: an attitude moreover, that can be defended with logic and sound and systematic argumentation which has philosophical consequences and that reverberate and resonate over the whole extent of our thought about everything, including the right we have to roam the earth.

The level of self consciousness of the first trekkers leaving Africa is unfathomable so we do not know whether, when man encountered man in these sparsely resourced environments, he did so in a spirit of hospitality or fear. Hobbes envisioned life in this kind of state of nature as being solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Locke, to the contrary, envisioned life in a state of nature to be relatively peaceful but politically problematic owing to the absence of law to regulate disagreements. Given the fact that one of the benefits of the nation state was to produce a rule of, and a respect for, the law it would seem that even if these early encounters of man with his fellow men were fearful, the rule of law in a more modern community would appear to make such a response of fear, otiose.

So, I am genuinely puzzled by the obviously fear based responses of both politicians and large numbers of people to immigration that we are seeing the world over. The first migrants from Africa took considerable risks and showed remarkable courage in their decisions to leave what they knew behind, however, sparse and poorly resourced their environment must have been. These first trekkers were the builders of our first small communities. There is an obvious correlation with their willingness to brave dangers and the subsequent skill and competence they demonstrated in creating and maintaining their small settlements. There is also an obvious correlation between the asylum seekers we see risking their lives in rubber rafts and our early ancestors. If one examines the statistics in immigration friendly countries, such as the USA of past years, Britain after the collapse of the British Empire and Sweden in recent times there is clear statistical and experiential evidence of the considerable benefits that have accrued to the countries in which immigrants have come to settle. There are of course short term adjustment problems where life as one knew it may be to some small extent disrupted for a period of time, but the Chinese are supposed to have wisely claimed (in response to the question why they did not resist large numbers of immigrant settlers) : “In three generations they will be Chinese, so why bother about the fact that they are not Chinese when they arrive?” The statistics and general experience in both the USA of the past and Britain support this claim.

There is no doubt that in Kant’s Philosophy there is an ethical obligation to help people whose lives are in danger. Asylum seekers must be given asylum irrespective of ethnic or religious denomination. The second formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative claims that we have a duty to treat people as ends in themselves and this demands as a consequence not just hospitable behaviour but also justifies the right to asylum that has been universally agreed to by the members of the UN.

Kant would not claim that there is any difference in principle in relation to the freedom of movement of peoples involved in the European project. Treating people as ends in themselves requires that one is hospitable to strangers. The European project is a Kantian project, an Enlightenment pilot-project. Today freedom of movement in Europe, tomorrow freedom of movement on a cosmopolitan scale. The logic of cosmopolitanism requires that the European eventually be hospitable to the non European stranger who appears on their doorstep.

The Kantian Philosopher believes that this ethical argument is the primary argument for globalization. But has it not historically been the case that commerce has been the driving force of globalization? It has certainly been a superficial force. To the extent that our self interest has driven commerce, the philosophical analysis of this phenomenon would suggest that self interested commercialism and the desire to expand ones sphere of self interest over the whole world is not in the spirit of Kantian cosmopolitanism. This commercial spirit on the contrary, was one of the roots of in imperialism which did not know what to do with the discovery that the mere accumulation of capital as an aim seemed to make the working man superfluous, an entity to be exploited for the end of the accumulation of capital. Hannah Arendt provides compelling arguments which suggest a connection between this anti-humanistic spirit of commercialism and the emergence of totalitarian governments last century.

There are deep processes of globalization which populism, in its ignorance or misunderstanding of the systematic arguments of Philosophy, does not understand. Quite simply the populist politicians, whether they be British, European, American or Swedish, do not know what they do not know. They concentrate upon the divisions or differences between people rather on the systematic truths which unite them. This is why there is so much discussion about who is telling the truth and who is lying, why there is so much discussion about real and fake news. Real, objective Ethical Truths relate to cosmopolitan rights and the rights that unite all occupants of the earth. The shadowy arguments of populist politicians focus on national and cultural differences and fear of change, fear of the deep ethical process of globalization. This process of ethical globalization, for them is not an ethical matter, it is rather a natural destructive phenomenon which requires national defense measures. This fear of something which is not of itself fearful is of course a pathological feat of the imagination which reveals itself in all talk of building walls or defending borders or expelling aliens. This is the talk of the ignorant prisoners imprisoned deep in Plato’s cave, a deeply disturbing fearful incoherent babbling which is paradoxically, claiming to know something.

April 8, 2017June 12, 2018

The Meaninglessness of Terror

So Stockholm is the latest scene of what is beginning to look like a 5 act Shakespearean tale. The whole city locked down, people staying in hotels, walking home in what at times looked like a Great Trek, major television events cancelled, frenetic social media activity with all manner of response from the sublime to the superfluous(telling asylum seekers to go back to where they came from). And for what? For terrorism whose aim is to disrupt the peace and freedom of people who have absolutely nothing to do with the cause the terrorists claim they are fighting for. The question becomes: what kind of play are we witnessing, a tragedy, a comedy, a soap opera? Of course there were tragic consequences of the action in Stockholm but actions are defined by their intentions. If the object of terrorist action are people who have nothing to do with what is going on in the Middle East this scene is not tragic it is meaningless. Witness the actual consequences (barring the tragic loss of the victims and their families), strangers meeting and spending the evening together in bars or in hospitable homes. What did the terrorists imagine would be the actual consequences? Well I am sure if they imagined people actually coming closer together, societies actually bonding more tightly together because of their action, they might well wonder themselves what the point of their action is.

I have written elsewhere in this blog about my amazement at the reaction of the USA(and Russia) to , relatively speaking a handful of poorly armed terrorists. This “War on Terrorism” response is trickling down to all levels in the world. The amount of media time spent on this issue at all levels is quite disproportionate to its magnitude. This fact indicates that the terrorists actions and speech acts do not meet Aristotle´s definition of a tragic action which is an action of a certain magnitude. ISIS deliberately waits over 24 hours before taking credit for the acts because we overreact for approximately 24 hours to the events which occur. Compare this event to the bus accident with school children this week, a really tragic accident with approximately the same number of casualties(3 children) and compare the amount of attention given. In my mind the cause of both events are equally meaningless, if the cause of the bus accident turns out to be mechanical failure without any negligence involved.

February 24, 2017November 16, 2021

The Pathological Nation-State and the European Project

“Things of this world are in so constant a flux that nothing remains long in the same state.”–(John Locke). This was written 300 years ago and could be an accurate description of our current states of political affairs. Philosophically, this suggests that Political theory ought to be at the very least a theory of social and political change which of course will require some kind of relation to historical knowledge. Historical knowledge manifests our more significant social and political memories. Such memories and the narratives embodying them are a key not just to the identity of individuals but also to the identity of peoples.

The Problem of personal identity presupposes continuity of our memory which is firstly, one of the criteria of personal identity along with secondly, the criteria of the continuity of our physical body, and Aristotle would add two further criteria, namely, the continuity of our social institutions(such as language) and the continuity of our political institutions and processes. Aristotle claimed in this context that a good man needs a good state to be good and this echoes a Platonic assumption that the personality of the good man requires living in a society with just institutions. In the Republic Socrates attempts to define justice by reference to the harmonious relations of the parts of the soul of a good man. His interlocutors think this psychological or anthropological approach is inadequate and Socrates is forced to appeal to a Platonic Kallipolis or fully functioning just state in order for his argument to have any chance of achieving what it set out to do. The Socrates of Plato’s Republic is well aware, however, of the fragility of even a perfect state and the risk of its degeneration into the pathological forms of a military style Spartan state, and the even worse pathological forms of oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. For each of these forms of state there is a corresponding type of personality. For Plato and Aristotle, in other words, there is a fundamental logical relation between our descriptions of personal identity and our descriptions of state identity.

Plato would not have agreed with Churchill in his judgment that Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other kinds, principally because the democracy that Churchill was referring to was a form of government very different to the direct democracy that the Greeks founded and tried to perfect, and in the process, testing the scope and limits of personal freedom to their utmost. The Greeks discovered that direct democracy does not work because there needed to be a representative and constitutional structure which translates the power of the people into something which benefits everybody, or something which benefits what they referred to as the common good. Aristotle saw clearly that the essential nature of this power of the people embodied a pluralism which logically could not be transformed into the perfect unity which Plato was seeking . The only form of government which could deal with the problems posed by pluralistic forms of life in the State was what Aristotle called the constitutional form that evolved naturally from families forming villages and villages forming cities. The idea of a nation state may have been a pathological idea for Aristotle. He must have been more than surprised when one of his pupils, Alexander the Great embarked on his Empire building project.

Our modern ears are not tuned to the chords of Aristotle’s thought but it is interesting to note that at least three other major Philosophers of different periods, may have seen the fundamental limitations of the nation state: Kant, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Ricouer. Kant’s enlightenment ideas on this issue are to be found in his political/historical writings in which he prophetically at the end of the 1700s sketches out the blueprint for a United Nations as a means of dealing with the pathological war like nature of empire builders and nation -like conglomerations. The reasoning we find in these writings follows directly the revolution in ethical theory that his categorical imperative brought about. Maxims of action could be universalised, he argued, thereby reversing a philosophical prejudice in favour of theoretical reasoning that had prevailed since Aristotle’s philosophy had lost its influence in the cultures of the world. Kant’s ethical theory also restored freedom in the social and political worlds and demanded as a consequence respect for an individuals human rights which we all know is one of the major supporting columns of the United Nations along with a desire for universal peace. As suggested nations states as such did not exist during the Kantian period. When they did come into existence they bore all the characteristics of the nation-like conglomerates which Kant found to be pathological formations. Nation states were largely a creation of the 19th century and their pathological nature only became evident after the second world war for most of us(Freud saw this much earlier with his eagle eyes).

Hannah Arendt discusses this phenomenon at length in her work “the “Origins of Totalitarianism” but for the purposes of this essay her work on the trial of Eichmann is more pertinent reading. She refers to Eichmann’s personality as “banal”: his speech peppered with clichés and superficial description. He was, she suggests a product of a “scientific” education and a populist culture which believed that it was capable of everything it set its mind to do with a race of supermen at its disposal determined to put Germany first and make Germany great again. Eichmann referred to Kant in his defense and I suppose this puts him in a league above some of the contemporary populists presently strutting on the world stage. Arendt died in 1975 and was spared the details of the current resurrection of populism but her writings suggest that she would not have been particularly surprised by the phenomenon.

Paul Ricouer died in 2005 and also missed the current American anti-globalisation and British anti-European brand of populism. He did, however, witness the problems with the nation state in the context of anti-European movements and he did address this very interesting philosophical question of the identity of the nation state. He, like Arendt, points to the problems nationalist movements pose for the natural pluralistic diversity of conglomerations of populations and suggests that history and tradition in itself is not sufficient to constitute a state. Ricouer was more critical of Kant than Arendt and would probably have been prepared to accept a Hegelian teleological interpretation of tradition and history: an interpretation which characterises the flow of history dialectically in terms of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis: capitalism, communism and humanistic liberalism. More importantly Ricouer implicitly embraces an Aristotelian model of state identity when he proposes his philosophical response to the globalising forces of public and political life: forces which involve commerce, technology, ecology and national security He too believes that state identity has a similar structure to an individual’s personal identity.

Ricouer claims that the globalisation forces referred to above in the political system produces fragility. Counteracting forces are therefore needed to create a new form of European political authority. He suggests that religious institutions, institutions concerned with knowledge and learning , including schools and universities, should engage with this problem by trying to build opinion for a new political authority. He also suggests three mechanisms or models that can be culturally used in this process of cultural evolution. Firstly, a model of linguistic hospitality involving the translation of texts and discourse from other European cultures, secondly the exchange of cultural memories of norms, perspectives, customs and traditions of other European nations and thirdly a mechanism or model of secular forgiveness which is seen in the operation of the law in its intention to heal the injured and compensate the victim of selfishness or aggression. This third model or mechanism is more than an echo of the Socratic appeal not to return evil for the evil done to one by outsiders.. This category transcends that of individual rights and the law and resembles a Buddhist gift which one can ask for but cannot demand.

Ricouer has also written one of the greatest books written on Freud, in which he points out the strength and limitations of psychoanalytic categories in the explanation of cultural phenomena. Freud, who was asked by the League of Nations to write a discourse on War well before the second world war began, reasoned himself into a position in which the discontents of civilisation should adopt a stoical attitude of resignation to the imperfections of their societies. This, according to Freud is the only wise avenue of approach to the question relating to how the individual “bears the burden of existence” and bears the burden of our imperfectly constructed States.

Culture, in Freud’s view is the battleground of two mighty instincts, the life instinct of an individual which unites people into families, villages and cities, and the death instinct which can only be deciphered at the level of the relation between people where forces work conservatively to repeat the patterns of the past obsessively. These same forces work to prevent wider and wider associations, sometimes by destructively dissolving existing constructed relations on a limited scale, or on a global scale in a world war. The life instinct, Eros, Freud argues , ought in a perfect world, to triumph over the death instinct, Thanatos. The stoical attitude appears to be an attitude one adopts whilst one observes the battle of the giants on the cultural scene. Freud does not presume to even guess the outcome and stands in the shadow of Kant who was absolutely certain on moral grounds that Reason would prevail and a cosmopolitan kingdom of ends would be created as a consequence. Ricoeur stands either in between these two positions or alternately to the right of Kant if one believes the mechanism of forgiveness to have religious connotations. Freud has been mentioned in this context in spite of Ricoeurs criticism that the Freudian archaeological theory of mind and society lacks a Hegelian teleological dimension (or Aristotelian dimension:the telos of the common good).

Freudian theory is particularly valuable in the explanation of pathological phenomena. If the assumption of Plato and Aristotle relating to the logical identity of personal identity and social or political identity is philosophically defensable then, even if Freudian theory might lack an important teleological dimension this might not be of decisive significance when it comes to the characterisation of pathological phenomena whether it be of a personal or political nature. Take the phenomenon of group identity which Freud wrote a paper about(Group Psychology and the Ego). The stronger the bond of identification with the group, the stronger the reaction to “outsiders” however minimal the factual differences between the outsiders and the members of the group might be. This reasoning can be used to ground an objection to the project of globalisation, namely, that the only alternative to the current concept of the nation state is some kind of world government. Now Kant particularly rejected the concept of world government on the grounds that this would be tyrannical. If we connect this Kantian point to the Freudian reflection, the consequence would seem to be the kind of middle position suggested by Ricouer in which a European project dilutes national identity and nationalism on the road to the global project of further dilution of the identification mechanisms involved in Euro-politanism. Freud clearly described the pathological consequences of identification mechanisms in relation to the mobilisation of aggression against the Jews, but he did not see the full consequences of this particular battle between Eros and Thanatos. He died in 1939. Had he been alive he would probably have observed that a German Jew was just as much a German as any non- Jewish German. His analysis of the leader of the Germans at the time of Hitler’s suicide would have been very cool and technical. Terms such as “pathological or chronic narcissism”, “paranoia” “delusional”for him were descriptive and explanatory and embedded in a network of concepts and principles rather than emotionally laden as they seem to be for us when taken out of their medical context. Hannah Arendt points out the banality of the way in which the everyday family German participated in atrocities during the day whilst going home in the evening to be fathers to their families. In doing so, she argues, this phenomenon bears witness to the Freudian battle of the giants on the cultural stage. The same mechanism, if not same instincts, binding a child to his parents binds a citizen to his leader: one can identify out of love or as a consequence of exposure to aggression.

With all the Freud bashing going on in the name of “science” it is not so difficult to believe that we have not learned very much about the pathological mechanisms and phenomena operating at the social and political levels. If one believes in the logical relation of the individual and the political, and one understands how Freudian mechanisms are operating at the political level, then the idea of the nation state being driven into nationalistic isolationist anti-immigration policies and thereby manifesting itself as a pathological obsessive compulsion, becomes understandable. History has taught us about the causes of social and political pathology but the understanding of the mechanisms of the identity formation of groups need further philosophical investigation. Until that happens we will not be able to judge whether the counteracting mechanisms of the translation of cultures, the exchange of cultural memories relating to traditions customs and mores, and the secular concept of forgiveness suggested by Ricoeur, will heal the wounds inflicted by globalisation upon the pathological nation state.

Until we understand the mechanisms of political identity we risk embracing the pathological elements of our politics and blaming all our woes on Globalisation.

February 19, 2017November 16, 2021

The disintegration of Political Institutions: Populism, Science, Psychology, and Humanistic Liberalism

Paul Ricoeur refers in his writings on Political Responsibility to an interesting Humanistic/philosophical model to represent the concepts of power and authority. Power, he argues, rests with the people, and authority rests with the State. We are asked to conceive of this relation of power and authority as a triangle. The former, power, he characterizes as embedded in a base of community life where we live together ,with and for one another, in the midst of just institutions. The latter, authority, the parts of the triangle reaching from the base to the apex, he argues, is a hierarchical structure which it is necessary to submit to if the society is to preserve itself in the face of external and internal threats. This structure , he argues, is necessary for all kinds of states but as one can readily see, it manifests a paradox in the combining of authority in the form of legitimate law governed force, and the power of the will of the people that has evolved slowly, historically and ethically to constitute a culture. Given the nature of the model, the culture, mores, and customs of a society can, unless authority is especially sensitive to the will of the people be plagued by questionable political decisions and attitudes . These decisions and attitudes have a special holistic characteristic in that the major action of politicians which is being decided upon is the passing of laws.

The figure of a triangle obviously reminds us of Humanistic Psychology: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which makes reference to both personal, social and cultural needs but does not directly reflect economic or political needs. During modern times we have witnessed the unleashing of the economic forces of globalisation which are indifferent to the force of the ethical imperative that is suggested in Maslow’s hierarchy. In this process, global economic needs have differentiated themselves from national needs. In this process State economic decisions have become increasingly abstract and are understood only by groups of experts.

Now this differentiation reminds me of the deliberate decision taken by Psychology in 1870 to detach itself from the domain of Philosophy and thereby, as a consequence, detach itself from the realm of humanistic and ethical description and explanation. The decision was motivated by a desire to become more scientific and thereby advance knowledge of the human condition. Difficult to comprehend abstraction was also the result of this process. Theories of causation lie behind experimental manipulation of supposedly unvarying independent variables and dependent variables which can be quantified and measured. Probability theory is used in order to attempt to establish whether the correlations observed and measured can be regarded as indications of whether there is a causal relation between the variables. The problem with the experimental method and its accompanying probability theory is that it presupposes a form of the law of induction that things and relations which have not changed in the past will not change in the future. Now, as long as one is dealing with causation between at least one unvarying variable and one dependent variable the inductive method is a defendable assumption. But if one is to use probability theory to support the experimental method another assumption is required in accordance with Bayes´s theorem, which states that the probability of an event occurring is related to the information which one has about it. Now if one has a covered container with 50 balls, 25 of which are white and 25 of which are black, and we wish to calculate the probability of the event of drawing a white ball on the first draw, our information about the number of possible events in the system is finite and closed and probabilities can be accurately calculated. But the problem is this: in Psychological experiments, where we do have information of all the possible variables affecting possible outcomes, the results of the experiment very often merely produce knowledge of a relation which we already had knowledge of via experience or philosophical theory. Indeed, experience itself may be sufficient for knowledge of the cause-effect relations. The very best we achieve is a confirmation of what we already know. This, as one can see, is problematic from the point of view of the original motivation for the decision taken by Psychology to move away from Humanistic Philosophy which was struggling with the larger issue of determining the psychological and situational factors involved in open systems, i.e. in systems where agents freely choose what they ought and ought not to do. The real problem with this state of affairs is that we need to advance our knowledge of the human condition if we are going to understand ourselves and our relation to politics. Isolation from philosophical assumptions of the human condition and the ethical imperative has not produced very much of significance in almost 150 years. If a real comparison of progress in these two respective areas of research were to be made then what has been discovered in the name of science would then have to be compared with 150 years of philosophical reflection which would include all the philosophical discoveries of modern academic Aristotelians and Kantians, existentialism,phenomenology, hermeneutics and Analytical Philosophy of different kinds. We could for example ask whether Experimental research has contributed to our knowledge of the psychological and situational variables involved in political thinking and decision making. One would have to compare the results of such research with, for example, Paul Ricoeur’s and Hannah Arendt’s political and psychological(anthropological) research and reflections, some of which are presented here. The hypothesis presented here then is :No psychological theory using purely experimental method and results can compare with the humanistic method and results of interpretation, hermeneutics and logic in the field of political “science”. What we have in these experimentally based theories is a fruitless scientific abstraction comparable to economic abstraction which is a privileged domain of small groups of experts.

Ricouer presented his philosophical model in a number of sources (principally in the two articles “Fragility and Responsibility” and “Ethics and Politics”) and it differs significantly from Maslow’s Humanistic Psychological theory even if the latter carries interesting philosophical and ethical assumptions about the human condition.Paradoxically it might be the partial reliance on the scientific causal principle which limits the scope of Maslow’s theory.

Let us try to see, for example whether a non humanistic approach using an experimental mind set could solve the problem of analysing the concept of civil disobedience in the political framework of “the Law”.

The law can be changed, either by the government changing the law or by the government adding another law to the system. The government has the authority to do these things. However during the last century the will of the people has made itself heard in organised campaigns of demonstration and civil disobedience. The base of the triangle has, that is to say, not submitted to the authority of governmental institutions. It has expressed its power and its discontent with governmental authority. Why? It is often claimed that the laws of science are immutable and immune to change and the laws of men contingent and changeable. Yet in the civil rights movements, the anti Vietnam war, and the CND demonstrations it almost seems as if some immutable unchangeable law was on the side of the demonstrators, as if some timeless knowledge was being expressed by crowds surging through streets flashing their placards for the cameras and chanting. Kant believed the moral law was immutable and unchangeable and thought it would take man one hundred thousand years to fully understand this law, thus echoing the old Platonic chorus that knowledge is required for the just exercise of power and authority. Not the kind of abstract theoretical knowledge that “scientific” experts claim to possess but the practical knowledge that keeps the society evolving and developing. This practical knowledge, made explicit in the Enlightenment moral philosophy of Kant, demands the kind of consciousness that is needed to coordinate the customs , mores and ethical imperatives of the people with their representatives in authority who have the task of translating the power of the people into the power of government. Authority can only use the power of the people on the condition that it maintains its connection with the customs mores and ethical laws of the people. Hannah Arendt argues that in times of turmoil which she defines in terms of confusion, polarization and the growing bitterness of our debates are actually caused by a theoretical failure to come to terms with and understand the phenomenon of civil disobedience. From the point of view of the authorities, a crowd of unruly demonstrators are merely a number of individuals breaking the law and disturbing the peace whereas from the point of view of the base of the triangle, the ethically motivated demonstrators, the issue is rather as it was for Thoreau “let justice be done even if the world perishes” a view shared by Lincoln in the issue of the civil war over slavery. Aristotle claimed that the good man could only be a good citizen in a good state. Kant acknowledges this trinity of terms(the good man, the good citizen, the good state) necessary to analyse the phenomenon of justice and civil disobedience and points out that even a race of devils could found a nation if they were intelligent enough thus highlighting the importance of the good citizens relation to the moral law and the laws of the state. We are all conscious of the facts that historical processes take decades to reveal their significance. If we believe we are living in time of turmoil at the moment perhaps we should look back to the past for traces of the process which has led us to our current situation. Arendt in writing about civil disobedience reports the pessimism in the USA during the 1960’s where law writers were rhetorically claiming that the law is dead and referred to “the cancerous growth of disobediences” against the background of the claim that law enforcement authorities had been failing for many years to enforce the law especially in relation to drug offences, mugging and burglary. She maintains with reference to recent reports that over half the crimes are never reported and that only one in a hundred criminal offenders will ever go to prison. Research studies are not needed, she claims to establish the fact that criminal acts probably have no legal consequences whatsoever. Arendt points out that were the system more successful the court and prison system would collapse. The answer of of the authorities to this situation is to commission a manifold of scientific studies devoted to discovering the “deeper causes” whilst ignoring the more obvious causes under their noses. Add to these reflections on criminal law the frequency of civil disobedience in the post war world which resulted in government disrespect for the group of society that is intentionally disobedient and the reciprocating disrespect and contempt for political authority and we have , according to Arendt a recipe the disintegration of political institutions and thereby a recipe for a popular revolution. Is what we experiencing in the USA today exactly what Hannah Arendt predicted?

February 12, 2017June 12, 2018

When Humanistic voices fall silent(Philosophy of Education)

Recent changes to the Swedish Gymnasium School Curriculum indicate that politicians are succumbing to a number of different non-educational agendas to change what is taught and the way it is taught in schools. In the last two rounds of changes we saw the disappearance of Philosophy from 2 of the national curricula for the Gymnasium school.

We have also seen a very determined commitment via legislation to the introduce “scientific” research into schools. This determination is matched by a curious ambiguity as to exactly what constitutes “scientific” research. John Hattie’s work is mentioned in several contexts in the communications of Skolverket(The Swedish National School Authority) and if this kind of approach to education is what is meant we may be witnessing a paradigm shift of significant seismic proportions in the Swedish schools’ system.

This is all the more interesting in that there is another even more radical paradigm shift occurring in the Finnish Educational system. The Finnish authorities are experimenting with thematic or what they call “phenomenon” teaching. According to Siv Saarukka, a Finnish expert in this field, the Finnish authorities have been very influenced by a work, “The Fifth Discipline” written by a “popular” expert in the management of learning organisations, Peter Senge. This is an amazing revelation from a country that is very near the top of the Pisa(OECD-inspired) world school system rankings. This surprise ranks with that of the management consultancy report commissioned in England around 2000 in which the language used in the report to talk about teachers was no longer humanistic as it had traditionally been for well over a century. The language rather was associated with a psychology of business which drew upon the practices of the business world that revolved around business processes, products and productivity. The final estimate of the damage caused to the English educational system from this report by the consultancy firm (HayMcBer), has yet to be estimated. We do know that the report cost the British taxpayer 4 million pounds. “The Fifth Discipline” is a book written very much in the spirit of Hay/McBer’s report and is as completely devoid of the rigour of academic and philosophical argument as is all “popular” literature of this kind.

Perhaps, in their favour, the Swedish authorities can be admired for resisting the temptation toward populism which is currently causing problems on a global scale. Science is at least an academic pursuit, it might be argued. Let us try to put this Swedish strategy into some kind of context. In the 1920’s,1930’s, and 40’s in England Europe and the USA, Science spawned the Philosophical movement we call “logical positivism”. Logical positivism suddenly disappeared after the war as a movement although, to this day there is no doubt the odd positivist tucked away in some academic corridor or other. Logical positivism was very quickly construed by even its supporters as an anti-humanistic movement and English positivists like A J Ayer admitted that the position was untenable under considerable academic pressure.

After the second world war, there were also a number of commentators who felt that it was largely the absence of a sufficiently strong humanistic influence in educational programs which allowed global totalitarian forces to be unleashed earlier in the century. This discussion led to an academic revival of Humanistic Liberalism in English Universities in the 1960’s and 1970’s which began to talk in earnest about Education. Teaching certificates were supplemented with B.ed degrees and many such degrees had Humanistic Philosophy of Education components which viewed Science, Scientific Psychology, and Psycho-metrics as of peripheral concern to educators. During this discussion, out of which the International Baccalaureate program was born, it was acknowledged that the heavy emphasis on Scientific subjects in Europe at the expense of the Humanistic subjects in the German and Russian educational curricula were responsible firstly, for the absence of humanistic attitudes in many of the more disturbing events of the second world war and secondly, perhaps the absence of humanistic attitudes also played a part in the intransigence of the parties involved in the cold war and the threat of a nuclear holocaust. In the light of this, it is also, to say the least, not surprizing to find Sweden wishing to combat populism by trying to make schools more academic but it is surprizing to find Sweden wishing to follow the route that Germany and Russia once followed in the dark days of the last century. It is not being maintained that Science is not an important part of our lives. What is being maintained is that(according to Richard Pring in his essay “Education as a moral practice”) there are two narratives that define the dialogue that is taking place in the classroom between the teacher and the pupils. The one dialogue is the historical one that has taken place in all subjects, including the sciences, where voices firstly, join each other in a historical chorus over time and in agreement over important issues and secondly, where voices engage in scholarly yet friendly criticism of important ideas which might be mistaken. The second dialogue is that between the teacher as the representative of these historical voices and the pupils who are deciding whether or not to enter into the cultural arena in which voices of all ages have talked about almost everything it is possible to imagine. The pupil, of course, must be met on common ground but the moral message of this second narrative is to initiate the pupil into the “Holy”(R S Peters) cultural arena where it is realized how fragile our civilization is: how it might rest upon this kind of educational dialogue. When humanistic voices fall silent, ways of life are lost and tigers and lions enter the arena. To think that Science alone can hinder the fragmentation or atomization of our society is dangerously naive. Experimentation has its place in those fields which can be neatly divided into variables which can be measured. But how do we measure a desire to kill Jews? In the same way I suppose as you measure anything else. The Nazi’s were famous for strictly measuring and keeping meticulous records of their measurements. Is this anything else than distasteful, even if historians will be able to, in their turn, use this documentation for a narrative which very few of us will read with pleasure. Since I have mentioned business and its “populist” character let me consider an epistemological rather than an ethical objection to Science rampaging over our educational field. There is a famous business experiment done in a factory in which management consultants were let loose in an environment where productivity was very low. After much analysis and observation it was decided that the lighting was too bright and should be reduced. Expectations ran high in the experimental group and the productivity miraculously increased. A triumph for science and business! Alas it was not too long before productivity went down again and the gurus were called back in. After analysis and observations it was decided that the lighting was too bright and it was reduced. Productivity increased! Is this an argument that light is not an independent variable? Mayo tended to explain the result in terms of human association and human variables which are notoriously difficult to manipulate and measure. Experienced humanistic teachers will point to how the two above mentioned pedagogical narratives naturally produce an expectation that the subjects or pupils will curiously follow and appreciate the respective dialogues. I use the term “naturally” because were the teacher to instrumentally use this fact about pupils expectations causally to produce a calculated effect, this will be humanistically an example of doing the right thing for the wrong “reason”.

The National School Authority also talk of “established practice” as another possible means by which to achieve the sought-for academic environment. No one really knows what this means. If it means what I have referred to above as humanistic practice then it is about time that the National Schools authority came out and clarified the confusion over this issue. It would also greatly enhance the strength of the humanistic voice if Philosophy was returned to its rightful place in every curriculum.

February 8, 2017June 12, 2018

Humanistic liberalism and the law(Politics,the ethical imperative, and the law)

Humanistic liberalism has a view of the law and politics which is Kantian, and to the extent that much Kantian ethics and politics has an Aristotelian flavour, the views of Aristotle are also considered carefully by humanists in spite of the criticisms Aristotle has received on the fronts of slavery and feminism. We have argued in an earlier paper, with Paul Ricoeur, that Politics is fragile and can be efficacious only to the extent that the citizens (which have been constituted by a state and in turn constitute the state in a relation of mutual implication) care about the Politics of their state. This statement has the following relation to the law: the law is an action of a government(by the people and for the people) which means that as long as a law meets the criteria of justice(an unjust law is no law at all), the people have the same duty to follow an exterior law as they do to follow an internalised moral law. Kant argues in his third formulation of the categorical imperative that when citizens and politicians are mutually doing their duty there is a logical(in terms of the ought system of concepts and the practical reasoning that is operating in accordance with the idea of freedom) relation between citizens and their government and Kant calls such a state of affairs a kingdom of ends. Citizens treat the government as an end in itself, as having a value in itself, and the government reciprocates by treating citizens as ends in themselves partly by guaranteeing them the maximum freedom consistent with the principle of equal freedom for all. But although this might be how we ought to think about these matters, this is not in fact how we do think and this, it is argued, suffices to burst the idealistic utopian bubble of the humanistic liberal. I think the answer to this objection is a version of the so called parallel argument strategy which runs as follows: if one ought to think logically but does not, does this entail that the laws of logic which give language its meaning and truth value are to be discarded? Why, then is it relatively easy to accept the latter argument in relation to the laws of logic but not as easy to accept the former argument relating to the laws of man? Here is an account by Paul Ricoeur which might help to explain some of the difficulties we have with understanding the logical nature of the laws of men. Ricoeur claims that at least criminal law has an instrumental nature which is anti-humanistic and runs against the flow of both humanism and liberalism. Criminal law presupposes the legitimacy of physical force and violence(of power) in relation to those who fail to obey the law. The law punishes. After the contemplative weighing of evidence in the tribunal comes the judgment in accordance with the law and thereafter comes the freedom from the punishment or the punishment itself(the instrumental end–the substitute vengeance). Even the contemplative process is merely a more peaceful substitution for what might happen in the interaction between a partner that has been harmed and a partner seeking vengeance. The latter, if he is a citizen and cares for the state he lives in hopefully will reject a violent form of vengeance and accept the substitute vengeance offered.

The long process of the regulation of the law involves written laws, a tribunal in which evidence can be presented and weighed and competent independent people whose task it is to regulate the process fairly and pass fair judgment. This process at first sight looks very scientific and though there is classification of actions and arguments which have a logical structure, there is also art, a story being told in the courtroom which is open to interpretation, and there is also interpretation involved in the process of deciding which law is relevant to the narrated actions as well as which facts are relevant and which parts of the story are facts and which not. Criminal law obviously is a law which resolves conflicts with the motivator of conflicts, namely violence. It is divisive and divides society into the guilty and the not guilty. Many political realists have this model of law in mind when they speak about power and security: we the people shall protect ourselves from all enemies, imagined or real. Paul Ricoeur points out that civil law differs from criminal law in that it is not politically divisive but, on the contrary a region of law which regulates the making and keeping of promises and the exchange of promises, mutually relating partners in a venture or project. The claim that “Promises ought to be kept” is used by Kant as an example of a categorical imperative. It is, that is, the ethical imperative of society manifesting and symbolizing the global trust the members of a society have for each other. Should it transpire that someone fails to keep a promise, such a state of affairs undermines the trust that such a commitment entails and civil law regulates both the possible material damages done to the injured party and the metaphysical damage that is done to the moral law.

Paul Ricoeur also discusses a third region of the law relating to the just distribution of benefits and burdens necessary for the Aristotelian flourishing life. Some benefits and burdens are economic but some are more constitutional. Constitutional issues such as education and citizenship directly involve the ethical imperative. There is, however a third constitutional issue which is very relevant to our current situation and debate, namely, security. The recent executive order to temporarily stop refugees and immigrants from 7 selected predominantly Muslim countries seems to affect directly the ethical imperative and freedom insofar as it is involved in education and of course seemingly also raises the the issue of citizen security. The latter issue appears to be at least theoretically managed by the nation state and the other, the former, seems to practically transcend the nation state and be a manifestation of the more important aspect of the globalisation process. Given these considerations there seem to be at least two relevant issues pertaining to the court decision over the matter of whether the recent executive order issued by President Trump was constitutional or not. One is whether there is a real empirical provable threat to the security of American citizens. Here one can wonder whether the threat is purely hypothetical or alternatively one can wonder whether the measures taken were disproportionate to the threat. The second relevant issue concerns the ethical imperative at two political levels: firstly the level of promises(the signing of the Geneva convention and the Human Rights charter), secondly at the level of education which ideally should be educating citizens to be citizens of the world via ethical training and its concentration on the universal truth and justice valued by all men.

So, much more is at issue with this court decision over a hastily crafted executive order than merely power of the President and the powerlessness of refugees, not to mention the powerlessness of those tens of thousands of visa holders who have been promised entrance and are now in doubt as to whether State promises will be kept.

If the ethical imperative as a part of the deeper more meaningful process of globalisation is operating in the most powerful nation on earth then we should expect a decision which overturns at least the more unjust parts of the executive order. If the Presidential order stands, the young people of today have a task similar to that of the non-white civil rights movements and nuclear disarmament movements of the last century, the task of peaceful civil disobedience in the form of demonstrating for the implementation of the ethical imperatives in all government.

February 4, 2017September 29, 2019

Origins of Globalization, Totalitarianism, and the Ethical Imperative.

Hannah Arendt argues that Totalitarianism was unleashed by Imperialism which in its turn unleashed the power of a subterranean stream of globalising forces that surfaced and began to flow with a power that the nation-state was unable to harness or control: forces such as the will to colonise, the omnipotent will which felt that there was nothing which could limit its power, and the mass feeling of powerlessness in the face of powerful institutions. Running deeply in a part of this stream is a paradoxical cross-current: a belief amidst an educated middle class in the actualizing potential of the moral personality and the universal importance of an ethical imperative.

In relation to the above thought consider an interesting Philosophical and Historical perspective which relates to Ernst Cassirer’s work “The Myth of State”. Cassirer claims that all political theories of the 17th century have a common metaphysical/mathematical background. Metaphysical thought in the following century, amidst philosophers, took precedence over theological thought which in its turn was already being undermined by the subterranean stream of Stoical belief in a moral personality that surfaced first in the form of the thought of Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence which began with these famous words:

“We hold these truths to be self evident. That all men are created equal: that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights: that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The above experiential reflection on the rights and dignity of man preceded their philosophical/ethical justification through the works of Kant, a few years later, which put the final nail in the coffin of speculative metaphysics of all kinds ,and also provided a philosophical foundation for both human rights and the inevitable philosophical consequences: the idea of a United Nations and Cosmopolitanism. Further, the Kantian “Copernican revolution” provided a rational, non-experiential foundation for religion and politics and superseded the social contract theory of Hobbes and Locke which originated from the empirical/scientific method: the method of resolving a known whole into less known elements and synthesizing these elements back into a constructed whole again. In this methodical process, an individual’s moral personality mysteriously disappeared especially in the case of Hobbes who claimed that there was a legal bond between subjects and their sovereign which amounted to a pact of submission on all issues related to the sovereigns power and authority.

Cassirer argues that what we were witnessing during these years of the Enlightenment was a revival of Stoic ideas which

“seemed alone equal to the task of providing principles admitted by every nation, every creed, every sect.”

One critical element of this revival was the idea that if a man was forced to give up his personality he would cease to be a moral being, he would become a slave of a Machiavellian Prince or sovereign. Unfortunately Stoic thought did not sufficiently acknowedge the central concept of Freedom. This idea of practical reason had to be fashioned by Kant as part of a middle position between an experiential view and a foundation in Cartesian thought. He favoured a position with a foundation in action that maintains trust in nonmathematical and non- speculative theorizing.

“Kantian” Actions were, however, subseqently evaluated in terms of theoretical standards and it was these standards that provided the 18th century with its strength, inner unity, and Spirit. This absolute Hegelian Spirit, unfortunately, resulted in Romanticism and its attempt to poeticize the world in all its aspects in defiance of the political and philosophical ideals of previous Kantian generations. The poetic spirit, in its turn, reduced history to a romantic account of the portraits of great heroes and reduced ethics to reliving the spirit of the Homeric pre-Socratic era. This Romantic focus probably diverted the Kantian stream of emphasis on free ethical action and the dignity of man into subterranean experiential caverns. The Romantic spirit dominated and Carlyle´s historical theory of hero-worship was transformed into race worship in which it was maintained that only the white man possessed the will power to build a cultural and political life(Gobineau). The black and yellow races, it was claimed, did not have the energy or the spirit for such work. Thus was born:

“the totalitarianism of race that prepared the way for the late concept of the totalitarian states”(Cassirer, The Myth of the State”).

Romanticism was opposed by Academic Philosophy and Science which, in its turn attempted to continue the project of Hobbes: subjecting politics to the scientific method. Psychology, instead of focusing on the Philosophical idea of action preferred to use a scientifically determined concept of behaviour which was value-neutral and for that very reason could not be used in the debate about the moral personality and the ethical imperative.

According to Arendt, the negative sub-currents of globalization transformed a doctrinal religious prejudice against the Jews into a racial prejudice which manifested itself into the anti-Semitism of the first political parties in Europe in the 1870s. For Gobineau, Kantian ethics and its categorical imperative with its universal condition and assumption of a universal moral personality was a contradiction of the facts: there was, it was argued, no universal ethical attitude or personality. Behind such conviction was a scientific and epistemological claim that only the facts would reveal whether such a personality was a reality. If the claim was that such a personality was a universal phenomenon it would suffice to use the scientific method and engage in scientific observation to detect one actual case in which this was not true. One case observed sufficed for the universal theory to collapse. But all this teaches us is that a scientific and epistemological claim searching for the truth is a very different kind of claim to an ethical judgment relating to the idea of the good which is behind all ethical action. The idea of the good situates us in what modern philosophers call the “ought-system of concepts” in which arguments are constructed in terms of an ought major premise and an ought in the conclusion. We ought to have ethical self-knowledge but the fact that many people do not is still consistent with the major premise that we all ought to develop ethical personalities and the conclusion that an individual ought to develop his moral personality, that, in other words, an individual has a duty to develop their moral personality.

Romanticism and the scientific imperative, together with the dissolution of religious and many other forms of authority, including the authority of institutions, produced what Freud called the “discontents of civilization” as well as the idea of a global cosmopolitan community that is the world historical equaivalent of a moral personality. Globalization does not mean the creation and maintenance of the commodious life styles promoted by Hobbes and his followers. Globalisation means many things but amongst these things we find moral and political attitudes that have been on the aims and objectives lists of both Aristotelian and Kantian moral and political Philosophy.

February 1, 2017June 12, 2018

Political Realism, Political idealism, Power and Justice: Security versus Human Rights

Political realism basically takes two forms but both forms deny, for different reasons, that politics is fundamentally related to ethical categorical reasoning(the basis of justice and human rights) and both forms would claim that instrumental reasoning of different kinds form the preliminary stage of action which is fundamentally to be measured by its consequences. The first form of political instrumentalism or consequentialism is encountered in Machiavelli’s thoughts. Machiavelli in his work “The Prince” attempts to provide pragmatic guidance for rulers, advice that is free from “lofty ideals”, and he claims that private morality and public morality are to be separated for a Prince who has the task of governing people. He recommended a kind of “situational governorship” in which , if the circumstances demanded it , one would be wholly justified in deceiving and killing the nobility of a country if they threatened the power of the ruler. This kind of recommendation has led some commentators to call this work a handbook in the art of criminal government. It is better he argued to be feared and loved than to be merely loved, or even worse, feared and hated. He adds that it is very difficult to be both feared and loved and that therefore the ruler should satisfy himself with being feared. This recognizably bears the marks of a realpolitik which refuses to think in terms of any kind of political or ethical idealism. Machiavelli believes that “idealism” means something which common sense “associates” with the notion of an “idea” which in the mind of the realist becomes strangely detached from the action which is guided by it. It is almost as if the realist believes that rationally based actions can proceed blindly and instinctively toward some goal or consequence. It is not surprising therefore that Machiavelli believes that it is important for the ruler to have knowledge of the manipulation of instinctively based emotions as well as knowledge of the Psychology of the people one rules. For example:

“Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by payments, and not by greatness or nobility of mind, may indeed be earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”(Machiavelli, The Prince)

And of course it it would be foolish to question a realist about whether the above description is a realistic description of the real situation he finds himself in.For the narcissistic realist that would be a sign that he is hated which in turn would require appropriate action on his part, namely punishment of his critic.

Hobbes is a a Political realist but with different more scientific assumptions and a scientific method: the resolutive-compositive method of Galileo which he uses to describe and explain mans political activities. He has in common with Machiavelli a simplistic Psychology which claims that the basic parts of man from his sensory-motor organs up to his memory, imagination, and reason all compose endeavours which are essentially in the service of mans appetites and aversions. Every voluntary action is determined by mans appetites and aversions(Hobbes, Leviathan). This composite consequence then entails a further consequence that man always seeks some power when living in communities which is determined by the amount by which his capacities, riches ,reputation and friends exceed those of other men. In simple societies like a state of nature, there are further consequences, the powers of men oppose each other. There is a struggle for power which can become violent resulting in a war of all against all because some mens desires are without limit:

“So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death.”

Because the war of all against all cannot produce peace and commodious living Hobbes envisages a conditional justification of distributing ones own personal power to that of a sovereign who assimilates all the power, in return for the absolute obedience of the citizen. The sovereign provides the conditions necessary for a bourgeois market driven society in which men continue to strive for power in an environment which banishes the omnipresence of death unless related to the threat of the sanction of the law if their desires are uncontrolled. For Hobbes, a mans value is quantified by his capacities, riches reputation and friends.

This is in stark contrast to the idealistic Kantian concept of man as an end in himself irrespective of his capacities, riches, reputation and friends. For Kant man does not have a market value because, even if we concede that this simplistic picture of man refers to the facts about man and his relation to other men and his society, values cannot logically be deduced from facts. An ought cannot be derived from an is without committing the naturalistic fallacy. This is the major reason why political idealism is closer to the truth than political realism but in itself is not the whole truth.

The salience of the above post for the events we are currently experiencing in Syria, the UK(the land of Hobbes) and the USA is the following. The world is experiencing the consequences of the disconnection of value-laden ideas to action. Political idealism maintains, for instance that the good intention behind the action, rather than the actions consequences, is “logically” related to to the action which it ontologically defines. If this it is correct, this is certainly an Aristotelian and Kantian position and it is one of the foundation stones of humanistic liberalism. From this view of action we derive our views of justice and human rights. This view certainly rests on psychological or anthropological conditions far more complex than we see in either of Hobbes’ or Machiavelli’s theories which are fundamentally individualistic or egocentric in Hobbes’s case and narcissistic in Machiavelli’s case. These are the theories that allow us adopt an attitude which allows us to sign and support executive orders affecting a significant proportion of the Muslim world, an executive order whose major motivation is consequentialist: allowing the most powerful nation in the world to feel safe in the face of, relatively speaking, small numbers of terrorists.

January 30, 2017June 12, 2018

“An unjust law is no law at all”(St Augustine)

The above quote sprang to mind whilst viewing CNN : Zakharia Fareed’s GPS on the 29th January 2017.

A panel of participants were discussing the legal action taken by the ACLU against the temporary anti-immigration decree signed into force by President Trump earlier in the week. A legal representative for the ACLU outlined the complex and convincing argument which resulted in a high court judge temporarily mitigating the decrees’ more devastating consequences for some of the groups of people affected. The point was made that the decree violated firstly, the constitution, secondly , the right to due process under the law, thirdly, some legislation relating to discrimination against religious groups, and fourthly, treaties such as the Geneva convention which have been signed by America and give all refugees the right of asylum in the country. The implication being made was that the decree was an anti-Muslim measure.

Another legal expert countered the ACLU position with the view that, given the history of judgments from the US court system, it was highly unlikely that the action would succeed simply because there had been a history of discriminatory legal judgments against minority groups including the Chinese which still stand as precedents in the legal system today. It was also claimed that President Obama had during his presidency taken up this very issue of the courts “second guessing” the government on national security issues. The legal expert countering the ACLU expert claimed that he did not approve of the decree but was basically arguing that the law was the law and with respect to the issue of anti-Muslim discrimination this would not be the court’s position in view of the fact that some Muslim countries were excluded from the decree.

The next panel participant was a lady who had been a Middle Eastern correspondent and claimed, that under the temporary anti-immigration decree she would be prevented from entering the USA, as would Fareed if he left and decided to return. Her argument basically was that “an unjust law is not a law at all”. She went on to make another point about White supremacy and made the connection to the Trump government via the new head of national security Steve Bannon who, it was claimed, previously edited a right wing media outlet. She was very articulate and being an ex-debate coach I likened her performance to a speech in a debating competition. I absolutely agree with her that the problem with the argument she was attacking was that it was completely ignoring the humanistic element of the whole issue.(CNN had immediately prior to GPS been showing the crowds of demonstrators at a large number of airports up and down the US). But in defence of the legal expert perhaps his assignment from CNN was merely to respond to the ACLU court action. In good debating tradition the legal expert that she had attacked was allowed to respond but in doing so he completely ignored her major argument that this was a constitutional and humanistic issue transcending the actual practice and precedent of law. She was admonished for categorising 47% of the voters as white supremacists and also for letting her passions get the better of her reason.

I would like to argue that, from a humanistic liberal point of view ,the Middle East expert had a perfectly legitimate argument which was ignored and which goes all the way back to St Augustine who argued that the actual law must meet criteria of divine or eternal law if it is to be a just law at all. If we move forward into the realm of philosophy from the realm of religion and apply St Augustine’s quote in this new context , Kant(an enlightenment philosopher)would definitely say that any law which was not in accordance with the moral law, e.g. did not respect people’s freedom as an end in itself, was not a bona fide law at all. For Kant, then, the moral law was intimately connected to freedom and freedom could only be restricted if it encroached upon the freedom of others. He is often accused of being very formal and logical in his characterisation of the moral law but he concretises his first abstract formation of the moral law with the demand that we “act in accordance with the humanity in ourselves and others by never treating anyone solely as a means but always also as an end in themselves”. Philosophers during the Enlightenment and since have also been very quick to point out that no legal law can change the moral law but the moral law has very often in history served as the corrector of unjust laws. Move beyond the enlightenment to the civil rights demonstrations in the US led by Martin Luther King and you will find a concrete example of what I am saying. Martin Luther King referred to the moral law in his arguments and used St Augustine’s quote.

Earlier during the evening on a CNN report, a senior democrat had used the image of the statue of liberty weeping in connection with the temporary anti-immigration decree. I know the lady statue of justice is blindfolded but when the Middle East expert was neutralised because of her “passion” it was like hearing the statue of justice wailing and then witnessing her being gagged, at least in respect of this one very important argument. This for me illustrated the success of the Trump media campaign in “scaring” reporters away from the philosophically important humanistic issues that are involved here. This phenomenon also occurred throughout the election campaign and is continuing. Reference was made to the fact that Fox news was the preferred channel for the Trump team and I am truly sorry if this criticism of CNN drives even one viewer in that direction because, in my opinion CNN is the channel that is succumbing the least of all American channels to all attempts to neutralise the media.

I do not know what the outcome of the court action will be considering the fact that supreme court justices are politically appointed, but if the decree stands then we will indeed be faced with the reality of living with an unjust law in this ,the 21st century in the USA. The law and morality will be split apart and only mass demonstrations of the magnitude of the civil rights marches last century will restore the marriage. However, even if that is the case in the meantime there is still the very real issue of the confusion created at airports because of the lack of communication concerning which groups of people were and which groups of people were not to be screened or allowed entry.

Just a footnote concerning the relation of the President to reality. At the same time as the mass demonstrations were being televised at airports in the US, the President claimed that things were going “very nicely”. The key philosophical issue here is how to correctly describe and explain the phenomenon we are presented with. I saw no comment on the media about the Presidents statement. This inversion of the good and the bad, the truth and the false by Trump and his team is a tactic that has wrong-footed the mass media for more than 6 months now and it is time for them to attend to their footwork and live up to the expectations that all have of the 4th estate.

January 29, 2017June 12, 2018

The Banality of Authoritarian leadership

The title of this post attempts to echo a comment by Hannah Arendt in her book on Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. In this work she claims that after examination of all the interview material with Psychologists and other officials, and after witnessing the events of the trial, one can draw no other conclusion about the personality and character of Eichmann than that he merely was not able to think. This opinion flew in the face of the prevailing discussion which tended toward a religious categorization of what happened in terms of the evil of Eichmann’s actions and character. The comment “the banality of evil” seemed to many Jews to trivialize what had happened in the holocaust exactly because they believed strongly that a religious idea of the sacred served as the standard by which to measure a man and his actions. To a Philosopher who characterizes the humanity of a man in terms of his/her ability to think, however, the accusation has exactly equivalent dramatic value. Someone who fails to think in accordance with the basic categories of morality appears less than human. Popular opinion might even think of such people as monsters(rather than devils: but are not devils a kind of monster?).

So what is the evidence for judging that current political leaders might have difficulties with the capacity of thought in general but in particular with ethical thought? In an interview on television shown on CNN on the 26th January 2017, it was argued by the President of the USA that he believed that torture should be used on suspected terrorists and the reason he gave for his belief concerning the truth of his claim is that people in his intelligence agencies have told him that torture works. This was a somewhat surprising admission given an earlier claim that one of his own newly chosen cabinet ministers with extensive military experience had provided him with arguments that torture is not a good idea. Other commentators have pointed out that torture is in fact against the law of the country and a change in the law would be needed if it was to be a possible anti-terrorist strategy. I am not sure whether it was part of the same argument or a separate section of the interview but the President also seemed to be arguing that there was so much hate in the world that the decision to torture terrorists would not worsen matters noticeably. One is reminded here of the view of every humanist since Buddha that violence breeds more violence, that the policy of an eye for an eye would lead to a world of blind people trying to find their way to their destinations. It appears then that we have at least one current world leader who responds emotionally to both “sound bites” and images of the sizes of inauguration audiences without any thought or critical capacity. Of course it would be foolish to suggest that this leader is like Eichmann, the mass murderer in all respects or even most respects. The argument is only that there is sufficient resemblance between the banality of Eichmann’s behaviour as recorded in his pre-trial testimony and his witnessed court room behaviour and the banality of pre-and post inauguration behaviour of the latest President of the USA. The most obvious difference between Eichmann and Trump is, of course that Eichmann was merely a cog in the Nazi machine being directed by a larger cog higher up the chain. But for those of us who still read books, having ones life run by sound bites and television images is represented very well by the image of cogs blindly turning other cogs.

Indeed it might be the very banality of the behaviour and language of morally confused people that causes a mist of confusion to descend upon everyone in their vicinity and which allows a popular “acceptance” of alternative moral positions.

The danger of relativizing morality is that the next stage in that process is to believe that the law can be manipulated in the same way in which one manipulates other people. The law becomes another cog in the machine. Not to mention the fact that we have another leader to the East who cares little for International law and who has been characterized as delusional in relation to his behaviour in the Ukraine. The President of the USA wishes peaceful relations with this warmonger and it is not difficult to see why. The apprentice may be seeking a master in the arena of the manipulation of nations. He may be seeking to be a larger cog in a larger machine.

January 28, 2017June 12, 2018

The Open Society and its enemies

“The Open Society and its enemies” is a two volume work by Karl Popper claiming that Plato, Hegel and Marx were the enemies of open societies. I am not sure that this is fair judgment of Plato’s political ideas since many of these are still used as a standard by which to measure justice in societies today. Plato was definitely not a liberal but many humanistic liberals have sought and found inspiration in his dialogues. It should also be remembered that Plato’s “Republic” is the first systematic attempt to analyse political ideas such as justice and freedom. Since I have, in earlier posts, raised the question of whether humanistic liberalism is in the process of being dismantled by current events in the UK and USA it might be useful to use some of Plato’s ideas to analyse the phenomenon of Mr Donald Trump in terms of the idea of being an enemy of the open society. The BBC in a short critical presentation compares some of Plato’s criticism of classical Greek direct democracy with what is currently happening in the USA. According to the BBC’s presentation of Plato, when parents are no longer respected by their children and when teachers become afraid of their students a tyrant from the oligarchs will emerge to tempt the people with promises that he will solve all their problems and deliver a better life. Now one of the reasons why our liberal democracies are representative and not direct democracies is partly to eliminate the phenomenon of the tyrant via a system of representative democracy which functions in accordance with the classical Greek idea of areté. Areté means excellence when referring to action and virtuous when referring to an agent and involved in this idea is the message of the Republic which is that no one can govern in accordance with areté unless one has the appropriate knowledge. The warning bells relating to President Trumps lack of practical wisdom and competence have been ringing all through his campaign. A stable liberal representative democracy would have heeded the significance of these bells and any candidate should have been stopped in their tracks by the collective tonnage of rational argument in the media and through the collective tonnage of resultant public demonstrations. Now unfortunately the media did not fulfill its obligations in this respect and demonstrations only reached significant proportions the day after Trump was inaugurated.

In classical Greece during the time of the philosophers, a man of practical wisdom could stand in the market place and his arguments be heard and understood. I do not think the media are the only party to blame for the current chaotic situation because I am sure they will maintain that the argument that Trump was not qualified for the position of the Presidency was presented adequately to an audience that refused to listen or understand. Plato, suggested in the Republic as a definition of Justice in the State, a principle of specialisation in which he claims that people of the wealthy class should not interfere with the ruling class and furthermore the wealthy man should never rule for fear of the corruption of the office through abuse of power in for example, favouring his friends and family. But the real bite of the principle of specialisation relates to areté, the excellence of the rulers political wisdom, and in this respect the medias argument is a poor one because quite simply the sound bites we heard in the media interviews of Trump never achieved the level of practical wisdom, never were in accordance with areté, the excellence we expect from a President and his interrogators. One of the messages of the Republic was that training and thorough education was of vital importance for the rulers but since Ronald Reagan one must assume that the Republic of the USA no longer believes in that idea. Perhaps the future will see the birth of the concept of the apprentice President.

January 26, 2017June 12, 2018

Political Responsibility

Paul Ricoeur, the late French Philosopher, would have been fascinated by the twistings and turnings of current events in two of the bastions of political liberalism: the UK and the USA. His ethically based political theory reaches back to the Greeks and Aristotle, the Enlightenment and Kant, and engages with contemporary theories of Justice as manifested by the debates between Rawls and Nozick, Habermas and Gadamer. Ricoeur’s primary claim is that Politics is vitally important to the well being of us all, yet it is simultaneously surprisingly fragile. Both of these factors, he argues entails that we owe it to politics to act and vote responsibly. In particular we owe a complex allegiance to our body politic which involves both respecting the status quo which has given us so much, and respecting those that criticize the status quo for its inadequacies to deliver the flourishing lives we all hope for. Ricoeur analyses political discourse and finds a number of dialectical processes operating. Among them is that between the utopia we hope for and the values of the ideological factors that constitute the status quo which historically has provided us with so much stability and prosperity. We need to maintain a delicate balance between these two factors in our political acts and political talk. Politics, he argues, is a unique arena which requires the mastery of a unique set of capacities amongst which good judgment and sound reasoning are paramount. Ricoeur refers to a number of other paradoxes which constitute the fragility of political life including the problem of transference, i.e. the problem of people from other arenas of life bringing the capacities that they use in those arenas, into politics. Two arenas which immediately spring to mind in relation to this point are the arenas of business with its practices of wheeling and dealing and contractual “interpretations” and the arenas of science with its theoretically oriented practices, manipulation of variables and experimental reductionism and verification. To appreciate the differences for example between the business world and the political world it suffices to compare the stability and longevity of the institutions of business (a company or a bank) with the longevity and stability of political institutions like the legislative system or the educational system.Running a country is nothing like running a chain of hotels. Ricoeur’s criticisms of populism would point to the role of facts in the sound reasoning process. Without facts which by definition are true beliefs, reasoning cannot proceed to sound conclusions. Subjecting facts to an “interpretative process” might enable voters to vote for popular people with what they perceive to be unique interpretative and rhetorical abilities but time is going to reveal the consequences of such voting for the political system. Some commentators are arguing that we can forget about the dialectic between a better more hopeful future and the present status quo. What is at stake is a dismantling of the political status quo in favor of an economic roller coaster ride ending at an unknown destination.

Such is the fragility of the political process and the nature of our responsibility toward it.

January 19, 2017June 12, 2018

The Dismantling of Humanistic liberalism?

It must be difficult for both journalists and academics to describe and explain what has happened in the world over the past 6 months. Two of the bastions of liberalism, the United Kingdom and the USA have both radically changed their political direction. Brexit and the election of Donald Trump were not just unexpected because of a miscalculation of the values of a number of variables. These events were unexpected because a number of variables suddenly became irrelevant and a number of new variables seemingly appeared on our horizons. One of the variables which almost overnight seemed to become irrelevant, and which had become part of the framework of political expectations in all developed nations since the Age of the Enlightenment, was that of Globalization. Whether it be the global exchange of ideas or of goods and services no expert or group of experts could have foreseen that these processes would be displaced by populist slogans such as “Make America Great again ” or “Let us take control of our country again” which in their turn led people to vote for the least likely of a pair of alternatives. The analysis of the reasons for our modern predicament by journalists and the more popularly inclined academics who appear constantly in our media refer to an interesting number of factors which possibly could help to describe exactly what has happened, but no systematic attempt has yet been made to explain the phenomena which have recently presented themselves. The ground swell of attitudes and opinions that were leading us toward Globalization, or what Kant referred to as Cosmopolitanism, suddenly were affected by the two seismic events referred to above and the whole Project of the Enlightenment, namely the moral progress of the world appears to have been stopped in its course. The two world wars and the cold war of the last “terrible century”(Hannah Arendt) failed to permanently alter the agenda of the Enlightenment. Since then we have had over 70 years of Kantian progress which included the formation of the United Nations and the European Union. Humanistic liberalism seemed to have triumphed and the hundred thousand year journey which Kant predicted appeared to be much closer to fulfillment than expected. I do not believe that the phenomena of Brexit and Trump defy analysis but I do believe that we do not as yet have an analysis of why what happened, happened. The academic and political project of humanistic liberalism has suffered a setback. Some have claimed that this project is in the process of being dismantled. If this is the case one can well wonder whether this century is merely going to be a continuation in spirit of the previous century.

Michael James

"The world explored, the world suffered" Philosophy Blog:-Lectures, Journals, Book Reviews, and Discussion forums(MichaelRDJames)

Posts

Montesquieu, Arendt, The Principle of action, Existentialism, Loneliness and Totalitarian Government.

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Freud, Philosophy, Humanism and Science.(Philosophical Psychology)

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Modern Times and Representative versus Direct Democracy

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Political identity and Common Sense

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Expecting the unexpected: the UK elections and the absence of the middle ground

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Cosmopolitanism, Globalization, Human Rights and Immigration.

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The Meaninglessness of Terror

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The Pathological Nation-State and the European Project

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The disintegration of Political Institutions: Populism, Science, Psychology, and Humanistic Liberalism

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When Humanistic voices fall silent(Philosophy of Education)

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Humanistic liberalism and the law(Politics,the ethical imperative, and the law)

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Origins of Globalization, Totalitarianism, and the Ethical Imperative.

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Political Realism, Political idealism, Power and Justice: Security versus Human Rights

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“An unjust law is no law at all”(St Augustine)

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The Banality of Authoritarian leadership

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The Open Society and its enemies

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Political Responsibility

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The Dismantling of Humanistic liberalism?

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