Category Archives: philosophy

the future, in utilitarianism and pragmatism

In 1993, Cornel West wrote that “the future has ethical significance” for pragmatists. “In fact, the key to pragmatism, the distinctive feature that sets it apart from other philosophical traditions—and maybe its unique American character—is its emphasis on the ethical significance of the future” (West 1993, 111). He quotes John Dewey and Josiah Royce to that effect.

At first glance, this claim seems mistaken. What about utilitarianism, which teaches that an act, policy, rule, or institution is good to the extent that it improves happiness in the future?

For philosophers, utilitarianism is a type of consequentialism. In general, consequentialism focuses on the future by assuming that our responsibility is to make things better in the long run. Utilitarianism is the version that equates “better” with greater net happiness. Therefore, isn’t utilitarianism as much concerned with the “ethical significance of the future” as pragmatism is? And isn’t pragmatism a form of consequentialism?

I agree with West that pragmatism has a distinctive focus on the future. Utilitarians believe that we know today the criterion for evaluating future states. We already know what happiness is, and we will find out later whether our current actions promote future happiness. Our concern with the future requires predicting the effects of the present on outcomes that we value today.

In contrast, pragmatists presume that values will change as a result of continuous learning. We cannot know today the criteria by which the outcomes of our present acts will later be judged.

Dewey writes that the “present meaning of action” is the “only good which can fully engage thought.” He is against measuring this present meaning in terms of “a remote good” or “future good,” whether that “be defined as pleasure, or perfection, or salvation, or attainment of virtuous character.” This sounds like a focus on the present to the exclusion of the future. But Dewey adds:


‘Present’ activity is not a sharp narrow knife-blade in time. The present is complex, containing within itself a multitude of habits and impulses. It is enduring, a course of action, a process including memory, observation and foresight, a pressure forward, a glance backward and a look outward. It is of moral moment because it marks a transition in the direction of breadth and clarity of action or in that of triviality and confusion. Progress is present reconstruction adding fullness and distinctness of meaning, and retrogression is a present slipping away of significance, determinations, grasp. Those who hold that progress can be perceived and measured only by reference to a remote goal, first confuse meaning with space, and then treat spatial position as absolute, as limiting movement instead of being bounded in and by movement. There are plenty of negative elements, due to conflict, entanglement and obscurity, in most of the situations of life, and we do not require a revelation of some supreme perfection to inform us whether or no we are making headway in present rectification. We move on from the worse and into, not just towards, the better, which is authenticated not by comparison with the foreign but in what is indigenous. Unless progress is a present reconstructing, it is nothing; if it cannot be told by qualities belonging to the movement of transition it can never be judged (Dewey 1922, 281-2)

This is rich but abstract. For me, at least, Ruth Ann Putnam helps make Dewey’s view more concrete. She defines “inquiry” as a process that begins when we perceive a problem—something that requires action. “Values typically enter into the beginning of an inquiry on an equal footing with facts,” and they emerge on an equal footing as well, but potentially changed by being explored and compared by groups of people. She writes: “the facts are value-laden, and the values are fact-laden” (Putnam 1998, 7).

See also: explaining Dewey’s pragmatism; Dewey and the current toward democracy; a John Dewey primer. Sources: Cornel West, “Pragmatism and the Sense of the Tragic,” in Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (1993): 96-106; John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (Henry Holt, 1922); Ruth Ann Putnam, “Perceiving Facts and Values,” Philosophy 73, no. 283 (January 1988): 5–19

nostalgia in the face of political crisis

Amid the barrage of bad news about US politics, I frequently find myself nostalgic.

Sometimes, it’s for the recent past–for last summer, when we were on a family vacation and Kamala Harris seemed to be surging; or the eve of last fall’s election, when I spoke dispassionately about polarization at American and Colgate universities; or even last month, when we thought that Trump might prove more feckless than reckless.

Other times, my nostalgia reaches further back, to the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, when this white, male, college-educated, fairly moderate American felt that the republic was secure and the public’s values were evolving for the better with each new generation. That underlying optimism was one reason I spent most of the next 20 years focused on promoting youth civic engagement.

If I wish to return to when I felt better about politics, that means that I want to go back to being naive; and we shouldn’t want that for ourselves. Nor is nostalgia reliable. In the past, not everything was dappled sunlight on a late-afternoon lawn–certainly not for people less fortunate than me.

Near the beginning of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera’s narrator says that everything is bathed in nostalgia in the face of dissolution, even the guillotine. He’s discussing Nietzsche’s trope of the Eternal Return. If we believed that the French Revolutionary Terror would recur cyclically, we would fear it. Because we know that it has passed, we bathe it in nostalgia. Our deepest fear is the passage of time, because events do not recur endlessly for us. They move permanently into the past as our time runs out.

Nostalgia can be a way of grasping at the self, trying to trap that ghost in a display case. As such, it is better avoided, regardless of its cause. As for political nostalgia, it is a common ground of reactionary politics.

A related word is “envy.” In his Theses on the Philosophy of History (#2), Walter Benjamin notes that we never envy the future. He says that happiness that makes us envious is connected to our past. We seek redemption by wishing to recover (sometimes from other people) what we already experienced. A worthy redemption, however, requires a change for the better. Political progress brings a better future into the present and thereby imparts a new meaning to what happened in the past. “For every second of time [is] the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.”

This is a pretentious and roundabout way of saying that what matters is not what used to be but what we do now to improve the world that we are in.

See also: phenomenology of nostalgia; nostalgia for now; Martin Luther King’s philosophy of time

20th-century political philosophy syllabus

I will be teaching 20th-century political philosophy as a new course this spring. One could choose many different readings for such a course. My list reflects my own interests, to some extent, plus some advocacy by the prospective students. Just as an example, Tufts’ political theory students tend to study Nietzsche intensively, so I have omitted Nietzsche from the “background” part of this syllabus.

Jan. 16: Introduction to the course (we’ll look together at “W.H. Auden’s September 1, 1939”)

Part I: Background

(A review of five major schools of thought that were already well developed before 1914 and that most subsequent authors knew and addressed.)

Jan. 21: Liberalism

  • John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), chapters 1 and 2

Jan. 23: Liberalism

  • Mill (1859), chapters 3-5

Jan. 28: Marxism

Jan. 30: Psychoanalysis

  • A dream from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). [It is the dream about Count Thun, discussed by Carl Schorske, and I provide a version with my own explanatory notes.]
  • Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930), chapters 3, 7 and 8. (The rest is recommended but not required.)

Feb. 4: Modernity

  • Max Weber, Economy and Society. Ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittic. New York: Bedminster Press, 1922/1968, excerpts from around pp. 223 and pp. 956ff.
  • Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism, trans. by Talcott Parsons (1930), pp. 13-38, 102-125
  • [Not required, but an interesting take: Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity (2001)]

Feb 6: Faith and/or nation

PART II: Responses

Feb. 11: Friedrich Hayek 

  • The Constitution of Liberty, chapter 1, pp. 11-21, chapter  4, pp. 54-71and postscript, “Why I am not a conservative”
  • Chapter 2, Creative Powers of a Free Civilization, 18 pages
  • “Errors of Constructivism,” from The Market and Other Orders, 19 pages 
  • “Engineers and Planners,” from Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason, 13 pages

Feb. 13: Isaiah Berlin

  • “Two Concepts of Liberty”

Feb. 18: Marxism after Marx

Feb. 25: Fascism

  • Benito Mussolini (1883-1945): The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)
  • Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, pp. 19-22, 25-52, 53-58, 78-79

Feb. 27: Pragmatism I: John Dewey

March. 4:  Pragmatism II: other authors

  • Sidney Hook, “The Democratic Way of Life” 
  • Cornel West, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (1994), Chapter 7: Pragmatism and the Sense of the Tragic

March 6: W.E.B. DuBois

  • Black Reconstruction in America (1935), pp. 55-83, 182-202, 210-219, 711-731

March 11: The Frankfurt School

March 25: Hannah Arendt

  • Excerpts from On Revolution  (1963)

March 27: Hannah Arendt

  • The Human Condition, chapters II and V

March April 1: Simone de Beauvoir

  • The Second Sex, trans. by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier (1949/2011), pp. 23-39, 83-5, 330-360, 848-863

April 3: Frantz Fanon

  • The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Richard Philcox (1961/2004), the preface by J.-P. Sartre and Parts I-IV and the Conclusion.

April 8: Michel Foucault

  • Excerpts from History of Sexuality and/or Discipline and Punish [To be selected]

April 10: late Foucault

  • “What Our Present Is” (1981), from The Politics of Truth 
  • “What Is Critique?” in James Schmidt, From What Is Enlightenment?
  • Course Descriptions from the Collège de France 
  • “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom”
  • “Technologies of the Self (pp. 145-169) in The Essential Foucault
  • “The Subject and Power” (pp. 126-144 in The Essential Foucault
  • “Truth and Power” (1976) in The Essential Foucault   pp. 300-18

April 15: Jürgen Habermas

  • “The Public Sphere” 
  • “Legitimation Crisis”

April 17:  Habermas

  • Between Facts and Norms, pp. 17-23  and 38-41 and pp. 359-379 

April 22: Left open to pursue gaps we have identified (or else texts from the Habermas-Foucault debate]

April 24: Concluding discussion

Cuttings: Ninety-Nine Essays About Happiness

Cuttings is a book in progress that consists of 99 essays about the inner life: about suffering, happiness, compassion, and related themes. I first posted each of the essays on this blog, which is 22 years old today and has accumulated more than 2,400 posts. I’ve selected the contents of Cuttings carefully from this archive, revised most of the essays substantially, and arranged them so that there is a small and meaningful step between each one. In the last three years, I have written some new posts to fill gaps that I perceive in the overall structure. I believe that the architecture is now pretty solid.

Michel de Montaigne is the hero; I seek to emulate his skeptical, curious, humane mind. Like Montaigne, I talk about books, but my library is different from his. Cuttings includes short essays about Montaigne himself, early Buddhist texts, Greek philosophers, Keats and Blake, Hopkins and Stevens, phenomenologists from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty, Arendt and Benjamin, and Hilary Mantel and Ann Carson, among others.

I am releasing the third edition today–a substantial revision from last year, but not yet the final one. You can find the book here as a Google doc. I have also posted it as an .epub file, which will open directly in many e-readers. Alternatively, you could download the .epub to a computer or phone and then use this Amazon page to send it with one click to your own Kindle.

As always, comments are welcome and really the best reward for me.

on defining movements and categorizing people: the case of 68ers

In 1968: Radical Protest and its Enemies (HarperCollins, 2018), Richard Vinen describes the ideals and mores of people he calls “68ers.” (He discusses the USA, France, Germany, and Britain and acknowledges that he omits Mexico, Czechoslovakia, and other parts of the world where the events of 1968 were probably more consequential.) For him, the 68ers include Black Panthers in Oakland, Maoist professors in Parisian grandes écoles, striking French industrial workers in shrinking factories, Berlin squatters, and more.

How should we define such a meaningful but heterogeneous category? A similar challenge may emerge when we try to define any religious or aesthetic movement or historical period. This is not only a scholarly but also a practical issue, because words like “68er”–or “expressionist,” or “fundamentalist”–can be used to motivate or to criticize. We should be able to assess whether such words apply.

One option is to apply a general scheme. For instance, 68ers were on the left. That statement invokes the ideological spectrum that originated in the French Revolution. But 68ers often differentiated themselves from the Old Left, and both sides in that debate claimed to be further left than the other.

One could define the spectrum independently and then use the definition to settle the question of how far left the 68ers stood–but surely they did not agree with each other. Nor would they all endorse anyone else’s definition of the ideological spectrum. They devoted considerable attention to debating issues (with their opponents and among themselves) such as race, sexuality, violence, Israel, and voting. Where specific views of these matters fall on the left-right spectrum seems hard to establish without taking a substantive political position.

Another option is to use an exogenous characteristic that is directly observable to define the category. For example, surely 68ers were college students during the year 1968–hence, early Baby Boomers. But most college students were not 68ers (by any definition of that term), and some classic 68ers were considerably older or had never gone to college. Even the founders of Students for a Democratic Society were as old as 32 (Vinen, p. 30), and many important 68ers were industrial workers.

A third option is to use concrete behavior to define the category. Maybe 68ers are those who participated in mass protests during the year 1968. But the largest protest in Paris was in support of de Gaulle and the regime. Some classic 68ers never literally protested. Probably few thought that the act of protesting defined their movement. And “1968” was not constrained by the calendar year. Vinen thinks that most of Britain’s ’68 took place during the 1970s. The “hard hat riot”–in favor of the Vietnam War — took place a bit late (May 1970) but is still part of Vinen’s narrative.

A common approach in the social sciences would be to treat “68er” as a latent construct that can be detected statistically. Imagine a survey with numerous items: “Do you have a poster of Che on your wall?” “Would you abolish prisons?” “Do you live in a commune?” “Do you like the main characters in Bonnie and Clyde?” After many putative 68ers had completed the survey, researchers would use techniques like factor-analysis to detect patterns. The data might show that an individual’s aggregate score on a small set of the questions defines the category of interest. Then we would have a reliable “68er scale.”

I think that kind of method is helpful, but it cannot be presented as innocent of concepts. We might ask about communes and Che Guevara because we already have a loose mental model of a 68er. We wouldn’t ask people their favorite flavors of ice cream. If we did, and the answer happened to correlate with the whole scale, we would treat that result that as a curiosity, not part of the definition of a 68er. But, if we asked about food and found out that 68ers ate lentils, that would be meaningful. Evidently, we must already know something about what a 68er is as we draft the survey. What is already in our minds?

My own view would build on Wittgenstein’s notion of a family resemblance. In Philosophical Investigations (67), he writes, “the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and cris-cross in the same way.” He’s arguing that many useful words point to groups of objects that need not all share any single feature but that tend to share features from a list, much as a surname can point to a cluster of people who tend to display some of the same physical characteristics. (“Lots of the Joneses have curly red hair.”) Statistical procedures like cluster analysis can point to these resemblances.

But we know why physical features recur in families: DNA. Why would certain musical choices, political opinions, recreational drugs, hairstyles, and career choices cluster to form the group that we identify as 68ers? Is there an underlying cause?

I think of it this way: Each person holds many beliefs and values. Ideas come and go, and individuals hold them with various degrees of confidence. But ideas are not independent of each other. People think one thing and conclude something else as a result, thus linking two of their beliefs with a reason. For example, they might start by liking Joan Baez and come to oppose the Vietnam War, or vice versa. But there are many ways to put ideas together, and few do it in just the same way. You could hold a strongly anti-authoritarian premise that takes you to anarchism or to capitalism. You could begin by opposing the Vietnam War and find yourself against capitalism or against the state. (I’ve known some Boomer libertarians for whom Vietnam was the formative experience.)

Thus a group like the 68ers (and many others) consists of a cluster of people with a family resemblance, but the reasons that connect their individual beliefs and values together tend to recur, and they recur for discernible reasons. In that sense, a satisfactory account of the group is a list of many of their common specific beliefs and values plus a discussion of the ways that they tend to fit together. The resulting map will not describe everyone but it will capture some of the common patterns and explain on what basis members of the group disagree with each other.

See also: Levine, P. (2024). People are not Points in Space: Network Models of Beliefs and Discussions. Critical Review, 1–27 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2024.2344994