Category Archives: philosophy

to whom do the ancient Greeks belong?

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There has been some valuable debate about the diversity of the authors on the syllabus of the Summer Institute of Civic Studies. A participant noted, in particular, that Aristotle is mentioned over and over again in the readings. Is that a sign that the scope of the authors is too narrow for the 21st century world?

It could be. My own views on that question are complex and unsettled. But I think it is worth thinking seriously about the identity of a person like Aristotle.

On one hand, he was (to use our terms) a white man. He spoke an Indo-European language and lived in a country that currently belongs to the EU; in fact, his countrymen invented the idea of “Europe” as distinct from “Asia.” He was the tutor of another white man, Alexander, who conquered Egypt, Mesopotamia, and northern India. Aristotle’s thought deeply influenced Greco-Roman civilization and then was grafted onto Western Christian thought (especially after 1100) so that he now provides core ideas for Catholicism and some of its Protestant offshoots. So he is quintessentially Western.

On the other hand, Aristotle lived in a culture strikingly remote from our own. If we are individualistic, materialistic, technocratic, and used to mass societies, he came from a world of tightly integrated, deeply pious, zealously communitarian city-states. He lived in the eastern Mediterranean, influencing and studying cultures in countries that we now call the “Middle East.” The idea of whiteness had yet to be invented in his era. His thought arrived in the Christian world via Islamic authors who had made heavy use of him while hardly anyone in what we now call “the West” knew anything about him. The main entry point for his thought into the Catholic world was the Spain of the “tres culturas” (Islam, Christianity, and Judaism). Today, he is more likely to be studied deeply in Shiite Iran or in a Catholic seminary in Bolivia than in the United States.

I do not dismiss the argument that a syllabus in which most of the authors refer to Aristotle is too narrow. But I do dispute the idea that Aristotle is somehow “ours” (where “we” are Westerners) and doesn’t also belong to the rest of the world.

See also Jesus was a person of color; avoiding the labels of East and West; when East and West were one; on modernity and the distinction between East and West.

friendship and politics

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Last week, one session of the Summer Institute of Civic Studies was devoted to friendship, and the assignments were:

  • Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy, pp. 3-35, pp. 163-82, 290-8
  • Danielle E. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown, v. Board of Education, pp 140-186

When people treat one another as friends, interactions have a special quality. This is not a naive point, for people want to have friendships and will sometimes put the development and maintenance of their friendships above other goals. Aristotle observed as much.*

One might suspect that only some cultures cultivate friendships that are strong enough to make people check their conflicting self-interests. We might find people acting as friends among the ruling classes of classical city-states, but surely not in atomized and materialistic America.

Based in part on the great book by Mansbridge assigned for this session, I would propose instead that whether people act as friends depends on the immediate situation. When interactions are sustained and face-to-face (or possibly online, given sufficient bandwidth); when interests are not too starkly opposed or the stakes are reasonably low; and when groups are tolerably small, modern Americans will put friendship ahead of narrow interests and will work hard and skillfully to preserve friendship.

For instance, I hypothesize that a group like the Summer Institute itself (22 activists and scholars from six countries, gathered for 63 hours of seminar time), if asked to plan a recreational activity for themselves, would be primarily concerned with preserving their friendship. They would, for instance, be reluctant to put options for activities to a vote. If time pressures forced them to vote, they would be highly uncomfortable to see a minority disappointed and would–at a minimum–seek to acknowledge and regret their sacrifice. (Allen’s book is focused on sacrifice and how to repair it). If even one person said that he could not participate in a given activity (for instance, he couldn’t go on boat ride because of sea-sickness), that idea would instantly be retracted. On the other hand, if an individual simply didn’t like a given activity, he would be unlikely to say so because expressions of self-interest would make him look like a bad friend.

We didn’t actually assign the exercise of choosing a recreational activity, because it seems better for members of the Institute to make individual choices about how to spend their weekends. But we talked about how such a conversation would likely go, and the predictions seemed insightful to me.

Two big questions are:

  1. How can we create a degree of friendship in larger and less stable communities than the Summer Institute, or when the stakes are higher? Allen advocates “talking to strangers” in the US, to build sufficient friendship that we can govern ourselves justly. That requires, among other things, changes in the ways our cities are planned and our children assigned to schools. I doubt that Mansbridge would disagree, but her argument is that politics-as-friendship only works under certain objective circumstances, and when it is impractical, it is better to govern through explicitly adversarial politics.
  2. To what extent should friendship be a normative ideal? Philia may be a virtue, as Aristotle said, but it trades off against other virtues, such as freedom and equality. For instance, when trying to be friends, people may hide genuine interests that they should be free to express and act on. And that suppression may not play out equally.

Background on the two assigned books

Mansbridge emerged from the New Left of the 1960s and 70s, where she observed small groups , “appear[ing] everywhere like fragile bubbles” that had certain features in common. Decisions were made in face-to-face meetings, after much discussion, when someone expressed the consensus of the group. There were no formal distinctions among participants or offices. And there was a strong norm against making self-interested statements.

These forms seemed naïve from the perspective of what Mansbridge calls “adversary democracy,” which presumes that interests conflict and there must be winners and losers in decisions. Yet they seemed to work somewhat well and to have certain advantages.

She studied two examples. Helpline is a commune of the New Left: urban, somewhat racially diverse, aimed at social change. The other case is a Vermont Town Meeting in a rural, socially conservative white community. They differ, too, in that Helpline codifies the principles of “unitary democracy,” whereas Selby has official votes and office-holders and exercises powers granted by the state. And yet Mansbridge finds many similar practices.

This leads her to generalizations about where and when “unitary democracy” can work. She also finds convergence between the two examples.

Allen begins with the observation that democracy requires sacrifice. Some lose when others gain, and the losses are not fairly distributed. Her question is how you can build some kind of “friendship” when some must sacrifice?

Her friendly critique of Habermas: He explains why people will speak with reciprocity if they are in a setting where they are aiming for consensus, but not why they would enter such a space in the first place. She writes,“Friendship is not an emotion, but a practice, a set of hard-won, complicated habits that are used to bridge trouble, difficulty, and differences of personality, experience, and aspiration. Friendship is not easy, nor is democracy. Friendship begins in the recognition that friends have a shared life—not a ‘common’ nor an identical life—only one with common events, climates, built-environments, fixations of the imagination, and social structures. Each friend will view all these phenomena differently, but they are not the less shared for that” (pp. xxi-xxii).

*Our next business after this will be to discuss Friendship. For friendship is a virtue, or involves virtue; and also it is one of the most indispensable requirements of life. For no one would choose to live without friends, but possessing all other good things. … Moreover, …  friendship appears to be the bond of the state; and lawgivers seem to set more store by it than they do by justice, for to promote concord, which seems akin to friendship, is their chief aim, while faction, which is enmity, is what they are most anxious to banish. And if men are friends, there is no need of justice between them; whereas merely to be just is not enough—a feeling of friendship also is necessary. Indeed the highest form of justice seems to have an element of friendly feeling in it. And friendship is not only indispensable as a means, it is also noble in itself. We praise those who love their friends, and it is counted a noble thing to have many friends; and some people think that a true friend must be a good man (Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1155a3, 20)

notes on Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution

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For use in today’s Summer Institute of Civic Studies. The morning’s readings are

  • Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, pp. 18-25, 37-48, 240-7
  • “Hannah Arendt” from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

I first asked participants to name various kinds of freedom, and categorized the answers as positive and negative, inner (such as freedom from anxiety) and outer (such as freedom from coercion), and individual and group.

Arendt’s reading of the American Revolution: the founders were after freedom, which they didn’t initially define all that sharply but which probably meant mostly negative individual freedom: “the more or less free range of non-political activities which a given body politic will permit and guarantee to those who constitute it” (p 20). But in creating new institutions that would protect that kind of freedom, they discovered public freedom—the freedom to create together. And this was a source of happiness for them. P. 24: “they were enjoying what they were doing far beyond the call of duty.”

In the French Revolution, however, the leaders felt themselves compelled by great forces beyond their control and they also lost interest in creating new institutions or even following the rules they had constructed as they declared the “social problem” the only thing that mattered. As a result, they lost all forms of freedom (pp. 40-1).

Relation between freedom and equality

Many might see freedom and equality in tension. But for Arendt, public freedom requires equality. People are not naturally equal but they are made equal in “artificial” political spaces, “where men [meet] one another as citizens and not as private persons” (p. 21.) The tyrant, the master and the slave are not free because they are not engaged in equal politics.

Politics as performance and self-discovery

Arendt is not a deliberative democrat, envisioning public life as a discussion about what should be done, in which people try to discipline their own interests and personalities in the interests of the common good. She appreciates competition and the pursuit of excellence in public life. And people discover their full humanity by displaying their personalities in public. “Freedom was understood as being manifest in certain, by no means all, human activities, and that these activities could appear and be real only when others saw them, judged them, remembered them. The life of a free man required the presence of others. Freedom itself therefore needed a place where people could come together—the agora, the market-place, or the polis, the political space proper” (p. 21)

Civic republicanism/liberalism

Arendt sees political participation as a source of happiness (at least for some) and self-discovery. It is thus an intrinsic good, not just a means to justice, or security, or happiness, or other goods. And you need government not so much to guarantee good outcomes for communities as to be a space for politics.

That reflects what is now being called the “civic republican” tradition, in contrast to what is sometimes called “liberalism,” which holds that politics and governments are costs we must pay to get benefits. The liberal tradition encompasses a great variety of answers to the question: how much government and politics do we need? (Some liberals say: a lot.) But all see government and politics as a cost, whereas Arendt sees politics as a benefit and government as the space that allows politics.

Must/should everyone participate?

The civic republic tradition poses the question: who should participate? Granting that politics has intrinsic value, does it have value for all (or only some) and is it the highest value or only one valuable pursuit?

On p. 271, Arendt suggests that there are just some “who have a taste for public freedom and cannot be ‘happy’ without it.” And it’s OK not to participate, because “one of the most important negative liberties we have enjoyed since the end of the ancient world [is] freedom from politics.” (p. 272)

But on p. 247: “no one could be called happy without his share in public happiness, that no one could be called free without his experience in public freedom, and that no one could be called either happy or free without participating, and having a share, in public business.”

How to keep public freedom alive?

Most of us are not in the position of the American founders, able to discover happiness and freedom by creating institutions and feeling that “man is master of his destiny, at least with respect to political government” (p. 41).

So what are some options?

  • Frequent revolutions?
  • Co-creation in other domains? (What about a startup enterprise?)
  • Radical decentralization—Jefferson’s proposal for “ward” government?

Private and public

In the civic republican vein, Arendt is a great defender of public life. But she is also an explicit and strong defender of the private life and, indeed, of privacy. Sometimes she takes the latter to a fault, as in her “Reflections on Little Rock,” where she argues that sending paratroopers to Arkansas was a violation of the private sphere. But it makes sense that we need a strong private domain to create an impressive public space. The “four walls, within which people’s private life is lived, constitute a shield against the public aspect of the world. They enclose a secure place, without which no living thing can thrive” (Between Past and Future, p. 186). After all, her public space is not about agreement but contention, and one needs a private space to develop enough individuality to contend.

See also: Hannah Arendt and thinking from the perspective of an agent; Hannah Arendt and philosophy as a way of life; homage to Hannah Arendt at The New School; when society becomes fully transparent to the state; and on the moral dangers of cliché.

Hannah Arendt and thinking from the perspective of an agent

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In the following passage from On Revolution (pp. 42-3), Hannah Arendt is criticizing the Hegelian tradition of German philosophy (including Marx) that purports to find fundamental meanings in the narrative of world history.  I think that her words would also describe mainstream social science, which attempts to explain ordinary events empirically rather than philosophically:

Politically, the fallacy of this new and typically modern philosophy is relatively simple. It consists in describing and understanding the whole realm of human action, not in terms of the actor and the agent, but from the standpoint of the spectator who watches a spectacle. But this fallacy is relatively difficult to detect because of the truth inherent in it, which is that all stories begun and enacted by men unfold their true meaning only when they have come to their end, so that it may indeed appear as though only the spectator, and not the agent, can hope to understand what actually happened in any given chain of deeds and events.

The more successful you are in social science, the more you can explain who acts and why. By explaining “deeds and events” that have already happened, you make them look determined. You seek to reduce the unexplained variance. But when you are a social actor, it feels as if you are choosing and acting intentionally. The unexplained is a trace of your freedom.

Arendt does not assert that the spectator’s perspective is epistemically wrong, but that it reflects a political fallacy. It has the political consequence of reducing freedom.

On p. 46, she gives an example: the French Revolution has been understood in ways that hamper the agency and creativity of subsequent revolutionaries. She even argues that revolutionary leaders have submitted to being tried and executed because they assume that revolutions must end in terror. Thus all later upheavals have been

seen in images drawn from the course of the French Revolution, comprehended in concepts coined by spectators, and understood in terms of historical necessity. Conspicuous by its absence in the minds of those who made the revolutions as well as of those who watched and tried to come to terms with them, was the deep concern with forms of government so characteristic of the American Revolution, but also very important in the early stages of the French Revolution.

If you are a political agent, you believe that you can invent or reconstruct “forms of government” to reflect your considered opinions. Deliberate institutional design and redesign seems both possible and valuable. But if you think of history as inevitable and driven by grand forces (the World Spirit, the class struggle), by root causes (capitalism, racism), or by empirical factors (income, gender, technology), then institutional design seems to be an outcome, not a cause; and the designers appear to lack agency. “Civic Studies” can be seen as a reorientation of the humanities and social sciences so that they take an agentic perspective and therefore avoid the “political fallacy” of determinism.

See also: Roberto Unger against root causes and the visionary fire of Roberto Mangabeira Unger

defining “games”

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I am reading Josh Lerner’s Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics because it makes an important argument. Games are fun for specific reasons; most political processes fail to be fun because they lack those elements; and we could make politics more fun without sacrificing serious purposes if we learned from game design. That’s the great value of the book, but here is a philosopher’s digression ….

Lerner (p. 29) defines games as “systems where players engage in artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in measurable outcomes.” My ears perk up at any definition of “games” because Ludwig Wittgenstein famously avoids defining that word in his Philosophical Investigations. There he observes that games come in many different forms and asserts that no single feature defines them all. Games constitute a family of cases, each of which resembles several others even though they are not all alike in any particular respect. We know how to use (and teach) the word “game” even though we cannot define it in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. This observation is important for Wittgenstein because he believes that language is a heterogeneous set of games. And we think in language. Thus our thought is a set of practices that lack a common feature, yet we can learn to think and communicate.

Lerner offers a definition. He emphasizes relevant and important features of many practices that we call “games”–features that we should heed when we design political processes, which is Lerner’s interest. One wouldn’t need his definition to understand the word “game”: I have been playing games for almost half a century without thinking in Lerner’s terms. His doesn’t exactly work as a literal definition, because, for instance, a business competition could easily be an “artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in measurable outcomes” such as profit and loss. If that competition is devoid of fun, we wouldn’t call it a “game,” except metaphorically. Also, if you showed Lerner’s definition to someone who had never played a range of games, it wouldn’t communicate what he has in mind. This person might think of standardized tests, duels, court cases, and other artificial conflicts that we don’t usually call “games.”

This is not a criticism of Lerner. I think his definition plays its intended role in his book. He presumes some real world experience with games and provides many vivid examples to expand one’s store of cases. His definition points to general tendencies in those examples that are important in a different context, politics. That is a typical and appropriate way to advance an argument. But I am left thinking that Wittgenstein was right about the indefinability of the word “game.”

(As a digression on this digression: Wittgenstein wrote in German, and the word “Spiel” means both “game” and “play.” For Lerner, the differences between the English words “game” and “play” are important; to make politics more game-like is different from making it more playful. Does Wittgenstein fail to see a common denominator to all “Spiele” because that word encompasses play as well as games? I don’t think so: all of his examples are actually “games” in the English sense. His argument works perfectly well when translated.)