Category Archives: philosophy

mapping a moral network: Auden in 1939

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We can think of a person’s moral mentality as a network. The nodes are ideas or values; the links are various kinds of connections among the ideas: implications, explanations, influences, and meaningful tensions. For instance, I believe that all human beings have exactly equal value, yet I also believe that my primary obligations are to my own family. These are two nodes in my personal moral network, connected not by a contradiction but by a tension.

A good moral mind comprises important and correct nodes. For instance, it is better sincerely to endorse a principle of equality than to advocate hating some of one’s fellow human beings. That example shows that a single node can affect–even determine–a person’s character. But it is hard to argue for any given idea all by itself. (Why equality, for instance?) And it is not enough to have the right principles; they must also be well organized.

Those two considerations lead us to think not merely about which principles are right or good, but also about the overall shape of a person’s moral network. Does it include enough ideas to handle the actual complexity and variety of human affairs? Are weighty and serious ideas central to the network? Do ideas just stand by themselves, or are they linked together in meaningful ways?

I’ve been thinking about these questions introspectively–but that is a somewhat private matter. Another way to demonstrate this kind of analysis is to examine the moral network map of a famous person.

A full personality would be an immensely complicated thing to map, since it comprises all kinds of principles, desires, aversions, memories, virtues, vices, memberships and identifications, hopes, plans, skills, and facts. It changes constantly and is inconsistent, replete with thoughts that are only half-endorsed, only half-sincere. But if we are interested in moral questions–What should we do? How should we live?–we can simplify the analysis to a person’s moral ideas.

Most people (including me) are not sure what those are; we would have great difficulty explaining our moral premises adequately to other people. We are not terribly clear or articulate. Fortunately, some writers describe moral ideas cogently and concisely, not merely listing them but putting them in a formal arrangement that reflects appropriate amounts of tension, irony, ambivalence, and ambiguity. Whether the resulting text reflects the author’s sincere, inner motivations doesn’t matter; we are not interested in psychoanalysis, but in finding a moral worldview to analyze. It is the text, not the writer, that we will use for analysis.

Morally conscious lyric poets are especially helpful for this purpose because their writing is concise and is concerned with form and organization as well as discrete ideas. Also, poetry can accommodate abstract concepts, concrete stories, personalities, reasons, and emotions–as the poet sees fit. I don’t believe we should screen out any of these kinds of ideas in advance but should see how they work together in a particular mentality.

Recently, I offered a brief reading of a great and influential moral poem, W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939.” I explored the complexities of Auden’s pronouncements, some of which we know he did not mean literally. For instance (as he himself said later), the line “We must love each other or die” is false, since we will die even if we do love each other. So its place in the poem is more complicated than just a proposition that Auden endorsed. The setting–a gay bar on the first night of World War II–may be as important as some of the abstract themes.

One way to think of the structure of the poem is as a literal network map. See the top of this post for an example. To make that image, I selected ideas (and in some cases, quotes) from the poem. I used software to place them in literally random locations on a blank plane, connected the ones that seemed related–using dotted lines for nodes that are in mutual tension–and then applied an algorithm that moves the nodes around as if they were billiard balls connected by springs, until the diagram stabilized at an equilibrium. That yielded a picture of the relationships among Auden’s ideas as presented in this (partly fictional) poem.

An important disclaimer: the labels of those nodes are simplistic; they reduce subtle and ambivalent ideas to slogans. So you must actually read the poem. Nevertheless, the network analysis brings out certain points:

Auden presents a rich view in just a few pages. I found 16 nodes and 52 links, and I’m sure I could have found more. None of these nodes can be collapsed into others, but a few separate areas of emphasis emerge. As shown at the bottom-left of the map, Auden is anti-collectivist: against the state, mass society, and ideologies (including corporate capitalism). He admires personal conscience–but not the retreat into private life.

Another important ideal for him is disinterested love, which is threatened by the universal desire to be loved exclusively.

I put “gay identity” on the map because the setting is known to have been a gay bar, and Nijinsky/Diaghilev (mentioned in the poem) formed a same-sex couple, as did Auden/Kallman. But I can’t connect that node to others because Auden is not explicit about homosexuality. This is a case where what is unstated is also part of the map.

Philosophy as a Way of Life (on Pierre Hadot)

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Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) was a careful empirical scholar of ancient thought and a clear and modest writer, yet he defended a conception of philosophy that was exciting enough to attract the enthusiastic support of Michel Foucault. I’m becoming directly acquainted with Hadot for the first time via a collection entitled Philosophy as a Way of Life, edited by Arnold Davidson (1995). These are some of Hadot’s most important points:

In the Greco-Roman world, a philosopher was someone who lived the good life. What made a life fully good was a matter for debate, but it was widely understood to involve equanimity-in-community (borrowing a phrase from Owen Flanagan): that is, inner peace or control over one’s own emotions combined with active and ethical engagement with other people. Another essential element of the good life was freedom from error. That didn’t mean full understanding, which was impossible, but the avoidance of logical, scientific, and moral mistakes.

A philosopher need not develop or hold original views or arguments. Socrates was the model sage of all the ancient schools, and he didn’t even write anything, let alone teach positive doctrines of his own. His life–including his dialogic relationships with other Athenians, and the equanimity he displayed on the point of death–was what made him a philosopher.

All the ancient schools developed spiritual exercises designed to train the practitioner to be more philosophical. These exercises included, for instance, describing emotionally fraught situations from the dispassionate perspective of nature or science, and learning to focus on the living present, because it is all that really exists, while the past and future are  sources of irrational emotions. Debating abstract issues with other people was yet another spiritual exercise. While participating in an argument, one took the propositional content seriously, but the point of the dialogue was to improve the participants’ personalities and their relationships.

The philosophical writing that comes down to us, then, wasn’t what the ancients called “philosophy.” It was just the offshoot of one of their philosophical exercises: abstract disputation. Writing was not a satisfactory substitute for actual dialogue, which must involve real people who were friends as well as debating partners. All the schools disparaged as “sophistic” the view that a text could suffice. Nevertheless, the philosophical writing that survives is excellent, especially if one reads it with proper attention to genre, purpose, and form. For example, Marcus Aurelius didn’t report his actual mental states or try to advance true and original propositions. Instead, he recorded standard Stoic moral exercises, beginning with his daily thanks to each of his moral teachers (book 1), and ending with a reminder that all famous men end as “smoke and ash and a tale” (book 12). He listed his own teachers and the exemplary men by name because he would actually visualize each of these people in turn. Those were just two spiritual exercises for which the Meditations was a notebook.

Hadot argues that the ancient conception of philosophy as an integrated way of life shifted, during the Middle Ages, into philosophy as argumentative writing about abstract topics. Early Christians fully understood the ancient ideal, but they split it into two parts. Monks borrowed, developed, codified, taught, and described the spiritual exercises of the ancient schools. The life of a hermit, monk, or friar became “philosophical,” in the ancient sense. Meanwhile, the task of reasoning about logic, metaphysics, and ethics was assigned to universities and understood as a tool for improving theology, supplying “the latter with the conceptual, logical, physical, and metaphysical materials it needed.” Hadot observes,

One of the characteristics of the university is that it is made up of professors who train professors, or professionals who train professionals. Education was thus no longer directed toward people who were to become educated with a view to becoming fully developed human beings, but to specialists, in order that they might train other specialists. … In modern university philosophy, philosophy is obviously no longer a away of life or form of life unless it be the form of life of a professor of philosophy [pp. 270-1].

Although Hadot admires the ancient conception of philosophy and argues that it has been forgotten in the Continental European university, he is not given to pessimism and cultural nostalgia. Matthew Sharpe writes,

Unlike many of his European contemporaries, Hadot’s work is characterized by lucid, restrained prose; clarity of argument; the near-complete absence of recondite jargon; and a gentle, if sometimes self-depreciating, humor. While Hadot was an admirer of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and committed to a kind of philosophical recasting of the history of Western ideas, Hadot’s work lacks any eschatological sense of the end of philosophy, humanism, or the West. Late in life, Hadot would report that this was because he was animated by the sense that philosophy, as conceived and practiced in the ancient schools, remains possible for men and women of his era: “from 1970 on, I have felt very strongly that it was Epicureanism and Stoicism which could nourish the spiritual life of men and women of our times, as well as my own.”

Hadot argues that the ancient tradition of philosophy has lingered among influential writers deeply schooled in Hellenistic thought: Montaigne, Spinoza, Goethe, the young Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Wittgenstein, among others. And it has the potential to flourish again today.

I don’t know whether Hadot addressed the vexing questions that arise for me in reading his work on the ancients: Should philosophy be a way of life? How that would be practiced? By whom would it be taught? And what it would mean for the evidently fruitful and impressive enterprise of modern academic philosophy?

I would be most excited by a revival if it took seriously all three parts of the ancient ideal: equanimity or inner peace; avoidance of error; and ethical political participation. The last is easiest to overlook in an era of psychotherapy, when the “self-help” section of the bookstore is full of ancient philosophical works and modern popularizations, but we don’t seriously study how to improve the world. Hadot ends,

This concern for living in the service of the human community , and for acting in accordance with justice, is an essential element of every philosophical life. In other words, the philosophical life normally entails a communitary [sic] engagement. This last is probably the hardest part of carry out. The trick is to maintain oneself on the level of reason, and not allow oneself to be blinded by political passions, anger, resentments, or prejudices. To be sure, there is an equilibrium–almost impossible to achieve–between the inner peace brought about by wisdom, and the passions to which the sight of the injustices, sufferings, and misery of mankind cannot help by give rise. Wisdom, however, consists in precisely such an equilibrium, and inner peace is indispensable for efficacious action [p. 274].

Cf. some of my own thoughts: “happiness and injustice are different problems“; “If you achieved justice, would you be happy?“; “three truths and a question about happiness” (inspired by Buddhism rather than stoicism); “Must you be good to be happy?” (exploring some relevant psychological evidence); and “the importance of the inner life to moral philosophy” (arguing that the main schools of modern ethics neglect equanimity).

what is public philosophy?

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Joshua Miller has an interesting blog post on the definition of “public philosophy.” Although I hold a philosophy PhD and spend all my time thinking about civic engagement, public scholarship, the engaged university, and related topics, I have never really addressed the overlapping part of the Venn diagram: philosophy that is public. That is an active intellectual community, but I am not yet sure what it means or whether I want to be part of it.

“Philosophy” can mean several different enterprises. In this context, we are talking predominantly about moral philosophy/ethics and political/social philosophy. Some think that is basically values-clarification. Anthony Laden calls it conceptual optometry, bringing ideas into sharper focus.* So then the philosopher’s job in relation to the public would be clarifying other people’s ideas. Jonathan Dancy has said that moral philosophy explains what we are doing when we think morally; it doesn’t change our thinking at all. So then a philosopher’s role [in] relation to the public would be something like explaining what people do when they talk about public issues. A third option is the development and defense of moral ideas. Karl Marx and Friedrich von Hayek didn’t just explain or sharpen distinctions; they wrote manifestos.

The word “public,” too, has many meanings. It often means those outside a given reference group. For the police, the public means everyone who isn’t a law enforcement official or a criminal suspect or defendant. For academics, the public means non-academics. For philosophers, it may include academics who don’t teach philosophy. Its referent shifts around in that way.

In some theories, the word “public” takes on specialized meanings. For Dewey, it means the people when they are conscious of their issues and powers. Thus it is desirable to turn a people into a public. Conceivably, a philosopher could help that transformation happen, which would be “public philosophy” in a Deweyan vein.

In general, the kind of public scholarship that interests me most is that which (a) involves research collaborations between academics and non-academics and (b) strengthens the capacity of non-academics. At its best, community-based participatory social science works that way: laypeople help define research problems and hypotheses, help collect and interpret data, and become more knowledgeable and effective as a result. This is different from “public scholarship” in the sense of scholarship that is well-known and accessible. It is also different from activist scholarship, because activism often implies an agenda, whereas public engagement implies a willingness to deliberate ends and means.

Exploring moral issues is often not seen as scholarship or research at all. Starting in grade school, we very widely teach students to be positivists: facts can be true or false, but values are subjective opinions. Although you can study the values that people hold, investigating their truth is not a job for scholarship or research (and involves no expertise). But I view moral philosophy as a professional investigation into the truth of moral propositions, and doing that with laypeople might be “public moral philosophy.”

*Anthony Simon Laden, “Learning to be Equal: Just Schools and Schools of Justice,” in Education, Justice and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

where are citizens in the Capabilities Approach?

The “capabilities approach” is a theoretical position in political philosophy and development economics that has been advanced by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and now numerous others. Summarized very crudely, it presumes that human beings have a set of potential “functionings.” These functionings, which Sen has called “beings and doings,” range from eating and being calm to raising children and holding office. A “capability” is the actual capacity to perform one of the functionings. So, if I can afford food, if I am allowed to eat, if I have time for a meal, and if I am in normal health, then I have the capability to eat. Whether I choose to eat is substantially my business–I may fast for religious reasons or skip a meal to do something important–but a better society is one that provides more capabilities.

This approach steers a course among several dangerous shoals: It doesn’t ignore freedom, because you have the choice about whether to exercise a capability. But it defines freedom in a partly positive way, not merely as the absence of official constraints. (I am not free to eat if I am destitute.) It is a theory of well-being that does not assume that the goal is to maximize subjective happiness. It is concerned with individuals yet allows for the measurement of aggregate social welfare. It makes objective and universal claims about human beings yet encourages diversity.

All that is by way of background. I have a complaint about the specific formulation of the approach in Martha Nussbaum’s 2011 book Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. A few quotes will quickly reveal my concern:

In my view, there is a conceptual connection between Central Capabilities [the really important ones] and government … Of course governments may delegate … to private entities, but in the end it is government, meaning the society’s basic political structure, that bears the ultimate responsibilities for securing capabilities …. . The Capabilities Approach … insists that all entitlements involve an affirmative task for government: it must actively support people’s capabilities, not just fail to set up obstacles. … Fundamental rights are only words unless and until they are made real by government action. [pp. 64-5]

Citizens can deliberate about the fundamental political principles for which they want their nation to stand–if they are framing a new constitution, for example [p. 74].

The task for the constitution-maker (or, more often, for courts interpreting an abstract constitution and for legislators proposing statutes) is to select a level that is aspirational but not utopian. … [p. 42]

Note the emphasis on government as the agent. Citizens originally frame constitutions that will be interpreted and implemented by courts and legislatures, “and citizens deliberate about legislation–subject to the intervention of courts, if a statute violates constitutional guarantee” (p. 75). Citizens emerge only at the end of this long paragraph about professional politicians and lawyers, and the phrase after the dash urgently reminds us that their role is constrained.

I would start in a different place. We the people have the obligation to secure capabilities for our fellow citizens–or even for all human beings. Whether a government is the best tool for securing any particular capability is a worthy question for us to consider. In general, governments have the ability to make rights and entitlements official and universal, to fund them through taxes, and to enforce them at the point of a gun. But they have known frailties, too: limited information, a tendency to corruption, limited territorial control in a global market, and limited ability to constrain the bad behavior of individuals. Sen opens his book The Idea of Justice (2009) with a passage from Great Expectations. Pip is decrying his unjust treatment at the hands (literally) of his sister. Sen observes that injustice “may well be connected with behavioural transgressions rather than with institutional shortcomings.” (Pip has an objection to his sister, but not to the family or family law.)

Apart from the limits of government, there is also a deeper problem. Treating the state as an agent puts us in the position of hoping that the state acts well. Why should it act well if we put no pressure on it? So I think this theory is problematically incomplete:

good government –> capabilities

We might as well just write “capabilities” on the paper and assume that they will somehow be provided. The theory must be:

good citizens –> good government –> capabilities

But that raises the urgent question of how we are to get good citizens. To be sure, good governments help make good citizens–just regimes are self-sustaining. But that is no use to people who live in imperfect societies among imperfect people, with bad laws and leaders and short-sighted or even hateful citizens. (Auden: “I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”) Thus I think the most important question is how to fill in this X:

x –> good citizens –> good government –> capabilities –> good citizens

I don’t blame Nussbaum for failing to address the citizens’ role (no book explains everything), but she implies that it isn’t even relevant.

Bent Flyvbjerg and social science as phronesis

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I am co-teaching the Summer Institute of Civic Studies and blogging about roughly half of the 18 topics on our syllabus. Last Friday morning, we discussed Bent Flyvbjerg and social science as phronesis. The readings were:

  • Bent Flyvbjerg, “Social Science that Matters” (2006)
  • Bent Flyvbjerg, “Making Organization Research Matter: Power, Values and Phronesis” (2006)
  • Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, Chapter 10, pp. 141-65
  • David Garvin, “Making the Case,” Harvard Magazine, September-October 2003

Flyvbjerg started as a planning professor in Denmark who uncovered and successfully addressed corruption in the city of Aalborg by finding specific information and using it to challenge power. The key moment was when he discovered five lines of a specific memo which guaranteed that “The Chamber of Industry and Commerce” (a private interest) would be included in all official meetings about redesigning the city center. He asked why they would be there, and that revealed a whole scandal. The Chamber was actually pro-car and had been the most powerful force in city planning.

Flyvbjerg has since developed a broader theory of social science as “phronesis,” the Greek word for practical wisdom. His theory has been highly influential; for example, it provided one inspiration for the Perestroika movement in political science.

In Latin, the word phronesis was translated as prudentia. The English derivative word “prudence” is too narrow, but it reminds us that phronesis is a virtue, not just a cognitive skill. Aristotle distinguishes phronesis from:

  • Sophia (wisdom about abstractions, often spiritual in nature)
  • Techne (art), which is knowledge about how to make things or make things work
  • Episteme (knowledge that consists of general propositions, connected logically, and therefore teachable)

Flyvbjerg asserts that social science tries to be an episteme, but as such, it does not work. “No predictive theories have been arrived at in social science, despite centuries of trying. This approach is a wasteful dead-end.”

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