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Advaita Vedānta Philosophy: An Introduction & Basic Reading Guide

 

Introduction [subscript diacritic dots unavailable]

Advaita Vedānta: one of the six ‘orthodox’ (from āstika, one who accepts the normative revelatory status of the Veda) schools (better: darśanas, philosophical viewpoints) of Indic philosophy that emerged in the early centuries of the Common Era. Advaita (Absolute Non-Dualism) is perhaps the best known of the sub-schools within Vedānta, which counts Viśistādvaita (Qualified Non-Dualism, or Non-Dualism of the Qualified) and Dvaita (Dualism) among the most important. Advaita Vedānta formally commences with commentaries on the Brahmasūtras (‘Holy Power Aphorisms’) (c. 300 BCE to 300 CE) of Bādārāyana (also known as Vyāsa, the ‘Arranger’). The main focus is on the relation between ātman (the soul/Self) and Brahman (the One, Ultimate Reality). In the Upanisads we find the claim that, in some sense, ātman and Brahman are ‘One,’ a claim endorsed by Śankara (8th century), the great religious philosopher whose commentaries (bhāsya) on the Brahmasūtras and the Upanisads are taken to represent the crystallization of Advaita philosophy. Mention should be made of Gaudapāda (late 5th to early 6th century), Śankara’s parama-guru (i.e., the teacher of Śankara’s master, Govinda) and author of the Māndūkya-kārikā, passages from which ‘are cited almost verbatim in Śankara’s Commentary on the Brahma-sūtra’ (Natalia Isayeva). The brilliant grammarian and philosopher of language, Bhartrhari (c. 450-510), known largely through his Vākyapadīya and its sphota theory of language, undoubtedly influenced early Vedānta philosophy, although his impact is more clearly evidenced in Kashmir Śaivism. Brahman alone is real (sat), the knowledge of which is an experiential (mystical) realization of a ‘higher’ truth qualitatively different from ordinary or conventional truth. From the vantage point of this higher truth, our perception of and belief in distinct selves and, indeed, any plurality of phenomena, or any subject/object discrimination is indicative or reflective of fundamental ignorance (avidyā) and entanglement in māyā (illusion). Until one has attained this higher truth—the goal of jñāna-yoga—it is perfectly acceptable to rely on the perception and knowledge captured in common sense or conventional descriptions of the world, as well as the applicable ethical rules, values and virtues associated with one’s obligations to and understanding of dharma (hence the acceptance of conventional epistemic criteria and standards as found in classical Indian pramāna theory). A notable Advaita exponent after Śankara, was the twelfth-century dialectician (in the manner of the Buddhist Madhyamaka school) Śriharsa. Advaita Vedānta might be described as monistic, but its monism is decidedly different from modern conceptions (wherein there is one kind of ‘something’ or stuff), for Brahman is (the ‘One without a second’), in the end, beyond predication, beyond conceptualization (a-rational, non-rational, or supra-rational), absolutely indescribable or ‘ineffable.’ It’s perhaps best characterized as a ‘neutral’ monism, and an Asian exemplification of apophatic mysticism.

Brahman is the principle of neutral monism within Advaita Vedānta, and no qualities or attributes can be predicated of Brahman, as it is beyond conceptualization. The jñāna yogi pursues a mystical awareness of that which cannot be an ‘object’ of knowledge, as Brahman transcends subject-object distinction. Brahman is ātman. Realization of Brahman is the supreme good that brings about freedom from fear and evil. The apprehension of Brahman is evocatively summarized in the formulaic expression, saccidānanda, being (sat), consciousness (cit), and bliss (ānanda). If Brahman defies all description and characterization, is beyond all predication, how can one say, for example, that ‘Brahman is truth?’ According to Eliot Deutsch, ‘To say “Brahman is truth,” negates the quality of untruth—and this negation, it is believed, serves pragmatically to orient the mind towards Brahman. All characterizations of Brahman, in short, are intended in their experiential dimension to aid those who are searching for Brahman but have not yet realized it.’ Advaita Vedānta distinguishes two modes of Brahman: nirguna and saguna. Nirguna Brahman is what we have been discussing up to this point, that transcendent indeterminate state of mystical awareness about which nothing can be affirmed (hence the via negativa or apophatic tradition of mysticism is germane). To experientially ‘know’ Brahman is to experience moksa, to be liberated from the beginningless cycles of samsāra, to nullify any further generation of karma. Until such time as we realize (nirguna) Brahman, we are perfectly fit to focus our spiritual energy and sights on saguna Brahman, that is, God with qualities, attributes, or properties. Saguna Brahman is Brahman understood by the yogi or devotee from her necessarily limited, partial, or relative perspective, in which all knowledge and understanding is qualified by ignorance. From this vantage point (saguna) Brahman is Lord, Īśvara, the proper object of our devotion and admitting of degrees of spiritual experience and understanding. Until one has the intuitive spiritual experience of non-duality, an awareness in which all distinctions, plurality, and difference are transcended and obliterated, until that is, nirvikalpa samadhi, one must acknowledge the consequences that follow entanglement in māyā (illusion) and being shadowed by avidyā (ignorance). The illusion, in other words, is for most purposes, real for us. It is an illusion created by the power (śakti) of Īśvara, the Great Magician who created the world. Māyā, in turn, has its own power, for it both conceals reality (āvarana-śakti) and misrepresents or distorts reality (viksepa-śakti). The phenomenal world as we know it (Plato’s ‘Many,’ ‘the ten thousand things’ in classical Chinese worldviews) is neither true reality (sat), nor is it fair to call it non-reality (asat) (e.g. the hare’s horn, or the square circle), rather, it has the status of ‘provisional reality’ (mithya). Another way to say this is that the world is ‘relatively true’ (vyāvahārika) for us, rather than absolutely true, or the ‘ultimate reality’ (pāramārthika).  While Īśvara knows himself as Brahman, we know Īśvara as a personal God, for ours is the vantage point of a provisional and relative reality, not (yet) that of ultimate reality.

As Ram-Prasad explains,  ‘The dense and intricate metaphysics of Advaita is built on an extraordinarily sweeping conception of consciousness.’ Indeed, the beginning of religio-philosophical and psychological inquiry in this school is found in the assumed consciousness of the individual subject*—the jīva—the sheer primitive ontological or existential presence that is both revealing and concealing: the former, owing to the fact that it is a ‘taste’ of and testament to the pure(r) and universal form of ‘witness’ consciousness (sāksin), the latter insofar as the individual’s phenomenal experience of consciousness amounts to a ‘superimposition’ (adhyāsa) on that which is truly real, a qualification or limitation of universal consciousness that arises in conjunction with ignorance. In one of the schools of thought within Advaita, a theory and metaphor of ‘reflection’ (pratibimba-vāda) is used to clarify this peculiar instantiation or embodiment of reality and appearance, for

‘the jīva is a reflection of Ātman [the Self] on the mirror of avidyā [ignorance], as such it is not-different from Ātman is essence. Just as in everyday experience where we know that the face in the mirror is not really different from the face in front of it, that the face in the mirror does not have an independent life of its own, and yet we maintain a distinction between them, so the jīva reflected in “ignorance” is not really different from its prototype, the Self, and yet it continues to be a jīva until the mirror itself is removed. The pratibimba, the reflection, is actually as real as the bimba, the prototype, being in essence the same thing; the pratibimba is misjudged to be different only because it appears to be located elsewhere than the bimba. One attains the truth of non-difference then, the moment one understands that one is a reflection of Ātman that only appears to be different from it, but is identical with it in reality.’ (Eliot Deutsch)

Intriguingly, the ‘mind (or ‘heart-mind’) as mirror metaphor’ (or the reflection of the person on a body of water) is likewise found in the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, as the sage or saint in possession of a quiescent mind is able to purely reflect the natural order of the cosmos. In chapter 10 of the former work, the question is posed: ‘In scrubbing and cleansing your profound mirror, Are you able to rid it of all imperfections?’ In both Advaita Vedanta and Daoism it appears, ‘rather than being restless, anticipating, and desiring, our minds ought to be like a clear and calm mirror capable of reflecting truth’ (Eliot Deutsch). The true nature of consciousness in Advaita is universal in scope and thus is not subject to the limiting condition(s) of individual consciousness as the basis of personal identity or the jīva. Awareness of this individual self, however, is critical and serves as the starting point and therefore is emblematic of the possibility of liberation as a locus of reflexive awareness, as it is this reflexivity which in theory and practice points to the true nature of witness-consciousness (sāksin). Ram-Prasad elaborates:

‘The self is individuated and has its own parametrically determined region of reflexive occurrence; it is then called the jīva. It is the jīva that has the “I” sense (ahamkāra). The self [as Self] is also the typical reflexivity shorn of all individuated occurrences; it is then called ātman. Then there is general consciousness, which is typically reflexive and the singular, irreducible entity [hence the ‘monist’ characterization]; it is then called brahman. A proper articulation of the Advaita position must go from highly individuated—personal and subjective—states of awareness to general features across subjects to the universal consciousness.’ (Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad)

The unliberated state is individual consciousness as experienced by the subject in a phenomenologically dualistic manner, with consciousness reaching out as it were, to both mental (intrinsic) and physical (extrinsic) objects. The pure state of universal consciousness, on the other hand, is purged of all ‘otherness,’ it is consciousness as such, sans determinate and contingent individuation or conditionality. One way to describe this is to state that it is the selfsame empirical jīva now freed of all conditions or determination, in its pure or ultimately real state as ‘transcendent’ consciousness (Ātman or Brahman). The seed-thought or intuitive spark that awakens the thirst for liberation could be said to commence with the thought or awareness that this transcendental consciousness is ever-present, veiled or obscured by the individuated consciousness tied to locus- and object-specific states. Individuation should eventually give way to de-individuation, being two sides of the same coin. Brahmānubhava, experience of Brahman, is a ‘context-free’ state of consciousness, making it difficult to intellectually comprehend how this is in fact an experience of any kind. One must account for the nature of liberation as a personal quest in a way that accounts for de-individuation as a process capable of overcoming individual will, which seems to imply that one must not become ‘attached’ to liberation, pursuing this goal in a roundabout  or indirect fashion wherein realization of the true nature of the self is attained as a by-product of spillover effect of spiritual praxis (the yogas, for example, but especially jñāna yoga), as a necessary yet not sufficient condition for Brahman-awareness.  

Reflection on the scriptural texts of Advaita Vedānta is an integral part of the spiritual praxis that serves as a necessary condition for the knowledge of Brahman. With Mīmāmsaka, another āstikadarśana, Advaita views its sacred texts as revelations or manifestations of the ‘primordial Word,’ eternal and eternally valid with regard to their statements about liberation (moksa).On this account, religious language is understood to have the capacity to precipitate a spiritual experience or awareness that is itself beyond all thought (in which case śruti, the Vedas as revelatory texts, and anubhava, the knowledge gained from experience, are inextricably intertwined) and the theoretical justification for this view draws upon Indian poetics or ‘Sanskrit criticism’ (alamkāra śāstra), including the ‘evocative’ character of poetic utterances insofar as they call to mind feelings (not, however, arousing the actual feelings embodied in the poem). As the great Kashmiri Śaiva philosopher Abhinavagupta (c. 950-1015) noted, it is the poem’s cognitive content that allows our own mental states to be objectively perceived by awakening latent memories, impressions or dispositions. The resulting rasa experience is said to be self-validating (or –certifying) (svatah prāmana, the notion that the validity of a cognitive episode or knowledge is present in the material that creates the object and that the awareness of this validity arises spontaneously with that episode or knowledge itself; for example, in Advaita Vedānta, awareness is said to be self-validating—and self-illuminating—such that the doubt ‘Am I aware or not?’ cannot occur). The self-validating character of rasa experience appears to countenance the idea that, in the end, such experience is a species of self-knowledge, in Abhinavagupta’s words, ‘a form of self-contemplation.’ The religious authority of śruti is understood as independent and self-evident, acting as a fundamental axiom of this philosophical school. Reflection and meditation on certain formulations in the Vedas can directly lead to, and are a necessary condition of, the experiential awareness of Brahman. The apparent paradox that arises with the Advaita understanding of its sacred texts (or at least certain formulations therein) is well-captured by Ram-Prasad: the sacred text is part of the world that is not ultimately real and thus the Advaita conception of liberation must explain why and how ‘the teachings of the sacred texts…are both necessarily part of primal misunderstanding and indicators of a liberation that is necessarily beyond that understanding.’

Legal Personhood for “Autonomous Artificial Agents”

I wanted to alert our readers to an intriguing online symposium that has begun today* at Concurring Opinions (although the announced schedule was February 14—16) on Samir Chopra and Laurence F. White’s book, A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011). I’ve yet to read the book (it’s on order). In the announcement to the symposium I made a few preliminary comments (as did the other longstanding CO commenter, A.J. Sutter), to the last of which Professor Chopra responded as follows:

“Patrick: I think there might be one fundamental point of disagreement between us might be my refusal to consider human intentionality and morality some sort of singularity in the natural order, the attainment of which lies entirely beyond non-carbon based entities.” [….]

This is indeed a fundamental point of disagreement. I’m considerably more than a wee bit concerned when concepts and categories intrinsic to morality, ontology (if not metaphysics), and psychology (consciousness, intentionality, autonomy, moral agency, and so on) are taken from the domain of the human (and, to a limited extent, nonhuman) animal world and applied to the realm of “artificial intelligence” (AI) technology. In other words, their natural domain of application (pun intended) does, in fact, rule out both literal and metaphorical extension into the realm of “non-carbon based entities.”

Without going into the details or possible arguments, we might find it tempting or at least easier to extend our moral and psychological concepts and categories beyond the human and nonhuman animal world into the domain of AI technology if our understanding of the mind (including consciousness and intentionality) is beholden to metaphors, models, or pictures that are currently fashionable in some quarters of philosophy, cognitive science, and psychology. One such model comes courtesy of “cognitive naturalism,” an “interdisciplinary amalgam of psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and linguistics,” the central hypothesis of which is “that thought can be understood in terms of computational procedures on mental representations,” dubbed by the philosopher Paul Thagard as CRUM, for Computational-Representational Understanding of Mind. On this model, mental representations are like (or virtually identical to) data structures and the mind’s putative “computational procedures” are algorithms, and thus “thinking” is tantamount to running programs. The current and fairly uncritical fascination with the neurosciences, evolutionary psychology, and reductionist theories in philosophy of mind contribute to an intellectual climate and disciplinary inquiries that directly or implicitly sanction or legitimate the legal endeavor to ascribe moral autonomy and ethical agency to technological programs and devices like robots.

I’m not claiming that these new technologies don’t raise novel moral and legal problems for which we may need to craft a fairly new conceptual (including legal) vocabulary. But such an enterprise would necessarily eschew simply importing existing moral and psychological principles, predicates, and concepts (as presuppositions, assumptions, or axioms) into the world of technology and law. And such an enterprise will have to avoid, at the very least, the siren call of mind-brain reductionism. In other words, consciousness, intentionality, and normativity decisive (i.e. basic or fundamental) properties or features or characteristics of our mental life which rule out the plausibility of reductionist or eliminativist “hypotheses.” (In Daniel Robinson’s words: ‘It cannot even be said that they are working hypotheses, because a working hypothesis is one that will rise or fall on the basis of relevant evidence, and there is no “evidence” as such that could tell for or against “hypotheses” of this sort.’) 

I hope to write more on this topic in the near future.

* There is now another post up by James Grimmelmann: here.

Further Reading:

• Bennett, M.R. and P.M.S. Hacker. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
• Bennett, Maxwell, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle, and Daniel Robinson. Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
• Borgmann, Albert. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
• Buller, David J. Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
• Descombes, Vincent (Stephen Adam Schwartz, tr.). The Mind’s Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
• Dupré, John. Human Nature and the Limits of Science. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2001.
• Feenberg, Andrew. Questioning Technology. New York: Routledge, 1999.
• Finkelstein, David H. Expression and the Inner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
• Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
• Horst, Steven. Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Hutto, Daniel D. The Presence of Mind. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999.
• Hutto, Daniel D. Beyond Physicalism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000.
• Hutto, Daniel D. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
• Ihde, Don. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990.
• Midgley, Mary. Science and Poetry. London: Routledge, 2001.
• Pardo, Michael S. and Dennis Patterson, “Minds, Brains, and Norms” (July 10, 2009). Neuroethics. Forthcoming. University of Alabama Public Law Research Paper. Available: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1432476 .
• Pardo, Michael S. and Dennis Patterson. “Philosophical Foundations of Law and Neuroscience” (February 6, 2009). University of Illinois Law Review, 2010. University of Alabama Public Law Research Paper No. 1338763. Available: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1338763 .
• Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
• Putnam, Hilary. Realism with a Human Face. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
• Putnam, Hilary. The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
• Rescher, Nicholas. The Limits of Science. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.
• Rescher, Nicholas. Nature and Understanding: The Metaphysics and Method of Science. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2000.
• Robinson, Daniel N. Consciousness and Mental Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
• Tallis, Raymond. The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999 ed.
• Tallis, Raymond. The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003.
• Tallis, Raymond. I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First-Person Being. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
• Tallis, Raymond. The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.  
• Tallis, Raymond. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Durham, England: Acumen, 2011.
• Thagard, Paul. Mind: Introduction to Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
• Travis, Charles. Unshadowed Thought: Representation in Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
• Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005 ed.
• Velmans, Max. Understanding Consciousness. London: Routledge, 2000.
• Wedgwood, Ralph. The Nature of Normativity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
• Ziman, John. Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.  

The End of Art

My assertion at one point that Warhol was closest to a philosophical genius of any twentieth-century artist very nearly cost me Robert[] [Motherwell’s] friendship, and he pointed out to me that Warhol rarely said more in front of a painting than ‘Wow.’ But that of course is just my point: the philosophy was in and through the work, and not in what was said in front of the work. There is in my view a great deal in Hegel’s belief that art and philosophy are deeply affined—that they are, in his heavy idiom, two moments of Absolute Spirit. The wonder of Warhol is that he did philosophy as art, in the sense that he defined false boundaries by crossing them. Since no philosopher of art in 1964 recognized the kind of problems Warhol raised, he could not have had a philosophical language in which to explain it. So, perhaps, ‘Wow.’  [….] Since at least Warhol’s exhibition of Brillo (and other) cartons at the Stable Gallery on East 74th Street in Manhattan in the spring of 1964, I have felt him to possess a philosophical intelligence of an intoxicatingly high order. He could not touch anything without at the same time touching the very boundaries of thought, at the very least thought about art. [….] Indeed, I believe it was among Warhol’s chief contributions to the history of art that he brought artistic practice to a level of philosophical self-consciousness never before attained.—Arthur C. Danto

For Warhol all art is commercial, which says more about the power of commerce than it does about the power of art. It took little more than half a century to undo Kandinsky’s idea that art was the last bastion of spirituality against materialism. [….] The artist was once thought of as sacred—he had a spark of God’s creativity in him—but Warhol’s artist is a businessman, profaning everything sacred and creative by putting a price on it, as Marx said. [….] Warhol’s art exploits the aura of glamor that surrounds material and social success, ignoring its existential costs. His art lacks existential depth; it is a social system with no existential resonance. ‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.’ This consumate statesman of postmodern nihilism suggests the reason that art has lost faith in itself: it has lost emotional and existential depth, and sees no reason to have any. [....] Some interpreters have thought Warhol was deliberately cynical, or at least ironical, but I think his seductive equation of money and art—not to say permanent confusion of their terms—was dead serious and honest. It is ruthlessly cool, in a world where ‘coolness’ is the aesthetic…. Cool is the way to be both indifferent to commerce and commercial at the same time.—Donald Kuspit

The following is a synoptic introduction to Donald Kuspit’s The End of Art (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

This book provides a brilliant and devastating diagnosis of what ails post-aesthetic or postmodern art: its failure to facilitate an aesthetic contemplative alternative to the “ugliness and injustice” of our social world (failing to realize that beauty is the ‘ultimate protest’ against ugliness); its constitutional inability to provide a “psychic space” that permits or encourages autonomy (wherein the ethical is inherent in aesthetics and beauty); its penchant for the tragicomic or farcical wherein the work of art, constructed by the would-be celebrity-artist, is merely a “psychosocial construction defined by its institutional identity, entertainment value, and commercial panache.”

Kuspit defines the “post-aesthetic” character of art as having abandoned the “heroic idea of the human potential of aesthetic experience,” which includes the “further[ing] [of] personal autonomy and critical freedom.” Postmodern “art” has become “consummately commercial,” causing the artist, the public, the patron and even the connoisseur to confuse or conflate commercial values with the spiritual values of art: “When commodity identity overtakes and subsumes aesthetic identity, so that an expensive work is uncritically accorded aesthetic significance, not to say spiritual value—they become everyday artifacts.” Postmodern art’s commercial value is linked to its role as entertainment: for the wealthy, who can afford its products, and the hoi polloi, whose consumption is passive, collective witness to the commercial spectacle and permitted vicarious association with the rich and famous aesthetes by way of “the  museum,” an institution that serves as “an intellectual sarcophagus, as much as a physical museum.” Postmodern artists hanker after “an audience that will make them popular, giving them the celebrity and charisma they believe they are entitled to as artists.” Kuspit dares his readers to show him “the contemporary artist who would prefer to live from hand to mouth rather than fall into the hands of an art dealer.”

Kuspit laments “protest art” and art that is ostensibly “moral,” enlisting art in the service of “meliorative criticism and social advocacy” because it tends to “regard[] form as a kind of scaffolding for subject matter from which it can be proclaimed,” and “the artist tries to bully the spectator into believing what the artist believes,” all the while leaving matter more or less “aesthetically untransformed” and evidencing a “certain failure of creativity.” Protest artists (producers of what others call ‘agitprop’),

“fail to realize that beauty is the ultimate protest against ugliness, which why the absence of beauty in their works shows that they are not critical. They are in fact creative failures. Indeed, the inability to imagine beauty is a sign of the creative inadequacy of post-aesthetic art.”

By contrast, “traditional art reveals the qualities—dignity and empathy especially—that make us human. It is morally concerned, and often shows the moral siege in an immoral world.”

Kuspit’s stinging lament does not end in despair:

“The anti-aesthete, anti-imaginative, anti-unconscious seem to have destroyed the possibility of making an aesthetic masterpiece, but there are still artists who believe in the imaginative refinement, under the auspices of the unconscious, of raw social and physical material into aesthetically transcendent art.”

First Image: By Avigdor Arikha who, together with Lucian Freud, Kuspit christens “Deans of the New Old Master artists.” Second Image: Brillo Soap Pads Box, 1964 (silkscreen on polymer paint on wood) The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh Founding Collection.

Gandhi and the Gītā

Owing to its length, and the fact that I thought it might receive greater attention from our readers, I’m posting my reply to Bob Hockett’s important question to the post immediately below.

One might, with Margaret Chatterjee, rightly characterize Gandhi’s interpretation of the Gītā as “unorthodox,” and it was indeed at least with regard to the story as a whole insofar as he viewed its historico-mythic setting in an allegorical fashion (some have referred to it as wholly ‘spiritualized’). It was an interpretation largely shared later by no less than Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. This may not be surprising for several reasons, one of which being the eclectic and strongly individual nature of his spirituality generally but perhaps more importantly, his insistence that the interpretation of religious texts should be based on one’s own experience and in the light of one’s own reason (‘the result of prayerful study and experience’), in this case, virtually free from the moorings of traditional interpretation (and this went beyond the differences between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ interpretations in Hinduism) and in keeping with the criteria he outlined for “justified faith.” In addition, and accordingly, Gandhi felt free to reject anything he found “inconsistent with the first principles of morality,” including “any conduct contrary to truth and ahimsā.” Gandhi’s knowledge (in the intellectual and philosophical sense) of “his” religious roots came fairly late, exemplified by the fact that he discovered the Gītā in an English translation by Sir Edwin Arnold, which had gained popularity in Theosophical circles, and in fact it was two Theosophists who gave the book to him (yet he did not begin a close study of the text until 1903, about ten years later). Gandhi may indeed have been strongly influenced by a Theosophical reading of the text, most likely that of T. Subba Row (July 6, 1856-June 24, 1890).

Gandhi’s intepretation is not implausible, and an allegorical reading of religious and philosophical works is not uncommon, in this instance especially if one views the larger epic itself, the Mahābhārata (the longest epic poem ever written, the Gītā being but a small portion of the text), as allegorical:

“The Mahabharata is not to me a historical record. It is hopeless as a history. But it deals with eternal verities in an allegorical fashion. It takes up historical personages and events and transforms them into angels or devils as it suits the purpose of the poet whose theme is the eternal dual between good and evil, spirit and matter, god and satan.”

As J.T.F. Jordens has explained, heretofore Gandhi “had argued that the author of the Gita only used the battle as an ‘occasion’ for its teaching, and that he used it in such a way because he did not look upon war as morally wrong” [there is, after all, something like a ‘just war’ conception in Hinduism]. Incarceration in Yeravda jail in 1922 gave Gandhi time to read the entire epic, whereupon he now argued that the Mahābhārata, in Jordens’ words, was itself

“against war because it described the utter futility of a pyrrhic victory in which both victors and vanquished lose their all. Henceforth Gandhi’s main argument for holding that the Gita was a treatise on non-violence was the assertion that it constituted a central episode in the great anti-war epic.”

The plausibility of such an interpretation was acknowledged in our own time by one of the foremost philosophers of Indic philosophy, Bimal Krishna Matilal (1935-1991): “the Gītā can, paradoxically, be treated as a text that discourages violence or bloody battles. It may also show the futility of all such battles.”

I hope to discuss the Bhagavad Gītā at length in a future post in response to something written online by Namit Arora that should further touch upon some of these issues.

The Three Yogas of the Bhagavad Gītā: An Introduction

In our introductory post on yoga, which focused on Patañjali’s Yoga system, I promised to introduce the three principal forms of yoga as discussed in the Bhagavad Gītā. The following therefore attempts to make sense of the Gītā’s discussion of bhakti-yoga, karma-yoga, and jñāna-yoga. It is certainly is possible and perhaps best to practice all three yogas, although in keeping with the karmic and psychological consequences of “guna” theory (see below for the meaning of this concept), an individual will be inclined to elevate one of the three yogas over the others in his or her life owing to a particular psycho-physiological temperament or character type in which one of the three gunas predominate. [subscript diacritic dots missing]

Bhagavad Gītā: ‘Song of the Lord’—a spiritual and philosophical story in verse consisting of a dialogue between Krsna, as an incarnation of Visnu, and Arjuna, the brave warrior who was the offspring of Pāndu’s wife, Kuntī, and the god Indra (the gods, at Pāndu’s request, having sired his five sons with his two wives). Krsna appears as Arjuna’s charioteer just prior to the start of the great Bhārata war to counsel the courageous warrior who is having second (and last minute) thoughts about participating in a battle in which the two sides are closely related to each other, and which is certain to result in enormous carnage for both parties. The Gītā is but a comparatively small section of the epic Mahābhārata (‘the great [war of] the Bhāratas’). Commentaries on the Gītā have been penned some famous Indian philosophers, including Śankara, Rāmānuja, and Madhva in the Vedānta tradition, and Abhinavagupta in the Kashmir Śaiva tradition. Gandhi left us with a Gujarati translation and commentary (trans. into English by Mahadev Desai) of the work he called his ‘dictionary of daily reference.’ Among the topics covered in the Bhagavad Gītā we find dharma (including svadharma), karma, reincarnation, the immortality of the soul, yajña (sacrifice), vairāgya (free from attachment or detachment), anāsakti (selfless action), dama (self restraint), samnyāsa (renunciation), bhakti (love and devotion to God), and the various paths (mārgas) to liberation (moksa): bhakti-, karma-, and jñāna-yoga.

bhakti-yoga (or mārga): the yoga or path of love and devotion; devotional worship, including pūjā, to one’s personal deity. Bhakti is the most popular and accessible religious practice among Hindus, although the likes of Rāmānuja and Madhva have accorded it theological and philosophical authority and respectability. In addition to pūjā, devotional singing and dancing, as well as pilgrimages to holy places, are conspicuous expressions of this spirituality. An inner surrender to and love of the chosen god or goddess complements the above religious practices. Bhakti-yoga is perfectly compatible with simultaneous fidelity to other yogas. Devotionalism is a recurring theme in the Epic literature and the Purānas. Cf. Bhagavad Gītā XIV. 26: ‘He who serves Me with the unswerving yoga of devotion, transcending the gunas, gains the fitness to become like unto Brahman.’ Bhakti may in part be the fruit of God’s grace, and can assume attitudes and roles analogous to various relationships: master/servant, parent/child, husband/wife, and so forth.

karma-yoga (or –mārga): the yoga or path of ‘works’ or selfless social service; one of the three yogas to spiritual fulfillment or moksa. It is the path to God through selfless action and service to others. Devotion to God through such works means one must learn non-attachment and renunciation regarding the fruits of one’s actions, effectively surrendering oneself to God. Cf. Bhagavad Gītā III.3: ‘Men may pursue either of the two paths I have taught in former times, that of yoga through contemplation of the Truth, as expounded by the sāmkhya, and that of yoga through devotion to disinterested action, as exemplified by the yogins.’ In Gītā II.7 we learn that karma-yoga involves the use of our mind to control the senses and acting without becoming attached to sense-objects. Generally speaking, a karma yogin acts in a dispassionate manner, without attachment to the ‘fruits’ of action, meaning those consequences of actions in and for the agent: for instance, pleasure or pain, success or failure. Thus the karma yogin performs dharma without desire for personal pleasure, success, reward and the like, proper motives being on the order of something like Mohandas K. Gandhi’s satyāgraha (nonviolent resistance; relentless search for truth) or sarvodaya (social good, public interest; universal welfare) or, in a different cultural context, the impersonal motives that inspire members of The Catholic Worker Movement founded by Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day. Indeed, Gandhi is best thought of (and thought of himself as) as karma-yogi. The Hindu nationalist politician Bal Ganghadar (Lokamanya) Tilak (1856-1920) wrote a commentary on the Gītā in which the text is taken to uphold the value of karma-yoga over both bhakti and jñana yoga. Gandhi read Tilak, and in spite of their clear moral and political differences, it’s not unlikely that Tilak’s interpretation had some influence on Gandhi’s own rather idiosyncratic rendering of the text’s meaning. The Gītā, and the notion of karma-yoga, was also central to the life and thought of another Hindu nationalist who later founded ‘Integral Yoga’ and his own āśrama, namely, Śri Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950). In fact, Karmayogin was the title of one of the early journals Aurobindo founded. But Aurobindo could never endorse Gandhi’s whole-hearted commitment to the theory and practice of nonviolence, and it seems unlikely that Gandhi would have countenanced Aurobindo’s later critique of the Gītā (that said, Gandhi was firm in his belief in the need for rational and critical interrogation of religious texts). Tilak, Gandhi and Aurobindo together represent the plausibility of according primacy to karma-yoga vis-à-vis the other yogas, as well as some of the varieties of moral and political practice that follow different interpretations of the Gītā’s discussion of karma-yoga. B.K. Matilal well-summarizes the karma-yoga ideal as elucidated by Krsna in the Gītā: ‘He must possess perfect knowledge of the nature of things and persons, but this knowledge would not lead him to non-action [as is alleged to occur in the śramana traditions like Jainism and Buddhism]. He would do whatever is expected of him by society [within the bounds of reason and ethics] and he would exercise unbiased reason to decide conflicting alternatives, but he would be completely free from any selfish desires, motives or preferences. If he acts of no selfish desire of his own, such acts will not produce any result that may cling to the agent and create further bondage.’

jñāna-yoga: (sometimes, jñāna-mārga or path of knowledge); the yoga of knowledge or wisdom. The path to God through the yoga of wisdom; cf. Bhagavad Gītā IV. 38, 39: ‘Verily, there is no purifier (pavitra) in this world equal to Divine Wisdom. He who is proficient in yoga discovers wisdom within his own soul in the progress of time.’ And, ‘He who is full of faith gains Divine Wisdom, seeking after it with supreme devotion and mastery over his senses. Gaining Wisdom, in no long time he enters the state of supreme peace (parāśānti).’ In Advaita Vedānta, jñāna-yoga is a mental-spiritual discipline the goal of which is moksa (freedom) from karma and the cycles of birth-death-rebirth, in other worlds, awareness of (nirguna) Brahman. In this school, the paths or yogas of bhakti and karma, in the end, subserve jñāna-yoga, which means they are not unimportant, in fact they can and do play an essential role in Advaita. As the most arduous and spiritually fulfilling of the yogas, jñāna-yoga is reserved for those few aspirants possessed of the proper psychological disposition and temperament. The would-be practitioner must evidence four spiritual capacities or abilities (sādhana catustaya): 1) some degree of ability to discriminate (viveka) between the spiritual and the conditioned, between the real and the provisionally real; 2) the renunciation of or indifference to (vairāgya) petty desires and all strivings for sensuous self-satisfaction; 3) attainment of mental tranquility (śamā), self-control (dama), dispassion (uparati), perseverance (titiksā), mental resolve or intentness of mind (samādhāna), and faith (śraddhā; but with connotations of trust, and to be progressively vindicated by knowledge and experience); 4) a positive longing for wisdom and freedom (mumuksutva). Broadly, jñāna-yoga entails the study of Vedāntic texts, sustained reflection upon the philosophical principles of Advaita (under the guidance of a guru), and ‘constant meditation’ (nididhyāsana).

guna(s): quality; attribute; characteristic; constituent; rope; in Sāmkhya philosophy, three gunas (gunasāmyāvasthā) exist in equilibrium with prakrti (primordial matter) until disrupted by the presence of purusa (pure consciousness). The disturbance in equilibrium causes the manifestation of determinate things and the separation of the three qualities or strands: sattva or ‘brightness’ strand, rajas or ‘force’ strand, and tamas or ‘mass’ strand. Guna theory has psychological (better: moral psychological) and epistemological ramifications as well, as sattva denotes eudaimonia and knowledge or the essence of higher mental functions, rajas denotes the will or energy and passion, and tamas denotes dullness, indifference and lethargy, mental inertia. This theory rules out any sharp separation between the metaphysical and the psychological, the epistemological and the ethical, and has been used to account for varying psycho-physiological states, temperaments, and character types (cf. Plato’s tripartite soul). It is comparable in function to the use of yin/yang and qi (or ch’i) in classical Chinese worldviews. In Nyāya-Vaisesika, gunas are qualities that inhere or subsist within substances (dravya). The number of gunas differs canonically from seventeen to twenty-four, and once more indicates an effacement (or at least a lack of sharp boundaries) of the material and the mental, the list including qualities of both types, and even qualities of ‘relation’ (e.g., remoteness and proximity, conjunction and disjunction). Relative to a ‘universal’ or ‘generic property’ (sāmānya or jāti), gunas are ‘abstract particulars,’ that is, particular spatio-temporal occurrences of colors, tastes, dimensions and so on: a particular that instantiates a universal (e.g., the particular redness of this tomato is an instance of universal redness as a property common to all red colors). In this system, the dravya-guna-sāmānya ontology is illustrative of realist metaphysics. In order to make clear that guna instantiation is non-repeatable, guna has recently been translated as ‘qualia,’ as qualities and properties are traditionally repeatable features. According to Gangeśa (Navya-Nyāya), guna ‘is a verdicality-grounding causal condition with respect to awareness’ (Stephen Phillips).

Incidentally, it is commonplace in the Indic religio-philosophical environment to formulate core doctrinal teachings and practices in a triune structure (there is not, however, a strict one-to-one correspondence): the Gītā’s three yogas thus worthy of comparison to the threefold division of the Eightfold Path of the Buddhists and the Triple Gems of the Jains, all three involving the mutually reinforcing practices of mind-heart training, moral virtues or ethics, and intuitive insight or wisdom.

Suggested Reading (I’ve highlighted my favorite translations of the Gītā):

• Aurobindo, Sri. Essays on the Gita. Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1949.
• Aurobindo, Sri. The Life Divine, 2 Vols. Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1977 (1955).
• Aurobindo, Sri. The Synthesis of Yoga. Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1976 (1948).
• Bartley, Christopher. The Theology of Ramanuja. London. Routledge Curzon, 2002.
• Buitenen, J.A.B. van. Rāmānuja on the Bhagavadgītā. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1968.
• Carman, John B. The Theology of Ramanuja: An Essay in Interreligious Understanding. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974.
• Chari, S.M.S. Vaisnavism. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2000.
• Chatterjee, Margaret. Gandhi’s Religious Thought. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.
• Deutsch, Eliot. Advaita Vedānta: A Philosophical Reconstruction. Honolulu, HI: University Press of Hawaii, 1971.
• Feuerstein, Georg. Introduction to the Bhagavad Gītā: Its Philosophy and Cultural Setting. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1983.
• Feuerstein, Georg. The Shambhala Encyclopedia of Yoga. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 1997.
• Feuerstein, Georg (with Brenda Feuerstein), trans. The Bhagavad Gītā: A New Translation. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2011.
• Gandhi, M.K. (Mahadev Desai, trans.). The Gospel of Selfless Action or the Gita according to Gandhi. Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1946 (1930).
• Gonda, Jan. Visnuism and Śivaism: A Comparison. London: Althone Press, 1970.
• Hardy, Friedhelm. Viraha Bhakti: The Early History of Krsna Devotion in South India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.
• Iyer, Raghavan, ed. The Bhagavad Gītā with the Uttara Gītā. Santa Barbara, CA: Concord Grove Press, 1985.
• Larson, Gerald James and Ram Shankar Bhattacharya, eds. Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Vol. XII, Yoga: India’s Philosophy of Meditation. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2008.
• Lester, Robert C. Rāmānuja on the Yoga. Madras: Adyar Library and Research Center, 1976.
• Lipner, Julius. The Face of Truth: A Study of Meaning and Metaphysics in the Vedantic Theology of Rāmānuja. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986.
• Matilal, Bimal Krishna, ed. Moral Dilemmas in the Mahābhārata. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1989.
• Minor, Robert N., ed. Modern Indian Interpreters of the Bhagavad Gītā. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986.
• Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi. Advaita Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Outline of Indian Non-Realism. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002.
• Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi. Knowledge and Liberation in Classical Indian Thought. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
• Sargent, Winthrop, trans. The Bhagavad-Gītā. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994 ed.
• Sharma, Arvind, ed. Essays on the Mahabharata. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2005.
• Sharma, Arvind, ed. Advaita Vedanta: An Introduction. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2004.
• Singh, R. Raj. Bhakti and Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006.
• Vivekananda, Swami. Jnana-Yoga. New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1982.
• Vivekananda, Swami. Karma-Yoga and Bhakti-Yoga. New York: Ramakrishna Vivekananda Center, 1982.
• Werner, Karel. Love Divine: Studies in Bhakti and Devotional Mysticism. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1993.
• Zaehner, R.C. The Bhagavadgītā with a Commentary Based on the Original Sources. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1973 (1969). 

Dreams and Dreaming: A Select Bibliography

Le Rêve (The Dream) is a 1932 oil painting by Pablo Picasso.

The select bibliography for “dreams and dreaming” is here. What follows is material on dreams and dreaming from several civilizations, cultures, and worldviews, as well as reflections on same from sundry writers, psychologists, and philosophers. It is hoped that these nuggets of analysis and insight will grant one a taste (rasa) of the wonderful world of dreams. I firmly believe that most of us who identify with the Religious or Spiritual Left are, in the best sense of the term, incorrigible dreamers.

“[D]reams are meaningful and dreaming a purposeful activity.”—Sudhir Kakar

“Dreams…are communications with the soma, psyche, polis, or cosmos of the dreamer.”—Sudhir Kakar

“Thanks mainly to Freud, the dream has been overwhelmingly in the hands of the psychologists. We cannot blame the psychologists for this, because they have proper business with the dream. But few humanist scholars have bothered to look directly at the dream as a subjective experience that has, however delusively, aroused in us all a sense of being alive in an unusual way. One scholar will write about Kafka and the dream, another about Mann or Strindberg and the dream, but few write about the dream itself. The average person is so used to dreaming that dreaming becomes as unremarkable as shaving or daydreaming on the bus. Yet for several hours each night, most of us invent and populate an outrageous world into which we are involuntarily projected to take our chances like the hero of a novel or a film. This is a staggering fact about human consciousness, this other reality….”—Bernard O. States

“Everyone approaches the subject, first and foremost, through their own personal dreaming. This is true for researchers and clinicians as well.”—Kelly Bulkeley

The most widely accepted facts about ordinary dreams are as follows: “(1) Nearly all humans remember at least some dreams. (2) A very small number of people report never dreaming. (3) Ordinary dreams are mostly visual and auditory, with some tactile sensations and very little smell or taste. (4) The whole range of emotions can appear in dreams but many dreams have no emotional tone at all. (5) High-level mental abilities for rational thought, decision-making, and self-reflection are active and normally functional in some dreams, but not in others. (6) Most dreams contain one or more characters other than the dreamer. (7) Many dreams involve speaking, listening and common forms of social interaction.”—Kelly Bulkeley

The following have been claimed as additional patterns in the form and content of ordinary dreams: “(1) Children dream more often of animals than adults do. (2) Women tend to remember more dreams than men do. (3) Men’s dreams tend to be more aggressive and sexual than women’s dreams. (4) Men dream more often of male characters than female characters, while women tend to dream evenly about male and female characters. (5) Falling dreams are much more common than flying dreams. (6) Some dreams include explicit reference to cultural symbols and metaphors. (7) The primary emotional concerns and activities of the waking life are accurately reflected in the frequencies of various elements of the dream content (the continuity hypothesis).”—Kelly Bulkeley 

After Jung, we might make a distinction between “little” and “big” dreams. With regard to the latter: “(1) Many cultures do make a general distinction between significant and insignificant dreams, after casting it in religious terms (e.g., divine dream visions and merely human dreams). (2) Nightmares are an especially widespread form of highly memorable dreaming, with a high prevalence among the general population of two primal themes: being chased or attacked by another character (especially animals) and falling or losing control of one’s body (e.g., feeling paralyzed). (3) At the other end of the emotional spectrum, some highly memorable dreams involve feelings of intense sexual pleasure that carry over into physiological arousal on waking (wet dreams). (4) Among the most emotionally positive big dreams are those involving seemingly magical phenomena (e.g., flying, dead people appearing alive again), with qualities of unusually intense realism. (5) Other factors associated with big dreams include recurrence, aesthetics, bizarreness, temporality, and lucidity.”—Kelly Bulkeley

“At the farthest edge of speculation a science of big dreams allies itself with the study of other non-linear processes such as weather, quantum physics, star formation, and art, which spontaneously generate new clusters of emergent order. From this perspective the open-ended dynamism and chaotic creativity of dreaming can be seen as provoking the conscious mind into a greater understanding of itself and the world.”—Kelly Bulkeley

“…[C]ontemporary philosophical and scientific literature has affirmed [the] ancient notion of the dream as prognostication, if this is understood not merely as foretelling the future, but as giving shape to the reality that will come to pass.”—Elliot R. Wolfson

“In our times [the] quest for meaning is part of a larger Euro-American movement of investing dreams with existential meaning, which in turn occurs in the context of the erosion of the magical garden and the death of god.”—Gananath Obeyesekere

“The tales of dreams suggest…that dreaming and waking partake of the same reality, which is both spiritual and physical.”—Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty

“The dream ether is the warp that myths are woven on; the weft is individual experience and art. Myths reflect our desire to believe that people really can dream the same dream, a desire that is a deep hope—a dream, if you will—that we all share. The myths that describe such experiences are shared dreams about shared dreams.”—Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty

“[O]ne can justifiably assert that Freud discovered psychoanalysis, or at least its central features, through his own dreams….”—Sigmund Freud

“[I]n spite of [the] self-criticisms, and in spite of the depression which followed the almost total neglect of the book by the outside world—only 35 copies were sold in the first six years after publication—The Interpretation of Dreams was always regarded by Freud as his most important work: ‘Insight such as this,’ he wrote in his preface to the third English edition, ‘falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime.’”—James Strachey

“Anyone who has failed to explain the origin of dream-images can scarcely hope to understand phobias, obsessions or delusion or to bring a therapeutic influence to bear on them.”—James Strachey

“It may happen that a piece of material occurs in the content of a dream which in the waking state we do not recognize as forming a part of our knowledge or experience.”—Sigmund Freud

“[D]reams have at their command memories which are inaccessible in waking life.”—Sigmund Freud

“Now most dream-images are unique experiences; and that fact will contribute impartially towards making us forget all dreams.”—Sigmund Freud

“[T]he emergence of impulses which are foreign to our moral consciousness is merely analogous…to the fact that dreams have access to ideational material which is absent in our waking state or plays but a small part in it.”—Sigmund Freud

“I have been driven to realize that here once more we have one of those not infrequent cases in which an ancient and jealously held popular belief seems to be nearer the truth than the judgment of the prevalent science of today. I must affirm that dreams really have a meaning and that a scientific procedure for interpreting them is possible.”—Sigmund Freud

Regarding the psychological preparation of the subject for dream interpretation in psychoanalysis: “We must aim at bringing about two changes in him: an increase in the attention he pays to his own psychical perception and the elimination of the criticism by which he normally shifts the thoughts that occur to him.” [These are uncannily similar to preliminary practices for meditation instruction.]—Sigmund Freud

“I am far from seeking to maintain that I am the first writer to have had the idea of deriving dreams from wishes.”—Sigmund Freud

“[D]reams are given their shape in individual human beings by the operation of two psychical forces (or we may describe them as currents or systems); and that one of those forces constructs the wish which is expressed by the dream, while the other exercises a censorship upon this dream-wish and, by the use of that censorship, forcibly brings about a distortion in the expression of the wish.”—Sigmund Freud

“[A] dream is a (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish.”—Sigmund Freud

A dream can both express and gratify a wish.

Anxiety dreams are a sub-species of dreams with a distressing content, the anxiety being superficially attached to the idea that accompanies it. Freud concedes that anxiety dreams are “dream structures unpropitious from the point of view of the wish-theory.”

“Freud eventually abandoned the idea that every dream was the gratification of a wish. In particular, he left open the possibility that a dream might be a manifestation—and representation of anxiety. And anxiety can be a realistic response to the world.”—Jonathan Lear

With regard to the manifest content of dreams: “(1) [D]reams show a clear preference for the impressions of the immediately preceding days; (2) they make their selection upon different principles from our waking memory, since they do not recall what is essential and important but what is subsidiary and unnoticed; [and] (3) they have at their disposal the earliest impressions of our childhood and even bring up details from that period of our life which, once again, strike us as trivial and which in our waking state we believe to have been long since forgotten.”—Sigmund Freud

Displacement refers to what occurs when “ideas which originally had only a weak charge of intensity take over the charge from ideas which were intensely cathected [charged with psychical energy] and at last attain enough strength to enable them to force an entry into consciousness.”—Sigmund Freud

“Censorship is served by processes such as displacement, whereby intensity and apparent importance are detached from a significant idea and passed along, by associative paths, to an insignificant idea. Displacement, along with condensation and other aspects of primary process constitutive of unconscious processing, are formal, syntactically characterisable operations. They account for the dream-work’s success in disguising desire, in the negative sense of making the content of wishes inaccessible.”—Sebastian Gardner

“Dreams are never concerned with trivialities; we do not allow our sleep to be disturbed by trifles. The apparently innocent dreams turn out to be quite the reverse when we take the trouble to analyze them.”—Sigmund Freud

The latent content of dreams refers to the “dream-thoughts” one arrives at through dream-work.

The process of condensation permits us to see how dreams are “meagre and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth of the dream-thoughts.”—Sigmund Freud

“[A] transference and displacement of psychical intensities occurs in the process of dream formation, and it is a result of these that the difference between the text of the dream-content and that of the [latent] dream-thoughts come about.”—Sigmund Freud.

“Dreams are completely egotistical” insofar as “every dream deals with the dreamer himself.”—Sigmund Freud

In describing the interpretation of dreams as “the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind,” Freud is referring, in Jonathan Lear’s words, to “the conscious waking activity of interpreting dream-memories in the analytic situation.”

If one takes Freud’s principles of dream interpretation seriously, it “emerges that the interpretation of dreams is an ethical activity.”—Jonathan Lear

“More than any other psychic phenomenon, dreams reveal so regularly and so graphically the variety of unconscious forces, including the unconscious ego and superego as well as dynamic and genetic factors. As compromise formations rather than mere wish fulfillments, dreams prove crucial for indicating the nature of pathology and defensive structure.”—Patrick J. Mahony

“What is meant by lucid dreaming? The French dream theorist Michel Jouvet puts it thus: ‘A dream is lucid when the subject, while dreaming, knows he or she is dreaming. This peculiar state allows the dreamer a certain measure of control over the actual unfolding of the dream and a sense of freedom through being able to explore the dream world according to his or her own inclinations’ [The Paradox of Sleep (Laurence Garey, trans.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999: 761]. What is striking about lucid dreaming is that, like its Buddhist and Hindu precursors, it provides technologies for disciplining oneself in order to dream lucidly. A detailed account of these technologies is found in the work of an important theorist, Stephen LeBerge, whose pioneering work Lucid Dreaming [1987] was followed by Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming [1990], written with his collaborator Howard Rheingold.”—Gananath Obeyesekere

“In the West, mentions of lucid dreaming can be found in the writing of philosophers Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Reid, Pierre Gassendi and the first mention in Europe was in a letter written by St. Augustine of Hippo in 415 AD.”—Fariba Bogzaran

“Perhaps the awareness of lucid dreaming in Western academic circles [first] occurred with the publication of Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys (1822-1892), a Sinologist who published Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger: observations pratiques (Dreams and the Ways to Direct Them: Practical Observations or often translated as Dreams and How to Guide Them). He documented more than twenty years of personal investigation into lucid dreams. Although working with dreams was not at the centre of his career, his book influenced and inspired many in the arts and literature including the surrealist André Breton. The name ‘lucid dreaming’ was coined by Dutch psychiatrist Frederick van Eden in 1913.”—Fariba Bogzaran

“Research and first-person accounts show that in lucid dreaming, different levels of intentionality can be carried out, such as transforming a self-image, ego-splitting; spiritual experiences; meeting the deceased; witnessing, entering hyperspace; healing, and encountering inner light.”—Fariba Bogzaran

“[W]hile lucid dream theory claims to have been influenced by Tibetan dream yoga, the latter has little affinity with lucid dreams.”—Gananath Obeyesekere

“The boundaries between waking and dreaming are more permeable in the Hindu, specifically Upanishadic thought.”—Sudhir Kakar

In the Mahābhārata, we find “a set of contrasting dreams on the eve of a great battle: nightmares in those who are about to be defeated, auspicious dreams in those who are about to conquer.”—Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty

“[I]t is argued in the Yogavāsistha, when we take the material universe to be the ultimate reality, we make a mistake comparable to the mistake someone makes when he thinks he sees his head cut off in a dream, a traditional image in Indian dream books.”—Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty

Online Bibliographies on Motley Subjects

Here is the list of motley bibliographies to date in my Directed Reading series inaugurated in March of 2008 at the Ratio Juris blog. Some of these lists I’ve since updated a bit, so if you want the latest version, just e-mail me. I hope to finish posting all of the proposed bibliographies before proceeding to systematically update them. Of course I welcome suggestions and comments. Many of these lists were first posted at various law blogs and some are found online at several university and other library sites. They are far from exhaustive and probably more than a tad idiosyncratic (especially because most of them were put together in the first instance for yours truly), nevertheless, I think they should prove useful for basic research endeavors. (At the respective blog posts, click on the appropriate highlighted term for the bibliography in Word doc. form.)

• American Indian Law
• Analogy and Metaphor
• Animal Ethics, Rights, and Law
• Bioethics
• Buddhism
• Christianity
• Classical Chinese Worldviews
• Comparative Law
• Constitutionalism
• The Contemporary Arab World
• Criminal Law, Punishment, and Prisons
• Death and Dying
• Dreams and Dreaming
• Ecological and Environmental Worldviews
• The Emotions
• The Ethics, Economics, and Politics of Global Distributive Justice (First draft used in Professor Appelbaum’s course, ‘Global 2: An Introduction to Global Socioeconomic and Political Processes’ in the Global and International Studies Program at University of California, Santa Barbara)
• Freudian and Post-Freudian Psychology
• Health: Law, Ethics, and Social Justice
• Hinduism
• Human Rights
• International Law
• Islamic Studies (Early draft published in Ian Richard Netton, ed., Encyclopedia of Islamic Civilisation and Religion (New York: Routledge, 2008): 741-799, and available online at Islamic Philosophy Online and several university library websites)
• Israeli/Palestinian Conflict
• Judaism and Jewish Philosophy
• Marx and Marxism
• Mass Media: Politics, Political Economy, and Law
• Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory
• Science and Technology
• Slavery
• Socio-Political Conflict Resolution and Nonviolence
• Terrorism
• Torture: Moral, Political, and Legal Dimensions
• The World of Work and Labor Law

Forthcoming:

• Aesthetic Theory and Philosophy of Art
• Capital Punishment
• Chinese Medicine
• Contract Law
• Democratic Theory and Praxis (First draft published in two issues of The Good Society)
• Law and Literature (early draft available at The Literary Table)
• Tort Law
• Zionism

Facts & Values, Truth & Objectivity—An Introduction (Part III)

This is the third and final installment of our series. The first post is here, and the second is here.

‘Recently Iris Murdoch has put forward the view that the whole “fact/value” dichotomy stems from a faulty moral psychology: from the metaphysical picture of “the neutral facts” (apprehended by a totally uncaring faculty of reason) and the will which, having learned the neutral facts, must “choose values” either arbitrarily (the existentialist picture) or on the basis of “instinct.” I think she is right; but setting this moral psychology right will involve deep philosophical work involving the notions of “reason” and “fact” (as she, of course, recognizes).’—Hilary Putnam

‘The concept factual judgment or judgment with a truth-value and the concept of ethical judgment will be different concepts—such a distinction is there to be made, just as the concept mouse and the concept mammal are different concepts—but the distinctness does not preclude a judgment’s being both a factual and an ethical judgment. Compare the way in which the distinct concepts mouse and mammal will each collect any particular mouse you please, Timmy Willy or Johnny Town or whichever, within their extensions. Ethical judgments could be a subset of factual judgments even if they were an utterly special and essentially contestable subset. In this way, we can have a clear difference between the ethical-as-such and the factual-as-such without any dichotomy between their property provinces. The hope of making good a claim of this sort is the characteristic hope of ethical objectivism or moral cognitivism.’—David Wiggins

‘A predicate stands for a natural property if it is indispensable to the exposition or development of some natural science (or to some similarly strictly empirical-cum-explanatory mode of investigation). A non-natural property is simply one that is not like that. It is a myth and the opposite of the truth that our grasp of properties that are natural in this sense is better than our grasp of the non-natural.’—David Wiggins

‘Consider the ethical predicate “considerate.” That which marks out or delimits or decries or discriminates the property of considerateness in acts or attitudes or human characters is an essentially ethical interest, in pursuit of which we can deploy any mode of investigation or and associated concept that suits the case. The presence of such properties, that is, of value properties, is ascertained by all the multifarious means that are called for by the exercise of our grasp of this or that ethical concept. Such properties are to be conceived in light of what it takes to exercise that grasp—not vice versa. A particular ethical property, we might say, is to be identified or singled out as the property which the reasonable exercise of the grasp of such and such a concept, as regulated by criticism, hunts down.’—David Wiggins

‘Objectivity calls for putting one’s idiosyncratic predilections and parochial preferences aside in forming one’s beliefs, evaluations and choices. It is a matter of proceeding in line not with one’s inclinations but with the dictates of impartial reason. The universality of reason must be recognized: What is rational for one person to do, to believe, or to value will thereby also of necessity be equally rational for all the rest of us who might find ourselves in the same circumstances. For rationality is inherently “objective:” it does not reconfigure itself to meet the idiosyncratic predilections of particular individuals. To be sure, objectivity will have to take context into account, seeing that different individuals and groups confront very different objective situations. Rationality is universal, but it is circumstantially universal—and objectivity with it. It is a matter of what “any of us” would do in one’s place. [….] The contextuality of good reasons can be reconciled with the universality of rationality itself by taking a hierarchical view of the process through which the absolutistic (and uniform) conception of ideal rationality is thought to bear context differently, on the resolution of concrete cases and particular situations.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘The content of an assertion is intrinsically related to a conceptual scheme. [….] In effect, propositions, true or false, are implicitly indexed to some conceptual scheme or schemes. [….] Facts are internal to conceptual schemes, or ways of dividing the world into objects, among which there can be equally acceptable alternatives. [….] [S]uch metaphysical pluralism is consistent with realism about truth.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘[I]n taking concepts to be flexible and fluid like, the pluralist is not saying that we are confused about our concepts. Rather, the point is that concepts are not absolutely determinate or closed; they do not have a fixed use in every possible situation. This does not imply, however, that no concepts have determinate uses in all actual situations. Some concepts may be perfectly determinate in actual situations, but not in all possible situations. [….] For the pluralist, concepts are…flexible; they are subject to possible extension in the fact of unforeseen circumstances. Hence, there can be irresolvable disagreements over how to apply any concept. In a sense, concepts are therefore always possibly vague in a nonpejorative sense; they have what Waismann called “open texture.”’—Michael P. Lynch

‘Minimally speaking, a proposition is true in the realist sense when things are as that proposition says they are. Some aspect of objective reality must simply be a certain way. If it is, then the proposition is true; if not, the proposition is false. The truth of the proposition hinges on the world alone, not on our thought about the world. In short, realism about truth minimally implies two commitments: (a) truth is an authentic property that some propositions have and others lack, and (b) the concept of truth is, in Putnam’s words, “radically non-epistemic;” that is, whether a proposition is true (in most cases) does not depend on what I or anyone else believes or knows. [….] According to correspondence accounts of truth, there are three metaphysical aspects to any true proposition: the proposition itself (the truth bearer), its correspondence (the truth relation), and the reality to which it corresponds (the truth marker). [….] In other words, propositions are true when they correspond to the facts.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘[T]here is no logical incoherence in supposing that facts and propositions are relative to conceptual schemes and that truth is the correspondence of (relative) propositions with (relative) facts.’—Michael P. Lynch

Truth is objective; it is good to believe what is true; truth is a goal worthy of human inquiry; and truth is worth caring about for its own sake.

‘Thinking about why we should care about truth tells us two things about it: first, that truth is, in part, a deeply normative property—it is a value. And second, this is a fact that any adequate theory of truth must account for. In light of this fact, I suggest that truth, like other values, should be understood as depending on, but not reducible to, lower-level properties. Yet which properties truth depends on or supervenes on may change with the type of belief in question. This opens the door to a type of pluralism: truth in ethics may be realized differently than in physics.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘Truth is a property that is good for beliefs to have. Since propositions are the content of beliefs, and it is the content of a belief and not the act of believing that is true, we can also say that truth is the property that makes a proposition good to believe.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘All truths are relative, yes, but our concept of truth needn’t be a relative concept.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘[T]he conditions under which a proposition is true are partly determined by the conceptual scheme in which the proposition is expressed. But what makes a proposition true is not its relation to a scheme but whether or not the conditions in question obtain. For a claim to be true (or false), the conditions must be relative to a scheme. Yet the reason that the claim is true is not because it is relative to a scheme (as the truth relativist must hold); it is true because it is the case.[….] A fact, in the human sense, is simply what is the case.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘Deflationists are right to be skeptical of the thought that any one traditional theory of truth can tell us what all and only true beliefs have in common. At a suitable level of abstraction, understanding what true beliefs are simply involves simply understanding what they do—their role in our cognitive economy. To play this role is to satisfy certain truisms, truisms that display truth’s connection to other concepts. It is this truth-role that gives truth its unity; the features that are constitutive of this role are what true propositions have in common, and simply having those features is what we ordinarily mean by saying that a proposition is true. But not all facts are exhausted by the truisms. One such facts is that there is more than one property that make beliefs true. Truth…is immanent in those other properties of beliefs. In some domains, what makes a belief true is that it corresponds to reality; in others, beliefs are made true by a form of coherence. [….] [Traditional theories of truth] are not best conceived of as theories of truth itself. They are better seen as theories of the properties that make beliefs true—or manifest truth.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘Truth is immanent in distinct properties of beliefs; our ordinary concept of truth is univocal.’—Michael P. Lynch

Core Folk Truisms (there may be other truisms): 1. Objectivity: ‘The belief that p is true if, and only if with respect to the belief that p, things are as they are believed to be…is a central truism about truth.’ 2. Norm of Belief: It is prima facie correct to believe that p if and only if the proposition that p is true.’ 3. Warrant of Independence: ‘Some beliefs can be true but not warranted and some can be warranted without being true.’ 4. End of Inquiry: Other things being equal, true beliefs are a worthy goal of inquiry.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘A theory of truth should make sense of the following metaphysical principle: Truth is One: There is a single property named by “truth” that all and only true propositions share.’ The theory should also be ‘able to make sense of the intuition that drives pluralism about truth, namely, Truth is Many: there is more than one way to be true.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘[T]ruth is a single higher-level property whose instantiations across kinds of propositions are determined by a class of other, numerically distinct properties. [….] Truth is many because different properties may manifest truth in distinct domains of inquiry. In those domains they have the truish features [we find in those folk-truisms enumerated above]. Truth is one because there is a single property so manifested, and “truth” rigidly names that property.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘Truth is an immanent functional property that is variably manifested.’—Michael P. Lynch

An atomic proposition of some domain is true, if and only if, it has the particular property that manifests true for propositions in that domain. The truth-value of compounds supervenes on the truth-value of atomic propositions.

‘In the denial that artwork can or should make truth claims I see formalism joining hands with romanticism, to yield an aestheticism that renders art autonomous, to be sure, and perhaps even pleasantly anarchic, but also cut off from the rest of life, deracinated, robbed of its claim upon conscience or consciousness, and so transformed into little more than the toy of decadence.’—Lenn E. Goodman

‘I think artworks do make truth claims, even if not always propositionally. But no truth claim is self-validating, and artistic claims are not made true by virtue of their medium. Perhaps the most suspect of pretensions in behalf of artistic truth is the idea that art’s higher truth is somehow exempt from the demands of human understanding, critical thought, or moral judgment. That makes artists into hit-and-run oracles. Surely, even a higher truth, if it really is truth, is worthy and capable of scrutiny. That means that works of artistic fancy can and should he held accountable for their veracity, on whatever level they can make good their claims.’—Lenn E. Goodman

 ‘[A] uniformitarian absolutism at the high-generality level of “what rationality is” is perfectly consonant with a pluralism and relativism at the lower level of concrete resolutions regarding “what is rational” within the contextual setting of particular cases. The ruling principles of rationality never uniquely constrain their more specific circumstantial implementations. At each step along the way we repeat the same basic situation: delimitation, yes; determination, no. The sought-for reconciliation between the universalistic absoluteness of rationality and the variability and relativity of its particular rulings is thus provided for by the consideration that the absolutism of principles operates at the highest level of the hierarchy of rational development, while there is ever “slack” and variability as one moves towards the lowest level of concrete determinations. The variability and relativity of good reasons at the level of our actual operations can indeed be reconciled with the absolutism of rationality itself by taking a hierarchical view of the process through which the absolutistic conception of ideal rationality is brought to bear on the resolution of concrete circumstances and particular situations.’—Nicholas Rescher 

‘In characterizing a belief as objectively rational we are certainly not claiming that there is a universal consensus about it. No matter how sensible a contention on any significant issue may be, there is an ever-present prospect that some people—perhaps even many—will nevertheless quite defensibly and appropriately dissent from it. The validity of our judgments is emphatically not destroyed by finding that there are people who reject them.’—Nicholas Rescher 

‘We have to come to terms with epistemic realities, which include:

• the diversity in people’s experiences and cognitive situations
• the variation of “available data”
• the underdetermination of facts by data (all too frequently insufficient)
• the variability of people’s cognitive values (evidential security, simplicity, etc.)
• the variation of cognitive methodology and the epistemic “state of the art”

Such factors—and others like them—make for an unavoidable difference in the beliefs, judgments, and evaluations even of otherwise “perfectly rational” people.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘If we are going to be rational we must take—and have no responsible choice but to take—the stance that our own standards (of truth, value, and choice) are the appropriate ones. Be it in employing or in evaluating them, we ourselves must see our own standards as authoritative because this, exactly, is what it is for them to be our own standards—their being our standards consists in our seeing them in this light. We have to see our standards in an absolutistic light—as the uniquely right appropriately valid ones—because this is what is at issue in their being our standards of authentic truth, value, or whatever. To insist that we should view them with indifference is to deny us all prospects of having any standards at all. Commitment at this level is simply unavoidable. Our cognitive or evaluative perspective would not be our perspective did we not deem it rationally superior to others.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘What people think to be true is clearly something that is person-variable and thus relative. We can take the line that “What is true?” is a question that different people can quite appropriately answer differently because of the interpersonal variability of available information. But what truth is all about is something that is…altogether definite and fixed. The evidentiation at issue in the epistemic sector is doubtless interpersonally and intercommunally variable. But variability on the side of information does not make for variation on the side of concepts.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘[W]e can (quite appropriately) disagree about what it is that is true and what good reasons are at hand, while yet maintaining an (appropriately) absolutistic view of what truth and good reasons are. The ideal nature of actual truth and of actual good reasons that inhere in our (defining) conceptions of inquiry establishes a clear limit to the implications of cognitive relativism. To re-emphasize: a pluralistic contextualism of potential basis-diversity is altogether compatible with an absolutistic commitment to our own basis. One can accept the prospect of alternatives as available to the community at large without seeing more than one of them appropriate for oneself. One can combine a pluralism of possible alternatives with an absolutistic position regarding ideal rationality and a firm and reasoned commitment to the standards intrinsic to one’s own position. We ourselves are bound to see our own (rationally adopted) standards as superior to the available alternatives—and are, presumably, rationally entitled to do so in light of the cognitive values we in actual fact endorse. The crux of the pluralism issue lies in the question of just what it is that one is being pluralistic about.’—Nicholas Rescher

How Good Laws—and Good Social Norms—Make Good People

At PrawfsBlawg, they’re having a discussion of Lynn Stout’s Cultivating Conscience: How Good Laws Make Good People (2010): here, here, here, here, here, and here.  The Princeton University Press webpage for the book introduces us to its central argument:

Contemporary law and public policy often treat human beings as selfish creatures who respond only to punishments and rewards. Yet every day we behave unselfishly--few of us mug the elderly or steal the paper from our neighbor’s yard, and many of us go out of our way to help strangers. We nevertheless overlook our own good behavior and fixate on the bad things people do and how we can stop them. In this pathbreaking book, acclaimed law and economics scholar Lynn Stout argues that this focus neglects the crucial role our better impulses could play in society. Rather than lean on the power of greed to shape laws and human behavior, Stout contends that we should rely on the force of conscience.

Stout makes the compelling case that conscience is neither a rare nor quirky phenomenon, but a vital force woven into our daily lives. Drawing from social psychology, behavioral economics, and evolutionary biology, Stout demonstrates how social cues--instructions from authorities, ideas about others’ selfishness and unselfishness, and beliefs about benefits to others--have a powerful role in triggering unselfish behavior. Stout illustrates how our legal system can use these social cues to craft better laws that encourage more unselfish, ethical behavior in many realms, including politics and business. Stout also shows how our current emphasis on self-interest and incentives may have contributed to the catastrophic political missteps and financial scandals of recent memory by encouraging corrupt and selfish actions, and undermining society's collective moral compass.

As I’ve yet to read the book, I can’t make any substantive comments on its thesis, although I’m predisposed to view it with favor, at least I think I understand the animating motivation for the argument. And I won’t in this post address the question of “how good laws (and good social norms) can make good people.” In any case, the emphasis in “law and economics” scholarship “on self-interest and incentives” has long been troubling, and Amartya Sen, among others, has critiqued the psychological assumptions behind homo economicus, while S.M. Amadae, again among others, has critiqued “rational choice theory” as conventionally employed in the social sciences: neither Sen nor Amadae are cited in the book. So while economists and philosophers have addressed some of the moral, psychological, and general normative assumptions that come with neo-classical economics, the problems intrinsic to “law and economics” as an area of legal study are not all found on the right side of the conjunction, for the other half of this cross-disciplinary enterprise—law—is routinely construed in strongly positivistic and instrumentalist terms (or, at best, in utilitarian fashion), which only compounds the problem.

But the questions I want to focus on concern the reliance on “conscience” to transform various areas of the law and the legal system generally. In one sense, Stout’s thesis may be judged too modest in aim and aspiration, particularly considered in comparison with the potential for the natural law tradition to reform or radically alter our laws and the attitudes of citizens to their legal system in a democratic constitutional polity. In a future post, I’ll attempt to outline the potential for the natural law tradition and aretaic legal theory to demonstrate the manner in which “good laws (and good social norms) can make good people” (and how good people may be necessary to make good laws).

The part played by conscience in our social and political life is typically circumscribed by the power of the moral no: the ethical refusal to engage in some enterprise, to perform some act, to behave in some morally repugnant manner, or to call attention to some egregious moral violation on the part of the government or some powerful institution in civil society. To invoke the call of conscience means to stand alone or apart for the sake of a fundamental or moral value or principle of ethics, grounded in the basic exercise of moral discrimination through a sacred right of refusal (hence, the ‘voice within,’ the ‘inner light’). Stout defines conscience as an “internal force that inspires unselfish, prosocial behavior,” but this definition is misleading if we consider how individual conscience is typically intended as a defense against the group. Of course the individual taking a stand on the promptings of conscience may inspire group or collective action of some sort, and those who take stand on the basis of a claim of conscience are seeking recognition by others of some moral truth or truths they see more clearly and urgently than the rest of us (what Vischer terms the ‘relational dimension’ of conscience’). But it strikes one as strange to make the inspiration of “prosocial behavior” an essential part of the meaning of the concept. I don’t mean to dismiss or diminish the power and importance of conscience, but I’m inclined to see it primarily as negative in scope, and thus restricted to an ex post rather than ex ante orientation. Consider, for example, how the notion of conscience did not assume its modern meaning until late in the eighteenth century (the seeds for the concept were sown as far back as Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, and the Stoics in the West), when individuals invoked the claims of conscience as a viable substitute for identification with sectarian religions.

The individual orientation of what Gandhi called the “Court of Conscience” and the “still small voice within,” is best seen from the vantage point of moral psychology as a developmental outcome, so much so that we take its presence as indicative of moral individuation and moral autonomy. Conscience, on this view, is thus not something one has ready-at-hand upon reaching the age of reason, for it is a potential or capacity that needs to be awakened and nurtured, in Gandhi’s words, it is “the ripe fruit of the strictest discipline.” In other words, it seems hard to believe that conscience today is, as Stout says, “a vital force woven into our daily lives,” a claim not rendered true by the sheer volume of claims of conscience in our society. This should certainly give one pause in imagining anything like a well-honed conscience (to mix metaphors) as deeply ingrained and widespread throughout society. The individuality of conscience combined with its role in the courageous or uncommon expression of warnings or admonitions or refusals—the power of no—does not appear to make it well-suited for the role Stout intends for it. To complicate matters yet further, Rob Vischer has recently noted that, “[i]ncreasingly the individual who invokes conscience is opposed not by the state, but by the similarly conscience-driven claims of other individuals and groups.” For better and worse, in the era of “rights claims,” invocations of conscience may come too easy, reflecting a conspicuous lack of the kind of cultivation and training Gandhi thought absolutely necessary to the exercise of true conscience.

There is one glaring exception to the picture of conscience I’ve sketched here and that comes, oddly enough, from Gandhi himself. Gandhi’s conscience was atypical inasmuch as his “inner voice” also came in the form of “positive guidance.” Closer to the role Stout would envisage for conscience, and unlike most of those who came before and after him in invoking claims of conscience, Gandhi’s “stress on individual conscience” was wedded to a “program of mass action,” for he in fact made conscience “the basis of all social and political action.” It’s hard to imagine, however, more than a few individuals capable of conjoining the roles of saint and revolutionary in the manner exemplified my Gandhi. 

At a later date I hope to show why I think aretaic legal theory and the natural law tradition are better suited to the sorts of tasks Stout imagines for conscience, that is, as a “tool or weapon,” in transforming our laws and the legal system.   

Facts & Values, Truth & Objectivity—An Introduction (Part II)

[This series was introduced in our prior post.]

‘[E]motions can reveal value that they contain. But in addition, people’s characters and their values can be revealed by emotions. [….] [E]motions reveal not just our values and evaluations but much of our interior and exterior worlds….’—Michael Stocker (with Elizabeth Hegeman)

‘Emotions may show valuings rather than value: how a person values something, not the value something has or the value the person takes it to have. Sometimes people have emotions that contain and reveal valuings, not values; and sometimes people have emotions that reveal a lack of valuing, even in the face of acknowledged value.’—Michael Stocker (with Elizabeth Hegeman)

Emotions can be evaluatively accurate and informative, therefore we can justly say that emotions are epistemologically important for evaluations and evaluative knowledge.

‘[T]he values and evaluations of one’s having or not having certain emotions, and of the ways one has or does not have them, are rarely, if ever, central to our important ethical works, and they are often enough not even mentioned, much less discussed, in those works [among a few notable exceptions, Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good, 1970, is mentioned]. However, I do not think that their absence from our works on ethics shows that these issues lack importance. I think, rather, that it shows an important lack, and indeed something of a lack of importance, in our work in ethics.’—Michael Stocker (with Elizabeth Hegeman)

‘[We] should respect our emotional responses and listen to what they have to say to us and about us. But they are not the final arbiter: our emotional responses should be held for examination and reflection. Of course, this cannot be done from an emotionless, purely rational perspective, for there is no such standpoint, but it should be done in the light of reason and of our other emotional responses to the other things we value. And if this examination and reflections shows that our emotional responses are not appropriate, then the emotion should cease.’—Peter Goldie

‘Values enter into the very definition of what a fact is; the realm of facts cannot be defined or specified without utilizing certain values. Values enter into the process of knowing a fact; without utilizing or presupposing certain values, we cannot determine which is the realm of facts, we cannot know the real from the unreal.’—Robert Nozick

Rational acceptability in the natural sciences depends ‘on such cognitive virtues as “coherence” and “functional simplicity,” show[ing] that at least some value terms stand for properties of the things they are applied to, and not just for feelings of the person who uses the terms.’—Hilary Putnam

Our knowledge of the world presupposes values, indeed, what comes to count as the real world depends upon our values. This is evidenced in the ‘implicit standards and skills on the basis of which we decide whether someone is able to give a true, adequate, and perspicuous account of even the simplest perceptual facts…’—Hilary Putnam

‘[F]act, (or truth) and rationality are interdependent notions. A fact is something that it is rational to believe, or, more precisely, the notion of a fact (or a true statement) is an idealization of the notion of a statement that it is rational to believe. [….] [B]eing rational involves having criteria of relevance as well as criteria of rational acceptability, and…all of our values are involved in our criteria of relevance. The decision that a picture of the world is true (or true by our present lights, or “as true as anything is”) and answers the relevant questions (as well as we are able to answer them) rests on and reveals our total system of value commitments. A being with no values would have no facts either. The way in which criteria of relevance involves values, at least indirectly, may be seen by examining the simplest statement. Take the sentence “The cat is on the mat.” If someone actually makes this judgment in a particular context, then he employs conceptual resources—the notions “cat,” “on,” and “mat”—which are provided by a particular culture, and whose presence and ubiquity reveal something about the interests and values of that culture, and of almost every culture. We have the category “cat” because we regard the division of the world into animals and non-animals as significant, and we are further interested in what species as given animal belongs to. It is relevant that there is a cat on the mat and not just a thing. We have the category “mat” because we regard the division of inanimate things into artifacts and non-artifacts as significant, and we are further interested in the purpose and nature a particular artifact has. It is relevant that it is a mat that the cat is on and just something. We have the category “on” because we are interested in spatial relations. Notice what we have: we took the most banal statement imaginable, “the cat is on the mat,” and we found that the presuppositions which make this statement a relevant one in certain contexts include the significance of the categories animate/inanimate, purpose, and space. To a mind with no disposition to regard these as relevant categories, “the cat is on the mat” would be as irrational as “the number of hexagonal objects in this room is 76” would be, uttered in the middle of a tête-à-tête between young lovers. Not only do very general facts about our value system show themselves in our categories (artifacts, species name, term for a spatial relation) but, our more specific values (for example, sensitivity and compassion), also show up in the use we make of specific classificatory words (‘considerate,’ ‘selfish’). To repeat, our criteria of relevance rest on and reveal our whole system of values.’—Hilary Putnam

‘There are a variety of reasons why we are tempted to draw a line between “facts” and “values”—and to draw it in such a way that “values” are put outside the realm of rational argument altogether. For one thing, it is much easier to say, “that’s a value judgment,” meaning, “that’s just a matter of subjective preference,” than to do what Socrates tried to teach us: to examine who we are and what our deepest convictions are and hold those convictions up to the searching test of reflective examination.’—Hilary Putnam

‘(1) In ordinary circumstances, there is usually a fact of the matter as to whether the statements people make are warranted or not. [….] (2) Whether a statement is warranted or no is independent of whether the majority of one’s cultural peers would say it is warranted or unwarranted. (3) Our norms and standards of warranted assertibility are historical products; they evolve in time. (4) Our norms and standards always reflect our interests and values. Our picture of intellectual flourishing is part of, and only makes sense as part of, our picture of human flourishing in general. (5) Our norms and standards of anything—including warranted assertibility—are capable of reform. There are better and worse norms and standards.’—Hilary Putnam

‘The moral life is not intermittent or specialised, it is not a peculiar or separate area of our existence…. [W]e are always deploying and directing our energy, refining it or blunting it, purifying it or corrupting it…. “Sensitivity” is a word which may be in place here…. Happenings in consciousness so vague as to be almost non-existent can have “moral colour”… (“But are you saying that every single second has a moral tag?” Yes, roughly.)’—Iris Murdoch

Because our states of consciousness and action presuppose perceptual (or epistemic) discrimination, any such discrimination is subject to moral evaluation.

‘The moral point is that “facts” are set up as such by human (that is moral) agents. Much of our life is taken up by truth-seeking, imagining, questioning. We relate to facts through truth and truthfulness, and come to recognise and discover that there are different modes and levels of insight and understanding. In many familiar ways, various values pervade and colour what we take to be the reality of our world; wherein we constantly evaluate our own values and those of others, and judge and determine forms of consciousness and modes of being.’—Iris Murdoch

‘In recognizing the compelling power of values, and of logical principles (their normative, or what is sometimes called their ‘magnetic quality’), we humans are plainly recognizing something that goes beyond the observed facts of the natural world. And the theistic outlook now proposes to interpret these features as signifying the presence, beyond the empirical world, of a transcendent supernatural domain that is by its very nature normative—rational and moral. The two principal categories of the normative, the rational and the good, are features which traditional theology has held to apply to God in virtue of his very nature. God is goodness itself (Aquinas), he is the Logos—ultimate rationality (St. John). In short, beyond, or behind, the observable universe—the sequence of events that is simply one contingent happening after another—there is for the theist a domain of eternal value and reason, a domain that impinges on our empirical world, making us respond to something beyond the mere sequence brute facts. We human creatures (since we are ourselves rational and moral beings, at least in part) are responsive to reason and value, and in being so responsive we participate, however dimly, in the divine nature.’—John Cottingham

Facts & Values, Truth & Objectivity—An Introduction (Part I)

The following are snippets from various philosophers representative, I believe, of their thoughts on facts and values, and questions of truth and objectivity.* I have occasionally interjected my own formulations based on their views. I hope these often provocative and perspicuous reflections will prod one into exploring the articles and books from which they were drawn as found in the list of “sources and further reading” appended to the end of the material (with Part III). It is there that you will find the various arguments and explanations that make full sense of these passages as found in their original context. Although I teach in a Philosophy Department (the bulk of my formal training is in the study of religions), I’m an autodidact and amateur when it comes to (especially ‘professional’) philosophy. I suspect that is the case with most of our readers. Nonetheless, the lack of formal training in this regard should not preclude those of us who are of a religious or spiritual persuasion and orientation from assiduously cultivating an ardent interest in philosophical topics, particularly those having to do with such subjects as metaphysics, ethics, the philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, hermeneutics, or, for example, questions of consciousness, “meaning,” beauty, value, objectivity, “the good,” and truth more generally.

* Please bear in mind that, as David Wiggins reminds us, the “fact-value” distinction is not identical to the “is-ought” or “is-must” distinction, even if on occasion they overlap.

[This introductory series will be in three parts.]     

Value(s) ‘refer to what is worth having or being, taken purely for its own sake, or what is such that (taken by itself, apart from anything it causes) it is preferable that it exist rather than not exist.’—Joel Kupperman

Value means goodness as an end: that which is worthwhile or desirable for its own sake.

We choose or determine that there be values, that they exist, but their character is independent of us.

To judge that something is good is to judge that it is properly valued.

Values are ‘intrinsic goods’ that by their nature enhance a life, that make a fundamental and positive contribution to human flourishing (eudaimonia).

‘Most philosophers who have written on the question of what has intrinsic value have not been hedonists; like Plato and Aristotle, they have thought that something besides pleasure and pain has intrinsic value. One of the most comprehensive lists of intrinsic goods that anyone has suggested is that given by William Frankena (1908-1994). It is this: life, consciousness, and activity; health and strength; pleasures and satisfactions of all or certain kinds; happiness, beatitude, contentment, etc.; truth; knowledge and true opinions of various kinds, understanding, wisdom; beauty, harmony, proportion in objects contemplated; aesthetic experience; morally good dispositions or virtues; mutual affection, love, friendship, cooperation; just distribution of goods and evils; harmony and proportion in one’s own life; power and experiences of achievement; self-expression; freedom; peace, security; adventure and novelty; and good reputation, honor and esteem, etc. (Presumably a corresponding list of intrinsic evils could be provided.) Almost any philosopher who has ever addressed the question of what has intrinsic value will find his or her answer represented in some way by one or more items on Frankena’s list. (Frankena himself notes that he does not explicitly include in his list the communion with and love and knowledge of God that certain philosophers believe to be the highest good, since he takes them to fall under the headings of ‘knowledge’ and ‘love.’) One conspicuous omission from the list, however, is the increasingly popular view that certain environmental entities or qualities have intrinsic value (although Frankena may again assert that these are implicitly represented by one or more items already on the list). Some find intrinsic value, for example, in certain “natural” environments (wilderness untouched by human hand); some find it in certain animal species; and so on.’—Michael J. Zimmerman

‘That which is extrinsically good is good, not (insofar as its extrinsic value is concerned) for its own sake, but for the sake of something else to which it is related in some way. For example, the goodness of helping others in time of need is plausibly thought to be extrinsic (at least in part), being derivative (at least in part) from the goodness of something else, such as these people’s needs being satisfied, or their experiencing pleasure, to which helping them is related in some causal way.’—Michael J. Zimmerman

Value judgments are implicit in emotions and in judgments that at first glance may not appear evaluative. Emotional states often function as indicators of our scale of values, of our appreciation and awareness of values.

‘[W]e notice something marked in the intentional perceptions and the beliefs characteristic of the emotions: they are concerned with value, they see their object as invested with value or importance. [….] The value perceived in the object appears to be of a particular sort. It appears to make reference to the person’s own flourishing. The object of the emotion is seen as important for some role it plays in the person’s own life. […] Another way of putting this point…is that the emotions appear to be eudaimonistic, that is, concerned with the person’s flourishing. And thinking for a moment about ancient Greek eudaimonistic ethical theories will help us to start thinking about the geography of the emotional life. In a eudaimonistic ethical theory, the central question asked a person is, “How should a human being live?” The answer to that question is the person’s conception of eudaimonia, or human flourishing, a complete human life. A conception of eudaimonia is taken to be inclusive of all to which the agent ascribes intrinsic value: if one can show someone that she has omitted something without which she would not think her life complete, then that is a sufficient argument for the addition of the item in question. Now the important point is this: in a eudaimonistic theory, the actions, relations, and persons that are included in the conception are not all valued simply on account of some instrumental relation they bear to the agent’s satisfaction. This is a mistake commonly made about such theories, under the influence of Utilitarianism and the misleading use of “happiness” as a translation for eudaimonia. Not only virtuous actions but also mutual relations of civic or personal love and friendship, in which the object is loved and benefited for his or her own sake, can qualify as constituent parts of a person’s eudaimonia. On the other hand, they are valued as constituents of a life that is my life and not someone else’s, as my actions, as people who are in some relation with me. For example, an Aristotelian really pursues social justice as a good in its own right: that is why she has put it into her conception of eudaimonia. She doesn’t want just any old conception, she wants the one that values things aright, in the way that a human being ought to. Once she puts it into her conception, however, she both seeks the intrinsic good of justice and seeks to be a person who performs just actions for their own sake.’—Martha Nussbaum

‘In reflecting about how a human being should live, a person may commend some very general goals as good for human beings in general: for example, friendship, parental love, civic responsibility. But she will also deliberate about which more concrete specification of each of these general ends she will prefer; some of this work still involves asking which specifications are to be commended for human beings in general. At some point in the process, however, we get to items that are not commended for all human beings, but are just her own ways of realizing the general human ends in her situation and context. For example, if the general goal were artistic cultivation and performance, she might realize this by playing the clarinet, but she would believe that other human beings can equally well realize it by dancing, or singing, or playing the oboe.’—Martha Nussbaum

‘If we ask what most people value most, the answers will fall mainly under three headings: ongoing features of one’s life (e.g., love, sets of personal relationships, a sense of success or achievement), particular experiences (e.g., moments of heightened awareness, or of euphoria or ecstasy), or things (e.g., money, expensive or attractive objects—perhaps only as a means, but very possibly for their own sake as well).’—Joel Kupperman

‘To see something (e.g., a set of experiences, a way of life) as having high value is often to be motivated to promote it for other people in general, or to make it available to the people one most cares about, or to have for oneself.’—Joel Kupperman

‘Value or preciousness of persons has a dual role in my interpersonal actions. Your value generates a moral claim or constraint on my behavior toward you; because of your value, others (including me) ought to behave toward you in some ways, not in others. Also, my value is expressed in how I am best off behaving, in the kind of behavior that should flow from a being with my value, in how that value is shown or maintained in action. My value fixes what behavior should flow from me; your value fixes what behavior should flow toward you. Value manifests itself as a push and as a pull.’—Robert Nozick

There is a value cost to immoral behavior: The immoral life is a less valuable life than the moral one. ‘The immoral person thinks…his immoral behavior costs him nothing. But that is not true; he pays the cost of having a less valuable existence. He pays that penalty, though he doesn’t feel it or care about it.’—Robert Nozick

Structurally speaking, intrinsic value appears to be characterized by some degree of organic unity in which such unity suggests that the value of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Values are abstract structures that can be realized in various ways. For instance, a work of music can exemplify and refer to value.

‘Values are to be brought about, maintained, saved from destruction, prized and valued (where this last is some descriptive term of psychology plus the theory of action).’ We ought to ‘care about, accept, support, affirm, encourage, protect, guard, praise, seek, embrace, serve, be drawn toward, be attracted by, aspire toward, strive to realize, foster, express, nurture, delight in, respect, be inspired by, take joy in, resonate with, be loyal to, be dedicated to, celebrate values. With the very highest values, we are to be elevated by, enthralled by, love, adore, revere, be exalted by be awed before, find ecstasy in these highest values.’—Robert Nozick

‘We are born, as social animals, into a cultural world of value and disvalue—a world where certain things matter, as harmful, dangerous, comforting, warming and so on. If we have been brought up in the right way, we will be disposed reliably to recognize these values and disvalues and to respond as we should: as Aristotle says: “at the right times, about the right things, towards the right people, and in the right way.” And if this happens, then we will care in the right way about the things that matter: not simply caring for justice and kindness as if for some vague idea, but caring that particular people in particular circumstances are treated as they should be—with fairness, honesty and consideration, so that we get angry (justifiably angry) if this doesn’t happen. It will become “second nature” to have these responses, so that our own interests narrowly conceived, are quite naturally far from being our only consideration in deciding what to do. Being disposed reliably to be motivated by specifically other-regarding moral considerations is part of what it is to have a virtue.’—Peter Goldie

‘There are some individuals whose lives are infused by values, who pursue values with single-minded purity and intensity, who embody value to the greatest extent. These individuals glow with a special radiance. Epochal religious figures often have this quality. To be in their presence (or even to hear about them) is to be uplifted and drawn (at least temporarily) to pursue the best in oneself. There are less epochal figures as well, glowing with a special moral and value loveliness, whose presence uplifts us, whose example lures and inspires us.’— Robert Nozick

‘Values are organic unities; something is intrinsically valuable in accordance with its degree of organic unity. However, it does not follow that the realm of values itself exhibits high organic unity, that diverse and apparently conflicting values can be united in some higher unity or larger harmony. [Plato would say that the realm of values does exhibit a higher unity or harmony insofar as it is, in the beginning and in the end, so to speak, and to speak metaphysically, part of the Good.] The theme of the ineradicable plurality of values, of the conflict between different values that cannot all be realized, a theme presented in Antigone and later tragedies, has been subordinated in the history of philosophy to the theme or hope of the harmonious reconciliation of all values. Recently, however, the pluralism of values has received renewed attention.’ [This is true, but the pluralism of values does not rule out, in theory, the possible harmonious reconciliation of all values.]—Robert Nozick

‘A person who tracks bestness, who seeks value, will have to formulate her own package of value realization; she cannot simply “maximize” on the value dimension. This package need not be an aggregate, it can pattern and unify the diverse values it realizes. In thus patterning value, the person may emulate a previous pattern exhibited by a value exemplar, or described in some tradition, or she may create a new complex unity, sculpting the value contours of her life in an original, perhaps unique way. Some significant part of the vividness of characters we read about in fiction, history, or religious texts or scriptures is their individuality in (valuable) value contouring.’—Robert Nozick

‘We value being a unique self, and come therefore also to value the particular unique self someone is. Valuing that there is a unique self spills over to valuing, for itself, that unique self there is.’—Robert Nozick

‘[T]he perfectionist aspiration to self-development…to a harmoniously hierarchically ordered being [cf. here Plato’s distinguishing and ranking of the rational, spirited and appetitive parts of the soul]…[should not] be interpreted as a denigration of what one hopes to improve on or of others not so intent. If we are to strive for a state judged higher, then something also must be ranked lower: to judge something as less than the best need not involve any elitist contempt for it.’—Robert Nozick

‘It is not implausible to think we are elevated by others who are more developed than ourselves in their striving for harmonious hierarchical development and for a valuable life. We are aided and encouraged along our own path of development by their striving for self-development and purer feeling; contrast the effects on us of encountering those with a sour mixture of one-upmanship, self-aggrandizement, desire to dominate or destroy, and other festering emotions, the effects of wending our way and bending our attention, to their motivations and trajectories. Just as a cacophony of urban noise is an intrusion if your are trying to listen to a string quartet or compose your own, so a person in the course of his own self-improvement or development will want, if merely as a means, to help raise the developmental level of those around him (or else to move into an isolated community of like-spirited persons). He will want to help them along. Even if a person were able to maintain his level and rate of (spiritual) advance and development unperturbed by others around him [like Plotinus!], not dragged down by them no matter what their state, he would still lack the benefits of associating with others who are equally or more developed. First, there is the benefit of being helped along by good examples and good companions. We all know people, I hope, who bring out the best in us, people in whose presence we would be embarrassed to speak or act from unworthy motives, people who glow. In their presence we feel elevated. We are pushed or lured or nudged further along a path of development and perfection; rather, we are inspired to move ourselves along, in the direction shown. Second, there is the joy in encountering a like person, in the experience of the other and in the mutual recognition of the mutual joy. The most intense delights, surely, are these experiences, at least as they combine with, enrich, and transfigure other delights more frequently listed. One awful psychological deformity is the resentment of excellence, not merely the inability to delight or take pleasure in it—bad enough—but the envious desire for its absence. To avoid being the object of such envy, people will hide their own excellence and camouflage their delight in it. Not only does this deprive others of the encouragement of an example, and of the opportunity for happy mutual recognition, it also alters the person’s own experience. She does not simply feel the same delight only without expressing it; an unexpressed delight is not as delightful. Resentment and envy of moral and spiritual excellence is most awful. [….] At any rate, persons developing in value will not feel or dwell in such envy; they will seek out opportunities to share the joy of being on and moving along their path. They will aid others in their own (spiritual or developmental) advance, for the pleasure of their company. (In thus aiding, they will not focus their attention upon their own pleasure but rather upon what brings that pleasure—the developed state of the others.) There is a third reason for wanting other equally or more developed persons around: their appreciation is especially worth having. In a loving relationship with another adult, the worth of what they give, including themselves, depends partially upon their estimation of themselves—whether they give something they hold precious and valuable. [….] The developed or developing person will wish for like companions, for inspiring examples to aid him along his path, for joyous company, and for meaningful affirmation of his own worth. This is the opposite of the desire to be surrounded by submissive people less developed than oneself, the desire that they be less developed.’—Robert Nozick

‘The developed person will want to help perfect others; this is the most important aid he can give them. We want to find a way of living whereby our best energies and talents are poured out so as to speak to and improve the best energies and talents of others. We want to utilize our highest parts and energies in a way that helps others flourish.’—Robert Nozick

‘[T]he investigation into what is worth our caring about is a quest for self-understanding, an attempt to make sense of our own valuational responses to the world.’—Elizabeth Anderson

‘[P]eople interpret and justify their valuations by exchanging reasons for them with the aim of reaching a common point of view from which others can achieve and reflectively endorse one another’s valuations. To judge that one’s valuations make sense is to judge that they would be endorsed from that hypothetical point of view. To be rational is to be suitably responsive to reasons offered by those attempting to reach that point of view.’—Elizabeth Anderson

‘[T]he grounds of a person’s reflectively held values (if she has any) lie in her conceptions of what kind of person she ought to be, what kinds of character, attitudes, concerns, and commitments she should have. I call such self-conceptions ideals. Ideals are objects not merely of desire but of aspiration. [….] Ideals give us perspectives from which to articulate and scrutinize the way we value things.’—Elizabeth Anderson

‘[M]oral development leads to self-identification and autonomous, self-directed living, but is associative as an interdependence based in a division of labor with respect to the realization of values. The self-fulfilling life of each person requires more values than he or she personally realizes and is dependent upon other for these values. The principle of this form of association is the complementarity of perfected differences. Accordingly this meaning of “autonomy,” if the term is to be applicable, must be consistent with interdependence. [This] means, not total self-sufficiency, but determining for oneself what one’s contributions to others should be and what use to make of the values provided by the self-fulfilling lives of others. To follow the lead of another person in a matter he or she understands better than we is not a lapse from autonomy into heteronomy but a mark of wisdom. [….] [T]he self here is conceived of as a task, a piece of work, namely the work of self-actualization. And self-actualization is the progressive objectivizing of subjectivity, ex-pressing it into the world. This recognition exposes as a fallacy the modern use of “objective” and “subjective” as mutually exclusive categories. Every human impulse in subjective in its origin and objective in its intentional outcome, and because its outcome is within it implicitly from its inception, there is nothing in personhood that is ‘merely subjective,’ that is, subjective in the exclusive sense. Narcissism (with which individualism is sometimes charged) is a pathology that tries to amputate from subjectivity its objective issue. It is real enough, and was a propensity of some romantic individualisms that judged experience by the occasions it affords for the refinement of the individual’s sensibilities. But the supposition that individualism is narcissistic subjectivism represents (again) a failure to recognize divergent kinds of individualism. For eudaimonistic individualism, it is the responsibility of persons to actualize objective value in the world.’—David L. Norton

‘[People] differ in temperament, interests, intellectual ability, aspirations, natural bent, spiritual quests, and the kind of life they wish to lead. They diverge in the values they have and have different weightings for the values they share. (They wish to live in different climates—some in mountains, plains, deserts, seashores, cities, towns.) There is no reason to think that there is one community which will serve as ideal for all people and much reason to think that there is not. [….] For each person, so far as objective criteria of goodness can tell (insofar as these exist), there is a wide range of very different kinds of life that tie as best; no other is objectively better for him than any other one in this range, and no one within the range is objectively better than any other.’—Robert Nozick

‘[Moral values] refer to things we consider worth cherishing and realizing in our lives. Since judgments of worth are based on reasons, values are things we have good reasons to cherish, which in our well-considered views deserve our allegiance and ought to form part of the good life. Universal moral values are those we have good reasons to believe to be worthy of the allegiance of all human beings, and are in that sense universally valid or binding. Moral values are meant for beings like us and intended to regulate our lives. Reasons relevant to a discussion of them are therefore of several kinds, such as our assessment of our moral capacities, what we take to be our basic tendencies and limits, the likely consequences of pursuing certain values, their compatibility, the ease with which they can be combined into a coherent way of life, and the past and present experience of societies that lived by them.’—Bhikhu Parekh

A Revolutionary Spiritual Praxis

Paul Wilson, translator of several of Václav Havel’s works, including his celebrated Letters to Olga (1983/1988), and one-time member of the underground band, The Plastic People of the Universe, has an eloquent and moving remembrance in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books:

[….] “[Havel’s] vision [was] based on a democratic politics underpinned by a strong civil society and rooted in common decency, morality, and respect for the rule of law and human rights; a politics that sought to transcend racial, cultural, and religious differences by articulating a ‘moral minimum’ that Havel believed existed at the heart of most faiths and cultures and that would provide a basis for agreement and cooperation without sacrificing the unique gifts that each person, each culture, and each ‘sphere of civilization’ could bring to enrich modern life. [....]

Like many great Czechs before him, Havel insisted on the importance of truth, but with a difference. ‘Truth and love,’ he was fond of saying, ‘must prevail over lies and hatred.’ He was often ridiculed for what seemed like a Hallmark sentiment (‘Why love?’ people asked), but he defended the slogan by referring to one of his greatest insights: truth, by itself, is a malleable concept that depends for its truthfulness on who utters it, to whom it is said, and under what circumstances. As a playwright, Havel turned this insight into a dramatic device: in most of his plays, the main characters constantly lie to one another and to themselves, using words that, in other circumstances, would be perfectly truthful. Truth by itself is not enough: it needs a guarantor, someone to stand behind it. It must be uttered with no thought for gain, that is, in Havel’s words, with a love that seeks nothing for itself and everything for others.*

We are close to religious territory here, and indeed, in the week of leave-taking in Prague, I heard many discussions about Havel’s true beliefs. Was he a Catholic and, if not, was the high mass in St. Vitus’s Cathedral the right way to send him off? Yes, replied some, he had been raised a Catholic and been confirmed as a young man. Sister Veritas said she felt that Havel was “with God” more profoundly than many observant Catholics, but she admitted that he had neither asked for nor received the last rites before he died. One of his last conversations was with the Dalai Lama, whom he considered a spiritual guru. But in the circumstances, such questions seemed inconsequential, even scholastic. Havel was a deeply spiritual man who expressed his spirituality, if that is the right word, almost entirely through his actions in the world.” [….]

* The idea here of “no thought for gain” or “a love that seeks nothing for itself and everything for others,” might favorably be compared to Gandhi’s stress on anāśakti (selflessness, selfless action; non-attachment, desirelessness). As Raghavan Iyer writes, this concept is “the central teaching of the Gītā [and] transcends ahimsa, which is a necessary preliminary, and is included in it.” In effect, for Gandhi, anāśakti yoga is equivalent to karma-yoga, which can be defined as the endeavor to express one’s spirituality “almost entirely through…actions in the world.”

Hat tip to Mark Edwards, who let me know of this essay (I’ve yet to receive my hard copy of the NYRB) in his latest installment at Concurring Opinions: “Vaclav Havel, Part V: Prison, Torment and Temptation.”

Image: (Courtesy of the NYRB) Tomki Němec—Václav Havel visiting Ruzyně Prison, where he had once been incarcerated, Prague, March 1990.  

On the Etiology of What Economically Ails Us (Updated)

At New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science, Mark Lance writes:

“There is an important article in today’s NYT. What is fascinating about this account of Apple’s iphone production in Asia is not the usual left criticism of Asian working conditions. That is mentioned. Work is structured in an authoritarian manner, for low pay, and with long hours. But a good case is made here that this is not the main issue. Rather, the US simply lacks the economic and educational infrastructure to get the job done at all.

It would be nice if the NYT would delve into the causes of all this. They note that we lack the relevant numbers of workers with the relevant skills, that we lack huge amounts of manufacturing infrastructure, that what manufacturing we have has not kept up with the flexibility needed for 21st century production. They also note that a huge middle class that might have been trained in the relevant sorts of skills are employed in service, financial, and other auxilliary sectors of the economy. What they don’t mention is that public decisions led to this. There are no doubt many decisions over the last 40 years that left us in such a situation, but I’d like to highlight one: military spending. The US--especially since the second half of the Carter administration—has diverted enormous resources from civilian infrastructure to military spending, regularly spending more on its military than the rest of the world combined. One occasionally hears about how this level of spending contributes to deficits and wars, or how it facilitates imperialism and authoritarian regimes abroad, but far less does one hear about how it leads to a country that is incapable of producing actual goods.” [….] *

My response:

However sympathetic I am to the tenor and salutary intentions of this piece, I’m not sure that military spending, as unconscionable or unjustifiable as it may be, is responsible in the first instance for “a country that is incapable of producing actual goods.” And I truly doubt the veracity of the claim (or at least it’s arguable) that “the US simply lacks the economic and educational infrastructure to get the job done at all.” In any case, the National Security State that developed in the midst of material affluence after World War II in the form of “military-industrial complex” has not changed. What has changed, however, are the terms and conditions of capitalist globalization which, roughly, began to appear in the period between 1965 and 1973, that, as David Harvey explains in his seminal work, The Condition of Postmodernity (1990), “was one in which the inability of Fordism and Keynesianism to contain the inherent contradictions of capitalism became more and more apparent.” In the early 1970s, we see the lineaments of a new capitalist logic of “flexible accumulation” (with regard to labor markets and processes, products and services, and patterns of consumption), a logic that in many ways is playing itself out today, one in which has helped to improve the quality of life (less true poverty, although recalcitrant forms of inequality) in many parts of the so-called developing world but has altered the terrain of capitalist democracies in the affluent Northern hemispheric countries.

If one accepts the principal parts of this historical narrative, as I do, than one is not at all surprised by current events and does not believe there’s too much national economies can do (e.g., by way of ‘public decisions’) in the present configuration of economic forces, to alter the course of events in any substantive and long-term fashion. At best perhaps, that is, with a renewed political will and courage, we can hope to salvage the welfare state (which may be why Tony Judt wrote, in Ill Fares the Land [2010], about the Left today simply ‘conserving valuable pasts’ with a ‘defensive’ Social Democratic project), but I fail to see how domestic politics (apart from ex post facto efforts at regulation) can constrain or alter rather uninhibited capital flows that make for the situation Lance describes. In other words, in the first place it’s a story about the logic of capitalist forces trumping democratic decision-making: after all, it’s often labor market conditions that determine where capital (so to speak) will concentrate itself. As Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers make plain in On Democracy (1983), the nature of “capitalist democracy” places structural constraints on both the articulation and satisfaction of interests within the system. With regard to the latter, for instance, and owing to their control of investment, “the satisfaction of the interests of capitalists is a necessary condition for the satisfaction of all other interests in the system,” which means “the welfare of workers remains structurally secondary to the welfare of capitalists,” a fact we conveniently forget in times of economic abundance and low unemployment but is resurrected in the wake of the cycles, crashes, and panics endemic to capitalism. The decisions of capitalists are directly responsible for the well-being of workers, and thus we see the “interests of capitalists appear as general interests of the society as a whole, [while] the interests of everyone else appear as merely particular, or ‘special.’”

Only when we’re able to transcend the socio-economic and political conditions intrinsic to “capitalist democracy” (today’s postmodernist neoliberalism) will we be able to imagine a world in which “public decisions” are no longer invariably distorted or trumped by the turbo-capitalist economic forces in the so-called private sector (an egregious euphemism). In any case, I don’t worry about us producing actual goods so much as our distributively unequal capacity to consume goods essential to the satisfaction of “basic needs” alongside the opulent displays of conspicuous consumption by the upper classes (the allure of which still shapes the dreams of many in the other classes). One world is being created, as Meghnad Desai reminds us, but by the forces of market-led globalization (hence the WTO is displacing the UN/IMF/World Bank as the premier institution for global governance). I’m not saying we shouldn’t, let alone can’t, alter our domestic economic priorities such that spending is directed toward things like infrastructural projects or even actual goods, but given the nature of the National Security State (see, for example, Gary Wills’ Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State [2010]), to which both major parties are committed, in conjunction with this latest phase of capitalist globalization, the prospects for same, alas, appear rather bleak: witness the dismantling of the liberal welfare regime in this country and the cumulatively corrosive assaults on European corporatist and social democratic welfare regimes. It seems we’re consigned to fighting, for the near term at least, purely rearguard actions.

* I’ve corrected a couple of typos in the original.

Update:

Correspondence with Mark Lance prompts me to further explain why that, even if one accepts the proposition “that there is a massive difference in both manufacturing infrastructure and level of manufacturing-relevant education between major Asian countries and the US,” which I do not, the cause of this cannot be explained by “public decisions,” foremost among them being the increased level of defense expenditures. First, as I say, I don’t believe there to be a “massive difference in both manufacturing infrastructure and level of manufacturing-relevant education between major Asian countries and the US,” even if there are significant differences and especially in certain manufacturing sectors. I don’t have the empirical evidence ready-at-hand but we can leave that disagreement to the side and for the sake of argument accept the proposition as true. Now, what explains it? I would argue that cumulative public decision making, involving defense expenditures or other legislative and public policy directives and initiatives with bearing on the economy are rather beside the point, or at least impotent in the face of the economic forces of the current phase of capitalist globalization.

Capital forces in the form of corporate decision-making, investment, the search for lower production and labor costs, and so on are global in nature: there’s nothing intrinsic to “Asian capitalism” that alters that fact. As long as labor market conditions (including fairly stable social conditions, and even authoritarian politics, and such things as corruption notwithstanding) are more favorable in Asian countries, capital will move there and in fact has moved there: it is that which accounts for disparity in manufacturing infrastructure. Capitalism has, of course, different conditions and effects across the globe, but those are tending toward a “leveling” on many fronts (for instance, and generally speaking, ‘our’ collective ‘affluence’ is diminishing, while ‘their’ well-being is increasing, even if there are some classes more than others that are the immediate and principal beneficiaries of increased capital flows). There’s a price to be paid for admitting more countries to the banquet of wealth-production, and capitalists cannot completely control the various markets or overcome competition, hence they’re driven to make profit and accumulate. It is that which is the principal causal variable in explaining the state of this country’s economy. Nation-state governments no longer control economies as they “did in the halcyon quarter-century of the Golden Age of capitalism.” In Desai’s words,

“The influence of capital—either as portfolio finance or as direct investment—the hegemony of financial markets, the increasing penetration of trade, have been experienced by all the worlds: First, Second and Third. Indeed, this numerical categorization is now otiose. The benefits and costs of capitalism fall symmetrically—though not equally—on all parts of the world. For the first time in two hundred years, the cradle of capitalism—the metropolis, the core—has as much to fear from the rapidity of change as does the periphery.”

It is precisely the effects and by-products of this “rapidity of change” that, in our case, has “[led] to a country that [may at times be] incapable of producing actual goods.” We have to remind ourselves why capitalists, in the form of transnational corporations or foreign direct investment and so forth, went abroad or to the “developing” world in the first place: in search of cheaper costs of production and labor most notably. So, even if, say, defense spending had not taken off as it did, even if it were considerably less than it is today (and some of that money were directed to education), I don’t see how this would have altered the fundamental thrust of the capitalist globalization. In terms of the affluent nation-states, the primary causal variable is found in the proposition that globalization has meant an international movement of goods, capital and labor which “has increased the inequality and/or volatility labor earnings in advanced industrial societies while constraining the ability of governments to tax the winners from globalization to compensate workers for their loss.” In the face of this basic economic fact, domestic governments are severely constrained in their economic decision-making.

Why does the threat of “capital strikes” remain an effective tool in wage negotiations? Because it’s a credible threat, one carried successfully carried out on occasion (both regionally on the domestic plane and globally) owing to increased capital mobility, and the principal reason workers are willing to make concessions at the bargaining table and accept a lower share of the rent. Absent a social democratic model of development in the Asian countries, I don’t see this situation changing. It’s the impact of globalization in the rich countries, in the form of capital mobility, that explains the decline of manufacturing infrastructure in this country and the rise of manufacturing infrastructure elsewhere, not the simply the cumulative historical impact of “public decisions,” about defense expenditures or other budgetary matters. The relatively free flow of goods, capital, and labor does “create opportunities for enhancing the welfare of the poor in poor and middle-income countries,” and that, I would think is a relatively good thing, despite the immediate impact of increased inequality and income insecurity found in the richer countries. It is therefore a good thing that we find an increased ability on the part of “developing” countries to export goods to the “developed” countries. It is therefore in many respects a good thing for people in these countries that transnational corporations are contributing to the development of an industrial infrastructure, even though their profit often represents merely the ability to take advantage of cheap wages and sub-standard working conditions. The increased rate of growth in foreign direct investment reflects the ability to exploit the comparative revenue-productivity of labor in the developing world, be it in Asia or elsewhere. I can’t fathom how any municipal legislation or policy initiative can alter these global economic trends and forces such that transnational firms, for example, decide to reverse their preferences on this score.

“Is Art a Superstition, or a Way of Life?” (Part 4)

Please Note: In the final installment of this series, I will attempt to highlight what I take to be the most compelling propositions of Coomaraswamy’s argument. I also hope to bring to the discussion later works in aesthetics and philosophy of art which treat some of the themes that concerned Coomaraswamy or capture some of the spirit of his critique of the condition of contemporary art and the myriad apologetic theories and ideologies that are both cause and effect of that condition (this being not so much the fault of art qua art, but something directly attributable to a post-modern civilizational ethos fashioned largely in the image of high technology and turbo-capitalism).  

Here are Parts 1, 2, and 3.

“It is taken for granted that the artist is always working ‘for the good of the work to be done;’ from the coincidence of beauty with perfection it follows inevitably that his operation always tends to the production of a beautiful work. But this is a very different matter from saying that the artist has always in view to discover and communicate beauty. Beauty in the master craftsman’s atelier is not a final cause of the work to be done, but an inevitable accident. And for this reason, that the work of art is always occasional; it is the nature of a rational being to work for particular ends, whereas beauty is an indeterminate end; whether that artist is planning a picture, a song, or a city, he has in view to make the thing and nothing else. What the artist has in mind is to do the job ‘right,’ secundum rectam rationem artis: it is the philosopher who brings in the word ‘beautiful’ and expounds its conditions in terms of perfection, harmony, and clarity. A recognition of the fact that things can only be beautiful in kind, and not in one another’s kinds, and the conception of the formality of beauty, bring back again to the futility of a naturalistic art; the beauties of a living man and of a statue or stone man are different in kind and not interchangeable; the more we try to make the statue look like a man, the more we denature the stone and caricature the man. It is the form of a man in a nature of flesh that constitutes the beauty of this man; the form of a man in a nature of stone the beauty of the statue; and these two beauties are incompatible.

Beauty is, then, perfection apprehended as an attractive power; that aspect of the truth for example which moves the will to grapple with the theme to be communicated. In medieval phraseology, ‘beauty adds to the good an ordering to the cognitive faculty by which the good is known as such;’ ‘beauty has to do with cognition.’ [….] Beauty is at once a symptom and an invitation; as truth is apprehended by the intellect, so beauty moves the will; beauty is always ordered to reproduction, whether a physical generation or a spiritual regeneration. To think of beauty as a thing to be enjoyed apart from use is to be a naturalist, a fetishist, and an idolater. [….]

The intelligibility of traditional art does not depend on recognitions but, like that of script, on legibility. The characters in which this art is written are properly called symbols; when meaning has been forgotten or ignored and art exists only for the comfort of the eye, these become ‘art forms’ and are spoken of as ‘ornaments;’ we speak of ‘decorative’ values. Symbols in combination form an iconography or myth. Symbols are the universal language of art; an international language with merely dialectic variations, current once to all milieus and always intrinsically intelligible, though no longer understood by educated men, and only to be seen or heard in the art of peasants. The content of symbols is metaphysical. Whatever work of traditional art we consider, whether a crucifix, Ionic column, peasant embroidery, or trappings of a horse, or nursery tale, has still, or had, a meaning over and above what might be called the immediate value of the object as a source of pleasure or necessity of life. This implies for us that we cannot pretend to have accounted for the genesis of any such work of art until we have understood what it was for and what it was intended to mean. The symbolic forms, which we call ornaments because they are superstitious for us, are none the less the substance of the art before us; it is not enough to be able to use the terms of iconography freely and to be able to label our museum specimens correctly; to have understood them, we must understand the ultimate raison d’être of the iconography, just why it is and not otherwise.

Implicit in this symbolism lies what was equally for artist and patron the ultimately spiritual significance of the whole undertaking. The references of the symbolic forms are as precise as those of mathematics. The adequacy of the symbols being intrinsic, and not a matter of convention, the symbols correctly employed transmit from generation to generation a knowledge of cosmic analogies: as above, so below. Some of us still repeat the prayer, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The artist is constantly represented as imitating heavenly forms—‘the crafts such as building and carpentry which give matter in wrought forms…take their principles thence from the thinking there’ (Enneads, V. 9). The archetypal house, for example, repeats the architecture of the universe; a ground below, a space between, a vault above, in which there is an opening corresponding to the solar gateway by which one ‘escapes altogether’ out of time and space into an unconfined and timeless empyrean. Functional and symbolic values coincide; if there arises a column of smoke to the luffer above, this is not merely a convenience, but also a representation of the axis of the universe that pillars-apart heaven and earth, essence and nature, and is itself although without dimensions or consistency the adamantine principle and exemplary form of temporal and spatial extension and of all things situated in time or space. [….]

Let us now remind ourselves that the artist is also a man, and as a man responsible for all that his will consents to; ‘in order that a man may make right use of his art, he needs to have a virtue which will rectify his appetite.’ The man is responsible directly, as a murderer for example by intent if he consents to manufacture adulterated food, or drugs in excess of medical requirement; responsible as a promoter of loose living if he exhibits a pornographic picture (by which we mean of course something essentially salacious, preserving the distinction of ‘obscene’ from ‘erotic’); responsible spiritually if he is a sentimentalist or pseudo-mystic. [….] The doctrine of art for art’s sake implies…a sacrifice of humanity to art, of the whole to the part. It is significant that at the same time that individualistic tendencies are recognizable in the sphere of culture, in the other sphere of business and in the interest of profit most men are denied the opportunity of artistic operation altogether, or can function as responsible artists only in hours of leisure when they can pursue a ‘hobby’ or play games. [….]

Under present circumstances, then, art is by and large a luxury: a luxury that few can afford, and one that need not be overmuch lamented by those who cannot afford to buy. The same ‘art’ was once the principle of knowledge by which the means of life were produced, and the physical and spiritual needs of man were provided for. The whole man made by contemplation, and in making did not depart from himself. To resume all that has been said in a single statement—Art is a superstition; art was a way of life.”—Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art (New York: Dover, 1956 [originally published in 1943 under the title, Why Exhibit Works of Art?])

Israel, Iran & Nuclear Weapons

At Opinio Juris, Kevin Jon Heller writes:

“It’s difficult to accuse these guys of being soft on Tehran, so it’s hard to quibble with their conclusion:

The intelligence assessment Israeli officials will present later this week to Dempsey indicates that Iran has not yet decided whether to make a nuclear bomb.

The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon – or, more specifically, a nuclear warhead mounted atop a missile. Nor is it clear when Iran might make such a decision.

This statement simply reinforces my argument that killing the Iranian nuclear scientists was an act of terrorism under the Terrorist Bombing Convention.  Although I think killing the scientists would have been illegal under IHRL [International Human Rights Law] even if they had been helping to build a nuclear weapon, given that by all accounts it still would have taken Iran years to complete it, the counterargument wouldn’t be completely unreasonable. But If Iran is not even trying to build a weapon at this point, as Israel has apparently concluded, it is simply impossible to argue that killing the scientists was lawful targeted killing under IHRL.”

My comment: And now we can move on to a discussion of Israel—alongside India and Pakistan—having never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Israel alone among nuclear-weapons states having never publicly acknowledged their nuclear arsenal nor openly demonstrated their nuclear capability. As Avner Cohen writes in The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb (2010), “In Israel, to this day, the gap between nuclear conduct and basic democratic norms of open debate, the public’s right to know, public accountability, oversight, and transparency remains vast.”

A Model for Qur’ānic Interpretation & The Qur’ān: A Select Bibliography

I have liberally adapted the bulk of what follows from Abdullah Saeed’s Interpreting the Qur’ān: Towards a Contemporary Approach (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 150-154. The additional material is largely by way of clarification or explanation and although some of it is wholly new, I believe it is in the spirit of, if not faithful to, Saeed’s proposed model.

*   *   * A Model for Qur’ānic Interpretation *   *   *

Stage 1—Encounter with the world of the text

Stage 1—A  broad and general familiarization with the text(s) and its (their) world(s).

Stage 2—Critical Analysis: (a) Linguistic considerations; (b) Literary context; (c) Literary form; (d) Parallel texts; (e) Precedents

Stage 2—Here we are interested in what the text says about itself (its ‘self-referential’ character). This involves various fundamental analyses:

1. Linguistic considerations: this entails analysis of the language of the text (linguistic units), semantics (the meaning of words and phrases involving features of the context, conventions of language use, and goals of the speaker), syntax of verse(s), and in general all linguistic and grammatical issues intrinsic to the text. It also covers different ways in which particular words and phrases can be read (qirā’āt).
2. Literary context: how the text in question functions within a particular sūra and/or the Qur’ān as a whole. For instance, examining what comes immediately before or after the verse(s); the composition and structure of the text as well as its rhetorical style and qualities.
3. Literary form: identifying whether the text is (largely or principally historical), has liturgical function (e.g., a prayer), is a proverb, a parable or other kind of narrative, or has a legal function. Detailing the connection between literary form and meaning (including, possibly, pragmatics: extra-linguistic context of utterance, generally observed principles of communication, goals of the speaker, presuppositions vis-à-vis new information, speech acts, implicature, etc.).
4. Parallel texts: exploring whether there are other texts that are similar to the text under consideration in the Qur’ān and, if so, the extent to which they are similar and different.
5. Precedent(s): identification of texts that are similar in content or import and whether these were revealed or inspired before or after the text under consideration.

Stage 3—Meaning for the first recipients: (a) Socio-historical context; (b) Worldview; (c) Nature of the message: spiritual, theological, ethical, legal; (d) Message: contextual v. universal; (e) Relationship of message to overall revelatory message of the Qur’ān

Stage 3—Relating the text to the recipients of the Qur’ān:

Wider contextual analysis: historical and social information that would shed light on the text in question; analysis of the worldview, culture, customs, beliefs, values, and institutions of the first recipients of the Qur’ān in Hijāz (region in the northwest of present-day Saudi Arabia and includes the cities of Mecca and Medina). This analysis includes close examination of the time and place in which, for example, specific cultural, legal, political and economic issues arose.

1. Determination of the nature of the message the text conveys: spiritual, theological, ethical, legal, etc.
2. Exploration of possible layers of meaning: ‘outer’ and ‘inner,’ overt and implied, or specific and underlying messages of the text; investigation of whether or not the text has universal or simply contextual import and application in the context of the first recipient community. Are there different ways or means other than those specified that can accomplish the specific and clear reason, purpose, or goal of the text in question (e.g., punishment, deterrence, and mercy but without this prescribed form of punishment (which ‘made sense’ at the time and place of the first recipients of this revelation).
3. Determination of where message the message is located in a hierarchy of values (metaphysical, devotional and ritual, legal, ethical, etc.).
4. Consideration of how the message relates to the broader objectives and concerns clearly evidenced in the Qur’ān.
5. Evaluation of how the text was received by the first community of Muslims and how they interpreted, understood and applied it.

Stage 4—Contemporary meaning: (a) Analysis of present context; (b) Contemporary context vis-à-vis socio-historical context; (c) Meaning through time: earliest recipients to the present; (d) Message: contextual v. universal; (e) Applicability to contemporary circumstances and conditions

Stage 4—Relating the text to the contemporary context:

1. Determining the current concerns, problems, and needs that appear to be relevant to the message of the under consideration.
2. Exploring the present social, political, economic and cultural context relevant to the text.
3. Exploring the specific values, norms, and institutions that have a bearing on the message of the text.
4. Comparing the present context with the socio-historical context of the text under consideration, taking into account similarities and differences.
5. Relating how the meaning of the text as understood, interpreted and applied by the first recipients of the Qur’ān and subsequent historical recipients to the present context, taking into account similarities and differences.
6. Evaluating the universality or specificity of the message the text conveys and the extent to which it is related or unrelated to the well-known (i.e., uncontroversial within the tradition) broader objectives and concerns of the Qur’ān.

Most of the last two stages (3 & 4) are not covered by classical tafsīr.

The Qur’ān: A Select Bibliography (in English)

This list includes translations of the Qur’ān into English as well as works examining this sacred scripture from both within and outside Islamic (theological, philosophical, mystical, and legal) traditions.

• Abdel Haleem, M.A.S. Understanding the Qur’an: Themes and Style. London: I.B. Tauris, 2001.
• Abu-Hamdiyyah, Mohammad. The Qur’an: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2000.
• Akhtar, Shabbir. The Quran and the Secular Mind: A Philosophy of Islam. New York: Routledge, 2008.
• Ali, Abdullah Yusuf. The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation and Commentary. Washington, DC: Amanah, 1989.
• Ali, Abdullah Yusuf. The Meaning of the Holy Qur’ān. Beltsville, MD: Amana Publ., 1989.
• Ali, Ahmed. Al-Qur’an: A Contemporary Translation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
• Aresmouk, Mohamed Fouad and Michael Abdurrahman Fitzgerald, trans. The Immense Ocean—Al Bahr al-Madīd: A Thirteenth Century Quranic Commentary on the Chapters of The All-Merciful, The Event, and Iron, by Ahmad ibn ‘Ajība. Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2009.
• Asad, Muhammad. The Message of the Qur’an. Gibraltar: Dar al-Andalus, 1980.
• Ayoub, Mahmoud. The Qur’an and Its Interpreters, Vols. 1-2. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984.
• Baljon, Jon M.S. Modern Muslim Koran Interpretation (1880-1960). Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1961.
• Barlas, Asma. “Believing Women” in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002.
• Bell, Richard. Introduction to the Qur’an. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1963.
• Bell, Richard. The Qur’an Translated, 2 Vols. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1960.
• Boullata, I.J. Literary Structures of Religious Meaning in the Qur’an. London: Curzon Press, 2000.
• Burton, John. The Collection of the Qur’ān. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
• Cook, Michael. The Koran: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Cooper, John. The Commentary on the Qur’an by Abu Ja‘far Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press and Hakim Investment Holdings, 1987.
• Cragg, Kenneth. The Event of the Quran: Islam in its Scripture. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971.
• Cragg, Kenneth. The Mind of the Quran: Chapters in Reflection. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973.
• Cragg, Kenneth. Readings in the Qur’ān. Brighton: Sussex University Press, 1988.
• Dawood, N.J., trans. The Koran. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956.
• Draz, M.A. Introduction to the Qur’an. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000.
• English Translation of the Meaning of Al-Qur’an: The Guidance for Mankind (Muhammad Farooq-i- Azam Malik, trans.). Houston, TX: The Institute of Islamic Knowledge, 1997.
• Esack, Farid. Qur’ān, Liberation and Pluralism. Oxford, England: Oneworld, 1997.
• Esack, Farid. The Qur’ān: A Short Introduction. Oxford, England: Oneworld, 2002.
• Fakhry, Majid, trans. An Interpretation of the Qur’an. New York: New York University Press, 2002.
• Gätje, Helmut (Alford T. Welch, trans. and ed.). The Quran and Its Exegesis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976.
• Al-Ghazālī, Shaykh Muhammad. A Thematic Commentary on the Qur’an. Herndon, VA: The International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2005.
• Gwynne, Rosalind Ward. Logic, Rhetoric, and Legal Reasoning in the Qur’ān: God’s Arguments. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.
• Hamza, Feras and Sajjad Rizvi, eds. An Anthology of Qur’anic Commentaries, Vol. 1: On the Nature of the Divine. New York: Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2008.
• Hawting, G.R. and Abdul-Kader A. Shareef, eds. Approaches to the Quran. London: Routledge, 1993.
• The Holy Qur’an: Arabic Text with English Translation and Short Commentary (Maulavi Sher Ali, trans. and Malik Ghulam Farid, ed.). Tilford, Surrey, England: Islam International Publ., 1994.
• Izutsu, Toshihiko. Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Quran. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2002.
• Izutsu, Toshihiko. God and Man in the Koran. Salem, NH: Ayer Co. Publ., 1980.
• Izutsu, Toshihiko. The Structure of Ethical Terms in the Qur’ān. Chicago, IL: ABC International Group, 2000.
• Jansen, J.J.G. The Interpretation of the Koran in Modern Egypt. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974.
• Kassis, Hanna E. A Concordance of the Qur’an. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998.
• Khalifa, Rashad. Quran, Hadith, and Islam. Fremont, CA: Universal Unity, 2000.
• al-Khu’i, ‛Abu’l Qasim al-Musawu. The Prolegomena to the Qur’an. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998.
• The Koran. J.M. Rodwell, trans. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1909 (reprint ed., 1974).
• The Koran Interpreted. Arthur J. Arberry, trans. New York: Macmillan, 1955.
• Leaman, Oliver, ed. The Qur’an: An Encyclopedia. New York: Routledge, 2005.
• Madigan, Daniel A. The Qur’an’s Self-Image: Writing and Authority in Islamic Scripture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
• Mattson, Ingrid. The Story of the Qur’an: Its History and Place in Muslim Life. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008.
• McAuliffe, Jane Dammen, ed. The Encyclopedia of the Qur’an, 5 Vols. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2001-2006.
• McAuliffe, Jane Dammen, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Qur’ān. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Mir, Mustansir. Dictionary of Qur’anic Terms and Concepts. New York: Garland, 1987.
• Nelson, Kristina. The Art of Reciting the Qur’ān. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1985.
• Pickthall, M.M. The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation. New York: New American Library, 1930.
• The Qur’an (Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, trans., with Arabic text). Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 1997.
• The Qur’an Translated, With a Critical Rearrangement of the Surahs. Richard Bell, trans. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1939.
• Rahman, Fazlur. Major Themes of the Qur’an. Minneapolis, MN: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1980.
• Rippin, Andrew. The Qur’an and Its Interpretive Tradition. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002.
• Rippin, Andrew, ed. Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur’an. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1988.
• Rippin, Andrew, ed. The Qur’an: Formative Interpretation. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate/Variorum, 2000.
• Rippin, Andrew, ed. The Qur’an: Style and Contents. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001.
• Robinson, Neal. Discovering the Qur’an: A Contemporary Approach to a Veiled Text. London: SCM Press, 1996.
• Saeed, Abdullah. Approaches to the Qur’an in Contemporary Indonesia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Saeed, Abdullah. Interpreting the Qur’ān: Towards a Contemporary Approach. New York: Routledge, 2005.
• Sands, Kristen Zahra. Sūfī Commentaries on the Qur’ān in Classical Islam. New York: Routledge, 2006.
• Sells, Michael. Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations. Ashland, OR: White Cloud Press, 1999.
• Stowasser, Barbara Freyer. Women in the Qur’an: Traditions and Interpretations. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Tabarī, al (J. Cooper, trans.). The Commentary on the Qur’ān. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987.
• Taji-Farouki, Suha, ed. Modern Muslim Intellectuals and the Qur’ān. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Turner, Colin, trans. (Mohammad Baqir Behbudi, textual exegesis). The Quran: A New Interpretation. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1998.
• Versteegh, C.H.M. Arabic Grammar and Qur’anic Exegesis in Early Islam. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993.
• Wadud-Muhsin, Amina. Qur’an and Woman: Reading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective. New York, Oxford University Press, 1999 reprint ed.
• Wansbrough, John. Qur’anic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
• Wansbrough, John and Andrew Rippin. Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004.
• Warraq, Ibn, ed. The Origins of the Koran: Classic Essays on Islam’s Holy Book. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998.
• Warraq, Ibn, ed. What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text, and Commentary. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002.
• Watt, William Montgomery. Companion to the Qur’an. Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 1994.
• Watt, William Montgomery and Richard Bell. Introduction to the Qur’an. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1970.
• Wild, Stefan., ed. The Qur’an as Text: Islamic Philosophy, Theology, and Science. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

At Concurring Opinions, Frank Pasquale has kindly provided us with appropriate links in honor of today’s holiday in memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Martin Luther King Day Links

Existentialism, Phenomenology, and Intellectual Responsibility: The Playwright & The Philosopher

Mark Edwards has a wonderful four-part (to date) series of posts on the late playwright, essayist and dissident intellectual Václav Havel (1936-2011) up at Concurring Opinions: Parts I, II, III, and IV. Havel was also the last president of Czechoslovakia (1989–1992) and the first President of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). I wrote a memorial post on Havel here. The philosopher in the title is Jan Patočka.  (Yours truly comments on several of the posts.) 

The image: On May 29, 1979, StB undertook a major police action against VONS members, subsequently ten of them were arrested and taken into custody. VONS is the Czech acronym for Výbor na obranu nespravedlivě stíhaných (Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Persecuted):

“The committee was founded on April 27, 1978, by a group of Charter 77 signatories [among whom were Václav Havel and Jan Patočka, the latter having died of a stroke ‘after a long and intense interrogation by the secret police’ before the committee was formed] with the aim of following cases of persons facing various forms of state persecution, from police harassment to unjust prosecution in courts of law. Its members helped individuals facing persecution with obtaining legal representation and acted as mediators in acquiring assistance of a financial or other nature. Observing legal formalities, they addressed their communiqués to the Czechoslovak authorities, calling on them to take steps to rectify injustices perpetrated against individuals in the cases monitored. They also passed reports on the cases monitored to entities and persons abroad, from where this information was reported back to Czechoslovakia via the radio stations Radio Free Europe, Voice of America and the BBC. A number of VONS members were persecuted by the police and justice system for their activities, the most well known case being the legal process against six of its members in 1979. The vast majority of VONS communiqués were published in the samizdat bulletin Informace o Chartě 77 (Information on Charter 77). The Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Persecuted was also active after November 1989, when it focused on amending the criminal code, calming the stormy situations in the prisons at the time, as well as, for example, on preparing a general amnesty and rehabilitation laws. Members of VONS also made efforts to purge the judiciary, but with minimal success. At their meeting of July 3, 1996, VONS members decided to suspend the activities of the committee for an indefinite period.”

“Is Art a Superstition, or a Way of Life?” (Part 3)

Part 1 is here, and Part 2 here.

“Art can…be defined as the embodiment in material of a preconceived form. The artist’s operation is dual, in the first place intellectual or ‘free’ and in the second place manual and ‘servile.’ ‘To be properly expressed,’ as Eckhart says, ‘a thing must proceed from within, moved by its form.’ It is just as necessary that the idea of the work to be done should first of all be imagined in an imitable form as that the workman should command the technique by which this mental image can be imitated in the available material. ‘It is,’ as Augustine says, ‘by their ideas that we judge of what things ought to be like.’ A private property in ideas is inconceivable, since ideas have no existence apart from the intellect that entertains them and of which they are the forms; there cannot be an authorship of ideas, but only an entertainment, whether by one or many intellects is immaterial. It is not…in the themes of his work, that an artist’s intellectual operation is ‘free;’ the nature of the ideas to be expressed in art is predetermined by a traditional doctrine…. As Aristotle expresses it, the general end of art is the good of man. This is a matter of religious art only in this sense, that in a traditional society there is little or nothing than can properly be called secular;…no distinction can be drawn between the ideas expressed in the humblest peasant art of a given period and those expressed in the actually hieratic arts of the same period. We cannot too often repeat that the art of a traditional society…has fixed ends and ascertained means of production; art is a conscien[tiousness] about form, precisely as prudence is a conscie[tiousness] about conduct—a conscien[tiousness] in both senses of the world, i.e., both as rule and as awareness. [….]

Where an idea to be expressed remains the same throughout long sequences of stylistic variation, it is evident that this idea remains the motif or motivating power behind the work; the artist has worked throughout for the sake of the idea to be expressed, although expressing this idea always in his own way. The primary necessity is that he should really have entertained the idea and always visualized it in an imitable form; and this, implying an intellectual activity that must ever be renewed, is what we mean by originality as distinguished from novelty, and by power as distinguished from violence. It will readily be seen, then, that in concentrating our attention on the stylistic peculiarities of works of art, we are confining it to a consideration of accidents, and really only amusing ourselves with a psychological analysis of personalities; not by any means penetrating to what is constant and essential in the art itself. [….]

[T]he artist turns from intellectual to manual operation or vice versa at will, and when the work has been done, he judges its ‘truth’ by measuring the actual form of the artifact against the mental image of it and that was his before the work began and remains in his consciousness regardless of what may happen to the work itself. We can now perhaps begin to realize just what we have done in separating artist from craftsman and ‘fine’ from ‘applied’ art. We have assumed that there is one kind of man that can imagine, and another that cannot; or to speak more honestly, another kind whom we cannot afford, without doing hurt to business, to allow to imagine, and to whom we therefore permit a servile and imitative operation only. [….]

[W]e begin to see now why primitive and traditional and what we have described as normal art is ‘abstract;’ it is an imitation, not of a visible and transient appearance or ‘effect of light,’ but of an intelligible form which need no more resemble any natural object than a mathematical equation need look likes its locus in order to be ‘true.’ It is one thing to draw in linear rhythms and abstract light because one must; another thing for anyone who is not by nature and in the philosophical sense a realist, deliberately to cultivate an abstracted style. [….]

There is also a traditional doctrine of beauty. This theory of beauty is not developed with respect to artifacts alone, but universally. It is independent of taste, for it is recognized that at Augustine says, there are those who take pleasure in deformities. The word deformity is significant here, because it is precisely a formal beauty that is in question; and we must not forget that ‘formal’ includes the connotation ‘formative.’ The recognition of beauty depends on judgment, not sensation; the beauty of the aesthetic surfaces depending on their information, and not upon themselves. Everything, whether natural or artificial, is beautiful to the extent that it really is what it purports to be, and independently of all comparisons; or ugly to the extent that its own form is not expressed and realized in its tangible actuality. The work of art is beautiful, accordingly, in terms of perfection, or truth and aptitude….; whatever is inept or vague cannot be considered beautiful, however it may be valued by those who ‘know what they like.’ So far from that, the veritable connoisseur ‘likes what he knows;’ having fixed upon that course of art which is right, use has made it pleasant. Whatever is well and truly made, will be beautiful in kind because of its perfection.” [….] —Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art (New York: Dover, 1956 [originally published in 1943 under the title, Why Exhibit Works of Art?])

Silence is Golden

The following by Pico Iyer in today’s New York Times called to mind Steve’s recent post on “our electronic culture.”

[….]  “In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.

Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at a time at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.

The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book ‘The Shallows,’ in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. ‘Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,’ the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, ‘and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.’ He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content — and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that ‘the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.’ Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, ‘When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.’ Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that ‘Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,’ but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because ‘breaking news’ is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less). And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, ‘Dancing with the Stars’), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us — between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there — are gone.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

Maybe that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an ‘Internet sabbath’ every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing — or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.

Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to ‘forget’ their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects ‘exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.’ More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are ‘inherently slow.’ The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.” [….] The rest of the essay is here.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *

Speaking of Pico, there’s notice of his new book on Graham Greene in the New York Times. As I note in the former link, I would unhesitatingly recommend anything written by him, but I especially look forward with relish to this book, having had several conversations with him about his (and now ‘our’) fondness for Greene. Buy from your local, independent bookseller if possible (so as to help them avoid the fate of my beloved Bodhi Tree Bookstore) but if not, see here.

“Is Art a Superstition, or a Way of Life?” (Part 2)

“Let us now take for granted the historically normal and religiously orthodox view that, just as ethics is the ‘right way of doing things,’ so art is the ‘making well of whatever needs making,’ or simply ‘the right way of making things:’ and still addressing ourselves to those [who]…ask whether art is not after all a necessity.

A necessity is something that we cannot afford to do without, whatever its price. We cannot go into questions of price here, except to say that art need not be, and should not be expensive, except to the extent that costly materials are employed. It is at this point that the crucial question arises of manufacture for profit versus manufacture for use. It is because the idea of manufacture for profit is bound up with the currently accepted industrial sociology that things in general are not well made and therefore also not beautiful. It is the manufacturer’s interest to produce what we like, or can be induced to like, regardless of whether or not it will agree with us…. Manufacturers and other artists alike resort to advertisement; art is abundantly advertised in schools and colleges, by ‘Museums of Modern Art,’ and by art dealers; and artist and manufacturer both alike price their wares according to what the traffic will bear. [….] It is only when the maker of things is a maker of things by vocation, and not merely holding down a job, that the price of things approximate to their real value; and under these circumstances, when we pay for a work of art designed to serve a necessary purpose, we get our money’s worth; and the purpose being a necessary one, we must be able to afford to pay for the art, or else we are living below a normal human standard; as most men are now living, even the rich, if we consider quality rather than quantity. Needless to add that the workman is also victimised by a manufacture for profit; so that it has become a mockery to say to him that hours of work should be more enjoyable than hours of leisure….

Industry without art is brutality. Art is specifically human. None of those primitive peoples, past or present, whose culture we affect to despise and propose to amend, has dispensed with art; from the stone age onwards, everything made by man, under whatever conditions of hardship or poverty, has been made by art to serve a double purpose, at once utilitarian and ideological. It is we who, collectively speaking at least, command amply sufficient resources, who have first proposed to make a division of art, one sort to be barely utilitarian, the other luxurious, and altogether omitting what was once the highest function of art, to express and to communicate ideas. It is long since sculpture was thought of as the poor man’s ‘book.’ [….]

…[T]he whole business of ‘collecting’ and the ‘love of art’ are no more than a sentimental aberration and means of escape from the serious business of life. …[M]erely to cultivate the higher things of life, if art be such, in hours of leisure to be obtained by a further substitution of mechanical for manual means of production, is as much a vanity as the cultivation of religion for religion’s sake on Sundays only could ever be; and…the pretensions of the modern artist are fundamentally wishful and egotistic. [….]

As to fame, it need only be pointed out that the greater part of the greatest art of the world has been produced anonymously, and that if any workman has only fame in view, ‘any proper man ought to be ashamed for good people to know this of him.’ And as to art, to say that the artist works for art is an abuse of language. Art is that by which a man works, supposing that he is in possession of his art and has the habit of his art; just as prudence or conscience is that by which he acts well. Art is no more the end of his work than prudence the end of his conduct.

It is only because under the conditions established in a system of production for profit rather than for use we have forgotten the meaning of the word ‘vocation,’ and think only in terms of ‘jobs,’ that such confusions as these are possible. The man who has a ‘job’ is working for ulterior motives, and may be quite indifferent to the quality of the product, for which he is not responsible; all that he wants in this case is to secure an adequate share of the expected profits. But one whose vocation is specific, that is to say who is naturally and constitutionally adapted to and trained in some one or another kind of making, even though he earns his living by this making, is really doing what he likes most; and if he is forced by circumstance to do some other kind of work, even though more highly paid, is actually unhappy. The vocation, whether it be that of the farmer or the architect, is a function; the exercise of this function as regards the man himself is the most indispensable means of spiritual development, and as regards to his relation to society the measure of his worth. It is precisely in this way that as Plato says, ‘more will be done, and with more ease, when everyone does but one thing, according to his genius; and this is justice to each man himself.’ It is the tragedy of a society industrially organized for profit that this justice to each man in himself is denied him; and that any such society literally and inevitably plays the Devil with the rest of the world.

The basic error in what we have called the illusion of culture is the assumption that art is something to be done by a special kind of man, and particularly that kind of man we call a genius. In direct opposition to this is the normal and humane view that art is simply the right way of making things, whether symphonies or airplanes. The normal view assumes, in other words, not that the artist is a special kind of man, but that every man who is not a mere idler and parasite is necessarily some special kind of artist, skilled and well contented in making or arranging of some one thing or another according to his constitution and training. [….]

What the class thinker who is not merely an underdog, but also a man, has a right to demand is…the opportunity to take as great a pleasure in doing whatever he does for hire, as he takes in his own garden or family life; what he should demand, in other words, is the opportunity to be an artist. No civilisation that can be accepted that denies him this.”—Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art (New York: Dover, 1956 [originally published in 1943 under the title, Why Exhibit Works of Art?]

“Is Art a Superstition, or a Way of Life?” (Part 1)

“It seems to be a matter of general agreement at the present day that ‘Art’ is a part of the higher things of life, to be enjoyed in hours of leisure earned by other hours of inartistic ‘Work.’ We find accordingly as one of the most obvious characteristics of our culture a class division of artists from workmen, of those for example who paint on canvas from those who paint the walls of houses, and of those who handle the pen from those who handle the hammer. We are certainly not denying that there is a distinction of the contemplative from the active life, nor of free from servile operation: but mean to say that in our civilization we have in the first place made an absolute divorce of the contemplative from the active life, and in the second place substituted for the contemplative life an aesthetic life…. [….] In any case we have come to think of art and work as incompatible, or at least independent, categories and have for the first time in history created an industry without art. [….]

Art having been abstracted from the general activity of making things for human use, material or spiritual, has come to mean for us the projection in a visible form of the feelings or reactions of the peculiarly-endowed personality of the artist, and especially of those most peculiarly-endowed personalities which we think of as ‘inspired’ or describe in terms of genius. Because the artistic genius is mysterious we, who accept the humbler status of the workman, have been only too willing to call the artist a ‘prophet,’ and in return for his ‘vision’ to allow him many privileges that a common man might hesitate to exercise. [….] Whereas it was once the highest purpose of life to achieve a freedom from oneself, it is now our will to secure the greatest possible measure of freedom for oneself, no matter what. [….]

Our theoretical knowledge of the material and technical bases of art, and of its actual forms, is encyclopedic; but we are either indifferent to its raison d’être and final cause, or find this reason and ultimate justification for the very existence of the work in the pleasure to be derived from its beauty by the patron. We say the patron; but under present conditions, it is oftener for his own than for the patron’s pleasure that the artist works; the perfect patron being nowadays, not the man who knows what he wants, but the man who is willing to commission the artist to do whatever he likes, and thus as we express it, ‘respects the freedom of the artist.’ The consumer, the man, is at the mercy of the manufacturer for pleasure (the ‘artist’) and manufacturer for profit (the ‘exploiter’) and these two are more nearly the same than we expect. [….]

It is one of the greatest counts against our civilization that the pleasures afforded by art, whether in the making or of subsequent appreciation, are not enjoyed or even supposed to be enjoyed by the workman at work. It is taken for granted that while at work we are doing what we like least, and while at play what we should wish to be doing all the time. And…it is not so shocking that the workman should be underpaid, as that he should not be able to delight as much in what he does for hire as in what he does by free choice. As Meister Eckhart says, ‘the craftsman like talking of his handicraft:’ but, the factory worker likes talking of the ball game! It is an inevitable consequence of production under such conditions that quality is sacrificed to quantity: an industry without art provides a necessary apparatus of existence: houses, clothing, frying pans, and so forth, but an apparatus lacking the essential characteristics of things made by art, the characteristics, viz., of beauty and significance. Hence we say that the life we call civilized is more nearly an animal and mechanical life than a human life; and that in all these respects it contrasts unfavourably with the life of savages, of American Indians for example, to whom it had never occurred that manufacture, the activity of making things for use, could ever be made an artless activity.”—Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art (New York: Dover, 1956 [originally published in 1943 under the title, Why Exhibit Works of Art?])

Henry Miller on “being alone” in Big Sur

“The first time I knew what it was to be alone, and to like it, was on the island of Corfu. The second time it happened, despite all my talk of not being alone, was here at Big Sur.

To be alone, if only for a few minutes, and to realize it with all one’s being, is a blessing we seldom think to implore. The man of the big city dreams of life in the country as a refuge from all that plagues him and renders life intolerable. What he fails to realize, however, is that he can be more alone, if he chooses, in the midst of ten million souls than in a tiny community. To experience the feeling of aloneness is a spiritual achievement. The man who runs away from the city in search of this experience may find to his chagrin, particularly if he has brought with him all the cravings which city life fosters, that he has succeeded only in becoming lonely. ‘Solitude is for wild beasts or the gods,’ said someone. And there is truth in it.

Only when we are truly alone does the fullness and richness of life reveal itself to us. In simplifying our lives, everything acquires a significance hitherto unknown. When we are one with ourselves the most insignificant blade of grass assumes its proper place in the universe. Or a piece of manure, for that matter. Properly attuned, it’s all one come Christmas, as we say. One thing becomes just as important as another, one person as good as another. Lowest and highest become interchangeable. The own precious self gets swallowed up in the ocean of being. It is then that the carrion bird no longer seems hideous, nor merely to be tolerated because of its scavenger propensities. Nor do the stones in the field then seem inanimate, or to be regarded with an eye toward future walls and buttresses. Even if it last for only a few moments, the privilege of looking at the world as a spectacle of unending life and not as a repository of persons, creatures and objects to be impressed into our service, is something never to be forgotten. The ideal community, in a sense, would be the loose, fluid aggregation of individuals who elected to be alone and detached in order to be at one with themselves and all that lives and breathes. It would be a God-filled community, even if none of its members believed in (a) God. It would be a paradise, even though the word had long disappeared from our vocabulary.

In all the cities and countries I dream of visiting one day there are, of course, no such communities. Even in the holiest places man is prone to act the fool, the bigot, the idolater. As I said before, today we find only individuals dedicated to ‘the good life.’ Nevertheless, these isolated individuals are bringing about a community which will one day replace the dismembered warring communities which are a disgrace to the name. The world does tend to become one, however much its component elements resist. Indeed, the stronger the resistance the more certain is the outcome. We resist only what is inevitable.”—Henry Miller in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (New York: New Directions, 1957)

Henry Miller in...and on Paradise

“There is a type of individual who, after finding what he considers a paradise, proceeds to pick flaws in it. Eventually this man’s paradise becomes even worse than the hell from which he had escaped.

Certainly paradise, whatever, wherever it be, contains flaws. (Paradisiacal flaws, if you like.) If it did not, it would be incapable of drawing the hearts of men or angels.

The windows of the soul are infinite, we are told. And it is through the eyes of the soul that paradise is visioned. If there are flaws in your paradise, open more windows! Vision is entirely a creative faculty: it uses the body and the mind as the navigator uses his instruments. Open and alert, it matters little whether one finds a supposed short cut to the Indies—or discovers a new world. Everything is begging to be discovered, nor accidentally, but intuitively. Seeking intuitively, one’s destination is never in a beyond of time or space but always here and now. If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things. Which is to say that there are no limits to vision. Similarly, there are no limits to paradise. Any paradise worth the name can sustain all the flaws in creation and remain untarnished.

If I have entered upon a vein which I must confess is not frequently discussed here, I am nevertheless certain that it is one which secretly engages the minds of many members of the community.

Everyone who has come here in search of a new way of life has made a complete change-about in his daily routine. Nearly every one has come from afar, usually from a big city. It meant abandoning a job and a mode of life which was detestable and insufferable. To what degree each one has found ‘new life’ can be estimated only by the efforts he or she put forth. Some, I suspect, would have found ‘it’ even had they remained where they were.

The most important thing I have witnessed since coming here, is the transformation people have wrought in their own being. Nowhere have I seen individuals work so earnestly and assiduously on themselves. Nor so successfully. Yet nothing is taught or preached here, at least overtly. Some of us have made the effort and failed. Happily for the rest of use, I should say. But even those who failed gained something. For one thing, their outlook on life was altered, enlarged if not ‘improved.’ And what could be better than for the teacher to become his own pupil, or the preacher his own convert?

In a paradise you don’t preach or teach. You practice the perfect life—or you relapse.

There seems to be an unwritten law here which insists that you accept what you find and like it, profit by it, or your are cast out. Nobody does the rejecting, please understand. Nobody, no group here, would crave such authority. No, the place itself, the elements which make it, do that. It’s the law, as I say. And it is a just law which works harm to no one. To the cynical-minded it may sound like the same old triumph of our dear status quo. But the enthusiast knows that it is precisely the fact that there is no status quo here which makes for its paradisiacal quality.

No, the law operates because that which makes for paradise can not and will not assimilate that which makes for hell. How often it is said that we make our own heaven and our own hell. And how little it is taken to heart! Yet the truth prevails, whether we believe in it or not.

Paradise or no paradise, I have the very definite impression that the people of this vicinity are striving to live up to the grandeur and nobility which is such an integral part of the setting. They behave as if it were a privilege to live here, as if it were by an act of grace they found themselves here. The place itself is so overwhelmingly bigger, greater, than anyone could hope to make it that it engenders a humility and reverence not frequently met with in Americans. There is nothing to improve on in the surroundings, the tendency is to set about improving oneself.

It is of course true that individuals have undergone tremendous changes, broadened their vision, altered their natures, in hideous, thwarting surroundings—prisons, ghettos, concentration camps, and so on. Only a very rare individual elects to remain in such places. The man who has seen the light follows the light. And the light usually leads him to the place where he can function most effectively, that is, where he will be of most use to his fellow-men. In this sense, it matters little whether it be darkest Africa or the Himalayan heights. God’s work can be done anywhere, so to say.”—Henry Miller in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (New York: New Directions, 1957)

Henry Miller in Big Sur

“Here I should like to quote from a review of Living the Good Life, by Helen and Scott Nearing.* Says the editor: ‘What we are trying to suggest is that the solution for a cluttered, frustrated existence is not merely in moving to the country and attempting to practise ‘the simple life.’ The solution is an attitude towards human experience which makes simple physical and economic arrangements almost a moral and esthetic necessity. It is the larger purpose in life which gives to its lesser enterprises—the obtaining of food, shelter and clothing—their essential harmony and balance. So often people dream of an ideal life “in community,” forgetting that a “community” is not an end in itself, but a frame for higher qualities—the qualities of the mind and of the heart. Making a community is not a magic formula for happiness and good; making a community is the result of the happiness and the good which people already possess in principle, and the community, whether of one family or several, is the infinitely variable expression of the excellences of human beings, and not their cause….’

Digging in at Big Sur eleven years ago, I must confess that I had not the least thought or concern about the life of the community. With a population of one hundred souls scattered over several hundred square miles, I was not even conscious of a latent ‘community.’ My community then comprised a dog, Pascal (so named because he had the sorrowful look of a thinker), a few trees, the buzzards, and a seeming jungle of poison oak. My only friend, Earl White, lived three miles down the road. The hot sulphur baths were three miles further down the road. There the community ended, from my standpoint.

I soon found out how mistaken I was, of course. It was no time before neighbors began popping up from all sides—out of the brush, it seemed—and always laden with gifts, as well as the most discrete and sensible advice, for the ‘newcomer.’ Never have I known better neighbors! All of them endowed with a tact and subtlety such as I never ceased to marvel at. They came only when they sensed you had need of them. As in France, it seemed to me that I was once again among people who knew how to let you be. And always there was a standing invitation to join them at table, should you have need of food or company.

Being one of those unfortunate ‘helpless’ individuals who knew nothing but city ways, it wasn’t long before I had to call upon my neighbors for aid of one kind or another. Something was always going amiss, something was always getting out of order. I hate to think what would have happened had I been left entirely to my own resources! Anyway, with the assistance that was always willing and cheerfully extended, I received instruction in how to help myself, the most valuable gift that can be offered. I discovered all too quickly that my neighbors were not only extremely affable, helpful, generous in every way, but that they were far more intelligent, far wiser, far more self-sufficient that I had fatuously thought myself to be. The community, from being at first an invisible web, gradually became most tangible, most real. For the first time in my life I found myself surrounded by kind souls who were not thinking exclusively of their own welfare. A strange new sense of security began to develop in me, one I had never known before. In fact, I would boast to visitors that, once a resident of Big Sur, nothing evil could possibly happen to one. I would always add cautiously: ‘But one has first to prove himself a good neighbor!’ Though they were addressed to my visitor, I meant these words for myself. And often, when the visitor had departed, I would repeat them to myself like a litany. It took time, you see, for one who had always lived in the jungle life of the big city to realize that he too could be ‘a neighbor.’

Here I must say flatly, and not without a bad conscience, that I am undoubtedly the worst neighbor any community could boast of. That I am still treated with more than mere tolerance is something which still surprises me.”

* [From Manas, Los Angeles, March 23, 1955]

—Henry Miller in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (New York: New Directions, 1957)

Science & Religion: A Select Bibliography

This is a slightly different version of a compilation I put together at the request of a colleague, so I thought I’d share it with our readers who, presumably, have some interest in the subject.

• Barbour, Ian G. Issues in Science and Religion. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966.
• Barbour, Ian G. Myths, Models, and Paradigms: A Comparative Study in Science and Religion. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.
• Barbour, Ian G. Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, revised ed., 1997.
• Barbour, Ian G. When Science Meets Religion. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
• Brooke, John Hedley. Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• Brooke, John and Geoffrey Cantor. Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 (1998).
• Brooke, John Hedley and Ronald L. Numbers, eds. Science and Religion Around the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Cottingham, John. The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. [contains an important chapter on ‘science and religion’]
• Dixon, Thomas. Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Ferngren, Gary B., ed. Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
• Gould, Stephen Jay. Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. New York: Ballantine, 1999.
• Harrison, Peter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Haught, John F. Is Nature Enough? Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Haught, John F. Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God and the Drama of Life. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.
• Lopez, Donald S. Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
• Plantinga, Alvin, “Religion and Science,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/religion-science/.
• Ruse, Michael. Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? The Relationship Between Science and Religion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Stenmark, Mikael. Rationality in Science, Religion, and Everyday Life. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995.
• Wallace, Allan B., ed. Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Freud & The Philosophers: Exceptions to the Rule

“Virtually all those who are not ignorant of Freud or totally skeptical of his findings believe that he altered, radically altered, our conception of the mind. He effected a change of what we think we are like, and it was a big change. Astonishingly enough, it is philosophers who have been of all people slowest to recognize this fact. They have been slowest to recognize that this fact has anything to do with them.”—Richard Wollheim, The Mind and Its Depths (1993): 91.

 

In addition to Wollheim himself (regrettably, no longer with us), among those I would count as exceptions to this generalization include Sebastian Gardner, the late David Sachs, Donald Levy, John Cottingham, Marcia Cavell,* the late Ilham Dilman, Jonathan Lear, Ernest Wallwork, John Deigh, and Jim Hopkins. I haven’t read much beyond his first book (only a few articles in edited volumes), but I was informed that Michael Stocker should be in this list as well and I agree.

* I’m not sure where Professor Cavell is currently teaching, it may be at U.C. Berkeley.

The Port Huron Statement at 50

If any RLL bloggers or readers are in Southern California in February of 2012, I thought this conference here in Santa Barbara would be worth attending: The Port Huron Statement at 50 (!). I’ve put together some homework/background reading for those of you perhaps too young to be intimately acquainted or well-versed in this history. The Port Huron Statement, first published by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) (the student Department of the League for Industrial Democracy) in 1962, is reprinted as the appendix in the Miller volume below.

• Breines, Wini. Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968: The Great Refusal. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989.
• Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
• Case, John and Rosemary C.R. Taylor, eds. Co-Ops, Communes, and Collectives: Experiments in Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.
• Cohen, Robert and Reginald D. Zelnik, eds. The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.
• Gitlin, Todd. The Whole World is Watching: mass media in the making and unmaking of the new left. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980.
• Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam, 1987.
• Katsiaficas, George. The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1987.
• Miller, James. “Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
• Sale, Kirkpatrick. SDS. New York: Random House, 1973.

Václav Havel & The Existential Revolution

The playwright, essayist, and dissident, Václav Havel (1936-2011), died on Sunday. Havel was one of the foremost leaders of Czechoslovakia’s 1989 “Velvet Revolution,” the genesis of which was the invasion by the Soviet Union and four other Warsaw Pact states of the country in August 1968 so as to put a stop to its “popular experiment [in] reform socialism.” While the seeds of the nonviolent Velvet Revolution were planted during this particular revolt against Party-State Socialism, in the short term, the invasion was successful: “by 1970, Czechoslovakia had become one of the most rigidly orthodox states in the Soviet bloc.” One might reasonably conclude that nonviolent civil resistance clearly failed in this case, although it has been plausibly argued that the principle variables in determining the outcome were found in the orbit of “high politics,” the precise nature of the civil resistance possessing, therefore, little relevance to that outcome. Yet the commitment to nonviolent civil resistance did not disappear, even if the opposition’s strategies and tactics (exemplified by the Citizens’ Forum and The Public against Violence) differed this time ‘round. What is more, the geo-political circumstances had significantly changed for the better in the intervening period, and it may well have been this fact that was decisive in explaining the comparative success of the Velvet Revolution. 

Havel did not simply oppose, with considerable courage, the post-totalitarian society’s structural and political constraints on “living within the truth,” nor was his conception of a nonviolent revolution solely social or political in essence or orientation. In his well-known essay, “The Power of the Powerless” (1978), Havel wrote of the need for broad “existential revolution” in the industrial and post-industrial nation-states of the Northern hemisphere. It is only upon the basis of such a revolution that can one hope to achieve a “generally ethical—and, of course ultimately a political—reconstitution of society.” Without here going into details, Havel’s conception of an existential revolution is uncannily similar in important respects to Rudolf Bahro’s largely cognitive conception of “general emancipation” first outlined in The Alternative in Eastern Europe (1978, published in German in 1977) and later articulated in a “deep ecology” and more explicitly spiritual framework (wherein the forces of reason are now ‘relativized’ in the ‘economy of consciousness’) after Bahro moved to West Germany and became a leading spokesperson for the “fundamentalist” faction of Die Grünen. Havel here outlines the necessity of an existential revolution, the basic premises of which should be attractive to those of us who identify with the “religious left:”

“What we call the consumer and industrial (or post-industrial) society, and Ortega y Gasset once understood as ‘the revolt of the masses,’ as well as the intellectual, moral, political and social misery in the world today: all of this is perhaps merely an aspect of the deep crisis in which humanity, dragged helplessly along by the automatism of global technological civilization, finds itself.

The post-totalitarian system is only one aspect—a particularly drastic aspect and thus all the more revealing of its real origins—of the general inability of modern humanity to be master of its own situation. The automatism of the post-totalitarian system is merely an extreme version of the global automatism of technological civilization [what Rudolf Bahro, after Lewis Mumford, refers to as the ‘Megamachine’]. The human failure that it mirrors is only one variant of the general failure of modern humanity.

This planetary challenge to the position of human beings in the world is, of course, also taking place in the Western world, the only difference being the social and political forms it takes. [….] There is no real evidence that Western democracy, that is, the democracy of the traditional parliamentary type, can offer solutions that are any more profound. It may even be said that the more room there is in the Western democracies (compared to our world), for the genuine aims of life, the better the crisis is hidden from people and the more deeply do they become immersed in it.

[….] People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies. But this static conception of rigid, conceptually sloppy and politically pragmatic mass political parties run by professional apparatuses and releasing the citizen from all forms of concrete and personal responsibility; and those complex forces of capital accumulation engaged in secret manipulations and expansion; the omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce, consumer culture, and all that flood of information: all of it, so often analyzed and described, can only with great difficulty be imagined as the source of humanity’s rediscovery of itself. [….] In a democracy, human beings may enjoy many personal freedoms and securities that are unknown to us, but in the end they do them no good, for they too are ultimately victims of the same automatism, and are incapable of defending their concerns about their own identity or preventing their superficialization [sic] or transcending concerns about their own personal survival to become proud and responsible members of the polis, making a genuine contribution to the creation of its destiny. [….]

Above all, any existential revolution should provide hope of a moral reconstitution of society, which means a radical renewal of the relationship of human beings to what I have called the ‘human order,’ which no political order can replace. A new experience of being, a renewed rootedness in the universe, a newly grasped sense of ‘higher responsibility,’ a new-found inner relationship to other people and to the human community—these factors clearly indicate the direction in which we must go.

And the political consequences? Most probably they could be reflected in the constitution of structures that will derive from this ‘new spirit,’ from human factors rather than from a particular formalization of political relationships and guarantees. In other words, the issue is the rehabilitation of values like trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, love. I believe in structures held together more by a commonly shared feeling of the importance of certain communities than by commonly shared ambitions directed ‘outward.’”

In a later piece, “Politics and Conscience” (1984)*, Havel writes in a Gandhian-like vein that he

“favour[s] ‘anti-political politics’ [which calls to mind the Hungarian writer György (George) Konrád’s Antipolitics (1984)] that is, politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, of cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the useful, but politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them. I favour politics as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans. It is, I presume, an approach which, in this world, is extremely impractical and difficult to apply in daily life. Still, I know no better alternative.”

* This was intended for the University of Toulouse where Havel was to be awarded an honorary doctorate but was unable to attend.     

References and Further Reading:

• Bahro, Rudolf (David Fernbach, tr.). The Alternative in Eastern Europe. London: NLB, 1978.
• Bahro, Rudolf. From Red to Green: Interviews with New Left Review. London: Verso Editions and NLB, 1984.
• Bahro, Rudolf (Mary Tyler, tr.). Building the Green Movement. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1986.
• Bahro, Rudolf (David Clarke, tr., and Palden Jenkins, ed.). Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster: The Politics of World Transformation. Bath, UK: Gateway Books, 1994.
• Garton Ash, Timothy. The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague. New York: Vintage, 3rd ed., 1999.
• Havel, Václav (Jan Vladislav, ed.). Living in Truth. London: Faber and Faber, 1987.
• Havel, Václav (Paul Wilson, tr.). Letters to Olga: June 1979—September 1982. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.
• Konrad, George (Richard E. Allen, tr.). Antipolitics: An Essay. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
• Williams, Kieran. “Civil Resistance in Czechoslovakia: From Soviet Invasion to ‘Velvet Revolution,’ 1968-89,” in Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, eds. Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Nonviolent Action from Gandhi to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 

George Whitman: communist, utopian, and humanist…and “the most un-phony person” (Update, Dec. 16)

From the Los Angeles Times obituary:

“George Whitman, the legendary founder of the Paris bookshop and literary institution Shakespeare & Co., died Wednesday. He was 98.

The Left Bank bookshop was closed Wednesday, and a note on the door said Whitman had suffered a stroke a few months earlier. He ‘died peacefully at home in the apartment above his bookshop,’ the letter said.

On Wednesday night, people stopped to leave notes, flowers and candles along the ground and covering the window of the shop, now run by his daughter, Sylvia. Many of them said the place had always been much more than a bookshop to them, but a second home. Literally.

Over the years, Whitman has sheltered about 50,000 young, struggling writer types for free, right in the shop if they needed a roof, wanted to save a franc, or just had ideas about books and a hankering for a certain bohemian way of life. All they had to do in exchange was work a few hours in the shop, write a one-page biography and provide their picture (an idea born out of Whitman’s attempt to appease French authorities who wanted to know more about the clandestine ‘hotel’ he was running on the left bank of the Seine River).

The shop has kept all the letters from past boarders, dubbed ‘Tumbleweeds’ by Whitman, and each one is a testament to how he changed their lives.

Pia Copper said Whitman hired her on the spot in 1994, and she stayed 10 years.

’He found so many young people who were lost, on drugs, totally hopeless, and they lived here. And there was no hard logic to it, other than: Give them a roof, and maybe part of the shop will rub off on them,’ Copper said.

Though eventually an economic success, attracting book lovers from all over the world and writers such as Anais Nin, Lawrence Durrell, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the running joke was that the place rarely actually did what a bookstore is supposed to do: Sell books.

And that was exactly how Whitman wanted it. He used to call Shakespeare & Co. ‘a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookshop,’ and in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said: ‘I never had any money, and never needed it. I’ve been a bum all my life.’

But Whitman was something of a wild-haired, and wild-mannered, king to those who knew him. The land he ruled, with its constant flow of lodgers and poets from all over the world, might as well have come out of the books he loved, and read so voraciously. (One per night.)

Inspired by Sylvia Beach’s famous Paris bookstore and publishing house, which closed during World War II, Whitman fashioned the 17th century, two-story apartment into a labyrinth of soft-lit, teetering bookshelves, winding stairs, a library, stacks of well-read Life magazines, and cushy benches that turned to beds at night for Tumbleweeds. Free tea and pancake brunches were served every weekend to anyone brave, or hungry enough. After brunch, the leftover, mysteriously thick pancake batter was used as glue to repair peeling floor rugs.

Whitman didn’t care much for supervising the young lodgers that passed through, but his temper could famously flare if a book was misplaced or an edition not shelved just so.

’He’s the most un-phony person,’ Sylvia Whitman, 30, said in an interview this year with The Times. He ‘says what he thinks, and he doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him. And it’s quite refreshing.’

He once threw a book out the second floor window at a customer below because he thought they might enjoy reading it. And he used to light people’s hair on fire to save them the trouble of paying for a haircut. After all, he had been using the same technique on himself for years.” [….]

And from the New York Times:

“More than a distributor of books, Mr. Whitman saw himself as patron of a literary haven, above all in the lean years after World War II, and the heir to Sylvia Beach, the founder of the original Shakespeare & Company, the celebrated haunt of Hemingway and James Joyce.

As Mr. Whitman put it, ‘I wanted a bookstore because the book business is the business of life.’

Overlooking the Seine and facing the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the store, looking somewhat beat-up behind a Dickensian facade and spread over three floors, has been an offbeat mix of open house and literary commune. For decades Mr. Whitman provided food and makeshift beds to young aspiring novelists or writing nomads, often letting them spend a night, a week, or even months living among the crowded shelves and alcoves.

He welcomed visitors with large-print messages on the walls. ‘Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise,’ was one, quoting Yeats. Next to a wishing well at the center of the store, a sign said: ‘Give what you can, take what you need. George.’ By his own estimate, he lodged some 40,000 people.

Mr. Whitman’s store, founded in 1951, has also been a favorite stopover for established authors and poets to read from their work and sign their books. Its visitors list reads like a Who’s Who of American, English, French and Latin American literature: Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Samuel Beckett and James Baldwin were frequent callers in the early days; other regulars included Lawrence Durrell and the Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, all of them Mr. Whitman’s friends.

Another was the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The two met in Paris in the late 1940s and discussed the importance of free-thinking bookstores. Mr. Ferlinghetti went on to found what became a landmark bookshop in its own right, City Lights, in San Francisco. Their bookstores would be sister shops, the two men agreed.

Mr. Whitman’s beacon and enduring influence was Walt Whitman (no relation), who also ran a bookstore, more than a century ago. In a pamphlet, Mr. Whitman wrote that he felt a kinship with the poet. ‘Perhaps no man liked so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman,’ he wrote, ‘and I at least aspire to the same modest attainment.’” [….]  

Addenda: Professor Alice Woolley has kindly informed me of a book some of us might enjoy: Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005).

One of my former classmates from high school (class of 1975!), Patrick J. Cain, an attorney in Los Angeles, sent the following picture of himself sitting outside Shakespeare & Co. holding a copy of Father Gregory Boyle’s Tatoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion (2010) which, it turns out, was penned by Patrick’s brother-in-law!

 

Group Identity, Agency & Collective Responsibility: A Select Bibliography

This is the first draft of a compilation of book titles (in English) useful for delineating the contours of group identity, agency and collective responsibility in its various dimensions: metaphysical (and/or ontological), epistemic, psychosocial, moral, and legal. The list endeavors to represent the crème de la crème of the (fairly recent) relevant literature, so it’s not intended to be comprehensive, let alone exhaustive. I welcome suggestions for additional titles.

• Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
• Bion, W.R. Experiences in Groups, and other papers. London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1961.
• Brewer, Marilynn B. Intergroup Relations. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 2nd ed., 2003.
• Brown, Rupert. Group Processes: Dynamics Within and Between Groups. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2nd ed., 2000.
• Burkitt, Ian. Social Selves: Theories of Self and Society. London: Sage, 2^nd ed., 2008.
• Cane, Peter. Responsibility in Law and Morality. Oxford, UK: Hart, 2002.
• Casals, Neus Torbisco. Group Rights as Human Rights: a Liberal Approach to Multiculturalism. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2006.
• Dalal. Farhad. Taking the Group Seriously: Towards a Post-Foulkesian Group Analytic Theory. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1998.
• Erskine, Toni, ed. Can Institutions Have Responsibilities? Collective Moral Agency and International Relations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
• French, Peter A. Collective and Corporate Responsibility. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
• French, Peter A. and Howard K. Wettstein, eds. Shared Intentions and Collective Responsibility. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006.
• Gilbert, Margaret. A Theory of Political Obligation: Membership, Commitment, and the Bonds of Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Goldman, Alvin I. Knowledge in a Social World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Goodin, Robert E. Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
• Goodin, Robert E. Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Graham, Keith. Practical Reasoning in a Social World: How We Act Together. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Hinshelwood, R.D. What Happens in Groups: Psychoanalysis, the Individual, and the Community. London: Free Association Books, 1987.
• Hogg, Michael A. and Scott Tindale, eds. Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Group Processes. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001.
• Ingram, David. Group Rights: Reconciling Equality and Difference. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2000.
• Isaacs, Tracy. Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Kakar, Sudhir. The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Kernberg, Offo F. Ideology, Conflict, and Leadership in Groups and Organizations. New York: New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
• Kutz, Christopher. Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• List, Christian and Philip Pettit. Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• May, Larry. The Morality of Groups: Collective Responsibility, Group-Based Harm, Corporate Rights. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987.
• May, Larry. Sharing Responsibility. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
• May, Larry. Crimes Against Humanity: A Normative Account. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• May, Larry and Stacey Hoffman, eds. Collective Responsibility: Five Decades of Debate in Theoretical and Applied Ethics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991.
• McMahon, Christopher. Collective Rationality and Collective Reasoning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Miller, Richard W. Globalizing Justice: The Ethics of Poverty and Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Miller, Seumas. The Moral Foundations of Social Institutions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Ruben, David-Hillel. The Metaphysics of the Social World. London: Routledge, 1985.
• Schmitt, Frederick F., ed. Socializing Metaphysics: The Nature of Social Reality. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
• Searle, John R. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press, 1995.
• Tuomela, Raimo. The Importance of Us: A Philosophical Study of Basic Social Notions. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
• Tuomela, Raimo. The Philosophy of Social Practices: A Collective Acceptance View. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
•  Tuomela, Raimo. The Philosophy of Sociality: The Shared Point of View. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Image: Vanessa Bell (née Stephen) (1879-1961) – c. 1943 The Memoir Club (National Portrait Gallery, London). The Memoir Club (The Bloomsbury Group): Duncan Grant; Leonard Woolf; Vanessa Bell; Clive Bell; David Garnett; Baron Keynes; Lydia Lopokova; Sir Desmond MacCarthy; Mary MacCarthy; Quentin Bell; and E. M. Forster.

 

Socialist Experimentation in Richmond, California

Along with “middle class radicalism” in Santa Monica (Mark E. Kamm), “progressive politics” in San Francisco (Richard L. DeLeon), and “the leftmost city” in Santa Cruz (Richard Gendron and G. William Domhoff), we now have an anarchist-inspired experiment in socialist cooperation in Richmond, California. Yet another reason for why I love my home state!

As the Los Angeles Times article explains, “The flurry of democratic enterprise has been guided by Mayor Gayle McLaughlin, a former schoolteacher who visited Mondragon, Spain, and recognized a possible path out of the poverty and unemployment that plague her city.”

By way of background, I proffer the following readings:

• Cheney, George. Values at Work: Employee Participation Meets Market Pressures at Mondragon (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1999).
• Dolgoff, Sam, ed. The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936-1939 (New York: Free Life Editions, 1974).
• MacLeod, Greg. From Mondragon to America: Experiments in Community Economic Development  (Sydney, Nova Scotia: University College of Cape Breton Press, 1997).
• Morrison, Roy. We Build the Road as We Travel (Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1991).
• Thomas H. and C. Logan. Mondragon: An Economic Analysis (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982).
• Whyte, William Foote and Kathleen King Whyte. Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).

On some of the difficulties involved in assessing such experiments, please see the introductory essay by Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene to their edited volume, Alternatives to Capitalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 1-35.

Addendum—I decided to add a few more titles by way of further (broader and deeper) historical and theoretical context:

• Case, John and Rosemary C.R. Taylor, eds. Co-ops, Communes, and Collectives: Experiments in Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979).
• Clave, Pierre. The Progressive City: Planning and Participation, 1969-1984 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986).
• Hine, Robert V. California’s Utopian Colonies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983 ed. [1953]).
• Logan, John R. and Harvey L. Molotch. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987).
• Nichols, John. The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition…Socialism (London: Verso, 2011).
• Santos, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ed. Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon—Vol. 1 of Reinventing Social Emancipation: Toward New Manifestos (London: Verso, 2007).
• Santos, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ed. Another Production is Possible: Beyond the Capitalist Canon—Vol. 2 of Reinventing Social Emancipation: Toward New Manifestos (London: Verso, 2007).
• Schweickart, David. Against Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).

The Study of Religions

At Mirror of Justice, Marc DeGirolami has (yet again) an insightful post in which he writes of

“an essay by journalist Nathan Schneider [….] [that endeavors] to explain why religious studies is an important and useful field for the problems of our day.  The strangest and most anachronistic argument…is that religious studies came into its own as an academic discipline pretty much as of 1963 with the US Supreme Court’s decision in Abington v. Schempp. 

In Schempp, the issue was the constitutionality of daily devotional readings from the Bible in public schools.  The Court held that the practice violated both the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses.  In dicta, Justice Clark (writing for the majority) also said this:

‘In addition, it might well be said that one’s education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization.  It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.’ (374 U.S. at 225)

What that has to do with the origins of the discipline of religious studies is mysterious to me.  To be sure, the study of religion as a distinct discipline is of comparatively recent vintage.  But it was going on at least a century or more before Justice Clark got around to writing the Schempp majority.  Eminent and learned writers like Schleiermacher, and then later Troeltsch, Durkheim, Weber, and many others were writing about religion qua religion extensively.  One might object that these are not American writers, but one could then point to Harvard comparative religion professor Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s magisterial The Meaning and End of Religion, first published in 1962, which paved the way for much of the religious studies scholarship that exists today (Smith was Canadian, but lived and wrote in the United States for a large part of his career).  Or one could point to Mircea Eliade’s wonderful, The Sacred and the Profane (first published 1957).  If people of Eliade’s and Smith’s stature had already by 1962 made a career of the study of religion, it suggests that religious studies was already a mature field of academic inquiry by the time Schempp rolled around.  Even the structuralist cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss did his influential work in Tristes Tropiques before 1963.  And we haven’t even talked about William James yet, writing way back when it was Holmes’s court and Justice Clark was barely born. 

The other odd feature about relying on the Schempp dictum as a kind of foundational moment for the field of religious studies is that it assumes that academics take their cues about what is worth studying from the Supreme Court.  That isn’t even true in law any more, let alone in other disciplines.  The premise is that non-legal academics actually know about Supreme Court dicta, and that they care enough about it to fashion their scholarly pursuits in conformity with what the Court thinks is worth studying.

That seems to me to get things backwards.  The Supreme Court is generally (and rightly) a follower, not a leader.  It does not shape the culture, but instead perceives the social trends and tendencies of the culture and attempts to conform itself to them.  That was the thesis of the historical jurisprudents of the early 20th century, and it strikes me as exactly right in this and many other circumstances in religion clause law.

If Justice Clark’s dicta demonstrates anything, it isn’t that all of a sudden the Court decided that it ought to provide intellectual room for religious studies scholars the world round by brilliantly conceiving the distinction between teaching religion as true and teaching about religion in academic fashion.  It’s that the Court finally got around to perceiving, and recognizing in law, a distinction which was all around it in the academic customs and cultural mores of society that already existed.”

 *       *       *

I’m in whole-hearted agreement with virtually everything Marc says above. I’d simply like to fill out his story of the intellectual antecedents and origins of the field in which I was trained, namely, “Religious Studies,” a discipline that is also known by other names: History of Religions, Comparative Study of Religions, Study of Religions, Comparative Philosophy….  

Historical accounts of this disciplinary field of intellectual inquiry often go back, most importantly, to the pioneering research of Max Müller, in particular, his Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873). Prior to Müller in the late eighteenth century, translations of classic religious texts from what we now term “Hinduism,” as well as the publication of Bopp’s comparative grammar of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic languages in 1816, helped set the stage for the “scientific” study of religions (the meaning of the term Wissenschaft blurring the boundaries between what we think of as science today and the humanities). 

The cultural climate for such studies in this country was created, as Eric J. Sharpe has noted, “by little groups of freethinkers, Unitarians, Transcendentalists and romantics” (they had an impact abroad as well). French and German historians would help to ground their more speculative, idiosyncratic, non-contextual and non-historical musings. Cross-disciplinary cognitive battles, raiding, and trading brought the study of folklore, mythology, phenomenology, and sociology more explicitly into the mix in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. During the latter part of this period, works by the likes of van Gennep, Durkheim, and Frazer came into prominence (with categories like ‘sacred’ and ‘profane,’ totemism, taboo).

In this country, William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), was extremely significant in sowing seeds for the nascent discipline, as was Evelyn Underhill’s somewhat unwieldy but trailblazing study, Mysticism (1911). While in Europe, the academic field, recognized in the first instance as the “history of religions” received official recognition first in Switzerland (1877), in Holland soon thereafter, and then in France and Germany. The discipline developed comparatively late in the United States, although the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 had a lasting influence, in large measure owing to the impact of Swami Vivekananda’s appearance and lectures. Works in psychology by Jung and Freud of course were not long in making their impact across the pond (the former’s influence conspicuous in Eliade’s writings). The Eranos conferences (beginning in 1933) and subsequent publications have to be given some pride of place, for they reveal a “roll of honour of comparative religion, including as [they do]” Martin Buber, Joseph Campbell, Jean Daniélou, Mircea Eliade, Friedrich Heller, C.G. Jung, C.A.F. Rhys Davids, Gershom Scholem, D.T. Suzuki, Paul Tillich, Guiseppe Tucci, R.C. Zaehner, and Heinrich Zimmer! One book that might be singled out for its enormous influence on the discipline both here and abroad prior to those produced by such seminal figures as Mircea Eliade and W. Cantwell Smith, is Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy, 1917, translated into English in 1923).

I find myself extremely fortunate to have trained under some of the crème de la crème of the second generation of pioneers in our field: Raimundo Panikkar, Gerald James Larson, and Ninian Smart (alas, only Larson is still with us) (those associated with Harvard and the University of Chicago would cite others). By way of reiterating Marc’s conclusion, I can assure readers that in the field’s own narrative accounts of its history, Supreme Court cases are not to be heard.  

References & Further Reading:

• Clarke, J.J. Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought. London: Routledge, 1997.
• Cottingham, John. The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Flood, Gavin. Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion. London: Cassell, 1999.
• Kellenberger, James. The Cognitivity of Religion: Three Perspectives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985.
• Kitagawa, Joseph M. The History of Religions: Understanding Human Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
• Larson, Gerald James and Eliot Deutsch, eds. Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy. Princeton, NL: Princeton University Press, 1988.
• McEvilley, Thomas. The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. New York: Allworth Press, 2002.
• Panikkar, Raimundo. Myth, Faith, and Hermeneutics: Cross-Cultural Studies. New York: Paulist Press, 1979.
• Rudolph, Kurt. Historical Fundamentals and the Study of Religions. New York: Macmillan, 1985.
• Sharpe, Eric J. Comparative Religion: A History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975. 
• Smart, Ninian. The Science of Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge: Some Methodological Questions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973.
• Smart, Ninian. The Philosophy of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
• Smart, Ninian. Religion and the Western Mind. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987.
• Smart, Ninian (Oliver Leaman, ed.). World Philosophies. London: Routledge, 2nd ed., 2008.
• Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Image: My late teacher, mentor, and friend, Ninian Smart, a brilliant doyen in the comparative study of religious worldviews.

Freud Among the Philosophers

This is the latest in a series of fairly short posts introducing Freudian psychoanalysis (see 1. here, 2. here, 3. here, 4. here, 5. here, 6. here, 7. here, 8. here, 9. here, and 10. here).

I’ve just finished reading, once again, Donald Levy’s Freud Among the Philosophers: The Psychoanalytic Unconscious and Its Philosophical Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). The following is a brief (evaluative) abstract:

Although Wittgenstein (pictured above) wrote comparatively little about Freudian psychoanalysis, his complex critical comments have been enormously influential. Donald Levy does a wonderful job of examining Wittgenstein’s assumptions and arguments, exposing his rather uncharitable understanding of psychoanalytic interpretation and the fundamental flaws of his critique (Freud thought to have succumbed to an untenable ‘reductionism’). In addition, he ably defends core Freudian ideas against less gifted philosophers: Alasdair MacIntyre, Karl Popper, and Frank Ciofi, for example. The second half of the book thoroughly exposes the glaring and not-so-obvious weaknesses of Adolf Grünbaum’s positivistically (with regard to the philosophy of science) inspired critique, based as it is on a rather niggardly conception of science (including a ‘false dichotomy’ between intra- and extra-clinical evidence) and an implausible rendering of Freud’s views on more or less axiomatic psychoanalytic propositions (in this case, Freud’s methods are not sufficiently ‘reductionist’). Of course Grünbaum’s argument has been dispatched with some force by others: David Sachs, Paul Robinson, and Sebastian Gardner come first to mind, but I think Levy’s analysis can justly lay claim to being the most definitive of the bunch.    

Fundamental Features of Moral Psychology & Moral Responsibility from a Psychoanalytic Perspective

“If we take the implications of psychoanalysis [for moral responsibility] seriously, we are responsible in several different ways for our multiply motivated conduct. We are responsible retrospectively, in the sense of deserving modest praise, reward, or punishment for what we have consciously intended, unless we have been impeded in our decision making or action by a mental aberration, such as an irresistible compulsion, neurotic conflict, or serious mental illness. There is nothing in psychoanalysis that refutes this ordinary, everyday meaning of moral responsibility for past actions.

What Freud teaches us is that because our actions are multiply motivated, their voluntary aspects tend to be mixed with behavior that is involuntary. [….] The ratio of the voluntary component of an action to its involuntary elements varies both among persons (in accordance with differences in basic personality configuration) and in the same person from moment to moment. Even in the relatively healthy individual, the fact that so much in the mind remains unconscious makes it exceedingly difficult to be confident that we know enough about an individual’s inner mental life to be sure about the degree to which an act is voluntary or involuntary. Nonetheless, Freud felt that in the absence of evidence of mental aberration, ordinary judgments of intentional actions normally suffice. ‘Actions and consciously expressed opinions are as a rule enough for practical purposes in judging men’s character.’

Psychoanalytic understanding would also have us be prospectively responsible for increasing our self-knowledge and gaining control over those unconscious motives that contribute, perhaps decisively, to our conduct. This is similar to the time-honored notion that a person must take responsibility for his own character, though psychoanalysis expands the realm with which one is morally charged to include typical unconscious motives, spontaneous reactions, and settled behavioral patterns that were previously consider beyond conscious control.* [….]

[There is thus another mode of retrospective moral responsibility, for psychoanalysis holds that we are responsible for actions that we did not consciously intend.] If, in acting as I consciously intend, I also do something harmful that I unconsciously wished to bring about without being aware of it, I am responsible—that is, I deserve some degree of disapprobation—for the desire to injure and for any actual deleterious consequences that my conduct may have inflicted, once the causal consequences of my unconscious mental states become clear, even if, before I acted, I did not know that I wanted to do anything injurious and therefore did not form a conscious intention to do it. Responsibility for unconsciously guided actions that do harm is justified because the behavior is in fact my own (it proceeded ‘out of me,’ not some alien force). The action was self-determining in the broader meaning that depth psychology confers on the term ‘self.’ Freud even holds that I have no real choice about accepting responsibility for past unconsciously motivated behavior. ‘I am somehow compelled to do so’ as soon as I am aware that actions proceeded out of me. I own the action retrospectively by sincerely acknowledging that I caused it to happen and by sincerely regretting that I did not know myself well enough to succeed in monitoring my motivation so as to prevent the injury from occurring. Such sincere regret normally entails prospective responsibility in that in the act of acknowledging my responsibility for the regretted behavior I commit myself to do what is necessary not to act out of such motives in the same way in the future.

Psychoanalysis more fully supports assigning moral responsibility in such instances than does the Western moral tradition generally, because it reveals that the person who acts thoughtlessly or without any conscious intention to do harm unconsciously ‘intends’—in the sense of ‘aims at’—these consequences. The harmful behavior, though thoughtless, was not a random compulsion that must remain forever outside the agent’s ability to control. Rather, it was motivated by unconscious reasons for action that should be understood as aspects of the ‘self’ that acts. If these motives have not been subjected to conscious guidance, they should have been or should be, and the agent should assume responsibility for what he or she has failed to accomplish in this regard, even though the failure may be perfectly understandable.

In using the term moral responsibility in several senses, and broadening its usual limitations, Freud generally avoids such terms as guilt, guilty, and morally blameworthy. This is not because he denies the appropriateness of what might be referred to as realistic remorse for actual misdeeds. To the contrary, Freud clearly differentiates the ego-based sentiment of remorse from irrational guilt. He is leery of the term guilt and its variants because it connotes [for him] an indiscriminate self-punishment that is often irrational either because it is excessively harsh in light of the actual deed or because it is triggered by mere fantasies. Terms like guilt and blame are also avoided by Freud because they tend to be used intrapsychically against the self in ways that end up being morally self-defeating. This is likely to happen because the belittling, disparaging, and condemning connotations of these terms in combination with the superego’s proclivity for applying them indiscriminately to the entire self tend to trigger self-defensiveness. And self-defensiveness functions intrapsychically as an obstacle to the very self-understanding that is essential to responsibility. The accused ego feels like a terribly naughty or totally bad child, and these feelings in turn fuel motives of denial, repression, and revenge, rather than honest self-scrutiny and efforts at self-improvement.”

*As Wallwork explains in a note, “This prospective responsibility for our character is one reason why we hold persons retrospectively responsible for specific acts they were powerless to change at the moment of acting. We think they had something to do with the development of the characteristic style of behavior out of which they acted. Even if they did not directly choose it, we consider it possible that they may have had a part in choosing to be unconscious of both it and behavioral consequences.” No doubt a genetic explanatory role for self-deception would be necessary to fill out the reasons why one has such prospective responsibility and can thus be held retrospectively responsible.

—Ernest  Wallwork, Psychoanalysis and Ethics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991): 92-96.

Hermeneutic Considerations in Reading Freud

 

 

Freud stressed the need for psychoanalytic theory “to be filled out by research in such allied disciplines as neurophysiology, biology, normal psychiatry, academic psychology, sociology, and anthropology. [….] Psychoanalysis’s portrait of human nature thus encourages interdisciplinary bridge building among the several disciplines concerned with the study of human nature and behavior, including several of the humanities that deal with unconscious meaning, like literary criticism and aesthetics, at the same time it challenges most traditional views of human nature with its findings regarding unavowed impulses and processes, the persistence of infantile patterns in adult life, and unacknowledged defensive strategies.”

 “Freud’s subtlety as a theorist is commonly missed by beginning students and some academic interpreters who are easily distracted by his penchant for dogmatic overstatements and what are by now archaic metaphors drawn form nineteenth-century physics and biology.”

Freud “repeatedly described the metapsychology as ‘tentative,’ ‘speculative,’ and ‘hypothetical,’ and even went so far as to call it a ‘phantasy,’ a ‘myth,’ a product of wish fulfillment on the part of its creator. [….] [The] side of Freud that works ‘closer to actual experience’ [….] is relatively free of the mechanistic and scientistic viewpoint of the metapsychology…. [All the same], Ricoeur is…right in insisting…that though imperfect, Freud’s metatheory nevertheless ‘preserves something essential,’ and that its economic, structuralist (id, ego, superego), and topographic (conscious, preconscious, unconscious) metaphors, while admittedly flawed, embody notions of the psyche that must be included in any adequate representation of psychoanalytic facts.”

“The Freud of materialistic reductionism and physicalist explanations thus exists side by side with the Freud who peppered his writings with quotations from Sophocles, Aeschylus and Homer, Euripedes and Virgil, the Bible, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Molière, Goethe, Ibsen, and Dostoevsky in the belief that these literary greats captured both the essence of human experience and its depth-psychological explanation better than most academic psychologists.”

—Ernest  Wallwork, Psychoanalysis and Ethics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991)

Israel: A Democratic & Jewish State?

The following is by Sari Nusseibeh, a professor of philosophy at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem. (I have a few comments after his article and have appended a list of titles for ‘further reading.’):

“The Israeli government’s current mantra is that the Palestinians must recognise a ‘Jewish State.’ Of course, the Palestinians have clearly and repeatedly recognised the State of Israel as such in the 1993 Oslo Accords (which were based on an Israeli promise to establish a Palestinian state within five years—a promise now shattered) and many times since. Recently, however, Israeli leaders have dramatically and unilaterally moved the goal-posts and are now clamouring that Palestinians must recognise Israel as a ‘Jewish State.’

In 1946, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry concluded that the demand for a ‘Jewish State’ was not part of the obligations of the Balfour Declaration or the British Mandate. Even in the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, when Zionists sought to ‘establish a home for the Jewish people,’ there was no reference of a ‘Jewish State.’ The Zionist Organisation preferred at first to use the description ‘Jewish homeland’ or ‘Jewish Commonwealth.’ Many pioneering Zionist leaders, such as Judah Magnes and Martin Buber also avoided the clear and explicit term ‘Jewish State’ for their project of a homeland for Jews, and preferred instead the concept of a democratic bi-national state.

Today, however, demands for a ‘Jewish State’ from Israeli politicians are growing without giving thought to what this might mean, and its supporters claim that it would be as natural as calling France a French State. However, if we consider the subject dispassionately, the idea of a ‘Jewish State’ is logically and morally problematic because of its legal, religious, historical and social implications. The implications of this term therefore need to be spelled out, and we are sure that once they are, most people—and most Israeli citizens, we trust—will not accept these implications.

Many implications

First, let us say that confusion immediately arises here because the term ‘Jewish’ can be applied both to the ancient race of Israelites and their descendants, as well as to those who believe in and practice the religion of Judaism. These generally overlap, but not always. For example, some ethnic Jews are atheists and there are converts to Judaism (leaving aside the question of whether these are accepted as such by Ultra-Orthodox Jews) who are not ethnic Jews.

Second, let us suggest also that having a modern nation-state being defined by one ethnicity or one religion is problematic in itself—if not inherently self-contradictory—because the modern nation-state as such is a temporal and civic institution, and because no state in the world is—or can be in practice—ethnically or religiously homogenous.

Third, recognition of Israel as a ‘Jewish state’ implies that Israel is, or should be, either a theocracy (if we take the word ‘Jewish’ to apply to the religion of Judaism) or an apartheid state (if we take the word ‘Jewish’ to apply to the ethnicity of Jews), or both, and in all of these cases, Israel is then no longer a democracy—something which has rightly been the pride of most Israelis since the country’s founding in 1948.

Fourth, at least one in five Israelis—20 per cent of the population, according to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics—is ethnically Arab (and are mostly either Muslim, Christian, Druze or Bahai), and recognising Israel as a ‘Jewish State’ as such makes one-fifth of the population of Israel automatically strangers in their own native land and opens the door to legally reducing them, most undemocratically, to second-class citizens (or perhaps even stripping them of their citizenship and other rights)—something that no-one, much less a Palestinian leader, has a right to do.

Fifth, recognising a ‘Jewish State’ as such in Israel would mean legally that while Palestinians no longer have citizens’ rights there, any member of world Jewry outside of Israel (up to 10 million people perhaps), should be entitled to full citizens’ rights there, no matter wherever they may be in the world today and regardless of their current nationality. Indeed, Israel publicly admits that it does not hold the land for the benefit of its citizens but holds it, in trust, on behalf of the Jews of the world for all time. This is something that happens in practice, but that obviously Palestinians in the occupied territories—including Jerusalem—do not see as fair, especially as they are constantly forcibly evicted off their ancestral homeland by Israel to make way for foreign Jewish settlers, and because Palestinians in their diaspora are denied the same right to come and live.

Sixth, it means, before final status negotiations have even started, that Palestinians would have then given up the rights of about 7 million Palestinians in the diaspora to repatriation or compensation; 7 million Palestinians descended from the Palestinians who in 1900 lived in historical Palestine (i.e. what is now Israel, the West Bank including Jerusalem, and Gaza) and at that time made up 800,000 of its 840,000 inhabitants; and who were driven off their land through war, violent eviction or fear.

Seventh, recognising a ‘Jewish state’ in Israel—a state which purports to annex the whole of Jerusalem, East and West, and calls Jerusalem its “eternal, undivided capital” (as if the city, or even the world itself, were eternal; as if it were really undivided, and as if it actually were legally recognised by the international community as Israel’s capital)—means completely ignoring the fact that Jerusalem is as holy to 2.2 billion Christians and 1.6 billion Muslims, as it is to 15-20 million Jews worldwide.

In other words, this would be to privilege Judaism above the religions of Christianity and Islam, whose adherents together comprise 55 per cent of the world’s population. Regrettably this is a narrative propagated even by renowned Jewish author and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, who, on April 15, 2010, took out full page ads in The New York Times and The Washington Post and claimed that Jerusalem ‘is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture—and not a single time in the Qur’an.’ Now we do not propose to speak for native Palestinian Arab Christians—except to say the that Jerusalem is quite obviously the city of Jesus Christ the Messiah—but as Muslims, we believe that Jerusalem is not the ‘third holiest city of Islam’ as is sometimes claimed, but simply one of Islam’s three holy cities. And, of course, despite what Mr Wiesel seems to believe, Jerusalem is indeed clearly referred to in the Holy Qur’an in Surat al-Isra’ (17:1):

Glorified be He Who transported His servant by night from the Inviolable Place of Worship to the Aqsa Place of Worship whose precincts We have blessed, that We might show him of Our tokens! Lo! He, only He, is the Hearer, the Seer.

Moreover, Muslims wanting to take a similar, religiously exclusive narrative, could point out that while Jerusalem is mentioned 600 times in the Bible, it is not mentioned once in the Torah as such—a fact that any Biblical Concordance will easily confirm. Of course we do, however, recognise the importance of the land of Israel in the religion of Judaism—this is even mentioned in the Qur’an, 5:21—we only ask that the Israeli government reciprocate this courtesy and allow Muslims to speak for themselves in expressing what they consider, and have always considered, as holy to them.

There is another reason, more serious than all of the seven mentioned above, why Palestinian leaders—and indeed no responsible person—can morally recognise Israel as a ‘Jewish State’ as such. It has to do with the very Covenant of God in the Bible with Ancient Israelites of the promise of a homeland for Jews. God says to Abraham in the Bible:

On the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying: ‘To your descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates - the Kenites, the Kenezzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’ (Genesis, 15:18-21; NKJ)

The ancient Israelites then go on to possess this land in the time of Moses, upon God’s command, as follows:

‘When the LORD your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than you, and when the LORD your God delivers them over to you, you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them.’ (Deuteronomy, 7:1-2; NKJ)

‘Hear, O Israel: You are to cross over the Jordan today, and go in to dispossess nations greater and mightier than yourself, cities great and fortified up to heaven, a people great and tall, the descendants of the Anakim, whom you know, and of whom you heard it said: 'Who can stand before the descendants of Anak?' Therefore understand today that the LORD your God is He who goes over before you as a consuming fire. He will destroy them and bring them down before you; so you shall drive them out and destroy them quickly, as the LORD has said to you.’ (Deuteronomy, 9:1-4; NKJ)

The fate of many of the original inhabitants is then as follows:

And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and donkey, with the edge of the sword. (Joshua, 6:21; NKJ)

And this continues even later on in time, as follows:

Samuel also said to Saul: ‘The LORD sent me to anoint you king over His people, over Israel. Now therefore, heed the voice of the words of the LORD. Thus says the LORD of hosts: “I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he ambushed him on the way when he came up from Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”’ (1 Samuel, 15:1-3; NKJ)

Now it is very easy to cherry-pick quotes from scripture permitting or enjoining violence. One could cite, out of context, verses such as the ‘sword verse’ in the Holy Qur’an:

Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they repent, and establish prayer and pay the alms, then leave their way free. God is Forgiving, Merciful. (Al-Tawbah, 9:5) [….]

Democracy or a Jewish State?

…[I]t remains true that, in the Old Testament, God commands the Jewish state in the land of Israel to come into being through warfare and violent dispossession of the original inhabitants. Moreover, this command has its roots in the very Covenant of God with Abraham (or rather ‘Abram’ at that time) in the Bible and it thus forms one of the core tenets of Judaism as such, at least as we understand it. No one then can blame Palestinians and descendents of the ancient Canaanites, Jebusites and others who inhabited the land before the Ancient Israelites (as seen in the Bible itself) for a little trepidation as regards what recognising Israel as a ‘Jewish State’ means for them, particularly to certain Orthodox and Ultra Orthodox Jews. No one then can blame Palestinians for asking if recognising Israel as a ‘Jewish State’ means recognising the legitimacy of offensive warfare or violence against them by Israel to take what remains of Palestine from them.

We need hardly say that this comes against a background where every day the Israeli settler movement is grabbing more land in the West Bank and Jerusalem (there are now 500,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank alone)—aided, abetted, funded and empowered by the current Israeli government - and throwing or forcing more and more Palestinians out, in so many different ways that it would take volumes to describe. [….]

So, rather than demand that Palestinians recognise Israel as a ‘Jewish State’ as such—adding ‘beyond chutzpah’ to insult and injury—we offer the suggestion that Israeli leaders ask instead that Palestinians recognise Israel (proper) as a civil, democratic, and pluralistic state whose official religion is Judaism, and whose majority is Jewish. Many states (including Israel’s neighbours Jordan and Egypt, and countries such as Greece) have their official religion as Christianity or Islam (but grant equal civil rights to all citizens) and there is no reason why Israeli Jews should not want the religion of their state to be officially Jewish.” [….]

Please see the entire article at Al Jazeera.

 *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

Aharon Barak writes in The Judge in a Democracy (2006) that “Israel was founded as the state of the Jewish people.” The founding of not a few nation-states on along exclusivist ethnic and/or religious principles is similar in this regard, but what is more troubling is what follows from this historical premise, namely, an axiomatic “constitutional premise:” “The reason for the existence of the State of Israel is its existence as a Jewish state. That character is central to its existence, and it is ‘an axiom of the state.’ It is a ‘fundamental principle of our law and our system.’ We therefore cannot allow a list or an individual seeking to negate this reason and this foundation to participate in elections.” This goes far beyond requiring would-be electoral participants to recognize the right of the state of Israel to exist, for it excludes participants who would seek to put all religious and other worldviews on equal footing with Judaism vis-à-vis the democratic character of the nation-state of Israel.

Needless to say, Israel’s so-called demographic problem renders this amended (in 1992) Basic Law (as interpreted and applied by the Supreme Court) a pragmatic contradiction. Concrete “facts on the ground,” implications, and consequences are not lacking: pervasive discrimination against Arab citizens, the political role of religion, the blurring of the state’s geography, including the military control and settlement of territory in the West Bank and Gaza (e.g., roughly ‘60 percent of the West Bank is now held by Israeli Jews as private, state, or military land,’ and segregation is very real for Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews, Russian immigrants, and Palestinian Arabs, among others). And this should not prevent us from acknowledging whenever and wherever we discern democratic principles and practices belonging to the state of Israel.

What it troubling, however, is the legislative, political and cultural licensing of the notion that one cannot sufficiently separate, in the case of Israel, the “Jewish” from “the democratic,” hence even well-motivated or well-meaning criticisms of the Jewish nature of the state are seen as equivalent to, indeed, are in fact reduced to, “attacks on democracy.” The Judaization of Israel should therefore remain an important concern for all who cherish the democratic elements of this particular State, especially in light of what has been tellingly christened the “Arab demographic danger” and the resistance of Palestinians to a particular government’s agenda and policies, including those of the IDF.

In several and important respects, Israel can be described as a democracy, but it has some distance to go in ridding itself of those Zionist features that have come to be indissolubly associated with Israel insofar as it is at the same time (normatively) described as a Jewish state. Note that I’m not making the claim that all those who historically identified with Zionism were Jewish in the religious sense, they were not, but those who favored a more messianic-like understanding of Zionism were front and center among the founders of the state of Israel and have remained the ideological pool from which its political leadership has been drawn. This is made clear in Jacqueline Rose’s The Question of Zion (2005), for in the end, there turned out to be very little difference between secular and religious Zionists: both imbued nationalism with a messianic strain, for leaders like Weizmann “merely displaced” the “false messianic hope” they avowedly “relinquished.” Indeed, “the language of secular Zionism bears the traces and scars of a messianic narrative that it barely seeks, or fails, to repress.” An exemplar here is David Ben-Gurion: “A secular Jew, like so many of the key figures in the early political history of Zionism, Ben-Gurion bequeathed to Israel in his rhetoric the messianic destiny of the nation-in-waiting,” as the “language of salvation and redemption saturates...[his] prose.” One disturbing consequence: “Under pressure of the biblical narrative, two thousand years of history fall into the dust,” one reason why Palestine, to the Zionists, was a “land without a people” (when confronted with unavoidable empirical evidence to the contrary, ‘ethnic cleasing’ became the norm: cf. Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2006). Ben-Gurion understood the implications: “We must create a majority in the Land of Israel in the next twenty years.” Is it any wonder that, today, Israel’s “demographic problem” is both a manifest and latent cause of so much political and cultural anxiety? Alas, “Messianism, as unconscious inspiration, is in the air and soil of Israel.”

In Value, Respect, and Attachment (2001), Joseph Raz attempts to explain the underlying principled and rational interpretation of Barak’s characterization of Israel as a “Jewish state:”

“An Israeli Basic Law declares that the State of Israel is a Jewish state. Israeli courts struggled with the implications of the law for their practice. The president of the Supreme Court, Mr. Justice Barak, said that a Jewish state means a state which embraces the values which Judaism gave the world, namely (and I quote) ‘the love of mankind, the sanctity of life, social justice, equity, protecting human dignity, the rule of law over the legislature, etc.’ I think that he gave the statute the only acceptable interpretation. Notice that in the same sense France too can be a Jewish state. It too can embrace the values which Judaism gave to the world.... Indeed, it may well be said that in that sense no state can be a morally good state unless it is a Jewish state. Does that show that Barak adopted the wrong interpretation? Did he not empty that article in the law of all meaning? No and yes. He did empty the law of meaning, but it was the right thing to do. It would be wrong to suppose that on top of following justice, equity, dignity, and other universal values, Israeli law should follow some additional specifically Jewish values, which may conflict with justice or other values, and compromise them.”

Unfortunately, the fact that the wording of the law remains on the books, means it is always liable to an interpretation other than that provided by the former President of the Supreme Court of Israel. Indeed, if the law is thereby emptied of all meaning, why not change it? The plain meaning of the language here is not at all conducive to the secular apologetic gloss, indeed, it implicates the centrality of “specifically Jewish values” in the State by its inclusion and non-Jews can be forgiven for understanding it in just that fashion.

Further Reading:

• Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim. The Transformation of Palestine: Essays on the Origin and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971.
• Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim. Palestinian Rights: Affirmation and Denial. Wilmette, IL: Medina Press, 1982.
• Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim, ed. The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970.
• Alam, M. Shahid. Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
• Aruri, Naseer H. Dishonest Broker: The Role of the United States in Palestine and Israel. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003.
• Aruri, Naseer H., ed. Occupation: Israel Over Palestine. London: Zed Books, 1984.
• Asali, Kamil J., ed. Jerusalem in History. New York: Olive Branch Press/Interlink, 2000.
• Barghouti, Omar. BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions—The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2011.
• Benvenisti, Eyal. Legal Dualism: The Absorption of the Occupied Territories into Israel. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990.
• Benvenisti, Eyal. The International Law of Occupation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
• Black, Edwin. The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine. New York: Basic Books, 2001. ed.
• Bowen, Stephen, ed. Human Rights, Self-Determination, and Political Change in the Occupied Territories. The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1997.
• Boyle, Francis A. Palestine, Palestinians, and International Law. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2003.
• Chomsky, Noam. The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999 ed.
• Chomsky, Noam. Middle East Illusions. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.
• Farsoun, Samih K. (with Christian E. Zacharia). Palestine and the Palestinians. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997.
• Finkelstein, Norman G.. Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. London: Verso, 1995.
• Finkelstein, Norman G. Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008 ed.
• Flapan, Simha. The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. New York: Pantheon, 1987.
• Friedman, Robert I. Zealots for Zion: Inside Israel’s West Bank Settler Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.
• Gans, Chaim. A Just Zionism: On the Morality of the Jewish State. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Glass, Charles. “The Great Lie,” London Review of Books, Vol. 22, No. 23, 30 November 2000.
• Glass, Charles. “Balfour, Weizmann and the Creation of Israel,” London Review of Books, Vol. 23, No. 11, 7 June 2001.
• Gordon, Neve. Israel’s Occupation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008.
• Gorenberg, Gershom. The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977. New York: Times Books, 2006.
• Hadawi, Sami. Bitter Harvest: A Modern History of Palestine. New York: Olive Branch Press, 1989.
• Hajjar, Lisa. Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza. London: University of California Press, 2005.
• Kattan, Victor. From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891-1949. London: Pluto Press, 2009.
• Kattan, Victor, ed. The Palestine Question in International Law. London: British Institute of International and Comparative Law, 2008.
• Khalidi, Rashid. The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2006.
• Kimmerling, Baruch. Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics. Berkeley, CA; University of California Press, 1983.
• Kimmerling, Baruch. Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians. London: Verso, 2003.
• Kimmerling, Baruch and Joel S. Migdal. The Palestinian People: A History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
• King, Mary Elizabeth. A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance. New York: Nation Books, 2007.
• Krämer, Gudrun. A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
• Kretzmer, David. The Occupation of Justice: The Supreme Court of Israel and the Occupied Territories. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002.
• Laor, Yitzhak. The Myth of Liberal Zionism. London: Verso, 2009.
• Lustik, Ian. Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel’s Control of a National Minority. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1980.
• Makdisi, Saree. Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2008.
• Maoz, Zeev. Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s Security and Foreign Policy. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
• Marmor, Andrei, “Entitlement to Land and the Right of Return: An Embarrassing Challenge for Liberal Zionism” (2003), USC Law and Public Policy Research Paper, No. 03-17. Available: http://ssrn.com/abstract=424622
• Masalha, Nur. The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem. London: Pluto, 2003.
• Masalha, Nur. The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology, and Post-Colonialism in Israel-Palestine. London: Zed Books, 2007.
• Mearsheimer, John J. and Stephen M. Walt. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
• Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2006.
• Pappé, Ilan, ed. The Israel/Palestine Question: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2007.
• Peleg, Ilan. Human Rights in the West Bank and Gaza: Legacy and Politics. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995.
• Quigley, John. The Statehood of Palestine: International Law in the Middle East Conflict. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Rodinson, Maxime. Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? New York: Anchor Foundation/Pathfinder, 1973.
• Rogan, Eugene L. and Avi Shlaim, eds. The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Rose, Jacqueline. The Question of Zion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007 ed.
• Rose, John. The Myths of Zionism. London: Pluto Press, 2004.
• Ross, Dennis. The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
• Said, Edward W. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
• Said, Edward W. The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After. New York: Vintage Books, 2001 ed.
• Said, Edward W. and Christopher Hitchens, eds. Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question. London: Verso, 1988.
• Shlaim, Avi. Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations. London: Verso, 2009.
• Slater, Jerome. “What Went Wrong? The Collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 116, No. 2 (Summer 2001), pp. 171-199.
• Weizman, Eyal. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso, 2007.
• Wheatcroft, Geoffrey. The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State, and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma. New York: Perseus, 1996.
• Yiftachel, Oren. Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
• Zertal, Idith and Akiva Eldar. Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007. New York: The Nation Books, 2007.

Image: A Zionist poster from the 1940s reads, “Buy Local Products,” referring to goods produced by Jews. (Israel MFA)

Day of Judgment

“Don’t wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.”—Albert Camus (The Fall, 1956)

Spirit & Psyche

“A spirituality that does not take into account and engage with the complexities and dynamic nature of the psyche, in which our bodily life plays such an important part, will fail to touch people who are not incurably romantic. It will remain, in the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut’s felicitous phrase, experience-distant rather than experience-near. Equally, a psychology that refuses to recognize the potentialities of the psyche, of its possible extension into the realm of the spirit, a psychology which contents itself with Freud’s healing offer of replacing hysterical misery with common unhappiness, does not provide enough emotional sustenance to modern man.”—Sudhir Kakar, from the introduction to his book, Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Aśoka, Buddhist Emperor of India

The Indian emperor Aśoka (304-232 BCE) ruled the Mauryan Empire on the Indian subcontinent from c. 270-232 BCE. In addition to his appreciation of the need for religious toleration and heterodoxy, Ásoka “laid down what are perhaps the oldest rules for conducting debates and disputations, with the opponents being ‘duly honoured in every way and on all occasions,’” indeed, Amartya Sen suggests we view these as “a kind of ancient version of the nineteenth-century ‘Robert’s Rules of Order’” (Sen: xii-xiii and 16). His edicts gave shape to an understanding of the Dharma of Buddhism, meaning for him “a moral polity of active social concern, religious tolerance, ecological awareness, the observance of common ethical precepts, and the renunciation of war [the sound of drums becomes the sound of spiritual understanding, morality, and mind training—dharma—not war]:”

“In Pillar Edict VII, for example, he orders banyan trees and mango groves to be planted, resthouses to be built, and wells to be dug every half-mile along the roads. In Rock Edict I, he establishes an end to the killing and consumption of most animals in the royal kitchens. In Rock Edict II, he orders the provision of medical facilities for men and beasts. In Rock Edict III, he enjoins obedience to mother and father, generosity toward priests and ascetics, and frugality in spending. In Rock Edict V, he commissions officers to work for the welfare and happiness of the poor and aged. In Rock Edict VI, he declares his intention constantly to promote the welfare of all beings so as to pay off his debt to living creatures and to work for their happiness in this world and the next. And in Rock Edict XII, he honors men of all faiths.” (Strong: 4) 

The “provision of medical facilities” finds Aśoka a “pioneer in creating hospitals for public use,” one of the Edicts stating these were also established  “in the Hellenistic kingdoms—a claim that may sound implausible but has been plausibly defended on the basis of available evidence by Thomas McEvilley”* (Sen: 82-83).

Also among his edicts was the prohibition of animal sacrifice in votive offerings. In conjunction with Rock Edict II, medicinal herbs were distributed and planted, as were roots and fruits wherever they were lacking. And Rock Edict I effectively abolished hunting and fishing in the royal household.

Raghavan Iyer discusses the significance of Rock Edict XII:

“In India…the Emperor Aśoka in 250 BC was not only the first-known sovereign to exalt the virtues of tolerance and civility but also the first to enact religious toleration. Hinduism, which was sometimes messianic but never missionary until recent times, had been confronted by Buddhist religion, which was missionary but not messianic. Aśoka’s Twelfth Major Rock Edict was an earnest and thoughtful plea for toleration among the various sects of the day. Toleration was not passive sufferance but an active search for dialogue and concord, based upon the conviction that in the honoring of other sects lies the welfare and honor of one’s own. An individual or a group is enhanced by the display of active tolerance and genuine fellow feeling. Concord was regarded as universally meritorious and it was required that all sects should learn and benefit from each other.” (Iyer: 67)

With regard to the proposition that “all sects should learn and benefit from each other,” Aśoka employed a Jain-like approach to the rational and ethical assessment of religious beliefs and practices, refusing to endorse or dismiss a religious worldview in toto, preferring rather to examine its particular parts or facets, in the manner described here by the contemporary philosopher Hilary Putnam: “‘Is our own way of life right or wrong?’is a silly question, although it isn’t silly to ask if this or that particular feature of our way of life is right or wrong, and ‘Is our view of the world right or wrong?’ is a silly question, although it isn’t silly to ask if this or that particular belief is right or wrong.” And although he was a convert to Buddhism, Aśoka did not make Buddhism the official religion of the empire.

Aśoka’s concern with criminal justice led to the establishment of a “Ministry of Dhamma,” “through which he sought to prevent wrongful imprisonment and punishment, to free prisoners when appropriate, and to aid prisoners’ families if they were in need” (Harvey: 116).

While there was nothing novel in the regular circulation of imperial commands, “in his determination to achieve the maximum publicity for the new policy, and to ensure that its implementation would continue long after his own time, Aśoka caused many of his edicts to be inscribed on stone columns and on rocks at all the principal centers of his realm. No doubt he used more ephemeral media as well, but to us he has bequeathed his ideas in lasting form, many of his inscriptions remaining in their original places or in museums” (Warder: 237). Aśoka’s edicts were in stark contrast to the largely amoral maxims of political power found in Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra (‘Science of Wealth,’ i.e., politics and economics), the latter’s reflections on power and conceptions of raison d’état not dissimilar to those of Machiavelli and Hobbes in Western political philosophy.

* See McEvilley’s important book, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies, 2002.

References & Further Reading

• Harvey, Peter. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics: Foundations, Values, and Issues. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Hirakawa, Akira (Paul Groner, trans.). A History of Indian Buddhism: From Śākyamuni to Early Mahāyāna. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1990.
• Iyer, Raghavan. Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
• Nikam, N.A. and Richard P. McKeon, ed. and trans. The Edicts of Aśoka. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1959.
• Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
• Strong, John S. The Legend of King Aśoka: A Study and Translation of the Aśokāvadāna. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
• Thapar, Romila. Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas. New York: Oxford University Press, revised ed., 1998.
• Warder, A.K. Indian Buddhism. Delhi: Motilal Barnarsidass, 3rd ed., 2000.           

Self, No-Self?—A Select Bibliography on Personal Identity

• Albahari, Miri. Analytical Buddhism: The Two-Tiered Illusion of Self. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
• Baker, Lynne Rudder. Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Collins, Steven. Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravāda Buddhism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
• Duerlinger, James. Indian Buddhist Theories of Persons: Vasubandhu’s ‘Refutation of the Theory of a Self.’ London: RoutledgeCurzon 2003.
• Elster, Jon, ed. The Multiple Self. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 
• Ganeri, Jonardon. The Concealed Art of the Soul: Theories of Self and Practices of Truth in Indian Ethics and Epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Hutto, Daniel D., ed. Narrative and Understanding Persons. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Lints, Richard, Michael S. Horton and Mark R. Talbot, eds. Personal Identity in Theological Perspective. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2006.
• Martin, Raymond and John Barresi, eds. Personal Identity. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
• Noonan, Harold W. Personal Identity. London: Routledge, 2nd ed., 2003.
• Olson, Eric T. What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1984.
• Perry, John. Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002.
• Perry, John., ed. Personal Identity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2nd ed., 2008.
• Shoemaker, Sydney. Identity, Cause, and Mind: Philosophical Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003 ed.
• Siderits, Mark. Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.
• Sorabji, Richard. Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
• Strawson, Galen. Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Strawson, Galen. The Evident Connexion: Hume on Personal Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Strawson, Galen. Locke on Personal Identity: Consciousness and Concernment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
• Tallis, Raymond. The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
• Tallis, Raymond. I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First Person Being. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
• Tallis, Raymond. The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.
• Unger, Peter. Identity, Consciousness and Value. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Velleman, J. David. Self to Self: Selected Essays. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Wilkes, Kathleen V. Real People: Personal Identity Without Thought Experiments. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1988.
• Wollheim, Richard. The Thread of Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984.
• Zahavi, Dan. Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

Neuromania & Darwinitis

Highly recommended: Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Durham, UK: Acumen, 2011).

For a short list of related titles in philosophy of mind (and a few in philosophy of science), please see this post from earlier in the year: Unfashionable Literature—or Swimming Against the Current—in Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (and elsewhere): Mind is a Mind is a Mind...and not a Brain.

When the Hebrew Bible is the Hebrew Bible and not the “Old Testament”

In public discourse, we should refer to the “Hebrew Bible” or Tanakh, and not the “Old Testament,” out of respect for the Judaic tradition and religious Jews. For Jews, the Hebrew Bible is not superseded or in some sense transcended by a “new covenant” (and thus ‘New Testament’). Why should it be so difficult for Christians (and others, for that matter) to do this?

Religion and Politics in Modern Iran: A Select Bibliography

I thought perhaps some readers might be interested in this manageable English-language (books only) bibliography on “religion and politics” in Iran. I welcome suggestions for additional titles.

• Abdo, Geneive and Jonathan Lyons. Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in Twenty-First Century Iran. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2003.
• Abrahamian, Ervand. Iran Between Two Revolutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982.
• Abrahamian, Ervand. The Iranian Mojahedin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989.
• Abrahamian, Ervand. Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993.
• Abrahamian, Ervand. Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999.
• Abrahamian, Ervand. A History of Modern Iran. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Adelkhah, Fariba. Being Modern in Iran. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
• Adib-Mogahaddam, Arshin. Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republic. London: Hurst Publishers, 2007.
• Afary, Janet. The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906-1911. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
• Afary, Janet. Sexual Politics in Modern Iran. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Afary, Janet and Kevin B. Anderson. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
• Afkhami, Mahnaz and Erika Friedl, eds. In the Eye of the Storm: Women in Post-Revolutionary Iran. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994.
• Afshari, Reza. Human Rights in Iran: The Abuse of Cultural Relativism. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
• Aghaie, Kamran Scot. The Martyrs of Karbala: Shi‘i Symbols and Rituals in Modern Iran. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2004.
• Aghaie, Kamran Scot. The Women of Karbala: Ritual Performance and Symbolic Discourses in Modern Shi‘i Islam. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005.
• Akhavi, Shahrough. Religion and Politics in Contemporary Iran: Clergy-State Relations in the Pahlavi Period. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1980.
• Algar, Hamid. The Islamic Revolution in Iran. London: Open Press, 1980.
• Algar, Hamid. Religion and State in Iran 1785-1906: The Role of the Ulama in the Qajar Period. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969.
• Alizadeh, Parvin, ed. The Economy of Iran: The Dilemma of an Islamic State. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000.
• Ansari, Ali M. Iran, Islam, and Democracy: The Politics of Managing Change. London: Chatham House, 2nd ed., 2006.
• Ansari, Ali M. Modern Iran Since 1921: The Pahlavis and After. London: Longman, 2003.
• Arjomand, Said Amir. The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988.
• Arjomand, Said Amir. After Khomeini: Iran Under His Successors. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Azimi, Fakhreddin. Iran: the Crisis of Democracy. London: I.B. Tauris, 1989.
• Azimi, Fakhreddin. The Quest for Democracy in Iran: A Century of Struggle Against Authoritarian Rule. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
• Bakhash, Shaul. The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 1990.
• Baktiari, Bahman. Parliamentary Politics in Revolutionary Iran: The Institutionalization of Factional Politics. Gainseville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996.
• Barth, Frederik. Nomads of South Persia: The Basseri Tribe of the Khamseh Confederacy. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1961. 
• Bayat, Asef. Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
• Bayat, Asef. Workers and Revolution in Iran. London: Zed Books, 1987.
• Bayat, Mangol. Iran’s First Revolution: Shi‘ism and the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1909. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Behrooz, Maziar. Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000.
• Bill, James A. The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988.
• Bonine, Michael E. and Nikki R. Keddie, eds. Modern Iran: The Dialectics of Continuity and Change. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1981.
• Browne, Edward G. The Persian Revolution, 1905-1909. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1910.
• Chehabi, H.E. Iranian Politics and Religious Modernism: The Liberation Movement of Iran under the Shah and Khomeini. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
• Cronin, Stephanie. The Army and the Creation of the Pahlavi State in Iran, 1910-1926. London: I.B. Tauris, 1997.
• Cronin, Stephanie. Tribal Politics in Iran: Rural Conflict and the New State, 1921-1941. New York: Routledge, 2007.
• Cronin, Stephanie. Soldiers, Shahs and Subalterns in Iran: Opposition, Protest and Revolt, 1921-1941. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
• Dabashi, Hamid. Iran, The Green Movement and the USA: The Fox and the Paradox. London: Zed Books, 2010.
• Dabashi, Hamid. Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
• Ebadi, Shirin (with Azadeh Moaveni). Iran Awakening. New York: Random House, 2007.
• Ebadi, Shirin. Refugee Rights in Iran. London: Saqi Books, 2008.
• Ebadi, Shirin. The Golden Cage: Three Brothers, Three Choices, One Destiny. Carlsbad, CA: Kales Press, 2011.
• Ehteshami, Anoushiravan. After Khomeini: The Iranian Second Republic. New York: Routledge, 1995.
• Esfandiari, Haleh. Reconstructed Lives: Women & Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
• Farsoun, Samih K. Iran: Political Culture in the Islamic Republic. London: Routledge, 1992.
• Fischer, Michael M.J. Iran: from Religious Dispute to Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
• Foran, John. Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from 1500 to the Revolution. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993.
• Foran, John, ed. A Century of Revolution: Social Movements in Iran. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
• Ganji, Akbar. The Road to Democracy in Iran. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
• Gasiorowski, Mark. U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah: Building a Client State in Iran. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.
• Ghani, Cyrus. Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah: From Qajar Collapse to Pahlavi Power. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000.
• Ghani, Cyrus. Iran and the West: A Critical Bibliography. London: Kegan Paul Int’l., 1987.
• Gheissari, Ali. Iranian Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998.
• Gheissari, Ali, ed. Contemporary Iran: Economy, Society, Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Graham, Robert. Iran: the Illusion of Power. London: Croom Helm, revised ed., 1979.
• Hairi, Abdu’l-Hadi. Shī‘ism and Constitutionalism in Iran. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1977.
• Hashemi, Nader and Danny Postel, eds. The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2010.
• Hooglund, Eric, ed. Twenty Years of Islamic Revolution: Political and Social Transition in Iran since 1979. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002.
• Irfani, Shuroosh. Revolutionary Islam in Iran: Popular Liberation or Religious Dictatorship? London: Zed Books, 1983.
• Kamrava, Mehran. Iran’s Intellectual Revolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Katouzian, Homa. Mussadiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran. London: I.B. Tauris, 1991.
• Katouzian, Homa. The Political Economy of Modern Iran. London: Macmillan, 1981.
• Kazemi, Farhad. Poverty and Revolution in Iran: The Migrant Poor, Urban Marginality, and Politics. Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1981.
• Keddie, Nikki R. Iran and the Muslim World: Resistance and Revolution. Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1995.
• Keddie, Nikki R. Iran: Religion, Politics and Society. London: Frank Cass, 1980.
• Keddie, Nikki R. Religion and Rebellion in Iran: The Tobacco Protest of 1891-1892. London: Frank Cass, 1966.
• Keddie, Nikki R. Roots of Revolution: An Interpretative History of Modern Iran. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
• Keddie, Nikki R. Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006 ed.
• Keddie, Nikki R., ed. Religion and Politics in Iran: Shi‘ism from Quietism to Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983.
• Majd, Hooman. The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran. New York: Anchor Books, 2009 ed.
• Majd, Hooman. The Ayatollahs’ Democracy: An Iranian Challenge. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010.
• Menashri, David. Post-Revolutionary Politics in Iran: Religion, Society and Power. London: Frank Cass & Co., 2001.
• Milani, Mohsen M. The Making of Iran’s Islamic Revolution: From Monarchy to Islamic Republic. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, revised ed., 1994.
• Mir-Hosseini, Ziba. Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
• Mir-Hosseini, Ziba and Richard Tapper. Islam and Democracy in Iran: Eshkevari and the Quest for Reform. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006.
• Mirsepassi, Ali. Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Mirsepassi, Ali. Democracy in Modern Iran: Islam, Culture, and Political Change. New York: New York University Press, 2010.
• Moaddel, Mansoor. Class, Politics, and Ideology in the Iranian Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
• Moghissi, Haideh. Populism and Feminism in Iran: Women’s Struggle in a Male-Defined Revolutionary Movement. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
• Moqadam, Afsaneh. Death to the Dictator!: A Young Man Casts a Vote in Iran’s 2009 Election and Pays a Devastating Price. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.
• Moslem, Mehdi. Factional Politics in Post-Khomeini Iran. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002.
• Mottahedeh, Roy. The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran. Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2000.
• Nabavi, Negin. Intellectuals and the State in Iran: Politics, Discourse and the Dilemma of Authenticity. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003.
• Nabavi, Negin, ed. Intellectual Trends in 20th Century Iran. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003.
• Paidar, Parvin. Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Postel, Danny. Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2006.
• Rajaee, Farhang. Islam and Modernism: The Changing Discourse in Iran. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2007. 
• Rajaee, Farhang, ed. The Iran-Iraq War: The Politics of Aggression. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1993.
• Rejali, Darius M. Torture and Modernity: Self, Society and State in Modern Iran. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993.
• Ringer, Monica M. Education, Religion, and the Discourse of Cultural Reform in Qajar Iran. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publ., 2000.
• Sanasarian, Eliz. The Women’s Rights Movement in Iran: Mutiny, Appeasement, and Repression from 1900 to Khomeini. New York: Praeger, 1982.
• Schirazi, Asghar (John O’Kane, trans.). The Constitution of Iran: Politics and the State in the Islamic Republic. London: I.B. Tauris, 1997.
• Sick, Gary. All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter With Iran. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse.com, 2001 ed.
• Takeyh, Ray. Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co., 2006.
• Takeyh, Ray. Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of Ayatollahs. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad. Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
• Vahdat, Farzin. God and Juggernaut: Iran’s Intellectual Encounter with Modernity. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002.
• van den Bos, Matthijs. Mystic Regimes: Sufism and the State in Iran, from the late Qajar Era to the Islamic Republic. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002.
• Wright, Robin. The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran. New York: Vintage Books, 2001.

To Hell with Conflict Resolution

…for that is the conclusion one might reasonably draw from the fact

“that Israel is moving forward with another large housing project on territory it seized during the 1967 Mideast war, unveiling plans to build 2,610 units in what critics say would be the first entirely new development on disputed Jerusalem land in 14 years.

The planned project, to be called Givat Hamatos, would expand the footprint of Jewish housing development into new areas, nearly cutting off Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem from West Bank communities. If built, the project would make it harder to create a Palestinian state with contiguous borders and a capital in East Jerusalem, opponents say.

‘This one is really bad,’ said Hagit Ofran of Peace Now, the Israeli anti-settlement group. ‘This would block the potential of a two-state solution.’

Peace Now said Givat Hamatos would be the first new Israeli development in the Jerusalem area since the creation Har Homa in 1997, which was approved by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his first term in office.

The project would isolate the Palestinian communities of Beit Safafa and Shurafat, which are considered to be part of East Jerusalem, from the West Bank city of Bethlehem. It would be built on land that Israel now considers to be part of southern Jerusalem. Palestinians and the international community never recognized the annexation and view the land as occupied West Bank territory.

Government officials emphasized that the project was still in the early stages of the approval process.

‘This proposal has been around for years and there has been no decision taken yet, either at the municipal level or the national level,’ said Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev.

Plans for Givat Hamatos were originally announced in 2008, but were shelved to allow for revisions. On Oct. 11, Jerusalem authorities quietly resubmitted the plans, starting the clock on a 60-day public comment period.

If the project is approved, groundbreaking would not be expected to take place for two years. Israel has said it needs to build new homes to meet growing demand around Jerusalem.

Palestinian officials said the proposal was a sign that Netanyahu is not serious about resuming peace talks and is thumbing his nose at the international community, which has repeatedly urged Israel to halt settlement construction.

The Mideast ‘quartet,’ consisting of the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union, has called upon Palestinians and Israelis to refrain from provocative actions and return to the negotiating table by the end of the month.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the Givat Hamatos proposal ‘makes a mockery of the quartet statement and other international efforts to bring about a just and lasting peace.’”

The rest of the article from the Los Angeles Times is here.

Image: A man works last month on a construction site in the Jerusalem-area Jewish settlement of Gilo, where 1,100 new housing units were approved by Israel last month. Plans for a new development nearby, to be called Givat Hamatos, foresee construction of 2,610 housing units. (Tara Todras-Whitehill, AP/September 27, 2011)

Jonathan Lear on the Science of Subjectivity (and the modern ‘therapy of desire’)

 

“The idea of a science of subjectivity seems, at first, paradoxical: how could there be an objective study of subjectivity? And yet, Freud realized, there had to be such a study if we were to understand human existence. For human reality is significantly constituted by subjectivity: what it is to be a person is shaped by what it is like for that person to be. The meanings, emotions and desires alive in a person’s soul [psyche] play a crucial role in determining who that person is. There cannot, then, be a science of human life without its including subjectivity within its scope. That is not easy to do. For, as Freud realized, the deeper meanings which shape a person’s soul and structure his outlook are not immediately available to his awareness. A person is, by his nature, out of touch with his own subjectivity. [….] The only way to get at these deeper meanings is through a peculiar human interaction, the like of which never before existed in the world. It is in the structured setting of a psychoanalytic therapy that the deeper strata of a person’s subjectivity emerge.

If this is so, the conception of science into which Freud was born and to which he tenaciously adhered must be inadequate for the study of human life. For that conception requires that an observer remain detached from and non-intrusive with respect to the reality he is observing. This is a conception of observation that has worked out in the study of purely physical objects. There was no question of trying to capture the subjectivity of those objects: they had none. And the demand that an observer be detached gave content to the idea that he was investigating a reality that exists independently of the investigation. Now, the analytic situation is, of its essence, therapeutic. There have been no interesting psychoanalytic observations of human nature that have not arisen out of an attempt to ease human suffering. Analytic therapy demands that the analyst embody a unique blend of empathy, sympathy and distance. Psychoanalysis is nothing if not a (special) emotional relationship between analyst and analysand.

[….] As a practitioner, [Freud] was a therapist who helped himself to empathic understanding; as a theorist, he tried to fit psychoanalysis into the scientific image of his day. He never came to grips with the full force of the idea of a science of subjectivity. Neither have we. And that is why…most criticisms and defenses of the validity of psychoanalysis are beside the point. For this point cannot be to show that psychoanalysis does or does not conform to this or that model of science. A more promising strategy is to say that the idea of a science of subjective reality is so new that we do not have any fixed model to which it should conform. Indeed, the idea of a science of subjectivity—like the idea of the unconscious mental—is at first so strange as to seem almost a contradiction in terms. If one listens carefully, one can hear the faint echoes of Viennese professors proving the unconscious mental absurd: ‘The mental,’ I hear them saying, ‘must be conscious!’ Rather than take up a similarly antiquated stand with respect to the ideas of our time, we should leave ourselves open to the possibility of a science of subjectivity. Antecedently to the working out of psychoanalysis, we have little idea of what it would be to study subjectivity objectively. If we can conceive of psychoanalysis as a science of the first person, the I, we must conceive of Freud as standing at the beginning of this science, not at its end.”—Jonathan Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Examination of Freudian Psychoanalysis (1990)

The schizoid, borderline, and narcissistic analysand of our time and place

“As a rule, today’s patients do not simply present classically neurotic problems of an oedipal nature. Rather, they present the kind of problems which have come to be labeled schizoid, borderline, and narcissistic. For whatever reasons, problems of self and object relations—experienced as feelings of meaninglessness, feelings of emptiness, pervasive depression, lack of sustaining interests, goals, ideals, and values, and feelings of unrelatedness—are the overwhelming predominant symptoms in today’s modal patient. Furthermore, since as early as 1954, Winnicott warned young analysts that they would be unlikely to be seeing many classically neurotic patients in their practices, it is clear that we are witnessing a phenomenon of some duration.”—Morris N. Eagle in Recent Developments in Psychoanalysis: A Critical Evaluation (1984)

Image: Kathe Kollwitz, Die Witwe I (The Widow I), 1922-3.

Socio-Political Conflict Resolution & Nonviolence: A Select Bibliography and Historical Exemplum

 
 

Preface

What follows is by way of an introduction to whet your appetite for the subject matter covered in our latest compilation in the Online Research Bibliographies series: Socio-Political Conflict and Nonviolence. I had originally intended to post this bibliography and essay in honor and celebration of May Day, as “the exemplum” outlines the nonviolent theory and praxis exemplified by KOR, the Workers’ Defense Committee (later: Komitet Samoobrony Społecznej KOR/Social Self-Defense Committee, KSS-‘KOR’) in Poland that played a direct “service” role in the emergence of Solidarity (or Solidarność, the first non-Communist party-controlled trade union in the Warsaw Pact countries) in 1980. Perhaps more importantly, KOR represented a new philosophy and political strategy for the democratic opposition that was at once revolutionary and reformist: the former insofar as it made a deliberate break with the primary modes of civil resistance in Polish history in its rejection of political violence and corresponding fidelity to principles of truth (cf. the idea of ‘living in truth’ that became prominent among opposition intellectuals like Václav Havel, Jacek Kuroń and Adam Michnik) and nonviolence (in Gandhian terms, ‘satyā’ and ‘ahimsa’). The “reformist” character of the democratic opposition refers to its means and methods (thus not its theoretical cast or social vision), which were predominantly gradual and piecemeal, including a commitment to the “self-organization” of civil society (what in Gandhi’s doctrine of satyāgraha was termed the ‘Constructive Programme’). In many and important respects, KOR incarnated the political cultural logic and virtues of what has been called Poland’s “Self-limiting Revolution.” This was the first of several nonviolent “revolutions” (e.g., the ‘Velvet’ Revolution in Czechoslovakia) that culminated in a series of roundtable talks that began in 1989 and took place in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Hungary, and Poland. The “roundtable talks” in these countries was responsible for the negotiated breakdown of (and thus peaceful transition from) Party-State Communism (as Jon Elster notes, the regimes in the GDR and Czechoslovakia were crumbling before the talks began). (In what follows, I don’t mean to slight the structural catalytic or precipitating role played by the policies and reforms initiated through Mikhail Gorbachev’s political doctrines of perestroika and glasnost.)

The “new opposition” that formed in Poland in the 1970s was not entirely novel and thus there was an historical tilling of the soil for civil resistance and nonviolent politics: from the Polish October of 1956 and the Club of the Crooked Circle (Klub Krzywego Koła, 1955-1962), to Jacek Kuroń and Karl Modzelewski’s “Open Letter to the Party” (for which they were both imprisoned) and the “Letter of 34”in 1964, and the “unstructured strike” by predominantly women workers in the textile factories at Łódź in 1971, Poland was not without its fair share of historical examples of nonviolent civil resistance and opposition politics. Indeed, vast underground publishing networks, self-education societies (e.g., the ‘Flying University’ or Uniwersytet Latający, revived in 1977), cultural clubs and networks thoughout the arts, a “second economy” with its grey-black market, all of this and more existed prior to Poland’s nonviolent (i.e., ‘bloodless,’ ‘self-limiting,’ and ‘looking glass’) social revolution. With regard to groups and events that acted as precursors to KOR in particular, we learn from Jan Jósef Lipski’s invaluable study that in addition to some of the above, we can count dissident lawyers, writers and scholars; the Club of the Seekers of Contradiction; “Walterites” (pupils of Jacek Kuroń: ‘the nom de guerre of General Karol Świerczewski, the “General Walter” of the Spanish Civil War, and thus they identified themselves ideologically with the communist tradition’); the “Commandos” (‘the name was forged in the cell of the Polish United Workers (PUWP) party at Warsaw University’); the March 1968 student protests (including the few protests that followed the invasion of Czechoslovakia); the Scouts of Black Troop No. 1 and the Band of Vagabonds; students and young university graduates associated with the Warsaw Club of Catholic Intelligentsia (KIK); Ruch (Movement); the trial of the “Tatra Mountaineers” (several young people arrested in 1969 for ‘having organized, in collaboration with some Czechs, the smuggling of copies of Paris Kultura into Poland by way of Czecholslovakia and across the Tatra Mountains’); sundry ‘minigroups’ of associates and sympathizers; the “Letter of 66” (also mistakenly known as the ‘Letter of 59’) signed by intellectuals and artists protesting changes in the Constitution of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL) (the Diet passed the constitutional amendments of February 10, 1976); and, as “the final act of the opposition by intellectuals before the creation of KOR was a letter of Edward Lipiński to Edward Gierek” (First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party from 1970-1980). In the words of Jan Josef Lipski, this letter, “which contained a many-sided critique of the system of governing and warned of catastrophe, became an important factor influencing the formation of a new social consciousness among the intelligentsia, and many of the ideas it contained were to enter into the standard repertoire of later attempts to forumlate a program.”

According to Lipski, KOR had a considerable impact on the course of events in Poland, an impact constrained by its numerical strength and by the “tremendous inertia of the system.” Moreover, the government “limited its repsonse to the activities of KOR to restraints and repressions,” and KOR stood out among other weaker if not smaller and less successful opposition groups (despite their ‘not inconsiderable’ and ‘on the whole positive’ achievements), so much so that “KOR created not only an original model of opposition but above all it was unrivaled in its actions, which extended from help for the workers in 1976, through the periodical Robotnik (The Worker) and the Initiating Committees of the Free Trade Unions (KZ WZZ), and eventually to Solidarity.” KOR’s “social service” role ended with the formation of Solidarity in September 1980, formally dissolving itself the following year.

KOR: An Historical and Sociological Exemplum of the Theory and Praxis of Nonviolence

In his book, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (1995), Charles M. Payne shares Bob Moses’s understanding of the civil right movement as characterized by two forms of collective praxis and liberation: a “community-mobilizing” form and a “community-organizing” form. The latter was, and is, a necessary and but not always a sufficient condition of the former. It is not always sufficient insofar as community or social movement mobilization frequently requires a precipitating catalytic incident or event that serves as the tipping-point for people to step out of the routine of daily work and life and risk involvement in “history-making” species of collective action. Both forms of collective praxis occur on the terrain of civil society as the site of hegemonic struggles to capture the hearts and minds of individuals as part of a Gramscian (or Gramscian-like) “war of position” inspired by democratic values and principles that, ideally, rely on means and types of collective action in harmony with those values and principles and the short-term goals and long-term ends they necessitate. Those committed to the theory and praxis of nonviolence believe they’ve found the types and means of action best suited to, that is, in most harmony with, such emancipatory democratic values and principles. Albeit with some notable exceptions (e.g., Aldon Morris’ 1984 study, Origin of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communites Organizing for Change), narratives of the civil rights movement privilege “community-mobilizing,” and it is the form of collective action called to mind by “popular memory and the only part of the movement that has attracted scholarly attention,” understandable in part owing to the mass media’s focus on “large-scale, relatively short-term public events,” on historical display in “the tradition of Birmingham, Selma, the March on Washington…[and] best symbolized by the work of Martin Luther King.”[1] Not in the foreground and klieg lights of mass media, but setting the stage as it were for such mass mobilization and social protest is the “community organizing” tradition that is the subject matter of Payne’s indispensable work. In this lesser-known tradition of nonviolent democratic praxis, there’s a “greater emphasis on the long-term development of leadership in ordinary men and women, a tradition best epitomized” by Bob Moses himself, but also such remarkable individual as Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and Fannie Lou Hamer.[2]

More generally, Payne informs us that “We do not ordinarily realize how much the well-publicized activism of the sixties depended on the efforts of older activists who worked in obscurity throughout the 1940s and 1950s.”[3] Similar stories can be told elsewhere, as in the case of the “Self-limiting” and Velvet Revolutions in East-Central Europe, for example the forms of nonviolent action community organizing and social resistance that took place in the nooks and crannies of civil society in Poland as a necessary condition for the eventual emergence of Solidarity as both a “trade union” and wider social movement, the principal collective actor in the country’s “evolutionary” or “self-limiting” revolution.[4] Of course that revolution cannot be explained without an appreciation of the structural role of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union that began in 1985, but the comparative success of Solidarity cannot be accounted for without an understanding of such underground and above ground phenomena as the “Flying University” (TKN) or the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR), the latter founded in support of striking Polish workers in 1976. Aleksander Smolar provides us with an introduction to this Polish variation on community organizing that set the stage for the country’s nonviolent and thus “self-limiting” social revolution and from which I will quote at length, for it enables us to see what occurs when nonviolent democratic and emancipatory struggles “from below” transcend the barriers between “making history” and the living of daily life among members of the lower and middles classes of civil society. Speaking first of KOR, Smolar says

“The very creation of an organization independent from the authorities and functioning openly was a bold political act. The following months witnessed the emergence of different opposition groups, one of which was characteristically named the Movement for the Defence of Human and Civil Rights (ROPCiO), as well as the publication of illegal periodicals and books. It is estimated that between 1976 and 1980, the opposition numbered several thousand persons. It was composed overwhelmingly of the intelligentsia and students, assisted by a few individual priests and members of religious orders; the institutional hierarchy of the Church did not officially affirm its attitude toward initiatives of this sort, either for or against. Only with time did the groups in question manage to make their way—albeit on a small scale—into the countryside.”[5]

Later the Catholic Church did play a pivotal part vis-à-vis the Party-State in Poland in protecting the social resistance and nonviolent politics coming to fruition in the fragile but expanding terrain of Polish civil society. But what I want to highlight here is the nature of revolutionary leadership and the role played by only a few corresponding organized groups engaged in both legal and illegal (yet not unethical) activities, a leadership that articulated a moral and political philosophy as the very marrow of its nonviolent political strategy. This revolutionary leadership was composed of what in Eastern and Central Europe—as well as the Soviet Union—is termed the “intelligentsia” or what we more commonly refer to as intellectuals. As Rudolf Bahro reminds us, even Lenin made his appeals in revolutionary Russia not to the workers as such, but to those capable of leading the workers, for “instead of appealing to the working class as a whole...[Lenin] appealed to the most enlightened elements in Russia, meaning the most advanced (most cultivated, most intellectualized) workers and to the minority of intellectuals and specialists inspired by the revolution. [....] The workers—individual exceptions apart—were never Marxist in the strict sense. Marxism is a theory based on the existence of the working class, but it is not the theory of the working class.”[6] Bahro elaborates:

“[I]n no known historical case did the first creative impulse in ideas and organization proceed from the masses; the trade unions do not anticipate any new civilization. The political workers’ movement was itself founded by declassed bourgeois intellectuals, which in no way means that the most active proletarian elements did not soon come to play a role of their own in the socialist parties and tend themselves to become intellectuals.”[7]

Marxist and post-Marxist writing on intellectuals tends to equivocate between (or simply conflate) the notion of intellectuals as a sociological and descriptive category and the meaning of the term in a normative sense. We’re not assuming intellectuals invariably form a united class of sorts destined for the sort of leadership role Bahro alludes to here, indeed, for it is often the case that only a very small number of intellectuals summon up the requisite moral motivation for revolutionary politics, one reason why Sartre was compelled to make his famous public “Plea for Intellectuals” in Japan in 1965.[8] Most intellectuals are not naturally inclined, given their location and status in the existing socio-economic order, to make what Sartre called a “a concrete and unconditioned alignment with the actions of the underprivileged classes.” And in outlining the central role of intellectual leadership in nonviolent revolutionary politics we need not subscribe to a strict Leninist interpretation of this “vanguardist” model of revolutionary politics, especially insofar as it clashes with democratic means and methods, but it would be foolish to deny the truths inherent in the vanguardist model in as much as it represents a recognition of the necessary role of formal and informal leadership in nonviolent reformists and revolutionary politics. In particular, we’re speaking here of the role of what James MacGregor Burns memorably described as “transformative leadership” (in contrast to the ‘transactional’ type common to conventional power politics), using Mahatma Gandhi by way of exemplifying this particular type of intellectual leadership:

“Transforming leadership ultimately becomes moral in that it raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspiration of both leader and led, and thus it has a transforming effect on both. Perhaps the best modern example is Gandhi, who aroused and elevated the hopes and demands of millions of Indians and whose life and personality were enhanced in the process. Transcending leadership is dynamic leadership in the sense that the leaders throw themselves into a relationship with followers who will feel ‘elevated’ by it and often become more active themselves—thereby creating a new cadre of leaders [these are what Gramsci termed ‘organic intellectuals’] . [….] Leaders are taskmasters and goal setters, but they and their followers share a particular space and time, a particular set of motivations and values. [….] The problem for them as educators, as leaders, is not to promote narrow, egocentric self-actualization but to extend awareness of human needs and the means of gratifying them, to improve the larger social situation for which educators or leaders have responsibility and over which they have power. Is it too much to believe that it is ‘the grand goal of all leadership—to help create or maintain the social harbors for these personal islands?’ Gandhi almost perfectly exemplifies this…. The transforming leader taps the needs and raises the aspirations and helps shape the values—and hence mobilizes the potential—of followers.

Transforming leadership is elevating. It is moral but not moralistic. Leaders engage with followers, but from higher levels of morality; in the enmeshing of goals and values both leaders and followers are raised to more principled levels of judgment. Leaders most effectively ‘connect with’ followers from a level of morality only one stage higher than that of the followers, but moral leaders who act at much higher levels—Gandhi, for example—relate to followers at all levels either heorically or through the founding of mass movements that provide linkages between persons at various levels of morality and sharply increase the moral impact of the transforming leader. Much of this kind of elevating leadership asks sacrifices from followers rather than merely promising them goods.”[9]

Raghavan Iyer has well captured Gandhi’s own conception of social and political “transformative” leadership, of the role, if you will, of nonviolent vanguardist intellectuals. Gandhi realized that “Revolutions are the work of comparatively small groups of men who concentrate all their energies to the task:”

“Gandhi’s pleas for heroism in society involved him in the recognition of the need for inspired leadership in political and social activity and the role of small groups as pioneers and pathfinders, but also in a stout refusal to distinguish sharply between the elect and the masses. ‘All cannot be leaders, but all can be bearers,’ he declared in 1921. Courage, endurance, fearlessness and above all self-sacrifice are the qualities required of our leaders. ‘A person belonging to the suppressed classes exhibiting these qualities in their fullness would certainly be able to lead the nation; whereas the most finished orator, if he has not got these qualities, must fail.’ In well-ordered organizations, leaders are elected, he said, for convenience of work, not for extraordinary merit. A leader is only first among equals. Someone may be put first, but he is no stronger than the weakest link in the chain. And yet the true leader shows his capacity to assume heavy burdens of responsibility by taking upon himself the errors and failings of those weaker than he is, and if necessary atoning for them and using them as the basis of his own self-examination.”[10]

Owing to his introduction of the aśrama or monastic ideal into politics (which entails the moral if not spiritual ‘purification’ of conventional power politics or Realpolitik), Gandhi elaborated fairly stringent standards for any would-be satyāgrahi (that is, the practitioner of satyāgraha, literally, ‘holding on to Truth,’ therefore, one who is bound to ‘truth-force or soul-force; Gandhi importantly distinguished his nonviolent doctrine of satyāgraha from conceptions of ‘passive resistance’) including, most controversially, “the taking of vows as the necessary means to self-purification and self-discipline.”[11] And the practice of satyāgraha is further distinguished from the closely connected notions of civil disobedience and noncooperation: while it underpins his particular formulations of civil disobedience and noncooperation, it is at the same time much broader in meaning, entailing as it does the idea of a “constructive program” (In the words of a recent Egyptian activist: ‘The real politics start after the demonstrations end.’) the patient building of alternative forms of social association, instititutions, and ways of life in civil society by way of lessening dependence on the State: think here, for example, of the “co-ops, communes, and collectives” of the 1960s and ‘70s in the United States, some of which continue into our own time (e.g., food co-operatives and free clinics); of CORE, the Highlander Folk School, Citizenship Schools, and SNCC during the struggle for civil rights; of the praxis of the comunidades de base inspired by Liberation Theology in Latin America; of the aforementioned Flying Universities and KOR in Poland as well as samizdat across the countries of the Soviet bloc; of the formation of the Citizens Forum and The Public against Violence in Czechoslovakia during the Velvet Revolution of 1989; of the new social movements (e.g., the April 6th movement), NGOs, lawyers’ associations, trade unions, the counter-cultural role of music and poetry and the arts generally, the self-discipline and self-organization of the masses in Tahrir Square[13], and the prefigurative function earlier played by the Kifaya movement, in Egypt’s recent revolution; of the Internet cafes as seedbeds and greenhouses for political dialogue and debate, the men and women marching and protesting side-by-side, in Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution.

As should be clear from Gandhi’s nonviolent campaigns, satyāgraha should not be viewed simply as the political prerogative of those few individuals in possession of the requisite virtues of ethical leadership—of moral and spiritual charisma—and the uncommon capacity for self-suffering (tapas), for its efficacy, in the end, is judged by its capacity to move others, both one’s opponents as well as the public, and this occurs in circumstances in which appeals to reason simpliciter fall on deaf ears for reason often is, as Hume famously claimed, the “slave of the passions,” at least in the sense that one’s well established or otherwise intransigent convictions are rarely altered by rational argument, for in such cases the head depends on a prior movement of the heart:

“Although Gandhi sometimes formulated the doctrine of satyāgraha in a typically individualist fashion, he was fully aware that it was dependent in practice upon the sanction, not only of individual conscience (satyā) and ahimsa [nonviolence] but also of public opinion. ‘An awakened and intelligent public opinion is the most potent weapon of the satyāgrahi.’ He must first mobilize public opinion against the evil which he is out to eradicate, by means of a wide intensive agitation. When public opinion is sufficiently roused against a social abuse, ‘even the tallest will not dare to practise or openly lend support to it.’ [Like Socrates,] Gandhi refused to set up the demos as a demi-god and he could recognize no higher court of appeal than ‘the Court of conscience.’ And yet he was willing to see that the success of the satyāgrahi’s efforts must necessarily depend not merely on the appeal to his own conscience but even more on the awakening of the slumbering conscience of a large number of people, and ultimately, the stifled conscience of those responsible for enacting or administering unjust laws and social abuses.

In its appeal to public opinion, to the prevailing or potential respect in society for satyā and ahimsa [truth and nonviolence], and to the moral sensitivity of those whose acts are being challenged, satyāgraha differs from the methods of rational persuasion and violent action chiefly in its unique reliance upon tapas or self-suffering. Gandhi argued that experience has shown that mere appeal to [the faculty of] reason produces no effect upon those who have settled convictions. ‘The eyes of their understanding are opened not by argument, but by the suffering of the satyāgrahi. The satyāgrahi tries to reach the reason through the heart. The method of reaching the heart is to awaken public opinion. Public opinion, for which one cares, is a mightier force than gunpowder.’”[12]

As Iyer proceeds to explain, this is not an argument for the abdication of reason although Gandhi did value nonviolence and love more than reason. The turn to satyāgraha is only justified when reason has failed, where attempts at rational persuasion have no effect, in cases where one has exhausted, insofar as is practically reasonable, legalistic arguments and conventional avenues for change. The purpose in all cases remains to both convert and convince one’s opponent.

Returning to Smolar’s discussion of the leaders of Poland’s self-limiting revolution: while the new social resistance that broke out in 1976 was not a direct result of actions or public proclamations of the Catholic Church, the Church in Poland did, in time, transform the historic Polish culture of resistance into one no longer eager or content to resort to violence, indeed, both intellectuals and the masses at large came to decisively reject violent methods of social and political change, a belief that was not the sole or necessary conclusion of political realism or expediency in the shadow of Soviet domination:

“The Catholic Church in Poland, traditionally powerful, naturally fulfilled some of the functions of an opposition, in a system based on the omnipotence of a single [political] party. First and foremost, the Church was an independent moral universe of free speech and free ideas. But it also presented a consistent message of nonviolence, especially following the tragedy of the Second World War. [….] The authority of the Catholic Church in Poland, already very strong, was reinforced when the archbishop of Kraków, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, became John Paul II in 1978. His philosophy and his strategic vision for the transformation of Poland can be summarized in a passage often cited by him, and by Solidarity’s martyr priest, Father Jerzy Popieluszko: ‘Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.’”[13]

The Church’s position on this score, and John Paul II’s exhortations in particular, affirm a Gandhian-like commitment to absolute nonviolence (not surprisingly, Gandhi regarded Jesus as the very embodiment of the true satyāgrahi) or, put differently, an “absolute moral rejection of all political violence.”

 

An Incipient Science of Subjectivity: Folk-Psychology & the Power of Psychoanalysis

 

“Psychoanalysis is arguably the single most important intellectual development of the twentieth century. Comparable to the theory of evolution in the controversy it has caused and continues to cause, psychoanalysis informs part of our daily discourse in a way that evolution has never done. Terms such as unconscious, repressed, ego, ambivalent, complex, projection, denial, and double-bind enter into our every walk of life whenever people talk about mental states and the reasons for human actions. Psychoanalytic language and concepts have been integrated into Western culture through novels, poetry, drama and film, literary and film criticism. [….]

After more than a century of work, psychoanalysis emerged with the richest systematic description of inner experience that the Western world has produced. Its theories spanned such fundamental matters as sex, love, and death; childhood, parenting, and family; cruelty, fear, jealousy, envy, and hate; identity, conscience, and character; desire and mourning. In addition, a new social space has been created for the in-depth examination of mental life through use of methods that might mitigate psychic suffering. And, yet, these ideas were not timeless truths, immune to social flux. Psychoanalysis took root in western and central Europe, and that culture permeated its logic and assumptions. Once transplanted to foreign lands, it was inevitable that this body of knowledge would in part be remade.”—Joseph Schwartz, Cassandra’s Daughter: A History of Psychoanalysis (1999)

“So far our opposition to the claim that psychology can be a science on the order of physics, or even biology, has turned on the nature of folk-psychological explanation. So now that claim might shift ground, contending that folk psychology is just, as Freud thought, a temporary expedient which can be gotten rid of without loss someday. Loss of what, to whom? The obvious answer is: of everything that interests us as persons, as members of a world in which marrying, feeling guilty, promising, disavowing and repressing, committing murder, joining the baseball team, believing that the earth is round, and so on, have the importance they do. These are things we want to understand about our enemies and friends; and such a project necessarily invokes mental states like beliefs, desires, and intentions. [….] Of actions it is both explanatory and constitutive. If our interest is in what Oedipus meant to us, or what Maisie knew, or what Little Hans saw, then nothing but the language of mind will satisfy. Reductionists refer disparagingly to reason-explanations as ‘folk-psychology.’ But if reduction isn’t possible, then folk psychology is the best we can do, and good enough. [….]

So long as psychoanalysis hopes to understand human actions, it will always be, and must be, an interpretive discipline. It will attempt to find out what we have meant by what we have said, and what obscure desires, what strange beliefs—yet beliefs and desires for all that—give both cause and sense, or reason for, our more-or-less intentional doings. The so-called hermeneuticists are wrong in saying that interpretations do not uncover links that are causal in nature; but they are right in insisting our explanations of actions are interpretations, and that as such they can be incorporated only in a ‘softer’ science than physics.

One of the things that psychoanalysis means in calling itself a science is that analyst and patient may make genuine discoveries about how the patient sees things, what she wants, phantasizes, believes, remembers, and so on, consciously and unconsciously. [….] [T]he very possibility of one person’s interpreting another rests on the fact that they share norms, many beliefs and desires, and a material world in common. Interpretation is not ‘subjective’ in a sense that leaves truth up for grabs, or that makes it merely a matter of one person’s opinion, or that potentially places all narratives on an equal footing. If ‘objectivity’ describes what is in the public domain and intelligible according to norms that are also public, then human thought and behavior can be understood only on the assumption that they, together with our interpretations of them, are objective in this sense. [….]

…[E]ven when [Freud] was wrong, he was unfailingly interesting, as a philosopher as well as a psychologist.”—Marcia Cavell, The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy (1993)

The Social Democracy of Red Vienna & the “Intellectual Communism” of the Psychoanalytic Salon

“Social democracy offered one possible solution to the problematic social place of psychoanalysis. [That problematic ‘place’ was due largely to the ‘fact that all of Freud’s early associates were Jewish,’ bearing in mind that ‘Jews were the radical “other” in European life of the period.’] Austrian socialism opposed anti-Semitism and was less economistic and more oriented toward cultural questions than most socialist traditions. Many of the original figures in Freud’s circle [i.e. the Wednesday Psychological Society] were Social Democrats. [….] Many analytic patients were also socialists. Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.) translated Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman into German and founded the Jewish Women’s Union (Jüdischer Frauenbund), Emma Eckstein (Irma) was an associate of Karl Kautsky, the leader of the Social Democrats, and the sister of Therese Shlesinger, a Social Democrat who was one of the first female members of Parliament. [….]

In fact, autodidacticism and countercultural pursuits were combined with a socialist sensibility in early psychoanalysis. Discussions at the Wednesday-night meetings ranged over such topics as Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, the woman question, the psychology of Marxism, and the sexual enlightenment of children. As in his university course, Freud required every member to participate in discussion, the order determined by choosing slips from an urn. Ideas were deemed to be communal property, to be used without citation. This they called ‘intellectual communism.’”—Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (2004): 70-71.