ReligiousLeftLaw.com

Election Interference

Ordinarily the Justice Department prosecutes those who interfere with or threaten voters. This year there is a worry that the Justice Department might abdicate its duties. It is time to recall that the Manner of holding elections is first reserved to the Legislatures of the several states (subject to Congressional override). Anyone interfering with the prescribed manner of elections could be subject to criminal prosecution if the legislature saw fit 

No More Debates

Donald Trump refused to abide by the rules he promised to keep in the first Presidential debate. There is no reason to believe he will now respect his promises. Joe Biden should seriously consider refusing to engage in future debates, or at least moderators should cut off Trump's mike. Failing that Biden should leave the stage.

A preliminary sketch of the emotions

   

Although emotions punctuate almost all the significant events in our lives, the nature, causes, and consequences of the emotions are among the least understood aspects of human experience. It is easier to express emotions than to describe them and harder, again, to analyze them. — Aaron Ben-Ze’ev

*           *           *

Because there are reasons and justifications for feeling emotions, because emotions can, to a degree, be suppressed, because their manifestation is, to some extent, controllable, because the expression of persistent emotions in words and deeds is largely intentional, and because our emotions provide us with reasons (and hence too with motives) for voluntary and intentional action, emotions can be educated. [….] Equally, children and adults alike need to learn to control the manifestations of their immediate and spontaneous emotional responses, as well as the expression of emotional responses in what they say. They need to learn to reflect on the motivational warrant afforded by persistent emotions and to make reasonable and rational decisions about acting out of emotions.

Although our emotions need educating, there are, of course, no lessons in feeling emotions any more than there are lessons (as opposed to training) in virtue.* Our emotional education takes place in the white waters of life, with its rocks, eddies, waterfalls, and whirlpools. Our emotions are diurnally engaged in familial and social intercourse, in relationships with superiors, equals, and subordinates at the workplace; with members of the public at large and with officials of the bureaucratic state. They are subjected from time to time, to a greater or lesser degree, to cynicism and approval—especially, but not only, in childhood and youth. As we are social creatures, our emotional education is the product of parental care (or neglect), peer pressure (in childhood and adulthood alike), responsible (or negligent) schooling, the wisdom (or bigotry) of religion, the honest (or deceitful) rhetoric of political leaders, and the mass media. All of these teach us, well or badly, what to care about and what not to care about. They are all liable to breed emotional inauthenticity. They are prone to generate prurient emotions, sentimentality (spurious and excessive emotion), hypocrisy, clichéd and stereotyped emotional responses, religious, racial, and political bigotry and self-satisfaction, and self-righteous aggressive emotion. Authentic emotions require not merely an open heart, but also a critical mind—the exercise of one’s own rational faculties. Mere authenticity in emotion is of little merit, let alone an excuse, in the absence of reason and understanding. Emotional maturity requires good judgment. — P.M.S. Hacker, The Passions: A Study of Human Nature (John Wiley & Sons, 2018)

* That is one reason why critical education in literature is not a pedagogical luxury but an indispensable part of the curriculum in any civilized society. It awakens the imagination, broadens the conception of emotion-eliciting situations, fosters the ability to appreciate different points of view, encourages the critical evaluation of emotions and emotional motivation, and invites considered judgment.

*           *           *

… [W]ith respect to an important subset of the emotions we can learn more from moralists, novelists, and playwrights than from the cumulative findings of scientific psychology [Elster is referring to academic, experimental psychology which is neo-positivist and behaviorist, as well as radically reductionist and largely dismissive of psychoanalytic psychology.¹]These emotions include regret, relief, hope, disappointment, shame, guilt, pridefulness,² pride, hybris, envy, jealousy, malice, pity, indignation, wrath, hatred, contempt, joy, grief, and romantic love. By contrast, the scientific study of the emotions can teach us a great deal about anger, fear, disgust, parental love, and sexual desire (if we count the last two as emotions). [….] I believe … that prescientific insights into the emotions are not simply superseded by modern psychology in the way that natural philosophy has been superseded by physics. Some men and women in the past have been superb students of human nature, with more wide-ranging personal experience, better powers of observation, and deeper intuitions than almost any psychologist I can think of. This is only what we should expect: There is no reason why one century out of twenty-five should have a privilege in wisdom and understanding. In the case of physics, this argument does not apply. — Jon Elster, Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999)

*           *           *

I want to outline a few conceptual, analytical, and phenomenological assumptions and propositions about “the emotions” in general while later introducing the emotion of anger in particular (some of this material is taken from a post in 2012). And while I’ll draw primarily from “Western” philosophers and those familiar with psychoanalytic psychology in what follows, I should point out my agreement with Jon Elster’s belief stated above, namely, that at least “with respect to an important subset of the emotions, we can learn more from the moralist, novelists and playwrights than from the cumulative findings of scientific psychology.” Elster further notes that “[a]lthough there is no clear boundary line between the moralists and the moral philosophers … their concern is more with moral psychology rather than with morality as such.” Professional moral philosophers and ethicists during much of the twentieth century largely ignored moral psychology (leaving it, by default, to the province of modern experimental psychology). Amélie Oksenberg Rorty is perhaps the foremost exception to the rule, for not only did she—unlike most of her colleagues—take Freud seriously, she helped to resurrect a philosophical interest in and exploration of moral psychology (this resurrection was in part aided by the emergence of ‘virtue ethics’ and a revival of philosophical interest in our emotions). Early Greek philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to the Hellenistic philosophical schools in Greece and Rome: Peripatetic, Neo-Platonic, Skeptic, Epicurean, and Stoic, did not neglect moral psychology (nor did classical Chinese philosophy, especially that associated with Confucius, which we see not only in the Analects, but in the Five Classics [the Odes, Documents, Rites canons, Changes, and the Spring and Autumn Annals], especially the Odes). Indeed, it was an integral and often prominent part of these moral and ethical philosophies, and conspicuously so in Buddhism as well. And I think we can appreciate this on its own terms even if we believe in the necessity (with regard to conceptual and analytical clarity) of the professional division of labor that exists today between philosophy and psychology, a division that readily turns pernicious (as more than a few ethicists and moral philosophers have begun to recognize) when moral psychology falls between the disciplinary cracks.

Unfortunately, I will leave out here not only the approach to emotions found in Buddhist schools, but likewise “emotions in Indian thought-systems” more generally. Nor will I address the role of emotions in classical Chinese worldviews (or numerous other worldviews for that matter), for my knowledge in these domains is limited to some familiarity with Indic aesthetic theories and Buddhist works on the emotions (the latter parsed in terms of the three-fold division of the ‘eightfold path’ or [P.] ariya aṭṭhaṅgika magga/[S.] āryāṣṭāṅgamārga: concentration, ethics, and wisdom). We should bear in mind that Buddhism does not have a conceptually equivalent generic term for “emotion,” and its “holistic” approach to mental life (and the spectrum from suffering to happiness) is primarily in service of its therapeutic philosophy and psychology, taking us far beyond the parameters and constraints set by our accordingly parochial preliminary sketch.³

In Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Elster looks at the emotions in terms of six features: 1) bodily arousal; 2) physiological expression; 3) cognitive antecedents; 4) intentional objects; 5) valence (pleasure-pain); and 6) action tendencies. In what follows I’ll largely ignore the first two items in the list, and although the other features will be important, the results will be far from the analytic perspicuity, sophistication, and detail with regard to these elements that mark Elster’s work. The late Robert C. Solomon wrote that “we live in and through our emotions,” a proposition that appears true, for many of us, much of the time, although it is perhaps a banal observation to some. All the same, I suspect we have yet to sufficiently appreciate the existential and psychological truth incarnate in that statement, with all its implications and consequences for understanding and explaining human behavior. Solomon elaborates:

“[Emotions] are sometimes, perhaps even often, strategies for getting along in the world. They are a means of motivating, guiding, influencing, and sometimes manipulating our own actions and attitudes as well as influencing and manipulating the actions and attitudes of others. [Wollheim argues that motivation is, strictly speaking, the prerogative of desire, as an emotion will lead us to form desires, and these desires, conjoined with beliefs, are what cause us to act.] [….] [Moreover], we are to a significant extent responsible for our emotions, something we often deny for the most self-serving of reasons, to make excuses for ourselves.”

The idea that our emotions are strategies suggests, for example, that anger (and other emotions) is (are) not so much in the mind (nor in the body or the brain) so much as they are “out there in social and interpersonal space.” Most of our emotions usually arise with personal interaction and in reaction to other people, beginning at birth. Ronald de Sousa has captured this social learning aspect of emotions in a provocative and fertile phrase, “paradigm scenarios.” We learn to be angry, whatever the underlying neurological and hormonal machinery, in social interaction. And what we learn has a lot to do with the seeming appropriateness of the circumstances.”

Nonetheless, the fact that we learn about anger in “social and interpersonal space” (one reason Peter Goldie speaks of making sense of emotional experience only by way of its ‘embeddedness’ in ‘narratives’) does not preclude the possibility that anger still is, in several and very important senses, a matter of what is, as we say, “on” or “in” our minds (recalling that some—especially Wittgensteinian-inspired—theories of ‘the mind’ encompass in large measure this social dimension). We therefore, and rightly, speak of “internalizing” what we have learned. And we need only think of how we learn to moderate our expressions of anger or overcome predilection for same: this typically involves self-examination, personal reflection, and a “therapy of desire” in the Buddhist or Stoic sense (again Wollheim: ‘emotion rides into our lives on the back of desire’), in other words, mental exercises or a therapeutic regimen of some sort (what the Buddhists term ‘mind-training’). To be sure, such exercises or therapies will be tested in the crucible of everyday life, but the primary focus is on the mind as such.

In brief, how we learn to be angry or learn about anger is not necessarily determinative or indicative of the nature of anger as an (often volatile) emotion. As Solomon himself would say, emotions like anger structure the way we perceive, conceive, and evaluate things in our world, and these are by definition mental (or ‘intentional’) activities, however much they are of or about objects in our external and internal worlds: a thing, person, event, action, or state of affairs (as in 3, 4, and 6 of Elster’s list above), objects; furthermore, these objects may or may not exist in the conventional sense (cf. Kleinian phantasy). The morally and psychologically salient aspects of the emotions require a keen understanding of the nature of mental states and mental dispositions (the latter underlying the former), of the meaning, makeup, and roles of beliefs and desires, of knowledge, imagination, memories, inhibitions, habits, virtues and vices: sundry cognitive, affective, and volitional powers and skills. Richard Wollheim has explained in some detail just how such general properties as intentionality, subjectivity, and grades (or levels, states, forms) of consciousness qualify these mental phenomena.

   

    With Robert C. Roberts, we’ll make the assumption that emotions are directly and indirectly implicated in the “the ‘moral’ character of our lives” in a manner that is “pervasive and deep.” Emotions are capable of determining the identity of our actions, given their intrinsic connections to action, character, and relationships. A set of basic propositions about the emotions drawn largely from Roberts’ Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (2003), and Michael Stocker’s Valuing Emotions (1996), but gleaned also from a few other philosophers, will serve as a conceptual backdrop by way of fundamental assumptions and premises for our preliminary or introductory examination, as well as a forthcoming post on anger (these are not in any kind of order apart from being enumerated):

1. “The role of emotion is to provide the…person with an orientation, or attitude to the world.” (Wollheim)
2. [E]motions can aid in the discovery of value. (Stocker)
3. “[P]eople’s characters and their values can be revealed by emotions.” (Stocker)
4. “[E]motions reveal not just our values and evaluations but much of our interior and exterior worlds….” (Stocker)
5. “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.” (Stocker)
6. “Some emotions involve … fantasy valuings; and, inspired by the Philebus, false valuings,” hence such emotions are called “fantasy or false emotions.” Stocker uses the example of Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich to illustrate how false or fantasy emotions can render large portions of a life, or even an entire life, “inauthentic.” This enables us to better understand Ilyich’s “disquiet” about his life, “about the truth and falsity of his leading values and emotions.”
7. “Emotions can be evaluatively accurate and informative, and indeed more accurate and informative than reason and belief….” (Stocker)
8. Emotions help motivate us. (Stocker)
9. “Life like ours would be impossible without emotions.” (Stocker)
10. “Emotions are paradigmatically felt, but emotions may occur independently of the corresponding feeling, and the feeling of an emotion can [as in no. 5 above] be nonveridical, illusory.” (Roberts)
11. “Paradigm cases of adult human emotions take ‘objects.’” (Roberts)
12. “Emotional objects are typically situational or composite, with unequal and shifting focus on the various elements of the situational object.” (Roberts)
13. “It is possible to have emotions without being able to articulate (all of) their content; some of the content may be nonpropositional.” (Roberts)
14. “Many types of emotion are motivational in the sense that they involve a desire to perform characteristic types of actions, but not all emotions are motivational in this sense.” (Roberts)
15. “Emotions come in degrees of intensity.” (Roberts)
16. “Expression of an emotion in behavior and action sometimes causes an emotion to subside, but sometimes expression intensifies and/or prolongs the emotion.” (Roberts)
17. “Emotions, like actions, are subject to moral praise and blame.” (Roberts)
18. “Emotions do typically ‘assert something about a situation, about its character (what kind of situation it is), and about its importance to the subject. But what the emotion ‘says’ is not always agreed to by the subject of the emotion, and it is that agreement would be required for the emotion to be a judgment of the subject. Speaking metaphorically, we might say that the emotion makes a judgment (a proposal about reality); but this ‘judgment’ is just the appearance or phantasia.”
19. “Emotional pretense can take two basic forms: veil and mask, that is, hiding an emotion one feels and showing an emotion one does not feel.” (Ben-Ze’ev)
20. “Nothing is more immediate to us than our own emotions, but nothing about us is more prone to self-deception, suppression, lack of recognition, and even straightforward denial than our emotions.” (Solomon)
21. “[W]e cannot fully make sense of the emotional experience without taking into account the larger narrative of which it is a part,” [including traits of character]. (Goldie)
22. “[O]ur emotions can be educated.” (Goldie)
23. “[O]ur capabilities for emotional experience are significantly developmentally open or plastic (a notion which comes in degrees). To be developmentally open is to be open (to some degree) to moulding by culture and the environment. I put this forward as an alternative to a view which I call the avocado pear conception of the emotions: the view that what is evolved in human emotional capabilities is, in some sense, ‘hard-wired,’ and that it is only the ‘softer’ outer element which is culturally influenced.” (Goldie)
24. “[N]either the sciences nor cross-cultural diversity need threaten our concepts of emotions and emotion-evoking features [as we have come to understand these in ‘commonsense’ or folk psychology]. The fact that these concepts are, unlike scientific concepts, interest-relative, need not undermine our confidence in them, nor need it imply any sort of relativism about the truth of claims we might make about our emotions or about emotion-invoking features of things in our environment.” (Goldie)
25. “[I]magination can induce a particular emotional state in someone who does not have the emotional disposition that that state would ordinarily manifest.” (Wollheim)

   

By way of wrapping things up, I want to share another passage from Peter Hacker’s book, The Passions (2018) one that speaks concisely and incisively to the complicated relations between reason or rationality and the emotions, between the cognitive and affective dimensions of our lives, which we might distinguish for analytical purposes but in reality are often deeply if not mysteriously entangled.

“ … [T]he picture of ‘reason’ and the ‘emotions’ as being in perpetual conflict, of the rectitude of the faculty of reason and the irrationality of the emotions, is a pernicious distortion of important truths. Our emotional responses are commonly rational and reasonable. But they may be irrational and unreasonable. They are then to be judged, criticized, and changed or restrained by reasoning. Conversely, our reasons for thinking or acting may be wrong, poor, or even bad, and they can be corrected by our feelings—especially by different forms of love and compassion. Forgiveness is often wisely motivated by love; deserved indifference is sometimes mitigated by compassion; reasonable self-interest is sometimes overridden by feelings of fraternity and solidarity. Finally, one emotion may often correct another: hope may overcome despair; curiosity may master disgust; pride may control fear. But these are not conflicts between forms of unreason.

We caricature our abilities and liabilities when we contrast ‘cold’ reason with ‘hot’ passion, although it is true that passions warp good judgment. But there is nothing ‘cold’ about reasons for feeling gratitude or indignation, compassion or remorse, pride or shame, and nothing ‘hot’ about feeling indifferent or apathetic. To say that we are going to act in accordance with our heart, not with our head, is misleading. For that, if taken at face value, is tantamount to saying that we shall disregard good reasons and act out of unreasoned inclination. What is presumably intended is a declaration that we shall disregard cost-benefit considerations and act out of loyalty, love, or fraternity. [….] We have reasons for our emotions—but they may be poor rather than good reasons, invalid rather than correct, and we may indulge to excess in the emotions we feel. Our emotions often provide us with motives—but whether we should act out of the emotion we feel requires judgment and understanding. In these ways, and in others, reflexive reason is needed to control the passions. Its task is to assess the rational warrant for our feelings when such warrant is met, to curb excess in the emotions felt, to control their manifestation and expression, and to keep them within the bounds of reasonableness. It is not always up to the task.”

Notes (by yours truly)

1. I would add psychoanalysts to this list (many of whom are of course inclined to learn from or draw upon particular arts, such as literature and poetry, as well as drama). It is not clear that Elster would agree on this score. As for the principal differences between “academic” or experimental psychology and psychoanalytic psychology I’ll recommend two titles: Kurt Jacobsen’s Freud’s Foes: Psychoanalysis, Science, and Resistance (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009) and Ilham Dilman’s Freud: Insight and Change (Basil Blackwell, 1988). Another contrast we should note is that between psychoanalytic psychology and contemporary psychiatry. Psychoanalysis rests, in several fundamental respects, on metaphysical, epistemic, and philosophy of mind presuppositions and assumptions that are in striking contrast to the predominant model of contemporary psychiatry, one that unabashedly adheres to a (scientistic) “’medical model’ advocating ‘the consistent application, in psychiatry, of modern [bio-]medical thinking and methods’ because psychopathology ‘represents the manifestations of disturbed function within a part of the body,’ to wit, the brain” (from the introduction to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry on the ‘philosophy of psychiatry’). Biology (with genetics and neurology) is constitutive of scientistic (i.e., reductionist) psychology on this account and the “mind” is reducible to the brain. Much more could be said by way of illuminating these differences, which are often (intentionally or not) ignored or insufficiently appreciated among both professionals and the lay public.
2. Elster defines “pride” as an emotion triggered by a belief about one’s own action and “pridefulness” as triggered by a belief about another’s character.
3. For a taste of what’s left out, please see:

• Bilimoria, Purushottama and Aleksandra Wenta, eds. Emotions in Indian Thought Systems. New York: Routledge, 2015.
• Chakrabarti, Arindam, ed. The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
• Chari, V.K. Sanskrit Criticism. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1990.
• de Silva, Padmasiri. An Introduction to Buddhist Psychology. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 3^rd, 2000.
• de Silva, Padmasiri. Buddhist and Freudian Psychology. Carlton North, Victoria: Shogam Publications, 4^th, 2010.
• Masson, J.L. and M.V. Patwardhan. Śāntarasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy of Aesthetics. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1969.
• Nylan, Michael. The Five “Confucian” Classics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.
• Pollock, Sheldon, ed. A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
• Zhang, Yanhua. Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine: An Ethnographic Account from Contemporary China. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007.

References and Further Reading (embedded links to relevant bibliographies)

• Addiction: Transdisciplinary Perspectives
• Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason
• Buddhism and Psychoanalysis
• Dreams and Dreaming
• The Emotions
• Human Nature and Personal Identity
• Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy

Just what is “pure,” “fundamental,” or “basic” science?

 

I do not think there is such a thing as (absolutely) “pure science,” even if the motivations or curiosity of the scientists engaged in this putative endeavor are invoked to explain why this is nonetheless believed to be the case. They may fancy themselves, comparatively speaking, conducting “basic” or “fundamental” research, which is not instrumental by intent or design, distinguishable, that is, from “applied” science or work clearly connected in some manner to technology, but the nature and history scientific research invariably (in the bosom of time as it were) brings such “pure” science down to earth, connects it, somehow, some way, with those sciences that have effects in the real world. In so far as “research and development” or applied science accurately describes over ninety per cent of modern scientific activity, what characterizes this “pure” science is its research distance from any known application or practical relevance, in other words, it is not and so to speak, at its moment of praxis, in any obvious, proposed, or probable sense “instrumental.” That an application is “not in view” does not rule out its eventual or possible “coming into view” at some future time, indeed, we might imagine that those who fund such endeavors, be they public or private patrons, envisage such a possibility even if they can’t coherently explain or describe what in fact that might be. So, while “the notion of pure science cannot be formulated in policy terms,” and may be justified on epistemic grounds alone (the search for knowledge, the formulations of abstract theories, etc.), I suspect a truly “pure science” would in fact no longer be science but, say, mathematics, metaphysics or philosophical speculation of one kind or another. “At its best,” writes John Ziman, pure science or “basic” or “fundamental” research is only “more or less fundamental in relation to some other research, to some body of knowledge,” some form of instrumentalized or applied science and technology. Thus such pure, basic, or fundamental science is linked “only indirectly to its applications.” I leave you with a passage from the late John Ziman’s* book, Real Science (Cambridge University Press, 2000):

 

“Pure science usually appears in government R&D statistics as a residual category with a vague label such as advancement of knowledge. Research managers sometimes give a positive spin to its lack of practical purpose by referring to it as open-ended. Sociologists and economists point to—but seldom attempt to calculate—the cultural value of the ‘useless’ knowledge obtained by pure research. In the past, scientists would have said this was work for the glory of God and the benefit of mankind. This is described nowadays as blue-skies research, which is short for ‘the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake [which is as incoherent as ‘art for art’s sake’], wherever it may lead them, perhaps up in the air, out of touch with the solid earth of established theories, etc.’ The inconsistency of this image with other equally apt metaphors, such as ‘exploring foundations,’ and ‘pushing back frontiers,’ shows just how difficult it is to define pure science in general terms.”

 

* A former professor of theoretical physics, Ziman came to devote himself to scholarly and public works clarifying the social relations of science and technology.

 

See too: Notes on Science and the Sciences (also available here) and the compilation for Sullied (natural and social) Sciences.

George Padmore (28 June 1903 – 23 September 1959): exemplifying laudable communism

George Padmore (né Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, 28 June 1903 – 23 September 1959) was an author, journalist, Left organizer and activist against colonialism, imperialism and Empire, one-time Communist Party member, socialist, and Pan-Africanist intellectual.

This post is in memory and honor of the all-too-short life and work of George Padmore. In an earlier post I attempted to characterize the “Marxist spirituality” of C.L.R. James (a good friend of Padmore’s going back to the days of their youth in Trinidad) and in this case I want again to suggest we appreciate, in the broadest and deepest sense, a kindred “humanist spirituality” that suffused Padmore’s worldview while firmly grounded in the communism and Pan-Africanism he viewed as integral to the ends of Black self-determination and emancipation (Padmore’s ‘communist’ and socialist beliefs and commitments appear to have more or less survived his former formal identity as a Communist Party member). The following material, a kind of bricolage, is an attempt to give one a taste of the remarkable qualities Padmore possessed as an “organic intellectual” and political organizer on the (Black) Left. George Padmore is yet another exemplar of laudable communism.

[The Soviet Union] has done more to liquidate illiteracy and raise the cultural level of the former subject races of Central Asia within twenty-five years, than the British Government has accomplished in India or Africa in two centuries. — George Padmore, writing in The Crisis (November 1942): [One can appreciate this fact, cited by Padmore in spite of his formal withdrawal/expulsion from the Communist Party, without ignoring Soviet behavior at the time in—among other places—Poland and Finland.]

… I don’t know anybody else, except perhaps Dr. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, who is worth more careful consideration…. Anyone who wants to know where the movement [i.e., Pan-Africanism] came from, what was its foundation, the people you have to look at are Marcus Garvey, who made it a mass movement, Du Bois, who gave it the historical and social background it needed, and George Padmore, who organized it…. Marcus Garvey was the great agitator who made black people and Black politics something in the world. Before Garvey there was none. After Garvey … the great theorist and historian was Dr. Du Bois, but the organizer, the man who took Du Bois’ theory and linked it in such a way to political movement, to the mass movement that Garvey created—that man was George Padmore. — C.L.R. James, At the Rendezvous of Victory (London: Allison and Busby, 1984): 253

Padmore’s writing and his organizing were never distinct spheres: his writing was a form of action. This writing was intended, quite literally, as ‘praxis;’ that is, the application of ideas into practice. The praxis was primarily pedagogical. He executed his primary aim of teaching and enabling through his writing but also, crucially, in his own home. His correspondence with [Richard] Wright and the testimony of many, including C.L.R. James and Ras Makonnen, described Padmore’s practice of taking in and advising anyone interested in imperialism and its relevance to contemporary politics. His home became a center for visitors from the colonies seeking advice and/or access to British sympathizers such that upon arrival in London, the first question on people’s lips was often ‘How can I get in touch with George Padmore?’ C.L.R. James admitted that his own political methodology in the 1960s, when he lived in Washington, D.C. was modelled on Padmore. [Padmore was a ‘political organizer’ and social movement builder who] … encourag[ed] others to take action …, provid[ing] them with the skills and knowledge to do so. [….] Padmore expressed a strong contempt for ‘café intellectuals’ who were unwilling to ‘get out and fight for freedom.’ [….] The vast majority of his work, which required a literate audience able to absorb sometimes vast amounts of information, was still distinct from many in his network like Richard Wright, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, and W.E.B. Du Bois because it was much more forensic and report-based, rather than theoretical. Padmore labored to imprint the evidence that could serves as the basis for a sustained attack on the hypocrisy of benevolent empire. [….] Yet Padmore was also deeply engaged in political thought of his own, even if he derided the status of intellectualism. His books have been described as ‘empirically dense’ accounts that applied [history] to present problems, referencing authors who often stood on opposite side of the political spectrum from him. — Leslie James, in George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): 10-11

George Padmore’s biography courtesy of the Marxist Internet Archive:

“George Padmore was the pseudonym of Malcolm Nurse, who was born in 1902 in Trinidad, then part of the British Empire. After leaving school, Nurse went into journalism before leaving Trinidad to study law at university in the United States. Yet instead of returning home to become a respected professional among the small black middle class of Trinidad, Nurse became a student radical and in 1927 joined the Communist Party of the USA, becoming ‘George Padmore’ in the process. Padmore’s talents as an organiser and writer meant he was soon appointed head of the Communist International’s ‘Negro Bureau,’ and from 1929 to 1933 he was a leading agitator for colonial revolution, travelling widely and residing for periods in Moscow, Hamburg, Vienna, London and Paris. As well as editing the Negro Worker, Padmore wrote prolifically, and his The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (1931) was particularly influential.

However, when the rise of Hitler’s Nazis in Germany led the Soviet Union to join the League of Nations and seek new diplomatic and military ties with Britain and France, anti-colonialism was no longer the central issue it once was for the Communist International. Resigning from his positions in disgust, the anti-imperialist Padmore survived a vicious Stalinist witch-hunt, and in 1935 returned to Britain. Meeting up again with his boyhood friend from Trinidad, the then Trotskyist C.L.R. James, Padmore from his base in London now steadily evolved into arguably one of the twentieth century’s most important Pan-African figures. Though close to the Independent Labour Party in Britain, and writing prolifically for its publications, Padmore never formally joined, but continued to devote his energies to the struggle to liberate Africa from colonial rule.

In 1937, Padmore formed the International African Service Bureau, later the Pan-African Federation and in 1945 was central to organising the legendary Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester. Besides writing several books from his London home, from How Britain Rules Africa (1936) to Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956), Padmore’s greatest triumph undoubtedly came when one African disciple of his, Kwame Nkrumah, led the Gold Coast from British colonial rule to independence in 1957. Though Padmore’s experience working in Ghana as advisor to Nkrumah in the last years of his life was to be a rather disappointing one, that he lived to witness the birth of a black nation in Africa remains a vindication of, and a testament to, his life’s work.”

“A forgotten fighter”

International Socialism, Issue: 124 (1st October 2009)

Christian Høgsbjerg (book review)

Fitzroy Baptiste and Rupert Lewis (eds.) George Padmore: Pan–African Revolutionary (Ian Randle Publishers, 2009).

This collection of essays on the Trinidadian Pan-Africanist George Padmore (1902-59), appearing on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, is a timely tribute to the life and work of a fascinating but forgotten anti-colonial activist and intellectual. The appearance of such a volume is to be welcomed, not simply because Padmore stands as a towering figure of the 20th century ‘black Atlantic’ who fully deserves more critical appreciation in his own right, but also because the question of why he has remained so overlooked for so long, despite the rise of postcolonial studies, is in itself illuminating.

George Padmore was the pseudonym of Malcolm Nurse, who was born in 1902 in Trinidad, then a British crown colony. After leaving school Nurse went into journalism before leaving the Caribbean to study law at university in the United States in 1924. Yet instead of returning home to become a respected professional among the small black middle class of Trinidad (indeed he never returned to the Caribbean), he became a student radical and soon joined the Communist Party of the USA, becoming George Padmore in the process.

Padmore’s talents as an organiser and writer meant he was soon appointed head of the Communist International’s ‘Negro Bureau,’ and from 1929 to 1933 he threw himself into agitating for black liberation and colonial revolution, residing for periods in Moscow, Hamburg, Vienna, London and Paris, and undertaking daring underground work in colonial Africa. As well as editing the Negro Worker, Padmore wrote prolifically, and his pamphlet The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (1931) became something of a classic.¹

However, when Russia’s Stalinist rulers, threatened by the rise of Nazi Germany, sought new diplomatic and military ties with the ‘democratic’ empires of Britain and France, anti-colonialism ceased to be the critical issue it once was for the Communist International. Padmore, a principled anti-imperialist, resigned from his position in disgust in 1933 and was vilified by the Stalinist bureaucracy. In 1935 he moved to London, the ‘dark heart’ of the British Empire, and joined forces with his boyhood friend from Trinidad, the Trotskyist CLR James.

For the next 20 years or so Padmore devoted all his energies to the struggle to liberate Africa and the Caribbean from colonial rule. In 1937 he formed the International African Service Bureau, later the Pan-African Federation, and in 1945 was central to organising the historic Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester. Matthew Quest offers a useful discussion of the ‘class struggle Pan-Africanism’ of the bureau’s journal International African Opinion, while Hakim Adi and the late Fitzroy Baptiste examine respectively how the fifth congress was built and how its potential impact was somewhat blunted by the realpolitik of British colonial officials.

Besides writing several books from his London home, from How Britain Rules Africa (1936) to Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956), Padmore’s greatest triumph undoubtedly came when one of his African disciples, Kwame Nkrumah, led the Gold Coast to independence in 1957. Nkrumah had met CLR James in America during the Second World War and when Nkrumah moved to Britain in 1945 James referred him to Padmore as a matter of course.

Marika Sherwood discusses Padmore’s relationship as mentor to Nkrumah, quoting one of Padmore’s letters, from 1955, in which he notes that James ‘introduced [Nkrumah] to Trotskyism and I knocked that nonsense out of him before his return [to the Gold Coast]. And put in its place Pan-Africanism (black nationalism and socialism).’

The extent to which Padmore, who ended his life working as adviser to Nkrumah in Ghana, bears responsibility for the manifest failings of Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism generally is perhaps a moot question, but it is certainly one avoided in this volume due to the Pan-Africanist perspective and hagiographic tone of some of the contributors.

Fitzroy Baptiste’s fine contribution does, however, note important continuities between the Stalinist ‘two-stage theory’ of colonial liberation (first political independence then socialism) that formed part of Padmore’s training while in Moscow and his later strategic vision for achieving ‘Pan-African Socialism.’ Baptiste also quotes from a British Foreign Office document from December 1959 entitled ‘Africa: The Next Ten Years,’ which, with what Baptiste notes was the ‘typical smugness’ of those wielding imperial power, concluded that ‘Pan-Africanism, in itself, is not necessarily a force that we need regard with suspicion and fear.’ This statement stands as an epitaph to the limitations of the ‘Pan-African Socialism’ envisioned by Nkrumah and Padmore (and for that matter by James).

That said, George Padmore’s extraordinary lived experience as an ‘organic intellectual’ of anti-colonial movements in Africa and the Caribbean is well brought out in this volume and remains in many ways inspiring for anti-imperialists today. Moreover, his relentless work exposing and denouncing what Karl Marx called ‘the profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation’ is of course relevant today.

Indeed, as a new ‘Scramble for Africa’ centred around oil unfolds, the memory of anti-colonialists such as Padmore becomes particularly poignant. His fate was to be largely ignored by postcolonial studies, never forgiven by Stalinists, regarded as a ‘problem’ by the British Labour Party and, after his death, turned into a ‘harmless icon’ by the new Pan-Africanist rulers of post-colonial Africa. Anyone interested in the past, present and future of revolutionary socialist politics in Africa and the Caribbean can learn much from a critical engagement with his life, work and legacy.

Note

1. For this pamphlet and more of Padmore’s writing, go to marxists.org/archive/padmore

George Padmore interviews Ho Chi Minh in Paris (1946)

I was delighted to learn that George Padmore interviewed Ho Chi Minh (Nguyen Sinh Cung, also known as Nguyen Tat Thanh and Nguyen Ai Quoc) while both were in Paris: Ho was there for the Paris Peace Conference (29 July to 15 October 1946), engaged in “confidential negotiations,” and Padmore was covering the conference for the Free India Press. According to James Hooker, one of the articles Padmore wrote “remains a good introduction to Vietnamese affairs,” the piece having been published by the Defender (28 September 1946, with an autographed photo of Ho!). In Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism (Praeger, 1967), Hooker further describes Padmore’s article as “a concise introduction to the Vietnam tangle, one which holds up surprisingly well after nearly two decades of persistent journalistic rediscovery of the situation in South East Asia” (in this instance, Indochina). We further learn that a portion of the article was reprinted in the December issue of (Dwight Macdonald’s) politics (sic) as “The Story of Vietnam.” It seems the journal’s readers took Padmore to task for “play[ing] down Ho’s communist associations.” Padmore defended his work, decrying the “preoccupation with anti-communism which seemed so tiresomely characteristic” of the American Left. 

Finally, Hooker mentions one consequence of Padmore’s exclusive interview at the private hotel provided Ho by the French government: “Padmore became the unofficial guardian of Viet-Minh interests in London, to which city Ho despatched a representative for English language training.”

George Padmore: Pan-African “communist”

 “An anecdote suggests [George Padmore’s] power of persuasion. [Cyril C.] Ollivierre [a fellow West Indian student at Howard University and president of the campus Garvey Club] and Padmore met as dishwashers at Camp Kinderland, a resort for leftwing working-class Jewish New Yorkers which had opened in 1923 in Hopewell Junction. When washing up for a large party, the two fell behind. As the stacks of dirty dishes mounted in the steaming kitchen and the waiters’ voices became more and more abusive, Nurse [i.e., Padmore] grew indignant. Ollivierre, a more pliant man, commenced to scant his efforts, merely dipping plates for a cursory swish, a course of action which brought about his downfall, but in the meantime earned him a respite. Nurse refused to do so. Instead, he stopped, rolled down his sleeves (always one for proper dress) and marched to the dining room where he excoriated the startled diners for abetting the exploitation going on beneath their noses. Some of the men marched back through the swinging doors and helped catch up under Nurse’s supervision.”

According to James Hooker, “[George] Padmore’s strength was his indefatigable nature, remarkable memory and sense of organization. He was able to state his aims concisely, collected statistics avidly, read the capitalist press in detail and quoted from the generally accepted academic sources when he touched upon sensitive issues.” Several of these virtues are exemplified in Padmore’s Life and Struggle of Negro Toilers (London: Red International of Labour Unions, 1931), “the back cover of which showed a gigantic Negro hovering over the United States, West Indies and Africa, snapping the links in the slave chain which connected these distant places,” while its contents displayed “an amazing amount of information on the condition of black men in three continents, described their various organisations, showed statistical tables of the black man’s role in the various militaries of the great powers (including the United States), and explained the role of the new section of the RILU [Red International of Labour Unions]. The book, though on occasion lapsing into jargon, is in the main straightforward journalism which conveys a feeling that the black men of the world are at last awake, with the appropriate weapon of their deliverance at hand. Of his ten books or extended pamphlets, this and his last, Pan-Africanism or Communism? [London: Dennis Dobson, 1956], are probably the best known.” — from James R. Hooker’s Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism (Praeger Publishers, 1967).

George Padmore Archive (at the Marxists Internet Archive Encyclopedia):

• The Negro Liberation Movement and the International Conference, 1930
• The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers, 1931
• “Left” Imperialism and the Negro Toilers, May 1932
• Fascism in the Colonies, February 1938
• Hands off the Colonies!, February 1938
• An Outrageous Report, March 1938
• Why Moors help Franco, May 1938
• White Workers and Black, May 1938
• The Government’s Betrayal of the Protectorates, June 1938
• Labour Unrest in Jamaica, July 1938
• West Africans, Watch Your Land, September 1938
• Manifesto Against War, 25 September 1938
• Police Swoop On Workers’ Leaders In Colonies, 20 October 1939
• The British Empire Is Worst Racket Yet Invented By Man, 15 December 1939
• Hands Off the Soviet Union, February 1940
• Poverty, Disease Is Native’s Lot in West Indies, 17 June 1940
• West Indies Need Independence – Not Big Reports, 24 June 1940
• A Typical British Colony, December 1940
• British Imperialists Treat the Negro Masses Like Nazis Treat the Jews, 1941
• Empire “Gauleiters” Greet Each Other, January 1941
• West Indians Answer Anglo-U.S. Imperialism, 4 January 1941
• Whither the West Indies?, 21 July 1941
• Britain’s Black Record, September 1941
• The Socialist Attitude to the Invasion of the U.S.S.R., September 1941
• Answers to a Questionnaire on the War, November 1941
• Blue-Print of Post-War Anglo-American Imperialism, October 1943
• Imperialism: The Basis of Labour Party Crisis, June 1944
• Chris Jones: Fighter for the Oppressed, September 1944
• A Political Review of the Colonies, February 1945
• The Voice of Coloured Labour, World Trade Union Conference, 1945
• Colonial and Coloured Unity, History of the Pan-African Congress, 1947
• Madagascar Fights for Freedom, October 1947

Books by George Padmore

• Padmore, George. The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers. London: Red International of Labour Unions Magazine for the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, 1931.
• Padmore, George. How Britain Rules Africa. London: Wishart Books, 1936.
• Padmore, George. African and World Peace. London: Secker and Warburg, 1937.
• Padmore, George, with Nancy Cunard. White Man's Duty. London: W. H. Allen, 1942.
• Padmore, George (in collaboration with Dorothy Pizer). How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire: A Challenge to the Imperialist Powers. London: Dennis Dobson, 1946.
• Padmore, George. Africa: Britain's Third Empire. London: Dennis Dobson, 1949.
• Padmore, George. The Gold Coast Revolution: The Struggle of an African People from Slavery to Freedom. London: Dennis Dobson, 1953.
• Padmore, George. Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa. London: Dennis Dobson, 1956.
• Padmore, George, ed. The Voice of Coloured Labour. Manchester: Panaf Services, 1945.
• Padmore, George, ed. Colonial and Coloured Unity—A Programme of Action: History of the Pan-African Congress. Manchester: Pan-African Federation/Panaf Services, 1947.

Further Reading:

• Adi, Hakim. West Africans in Britain, 1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998.
• Adi, Hakim. Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2013.
• Adi, Hakim and Sherwood, Marika. The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited. London: New Beacon Books, 1995.
• Baptiste, Fitzroy and Rupert Lewis, eds. George Padmore: Pan-African Revolutionary. Kingston and London: Ian Randle Publishers, 2009.
• Bolland, O. Nigel. On the March: Labour Rebellions in the British Caribbean, 1934-39. London: James Currey, 1995.
• Braithwaite, Lloyd. Colonial West Indian Students in Britain. Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001.
• Bush, Barbara. Imperialism, Race and Resistance: Africa and Britain, 1919 –1945. London: Routledge, 1999.
• Cooper, Frederick. Decolonization and African Society: The Labour Question in French and British Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Cooper, Frederick. Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005.
• Cooper, Frederick. Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
• Cunard, Nancy (Maureen Moynagh, ed.) Essays on Race and Empire. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002.
• Cunard, Nancy, ed. Negro Anthology made by Nancy Cunard, 1931-1933. London: Wishart and Co., 1934.
• Derrick, Jonathan. Africa’s “Agitators”: Militant Anti-Colonialism in in Africa and the West, 1918-1939. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
• Fryer, Peter, Staying Power:The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto, 1984.
• Geiss, Imanuel. The Pan-African Movement. London: Methuen, 1974.
• Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
• Grimshaw, Anna, ed. The C. L. R. James Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
• Hooker, James R. Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1967.
• James, C.L.R. Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. London: Allison and Busby, 1977.
• James, C.L.R. “George Padmore: Black Marxist Revolutionary,” in C. L. R. James, ed. At the Rendezvous of Victory:Selected Writings. London: Allison and Busby, 1984.
• James, Leslie. George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
• Langley, Jabez Ayodele. Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900-1945: A Study in Ideology and Social Classes. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1973.
• Langley, Jabez Ayodele, ed. Ideologies of Liberation in Black Africa. London: Rex Collings, 1979.
• Lewis, Rupert and Baptiste, Fitzroy, eds. George Padmore:Pan-African Revolutionary. Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2008.
• Makalani, Minkah. In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
• Makonnen, Ras (Kenneth King, ed.) Pan-Africanism from Within. London: Oxford University Press, 1973.
• Matera, Marc. Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015.
• Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000 (1983).
• Schwarz, Bill, ed. West Indian Intellectuals in Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.
• Stephens, Michelle Ann. Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
• Thompson, Dudley, with Margaret Cezair Thompson. From Kingston to Kenya: The Making of a Pan-African Lawyer. Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1993.
• Tilley, Helen, ed., with Robert J. Gordon. Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism and the Politics of Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011.
• Von Eschen, Penny. Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
• Zachernuk, Philip S. Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000.

Relevant Bibliographies:

• Blacks on the (Radical) Left
• Marxism
• Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law
• Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, & Black Cosmopolitanism.

Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (May 20, 1932 – September 18, 2020)

One of my favorite philosophers has died. Her work received nowhere near the attention granted Richard Rorty, to whom she was once married. While my judgment does not mean much, I happen to think she was a better philosopher than him. I continue to consult her book, Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1988), which I came across at a used bookstore shortly after it was published. There are, to my mind, a comparatively small number of philosophers who take Freud seriously,¹ and she is one of them. Relatedly, she helped to resurrect interest in moral psychology,² which was virtually absent from the halls of professional philosophy in the West for much of the twentieth century.

Rorty’s death also moved me to re-post this:

Some contemporary (living and dead) philosophers I relish reading who happen to be women: Carol Gould, Susan Haack, Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, Elizabeth Anderson, Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Annette Baier, Martha Nussbaum, Linda A.W. Brakel, Onora O’Neill, Angela Davis, Marcia Cavell, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, Seana Shiffrin, Elisabeth Camp, Kimberley Brownlee, Nancy Cartwright, Elizabeth Anderson, Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Seyla Benhabib, Hélène Landemore, Jane Mansbridge, Carol Pateman, Hanna Pitkin, Nadia Urbinati, Iris Marion Young, Nel Noddings, Miri Albihari, Marcia Cavell, Nancy Cartwright, Margaret Gilbert, and Jennifer Radden.*

From a fine essay by Annette C. Baier, “What Do Women Want in a Moral Theory?” in her book, Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Harvard University Press, 1994) I was reminded of three more women whose work I’ve read, although it was some time ago, which perhaps accounts for why I neglected to mention them above: Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Sissela Bok. In addition, she cites Cora Diamond, whose work on the treatment of nonhuman animals is very important. She names others whose work I’ve yet to take sufficient notice: Ruth Barcan Marcus, Jenny Teichman, Susan Card, Gabriele Taylor, Alison Jaggar, Marilyn Frye, Virginia Held and Sabina Lovibond. I’ve read an essay or two by Held and have one of Lovibond’s books, Ethical Formation (Harvard University Press, 2002), but I’ve yet to read it with due care.

* I should note that there are of course many more philosophers who are women in the profession, some of whom I could name, but I have not read them in depth, as it is difficult enough to keep up with the work of those listed above. This omission is not meant in any way to dismiss, diminish or demean the contributions to academic philosophy of those omitted (and even had I possessed such an intention, the fact that I am not a professional philosopher is sufficient enough to insulate them from any harm that might possibly come to their professional standing and esteem).

Notes

1. This list would include at least the following: Richard Wollhein, Adolf Grünbaum, Jonathan Lear, John Wisdom, Ilham Dilman, Jerome Neu, Marcia Cavell, Donald Levy, John Cottingham, David Sachs, Herbert Fingarette, J. David Velleman, James Hopkins, Michael Stocker, Jennifer Church, John Deigh, Linda A.W. Brakel, Paul Ricoeur, Jon Mills, and Ernest Wallwork. Some readers might find this helpful: Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory and therapy: An introduction to its therapeutic model and “science of subjectivity.”
2. In professional philosophy generally, this resurrection (or resuscitation) was also the result of the emergence of both “virtue” and “care” ethics as well as a revived interest in “the passions” or “the emotions” more broadly.

In vitro fertilization in the (moral, legal, and political) context of capitalist markets in “reproductive health”

“… [T]here has been a lot of attention given the ethics of in vitro fertilization—should we or should we not? To me, the question seems wrongly posed; instead, one should ask the prior question, which the in vitro fertilization techniques are presumably designed to answer: how can we increase the number of wanted, healthy babies? [Today, we would not presume this exact question in the first instance; more on that below.] If I ask that question, I also begin to ask what prevents wanted, healthy babies surviving; and I note that in Britain the principal mortality rate—that is, the number of babies dying at or just after birth—is much higher in certain geographical areas—for instance, Liverpool—than others—such as, for instance, Hampstead. I note that there is a several fold greater chance of a baby not surviving if it is born to a mother in poverty, or in the manual working class, than if it is born to a wealthy or upper-middle class mother. So if we want to save babies, I conclude, we do so best by applying known social, economic and health care improvements to deprived geographical areas and classes in Britain. In vitro fertilization is a method which is of relevance to a small number of relatively privileged mothers. The [moral, ethical and political] language of priorities says we should not get excited about the new set of techniques until we have addressed the question of how we save babies we know statistically will die from lack of application of quite simple preventative and health care measures.” – Steven Rose, from his essay, “The Limits to Science,” in Steven Rose and Lisa Appignanesi, eds., Science and Beyond (Basil Blackwell in association with the Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1986): 33-34

Comment

As you might have guessed (or noticed in the citation) this was written some time ago, in or before 1986 (the publication date of the book in which this appeared). In the affluent countries of (liberal, corporatist, and social democratic) democratic welfare capitalism, the first question posed above has been answered in the affirmative by way of a fait accompli. And this occurred primarily because the “wrongly posed” question is in fact the fundamental one under the regnant conditions of capitalist health care in affluent countries. Now it is not that ethical and political questions have altogether vanished with widespread acceptance of this technique, but rather that their ethical and political scope has considerably narrowed, now posed solely within an individualist and consensual framework which asks questions about the ethical status of an embryo as well as:

• the quality of consent obtained from the parties
• the motivation of the parents
• the uses and implications of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis
• the permissibility of sex-selection (or the choice of embryos for other traits)
• the storage and fate of surplus embryos

I am not denying the value and significance of the ethical characterization of these questions and topics. I am instead and with Rose, questioning the displacement (a ‘crowding out’ effect) of what he terms the “prior question” above. This has occurred in the social and economic context of “reproduction markets” in affluent countries as configured within the parameters of neoclassical capitalist economics in which individual desires, wants, or preferences of individuals qua individuals are paramount, economically, politically and morally speaking. The time has long passed, in other words, in which we could pose Rose’s question outside the consumer-driven logic of health care provision wherein “health” is invariably and relentlessly commodified as a product of the health-care system, and it is this system and this process that necessarily diminishes the scope of the ethical and political (e.g., health justice) with regard to health, health care, and the health system. In vitro fertilization is now a “health good” accessible to those of a certain income or class in which some (e.g., reproduction) markets are the prerogative of affluent consumers who have their needs and wants satisfied because they can merely afford them, the larger consequences for the common good (health, welfare and well-being) be damned.   

See too: Health: Law, Ethics and Social Justice—a basic bibliography

Should you be interested in my broader views on science, which are not at all systematic and generally beholden to the works of others, especially those philosophers of science identified with the so-called Stanford School (e.g., Nancy Cartwright, John Dupré, Peter Galison, Ian Hacking), but also Hilary Putnam, Philip Kitcher, and John Ziman, as well as such different philosophers as Paul Feyerabend and Nicholas Rescher, please see my Notes on Science and the Sciences (also available here).

When truth (i.e., facts and reality) became stranger than fiction: 2016-2020

Since Donald Trump’s tenure in office and the Republican domination of the Senate, one thing, alas, we can affirm without any hesitation or reservation: “[m]uch can be said for the dictum that truth is stranger than fiction.” This was written by Nicholas Rescher as part of a larger discussion emphasizing the fact that nature is “pervasively complex and inexhaustible in its details,” including the further and humbling fact that this complexity is far greater than the cognitive and affective equipment we bring to its study and characterization, unsurprising given that “we ourselves are merely a minor constituent of nature itself,” experience to date having convinced us that “nature’s intricacy proceeds without stop.”

I’m invoking this dictum not with regard to the scientific study of the natural world but in relation to recent experiences with and perceptions of our social world, and thus in reference to our nation’s moral, cultural and socio-political condition during Trump’s occupancy of the White House and the Republican majority in the Senate. My wife and I have discussed on several occasions the fact that were either of us to have read a work of fiction before Trump’s election along the lines of what we’ve experienced since 2016, we would have dismissed it as rather bad fantasy than fiction, worse than the worst pulp fiction, adolescent writing that has severed any necessary connection to social reality as we’ve experienced it in our lifetimes. Lo and behold, reality as worse than shitty fiction has come to pass, hence the aptness of Erich Fromm’s locution, the “pathology of normalcy,” or what Arno Gruen termed “realism as sickness” in his comparatively neglected book, The Insanity of Normality—realism as sickness: toward understanding of human destructiveness (Grove Weidenfeld, 1992 [in German, 1987]). In short, the stench that pervades our national politics has managed to suffuse the daily round of our intimate lives to such an extent that alcohol consumption has markedly increased (at least among those who can afford it), and adverse mental health conditions directly associated with the COVID-19 pandemic (thus and in turn tied to the Trump’s administration’s ‘public health’ response, its actions and inactions amounting to a failure of colossal proportions), including increased substance and abuse and higher levels of reported suicidal ideation, have justifiably alarmed mental health experts.

There may be a perfectly reasonable epistemic and scientific explanation for why “truth stranger than fiction” is readily available and responsible for defining our orientation to the world during the Trump administration and the rule of the Republican Party, even if it is only analogical or richly metaphorical. It goes as follows: “a key [fact] about fictional particulars is that they are of finite cognitive depth. In discoursing about them we shall ultimately run out of steam as regards their non-generic features. A point will always be reached when one cannot say anything further that is characteristically new about them—presenting non-generic information that is not inferentially implicit in what has already been said. [....] With real things, on the other hand, there is no reason of principle why the provision of non-generically idiosyncratic information need ever be terminated. On the contrary, we have every reason to presume these things to be cognitively inexhaustible. A precommitment to description-transcending features—no matter how far description is pushed—is essential to our conception of a real thing. Something whose character is exhaustible by linguistic characterization would thereby be marked as fictional rather than real.” — Nicholas Rescher, Nature and Understanding: The Metaphysics and Method of Science (Oxford University Press, 2000): 34.

What we are experiencing is clearly not exhaustible by linguistic characterization, as bad news and fresh horrors feed the 24/7 news cycle (one symptom of 24/7 capitalism) such that many of us have correctly concluded that our capitalist democracy is at a tipping point, perched at the edge of an authoritarian precipice. Things are worse than we ever imagined possible (that is, unless we are prone to apocalyptic phantasizing), thereby wrecking and despoiling our sleep and discretionary time, and endangering even our capacity to realistically entertain hope for a better world:

“Today the hope that matters has fallen on hard times. Even after the catastrophes of the twentieth century the great modern hope had persisted ‘that things will one day finally get better,’ in Theodore Adorno’s words—‘that one day human beings will be allowed to breathe easily.’ But today we are losing the hope of a better society and a better world, and even the collective consciousness that can pose such goals [the Black Lives Matter movement is evidence that this hope is not yet eviscerated]. Who still anticipates the continued spread of political and social equality and democracy? Who still banks on the collective force of workers and other ordinary people? Who still thinks that our children’s and grandchildren’s live can be made better than our own? Who still expects that the development of science and technology and the spread of education will make the world more humane and livable? And who still sees themselves as belonging to a collectivity capable of making any of these things happen? [….]

All our education and free elections [I would place the latter in scare quotes], our medical science and economic productivity, our instant communications and psychological self-knowledge [such as it is], do not make our world more hospitable, democratic, fairer, and more just. Nor do they give us heart that the forces shaping our lives are being brought under our collective control. The opposite is happening: as the impersonal force of ‘the market’ rules more and more areas of life, as people increasingly see themselves as separated, isolated individuals, the damage to the environment becomes impossible to ignore [such damage immeasurably worsened by the myriad effects of global warming]. Both in the United States and Europe [and not just there], existing political arrangements seem increasingly impotent to deal with the problems issuing from the ‘economization’ of all areas of life [this unabashed ‘economization’ is the regnant value of the Trump administration and the Republican Party, while Democrats are afraid to confront it head on, leaving us with feeble attempts to ameliorate its worst effects by way of ex post facto policymaking].”  — Ronald Aronson, We: Reviving Social Hope (University of Chicago Press, 2017): 1-2.

Food for thought (be forewarned: it may cause indigestion or even nausea and vomiting)

We have, at the very least (and most recently), the following titles to provide us with an overabundance of evidence, an embarrassment of riches, by way of painting a realistic and terrifying portrait of Donald J. Trump: as a person, his pathological character, and the nature of his Presidency (his rhetoric, his behavior, and his ‘policies’):

• Cohen, Michael. Disloyal: A Memoir (Skyhorse Publishing, 2020).
• Lee, Brandy X., et al. The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017).
• Rucker, Philip and Carol Leonnig. A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America (Penguin Press, 2020).
• Trump, Mary L. Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (Simon & Schuster, 2020).
• Woodward, Bob. Rage (Simon & Schuster, 2020).

Not having read all of these, preliminary reports and early reviews suggest a remarkable degree of consensus such that, among other things, we can conclude with considerable confidence that Trump is constitutionally and personally (in a moral psychological sense, although some suspect dementia) unfit for office, indeed, quite dangerous given his amply documented private and public symptomatic displays of psychopathy and sociopathy (rooted in megalomaniacal narcissism and ‘unbridled extreme present hedonism’), hence the habitual repetition of disturbing dispositional and behavioral character traits whose predominant form of expression is canalized in the enormous political power he wields, power gradually accumulated and largely legally enshrined in the Office of the President and the Executive Branch more broadly (with the ideological blessings of ‘unitary executive theory’).

But here’s the rub: the people who need to or should read this material either cannot or will not, and thus it’s speaking and preaching to the choir. Over the course of the Vietnam War, many Americans came to change their views regarding the political justification the war in Indochina, my late parents being two of them. In short, they changed their minds, the reasons for which were several and not always fully articulated, indeed, their motivations may have been more visceral or passionate in nature. What interests me is that a change of hearts and minds occurred among citizens who could in due time affect the policies and decision-making of those in Congress, which eventually led to our military withdrawal from the country. It’s important to reflect on the possible or probable reasons that might account for how and why our political landscape today is strikingly if not starkly different in this regard, in other words, the prospect of changing the hearts and minds of members of the cult of Trump range from dismal to non-existent (a null set). This is one reason that, in addition to a high turnout from all relevant constituencies, we hear how the Democratic Party needs to win back those former Democrats who voted for Trump as well as independent voters in the upcoming presidential election. Be that as it may, one causal variable we might invoke to make sense of contemporary social and political topography examines the sociology and social psychology of social media, the precipitous decline of print newspaper readership, as well as the existence and ratings success of Fox News.*

There is much more we might bring to this explanation that renders it quite complicated or messy, at the very least, it’s not likely to pin down any one cause-and-effect chain or feedback loop that explains how or why it came to pass that millions of people on the Right, in addition to having a calcified character armor in the Reichian sense, have grown all-to-comfortable daily indulging in denial, self-deception, wishful thinking (to be sure, we are all dispositionally prone to such stuff), as well as, more disturbingly, illusions, delusions, and phantasies, all of which are considerably more dangerous when they manifest themselves not just in the intimate realms of daily life but become routinely conspicuous in wider social and political fora (and during a pandemic no less).

* See, for example, Brian Stelter’s Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth (One Signal Publishers/Atria Books, 2020).

The People in Domestic and International Criminal Law v. Donald J. Trump

An eminently reasonable and urgent proposal: The President should be charged with felony murder on the domestic front and “crimes against humanity” in international criminal law

In effect, because the President was worried about “panic” on Wall Street* and refused to develop a coherent national public health strategy to fight the COVID-19 pandemic (including, and for personal political reasons having to do with his re-election strategy, deliberately refusing to sufficiently defer to the requisite scientific and medical expertise of public health experts), all the while habitually deceiving and lying to the American people, tens of thousands of people lost their lives and many more experienced a dramatic and unprecedented (i.e., horrific) decline in their basic welfare and well-being (loss of small business, significant loss of income, loss of jobs, housing…). Among other things, this is criminal behavior of the highest (or ‘lowest’) order. In terms of international criminal law, I believe Trump is guilty of “crimes against humanity” (in the Rome Statute for same, such crimes do not need to be linked to an armed attack). (Perhaps I should note the fact that Henry Kissinger has not been incarcerated for at least the last forty years does not bode well in this regard.) In municipal or domestic criminal law he should be charged with criminal homicide: “A person is guilty of criminal homicide if he purposely, knowingly, recklessly or negligently causes the death of another human being.” As to whether this is murder, manslaughter, or negligent homicide I leave that determination to prosecutors, although my layman’s judgment is that it meets the mens rea and actus reus elements for felony murder.

* On the other hand, in cities and suburbs across America, the President’s re-election strategy as ensconced in his historically resonant “law and order” racist rhetoric, aims to create fear and panic among the electorate at the prospect of Democrats winning the Senate and the Presidency.

Hilda Bernstein (15 May 1915 – 8 September 2006)

Hilda Bernstein is another exemplar of what we have in previous posts termed “laudable communism,”* which differs in significant and sundry ways from, say, the Party-State Communism of the former Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (countries in which indispensable Liberal principles and values indissolubly linked to democratic theory and praxis were severed from putatively Marxist or socialist ideas and ideals of one kind or another). Immediately below is Bernstein’s (edited) entry on Wikipedia, followed by a brief yet well-written biography by Tanya Barben (found at Revisions: Expanding the Narrative of South African Art).

 “Hilda Bernstein was a British-born author, artist, and an activist against apartheid and for women’s rights. She was born Hilda Schwarz in London and emigrated to South Africa at the age of 18 years and became active in politics. She married fellow activist Lionel ‘Rusty’ Bernstein in March 1941, and together they played prominent roles in the struggle to end Apartheid in South Africa. After her husband was tried and acquitted in the Rivonia Trial in 1964, government harassment forced them to flee to Botswana, an ordeal described in her 1989 book The World that was Ours. They lived in Britain for some years where she further established herself internationally as a speaker, writer, and artist. She returned with her husband to South Africa in 1994 for the South African election in which fellow activist Nelson Mandela was elected President. She died at the age of 91 in Cape Town, South Africa.

Bernstein was born in London to Russian-Jewish immigrants Simeon and Dora Schwarz. When she was ten her father, who was a lifelong Bolshevik and had been the Russian Trade Attaché to Britain, was recalled to the Soviet Union. He was not able to return to Britain, and after his death she quit school to work before emigrating to South Africa at the age of 18 to work in journalism. In response to the rise of fascism in Europe, she became involved with the Labour Party. This party, however, did not share her growing concern with apartheid and she left it to join the South African Communist Party, the only South African party with no racial segregation. She demonstrated her speaking and organizing skills on the party's district committee and national executive committee.

Through her political activities she met Lionel ‘Rusty’ Bernstein, whom she married in March 1941. In 1943 she was elected to the city council of Johannesburg by a then all-white electorate, the only member of the Communist Party to do so. She used this position for three years as a platform for publicizing the injustices of apartheid. In the 1950s she became more focused on organizing with women. She was a founding member of the multi-racial Federation of South African Women in 1956, and she was one of the organizers of the Women’s March to Pretoria. Her writings were appearing regularly in periodicals in South Africa and other nations in Africa and Europe.

As early as 1946 the South African government began its attempts to limit her activities and minimize her political influence. In that year she was convicted of assisting an illegal strike of black mineworkers. In 1953 the government banned her membership in a list of organizations, and in 1958 extended this ban to prohibit her from writing or publishing. In 1960 she was detained during the state of emergency declared after the Sharpeville massacre. She was therefore required to go underground with her political work.

 
    In 1963 her husband Rusty was one of 19 African National Congress leaders arrested at Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia. Rusty was acquitted at the Rivonia Trial, but was soon rearrested and released on bail to house arrest. Hilda Bernstein fled from their home as the police were on the way to arrest her. They fled to Botswana, crossing the border on foot. In exile, the Bernsteins eventually settled in Britain where they continued to work in support of the African National Congress. She also dedicated her written and oral communication skills to the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the British peace movement. Her writings and speaking engagements were numerous in Europe, the United States, and Canada. [….]

Rusty and Hilda Bernstein returned to South Africa in 1994 to participate in the South African election which was the first democratic election where all races were allowed to vote, and see the end of apartheid and their fellow ANC member Nelson Mandela become president.

In 1998, both Rusty and Hilda were awarded honorary degrees from the University of Natal for their role in helping to bring democracy to South Africa. Rusty died at their home in 2002. In 2004 she was awarded the Luthuli Silver Award for her ‘contribution to the attainment of gender equality and a free and democratic society’ in South Africa. She died from heart failure at the age of 91 at her home in Cape Town, South Africa. She was survived by their four children: Toni, Patrick, Frances, and Keith Bernstein. In March 2011, the country of Gambia issued a postage stamp in her honor, naming her as one of the Legendary Heroes of Africa.” 

Hilda Bernstein

By Tanya Barben (Revisions: Expanding the Narrative of South African Art)

“… [A] remarkable woman, [Hilda Bernstein] … was an accomplished artist, a significant recorder of South Africa’s liberation struggle and a political activist who was hounded by the Security Police, detained, banned repeatedly and forced to go into exile with her family. She also had to endure the uncertainty of the 1964 Rivonia Trial in which her husband, Rusty (Lionel), was appearing on a charge of treason as a co-accused with Nelson Mandela, Ahmed Kathrada, Dennis Goldberg, Walter Sisulu, Harold Wolpe and others. All expectations were that they would be given the death sentence, but Rusty was released on account of lack of evidence.

A committed feminist, Bernstein, together with Ray Alexander Simons, founded the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) which was to become what was once described as ‘the most dynamic of women’s organisations in the history of South Africa.’ Although neither women were able to attend FEDSAW’s inaugural conference on account of their being banned, they helped to draw up the Women’s Charter (the forerunner of the following year’s Freedom Charter), which not only articulated a strong feminist emphasis but also reflected on the political, social and economic conditions of the oppressed black people of South Africa. She became the first communist to be elected to public office by an all-white electorate when she won the Hillbrow seat on the Johannesburg City Council during the War years. She was an extremely effective public speaker whose words were grounded on hours of reflection and intense research.

Fellow activist and friend, Helen Joseph, described Bernstein as a ‘warm-hearted communist’ who was, Joseph adds, free from the chauvinism and dogma that so often characterised communism and its adherents. She shared a cell with her and others during the detentions of the 1960 State of Emergency and mentioned Bernstein’s contribution to raising the spirit of the detainees. Joseph recognised that Bernstein’s love for her own children, Toni, Patrick, Frances and Keith, was the catalyst for her concern for the suffering of all women, black women in particular. This concern, in fact, manifested itself before she became a mother. Bernstein’s political activism was driven partially by her intense desire to leap the divide between the various sections of the South African population. The Bernstein’s home in Observatory, Johannesburg, became a magnet for like-thinking South Africans of all races.

 

… [I]n the 1960s … she took up painting classes at the University of the Witwatersrand at Rusty’s suggestion. As a communist she was a ‘listed’ person who was likely to be placed under 24-hour house arrest. The painting classes, he thought, might provide her with the opportunity to get out of the house for some hours every week. These were the first formal art classes she was to attend, although her artistic ability was evident in the advertising and newspaper cover work she produced, and in the expressive and insightful caricatures of her fellow detainees she sketched during the State of Emergency. [….]

Hilda Watts was born in 1915 in London to East European parents. Her father, Simeon Schwartz, hailed from Odessa in the Ukraine. He had come to Britain to avoid the Tsar’s draft, and was quickly assimilated into London’s working-class environment (he considered himself a member of the upper working-class). Her mother, Dora, was also an East European who had come to London as a young girl, essentially as the unpaid servant to her brother and his family. She was deprived of a school education as a child but developed into a self-taught lover of the arts and admirer of Ruskin. Simeon changed his name to Samuel Watts to counteract the anti-German sentiment of the Great War period. He was a fervent supporter of the Bolsheviks and became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic’s representative in Britain. In 1925 he was summoned to Moscow and Bernstein was not to see her father again although for some time correspondence flowed between London and Moscow. In one letter she told her father of her interest in art. When it was quite clear that Simeon was not going to return to his family, Dora decided to move to South Africa. Bernstein was 18 when she arrived in this country. She soon began to be aware of the complexities of race relations in South Africa and considered what she saw as an insult to humanity. She joined the Communist Party of South Africa and that was where she met Rusty. Despite the age gap (he was five years younger) she was attracted to his strength and vigour and the fact that they shared the same idealism. They remained devoted to each other for the rest of their lives.

Following Rusty’s discharge at the Rivonia Trial he continued to be hounded by the apartheid authorities. So many of their friends and comrades were in prison or had gone into exile, and Molly Fischer, a much-loved friend, had died tragically. They, too, had to make the painful decision to leave South Africa. This they did by fleeing across the border into what was then the Bechuanaland Protectorate. Eventually they were joined by their three youngest children and their eldest, Toni, who had married Ivan Strasburg, also a political activist. Bernstein spent her time in exile working tirelessly for the African National Congress (ANC). She became a sought-after public speaker internationally. She found the time to turn to her interest in art, [taking] formal art classes and [holding] exhibitions. Her art found its way into many public and private collections. Her artwork was also been used in many publications for the Anti-Apartheid Movement. She and Rusty returned to South Africa in 1994 to vote in South Africa’s first democratic election. They were the recipients of honorary degrees from the University of Natal and in 2004 she was awarded the South African honour, the Luthuli Award in silver, for her ‘contribution to the attainment of gender equality and a free and democratic society’ in South Africa.

The Bernsteins settled in Cape Town where both continued to write and Bernstein to pursue her art interests. Rusty died in 2002. Hilda painted and drew until her death from a heart attack in 2006.”

* For example (and by way of illustration, far from a comprehensive list): such individuals, groups, and political parties as Paulo Freire, Pete Seeger, Brian Percy Bunting, Lionel Forman, Ruth First, Joe Slovo, Bram Fischer, Yusuf Dadoo, Moses Kotane, J.B. Marks, Thabo Edwin Mofutsanyana, Rachel (Ray) Simons and Jack Simons, Lionel ‘Rusty’ Bernstein, George Padmore, C.L.R. James, Cyril Briggs, Claudia Jones, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Howard “Stretch” Johnson, Harry Haywood, William L. Patterson, Richard Wright, Anne and Carl Braden, Dorothy (Ray) Healey, Angela Y. Davis …; and the Communist Party of India (Marxist)/CPI(M)] in West Bengal and Kerala (and other Indian states), the Palestine Communist Party, “Red Chicago,” “Alabama Communists during the Great Depression,” Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit, the Communist Children’s Movement in the U.S. (summer camps and other programs), Camp Wo-Chi-Ca (created under the auspices of the International Workers Order or IWO—the Communist Party-oriented split-off of the Workmen’s Circle), Communists in the Civil Rights Congress ….

References and Further Reading

• Bernstein, Hilda. Death is Part of the Process. London: Sinclair Browne, 1983.
• Bernstein, Hilda. For their Triumphs and for their Tears: Conditions and Resistance of Women in Apartheid South Africa. London: International Defence & Aid Fund [for South Africa], (August) 1975.
• Bernstein, Hilda. A Life of One’s Own. Houghton [South Africa]: Jacana, 2002.
• Bernstein, Hilda. South Africa: The Terrorism of Torture. London: International Defence & Aid Fund [for South Africa], 1972.
• Bernstein, Hilda. No. 46—Steve Biko. London: International Defence & Aid Fund [for South Africa], (April) 1978.
• Bernstein, Hilda. The World That Was Ours: The Story of the Rivonia Trial. London: SAWriters, 1989.
• Bernstein, Rusty. Memory Against Forgetting: Memoirs from a Life in South African Politics, 1938-1964. London: Viking, 1999.
• Frankel, Glenn. Rivonia’s Children: three families and the price of freedom in South Africa. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1999.
• Meredith, Martin. Fischer’s Choice: A Life of Bram Fischer. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2002.

See too the compilation on South African Liberation Struggles

From Hedgehogs & Foxes (or forests and trees) to Cosmopolitan Philosophy without Borders, Part 1

(In Part 2 I’ll try to extend some of the lessons drawn from Part 1 but primarily speak to cosmopolitan philosophy sans borders. There will be a Part 3 if I’m able to make synthetic coherence of possible implications and consequences such that 1+2 = 3.)

“The Hedgehog and the Fox is an essay by philosopher Isaiah Berlin—one of his most popular essays with the general public—which was published as a book in 1953. However, Berlin said, ‘I never meant it very seriously. I meant it as a kind of enjoyable intellectual game, but it was taken seriously. Every classification throws light on something.’”

*           *           *

Berlin’s now famous distinction between the “hedgehog” and the “fox,” which he applied to both writers and philosophers, does make for a pleasant intellectual parlor game, although I will take it, like Ronald Dworkin, a bit more seriously. In Dworkin’s pithy summary of Berlin’s proposal, “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” This way of putting things is a bit misleading however, because in one important sense, Berlin seems to be suggesting this, in the first instance, is more about perception and experience, not knowledge (that appears in due time), about how one chooses to see the world in conjunction with our experience of same. This of course, in turn, indelibly or structurally, or emotionally, or even axiologially, affects the quality and character of our knowledge and understanding. We can set aside the niceties of that difference for our purposes, although it may nonetheless insinuate itself in the course of our ruminations.

I think there are examples, and now I am speaking solely of philosophers, analogically and somewhat roughly if not crudely, who find themselves approaching their art or craft, their discipline or vocation, much like Berlin’s (or Dworkin’s) hedgehogs and foxes, although I will characterize the distinction in several other ways: “the jack of all trades [or] the master of one,” for instance, or what the late Hector-Neri Castañeda called the “forest” and the “bush” approach among his colleagues in the profession:

“[I]n the practice of philosophy there are two major tendencies, each correct—up to the point where the other tendency is not joined but shunned. One is the forest approach, the tendency to see very general structural lines of the world or of experience. The other, the bush approach, is the tendency to dwell upon small aspects of experience. Each approach can be, and has been, exercised in varying degrees. This is not bad. What is bad is the policy of merely exercising the extreme degrees. [….] Fruitful philosophical experiences are combinations of the two approaches: taking a full attentive look at the forests of the structures of experience and seeing their measure and reach in their realizations in the particular trees and bushes of experience: the pervasive general in the particular; the abstract structures within the concrete empirical. We want to understand the very large structures of experience, but we must understand them in their concrete settings in human life in its full social niche within the world at large—with occasional considered guesses at what things might be outside the human situation.”

Notice here that Castañeda, like Berlin, appreciates the value of either approach, the problem being when, as we say, one “can’t see the forest for the trees,” an expression which highlights the shortcomings of the “bush” approach but not obsession with or misplaced focus on the “forest.” Again, in the words of Castañeda,

“Fruitful philosophical experiences are combinations of the two approaches: taking a full attentive look at the forests of the structures of experience and seeing their measure and reach in their realizations in the particular trees and bushes of experience: the pervasive general in the particular; the abstract structures within the concrete empirical [for what it’s worth, I think the later work of Hilary Putnam exemplified this sort of philosophical praxis].”

The ideal philosopher on this model is something of a trickster, in turns both hedgehog and fox (or, to beg your indulgence, in a non-illusory way, both duck and rabbit), with more or less equal dexterity and acumen. The ideal philosopher, on this model, does not reify differences between “analytic” and “Continental” philosophy.

Nicholas Rescher provides us with another apposite analogy, one derived from a meta-philosophical description of “Western” professional philosophy as falling into, again roughly, two main types, indeed, in this case, as “ideal types” (and thus in one important and non-pejorative sense, close to a caricature):

 “There are two very different modes of writing philosophy. The one pivots on inferential expressions such as ‘because,’ ‘since,’ ‘therefore,’ ‘has the consequence that,’ ‘and so cannot,’ ‘must accordingly,’ and the like. The other bristles with adjectives of approbation or derogation—‘evident,’ ‘sensible,’ ‘untenable,’ ‘absurd,’ ‘inappropriate,’ ‘unscientific,’ and comparable adverbs like ‘evidently,’ ‘obviously,’ ‘foolishly,’ etc. The former relies primarily on inference and argumentation to substantiate its claims, the latter primarily on the rhetoric of persuasion. The one seeks to secure the reader’s (or auditor’s) assent by reasoning, the other by an appeal to values and appraisals—and above all by fittingness and consonance with an overall scheme of things. The one looks foundationally towards secure certainties, the other coherentially towards systemic fit with infirm but nonetheless respectable plausibilities. Like inferential reasoning, rhetoric too is a venture of justificatory systematization, albeit one of a rather different kind.”

While he invokes Hume and Nietzsche respectively in the history of philosophy as exemplars of these two rather different modes of writing philosophy, he is nonetheless arguing that these (i.e., the inferential, ‘discursive’ or demonstrative/argumentative mode on the one hand, and the ‘rhetorical’ or evocative mode on the other) are the two predominant modes of philosophizing (both equally ‘ventures in systematic justification,’ although the first speaks primarily to beliefs and the second to our sensibilities with respect to values), at least in the history of Western philosophy. Moreover, as ideal types, it’s the case that no philosopher relies exclusively on either mode of philosophizing. Rescher says the history of philosophy reveals philosophers endeavoring to normatively valorize their chosen mode, often despising or denigrating the alternative approach in the process, but that philosophy qua philosophy “must accommodate both of these discordant emphases.”

It’s not clear if this is also a conclusion from descriptive metaphilosophy, but Rescher correctly notes that “philosophy cannot provide a rational explanation for everything, rationalizing all of its claims ‘all the way down.’ Sooner or later the process of rationalization and explanation must—to all appearances—come to a halt in the acceptance of unexplained explainers” [the reliance on unavoidable presuppositions]. Insofar as this is the case, the aforementioned demonstrative/argumentative mode of philosophizing will be compelled at some point (explicitly or not), to rely on “inexplicable facts” or “unexplained explainers” that make space for the evaluative and evocative mode of philosophizing. In the end, this becomes part of a larger brief on behalf of Rescher’s own “coherentist” methodology for philosophy in which philosophical explanation is, at best, “holistically systemic.”

Our last example of analogical family resemblance to Berlin’s hedgehog and fox in academic philosophy (the adjective is important, as we often need reminding that philosophizing can take place among those who are not professional philosophers) is provided by the quintessential pragmatist philosopher, Hilary Putnam (a label that might have made him wince). Putnam spoke, after Stanley Cavell and Wilfrid Sellars respectively, of what appeared to him as the “two faces of philosophy,” one moral and the other theoretical, the first involving “interrogat[ion] of our lives and cultures as they have been up to now, and that challenges us to reform both,” and the second, clarifying what we think we know and working out how it all “hangs together.” This division of labor in both theory and practice may be transcended (as I think it is, both in the case of individual philosophers, for example, Iris Murdoch or Annette Baier, and, say, in classical Greek philosophy, existentialism, as well as Indian philosophical traditions). The first, or moral face, often comes, I would argue, under the heading of “philosophy as therapeia” or, and perhaps a bit differently, “practical philosophy.” The second captures much of contemporary professional philosophy.

Without trying to explain the possible reasons or motivations that suggest why or how philosophers find themselves being either hedgehogs or foxes, either “moral” or theoretical, either primarily inferential, discursive, and demonstrative on the one hand, or rhetorical, evocative and axiological on the other, I conclude with Castañeda and Putnam that our ideal philosopher will, in the beginning and in the end, aspire to be an artful practitioner of both models of philosophizing. In the history of philosophy, East and West, North and South, I suspect we can indeed find exemplars of this ideal, individuals whom we can point to with ample warrant and say, good philosophy is like that, making a demonstrative reference to a paradigmatically good piece of philosophical writing (the genres of which go well beyond the typical philosophy journal article: think—by way of normative inspiration—of the motley literary forms of medieval philosophy).

Please note: references and further reading will be appended to the next installment (part 2).