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Conversation as a vehicle for debate, dialogue and deliberation conducted within the normative orbit of rationality, equality, sense and sensibility or sociability

       

The following, from La Rochefoucauld’s (Leonard Tancock, trans.) Maxims (London: Penguin Books, 1959 [1678]), is perhaps more true today than when it was written:

One of the reasons why so few people are to be found who seem sensible and pleasant in conversation is that almost everybody is thinking about what he wants to say himself rather than about answering clearly what is being said to him. The more clever and polite think it enough simply to put on an attentive expression, while all the time you can see in their eyes and train of thought that they are far removed from what you are saying and anxious to get back to what they want to say. They ought, on the contrary, to reflect that such keenness to please oneself is a bad way of pleasing and persuading others, and that to listen well and answer to the point is one of the most perfect qualities one can have in conversation.

One day I hope to proffer a number of different, more elevating and inspiring models of conversation, some of which have existed in European and Asian history and involved vigorous debate, discussion, dialogue and deliberation of the highest order on matters of significance to the people of that time and place, matters that expressed shared and different beliefs and values and occasionally rather different worldviews and ideologies. They were consciously and otherwise often shaped and guided by norms of equality, rationality, sense and sensibility, sociability, and the moral psychological autonomy of individuals, while the power of their ideas and politics often rippled far beyond the circumference of their small social circles. The interlocutors in these ideal cases are minimally “sensible” and perhaps often “pleasant.” They exemplify the fine art of conversation insofar as they are attentive to the thoughts and feelings of others. This is but one example of what I have in mind:

The anarchist philosopher William Godwin (1756 –1836)* drew inspiration for his model of the anarchist society and its well-known reliance on sophisticated individual judgment as a vehicle of rationality and benevolence from “the context of the social circles in which he lived, worked and debated.” These radical social circles in turn “were part of a larger middle class community which drew on a range of philosophical and literary traditions in developing critical perspectives on contemporary social and political institutions” (Mark Philp). To be sure, Godwin drew upon the philosophes and British radicals, as well as the periphery of the early Liberal tradition (e.g., Paine), but especially the “writings, sermons, and traditions of Rational Dissent” when composing An Enquiry Composing Political Justice (first edition, 1793, later editions to 1798); but his belief in the veracity of his critique and vision was grounded in the daily life of the social circles of metropolitan radicalism in which he worked and spent his convivial and leisure activities. While this social and intellectual culture soon succumbed to government repression, it provides intimate empirical evidence that might be said to confirm Godwin’s belief—one shared with Condorcet—in the “perfectibility” (which is distinct from ‘perfectionism’) of man and the anarchist society for the provision of fertile soil for same. Godwin was not a political activist (although he knew members of radical groups and organizations) but a philosopher, but the radical social circles in which he lived temper the utopian (and crudely utilitarian) tendencies of his great work, at the very least they demonstrate the viability of at least some radical principles through their incarnation in daily praxis, even if Godwin lacked sufficient appreciation of the wider and deeper socio-economic and political conditions that made possible that praxis and served as a necessary material and political condition for radical sentiment and actions.

“Given the assumptions and conventions of his background and his social circles” writes Philp, “his position could be rationally defensible.” Godwin’s seemingly naïve faith in the power of private rational judgment was confirmed in his experience of these social and intellectual circles, which included, but were not limited to academics. In Philp’s words,

“… [Godwin’s] membership [in] a literate and intellectual culture … cannot be identified politically, socially or intellectually with either aristocratic privilege or with the potentially violent and disruptive London poor. It is in this group that we find the politically unattached intellectuals and writers who had greeted the French Revolution and who had called for reform at home on intellectual and humanitarian grounds. [While this group is] “diffuse and made up of heterogeneous social and intellectual currents … there seems to be no doubt that in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, there existed in both London and the provinces significant number of critical, literate, professional men and women who held often very radical views on social, political and religious issues who regularly met together for the purposes of discussion in a number of overlapping social and professional circles. [….] Godwin moves in the company of artists, portrait painters, engravers, grammarians, industrialists, writers, editors, publishers, antiquarians, librarians, actors, theater managers, playwrights, musicians, novelists, poets, classical scholars, scientists, dons, lawyers, mathematicians, doctors, surgeons, and divines—and this list is not exhaustive. We should also recognize that members of these groups sustained a commitment to radical thinking throughout most of the last decade of the century.”

The middling class radicalism of these men and women was not simply the product of a Dissenting background, the French Revolution, and the influence of the philosophes, for it required the warp and woof of a cultural experience of that type of sociability that formed the “basic fabric of late-eighteenth century intellectual life:”

“Once he had concluded his morning’s work Godwin’s day was free and he generally spent it in company—talking and debating while eating, drinking and socialising. His peers’ behavior was essentially similar; they lived in a round of debate and discussion in clubs, associations, debating societies, salons, taverns, coffee houses, bookshops, publishing houses, and in the street. And conversation ranged through philosophy, morality, religion, literature and poetry, to the political events of the day. Members of these circles were tied together in the ongoing practice of debate. These men and women were not the isolated heroes and heroines of Romanticism pursuing a lonely course of discovery; they were people who worked out their ideas in company and who articulated the aspirations and fears of their social group. Their consciousness of their group identity was of signal importance….”

Here we discern the skeletal structure of Godwin’s anarchist ideal of a natural society, one which is fundamentally “discursive” or, better, conversational, in other words, a society defined by “intellectually active and communicative agents, a society wherein advances are made through a dialectic of individual reflection and group discussion.” Reason and “argument” were the lifeblood of a radicalism that flourished in this kind of sociability:

“The rules of debate for this group were simple: no one has a right to go against reason, no one has a right to coerce another’s judgment, and every individual has a right—indeed, a duty—to call to another’s attention his faults and failings. This is a democratically participatory and deliberative discourse; furthermore, it artfully combines a sense of community or fraternity with individual moral and political autonomy: truth progresses through debate and discussion and from each submitting his beliefs and reasoning to the scrutiny of others.” The values of openness, rationality, and discussion or conversation that distinguished this sociability were likewise suffused with the norms and values that animated the literature of “sensibility.”

* As Peter Marshall informs us in his first-rate biography of Godwin, “At different times in his life, [Godwin] was a journalist, literary critic, satirist, political philosopher, psychologist, economist, educationalist, biographer, historian, novelist, playwright, essayist, grammarian, lexicographer, fabulist, and writer of sermons and children’s books,” as well as a nonviolent revolutionary!

       

For more on this, in addition to Philp’s book, Godwin’s Political Justice (Cornell University Press, 1986), from which the above was extracted, see too his later work, Radical Conduct: Politics, Sociability and Equality in London, 1789-1815 (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

The Ubiquity of Confabulation

Confabulation is a beautiful word for—if you will—a tragic concept. It is arguably a ubiquitous phenomenon. Assuming its ubiquity should mean that it’s likely not the case that most instances of confabulation are symptomatic of brain damage or dementia, even if some or many instances are in fact indicative or suggestive of real neuropsychological problems or disorders. In brief, it involves inaccurate or false personal or autobiographical narratives, but more formally: “confabulation is a memory error defined as the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world. People who confabulate present incorrect memories ranging from ‘subtle alterations to bizarre fabrications,’ and are generally very confident about their recollections, despite contradictory evidence.” As with delusions, confabulations are generally identified by what we term their “surface” or behavioral features and these features of necessity make reference to normative or evaluative epistemic terms: truth, rationality, justification or warrant, and belief.

As Lisa Bortolotti explains, “many of the epistemic features attributed to people with delusions and confabulations constitute infringements of norms of rationality for beliefs, such as resistance to counter-evidence, inconsistency, lack of evidential support, failure of action guidance, or as failures of self-knowledge, such as a distorted sense of one’s personal boundaries, double bookkeeping [in psychology: ‘the tendency, among those who experience delusions, to perceive reality and the delusions as both being real, while remaining unbothered by the discrepancy or inconsistencies between the two’], inaccurate autobiographical narratives and fabricated memories.” And here is where—if not why—confabulation in particular makes it hard to draw hard and fast conceptual, diagnostic and therapeutic boundaries between the fields of psychiatry (or psychology), psychoanalysis and neuropsychology: “principles of classification and diagnosis informing clinical practice and even neuropsychological research into psychiatric disorders are still parasitic on the behavioral manifestations of such disorders” (Bortolotti). The boundaries between everyday stress and distress, existential anxiety or unease, and “disorders” of the psyche, soul or mind (some of which may be etiologically ‘organic’) are likewise in question or at least fuzzy, although conceptual, medical, and mental or psychological distinctions and line drawing is no less necessary even if and when such boundaries are permeable.

I was moved to briefly introduce the concept confabulation because I came across its invocation unexpectedly in a book I am reading, Graeme Hunter’s Pascal the Philosopher: An Introduction (University of Toronto Press, 2013). Hunter relies on this technical and diagnostic concept in philosophy and psychology of mind to explain what he terms “philosophical failure.” Hunter experienced quite a few occasions in which he presented a lucid valid or sound argument on a substantive and contested or controversial topic to a “learned audience” (including his peers in the profession), its members afterwards unimpressed or unpersuaded by the argument’s conclusion, without, as befits their expertise, explaining to him (or discussing amongst themselves) what was wrong with the argument or why an apparent reaction of radical scepticism or failure to persuade was the (unwarranted) result. The characterization of this as “philosophical failure” has some precedent, Hunter informs us, not only in the writings of Pascal, but in our own time in the works of Robert Nozick and Peter van Inwagen. But Hunter, unlike Nozick and van Inwagen, wants to proffer a plausible or even persuasive explanation for this failure, and thus he summons the notion of confabulation to do so. The particular rendering of the concept, however, is a tad different than what we presented above, as it does not necessarily rely on a failure of memory as such, and thus can be considered a bit wider in scope:

“[C]onfabulation is a mental disorder some people exhibit in which, without intending to deceive, they make up explanations that sound rational [or reasonable or plausible] but are based on insufficient [or irrelevant, or improperly conceived or recalled] knowledge. It has been loosely or broadly characterized [by William Hirstein] as ‘a sort of pathological certainty about ill-grounded thoughts and utterances.’ Confabulations resemble lies, except they are believed by the teller and told without intending to deceive. And they are not like ordinary mistakes either, because the confabulator is in a position to see without difficulty [?] that what he is saying is false [while I agree that confabulations are not like ordinary epistemic or mental mistakes, I am not sure it is correct to claim that ‘the confabulator is in a position to see without difficulty’ his or her utterances are false, given what we’ve learned from over a century of psychoanalysis].”

Hunter also contends that “[c]ompelling examples of confabulation can only [emphasis added] be gathered under clinical conditions,” which I don’t think need be the case, although it is true that compelling neuropsychological, psychosomatic, or psychoanalytic explanations of the causes of same in any one individual require the constraints of the clinic for thorough symptomatic diagnosis, etiology, and (if possible) prescription or therapeutic regimen. And he proceeds to argue for a philosophical conception of confabulation to account for philosophical failure (having to do with how valid or sound arguments are received by others) based on reasons associated with professional philosophy and philosophers, which we will not address here. Yet, with him, I am extending the concept beyond what is circumscribed by “brain science” and “naturalized epistemology,” assuming (and here I may be departing from Hunter) there are credible forms of psychology and psychoanalysis (and thus philosophy and psychology of mind) that are neither conceptually nor even scientifically (when psychoanalysis is understood to be a science of subjectivity) beholden to or dependent upon neuropsychology and/or naturalized epistemology.

Given what has occurred in politics with the ascendancy of Trump and the cult that slavishly and blindly supports him, we can make armchair symptomatic diagnoses based on the behavioral manifestations of confabulation we  witness routinely in the news (be it cable television or newspaper; this is also to some extent now documented in social scientific research), to which we can of course add our own personal experiences or encounters as anecdotal evidence and/or “testimony” (construed in the manner of social epistemology). It is rather hard to resist the conclusion that “confabulation” (among other deleterious psychological phenomena: denial, self-deception, delusion, illusion, uninhibited wishful thinking, indulgence of dangerous passions or vices, etc., any or all of which in most cases is in conjunction with more commonplace cognitive biases that afflict most of us one time or another) rules the minds of millions of people in this country, the vast majority of whom proudly if not perversely avow Republican Party* identification or affiliation.

* As I earlier wrote, the GOP is a party of imaginary and delusionary grievance, of crass and cartoonish schtick, of denial and desperation, of repugnance and regression, of illusion and irrationality, of empty gestures and vain cynicism, of authoritarianism and aspirational fascism, of obscene wealth and amoral power, of sycophants and cults, of self-deception and phantasy, of white supremacy (and racism generally) and narcissistic privilege, of putatively Christian nationalism, a faux populism of bread and circuses that has failed to conceal, let alone contain, a degraded and debased political practice drowning in a toxic dump of greed, corruption, and sleaze.

Piecemeal (trial-and-error) Social Engineering and Incrementalism as Obstinate Ideological Doctrine in Government and Politics

... with some family resemblance to the fondness for and fealty to tradition, custom and, in common law, rather strict stare decisis (precedent) among conservatives of yesteryear.

I suspect the following methodological principles are not sufficiently understood in social science and history literature, but even if I’m mistaken, I am far more confident that public policy makers, politicians and administrators are peculiarly prone to violating these methodological principles when assessing constitutions, institutions, and revolutions; I think these principles are also applicable to not only social democratic and welfare state institutions, but to the various species of welfare state: liberal, corporatist, and social democratic, for example (but also what we might call ‘authoritarian’ welfare and ‘benevolent authoritarian’ welfare regimes).

“Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, was concerned to evaluate the social consequences of American institutions. The following methodological principles can be extracted from his work: (i) One must look at the consequences that emerge when the institution in question is widely used rather than marginal. [….] (ii) Any given institution will have many consequences, some of them opposed in their tendency. It is imperative, therefore, to look at their net effect. [….] (iii) One should not evaluate a given institution or constitution according to its efficiency at each moment of time, but rather look at the long-term consequences. [….] (iv) One should not confuse the transitional effect of introducing an institution with the steady-state effect of having it. The initial effect of a revolution may be loose morals, yet the steady-state effect may be to impose stricter morals. (v) The four principles just indicated can only be applied after the fact, to trace the consequences of a system that has been in operation for some time. Our knowledge about social causality is too slight to permit confident predictions about the effects of an as yet untried system. (vi) After the fact we can often perceive that the main advantage of the constitution is found in effects other than those which are its official purpose and in terms of which it makes sense to the participants.” — Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: studies in the subversion of rationality (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

As Elster says in a footnote with regard to (v), “it will not do to argue with Edmund Burke or [Karl] Popper that trial-and-error can be a substitute for well-founded predictions, since these methods fail to respect principles (i) to (iv). By requiring initial and local viability of institutional reform, the incremental method neglects the fact that institutions which are viable in the large and in the long term may not be so in the small and short term. This is, in fact, the main objection that Tocqueville makes to Burke’s evaluation of the French Revolution.”

Cf. too Robert E. Goodin’s Political Theory and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press, 1982), published a year before Elster’s Sour Grapes, in which he attributes the “lack of a proper theoretical base for policy studies” to the “perverse and pervasive doctrine of incrementalism.” Goodin’s critique is a bit more detailed and well-rounded than Elster’s, but in all fairness, Elster was focusing on methodological principles for evaluative purposes, not the doctrine of incrementalism as such (or policy studies in particular). See Goodin’s chapter 2, “Anticipating Outcomes: Overcoming the Errors of Incrementalism,” which remains an indispensable yet seldom cited critique of a policy doctrine that still, it appears, rules the minds of far too many people— be they theoretically or politically or administratively—involved in such matters. 

An incisive critique of Popper’s model of “piecemeal social engineering” from a Marxist vantage point is found in Maurice Cornforth’s The Open Philosophy and the Open Society (Lawrence & Wishart, 1968): 215-231. Incidentally, Cornforth appears neglected (or forgotten) not only (and perhaps not surprisingly) by philosophers but those on the Left as well.

Finally, to place the above within the proverbial big picture, I suggest browsing through the bibliographies for (i) Marxism, (ii) Philosophy, Psychology, and Methodology for the Social Sciences (available on my Academia page), as well as reading (iii) John Friedman’s Planning in the Public Domain: From Knowledge to Action (Princeton University Press, 1987). Should (i) and (ii) prove intimidating or overwhelming, one might instead read carefully Jon Elster’s Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

On the many and obdurate moral psychological obstacles to self-awareness (or self-knowledge), happiness, and eudaimonia (‘human flourishing’) … or individuation, self-realization and human fulfillment (Part 2)

(Part 1 is here)

Introduction

Today we continue sharing material from John Cottingham’s incisive, creative, and compelling (at least by my lights) book, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Cottingham (Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Reading and Professorial Research Fellow, Heythrop College, London) is a Catholic (he serves on the Advisory Board of the Von Hügel Institute), and his examples, explanations and reflections often draw upon his faith (as we say) while largely assuming—and I think in most cases correctly—that his arguments and conclusions apply in one fashion or to one extent or another to other traditional religious worldviews (he occasionally draws illustrations and comparisons with material from Buddhism). And while he more or less has specialized in the philosophy of Descartes (e.g., he is the co-editor and translator of the three-volume standard Cambridge edition of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes), his work as a philosopher has a far broader compass. Only a handful on contemporary philosophers (Iris Murdoch, Ninian Smart, B.K. Matilal, Jonardon Ganeri come quickest to mind) have written on religion and spirituality in a way that both resonates with and challenges me, and Cottingham is among them. I hope this series speaks to some of your abiding interests and concerns on these topics as well.

*           *           *

“What does this excursus into Freudian theory have to do with the question of spirituality and its link with mora virtue? [….] What is involved in [both the spiritual quest and the psychoanalytic quest] is a systematic programme of askesis which is linked to an interior journey—the journey to find the true self with which the smug, superior, intellectualizing, rationalizing ego is so easily confused [in brief, there are different conceptions of autonomy, some more spiritually and psychologically cogent and availing than others].

The process of growth and transformation, in order to overcome cognitive and the conative defects to which the moral deliberator is typically subject,¹ is a crucial part of what it is to become a developed human agent [that point in a person’s life in which she has fulfilled at least a necessary condition of self-realization through moral psychological individuation]: our moral lives are a journey in a much deeper sense than applies to many parts of our intellectual lives (for example our accumulating knowledge of geography or natural history). Now of course there are many moral philosophers who have acknowledged the importance of learning in the moral sphere; Thomas Aquinas, for example, was well aware of the Aristotelian stress on the importance of training and habituation in ethics [as were several notable philosophers in the Confucian tradition, beginning with Confucius], and he himself spoke of habits of virtue, describing conscience in terms of habits of will, as well as practical reasoning. But the human moral journey described in the works of the great spiritual writers (Augustine is perhaps the paradigm case, though there are many others) is radically different in its outlines—radically different from what one might call the ‘classroom’ model, a model of careful progressive moulding of habits based on innate capacities of practical intellect and will. All such ‘normal’ apparatus no doubt has its place, but, if anything like the religious worldview is correct, there is something more dynamic and more dramatic typically at work in the human spirit. As moral beings, we do not just start from a reliable innate deposit, and then accumulate information and get more skilled in processing it; rather, we gradually, laboriously, stimulated by examples, moved by parables, humbled by error, purged by suffering, begin to change. The faculty enabling us to respond in this way may be innate, and in that sense ‘natural’ (as Aquinas, for example supposed), but it also requires our being open to the possibility of transformation—in Pauline language, to putting off the old nature and taking on the new, or in the language of the Fourth Gospel, to the possibility of rebirth [religious and philosophical worldviews of Asian provenance would of course choose, in most cases, a different metaphor for this process!].

Such rebirth, for any who are sympathetic to the psychoanalytic model, will involve a guided programme of self-discovery, a struggle towards greater self-awareness and clearer resolution, whereby we are progressively freed from the shadows and projections inherited from the past, Not all religious thinkers will want to take on board all the Freudian or Jungian apparatus (though it will be very hard for anyone seriously interested in human moral and spiritual development not to acknowledge the need for at least some of it—for example the lessons to be learned concerning the battle against rationalization and self-deception, the need to recognize the shadow or darker side of the human psyche, in order to understand and transcend it). But however we work out the detail, and the structure of the required programme of askesis, the central point remains: that the healthy growth of the human spirit requires a therapeutic phase, a way of coming to terms with the obstacles to a balanced and harmonious and integrated life.

So far it may seem as if our argument simply presents the need for what could broadly be called a psychotherapeutic phase in human moral development. That itself would be a fairly ambitious result, taking us beyond what most of the leading philosophical accounts of the good life (for example those of Aristotle, Spinoza, Bentham, Mill, and even Kant) have been remotely prepared to acknowledge. But even if we grant a need for such a phase, we need to focus on one particular aspect to provide a rich understanding of what is added by a specifically spiritual dimension in the programme of askesis, and why the full flowering of the moral self may be thought to require it.

Consider for the sake of argument someone who has successfully completed a programme of psychotherapeutic analysis (the imagined case is perhaps rather artificial since it is probably a misunderstanding to envisage a final state of ‘cure’ after which everything is plain sailing, but let that pass for the present). The supposition is of someone who has begun to learn to integrate the disparate and split-off parts of the psyche, who has started to bring to the surface the buried fears and anxieties stemming from early experience, who has begun to master the techniques of self-examination and self-awareness, who has learned something of the dangerous and ever-present propensity to rationalize—the fussy attempts of the controlling intellect to manage life’s problems by neatly parceling them up and thereby concealing all that is most salient to their true meaning. How do we envisage such a person proceeding? After this imaginary ‘graduation day,’ when our subject gets up off the couch and resumes ordinary life, can the askesis of spirituality hence forth be ignored? Can our ‘cured’ patient stride forward into the clear daylight of the moral life, henceforth exercising the sober and self-confident virtue of Aristotle’s phronimos, the man of ‘practical wisdom,’ liberated from any psychological distortions that might previously have got in the way.

That is certainly one model of the good life. And indeed nothing in the present argument implies any denigration of practical wisdom and its virtues. Without the careful evaluation of evidence, accurate means-ends reasoning, calm consideration of alternatives, reasoned debate and discussion, it would be impossible for human beings to pursue the good in any systematic way. But for all that, to uphold the life of practical reason as, so to speak, the last word on the good life for humankind seems in the end both a naively optimistic position, and at the same time, an ultimately pessimistic one. It risks being naïve in so far as it places reliance on the balanced deliberation of the healthy subject to provide a sufficient basis for a fulfilled existence. Freud was more grimly realistic: you have learned to cope with neurotic misery, he said to his patients; now that your treatment is finished, learn to cope with ordinary misery. The fact is that vulnerability—to pain, to love, to fear, ultimately to extinction—is not simply a function of psychological or developmental difficulties, but is part of our very nature as human beings—one of the signs of existence, as the Buddhists have it.² And unless the moral life can be lived in a compartmentalized way, in a way that ignores or dangerously blindfolds us to that vulnerability (and this would involve a sacrifice of our wholeness, our integrity), then we are going to need an askesis [e.g., a daily regimen of spiritual exercises that includes, among other things, readings, contemplation, prayer, meditation, self-examination, the technique of prosoche, and a ‘therapy of desire’] that enables us to come to terms with it.” — John Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge University Press, 2005): 143-146.

Given Cottingham’s Catholic lifeworld (a’ lifeworld’ being the personal individuation of a worldview, religious or not), it is not surprising that he is more intimately familiar with, and argues specifically in favor of a Catholic (Christian) program and strategy of spiritual, moral and personal discipline and exercises for confronting, and embracing, existential vulnerability “as ultimately redemptive.” While mentioning Buddhism in particular, Cottingham appears to appreciate the fact that there are similar when not identical forms of askesis in other religious traditions (cf. Sufi ṭarīqah in Islam), including those of Asian provenance (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism, for instance), and these are not solely the prerogative of monastic orders or would-be mystics (arguably, the modern or post-modern age seems to be blurring the boundaries a bit between the spiritual praxis of monasticism and the religious life of the laity, most notably in Buddhism and Christianity, with Sufism providing arguably the best model of this insofar as celibacy is not institutionalized and Sufi orders seem to vary more among themselves than is the case with Christian monasticism). Moreover, the specific form of the spiritual exercises and disciplinary practices may differ, as does the metaphysical, philosophical, and in some measure, psychological presuppositions and assumptions that motivate the respective spiritual programs.

We should also note that Cottingham grants there are non-religious responses (unsatisfying or insufficient to the extent that they are ‘naturalistic,’ but he concedes that we can nonetheless speak of a—perhaps attenuated—‘spirituality’ here as well) to human vulnerability in the aforementioned sense: the Aristotelian approach, the “heroic” strategy of the Nietzschean, the “absurdist” existentialism of Camus, or the “romantic realist” (Iris Murdoch) version of Sartre’s existentialism, or the phenomenologically rich feminist existentialism of Beauvoir (Cottingham here cites only Camus).

In our third and final post in this series, the need for and role of spiritual, moral and personal discipline and exercises (which assume the possibility of transcending the natural world or the existence of non- or supra-natural metaphysical properties) will be explored further on its own terms with respect to religious pluralism as well as in relation to philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Notes

1. In a footnote stressing the significance of the distinction between cognitive (perceptual) defects and conative (volitional) defects, Cottingham states his belief that it’s “insufficiently appreciated that the aim of psychotherapeutic programmes of self-discovery is to produce a kind of self-awareness and integration in which the formerly split-off part of the psyche no longer appear as alien forces to be subdued by a ‘superior’ act of will, but instead are perceived in their true colours. The result is that our ‘cognitive’ and ‘conative’ incapacities are found to be intimately related….”
2. Cottingham is here referencing duhkha (P. dukkha), “suffering” or existential “unsatisfactoriness,” being “ill-at-ease” as fundamental ontological or metaphysical condition. It is the first of the “four truths (known by the spiritually) noble” ones (catvāry āryasatyāni, mistranslated but commonly known as the ‘four noble truths’), being a spiritually motivated symptomatic diagnosis of what ails us, as human beings (and a mark of all sentient existence). The second truth identifies different types or forms of such suffering and two principal causes (inordinate craving or desire and ignorance). The third truth is said to demonstrate, as the Buddha himself did, that it is possible, while embodied, to bring an end to duhkha. The fourth and final truth involves the therapeutic regimen of spiritual praxis needed to bring an end (nirodha) to duhkha, the path (marga) being of an eightfold nature (āryastāngamārga), with three principal sections having to do with, generally speaking, (i) morality, (ii) concentration, and (iii) wisdom. Duhkha is also one of the “three marks” (trilaksana) of all conditioned phenomena in samsāra (existence or the natural world), the other two being impermanence (anitya) and nonself (anātman).

(A list of recommended readings and relevant bibliographies is appended to the first post, and while there are no such readings this time round, additional readings will be appended to the third and last post in this series.)

On the many and obdurate moral psychological obstacles to self-awareness (or self-knowledge), happiness, and eudaimonia (‘human flourishing’) … or individuation, self-realization and human fulfillment (Part 1)

“One does not have to go all the way with Augustine and the theory of original sin in order to recognize that humans have a massive capacity to rationalize, deceive themselves, excuse themselves, convince themselves they are acting properly and sincerely, when their true motivations are often highly suspect. To take one example, it is all too clear that we rejig our assessments in our own favour: scarcely realizing it, when making decisions we interpret the balance of reasons in a way that is biased toward ourselves. I am not speaking here of the legitimate partiality that allows any sincere person of integrity to assign a certain reasonable weighting to his or her own self-interests and those of her loved ones, but rather to the distorting shadows cast by pride and vanity, and self-importance and fear and embarrassment and self-defensiveness and envy and greed and self-absorption and fantasies of power. Some contemporary moral philosophers, to be sure, write about these topics, and often they flatter themselves—or indeed quite rightly suppose—that they do so in an acute and insightful way; but one fundamental lesson of psychoanalytic thought is that the most articulate intellectuals are often the most resistant to self-awareness when it comes to their own case. That self-deception can operate right alongside the clearest intellectual grasp of all the salient features surrounding a decision is something that is not particularly easy to grasp without the personal kind of personal askesis that that makes it vivid.

The disciplines of psychoanalysis make available to the subject an understanding — one that is never final, but needs constant practical reinforcement through guided self-examination—of how present objects of choice can become invested with freight from the past, so that they take on a special significance which is opaque to the agent himself. [….] Change and growth require, if the psychoanalytic line is anything like correct, a radical vulnerability—a willingness to delve back into those early parts of our lives in which our very ability to value things, our very models of goodness and love and attraction and self-worth, were shaped and formed. That simple maxim, The child is father to the man, so rarely appreciated in its full significance by intellectualizing ethicists, tells us that we cannot overcome the obstacles to moral growth and fulfillment by intellectual analysis alone.

Nor, indeed, by intellect plus will-power.* For the other lesson of Freudian theory is that resolute determination very often does not do the job in the way we expect it to. Repression of desire, determination to ‘keep the passions in check,’ as some of the ancient philosophical programmes recommended, can simply lead to displacements of libido or psychic energy which may break out in different, but possibly even more serious ways. In a sense there is nothing new about this: the lesson is as old as Euripides’ Bacchae, and Freud’s genius was to make explicit what in one way we all knew already. But the lesson remains: we fantasize (and perhaps academics are ever more prone to this than most) that we are ‘mature,’ intelligent, rational beings who have our destiny in our own hands; but the child remains within us, and we fail to acknowledge it at our peril.” — John Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge University Press, 2005): 142-143.

* On this see chapter II, especially but not only the section on “willing what cannot be willed,” in Jon Elster’s Sour Grapes: studies in the subversion of rationality (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

A short list of suggested reading:

• Ames, Roger T. and Wimal Dissanayake, eds. Self and Deception: A Cross-Cultural Philosophical Enquiry (State University of New York Press, 1996).
• Barnes, Annette. Seeing Through Self-Deception (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
• Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron. The Subtlety of Emotions (MIT Press, 2000).
• Blackburn, Simon. Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press, 2004).
• Bryant, Edwin F., trans. The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali [with commentary and insights from the traditional commentators] (North Point Press, 2009).
• Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Polity Press, 2001).
• Desikachar, T.K.V. and Hellfried Krusche (Ann-Marie Hodges, trans.) Freud and Yoga: Two Philosophies of Mind Compared (North Point Press, 2014).
• de Silva, Padmasiri. An Introduction to Buddhist Psychology (Rowman & Littlefield, 3rd ed., 2000).
• de Silva, Padmasiri. Buddhist and Freudian Psychology (Shogam Publications, 4th ed., 2010).
• Dilman, Ilham. Freud: Insight and Change (Basil Blackwell, 1998).
• Dilman, Ilham. Raskolnikov’s Rebirth: Psychology and the Understanding of Good and Evil (Open Court, 2000).
• Dyson, Michael Eric. Pride: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Elster, Jon. Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
• Elster, Jon. Strong Feelings: Emotion, Addiction and Human Behavior (MIT Press, 1999).
• Elster, Jon. Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• Epstein, Joseph. Envy: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press/New York Public Library, 2003).
• Fingarette, Herbert. Self-Deception (University of California Press, 2^nd, 2000).
• Giannetti, Eduardo (John Gledson, trans.) Lies We Live By: The Art of Self-Deception (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000).
• Hacker, P.M.S. The Passions: A Study of Human Nature (John Wiley & Sons, 2018).
• Harris, William V. Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity (Harvard University Press, 2001).
• Hoffer, Axel, ed. Freud and the Buddha: The Couch and the Cushion. (Karnac Books, 2015).
• Marar, Ziyad. Deception (Acumen, 2008).
• Mele, Alfred R. Self-Deception Unmasked (Princeton University Press, 2001).
• Miller, William Ian. Faking It (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1994).
• Roberts, Robert C. Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• Roberts, Robert C. Emotions in the Moral Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
• Rochefoucauld, Duc de la (Leonard Tancock, trans.) Maxims (Penguin Books, 1959).
• Rorty, Amelie O. Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (Beacon Press, 1988).
• Taylor, Gabrielle. Deadly Vices (Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Thurman, Robert A.F. Anger: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Tickle, Phyllis A. Greed: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Wasserstein, Wendy. Sloth: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press, 2006).

See too the following compilations available on my Academia page: (i) Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, (ii) Dreams and Dreaming, (iii) The Emotions, (iv) Human Nature and Personal Identity, and (vi) Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy.

Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and Science

       

I (still) recall when Adolf Grünbaum’s (1923 – 2018) critique of Freudian psychoanalytic theory (and corresponding therapy) first appeared and gained fairly widespread acclaim in academic and intellectual worlds. I was then (mid-1980s) a graduate student (rather older than most of my classmates) in the Dept. of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara where the bulk of the professoriate, largely owing to Freud’s often simplistic critique of religion (mainly but not exclusively in its Judeo-Christian variations) but perhaps for other reasons as well, looked largely askance at Freud’s views on psychology and philosophy of mind. I tended to follow their lead, being a rather impressionable graduate student who, despite appearances to the contrary was, profoundly, intellectually insecure. However, cracks in my beliefs on this score began when I took a seminar on Freud which found us reading works by Jürgen Habermas and Paul Ricoeur (two of the parties, along with Hans-Georg Gadamer, also involved in the ‘hermeneutics’ debate of the time) that spoke to questions of psychoanalytic philosophy or theory, as well as delving into Grünbaum’s rather difficult book (at least for me and in those days), The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique (University of California Press, 1984). I was smitten by Grünbaum’s critique despite sensing his reliance on a rather constricted conception of science, mainly because I was not, as yet, deeply familiar with the entire Freudian corpus, let alone the literature of those that followed in his wake in the psychoanalytic tradition. I recite this biographical snippet to highlight how much one’s heretofore strongly held views can be subject to change (tantamount to a conversion experience!), in this case arising from a commitment to reading consistently and closely in a field of study over a long period of time.

Since Grünbaum’s critique, which many thought slammed the door on the idea that psychoanalysis could claim scientific status or warrant, a handful of philosophers took up a defense of Freud’s model of the mind as well as his core theoretical concepts and therapeutic aims. Grünbaum replied to some thus not all of these and continued to re-work his critique over the years. I won’t here discuss the philosophers who I believe sufficiently rebutted Grünbaum’s principal arguments (Ilham Dilman indirectly and Donald Levy directly, for example, among others), although it should go without saying that his critique, in the end, has had a salutary effect on psychoanalytic philosophy, theory, and therapy insofar as it prompted at least some psychoanalysts to think more clearly and coherently about what they are up to both inside and outside the clinic. A handful of these psychoanalysts are at the same time professional philosophers, for example, Jonathan Lear, Marcia Cavell, Jon Mills, and Linda A.W. Brakel. It is, for now, the work of Brakel that I want to highlight. She’s written three books worth the attention of anyone interested in this subject (that is, the philosophy of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis as a ‘science’ or a ‘science of subjectivity’), although I happen to be more fond of the first two than the last: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and the A-Rational Mind (Oxford University Press, 2009), Unconscious Knowing and Other Essays in Psycho-Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2010), and The Ontology of Psychology: Questioning Foundations in the Philosophy of Mind (Routledge, 2013).

I’ve mentioned Brakel’s books here before, but I recently came across her work again in a volume in which she is one of the editors: Simon Boag, Linda A.A. Brakel and Vesta Talvitie, eds. Philosophy, Science, and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Meeting (Routledge, 2015). This volume includes a more recent version of Grünbaum’s critique to which Brakel soundly and, for me at any rate, persuasively replies. For anyone still, so to speak, in Grünbaum’s corner, Brakel’s argument is a must read, as it is for those of us already convinced of the need and value of the psychoanalytic model of the mind, of psychoanalytic philosophy and theory more generally, and its correlative therapeutic regimen dedicated to the relief of common forms of suffering.

       

Is it still properly described as the GOP (‘grand old party’)?

How might or should we characterize today’s Republican Party? In other words, what generalizations* properly describe its views, its policies, and its behavior as a national political party?

The GOP is a party of imaginary and delusionary grievance, of crass and cartoonish schtick, of denial and desperation, of repugnance and regression, of illusion and irrationality, of empty gestures and vain cynicism, of authoritarianism and aspirational fascism, of obscene wealth and amoral power, of sycophants and cults, of self-deception and phantasy, of white supremacy and narcissistic privilege, of putatively Christian nationalism, a faux populism of bread and circuses that has failed to conceal, let alone contain, a degraded and debased political practice mired in a toxic dump of greed, corruption, and sleaze.

However well-intended, that makes mincemeat of Democratic rhetoric and aims on behalf of bipartisanship.

* As with all generalizations, there are exceptions of one kind and degree or another.

Objectivity and Non-Naturalism in Ethics

“It is not that goodness or rightness are ‘miraculous’ properties, or supernaturally decreed supervenience relations. Rather … goodness is like health: the criteria or its attribution to objects and actions have to do entirely with the presence or absence of certain broadly natural features, such as the tendency to alleviate suffering, the promotion of fellow feeling, respectful treatment, and the like. But the normative status of the obligations connected with such types of behaviour is, as Kant famously pointed out, not simply instrumental or hypothetical: we ought to do these things not just because we have contingently evolved to have certain inclinations, not because our society happens contingently to put a premium on certain goals, but rather because such behaviour is categorically right.”—John Cottingham, from his chapter, “Religion and Value: the problem of heteronomy,” in his profound and invaluable work, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge University Press, 2005)

As Cottingham says, “paradoxically,” the late J.L. Mackie’s characterization of moral objectivism as entailing or “implying the ‘irruption’ of value into the natural world [hence its metaphysical ‘queerness’] is in a certain sense correct.” Or, as Hilary Putnam, Raymond Tallis, or Grant Gillett, might put it, the notion of values, moral and otherwise, involves in some sense and in some way a transcendence of what we typically understand as the natural or material world. For how do we interpret the nature of the conclusive reasons we have to pursue right behavior or goodness? How do we metaphysically account for their objectivity? It seems the religious theist and non-theist alike have objective reasons that are interpreted in such a way, or making meaningful reference to, something that transcends the contingencies of human evolution or development and our individual naturalized embodiment. Avowedly non-religious philosophers who find Kant’s understanding of what we “ought” to do compelling may prescind from describing the metaphysical dimension or precise nature of this transcendence (here they might speak simply of the possibility of ‘non-natural properties’ that are not like natural ones!), they may be uncomfortable with ideas of moral teleology or moral cosmology but it seems we cannot avoid questions that take us beyond a full-throated commitment to metaphysical (or some would say ‘scientific’) naturalism. I am being deliberately provocative here by way of prompting thoughts and comments.  

The European Enlightenment: a basic bibliography

I previously announced to anyone listening that I was no longer composing lengthy bibliographies, but I had to make an exception for this one: The European Enlightenment (which was at once colonialist, cosmopolitan, and emancipatory, as well as revolutionary, liberal, and democratic ).