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Amartya Sen on British Imperialism in India

         

This is yet another excellent article by Sen who, among other qualities, is one of our most knowledgeable and incisive public intellectuals on democratic theory and praxis, which I hope to write about in a future post.

“Illusions of empire: Amartya Sen on what British rule really did for India”

By Amartya Sen for The Guardian

29 June 2021

It is true that before British rule, India was starting to fall behind other parts of the world – but many of the arguments defending the Raj are based on serious misconceptions about India’s past, imperialism, and history itself.

“The British empire in India was in effect established at the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757. The battle was swift, beginning at dawn and ending close to sunset. It was a normal monsoon day, with occasional rain in the mango groves at the town of Plassey, which is between Calcutta, where the British were based, and Murshidabad, the capital of the kingdom of Bengal. It was in those mango groves that the British forces faced the Nawab Siraj-ud-Doula’s army and convincingly defeated it. British rule ended nearly 200 years later with Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous speech on India’s ‘tryst with destiny’ at midnight on 14 August 1947. Two hundred years is a long time. What did the British achieve in India, and what did they fail to accomplish?

During my days as a student at a progressive school in West Bengal in the 1940s, these questions came into our discussion constantly. They remain important even today, not least because the British empire is often invoked in discussions about successful global governance. It has also been invoked to try to persuade the US to acknowledge its role as the pre-eminent imperial power in the world today: ‘Should the United States seek to shed – or to shoulder – the imperial load it has inherited?’ the historian Niall Ferguson has asked. It is certainly an interesting question, and Ferguson is right to argue that it cannot be answered without an understanding of how the British empire rose and fell – and what it managed to do.

Arguing about all this at Santiniketan school, which had been established by Rabindranath Tagore some decades earlier, we were bothered by a difficult methodological question. How could we think about what India would have been like in the 1940s had British rule not occurred at all? The frequent temptation to compare India in 1757 (when British rule was beginning) with India in 1947 (when the British were leaving) would tell us very little, because in the absence of British rule, India would of course not have remained the same as it was at the time of Plassey. The country would not have stood still had the British conquest not occurred. But how do we answer the question about what difference was made by British rule?

To illustrate the relevance of such an ‘alternative history,’ we may consider another case – one with a potential imperial conquest that did not in fact occur. Let’s think about Commodore Matthew Perry of the US navy, who steamed into the bay of Edo in Japan in 1853 with four warships. Now consider the possibility that Perry was not merely making a show of American strength (as was in fact the case), but was instead the advance guard of an American conquest of Japan, establishing a new American empire in the land of the rising sun, rather as Robert Clive did in India. If we were to assess the achievements of the supposed American rule of Japan through the simple device of comparing Japan before that imperial conquest in 1853 with Japan after the American domination ended, whenever that might be, and attribute all the differences to the effects of the American empire, we would miss all the contributions of the Meiji restoration from 1868 onwards, and of other globalising changes that were going on. Japan did not stand still; nor would India have done so.

While we can see what actually happened in Japan under Meiji rule, it is extremely hard to guess with any confidence what course the history of the Indian subcontinent would have taken had the British conquest not occurred. Would India have moved, like Japan, towards modernisation in an increasingly globalising world, or would it have remained resistant to change, like Afghanistan, or would it have hastened slowly, like Thailand?

These are impossibly difficult questions to answer. And yet, even without real alternative historical scenarios, there are some limited questions that can be answered, which may contribute to an intelligent understanding of the role that British rule played in India. We can ask: what were the challenges that India faced at the time of the British conquest, and what happened in those critical areas during the British rule?

There was surely a need for major changes in a rather chaotic and institutionally backward India. To recognise the need for change in India in the mid-18th century does not require us to ignore – as many Indian super-nationalists fear – the great achievements in India’s past, with its extraordinary history of accomplishments in philosophy, mathematics, literature, arts, architecture, music, medicine, linguistics and astronomy. India had also achieved considerable success in building a thriving economy with flourishing trade and commerce well before the colonial period – the economic wealth of India was amply acknowledged by British observers such as Adam Smith. The fact is, nevertheless, that even with those achievements, in the mid-18th century India had in many ways fallen well behind what was being achieved in Europe. The exact nature and significance of this backwardness were frequent subjects of lively debates in the evenings at my school.

An insightful essay on India by Karl Marx particularly engaged the attention of some of us. Writing in 1853, Marx pointed to the constructive role of British rule in India, on the grounds that India needed some radical re-examination and self-scrutiny. And Britain did indeed serve as India’s primary western contact, particularly in the course of the 19th century. The importance of this influence would be hard to neglect. The indigenous globalised culture that was slowly emerging in India was deeply indebted not only to British writing, but also to books and articles in other – that is non-English – European languages that became known in India through the British.

Figures such as the Calcutta philosopher Ram Mohan Roy, born in 1772, were influenced not only by traditional knowledge of Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian texts, but also by the growing familiarity with English writings. After Roy, in Bengal itself there were also Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Madhusudan Dutta and several generations of Tagores and their followers who were re-examining the India they had inherited in the light of what they saw happening in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Their main – often their only – source of information were the books (usually in English) circulating in India, thanks to British rule. That intellectual influence, covering a wide range of European cultures, survives strongly today, even as the military, political and economic power of the British has declined dramatically.

I was persuaded that Marx was basically right in his diagnosis of the need for some radical change in India, as its old order was crumbling as a result of not having been a part of the intellectual and economic globalisation that the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution had initiated across the world (along with, alas, colonialism).

There was arguably, however, a serious flaw in Marx’s thesis, in particular in his implicit presumption that the British conquest was the only window on the modern world that could have opened for India. What India needed at the time was more constructive globalisation, but that is not the same thing as imperialism. The distinction is important. Throughout India’s long history, it persistently enjoyed exchanges of ideas as well as of commodities with the outside world. Traders, settlers and scholars moved between India and further east – China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and elsewhere – for a great many centuries, beginning more than 2,000 years ago. The far-reaching influence of this movement – especially on language, literature and architecture – can be seen plentifully even today. There were also huge global influences by means of India’s open-frontier attitude in welcoming fugitives from its early days. [….]

One of the achievements to which British imperial theorists tended to give a good deal of emphasis was the role of the British in producing a united India. In this analysis, India was a collection of fragmented kingdoms until British rule made a country out of these diverse regimes. It was argued that India was previously not one country at all, but a thoroughly divided land mass. It was the British empire, so the claim goes, that welded India into a nation. Winston Churchill even remarked that before the British came, there was no Indian nation. ‘India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator,’ he once said.

If this is true, the empire clearly made an indirect contribution to the modernisation of India through its unifying role. However, is the grand claim about the big role of the Raj in bringing about a united India correct? Certainly, when Clive’s East India Company defeated the nawab of Bengal in 1757, there was no single power ruling over all of India. Yet it is a great leap from the proximate story of Britain imposing a single united regime on India (as did actually occur) to the huge claim that only the British could have created a united India out of a set of disparate states.

That way of looking at Indian history would go firmly against the reality of the large domestic empires that had characterised India throughout the millennia. The ambitious and energetic emperors from the third century BC did not accept that their regimes were complete until the bulk of what they took to be one country was united under their rule. There were major roles here for Ashoka Maurya, the Gupta emperors, Alauddin Khalji, the Mughals and others. Indian history shows a sequential alternation of large domestic empires with clusters of fragmented kingdoms. We should therefore not make the mistake of assuming that the fragmented governance of mid-18th century India was the state in which the country typically found itself throughout history, until the British helpfully came along to unite it.

Even though in history textbooks the British were often assumed to be the successors of the Mughals in India, it is important to note that the British did not in fact take on the Mughals when they were a force to be reckoned with. British rule began when the Mughals’ power had declined, though formally even the nawab of Bengal, whom the British defeated, was their subject. The nawab still swore allegiance to the Mughal emperor, without paying very much attention to his dictates. The imperial status of the Mughal authority over India continued to be widely acknowledged even though the powerful empire itself was missing.

When the so-called sepoy mutiny threatened the foundations of British India in 1857, the diverse anti-British forces participating in the joint rebellion could be aligned through their shared acceptance of the formal legitimacy of the Mughal emperor as the ruler of India. The emperor was, in fact, reluctant to lead the rebels, but this did not stop the rebels from declaring him the emperor of all India. The 82-year-old Mughal monarch, Bahadur Shah II, known as Zafar, was far more interested in reading and writing poetry than in fighting wars or ruling India. He could do little to help the 1,400 unarmed civilians of Delhi whom the British killed as the mutiny was brutally crushed and the city largely destroyed. The poet-emperor was banished to Burma, where he died.

The British … were not satisfied until they were the dominant power across the bulk of the subcontinent, and in this they were not so much bringing a new vision of a united India from abroad as acting as the successor of previous domestic empires. British rule spread to the rest of the country from its imperial foundations in Calcutta, beginning almost immediately after Plassey. As the company’s power expanded across India, Calcutta became the capital of the newly emerging empire, a position it occupied from the mid-18th century until 1911 (when the capital was moved to Delhi). It was from Calcutta that the conquest of other parts of India was planned and directed. The profits made by the East India Company from its economic operations in Bengal financed, to a great extent, the wars that the British waged across India in the period of their colonial expansion.

What has been called ‘the financial bleeding of Bengal’ began very soon after Plassey. With the nawabs under their control, the company made big money not only from territorial revenues, but also from the unique privilege of duty-free trade in the rich Bengal economy – even without counting the so-called gifts that the Company regularly extracted from local merchants. Those who wish to be inspired by the glory of the British empire would do well to avoid reading Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, including his discussion of the abuse of state power by a ‘mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies.’ As the historian William Dalrymple has observed: ‘The economic figures speak for themselves. In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8% of the world’s GDP, while India was producing 22.5%. By the peak of the Raj, those figures had more or less been reversed: India was reduced from the world’s leading manufacturing nation to a symbol of famine and deprivation.’

While most of the loot from the financial bleeding accrued to British company officials in Bengal, there was widespread participation by the political and business leadership in Britain: nearly a quarter of the members of parliament in London owned stocks in the East India Company after Plassey. The commercial benefits from Britain’s Indian empire thus reached far into the British establishment.

The robber-ruler synthesis did eventually give way to what would eventually become classical colonialism, with the recognition of the need for law and order and a modicum of reasonable governance. But the early misuse of state power by the East India Company put the economy of Bengal under huge stress. What the cartographer John Thornton, in his famous chart of the region in 1703, had described as ‘the Rich Kingdom of Bengal’ experienced a gigantic famine during 1769–70. Contemporary estimates suggested that about a third of the Bengal population died. This is almost certainly an overestimate. There was no doubt, however, that it was a huge catastrophe, with massive starvation and mortality – in a region that had seen no famine for a very long time.

This disaster had at least two significant effects. First, the inequity of early British rule in India became the subject of considerable political criticism in Britain itself. By the time Adam Smith roundly declared in The Wealth of Nations that the East India Company was ‘altogether unfit to govern its territorial possessions,’ there were many British figures, such as Edmund Burke, making similar critiques. Second, the economic decline of Bengal did eventually ruin the company’s business as well, hurting British investors themselves, and giving the powers in London reason to change their business in India into more of a regular state-run operation.

By the late 18th century, the period of so-called ‘post-Plassey plunder,’ with which British rule in India began, was giving way to the sort of colonial subjugation that would soon become the imperial standard, and with which the subcontinent would become more and more familiar in the following century and a half. How successful was this long phase of classical imperialism in British India, which lasted from the late 18th century until independence in 1947? The British claimed a huge set of achievements, including democracy, the rule of law, railways, the joint stock company and cricket, but the gap between theory and practice – with the exception of cricket – remained wide throughout the history of imperial relations between the two countries. Putting the tally together in the years of pre-independence assessment, it was easy to see how far short the achievements were compared with the rhetoric of accomplishment. [….]

Alas, neither the stopping of famines nor the remedying of ill health was part of the high-performance achievements of British rule in India. Nothing could lead us away from the fact that life expectancy at birth in India as the empire ended was abysmally low: 32 years, at most.

The abstemiousness of colonial rule in neglecting basic education reflects the view taken by the dominant administrators of the needs of the subject nation. There was a huge asymmetry between the ruler and the ruled. The British government became increasingly determined in the 19th century to achieve universal literacy for the native British population. In contrast, the literacy rates in India under the Raj were very low. When the empire ended, the adult literacy rate in India was barely 15%. The only regions in India with comparatively high literacy were the ‘native kingdoms’ of Travancore and Cochin (formally outside the British empire), which, since independence, have constituted the bulk of the state of Kerala. These kingdoms, though dependent on the British administration for foreign policy and defence, had remained technically outside the empire and had considerable freedom in domestic policy, which they exercised in favour of more school education and public health care.

The 200 years of colonial rule were also a period of massive economic stagnation, with hardly any advance at all in real GNP per capita. These grim facts were much aired after independence in the newly liberated media, whose rich culture was in part – it must be acknowledged – an inheritance from British civil society. Even though the Indian media was very often muzzled during the Raj – mostly to prohibit criticism of imperial rule, for example at the time of the Bengal famine of 1943 – the tradition of a free press, carefully cultivated in Britain, provided a good model for India to follow as the country achieved independence. [….]

Nothing is perhaps as important in this respect as the functioning of a multiparty democracy and a free press. But often enough these were not gifts that could be exercised under the British administration during imperial days. They became realisable only when the British left – they were the fruits of learning from Britain’s own experience, which India could use freely only after the period of empire had ended. Imperial rule tends to require some degree of tyranny: asymmetrical power is not usually associated with a free press or with a vote-counting democracy, since neither of them is compatible with the need to keep colonial subjects in check.

A similar scepticism is appropriate about the British claim that they had eliminated famine in dependent territories such as India. British governance of India began with the famine of 1769-70, and there were regular famines in India throughout the duration of British rule. The Raj also ended with the terrible famine of 1943. In contrast, there has been no famine in India since independence in 1947.

The irony again is that the institutions that ended famines in independent India – democracy and an independent media – came directly from Britain. The connection between these institutions and famine prevention is simple to understand. Famines are easy to prevent, since the distribution of a comparatively small amount of free food, or the offering of some public employment at comparatively modest wages (which gives the beneficiaries the ability to buy food), allows those threatened by famine the ability to escape extreme hunger. So any government should be able stop a threatening famine – large or small – and it is very much in the interest of a government in a functioning democracy, facing a free press, to do so. A free press makes the facts of a developing famine known to all, and a democratic vote makes it hard to win elections during – or after – a famine, hence giving a government the additional incentive to tackle the issue without delay. India did not have this freedom from famine for as long as its people were without their democratic rights, even though it was being ruled by the foremost democracy in the world, with a famously free press in the metropolis – but not in the colonies. These freedom-oriented institutions were for the rulers but not for the imperial subjects.

In the powerful indictment of British rule in India that Tagore presented in 1941, he argued that India had gained a great deal from its association with Britain, for example, from ‘discussions centred upon Shakespeare’s drama and Byron’s poetry and above all … the large-hearted liberalism of 19th-century English politics.” The tragedy, he said, came from the fact that what ‘was truly best in their own civilisation, the upholding of dignity of human relationships, has no place in the British administration of this country.’ Indeed, the British could not have allowed Indian subjects to avail themselves of these freedoms without threatening the empire itself.

The distinction between the role of Britain and that of British imperialism could not have been clearer. As the union jack was being lowered across India, it was a distinction of which we were profoundly aware.”

Adapted from Home in the World: A Memoir by Amartya Sen (Allen Lane, 2021).

For a handful of titles on the ideology and political theory of the East India Company and British Imperialism generally, please see:

• Dalrymple, William. The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence and the Pillage of an Empire (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).
• Iyer, Raghavan. Utilitarianism and All That: The Political Theory of British Imperialism (Chatto & Windus, 1960/Concord Grove Press, 1983).
• Kohli, Atul. Imperialism and the Developing World: How Britain and the United States Shaped the Global Periphery (Oxford University Press, 2020).
• Lal, Vinay. “John Stuart Mill and India,” a review-article, New Quest, no. 54 (January-February 1998): 54-64.
• Metcalf, Thomas R. Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
• Robins, Nick. The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational (Pluto Press, 2nd ed., 2012).
• Ryan, Alan. “Liberal Imperialism” and Utilitarian and Bureaucracy: The Views of J.S. Mill,” republished in his book, The Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton University Press, 2012).

To learn more about some of the topics broached by Sen in this piece, and in addition to his works (some co-written) on India and a wide range of other subjects (e.g. justice, political economy, human development, public health, poverty and hunger, famines), I have bibliographies on facets of Indian history and civilization at my Academia page. Please see, for example, the compilations for (i) B.R. Ambedkar; (ii) Communism in India; (iii) Constitutionalism in India; (iv) The Life, Work, and Legacy of Mohandas K. Gandhi; (v) Hinduism; (vi) Indian/Indic Philosophies; (vii) Jainism; (viii) and the Varna and Caste system in India. I also have a (ix) Study Guide for Hinduism. There is much that is not covered, for example, material on Islam in India is found in my Islamic Studies bibliography as well as several specific compilations for Islam (e.g., on theology and philosophy, jurisprudence, Sufism, arts, etc.), and the history, economics and politics of famines in India is found in the compilation on famines. I have yet to compose a bibliography for Sikkhism.

And here is a short list of readings on Indian history and politics more generally (much of which is not found in the above compilations):

• Abraham, Itty. The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State. London: Zed Books, 1998.
• Abraham, Itty, ed. South Asian Cultures of the Bomb: Atomic Publics and the State in India and Pakistan. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009.
• Alam, Fakrul and Radha Chakravarty, eds. The Essential Tagore. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
• Anderson, Perry. The Indian Ideology. London: Verso, 2013.
• Arora, Namit. Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization. Gurgaon, Haryana, India: Penguin Viking, 2021.
• Bardhan, Pranab. Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
• Bass, Gary J. The Blood Telegram: India’s Secret War in East Pakistan. New York: Vintage Books, 2013.
• Berenschot, Ward. Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
• Bidwai, Praful and Achin Vanaik. New Nukes: India, Pakistan and Global Nuclear Disarmament. New York: Olive Branch Press, 2000.
• Bilgrami, Akeel. Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
• Bose, Sugata and Ayesha Jalal, eds. Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso, 2013.
• Choudhry, Sujit, Madhav Khosla, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016.
• Cullather, Nick. The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
• Dalrymple, William. The Last Mughal—The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
• Desai, Meghnad. The Rediscovery of India. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011 (Allen Lane, 2009).
• Desai, Radhika. Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics. New Delhi: Three Essays Press, 2004.
• Dhar, P.N. Indira Gandhi, the ‘Emergency,’ and Indian Democracy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Drèze Jean and Amartya Sen. An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
• Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson. Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
• Frankel, Francine R. India’s Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971.
• Frankel, Francine, et al., eds. Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Ganguly, Šumit and Devin T. Hagerty. Fearful Symmetry: India-Pakistan Crises in the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006.
• Ganguly, Šumit and S. Paul Kapur. Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia: Crisis Behaviour and the Bomb. New York: Routledge, 2009.
• Ganguly, Šumit and S. Paul Kapur. India, Pakistan, and the Bomb: Debating Nuclear Stability in South Asia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
• Ganguly, Šumit and Rahul Mukherji. India since 1980. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• Gidla, Sujatha. Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
• Glaeser, Bernhard, ed. The Green Revolution Revisited: critique and alternatives. New York: Routledge, 2011 (1987).
• Griffin, Keith. The Political Economy of Agrarian Change: An Essay on the Green Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.
• Guha, Ramchandra. India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. New York: Ecco, 2007.
• Guha, Ramchandra, ed. Makers of Modern India. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
• Habib, Irfan, ed. Akbar and His India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Hansen, Thomas Blom. The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
• Jaffrelot, Christophe. The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
• Jaffrelot, Christophe. Religion, Caste and Politics in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
• Jaffrelot, Christophe, ed. Hindu Nationalism: A Reader. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
• Jayal, Niraja Gopal and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, eds. The Oxford Companion to Politics in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Jenkins, Rob. Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Kakar, Sudhir. The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Kihlnani, Sunil. The Idea of India. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
• Kohli, Atul, ed. The Success of India’s Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Larson, Gerald James. India’s Agony Over Religion. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995.
• McLeod, Hew. Sikkhism. London: Penguin Books, 1997.
• Metcalf, Barbara D. and Thomas R. Metcalf. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2006.
• Moosvi, Shireen. Episodes in the Life of Akbar: Contemporary Records and Reminiscences. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1994.
• Nikam, N.A. and Richard P. McKeon, ed. and trans. The Edicts of Aśoka. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1959.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.
• Perkins, John H. Geopolitics and the Green Revolution: Wheat, Genes, and the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Robinson, Francis. The Mughal Emperors and the Islamic Dynasties of India, Iran, and Central Asia. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007.
• Ruparelia, Sanjay, Sanjay Reddy, John Harris, and Stuart Corbridge, eds. Understanding India’s New Political Economy: A Great Transformation? London: Routledge, 2011.
• Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
• Sharma, Jyotirmaya. Terrifying Vision: M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS and India. Penguin, 2007.
• Sharma, Jyotirmaya. Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2003.
• Sharma, Jyotirmaya. A Restatement of Religion: Swami Vivekananda and the Making of Hindu Nationalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.
• Shiva, Vandana. The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics. London: Zed Books, 1991.
• Strong, John S. The Legend of King Aśoka: A Study and Translation of the Aśokāvadāna. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
• Thapar, Romila. Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas. New York: Oxford University Press, revised ed., 1998.
• Thomas, Raju G.C. and Amit Gupta, eds. India’s Nuclear Security. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000.
• Vanaik, Achin. The Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India. London: Verso, 1996.
• Varshney, Ashutosh. Democracy, Development, and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Warder, A.K. Indian Buddhism. Delhi: Motilal Barnarsidass, 3rd ed., 2000.
• Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

The American Bishops Have Betrayed Catholicism

In 2006, the American Catholic Bishops overwhelmingly approved new documents yesterday, exhorting Catholics to refrain from using artificial birth control, describing gay sex as immoral, and saying that anyone who disagrees with key church teachings should not take Communion. I read these documents and promptly left the Church. They were demanding that taking communion ratified their bigoted and indefensible views.

Their authoritarian mindset repelled me. Before I thought I could be a dissenting Catholic. No more.

Today, they have resurrected their views and injected them into American electoral politics. Pope Francis preached this month that communion “is not the reward of saints, but the bread of sinners.” His top doctrinal official, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, wrote a letter to the American bishops, warning them that the vote could “become a source of discord rather than unity within the episcopate and the larger church in the United States.” Even if the Bishops had a clue about doctrine, their approach to communion exposes that they lack empathy, love, and savvy.

Indeed, I am reminded of a statement I heard by a noted feminist. She said that if it were not a tenet of many religions, the doctrine of hell would be regarded as child abuse. Do not get me wrong, I am not anti-religious. I have always thought that William James, Hans Kung, and Charles Taylor are right. Whether God exists cannot be proven or disproven. Reasonable people have a choice to make. Do you want to believe that the universe has no meaning or would you rather live your life on the assumption that a loving God exists?

Sour Grapes and Wishful Thinking (revised July 4th)

“Wishful thinking—the longing to bend the present world into a different and better future—is often mocked, but the plain fact is that it is a regular feature of the human condition.* Whenever we refer to the world around us in language, we habitually allude to thing that are absent. We conjecture, we say things that miss the mark, or that express yearnings for things to be other than they are. We live by our illusions. The language through which we speak is an unending sort of short little dreams in the course of which we sometimes fashion new ways of seeing things, using words that are remarkably apposite and strangely inspiring to others. The feminine dēmokratia was one of those tiny terms that sprang from a little dream, with grand effect. It was to rouse millions of people in all four corners of the world—and give them a grip on their world by changing it in ways so profound they remain undervalued and misunderstood. [….]

The roots of the family of terms that make up the language of democracy, and exactly where and when the word was first used, remain a mystery. Democracy carefully guards her secrets. Through the fog of the past only random clues appear, in the guise of wild-looking ungroomed figures bearing suggestive names like Demonax of Mantinea, the bearded, robed, sandal-shod lawmaker who was summoned (around 550 BCE) by the women of the Oracle of Delphi to grant the people of Cyrene, a Greek-speaking farming town on the Libyan coast, the right to resist the tyranny of the limping, stuttering King Battus III, and the right to gather in their own assembly to govern themselves under their own laws. Demonax may have been among the first public figures to describe himself as a friend of democracy, but we cannot be sure. None of his writings or speeches or laws has survived. That makes him a fitting symbol of the way democracy carefully guards her own mysteries against those who think they know her every way. The subject of democracy is full of enigmas, confusions, things that are supposed to be true. It harbors not a few surprises, including the certainty … that it was not a Greek invention. The belief that democracy is or could be a universal Western value, a gift of Europe to the world, dies hard. [….] The claim put forward within most Greek plays, poems and philosophical tracts, that fifth century Athens wins the prize for creating both the idea and the practice of democracy, seemed plausible to contemporaries. It continues until this day to be repeated by most observers. But it is false.” — John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy (W.W. Norton & Co., 2009)

* Keane describes here but one species of such thinking, a benign or beneficial sort, rather different from the deleterious or pernicious form that is clearly contrary to our (well-considered) self-interests and capacity for acting rationally. The kind of wishful thinking Keane is referring to is in the spirit of utopian imagination and occasionally acts on the order of a self-fulfilling prophecy, while the harmful variety, as Jon Elster explains, involves “the shaping of belief by wants, making us think the world in fact is how we want it to be.” Adaptive preference formation is in some respects the converse of benign or beneficial wishful thinking, for it adjusts our wants to possibilities. G.A. Cohen explains it like this:

“The agent’s assessment ordering bends round to favour what (he thinks) is in the feasible set.” Cohen admits some possible good effects from this response (e.g., ‘it may prevent fruitless lamentation and wasted effort’), but generally speaking, “Adaptive Preference also has great destructive potential, since it means losing standards that may be needed to guide criticism of the status quo, and it dissolves the faith to which a future with ampler possibilities may yet be hospitable. If you cannot bear to remember the goodness of the goal that you sought and which is not now attainable, you may fail to pursue it should it come within reach, and you will not try to bring it within reach. When the fox succeeds in convincing himself that the grapes are sour, he does not build the ladder that might enable him to get at them.”

Elster adds that “[b]ehind this adaptation there is the drive to reduce the tension or frustration one feels in having wants that one cannot possibly satisfy.” Elster claims a similar hedonic effect with wishful thinking generally, in which case it may not matter if the kind in question is construed as baneful or beneficial (the latter roughly in Keane’s sense above).

And thus one kind of wishful thinking, the harmful sort, makes for sour grapes syndrome. Yet when not baneful or against our true self-interests, wishful thinking can or might have, in spite of its distance from the real world (from facts or what is ‘true’), and as a by-product, side-effect, or spillover effect, what have you, a mysterious role in motivating us to struggle in concert with others, in steeling our resolve, in giving us courage, in fortifying our commitments to and for “the Good.” A caveat, however: it seems we cannot (consciously) will ourselves into wishful thinking, for it operates, as we say, behind our backs, as a sub-conscious or unconscious cognitive and psychological phenomenon that serves to irrationally resolve conflicts between beliefs and desires. Nonetheless, some psychologists believe, along the lines suggested above, that wishful thinking can “positively influence behavior and so bring about … results” that otherwise are unobtainable. “This is called the ‘Pygmalion effect.’” I therefore leave you with the lyrics to this song:

Wishing (Will Make It So)

Wishing will make it so

Just keep on wishing and care will go

Dreamers tell us dreams come true

It’s no mistake

And wishes are the dreams we dream

When we’re awake

The curtain of night will part

If you are certain within your heart

So if you wish long enough wish strong enough

You will come to know

Wishing will make it so

Sung by Frank Sinatra (among others)

Songwriter: Jeff Lynne

Originalism: the dead get the first … and last word (or, to put it positively: toward a democratically sensitive, generous, and full-bodied ‘pragmatic’ legal interpretivism*)

“In the long run, the Supreme Court has helped secure greater protection for civil rights and civil liberties not because judges are smarter or nobler, but because the American people have demanded it. When social movements like the civil rights movement or the feminist movement convince the center of the country that their claims are just, the court usually comes around. Sometimes it gets ahead of the center of public opinion, and sometimes it’s a bit behind. But in the long run it reflects the national mood about the basic rights Americans believe they deserve. The great engine of constitutional evolution has not been judges who think they know better than the American people. It has been the evolving views of the American people themselves about what rights and liberties they regard as most important to them. Rather than a set of shackles designed by long-dead slave-owners, the framers bequeathed to us a Constitution that could adapt to the needs and aspirations of each succeeding generation.” — Jack M. Balkin

I should note that, in the words of Michael C. Dorf, Balkin, “accepts what Professor Solum characterizes as the thesis that public meaning originalism and living constitutionalism are substantially equivalent. That may be [I don’t think they are substantially equivalent] but by calling ‘living constitutionalism’—which you think is correct—a version of originalism, you undermine living constitutionalism in the real world.” I believe that to be true, and since Professor Dorf wrote this in 2017, time has proved him right.

*           *           *

The latest lexical entry in Larry Solum’s Legal Theory blog is on “Originalism,”** which he introduces as “the most controversial and also perhaps the most influential” of the many different theories of constitutional interpretation. It just so happens that Solum is one of the foremost and well-known proponents of Originalism, a constitutional doctrine I believe in theory to be profoundly wrong and in practice to be often pernicious. Solum has been notoriously keen on defending the proposition that Originalism neither entails nor implies any particular position on the political spectrum, but both the formulation and application of this constitutional “doctrine” has typically been conservative and generally Right-leaning in an emphatic or vigorous way. Given our nation’s legal and political history, we might want to proclaim that “by their fruits you will know them,” or that “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” Solum here helps us make this point:

“Originalism is not just an ivory tower theory. It has had a profound influence on the practice of constitutional interpretation and the political contest over the shape of the federal judiciary. President Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork (an avowed originalist) was one key moment--with his defeat by the Democrats was seen as a political rejection of originalism. The current Supreme Court has at least three members who seem strongly influenced by originalist constitutional theory—Associate Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas. Two others Justices, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh have called themselves originalists and are receptive to originalist arguments, although seem to be open to arguments that precedent should prevail over original meaning, at least in some categories of cases.”

Solum also indirectly reminds us that the legal doctrine of “precedent” is distinguishable from Originalism although they often operate through reliance on the same or similar assumptions and premises, even if, as I believe, we can articulate a (soft or pragmatic) notion of legal precedent that differs in both letter and spirit from Originalist constitutional interpretation.

Far better minds than mine have found much to criticize in Originalist theory and I will not attempt to engage that debate or outline my own specific thoughts and misgivings which, when translated into the consideration of real world legal and political effects, involve vigorous opposition to Originalism. Solum has of course been one of its most sophisticated proponents, and his background work in philosophy has served him well, even if I think it deeply misguided.

For now I simply want to compare his introductory definition or formulation of Originalist theory with consideration of what occurs in the interpretive approach to religious narratives and doctrines which deal with similar if not identical questions of “contextualized [‘frozen’ or ‘fossilized’?] linguistic meaning.” Toward that end, consider:

“Originalism is actually a family of constitutional theories, but two ideas are common to almost all versions of originalism. The first idea is that the meaning of the constitutional text is fixed: the contextualized linguistic meaning of the words and phrases does not change over time. The second idea is that the original meaning of the constitutional text is binding: judges and officials should consider themselves constrained by the text.”

Today, the “original-meaning version of originalism emphasizes the meaning that the Constitution (or its amendments) would have had to the relevant audience at the time of its adoptions,” or “original public meaning.” Here is Solum’s helpful summary of contemporary Originalist constitutional theory:

“’Original public meaning’ is one focal point, and the distinction between ‘interpretation’ and ‘construction’ has gained widespread traction, but there are many points upon which originalists disagree. This leads to the question: does originalism have a core? One answer to this question focuses on the distinction between two dimensions of the debate about originalism. The first dimension is linguistic: the linguistic dimension of controversies about constitutional interpretation addresses the question, ‘What is the meaning of the constitutional text?’ The second dimension is normative: the normative dimension of debates about constitutional practice addresses the question: ‘How should constitutional actors (judges, other officials, and citizens) act once the meaning of the constitution has been determined?’ Almost all originalists agree that the linguistic meaning of the constitutional text was fixed at the time each provision was framed and ratified: this idea can be called the fixation thesis. Originalists have different views about the effect that the constitutional text should have, but almost all originalists would agree that at a minimum the original meaning should constrain constitutional practice: this idea can be called the constraint principle.

The point made in the prior paragraph can easily be misunderstood. New originalists who embrace the distinction between construction and interpretation concede that the meaning of some constitutional provisions is vague, and therefore that these provisions require construction that goes beyond translation of the meaning of the text into legal doctrine. The core commitment of originalism to fixed linguistic meaning does not necessarily entail fixed constructions. For example, it might be the case that the key phrases that define the constitutional separation of powers, ‘judicial power,’ ‘executive power,’ and ‘legislative power,’ have an original public meaning that was vague. Given this vagueness, much of the important work required to resolve a dispute about the application of these phrases must be done by constitutional construction. This means that originalists who share the core commitment to the idea that meaning was fixed by 1789 when the Constitution was ratified may disagree about the proper method of construction of the separation of powers provisions.

Originalists disagree about other important questions as well. In particular, there is no consensus among originalists about the normative justifications for fidelity to the original meaning. Some originalists believe that originalism is normatively justified by popular sovereignty theory: we should adhere to the original meaning because it was ratified by ‘We the People.’ Other originalists, like Randy Barnett, argue that the legitimacy of the Constitution is a function of the justice of its content. And yet other originalists have argued that adherence to original meaning is justified by the rule of law values of predictability, certainty, and stability.”

As a kind of thought experiment, we might ruminate on the various ways we’ve determined the meaning of religious texts (and not just those of the Abrahamic traditions) and what it would mean to claim such meanings are “fixed.” There is a considerable body of literature on hermeneutics and approaches to such things from both within and “outside” these religious worldviews. And there are approaches to linguistic meaning in some religious traditions that strongly resemble Originalist legal theory or at least have an Originalist “flavor” (‘fundamentalist’ Christian evangelicalism, for example). On the other hand, consider how the interpretation of religious texts has been altered by the emergence of modern “environmental awareness” and ecological understanding, as in the case of the notion of “dominion” in Gen. 1:26, which historically often taken to mean exercising “royal dominion” in the sense of power and control over the earth and its creatures, with man acting in the manner of a “king” over God the King’s creation.

Well known among ecologists and environmental ethicists, Lynn White’s 1967 Science article, “The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” argued that biblical rhetoric countenanced if not directly contributed to the development of Christianity “into the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever seen.” Whatever the merits of this argument (I’m inclined to find it rather weak), it is a vivid reminder that crude anthropomorphism is disturbing to environmentalists insofar as it is understood to encourage an image of human beings as Promethean “masters” of the natural world, the products and inhabitants of which are designed (merely) to serve our interests and needs, as this instrumentalist (i.e. non-intrinsic) valuation is rightly construed as promoting and sanctioning ecological degradation, including the devastating exploitation of natural resources and corresponding destruction or radical alteration of ecological systems and habitats, the precipitous decline in biodiversity, and the deeply troubling ill-treatment of (non-human) animals on a massive scale. Environmental consciousness, if you will, prompted many people of religious faith to look afresh at their sacred texts, and in the case of Jews and Christians, this moved them to speak of “stewardship” rather than “dominion,” indeed, there is now a fairly large body of “stewardship” theology that aims to reflect and encourage environmental awareness and responsibility, not unlike the manner in which Marxists have discovered a more “ecological” Marx by re-examining and re-interpreting much of the Marxist corpus. The “original public meaning” as it were, of several topics in these texts for both Marxists and non-Marxists has been subject to new analysis and fresh interpretation. Thus it is no longer the case that interpretation and construction need mean “The dead hold the living in their grasp.”

I do believe, however, that something on the order of “original public meaning” might serve as one kind of (soft or reasonable) legal constraint on possible or later interpretations of a Constitutional text, but it should not be strongly determinative if only because “our world” has changed (for better and here and there for worse) in fundamental ways from “their world,” and that that should play a guiding role in how we interpret the Constitution, in other words, the strictly legal dimension of this text should be construed as a governing document meant to both preserve and serve our evolving democratic needs, purposes and practices; our understanding of justice; and our overarching and corresponding individual and collective commitment to the pursuit of liberty, equality, and fraternity. As it stands, Originalist interpretation too frequently (and for a number of readily ascertainable ideological reasons or motives) distorts, deforms, neglects, ignores, runs roughshod over, misconstrues, forgets, these various needs, purposes and practices, as well as our best conceptions of justice and the contents and contour of the common and public good.

Notes

* The notion of “pragmatism” I have in mind here is more or less in at least the spirit if not letter of that found in the later works of the philosopher Hilary Putnam.

** I have taken the liberty to correct some typos in the original post.

The rational and ….

There are beliefs, actions, values, and so forth that we might define or describe as (i) rational, (ii) irrational, (iii) nonrational (the question of rationality, in other words, does not enter the picture), and (iv) para-rational, supra-rational, or extra-rational. With regard to (iv), the idea is that there is respect for rationality as such, that is, its significance, importance, value, and so on, but the phenomenon in question involves some sort of transcendence or going beyond what is rational, in other words, this Aufheben or Aufhebung involves “sublation” without abolishing, denying, or contradicting what is rational, thus “preserving” rationality while transcending it. Among the sundry phenomena we might group within (iv) we cite, in general, psychological, emotional, experiential, aesthetic, pragmatic, and religious or spiritual (including ‘mystical’) phenomena. In other words, these are not necessarily (thus they can or might be) simply irrational or non-rational but capable of being para- or extra-rational in constitution and consequence. Because we (i.e., most human animals) have a dispositional tendency to indulge in “black-and-white” thinking (thus, for instance, a failure to recognize there is a spectrum or continuum of possible positions between sanity and mental health or well-being and insanity or mental illness or disorder), we often ignore the possibility of (iv). As Nigel Warburton reminds us, on occasion there may be only, in effect, a choice between two options or positions (e.g., as in U.S. presidential elections or deciding to vote for or against a ballot proposition, etc.), but in everyday life, at least with respect to the bigger questions and decisions, that is rarely the case. (In other words, it is not always the case that if you are not for us, you must be against us.) I happen to believe that we need more consideration of what (iv) is all about, that it is often ignored, misunderstood, or dismissed vis-à-vis the “rational.”

Proverbial Wisdom: a brief introduction to proverbs

Please note: Despite the photos, I am not addressing the Book of Proverbs in the Hebrew Bible (Hebrew: מִשְלֵי, Míshlê [Shlomoh], ‘Proverbs [of Solomon’], which is part of Ketuvim, ‘Writings,’ the third section of Tanakh), what Christians call the Old Testament,¹ nor am I speaking to Erasmus’ annotated collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, Adagia,² compiled during the Renaissance.

“True enough, ordinary people do not produce bodies of written reflection expounding their views of life. [We can readily imagine several likely explanations for this fact: they are comparatively disadvantaged: oppressed or exploited, they are preoccupied with ‘making a living’ and their discretionary time, such as it is, involves entertainment or forms of escape form the drudgery or dreariness of their everyday lives, they are poorly educated, their social and economic circumstances are conducive to neither individuation or self-realization, and so forth and so on.] But other roads lead into their avenues of thought. In particular, a communal group’s proverbial dicta provide us with a window into life as seen by ordinary people—an insight into the philosophical outlook of [the masses] that would otherwise remain mute because philosophy, literature, scholarship, and other modes of written expression remain outside its range.

By common dictionary definition, a proverb is a popular maxim that pithily conveys a useful lesson or instruction. The three salient features of a proverb are thus instructiveness, brevity, and popularity. And its reason for being is to provide useful guidance in the conduct of life. Perhaps we [Rescher is speaking of philosophers and those who read philosophy] can learn but little from this source of ‘popular philosophy,’ but that little is neither uninstructive nor uninteresting. For the proverbs of a people show us how they really think about things.

Proverbs are generally anonymous, passed down from time immemorial. Sometimes, however, the dictum of an identifiable individual becomes proverbial—as, for example, Sir Robert Walpole’s cynical remark now familiarly rendered as ‘Every man has his price.’ [Donald J. Trump believed this, assuming that ‘price’ can also be metaphorical.] Proverbial wisdom is overwhelmingly concerned with the conduct of life, formulating the ‘commonsense’ lessons put at the disposal of everyone the hard-won wisdom of the sagacious. [….] Hence the bulk of it is devoted to rules and instructions (‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’). To be sure, proverbs are sometimes framed in the form of questions. But then the questions are rhetorical and do duty for an injunction. [….] Here, as elsewhere, the exception tests (not proves, save in an antiquated sense of the term) the rule: Exceptio probat regulam.

Proverbial wisdom’s messages are generally universal. In overwhelming measure, proverbs reflect constancies of the human condition and not cultural peculiarities of particular groups or eras. [Rescher here provides numerous examples in a variety of languages.] The basic message is generally universal, although the particular mode of expression may be culturally shaped in ways that call for backward [i.e., historical!] information about prevailing conditions: the English ridicule taking coal to Newcastle, the Greeks taking owls to Athens, the Indians taking pepper to Hindustan. Sometimes, however, closely kindred proverbs move off in somewhat different directions: ‘When it rains, it pours, means once troubles begin for someone, he or she has lots of them [it seems in this instance there is a ‘tipping point’ leading to ‘slippery slope’]. But ‘Cuando llueve todos se mojan’ [‘when it rains, everyone gets wet’] means once troubles begin for someone, many people are affected.”—From Nicholas Rescher’s chapter, “Proverbial Wisdom,” in his book, Human Interests: Reflections on Philosophical Anthropology (Stanford University Press, 1990): 36-41.

*           *           *

The following are “quotable” definitions of proverbs insofar as I found them clever, incisive, or imaginative, in addition to being more or less true (I also came across some ‘quotable’ definitions that did not strike me as true, while others were needlessly and thus annoyingly elitist and condescending):

• “A short sentence based on long experience.”—Miguel de Cervante
• “The sanctuary of the intuitions”—Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “Consist usually of a natural fact selected as a picture or parable of a moral truth.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “They are all made for men, for their own advantage.”—Thomas Hardy
• “The proverbs of a nation furnish an index to its spirit, and the results of its civilization.”—Josiah G. Holland
• “The wisdom of the streets.”—William G. Benham
• “The philosophy of the common people.”—James Howell
• “Few words, right sense, fine imagery.”—Moses Ibn Ezra
• “A little gospel.”—Spanish proverb

I found these in Eugene E. Russell, ed. Webster’s New World Dictionary of Quotable Definitions (Prentice Hall, 2^nd ed., 1988).

In a forthcoming post I will share Rescher’s list of ten “thematic categories” into which proverbial wisdom “for the most part falls.”

Notes

1. The Book of Proverbs is “traditionally placed among the ‘Writings’ and considered part of the wisdom literature. It consists in part of short sayings expressing in pithy form insights into human affairs, especially of a social and religious natures. The Hebrew word (māšāl) translated ‘proverb’ can mean comparison, and many of the proverbs contain a metaphor or simile. The dates of the material within the book range over a long period of time; while the final edition was made after the exile [hence ‘postexilic’], probably in the fifth century B.C.E., much of the actual contents are earlier and some of it is even pre-monarchic. The oral origins are often obvious.” For the rest of this helpful introductory entry, please see “Proverbs, The Book of,” in Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan, eds. The Oxford Companion to the Bible (Oxford University Press, 1993): 624-626.
2. “Adagia (singular adagium) is the title of an annotated collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, compiled during the Renaissance by Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. Erasmus’ collection of proverbs is ‘one of the most monumental ... ever assembled’ (Speroni, 1964: 1). The first edition, titled Collectanea Adagiorum, was published in Paris in 1500, in a slim quarto of around eight hundred entries. By 1508, after his stay in Italy, Erasmus had expanded the collection (now called Adagiorum chiliades tres or ‘Three thousands of proverbs’) to over 3,000 items, many accompanied by richly annotated commentaries, some of which were brief essays on political and moral topics. The work continued to expand right up to the author’s death in 1536 (to a final total of 4,151 entries), confirming the fruit of Erasmus’ vast reading in ancient literature.” An English translation of a selection of the proverbs made by William Barker with ample contextual and explanatory material is found in The Adages of Erasmus (University of Toronto Press, 2nd ed., 2001).

Wittgenstein on the praxis of philosophy, psychoanalytic psychology … and professional philosophy

                                                                                           

What follows is from the volume edited by John Hayes, The Selected Writings of Maurice O’Connor Drury: On Wittgenstein, Philosophy, Religion and Psychiatry (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), as well as Ray Monk’s better known biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1990/The Free Press, 1990):

Drury: “Wittgenstein constantly urged his pupils not to take up an academic post and become teachers of philosophy. Though later he did admit to me with regard to a few of his pupils he had been wrong; they had turned out to be excellent teachers. But certainly in my own case and that of many others he was most emphatic that we must earn our livelihood in some other way. This advice of his has been misinterpreted. Wittgenstein never advised anyone to give up philosophy, if by that is meant thinking about first principles and ultimate problems. [….]

Why, then, did he strongly discourage pupils from becoming teachers of philosophy. I think it was because Wittgenstein knew from his own experience that in philosophical thinking there are long periods of darkness and confusion when one just has to wait. In philosophy above all there is a time to speak and a time to keep silent [a profound understanding of the necessity and value of silence evidenced here is not that different from that found within monastic and mystical religious traditions, including yogic, contemplative, and meditative practices]. Wittgenstein had a great horror of what Schopenhauer once described as ‘professorial philosophy by philosophy professors:’ people having to go on talking when really they knew in their own heart they had nothing of value to say.”

It is hard to imagine any minimally competent professional (academic) philosopher in our time proclaiming proudly if not perversely, with Wittgenstein, that they have read neither Aristotle nor Hume! Although from within these same ranks, especially among a certain kind of “analytic” philosopher, one would not think it unusual to hear an expression of distaste for—with Wittgenstein—Hegel’s philosophy.

Wittgenstein well knew (and it was widely recognized in all the right quarters) that he possessed a “special ability” for philosophizing. “Yet whilst knowing this, for the greater part of his life he was making plans to forsake this work and to live an entirely different mode of existence to that of an academic philosopher.” Drury goes on to say that “… I am certain we will not understand Wittgenstein unless we feel some sympathy and comprehension for this persistent intention to change his life.”

In the same vein perhaps, Drury informs us that Wittgenstein once said “A philosopher should enjoy no more prestige than a plumber!”¹ I’m inclined to think there is something profoundly true and moving about this remark, which I don’t want to attempt to flesh out here. Oddly enough, the British philosopher Mary Midgley (née Scrutton; 13 September 1919 – 10 October 2018) made an analogical comparison between, of all things, philosophy and plumbing in her book, Utopias, Dolphins and Computers: Problems of Philosophical Plumbing (Routledge, 1996).

As an enlisted soldier in WW I (the ‘Great War’), Wittgenstein “became known to his comrades as ‘the man with the gospels,’” for he had taken to recommending Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief² “to anyone in distress.” What was vigorously recommended to others, for Wittgenstein, began as a need and obligation: “During the first few months of the war, the spiritual sustenance that Wittgenstein derived from reading Tolstoy’s Gospel ‘kept him alive,’ in the sense that it allowed him, as he put it, to lighten his external appearance ‘so as to leave undisturbed my inner being.’”

In the service, before being posted (as he ardently wished) to the Russian Front as “an ordinary soldier,” Wittgenstein performed “mundane clerical work” in an artillery workshop and later was “in charge—as a foreman—of the forge” there. Wittgenstein’s wartime experience included being among those captured by the Italians (one of roughly 500,000) near the end of the war, his prisoner-of-war status not ending until August 21, 1919.³

It seems more than plausible to surmise that Wittgenstein’s “persistent intention to change his life” arose both from his wartime experiences as well as periods in his life when he worked as a village schoolmaster, an architect, hospital porter, paramedic, and an independent researcher in physiology. More than once Wittgenstein considered a vocation in medicine and was always drawn to psychology. Indeed, although we learn from an “isolated remark” in one of his manuscripts that one shouldn’t (lit. ‘don’t’) “play with what lies deep in another person,” and that Wittgenstein characterized psychoanalytic therapy as “a very dangerous procedure,” attesting his knowledge “of a case [thus anecdotal evidence] that did infinite harm,” he “played” at being an amateur (psychoanalytic?) psychologist himself, as recounted by Drury:

“During his visit to Dublin [in 1938] Wittgenstein asked me if I could arrange for him to have discussions with patients who were seriously mentally ill. He said this would be a matter of great interest to him. I was acquainted with one of the resident doctors in St. Patrick’s Hospital, and I put this request to him—and it was soon arranged, after the Medical Superintendent, Dr. Leper, had an interview with Wittgenstein [!]. Wittgenstein then went two or three days a week and visited some of the long-stay patients who had few to visit them.”

It’s hard not to draw the conclusion that Wittgenstein held ambiguous and ambivalent (if not inconsistent) thoughts and feelings not only about professional philosophy but also Freudian psychoanalysis, both as a philosophy and psychology of mind and therapeutic regimen: (psycho-)analysis. Wittgenstein never formally or systematically pursued medical studies or training in psychology, a fact John Hayes attributes to his “misapprehension (certainly insofar as it pertained to British and a fortiori Irish practice) that training in psychiatry would involve a ‘training analysis’ and that would be unacceptable to him.” In both instances, this appears to stem from Wittgenstein’s intriguing conception of philosophical therapy (which might be viewed fruitfully—albeit in different proportions and with somewhat different motivations and reasons—like Freudian psychoanalysis, as existing in an ill-defined or indefinable space betwixt and between psychology and philosophy.

Notes

1. I would add—and Wittgenstein may have assumed this or taken it for granted—a “good” plumber.
2. Available in English: Tolstoy, Leo (Dustin Condren, trans.) The Gospel in Brief: The Life of Jesus (Harper Perennial, 2011).
3. “Some war memorials date the end of the war as being when the Versailles Treaty was signed in 1919, which was when many of the troops serving abroad finally returned home; by contrast, most commemorations of the war’s end concentrate on the armistice of 11 November 1918. Legally, the formal peace treaties were not complete until the last, the Treaty of Lausanne, was signed. Under its terms, the Allied forces left Constantinople on 23 August 1923.”

Wittgenstein on John Calvin and Michael Servetus

Monument to Michael Servetus in Geneva, Switzerland

I am doing a bit of exploration/research into Wittgenstein’s thoughts on religious worldviews as well as psychoanalysis and came across something I want to share, but first a brief introduction to his work as a philosopher (one who was highly critical of professional philosophy as it existed in Europe and North America).

Ludwig (Josef Johann) Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) “was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.” The following is from the introduction to his SEP (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) entry:

“Considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein played a central, if controversial, role in 20th-century analytic philosophy. He continues to influence current philosophical thought in topics as diverse as logic and language, perception and intention, ethics and religion, aesthetics and culture. Originally, there were two commonly recognized stages of Wittgenstein’s thought—the early and the later—both of which were taken to be pivotal in their respective periods. In more recent scholarship, this division has been questioned: some interpreters have claimed a unity between all stages of his thought, while others talk of a more nuanced division, adding stages such as the middle Wittgenstein and the third Wittgenstein. Still, it is commonly acknowledged that the early Wittgenstein is epitomized in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. By showing the application of modern logic to metaphysics, via language, he provided new insights into the relations between world, thought and language and thereby into the nature of philosophy. It is the later Wittgenstein, mostly recognized in the Philosophical Investigations, who took the more revolutionary step in critiquing all of traditional philosophy including its climax in his own early work. The nature of his new philosophy is heralded as anti-systematic through and through, yet still conducive to genuine philosophical understanding of traditional problems.”

Wittgenstein often had a noticeably profound impact on his students and emerging young philosophers who knew him, as well as others like Maurice O’Connor Drury (3 July 1907 – 25 December 1976) who, while not a philosopher (he was a physician and psychiatrist), “had a long and deep friendship with Wittgenstein.” According to Wittgenstein’s biographer, Ray Monk, Drury’s book, The Danger of Words (1973), is “the most truly Wittgensteinian book published by any of Wittgenstein’s students.” He was befriended by such intellectual giants of his time as the economist John Maynard Keynes and the “brilliant Cambridge mathematician,” Frank (Plumpton) Ramsey, both of whom “had ’plotted’ (as Ramsey’s sister put it) over most of the 1920s to entice Wittgenstein back to Cambridge.” Some of the earliest philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein include Rush Rhees (a student, friend, and Wittgenstein’s literary executor), Norman Malcolm, and Georg Henrik von Wright (Wittgenstein’s successor at Cambridge). Among those philosophers who knew Wittgenstein but were a bit more independent from him, philosophically speaking, include Elizabeth Anscombe and her husband, Peter Geach, as well as John Wisdom. Finally, philosophers who were more indirectly influenced by Wittgenstein’s philosophical work include A.J. Ayer and Gilbert Ryle, and perhaps J.L. Austin (he appears to have denied this influence). Later, a number of philosophers were frank about their debts to the writings of Wittgenstein (and are sometimes christened ‘Wittgensteinians’), including Peter Winch, D. Z. Phillips, Ilham Dilman, and Hanna Fenichel Pitkin (yes, the daughter of the Freudian psychoanalyst, Otto Fenichel). More recently, P.M.S. Hacker and the late G.P. Baker are contemporary philosophers devoted to explicating much of Wittgenstein’s philosophical corpus (Hacker is the author of a remarkable tetralogy in ‘philosophical anthropology:’ (i) Human Nature: The Categorial Framework [2007], (ii) The Intellectual Powers: A Study of Human Nature [2013], (iii) The Passions: A Study of Human Nature [2018], and (iv) The Moral Powers: A Study of Human Nature [2021]). Among other contemporary philosophers beholden in one way or another to Wittgenstein’s work we should include Cora Diamond, the late Stanley Cavell, and James F. Conant.

I hope this provides at least a taste of Wittgenstein’s philosophical “genius” and legendary powerful personality or character. However, Wittgenstein could also be, as we say, all-too-human, and I want to illustrate this with a snapshot from one particular conversation he had with Drury as retold in the volume of the latter’s selected writings edited and introduced by John Hayes. Rush Rhees once “assured [Drury] that Wittgenstein had spoken to him about [religion] more than to anyone else.” As Hayes writes, “If Rhees was correct, it may have been because Wittgenstein found in Drury someone knowledgeable about issues concerning biblical interpretation [hermeneutics] and the history and theology of the Christian churches, who was to boot a committed believer [Anglican].” Near the end of the conversation in question, we learn that

“… when Wittgenstein reflected on R.H. Tawney’s attempt to link Calvin to the rise of bourgeois civilization in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) [an argument distinct from and in part a response to Max Weber’s classic study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in German in 1905], he considered Tawney [an economic historian, social critic, and Christian socialist] too daring in his willingness to criticize ‘a man such as Calvin must have been.’ Even when Drury told him that Calvin had Michael Servetus [Miguel Serveto (29 September 1509 or 1511 – 27 October 1553) a Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer, and Renaissance humanist] burnt for heresy on account of his views on the doctrine of the Trinity, this did not dispose Wittgenstein to modify his estimation of Calvin; he thought Servetus’s action in interrupting Calvin’s preaching in Geneva to press his case as a courting of his own death and Calvin could have done no other than he did in the circumstances!”

I might have added a few more exclamation points, but needless to say, this is a morally outrageous reading if not obtuse and inexplicable re-description of this horrific episode in religious, legal, and political history. The Wikipedia entry on Michael Servetus is quite good for much of the relevant historical details.

The U.S. Senate and the elusive hope for sober democratic deliberation

Peggy Noonan reported on Saturday that “15% of Americans agree that the government, media, and financial worlds are controlled by Satan-worshipping pedophiles.” Hopefully, most of them were simply casting contempt on the pollsters, but the distance between the crazies and the Trumpers is trivial. Many of us are outraged by the fact that the Republicans are out to prevent their opponents from voting and are unwilling to condemn the Orange Monster.

But it is worth noting that our constitution is deliberately anti-Democratic. The Senate is obviously anti-majoritarian. Eliminating the filibuster would help make the Senate more democratic, but the sunny Founder’s hope that the Senate would be a place of sober deliberation has become a pipe dream.

Please note: I am posting this for Steve Shiffrin, although I am responsible for the title. By way of reinforcing his argument, one might read Robert Dahl’s democracy-motivated critique, How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (Yale University Press, 2^nd ed., 2003).

Ludwig Wittgenstein: philosophical and religious—or spiritual—therapy

I have long suspected—alongside others—that Wittgenstein understood both philosophy and religion in some sort of “therapeutic” sense insofar as that means a profoundly spiritual and ethical orientation that puts a primacy of spiritual praxis, the search for truth, and living a life suffused with what are often thought to be religious (but not exclusively religious) or spiritual virtues such as love, compassion, profound respect of others as persons and the natural world, faith, trust, and selflessness, for example (this being far from exhaustive of ethical and religious virtues), all the while struggling, to cure the “diseases of belief and desire,” in the words of David Burton in his essay on Buddhist philosophical therapy (in the edited volume by Ganeri and Carlisle below). Either directly or as a welcome by-product of such spiritual praxis, one often finds an arduous and passionate commitment to the amelioration, relief, and elimination of the unnecessary and debilitating suffering of others. There is a perhaps vague if not poorly understood kind of existential if not psychological suffering intrinsic to the human condition and human nature that does not appear to be eliminable, at least for the overwhelming majority of us, although some religious worldviews of Asian provenance—Jainism, Buddhism, and  Pātañjala Yoga, for example—provide us with what they take to be exceptions to this rule; in fact, they believe, in principle, that such suffering can be absolutely transcended and thus eliminated.

I am now beginning to learn more precisely what Wittgenstein’s somewhat elusive spiritual therapy entailed, partaking as it does of elements commonly ascribed to both philosophical and religious worldviews. In doing this I am relying primarily, in addition to some things Wittgenstein wrote about Christianity and religion more broadly (and his discomfort with professional philosophy), on only five sources: (i) Ray Monk’s well-known biography of Wittgenstein (1990), (ii) Garry L. Hagberg’s “The Thinker and the Draughtsman: Wittgenstein, Perspicuous Relations, and ‘Working on Oneself,’” in Jonardon Ganeri and Clare Carlisle, eds. Philosophy as Therapeia (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 66) (Cambridge University Press, 2010): 67-81, (iii) Maurice O’Connor Drury’s (John Hayes, ed., with Foreword by Ray Monk), The Selected Writings of Maurice O’Connor Drury: On Wittgenstein, Philosophy, Religion and Psychiatry (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), (iv) James Kellenberger’s The Cognitivity of Religion: Three Perspectives (University of California Press, 1985), and (v) John Forrester and Laura Cameron, Freud in Cambridge (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Although I cannot commit to even a rough date, as I have several other reading and writing projects ongoing, I hope to be able to make significant sense of what I am learning about Wittgenstein’s “spiritual therapy”(my characterization) so as to share it with you in a coherent if not meaningful fashion.

Images: sculptures by Elizabeth Catlett

On Facts … and Values

A fact-value dichotomy is pernicious and profoundly (or epistemically, morally, and psychologically) mistaken. While conceptually and otherwise distinguishable, facts and values are best viewed in a necessary or obligatory relation of entanglement. Because fascist and proto-fascist members of the cult of Trump in the Republican Party have played loose with facts since (and to a significant extent before) Trump first campaigned for the Presidency, in other words, because they have ignored or distorted facts, have lied about what is factual, preferring myths, illusions, delusions, and phantasies to a social and ontological reality that is intrinsically connected to determination of what is true, to a concern for what bears a connection to socially supported and warranted or justified facts, there’s been a tendency in mass and social media to rely on and emphasize a rather simplistic or crude or convenient notion of facts that blithely ignores fact/value entanglement if only because it raises philosophical and ethical topics that are not easily addressed in such communicative fora.

Explaining this entanglement involves invoking contested notions of reason, rationality and reasonability; of objectivity, generalization and universalizability; of moral and conceptual relativism or perspectivalism; of truth; of instrumental and intrinsic values; of emotions and passions; and so forth and so on. Moreover, it raises the role played by obdurate prejudices and passions, by “personal affinity, loyalty and affective involvement with individuals and groups” that often display symptoms of mental illness or psychopathology, by ideological allegiances that are close-minded and calcified, relying on what Albert O. Hirschman termed the “rhetoric of reaction” that in turn rests on the theses of “perversity,” “futility” and “jeopardy.” Finally, were we to publicly and sufficiently address the nature of fact/value entanglement we would need to speak to the dispositional preference for that species of wishful thinking that privileges our peculiar or idiosyncratic wants and desires in a manner that runs roughshod over evidence and argument, that habitually indulges in self-deception and denial, that orients itself around a regressive narcissistic hedonism.

The following snippets are intended to serve as an introduction to the topic of fact/value entanglement.

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

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

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

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

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

“(1) In ordinary circumstances, there is usually a fact of the matter as to whether the statements people make are warranted or not. [….] (2) Whether a statement is warranted or not is independent of whether the majority of one’s cultural peers would say it is warranted or unwarranted. (3) Our norms and standards of warranted assertibility are historical products; they evolve in time. (4) Our norms and standards always reflect our interests and values. Our picture of intellectual flourishing is part of, and only makes sense as part of, our picture of human flourishing in general. (5) Our norms and standards of anything—including warranted assertibility—are capable of reform. There are better and worse norms and standards.” — Hilary Putnam

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

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

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

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

“[T]here is no logical incoherence in supposing that facts and propositions are relative to conceptual schemes and that truth is the correspondence of (relative) propositions with (relative) facts.” — Michael P. Lynch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suggested Reading: There is an enormous number of articles and books one might include here, and while I usually attempt to provide one with a sense of the abundant relevant literature on a particular topic, this time I leave you with but two sources!

• Putnam, Hilary. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Harvard University Press, 2002)
• Rescher, Nicholas. “Value Objectivity,” in his book, Objectivity: The Obligations of Impersonal Reason (University of Notre Dame Press, 1997): 172-196.