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end of blogging

I am through blogging. I appreciate our regular and intermittent readers over the years. The problems with the blog are ongoing and suggest to me it is time to quit. Keep up the good fight.

Best wishes, Patrick

Images/Photos not appearing in some posts

I apologize for the disappearing images and photos in some posts, including the last two. I have written to Typepad about this so hopefully it will be corrected soon. Thanks for your patience. Patrick

A thorough re-examination of the moral and political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, “precursor of modern [L]iberalism” (Larry May)—Essential Reading

I have arrived at the point where I can wholeheartedly (thus unreservedly) agree with prolific and brilliant philosopher Larry May’s statement that Thomas Hobbes is “arguably the greatest systematic philosopher to have written in the English language.” If that be too extravagant for you (e.g., those of you enamored with Hume), consider that Hobbes was “the first great philosopher to write in English.” May himself, by my lights, is our foremost philosopher of international criminal law and justice (he writes in other areas as well, as his works on shared intentionality, collective responsibility, and the morality of groups generally, attests).

More than a few respectable and well-known philosophers have made surprising mistakes and misleading if not simply incorrect interpretations of Hobbes’s ideas, however perhaps plausible and imaginative in construction. The views of these philosophers “ruled the roost” for the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond. Their portrait of his philosophical corpus long ago moved me to either ignore or dismiss Hobbes as no longer worth my attention, a portrait that happens to have been invoked and reproduced in whole or in part by philosophers and intellectuals who are not scholars of Hobbes by way of caricaturing his ideas such that he is a bête noire or strawman of many moral and political philosophers, political scientists, and their credulous students.

I am neither a Hobbes scholar nor a philosopher, but I’ll confess to having the chutzpah necessary to recommend a list of ten titles (books only) that reflect a rather different—more sophisticated, nuanced, and suggestive—picture of Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy than the one I learned at university (which was, more or less, the ‘traditional’ interpretation, although creatively enhanced by the works of ‘analytical philosophers’ in the mid- to late-twentieth century). A few of the titles below I have not read in toto but learned about them from others, their reference to and use of material from them allowing me to trust their judgment. I am sure I have not listed all the books that might meet the above criteria for inclusion but this is a good start, especially for those of us not specialists in this area but possessed of no less an avid or ardent interest in moral and political philosophy and Liberalism in particular.

• Curran, Eleanor. Reclaiming the Rights of the Hobbesian Subject (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
• Dryzenhaus, David and Thomas Poole, eds. Hobbes and the Law (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
• Gert, Bernard. Hobbes: Prince of Peace (Polity Press, 2010).
• Lloyd, S.A. Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Power of Mind over Matter (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
• Lloyd, S.A. Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Cases in the Law of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
• Lloyd, S.A., ed. The Bloomsbury Companion to Hobbes (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).
• Lloyd, S.A., ed. Interpreting Hobbes’s Political Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
• May, Larry. Limiting Leviathan: Hobbes on Laws and International Affairs (Oxford University Press, 2013).
• Sreedhar, Susanne. Hobbes on Resistance: Defying the Leviathan (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
• Zagorin, Perez. Hobbes and the Law of Nature (Princeton University Press, 2009).

Fools, Hypocrites, Zealots, and Dupes as “social character” types deaf to the voice of reason (or the reasonable)

When Republicans run for public office, at whatever level of government, one simple analytical or interpretive method to employ with regard to their campaign ads and public rhetoric in whatever fora (e.g., in person or in social and mass media) is to compare what they say to what they do not say. This will allow you to see clearly that the GOP has become a regressive Manichaean political party of inchoate grievance, resentment, fear, anger, racism and rage. They are unable to proffer a coherent and thus plausible let alone positive political platform of public policies that address the sundry problems of our time and place: from climate change to gun violence, from a crumbling infrastructure to environmental degradation, from a deformed and neglected system of public education to racial segregation, from an indefensible military budget to an inexcusably inadequate public health system, and so forth and so on. The substance of their unhinged political ambition revolves around the tired, time-worn ineffective tropes of de-regulation and privatization. The authoritarian and fascist flavor of its rhetoric has resulted in systematically deleterious effects on our electoral system and public discourse, coinciding with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court contemptuous of defensible constitutional doctrines and blithely dismissive of hard-won democratic changes that have given substance to democratic liberties and aspirations. Republicans are shameless in relying on nostalgic myths of American exceptionalism and xenophobic “Christian” nationalism. The cult of Trump, be it its leaders (who are most culpable and blameworthy) or the led, are made up of “social characters” (in Erich Fromm’s sense¹) who Thomas Hobbes long ago identified as “the Foole,” the “Dupe,” the “Zealot,” and the “Hypocrite” (the last aptly characterizes Republican leadership, being the ‘worst of the worst,’ and most vile of the vile;’ furthermore, the ‘Hypocrite pretends to believe what the Zealot believes, or what the Foole believes, but only in order to manipulate others in his grab for temporal power’).²

Notes

1. See the term, “social character,” in the respective indices of Daniel Burston’s The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991) and Kieran Durkin’s The Radical Humanism of Erich Fromm (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

2. See S.A. Lloyd’s superb discussion of these “civil characters” in the chapter, “Fools, Hypocrites, Zealots, and Dupes: Civic Character and Social Stability,” in her book, Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Cases in the Law of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2009): 295-355.

Cosmopolitan Arguments or Sym-Philosophy in Eunomia

       
Prelude

While Romanticism as a social and cultural movement is sometimes (or often?) viewed historically as a non-rational or irrational or even supra-rational reaction to ideas about reason and science prominent in the European Enlightenment, looking back it seems, to me at least, to be in some respects in keeping with the Enlightenment insofar as it often complements various facets of same or fills out those forms of sense and sensibility that did not, at the time and for some time thereafter, receive their due attention and consideration (to cite but one example: sundry types of sociability, such as salons and reading societies). I thus prefer to view Romanticism as simply softening the harder or cruder edges of European rationalism (in the end, more continuity than difference, the latter being a necessary yet not sufficient condition of the former). That said, I agree with Raghavan Iyer that the

“Romantics sought refuge from industrialism [and ‘the ideological superstructure of bourgeois capitalism’] in art and it was natural, though sad, that their apotheosis—art as a basis of moral protest—should have ended up in almost religious worship of art for its own sake. As aesthetic standards were threatened by industrialism, there was an overcompensation in the tendency to judge religion, morals, and society by purely aesthetic standards.”

Here is the opening paragraph from Kwame Anthony Appiah’s enjoyable essay in the NYRB, “Symphilosophizing in Jena,” although of course I recommend the entire piece. This is followed by a brief note from yours truly.

“The cult of individuality was born amid a melding of minds. Meldings must be preceded by meetings, of course, and the meetings took place in Jena, a university town in the German duchy of Saxe-Weimar with a population of 4,500 or so. If Jena was small, the minds that gathered there in the last years of the eighteenth century were large, and included the most consequential poets, critics, and philosophers of the era. The sparks they threw out electrified the world.”

       

A brief note:

August Wilhelm Schlegel and his younger brother Friedrich (‘Fritz’) apparently coined the term “symphilosophy” (and thus symphilosophizing), what Appiah calls “communal cognition” in this review essay. I came across this concept once before, in an article by the late Hector-Neri Castañeda, “Philosophy as a Science and as a Worldview” (in Avner Cohen and Marcelo Dascal, eds., The Institution of Philosophy: A Discipline in Crisis?, 1989), although its conception is appears to be far less vague than its original meaning among the Romantic philosophers (I do not know if Castañeda was aware of its origin, although I would be surprised if he was not). Castañeda here explains how his methodological proposal for philosophers arrives at the state of “sym-philosophy,” which is the result of seeing the world in light of both an ontology and metaphysics that respects pluralism and relative epistemic perspectives, much like what we see in Jain philosophy, with its doctrines of anekāntavāda, syādvāda, and nayavāda (and, it seems, in the spirit of Paul Feyerabend’s ‘anything goes,’ which was not so much a principle as an attitude or approach forged in the fire of rhetorical polemics with Rationalist):

“Perhaps human-world reality is not a monolith, but a many-sided perspectival structure. Perhaps the greater understanding will be achieved by being able to see human reality now one way and now another way. Thus, we need ALL philosophical points of views to be developed, and ‘developed’ is meant in earnest: the more it illustrates the harmonious unison of the encompassing Forest Approach and the riches of the Bush Approach. Hence, all philosophers are part of one team collectively representing the totality of philosophical wisdom, and individually working the details a point of view: we are ALL parts of the same human project. Looking at things this way, we realize that we need not polemicize against the most fashionable views hoping to supplant them with our own view [emphasis added]. Instead, with a clear conscience, we may urge the defenders of those views to extend them, to consider further data to make them more and more comprehensive, pursuing the goal of maximal elucidation of the structure of experience and the world. At the same time we urge other philosophers to develop equally comprehensive views that are deliberately built as alternatives. The aim is to have ALL the possible most comprehensive master theories of world and experience.

To be sure, we cannot foretell that such a plurality of views as envisaged is ultimately feasible. But neither can we prove that in the end there must be just one total view, bound to overwhelm all others. If many master views are feasible, then the greatest philosophical illumination will consist alternatively to see reality through ALL those master views. It would be still true that the greatest philosophical light comes, so to speak, from the striking of theories against each other, but not in the destruction of one theory in the striking process, but rather in the complementary alternation among them. Each master theory would be like a pair of colored glasses with different patterns of magnification so that the same mosaic of reality can appear differently arranged [this calls to mind my youthful experimentation with psychedelics!]. Here Wittgenstein’s reflections on the duck-rabbit design are relevant. The different theories of the world give us different views, the rabbit, the duck, the deer, the tiger, and so on, all embedded in the design of reality. The analogy is lame on one crucial point: the master theories of the world and experience must be forged piecemeal: with an eye on the Bush Approach, patiently exegesizing the linguistic and phenomenological data, and with another eye on the Forest Approach, building the theoretical planks (axioms, principles, theses, rules) carefully and rigorously.” [….]

Among the consequences of “pluralistic meta-philosophy” noted by Castañeda is a “later stage in the development of philosophy” in which we will be rendered fit to engage in a “comparative study of master theories of the world and experience,” or what he terms “dia-philosophy.” In other words, our master theories of philosophical structures will be sufficiently rich and comprehensive for us to be able to articulate holistic and dia-philosophical critique: “compar[ing] two equally comprehensive theories catering to exactly the same rich collection of data, and, second, assess[ing] the compared theories in terms of their diverse illumination of the data.”

“The natural adversary attitude” will take the form of “criticisms across systems or theories,” but “not as refutations or strong objections, but as contributions of new data as formulations of hurdles for steady development.” Castañeda christens the development of master theories of the world and experience  for dia-philosophical comparison “sym-philosophy:” “Thus the deeper sense in which ALL philosophers are members of one and the same team is the sense in which we are all sym-philosophers: playing our varied instruments in the production of the dia-philosophical symphony.”

       

The Myth of Normal or the Pathology of Normalcy

“Young adults in California experience alarming rates of anxiety and depression, poll finds”

Los Angeles Times, Sept. 30, 2022

By Paloma Esquivel

“Young adults in California experience mental health challenges at alarming rates, with more than three-quarters reporting anxiety in the last year, more than half reporting depression, 31% experiencing suicidal thinking and 16% self-harm, according to the results of a survey commissioned by the California Endowment. The numbers reflect a years-long trend of worsening mental health among young people that was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, experts say.

The poll of nearly 800 Californians ages 18 to 24 also found young people facing significant barriers to getting help — with nearly half of those who wanted to speak to a mental health professional saying they had been unable to do so, and many saying cost or lack of access had stopped them. [….]

The poll reveals a generation under strain from a wide range of problems, with 86% saying the cost of housing was an extremely or very serious problem and more than three-quarters saying the same about the cost of college, lack of well-paying jobs, homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, and the cost and availability of healthcare.

Mental health ranked just behind the cost of housing as a widespread problem for young adults, with 82% calling it an extremely or very serious problem. When asked to pick a word that described how they felt about their generation’s future, the two dominant feelings were uncertainty and worry.

‘If we compare this to what we get when we talk to [older] adults, we don’t see the same breadth and intensity of concern about this wide range of issues,’ said pollster David Metz of the research firm Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates, which conducted the survey. ‘I think that says something about the burdens that young people are feeling.’” [….] The full article is here.

*          *          *

The findings reported here are part of a deleterious nation-wide trend in public mental health issues (so described, this includes physiological symptoms of various kinds in keeping with our knowledge of mind-body causal interactions), as U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy warned at the end of last year. While just a hunch or suspicion (based on anecdotal evidence and trustworthy personal testimony), I’m inclined to believe the situation may be considerably worse than outlined in this article (one obvious symptom* that something is awry is the increasing rate of automobile accidents of late, which jibes with the countless daily stories from work and home of how horribly people are driving these days, including the widespread reports of ‘road rage’). Over fifty years ago, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote of the so-called normal person in contemporary society suffering from chronic low-grade schizophrenia marked by an inability to feel deeply, loneliness, anxiety, alienation and lack of creative activity. The epigraph to the Introduction to Gabor Maté’s (with Daniel Maté) latest book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture (Avery, 2022) is fittingly, therefore, a well-known quote from the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society (1955):

“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors [of formal and informal logic, reasoning, perception, cognition, etc.] does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”

Now consider, if you will, the opening paragraphs of Maté’s book:

“In the most health-obsessed society ever, all is not well. Health and wellness have become a modern fixation. Multi-billion dollar industries bank on people’s ongoing investment—mental and emotional, not to mention financial—in endless quests to eat better, look younger, live longer, or feel livelier, or simply suffer fewer symptoms. We encounter would-be bombshells of ‘breaking health news’ on magazine covers, in TV news stories, omnipresent advertising, and the daily deluge of viral online content, all pushing this or that mode of self-betterment. We do our best to keep up: we take supplements, join yoga studios, serially switch diets, shell out for genetic testing, strategize to prevent cancer or dementia, and seek medical advice or alternative therapies for maladies of the body, psyche, and soul.

And yet collective health is deteriorating. What is happening? How are we to understand that in our modern world, at the pinnacle of medical ingenuity and sophistication, we are seeing more and more chronic physical disease as well as afflictions such as mental illness and addiction? Moreover, how is that we’re not more alarmed, if we notice at all [here is where problems of cognitive dissonance, self-deception, pernicious forms of wishful thinking, and denial come into the picture]? And how are we to find our way to preventing and healing the many ailments that assail us, even putting aside acute catastrophes such as the COVD-19 pandemic? [….]

I have come to believe that behind the entire epidemic of chronic afflictions, mental and physical, that beset our current moment, something is amiss in our culture itself, generating both the rash of ailments we are suffering and, crucially, the ideological blind spots that keep us from seeing our predicament clearly, the better to do something about it. These blind spots—prevalent throughout our culture but endemic to a tragic extent in my own profession [a health care system suffused with capitalist imperatives and distortions]—keep us ignorant of the connections that bind our health to our social-emotional lives [that is, our welfare, well-being, and potential or possibilities for individual and collective human fulfillment or happiness or eudaimonia].”

* For me at any rate, another and more all-pervasive symptom has to do with deteriorating adherence to minimal standards of etiquette, good manners, and social norms more generally.

Please see, in particular, the titles below for works that support or complement Maté’s arguments about the social and cultural sources of “the entire epidemic of chronic afflictions, mental and physical.”

• Auestad, Lene, ed. Nationalism and the Body Politic: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia (Karnac Books, 2014).
• Berkman, Lisa F., Ichiro Kawachi, and M. Maria Glymour, eds. Social Epidemiology (Oxford University Press, 2014).
• Burston, Daniel. The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991).
• Durkin, Kieran. The Radical Humanism of Erich Fromm (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
• Fromm, Erich. The Sane Society (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1955).
• Glass, James M. Psychosis and Power: Threats to Democracy in the Self and the Group (Cornell University Press, 1995).
• Gruen, Arno. The Insanity of Normality—Realism as Sickness: Toward an Understanding of Human Destructiveness (Grove Press, 1992).
• Haybron, Daniel M. The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Haybron, Daniel M. Happiness: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013).
• Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009).
• Hofrichter, Richard, ed. Health and Social Justice: Politics, Ideology, and Inequity in the Distribution of Disease—A Public Health Reader (Jossey-Bass, 2002).
• Krieger, Nancy, ed. Embodying Inequality: Epidemiologic Perspectives (Routledge, 2017 [Baywood Publishing, 2005]).
• Layton, Lynne (Marianna Leavy-Sperounis, ed.) Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes (Routledge, 2020).
• Levine, Bruce E. A Profession Without Reason: The Crisis of Contemporary Psychiatry Untangled and Solved by Spinoza, Freethinking, and Radical Enlightenment (AK Press, 2022).
• Phillips, Adam. Going Sane: Maps of Happiness (Fourth Estate/Harper Collins, 2005).
• Rustin, Michael. The Good Society and the Inner World: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Culture (Verso, 1991).
• Staub, Michael E. Madness is Civilization: When the Diagnosis Was Social, 1948-1980 (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
• Venkatapuram, Sridhar. Health Justice (Polity Press, 2011).
• Waitzkin, Howard. Health Care Under the Knife: Moving Beyond Capitalism for Our Health (Monthly Review Press, 2018).

And relevant material is found in these bibliographies:

• Addiction: Transdisciplinary Perspectives
• Alternative and Complementary Medicine
• Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason
• Buddhism and Psychoanalysis
• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• Diseases, Epidemics, and Pandemics
• Health: Law, Ethics and Social Justice
• Marxism
• Marxism and Freudian Psychology
• Otto Neurath & Red Vienna: Mutual Philosophical, Scientific and Socialist Fecundity
• Psychoanalytic Psychology Beyond the Color Line
• Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy
• Public Health: Social Epidemiology, Ethics, and Law
• Sullied (Natural and Social) Sciences