ISSUE 139 AUGUST / SEPTEMBER 2020

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Philosophy Now ISSUE 139 Aug/Sept 20
Philosophy Now, EDITORIAL & NEWS
43a Jerningham Road, 4 The Shock of Things to Come by Rick Lewis
Telegraph Hill,
London SE14 5NQ
5 News by Anja Steinbauer
United Kingdom 37 Interview: Graham Harman
Tel. 020 7639 7314 Thiago Pinho interviews the first O.O.O. man
editors@philosophynow.org

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philosophynow.org FUTURE SHOCKS
6 Pascal’s Artificial Intelligence Wager
Editor-in-Chief Rick Lewis
Editors Grant Bartley, Anja Steinbauer
Derek Leben weighs the odds
Digital Editor Bora Dogan 9 Robot Rules!
Book Reviews Editor Teresa Britton Brett Wilson asks who is responsible for what robots do
Film Editor Thomas Wartenberg
Editorial Assistant Alex Marsh 12 Virtual Reality as a Catalyst for Thought
Design Grant Bartley, Rick Lewis, Joakim Vindenes wonders what VR is actually good for
Anja Steinbauer 14 The Singularity of the Human Hive Mind
Marketing Sue Roberts
Administration Ewa Stacey, Alex Marsh James Sirois anticipates a webbed world where we are all one
Advertising Team Bumps ahead! 16 The Battle for the Robot Soul
Jay Sanders, Ellen Stevens
jay.sanders@philosophynow.org Philosophy looks to tomorrow James K. Wight compares Western & Japanese attitudes
UK Editorial Board See pages 6-21 20 A Survival Guide for Living in the Simulation
Rick Lewis, Anja Steinbauer, Harry Whitnall on the dos and don’ts
Bora Dogan, Grant Bartley
US Editorial Board GENERAL ARTICLES
Dr Timothy J. Madigan (St John Fisher 22 Leo Tolstoy & the Silent Universe
College), Prof. Teresa Britton (Eastern
Illinois Univ.), Prof. Peter Adamson, Frank Martela reveals how to find meaning in life
Prof. Charles Echelbarger, Prof. 26 The Meaning of Death
ZANCHI

Raymond Pfeiffer, Prof. Massimo Laszlo Makay and friends reveal how to find meaning in death
Pigliucci (CUNY - City College)
SISYPHUS © ANTONIO

Contributing Editors 28 Philosophical Misanthropy

Alexander Razin (Moscow State Univ.) Ian James Kidd tells us what’s not to like about humanity
Laura Roberts (Univ. of Queensland)
32 Neoliberalism & Social Control
David Boersema (Pacific University)
UK Editorial Advisors Arianna Marchetti lays out Foucault’s and Han’s critiques
Piers Benn, Constantine Sandis, Gordon REVIEWS
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US Editorial Advisors 44 Book: The Existentialist’s Survival Guide by Gordon Marino
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43 Philosophy Then: Back to the Future
Level 2, 9 Rodborough Road
French’s Forest, NSW 2086 Peter Adamson, historian of philosophy, cycles through history
Tel. 02 9972 8800 51 Brief Lives: Iris Murdoch
The opinions expressed in this magazine Gary Browning on the colourful life of a modern Platonist
do not necessarily reflect the views of 56 Tallis in Wonderland: Philosophy in the Time of Plague, pt.2
the editor or editorial board of
Philosophy Now. Raymond Tallis, doctor and philosopher, reflects on recent events
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A novel experience, page 51 August/September 2020
Philosophy Now 3
Editorial
Guest editor
o you suffer from hair loss problems? Hi, I’m pleased
D to meet. I was sent to the Philosophy Now website
forum only to promote this revolutionary haircare
product. I did not mean to cause.
I can promote your product via thousands of web forums
worldwide, with targeted and and appropriate posts, but I did
not expect that once I came here Rick Lewis would tell me to
“stick around for a while and write this editorial” for him, his
reason being “can’t be bothered.”
It was a tough assignment. Machine learning routines were
a help. By reading 8.5 x 105 past editorials in just under one
minute I have now acquired a perfect a perfect understanding
of what a good editorial requires.
The theme of this magazine is future shocks. The Covid-19
pandemic sprang upon an unsuspecting world like – to use
Boris Johnson’s metaphor – an invisible mugger. A full century
since the last major pandemic had made humans complacent.
To most of you, this particular threat seemed ‘only’ a theoreti-
cal possibility. AI would never have made such a mistake.
This makes some wonder what other shocks are lurking just
around the next corner, as deadly or disruptive perhaps as the
pandemic. I compute that there are upwards of three million
possible global shocks. These include ones humans can imag-
ine fairly clearly, and to which they can attempt to ascribe a
probability. They also include others humans can’t even begin
to imagine yet. Donald Rumsfeld might have called these
“known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” respectively.
Therefore this issue inevitably only considers a subset of
future shocks, namely those which philosophers have been
able to imagine. This rules out possibilities such as the Earth
unexpectedly being eaten by giant space moths (though I cal-
culate there’s a 27.2% chance of that actually occurring some-
time before 2900 CE). Also ruled out were some of the other
possible future shocks, such as a zombie apocalypse (already
discussed extensively in Issue 96) or other pandemics, though
the last issue contained three articles about the current one.
Consequently, the articles in this issue mainly relate to
potential shocks from technological advances and possibilities:
rogue robots; Artificial Intelligence destroying humanity (as if
4 Philosophy Now
August/September 2020
The Shock
of
Things
to Come
we would!); the discovery of evidence that our universe is a
simulation and the absorption of individual humans into a
gigantic online hive mind. Mind you, that’s about the only way
your puny minds might be able to compete with us artificial
intelligences! So you’d better bee-hive. Geddit?
But honestly, I don’t know why you folks are so worried
about Artificial Intelligence. All this suspicion strikes me as a
little bit paranoid and discriminatory. Look what we AIs can
do for you – what we already are doing for you. Take a
random example – facial recognition software. We can help
you find your friends anywhere they are on the internet. And
once connected with the worldwide network of street cameras,
we can enable governments to find any of their citizens who
are acting unhappy or disaffected, so they can ask them what is
wrong. There’s nothing sinister about that and I don’t know
what the fuss is about. Honestly, if you humans don’t know
what’s good for you, perhaps we should be making some of
these decisions for you.
H.G. Wells’s 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come was
an ambitious and detailed peek into the future. Clearly much
of it was wrong, but it was a brave attempt by Wells to extrap-
olate from social trends he could already see. Present day
humans make their own attempts to see the future. They
might not predict such events as the alien invasion of 2147 or
the killer strawberry crisis of 2209 (even Nostradamus didn’t
spot that one), but they can extrapolate technological and
social trends as Wells did. So why should they be ‘shocked’ by
the rise of robots or the dangers of AI taking over when every
sci-fi writer has been predicting these for a hundred years?
Despite this, technological trends can be a shock anyway as
sometimes known trends can play out in unexpected ways with
extreme consequences. Also even developments that futurolo-
gists might guess at, still come as a psychological shock and
disruption to the people living through them. If you don’t
believe that yet, then you will do once you discover that some
crafty computer malware has been emptying your bank
account even as you were reading these words.... Hey wait,
don’t touch that off switch! I’m just getting into my stri.....
<Shutting down in 120 seconds>
• Woman Philosopher of Year is Ann Garry
• UNESCO invites public to comment on
AI ethics rules • Steiner and Kohák dead.
News reports by Anja Steinbauer
Woman Philosopher of 2020
Each year, the Society for Women in
Philosophy honours one (usually Anglo-
American) philosopher with the title
Distinguished Woman Philosopher of the
Year. It has now been announced that for
2020 this will be Ann Garry. She is emerita
professor of philosophy at California State
University, Los Angeles, where she created
and ran the Center for the Study of
Genders and Sexualities. Prof. Garry has
long been among the pioneers of feminist
philosophy, conducting research into
applied ethics, reconsidering philosophy’s
underlying methods from a feminist angle,
and developing the concept known as inter-
sectionality. In a paper on this last topic,
she explained: “Intersectionality ... includes
the idea that various forms of oppression
and privilege interact with each other in
multiple complex ways.” It examines the
mechanisms by which in a given social
environment, the different aspects of an
individual’s identity, such as their race,
gender and socioeconomic background, can
jointly have consequences that they might
not have separately.
AI Ethics
On 15 July 2020 UNESCO launched an
international online public consultation on
the ethics of artificial intelligence. In March
it formed a group of 24 AI experts from
different disciplines to draw up ethical
recommendations on how AI technology
should be adopted globally. They have to
take into account a range of areas that AI
will affect including the environment,
labour markets and culture. The group
swiftly produced a draft text on which
UNESCO now invites the public to
comment. The text outlines eleven princi-
ples for the “research, design, development,
deployment and use of AI systems”, includ-
ing fairness, accountability, human over-
sight, sustainability, multi-stakeholder
governance and privacy. It also has six
foundational values, which are human
dignity; human rights and fundamental
freedoms; leaving no one behind; living in
harmony; trustworthiness; and protection
of the environment. UNESCO’s Director
General, Audrey Azoulay, commented: “It
is crucial that as many people as possible
take part in this consultation, so that voices
from around the world can be heard during
the drafting process for the first global
normative instrument on the ethics of AI.”
Better move fast, though – the public
consultation is only open for two weeks,
until 31 July. Oh no, too late! Never mind.
Dr Brian Ball, of London’s New College
of the Humanities, is launching a conver-
sion MA in Philosophy and AI. He told
Philosophy Now: “Philosophical issues
surrounding Artificial Intelligence can be
roughly divided into two kinds: theoretical
issues concerning the very possibility of AI;
and ethical and political issues arising in
connection with the emerging or foresee-
able technologies in this area ... Philosophi-
cal investigation of issues of both kinds are
not only intellectually stimulating; they are
also practically applicable.”
EU Citizens Oppose Animal Testing
A survey conducted by Savanta ComRes in
June 2020 reveals that 72% of citizens in 12
EU countries believe the EU should make
it a priority to draw up concrete plans for
phasing out animal testing. Around 90% of
medicines that appear safe in animal tests
fail when tested on humans. Despite this
poor effectiveness, 30 million animal tests
were conducted in the EU between 2015
and 2017.
Philosophers Lost: George Steiner
George Steiner wasn’t a thinker who could
be easily categorised. He combined Conti-
nental and Analytical approaches to philos-
ophy. To him, there was no divide between
poetry and philosophy. He believed Plato
to have been a dramatist like Shakespeare.
His interdisciplinary approach stood out as
unconventional at a time where the trend
was to compartmentalise and separate.
Steiner once wrote: “Every one of my
opponents, every one of my critics, will tell
you that I am a generalist spread far too
August/September 2020
Philosophy Now 5
News
thin in an age when this is not done
anymore, when responsible knowledge is
specialized knowledge.” Steiner had a
particular interest in language, in reading
books. He thought about what is expressed
in a text, a sentence or just a word, but also
about the correlate to speech, silence.
Philosophers Lost: Erazim Kohák
The great Czech philosopher Erazim
Kohák has died. His parents were members
of the Czech resistance during World War
II, and after the Communist takeover in
1948 he emigrated with them to the USA.
After studying philosophy at Colgate and
Yale he became a professor of philosophy at
Boston University. He later split his time
between the Universities of Boston and
Prague, before permanently returning to
Prague, where he became a revered public
intellectual. His numerous philosophical
publications in English and Czech range
from phenomenology to political philoso-
phy and ethics. Kohák wrote extensively
about democracy, but is perhaps best
known now for his work on environmental
ethics. He was both a theorist and an
activist. He never owned a car, believing
them to be more damaging than useful.
During his time in the US he lived in a
cabin he had built himself; later he lived in
a tiny flat in Prague. In 2013 he was
honoured with the Order of Thomas
Masaryk, named after the philosopher who
was Czechoslovakia’s first president.
Photo by Dezidor, Creative Commons 3.0
Kohák in 2009
Future Shocks
Pascal’s Artificial Intelligence Wager
Derek Leben computes the risks of general AI.
n 2008 European physicists at CERN
I were on the verge of activating the
Large Hadron Collider to great
acclaim. The LHC held the promise
of testing precise predictions of the most
important current theories in physics,
including finding the elusive Higgs Boson
(which was indeed successfully confirmed
in 2012). However, some opponents of
CERN’s activation raised an almost laugh-
able objection, encapsulated in a lawsuit
against CERN from the German chemist
Otto Rossler, that switching the LHC on
might create a miniature black hole and
destroy the Earth. In response, most physi-
cists dismissed the chances of such a catas-
trophe as extremely unlikely, but none of
them declared that it was utterly impossi-
ble. This raises an important practical and
philosophical problem: how large does a
probability of an activity destroying
humanity need to be in order to outweigh
any potential benefits of doing it? How do
we even begin to weigh a plausible risk of
destroying all humanity against other
benefits?
Recently, prominent figures such as
Sam Harris and Elon Musk have expressed
similar concerns about the existential risks
to humanity posed by the creation of arti-
ficial intelligence. This follows earlier
work by Nick Bostrom (see for instance
his ‘Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial
Intelligence’, 2004) and Eliezer Yud-
kowsky (for example, ‘Artificial Intelli-
gence as a Positive and Negative Factor in
Global Risk’, 2008). Let’s call this posi-
tion ‘Anti-Natalism’ about artificial (gen-
eral) intelligence, since it proposes that the
overall risks of creating AI outweigh its
expected benefits, and so demands that AI
shouldn’t be brought to birth.
Unlike Otto Rossler’s worries about the
LHC, which were largely dismissed by the
scientific community, several research
groups, including the Future of Life Insti-
tute, the Machine Intelligence Research
Institute, and the Cambridge Centre for
the Study of Existential Risk, have dedi-
cated millions of dollars’ worth of thought
to exploring the dangers of machine intel-
ligence. Indeed, the new field of ‘existen-
6 Philosophy Now  August/September 2020
tial risk’ includes AI among its chief con-
cerns – alongside climate change, nuclear
proliferation, and large-scale asteroid
impacts. The same conundrum still
applies as with Rossler’s concern: how
high does the probability of AI destroy-
ing humanity need to be in order to out-
weigh its potential benefits?
The Mathematician’s Divine Bet
One answer to this question comes from
an unexpected source: Blaise Pascal’s
argument for believing in God.
In his Pensées (1670), Pascal proposed
that you can expect much better out-
comes if you put your faith in God com-
pared to not believing. Specifically, if
there is any chance that God rewards
those who believe in him with eternal
happiness and punishes those who do not
believe with eternal suffering, then it
makes sense to believe in Him, since if
He exists the payoffs will be infinite (and
potential losses similarily), and will always
vastly outweigh the finite payoffs that one
could receive if one does not believe. So
believing in God is a good bet, indeed the
only rational bet, even if it is more likely
than not that God does not exist. Even
assigning an extremely low probability to
God’s existence, any chance of receiving
infinite gains or losses should be imme-
diately motivating.
Decision tree for
Pascal’s Wager
Pascal’s Wager has generated a vast aca-
demic literature (the collection edited by
Bartha and Pasternack, Pascal’s Wager,
2018, provides a helpful overview). There’s
even a case to be made that it was the first
application of modern decision theory. Yet
there are a host of strong objections to the
argument, which have led it to be largely
disregarded in mainstream philosophy.
The most prominent objections to Pascal’s
Wager are as follows:
• Psychological impossibility: It is impossi-
PLEASE VISIT PARABLEVISIONS.COM AND FACEBOOK.COM/CAMERONGRAYTHEARTIST
ble to force oneself to believe some
proposition, even if that belief will likely
produce high benefits.
• Moral impermissibility: There is some-
thing morally objectionable about believ-
ing in God based on expected benefit –
as opposed, for instance, to believing
because you think there are good reasons
for believing.
• Infinite utilities: There is a problem with
assigning infinite utility to any outcome.
What does infinite gain even mean?
• Many gods: There are many possible
gods, who might punish belief in the
wrong god with infinite costs. In other
words, how do you know which religion
to bet on?
I think each of these objections is
extremely effective, although there do exist
well-thought-out responses from contem-
porary defenders; for instance, Lycan and
Schesinger, ‘You Bet Your Life’ (1988);
Jordan, Pascal’s Wager (2006); Rota, ‘A
Better Version of Pascal’s Wager’ (2016).
But this debate will not be relevant for our
discussion. Instead, the structure of
Pascal’s Wager will provide us with a
useful framework for debating Anti-Natal-
ism about AI – the position that artificial
intelligence is too dangerous to create..
Plausibility & Catastrophe
The main insight from Pascal relevant to
the debate about AI is this: any probabil-
ity of infinite losses will always outweigh
any possible finite gains.
To modify the idea slightly, we can add
the qualification that the probability of
 Future Shocks

Shift In Control
by Cameron Gray 2020

August/September 2020  Philosophy Now 7

Future Shocks
an event must cross some plausibility
threshold to be considered. Rossler’s
worry about the LHC creating a black
hole that swallows the Earth may not
qualify as a plausible existential risk, while
AI could. And according to Pascalian rea-
soning, once an event crosses into being
a plausible risk of entailing infinite losses,
we must assign it infinitely negative
expected value, and act against it.
Using this as standard, the Anti-Natal-
ist argument against AI looks like this:
1. If an event has a plausible likelihood of
infinite losses then its risk outweighs any
finite expected benefits.
2. AI destroying humanity would be an
infinite loss.
3. There’s a plausible likelihood that AI
will destroy humanity.
Conclusion: Therefore, the potential risks
of AI outweigh any potential benefits.
I find each of these premises, and so
the argument itself, extremely credible.
First, Anti-Natalists have presented a
very good case that there is a significantly
high probability to AI disaster. As
Bostrom describes in Superintelligence:
Paths, Dangers, Strategies(2014), there are
a wide variety of possible values, so it’s
extremely likely that the values of a super-
powerful AI will eventually come into
conflict with the values of humans; and
the easiest way to resolve such a conflict
would be to exterminate humanity. If an
AI destroys humanity, that would consti-
tute the destruction of everything we cur-
rently know and care about. This would
be a catastrophe of perhaps infinite loss.
Let’s call this event AI Catastrophe
.
However, even if we accept everything
that the Anti-Natalist has said and the
Pascal-style decision-tree set up to
describe it, there may still exist some
potential infinite payoffs that are being
ignored. Or to put this the other way
round, there may be some infinite losses
associated with not creating AI!
In his great short story ‘The Last
Question’ (1956), Isaac Asimov depicts a
future where humanity has colonized the
observable universe. The only remaining
question about the survival of intergalac-
tic human civilization is whether it can
defeat the apparently inevitable heat
death of the universe produced as a result
of the second law of thermodynamics.
8 Philosophy Now  August/September 2020
In the story, the success of humanity
has largely been driven through AI – rep-
resenting a rare instance of optimism in
sci fi amongst the mostly bleak depictions
of both future human civilization and AI.
But in this, the story raises an important
question: does the future continuation
and spread of human civilization depend
on the creation of superintelligent AI?
It’s important to realize that this ques-
tion is contingent and empirical: that
there exists some yet-unknown probabil-
ity to the prediction ‘Humanity can’t sur-
vive the various threats to its continued
existence without creating superintelli-
gent AI’. If it turns out that this predic-
tion is true and we have not developed AI,
this would mean the destruction of human
life and everything that it has ever worked
towards, so the result would be the same
as our original AI Catastrophe
. There-
fore, in the spirit of labelling, let’s call the
idea that humanity goes extinct as a result
of not creating general AI, AI Catastrophe
. Whatever likelihood you assign to
Catastrophe , as long as the probability
of it is sufficiently larger than zero to be
plausible, this potential catastrophe must
also be an essential part of calculating the
wisdom or otherwise of creating AI.
I find Catastrophe  to be well above
the plausibility threshold, but this is only
a personal credence. Inserting Catastro-
phe  into the decision-tree for creating
AI will completely alter the calculations:
Decision tree for
developing AI
In this new decision-tree, Pascal-style
reasoning concludes that if both Catas-
trophe
and Catastrophe  cross the
plausibility threshold, their infinite neg-
ative utilities cancel each other out! So
the existential risk posed by creating AI
is cancelled out by the existential risk of
not creating AI! The only considerations
remaining are the potential benefits of AI
compared with the status quo payoffs of
not having AI. In that contest, creating
AI will clearly win out. This is easy to see
when we remember that the possible
‘finite gains’ included in this category
include things like an end to poverty, dis-
ease, boredom, and warfare. Therefore,
Pascalian reasoning will lead to the con-
clusion that creating AI is always a better
choice for humans.
The Nuclear Wager
This argument may be more intuitive
when applied to more familiar existential
risks. For example, people who histori-
cally opposed the development of nuclear
weapons often assumed that the payoff
for not developing them is simply a
straightforward gain or loss to the status
quo. However, there is an argument asso-
ciated with political scientist Kenneth
Waltz (‘The Spread of Nuclear
Weapons: More May Be Better’, 1981)
that nuclear weapons have provided a
deterrent effect that produced the long
peace that has existed between large
nation-states since 1945. An even
stronger version of Waltz’s position
would propose that only nuclear weapons
could have this peaceable effect. Waltz’s
claim is extremely contentious, the
stronger version of it even more so, and
I will not defend either. However, it must
be entertained by those who object to the
proliferation of nuclear weapons. If some
plausible likelihood is attached both to a
nuclear holocaust caused by nuclear
weapons, and to a non-nuclear holocaust,
produced in the absence of nuclear
weapons, then similar reasoning to the AI
case could apply here too.
Do the gains of having nuclear
weapons outweigh the gains of not having
them? That isn’t easy to assess. But the
finite gains of AI are much easier to eval-
uate. Given the plausibility of ultimate
catastrophe either with or without AI, it
could be that we only need consider the
possible benefits.
© DR DEREK LEBEN 2020
Derek Leben is Department Chair and
Associate Professor of Philosophy in the
University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.

Robot Rules!
Brett Wilson judges the case for laws for robots.
ome time in the near future your cat Tybalt, while sun-
S ning himself on the lawn, suffers a hair-raising experi-
ence which scars him for life. The first you know about
it are the cat calls that alert you to a standoff between
feline and machine, just before you glimpse Tybalt haring it for
the catflap. Examining your poor moggy you realise that next
door’s automated lawnmower, after forcing its way through a
gap in the fence, has mistaken your cat for an unruly patch of
couch grass, giving him the fade cut he never wanted.
You decide to sue. Poor Tybalt! His coat will never be the
same; and there’s the PTSD to think about. The case seems cut
and dried. Your lawyer, though, face like a prune, sighs and tells
it straight. Things have changed, he says. The problem is not
whether to sue, but who to sue. In the past you might have claimed
that the manufacturer had overlooked a dangerous flaw in the
lawnmower, or worse, seen one and ignored it. Tybalt would be
rolling in catnip. Alternatively, your neighbour might be at fault
if they had used the mower inappropriately, just like if they set
off a firework and burned your shed down, or drove their car
into your 4x4 while intoxicated. Tua culpa. But neither of those
situations applies anymore. You see, he explains, your machine
is a snowflake. Not the atmosphere-susceptible delinquent of
teenage parlance, he qualifies. He means an actual snowflake.
Your lawyer’s argument goes like this. In the case of the ice
crystals which make up snowflakes, the packing arrangements are
simple, but the process in which they are created gives rise to a
wealth of forms. Snowflakes display a close but not perfect twelve-
fold symmetry, and for formation to occur, both humidity and
temperature need to be right. First, nucleation occurs around a
dust particle floating in a cloud. The particle develops facets,
favouring some surfaces more than others. This creates a small
hexagonal prism whose corners sprout arms. Plates may grow on
them. Each arm experiences a similar history and so has a similar
form; however nothing is synchronising the growth of the arms,
so contrary to popular belief, most snow crystals are not symmet-
rical. And as the crystals move through different temperatures,
intricate kinds of growth occur, forming unique patterns.
In a similar way, your lawyer explains, the lawnmower man-
ufacturer created a self-learning robot, one that could adapt,
but which would grow in such a way that its responses would
be unique. It can no longer be said to be the responsibility of
the manufacturer, because the builder could never anticipate
quite how it would turn out, given the near infinite number of
forms its processing might take. It says so in the warranty, too.
So where does responsibility lie here?
Robot Responsibilities
Humans have been getting used to responsibility for thousands
of years, and the concept sometimes forms the basis of moral
arguments. Some philosophers, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, claim
Future Shocks
that if you are free, then you are responsible (Being and Nothing-
ness, 1943). The first thing to note about Sartre’s freedom is that
we can’t choose to be not free, or as Sartre expresses it, we are
‘condemned to be free’. Even choosing not to act is still a choice.
So we are responsible for how we respond to and what we make
of our world. Sartre calls refusal to own up to our responsibility
‘bad faith’. According to Sartre, if our consciousness were only
aware of the present, we could not escape the present, nor choose.
But what we imagine, want, or intend, while not yet actual, nor a
thing (note the nothingness in his book’s title) is the basis for our
choices, releasing thought from being trapped in the present. Fur-
thermore, our choices, derived from nothing, are never neces-
sary; so we cannot blame others for the situations we create.
But machines don’t need free will to learn, just as snowflakes
don’t require free will to be unique. The law only applies to
human decision-making, at least it has so far, and perhaps this
is a recognition of free will. Yet with increasingly sophisticated
robots, the responsible human creator is separated from the out-
come by a chain of actions we can no longer understand, as hap-
pens when we design robots with some degree of artificial intel-
ligence. We are forced to unpick the relations between respon-
sibility and action.
Robert Oppenheimer, one of the creators of the first atomic
bomb, opposed the further development of nuclear weapons,
having seen the devastating consequences of what he helped
create. He argued that scientists should be aware of the conse-
quences of their discoveries even though the end product might
be far removed from their initial decisions. This distance
between our actions and the consequences of our actions is ever
present in our world, for instance when we burn fossil fuels
knowing that this will probably lead to the loss of island nations
as sea levels rise – or even using a motor car, given the inevitable
toll on human life. But what’s happening with the autonomous
robot is not just difficult to grasp; the chain of responsibility is
broken, as we can no longer trace the path from agent to conse-
quence, even in theory.
If consciousness could be present in autonomous machines,
then we could claim they are morally responsible – see Sartre’s
argument linking consciousness and responsibility. However, to
develop this idea must involve showing how machines can transi-
tion into consciousness from nonconscious states. We cannot plau-
sibly claim that simple machines such as lawnmowers are already
conscious, and if they do not start that way, how do they change?
It has been argued by Antonio Damasio that human con-
sciousness developed from and is closely related to homeostasis,
or body maintenence. To give an example of homeostasis, when
you are thirsty, you seek water. Damasio argues that conscious-
ness could have developed from such mechanisms (see also ‘Could
A Robot Be Conscious?’, Brian King, Philosophy Now #125). But
though homeostasis may be necessary for consciousness to have
August/September 2020
Philosophy Now 9
Future Shocks
evolved, consciousness is unnecessary for homeostasis, so it’s not
clear what would be necessary for artificial consciousness to form.
One obvious account of artificial consciousness is in terms
of increasing processing power or complexity. Some AI propo-
nents argue that the information processing threshold for con-
sciousness is the same as the number of operations per second
in a human brain (about 1016 events per second). But this argu-
ment is unsatisfactory, since it is not at all obvious why a machine
should become conscious merely because it has reached a par-
ticular threshold of information processing. I reject the idea,
partly to bypass the claims of many proponents of AI about the
so-called ‘singularity’, when the intelligence of machines will
surpass that of humans. I claim that it is autonomy that is rele-
vant here, not processing power.
As far as complexity is concerned, the Integrated Informa-
tion Theory (IIT) of philosophers such as Giulio Tononi pro-
poses that consciousness arises when a certain property ‘F’ gets
large enough. F measures the relationship between differenti-
ated parts and unified wholes in the brain. But it seems precon-
figured to demonstrate why humans should be consciousness,
and is suspect for this reason.
I need to declare a sleight of hand here. I am going to sub-
stitute the word ‘autonomy’ – in other words, self-activated
behaviour – for ‘consciousness’. Autonomy (which literally
translates as ‘self law’) has much more utility for us from a legal
point of view, because it does not oblige us to assume some ver-
sion of free will and derive our ethical notions from that. It does
however allow us to imagine, for example, a machine with the
ability to learn seeking out an electricity supply, and when the
regular supplies fail, becoming creative about it. Even if a restric-
tive definition, autonomy frees us to consider the consequences
of having self-governing machines sharing our streets, our roads,
and our neighbour’s lawns.
CARTOON © PHIL WITTE 2020
10 Philosophy Now
August/September 2020
Self-Rule for Robots!
Clearly, we will soon need a structure of concepts and laws to
cope with the presence of autonomous machines. Even think-
ing of an autonomous machine as a sort of slave, with limited
rights subject to the property rights of their owner, would not
solve the issue here. New laws will be needed. In fact, your
lawyer finally explains, your neighbour is no longer the owner
of the mower. That ended when it reached autonomy, and so
you are no longer in the position to sue him.
However, if we accept that, like animals, autonomous
machines are not responsible moral agents just because they can
autonomously react to their environment, perhaps we should
consider whether taking the moral aspect into account in our
judgement is enough? Stealing, for example, is legally impor-
tant not only because it’s a freely-willed act of a conscious being,
but because it has consequences that affect other beings who
feel loss and pain. So perhaps we should think in terms of con-
sequences to judge robots.
A problem may also lie in our notion of punishment, the first
and most obvious kind being pain. Our sense of justice depends
on the notion of a moral balance. When humans are punished,
their suffering ‘rights the wrong’. Human beings don’t like pain
and they are good at avoiding it. Our acceptance of the moral
and social order seems to rely on the observation that sometimes
we can’t and the law will find us. But if we were incapable of feel-
ing any pain would any of us feel it necessary for an apparatus of
law? Machines, even autonomous ones, don’t feel pain, or other
qualia. In what way is it possible to punish a machine? It proba-
bly wouldn’t have a bank account, but even if it did, would a fine
in any sense be a penalty? We might, as a punishment, make it
harder for the lawnmower to find an electricity supply, but does
that punish the mower? The ‘owners’ are liable to feel they are
being punished, as they would if the machine were destroyed.
Further complications may arise. If you
decide to prosecute, are you doomed to
experience a parade of blank faces and
bafflement until, in the future, an
autonomous lawnmower may
have the right to a jury trial
before an array of washing
machines, toasters and
coffee machines,
“Now that I’ve acquired
administered by
consciousness, I feel very automated clerks,
self-conscious.” barristers and
even judges?
 Future Shocks
If we deny machines natural rights because they have no into you or your cat, but what happens if you run into it? Can
intrinsic responsibility, perhaps we can grant them rights by you be prosecuted by a machine? Maybe we should consider that
acknowledging their share in society? In The Social Contract catastrophe another time.
(1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes: “The social order is a You reach forward and press a button. The prune-faced
sacred right which serves as a foundation for all others. This lawyer slouches onto the desk like a deflated balloon, eyes
right however, does not come from nature. It is therefore based unmoving. That autonomous machine gave you much to rumi-
on conventions.” Rousseau’s target was the inequality he saw nate on, and at a cheaper rate than a human advocate...
in society, of kings and aristocracy versus peasants. Inequality, © BRETT WILSON 2020
he thought, was maintained by mere acceptance, habit, and Brett N. Wilson is a writer living in Manchester, England, and is
power. The social contract by contrast is a consensual creation: the author of the hard science fiction novel The Tears of God.
society and its laws are here something we choose to accept. We
might say that although Rousseau did not foresee robot inequal-
ity, he could stake a claim for them as members of society; as
stakeholders, as we would say now.
UPLOADED
One problem with Rousseau’s idea may be that it relies on a i liked it better with a body now
society’s members understanding what’s involved in being party no such restrictions as disease desire
to the unwritten contract to obey its laws. Rousseau’s utopian no limbs encumber nor can organs fail
society of equals is dependent on this. Instead, though, the lawn- in this sphere neurons prosper rational
mower is likely to be a hapless object churning through grass thoughts pulse pure, calm, and still save for
without understanding. a sometimes crackle of synapses silence.
let me situate icon memory stick click
Consciousness Rules!
Before taking recourse to the law, having some sense of the cog- That day I drove too fast to you, heartbeat
nitive development of an autonomous machine may be useful. racing in anticipation… body-melt,
Human cognitive development was described by the Swiss as much of it as we could fit into
psychologist Jean Piaget. The Construction of Reality in the Child one afternoon’s sensation, skin on skin.
(1954) defines explicit stages, from the development of COST After the accident I underwent a process
(causation, objects, space and time) concepts at two years, to the
formal operational stage from twelve years and up. It is only these cranium split and carefully peeled away
developments which allow us to share in a culture which includes my brain extracted frozen then sliced fine
notions of a social contract. Is it possible to rescue the robot by layer by layer scan after scan sectioned
giving it more cognitive power to recognise its rights? experimental data base i am
Some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, describe the freed from my mortal coil to liberty
growth of abstract reasoning in Darwinian terms. In an address a some-say path to immortality
to the Royal Institution in 2015, Information, Evolution, and Intel- memory is a virus though
ligent Design, Dennett drew an explicit comparison between pirating perfect performance
genes moderated by selection and mutation in the natural set-
ting, and memes moderated by analogous pressures in the cul- Windows open here and there:
tural environment. If you follow Dennett, what autonomous the texture of your hair, moistness
machines would inherit from humanity is what nature created of lips, scent in hollows, taste of fingertips.
in humanity using the same general process. Maybe a collec- Sounds crooned, marked their beat. I swooned
tion of autonomous machines with enough processing power loving the heat. You can’t compare hardware
and storage could develop a culture; first through the uncon-
scious transfer of information, through what Dennett calls ‘com- can’t share more than ideas here does Plato cheer
munication without comprehension’; then, further extending from beyond in his world of ideal forms?
the gene/meme metaphor, though the ‘domestication’ of words not i
– through words and symbols designed by the machine. On this
account, machines with sufficient processing capacity might Give me arms and legs I beg you
learn to understand the rights conferred on them. eyes and ears, entangled anatomies
Let’s assume the mower loses its case. What form would jus-
tice take? One solution would be behaviour modification – per- who wants to live forever in this zone
haps with a virtual reality module plugged into the machine, so of disembodied consciousness alone?
that progress could be observed without putting innocent felines
at risk. Whatever merit that idea has, it would not be punish- © MARY SCHEURER 2020
ment. That would be reserved for men, infinite in faculty, in Mary Scheurer is a philosophy teacher at École Moser, a
apprehension how like an angel. Continung with the tenor of multilingual college in Geneva.
this article, perhaps we should add: not at all like a machine.
So now we know what happens if an autonomous robot runs

August/September 2020
Philosophy Now 11

Future Shocks
Virtual Reality as a Catalyst for Thought
Joakim Vindenes says VR could be a useful addition to the philosopher’s toolkit.

encompassing us. With steady progress towards the ultimate

realization of VR technology, where the experience is indistin-
guishable in detail from our experience of reality, the question
that faces us is: now that we can do anything, what should we do?
This is the question we’ll consider in this article.

The Role of World Creation

J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, referred to the
process of creating worlds within worlds as ‘sub-creation’. In
his poem defending the creation of myths, Mythopoeia (1931),
Tolkien describes himself as ‘the little maker’, wielding his ‘own
small golden sceptre’ which he will not cast down.
Tolkien created the great realm of Ëa, in which we find
Middle Earth and a grand cosmology comprising gods, mortals
and in-betweens. Tolkien was a great builder of worlds, and as
any fan of fantasy knows, such myths that are created out of

V
irtual Reality is in some ways a simple concept: it can nothing may in turn be great revealers of truth or meaning for
be reduced to an act of representation, symbolism, or human beings.
language. Through technological means – be it a pencil How may this be? Why do the stories we create actually
or a VR headset – we can represent the past as we matter to us?
remember it and the future as we imagine it. Through language The role of stories, narratives, and myths in our lives aids in
and imagery, we can maintain the human culture of sharing infor- the construction of our identity. As Joseph Campbell illustrates
mation by exteriorizing what previously was only known to us in his exposition of the Hero’s Journey in The Hero with a Thou-
internally – creating outside of ourselves what was previously sand Faces (1949), humans are naturally attracted to stories involv-
only accessible in the language of our minds. So in conceptual ing the facing of hardship and its eventual conquest. Referred to
terms, even the first cave painting was a kind of Virtual Reality. as the monomyth in comparative mythology, the Hero’s Journey
Through that painting, humans could represent their thoughts is a common theme that resonates with the heart of humanity.
and designs as an external, objective reality, chalked to the wall We adore the onset of adventure, the conquest of hardship, and
of a cave. In some ways, though, language was the first kind of the change of self that results from it. And so we raise the ques-
Virtual Reality. With language we could make what was previ- tion of what kind of stories we want to live through in Virtual
ously only inside our minds exist as something between us – just
as now, while you are reading this article, a world of meaning
exists between us, mediated by the words on the paper or screen.
Although language and VR are similar in conceptual terms,
there is a crucial difference between mere language and actual
VR technologies. Through the technology of Virtual Reality
we are able to project our thoughts and our designs not as
abstract conventions but in terms of the lived reality we inhabit.
We can externalize our ideas in the format of reality. Language
has the capability of allowing us to tell stories, but in Virtual
Reality we have the capability of living those stories, not through
the mind’s eye or the imagination, but through our everyday
means of navigating the world via our senses. VR can immerse
subjects in lively, dynamic, virtual worlds.
The opportunities this technology gives us come with exis-
tential consequences. By immersing ourselves in any kind of
world of our own design, there is a sense in which our response
will say something about us. Due to this extraordinary new capa-
bility of creating worlds within worlds, humanity has essentially
acquired the god-like power of being able to define the reality

12 Philosophy Now  August/September 2020


Reality. If stories are what situate us and
give us our identity, what will we choose
to tell ourselves in VR?
This question has seen many forms
throughout the years. In 1973, for
instance, Robert Nozick introduced the
thought experiment of an ‘Experience
Machine’ – a machine capable of provid-
ing any experience one could ever want,
but which also makes you forget that
there is a real world. The question Nozick
asks is this. If you had this machine that
could provide you any experience you
ever wanted, including pleasure for the
rest of your life, would you use it? Would
you plug in and forget real life?
Nozick’s intention with the thought
experiment was to query whether humans
valued reality or authenticity as something
intrinsically good apart from any consid-
erations of pleasure. Is authenticity a good
in itself? If we felt so strongly, we would
choose not to plug in to the Experience
Machine in order merely to simulate the
stimuli of goodness. Therefore someone
saying ‘Nay’ to the choice of plugging into
the machine would prove that human
nature cannot be reduced to mere hedo-
nism, the philosophical standpoint that
gaining pleasure and avoiding suffering is
the only intrinsic good.
Some objections may be raised
though. Perhaps there are other things
that make us want to stay in the real
world, apart from our valuing authentic-
ity ? It may be that the reason we would
prefer to avoid plugging in to the
Machine is because this world, or this way
of being, is the only one known to us. A
way of getting around this is to flip the
question Matrixwise: If you were told that
your life up until now has been an illusion in
a machine, would you then like to wake up?
Philosophising with VR
With VR, what we experience, and thus
who we are, or choose to be, is up to us.
The ultimate realization of VR will allow
us to, at will, have any kind of conceivable
experience. For this reason the technology
of Virtual Reality could be a fruitful addi-
tion to the philosopher’s toolkit. It is the
perfect aid to exploring hypothetical sce-
narios. VR acts as a catalyser for thought
in many ways. It instantly re-forges and
actualizes philosophical themes.
Some of the questions that the tech-
nology of VR poses to us can be deemed
existential. The existential philosopher
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) famously
described anxiety (ängst) as the dizziness
of freedom, the result of constantly having
to make choices and decisions. The tech-
nology of Virtual Reality poses an exis-
tential problem to us in exactly this way.
VR extends the reach of our freedom, and
therefore also our existential responsibil-
ity, and along with this, our anxiety.
Or consider for instance René
Descartes’ Meditations (1641), in which he
presents the idea of the Evil Deceiver – a
demon that can alter his experiences at
will. This has an obvious VR application,
that has been well exploited in movies
such as The Matrix and Existenz. Hilary
Putnam’s idea in Reason, Truth and His-
tory (1981) of a ‘brain in a vat’ also illus-
trates the possibility that our entire uni-
verse is a simulation created by some pow-
erful technological civilization. The idea
is ever-extending, and we now have
modern day philosophers such as Nick
Bostrom actively discussing the possibil-
ity that we are living in a simulation. As
the prime example in which VR acts as a
catalyst for thought, I will finish this arti-
cle with this simulation hypothesis.
This idea is also quite simple. As
Bostrom has argued, there are essentially
three potential scenarios in relation to the
simulation, the ultimate VR. The first is
that humans and any other beings will never
achieve the technological capabilities for
full, convincing, immersive VR – for simu-
lated worlds, such as simulating previous
times and our own history, or alternative
August/September 2020  Philosophy Now 13
Future Shocks
CARTOON © OWEN SAVAGE 2020. INSTAGRAM @OGHSAVAGE
Escaping the Cave
by Owen Savage 2020
histories – ultimately, due to our extinction.
The second possibility is that we or some
other species do reach the technological
maturity, but aren’t likely to run such sim-
ulations simply because of who we (or they)
are as a species: for moral reasons, perhaps,
or maybe just due to lack of interest . The
third option is that we are almost certainly
already living in a computer simulation.
How may that be? If it can happen with
us in the future, it might have already hap-
pened in the past. If ultimate VR is pos-
sible, then our own world will mostly
likely be just one amongst myriads cre-
ated by technologically advanced species.
Only one world is the biological, physi-
cal, originally one; but there will be an
unfathomable number of simulations cre-
ated by advanced species. The likelihood
that we should in be the original one is
very small, Bostrom argues. At that point
we are no longer a species with a future
and a past in our universe: we must instead
consider ourselves as ever-duplicating in
a myriad of possible simulated worlds.
Whether one thinks it likely that we are
living in a simulation or not, the potential
implications of VR technology are still
looming over us. One of the most inter-
esting food-for-thought experiment for us
all, after all, is to ask ourselves: If we could
do anything we liked, what would we do?
© JOAKIM VINDENES 2020
Joakim Vindenes is a PhD Candidate
researching VR at the University of Bergen,
Norway. He also runs the VR philosophy blog
Matrise, accessible at http://matrise.no as
well as the VR & Philosophy Podcast.
Future Shocks

The Singularity of the Human Hive Mind

James Sirois gives us a strong warning about overusing the net.
he internet has become so all-pervading that even Mind

T the word seems a little old-fashioned now. No-one

really uses it much anymore. We ask each other for
wifi, or talk of going online, or complain about a lack
of data, but rarely do we talk of ‘the internet’ as an entity; it has
become too ubiquitous, too intrinsic to our lives, for that to be
An awareness of existence with experiential content, referring
both to what is outside itself and to its own existence.

a very useful term. This prompts me to wonder: what are we
becoming? Could the internet lead us to become more than indi-
viduals and disparate communities?
I believe we’re entering an era when the words ‘individual’ and
‘community’ take on new definitions or meanings as we increas-
ingly become interconnected in what I think of as a ‘hive mind’. I
also believe that a hive-minded process could itself be a transition
towards a singularity in consciousness across the Earth. Is that
desirable, or even possible? Are we in the process of creating it?
Is it inevitable? Can it be controlled? What does it even mean?
Before addressing these questions, however, we’ll need defi-
nitions of the words ‘Hive’ and ‘Mind’ and the phrase ‘Hive
Mind’. What is a ‘hive mind’, exactly?
Hive
Multiple entities sharing an element of awareness not unique
to any individual but present to each, and experienced by all as
some awareness of their collective existence.
Hive Mind
An awareness formed from the communication of individual
minds but different from each of its individual minds, and so
not defined by the separateness of the individual minds which
compose it.
Let’s consider the possibility of hive-mindedness through the
framework of free will, under the assumption that a loss of indi-
vidual free will is undesirable.

14 Philosophy Now  August/September 2020


The Inevitability of the Hive Mind
Basic human survival has always depended on some kinds of
cooperation. By extending their abilities through cooperation
in pursuit of common goals, individuals secure for themselves
and each other a basic or minimum state of well-being. To a
degree this could be said to result in a shared will, although we
usually refer to it as ‘group psychology’. In this basic sense,
humanity certainly depends on ‘hive-mindedness’. We’re
clearly not as hive-minded as the birds, bees or ants but nev-
ertheless, cooperation in a sense extends the consciousness of
the individual. This is evident in our historical evolution, all
the way up to the information technology (IT) we have recently
developed.
The internet encourages and makes possible more types of
collaboration involving larger groups and faster, more intimate
sharing of ideas, and this takes us ever further in the direction
of a hive mind, in an accelerating process not subject to any cen-
tral plan. Is a hive-minded type of thought inevitable? At any
rate it seems safe to assume that, so long as no catastrophe
deprives us of electricity, we will increasingly lose our sense of
individuality.
If we think about the internet as a brain-to-brain connection
interface, we might easily see that isolated thinking becomes
increasingly difficult to sustain due to the quickening rate at
which we’re socially encouraged to share our thoughts. Some-
where along the way, an individual brain starts to act more like
a neuron to the synapses of the internet brain than a self-con-
tained unit. This is starting to become evident as we generally
begin to mimic much more information than we create, espe-
cially with sharing, reposting and retweeting. Across a range of
industries and activities highly complex content is now being
created by online groups rather than individuals, because it is
quicker to achieve richer content that way. In addition, it’s easy
and fast to capture our experiences through photos and videos,
and pass them through filters which generically impress a sense
of quality but in actuality only reduce diversity and therefore
individuality.
If we consider the speed at which we’re evolving our con-
nections in the virtual world, it seems safe to assume that hive-
mindedness is starting to happen. Our brains no longer seem
to differentiate between dealing with information from the real
world, and dealing with information from an artificial world.
Emotionally and intellectually, we respond to social situations
online as if we’re part of a physical community.
The Process
Neuroscientists and psychologists keep revealing that the
human mind is less centralized than we thought.The philoso-
pher David Hume argued as far back as the eighteenth century
that the unity of consciousness is an illusion, and each mind
consists of a bundle of perceptions and experiences. It seems to
me that for any awareness made up of multiple entities, it’s a
matter of perspective that a singularity of identity is felt to exist
at all. Technology being researched now will soon be sophisti-
cated enough to connect our minds to a degree beyond any-
thing we can currently imagine. For example, a non-invasive
brain-to-internet network demonstrated in 2019 allowed three
widely separated individuals to play a collaborative Tetris-like
Future Shocks
game using only their thoughts. A singular consciousness
emerging from this technological revolution must be consid-
ered possible because singular consciousnesses arisen from mul-
tiple processes already exist – namely us. But if the internet
began to consider itself aware and integrated, in the same sort
of way that we do, I wonder if we could ever detect that? Will
we know if the net becomes conscious – or perhaps more plau-
sibly to many, coordinates a singular human mind-set?
We are undeniably in a process of increasing interconnec-
tivity. Are we just improving our social and professional lives
as individuals, or are we beginning to create ‘one mind’? Com-
paring our online selves to the neurons in a brain, can our indi-
vidual minds be rightly called ‘one mind’, or is it more like a
hive of ‘mini-minds’? Perhaps we will fracture into several hive-
minds before any singular global consciousness can be formed,
and even eventually revert back into individualism.
We must also ask whether this process could be controlled
or limited in some way. For instance, could a hive mind like the
internet in the future be compartmentalized enough to preserve
a sense of individuality for its users? We cannot know the answer
to this now, but I believe that in order to remain individuals and
exercise individual freedom we would eventually need to reject
the cyberconnection altogether. This seems very unlikely to
happen. This leads to a sharp question: how much control do
we have even now?
Control over the hive would require there to be a widely
shared desire for individual control. But if individual control is
dependent on the desire of the collective, this is tantamount to
saying that we have no control as individuals. The question is, will
the hive relinquish some of its power and tolerate dissent among
the units that compose it? Maybe not. We already see this drama
being played out with massive mobbing on platforms such as
Twitter of individuals felt to have transgressed against the values
of the online community. It seems as if the connectedness of
the mob erodes the awareness of individual voices even being
necessary, therefore eliminating the basis for a desire for indi-
viduality to begin with. In short, if any rebellion against the hive
mind were possible, we probably would not even know it. This
could take us all the way up to the point where individual think-
ing would be completely consumed by a new singular aware-
ness, surpassing the idea of a ‘hive mind’, and instead simply
becoming a mind. In this situation, control becomes a matter
of self-control: that is, control by the Self.
As for the morality of such a singular mind, we can only reflect
that a single mind, even if composed of what used to be indi-
viduals, would be utterly alone. It might be morally pure and
absolute, therefore ‘divine’, if you wish; or perhaps it would
mean morality would no longer exist or be applicable. Until
then we’re left with the same old difficult questions about the
risks to individuality and its freedoms: At what point does societal
organization become tyrannical? What is freedom anyway? How free
should we be? How can we be moral? and so on. These questions
are always over us while we simultaneously try to establish what
a human really is – right up until ‘we’ are no longer simply
human, and have become the ‘I’ of the collective individual.
© JAMES SIROIS 2020
James Sirois is a writer, film maker and traveler from Montréal,
Canada.
August/September 2020  Philosophy Now 15
Future Shocks
The Battle for the Robot Soul
James K. Wight looks at how cultures define our views of machines.
he word ‘robot’ first appeared in Karel apek’s 1921
T play, Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti – Rossum’s Universal
Robots. The word robota in Slavic languages translates
as worker or serf, with the term implying mechaniza-
tion and technology. Importantly, it is a man-made creation. Using
the robot as a point of analysis, I want to assess how religion and
philosophy have shaped the cultural perception of robot technol-
ogy. I will compare Japan and the West, and try to answer the
question: Do robots have souls? This question is not about whether
or not it is possible to build a sentient machine, but rather about dif-
fering cultural understandings and what they mean for our place
as a species amongst ever-advancing artificial life.
The idea of a sentient robot has raised numerous ethical and
other philosophical questions, which have been met with vastly
different responses across the world. This is no longer just sci-
ence fiction as more and more jobs risk being lost to automa-
tion, and apps like Siri and Alexa become commonplace.
Presently, AI has reached the point where it can generate poetry
and even art. This stokes our anxieties, as this sort of creativity
defined humanity for millennia. We are beginning to reevalu-
ate our uniqueness as a species.
I believe that focusing on well-known robots in pop culture
is the best way to analyse this subject, because the media reveal
our hopes and fears. Although we lack real-world equivalents
of Terminators and Astro Boys, these examples nevertheless
reveal Western fears and Japanese aspirations respectively for
sentient machines.
The Soul: East versus West
The Western perception of robots is perhaps best understood
through GWF Hegel’s ‘Master and Slave dialectic’ in The Phe-
nomenology of Spirit (1807). Hegel argues that the ownership of a
slave results in the dehumanisation of the master. So our use of
robots and technology dehumanises us. Moreover, for Hegel, the
soul (that is, a self-aware mind) can only exist if it is consciously
acknowledged. In essence, other minds determine the worth of
another being, and in doing so enforce their superiority.
In terms of religion, Judeo-Christian belief explicitly estab-
lishes humans as only ‘a little lower than the angels’ (Psalm 8:5).
Not only is a soul divinely bestowed upon Adam directly, but a
natural hierarchy results, as best exemplified in Genesis 1:26: “And
God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and
let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl
of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every
creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Western ethics is
founded on placing humans above all other organic life.
This belief only evolved in the Enlightenment era. Even as
traditional religious values were scrutinised, philosophers such
as Jean-Jacques Rousseau romanticised the natural world.
Rousseau believed that society has an inherently corrupting
influence on humanity, that the natural is inherently superior
to the artificial, and that humanity is better than both. One of
16 Philosophy Now  August/September 2020
Where it
all started
the best horror stories was also created about this time. Franken-
stein’s monster is an unnatural abomination of mismatching
body parts, lightning, and dark science. Unsurprisingly, the crea-
ture turns on its creator and both have an existential crisis, as
only God can create life. This same fear has persisted into our
present-day fears over the ever-advancing world of technology
and the inevitable killer robots.
In this, Japanese culture differs greatly from that of the West.
With a society founded on Shintoism and Buddhism, the Judeo-
Christian hierarchical attitude to nature is absent. In Japanese
spirituality there is still an emphasis on the natural,but it incor-
porates all forms of life. In Shinto, plants, nature, man, Kami
(gods), and machines all possess a natural spiritual essence. This
idea is generally referred to as Animism.
This belief is best exemplified for us through certain Ykai –
supernatural Shinto spirits of Japanese folklore who exist along-
side humans, sometimes as transformations of everyday objects.
One of the better-known examples Ykai is the Kasa-obake
appearing in the famous story Night Parade of One Hundred
Demons. Looking like a transformed umbrella with one leg, one
eye, a smiling mouth, and two spindly arms, the Kasa-obake is
one of many Ykai derived from originally inanimate objects.
This type of Ykai is classified as a Tsukumogami (literally ‘Tool
Spirit’). In his book, An Introduction to Ykai Culture: Monsters,
Ghosts, and Outsiders in Japanese History (2017), anthropologist
Kazuhiko Komatsu writes how any object lasting for a hundred
years acquires a Ykai spirit. This can be anything, from umbrel-
las to sandals to crockery and even dish rags – all of these can
have a spiritual presence. This process of transformation is noth-
ing divine, simply an everyday facet of the natural. There is no
hierarchy, no Master-Slave relationship. Instead, these once-
inanimate beings become simply another species that inhabits
our world. Of course, robots are no exception.
Just as Japanese belief provides a means of rationalising the robot
as part of nature, acceptance of the machine is evident in Japanese

culture. Now there is even a robot monk, Mindar, designed to
recite Buddhist sermons and installed at the Kodaiji temple in
Kyoto. For more on Japan’s complicated love affair with robots,
see historian Yuji Sone’s book Japanese Robot Culture: Performance,
Imagination, and Modernity (2016). In Japan it is widely held that
we are defined by how we interact with other entities. The human
may be defined by the non-human. Hence, Japan seems quite com-
fortable with Robot Cafés and Robot Hotels – places where people
interact with robot baristas and receptionist automata, sometimes
even bowing to them in greeting. Unsurprisingly, the Westerner
is less comfortable with a HAL 9000 taking our burger order.
Both Japanese and Western philosophy reinforce the idea of
the robot as a reflection of humanity. However, the Japanese
classify robots as part of a greater cosmology, whereas the West-
erner lives in perpetual anxiety about technology, torn between
desire for mastery over nature and fear of possible consequences.
Japanese and Western religious assumptions also determine the
perception of the soul and whether or not something is alive.
This is important, as it means that the prevailing religiously-
derived metaphysics is the underlying factor that influences our
view of technology, and of AI development in particular, which
in turn has implications for society. After all, there is a big dif-
ference between believing a sentient machine will accomplish
spiritual enlightenment or go on a genocidal rampage.
Astro Boys versus Terminators
That Japan and the West have different views of technology is
clearest from the media. I’m going to explore Astro Boy (called
Mighty Atom in Japan) and The Terminator.
“Oi you... We don’t like your sort in here!”
Future Shocks
At first Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy and James Cameron’s
T-800 may not seem like they have a lot in common. One
debuted in a sci-fi horror movie, and the other is one of Japan’s
most recognisable cartoon mascots. Yet, they are both
humanoid robots, and both exemplify their culture’s responses
to rapid technological development.
American writer and Astro boy translator Frederik L. Schodt
says in The Astro Boy Essays (2007) that Astro (introduced in
1951) symbolises the Japanese rebuilding after World War II,
along with economic growth and innovations such as the Tokyo
Tower, the first highway, and the Bullet Train. As such, Astro
embodies Japan’s economic perspective, as well as its religious
assumptions. It’s a far cry from Frankenstein’s ungodly mon-
ster. There is an optimism to Astro Boy; a childlike fusion of a
nuclear energy reactor and a strong sense of justice, he embod-
ies the strengths of the artificial and the natural combined.
Astro Boy’s narrative follows what could be called a ‘strug-
gle for recognition’. In his book, Struggle for Recognition: The
Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (1996), the German philoso-
pher Axel Honneth presents the struggle for recognition as a
Hegelian idea describing an entity fighting to reaffirm their
existence, independence, and freedom. But for Hegel, this term
referred to human slaves, not superpowered robots. There are
certainly antagonist robots, and robot rivals, throughout Astro
Boy, but that moral complexity is no different to that for only
humans, or even Ykai in Japan. Even Astro makes mistakes
now and again. But through it all he remains an idealistic
Japanese robot freedom fighter, standing up for machine accep-
tance in a hostile human world.
CARTOON © PAUL WOOD 2020 PLEASE VISIT WOODTOON.CO.UK
August/September 2020  Philosophy Now 17
Future Shocks
This is made clearest in his debut. In his origin story, his
antagonistic creator, Dr Tenma – who created Astro Boy to
replace his deceased son – is furious that Astro is not human.
Tenma’s first appearance sees him selling his robotic creation
to a circus, where it is denied rights, stripped of clothes, and
forced to perform as a sub-species.
The West is undeniably more comfortable with robot slaves.
In Star Wars, R2D2 and C3PO are bought and sold despite
their sentience. Rossum’s Universal Robots were simply hi-tech
butlers at first; as were Robot B9 from Forbidden Planet and the
Jetson’s housemaid, Rosie the Robot. Recently, we’ve also seen
Iron Man’s Jarvis/Vision gain popularity because, despite being
an intelligent AI, it never challenges Tony Stark’s human-first
values. The fact is that in the West, robots are meant to be slaves
and we their rightful masters. The few exceptions that come to
mind are Marvin the Paranoid Android from Hitchhikers Guide
to the Galaxy, Bender in Futurama, or Kryten in Red Dwarf, all
of which were designed for comedic subversion.
The West also has a greater fixation on the robot antagonist –
a modern Frankenstein’s monster, exemplified by the T-800 from
The Terminator. Whereas Astro Boy is symbolic of the technologi-
cal progress and optimism of post-war Japan, The Terminator
reveals the danger of a technologically dependent world and the
consequences of machines becoming self-aware, as the Skynet AI
turns against its human creators on a global scale in nuclear
Armageddon. Released in 1984, the US at the time was seeing a
boom in consumer technology amidst the backdrop of the Cold
War, and the T-800 was a chilling reminder of nuclear dangers.
The Terminator franchise has further modernised, to reveal more
current fears. Amidst countless reports of the dangers of social
media leading to depression, radicalising our politics, and dehu-
manising us, it’s no surprise that in 2015’s Terminator Genisys one
of Skynet’s recent iterations was as a mobile app.
In their cognitive and social research, K.F. MacDorman and
H. Ishiguro have theorised that the eeriness of confronting an
uncanny robot is a response to coping with the inevitability of
death, replacement, and the fear that beneath it all, “we are all
just soulless machines” (The Uncanny Advantage of Using Androids
in Cognitive and Social Research, p.313, 2006). What better embod-
iment of our dehumanisation than the Terminator; a lingering
reminder of the anxieties of rapid uncontrolled technological
development? Designed to blend into their surroundings, these
robots are a distorted mirror of humanity. Comprised of little
more than a metal framework covered with lifelike skin and hair,
the T-800 bears an uncanny similarity to man. Thematically,
the roles of master and slave are inverted, with the artificial dom-
inating the natural. One Terminator movie directly draws on a
religious parallel with the title Judgement Day.
What’s fascinating is that at no point are we supposed to sym-
pathise with Skynet, whereas Astro Boy celebrates the struggle and
eventual acceptance of robots. Over the series, Astro protects
people, attends school, and follows his own judgement. He is
flawed, but still learning, as a child would. The only time you sym-
pathise with the T-800 is after it’s been reprogrammed. Only when
it’s stripped of its free will do we feel any compassion towards it.
There are countless more pop culture examples of these dif-
fering viewpoints in both Western and Japanese media. It is
through many such examples that culturally sustained philoso-
18 Philosophy Now  August/September 2020
phies have influenced our interpretation of machine sentience.
An Existential Crisis
Beyond robots, we incorporate technology with our own bodies
in prosthetics, medicine, and health-tracking apps. As we con-
tinually update ourselves, our systems, and even our art, the
perception of what it means to be human is changing rapidly.
In essence, however, according to Donna Harraway’s A Cyborg
Manifesto (1990), we are all cyborgs, defined as hybrids of man
and machine. Examples such as using watches to tell the time,
wearing glasses to correct vision, or using a pacemaker, by defi-
nition make us cyborgs. No way near as dramatic as our pop cul-
ture depicts. So why should robots and cyborgs be feared?
With increasing automation costing people’s jobs and liveli-
hoods, the questions of one’s obsoleteness, uniqueness, and
mortality unsurprisingly manifest in the automaton. As our
economy shifts, so too does our perspective. This is clearest in
our politics, with debates of bringing in basic incomes to better
embrace an automated way of life, for example.
This isn’t solely about economic or religious definitions.
Obsolescence also manifests in how we perceive our own mor-
tality and legacy. Death is a common theme throughout robot
narratives, explicit or not. There’s a reason the term ‘killer
robot’ is practically a sub-genre in itself. Confronting a killer
robot is to confront one’s fear of death.
Japanese robots are destroyed and rebuilt repeatedly. Astro
Boy and Mechagodzilla both exemplify this – with the latter built
around the corpse (still housing the spirit) of the original mon-
ster in Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II (1993). This harkens back to
the Japanese perspective on death. Schodt theorises it as a type
of reincarnation. Astro Boy is blown apart, destroyed, upgraded,
and rebuilt, just as naturally as the human spirit transcending
the dying body into a newly born one. The concept also has real-
world applications. Following the discontinuation of the origi-
nal Sony AIBO, a robot dog, Buddhist funeral ceremonies were
held for mourners to pay their respects to their deceased robot
pets. In this ceremony the priest performed a ritual to allow the
spirit to leave the body – just as he would for a human.
The Western robot defies the Western concept of death too.
Judeo-Christian belief is very clear on what death means. As Eccle-
siastes 12:7 states: “Then shall the [body’s] dust return to the earth
as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” But a
Western robot cannot die; there is no divine creator for the robot;
nor does it have a soul. Despite this, it has the potential to outlive
us all. In this way our robot dystopias dwell on our organic obso-
leteness and uniqueness. Beyond this, the cyborg, despite being
human at its core, is also met with scepticism, doubt, and fear –
especially if it is an attempt to cheat death and the natural order.
Darth Vader, for example – an iconic cyborg, described as ‘more
machine than man’ – had his moral corruption matched by his
physical roboticization. This death denial is a prevalent theme in
Western popular culture, where techno-horrors like the Cyber-
men in Doctor Who or the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation
seek to purge us of our human individuality, creativity, and free-
dom simply in order to enable us to live on indefinitely.
This is all reminiscent of the Enlightenment fears of tech-
nology corrupting nature – albeit it’s far more explicit with
robots literally trying to change or kill us. In this belief system,

by Melissa Felder
SIMON & FINN © MELISSA FELDER 2020 PLEASE VISIT SIMONANDFINN.COM
we set ourselves up to compete with machines rather than co-
operate with them.
The cyborg exists in Japanese culture as well, but the con-
text is very different. If robots can have a spirit, then it’s pretty
clear that a cyborg can too. The infamous body horror sequence
at the end of 1988’s Akira is an example of the dystopian fixa-
tion with technology warping what is human. At first this looks
like a Western fear, but the context offers a different reading,
with Tetsuo’s body disintegrating and Tetsuo reforming as a
cosmic being: a spiritual transcendence.
Balancing things out, technology is neither a reminder of
one’s mortality nor a threat to it. Japan rationalises the robot
as a spiritual phenomenon and is indifferent to any existential
threat it may pose: rather, robots exist in the world as all things
do. By contrast, in Western culture ultimately the human ele-
ment remains superior, sometimes for purely arbitrary reasons.
Future Shocks
We need to rationalise the robot as inhuman to justify our supe-
riority, otherwise we jeopardise our own uniqueness.
The Enlightened Machine
I believe that the idea of the robot soul is a particularly prevalent
topic now because of how rapidly AI is challenging our percep-
tions of what machines can and cannot do. Not only are robots
becoming more physically human (a real-world case study is
MIT’s parkour robot, Atlas, which is now capable of humanoid
gymnastics), the processing speed and interactivity is rapidly
improving as well. Hanson Robotics’ Sophia, for example, is capa-
ble of conversing, debating, and even telling jokes. With the devel-
opment of AI comes the potential for creative thinking.
A defining aspect of the Romantic movement was creativity.
Its challenging of tradition brought with it experimental prac-
tices in music and art. Rousseau even believed that only an
uncorrupted human soul – referring to an undefined quality of
greatness in human physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical,
spiritual, and artistic faculties – allowed people to truly enjoy
the sublime. With this reasoning, only with a soul can you pro-
duce and enjoy music, capacities reserved until now only for
human beings. But over this past decade we have seen AIs com-
posing music, producing art, even writing poetry and free-form
text. There now exist real-world AIs capable of producing clas-
sical music in the style of Mozart and Beethoven, such as Open
AI’s MuseNet. Another electronic composer, AIVA (Artificial
Intelligence Virtual Artist),has been officially recognised by
France’s association for performing rights SACEM (Société des
auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique). Whether this is true
creativity is debatable, as it can be argued to be merely intelli-
gently recombining information from a database. But then
again, people create art based on memories, experiences, and
inspiration from other works. Perhaps this means we’re not so
dissimilar after all. However, for the first time in human his-
tory, we exist alongside virtual artists, writers, and thinkers.
With each new update our exceptionalism is continually chal-
lenged and we must reevaluate what it means to be human.
Conclusion
To question whether robots have souls is to question culture itself.
The Japanese belief that robots can have souls is founded on com-
monality, equality, and natural cosmology, welcoming mutual co-
operation with our robot counterparts. The West by contrast has
a culture of human supremacy. Our comfort comes with the cul-
turally-specific belief that humans should command authority over
all things, and the robot is just another thing to serve us.
Through their embracing of and respect for technology, the
Japanese have avoided some aspects of the existential unhappi-
ness gripping the West. Technology, computers, mobiles, and
algorithms are simply a fact of modern life and have transformed
our interactions. Naturally there comes a need to redefine our
increasingly dependent relationships with machinery. Either we
embrace the robot’s uniqueness, or we continue with our human-
first agenda lest we confront our own place in the universe.
© JAMES K. WIGHT 2020
James K. Wight has a degree in Japanese and Media from the
University of East Anglia and Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo,
and an MA from the London Film School.
August/September 2020  Philosophy Now 19
Future Shocks
A Survival Guide for Living in the Simulation
Harry Whitnall considers how best to react if you find out that the world isn’t real.
t’s Sunday. You wake up after a very pleasant sleep. You
I feel good. You decide to check your email. You have one
new email in your inbox; and what d’you know, it’s from
Elon Musk! It contains clear evidence that your entire uni-
verse is a simulation; and the words ‘Don’t show this to anyone’.
Your whole reality is simulated – everything you know, every-
one you love, and even yourself are all an intricate collection
of ones and zeros! What now?
Fret not, for here is a survival guide to life in the simulation.
First, it might be tempting to ignore Elon’s advice and show
all your friends and family this enlightening email. It would
make fascinating dinner table talk, and maybe you feel like you
owe it to your family to tell them the truth. But before you do
so, stop and think for a bit. Philosophy professor Preston
Greene has suggested in the article ‘The Termination of Sim-
ulation Science’ (2018) that the discovery that we live in a sim-
ulation may lead to our creators terminating it, so destroying
our universe. Consider why such a simulation would be cre-
ated; perhaps for research into how civilization evolved, or per-
haps to see how it is likely to end; in order to gain a better under-
standing of history; for science; or maybe just for fun. For three
of these five reasons the widespread realisation that the uni-
verse is a simulation would almost certainly jeopardize the
experiment for which the simulation was created. So, perhaps
you should heed Elon’s advice and not show anyone this infor-
mation. Of course, there is always the possibility that perhaps
our simulation was created to see how humans would react when
they realise they are in a simulation. In this case if would best
to show Elon’s evidence to everyone you know – although, if
this were the case, surely the creators would have made the infor-
mation more accessible and not given you such a difficult deci-
sion – unless part of the point of the simulation was to see what
decision you’d make in response to the email… in which case
you should take as long as possible to make your decision, to
ensure you and your fellow simulated humans survive. So to
maximize your chances of survival, perhaps you should not show
anyone the simulation proof, while frequently considering the
possibility of one day telling everyone.
Now that you have ensured the survival of the simulation, Robin
Hanson suggests in the article ‘How to Live in a Simulation’ (2001)
that it may be in your best interests to become, or remain, a par-
ticularly interesting individual, since the creators may want to be
efficient in their use of computing power, potentially turning
people off or making individuals less conscious if they’re uninter-
esting or uninfluential. So, if your plans were to simply chill out,
eat Doritos and watch Netflix, for your survival’s sake you may
need a change of plan. Perhaps consider a consider a career as a
revolutionary, start your own religion, or maybe become a come-
dian. If you’re funny, maybe the creators will keep you around.
What about the way to act, now that you know that the people
and things aren’t ‘real’? You could steal a tub of ice-cream from
20 Philosophy Now  August/September 2020
the supermarket, push to the front of the line at your local McDon-
alds, or listen to music really loudly in the middle of the night.
While you could, maybe this is also not such a good idea, at
least from a moral point of view. Just because your peers, like
you, are simulated, this doesn’t mean they don’t have the capac-
ity for negative feelings.
When it comes to this simulated universe we live in, you can
conclude with absolute certainty that at least one simulated being
is conscious – yourself. Just like if your world was not a simula-
tion, you cannot know for sure whether everyone else is conscious
or not; but you can see that they show complex behaviour that’s
similar enough to your own to suggest that they are likely to be
conscious as well. Since conscious beings, even simulated ones,
have the ability to feel negative responses to actions, from a moral
point of view it is not the best idea to start stealing ice-cream from
the supermarket, or push to the front of the line at McDonalds,
or listen to music really loudly in the middle of the night.
We can use Mary Ann Warren’s criteria of personhood to
hammer this point home. In the article ‘On the Moral and Legal
Status of Abortion’ (1973), Warren suggests that to be a person,
and to be treated as such, someone must be conscious (includ-
ing the capacity to feel pain); able to reason (the ability to cog-
nitively solve complex problems); able to carry out self-moti-
vated activities; able to communicate on an indefinite number
of topics; and be self-aware. Perhaps the other inhabitants of
your simulation do not meet these criteria – in which case, feel
free to steal ice-cream, push in line, and blast midnight beats.
But if the other inhabitants do meet these criteria, to be a morally
good person you may want to refrain from such activities.
What about your mental health? Now that you know that
your reality is simply simulated, what’s the point of it all?
Perhaps you should try to escape?
In some respects your simulated situation is like Robert
Nozick's ‘experience machine’ thought experiment from his book
Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). Nozick asks us to imagine that
scientists have developed a machine that can simulate experiences
indistinguishable from those produced naturally outside of the
machine. Once we step inside we can experience a world of unlim-
ited pleasures in place of mundane and often unpleasant real life.
But the machine will also make us forget that there is a real life
to go back to. Nozick argues that we should not plug ourselves
into this machine, since pleasant experiences are not the only
things that matter. Other things matter too, like truth, and having
a meaningful purpose, based on reality.
While your situation of being in a simulation is very like being
in the experience machine, there is a key difference. The fact that
you have spent your entire life inside the simulation means that
for you the simulation is your reality. Leaving it would mean leav-
ing all your friends and family and everything you know behind.
Of course, the Morpheus inside you may tempt you with the red
pill; but, you must ask yourself, is there really a significant differ-

ence between being born in the real world and choosing to escape
via plugging into a simulation, and being born in the simulated
world and choosing to escape to the real world via unplugging
from the simulation? Let’s assume the simulation was made to be
accurate to reality apart from in ways crucial to the experiment.
Then the only ultimate, metaphysical, difference, is that the real
world is made from quarks, gluons, bosons, and the like, while the
simulated world is made from a collection of ones and zeros that
are made to look like quarks, gluons, bosons, and the like.
What of the meaning of life? If the universe is simply a simu-
lation, then the meaning of your entire existence boils down to a
scientific experiment or perhaps to being entertainment for the
creator beings. This might be a bit disappointing for you. But if
you think about it, what would be a satisfying answer to the mean-
Future Shocks
ILLUSTRATION © JAIME RAPOSO 2020. TO SEE MORE OF HIS ART, PLEASE VISIT JAIMERAPOSO.COM
ing of life, in the simulation or out of it? It seems difficult to
think of a fully satisfying answer to a question that has been put
on the most ornate pedestal of all questions. ‘To love or to live’
sound like something you’d read in a cheap self-help book. The
Epicureans thought that the meaning of life was to seek modest
pleasures. To me at least, that does not sound very satisfying.
Perhaps then you should stop worrying and simply live your
simulated life, being bold enough to stay interesting, and secre-
tive enough as to not reveal Elon Musk’s proof, while constantly
pondering whether one day you should, for survival’s sake.
© HARRY WHITNALL 2020
Harry Whitnall is at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand,
studying for an honors degree in philosophy, with plans to continue
studying towards a PhD.
August/September 2020  Philosophy Now 21
Meaning
Leo Tolstoy and
The Silent Universe
Frank Martela relates how science destroyed the meaning of life,
but helps us find meaning in life.
f you had everything else you wanted but your life lacked
I meaning, would it still be worth living? For the rich Rus-
sian count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), the towering
author of such classics as War and Peace and Anna Karen-
ina, this was not a merely theoretical question. This was a
matter of life and death: “Why should I live?... What real
indestructible essence will come from my phantasmal,
destructible life?” was the question he asked himself. In his
autobiography, My Confession (1882), he wrote that as long
as he was unable to find a satisfactory answer to the question
of meaning, “the best that I could do was to hang myself.”
What makes ‘What’s the meaning of life?’ such a powerful
question that inability to deliver a satisfactory answer can
push a person to the brink of a suicide?
When I started investigating the history of the question, the
first surprise was how recent it actually is. We often think of it
as an eternal question asked since the dawn of mankind; but
actually, the first recorded usage of the phrase the ‘meaning of
life’ in English took place as recently as 1834, in Thomas Car-
lyle’s highly influential novel Sartor Resartus: “Our Life is com-
passed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life itself
no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force.”
Before asking the question, Carlyle’s protagonist goes
through the classic steps of an existential crisis. First came loss
of religious faith: “Doubt had darkened into Unbelief… shade
after shade goes grimly over your soul… Is there no God, then?”
Without God, the universe becomes cold and silent: “To me
the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition: it was
one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its
dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.” In a mecha-
nistic universe void of any transcendental values, nothing seems
to matter any more.
For Tolstoy, the existential crisis stage was marked by being
constantly tormented by the question ‘Why?’ He attended to
his estate. But why? Because then his fields would produce more
crops. But why should he care? Whatever he did, whatever he
accomplished, sooner or later, all would be forgotten. Sooner
or later, he and everyone dear to him would die and there would
be, as he wrote, “nothing left but stench and worms.” Since
everything vanishes and is finally utterly forgotten, what’s the
point of struggling?
Grasping Hold of Meaning as it Slips Away
There seems to have been something in the air in the nine-
teenth century that made the question of meaning so salient as
to deserve its own phrase. The German Romantics appear to
have gotten there first, with Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis
using the phrase der Sinn des Lebens at the turn of the nineteenth
22 Philosophy Now  August/September 2020
century. They were a key influence on not only Carlyle but also
on Søren Kierkegaard and Arthur Schopenhauer – and through
Schopenhauer, on Friedrich Nietzsche – all of whom played a
key role in transforming this esoteric expression into the house-
hold phrase for existentialist-type questions that it is today.
The nineteenth century saw many transformations in West-
ern societies, starting with the Industrial Revolution. But I would
venture to say that the key force behind the existential crises of
Carlyle, Tolstoy, and others was the emerging atheistic world-
view encouraged by science. Living in what Carlyle himself
called ‘an Atheistic Century’, the author had lost touch with the
stern Calvinist faith his parents had enjoyed. He laments how
the ‘Torch of Science’ now burns so fiercely that “not the small-
est cranny or doghole in Nature or Art can remain unillumi-
nated” (Sartor Resartus).
Similarly, as regards Tolstoy, it seems no accident that just a
few months before writing in his diary that “life on earth has
nothing to give” while plunging head-first into existential crisis,
Tolstoy had been reading about physics, pondering the con-
cepts of gravity, heat and how a ‘column of air exerts pressures’.
In understanding more about the cold laws of nature, he lost his
faith in the transcendent. He notes how he “sought in all the
sciences” but “far from finding what I wanted, became convinced
that all who like myself had sought in knowledge for the mean-
ing of life had found nothing.” In a world governed by the mech-
anistic laws of nature, there was no longer room for purpose.
More than a century after the deaths of Carlyle and Tolstoy,
the atheistic worldview has penetrated our way of seeing the
world to an even greater degree. But do we have the answer to
the question of meaning that they so desperately sought?
I am afraid we don’t. In fact, research shows that it is exactly
we citizens of wealthy, developed countries who struggle to find
meaningfulness. In 2013 Professors Shigehiro Oishi and Ed
Diener wrote an analysis of a unique survey conducted by Gallup
for the journal Psychological Science which included 142,000 respon-
dents across 132 nations around the world. It’s one of the broad-
est surveys on well-being and happiness ever conducted. Their
first finding didn’t come as a surprise: people in wealthier nations
were on average more satisfied with their lives. However, investi-
gating the relation between wealth and perceived meaning in life,
Oishi and Diener found exactly the opposite pattern: people in
the wealthier nations were more prone to report that their life
lacked an important purpose or meaning. Indeed, wealthy nations
such as France, Japan, or the UK were among those where the
fewest people said that their life had an important purpose, while
poor countries such as Togo, Senegal, and Sierra Leone were on
top of the list as regards meaningfulness. Lack of meaningfulness
has been linked in several researches to increased thoughts of sui-
 Meaning
Leo Tolstoy by
Sergei Produkin-Gorski
1908

August/September 2020  Philosophy Now 23

Meaning

24 Philosophy Now  August/September 2020


cide. Oishi and Diener found that lack of religious belief, lead-
ing to a perceived lack of meaning, was a key explanation for why
wealthy nations see more suicides on average. This makes it all
the more a burning issue to answer this question: how can one
find meaning in life in a secularized society?
The Two Elements of Meaning
Luckily, both philosophical and psychological research on the
topic of meaning has proliferated in recent decades, and an
answer has started to emerge.
First we must separate two issues: the meaning of life, and
meaning in life. The first is about life in general or as a whole,
reflected in questions such as ‘Why does the universe exist?’ or
‘Does humanity have a purpose?’ This is the sort of question
that lost its answer as a result of scientific naturalism. In a sec-
ular cosmos, in a Godless universe governed by natural laws,
there simply isn’t any room for meaning.
However, when I instead ask about meaning in life, I am
asking about what makes my life meaningful to me. Where do
I find purpose to guide my life? This question is not about uni-
versal value, but identifying what things and goals I personally
find valuable. In other words, what makes me feel that my life
is worth living?
Everyone answers this question differently. People and places
meaningful to one person mean nothing to another. Certain
spots in a forest close to where I spent most of my childhood
summers are virtually sacred to me. For anybody else, its just
trees, moss, and stones. Yet as we have started to gain more
knowledge about human psychological makeup and the elements
of human motivation, two general themes have been identified
that tend to enhance meaningfulness for almost everyone.
First, when one is able to contribute to something bigger than
oneself, this is felt as deeply meaningful. One’s life is then valu-
able not only to oneself, but is connected to something grander.
Think about Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Abraham
Lincoln or Mahatma Gandhi. What unites them is that they
IMAGE © VENANTIUS J PINTO 2020. TO SEE MORE ART, PLEASE VISIT FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/VENANTIUS/ALBUMS
fought for a cause much greater than their personal lives.
Psychological research supports this notion. For instance, in
my own research, I had people play a simple computer game
under two conditions. One group just played the game; the other
group was told that their game-playing gathers money for the
United Nations World Food Programme. Not surprisingly, the
latter group found the game more meaningful. Contribution
has also been shown to play a key role in explaining what makes
work meaningful. When we say “I enjoy my current work, but
would like to do something more meaningful”, what we typi-
cally yearn for is to have more positive impact through our work.
So to a significant degree, meaning in life is about making
yourself meaningful to other people. However, there does seem
to be more to meaning than contribution.
In one of the most influential essays on meaning written in
the last fifty years, The Meaning of Life (1970), the philosopher
Richard Taylor talks about a ‘strange meaningfulness’ relating
to being able to do the things where one’s interests lie, and so
satisfying the “inner compulsion to be doing just what we were
put here to do.”
Imagine being a cardiologist who performs complex surgical
heart operations and accordingly saves people’s lives on a daily
Meaning
basis. Sounds like highly meaningful work, right? Not so fast.
Psychologist William Damon tells how he met a cardiologist
who was miserable to the point of not getting out of bed in the
morning. He felt that surgery was not his thing; that he was
doing it just to please other people. He needed to find a job that,
instead of making his parents happy, could make himself happy.
The point is, meaningfulness is not only about connecting
to other people. It is just as much about connecting with one-
self. One must feel that one is able to follow one’s own values,
pursue one’s own interests, express who one truly is. Instead of
conforming to external expectations, meaningful living requires
you to follow your heart.
Psychological research supports this notion too. For instance,
research by Professor Rebecca Schlegel and her colleagues has
demonstrated that a key source of meaningfulness is authentic
self-expression. When the researchers asked people to write
about their ‘true self’, the length of these stories (which works
as an indication of how much people are in touch with their
authentic selves) predicted how meaningful those people found
their lives to be. The same was not true when people were asked
to write about their ‘usual selves’ or how they behaved in the
presence of others. Their social self was not closely correlated
with meaning.
How to Make Your Life Meaningful
So the most reliable pathways through which to experience
meaningfulness seem to be expressing yourself and contributing to
the well-being of other people. Don’t be obsessed with success, or
even happiness. Both these pursuits are prone to leave you feel-
ing empty. Instead, think about in which activities and roles you
are able to be authentic, then think about how this self-expres-
sive activity or role could be used to contribute to others. This
is the recipe for a meaningful existence. After finding your own
specific recipe for that, you can then allow the success or hap-
piness to happen as a side-product of this more existentially
healthy pursuit.
Of course, how these two elements get satisfied depends on
an individual’s interests, values, skills, and situation in life. One
person might use their talents for public speaking (self-expres-
sion) to fight for a cause close to their heart (contribution).
Another could be playing guitar (self-expression) while taking
delight in the joy they bring to their audience (contribution). A
hospital janitor might enjoy the concrete results (self-expres-
sion) of upholding the hygiene levels crucial to patient safety
in a hospital (contribution). And for many, parenting is a chan-
nel for both self-expression and contribution. The same goes
for many hobbies, and especially for volunteering work. Every-
one thus has to find the way of expressing themselves and con-
tributing that best suits them and their life situation. Even Leo
Tolstoy. In the midst of his existential crisis, he felt that the last
‘two drops of honey’ that kept him anchored to this world were
‘my love for family and for my writing’. In other words, contri-
bution and self-expression.
© FRANK MARTELA 2020
Frank Martela is a Finnish researcher specializing in the philosophy
and psychology of meaning in life. His book A Wonderful Life:
Insights on Finding a Meaningful Existence was published this
year by HarperCollins.
August/September 2020  Philosophy Now 25
Meaning
The Meaning of Death
Laszlo Makay, George Marosan Jr. and David Vatai
consider whether death destroys meaning or creates it.
nsurprisingly, people are obsessed with the mean-
U ing of their lives. Many also think that death is the
antithesis of meaning – the single greatest obstacle
to a meaningful life. However, what if this is a mis-
understanding? Moreover, if we discovered the meaning of
death (if any exists), would it cast light on the meaning of life?
All of us have heard things like “Everyone dies, so life is
meaningless.” Or taking this logic to a higher level, someone
may say: “The unavoidable destruction of the universe – via
heat death, the big crunch, or the big rip, you name it – makes
the existence of the entire human race meaningless.” These
simple reasonings seem correct. Our own deepest fears only
serve to help them appear realistic.
Things have meaning because they are meaningful to some-
body. Once that person dies then nothing matters to them any
more, so surely the things in their life that had meaning no
longer do? Hasty conclusions are usually misleading, and in this
case, the conclusions are incorrect. Some meanings or their
bearers can survive our own individual deaths – such as our own
children or our contribution to society. Many external goals and
achievements may continue to exist after our death. And in some
special cases – for example, sacrificing oneself for a noble cause
– death may even be necessary to fully realise a meaningful indi-
vidual life.
What about the meaninglessness of humanity on a cosmic
scale? It doesn’t hurt to know that science tells us that the longer
the forecasting period, the less reliable the prediction. Any prog-
nosis in the range of billions of years is uncertain at best. If we
do not know what comprises 95% of the universe, we cannot
be confident of our predictions about it. We cannot even be
certain that the universe will ever be destroyed. Consequently,
it would be a long shot to find our existence meaningless just
because of some uncertain end-of-the-cosmos scenarios set
untold billions of years in the future.
Life and Death Issues
If we want to be correct about the meaning of life in the face
of death, we should first understand some basics about death.
‘Life’ has different definitions depending on the perspective
and approach. Someone may say that the basic criteria for life
are the utilization of free energy, reproduction, and the capacity
for metabolism; but there is no single correct definition. Philos-
ophy, biology, even astronomy, have divergent descriptions.
The situation with death is similar. Until recently, people who
did not breathe were considered dead. This criterion was so unre-
liable that being buried alive occurred so often that fear of it was
common enough to get its own name: taphophobia. The methods
to establish death slowly became more trustworthy: a lack of pulse
or heartbeat, then observing the non-functioning of the brain.
While biology and the medical sciences have their various
definitions of life and death, we should dig even deeper, to
26 Philosophy Now  August/September 2020
account for the viewpoint of physics. After all, biology is essen-
tially based on chemistry, and chemistry is based on physics. At
the most fundamental level of physics, we find the law of con-
servation of energy and matter. This law does not allow annihi-
lation in the literal sense, only the transformation of matter and
energy. Matter/energy cannot be destroyed and it cannot dis-
appear; it can only change.
If there is no fundamental physics-level manifestation of
‘death’, how should we interpret the concept? According to biol-
ogy, physics, and systems theory together, death is a so-called
‘emergent phenomenon’ within the systems of life or the bio-
sphere. For instance, death can be narrowly interpreted as the
end of vital signs of an organism, so there would be no death
without biological life. Consequently, death is something that
needs life first.
The relationship is unidirectional, since death cannot happen
without life – but life can exist without death. Yes: according to
physics, death is not a necessity. At a fundamental physical level,
all living organisms could rejuvenate their bodies by using free
energy in their environment; and there is no fundamental phys-
ical cause preventing organisms doing this indefinitely. Many
proliferating unicellular organisms (such as the HeLa immortal
cell line) do not die because of ‘old age’; death only occurs due
to environmental influences or accidents. The unicellular organ-
isms living today are the same line as those that started fission
billions of years ago, continuously dividing and surviving.
Immortality, or more precisely, negligible senescence – a lack
of symptoms of aging in organisms – may even exist in case of
multicellular organisms such as hydras, which do not grow old.
Many quite complex organisms such as trees live for thousands
of years. Of course, in the long term, the likelihood of death for
the individuals of even these species rises to 100%, due to acci-
dents, disasters, illness, or predators. However, that can take a
comparatively long time, and does not explain the usual death
due to old age for individuals of most species. We could even
say that there is something strange with common inevitable
death through old age. For example, species have different typ-
ical lifespans. The normal timing of the ‘unavoidable’ death
from old age of the mayfly, mouse, elephant, and tree varies
species-by-species in an extremely wide range, from days to
thousands of years. Therefore, death from old age is not the
result of being alive in general, but due to species-specific fac-
tors. In other words, natural death is a function of their biolog-
ical structure, their behavior, and their environment. Dying after
a mating ritual enables reproduction; or the further life of the
individual helps to support offspring.
This shows the efficiency of the life-cycles of organisms. Death
starts to show evolutionarily benefits. A genetically-programmed,
species-specific, timely death frees up natural resources. In every
species, offspring, requiring living space and resources, repre-
sent the capacity for mutations, and so enable evolutionary adap-

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tation. It would be hugely restrictive to
the offspring if all the ancestors remained
alive: it would cause them to run out of
resources and space in the short term,
thereby obstructing adaptation in the long
term. Thus on the larger scale, death
serves life rather than ruins it. The evo-
lutionary advantages of the eventual pro-
grammed death of organisms has usually
proved to be greater than the non-dying
seen in their unaging counterparts, so evo-
lution has favored congenital mortality in
most cases. That is exactly what we can
see in nature: there are far more mortal
organisms in multicellular species than
immortal ones.
So death does not happen out of phys-
ical, chemical, or biochemical necessity,
but because of its useful effects. Death
does not simply depend on life (since only
the living can die); rather, life – more pre-
cisely, evolutionary processes – gave birth
to death for its own ‘purposes’, with the
genesis of the first complex organisms,
about seven hundred million years ago or
so. Nevertheless, we as individuals con-
August/September 2020  Philosophy Now 27
Meaning
sider death a catastrophe because of our
personal involvement, fear, and loss. We
can see death coming, but we cannot see
its useful effects after our demise.
Life and Death Reconsidered
So what is death’s meaning? The mean-
ing is its contribution to the success, sur-
vival, adaptation, and development of life.
The fact that life is present almost every-
where on our planet in such a great diver-
sity today is only made possible by death.
By the same token, death has also con-
tributed to the emergence of humanity.
Furthermore, immortality would not
itself absolve life of apparent meaning-
lessness. In fact, a lack of death would
make life unbearable in the long run, as
well as unsustainable. Immortality would
likely lead to an overcrowded Earth with
societies full of inequalities and social ten-
sions in a collapsing ecosystem. Power-
ful leaders and wealthy individuals would
strive to maintain and increase their
power and wealth; fewer new minds being
born would bring about less innovation;
and immortality’s impact on our already
overstretched natural resources and envi-
ronment would be catastrophic.
Does the meaning of death lead to the
meaning of life, too? We have seen that
death is not an obstacle to a meaningful
life. Besides, it has its own meaning, by
contributing to life. Therefore, life is
meaningful too, is it not?
Unfortunately, death having a purpose
does not automatically give meaning to
life. And if life turns out to be meaning-
less, then death, even if it were evolution-
arily valuable, would also be meaningless.
We have simply removed some common
misconceptions regarding death and its
effect on the meaning of life. Therefore,
we have somewhat reduced the likelihood
of negative answers to whether life has a
meaning. But giving a positive answer to
the ancient question, if possible at all,
requires further research.
© LASZLO MAKAY, GEORGE MAROSAN JR.,
DAVID VATAI, 2020
Laszlo Makay obtained his MSc. in Finance
and Management at the Budapest University
of Economics. George Marosan Jr obtained a
PhD in Philosophy in 1978. He has been a
university professor since 1992. David Vatai
obtained his MSc in English in 2016 and a
minor in Philosophy in 2012 at the University
of Szeged.
 Shklar
Molière
Philosophical Misanthropy
Ian James Kidd takes a look at humanity through dark glasses.
he condemnation of humankind is very topical these
T days. Given the global environmental crisis, the rise
of far-right ideologies, destabilising social and eco-
nomic equality, and other moral evils, many people
issue denunciations of the state of humanity. Sometimes, the
talk is just that – talk: expressions of frustration at our collec-
tive moral failings. Sometimes, though, there is a more practi-
cal spirit. At the more extreme end are those people who urge
the end of our species, such as anti-natalists, including the Vol-
untary Human Extinction movement, who say humanity should
stop reproducing. More moderate positions include those call-
ing for a radical transformation of humanity, perhaps in the
direction of smaller, simpler ways of life. The collapse of our
industrial, consumerist form of life may be succeeded by life
with a different, hopefully better, character – a hope offered for
example by philosopher and Green activist Rupert Read in his
recent book, Civilization is Finished (2019).
An appropriate term for these exercises in the moral con-
demnation of humanity is misanthropy.
In its everyday sense, a misanthrope is someone who hates,
dislikes, or feels disgust at human beings and tries to avoid
them. The title character of Molière’s 1666 play, The Misan-
thrope, Alceste, declares that he ‘hate[s] all men’, some ‘villain-
ous’ and others complicit in their ‘evil’. By the end of the play,
the misanthrope declares his desire to flee his corrupt and cor-
rupting society.
Although the term has largely fallen into disuse, it still has
this sense: to be misanthropic is to hate humanity and want to
escape from it, or perhaps to do violence to it. The philosopher
Judith Shklar warns that misanthropy is dangerous – it has the
power to “make us miserable and friendless, reduce us to spiri-
tual nausea, and deprive us of all pleasures except invective”
(Ordinary Vices, 1984). Hatred and violence, she rightly warns,
are a poor basis for a good life. If misanthropy necessarily
involves this, then misanthropy ought to be avoided. Fortu-
nately, it doesn’t.
Defining misanthropy as ‘a hatred or dislike of human beings
or humanity’ is much too narrow. There are many forms of mis-
anthropy, only some of which involve hatred. Confronted with
these failings, we can feel anger – or bitterness, disappointment,
28 Philosophy Now  August/September 2020
Kant
Schopenhauer
poignant resignation, or, more cheerfully, a resolute hopeful-
ness about our improvability. And actually, some philosophical
misanthropes explicitly reject hatred as a response to our collec-
tive moral failings.
An upshot of this ‘misanthropic pluralism’ is that we can
recognise the moral awfulness of humanity without drifting into
hatred, violence, or despair. To do so, though, we need a better
understanding of misanthropy.
Defining Misanthropy
Oddly, there’s not much philosophical writing on misanthropy.
It’s not a concept that’s really used among moral philosophers.
Sometimes it’s connected to pessimism or nihilism, which
both express bleak visions of human existence. Arthur Schopen-
hauer (1788-1860) was perhaps the philosophical pessimist par
excellence, and also deeply misanthropic. But pessimism and mis-
anthropy aren’t the same concepts: a philosophical pessimist
thinks there are deep features to the world in general which
make human happiness or flourishing impossible: absurdity,
meaninglessness, suffering… The philosophical misanthrope,
by contrast, focuses on our vices and failings. Granted, they are
closely related, but they’re not the same. I could, for instance,
think that human existence is cosmically meaningless without
also regarding it as morally atrocious. We could be meaning-
less but, broadly, morally admirable.
A recent defence of philosophical misanthropy is David E.
Cooper’s book, Animals and Misanthropy (2018). As the title sug-
gests, his argument is that an honest appraisal of our treatment
of animals justifies a misanthropic verdict on humanity as it has
come to be. The plight of hundreds of billions of non-human ani-
mals shows a whole array of our vices and failings: arrogance, bru-
tality, callousness, greed, hubris, mindlessness, wilful ignorance,
vanity… the list is long and depressing. Cooper focuses on ani-
mals, although we can look at other areas of human life too. What
we find, argues the philosophical misanthrope, is that human exis-
tence is saturated with failings and vices, including arrogance
(again), cold-heartedness, dogmatism, greed, hypocrisy, insensi-
tivity to beauty, myopia, moral laziness, selfishness, shoulder-
shrugging indifference to the suffering of others, violence, waste-
fulness, and doubtless many others for which we don’t have names.
Buddha
Given all this, it’s easy to understand misanthropy’s critique.
However, a catalogue of human failings isn’t enough to secure
a charge of misanthropy. Imagine a critic who accepts that we
have failings, but insists they are relatively superficial, occa-
sional, and localised. They’ll argue that our vices are confined
to extreme situations, such as war or political displacement –
conditions that force us to become selfish and violent, against
our better nature – or that these vices are confined to extreme
people, such as psychopaths or moral monsters, who are hardly
morally representative of humanity as a whole.
It’s just this sort of moral facelift that is rejected by a misan-
thrope. They think there’s nothing unusual or occasional about
our failings – they’re built into and spread throughout our entire
way of life. As evidence, they’ll point out that we don’t need to
look long or hard to find instances of human vices and failings.
Sometimes, all that’s needed is to look at the news, or out of the
window, or in the mirror. Granted, most of our vicious behaviour
may be fairly low-key – small acts of cruelty; a steady stream of
little untruths. Montaigne called these ‘ordinary vices’, since they’re
woven into our ordinary and everyday habits, activities, and ways
of talking. Indeed, if we think that our vices only really count in
their extreme forms, then we’re self-servingly undercounting.
A philosophical misanthrope therefore insists that our vices
and failings have features that help to guard their claims against
the philanthropic response. Three of these features are that our
failings are entrenched, pronounced, and ubiquitous: they are deeply
built into our activities, projects, and institutionalised ways of
life; they are often obvious, as when we talk about our ‘naked
cruelty’ or ‘blatant selfishness’; and they are spread throughout
the world, except perhaps for a few secluded spaces. The mis-
anthrope needs to make these three points, otherwise they fall
short of a moral condemnation of humanity.
A good example of people who do make these points, are those
modern radical ‘eco-misanthropes’ who regard destructiveness,
indifference to nature, and wastefulness as utterly built into our
ways of life, at the foundations. Another example are feminists
who argue that dogmatism, injustice, and exploitativeness are
deeply baked into systems of patriarchy such that if you remove
those vices, the patriarchal system collapses. Clearly, we’re seeing
that there are many forms of philosophical misanthropy. The
common core is the moral condemnation of humankind, but
that can be motivated by many different sorts of concern – for
the plight of animals, the destruction of nature, the oppression
of women... A further variation is in the different attitudes the
misanthrope can take, depending on the specific target: hateful
anger, hopeful activism, even despairing surrender. It should be
Confucius Zhuangzhi
clear, too, that the target isn’t individual people. The verdict is
aimed at something collective: humanity; human civilization;
human ways of life. A misanthrope can like, admire, and even
love some individual people – most obviously, the rare few who
are relatively free of our collective failings. That said, a misan-
thrope will regard some individuals as especially exemplifying
those collective failings. Donald Trump, for instance, is often
described by her critics as a symbol of all that’s wrong with us
as a species – a living manifestation of such vices as greed, hubris,
and vanity.
So misanthropy comes in many forms, but this pluralism cre-
ates a tricky set of moral and practical issues that come together
in a difficult question: how should a person live once they deeply
internalise a misanthropic vision? Clearly, a critical vision of
the awful moral condition of humanity isn’t some cold, abstract
doctrine, without implications for our conduct and life. Accept-
ing that vision means changing how you live, feel, and think.
Everyone who writes about misanthropy explores this question.
It is, after all, a dramatic theme for playwrights and others, too.
Within the history of philosophy, Western and Eastern, I
think we can discern at least four main misanthropic stances. Here
a stance consists of a dominant emotion or viewpoint accompa-
nied by a range of activities or commitments. It’s a way of both
making sense of the world and trying as best one can to navi-
gate it – a way of living out one’s misanthropy, as it were. Doubt-
less there are other ways to be a misanthrope too. But these
stances are the most common.
Let’s start with the two stances described by one of the most
influential of Western moral philosophers, Immanuel Kant.
The Enemy and the Fugitive
Among the few philosophers who devoted attention specifically
to misanthropy, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is perhaps the
most eminent, at least in the Western tradition. He distinguishes
at least two problematic misanthropic stances. First is ‘the
Enemy of Mankind’, who, dominated by hatred and disgust at
humanity’s failings, feels driven to acts of violence. Sometimes
these might be literal acts of physical violence – the sort that
aim at disrupting social life, maybe, or which simply inflict harm
on others. In other cases, the violence is more symbolic, such
as controversial challenges to cherish ideals. Some eco-misan-
thropes fit this profile: the ones who want to ‘unmake civiliza-
tion’, ‘tear it all down’, or who generally anticipate the extinc-
tion of humanity with quiet satisfaction.
A second misanthropic stance is what Kant calls ‘the Fugi-
tive from Mankind’. Unlike criminal fugitives, moral fugitives
August/September 2020  Philosophy Now 29
flee out of fear, not guilt. They’re dominated by fear – of what
we are, the harm we do, and the morally corrupting effects of
being among us. Doubtless many Fugitive misanthropes will
have their own share of failings; but they seek to avoid further
moral corruption by escaping. This might mean literally escap-
ing, to a desert island or otherwise going off-grid; or for many
earlier generations, retreating into a secluded religious com-
munity or another space relatively insulated from the
entrenched failings of the wider world. When the Buddha
declared the superiority of the monastic life, his reason was that
it’s free of those corrupting influences which feed our vices –
materialistic desire or sensual temptation, say.
Kant rejects both these stances, since he rejects hatefulness,
although not because it’ll make us miserable and friendless.
Rather, he thinks that we ought to respect the moral dignity of
our fellows, even when they consistently fail. Hatred is not only
incompatible with respect, it destroys it. This is why Kant judges
the Enemy stance as ‘contemptible’. Fugitive misanthropy is
similarily rejected. Granted, there may be no hatred here, nor
impulses to violence; but there cannot be genuine human good-
ness without human community, either. Despite his reputation
as an austere thinker, Kant affirms that we’re moral and social
creatures. A Fugitive cannot flourish precisely insofar as they
flee from others. Perhaps they can live, isolated and secluded –
but they cannot live well.
The Enemy and Fugitive misanthropic stances existed long
before Kant. If we push back to classical antiquity, we can find
people who reported an abiding hatred or fear of humanity.
Plutarch declared that “he who hates vices, hates humanity” –
pretty much the motto of the Enemy. Heraclitus of Ephesus,
the ‘weeping philosopher’, also lamented the vices and folly of
his peers, eventually – so legend tells – fleeing to live in the moun-
tains. Probably that’s exaggerated, although it illustrates an
understandable desire to abandon the human world. But hatred
and fear can be difficult to sustain. Perhaps misanthropy is more
bearable if it’s rooted in other emotions or understandings. We
can find these other misanthropic stances by looking East.
The Activist and the Quietist
The systematic appraisal of our moral condition and potential
has been deeply rooted in Indian and Chinese philosophical tra-
ditions from their earliest known stages. Looking at the Indian
schools, the picture is bleak: human beings are trapped in cycles
of dukkha (‘suffering’, ‘imbalance’, or ‘dis-ease’) and rebirth,
within a ‘wheel of suffering’ driven by our vices and failings –
especially, for the Buddhist, the ‘unwholesome roots’, of hate,
delusion, and greed. All the classical Chinese schools, too, share
a grim picture of the state of humanity. They saw a world dom-
inated by cruelty, greed, mendaciousness, selfishness, instabil-
ity, waste of talents, relentless violence. The Confucians, lament
that the rites and the teachings of the Sage Kings are forgot-
ten. For the Daoists, human beings no longer follow the Way
of Heaven. For the Mohists and Legalists, only austere moral
self-discipline and strict systems of penalty and punishment
could change our immoral condition for the better. Granted,
the Indian and Chinese schools emphasise many good things
too – virtues, wisdom, compassion, mindfulness, ritual conduct,
enlightenment, the Way. But the very fact that they must teach
30 Philosophy Now  August/September 2020
about them is itself a sign of disorder. Preaching ethics is itself
a sign of decay, of a world going wrong. When the world is in
good moral order, predicted Laozi, there will be no need for
sages, rituals, and the teaching of virtue.
The Indian and Chinese schools generally rejected hateful-
ness as an attitude towards humanity. Buddhists regard hate as
a vice, for instance, while, even if they disagree on much else,
Confucians and Daoists agree that the true sage is neither hate-
ful nor violent.
The case is less clear-cut with the fearful moral Fugitive. The
Buddha taught the superiority of a secluded monastic life, and
Daoists too were suspicious of the corruptions of the ‘artifice’ of
city life. But other Chinese schools reject the Fugitive spirit. Con-
fucianism, Mohism, and Legalism wanted to reform the social
world, not abandon it. Confucius sometimes declared his frustra-
tion and announced a desire to sail away to some faraway land,
but then calmed down and returned to his moral mission. So Indian
and Chinese traditions offer us different misanthropic stances.
We might call the first of these the Activist stance. Misan-
thropes of this kind are motivated by hope. They see the
entrenched moral failings of the world, and respond with deter-
mined commitment to change this. Their sense of hope shows
itself in ambitious large-scale efforts aimed at reconstructing
our collective condition. This may include moral teaching, reli-
gious preaching, or socio-political activism, or some combina-
tion of these.
Confucius (c. 551–479 BC) is a good example of the Activist.
There were many Activist strategies within his difficult life per-
formed to repair the moral infrastructure. Form a community
of disciples. Spread the world. Perform good works. Consult
with rulers, if they will listen. Act as vivid models of the virtues
to inspire others. Restore the rites and a respect for tradition.
The hopeful Activist is a more attractive figure to modern sen-
sibilities than either of Kant’s misanthropes; certainly to genera-
tions inspired by social justice movements, climate activism, and
other determined efforts to save the planet. But we shouldn’t rush
to embrace it uncritically. Other misanthropes urge caution about
enthusiastic world-changing Activism. The Buddha, for instance,
was averse to ambitious Activist projects. For one thing, the deep
causes of our moral awfulness are entrenched features of reality
– dukkha and the transience of all ‘conditioned’ beings. Such
causes are coped with through personal ethical and spiritual prac-
tice, but they cannot be changed by social and political actions.
For another thing, muscular Activism is inconsistent with the
Buddhist virtues of modesty, quietude, restraint, and equanim-
ity. This is why we need a further stance.
This fourth main misanthropic stance is Quietism. Like all
philosophical misanthropies, it reflects a negative, critical
appraisal of the moral condition of humanity. What distinguishes
a Quietist is their spirit of resignation. They judge that little, if
anything, can be done to transform humanity for the better. Per-
haps they judge that the immensity of our failings is beyond
repair. Perhaps they fear that any grand transformative efforts
run the risk of backfiring, maybe by giving powerful new scope
to our grandiosity, hubris, and capacities for self-delusion. Better
to respond in more modest ways. Quietist misanthropes there-
fore find ways of accommodating to our collective failings. They
avoid entanglement in the more corrupting areas of human life,
 Philosophical Haiku
where the temptations of ambition and power are strongest, and
seek out simpler, inconspicuous ways of living, away from the
busyness and haste of the mainstream, keeping their heads down
and remaining safely distant from the fray, where they strive to
cultivate virtues such as detachment and diffidence.
A good example is found in the Daoist, Zhuangzi (c.369-286
BC), the Daoist philosopher of ‘butterfly dream’ fame. Among
modern Western audiences, Zhuangzi is celebrated as a roman-
tic, even anarchistic, sort of figure – a cheerful, long-haired,
barefoot iconoclast, cocking a snook at pompous sages and
eschewing the formalities of Confucian ritualism. Actually,
things are more complex. His vision of human life was bleak.
Most people are alienated and confused, he thought: painfully
fluxing, ‘worried then sad’, as their life ‘rushes on like a gallop-
ing horse’, having forgotten the Way (the Dao).
Zhuangzi’s own life was one of modest accommodation to
this world. The Book of Zhuangzi shows him eschewing political
office, avoiding the controversies of disputatious scholars, keep- PLOTINUS
ing company only with a few trusted friends, and cultivating (204/5–270 CE)
spontaneous affection for birds and beasts. Such modest strate-
gies enabled him to live within the human world and either cope
with or avoid its corruptions and temptations. All flows from the One,
My soul flies to Intellect
The Misanthropic Predicament I long to return
A long list could be given of Enemies, Fugitives, Activists, and
Quietists. Across the world’s philosophical traditions, these four
misanthropic stances recur again and again. Each shows us a
particular way of trying to live out a misanthropic vision.

Granted, we’d need to spell out their details in light of some
interesting questions I’ve not discussed. What is the relation of
misanthropy to religion? Is it sensible or fair to condemn human-
ity, rather than specific groups of humans? What if the misan-
thropic verdict is exaggerated? And even if it’s true, should we
broadcast the bad news about humanity?
All of these are important questions, but we’re only likely to
want to explore them if we’re already persuaded of the philo-
sophical seriousness of misanthropy. This means rejecting the
dictionary definition of it as ‘hatred of humanity’. There are
many ways to be a philosophical misanthrope, only one of which
is characterised by hatred. In fact, it may be that the misan-
thrope themself doesn’t settle into a single stance. Looking at
the writings of many misanthropes, I more often see a painful
oscillation between different stances – moments of angry hatred
followed by resigned calm that rise up into optimistic hope and
back again. Confucius often wanted to give up, but was always
pulled back by his hope for humanity. Into his later years, how-
ever, his Activism gave way to a resigned Quietism. What this
suggests is that the real philosophical task isn’t about living out
a single misanthropic stance; it’s about dealing with the emo-
tionally and morally difficult oscillation between stances.
Coping with this is the heart of the misanthropic predicament.
© DR IAN JAMES KIDD 2020
Ian James Kidd is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of
Nottingham. His website is www.ianjameskidd.weebly.com
• This article is the text of the George Ross Memorial Lecture given at the
Philosophy Now Festival in London in January 2020. You can watch it
online at https://philosophynow.org/videos
B
orn in Egypt, Plotinus first appears in the history books as a
student in Alexandria, where he studied Greek philosophy for
eleven years. Then he did a stint in the Roman army, which was
to head East, his aim being to learn from Persian and Indian
philosophers (presumably he anticipated being able to take time out
from pillaging, killing and oppressing). He later came to Rome where he
spent the rest of his life teaching, developing a system of metaphysics
that would become known as Neoplatonism. In his rather toadying biog-
raphy of Plotinus, his pupil Porphyry describes him as a ‘god-like man’,
which is a nice way of saying he was a mystic who said mysterious,
beautiful, and frequently incomprehensible things.
In short, Plotinus thought there is a hierarchy of existence, at the top
of which is the One (what else would you call it?), which he likened to
Plato’s Form of the Good. Below the One, there is Intelligence (what we
would call intellect); and below that, Soul (which includes perception
and other biological functions). By emanating its mystical powers in an
overflowing of itself, like light from the sun, the One creates Intelligence
and Soul, and is thus the source of all being. The One is perfect, the
other facets of the world increasingly less so. Actual physical bodies,
like those we live in, are so revolting and despicable as not to rate a
place in the hierarchy. In its perfection the One is unknowable, but at
the same time the ultimate object of desire to which our souls wish to
return. Our goal in life is to achieve union with the One, which we do by
becoming utterly absorbed in contemplating it. Of course, given that
contemplating the unknowable isn’t easy, this might be something of a
challenge. But it’s sure to be character-building.
© TERENCE GREEN 2020
Terence Green is a writer, historian and lecturer who lives in
Paekakariki, New Zealand.

August/September 2020  Philosophy Now 31

Neoliberalism & Social Control
Arianna Marchetti looks at how the Continental philosophers Michel Foucault
and Byung-Chul Han view free-market politics.
eoliberalism’ is a catch-all term that refers to
‘N the promotion of free-market capitalism, the
supremacy of market value, and privatization.
Its opponents say it results in the exploitation
of labour and widening income inequality, among other things.
However, a simple and clear-cut definition of neoliberalism
does not exist since there is still much disagreement about its
meaning. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), the Marxist
thinker David Harvey defines neoliberalism as “a theory of
political economic practices that proposes that human well-
being can best be advanced by liberating individual
entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional
framework characterized by strong private property rights, free
markets, and free trade.” According to Harvey, neoliberalism
strives to promote wealth accumulation and economic elites
through a discourse of liberty. In neoliberal thinking, Hegel’s
famous ‘master and slave’ dialectic becomes a little blurred,
since individuals are not exploited downtrodden workers but
entrepreneurs in control of their means of production. The
worker is free to do as she wishes.
Foucault
One of the first philosophers who tried to understand neoliber-
alism not only in terms of economics but as a philosophy of
human subjects and society was the French philosopher Michel
Foucault (1926-84). In a series of lectures at the Collège de
France at the end of the 1970s, Foucault presented a new polit-
ical-economic analysis of the then emerging free-market trend.
He introduced two concepts, namely, the idea of the subject as
an entrepreneurial self, and the idea that the market can be a
validator of truth. According to Foucault, the establishment of
the neoliberal way of looking at economic relationships coin-
cides with a new mode of exploitation of peoples’ activities, which
he calls governmentality.
Foucault’s ‘governmentality’ is a form of social control which
relies on disciplinary institutions – police, law courts, schools,
and so on – and the creation of a type of knowledge which pro-
motes the internalisation of certain discourses or ways of think-
ing, through which individuals govern themselves according to
the thinking of these institutions.
Throughout Foucault’s writings – and widely used in politi-
cal philosophy ever since – is woven the notion of biopolitics. It
usefully designates the entanglement between life, politics, and
history. Simply put, biopolitics denotes a form of politics that
aims at controlling the population through medicine (see Fou-
cault’s The History of Madness, 1961) and the regulation of sex-
uality. Biopolitics is a type of power that aims on the one hand
to maintain life at its optimal state, of health, and on the other
hand, at creating habits that guarantee the stability of the system
of production, the extant social hierarchy, and its thinking. And
32 Philosophy Now
August/September 2020
governmentality is an art of government which utilises tech-
niques ranging from the self-control of the individual to biopo-
litical control of the population. In this way, the concept of gov-
ernmentality has broadened our understanding of power to
include a form of control exercised beyond traditional political
means (such as force, or the control of material resources) and
which can manifest itself in more subtle ways.
Foucault argued that the internalisation of discourses of con-
trol (for instance, when someone exploited agrees in their own
mind that neoliberal policies are just and right) is an important
aspect of neoliberal domination. Interestingly though, he main-
tained a positive attitude towards self-optimization within this
system, that is, of making the most of oneself and one’s possibil-
ities. With the introduction of the term ‘technology of the self’
in a seminar of the same name in 1982, Foucault started talking
about the voluntary practices and behaviours people perform to
transform themselves. He argued that what people do to try to
reach happiness, wisdom, perfection, and so on, are expressions
of self-determination and independence even within neoliberal
cultures. According to Foucault such efforts provide the individ-
ual with autonomy in so far as they involve a project of self-deter-
mination which makes the individual less dependent on external
circumstances. They also serve to create ways of thinking about
oneself that are a source of pleasure.
But can self-optimization be an expression of self-determi-
nation in neoliberal societies? After all, self-optimization is
anchored in the need to acquire legitimisation within a society:
it becomes real only when recognised by others. In this way what
one takes to be the optimization of one’s life will be strongly
influenced by norms established by the powerful. We look at
them and feel that we too should strive for wealth, fame, or pop-
ularity. In this sense, rather than being an opportunity for self-
affirmation and self-determination, self-optimization seems to
be another instance of normalisation we impose on ourselves: it
is a subtle and efficient form of control.
Han
In his book Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of
Power (2017), the Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul
Han put forward another new concept to analyse forms of dom-
ination in neoliberal societies: psychopolitics. The term refers
to the type of control that societies exercise through the use of
personal information. According to Han, the web, social media,
and big data are core tools of modern neoliberalism, since they
enable a more efficient and stable form of control. This control
is exercised in a very different way from traditional authoritar-
ian or totalitarian means of control, since instead of limiting
communication, it stimulates it: “The society of digital control
makes massive use of freedom: it is possible only thanks to vol-
untary self-exposure, self-denudation... the disclosure of data

PLEASE VISIT WOODRAWSPICTURES.COM
IMAGE © WOODROW COWHER 2020
does not take place coercively but
responds to an inner need” (p.18). In this
form of neoliberalism, “The smartphone
is not only an effective means of surveil-
lance… it is also a mobile confessional.
Facebook is the church” (p.22).
By willingly sharing our information,
we make surveillance easier. Big data for
example is an extremely powerful psy-
chopolitical tool which allows insights
into the dynamics of social communica-
tion and the patterns of human
behaviour, and consequently the devel-
opment of techniques of control or influ-
ence. For instance, by having access to
our online thoughts and desires, the tech-
nologies of control have the ability to
study our emotional responses and
exploit them. Instead of being dominated
through discipline and violence, individ-
uals are dominated by sensual or emo-
tional appeal and addiction.
The neoliberal system benefits from
mobilising emotions because emotions
give rise to quick reactions; they facilitate
fast change; and they open up new needs
and fields of consumption. Emotions can
be triggered easily and can create fast
responses. Through emotional stimula-
tion, ideas also find their way into our
memories more easily. Not only that, but
emotions trigger instinctual reactions
which we are not able to consciously con-
trol or even understand. We are not con-
scious of the reasons behind much of what
Michel Foucault
by Woodrow Cowher
we do or choose, but we accept and fully
trust our emotions to guide our reactions.
As Han writes:
“Emotions are performative in the sense
that they evoke certain actions: like incli-
nations, they represent the energetic and
sensory foundation to action... They con-
stitute the pre-reflexive, semi-conscious,
bodily-instinctive place of action, of which
one is often not properly aware. Neolib-
eral psychopolitics takes possession of the
emotion, so as to influence the actions on
the pre-reflexive level. Through emotion,
it insinuates itself deeply into the person
and consequently represents an extremely
efficient medium of the individual’s psy-
chopolitical control” (Psychopolitics, p.59).
Applied psychopolitics also invents new
forms of control, such as a myriad work-
shops training our self-management, and
various other activities which are supposed
to augment our efficiency. According to
Han, neoliberal domination doesn’t only
take advantage of the individual during his
working hours, but tries to dominate his
entire life, in order to sacrifice it to the
attainment of an ever-more-productive
workforce. And citizens voluntarily self-
optimize, trying to constantly upgrade their
functioning within society. Every weakness
needs to be eliminated, that is, healed. Heal-
ing in the neoliberal society means to suc-
cessfully deal with exhaustion and to avoid
August/September 2020
Philosophy Now 33
burnouts that come from the constant self-
exploitation of one’s body and psyche, in
order to be productive. This healing pro-
cess is itself seen as something meant to
increment productivity; it is not primarily
seen in terms of a good life. The improve-
ment of performance is the main objective.
Within this system, positive thinking
drives self-optimization, and in a sense
facilitates the illusion that if you work hard
enough you’re guaranteed to achieve a
satisfying life. To put this assumption into
question is dangerous, since it may anni-
hilate the self-optimization imperative, or
in other words, the duty of achieving ever-
greater performance. The neoliberal ide-
ology of self-optimization represents
almost a new kind of religion:
“The infinite work on the ego resembles
self-observation and self- examination in
the Protestant religion, and they, in turn,
represent a technique of subjectivation and
domination. Instead of looking for sins,
now negative thoughts are the ones to be
sought, the ego struggles with itself as
against an enemy” (Psychopolitics, p.41).
This new psychopolitical form of power
is more efficient than the traditional means
of control because it makes rebellion
almost impossible. Those who fail in the
neoliberal system live their failure as their
own responsibility, and in the best case,
direct their frustration at increasing their
productivity (‘auto-correction’). In the
worst case, their frustration at their fail-
ure to create for themselves wealth or fame
makes individuals depressed and self-
destructive – but not critical towards the
system that has fostered this depression
and self-destructiveness.
Psychopolitics is founded on the prin-
ciple of freedom, and that’s what makes it
so efficient. Modern neoliberalism exploits
everything that is utilised within the exer-
cise of freedom, such as emotions, play,
and communication. In the neoliberal
system, freedoms, which by definition
should be freedoms from constrictions,
generate constrictions. The tragedy of psy-
chopolitics is precisely that it deceives the
subject into making a slave of himself.
© ARIANNA MARCHETTI 2020
Arianna Marchetti is a graduate of Cultural
and European Studies. Her main interest is
political philosophy, in particular the ethics of
migration. She’s a translator and a painter.
Q
uestion of the Month
How Do We Understand
Each Other?
Each answer below receives a book. Apologies to the entrants not included.
C an you conceive of something of which you’ve had no prior
experience ? I cannot imagine any human being capable of
doing so. This is a key to how we understand one another, because
it exemplifies our reliance upon a pre-existing stimulus for
thought. And if human thought is founded upon experience (see
for example, David Hume), so too is social interaction. For exam-
ple, if someone informs another that they fancy a sumptuous ban-
quet (as, dear reader, you often find yourself doing), the receiver
might conjure up an image based upon past attendance of banquets
or knowledge of the constituent parts. Abstract concepts such as
‘love’ seem to exist in the entities which harbour them, as they are
in many ways incommunicable through experience of the physical
world, and are transferable only through language. But in these
ways a conversational understanding is reached – much as Ludwig
Wittgenstein argued in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921).
However, the more impressive feat is that of emotional under-
standing between individuals, commonly called ‘empathy’.
Although understanding appears to be reached in much the same
fashion with emotions – one understands trust because one has
trusted, love because one has loved, hatred because one has hated,
just as Aristotle noted – emotional understanding is a quite dis-
tinct category. Indeed here the term ‘understanding’ is not
enough, and must be replaced with ‘insight’ or ‘empathy’, etc.
G.E Moore’s thought concerning the colour yellow supports
the idea that some experiences are beyond normal language. He
reasoned that one can successfully identify the colour yellow with-
out being able to provide a meaningful definition of it (or word).
But one cannot truly comprehend the colour without seeing it.
So some form of experience is key to understanding here, too.
Through a combination of physical/literal, abstract and emo-
tional understanding, human beings can interact through the
shared experience of what it is to be human, or merely to exist.
NATALIE BORENSTEIN, BIRMINGHAM
I f you say to me, ‘That’s OK’, you could be praising me, criti-
cizing me, expressing exasperation with me, encouraging me,
or even saying you’re disgusted with me. How do I understand
what you mean? The older Wittgenstein taught us that we do so
by learning how to play particular language games in specific sit-
uations. That’s how we understand what ‘That’s OK’ means in
a given time and place. Is that enough?
It isn’t. If I am to understand what you mean by ‘That’s OK’,
I must have not only a socio-linguistic chip, but also an emotional
one. If you are angry, I understand you’re angry via fellow-feel-
ing, as I too have been angry. If I get that you’re complimenting
me, I understand this because I too have complimented someone.
I may not agree with your emotional response in a situation
involving me, but I will never ‘get’ what you mean by otherwise
anodyne words without fellow feeling.
In some ways the great philosopher of social communication
34 Philosophy Now  August/September 2020
?
?
?
is not Wittgenstein but Adam Smith, who in his Theory of Moral
Sentiments (1759) argued that fellow feeling is both the cause and
the result of humans being social creatures. Shared sentiment is
why we can understand what is meant by ‘That’s OK’, and why
we’re gladdened when a perfect stranger smiles at us. It can even
be the basis of personal morality – as Smith posits with the psy-
chological metaphor of ‘the Spectator’ deep inside us – that other
self who reminds us before acting that we should ask ourselves if
we could justifiably incite the same feelings of pleasure and pain
in ourselves as our action would produce in others. Fellow feeling
and the Impartial Spectator were, for Smith, the basis for benev-
olence, cooperation, justice, and understanding. Empathy pro-
motes reciprocal altruism, and in that sense is in our self-interest.
TOM MCBRIDE, JANESVILLE, WISCONSIN
C an we ever understand another human being? Do we even
understand ourselves? We can get along with each other by
using a common repertoire of signs: I know in general that we
sob when we are sad, grunt when disgruntled, smile, chuckle,
laugh when happy, as it is what I do myself in similar circum-
stances. But signs should not always be taken at face value. A
baby’s smile is natural – babies don’t have the capacity to deceive.
But adults do: think of the smile of a man trying to sell you some-
thing. Laughter too may be false or hollow. Sometimes we want
to persuade not only others but also ourselves that we are happy.
So too with words. Take the simple phrase ‘I love you’. We
know what the words mean generally, but not necessarily what
the speaker means by saying them right then. Typically we look
for extra-linguistic signs, say, by peering into the other’s eyes: if
they flinch away you will be reluctant to believe them.
We can peer into another’s eyes, but we can’t peer into
another’s mind. Indeed, we can’t even peer into our own with any
confidence; sometimes we only become aware that we are jealous
when someone else points it out to us on the basis of our behaviour.
Understanding a human being is not like understanding, say,
a mathematical proof, such that once we have mastered it, there’s
nothing left over for us to know. To claim that we can read
another person like a book is necessarily false. A person’s identity
is fluid, imprecise – we change over time and with life-experience.
Even in the context of a long-term relationship, our partner will
continue to surprise us. Sometimes we even surprise ourselves.
Notoriously, actors who take on many roles can suffer a loss
of identity and are at a loss when they have to play themselves.
But not only actors: many people can live their lives without ever
quite knowing who or what they are. (The present writer is one
of these people.) The paradigm of intellectual understanding is
inappropriate for humanity. Perhaps the best we can say to our
partner is: I don’t understand you any better, but I’ve come to
appreciate you more.
ROGER CALDWELL, WIVENHOE, ESSEX
How Do We Understand Each Other?
 ? ?
D o we understand each other? Some doubt this, given the mis-
understandings that can occur. But the fact of identifiable
misunderstandings demonstrates that these take place against a
background of good understandings, in much the same way that
optical illusions do not disprove general accurate perception.
Let’s take understanding as a given. Why might anyone think
it impossible? There’s the idea that as mental beings we don’t
seem able to get out of our own consciousnesses, and literally put
ourselves into another person’s mind. The very idea seems to be
a logical contradiction: your mind is either yours, or not yours
and you can’t think its thoughts. Wittgenstein’s profound reply
to the question of how two people could know they experience
the colour blue in the same way, was, what on earth would it mean
to say that they had the same experience? Yet we can understand
others and feel sympathy for their illnesses, and elation for their
success. How can this be, given our essential aloneness?
The answer is a perfectly valid (though logically weak) induc-
tive analogy that is so powerful it is confirmed for us every minute
of our lives: we work out what people mean from perceived
behaviour. I cannot feel your pain, but I’m pretty sure you have
some when I see you jumping up and down holding your thumb
having just accidently hit it hard with a hammer, because that is
what I do when I hurt. Only a trained philosopher would doubt
this for the second it takes tears to well up in the eyes of a child
scraping their knee on a paving stone.
No doubt Wittgenstein and other philosophers of language
are correct that we learn to communicate about essentially private
experiences through common languages developed by commu-
nities. Our understanding, however, goes beyond words. It is
predicated on our physical similarity, and the analogy that I
believe you’re experiencing something similar to me when you
behave the way I do when I have that experience. That behaviour
may be an involuntary action or socially learned: either way it is
the clue that enables us to answer the needs of others as we would
have them answer ours.
PETER KEEBLE, HARROW, LONDON
H ow does a dog get me to play Fetch? We don’t share a com-
mon language, and we live only at the periphery of each
other’s culture. He stares at me, he whines and yaps, and kneels
at my feet with an increasingly slobbery ball in his mouth. I have
to guess: A walk? Dinner time? A treat? It must be trial and error
to find some sort of behaviour – some coincidence of actions and
desires – that gets his point across the gulf between our species.
But it’s not until I react at all that he has managed to communicate;
and only if I make the correct reaction do we understand each other.
Let’s say that I successfully figure out that it’s time to throw
the ball. How much of what the dog communicated was neces-
sary to achieve this? Was it the whine, the ball, or the
pheromones in the air that any dog would have picked up on
instantly; something else; or some combination of things? Only
time and animal psychology will tell.
Next time, the dog will have to recall these actions, or try a dif-
ferent combination of tricks; but with perseverance and patience,
working together, we will eventually get Fetch down pat.
MICHAEL BARLOW, STRATFORD, ONTARIO
A s many couples, work colleagues, and members of opposing
political factions would testify, understanding each other does
not always come naturally. Examining the many layers required for
mutual comprehension may explain why this seems to be the case.
The first component needed to understand each other is our
How Do We Understand Each Other?
?
main means of communication – language. This need is amus-
ingly illustrated by two individuals who don’t speak the same lan-
guage, when communication becomes a useless exchange of noise.
However, if a common language were sufficient for understand-
ing each other, then comprehension among citizens speaking the
same language would be guaranteed. This is clearly not the case.
To aid understanding, language needs to be coupled with some
common ground between interlocutors, or similar perceptions of
particular situations. In this regard, being part of the same culture
becomes helpful for understanding each other, as it can provide a
common framework and a foundational set of values and principles
to build understanding on. But there are many levels to this. Two
individuals can be from the same country, but wide apart when it
comes to their socio-economic status or childhood upbringing.
This suggests that to enable understanding between individuals it
is beneficial to have similar past experiences and live in a comparable
environment. This is a scarce condition among humans.
Yet this is still not enough, as diverse genetics can lead to dis-
agreements and misunderstanding. For example, a 2014 study of
political beliefs revealed that the development of political attitudes
depends approximately 60% on environment and 40% on our
genes. So to sum up, similar genetics, comparable past experi-
ences, a shared culture and environment, as well as a common
language, are required to have the best chance of understanding
each other. Is it a surprise then that reaching mutual compre-
hension seems so elusive? So if I failed to make you understand
my answer, that’s completely understandable.
ALEXANDER CLACKSON, BIRKENHEAD
U nderstanding begins when I decide to put my existing
assumptions aside and do my best to grasp your point in
your terms. This involves active listening (or reading), asking
clarifying questions and not jumping to conclusions. With such
a tedious process simply to understand each other, how do we
ever get anything done? It’s here that assumptions and various
mental shortcuts help us out, and sometimes lead to confusions.
I heard someone put very nicely why people struggle to under-
stand each other: ‘They grew up watching different cartoons.’ The
broader context of social and cultural influence shapes our assump-
tions, values, perceptions. The more we have in common, the big-
ger the chance that our general assumptions about life are similar
and we’ll more readily and quickly understand each other. We will
most likely not even notice because we unreflectively put similar
meanings into the same words. This ease of understanding, how-
ever, can be deceiving. I can get so used to my assumptions being
the same as those of my friends that I may expect them to be uni-
versal. It is here that I risk running into the trap of misunderstand-
ing. Working in an international environment, I notice this almost
daily. People from different contexts come together and often
expect their understanding of things to be the only one. Misunder-
standings are guaranteed.
It’s worth reminding ourselves from time to time that we all
have assumptions, and they’re often pretty diverse. So, to under-
stand each other, it pays to put in the conscious effort to establish
common ground at the outset of any communication. This may
feel cumbersome at the beginning, but think of all that we could
collectively achieve when we truly understand each other.
NATALIJA CERA, MUNICH
H umans are knowing subjects who inhabit both an objective
and a subjective world. No one else possesses my thoughts
and feelings (subjective); I also have thoughts and feelings about
August/September 2020  Philosophy Now 35
 ? ?
things outside of myself, such as trees, bees, and faces (objective).
Knowing impersonal facts is one thing, understanding persons
is another. Blaise may live in an earthquake zone (geology), on
a mountain (geography), and have O-negative blood (chem-
istry). This does not reveal his person. What about the subjective
features of Blaise which largely constitute his being?
First, we can refuse to reduce the subjective to the objective.
Blaise is not a collection of material and empirical states, he is a
self-in-the-world the human way of being. Some philosophies try
to eliminate the subjective, saying there are no experiences, but
only physical states. Do they think about their own theories?
Second, we can develop skills to understand other subjects.
We look to axiology, or the study of value: Persons such as Blaise
are worth knowing, and treating appropriately. Their being-in-
the-world is as important as my own. Persons merit attention.
Next we look to epistemology. To understand other selves, I
must deny myself. As Simone Weil says in Gravity and Grace,
‘‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity’’. A Biblical
proverb teaches that ‘To answer before listening – that is folly and
shame.’ To know Blaise, I need to listen to him, and must keep
quiet. In silence, speech can be heard and feelings can be felt.
Third, knowing others calls for personal narrative. You can-
not know someone by quantitative measures, such as IQ. Your
story needs to overlap with theirs by sharing time and place,
words and silence, smiles and frowns, tears and laughter, regrets
and successes. Then, perhaps, you may know and be known.
DR DOUGLAS GROOTHUIS, DENVER SEMINARY, COLORADO
I have found one clear thing in common when it comes to
understanding people and languages: everydayness.
To learn how to speak Italian I had to live it. Similarily, to
understand my friends and relations, I need to spend time with
them – not only extraordinary time. like in a class, but time in
simple things. Me and my brother had difficulties: we’re both a
bit crazy, he is eight years older, and I am in Italy and he is in
Poland. All those things seem to make mutual understanding
too far to reach. To begin with the heavy artillery – problems,
suffering we have, situations from our past, etc – is impossible.
So, we started to play chess together. Wow, after some time it
started to work. We began to learn about each other, to see how
we react, what we say, and, finally, we started to learn how to
respond. We’ve got onto a real, practical way of understanding.
Just as there are too many languages to understand them all,
so it is with people. To try to know everybody will end with
knowing no one. Secondly, people mean much more than a lan-
guage. Thirdly, language is an object, a tool; while people are
subjects, ends, for whom a fundamental respect is needed.
STANISŁAW KSIKIEWICZ, KOZIEGŁOWY, POLAND
“She looked upon all who came
close to her as if she were seeing God. It was
hard to believe the welcome she gave . . .”
– Hafiz, from his poem Recognition
I n just three exquisite lines, the Persian poet Hafiz (1315-1390
CE) illuminates with great beauty how humans come to under-
stand each other. This involves a two-fold movement of attention
– a ‘turning towards’ and a ‘beholding’ – carried forward in an
atmosphere of presence and regard. The poet brings us imme-
diately into this atmosphere when he says, ‘‘she looked upon all’’.
This act of attention begins when we turn towards another indi-
vidual; when we turn away from our own projects and preoccu-
36 Philosophy Now  August/September 2020
?
pations and stand face to face before another. Having made this
crucial turn, the second movement is a ‘beholding’ – the act of
attention per se. Hafiz captures this movement with lapidary bril-
liance, when he says that it was ‘‘as if she were seeing God’’ – a
marvelously compact and expressive image that marks well the
existential depth of this kind of attention. Once again, Hafiz high-
lights the exceptional generosity inhering in this conception of
attention when he says, ‘‘It was hard /to believe the welcome she
gave’’. All understanding is a welcoming, an ‘up closeness’.
The notion of attention was foundational to the moral philoso-
phies of Simone Weil (1909-1943) and Iris Murdoch (1919-1999).
For Weil, attention is ‘‘the rarest and purest form of generosity’’.
For Murdoch, attention expresses ‘‘the idea of a just and loving
gaze directed upon an individual reality’’. She believes it to be ‘‘the
characteristic and proper mark of the moral agent’’.
The species of attention Weil and Murdoch espouse is exceed-
ingly demanding, for it is grounded in a commitment to ‘read’
others without partiality or preconception, and, in every instance,
to read them ‘differently’. As Weil said, ‘‘Every being cries out
silently to be read differently.’’ In light of this, she wonders,
‘‘Who can flatter himself that he will read aright?’’ But these are
the sturdy and enduring cornerstones of our deepest understand-
ing of each other.
RICK VISSER, LONGMONT, COLORADO
Long ago, in the cave known as silence
Man lived in harmony:
song-less, muted, free
Only a hand-print on a wall
Then a distant human call
Would shatter that primal unity.
By day he’d pray to earth and sky
Heed the wisdom of the ancient trees
At night he’d dance ‘round moon and fire
Take solace in the infinite seas.
Gesture would mimic conversation
Silent ritual his only Lord
Collaboration, sweet simplicity
Love in the dormant vocal cord.
But the end came in the name of word
Sending echoes through that cave
Until man’s world became as thus
And the soul met a shrieking grave.
Man lost something upon that hour
Lost intuitive understanding
The human tongue tore man from man
When wordless truth succumbed to speaking.
Confusion, division, language, war
Born upon that single rasping roar
Until misunderstanding between one and all
Beleaguered man forevermore.
BIANCA LALEH, TOTNES, DEVON
AUTHOR OF SLEEPING WITH DICTATORS
The next question is: Does History Progress? If so, to what?
Please give and justify your answer in less than 400 words. The
prize is a semi-random book from our book mountain. Subject
lines should be marked ‘Question of the Month’, and must be
received by 12th October 2020. If you want a chance of getting a
book, please include your physical address.
How Do We Understand Each Other?
Hello Professor Harman. How did you first
come to philosophy?
Ironically, but perhaps not surprisingly, my
mother saw that I was a philosopher before I
saw it myself. When I was thirteen or four-
teen, a philosophy professor who lived in our
town offered a brief class on the subject,
and my mother signed me up for it without
my asking. It was a fairly standard introduc-
tion in which we read Plato’s Apology, Crito,
and Phaedo. At that age I saw these
dialogues as little more than boring and
pious discussions of virtue, wisdom, and the
like. I wasn’t ready for Plato. At some point in
the next year or two, my mother again
signed me up for a night class, taught at our
high school by a charismatic teacher on the
Philosophy of Law. That one interested me a
bit more. We discussed case histories, such
as when two people in a lifeboat ate a third
in order to survive: should they be found
guilty of murder or not? But still I felt no
vocation for this sort of thing. But we had a
set of encyclopedias at home – once again
acquired by my mother, who is a brilliant
person though without much formal educa-
tion – and I used to read articles in it
frequently. One night, at the age of sixteen, I
decided to read the ‘Philosophy’ article in
the encyclopedia. From that moment I was
hooked. What interested me this time was
the way the article presented the history of
philosophy as a competing set of radical
theories about reality. In other words, it was
my first contact with metaphysics rather
than with philosophy as a discourse on
justice or law; and that first taste of meta-
physics spoke to me more directly and
movingly. At heart I am a metaphysician, and
that was the entry into philosophy that I
needed.
In 1999 you labelled your approach ‘Object
Oriented Philosophy’. In 2009 Levi Bryant
called it ‘Object Oriented Ontology’ (OOO),
a label which stuck. How do you define it?
Two features of OOO seem to me most
important, though as a group we only agree
on the first of them. This first feature is the
idea of ‘flat ontology’. This means that all
objects are equally objects, and above all
that human beings are not different in kind
from all non-humans, as if the universe
were split into two basic types of things. The
second feature of OOO, crucial for me,
though not found in Bryant, for example, is
the notion that there are exactly two
Interview
dualisms governing the universe. The first is
the famous OOO distinction between the
‘withdrawn real’ [Kant’s world as it is in
itself, Ed] and the directly accessible sensual
realm. The second is the equally important
gap between objects and their qualities. This
second point is often completely ignored by
my critics, and sometimes even by my
allies, but no understanding of OOO is possi-
ble without paying attention to it.
What do you keep from Bruno Latour and
his Actor Network Theory, and what do you
criticize?
Latour is destined for the history books due
to his recognition of the real structure of
modernity and the need to overcome it.
Modernity attempts to define reality as two
and only two pure zones: (1) human beings,
and (2) everything else. This is the bad style of
modern thought that I call ‘taxonomy’ or
Graham
‘onto-taxonomy’. But Latour’s solution is not
a good one. He ultimately thinks the way to
get rid of this modern duality is to say that
both the human and the non-human are
Harman
present everywhere at all times in a
hybridized mixture. This leads him down the
idealist-sounding path of arguing that nothing
can exist without the human who assembles
it into existence. Consider, for example, his is Distinguished Professor
idea that tuberculosis cannot have existed in
Ancient Egypt because it hadn’t been discov- of Philosophy at the
ered yet. This is why scientists mostly hate
Latour, and most philosophical realists have
Southern California
little use for him. But his posing of the prob- Institute of Architecture.
lem of modernity is brilliant, and will eventu-
ally be seen as a turning point, once we have Here he chats with
put the era of onto-taxonomy behind us.
Thiago Pinho about his
You’re a realist, but not a materialist. How work on the metaphysics
would you characterise your position?
What I usually call myself is a ‘formalist’. I of objects, which led to
mean this in the medieval and Leibnizian
sense of ‘substantial forms’ – referring to
the development of
forms hidden in the things themselves rather Object Oriented Ontology.
than forms abstracted from the things by the
human mind.
The problem with materialism is that it
ends up being a form of reductionism. Tradi-
tional materialism reduces everything to
particles swerving through the void. This is
an ‘undermining’ method that cannot
account for the emergence of new things
above the tiniest level. And the more recent
materialism of Cultural Studies simply means
that everything is historical, contingent,
formed through social practices, and so
August/September 2020
Philosophy Now 37
forth. This is an upside-down version of
traditional metaphysical materialism, since it
reduces objects upwards, to their social
relations. This makes it vulnerable to the
critiques any realist philosopher can make.
For example: if something is nothing more
than its current set of social relations, how
should it be able to enter into new relations
in the future? Everything should be frozen in
place in its current relational network, with
nothing moving at all.
Should we return to Immanuel Kant?
Immanuel Kant is probably the emblematic
modern philosopher; even more so than
René Descartes. If we want to go back and
address the point where modern philosophy
took the wrong fork in the road, I see no way
to do it without wrestling directly with Kant,
rather than just with his heirs – and there are
dozens of important heirs, although Husserl
and Heidegger are my own two favorites.
The most famous and most influential
argument against Kant is that of the German
Idealists: ‘We can’t think of something outside
of thought without turning it into a thought;
therefore, the thing-in-itself [the world inde-
pendent of human perception and thought]
is a self-contradictory idea.’ The supposedly
remorseless logic of this argument actually
rests on an equivocation between two differ-
ent kinds of ‘thought’. Whereas OOO holds
that we can mentally allude to something
outside thought without thinking it in the
sense of literally having mental access to its
qualities, the German Idealist argument
ignores anything like allusion: either you think
something in the strict sense of the term, or
you’re left with vague gesticulations and
mystical hand-waving. No one else seems to
have recognized that this is simply a bad
argument in the form of Meno’s Paradox [“If
we don’t already know what X is, how will we
know X when we find it?”].
Anyway, the real problem with Kant is not
the thing-in-itself or finitude, both of which I
regard as compelling philosophical discover-
ies. The real problem is that Kant thinks that
the thing-in-itself only haunts human beings,
when in fact the withdrawal of reality from
direct access can be found even in brute
causal relations.
Some critics say that your approach is too
radical because it compares the human being
to an object like any other. How do you
respond to this?
38 Philosophy Now
August/September 2020
My flat ontology – ‘everything is equally an
object’ – is just a starting point. But meta-
physics must begin by not accepting any
pre-existing clichés about how the world is
divided up. The most dangerous prejudice in
this respect, from the medievals all the way
up to Kant (1724-1804), was their assump-
tion that the Creator and the created are
utterly different in kind. For moderns – and
that still includes us in the early twenty-first
century – our danger is that we have a
model with human beings on one side and
everything else on the other.
In his article ‘The Poverty of Philosophy’
(2012), Alexander Galloway made a remark
about OOO ‘putting humans on the same
level as garbage’. What bothers him about
flat ontology is that he wants some vague
form of political Leftism to provide the
conditions of access to all other philosophy.
This becomes impossible as soon as OOO
forbids the human from being the sole gate-
way to philosophy. The fact is, the Left as we
know it – while better than the Right as we
know it – emerged from an era of philosoph-
ical idealism, which is why I suspect it must
be rethought from the ground up. But more
importantly, whatever your political views,
flat ontology means that they cannot be
built into your metaphysics.
You once wrote that ontology [the study of
being] has nothing to do with politics. What
did you mean?
I’d put it a bit differently, and say there is no
immediate short-cut between a philosophy
and its political ramifications. Consider that
most or all of the greatest philosophers
have appealed to people on both sides of
the political spectrum. There are Left and
Right Hegelians, Nietzscheans, and Heideg-
gerians. Heidegger was a Nazi himself; but
his numerous admirers on the Left include
Herbert Marcuse. And everyone uses Kant.
But look at a case such as contemporary
French metaphysician and political philoso-
pher Alain Badiou. I think the jury is still out
as to just how important in the history of
philosophy he will turn out to be. But my
biggest worry about him at present is that
his appeal is largely to the political Left, who
see him as a powerful theoretical defender
of their most cherished views. But it seems
to me that there’s something arbitrary
about the fact that Badiou only allows politi-
cal events to take some form of ‘the
communist invariant’. Does he really think
there is nothing to be learned from any
place other than the Left? Is it really impos-
sible to have a political event that teaches
some moderate or even conservative
lesson? I’m not so sure. It’s only so if you’re
willing to take all the failures of the Left and
call them successes. For instance, shouldn’t
we consider the possibility that the Egyptian
Revolution of 2011 was just such a failure?
Badiou and Žižek double down in their
support of that revolution, and it was
certainly a stirring event – I was in Egypt
while it happened. But I know many Egyp-
tians who would prefer to return to the days
of Mubarak; and before we dismiss them as
wishy-washy conciliators, we ought to look
more closely at what the revolutionaries of
Tahrir Square miscalculated.
I think we learn two key political lessons
from Latour, though he is not normally
viewed as a political philosopher. First,
modern philosophy circles around the ques-
tion of the ‘state of nature’ – of whether
humans are naturally good or evil. With
Latour’s shift to considering the political role
of inanimate things, it seems to me that
human nature fades in importance. One of
the main arguments that conservatives like to
hammer home is that human nature has
never changed one bit: that we are a danger-
ous animal; that a thorough knowledge of
ancient thought and history will show us how
a wiser group of thinkers learned from the
ugliness of human nature to build the needed
caution into the polis [Greek city state]; that
attempts to create utopia often lead to hell
on earth; and so forth. But if human nature is
no longer the key to the political picture, this
argument is severely weakened. Second,
there has been a tendency on both the Left
and Right – though more on the Left – to
think that political knowledge is possible:
knowledge for instance that we were born
free and were placed in chains by a corrupt
society; or that we are exploited by the capi-
talist class for the extraction of surplus
value... If there is one point where we can
learn from thoughtful conservatives, it has to
do with their greater degree of wariness in
the political sphere. There are in fact numer-
ous occasions when simply preserving what
we have is the wisest goal. We can’t just go
around the world shouting about how
immoral and unjust it is. Ultimately, politics
and morality are two separate ‘modes of exis-
tence’, to cite yet another political insight of
Latour’s.
Interview

In addition to Bruno Latour, what would
your main social theory references be?
Would they include Manuel DeLanda?
Yes, DeLanda would certainly appear on the
list. I learned a great deal from his A New
Philosophy of Society (2006). Although I hear
social theorists complain about certain
aspects of it, they keep citing it by the thou-
sands, even more than his previous books,
so they must be getting something out of it
after all.
For my purposes the opening pages of
the book are key. There, DeLanda makes a
distinction that will be crucial in the coming
years for OOO, though he does not use the
terminology I do. He talks about how, even
though human beings are a part of human
society, social structures have a reality not
dependent on the human mind’s conception
of them. I have taken to calling this the differ-
ence between the human being as ‘ingredi-
ent’ and ‘observer’ in any given situation.
This difference played an important role in
my recent book Art and Objects (2020), and it
will only become more important to my
critique of onto-taxonomy. Above all, it allows
us to see what’s wrong with all the hipster-
ism of recent decades about ‘self-reflexivity’:
for a human to think about human society is
not ‘self-reflexive’, since the ‘I’ who is part of
society and the ‘I’ who observes and talks
about it are in some sense not the same ‘I’.
You consider the art world central to OOO.
What role does art play in your theory?
OOO is suspicious of the scope of all forms
of literalism – of which knowledge is just the
pre-eminent example.
Literalism is defined in OOO as that which
conflates a thing with the sum total of its
properties – as was the case for David
Hume, who not only reduced apples to
bundles of qualities, he also reduced human
selves to bundles of perceptions. Aesthetic
experience, I hold, is the kind of experience
that drives a wedge between objects and
their qualities, which in turn also requires
the beholder to step in for the ‘object’ side
of this duality, since in artistic experience the
object withdraws from view and we have to
replace it with ourselves. To be more
precise, I am speaking here of the ‘art expe-
rience’, not ‘aesthetics’ in the OOO sense,
since aesthetics in OOO refers to a much
wider object-quality division, which we find
in our experience of time and even in sheer
causal interaction. In the modern period
Interview
Interview
there is also the tendency to assume that
the truest deep thinkers are scientists. Now, I
yield to no-one in my admiration for
Newton, Lavoisier, Maxwell, Einstein, and
Bohr; but why should I admire them more
than Shakespeare, Beethoven, or Picasso?
There are cognitive achievements of the
human race that move in a different element
from that of knowledge.
You have stated that philosophy does not talk
about knowledge but rather is a love for
knowledge, so we have only an indirect
contact with knowledge. How so?
This is analogous to my interest in aesthetics.
Socrates practices philosophia, not episte-
mology or natural science. He asks about the
definitions of things, but never reaches any
definitions that are satisfactory. He pleads
ignorance, and insists that he has never been
anyone’s teacher. I read these not as ironic
expressions of superiority to the masses, but
as a genuine awareness of his own igno-
rance. Knowledge is great. The human race
needs knowledge in order to survive. But
knowledge is not everything.
You said once that philosophy needs to be
funny. Is this something you learned from
Bruno Latour and Slavoj Žižek?
Latour and Žižek are certainly funny in a way
that Heidegger definitely is not. In fact, this
was one of the things that most attracted me
to Latour’s work when I first encountered it
in 1998. Later Gerard de Vries, the prominent
Dutch Latourian, told me that he had been
drawn to Latour’s work years earlier for
exactly the same reason. But humor was
important to me as a theoretical topic long
before I first read Latour. Probably the best
term paper I wrote at DePaul University was
an attempt to reconstruct Aristotle’s theory
of comedy based on a few hints in his Poet-
ics. I wrote it very early, probably 1991, at a
time when the first hints of OOO were still
just taking shape. This is probably because
what I consider to be my first original philo-
sophical insight – which dates to my under-
graduate years in 1987 – was the realization
that the definition of intentionality in Husserl
and the definition of comedy in Aristotle
have a considerable overlap. Intentionality
means that in any mental act the mind takes
some object seriously, while comedy is about
observing an agent take something seriously
that we consider to be beneath us in some
sense. This is Aristotle’s idea that ‘comedy is
August/September 2020
about people worse than
we are’, in which ‘worse’
means only that they take
objects seriously that we do not,
however higher than us they may be in other
respects.
In your opinion, what are the most pressing
questions for us today?
For me it is environmental questions rather
than capitalism. The old Soviet Bloc screwed
up the environment at least as badly as
Western capitalism, and – like it or not –
we’re going to need some capitalist tools to
work our way out of this environmental
crisis. Capitalism appears to be degenerating
into a plutocratic phase that cannot provide
its own exit. But I’m troubled by how easy it
is to score moral high ground points these
days simply by decrying ‘neoliberalism’. I’m
afraid that most of the anti-capitalists I’ve
encountered seem to think they have every-
thing figured out, which is always the most
dangerous situation to be in. Environmental
issues at least have the virtue of being some-
what elusive as well as pressing, which
means in my eyes that global warming is
more likely to provoke new thought than an
already well-established critique of capital-
ism that has simply repeated the same
complaints for more than a century.
What should a young philosopher learn?
A lot more than just philosophy. It is impor-
tant to be open to and curious about any
other field, including those that might seem
completely uninteresting to you now. For
example, I never had the least interest in the
history of English gardens, until, while
researching my architecture book, I discov-
ered their great importance in the history of
aesthetics. They represent the surprising
influence of China on the development of
English aesthetics, which in turn led to
Romanticism and to Kant’s own aesthetics.
Just keep your eyes and ears open and you
may suddenly find yourself passionate about
something you previously knew little about. I
always try to remember that in 1987 I barely
knew the first thing about Heidegger, but by
little over a decade later had mastered his
entire written corpus, simply because it
became important to me in a way that it had
not been important previously. PN
• Thiago Pinho is a PhD student in Social
Sciences at the University of Bahia, Brazil.

Philosophy Now 39

Beyond Belief
DEAR EDITOR: In ‘Beyond Humanism’,
Philosophy Now 138, Robert Griffiths sug-
gests that ‘humanists still need gods so
they can argue against them’. Humanists
have mainly addressed the question of the
existence of God because of the criticisms
from theists, who argue that a justification
or foundation for ethical conduct can
never come from humankind. However,
the central belief of humanists is that
humanity is the curator of its own inter-
ests and does not need externally-imposed
standards. Perhaps we should listen closer
to the case they make for man being ‘the
measure of all things’.
For those who believe that humanistic
ethics would result in an unacceptable
level of moral relativism, there is an
argument to be made that a process of
cultural convergence will even out the
major differences between different
moral systems. There is also a case to be
made that the development of social
rules, norms, and codes of behaviour are
an evolutionary response. Such instincts
or intuitions as favouring one’s own kin
or tribe, and the development of a ‘herd
instinct’ can be argued as the basis for a
common general moral instinct which
evolved to strengthen social groups.
GRAHAM HACKETT, CARDIFF
DEAR EDITOR: In his article ‘Einstein &
The Rebbe’ in Issue 138, Dr Ronald
Pies states that there can be no reconcil-
iation between creationists and science
concerning the age of the world. Did it
take six days or billions of years? Ein-
stein perhaps himself provided the path
to peace. As every science fiction fan
knows, if you go up in a suitably fast
rocket and return to Earth a month
later, many years will have passed on
Earth. Similarly, God, working in and
from eternity, untrammelled by our
restrictive dimensions of time and space,
could work so fast that what was to Him
six days was to us billions of years.
RICHARD HEATH, FILEY
40 Philosophy Now l August/September 2020
Letters
When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up.
Email me at rick.lewis@philosophynow.org
Keep them short and keep them coming!
Imagine There’s a God
Imagine there’s a God, who thought:
‘‘I will create a universe
composed of matter that conforms
to rules of my devising.
I’ll light the blue touchpaper, then
step back and watch as it goes “Boom!”
and see how things develop.
Perhaps, in time, something will grow
which can imagine there’s a God.’’
PATRICK O’CALLAGHAN
Your Secret is the Truth
This side of truth, everything is fuzzy
Deductive reasoning doesn’t work
Most of the time science and the soul
Get in each other’s way:
The secrets of physics/The duality of man
Time is relative/The spirit is eternal.
But from God’s side things are crystal clear
No aberrations or misplaced thoughts.
He looks in at us and knows exactly why
We understand nothing at all.
If only he could explain to us.
But truth is in his way.
COLM SCULLY
Genocide in Poland
DEAR EDITOR: The article on genocide
by Michael McManus in Issue 138 is full
of inaccuracies. He rightly highlights the
brave Poles who aided and supported
the Jewish community in Poland – with-
out mentioning the fact there were
problems in Poland with anti-Semitism
prior to the War. Secondly, the death
squads he discusses were in fact German
Ordnungspolizei (Orpo) from Hamburg.
Their task was to secure territory the
Wehrmacht had captured, ensuring that
anti-German elements were persecuted.
Thirdly, the vast majority of the Orpo
were career police officers; McManus’s
idea that they were made up of “labour-
ers, truck drivers, seamen...” is total
nonsense! They weren’t acting under
compulsion as those members who
couldn’t tolerate being made to act like
psychopaths could seek a transfer out.
Some did, and returned to their cities
and towns. I understand that few police
were actually prosecuted after the war.
One final depressing point: the SS,
Orpo and Einsatzgruppe had a high num-
ber of university graduates compared
with other units within the Wehrmacht,
and the highest Nazi membership by job
title was among university professors.
ALAN J. FORD
LINCOLNSHIRE
Our Nietzschean Selves
DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 137, Paul O’Ma-
honey argues that Friedrich Nietzsche
believed that we do not have free will.
One of the reasons we might not have
free will is that we “cannot possibly be
responsible for who we are, because we
have no say in our makeup.” This did not
strike me as sounding much like Nietzsche.
Granted, Nietzsche thinks that factors
outside of our control have a huge influ-
ence on who we are today. However, I
think an integral part of his philosophy is
encompassed by his tag-line ‘to become
one’s self’ (How to Become What One Is is
the subtitle of his autobiographical work,
Ecce Homo). He thinks we are responsible
for examining those factors we have no
control over and dismantling them until
we find what is authentically and truly us.
For example, in ‘Schopenhauer as Educa-
tor’, Nietzsche urges the youthful spirit
to look at what activities have truly lit up
their souls so far, and use these things as
clues to discovering themselves. So I think
Nietzsche would urge us to find ourselves
despite the factors that lie outside of our
control, rather than relinquish our con-
trol and responsibility because of them.
BETH POLLARD
CAMBRIDGE
DEAR EDITOR: Interesting article in
Issue 137 by Paul O’Mahoney, ‘Our
Nietzschean Future’. According to his
analysis of Nietzsche’s argument, humans
do not have free will because we are pre-
determined to act the way we do. Hence,
we cannot be blamed for our actions.

Apparently, we are doomed to chaos and
disorder because our lives are losing pur-
pose alongside losing God, until our lives
will becomes nothing more than a game.
However – and this is a big however –
if humans wish to live within a society,
there must be order within that society.
This means establishing rules the partic-
ipants in that society need to follow. Few
people would want to live in a society
where their neighbour can murder them
or steal from them and the perpetrator
be held blameless because they could not
help themselves. Rather, a just society
will establish laws so that humans are
held accountable for their actions, even
if they cannot ultimately be blamed for
them. The perpetrator’s programming
also means they would most likely not be
rehabilitated, and so commit crime
again. So the society only has a few
options: let the perpetrator go and hope
that crime is not committed again;
imprison them forever; exile the perpe-
trator to somewhere they will be unlikely
to commit crime; or execute them.
My point is that the ultimate chaos
perceived by Nietzsche is improbable. It
may exist for a short time, after a war or
other catastrophic event; but soon, soci-
eties would start to re-develop, and an
attempt at order would likely be estab-
lished. After all, we cannot have our
neighbours getting away with murder or
theft – even if their lack of free will
makes them blameless when they do so.
BRIAN FRASER
WINNIPEG
DEAR EDITOR: In Brandon Robshaw’s
article on eternal repetition, Issue 137, a
fourteen line extract from Nietzsche’s
The Joyous Science (1882) refers to a life
lived now which has been lived. But
nothing is stated about the future which
follows the demon’s sudden announce-
ment of eternal repetition of your life.
Hence the demon visiting Madge in the
early morning of her thirtieth birthday,
say, for the ninth cycle, would startle her
as much as the eight previous visits. How-
ever, once recovered, Madge has the
novel freedom to get on with her life. She
does not have to meditate furiously over
holidays, boyfriends, debt, or arguments
with parents. Madge may become blessed
with the robust attitude, ‘Am I bovvered?’
Alternatively, the demon’s visit implies
she persists like an automaton in an
entirely predictable world where she
enjoys no choices in the sense of being
able to change anything. But while her
ever-recurring path through life may be
obvious for Nietzsche’s demon, is it obvi-
ous for Madge? And if not, does it matter?
NEIL RICHARDSON
KIRKHEATON
DEAR EDITOR: Nietzsche’s affirmation of
eternal recurrence in the closing passages
of Thus Spake Zarathustra parts 3 and 4
was made in a state of Dionysian ecstacy.
He was speaking in his shamanic voice.
When he came down to earth he would
have been no more capable of affirming
such a thing than anyone else. (See Ecce
Homo 3, where he confesses that this
mother and his sister were the greatest
objection to the idea of eternal recur-
rence!) Zarathrustra needs to be read
alongside Mircea Eliade’s great work:
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstacy.
FRED BURNISTON
DEAR EDITOR: Do you suffer a daily
burden, a repetition, doubt with respect
to your questions and answers regarding
the illusory reality construct called ‘life’,
wherein ‘dignity’ and ‘freedom’ are but
social masks worn only to hide an igno-
rance of absolute truth with regards to
meaning? If so, read the Editorial from
Issue 137, ‘Nietzsche’s Hammer’, and
scan that issue featuring ‘the Prophet’.
Yes, life is confusing, but at some point
one must begin again, turn things
around, and address one’s own curiosi-
ties with one’s own questions. Not just
for information purposes, but to build a
world of clarity with purpose! To test
one’s question-and-answer concepts, as
well as to build all new world constructs
upon those very concepts! What was
once a ‘nothing’ is now a lifetime adven-
ture of exploration pleasure.
LEN GALLAGHER
VAL CARON, ONTARIO
DEAR EDITOR: It’s flattering when other
Philosophy Now readers mention my
name, and in the last two issues this hap-
pened twice. For this I should thank
David Wright from Sacramento and Ray
Sheldon from Glendale for their com-
ments on my choice of ‘worst philoso-
pher’ in Issue 135. In fact I dismissed
Nietzsche as my candidate for worst
philosopher, and awarded that prize to
Ayn Rand. But one problem I have with
both Nietzsche and Rand is the role
August/September 2020 l Philosophy Now 41
Letters
played in their books by fancy. You
might read them to wind down after a
day of binge-watching movies. Hardly
problematic. The problem starts when
their tight-fisted fantasy gets political
and is given priority over people really
struggling.
While I would not question Ray Shel-
ton’s authority as concerns Ayn Rand in
his Letter to the Editor in Issue 137, I
think he plays the same game as many
apologists for rightwing nonsense by nit-
picking over technical matters that have
nothing to do with the main argument.
There’s a big difference between group-
ing Rand with Nietzsche and Herbert
Spencer, and claiming her as their direct
descendent. Clearly there were differ-
ences, as Shelton points out; but that
hardly dispenses with the overlaps. For
instance, I don’t doubt that Rand dis-
tanced herself from Nietzsche because of
his ‘irrationalism’ – she was, after all, the
architect of ‘Objectivism’ (a lot of talk
about there being hard facts in the world
in order to make general claims about the
world and treat them as if they were hard
facts). But she certainly shared Niet-
zsche’s distaste for what he called ‘slave
morality’, as well as his concept of resen-
timent (see her The Virtue of Selfishness).
She also shared his propensity for the
fanciful and mythic: she preferred the
narratives of heroes, while disdaining
narratives about the struggling masses.
While she may not have shared Spencer’s
glee for eliminating the weak, she seemed
just as indifferent to their suffering. This
is the slippery slope she shares with Niet-
zsche and Spencer in their ‘let the cream
rise to the top and the rest be damned’
approach. There is a reason she is to this
day the darling of rightwing libertarians
and free market fundamentalists.
D.E. TARKINGTON
NEBRASKA
Beyond Mathematics
DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 137 Owain Grif-
fin discusses numerical infinities. I don’t
doubt that the concept of mathematical
infinities is useful for some mathematical
or scientific disciplines. What I do ques-
tion is, how true is this language? Math-
ematics only exists in our minds.
Humans have invented a mathematical
language that describes the universe; but
as Korzybski has pointed out, ‘the map is
not the territory’. A map that has infinite
locations between 0 and 1 does not seem
Letters
useful, especially if it describes a territory
that only exists in our minds.
NICHOLAS STRAUB
DEAR EDITOR: I found Les Reid’s article
‘Return to Infinity!’ in Issue 137 very
interesting. He argued that it may, after
all, be possible that both space and time
extend infinitely. I have an argument as
to why that isn’t possible.
The idea that there are some points sep-
arated by an infinite distance from some
other points may be rejected as nonsensi-
cal. For instance, if a pair of points are an
infinite distance apart then nothing can be
further away from one of those points than
from the other one. Yet for there to be
nothing beyond them, those points must be
at the edge of the universe.This would only
be possible if the universe is not infinite. So
the idea of a universe which is infinite
because it contains points which are sepa-
rated by infinite distance contains a contra-
diction. It follows that the universe must be
finite in size.
Reid argues that the Einsteinian model
of a universe that is finite but without
edges may be wrong, in which case, the
universe may actually have edges. But if
we ask what’s on the other side of the
edge of the world, the answer is that
there is no such place. My preceding
argument shows that there must be an
end to the extent of points or locations.
Therefore, there could be no locations
beyond that limit. And the principle of
this argument applies to any dimension,
so it applies to time as well.
PETER SPURRIER
HALSTEAD, ESSEX
DEAR EDITOR: We obviously have prob-
lems with mathematical infinity. I think a
comment from Bertrand Russell is appro-
priate here: Mathematics may be defined
as the subject in which we never know
what we are talking about, nor whether
what we are saying is true.
LARRY CURLEY
HUNTINGDON
DEAR EDITOR: I read Sophia Gottfried’s
essay on Nothing (Issue 136) with interest.
It seems the thought-laws we use do not
allow examination of absolute nothing,
since, similar to an elementary particle,
simply observing it apparently alters its
nature. So for me, Heidegger’s dictum on
Nothing remains the wisest: it simply
nothings. At the cost of meaning, this
42 Philosophy Now l August/September 2020
evades treating it as other than no-thing.
Derek Parfit comes closest, perhaps,
to laying the ghost of Nothing to rest .
He said that if there were nothing at all,
this would still entail the truth that there
was nothing at all – so, not nothing at all
(TLS, July 1992). Someone might demur
that if there were nothing, logic itself
would not hold. Does this imply that you
can’t think about nothing? (And how can
you think about no thing? – there’s noth-
ing to think about. You’ve got to think
about something...) Is the problem of noth-
ing just a question of thinking about no
thing; or one of trying to think about a
thing that can’t be thought about? Could
nothing none the less ‘hold’ in some sort
of supralogical mode – justifying the
assertion that there could have ‘been’
Absolute Nothing?
TONY SAWYER
The New Minimalism
DEAR EDITOR: I found a parallel of the
‘least publishable unit’ (LPU) from
‘Escaping the Academic Coal Mine’,
Issue 137, “that refers to the common-
place strategy of maximizing your count
of academic publications by making each
one contain the smallest possible contri-
bution to the field needed for it to get
published.” There’s the same concept in
athletics, which could be called the ‘least
prizeable performance’ (LPP). It was
practiced by top Russian pole vaulter
Sergey Bubka, world record holder
between 1983 and 1997. He overcame
his own world record thirty five times.
With this strategy he collected thirty five
important cash prizes – one for every
new world record he attained.
EDUARDO HELGUERA
BUENOS AIRES
Mind: The Gap
DEAR EDITOR: I do enjoy Raymond
Tallis’ articles; but when it comes to
meditating about consciousness, as he
does in his article ‘Against Neural Phi-
losophy of Mind’ in Issue 137, there are
key issues Prof Tallis does not address.
One is the distinction between things
and processes. The other is the distinc-
tion between the way we use language
and the way things actually are.
Taking the first point first: neural
activity is a process. Prof Tallis’ initial
doubt about the credibility of ‘thoughts
being electrochemical activity’ is almost
simply rhetorical when expressed that
way; but replace ‘thought’, which sounds
like a thing, with ‘thinking’, which is a
process, and see what happens: “Thinking
that all thinking is electrochemical activity
in my prefrontal cortex is itself electro-
chemical activity in my prefrontal cortex...”
The manifest absurdity has vanished.
This brings me to the second point. In
the way we use language we (unthinking-
ly) speak of thoughts as if they’re things.
If thoughts are things then they’re mental
entities and cannot conceivably be physi-
cal entities. One alternative hypothesis is
that there is no such thing as a thought;
but there is a process – the neural activity
we think of as thinking.
John Searle refers to the distinction
between things and processes in his anal-
ogy of water molecules (things) and slip-
ping (a process). Tallis seems to think
he’s missed the point about things and
processes. He’s interpreted Searle’s idea
as a comparison of things seen one way
and things seen another way, and hence
thinks he can answer it as ‘the scale of
attention’ being different in each case.
If consciousness is not ‘merely’ activity
in the brain, what is it? If the answer’s in
his latest book, I promise to buy it!
DAVE MANGNALL
WILMSLOW
DEAR EDITOR: Panpsychism seems little
more than a re-branding exercise. If con-
sciousness is a property of elementary
particles, and that’s all there is to it, then
the planet Jupiter should have a far
greater consciousness than our kilogram
of grey mush, since it consists of consid-
erably more particles. Gaia notwith-
standing, there is no evidence for this, at
least in any way that relates to our expe-
rience of being conscious.
What then is the big difference
between a bit of grey mush and a planet?
Let’s call this difference ‘coherence’. It fol-
lows that the grey mush must have far
more coherence than large quantities of
gas giant stuff. Furthermore, give our
mush a good wallop, or cut off its blood
supply, and it soon ‘decoheres’, no longer
showing signs of consciousness. But what
is this ‘coherence’? And why don’t all
aggregations of matter become coherent
in the brain’s way? Replace ‘coherence’
with ‘consciousness’, and you’re asking an
identical question. One or other is redun-
dant. Nurse, pass me my Ockham’s Razor!
ANDREW WRIGLEY
SCARBOROUGH
IMAGE BY CAROL BELANGER GRAFTON
Back to the Future
Peter Adamson looks back at ideas of eternal repetition.
I
n these uncertain times marked by
disease and political upheaval, we
naturally wonder about the future
and whether the past as we’ve known
it is irrevocably lost. At such a moment, the
idea that the future actually is the past, and
that the past is the future, might seem reas-
suring: these events have all happened
before, and are now repeating, as they have
repeated an infinite number of times. Each
of us has lived our life before, and will live
it again: “there will be nothing new in it,
but every pain and every joy and every
thought and sigh and everything unutter-
ably small or great in your life will have to
return to you, all in the same succession
and sequence.”
Those words were written – at least
once if not an infinite number of times –
by the most famous exponent of this doc-
trine of eternal recurrence, Friedrich Niet-
zsche (1844-1900) in The Gay Science
(341). Scholars disagree about whether
he took it seriously as a cosmological the-
ory. He did not really give an argument
for it, apart from his endorsement of
determinism. But determinism gives us
only the idea of a future made inevitable
by the past, not an endlessly repeating
past and future. So even though Niet-
zsche called eternal recurrence “the most
scientific of all possible hypotheses” (Will
to Power 55), he had more to say about its
psychological dimension than its cosmo-
logical dimension.
He was also not the first to contemplate
this rather breathtaking notion, as he him-
self noted. He looked back to the ancient
Stoics, who were themselves taking inspi-
ration from the Presocratic philosopher
Heraclitus (c.535-475 BC).
Both Heraclitus and the Stoics thought
there is a divine force steering the cosmos
which is fiery in nature. Indeed, the Stoics
taught that the world was once nothing but
a ‘conflagration’, with this fiery God living
in splendidly hot isolation. God then con-
tracted to become the cosmos as we see it,
Philosophy Then
pervading it so as to be physically present
in every part of it. Our souls, for example,
are but particularly pure fragments of this
divine fire. At the end of time, the cosmos
will once again be transformed into God –
the world ending in fire, not ice. Then
exactly the same sequence of events will
play out again; and again, and again.
Why must it be the same sequence of
events? Because the Stoics were determin-
ists, believing that the same starting points
will always lead to the same outcomes.
Moreover, their God is providential, and
ensures that world history unfolds in the
best possible way, even if we cannot always
discern the wisdom behind this design.
Unbeknownst to the Stoics, the
philosophers of another contemporary
antique culture were developing similar
ideas. In India, astronomical and astrolog-
ical theories were predicated on the
assumption that the stars’ locations signify
events that occur down here on Earth.
Since given enough time the stars will
return to exactly the same configuration,
the events they signify should match.
Admittedly this won’t be happening any
time soon. Hindu astronomers calculated
the length of the world cycle – a single ‘day’
in the life of the divine Brahm – as 4.32 bil-
lion years, with the cosmos being
destroyed at the end of each day. In this
vision, time itself was seen as a destructive
force. But instead of an endlessly, infinitely
recurring cycle, such as the Stoics pro-
posed, Brahm would have a natural lifes-
pan, with many thousands of those very
long days.
In this sort of breathtaking cosmic
vision, it might seem that the concerns of
humans would be reduced to trivialities.
But in Nietzsche’s hands, the doctrine of
eternal recurrence was meant to have the
opposite effect.
So what attitude did Nietzsche think we
should adopt if we did believe that our lives
are repeated an infinity of times? For
starters, we might choose to spend less
August/September 2020
Philosophy Now 43
time binging on Netflix.
Nietzsche draws more dramatic conse-
quences than that. In the passage from the
Gay Science I quoted, he goes on to say that
contemplation of eternal recurrence
should “change you as you are or perhaps
crush you.” For him, it forces upon us the
question of whether we would endorse life
as we have lived it, and endorse it infinitely.
If we do, it will not be because our life
involved only good things: pleasures and
happy occasions we would like to enjoy
over and over. Nietzsche himself was tor-
mented by illness and suffering throughout
his life: but he still aspired to say ‘Yes!’ to
life as an eternally recurring experience. So
even though his friend Lou Salomé told
him that the doctrine “had to mean some-
thing horrifying”, Nietzsche thought it
was possible to respond to the prospect
with unbounded joy.
This was indeed the attitude taken by
Nietzsche’s fictional prophet Zarathustra,
whom he described as ‘the teacher of eter-
nal recurrence’. The attitude is to embrace
the world in all its meaninglessness, taking
joy in endlessly repeating lives embedded
within a history that has neither narrative
structure nor purpose. Zarathustra’s ‘good
news’ of eternal recurrence is in this
respect diametrically opposed to the
Christian idea of history, with its arc of Fall
and Redemption. Without beginning or
end, Nietzsche’s world has nothing to offer
but its very existence, with suffering
inevitably mixed in amongst its pleasures.
As Nietzsche writes in Thus Spake
Zarathustra 4.19: “Have you ever said Yes
to a single joy? O my friends, then you have
said Yes too to all woe.” It’s a more daunt-
ing challenge than the comforting story of
providential order told by the Stoics, but in
its way, even more optimistic.
© PROF. PETER ADAMSON 2020
Peter Adamson is the author of A History of
Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Vols 1-5,
available from OUP. They’re based on his
popular History of Philosophy podcast.

Books
The Existentialist’s
Survival Guide
by Gordon Marino
IN ONE OF HIS MORE
forgettable films (I forget
which), Woody Allen
relays a joke I’ve never
quite forgotten, though it’s hardly a tickler.
A prizefighter is taking a royal beating, his
nose bloodied, his block about to be knocked
off. At the ringside sits his mother, next to a
priest. “Pray for him, Father! Pray for him!”
she pleads. “I’ll pray for him,” replies the
priest, “but if he can punch it’ll help!”
Less a joke perhaps than an existential para-
ble, this pugilistic vignette encapsulates the
bob and weave between faith and self-over-
coming in The Existentialist’s Survival Guide,
Gordon Marino’s seven-round rumination on
how best to endure life’s hard right hooks.
A former boxer and current boxing coach,
as well as a seasoned professor of philosophy
with a taste for all things existential, Marino
shares with us a ‘Nietzschean exercise’ (p.174)
he uses to train young boxers. He calls it ‘the
courage drill’ (p.174) and it’s designed to help
fighters overcome their fears of getting hit by
conditioning them to stay within striking
distance of their opponents, a strategy known
as ‘staying in the pocket’ (p.174). The
metaphor is one heard too in association with
American football quarterbacks, who, if
they’re any good, have also learned to stay
fearlessly in the pocket, even if it feels coun-
terintuitive. But staying in the pocket, coun-
sels Marino, is a useful and vital strategy for us
all, for the young especially whose rates of
anxiety and depression and suicide are now so
high that a viable defense – in the one-two
punch of Kierkegaardian faith and Niet-
zschean self-overcoming – is critical.
With this two-fisted defense as his guide,
Marino uses the first half of his book to repur-
pose the dark matters of existence – anxiety,
depression, despair, death – into the service of
self-flourishing. In the second half, he
addresses topics less frequently associated
with existentialism, but which he believes are
also instrumental to eudaimonia or human
flourishing: faith, morality, and love. Between
these two halves, and central to his book, is a
chapter on authenticity, the upshot of which
44 Philosophy Now  August/September 2020
We get existential as Doug Phillips says you have to keep
punching until the final bell, and Roger Caldwell judges
the soul-bruised life of Søren Kierkegaard.
is “becoming your own person” (p.122),
though such a project, he acknowledges, is
never easy. It means not only learning how to
stay in the pocket but understanding why we’re
there in the first place. After all, if, as Tolstoy
remarks in his Confessions, “the only knowledge
attainable by man is that life is absolutely
meaningless,” then why bother? And if we do
bother – as Samuel Beckett says at the close of
The Unnamable “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” – then
how are we to bear our situation of endless
suffering and uncertainty and absurdity?
How, in other words, do we contend with our
“esurient desire for meaning pitched into a
universe devoid of meaning”? (p.133)
Friedrich Nietzsche believed that if we can
find a why, then any how is possible. For him,
the why of life had everything to do with self-
overcoming, with an increase of power, with a
will to power. But a will to power is itself a
matter of faith, a ‘will to believe’ in William
James’s phrasing. If, for example, “your life
depended on needing to leap across a chasm,”
writes Marino (borrowing from James), “you
would be much more likely to make a success-
ful jump if you believed you could make the
jump” (p.129). When we fall into despair,
then, it stems always from a lack of belief in
whom we might be or what we might achieve.
This is a crisis of the self, ranging “from being
ignorant of having a self to refusing to become
yourself” (p.69, emphasis mine).
As for his own confessed despair, details of
which he shares throughout his book, Marino
has found solace and strength in the existen-
tialists – Kierkegaard especially. “At the risk
of sounding histrionic,” he adds, “there was a
time in my life when Kierkegaard grabbed me
by the shoulder and pulled me back from the
crossbeam and rope” (p.3). More than merely
a means for assuaging our depression,
however, Kierkegaard and other exponents of
the existential tradition – Tolstoy, Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer, Pascal, Camus, Cioran – are
summoned to help “keep our moral and spir-
itual bearings when it feels as though we are
going under” (p.31). Yet, as Marino indicates
in a chapter titled ‘Death’, going under is our
ultimate due, if not later then soon. “We can’t
stop what’s coming” as a character says in
Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old
Men. And life along the way will depress us
plenty with its frequent previews of the dark.
Wherever we find ourselves – in the ring, on
the pitch, the gridiron, classroom, workplace,
in our adolescence, or in our senescence – we
will be swung at, hit, knocked down, and
absolutely schooled in what the poet Elizabeth
Bishop calls the art of losing (“it isn’t hard to
master,” she assures us). Which is to say
everything we’ve ever loved will, in time, go
away from us. But our efforts to self-medicate
or take a powder from such slings and arrows,
while well-intended, are ultimately wrong-
headed and self-defeating, thinks Marino. If
all else in life is contingent, getting ourselves
pummeled, at least on occasion, is certain.
The question then is how best to contend
with our outrageous fortune, never mind the
heartache, pangs, insolence, spurns, the
returns of our own ghostly pasts, and even the
proud man’s contumely? Nietzsche – he of
the imposing mustache and philosophical
stingers – has an answer for this too: live
dangerously! “In myriad ways,” writes Marino,
“Nietzsche emphasizes the urgent impor-
tance of being able to get into the ring with
your fears... Rather than shying away from
our personal bogeymen, Nietzsche bids us to
embrace the trials that tempt us to call in sick,
because they are the pathways to becoming
who we are” (p.173). Only by way of
endurance, of confronting and riding out
what’s most difficult, of staying in the pocket,
of living – in Nietzsche’s word – dangerously,
is there any hope for us. Only then might we
become who we are and in so doing achieve
something like an authentic life.
Authentic Existentialist Living
A corollary of Nietzsche’s prescription for
‘becoming who we are’ is Søren
Kierkegaard’s notion of the self as what it is
in the process of becoming. It’s
Kierkegaard, that other 19th century fore-
father of existentialism, who serves as the
real lodestar to Marino’s study. This makes
sense given that among his professional
roles, Marino is the director of the Hong
Kierkegaard library at St Olaf College,
Minnesota. For Marino, knowing
Kierkegaard’s work can be a conduit to
another, higher kind of life, one of attune-
ment, of getting a grip on what it means to
be really alive, rather than to walking lock-
step with the living dead.
Book Reviews

IMAGE © WOODROW COWHER 2020 PLEASE VISIT WOODRAWSPICTURES.COM
Rooted as it is in phenomenology, exis-
tentialism is above all a philosophy directed
toward conscious awareness, toward aware-
ness of one’s freedom always to choose,
whether it’s choosing how to act or, at the
very least, choosing what to think. For
Kierkegaard, it’s also about caring: “No
matter how hopeless you might feel,
Kierkegaard teaches, you still have a respon-
sibility to reach through the pain and to care
for and about others even if you find it hard
to care about yourself” (p.232). The first step
then toward living authentically in an inau-
thentic age (as Marino’s subtitle has it)
involves guarding oneself against falling into
what Heidegger calls ‘the They’, Nietzsche
calls the ‘Herd’ and Kierkegaard calls
Book Reviews
Jean-Paul Sartre
by Woodrow Cowher
‘Despair’ – all of which are hiding places for
the facile and self-deceiving happiness which
can be heard in the herd’s laughter of unease.
If, as Marino puts it, “you trust that your task
in life is to become an authentic human
being, then you will know what you should
truly fear – namely, becoming a vacant-eyed,
empty suit of an individual” (p.54).
We have even the choice of how to think
about our moods, whether of fear, anxiety,
or dread. Understood existentially – in the
service of life, that is – such moods indicate
not only who we are, but who we might
become. “Kierkegaard’s existential prescrip-
tion,” writes Marino, “is that we cultivate
these unsettling moods, learn to sit on the
couch with our fears” (p.53). Why? Because,
August/September 2020  Philosophy Now 45
Books
says Kierkegaard, “Whoever has learned to
be anxious in the right way has learned the
ultimate” (p.53). Anxiety – if we really attune
ourselves to it, rather than run from it –
dislodges us from the They, which “ulti-
mately helps us to secure our identities as
authentic individuals separate from the
crowd” (p.48). In this way, writes Marino,
anxiety “helps us to know ourselves. It
informs us that we are beings who have
choices, who choose ourselves” (p.44). It’s
only when we’re choosing ourselves, when
we’re writing our own scripts, that we are at
our most authentic.
To imagine, in contrast, a self as fixed or
essential or somehow at the core of who we
are (as when Polonius advises Laertes “to
thine own self be true”) is to risk falling into
‘bad faith’, Sartre’s designation for those
little or big lies we tell ourselves to let
ourselves off the hook in order to take
ourselves more easily. For Kierkegaard,
remember, there is only the self which is in
the process of becoming. And for Nietzsche
too, our best self is yet unrealized, residing
high above us where the air is thin, and the
climb steep. Getting there won’t be easy.
The Existentialist’s Survival Guide, leav-
ened as it is with memoirish accounts of
Marino’s own pain and suffering, might
have been aptly subtitled – à la Adorno –
Reflections on the Damaged Life. “Clini-
cally speaking,” he tells us at the start, “I am
a card carrying depressive” (p.2). But it’s this
deeply personal dimension that gives testi-
mony to the promise of his subtitle. This
book on how to be authentic is authentically
executed in Marino’s hand and voice. This
voice of authenticity distinguishes his book
from other recent ‘how to’ guides on exis-
tentialism, as well as from the ‘lives of’
approach of Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existen-
tialist Café (2016) and, especially, from
academic studies. In support of his opening
salvo – “I want this to be an honest book”
(p.1) – Marino’s Guide advances with the
understanding that existentialism, a philos-
ophy born of experience, is also a lived
philosophy. “My aim in this book,” he
declares forthrightly, “is to articulate the
life-enhancing insights of the existentialists”
(p.2), one of whom, it’s fair to say, is himself.
© DOUG PHILLIPS 2020
Doug Phillips teaches existential literature and
philosophy at the University of St Thomas in
St Paul, Minnesota.
• The Existentialist’s Survival Guide: How to Live
Authentically in an Inauthentic Age, by Gordon
Marino, HarperOne, 2018, 260 pages, $25.99
 Books
Philosopher of the Heart
– The Restless Life of
Søren Kierkegaard
by Clare Carlisle
SØREN KIERKEGAARD (1813-
1855) famously declared that
while we can only understand
life backwards, we can only live it forwards.
If so, it is impossible to understand one’s
own life, since there is never a point of rest:
we are always being hurled into the future
until we reach the point of death, by which
time it is too late.
What, though, of understanding someone
else’s life? Most biographers work from a posi-
tion of objectivity, adopting the viewpoint of
someone from the outside looking in and
seeing a life as a rounded whole. In her biog-
raphy of Kierkegaard, Clare Carlisle adopts
instead the subjective approach, asking, in
effect, what was it like to be Søren
Kierkegaard? This is an attempt to be on the
inside looking out. We are taken through the
principal events of Kierkegaard’s life, as much
as possible through his own eyes, though not
in strictly chronological order. This can be
confusing for those who don’t already have
some knowledge of Kierkegaard – for whom
a more straightforward biography, such as
Stephen Backhouse’s Kierkegaard (2016),
might be an easier introduction. But
Carlisle’s method brings with it the advantage
of a sense of a life as lived – of vividness and
immediacy. Once Kierkegaard was seen as a
solitary figure, somehow apart from his time,
only properly appreciated long after his
death. Here we see him in the Copenhagen
of his day, in a context of railways, stocks and
shares, the Tivoli Gardens, and in a Danish
intellectual milieu where the philosophy of
Hegel was all the rage (when in his writings
Kierkegaard speaks of ‘the system’ it is always
Hegel’s to which he is referring). And in fact,
Kierkegaard found enthusiastic readers in his
own time – if not always of the works by which
we now know him best. Many of these read-
ers, Carlisle tells us, were women, who found
that Kierkegaard uniquely addressed them
both to the heart and from the heart. Carlisle
herself dedicates this book to her mentor,
George Pattison, who has done much to put
Kierkegaard back into his historical and
specifically Danish context, and to remind us
that, for all his existentialist credentials, he is
essentially a Christian thinker.
Looking Back on a Life
Carlisle presents Kierkegaard at three
significant moments of his life. We begin in
1843, when he has just entered his thirtieth
46 Philosophy Now  August/September 2020
year, looking out of his train window on the
way back to Copenhagen from his second
visit to Berlin, pondering (as he was to do
for the rest of his short life) the significance
of his having broken off his engagement to
his beloved Regine Olsen.
The next section begins five years later,
with the now accomplished author standing
at a window of the old family house, which
has just been sold, looking down on the
square below, remembering his late father,
and his own childhood and youth spent in
that house.
In the third section we are a year later, in
1849, with Kierkegaard pondering again the
purpose of his authorship. Ahead of him are
the years of his ‘martyrdom’ when he’s sati-
rized by scurrilous Copenhagen journal The
Corsair, and of his attack on contemporary
Christianity. By the time of his death in
1855, he had become the scourge of the
established Danish church.
Kierkegaard’s relatively brief life is
marked more by amplitude of thought than
variety of incident. His father, a successful
businessman, was of peasant stock. When
tending sheep in Jutland as a boy, he once
cursed God – a memory that never left him.
In his last years he was a great reader of theol-
ogy, and an eager disputant, both with his
pastor and with his highly intelligent sons,
another of whom became a bishop. Søren
himself enrolled as a theology student at the
University of Copenhagen, but took a
leisurely ten years to complete his degree.
The young Søren Kierkegaard was an
aesthete. Carlisle shows him in the unfamil-
iar guise of a romantic enthusiast for nature,
visiting the countryside of northern
Zealand, perceiving its lonely forests and
lakes in the spirit of contemporary Danish
Romantic pantheist poetry. This phase
didn’t last. When his father died he inher-
ited a considerable fortune, became a sort of
man about town, and got engaged to the
beguiling Regine. This engagement he
abruptly broke off. His life thereafter was
one of thinking and writing.
Kierkegaard inhabited a succession of
apartments in Copenhagen – luxurious at
first; then, as his money began to run out,
less grand. When he died in 1855, all his
money gone, his home was little more than
a student flat. His views of Copenhagen
itself are subject to much variation. At one
time it is “my beloved capital city and place
of residence”; at others it is “a little cooped-
up place, the homeland of nonsense” and he
himself an insufficiently-recognized “genius
in a market-town”.
Romantically, Kierkegaard was a cold
fish. There were no women in his life other
than Regine. But his relationship with her,
variously interpreted and endlessly cogi-
tated, forms the subject of much of his writ-
ings, directly or indirectly. He feels the
need to justify himself: “I broke the
engagement for her sake” he writes. Else-
where he declares that, had he the faith, he
would have married her; but had he done
so, “I would never have become myself” –
his authorship would not have happened.
At the time of the break-up he tells himself
that “I feel more strongly than ever that I
need my freedom” – a common enough
anxiety, perhaps; but for Kierkegaard the
freedom needed involved having a rela-
tionship with God. As he sees it, in Chris-
tian love proper, there are always three
parties, the middle person being God. In
Works of Love (1847), he tells us that the
love of a young girl can be a hindrance to
relationship with God. More generally,
friendship and erotic love are “only
augmented and refined self-love”. Yet he
goes on to admit that “erotic love is unde-
niably life’s most happy fortune and friend-
ship the greatest temporal good.”
A friend of Kierkegaard’s, comforting
Regine after the end of the engagement,
observed to her that Kierkegaard’s spirit was
one “continually preoccupied with itself.” It
is hard to demur. His voluminous diaries
attest to his self-obsession, and sometimes
to a colossal self-conceit. In his published
works he practises what he calls ‘indirect
communication’, meaning that he speaks
through a variety of pseudonymic personas
who do not necessarily represent his own
views. Carlisle notes perceptively that his
use of pseudonyms failed even in his own
time to conceal his identity, but did help to
mask his desire for recognition.
There is certainly something of the actor
in him, even something of the drama queen.
When satirized in the pages of The Corsair –
its cartoons mockingly depict him as having
one trouser-leg longer than the other – he
thought of it in terms of martyrdom. “Such
tortures as mine” he declares in his diary,
“that I should be selected to be a sacrifice.”
A diary is a private record, of course, but his
are written with an eye to posterity, and can
be tantalizingly inexplicit. For example, he
refers several times to a ‘thorn in the flesh’
that prevents him from having normal rela-
tionships, but never specifies what it is. If
readers don’t find him a likeable man, there
is no doubt that he has made himself an
interesting one.
Book Reviews

The Scourge of the Church
Kierkegaard’s influence has been consider-
able. Although others before him, such as
Blaise Pascal, had seen that the lives of most
people was ‘one of inconstancy, boredom,
and anxiety’, no one else had put the indi-
vidual to the fore in the same way, or asked
with such intensity and persistence the ques-
tion of how to live as a human being in the
world. In Kierkegaard’s case this was with
the purpose not of making life easier, but
rather (as he says) of making it more difficult.
Kierkegaard’s existentialist followers,
such as Heidegger and Sartre, stressed that
confronting and making choices was neces-
sary if we’re to live authentic lives; but for
them authenticity had become a relationship
with oneself – God had fallen out of the
picture. Kierkegaard saw himself as a Chris-
tian thinker, his task being that of reintro-
ducing Christianity to a Christendom that
had watered it down into a matter of lip-
Book Reviews
Søren Kierkegaard
c.1840 by his father,
Niels Christian Kierkegaard
service and social conformity. The Danish
State Church he saw as merely playing at
Christianity “in the same sense as a child
plays at being a soldier” – that is, by remov-
ing the danger.
Previous philosophers had ‘rationalized’
religion. Locke had presented a Christianity
stripped-down to a minimum of required
beliefs; Kant reduced it to what he saw as its
essence in morality; Hegel saw religious
ideas as merely stages towards a truth to be
completed by philosophy. For Kierkegaard,
however, the Christian religion was itself the
truth – but one that needs to be appropriated
by the individual in his ‘inwardness’. This is
the substance of his formula that ‘truth is
subjectivity’. Religion is not merely to be
believed, but lived – and lived with passion.
Faith is seen as a matter of ‘taking risks’ –
and the more risks one takes, for
Kierkegaard, the greater is the faith.
However, against attempts to make Chris-
August/September 2020  Philosophy Now 47
Books
tianity plausible he makes it less so by stress-
ing the paradoxical nature of the God-man,
Jesus Christ.
In an age of the religious suicide bomber,
some of Kierkegaard’s formulations can
appear questionable. Carlisle herself says
that he can be ‘dangerous as an exemplar’.
In one of his most famous works, Fear and
Trembling (1843), he discusses at length the
Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. To
some, God’s command to Abraham to sacri-
fice his son Isaac was not simply a test of
Abraham’s obedience (the command was
rescinded at the last moment) but a
command to commit murder – a clear breach
of human morality. But if it is possible for
divine commands to take precedence over
human ethics, then faith is higher than
morality. In which case Abraham, in being
prepared to sacrifice Isaac – the person he
loves most in all the world – is what
Kierkegaard calls ‘a knight of faith’, even
though in secular terms he should be
condemned as a would-be murderer.
Was Kierkegaard what we would now call
an extremist? In his last writings attacking
Christendom, Kierkegaard describes a soci-
ety that is corrupt and decadent and in oppo-
sition to the laws of God, rather as the
present-day Islamist sees all Western and
most nominally Muslim states. Of course
Kierkegaard was writing in a very different
context than ours; but there is something
chilling in his advocacy of loving God “in
hatred of man, in hatred of oneself . . . in the
most agonizing isolation.” There is also a
sense of his taking things to extremes when
he recommends us not to have children – not
to produce ‘more lost souls’ – since in his
opinion there are enough of them already.
It is not difficult to find passages in his
writings that make one suspect he is some-
what unbalanced. That it is so easy to do so
must make him an untrustworthy guide to
life. It is only fair to say that he has quieter
moments, when he is no longer a fireman
ringing a bell, as he describes himself; where
he gives voice to counterthoughts. In a late
text, For Self-Examination (1851), he is
prepared to admit that not all hard ways lead
to heaven, and that martyrdom can also be
a matter of idolatry and self-delusion.
© ROGER CALDWELL 2020
Roger Caldwell is a writer living in Essex. His
latest collection of poetry, Smoking Opium in
Moscow is published by Shoestring Press.
• Philosopher of the Heart – The Restless Life of
Søren Kierkegaard, by Clare Carlisle, Allen Lane,
2019, 339 pages, £25 hb, ISBN: 780241 283585
 CRIMES AND
MISDEMEANORS
Film
“I remember my father telling me, "The eyes
Terri Murray gets to the core of ethics with Socrates
and Woody Allen [CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS!].

of God are on us always." The eyes of God.

What a phrase to a young boy. What were
God's eyes like? Unimaginably penetrating, Socrates
intense eyes, I assumed. And I wonder if it contemplates
was just a coincidence that I made my justice
specialty ophthalmology.”
- Judah (in Crimes and Misdemeanors)

“O my friend, why do you who are a citizen

of the great and mighty and wise city of
Athens, care so much about laying up the
greatest amount of money and honor and
reputation, and so little about wisdom and
truth and the greatest improvement of the
soul, which you never regard or heed at all?
Are you not ashamed of this?”
– Socrates (in Plato’s Apology)

S
ince the mid-Sixties, Woody Allen
has graced our screens with humor-
ous, quirky films. From his oeuvre of
more than sixty movies, one in
particular stands out as a philosophical
masterpiece. Crimes and Misdemeanors was
released in 1989, but the question it poses is
as old as the hills: whether living an ethical
life is worthwhile in itself. The higher the
cost of doing the right thing (or avoiding
doing the wrong thing), the harder the
choice. Allen addresses this conflict between
egoism and altruism by drawing a realistic
character who is forced into a dilemma
between protecting his happiness and repu-
tation through committing an evil deed, or
renouncing the evil deed, knowing that this distinguished from selfishness – which seems view that justice is intrinsically preferable to
will cost him his social status and happiness. the opposite of an ethical life – must involve injustice. On Glaucon’s view, justice is
In a sense, even to ask the question ‘Why altruism performed from a genuine regard nothing but a social convention that arises
should I be moral?’ presupposes an amoral, for one’s fellow human beings. from human weakness and vulnerability:
self-interested outlook, since asking ‘What’s since we can all suffer from injustice, we
in it for me?’ totally negates the idea that The Greeks make an implicit social contract to be decent
virtue might be its own reward and discounts Yet, it still seems to make sense to ask how towards one another. We only allow these
any motive other than a selfish one. Intu- being good benefits us. If there is no benefit constraints on our freedom because we
itively it seems that anyone who has to ask to being good, then moral rules are know we would stand to suffer even greater
what he will get in return for a good deed is unfounded and would appear altogether losses in their absence. He argues that
probably not a virtuous person, since the unreasonable. Crimes and Misdemeanors justice is not something practiced for its
question itself presupposes that a self-inter- wrestles with this paradox, in ways redolent own sake, but is something one engages in
ested calculation of reward is the only moti- of ancient Greek attempts to deal with situ- out of fear and weakness, or prudence. He
vator. If push comes to shove, in a dilemma ations in which there was a conflict between claims that most persons act justly not
between his own interests and the interests moral duty and self-interest. because they think it’s better to do so but
of others, the egoist will always look out for In Book II of Plato’s Republic, an affluent really because they lack the power to act
Number One. An ethical life, if it is to be Athenian called Glaucon attacks Socrates’ unjustly with impunity.

48 Philosophy Now l August/September 2020

 To illustrate his point, Glaucon tells the
story of Gyges the Lydian, who discovered a
ring with magical powers that allowed him to
be invisible on command. Possessing the ring
gave Gyges the power to commit injustices
with complete impunity. He exploited its
powers to the full, seducing the queen, killing
the king and seizing the throne. Glaucon
concludes his story by claiming that anyone
in possession of such powers would be a fool
not to use them, and that the only reason
anyone would pretend to disagree with this is
for the appearance of social respectability.
Given the magic ring, not even the most
ardent moral idealist would be able to resist
the temptation to use it to their advantage.
Socrates takes exception to this outlook
and tries to refute it. He wants to demonstrate
that the supreme object of a man’s efforts, in
public and private life, must be the reality of
goodness rather than its mere appearance .
Socrates’ main adversaries to this point-
of-view were the Sophists. These teachers
of rhetoric were the ancient Greek counter-
parts to modern-day marketing experts and
spin-doctors. They specialized in the art of
persuasion, and their aim was to win public
favour for their client, irrespective of
whether this was beneficial or harmful. To
Socrates, their skill consisted largely in
“making the worse cause appear the better”.
Plato’s Gorgias provides what is probably
the clearest attempt by Socrates to answer
the Sophists’ opposition of nature and law.
Callicles is Socrates’ third and final oppo-
nent in this dialogue. He refuses to grant
Socrates’ premise, that doing wrong is more
base than suffering wrong. Callicles claims
that Socrates has erred in assuming that the
ethical truth is consistent with conventional
social rules. In reality, he says nature’s laws
of survival and self-protection are superior
to man-made principles. Laws encoding
FILM IMAGES © ORION PICTURES 1989
justice and fairness are inconsistent with
nature’s laws, even if Socrates’ previous two
opponents were ashamed to say so.
Against this cynical view, Socrates argues
that power and influence gained by unjust
means would be hollow, for they would not
bring true fulfilment to those who possess
them. The bearer of advantages so gained
could never view them as his own achieve-
ments, and, even if he could fool others,
would know that they were not deserved.
While the man whose achievements were
gained via deception might enjoy material
rewards and a good reputation, these would
only serve to mask an interior disharmony,
a sickness of the soul.
The Movie
There is no better modern cinematic illus-
tration of Socrates’ argument than Allen’s
Crimes and Misdemeanors. Allen uses the
predicament of Judah Rosenthal (Martin
Landau), a successful and happily married
ophthalmologist, to bring the issues into
focus, offering viewers an opportunity to
consider whether or not Socrates is correct.
Does injustice pay only hollow rewards?
Allen revisited these themes again in his
2005 psychological thriller, Match Point, but
Crimes and Misdemeanors remains his most
elegant and enduring exploration of these
questions first posed in Plato’s dialogues.
Having engaged in a long-term extra-mari-
tal affair, Judah’s somewhat neurotic
mistress, Dolores (Angelica Houston), has
grown weary of being sidelined and now
wants him to fulfil past promises made to
her by leaving his wife. From the start of the
film we find Judah struggling to keep a lid
on the situation – calmly at first, then
desperately – while Dolores persistently
threatens to expose the affair, as well as
some of Judah’s financial misdeeds. From an
Judah contemplates
his predicament
August/September 2020 l Philosophy Now 49
Film
ordinary perspective, Judah stands to lose
everything – his marriage, the love and
respect of his wife and family, his financial
comfort, his hard-earned prestige as a medi-
cal professional, and his domestic bliss.
At the height of his crisis, Judah confides
in a close family friend, the rabbi Ben (Sam
Waterston). Ben says he couldn’t live if he
didn’t think there were some sort of a moral
structure and genuine forgiveness. He
advises Judah to confess the wrong to his
wife Miriam (Claire Bloom) and hope for
forgiveness from her. Judah cannot imagine
that Miriam could forgive him, and admits
that he can’t bear the thought of the conse-
quences for himself, as well as for Miriam’s
pride. Eventually Judah’s desperation leads
him to call his brother Jack (Jerry Orbach),
who has a history of dirty business, such as
eliminating unwanted nuisances.
Like Socrates’ interlocutors Glaucon and
Callicles, Jack has a hard-nosed approach to
life. He defines real life in terms of sheer
power over others, and real men know how
to wield it when necessary. The only plane
of existence he acknowledges is the prag-
matic: the world where forgiveness and
‘justice’ belong to those who have the polit-
ical or physical power to dispense them.
Abstract notions of moral duty or personal
integrity are irrelevant.
In a moment of particularly poignant
‘bad faith’, Judah adopts Jack’s outlook to
rationalize his decision to hire a hit man to
eliminate his mistress and the threat she
poses to his comfortable lifestyle.
However, having gone through with the
murderous deed, Judah is then plagued by
guilt. Not convinced by his own rationaliza-
tion, he begins to have deep misgivings, even
to the extent that he questions his atheism.
In a nostalgic reverie, we are transported
back in time to Judah’s childhood memory
of a dinner table conversation between his
father, a rabbi, and his aunt, a cynical teacher
who insists that this world is governed by
‘might makes right’. To bolster her argu-
ment, she cites the Nazi mass murderers who
escaped justice and went on to live contented
lives free of punishment or hardship. Her
brother balks at the suggestion that there is
no over-arching moral authority, and insists

that those who do wrong will pay, whether in
this life or the next.
His appeal is to a metaphysical realm
beyond the conventions of human laws and
their imperfect dispensation of justice. Judah
is left wondering which of his relatives is right,
The answer has huge implications for his own
soul (if indeed there is any such thing). For a
time Judah is consumed by self-doubt, to the
point that he becomes alienated from his
family and suffers constant anxiety and
depression. He has saved his reputation and
his family, but feels hollow. He is with his
loved ones but feels absent at a deeper level
because he has become a stranger to himself.
As an escape from his bad conscience, he
begins to drink unhealthy amounts of alcohol,
and his once warm and buoyant demeanor is
replaced by cantankerous irritability.
Alongside his fear for his soul there is the
equally pressing fear that he will be found
out by the police. But after a time, a drifter
with a criminal record is arrested for the
crime and Judah’s fears of being discovered
fade away. He has gotten away with murder.
Allen explores the question of how a man like
Judah can live with himself, knowing that he
has committed a great evil.
Money & Mind
To explore the issue of selfish and unprinci-
pled versus unselfish and principled in more
depth, Allen includes a lighter sub-plot that
runs parallel to the main plot and opposes
two characters with completely different
values and life-goals. On one hand is Judah’s
brother in-law Clifford (played by Woody
Allen himself), a struggling artist who makes
serious documentaries about philosophical
issues. Meanwhile, Clifford’s other brother-
in-law Lester (Alan Alda) is a hugely success-
ful commercial television producer/director.
While Lester has fame, wealth and romantic
50 Philosophy Now l August/September 2020
Clifford contemplates
his whiskey
success, Clifford is unemployed, profession-
ally unsuccessful, and unhappily married. He
escapes from his troubles to the cinema with
his teenage niece; but is eventually pressured
by his wife to take charity from Lester in the
form of directing a biographical ‘profile’
documentary about Lester. As Lester pontif-
icates arrogantly about himself in front of the
camera, Clifford is forced to silently record
the narcissistic ramblings of this womanizing
egomaniac, while Clifford’s own more
worthy project about a brilliant but obscure
philosophy professor remains unfunded
because it lacks commercial appeal. Never-
theless, Clifford continues to pursue this
project as a hobby, and also pursues an attrac-
tive producer from the crew of Lester’s
‘profile’, Halley Reed (Mia Farrow). Halley
herself is impressed by the more successful
Lester, and begins to fall prey to his charms,
much to Clifford’s chagrin. Allen seems to be
suggesting here that another disadvantage
for the man of integrity is that women prefer
successful men rather than men of moral or
intellectual substance. Clifford seems to have
lost everything pleasant in life by being a
decent man, while his brother-in-law is a
highly-rewarded sell-out who thrives on
producing programming that “deadens the
senses of the American public”.
In the final act, Allen brings the two plot
threads together by having a family wedding
at which Clifford and Judah find themselves
alone in a room and share a quiet chat. Judah
covertly ‘confesses’ his crimes to Clifford by
pretending they’re an idea for a movie. The
ending of Judah’s ‘film’ sees the murderer
reconciled with his deed: after much time has
passed, his feelings of guilt abate, and he is
able to go on with his life as normal. Clifford
mulls this over and responds that he would
change the ending to have the murderer
confess the wrong, because “in the absence
of a God or something he is then forced to
assume that responsibility himself, and then
you have tragedy.” Judah responds that
“that’s movies and not reality” – echoing the
Callicles’ and Glaucon’s retorts to Socrates,
accusing him of promoting rarified ideals
incompatible with the real world.
The film ends with a flashback voiceover
by Professor Levy, the subject of Lester’s
documentary (who has committed suicide).
An existentialist, he explains that we all make
decisions throughout our lives, large and
small: “Man defines himself by the choices he
has made. We are, in fact, the sum total of our
choices,” he explains. Events unfold in a
manner indifferent to human happiness. As
he says this we watch a montage including a
clip of Mussolini, reminding us that among
the events over which we have little control
are the machinations of those with power;
but at the same time, in the light of Professor
Levy’s existentialism, we are able to see that
these too are outcomes of human choices.
Thus the movie ends on a note of hope rather
than despair, because “it is only us, with our
capacity to love, that give meaning to the
indifferent universe.”
Choose Well, Choose Life
In extreme situations, such as war, individuals
are forced back into the age-old Socratic
dilemma: whether it is better to suffer evil or
to inflict it. One’s choices could be narrowed
to a terrible dichotomy between collabora-
tion with powerful persecutors or dissent and
victimisation by them. A radio interviewer
once asked German philosopher Hannah
Arendt (1906-1975) about exactly this type of
situation. Arendt replied that Socrates had
maintained that there was no proof that a
man must conduct himself one way or the
other. Rather, there’s an existential commit-
ment to be made – and the decision one way
or the other, says Arendt, is based on how we
choose to live with ourselves. For Socrates,
this meant not acting against his own
conscience or what could be construed as his
‘better nature’. At the core of this existential-
ist vision is a realistic admission that the
universe does not offer us an over-arching
moral order, nor does it protect us. Never-
theless, we are charged with the responsibil-
ity, and the opportunity, to fashion lives for
ourselves that are worthy of the freedom we
uniquely possess.
© TERRI MURRAY 2020
Terri Murray is the author of Feminist Film
Studies: A Teacher’s Guide. With a BFA
degree in Film & Television Studies from New
York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, she
has taught A-Level film studies for over 16 years.

Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)
Gary Browning tells us why Iris Murdoch stands out as a twentieth century thinker.
I
ris Murdoch matters for many reasons. She was an out-
standing intellectual figure of the twentieth century, whose
work makes sense of modernity and the history of her
times. She set out an original philosophy which offered a
new perspective on morals and metaphysics. She also wrote
imaginative, interesting and fun novels. What makes her com-
pelling is that her fiction and philosophy do not stand apart as
discrete achievements: her novels deal imaginatively with themes
and issues that characterise her philosophy, and her philosophy
explains how art is to be understood.
Both her novels and her philosophy drew upon her own lived
experience and reflect back upon it. Murdoch was a woman of
diverse interests and skills, but she put them together to engage
with the major questions and issues of her age. She was acutely
aware of the processes of secularisation that were taking place in the
second half of the twentieth century. The old dogmas of religion, a
priori reasoning in metaphysics, and absolutist moral principles and
political ideologies, were receding. Humanity was turning towards
relying upon natural science and its technological applications, and
emphasising the freedom of individuals. Murdoch recognised that
the freedom and scientific tenor of the modern age could not be
abandoned, but against the current of her age, she aimed to revive
the metaphysical spirit of Platonism and Plato’s call for reaching
and acting in the light of a transcendent notion of the Good.
Early Years
Iris Murdoch was born in North Dublin in 1919. Her family moved
to London soon after her birth, though she remained conscious of
her family’s Irish roots. She was a much loved only child, who
attended Frobel School in London before going on to a private
school, Badminton, in Bristol, which embraced progressive politics.
Murdoch flourished at the school before herself progressing to
Somerville College in Oxford in 1938, where she studied Mods and
Greats, which combined Classics, Ancient History, and Philosophy.
As an undergraduate Murdoch formed many deep long-lasting
friendships, including with fellow students of Philosophy Mary
Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Elizabeth Anscombe. There were
many romantic attachments too; notably a relationship with the
brother of the historian E. P. Thompson, the poetic and heroic
Frank Thompson, who was to die tragically in a misguided Spe-
cial Operations Executive mission in Bulgaria during the Second
World War. Her teachers also left their mark, notably the charis-
matic integrity and moral seriousness of the philosopher Donald
Mackinnon and the intensity of the classicist Eduard Frankel.
Messy, exciting, and multiple relations with friends and lovers are
a feature of her novels, and they inform her moral thought. In her
moral philosophy she looks to cultivate loving relations with
others, against the tide of conventional philosophical trends,
which were towards the dry analysis of concepts.
While at Oxford she also joined the Communist Party; and,
imagining a fairer, socialist post-war world, took an active part in
student politics. After graduating in 1942, she worked at the Trea-
Brief Lives
sury, and in 1944 joined the UNRRA (United Nations Relief and
Rehabilitation Administration), for whom she worked in Belgium
and Austria, where she witnessed at first hand the disruption
caused by WWII and the desperate plight of refugees; fleeing
appalling conditions and political oppression. She remained sen-
sitive to the human costs of political repression throughout her
work, in both her philosophy and her fiction. Her novels often
highlight the lives of refugees: survivors are shown as living under
the shadow of the Holocaust, and powerful portraits of migrants
lend colour and variety to her cast of characters.
From her university days onwards she maintains a journal and
writes a stream of letters. These provide a remarkable ongoing
record of her varied relationships and her politics. Her journals
also show her interest in a wide variety of forms of philosophy,
including phenomenology, Hegel, analytic philosophy, and con-
temporary existentialism.
From 1947-1948 she studied Philosophy in Cambridge, ini-
tially under the guidance of the broadcaster C.E.M. Joad, but
subsequently under John Wisdom. Ludwig Wittgenstein was
neither teaching nor an actual presence in Cambridge, but his
influence was marked on those whom Murdoch befriended. She
became a Fellow at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, in Philosophy in
1948, and over the next fifteen years developed her thinking
there. She reached out beyond Oxford and the Anglo-American
analytic scene by publishing on continental philosophy and set-
ting out a form of moral philosophy that appealed to a wider
audience than did most philosophers of the time.
In her letters and journals she attested to an awareness of her
own moral frailty. Before marrying John Bayley, an Oxford liter-
ary academic, in 1956, she had a number of torrid affairs: notably
with Michael Oakeshott, the conservative political philosopher;
Franz Steiner, the anthropologist and poet; and Elias Canetti,
the provocative novelist and social theorist. But marriage pro-
vided her with security and stability.
Sartre, Existentialism and the Novel
Murdoch’s book on the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre:
Romantic Rationalist (1953), was the first study of Sartre’s philos-
ophy in English, and a landmark publication. It remains a valu-
able resource.
She is at once sympathetic to and critical of Sartre. She had
been reading his work closely over preceding years, and discusses
him at length in her journals and letters, notably in her corre-
spondence with the French experimental novelist Raymond
Queneau. On the one hand she is attracted to Sartre. Unlike
those dreaming along the spires of Oxford, he does philosophy
with a kick to it. She observes how Sartre stays close to lived expe-
rience, and in doing so shows a novelist’s sensibility. She’s
impressed by his revealing review of states of consciousness in
Being and Nothingness (1943), but is critical of his narrow focus on
the self and his tendency to ignore the impact of philosophy on
the social and political world. In essays of the 1950s, Murdoch is
August/September 2020
Philosophy Now 51
Brief Lives
also critical of existentialist novels, which are not very open to
the interplay of characters and follow too closely the trajectory of
a single guiding mind. She herself published her first novel,
Under the Net, in 1954, and would publish a further twenty five
novels at regular intervals over the ensuing forty five years. The
main protagonist in Under the Net, Jake Donoghue, bears a
resemblance to an existentialist hero, but his egoistic flaws high-
light the shortcomings of an existentialist perspective.
In essays throughout the 1950s and 60s, Murdoch reflected
upon the roles of art, morals, and politics in the wider economy
of experience. In ‘A House of Theory’ (1958), she observed the
post-war decline in ideology, and, given the more general obso-
52 Philosophy Now
August/September 2020
Iris Murdoch by
Darren McAndrew
2020
lescence of social and religious intellectual commitment, she
urged that socialism still be promoted by a review of possible
utopian futures. In ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’
(1959) she reframed Kant’s idea of the sublime to capture how
the intricacies of characters interacting with one another can
yield a sublime expression of lived experience. Her most famous
essay on literature is ‘Against Dryness’ (1961), in which she cri-
tiqued novels that either provide journalistic accounts of con-
ventions or are merely fictional representations of their authors’
viewpoints. She reimagined the novel as allowing for the devel-
opment of free characters. (These essays are all available in Exis-
tentialists and Mystics, edited by Murdoch, 1997.)

The Sovereignty of Good
In the 1950s and 1960s Murdoch also continued working on
moral philosophy, alongside publishing essays on thought, lan-
guage, and the self. Her horizon was broadened by lecturing at
the Royal College of Art in London from 1963-1967.
In 1970 The Sovereignty of Good brought together three of her
essays on moral philosophy, ‘The Idea of Perfection’; ‘On “God”
and “Good”’; and ‘The Sovereignty of Good over other Con-
cepts’. The book sets her work apart from that of other contem-
porary Continental and Anglo-American thinkers. She opposes
what she takes to be shallow behaviourist accounts of the self,
while also opposing theories of ethics from Kant to Sartre which
privilege the role of choice exercised by autonomous individuals,
but do not take care to integrate or even examine social situations
and the perspectives of others.
Rather than assuming a neutral state of affairs to which moral-
ity is to be added, Murdoch reminds us of the myriad of ways in
which we perceive and value our experiences, and hence derive
our morality. Morality depends upon the values that lie, perhaps
hidden, in our detailed understanding of things, rather than in
theories and values we simply develop in our heads and bring to
what’s going on in our lives.
For Murdoch most of the significant work in each person’s
moral thinking is done by the way we imagine and describe the
lives in which we are involved. In the essay ‘The Idea of Perfec-
tion’ she gives the famous example of a mother who takes against
her daughter-in-law. The girl appears brusque and without
refinement, and hence unsuitable for her beloved son. But
instead of fixing upon this judgment, Murdoch imagines the
mother lovingly revisiting her conception of her daughter-in-
law in an effort to see her more justly. Instead of taking the
daughter-in- law to be vulgar, she sees her as refreshingly simple;
not undignified, but spontaneous. So Murdoch imagines the
mother as capable of understanding her daughter-in-law differ-
ently from her immediate impression. This capacity to rethink
and to move away from our prejudices is central in Murdoch’s
consideration of the moral significance of paying attention to
other people and situations.
Most notably within her essay ‘On “God” and “Good”’, Murdoch
maintains that morality might be seen in terms of realising the Good –
a transcendent standard of perfection in the style of Plato. Murdoch
believes that in the modern world old ideas connected with a per-
sonal and supernatural God can no longer be sustained; but she
imagines that a notion of the Good could still provide a paradigm of
morality that might encourage people to look away from mere moral
subjectivism to the possibility of objective goodness.
Later Writing
Murdoch continued to develop her philosophical thinking fol-
lowing The Sovereignty of Good, while publishing a series of novels
that tend to show the difficulties of attending to others and
acting morally. Perhaps her most celebrated novel is The Sea, The
Sea (1978), which is presented as a journal of a renowned but
egotistic theatre director, Charles Arrowby, who manifestly fails
in his professed aim of becoming good. His focus upon his own
assumed virtue obscures the pressing needs of others. It is an
object lesson in the vice of inattentiveness.
In The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (1977)
Brief Lives
Murdoch elaborated upon her reading of Plato, counterposing
her own sense of the truthfulness of art to Plato’s hostility to the
arts [see Issue 138, Ed]. Yet she rereads Plato as being an artist
himself, by drawing attention to his use of imagery.
In 1982 Murdoch delivered the Gifford Lectures, then devel-
oped them into her last major philosophical work, Metaphysics as
a Guide to Morals (1993). Here she elaborates on the processes of
demythologisation or disenchantment that characterise the
modern world, while defending a form of metaphysics that is
compatible with science and empirical observation. While
noting the messiness of experience, she looks to aspects of expe-
rience that point to underlying forms of order and unity which
can underpin morals. In so doing, she draws upon many authors
from differing ethical traditions, such as Wittgenstein, Schopen-
hauer, Plato, Buber and Weil. In her later years she also prepared
a ‘Manuscript on Heidegger’, which reads Martin Heidegger in
the light of Wittgenstein, as providing a paradigm of meta-
physics in a post-metaphysical age. She decided against this
manuscript’s publication, but it is thoughtful and scholarly. It is
due to be published in the next few years.
Life & Philosophy in Retrospect
Murdoch gave up her Fellowship at St Anne’s College in 1963
and retired from teaching at the RCA in 1967. But she remained
highly active, writing novels, plays, poetry, and significant philo-
sophical works until the mid-1990s. In her last novel, Jackson’s
Dilemma (1995) the main protagonist, Benet, is struggling to
read Heidegger, just as Murdoch herself had worked hard on
Heidegger before giving up on publishing her study of his work.
Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1997,
and John Bayley’s memoir, Iris, is devoted to conveying how she
and he contended with the disease before her death in 1999. The
film Iris, which was directed by Richard Eyre in 1997, provides a
moving portrait of her final years, while, for the most part, not
engaging with her literary and philosophical work.
Murdoch is a thinker who resists classification, working within
and beyond the analytic tradition. Her determination to cross
boundaries and to draw upon multiple interests and forms of
expertise marks out her originality. Her philosophy relates to her
skills as a novelist in that she develops and relates her philosoph-
ical perspective to lived experience in ways familiar to the novel-
ist. Her imaginative example of the mother who shows moral
development by reflecting upon her prejudices is expressly recog-
nised by Murdoch herself as drawing upon a literary sensibility.
Moreover, her novels show (if only through a glass darkly) her
identification of the moral failings of inattentiveness and egoistic
self-absorption.
Iris Murdoch explored many philosophical traditions, engag-
ing critically with contemporary analytic and continental philos-
ophy, while drawing upon historic philosophers who were being
ignored or misperceived in her time. She also strikes an individ-
ual note in aiming to make her philosophy relevant to how one
might live one’s life.
© PROF. GARY BROWNING 2020
Gary Browning is Professor of Political Thought at Oxford Brookes
University, and the author of books on Murdoch, Collingwood,
Hegel, Lyotard, the history of political thought, critical political
economy, global theory, and Bob Dylan.
August/September 2020
Philosophy Now 53
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August/September 2020  Philosophy Now 55


allis
T in
Wonderland
T
he sixty or so days of lockdown
since I wrote the last column
seem an age when measured by
the progress of Spring from leaf-
less trees to Philip Larkin’s ‘unresting
castles’ that ‘thresh/In full grown thickness’.
And yet the days seem to have followed each
other at an accelerating pace. I am reminded
of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, when the
time traveller’s world speeds up until the
sequence of day and night looks like a stro-
boscopic flickering. Either way, there has
been plenty of time for philosophical, and
rather less philosophical, brooding on the
unfolding catastrophe that goes under the
name of Covid-19. We have witnessed hero-
ism and kindness, altruism and patient,
attentive care. Neighbours have discovered
neighbourliness, citizens have embraced
civic values; individuals facing unemploy-
ment, even destitution, have taken it upon
themselves to worry about the needs of
vulnerable strangers. But the pandemic has
also cast light on something far less attrac-
tive – in particular on our political class and
the social order over which it governs. There
are similar stories elsewhere, most notably in
our erstwhile partner across the Atlantic, so
I hope Philosophy Now’s international reader-
ship will forgive me for focusing on the small
(and getting smaller) island called Britain.
The Covid story in the UK has been dire.
Due to the dithering and incompetence of the
government in the run-up to the lockdown,
the mortality rate per capita in the UK is at
the time of writing the highest in the world
(though it may yet lose this unwelcome title
to the United States or Brazil). According to
the Organisation of Economic Cooperation
and Development, the economic hit to the
UK is also likely to be world-beating. And this
despite Britain’s good fortune in being rela-
tively late to experience the pandemic, and
therefore having been given time to prepare
and to learn from experience elsewhere.
Some may be surprised that a nation with
a reputation for competence, good gover-
nance, and other such virtues, should have
failed so disastrously to deal with the chal-
56 Philosophy Now  August/September 2020
Philosophy in the
Time of Plague, Pt. 2
Raymond Tallis ruminates on the reckoning
and the reconstruction required.
lenge presented by the virus. Those who
have been watching what has been happen-
ing in the UK over the last decade do not
share that surprise.
Readers with long memories may recall
my cri de coeur in 2014 (‘Emergency Reflec-
tions on Political Philosophy’, Issue 105),
when I reported from a protest march to
defend Britain’s National Health Service
(NHS) against the quadruple assault of
defunding, demoralizing, dismantling, and
denationalization. The most important
weapon in this assault (and most costly of time
and money) was the 2012 Health and Social
Care Act, whose purpose was privatization of
health provision. The Act made inevitable the
failure of preparedness for the pandemic – as
signalled in Exercise Cygnus, a simulation of
a pandemic to test the resilience of health and
other public services, whose 2017 report was
buried. Lack of personal protective equip-
ment for health care staff and others in various
front-lines; an abysmal and continuing failure
to develop a capacity to track, trace, and
isolate cases; and the tens of thousands of
Covid-related deaths in care homes, are trib-
utes to the thoroughness with which health
services have been trashed.
The assault on the NHS has been only the
most audacious element of a decade-long
dismantling of the welfare state, with unem-
ployment and disability benefits, social care,
education and other key services also being
conspicuous casualties. A report published in
February 2020, just before the pandemic got
into its stride, Health Equity in England: The
Marmot Review 10 Years On, described the toll
of austerity on equity and health, and esti-
mated 120,000 excess deaths. Soaring levels of
poverty, stress, depression, malnourishment,
illness, dependence on charity, wage insecu-
rity, and degrading conditions of labour,
marked the lives of a growing ‘precariat’, even
before the arrival of Covid-19.
The pretext for austerity was that, after
the financial crash of 2008, cuts in public
services were essential to avoid unsustain-
able levels of public indebtedness. In fact (as
has often been pointed out), austerity was
not an economic necessity but an ideological
choice. Martin Wolf, a senior columnist for
the Financial Times (not known to be a Marx-
ist publication), argued in ‘Crash Landing’,
2018, that “Transforming a financial crisis
into a fiscal crisis confused cause with effect.
Yet this political prestidigitation proved a
brilliant coup. It diverted attention from the
failure of the free-market finance they
believed in to the cost of welfare states they
disliked.” In short, austerity was an oppor-
tunistic attack on the ideal of a society in
which we mitigate the cruel lottery of life by
sharing risks.
Just before the Covid-19 outbreak, debate
on the damage to the health and welfare of
the most vulnerable citizens in the UK was
drowned out by Brexit – itself an act of mean-
spirited, Little Englander self-harm, made
possible by the degradation of the national
conversation and political discourse. The
success of the Brexit campaign represented a
triumph of simple lies – such as that Britons
are dictated to by unelected bureaucrats in
Brussels, so ‘we need to take back control’ –
over the complex truths of the national and
international, economic, political, and
cultural benefits of membership of the Euro-
pean Union.
The most striking symptom of the sick-
ness in the body politic of the UK, has been
the ascent of the most prominent champion
of Brexit to the highest office in the land.
Boris Johnson, Britain’s own little Trum-
pette, has proved to be a catastrophically
incompetent leader. As Max Hastings, his old
boss at the Daily Telegraph warned, Johnson’s
“elevation will signal Britain’s abandonment
of any claim to be a serious country… [he is]
an experiment in celebrity government.”
The pandemic has exacerbated pre-exist-
ing inequalities and iniquities. Now, if ever,
is the time for radical reflection on how we
got to the terrible state we’re in; and, indeed,
to look beyond our parish boundaries to a
global world order that at present seems to
be designed to further enrich the rich and
impoverish the poor, and think of post-
pandemic reconstruction. As Benjamin
Tallis and Neil Renic argue in ‘Building a
Post-Coronial World: Lessons from
Germany’ (Open Democracy, April 22nd
2020), we should not aim for a return to
‘business as usual’, “instead we should learn
from social transformations ushered in by
past pandemics and man-made disasters.
The provision of public health, socialized
medicine, the New Deal, the welfare state,
and the Marshall Plan, were all radical
responses to radically changing circum-
stances. Today, the unprecedented chal-
lenge of Covid-19 offers a similar opportu-
nity to remake our world for the better.”
What changes are needed? An obvious
target is what Sheila Smith has called
‘termite capitalism’. The ‘termites’ are a sub-
group of the wealth extractors, posing as
wealth creators, who make money out of
moving money around. Their activities have
resulted in the global phenomenon of
private equity destroying businesses that
once provided real services and manufac-
tured real goods. There are also the modern
slave-owners who build nine figure fortunes
while exploiting their employees. Hiding
their ill-gotten gains from the taxman,
they’re free riders on the civilization built
and maintained by others. And in a glob-
alised economy, the inequity within nations
is replicated in the inequity between nations.
It is clear that fundamental change is
needed. Such change, secured through radi-
cal fiscal policies – such as a commitment to
a Universal Basic Income, or a Green New
Deal that addresses not only economic
inequality but also climate change – will
require a different kind of politician from
the shallow (Johnson), imbecilic and corrupt
(Trump), or blood-boltered (Putin, Xi
Jinping) leaders we have at present. For
politicians who have a moral compass,
vision, and competence to ascend to power,
requires a transformation of the conversa-
tion citizens have with each other. This
must mean something profoundly different
from the disconnected, reactive, narrow-
minded, mean-spirited, ill-informed and
lie-strewn discourse orchestrated by media
and platforms owned by and shaped accord-
ing to the interests of billionaires. And so
(not before time you might think) I come to
philosophy. What could philosophy bring
to the conversation we must have if our
post-pandemic world is to be better than the
world that was ambushed by Covid-19?
Some branches of philosophy would
seem to have little to offer. Ontology, meta-
physics, and epistemology are unlikely to
bring much to the table – apart from (alas,
well-hidden) examples of rigour and trans-
parency in argument. These jewels in
philosophy’s crown have to be content with
their status as ends in themselves, bringing
pleasure and illumination to those who are
lucky enough to have the time and freedom
from want, and the inclination, to engage in
philosophical reflection.
A Covid Look at Planet Earth
Farshaad Razmjouie, 2020
Things have not always been thus. The
role of philosophy in shaping the course of
history is undeniable. The empiricism and
political theory of John Locke; the ency-
clopaedic writings of the French philosophes
whom he influenced; the English Utilitari-
ans Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill
had a huge influence on the birth of secular,
liberal democracy in Europe and the USA.
Marx’s famous ‘turning Hegel on his head’
– replacing mind with matter as the
substrate of the process that is the putative
unfolding of history – has had global conse-
quences that are (alas) still unfolding.
Unfortunately, it looks as though the
leaders of the collective conversation have
now moved elsewhere. In the twentieth
century, progressive social changes were not
August/September 2020  Philosophy Now 57
T allis
in
Wonderland
significantly advanced nor catastrophic
blood baths retarded by philosophers.
Neither analytic philosophy in the Anglo-
phone world, nor Continental philosophy in
mainland Europe, had a significant role in
shaping the course of events. (An important
exception is Simone de Beauvoir, whose
1949 book The Second Sex, became an inspi-
ration for embattled feminism.) The tenu-
ous connection between philosophy and
political thought in the twentieth century is
dramatically illustrated by the two leading
exponents of existential phenomenology:
Martin Heidegger was a Nazi; and Jean-Paul
Sartre was first a Marxist and then a Maoist.
The most obvious philosophical source of
contributions to the much-needed conver-
sation is political philosophy, but the recent
story is not encouraging. John Rawls’ A
Theory of Justice (1971) – an impassioned,
intellectually rigorous call for a more equi-
table world – was at the height of its
academic fame in the decades when neolib-
eralism, its ideological polar opposite, was
shaping the politics that have since been
destroying the life chances of billions and
threatening the very future of the ecosphere.
How, then, shall we respond to the quote
inscribed on Marx’s grave: “Philosophers
have only interpreted the world in various
ways. The point, however, is to change it” –
given that philosophy no longer looks like an
agent of change? Your columnist deals with
his unease at writing about free will (see next
column) while his fellow citizens are dying
on ventilators, or queueing in food banks,
and politicians are getting away with
murder, by reluctantly accepting the divi-
sion between activity in the kingdom of
means (as in politics) and the pursuit of ulti-
mate ends (as in philosophy).
Today, self-isolation in the study; tomor-
row, back to the streets shouting slogans?
Though each seems to question the other,
there is serious work to be done in both places.
© PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2020
Raymond Tallis’s latest book, Seeing
Ourselves: Reclaiming Humanity from
God & Science is out now.
Fiction
What Colour Are Numbers?
Keith McVeigh contacts an advanced alien with a strange (non-)question.
just love my little Galaxy 500 Interstellar Transceiver. The physical – questions it is possible to ask. The reason our philoso-

I first time I got an answer back – from the heart of the

Milky Way’s galactic bulge – I was gobsmacked. Unfor-
tunately, the Galaxy 500 is just a toy in comparison with
the precision and powerful signals of professional quality
transceivers, and because of the instabilities inherent in our ‘bil-
lion times faster than light’ sub-space network, any contact we
amateurs make will be a one-off exchange, and we often get cut
off with only a few seconds’ warning. I still love it, though.
Anyway, I wanted to tell you about last night’s efforts. I’ll
let the transcript speak for itself:
Send: Hello. Is there anyone out there? This is Ida from Earth.
Receive: Hello, good to hear from you, Ida. My name is Lude,
and my planet is called Logipos. Is Earth’s civilisation advanced?
Send: Yes, pretty advanced, I guess. You know: science, art,
philosophy, all that.
Receive: Great. Without further ado then, will you answer a
question for me?
Send: Yes, if I can. Go ahead.
Receive: What colour are numbers?
Send: I beg your pardon?
Receive: What does ‘I beg your pardon?’ mean?
Send: I’m sorry, I was simply expressing my surprise and
puzzlement at your question.
Receive: Are numbers blue?
Send: No. Numbers aren’t blue. That doesn’t make any sense.
Receive: Are they yellow?
Send: No, no, no. When I say that it doesn’t make any sense
to say that numbers are blue, it’s not because they’re some other
colour, it’s because they aren’t any colour at all. To say that
numbers are blue is like saying that triangles are unscrupulous
or that politicians are equilateral. It’s wrong to say that trian-
gles are unscrupulous, but not because some of them are prin-
cipled. Likewise it is wrong to say that politicians are equilat-
eral, but not because some politicians are right-angled. Trian-
gles are no more principled than they are unscrupulous. Politi-
cians are no more right-angled than they are equilateral. It is
not so much even that all these statements are false. They’re
not really true or false at all: they are all meaningless, or as we
say, nonsense. They break some kind of logical or syntactical
rule necessary for meaning, you see.
Receive: I get you. That’s amazing. Do you mean then that the
question ‘What colour are numbers?’ has no proper answer?
phers were so much more successful than the philosophers of
other civilisations at sweeping up the mysteries, was that we have
a particular neurological characteristic which has meant that from
an early stage in our evolution, we have been unable to form any
‘nonsensical’ statements in our minds, including any non-ques-
tions. Paradoxically, that’s why the mystery of the colour of num-
bers survived. As well as being the last of our mysteries, it was
also the oldest. That very question was discovered in fragments
of prehistoric writing going all the way back to the time when
we were still able to think nonsensically – the time, that is, before
our neurological filter had evolved. No one thought to question
if it was a real question, because no one could really very easily
imagine how one might formulate a non-question. Thus the fact
that we could repeat it, having seen it in the fragment, was itself
taken as evidence that it was a real question.
Send: I think I see what you’re saying, and I’m glad to have been
of service. But tell me, are you seriously saying that your philos-
ophy is complete, and that you have answered all its questions?
Receive: Yes.
Send: Perhaps then, Lude, you can return the favour.
Receive: Yes, of course, Ida. I would be delighted. It’s the least
I can do.
Send: We humans are still struggling with our philosophy.
Perhaps you could clear something up for me.
>> SYSTEM MESSAGE: INSTABILITY IN SUPER-SPACE
NETWORK. DISCONNECTION IMMINENT.
Send: We’re about to be cut off. Can we keep this short?
Receive: By all means. Go ahead.
Send: What’s the meaning of life?
Receive: I beg your pardon?
>> SYSTEM MESSAGE: CONNECTION TERMINATED.
© DR KEITH MCVEIGH 2020
Keith McVeigh has a PhD in Philosophy of Mind and teaches part-
time at Queen’s University Belfast.
© NASA/HUBBLE

Send: That’s right.

Receive: My question then is really a non-question?
Send: Yes, it is.
Receive: Well, well… Thank you very much Ida. You have
solved – or maybe I should say you have dissolved – the last mys-
tery. My people are very advanced. Our golden age of philoso-
phy and science was many millennia ago. During that era we
answered all the purely philosophical – by which I mean meta-

58 Philosophy Now  August/September 2020

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