Aristotle's Politics, A.1-2

...in a translation of my own devising. Notes and thoughts to follow.

Aristotle, Politics [that is: “what is proper to the citizen”]

(1252a1) Since we see that every city is a sort of community and that every community is joined together for the sake of some good – for everyone does everything for the favor of what seems to be good – then clearly, as every community endeavors for some good, doubtless (5) the most sovereign of all will endeavor for the most sovereign of all goods and the one encompassing all the others. And this community is called the city or the political community.

And so those who suppose that what is proper to a citizen and to a king and to the head of a household and to a master are all the same do not speak beautifully. For they hold that each of these is (10) distinguished by being many or few, but not by its form, such that a few would be proper to a master, more to the head of a household, and yet more to a citizen or a king, as if there were no distinction between a large household and a small city. And as for what is proper to a citizen and to a king, whenever one is set above, this is kingly, and whenever, one in part rules and in part is ruled, (15) according to the account of science, this is civic. But none of this is true.

Philosophy among the humanities

I usually try to avoid commenting on these sorts of things, but I'm feeling surly this morning...

Jason Stanley, a philosopher at Rutgers, has an article in Inside Higher Ed bemoaning the fact that philosophy is alienated from the rest of the humanities. This is a distillation of various complaints Stanley has aired in recent years on Brian Leiter's blog (which writings can be perused here). He forwards three bits of evidence for this sorry state of affairs:

1. Philosophers don't win the big prizes in the humanities -- MacArthur grants, Guggenheim fellowships, ACLS New Faculty fellowships -- at the same rate as historians and other humanists. (The numbers with which he backs this up are questionable.)
2. "Most American humanists are unclear about how the debates of philosophers are supposed to fit into the overall project of the humanities. We are ignored at dinner parties, and considered arrogant and perhaps uncouth." (I'm not sure why Mr. Stanley's unpopularity at dinner parties is an interesting topic for IHE.)
3. "To add insult to injury, the name of our profession is liberally bestowed on those teaching in completely different departments." (By which he means, horror of horrors, that "Many academics use the term "philosopher" not as a description of the people working on the set of problems that occupy our time [i.e., the time of academic philosophers like Mr. Stanley], but rather as a certain kind of honorific [for anyone] who constructs some kind of admirable general theory about a discipline.")

As is clear from these rather odd complaints, the title of Stanley's piece ("The Crisis of Philosophy") is misleading. The crisis of philosophy is not a crisis in philosophy. Professional philosophy in the Anglo-American world is doing just great, thank you very much. The crisis of philosophy is rather a crisis in the humanities. As Stanley makes clear by his insistence that Nietzsche and Zizek are the outside of a line of continuity running from Aristotle through Spinoza and Kant and up to Saul Kripke and David Lewis, and his further contention that the six MacArthur fellows in philosophy (Rorty, Scanlon, Cavell, P. Churchland, Kolakowski, and Shklar -- he ignores the six philosophers who have won MacArthurs under other headings [Vlastos, Cartwright, Kristeller, Fox Keller, Hawkins, and Moses]) are "an odd group," the real complaint is that humanists don't pay attention to or honor the sort of philosophy that Stanley considers central to the profession.

That may be. But I think it is weird for Stanley to complain about it, or to think that this is a defect in the humanities. Does the work of Lewis or Kripke or Frege have any relevance for your average humanist? As Stanley admits elsewhere, the philosophers he knows tend not to be humanists themselves, or to have "wisdom and insight about the human condition." He explicitly includes moral philosophers in this judgment. As he writes:

It's clear to me why (say) someone working in metaphysics is not likely to have more insight into the human condition than the average mortal. It's because many people working in metaphysics are captured principally by the problem of working out the consistencies of an abstract problem space with only dubious connections to how we live our lives. Moral philosophers tend as a whole to be exactly the same as metaphysicians, except they have chosen a somewhat different problem space to explore the logical relations between theses.

What is there for a humanist to take interest in here? Why should the logical relations among theses in a problem space be of any concern to a historian, anthropologist, or student of literature?

My own feeling is that the way in which many philosophers -- and, in particular, your run-of-the-mill, mainstream, analytic philosophers -- pose their problems and lay out the theses to be examined is utterly disconnected from anything that is a recognizable part of my day to day life. The problems defined by previous generations of (mainstream academic) philosophers have spawned partial solutions which have given rise to sub-problems which have been formalized in various ways and this continuous process has resulted in a rather arid and extremely technical set of "problem spaces" that do not seem to an outsider to hold any potential for yielding "wisdom and insight about the human condition." Now I don't necessarily have a problem with that; taking anything seriously for very long is bound to give rise to technical and obscure issues. But it is truly bizarre to complain that humanists don't appreciate the inner workings of professionalized philosophy.

Less bizarre but more problematic is Stanley's penchant for speaking on behalf of "we" philosophers. (Leiter does this all the time, too.) On the one hand, Stanley wants to insist that mainstream analytic philosophy is absolutely open and diverse because, for example, it "clearly does not place any limits upon the conclusions that can be defended in its journals." On the other hand, this very formulation maintains the substantive notion that philosophy is all about a neutral and universal methodology (a set of logical and argumentative tools) that is merely applied to different ends. I look at the history of philosophy, and at the current crop of professional academic philosophers, and I don't see a "we." I see a host of fundamental disagreements, not so much about conclusions as about what sort of activity philosophy is in the first place. Aristotle and Hobbes did not agree about a neutral methodology while disagreeing about conclusions. Same goes for Heidegger and Lewis. That's what I like about philosophy -- nothing can be taken for granted, it's open conflict on all possible fronts, including meta-fronts and meta-meta-fronts.

In other posts, Stanley is much more open to these sorts of issues. What he seems consistently to elide is the difference between philosophy as a profession -- as an academic specialization or "discipline" -- and philosophy as this possibility of open conflict on all fronts. Despite his claim, philosophy is not the oldest discipline, because it is not a discipline at all. Philosophy has only very intermittently been captured by the academy. It happened for a while in Medieval Europe. It happened for a while in Enlightenment Germany. It has been the rule during the 20th century. There is no reason to expect that it will remain the rule for very long.

Stanley and Leiter systematically confuse the academic profession of philosophy (within which they, unlike me, occupy elite positions within the mainstream) with philosophy as such (within which they are, like me, just johnny-come-lately epigones and amateurs). When they say "we philosophers" they are speaking as elite academic professionals but think they are speaking as philosophers as such. And when Stanley complains about humanists lack of concern for the former, he has no one to blame but himself.

Echoes of Historical Materialism

So, obviously, substantive posts have been a bit scarce of late. I'd like to turn that around, both because and by means of the HM conference I attended in NYC last week. Because: it was one of the very best conferences I've ever attended, and certainly the very best Lefty, is-it-academia-or-is-it-activism sort of conference I've ever attended. By means of: I'm hoping it will be easy enough for me to half report on, half respond to what I saw and heard there, and generally to spin the experience out into a set of reflections on this, that, and the other.

First up: the matrix of historicisms.

This is an attempt to present in a more articulate manner the introductory remarks to my paper on Virno and Aristotle, which were marred by my inability to remember how to draw a simple matrix on the chalkboard.

My talk was to have been, to some extent, concerned with the “family politics” of communists – the friends and enemies, lineages and filiations, by which we construct our identities. In asking about and proposing to discuss Aristotle’s communism, I wanted to avoid – or at least postpone drawing – the seemingly foregone conclusion that Aristotle was in his day, and is even now one of the preeminent anti-communists: critic of Plato’s communist scheme, defender of private property and slavery, basing his entire ontology on the “substance” of the landed proprietor. Either he is no ancestor at all, or, if some distant consanguinity must be admitted, then it must just as surely be renounced, and any holdings that come down from it sold off, used up, or simply abandoned to the elements. Besides, the anti-communists seem more than happy to enshrine Aristotle alongside their honored dead.

However – and this is the first complication – there are several distinct anti-communist Aristotles, each of whom is anti-communist by way of a distinct proxy for communism. Murray Rothbard’s Aristotle is anti-communist because his empiricism and pluralism are supposed to be anti-Platonist. Here, communism is figured as an extreme form of authoritarian rationalism. Ayn Rand’s Aristotle is anti-communist because his realism and elitism are supposed to be anti-Kantian. Here, then, communism is figured as an extreme form of Christian subjectivism. Leo Strauss’s Aristotle is anti-communist because of his proto-Machiavellian pessimism about the possibility of justice. Hannah Arendt’s Aristotle, on the contrary, is anti-communist because he is anti-Machiavellian in his non-instrumental understanding of political discussion. Obviously, then, there is no agreement among anti-communists as to what communism itself amounts to, and hence no agreement about just which aspect of Aristotle is supposed to align him with their cause. Communism is “bad,” and Aristotle, being “good,” must be a natural ally in the struggle against communism.

Amongst socialist and communist authors, similarly – and this is the second, and more interesting, complication – Aristotle’s situation tends to vary depending upon a prior determination of the character of the anti-capitalist movement. In particular, it seems to depend upon how capitalism and anti-capitalism are situated in history. To employ a simplifying schematism, it seems to me that you can force anti-capitalists to answer two questions about history and classify them on the basis of their answers.

Question 1: Is the anti-capitalist movement an attempt to realize a break in history that has already occured at some point in the past?

Question 2: Would the victory of the anti-capitalist movement constitute or presuppose a break in history that is yet to come?

Answers can be plotted in a matrix:















"Modernists" (Hans Blumenberg, Deleuze perhaps, and certainly many Deleuzians, Negri at times) see the struggle against capitalism as the struggle to extend or realize the historical rupture that inaugurated modernity. The problem with capitalism, then, is that it represents a lingering past. Since Aristotle is almost certainly part of this pre-modern past that lingers on and must be overcome, Aristotle is an enemy of modernists. (Marx's exhortation to let the dead bury their dead might be the fountainhead of this progressivism.)

"Catastrophists" (Horkheimer and Adorno anyone?) see history as monotononous and relentless and devoid of promise, and see the overcoming of capitalism as the unprecedented inauguration of something new, a break with all that has come before. (Marx's claim in the 1859 Preface that the end of capitalism will mark the end of pre-history might be read as precedent here.)

"Dialecticians" (Murray, Meikle, Postone, Arthur, and even Althusser at times) see capitalism as the manifestation of a historical rupture that must itself be suppressed, dismissed, repeated, or otherwise cancelled. The era of capitalism is an interregnum. Use-value romantics reside here, but so do most of the folks I most admire. Not all of them are Catholic, but a rather large percentage are. These are the friends of Aristotle, who was the first to criticize exchange because it abstracts from concrete usefulness.

"Natural Historians" (Virno, Althusser at other times) don't believe in historical ruptures, epochal befores and afters. The break between capitalism and communism is not a break between histories (eras) so much as a break within every history. The field of history is not, on this approach, subject to the sorts of progressions, leaps, or returns that characterize the pro- and anti-modernization stances taken by those situated in the other quadrants of the matrix. Because communism is not a referendum on modernity, Aristotle is not subject to valorization or condemnation for his proto- or anti-modern tendencies. Instead, there is a certain freedom to approach Aristotle – or any other thinker, for that matter – in a non-reductive way. What Virno says of Simondon could be said also of Aristotle: “At a certain point it is necessary to take leave of him and proceed alone (just as we must depart from many other ‘friendly’ thinkers). We do so with gratitude for his help but without nostalgia or regrets.”

Comments on Cohen

Here are the comments I delivered yesterday as part of the Cohen symposium:

Analysis Terminated? Towards a Post-Analytical Marxism

Or: What Can Bullshit Marxists Learn from G. A. Cohen?

I never encountered Jerry Cohen, the man. I only knew G. A. Cohen, the author of important and influential books and essays in analytical Marxism. Jerry Cohen, so I’m told, was playful, funny, kind, and generous. The G. A. Cohen I knew was dead serious – if also capable of wit – harsh in his judgments, and quite intimidating. He was also incredibly sharp and really knew his way around Marx. I read his work – everything relevant to the study of Marx, that is – when I was in Amsterdam working on my dissertation on Marx’s concepts of labor. I found some of it helpful for my project, much of it ever so slightly disagreeable, and all of it rather less enticing than the Althusser I was reading at the same time. Nonetheless, even in my youth I recognized that Karl Marx’s Theory of History was the most formidable exposition of that other kind of Marxism, the attempt to make sense of Marx in the terms and by the conventions of Anglo-American academic philosophy and social science. I took Cohen much more seriously as a Marxologist than I did Jon Elster, for instance (indeed, footnote references to Elster in my dissertation included a parenthetical “sic!” after the title of his book, Making Sense of Marx). It was quite apparent to me that Cohen was seeking to clarify what Marx wrote precisely because he was convinced that, in rough outline at least, Marx was right: right about history, right about society, right about capitalism and the need to overcome it. His was not my kind of Marxism, but it seemed to me an intellectually honest, respectable, and challenging kind of Marxism, nonetheless.

I don’t think Cohen would have had the same judgment of me. In the introduction to the 2000 edition of Marx’s Theory of History, Cohen recollected that “before others taught me to call what we were doing ‘analytical Marxism,’ it was my own practice to call it ‘non-bullshit Marxism’” (KMTH, xxv). He admits that the term is “aggressive,” since “when you call what you do non-bullshit Marxism, you seem to imply that all other Marxism is bullshit.” He seems for a moment to undercut this aggressiveness by conceding that “there exists Marxism which is neither analytical nor bullshit,” but this concession has a sting in its tail, for he concludes by naming this non-analytical, non-bullshit Marxism “pre-analytical Marxism,” and declaring that whenever “pre-analytical Marxism encounters analytical Marxism, then it must either become analytical or become bullshit” (KMTH, xxv-xxvi). Since my Marxism encountered Cohen’s analytical Marxism in 2003, and did not, after that encounter, become analytical, then it seems that I have been, for the last six years or so, a bullshit Marxist. Hence, the alternate title for this talk. Since I nonetheless find much to respect and value in Cohen’s work on Marx, I want to press his definition of and commitment to analysis, and to see whether or not it makes sense to proclaim myself – not to mention numerous others who are similarly situated vis-à-vis Marxist theory – a post-analytical Marxist.

To that end, I want to do what Cohen claimed in 2000 he and his fellow analytical Marxists never did, put analysis in question. The first task will be to get clear on just what analysis is, on Cohen’s account. It has both a broad and a narrow sense, and I will proceed to challenge each sense, beginning with the narrow one, anti-holism. I will argue that, in the narrow sense defined by Cohen, analytical Marxism is not actually analytical. That is, it is committed to a certain sort of holism. Then I’ll move on to discuss the broader sense of analysis, which is opposed to “dialectical reasoning,” something Cohen does not actually think exists. In other words, Cohen takes analysis to be identical to reasoning as such. I think there are good reasons for resisting this view, and that Marxists in particular ought to be wary of it. In order to show why this is so, I will enter into the realm of Cohen’s Marx interpretation. I think that Cohen makes a number of observations about Marx and Marx’s project that can actually be read as motivations for a post-analytical Marxism.

G.A. Cohen In Memoriam: A Critical Celebration of His Life and Work

This Friday, 27 November 2009, 10am - 4pm
McGill University, Old McGill Room, Faculty Club

Programme:

• Joseph Carens (Toronto) "Motivation and Equality in Cohen"


• Jurgen De Wispelaere (CRÉUM) "Cohen in the Real World? Equality, Justice and Social Institutions"


• Pablo Gilabert (Concordia) "Cohen on Socialism, Equality, and Community"


• Jacob T. Levy (McGill) "Cohen on the Tasks of Political Philosophy"


• William Clare Roberts (McGill) "Analysis Terminated? Towards a Post-Analytical Marxism"


• Daniel Weinstock (CRÉUM) "Cohen and Cohen on Jokes"

I don't know that this is the actual order in which we'll be speaking* -- an earlier version of the program had Roberts and Levy going first and second. Regardless, come for the whole thing.

By the way, I feel a little odd being the only person who didn't include Cohen's name in the title of his talk, but if it makes a difference, my talk also has an alternate title: "What Bullshit Marxists Can Learn from Cohen." (You can tell, perhaps, why that is not on the program.)

* UPDATE: The "definitive" schedule:

10h/11h30
William Clare Roberts: Analysis Terminated? Toward a Post-Analytical Marxism
Joseph Carens: Motivation and Equality in Cohen

11h45-13h15
Jacob T. Levy: Cohen on the Tasks of Political Philosophy
Jurgen De Wispelaere: Cohen in the Real World? Equality, Justice and Social Institutions

13h15-14h30
Lunch break

14h30-16h
Pablo Gilabert: Cohen on Socialism, Equality, and Community
Daniel Weinstock: Cohen and Cohen on Jokes

A Short Essay in Self-Criticism

So I have slightly mixed feelings about my essay in Marx and Contemporary Philosophy. Of course I'm thrilled to share space with so many of my Marxological heroes--Meikle, Postone, Murray, Carver, and Arthur, especially--from whom I have learned so much over the years. And I am quite happy with many aspects of the essay. And yet...

The root of the problem is that I'm re-reading Alfred Sohn-Rethel's Intellectual and Manual Labor for the first time since I was writing my dissertation. Unfortunately, I read it in German the first time, and apparently I didn't understand it nearly as well as I thought I did. It turns out that Sohn-Rethel should have influenced me far more than he did, and exactly on those questions with which the newly published essay is concerned. In other words, just as this essay is venturing out into the world on its own, I am looking up from my desk and crying, "Wait! You're not ready! Please let me make you a bit more presentable!"

Here's the issue: Understanding Marx's account of capital hinges on understanding the differences between exchange-value and use-value, and between abstract labour and concrete labour. Marx is adamant that exchaneg abstracts from use-value, and that, therefore, use-value plays no rule in the determination of the magnitude of value. Instead, the magnitude of value is determined by the abstract labour-time necessary to produce the commodity under given conditions. Thus, everything that is distinctive about Marx's approach gets off the ground here, where use-value and exchange-value part ways, and abstract labor-time appears as the substance of value. This is where all liberal economists (and most Marxist economists!) lose the thread (all of two pages into Capital). The question is, how does exchange abstract from use-value?

In my paper, I try to answer this question in what I guess could be called a phenomenological manner. I argue that the agents in exchange act as if use-value didn't matter, and that this "acting as if" amounts to a practical abstraction from use-value, which is intensified when a) labour-power becomes an object of exchange and b) is employed within a capitalist production process.

In the essay I waffle a bit on how intentional this abstraction is. My "as if" construction allows for the possibility that the consciousness of the agents does not apprehend what they do. But I also say things to the effect that we "disregard" the use-value of commodities in exchange, or "ignore" thereby the particular usefulness of labor. These formulations suggest, if not full consciousness, at least a sort of intentional structure to the practical abstraction.

In contradistiction to my rather muddled language, Sohn-Rethel is crystal clear: the abstraction from use effected by the practice of exchange is completely unconscious, and the furthest thing from the minds of the participants in exchange. Exchange excludes use in the sense that I can't exchange what I am using, or use what I am exchanging. This brute, physical abstraction from use is the original abstraction, and, according to Sohn-Rethel's analysis, contains all manner of counter-factual norms that structure the practice of exchange apart from any conscious or half-conscious intention. In fact, he even insists that the practice only works if the participants don't pay attention to the abstractions performed by it. I'm not sure I'm convinced by this bit, but he seems to think that exchangers have to think about use-value in order to practice an abstraction from use-value.

Regardles of this last point, I think Sohn-Rethel is invaluable for outlining a performance of abstraction that can proceed without any reference to a determining intentionality. My formulations in the just-published essay lend themsleves to an idealistic (that is to say, ideological) acount of exchange relations arising from conscious subjects. And that idealism of the act is worthy of endless criticism.

Univ. of Louisiana-Lafayette to Lose Philosophy BA

The Louisiana Board of Regents is recommending terminating the degree program in philosophy at the "second ship" University of Louisiana. It is one of a mass of "low-completer" degree programs facing the axe. The Committee of Regents agenda is here (WARNING: PDF). The University recommended keeping the program unconditionally:

The B.A. in Philosophy is one of only three such programs in the state. Philosophy, by its very content and essential relationships with other disciplines, is fundamentally a core discipline in any comprehensive, doctoral granting institution. As the Board of Regents Academic and Student Affairs Committee staff stated in its report at its meeting of August 25, 2004, regarding the then low-completer status of the Philosophy Program at UL Lafayette: The staff notes that ULL is ranked by the Carnegie Foundation as [a] Doctoral Intensive Institution; hence, the B. A. in Philosophy program should probably be considered as a core undergraduate offering for the University. Accordingly, the staff recommends that the program be maintained unconditionally.

The University recommendation also notes that the number of majors has tripled since 2003-04 (the last time the program was under review for its low-completion record. There are also a number of considerations of the program's instrumental value: It's cheap! It raises LSAT scores! Professional ethics!

But the Regents aren't buying it:

The staff is sympathetic with the University desire to retain this program; it is, indeed, a traditional core program of a broad-based liberal arts and sciences institution. Yet, one cannot help but recognize that Philosophy as an essential undergraduate program has lost some credence among students. This is reflected in decreasing numbers not only in this program, but others across the country. The issue is not whether Philosophy as a topic of study is an essential component of a broad undergraduate program of studies, but whether a separate and distinct degree in Philosophy is needed. To that question, the staff cannot ignore the statistics. This B.A. program has been a low-completer four out of the five times over a twenty-two year period. Repeated past efforts by the University to enhance student enrollment and completers, while well-intentioned, have not been successful and there is no compelling reason presented here why that pattern should change in the near future.

Accordingly, the staff recommends immediate termination. Currently enrolled student shall be allowed to complete their program of studies within a reasonable frame of time.

Yikes!

I notice three things:
1. One of only three philosophy BA programs in the whole state! (Tulane and LSU must be the others.)
2. The Regents completely ignore the statistics--which do indeed show an increase in enrollment and in majors, both at ULL and nationwide--in order to say that the centrality of philosophy has "lost some credence" among the students.
3. On the other hand, the University doesn't help by hanging its case so heavily on instrumental and service functions. The Regents want to turn Philosophy into a purely service department, so the University is just helping them make their own case.

Istvan Berkeley, of the ULL Philosophy Department, suggest the following:

I politely suggest that the Board of Regents be made aware that their assessment of philosophy, as a declining academic discipline, is incorrect. Any other related thoughts might also be useful. Probably the best method of doing this is to send messages to Dr. Sally Clausen, who is the Commissioner of Higher Education. Her e-mail address is sclausen@uls.state.la.us. The last time they tried to take away our major, we were able to generate a petition with over 1,500 signatures from people around the State of Louisiana. This time we do not have the time to organize such an effort. So, support from philosophers around the world would be very much appreciated. However, as the time is short, please act as soon as you can.

There you go.

The Suicidal Animal

I really like Paolo Virno. I've been reading his recent book (Multitude Between Innovation and Negation), and enjoying it immensely. One point he stresses repeatedly in this work intersects in an interesting way with the Hegel I'm teaching right now and with something I always try to insist upon when teaching Aristotle: that human beings are the suicidal animals.

For Hegel, this is explicit and almost axiomatic. I'm teaching the Philosophy of Right, and right away in the Introduction Hegel insists that the will is first and foremost a negation or refusal. As a consequence, any positive choice we make has the form of refusing to refuse. "Yes" is always a "No" to saying "No." Because of this absolute universality of negation for the will, the being with a will--human being--is necessarily capable of suicide, of saying "No" to the whole world and hence to life itself. (Sartre really never gets much beyond these first few pages of Hegel...)

That is an interesting enough piece of philosophical anthropology, if familiar.

Virno makes what seems on its face to be a very similar argument: that, because of the negating power inherent in all language, human beings, as language users, are always confronted with the possibility of negating the humanity of themselves and others. This is what makes us especially dangerous animals for our own kind. Virno's emphasis is on humans as murderous, rather than humans as suicidal, but that difference seems less important than the fact that he locates the power of negation in language rather than in the will. I inadvertently put the entire discussion of willing in Hegel in linguistic terms--saying "Yes" or saying "No"--but I don't think Hegel does this at all. He does draw a link between language use and the ability to commit suicide later in the Philosophy of Right (I'll have to check that--I don't have my copy of the text with me). But it is not so immediate as it is with Virno. This lends Virno's anthropology a post-humanist and post-structuralist hue: Whatever being is captive to language is thereby also murderous and suicidal. This makes the modern attempt to restrain the violence of human willfulness by precisely delineating and enforcing the boundaries between wills (by means of the law and the state as law enforcer) seem less promising.

As an aside, this makes the seemingly recent interest in Hobbes' theory of language much more understandable and interesting to me. Hobbes seems like the one early modern political philosopher who really consistently and rigorously linked the problem of inter-human violence with the question of language.

But I want to skip over Hobbes and go back to Aristotle. When I teach Aristotle, I illustrate the difference between a definition and an attribution of a peculiar property by contrasting the proper definition of the human being--the animal having logos--with "the animal that can commit suicide." I think the latter does pick out human beings from all other animals on Aristotelian terms, but it nonetheless does not define human being. This is because--in part--it follows from the fact that human beings are the animals having logos, and hence does not get at the basic differential of the human form, but only at a consequence of that differential. Despite the commonplace claim that Aristotle defines human being as the political animal, I think the same point applies: we are political because we have language, so our political being does not define us, even if it is peculiarly proper to us.

So, in Aristotle, you have the same linkage of "having language" and "being suicidal." But--and this is where Aristotle differs from both Virno and Hegel, and where Virno suddenly appears quite modern--for Aristotle, the power to commit suicide is identical with the power to value something more highly than one's own life. That is, it is not a power of negation that makes us the suicidal animal, but an ability to see things in terms of good and bad, beautiful and ugly, just and unjust. Seeing something as good contains the possibility that we will see it as better than our own lives, or than the lives of others. According to Aristotle, one always dies (or kills) for something, but Virno and Hegel would have have us believe that one can die (or kill) for nothing. That seems not a small difference.

The Ideological Animal

Daniel Dennett was here in Montreal the other day, and we went to his lecture at UQaM. The title was "From Animal to Human: How Culture Makes Up Our Minds," and I have to say that I correctly predicted the thesis before attending: We human beings are so special!

On the way to that rather predictable thesis, however, he said a number of very interesting things, mostly in the form of anecdotes and examples passed on from all manner of scientific research. My favorite: according to Paul MacCready's calculations, human beings and their domesticated animals made up 0.1% of the terrestrial biomass 10,000 years ago, at the origin of settled agriculture. Today, we and our companions (mostly our cattle) make up 98% of the terrestrial biomass. That's a lot of domestication!

He also had several very good lines. My favorite: "Not a one of us thinks maximizing our progeny is the summum bonum of our lives."

Nonetheless, the most interesting parts of his talk, for me, were the parts that were unintentionally interesting: toss-away lines or formulations that were extremely revealing, even though this revelation was not at all thematized by Dennett himself. Here I have several examples.

• Discussing viruses, he said "they have a shape, and hence they have a function." Aristotle lives!
• He repeatedly cast both biological and cultural evolution as a process of exchange, saying at one point that differential replication was the currency with which evolutionary adaptations ("research and development") were paid for. Differential replication is the common denominator of all historical processes.
• "Our power depends on the culture that allows us to divide labor and share expertise," he said at one point. He seems to put a great stock in techniques and expertises, which he basically equated with understanding.
  

This last point, however, was in tension with another point he did emphasize, that "one of the great things about language" is that you don't have to understand it to remember it and pass it on. So, on the one hand, he equates technique with understanding the reasons why we do something, but on the other hand, he situates these techniques in a social division of labor mediated by language which guarantees that no one actually understands why they're doing something because no one actually has a grasp of the whole within which their particular technique has its place. The power of the incomprehensible division of labor gives way to the power of technical comprehension, and each underwrites the other. That is, my technique is only a real expertise, and a real bit of knowledge, if it is validated by the non-technical and incomprehensible social totality, but that social totality is itself only powerful (as opposed to suicidal or self-destructive) insofar as it promises to set in motion more and more powerful techniques.

Finally, I think this tension brings us back to Dennett's thesis. Dennett represents a discourse that wants to scientifically explain culture as the transmission of memes, "data structures that act virally," in his own, very nice, phrase. His argument rests on developing a narrative about the proliferation of such viral data structures, a narrative in which human subjectivity is, necessarily, absent. And yet, Dennett ended his talk by claiming that "we alone represent our reasons," and "that's what makes us responsible." He reverts to precisely that theological and humanist discourse that is most at odds with his own project.

What would it take for memeticists to turn their analysis back on themselves? What is the structure of the discourse of representation, reason, and responsibility such that it acts virally upon us? Is it a case of something we don't have to understand in order to remember and pass on? What about the memetic discourse itself? Can they give a scientific account of their own science? If such a leap could be made, memetics might prove itself to be the science of ideology that Althusser tried so hard to inaugurate.

It seems to me (and I admit, I have not done any reading in this area in several years) that memetics does not yet have an operative concept of "structure" by which it can begin to analyze memes in their specificity. I think there really is room for fruitful research here, and it might be research that would allow Marxism to make a contribution to the science of genetics to make up for Lysenko.

Philosophy as Ur-Job Training

Philosophy got a write up in the NY Times on Sunday. Apparently, enrollments are way up at lots of places. My old department chair, David Schrader, gets quoted in his new capacity as executive director of the APA.

This is all good, but...

My one concern with the article is that--except for a nod to the romantic possibilities of existential depth at the end--philosophy is presented largely as a way to do well on the LSATs and/or as a way to bone up on all-purpose skills in a post-career era. This can be given a more congenial spin, also:

Frances Egan, a Rutgers philosophy professor who advises undergraduates, said that as it has become harder for students to predict what specialties might be in demand in an uncertain economy, some may be more apt to choose their major based simply on what they find interesting. “Philosophy is a lot of fun,” said Professor Egan, who graduated with a philosophy degree in the tough economic times of the 1970s. “A lot of students are in it because they find it intellectually rewarding.”

I like the emphasis on the fun to be had. Nonetheless, I tend to be of the opinion that philosophy, far from preparing you to do everything, renders you incapable of doing anything. Philosophy makes you useless. That is precisely why it is enjoyable, and why I think students should pursue it.

What's Up With That?

A New Year's puzzler: Why are there Randian Aristotelians?

I understand that there is some affinity between Rand's realist ontology and Aristotle's, but Mayhew and Miller both work on Aristotle's political philosophy, and there are few political philosophies more opposed to Rand's than Aristotle's--the master of those who know held that:

• The political community is natural.
• The city is an organic whole.
• Trade and money-making are antithetical to ethical life, and should be heavily restricted.
• Those who pursue life as the highest good are living the life of cattle.

So, as I said, what's up with that?

UPDATE: Yeah, so the obvious answer is because Rand considered herself an Aristotelian, and the fruit never falls far from the bigger fruit, or something like that. But what I want to know is how they read Aristotle's Ethics and Politics and come away thinking Aristotle's anti-(Platonic)-communism leads him to be pro-capitalism, or to be compatible with such a stance??

Work in Progress

"Aristotle's Perfectionism and the Critique of Justice"

I dashed this paper off two weeks back in time for a conference submission deadline, and now need to revise it to give at the University of Maine next week. Comments?

Critical or Pre-Critical?

Kind of stacks the deck doesn't it? Post-critical is ruled out a priori. Despite the obvious influence of Kant on Heidegger and Derrida, for example, it is not at all clear to me that they are any closer to Kantian critical philosophy than is Althusser.

The lines of lineage are a bit more crossed and re-crossed than all this. It reminds me of Agamben's dichotomy between philosophies of immanence and philosophies of transcendence, or of Althusser's claim that the two tendencies of philosophy are materialism and idealism. I understand those as tactical distinctions, but to take them too seriously seems to me to be a mistake. It's dangerous to too closely identify with one's polemics.

Over on Unemployed Negativity, it has been suggested that our task is that of "thinking social relations beyond the category of the individual." That seems more fruitful to me. And if the line of demarcation is between philosophies of individuality and philosophies of trans-individuality, then Heidegger and Derrida end up on the same side as Althusser and Deleuze.