Johnathan Bi: Book Notes

Discourse on the Origin of Inequality by Rousseau | Notes & Summary

Johnathan Bi — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 19:25:25 GMT

To the Republic of Geneva

"Convinced that only the virtuous Citizen…"
1. Only the virtuous Citizen is worthy to honor a country. Rousseau considers himself ready.
2. Geneva is an exemplary society that Rousseau must examine to answer the question posed by the Academy of Dijon because it has delt with inequality well, implemented the right "maxims"
3. Rousseau's praise of Geneva is not without qualification (and, therefore, coherent with rest of the work) since he says "most closely approximating" and "best forestalled."
4. Interesting that equality established by nature and inequality established by men CAN be "happily combined." It's not as simple as the former good, the latter bad.
"If I had to choose my place of birth…"
1. Rousseau's ideal state to be born to is primarily defined by its small size of population. This small size is…
2. Naturally suited for the range of human faculties (e.g. think Dunbar's number)
3. "Everyone being equal to his task" and, thus, no one pushes off the task they are responsible for to others (is this a gesture at exploitation of labor?)
4. Crucially, everyone knows everyone else: "neither the shady stratagems of vice nor the modesty of virtue could have escaped the Public's gaze and judgment." Crucially this enables …
5. "This gentle habit of seeing and knowing one another would have made the love of one's Fatherland a love of the Citizens rather than of the soil."
6. This is significant because the gaze of the other is so often seen solely as a form of corruption. But here, it is clear that it serves an important positive function not just consequentially (in moderating right behavior) but for its own sake: as love for the other.
"I should have wished to be born in a country where the Sovereign…"
1. The ideal state is where the Sovereign and the people only share the same interest "so that all the motions of the machine might always tend only to the common happiness."
2. This is impossible because different people necessarily have (some) divergent interests. Therefore, the next best outcome is a democratic government "wisely tempered."
"I should have wished to live and die free…"
1. Interesting definition of freedom. To be free is to be "docile" subject to ONLY honorable, beneficial laws.
"I should have wished, then, that no one inside the State could have declared himself …"
1. Everyone is subject to the laws, otherwise all become subjects of the few who are not subject to those laws
2. No foreign entity can impose laws
"I should not have wished to live in a newly established Republic … "
1. He does not want to live under a newly established Republic that just emerged from a dictatorship (like Rome did from Tarquin).
2. "For freedom is like the solid and hearty foods or the full-bodied wines fit to feed and fortify robust temperaments used to them, but which overwhelm, ruin and intoxicate weak and delicate ones that are not up to them."
3. People who are accustomed to servitude have the most exaggerated understanding of freedom and in their revolutions always deliver them up to seducers who ensnarl their freedoms more.
4. Growing accustomed to freedom can happen, it just takes a long time (Rome did it).
5. Rousseau wants to be in a republic that has long been free whose citizens were worthy of freedom.
"I should have wished to choose … "
1. He wants to be in a state that was weak enough that it was never tempted by conquest.
2. He wants to be in a state surrounded by other states none of which wanted to conquer it, but whom all had an interest in preventing its conquest.
"I should have sought out … "
1. Citizens should have a say in legislation.
2. But he disapproves of the Romans where the leaders were excluded in deliberations and deprived of rights enjoyed by Citizens.
"On the contrary, in order to forestall … "
1. Only magistrates can propose laws (not everyone) and for people not to want to change their laws.
2. Laws require the venerability of antiquity to seem sacred.
"I should above all have fled … "
1. Definitely do not want a state that thinks it can rule itself without rulers. That was the vice of Athens.
"Rather, I should have chosen one … "
1. Instead, he wants a state where Magistrates were chosen by the people in a respectful, yearly way.
"Such, Magnificent, most honored … "
1. Ideally it would be rewarded with a beautiful landscape and vistas.
"If, less happy … "
1. Lamenting how he is not in Geneva due to youthful "want of prudence." And, thus, dedicating this to his citizens.
"My dear Fellow-Citizens … "
1. Reminding his compatriots how lucky they are.
"May a Republic so wisely … "
1. Geneva is yours to screw up. Rousseau warning them of sinister intentions and desires of mistrust.
"And you, Magnificent …"
1. The magistrates are so much more magnificent for governing the wisest and most enlightened people.
"Allow me to cite an example … "
1. Thanking his enlightened father for teaching him and instilling in him a good education.
"Such are, Magnificent and most honored … "
1. His father would be exemplary in any other state, but was quite average/normal in Geneva.
"It should not be surprising that the Chiefs … "
1. Surprisingly, even the theologians/priests of Geneva (professions who usually disdain this worldly attachments) have also a strong love for country.
"Could I forget that precious half of the Republic … "
1. Ode to the women of Geneva.
2. Surprisingly, without holding any political power Rousseau proclaims that it is they (the women) who govern the men: "it will always be the lot of your sex to govern ours." And that women "commanded" in Sparta.
3. The secret of woman's command is "chaste power" which allows her to speak honor and reason to her husband, to cause him to disdain luxury by simple and modest attire. In short, women, far beyond motherhood take on a forming role to men.
"I flatter myself that the event will not prove me wrong … "
1. Geneva will not be a place of spectacle / fashion / luxury.
"Deign, Magnificent, most honored and sovereign lords … "
1. Asking himself to be pardoned if he misspeaks.
2. Rousseau sees no greater happiness for himself than seeing Geneva happy.
3. Question: this all seems quite odd (although nothing seems contradictory, since he does share that there are good and bad societies available in state of nature) is this political? Is this ironic? What are we to make of this unqualified praise of a civil society in front of a discourse that critiques civilization itself.

Preface

"The most useful and the least advanced …"
1. The most useful, least advanced, most difficult question of human knowledge is about human nature.
2. We can make no progress on the question of inequality without understanding Man.
3. Rousseau paints a picture of human nature as constituting an original, simple part created by the "Author" and the historical baggage ladened on top. The famous metaphor of the statue of Glaucus that was perfect and then ravished by time and the sea until it appeared more beast than God.
4. There seem to be a few species of alteration/fall. 1. acquisition of both knowledge and falsehoods 2. physical changes in bodies (evolution? QUESTION: is this a big emphasis at all?) 3. the continued impact of the passions.
5. What we are left with is unruly passions that believes it can reason.
"What is more cruel still … "
1. The more we "progress," the more knowledge we accumulate, the more we deprive ourselves of the most important knowledge of all: knowledge about human nature.
2. This is for two reasons. 1. There are two types of knowledge. The more we try to study man analytically/symbolically the more we extend outward the less we can know him intuitively. (For rousseau, feeling is the means of true knowledge/understanding). See Note II "we seek only to spread outward, and to exist outside ourselves; too busy multiplying the functions of our senses and extending the external scope of our being, we rarely use that internal sense which reduces us to our true dimensions, and separates from us everything that does not belong to it." 2.Even if the study of man symbolically is helpful it is always conjoined with the superfluity of civilization (more luxury, more passions, etc.) so the same conditions that enable us to gain more (genuine) knowledge of man distort him further from the natural state.
"It is easy to see … "
1. Man started out equal, like all other animals. This is established "by common consent."
2. Just as animals from the same ancestor changed in different paces physically different human societies changed at different paces and so we are talking in the general -- not a precise history.
"Let my Readers therefore … "
1. The question of what is natural and what is artificial is a difficult one.
2. The only way to make "solid observations" would be to run experiments by the best philosophers and sovereigns that is "scarcely reasonable to expect."
3. Absent this, we are left with Rousseau having "initiated arguments" and "hazarded some conjectures." He doesn’t claim to have resolved it than elucidated it.
"Yet these investigations so difficult to carry out … "
1. Answering this question (what is artificial and natural to man) will help us answer a whole host of questions, including the idea of natural right / natural law (which cannot proceed without articulating what is "natural).
"It is not without surprise … "
1. There is so little agreement between philosophers/epochs on this most important question.
2. Roman jurists subject man and animal to same natural law. They consider law as something nature imposes on itself rather than prescribes. Ie. It is a thin conception of law that is just about the general relations of animate beings for common preservation. This would be closer to Newton's laws rather than the Laws of the US.
3. Moderns treat Law as something to be ascribed to moral beings (intelligent, free, considered in its relations with other beings) and, thus, only have as its subject man. The issue here is that people define it in such a complex way (opposite problem of the ancients) that it is inaccessible to all but a handful of metaphysicians.
"Knowing Nature so little … "
1. Other than disagreement, the issue is that many philosophers have included artificial capacities only developed after the state of nature into the original condition.
"But so long as we do not know natural man … "
1. We are concerned with natural law. That imposes two constraints. Natural: it must speak immediately with the voice of nature (as opposed to being artificial). Law: those who are obligated must be able to submit to it knowingly (against the obscure metaphysics point).
"Hence disregarding all the scientific books … "
1. There are two principles prior to reason (which he clearly considers artificial).
2. The first is concern for our own well-being and self-preservation (Amour De Soi).
3. The second is pity/sympathy.
4. It is from only these two principles that natural right is built off of.
"This way one is not obliged … "
1. "This way one is not obliged to make a Philosopher of man before making a man of him." This is a clever line that, again, suggests that reason is artificial and that it obscures rather than illuminates. The attack on modern natural right theorists and their dense metaphysical systems.
2. The natural law derived from the previous two principles is to not harm another sentient creature unless one's own self-preservation is at risk.
3. Animals are not bound by this natural law because they are deprived of enlightenment and freedom (Question: are these two other natural principles that should have been included above ^? Framed as critique, it seems like Rousseau is smuggling in "reason" here that we need it to recognize the natural law. Maybe its only now that we have reason do we need to recognize the natural law. ANSWER: we follow the natural law by default at this stage by naturally following our ADS and (weaker) pity) and therefore cannot recognize law. However, they ought to be protected by this law (e.g. partake in natural right) because our pity extends to sentient and not just rational beings.
"This same study of original man … "
1. This study of original man is only way to answer many important political-philosophical questions (one of which being the one raised by the academy of Dijon).
"Human society viewed with a calm … "
1. Human society may seem grounded on arbitrary power relations. With the understanding of what is natural and what is artificial, we can appreciate certain institutions that at first appear to bound our freedom but, in reality, forestall artificial perversions. The important outcome here is that there is a good way, at least a better way, to design civilization.
2. He calls his genealogy a "hypothetical history of governments."

Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men

"It is of man that I am to speak …"
1. Rousseau begins by asserting that he is speaking "to men" -- grown ups who can take the hard truth.
2. "I shall not be dissatisfied with myself if I prove worthy of my subject and my judges" -- presumably, dissatisfaction is the natural outcome of proving one worthy of the subject because the answer to the subject is so grim. Rousseau is saying he will be satisfied in honoring the truth even if that truth is distasteful.
"I conceive of two sorts of inequality …"
1. One inequality is natural/physical … the differences in our faculties.
2. Another inequality is moral/political … honor/wealth/power. Its foundations are established/authorized by consent.
"It makes no sense to ask …"
1. It's obvious that natural inequalities come from nature.
2. It's also obvious that moral inequalities are not fully justified by natural inequalities e.g. power and wisdom are not in proportion.
"What, then, precisely is at issue in this Discourse? … "
1. The question is precisely to figure out when these two inequalities became disjoined. How did the strong work for the weak, the wise for the ignorant?
"The Philosophers who have examined … "
1. Philosophers have smuggled traits of civil man into nature: notions of justice, belonging, and authority (Rousseau's genealogy will reveal how they actually came about).
2. If you read the Bible closely, you will find that there is no state of nature. For the Christian, the default is to assume that the state of nature did not exist because that's not where the Bible beings. The only cogent way of squaring it with the Bible is if one thinks that we relapsed into the state of nature after civilization was already founded.
"Let us therefore begin by setting aside all the facts … "
1. Rousseau is not giving us a historical account but rather a hypothetical one to elucidate what the natural "substratum" of man is even if it never happened.
2. Christianity tends to justify inequality because God "led" man out of the state of nature (Eden) so we think that all the inequalities of civilization are justified by God.
3. The fact that we have a competing narrative from the Bible with a genealogy without a state of nature doesn’t prevent us from asking what would happen if we were placed in such a state.
"O Man, whatever Land you may be from … "
1. Against the philosophers: "Here is your history such as I believed I read it, not in the Books by your kind, who are liars, but in Nature, which never lies."
2. Man has changed a great deal from the natural state.
3. This development is not all bad, there is a time in development that civilization should have stopped after the state of nature. After that point, everything has gone downhill.

Part I

"However important it may be … "
1. Will not investigate biological evolution (as Aristotle suggests) because the evidence is too sparse and the whole enterprise too speculative. Will treat man as fully formed.
"By stripping this Being … "
1. Stripped to just our bare natural faculties, Man is neither most agile nor most strong.
2. But man is most "advantageously organized."
"The Earth, abandoned to its natural fertility … "
1. The reason that we are most advantageously organized is that man has no "instinct" and instead he is able to imitate (key capacity of man) the instincts of the other animals. An example Rousseau gives is in our omnivorous diet.
"Accustomed from childhood … "
1. In nature children are tested by the elements. Like Sparta, only the fittest survive and makes them strong and robust.
2. In civilized society "the State kills Children indiscriminately before their birth by making them a burden to their Fathers," which, I think, means that they are allowed to live but they live truncated, existences because they become burdens to their families and are subject to oppressive expectations and forces.
"Since his body is the only tool which savage man knows … "
1. Savage man is forced to develop himself physically because he does not have any tools. Modern man, with all his machines, is quite limited himself.
"Hobbes contends that man is naturally intrepid … "
1. Hobbes thinks that savage man is aggressive. Rousseau thinks they are rather timid, fleeing at 1. animals much stronger 2. things they do not know.
2. Most animals that are stronger than Man, Man is more skilled that they are and so has no problem in attacking.
3. The point that Rousseau really is arguing against here is this idea that life in the state of nature was nasty, short, and brutish. Instead, he thinks that most animals learn not to mess with man and man is fully capable of fleeing if needed.
"These are undoubtedly the reasons … "
1. Real "savages" encountered by Europeans show little concern when they encounter wild beasts.
"Other, more formidable, enemies … "
1. Savages are susceptible to childhood, old age, and disease. But civilized man is even more exposed to the latter.
"Regarding illnesses … "
1. It's not clear that countries where medicine is more advanced, widely practiced that people have become more healthy.
2. Furthermore, most of the illnesses we experience are caused by civilization. The rich are too idle and eat too exotic foods. The poor work too much and eat too poor food.
3. Savages are not ill other than wounds and old age.
4. Dieting, which is so necessary now, wasn't invented until hippocrates.
"With so few sources of illness … "
1. Illnesses are often healed by time. Hunters often come across animals with wounds and broken limbs that are healed through time.
"Let us therefore beware of confusing Savage man with the men we have before our eyes … "
1. Domesticated animals are often much weaker and of more "effeminate" disposition than their wild counterparts.
2. We must think the same of savage vs. domesticated man.
"To go naked, to be without habitation … "
1. Man can survive without what we would consider "necessities" the first who created clothes and shelter was the first to create something unnecessary (reminds me of the critique of the first person who claimed private property).
"Alone, idle, and always near danger … "
1. Savage man will be a light sleeper. All the senses related to refinement/sensuality will be crude (touch and taste) whereas all the senses related to survival will be acute (sight, hearing, and smell).
"Until now I have considered only Physical Man; Let us now try to view him from the Metaphysical and Moral side."
1. Transition from physicality to morality/moral psychology.
"I see in any animal nothing … "
1. Animals, no matter how sophisticated, have to follow rules that nature prescribes to it. Rousseau gives example of pigeon starving to death next to bowl of meats … probably not a great example as I don’t think their stomachs can process it.
2. Humans can choose and go against the natural law through his capacity as free agent.
3. "The Beast cannot deviate from the Rule prescribed to it even when it would be to its advantage to do so, while man often deviates from it to his detriment."
"Every animal has ideas … "
1. Animals have ideas as much as humans do. The difference is that the animals are commanded by these ideas whereas humans have the freedom to choose to engage or not engage.
"But even if the difficulties … "
1. Man is perfectible in two ways: first, he does not finish his development in the way an animal does as it reaches maturity (is that true?). Second, mankind transforms drastically across generations whereas animals do the same things.
2. Important: it is a sad thing to have to recognize that this faculty of perfectibility is what will lead us out of this original, happy state.
3. Note IX is important (and frankly should have been in the essay). Rousseau reiterates numerous points about how society and civilization creates evil either directly or indirectly through what first appear to be goods. But the most important addition is the final paragraph. Rousseau asks whether we need to return: "What, then? Must societies be destroyed, thine and mine annihilated, and men return to live in forests with the Bears?" Here's his response:
  1. Question: is this ironic (are there people like this)? He says for those who can do so "resume your ancient and first innocence since it is in your power to do so; go into the woods.:
  2. But Rousseau cannot do so: "As for men like myself, whose passions have forever destroyed their original simplicity, who can no longer subsist on grass and acorns, nor do without Laws or Chiefs … "
  3. He seems to elevate civilized man over natural man here. He describes natural man as "you to whom the celestial voice has not made itself heard" and that "the divine voice called all Mankind to the enlightenment and the happiness of the celestial Intelligences." Civilized man is given morality, supernatural lessons from their "first father" (adam?) and also they have the possibility of heaven: "by practicing the virtues … to deserve the eternal prize."
  4. Of course good society is rare and few between but Rousseau does acknowledge its possibility: " they will honor above al the good and wise Princes who wil know how ot forestall, cure, and palliate the host of abuses and of evils that are forever ready to overwhelm us." But even in such a society (being more consistent with rest of the Essay) there "always arise more real calamities than apparent advantages."
  5. Question: this seems to be a massive benefit of civilized man over natural man that Rousseau does not mention anywhere else (namely the promise of eternal life). Can we say that the average savage is better but the best is to be a perfected civilized man for even if his worldly life is still worse he has the promise of eternal life?
"Savage Man, left by Nature to bare instinct alone … '
1. Summarizing what we have concluded so far. Man starts off with the bare minimum senses, to will and not to will, to desire and to fear. These are the only operations in the "first state."
"Regardless of what the Moralists may say about it … "
1. There is a reciprocal relationship between knowledge and passions.
2. We are only impelled to know because of passions (not the passion to know but the passion of others things like food and shelter which requires knowledge to be satisfied).
3. Passions are separated into two kinds. Originally there are just needs (sex, shelter, food) and then there is the complement set. You can only have passion (desire/aversion) for something if you know about it. So as knowledge expands, so do the passions. E.g. Think to the menswear collector who can tell the subtle difference between different types of yarn. This will critically be an important argument against reason and the expansion of knowledge.
4. Savage man has no enlightenment/knowledge so he only has his needs in view.
5. He is not even fearful of his death. Animals cannot comprehend their own death.
"If I had to do so … "
1. Natural endowments are proportioned by nature according to what a people need. E.g. Northerners are more industrious than those who live in the abundance of the equador because they had to be.
1. "Nature wanted in this way to equalize things, by endowing Minds with the fertility it denies the Soil."
"But without resorting … "
1. Savage man's passions are so limited and easily satisfied that there is no knowledge nor even foresight. The world appears plain to him as nature just cycles again and again. He barely has a conception of the future.
"The more one meditates on this subject … "
1. Even what we consider to be the most primitive and simplest forms of knowledge are so far removed from this early state.
2. Must've taken centuries to master fire and, even then, have the skill lost many times.
3. Agriculture can only exist outside the state of nature. Not only does it require knowledge and tools, but also a division of land to protect one's yields.
"Even if we should wish to suppose a Savage … "
1. That's to say nothing of a more advanced art. Even if there were a philosopher, his philosophy would be useless, would be lost in one generation, and he'd barely meet anyone whom he could pass it onto.
"If one considers …"
1. So much of civilization is dependent on the use of speech. Yet the invention of languages must have cost thousands of centuries. That is how primitive and barren the savage's life is when compared to ours.
"Let me be allowed briefly to consider … "
1. Divergence into the origin of languages. Question: is this of any significance?
2. Rousseau is considering that in this hypothetical state of nature there is no nuclear family. Individuals are roaming around. Males mate with females and leave. Females raise the child.
3. In this world, language is created between mother and child. In fact, it is the child who dictates the language because it is the child who has the need. In such a world, languages will multiple to the number of mother-child pairs.
"Let us suppose this first difficulty overcome … "
1. Even if we ignore this first difficulty about the multiplicity of languages. The more curious thing is how is language that points at non-sensible things (such as ideas) developed.
2. Question: is the faculty at issue here abstraction or rhetoric?
"Man's first language … "
1. The first language, the "cry of nature" was reserved for extreme and urgent opportunities.
2. It's only when men gathered together (and had much more to share and express) that not only did language become more expressive but tonality and gestures entered into the picture.
"It would seem that the first words … "
1. Words were all mushed together in the beginning.
2. It was a development that introduced subject and predicate, verb and noun. Adjectives in particular are difficult because adjectives are, by nature, abstractions.
"Each object was at first given a particular name … "
1. Without developed faculties of thought (to find essences, differences, similarities) one Oak would be called A and another would be called B, words would proliferate.
"Besides, general ideas can enter the Mind only with the help of words … "
1. General ideas can only be facilitated by words.
2. To imagine something is to render it particular (one cannot imagine the form of a triangle but can imagine a triangle)
3. Rousseau concludes that the first words are always about particulars and not general ideas. The argument is that you can only give names to an idea you already have. Since the idea you already have cannot be a general one (because you need words and propositions to conceive of it), the first words must be substantives, names for particulars.
"But when, by means which I cannot conceive … "
1. When the process of generalization began, the process went too far. They began over generalizing because comprehending the minute differences took more work and capacity than they had/were willing. Instead, they judged by first impression.
2. The most general notions like "matter" also alluded them for they still allude us today.
"I pause after these first steps … "
1. Rousseau is transitioning away from origin of language.
2. What he wants to show is that we've barely gotten basic nouns and how far we still have to go before we get to anywhere near the capacity we have now with numbers, abstractions, verbs, propositions, and logic.
3. He suggests that it is unlikely that language could have arisen by purely human means. He remains agnostic to the "most difficult" question about which was needed first language or society.
"Whatever may be the case regarding these origins … "
1. The key point Rousseau wants to draw out is that, in the state of nature, Men do not have many mutual needs and don't even have language well developed. Natural man is not social. "Indeed, it is impossible to imagine why, in that primitive state, a man would need another man any more than a monkey or a Wolf would need his kind, or, assuming this need, to imagine what motives could induce the other to attend to it, or even, if he did, how they might agree on terms."
2. The common belief that such a man is miserable is completely wrong. He is good in health and free. Civil man commits suicide, savage man never does.
3. It is a blessing that nature did not give him too much, so that his capacities won't be superfluous.
"It would at first seem that men in that state … "
1. Without society, it appears, that men cannot be good nor wicked, with vices nor virtues.
2. We should measure civilized man against natural man to see whether the goods they lack are made up for or not by the harms they avoid.
"Above all, let us not conclude with Hobbes … "
1. Let's not draw the Hobbesian conclusion that the absence of good in natural man is a presence of wrong. Just because he has no IDEA of goodness, that he cannot articulate what virtue is, that he does not believe in obligation, does not mean he is wicked. Just the opposite, Rousseau claims the state of nature is the state in which self-preservation is least harmful to others (because it is the least social).
2. The issue with Hobbes is that he only thinks the state of nature is so antagonistic because he projects tendencies only developed in society (Glory, Reason).
3. It is because and not despite that savages do not know what is good (and, thus, what is evil) that they are NOT wicked. It is not enlightenment nor law that curbs people from evil-doing but 1. not having inflamed passions 2. an ignorance of vice that keeps them from evil-doing. "So much more does the ignorance of vice profit these than the knowledge of virtue profits those."
4. There is another human capacity that curbs one's own desires for self-preservation and amour-propre (remember, this is a constructed drive).
5. He calls Mandeville "the great detractor of human virtues" but says even he was forced to acknowledge pity.
6. Note XV, the defining characteristic of the state of nature is that Amour-propre does not exist. "in the genuine state of nature, Amour propre does not exist;"
"Such is the pure movement of Nature … "
1. Even those with depraved morals have a strong impulse of natural pity. The tyrant Alexander of Pherae "dared not attend the performance of a single tragedy for fear that he might be seen to moan with Andromache and Priam" even though he was ok with the cries of his citizens being murdered.
"Mandeville clearly sensed that … "
1. Pity lies at the core of the other social virtues. Generosity is pity for the weak, clemency for the guilty, humanity for the species in general. Benevolence and friendship are pity pushed to its logical conclusion (not just the removal of suffering but the engendering of happiness).
2. Pity is obscure but lively in savage man … developed but weak in civil man.
3. Pity is all the more stronger when one identifies with the suffering being.
4. It is reason that engenders amour propre and reflection that reinforces it.
5. Important: reason is not that which motivates to help others but that which creates excuses not to: "reason that turns man back upon himself; reason that separates him from everything that troubles and afflicts him: It is Philosophy that isolates him; by means of Philosophy he secretly says, at the sight of a suffering man, perish if you wish, I am safe. One of his kind can with impunity be murdered beneath his window; he only has to put his hands over his ears and to argue with himself a little in order to prevent Nature, which rebels within him, from letting him identify with the man being assassinated. Savage man has not this admirable talent, and for want of wisdom and of reason he is always seen to yield impetuously to the first sentiment of Humanity. In Riots, in Street-brawls, the Populace gathers, the prudent man withdraws; it is the rabble,"
"It is therefore quite certain that pity … "
1. It is pity, not reason that moderates self-love in the state of nature.
2. The "sublime maxim" of reasoned justice is do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
3. The natural maxim that is less perfect but more useful is: do your good with the least possible harm to others. This is what pity motivates.
4. It is natural sentiment rather than in subtle arguments that has prevented evil-doing.
5. Clearly, Rousseau believes reason can motivate moral behavior. But that it is really difficult and of the rarest minds who become virtuous through reason.
"With such sluggish passions and such a salutary curb … "
1. Rousseau's state of nature paints man as simple. Not only are there few passions (desire for vengeance, esteem, etc.) there's also few contact that would inflame those passions.
2. Disputes, as rare as they were, would even-rarer lead to bloodshed.
"Among the passions that stir man's heart … "
1. The only immodest passion in the state of nature seems to be lust. It is a passion that "terrible passion that braves all dangers, overcomes all obstacles, and in its frenzy seems liable ca destroy Mankind which it is destined to preserve."
"It has to be granted from the first … "
1. The common knowledge is that violent passions require laws to contain them.
2. Rousseau suggests that laws are inadequate because, clearly, there are crimes and disorders all around us. Furthermore, we should inquire whether these disorders did not arise with Laws themselves.
"Let us begin by distinguishing the moral from the physical … "
1. There is the physical sentiment of love, which is the raw sexual desire for mating in general. And then there are moral sentiments which intensify the love, focus it on a single object; it is ultimately factitious.
2. The savage is motivated only by the physical and not moral. Rousseau concludes that the savage is equally happy to mate with any woman.
"Limited to the physical … "
1. Rousseau paints this peaceful picture. Without this moral force of love there is much less quarrel. "Everyone peacefully awaits the impulsion of Nature."
"It is therefore indisputable that love itself … "
1. The Caribs (people from Caribbean?) who are closest to state of nature show that they are least given to jealousy in their love life and nowhere near as quarrelsome.
"Regarding the inferences that might be drawn … "
1. We should not look at animals who fight until they are bloody and conclude that is what the natural state of mating is. We are different in that 1. females generally exceed number of males 2. our females do not have a minor window of heat followed by a long period of rejection. These are the two causes of bloody battles amongst males.
2. It is civilization that wreaks havoc. This theme of law and morality causing its opposite arises again "where the duty of eternal fidelity only makes for adulteries, and where even the Laws of continence and of honor inevitably increase debauchery, and multiply abortions."
3. Question: what are the pathways where morality leads to debauchery? One is that they are conjoined with other aspects of civilization which cause it (not causal, relational). Another one is that they directly cause it by giving people notions of right and wrong. Tree of knowledge of good and evil.
"Let us conclude that … "
1. Summary of what we've covered so far. Natural man lived in an isolated (even from children) environment with relatively few passions.
2. He could not communicate his inventions even if he did invent something and centuries went by without anything changes.
"If I have dwelt at such length … "
1. Rousseau has only inquired to the very origin because he needed to show how little people were unequal (even natural inequality).
"Indeed it is easy to see that … "
1. What appear to be natural differences are often social differences. Sturdy or delicate temperament is less innate than informed by upbringing. The strength of mind would be another example, formed through cultivation.
"But even if Nature displayed … "
1. Even if nature did give people disproportionate talents, Men would have no use of them for they are isolated. No need for beauty or love, no need for wit or charm. Because they are so isolated.
2. In this state, its not clear what oppression/subjection even means … How do you subject someone in the state of nature? It would take more work than doing the work yourself. What Rousseau wants to show is how certain aspects of what we consider to be natural relations to actually be artificial ones. Reminds me of Graeber's critique of the free market and that its not at all what people do when they are left alone.
"Without needlessly drawing out these details … "
1. Rousseau wants to show that the precondition of servitude is dependence. If you don’t need other men to survive, you always have the option of running away.
"Having proved that Inequality is scarcely perceptible … "
1. He has shown so far that inequality is scarcely perceptible in the state of nature.
2. He has also shown that there is little reason to develop the faculties of man (even say language).
3. It is only by the rarest of causes occurring together that humans "progressed" but this progression "perfected human reason while deteriorating the species, made a being wicked by making it sociable."
"I admit that since the events … "
1. The path that Rousseau is about to trace could have happened in multiple ways.
2. He can choose the right path only on conjectures. But these conjectures are the only means to discover the truth however, the conclusions from these conjectures will not be conjectural! That is because any of the paths that Rousseau is about to trace will lead to the same conclusions.
"This will exempt me from expanding … "
1. Rousseau's method prevents him from explaining:
  1. How unlikely things can happen over long periods of time.
  2. How small causes have great effects over long periods of time
  3. How one can reject hypotheses without appealing to facts
  4. How in the absence of history it is philosophy to connect the dots between facts. This is exactly what Rousseau was doing. Taking the latest empirical research and trying to draw connections. Question: what happens when that empirical research gets overturned?

Part II

"The first man who …"
1. "The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is mine, and found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors Mankind would have been spared by him who, pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had cried out to his kind: Beware of listening to this impostor; You are lost if you forget that the fruits are everyone's and the Earth no one's."
2. However, Rousseau suggests that at this moment, it was already too late to stop private property because it required the support of a whole host of developments that preceded it. His task now is to trace those preceding developments.
"Man's first sentiment was that of his existence … "
1. Restating part one. The primary concern was his own existence. His appetites were animal. "Even the child no longer meant anything to the Mother as soon as it could do without her."
"Such was the condition of nascent man … "
1. Natural man had to train his body and develop tooling to compete with other animals.
"In proportion as Mankind spread … "
1. The amount of difficulties facing man multiplied as the number of men multiplied. Not because of competition but because of new challenges faced in new terrain/climate/seasons. They had to invent proper tooling fitting for the environment and learned to master fire.
"This repeated interaction of the various beings … "
1. He began developing relational understanding of himself and animals as well as the relations of animals with each other: great, small, strong, weak, etc.
2. This is the development of amour-propre? Relational thinking? Interesting that the initial development of relationality is through animals.
"The new enlightenment that resulted … "
1. With this new understanding, man learned to build traps and trick animals. He became master to those that were useful and a scourge to those that are harmful.
2. This is where pride was first aroused. It is through relations with animals. It is because he thought of himself as first among species that born the desire to be first among man.
3. "This is how his first look at himself aroused the first movement of pride in him; this is how, while as yet scarcely able to discriminate ranks, and considering himself in the first rank as a species, he was from afar preparing to claim first rank as an individual."
"Although others of his kind were not for him … "
1. He started observing other humans (who were more distant for him than the animals). And he witnessed their way of thinking and feeling corresponded to his own.
2. Just as he predicted the behavior of animals to protect his own self-interests, he did the same with these humans.
"Taught by experience … "
1. He learned that self-interest is the sole motivator of human actions.
2. In the occasions where interests with others aligned, he joined them in free association which evaporated as soon as the needs were gone.
3. In the even more rare instances where interests diverged, he used force or cunning.
"This is how men might imperceptibly have acquired … "
1. This is the early developments of mutual engagements and obligations.
2. It was immediate interest that tied them together. The bounds were extremely fickle as soon as immediate interest changed.
"It is easy to understand that such dealings … "
1. The language required at this stage is no more developed than the shouts of animals that communicated key and important information.
"This initial progress finally enabled man … "
1. This initial progress (working together & basic language) set the stage for more rapid progress in industry.
2. This enabled people to make tools that would create permanent settlements in the form of huts.
3. Huts enabled establishment and differentiation of families, this was the first sort of property.
4. People didn’t really fight over these huts because it risked a fight and because there was plenty of space available.
"The first developments of the heart … "
1. The nuclear family formed and it caused "the sweetest sentiments known to man" conjugal love and paternal love.
2. This stage of family was a small society and a good once because "mutual attachment and freedom were its only bonds."
3. A division of labor occurred where men hunted and women became sedentary. Both of the sexes lost their ferociousness and vigor.
"In this new state … "
1. Man also gained leisure which he used to acquire conveniences unknown to their ancestors.
2. These became the "first yoke," the "first source of evils" that was prepared for their descendants.
3. This is because these conveniences became habitual and thus ceased to be enjoyable but degenerated into true needs. Ie. To lose them was painful more than to possess them was sweet.
"Here one gets a somewhat better view of how the use of speech … "
1. This is a tangent paragraph (?) on Rousseau's theory of how language was first developed on islands instead of the continent.
"Everything begins to change in appearance … "
1. "nations" (more accurately, tribes) start forming bounded not by law but by custom.
2. Young people living in adjoined huts start forming families.
3. Comparison starts forming: "they grow accustomed to attend to different objects and to make comparisons; imperceptibly they acquire ideas of merit and of beauty which produce sentiments of preference."
4. They become thoroughly social: "The more they see one another, the less they can do without seeing one another more."
5. Jealousies start forming and discord happens.
6. Rousseau concludes "the gentlest of all passions receives sacrifices of human blood."
"As ideas and sentiments succeed one another … "
1. This is the key part.
2. Leisure gave rose to amusement and communal time where the necessities of survival were not the most demanding tasks at hand.
3. The gaze, that's what got us. That's where everything started to go wrong: "Everyone began to look at everyone else and to wish to be looked at himself, and public esteem acquired a price. The one who sang or danced best; the handsomest, the strongest, the most skillful, or the most eloquent came to be the most highly regarded, and this was the first step at once toward inequality and vice: [so] from these first preferences arose vanity and contempt on the one hand, shame and envy on the other; and the fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence."
"As soon as men had begun to appreciate one another …"
1. Sociality "appreciating one another" itself is the problem, because that meant appreciating/giving weight to what they thought.
2. From this point on a "wrong" became an "afront" where the contempt was more unbearable than the harm.
3. This created vengeance and bloodthirst.
4. It is at this point that most of the "savages" Europeans met were developed to. This is why people concluded that natural man was brutish.
5. Rousseau argues that this is completely wrong and reiterates his claim that there is no one more gentle than the man in the primitive state of nature. "For, according to the axiom of the wise Locke, 'Where there is no property, there can be no injury.'"
"But it should be noted that … "
1. In this state morality was just forming.
2. Punishments had to be more severe in proportion to opportunities to offend becoming more frequent. Law was taken into one's own hands. Everyone was sole judge and avenger.
3. Rousseau considers this the happy medium between the "indolence" of the primitive state and the "petulant activity" of ours.
4. It is best because it is least subject to revolutions, the best for man.
5. Rousseau suggests that the fact we find all the "savages" in this state means that Mankind was made to remain in it, it is the "youth of the World." This is his hypothetical history, to fill in the blanks so to speak.
6. Progress since this state is "toward the perfection of the individual, and in effect toward the decrepitude of the species."
7. Question: didn't Rousseau just suggest this state is why so many philosophers falsely conclude natural man is violent and cruel? Answer: They are more cruel than primitive state, maybe more cruel than us too, but its not their lack of cruelty that, for Rousseau, makes them the best but the lack of amour-propre being fully inflamed. That cruelty is a tradeoff and it is a worthy one.
"So long as men were content with their rustic huts … "
1. In so far as men were doing tasks that a single individual could perform all was well and the interactions were cordial.
2. Everything went downhill when one man needed the help of another; when one person found it useful to have the supplies of two. QUESTION: there seem to be two things here that are unrelated. One is collaboration in work. Another is desire to acquire more. Not sure how these are supposed to be related? ANSWER: I suppose what unites them is dependence. Either in desiring more in needing help of others.
3. This paved the way immediately to private property, slavery and misery.
4. Private property is something that stems out of self-interest and which inflames it.
"Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts … "
1. Iron and wheat civilized man. They are absent in the "Savages of America" encountered by Europeans.
"It is very difficult to conjecture … "
1. Impossible that people decided to do the laborious process of iron production without a result in mind.
2. Even more impossible that some accidental fire created the first mine.
3. A volcano throwing up molten metal must be best guess.
4. Another example that Rousseau is trying to pursue a history with the limited means at his disposal.
"As for agriculture, its principle was known … "
1. The principle of agriculture (sowing seeds) was much easier to know but natural man had little incentivize to do so for a long time. Hunting and gathering was much more natural.
"The Invention of the other arts was therefore necessary … "
1. The other arts such as metallurgy was necessary to the development of agriculture 1. some people had to be full time ironsmiths which means we needed to increase output of food (demand) 2. iron tools made it possible to do agriculture efficiently (supply).
"From the cultivation of land … "
1. Agriculture created private property as well as foresight (a key capacity the Savage is supposed to lack is ability to think in the future. He can barely anticipate what he wants in the evening, recall Rousseau's description of the man selling his bed in the morning only to despair at night. It is crucially only with agriculture is this faculty developed).
2. Private property and foresight (anticipation of harm) created laws.
3. Echoing Locke (and anticipating Marx), Rousseau sees labor as the only thing by which man can turn something into property (descriptively). So the right of property was born which is different from natural law.
"Things in this state could have remained equal … "
1. In this state, equality could have been maintained. Only if the needs and capacities of each were perfectly equal.
2. Since they never are, natural inequalities became magnified.
3. Question: would Rousseau consider this justified? That the stronger plowman got more iron and owned more food?
"Things having reached this point, it is easy to imagine the rest … "
1. A brief skim of the other developments hinted at already: invention of the other arts, progress of languages, inequalities of fortune etc.
2. He wants to focus on who Man has become in this new state.
"Here, then, are all our faculties developed ... "
1. In civilization a whole set of unnecessary needs were inflamed. Even the people at the top are enslaved while becoming the master. "Rich, he needs their services; poor, he needs their help, and moderate means do not enable him to do without them."
2. The only way man can satisfy needs is by making others "consider" him, to attract consideration. And the only by doing this is in appearance and not in being. So civilized man is always pretending.
3. Ambition arises, and this ambition is relative: as much about dragging down others as it is about improving oneself.
"Before its representative signs were invented … "
1. In the beginning of civilization (before the status symbols), wealth consisted in just land and livestock. Once mankind owned everything the only way to gain was to plunder away from someone else.
2. Powerful language: "like those ravenous wolves which once they have tasted human flesh scorn all other food, and from then on want to devour only men."
"Thus, as the most powerful … "
1. Breakdown of equality created the most frightful disorder. The strong challenging the occupant, the poor tugging against the rich, wars ensued -- this is what debases and devastates humanity.
"It is not possible that men … "
1. This is the invention of the state.
2. The rich realized that this war is … unequal … everyone was risking their life but only the rich were also risking their property.
3. The rich realized that since they acquired it by force, force alone was what was defending their wealth.
4. Even if it is won by hard-earned industry, Rousseau still thinks it violates natural right: "Do you not know that a great many of your brothers perish or suffer from need of what you have in excess, and that you required the express and unanimous consent of Humankind to appropriate for yourself anything from the common subsistence above and beyond your own?"
5. More importantly, he realized he would be overwhelmed by the poor. So, instead, what the rich did was that they invented maxims and other institutions that were favorable for them to keep a disproportionate share. "As favorable to himself as natural Right was contrary to him."
"To this end, after exhibiting to his neighbors … "
1. The rich creates institutions that purport to benefit everyone and to protect the weak from oppression while restraining the ambitious.
2. It also imposes mutual duties upon both powerful and weak.
"Much less than the equivalent … "
1. Most people were easily convinced because they wanted an arbiter so that they can pursue industry for greed and ambition.
2. "All ran toward their chains in the belief that they were securing their freedom."
3. The only people who could see their abuses were the ones who set up the system wanting to abuse it.
4. Even the wise saw it as a tradeoff, that they were giving something up but getting something meaningful in return.
"Such was, or must have been, the origin of society and of laws … "
1. Through institutions, laws, maxims …
  1. Natural freedom was destroyed
  2. Inequality was justified
  3. Transformed skillful usurpation into an irrevocable right (best examples of this would be conquest)
2. One single united society like this made the establishment of others indispensable (because the only way to stand up to such a society is being one yourself).
3. Soon, the earth was covered with societies, and freedom was lost.
"The Bodies Politic thus remaining in the state of Nature … "
1. Out of this came the first National Wars and martial virtues that praised killing.
"I know that some have attributed other origins … "
1. Rousseau here is trying to dismiss other competing theories of how a state was formed.
2. Conquest by the powerful: there is no "right of conquest." if that is all there is then societies will be in turmoil. The conquered must, in some sense, choose the conqueror. Mere surrender is not enough to create laws and society.
3. Union of the weak (conquest of the weak): this is the wrong frame to think about it (strong/weak) instead we should think about rich/poor because before the establishing of government all you have is property. In this model, the poor have nothing but their freedom and are giving it up voluntarily. This makes no sense so it has to come from the rich. The rich could have been so easily hurt and so they invented the state to protect themselves.
"Nascent Government had not constant and regular form … "
1. Early government was a trial and error approach.
2. Time revealed the flaws of early government and people didn't really know what they were doing.
3. It would have been better, once time revealed a flaw, to purge the structure and start afresh, but the process, instead, was iterative. (Revolutionary tendencies?)
4. Initially there were a few general conventions but that didn't prove enough to stop the tide of violations.
5. Then came the (wrong) decision to trust public authority in the hands of private individuals (magistrates and the like). The key thing here is that judges did not come before laws nor politicians societies.
"It would be no more reasonable to believe … "
1. People chose a chief to protect their freedoms and things constitutive to their being.
2. Rousseau sees the fundamental maxim of all Political Right that the duty of the Chief is to defend his subjects' freedom.
"Politicians propound the same sophisms about the love of freedom … "
1. Politicians and philosophers judge too quickly that man does not really want to be free based on the people in servitude before their eyes.
2. They fail to realize that freedom, like innocence and virtue are goods one only has a taste for when one embodies them. E.g. in a state of lack, one loses the taste.
"As an untamed Steed bristles its mane … "
1. This paragraph is an elaboration of the previous. That civilized man has lacked even the taste of freedom. Beautiful language:
2. "As an untamed Steed bristles its mane, stamps the ground with its hoof, and struggles impetuously at the very sight of the bit, while a trained horse patiently suffers whip and spur, so barbarous man will not bend his head to the yoke which civilized man bears without a murmur, and he prefers the most tempestuous freedom to a tranquil subjection. Man's natural dispositions for or against servitude therefore have to be judged not by the degradation of enslaved Peoples but by the prodigious feats of all free Peoples to guard against oppression. I know that the former do nothing but incessantly boast of the peace and quiet they enjoy in their chains, and that they call the most miserable servitude peace: but when I see the others sacrifice pleasures, rest, wealth, power, and life itself for the sake of preserving this one good which those who have lost it hold in such contempt; when I see Animals born free and abhorring captivity smash their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of completely naked Savages scorn European voluptuousness and brave hunger, fire, the sword, and death in order to preserve nothing but their independence, I feel that it is not for Slaves to reason about freedom."
"As for Paternal authority … "
1. Absolute government is not justified by the idea of paternal authority projected onto the state. Because paternal authority is gentle, done for the sake of the child, and giving material aid to the child. Despotism is just the opposite.
"If one continued thus to examine the facts in terms of Right … "
1. One cannot enter into a contract/vote in an absolute tyrant anymore than one can sell oneself into slavery.
2. Such a contract is one sided and only obliges one of the parties.
3. Rousseau gestures at arguments that you can't sell your life because you are not the master of it (presumable god is) and that to sell your freedom, your most precious asset, you would go down to the level of a beast. But he simply asks how can you also sell the freedom of your progeny which you clearly have no ownership over.
4. A good state is one where the prince too obeys the law.
"Pufendorf says that just as one transfers one's goods … "
1. The analogy that because one can alienate one's goods to another, so too can one alienate one's freedom is a bad one.
2. Goods can be alienated, its not clear what it means to alienate your freedom.
3. Right of property is by convention only, right of nature is not.
4. It's fine to deprive your children of inheritance because it was your goods to give to them. Their freedom is not your good to take away.
"It therefore seems to me certain … "
1. He wants to suggest that governments did not begin by arbitrary power and even if they did it cannot be the grounding for why they exist.
"Without at present entering into the inquiries … "
1. Rousseau wants to consider the formation of society as a contract between the people and magistrates.
2. This contract is between the People (who unites their wills into one) and compensates as well as obliges the magistrates to act in service of this will.
"Before experience had shown or knowledge of the human heart … "
1. Prima facie, before the abuses were obvious, it appeared good that the people who were tasked with preserving the institution relied on its preservation for their own power and authority.
"If one but paused to reflect about it attentively … "
1. Because there is no overarching authority between magistrates and people, each side of it can and has the right to renounce the control and dissolve the state.
2. This power is so dangerous that it is good for divinity/religion to add a sacred and inviolable character to the magistrate. If religion performed this one task it would more than make up for all its other abuses.
"The different forms of governments … "
1. Different constitutions formed from the different capacities and how far they were from state of nature.
2. The closest to state of nature formed democracy; if there is a group that stands above the rest, aristocracy; if a single person, monarchy.
3. Some of these were just subject to laws others were enslaved. The former wanted to preserve their freedom, the latter wanted to rob the former of it.
"In these various Governments … "
1. Governments were initially elected. When it wasn't wealth that was the deciding factor it was merit and age.
2. The more you elect old men, the more frequent elections became and the more unsettled the state became.
3. After civil war, strong men attempted to establish dynastic rule. This is how we went from elected to dynastic succession.
"If we follow the progress of inequality … "
1. Rousseau is now getting the timeline straight since he seems to have jumped around. Each of these is another stage of inequality.
2. First came law and property. (rich over poor was authorized)
3. Then came magistrates. (powerful over weak was authorized)
4. Conversion of legitimate to arbitrary power. (master over slave was authorized)
5. Revolutions happen to bring about legitimate institutions or anarchy.
6. Perhaps this is how to make sense of the question is there legitimate political power. There is from perspective of Political Right but not Natural Right. The former, even in the best case, is a violation of (or, weaker, not confirmed by) the latter.
7. This is Rousseau's degeneration of states.
"To understand the necessity … "
1. To see that this direction of progress is necessary we need to remember that the same vices which make social institutions necessary make their abuse inevitable. That is to say the same reasons you would need law (to prevent people from stealing) will corrupt law (someone "stealing" the supreme court for example).
2. Laws do not change the character of people (except for in Sparta, where Laws were aimed at children's education).
3. This is why degeneration is inevitable, that the same vices will corrode the institutions that were meant to protect them (Amazon minimum wage example).
"Political distinctions necessarily bring about … "
1. Political distinctions create civil distinctions. Chiefs soon became more than just citizens.
2. Chiefs can only so easily usurp power and convince people to give up their freedom because they were ambitious and saw that they could takeaway the freedom of others. "It is very difficult to reduce to obedience someone who does not seek to command, and the cleverest Politician would never succeed in subjugating men whose only wish was to be Free."
"If this were the place to go into details … "
1. As soon as individuals are gathered in one society. They are forced to compare themselves and make distinctions between each other because they need to "use" each other.
1. There are many distinctions one can make: wealth, rank, power, and personal merit. You can tell by the interplay of these four forces whether a society is well-run or not. And you can tell by which distinction a society gives priority to how far they've fallen from the original constitution.
2. Personal merit, power, rank, and wealth represents an increase in the transmutability of goods. You can't directly trade your ability to sing for much, but you can trade it for wealth. The fact that the world is becoming more exchangeable. Things are becoming instrumentalized and financialized marks a corruption. Because, perhaps, it means you cannot escape prestige.
3. The idea might be this: you can't express everything in life as a function of how good a singer you are, but you can express almost everything in life as a function of $USD. I can look at a song and think, $5M in royalties and that can be my basis of comparison to something else.
  1. LECTURE: Go through our fundamental capacities of comparison, distinction, language. And how it is related to AP.
4. One of the most important passages "I would show how much this universal desire for reputation, honors, and preferment which consumes us all exercises and compares talents and strengths, how much it excites and multiplies the passions and, in making all men competitors, rivals, or rather enemies, how many reverses, how many successes, how many catastrophes of every kind it daily causes by leading so many Contenders to enter the same lists: I would show that it is to this ardor to be talked about, to this frenzy to achieve distinction which almost always keeps us outside ourselves, that we owe what is best and what is worst among men, our virtues and our vices, our Sciences and our errors, our Conquerors and our Philosophers, that is to say a multitude of bad things for a small number of good things."
5. What's important is not just for you to win but for others to lose, it becomes wholely relative "Finally, I would prove that if one sees a handful of powerful and rich men at the pinnacle of greatness and fortune while the masses grovel in obscurity and misery, it is because the former value the things they enjoy only to the extent that the others are deprived of them, and they would cease to be happy if, without any change in their own state, the People ceased to be miserable."
"But these details alone … "
1. Revolutions will necessarily be brought about in the Governments of the world because of these inequalities.
2. Governments will become more and more oppressive and freedoms will gradually die out.
1. As part of this oppression "One would see as a result taxes become necessary."
"From the extreme inequality of conditions and fortunes … "
1. The extreme inequality, diversity of passions, and multitude of frivolous arts would give rise to prejudices contrary to reason, happiness, and virtue.
2. Leaders will do anything to weaken and sow discord into their followers all while making it seem like concord (to make them easier to rule).
"From amidst this disorder and these revolutions … "
1. Despotism will rise and get away any structures like law.
2. There will be no more chiefs or laws and only Tyrants, nor will there be honesty or virtue.
"Here is the last stage of inequality … "
1. We have returned full circle, much like the beginning
  1. The people are all equal. They are equal in their nothingness.
  2. They are motivated by nothing other than the passions (in this case the master's passions).
  3. There is no longer notions of good and evil.
  4. The law of the stronger takes foot and we return to a state of nature
  5. The despot will be removed by a stronger despot and it will be a perpetual state of revolutions (almost like the change of the seasons).
"In thus discovering and retracing … "
1. This is a key paragraph with unbelievable language.
2. There is a wide gulf between civil man and natural man.
3. It is in this gulf, in the changing of civilizations that people will find the solution to key philosophical questions "It is in this slow succession of things that he will find the solution to an infinite number of problems of ethics and of Politics which Philosophers are unable to solve … the Mankind of one age is not the Mankind of another age."
4. The answer to why these perennial questions of philosophy are so difficult and perplexing is because man changes, his nature and desires.
5. Natural man, much closer to the animal is the sober one. Civilized man is the mad man: "the Citizen, forever active, sweats, scurries, constantly agonizes in search of ever more strenuous occupations: he works to the death, even rushes toward it in order to be in a position to live, or renounces life in order to acquire immortality. He courts the great whom he hates, and the rich whom he despises; he spares nothing to attain the honor of serving them; he vaingloriously boasts of his baseness and of their protection and, proud of his slavery, he speaks contemptuously of those who have not the honor of sharing it."
6. The issue is that sociable man has inflamed amour-propre. What beautiful language: "the Savage lives within himself; sociable man, always outside himself, is capable of living only in the opinion of others and, so to speak, derives the sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgment. It is not part of my subject to show how such a disposition engenders so much indifference to good and evil together with such fine discourses on morality; how everything being reduced to appearances, everything becomes factitious and play-acting: honor, friendship, virtue, and often even vices in which one at length discovers the secret of glorying; how, in a word, forever asking of others what we are, without ever daring to ask it of ourselves, in the midst of so much Philosophy, humanity, politeness, and Sublime maxims, we have nothing more than a deceiving and frivolous exterior, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness."
"I have tried to give an account … "
1. Rousseau here is giving a positive answer to the essay question.
2. The origin of inequality "owes its force and growth to the development of our faculties and the progress of the human Mind".
3. The foundation of inequality "finally becomes stable and legitimate by the establishment of property and Laws."
4. Moral inequality is not justified whenever it is not directly proportional to physical inequality.

Roman Republic of Letters by Katharina Volk | Notes & Summary

Johnathan Bi — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 16:53:08 GMT

Introduction

What this book is about
- The intellectual life and production of great men (politics) between 60 and 40BC (fall of Republic)
- It is a special time where the political elite also happened to be the intellectual elite (there is overlap not 1-1)
- It seeks to answer the following questions:
  - Why are the same men political players and intellectual luminaries?
  - What are the social, political, and larger cultural circumstances that enable this convergence of roles?
  - How do these men’s political and intellectual activities relate to one another?
  - And what is the relationship (if any) between the late Republic’s cultural flourishing and its concomitant political collapse?
It's methodology
- It's not a history of just ideas NOR does it take the view that ideas are strongly determined by the sociological circumstance
  - It treats ideas and the sociology that produces them as deeply intertwined
- It focuses on great men
  - Rome was structured to give agency to a few
  - The sources we have are from (mostly) Cicero and thus is about him and his friends
  - The people dealt with truly were "great men" in intellectual life that set the agenda for Roman philosophy
  - Usually intellectual history is about 1. intellectuals and 2. intellectual institutions but this focuses on neither. The dominant production of intellectual work in this period is men of action.
- It tries to recreate the past in their own rhetoric and not to apply too many modern categories to it.
- It does not dismiss ideas of Roman elite as merely "functionalist" serving primarily a political purpose for advancement. Instead, Volk is interested in understanding the "motivations" of different people. She is going to examine when people lived up to their expectations and when they failed.
- It does not fully subscribe to this "cultural revolution" theory of Roman decline that:
  - Roman republic began declining where it started off with morals that were held in consensus and then started splintering. Instead she thinks it’s a lot more messy. Furthermore, she rejects the teleological way of understanding history. There are a lot more different paths that history could have taken.
  - Intellectual life became more "rational." Instead writing becoming popular is the reason that it appeared to be more rational.
Chapter breakdown
- Chapter 2 drawing from Cicero to examine what the aristocratic intellectual “diet” consisted in.
- Chapter 3 investigates how much philosophy lives up to its claim of being an “art of living” how much political actors were actually influenced by the philosophies they subscribed to.
  - Cato and stoicism
  - Cicero and skepticism
  - Epicureans and how they reconciled engaging in political life with withdrawal
- Chapter 4 deals with philosophy after the defeat of Pompey.
  - Philosophy used as consolation of the losers.
  - Cicero’s encyclopedic corpus as mourning the loss of republic and daughter.
  - Philosophical justification of pro vs. anti-Caesarian camps after the assassination.
- Chapter 5 discusses how Romans used intellectual life to think about their own origins and traditions
- Chapter 6 is more “theology” how Caesar, Cicero and others used divination to their political favor.
- Conclusion is a summary of the text, emphasizing just how “republican” this period of intellectual production was. This all changed in the Empire when the Emperor had top-down control. The republic of letters did not survive the republic itself.

Chapter 2: Res Publica of Letters

This chapter is to trace out the intellectual life of the Roman elite in the late republic.
- Republic of Letters was a renaissance term that denoted a community of equal scholars that exchanged ideas. It is a republic because it transcended national and political boundaries. The same was the case here, where learned scholars would often use learning as a way to bridge the gap and build relationships.
Volk first wants to defend the label that Cicero puts for his age “the most learned of times”
- The case for:
  - Upper classes received tremendous education in Greek and Latin
  - Many of them patronized poets and scholars
- Two critiques against
  - Roman’s were not great intellectuals
    - This is due to comparison with Greek culture (and a fetishization of Greek culture) alongside a romantic notion of originality (because they imitated the Greeks, they were lesser)
  - The second critique has more ground which is that Romans themselves held very low opinion of intellectual life
    - They often recognize the superiority of the Greeks
      - But this is usually followed up with the idea that the contest is still “open” and that 1. They surpass the Greeks in other domains OR 2. They are eventually going to beat the Greeks even at their own game.
    - There are a lot of instances where they mock philosophers
      - But this is a common trope, one that Cicero himself uses a great deal (the absent-minded intellectual). Of course, Cicero is not against intellectual life at all.
    - Cicero feeling a need to defend his own intellectual activity / questioning it
      - No other intellectuals at the time do this. It might just be because Cicero himself is a very introspective person.
- The picture we get is of a Roman elite class that
  - Was very much focused on learning
  - Who produced important intellectual work but was very different from professional intellectuals
  - Who mocked the overly formal methods of the intellectuals
  - Who mocked the overly theoretical concerns of the intellectuals
  - Whose primary mode of engagement was in dialogue with each other and not lectures
Typically, the reading and writing of a Roman senator takes place during Otium, in his villa in the countryside when he is not engaged in business. With that said, study is deeply communal:
- They would often go on grand tours together.
- Philosophers would often be brought on campaign.
- Roman elite did intellectual pursuits in discussion/dialogue with each other.
- Even writing (dictating to a scribe) and reading (listening to a lector) are social.
- There were no public libraries so people borrowed each other’s books.
- People are being asked for feedback all the time.
- They would dedicate works to each other.
- Many of their works would be in dialogue form and would include each other as characters.
- It was how they networked and it was a way of discussing something interesting and “light” e.g. Caesar and Cicero after defeating Pompeii spending time together to discuss oratory and not politics, both said they had a good time.

Chapter 3: Engaged Philosophy

Philosophy is considered an “art of life” the question is whether they actually changed people’s lives.
- The dominant scholarly position is that it did not that people’s philosophical positions did not match to their political actions
- Volk’s position is that it’s too strict a criteria to expect their philosophies to show up in politics, especially because politics does not have a one-to-one correspondence with these schools (which are much more abstract) anyways. She’s more interested in seeing HOW these schools (not IF) have impacted them, if at all.
Cato and Stoicism
- Stoicism contra popular imagination was not popular in the late Republic. It became more popular in the Empire.
- Cato was great grandson of a famous censor. He was famously unwilling to compromise and hyper conservative.
- Cato was very eccentric and unusual. Neither his politics nor his philosophy were unusual but how doggedly he pursued them was.
  - He pursued his studies as fervently as he did his politics.
- Cato was almost playing “Cato” the character
  - He read Plato’s Phaedo twice before committed suicide.
  - He would not wear his Cloak and sandals for show
  - Cato leaving the arena so people could see an immoral act
  - BUT … there is something stoic about adhering to what one is so closely. Cato was very aware of this and he wanted to become an extraordinary person.
  - QUESTION: is this in tension with his stoicism?
- This is Volk’s key claim: stoicism did not determine the content of Cato’s thought but it determined the form of Cato’s thought. He’s very indifferent to the outcome. Three examples:
  - Convict someone who is guilty even if it led to good outcome
  - His physical courage during Election Day
  - He failed his consulship because he was too stubborn
  - But he was also not the perfect stoic:
    - Bursts of anger
    - Favoritism
    - Would compromise the ideal for the practical
Cicero and the Political Imperative
- Cicero was primarily interested in politics, only in exile did he fully engage in his studies. Even then, he conceived of his studies as a way to help the commonwealth.
- Many reasons he engaged in philosophy
  - Introducing fellow romans to Greek thought
  - Creating body of latin philosophy
  - Comfort and distraction for himself in hard times
  - Reasoning and deliberating on the best course of action (this was very close to his skeptic training)
- Cicero was a proponent of the Academic Skeptics. They were taught to pit each school against one another and make “progress” that way. They do not believe that capital-T truth is probable but that we can distinguish which are falsehoods, which are likely and which are “similar to the truth.”
  - Skepticism did not prevent him from holding views, but instead empowered him to play around with multiple views and adopt different positions which seem probable.
- Question: did skepticism lead to Cicero’s concern for the political good?
  - “In the Dream of Scipio, the eschatological vision that concludes De re publica, Cicero reaffirms his belief in politics as man’s highest calling, incorporating it into a grand cosmological scheme, whereby virtuous statesmen, such as the father and grand father of the dialogue’s main protagonist Scipio Africanus, are granted a blessed afterlife among the stars, in the Milky Way.”
  - Question: how do we get from skepticism to affirming such exaggerated religious views?
- Cicero has key doctrines which he holds namely 1. The primacy of virtue and 2. The importance of helping the community. Both of these led him to attack the Epicureans for their withdrawal and their priority of pleasure over righteousness.
  - Because of 2. He thinks learning shouldn’t be done for its own sake but to help the community.
- Cicero had two ways to adjust to the political currents
  - Debating between different options in the new academic manner
  - Adjust his own actions to the virtuous course laid out in his own works
    - Siding of Pompey over Caesar was to choose between two lesser evils
Epicureanism
- This was the most popular school of philosophy by far
- Why it was appealing (Cicero’s critique)
  - Easy to understand
  - People lured by pleasure
  - No better alternatives
  - It might have seemed extremely satisfying in a time when there was extreme political strife
    - This is my default position
  - It was very friendship driven and it built many communities around communal living. It also had many proselytizers
- Epicureanism suggested that public life and political ambition was something that thwarted the good life. So how could it become the dominant theory even within the senate?
  - One answer is that if you have a strong desire for glory, you aren’t going to be very happy if you don’t achieve it. So for different people epicureanism might suggest different things.
  - But most epicureans like Atticus stayed out of politics.
- There is a suggestion that there is a distinctively Epicurean way of doing politics that favored peace and non-confrontation.
  - Piso declined a Roman Triumph out of Epicureanism and the most interesting thing is that Cicero considered it a moral depravity. Because it represents a lack of social spiritedness. That you almost become an animal.
  - Caesar saying he lived long enough for both nature and glory.
The conclusion Volk comes to is that philosophy did not furnish individuals with actual political content but it did furnish them with ways of thinking about living and life.

Chapter 4: Philosophy after Pharsalus

This chapter deals with how philosophy was used after the defeat of Pompey.
Philosophy was a form of group therapy for the defeated Pompeians.
- They all wrote letters to each other
- Cicero’s philosophy at this time took on a strong stoic bent:
  - What matters is not the outcome but virtue
  - He who is virtuous with the right intentions is blameless
  - Preferred indifferents (like power/money) are to be pursued, but happiness does not depend on the outcome of the pursuit
  - Virtue is sufficient to live happy lives (but the happiest life requires external goods)
- The consolation was a genre that Cicero studied very closely
  - The whole genre is to try and show what is perceived as an evil is actually not an evil.
Cicero used philosophy as a way to do politics but by other means
- Cicero needed to be careful what he could or could not say. In his Brutus it appears to be a discussion about oratory. But there is a deeper message: only in a just republic is oratory the mode by which political decisions are made. In his time, the sword has sway over the pen.
- Volk doesn’t think Cicero had a clear and explicit political motive behind treatise like this ^ but that he was trying to create a safe space that was freed from Caesar, namely in the constructs of his writings.
  - Caesar was also trying to push people in this direction to turn senators into just intellectuals while he held the political power.
- Cicero was caught in tricky situations like being asked by Brutus to write a dedication to Cato.
  - What’s interesting is that both the pro and anti Cato treatise focused on his life and not political actions and were cordial (gentlemen scholars)
- This did not mean people had free speech. Caecina was one of the people Caesar did not extend clemency to because he had written a book against Caesar in the civil war. These things stick.
- Cicero used a technique called the mirror of princes which is to try and shower obliging praises on the recipient. In this case, it was an attempt to get Caesar to restore the republic.
- Cicero eventually gives up trying to persuade Caesar, citing how even Aristotle failed at educating Alexander.
- Philosophy is not just an art of living in that it teaches you how to live, but for Cicero it was a pastime that at the very least distracted him.
- Cicero’s ambition is to make philosophy Roman. He thought his innovation was to combine rhetoric with philosophy.
The competition of ideas after the death of Caesar
- The pro Caesar side cited arguments around loyalty and friendship
- The anti Caesar side cited arguments around tyranny and liberty
  - Brutus was Cato’s nephew and descended from two tyrant-slayers. He made “virtue” his trademark.
    - How does Brutus decide who to let into his circle of conspirators? He has a philosophical debate at his home.
  - Volk takes the fact that the conspirators had no plan afterwards to sieze power as proof that they were motivated by mostly ideological reasons.
  - Cicero argues that Caesar’s death shows that the just and the expedient (power) are ultimately aligned
- The friendship narrative won out over the liberty argument.
- Caesar miscalculated, he was extremely cynical and thought everyone like him didn’t care about the republic and its values anymore but it turned out to be just him. Ironically enough, his adopted son Augustus was a lot more deferential to the republic and her values while being the person who effectively ended it.

Chapter 5: The Invention of Rome

This chapter is about how Romans investigated their past. How they studied “Romanness”
What was a really important genre was Etiology this included family genealogy the origin of language, determining the foundation of Rome, and synchronizing Roman history with what has happened in the known world.
- History and etiology/antiquarianism were very different disciplines. The first was about getting things objective, properly cataloguing them but the second was about connecting past with present.
- Brutus is unlikely to be descended from Brutus but it was socially useful.
Motivation
- A common (mis)reading of why the Romans were so engaged in this discipline was that they believed Rome was on a downward trajectory. They did it out of nostalgia.
  - The first issue is that Romans were capable of telling the other story (the one Cicero tells of increased flourishing of learning).
  - Varro was interested not for nostalgic, reactionary movement but present day public service.
- Another common mis-reading was that Roman scholarship was becoming more rational and that’s why this project of dialoguing the past was created.
  - But this isn’t right either because ratio could also mean the inherent logic in things. That people were interested in investigating the past not because they had become more rational but because they were interested in the rational structure at the origin of things.
- Volk wants to show it’s not about ratio nor is it about an antiquarian project but what defines Romanness is a lot less glamorous: force of habit. That is to say, Rome is defined by trial and error and what that trial and error leads to is not necessarily a perfect alignment with nature or reason but sometimes is arbitrary.
Polybus attributes Rome’s success to 1. Mixed Constitution 2. Roman Religion. Cicero and Varro each examine a piece of this claim both of their conclusions is that Rome resists neat generalizations.
- Here is what is true across both these authors
  - Neither roman religion nor politics was formed in a day nor by one person its strength lied in the fact that it was the outcome of pragmatic trial and error. Individuals added to the original foundation.
- Cicero wants to tell a teleological story, he has the burden of showing how all the developments of Rome are in some sense “good”. He needs to show not only that there is a perfect city (Plato’s task) but that his Rome is that perfect city.
  - What makes Roman constitution perfect is that it is mixed with aristocratic (senate), monarchical (consul), and democratic (tribunate) elements.
  - The development is quite a peaceful one because Romulus got so much “right” in setting up the senate.
  - Now the republic is not perfect in its early stages. It has, for example, a lust for war.
  - But this story shows its cracks especially with the development of the tribunate. It’s ambiguous as Cicero had been hurt by them and it comes from suspicious origins.
  - Ultimately, this shows that Rome did not result from perfect ratio (rationality) and that nature as well as necessity (habit) played an important role.
- Varro does not need to tell a teleological story he’s interested in getting to the historical facts of the growth of Roman religion
  - His story is more conflictual with gods fighting for real estate in the pantheon.
  - Development of cult images is highly ambiguous
  - Varro suggests a pragmatic dimension that even if they are false, it’s good for people to believe.
  - There is a metaphysical and civil way of investigating religion. Varro’s way of investigation is civil. It’s to understand its social and political uses.
  - But then he sometimes at the end goes to metaphysical speculation about the nature of the gods.
- Volk thinks that Cicero and Varro are going in opposite directions. Cicero is starting from the ideal state and then trying to match it to the real. Varro is starting from the real and trying to see if it may have rationality in it.
Language was another popular etiological domain. The big debate is what should triumph rationality or habit for the correct uses of language.
- Varro thinks habit supersedes rationality.
- Cicero and Caesar wrote treatise on good oratory. Cicero believed correct usage of latin was just the beginning of good oration. His style is embellished. Caesar believed that rationality supersedes habit and that the essence of good oration is correct usage and clarity. His style is an elegant minimalism its unembellished yet systematic (not unlike his military/political style).
  - Caesar wrote a book on Latin oratory during his Gaulic campaign. He believed that with the influx of non-native speakers, the ability to speak correct latin had deteriorated.
  - Caesar gives praised to Cicero that rhetoric alone was enough to stop the Catalonian conspiracy. But this is a double-edged praise as he tried to “box” Cicero in and make him into just an intellectual. Cicero can dominate the domain of letters, but Caesar’s goal is to hold political power.

Chapter 6: Coopting the Cosmos

This chapter is on how Roman religiosity was co-opted and used in the political process. The same people in charge of the senate also were in charge of public rituals and communing with the gods. At the end of the late republic, religious practices were increasingly being shaped by and used for political purposes.
- An example of this is Cicero’s house, during his exiled, was partially transformed into a religious venue. When he came back, he had to (and did) convince the senate that the enlistment was improper due to a technicality.
- Caesar’s co-consul was rendered impotent through augury.
  - Augury came into conflict with popular philosophies. For epicureans, god did not interfere in human events. For the stoics, the world was already fated so whats the point of expiating weird signs?
- As republic gave way to empire astrology became more and more dominant. Because it became about the individual and not the entire community since everyone had their own unique chart.
Cicero’s religious position
- Cicero was very cynical about augury, thinking it was just a political tool.
- Cicero’s skepticism helped him distinguish views into wrong, probably, and similar to the truth.
- But even if he was skeptical about religious claims privately he still held them publicly.
- Cicero seems to have a few starting axioms that he takes for granted like he primacy of virtue for the good life.
- For Cicero, virtue is something we can determine ourselves and we don’t need to rely on signs form the gods.
Skipped the section about Nigidius who is a good example of a learned senator who was very much into divination.
Caesar’s first innovation: the calendar.
- Before the calendar had 355 days even though everyone knows that didn’t match with the year.
- This gave the Pontifex Maximus a lot of power to decide where to insert the extra days (intercalation).
- No one thought of a wholesale reform but Caesar just forced it upon everyone.
- What was important for Caesar’s reforms was to have a calendar that everyone could trust. Not arbitrary.
Caesar’s second innovation was his own deification.
- Before him, the Roman elite cozied up to the divinities. Many claimed divine lineage. Cicero in his epic poem about his consulship had himself visit mount Olympus.
- After Caesar, the deification of mortals became commonplace.
- But for his contemporaries the greater worry was not that Caesar would be a god but that he would be the King.

Conclusion

Even if the philosopher senators themselves would say that that turmoil is not helpful for their study, its clear that it created the intellectual backdrop for their theorizing.
This kind of republic of letters did not survive the death of the actual republic. It became a lot more top down. Not just funding and commissions but control over thought became much more centralized.

Innovation Contested by Benoît Godin | Notes & Summary

Johnathan Bi — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 06:08:39 GMT

Summary

This book outlines and explains the three paradigms that "innovation" and it's etymological ancestors underwent in western civilization.

Classical View: Innovation was predominantly political. It was defined as political change and was a suspicious concept but advisable in specific scenarios.
Reformation View: innovation was predominantly a religious concept. It was defined as deviation from the good (heresy/revolution) and was an evil idea that no one wanted to be associated with.
Modern View: innovation is predominantly a technological/utilitarian concept. It is defined as making progress towards the good and is a positive idea that everyone wants to be associated with.

On Method

This is an etymological study of the word "innovation" and not an intellectual history of the concept of "innovation". The latter would take our notion of innovation (technological change, loosely) and try to understand prior cultures' attitude towards that concept even if it is labeled under an etymologically unrelated word. This is no such book: instead, it examines the etymological roots of "innovation" (Kainotomia, innovo, etc.) even if they refer to different concepts: political rather than technological, stepwise rather than piecemeal, etc.

Because, for most of western civilization, "innovation" was considered to be an undesirable & deviant concept, it was defined more by its detractors than its practitioners. Thus, there is very little explicit theorizing. The study of innovation prior to the 20th century does not only/mostly reside in the study of great works as, say, the study of the concept of selfhood would be. An investigation must take on the shape of a social history, inquiry into public discourses (e.g. political pamphlets) in addition to the classics.

The Classical View

Contra Godin, I do believe the Ancients (greek antiquity to Machiavelli) presents a consistent view on innovation (doing something never been done before for the first time):

Primarily political concept and, because of that …
Defacto suspicious in all domains but especially in politics (in certain instrumental or artistic domains it is lauded by the same suspicion carries over)
Should be done only to correct a wrong or in response to calamity
Intended to stabilize

The last two bullet points are the biggest delta from modernity. In modernity innovation is something you do in the face of stability (stagnation) intended to disrupt.

The dominant view is set forth by Plato and Aristotle and what Godin sees as rebuttals against this view (Machievelli, Romans, Xenophon, Polybius) are actually consistent in my reading.

Plato

Plato very much wants to freeze his society in time. In the Laws (what could be interpreted as the best possible society) he presents a utopia that does not change. Not only are explicit political concepts such as laws frozen in time, but so is all "culture" such as dance, festival calendars, children's games and even the number of families.

Plato's arguments against innovation has two thrusts 1. Once you figure out what the Good is any deviation is bad 2. There is a natural tendency for people to like novelty but novelty introduces differences in opinion within a community which creates chaos. (1 is on the content of the community, 2 is the form of the community -- we might say that a community where everyone agrees on one bad value may still be better than a community where people have differing but equally bad values).

For Plato, innovation is only warranted 1. when natural change/fate forces you to react 2. you are correcting a wrong.

Aristotle

Aristotle encourages innovation in certain parts of society such as crafts. But discourages in laws.

It is discouraged in laws because

Innovations primarily benefit the innovator
We already know what the good looks like
Laws need to be sacrosanct and will not be respected if they keep changing
Slippery slope argument

Xenophon

Xenophon seemingly embraces innovation in his Ways and Means but upon further inspection 1. his innovation is an economic one (how better to encourage mining) which is not exclusively political 2. even so he tries to downplay its novelty and admits its riskiness. He is very much proposing this despite and not because it is an innovation.

Roman View

The etymological antecedent of innovation (innovare) seemingly takes on a positive connotation in Latin. Upon closer inspection the word does not mean doing something radically new for the first time, one of its dominant uses if not THE dominant use is to describe a reactionary return to a previous state. That is, bringing forth a radical change but one in emulation of something great done before.

Machiavelli

Again, Machiavelli seems at first glance to encourage the prince to innovate. Indeed, innovation is one of the arrows in the quiver of virtu. But it is necessary only because of the political instability brought forth by Fortuna. The goal of innovation is not to disrupt (as it is in modernity) but to seek stability.

Polybius

Polybius invents a new word to describe innovations in a positive light. Upon closer inspection 1. what he is praising often is instrumental innovation 2. when he praises people what he is praising isn't necessarily that they are doing something new but that they are doing something better.

The Reformation View

There is also a consistent "reformation view" of innovation to speak of. Innovation is, under this view, thought to be a deviation from some natural/good state of affairs. Within its definition is the idea that it is not only suspicious but bad.

Henry Burton

The Reformation saw the transformation of innovation from a suspicious concept that one may, on special occasions, partake in, to an evil concept that may never be touched.

Innovation was primarily a religious concept and took on the connotation of deviation from the natural/good order. Innovation (under the Aristotelean model) was considered a slippery slope, a gradual process that leads you to falsehood over a long time.

Henry Burton, English minister's, political pamphlets was the first controversy in innovation and brought innovation into the everyday language. It was the severe connotations of "innovation" in the religious sphere that devalued it in all spheres. Burton warned against innovation in: doctrine, discipline, worship of God, civil government, altering of books, means of knowledge, rules of manners, rule of the faith.

The associations of "innovation" was so negative that other disciplines had to invent different words that basically described innovation but didn't use the word: "invention", "discovery", "imagination".

Republicanism as Innovation

As Burton's and other controversies made innovation into everyday language, 17th century failed attempts at republicanism in England transferred much of the pejorative notion of innovation into the political realm, making it a political concept.

Just as innovation was conceived of a violation/deviation from religious truth, that same intuition became transplanted. Innovation is a violation of political boundaries. This marks a stark contrast from the view of antiquity. In the view of antiquity innovation itself was not defined negatively (just political change) even if it did have negative consequences. In this reformation view, innovation's definition itself is negative. Political change vs. political deviation.

Innovation was no longer gradual (Burton's view) but was sudden and also took on a violent dimension.

In the religious domain, innovation was synonymous with heresy. In the political domain, it was synonymous with revolution (also deeply negative connotations).

The Modern View

The rehabilitation of "innovation" can be interpreted as coming from two forces. One general force that changed many concepts and the specific connotative change of innovation from religion/politics to utility.

Within the definition of innovation was the idea of progress, making positive movements towards a goal. (you can see that the definition is flipped, the reformation sees it as deviation from the good, the modern view sees it as progression towards the good)

The General Change 18th-19th Century: Saddletime

Historian Koselleck identified the period between 1750 and 1850 as "saddletime" where many philosophical intuitions were flipped on its head.

Change is everywhere
- Religion (Reformation), politics (revolutions), economics (industrial revolution), science (scientific revolution). While everything was perceived as continuous before, people now become conscious or aware of changes in every sphere of society. They accept change, even promote changes.
Change is radical and revolutionary.
- While it was previously thought that change is mainly gradual and evolutionary (Nisbet, 1969), change is now sudden. Revolutions become the emblem of change.
Change is future-oriented, progressive (as opposed to time agnostic, or reactionary)
- Change is productive (useful) rather than destructive (of customs) or, if destructive, is so in a positive manner. Radical change and revolutions announce new possible futures (Koselleck, 1969; Lusebrink and Reichardt, 1988; Ozouf, 1989; Reichardt, 1997).
Humans are responsible for change/their destiny.
- Humans become conscious of their own action. While change was previously explained by God, nature or necessity, humans become aware of history and their capacity to shape their own destiny (Koselleck, 2002a).

Innovation (which was synonymous with revolution in the political realm) became rehabilitated through this period. It was not the only one: revolution itself went from a negative connotation to a positive one (alongside many other words).

The Specific Change 19th Century: Bentham's Rehabilitation

Bentham had four main arguments that helped rehabilitate innovation:

Dyslogism: That it was being used merely as a political attack word unreflectively.
Perfectionism: We don't know what the good is.
History: Look at all the past innovations.
Utility: one of the main battlegrounds that he focused on rehabilitating innovation was in the entrepreneurial realm.

The Specific Change 19th Century: The Useful Arts

Innovation became predominantly used by those engaged in the useful arts (teaching, metallurgy, medicine, etc.), it was associated with utility.

At this time, innovation didn't encompass scientific breakthroughs nor the commercialization piece but just the act of making advances in useful arts grounded on science or scientific methods/principles.

The Specific Change 20th Century: Technological Innovation

Innovation began to encompass the entire process of scientific breakthroughs --> innovations in the useful arts --> commercialization.

Why the Paradigm Shifts

We can attribute the paradigm shifts to three causes 1. the dominant sphere of innovation 2. Saddletime 3. Perfectionism.

The Scapegoat Mechanism / The Dominant Sphere

This cause can be teased out with the question: does this intellectual history represent a continuity or a break?

On one hand it is a continuity: we currently still think of political innovation as suspect and Xenophon still thought of instrumental innovation as good.
On the other hand it is a radical break: innovation went from suspicious to evil to radically good.

How do we reconcile these two readings?

The way we reconcile is by bringing in Girard's notion of the scapegoat mechanism (it's most general form at least). There are cataclysmic events in society that provide us with the fundamental substratum objects of good/evil. The associations permeate society and form, what we can reasonably call, the "culture" of the society. When you think of the scapegoat mechanism as not just murdering victims but the murdering of concepts (as girard must, since he concieves of rationality as the last religion).

The intuition is that depending on what the dominant realm we associate innovation with, the attitude and logic we think occurs in that domain becomes transplanted into other domains. Ie. One should be suspicious of innovation in politics, prevent innovation in religion, and accelerate innovation in technology but when one of the poles becomes dominant, the connotations "bleed over". Burton believed we should not innovate in laws and culture (in addition to religion). We currently think of change/innovation as good in the political/social domain.

What enabled this transference of connotations between the primary and ancillary domains is the word "innovation" itself. Words are vessels for political intuitions. You can see this by how other disciplines had to invent their own version of "innovation" to describe the same phenomena but with different connotations.

This is what I will focus on, not because I think it is most explanatory, but I think it is most instructive to what we ought to do now.

Sattelzeit

There was a deeper transformation that changed a whole family of concepts' connotations:

"Between 1750 and 1850 there occurred a “shift in the conception of time and a reorientation towards the future . . . against which structural changes are perceived, evaluated and acted upon” (Koselleck, 1977; Richter, 1995: 35–38). Many words change meaning and become positive. Such is the case with revolution, but also with innovation."

Perfectionism/Conception of Time

A key question that changes our attitudes towards innovation is: do we know what the good is? If the answer is "yes" (and that we have done it before or are already doing it) the attitude towards innovation is generally negative/suspicious and this lends to a past-focused orientation towards time. If the answer is "no", you usually end up with a future-focused orientation towards time and innovation is welcomed. This cuts against the spheres (politics/technology) as both mill (politics) and Bentham (technology) argued for innovation based on a skepticism.

Those who want to stop innovation believe that they are quite close:

Berkley: "That our constitution is absolutely perfect, it would be ridiculous to assert. Perfection belongs not to lapsed humanity. That a better constitution may be conceived, we do not positively deny . . . It may, however, be consistently asserted that so few and so unimportant are the defects, so many and so valuable the perfections, of the nicely balanced British Constitution, as to render it highly probable that any innovations in its system will be more likely to injure than to improve it . . . No plan of representation could possibly be devised in which the whole nation would agree. Why then should we hazard the consequences of an innovation, which it is barely possible might do some good; but which is much more likely to create discord . . . My Son, fear thou the Lord and the King, and meddle not with them that are given to change."
Recall, Aristotle said that all possible forms of organization have been discovered, this is like Plato's point about we already know what the good is and looks like:
- “All possible forms of organization have now been discovered. If another form of organization was really good it would have been discovered already” (Politics II: v, 1264a).

Look at how Bentham is gesturing at how many innovations in the past helped us to where we are now, there must be more to come: Bentham reprimands Smith for condemning “as rash and ill-grounded all those projects by which our species have been successively advanced from the state in which acorns were their food, and raw hides their clothing, to the state in which it stands at present”. For a third time, Bentham refers to the fallacy on innovation and concludes: "Sir, let me beg you, whether whatever is now the routine of trade was not, at its commencement, project? Whether whatever is now establishment, was not, at one time, innovation?" And so he argues for usury.

A good parallel here would be Mill having a similar argument for free speech. Look how much things we thought were right were actually wrong, therefore we should be open to new ideas. He argued for freedom of speech.

Mill is the ideas innovator to Bentham's economic innovator, their argument both takes the form of: look of what we thought of as optimal previously that turned out not to be so, surely we are far from perfection. Thus we must be open to innovations.

How this Intellectual History Speaks to Us

Like all good intellectual histories, this one rescues certain ideas from antiquity that help us correct our views. Specifically, it teaches how exaggerated our positive appraisal of innovation is. After seeing how laughable the negative appraisal of innovation in the reformation view is, the natural tendency is to correct this bias and I think there are two ways that this is corrected: 1. certain general critiques of innovation 2. critiques of innovation within specific spheres.

General Critiques of Innovation

Innovations are created to benefit the innovator. E.g. social media. Innovation is a usurpation of power. We should be default suspicious because its about gaining power of one group over another.
- To Aristotle, another innovator criticized by name is the architect Hippodamus because of his view, among others, that “honour ought to be awarded to those who invent” or discover some advantages to the country (Politics II: viii, 1268b). To Aristotle, “It is [always] possible for people to bring in proposals for abrogating the laws or the constitution on the ground that such proposals are for the public good” (Politics II: viii, 1268b). Only ambition drives Hippodamus “always to be different from other people”. To Aristotle, the lesson is clear: “Since men introduce innovations [neoterizein] for reasons connected with their private lives [modes of living], an authority ought to be set up to exercise supervision over those whose activities are not in keeping with the interests of the constitution” (Politics V: viii, 1308b).
- A term that recurs among all three Royalists (and King Charles’s Eikón basiliké) is design. The innovator has a design in mind. The meaning of design is a project, a suspicious project—another term that suffered from bad press (‘projectors’ were the untrusted innovators-entrepreneurs of the time). There is no reference to creativity here, but rather a machination, a subversion, a conspiracy. Poyntz, as we saw, talks in terms of a (dangerous) “experiment”, as well as design. So do the anonymous author W. W. and Goddard. Design, a key word of the political world in England and the US in the 1760s–70s (Bailyn, 1967: 94–159), would continue to characterize innovation in the next century, and then the notion of “scheme” would be added, as in Thomas Bancroft’s The Danger of Political Innovation and the Evil of Anarchy (1792). “I trust it may be expected from the good sense of English- men that they will reject their suspicious schemes of Reform and Innovation” (Bancroft, 1792: 14).
Innovations are dangerous to the innovator. We need to reconcile this with 1. the above view 2. with the fact that innovations aren't socially dangerous to the innovator anymore. On 1. we can say that innovations are dangerous even if their intention is self-benefit. On 2. we can say that there are two ways to define innovation: to do what is new OR to do what is not agreed upon. In modernity what is agreed upon is to do the new (for many domains). Thus modernity socially de-risks many innovations. Ie. Its only dangerous to do what is not agreed upon, in antiquity that overlapped strongly with the new, in modernity, there are many new things that one could do that is expected, agreed upon and thus is safe. The other cut would be to reject this and say that innovation is still dangerous. Ie. My friend getting sued by competitors.
- Innovation should only be done when necessary because it brings great danger to the innovator: "Those who become ruler through their own abilities experience difficulty in attaining power, but once that is achieved, they keep it easily. The difficulties encountered in attaining power arise partly from the new institutions and laws they are forced to introduce in order to establish their power and make it secure . . . Taking the initiative in introducing a new form of government is very difficult and dangerous . . . The reason is that all those who profit from the old order will be opposed to the [introduction of a new order], whereas all those who might benefit from the new order are, at best, tepid supporters of him. This lukewarmness arises partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the law on their side, partly from the skeptical temper of men, who do not really believe in new things unless they have been seen to work well. The result is that whenever those who are opposed to change have the chance to attack the innovator [innovatori], they do it with much vigour, whereas his supporters act only half-heartedly; so that [the innovator, se per condurre l’opera loro] and his supporters find themselves in great danger."
If you know what the good is, don't deviate from it.
- “All possible forms of organization have now been discovered. If another form of organization was really good it would have been discovered already” (Politics II: v, 1264a).
Slippery Slope: it's impossible to just do a bit of innovation. Once you open the flood gates, you can't shut it back in (the apocalyptic reading).
- It is essential in particular to guard against the insignificant breach. Illegality creeps in unobserved; it is like small items of expenditure which when oft repeated make away with a man’s possessions. The spending goes unnoticed because the money is not spent all at once, and this is just what leads the mind astray . . . One precaution to be taken, then, is in regard to the beginning. (Politics V: viii, 1307b)
- Revolution, or faction, arises from “small matters”: “The false step is at the beginning, but well begun is half done, as the proverb says, so that a small error at the start is equivalent in the same proportion to those of the later stages” (Politics V: iv, 1303b). It has an effect on the whole State: “A change so gradual as to be imperceptible . . . It very often happens that a considerable change in a country’s customs takes place imperceptibly, each little change slipping by unnoticed” (Politics V: iii, 1303a). Aristotle repeats the description elsewhere as follows: “The change occurring either quickly or gradually and little by little, without being realized” (Politics V: vii, 1306b).

Specific Critiques of Innovation

Innovation in politics/society/culture/religion (normative innovation)
- The form of a harmonious society is normative agreement (independently of what the values actually are). Innovation is necessarily harmful to this relation amongst members.
- For certain spheres, they require a form sacrality to function. Marriage, Law are perhaps examples. Their, power/appeal/meaning comes from stasis.
  - There are some occasions that call for change and there are some laws which need to be changed. But looking at it in another way we must say that there will be need of the very greatest caution. In a particular case we may have to weigh a very small improvement against the danger of getting accustomed to casual abrogation of the laws . . . There is a difference between altering a craft and altering a law . . . [It] takes a long time [for a law] to become effective. Hence easy change from established laws to new laws means weakening the power of the law. (Politics II: viii, 1269a).
Innovation in technology (instrumental innovation). These are not derived from the text:
- Nick Bostrom has this view of technological innovation as pulling balls blind out of a bag: some of them will kill you, some of them will save you etc. And that's what technological innovation is like, we can't see the consequences of our inventions.
- The first rebuttal to this is that we don't pull innovations out of the hat "blind". Modern capitalistic innovations come from mechanisms that are far from random. One fact about such a mechanism is that someone must pay for it. One might think that it needs to be helpful at least to someone in the beginning.
- The pushback to this is there are some mechanisms (like the creation of weaponry) has a prior that is harmful: weapon will only be invented if it is more effective at destruction. But even if this is so, it tells us that we are more agential in this process than randomly pulling balls out of a bag blind. There are at least probabilistic things we can do on the mechanism piece that can skew innovations on the harmful/helpful scale.

Misc

Desire for Novelty

Throughout history, writers tended to agree that people are interested in novelty. That's not to say some writers, as Machiavelli does, don't also argue that people tend to favor the familiar. This is simply to argue against the idea that the desire for the new/novelty is a modern phenomena. What is a recent invention seems to be our encouraging and affirming of this love of novelty. It was always a suspicious drive.

Children “hold in special honour he who is always innovating or introducing some novel device”. But “the biggest menace that can ever afflict a state” is changing “quietly the character of the young by making them despise old things and value novelty” (Laws VII: 797b). -- Plato
Quintillian, echoing Aristotle, describes how people are naturally attracted to and seduced by novelty.
Henry Fly, using the “popular fury of 1780” in England and the French Revolution as examples, discussed how the “love of novelty” “plunge[s] a whole nation into the most dreadful calamities”.

Technology is Inherently Progressive

One reading of progressivism is that it took the positive connotations of innovation and projected that upon the social realm. The intuition in technology/utility is that there is always a better way to do things. Also something to be said about quantification and how that method contains within itself an end (increase/growth) -- see invention of improvement notes for more on this.

Capitalism and Innovation

One of the most important insights then of this intellectual history is that for a long time, innovation was not the constitutive quality of what defined capitalistic societies. Smith did not emphasize it for example. Schumpeter and Marx both did. In the 20th century did innovation became probably theorized. Smith's answer to the wealth of nations wasn't innovation and technology it was more about organization, incentives, training (division of labor). Now, the defendants of capitalism primarily point to innovation as the reason.

Human and Natural Change

One of the key insights when comparing Machiavelli and modernity is that despite both seeming to praise innovation they do it to achieve the exact opposite ends. Machiavelli innovates for stability, the default is political chaos. We innovate for disruption, the default is economic stagnation.

Human change/innovation then always happens against the backdrop of natural change. Curious to think through what the natural change is if humans leave it alone (note by natural change, I often mean natural political change, what is the default state of things without a superior agent's intervention):

Moderns think it is stagnation
Machiavellie thinks it is political chaos
Plato has his anacyclosis
Ovid's default state is an ontology of metamorphoses

Chapter by chapter notes:

Introduction

In contrast to our solely positive attitudes towards it, innovation prior to the 20th century was considered bad, undesirable, and deviant.

As a result it was used only by its detractors, innovators never labeled themselves that way. Before 20th century, innovation was defined by its detractors, now innovation is defined by its proponents. There is even less theorizing about it explicitly. And thus, the study of innovation prior to the 20th century does not only/mostly reside in the study of great works as, say, the study of the concept of selfhood would be. An investigation must take on the shape of a social history, inquiry into public discourses (e.g. political pamphlets) in addition to the classics.

Innovation's rehabilitation happened at the very moment that the term started to be thought of instrumentally rather than normatively. Ie. Innovation had a bad connotation when it was primarily thought of as an innovation of ends. But when we started thinking about innovation as achieving the same end in a different way it became positive.

Godin dates innovation's transformation to 1750 - 1850 what German historian Koselleck coined Sattelzeit (saddle time) where the most fundamental change was a change in the conception of time and an orientation towards the future. Innovation's rehabilitation was an offshoot of this more fundamental change. Concepts like "revolution" were changed in the same brush stroke, alongside this idea of material progress.

The story of innovation is non linear in three senses of the term. The first is that the large "stroke" of people's attitudes towards innovation went from slightly negative to the ancient Greeks to slightly positive to the Medievals to extremely negative during the reformation to extremely positive now -- it's an oscillation instead of linearity. The second is that even in this period of rehabilitation (sattelzeit) the change was not overnight but a gradual, stepwise process of rehabilitation. The last is that, like any concept, innovation was always contested, there were always opposing voices to the dominant attitude.

1 Kainotomia and Conceptual Innovation in Ancient Greece

Innovation -- or, what could reasonably be translated as such -- appears infrequently amongst texts in Greek antiquity. Thucydides (Histories), Aristophanes (Ecclesiazusae), Plutarch (Lives) all mention it but in passing. Four authors in particular treat innovation more systematically and self-consciously that deserve closer inspection.

Xenophon

Xenophon's Ways and Means is a work of political economy presented to the Athenian Council as advice for how to better Athens's economic situation after losing a major war.

His self-conscious labelling of innovation (Kainotomia) is used on the following proposal: Athenians are not making as many mines as they use to because the war made them all poorer. The state should nationalize the ownership of slaves (people who use the mines) to be lent out to entrepreneurs to help them derisk the labor part of the equation. Instead of having to use private slaves, the entrepreneurs could, much more cheaply, rent slaves.

The word which Xenophon uses to describe this innovation is Kainotomia (New-Cutting) this is used literally in the sense of cutting new mines but others will use this metaphorically in terms of cutting new avenues. There are many words that were/are used to describe innovation in Ancient/modern greek in addition to Kainotomia (which is still used as the dominant word).

Even though Xenophon uses the term here in a descriptive, maybe slightly positive way (since this is his proposal after all). It is clear from his other utterances that it is not innovation itself that must be affirmed but this particular innovation. If anything, he shows that because he recognizes this to be innovation, people will/should be suspicious:

He tries to downplay its novelty: “were my proposals adopted, the only novelty [καινόν, kainon], would be that . . .”
He admits its riskiness and that one ought "proceed gradually [rather] than to do everything at once.”

Also notable that even though this is political change, it is an instrumental rather than a normative change.

Plato

Plato's negative attitude towards innovation is fully audible in his Laws. He wants to build the perfect society and then freeze it in time.

His city will have exactly 5040 families.
Singing, dancing, festivities must remain fixed: “We must do everything we possibly can to distract the younger generation from wanting to try their hand at presenting new subjects, either in dance or song”. Plato argues for laws on “natural correctness” to counter “the tendency of pleasure and pain to indulge constantly in fresh music” (Laws II: 657b).
To Plato, the Egyptians have developed good laws to this end: drawing a calendar of festivals and authorizing certain songs and dances (Laws VII: 799a–b; II: 656c–57b). The Egyptians have also “forbidden to painters and all other producers of postures and representations to introduce any innova tion . . . over and above the traditional forms” (Laws II: 656e). Plato rec- ommends that “no one shall sing a note, or perform any dance-movement, other than those in the canon of public songs, sacred music, and the general body of chorus performances of the young—any more than he would violate any other ‘norm’ or law . . . If he disobeys, the Guardians of the Laws and the priests and priestesses must punish him” (Laws VII: 800a).
Foreigners are met with suspicion. “The intermixture of States with States naturally results in a blending of characters of every kind, as strangers import among strangers innovations [novel customs]” (Laws XII: 950a). Strangers are most welcomed, unless they bring in innovations in the city: Magistrates “shall have a care lest any such strangers introduce any innovation [neoterizein]” (Laws XII: 953a).

The reason for this negative attitude can be seen in Plato's argument below. I think it has two thrusts 1. Once you figure out what the Good is any deviation is bad 2. There is a natural tendency for people to like novelty but novelty introduces differences in opinion within a community which creates chaos. (1 is on the content of the community, 2 is the form of the community -- we might say that a community where everyone agrees on one bad value may still be better than a community where people have differing but equally bad values).

First, people love innovation. Children “hold in special honour he who is always innovating or introducing some novel device”. But “the biggest menace that can ever afflict a state” is changing “quietly the character of the young by making them despise old things and value novelty” (Laws VII: 797b).
Second, innovation leads to political instability. “If children innovate [neoterizein]7 in their games, they’ll inevitably turn out to be quite different people from the previous generation; being different, they’ll demand a different kind of life, and that will then make them want new institutions and laws” (Laws VII: 798c).
Third, there is need to contain or control innovation: When the laws under which people are brought up have by some heaven- sent good fortune remained unchanged over a very long period, so that no one remembers or has heard of things ever being any different, the soul is filled with such respect for tradition that it shrinks from meddling with it in any way. Somehow or other the legislator must find a method of bringing about this situation in the state. (Laws VII: 798b).

Innovation is only warranted in two circumstances:

Human change is required if natural change (fate, natural calamity, chance, etc.) thrust upon a new situation: Chances and accidents (calamities, diseases and wars), not men, make laws and “often force on innovations” [revolutions] (Laws IV: 709a). At that very moment, men use their “skills” to “seize any favorable opportunity” (Laws IV: 709c). Even stronger, perhaps natural, degenerative change is inevitable (anacyclosis) and human change must do its best to counteract it.

Plato here is critiquing normative change. He is worried that changes in games and music will make people desire different types of lives.

Aristotle

Aristotle takes a more moderate approach. Encouraging innovation in certain parts of society and discouraging it in others.

Good in the crafts: “A case could be made out in favour of change. At any rate if we look at the other sciences, it has definitely been beneficial—witness the changes in traditional methods of medicine and physical training, and generally in every skill and faculty” (Politics II: viii, 1268b).
Bad in the laws.

He gives four arguments for why innovation is not desirable in law:

Innovations are introduced primarily to benefit the innovator disguised as public benefit:
- To Aristotle, another innovator criticized by name is the architect Hippodamus because of his view, among others, that “honour ought to be awarded to those who invent” or discover some advantages to the country (Politics II: viii, 1268b). To Aristotle, “It is [always] possible for people to bring in proposals for abrogating the laws or the constitution on the ground that such proposals are for the public good” (Politics II: viii, 1268b). Only ambition drives Hippodamus “always to be different from other people”. To Aristotle, the lesson is clear: “Since men introduce innovations [neoterizein] for reasons connected with their private lives [modes of living], an authority ought to be set up to exercise supervision over those whose activities are not in keeping with the interests of the constitution” (Politics V: viii, 1308b).
All possible forms of organization have been discovered, this is like Plato's point about we already know what the good is and looks like:
- “All possible forms of organization have now been discovered. If another form of organization was really good it would have been discovered already” (Politics II: v, 1264a).
Laws need to be sacrosanct:
- There are some occasions that call for change and there are some laws which need to be changed. But looking at it in another way we must say that there will be need of the very greatest caution. In a particular case we may have to weigh a very small improvement against the danger of getting accustomed to casual abrogation of the laws . . . There is a difference between altering a craft and altering a law . . . [It] takes a long time [for a law] to become effective. Hence easy change from established laws to new laws means weakening the power of the law. (Politics II: viii, 1269a).
Slippery slope. He argues that what appears to be revolutions in the change of constitutions are caused by innocuous, imperceptible changes built up over a long time. His analogy is of the spendthrift. That is why we must defend against even the smallest of changes.
- It is essential in particular to guard against the insignificant breach. Illegality creeps in unobserved; it is like small items of expenditure which when oft repeated make away with a man’s possessions. The spending goes unnoticed because the money is not spent all at once, and this is just what leads the mind astray . . . One precaution to be taken, then, is in regard to the beginning. (Politics V: viii, 1307b)
- Revolution, or faction, arises from “small matters”: “The false step is at the beginning, but well begun is half done, as the proverb says, so that a small error at the start is equivalent in the same proportion to those of the later stages” (Politics V: iv, 1303b). It has an effect on the whole State: “A change so gradual as to be imperceptible . . . It very often happens that a considerable change in a country’s customs takes place imperceptibly, each little change slipping by unnoticed” (Politics V: iii, 1303a). Aristotle repeats the description elsewhere as follows: “The change occurring either quickly or gradually and little by little, without being realized” (Politics V: vii, 1306b).

Polybius

Polybius is the exception to this. The word he uses for innovation is kainopoein (Godin speculates it is to be rid of the negative connotations of Kainotomia). It is used mostly in Polybius' historical work to describe new weapons, new projects -- often in a positive light. Most notably, Polybius applies kainopoein to his own work. He emphasizes the radicality of his project "No writer of our time has undertaken a general [world] history.”

Polybius isn't inconsistent with the prior views: what's good is instrumental innovation, devising new change. And it seems he isn't so much proud of the fact that he is doing something new as something important, spectacular etc. perhaps in the same mind as a Greek hero would brag about lifting a rock larger than any one that's ever been lifted.

The Greek View

I think there is a "Greek view" to be articulated more than Godin's emphasis on the differences may suggest. It seems that most of these authors think…

Negative
- General distrust of innovation in all fields
- Specific heed against innovation in politics
- The ideal state does not need to innovate
Positive
- Good in instrumental activities (crafts, ways of organizing slaves, war tactics)
- Good when correcting a deficiency

What is lurking behind innovation (man-made) is the general notion of change that is divine and natural. Godin suggests Greeks generally thought of former as unwanted and latter as good.

2 Innovo: On the Vicissitudes and Varieties of a concept

This chapter details Latin conceptions of innovation from the Roman empire to 16th century.

Prior to the fourth century Innovo was not used yet, many other terms such as Novitas, Novare was used to describe novelty, innovation. The attitudes in this period were ambivalent, but mostly continued the attitude of the Greeks, some exemplars:

Quintillian, echoing Aristotle, describes how people are naturally attracted to and seduced by novelty.
Novelty is both natural but also deeply strange. Think Ovid's metamorphoses. It's both the natural "ontology" of the world but also something alien and freightening. Although, this seems to be commenting more on natural change rather than man-made change.
The negative political connotation carried over in, for example, Livy's political writings. He critiques citizens who were “desirous of innovation in every thing [qui omnia novare cupiebant]”.

The most interesting development came in the fourth century with the proliferation of the word Innovo (where we get innovation from). Innovo spawned from the ancient greek word Kainizein which emphasized not creativity but originality: to be first at doing something. In Latin hands, this word is translated to RE-newal: not the first appearance of a new thing but of a re-appearance of an old thing.

Most of the positive connotations of innovo were in this special sense: a re-introduction of a lost good. Few illustrative examples:

Bible: Saint Jerome was asked to make a new standard translation of the Latin Bible, the Vulgate. He did so, it's very interesting to see what he chose to translate using Innovo.
- Job 29:20 when he repeats his faith that his wealth will be restored: (gloria mea semper innovabitur et arcus meus in manu mea instaurabitur) you shall see, my friends, my glory shall be renewed/innovated and my bow shall regain its youth.
- The returning of the Jews to Jerusalem. Lamentations 5:21: “Bring us to yourself, oh Lord, and so bring us to Jerusalem (converte nos Domine ad te et converteremur, innova dies nostros sicut in principio) bring us to yourself, oh Lord, and we shall return, renew our days as at the beginning/as before."
- Wisdom 7:27 (considered apocryphal by protestants) describes how wisdom rejuvenates (innovates) the world in a cyclical fashion: "(et cum sit una omnia potest et permanens in se omnia innovat et per nationes in animas sanctas se transfert amicos Dei et prophetas constituit)

since it [wisdom] is unique, it can do anything; stable in itself, it renews everything, and it circulates among the nations within pious souls and forms friends of God and prophets."

Ecclesiastes 36:6. Exhortation against Greek philosophy to return to Jewish tradition: "(

innova signa et immuta mirabilia) renew your signs and repeat your wonders."

Poetry: Grammarian Honoratus commenting on Virgil's Aeneid.
- Aeneas uses a snake crawling out of the ground having cast out its skin bursting with youth to describe the Greeks who sack Troy. This is a process of renewal/innovation:

(Constat enim serpentes innovari virtute pelle deposita) we know basically that, their skin having been cast off snakes are renewed in strength/vigour.

The feast to celebrate the romance of Dido and Aeneas is described as Innovabantur (renewing) the sacred rites of Bacchus.

Legal
- Pope Gregory VII wanted to purify the clergy's customs against corruptions such as simony. He did so by renewing prior legal statues, this was his language: this rule "which has long been neglected in the Church because of our sins and which has been twisted by a culpable habit, we desire to restore it (restaurare) and put it into effect (innovare) for the glory of God and the salvation of all Christianity . . . so that the bishop duly-elected according to the doctrine of truth cannot be described as a thief and a brigand.”

The Latin View and the Greek View

It appears that the Latin view is, in many ways, a continuation of the Greek view. The only reason it seems so different (innovation being praised in the former and derided in the latter) is because the Latin Innovo means a re-introduction -- which is certainly still man-made change but a specific species of it.

3. Innovation, or How to Stabilize a Changing World

Prima facie, Machiavelli's championing of innovation seems to represent a radical break from this Greco-Roman suspicion of innovation but, upon closer inspection the disagreement is less so about the normative judgement on innovation.

Innovation as a Part of Virtu, as Political Change

Innovation is an arrow in the ideal prince's quiver of virtu to be a successful ruler. It is political change: introducing new laws, new codes, destroying the old order, etc.

This is how the word innovation is being used: "To deal effectively with his enemies, to gain allies, to conquer (whether by force or by cunning), to inspire both devotion and respectful fear in the people, to be obeyed and respectfully feared by troops, to neutralise or destroy those who can or must be expected to injure you, to replace [innovare] old institutions with new ones, to be both severe and kind, both magnanimous and open-handed, to disband loyal troops and form a new army, to maintain alliances with kings and other rulers in such a way that they will either be glad to benefit you or be slow to injure you."

One might think that because Machiavelli is advising the Prince to innovate (to reject classical ideals of virtue, to enact new laws, to tear down the old) that he is pro-innovation which represents a radical break from the Greco-Roman view but this would be overlooking the backdrop of Machiavelli…

Fortuna and Stability

Virtu (part of which is innovation) is an antidote to fortuna: the unpredictable vicissitudes of fate. The 14th century florence of Machiavelli was defined by rapid change (Medicis were ousted twice, foreign conflict, internal discord) and Machiavelli himself experienced many changes of fate. His "political ontology" was one of continued crisis which rulers had to react to. That is to say, Machiavelli is not praising innovation qua innovation but innovation in response to new circumstances, underlying change (a sentiment echoed by Aristotle).

Very briefly, Machiavelli separates states into Republics and Princedoms. Princedoms are split into hereditary and new. Machiavelli is giving the advice to innovate in the case of a new princedom (e.g. a conquered one) it is almost a necessary evil you have to do to get it in order. On the other hand, in hereditary states you shouldn't innovate. It's clear from this sentence that innovation leaves a bad taste in people's mouths and the more you don't have to do it the better: “The length and continuity of his family’s rule extinguishes the memories of the causes of [past] innovations [innovazioni]” (The Prince II).

Innovation should only be done when necessary because it brings great danger to the innovator: "Those who become ruler through their own abilities experience difficulty in attaining power, but once that is achieved, they keep it easily. The difficulties encountered in attaining power arise partly from the new institutions and laws they are forced to introduce in order to establish their power and make it secure . . . Taking the initiative in introducing a new form of government is very difficult and dangerous . . . The reason is that all those who profit from the old order will be opposed to the [introduction of a new order], whereas all those who might benefit from the new order are, at best, tepid supporters of him. This lukewarmness arises partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the law on their side, partly from the skeptical temper of men, who do not really believe in new things unless they have been seen to work well. The result is that whenever those who are opposed to change have the chance to attack the innovator [innovatori], they do it with much vigour, whereas his supporters act only half-heartedly; so that [the innovator, se per condurre l’opera loro] and his supporters find themselves in great danger."

In fact, the best way to innovate is to do it 1. suddenly and 2. hidden manner by keeping the appearances of the old order (Bacon would go against this, arguing gradual and open change) because it is so distasteful: "He who desires or proposes to change the form of government in a state and wishes it to be acceptable and to be able to maintain it to everyone’s satisfaction, must needs retain at least the shadow of its ancient customs, so that institutions may not appear to its people to have been changed, though in point of fact the new institutions may be radically different from the old ones . . . Since novelties cause men to change their minds, you should see to it that changes retain as much as possible of what is old, and that, if changes are made in the number, the authority and the period of office of the magistrates, they should retain the traditional names" (The Discourses).

In short, for Machiavelli the goal of innovation is stability. It's the same goal as Plato to have an unchanging, orderly state. It should be done to the extent it is needed for stability.

The Ancient View

Summarizing these three chapters, I think there is a meaningful "ancient view" of innovation that is distinct from the modern view.

The difference between the two is this: innovation in modernity is to disrupt and innovation (in so far as it is championed at all, which it rarely is) in antiquity is to stabilize. Innovation is the constant state of what we want our societies to be today but innovation was only used to stop needing to innovate in the past. The ideal society innovates in modernity, the ideal society never has to innovate in antiquity.

My explanation for this difference is where the primary domain of innovation resides. If innovation is primarily economic, instrumental, if we live in a utilitarian world then of course we could do better, make more, etc. This intuition gets projected onto politics: we want MORE freedom, MORE inclusion, MORE recognition. But if innovation is primarily political, then it makes sense there is a natural stopping point, a natural limit for what the GOOD relationship/friendship etc. looks like. This gets projected onto the economic domain of just following what has been done before.

4 “Meddle Not with Them That Are Given to Change” Innovation as Evil

With Luther's reformation being engendered in the early 16th century, the English reformation followed closely after (triggered by the fact that the pope wouldn't annul Henry VIII's marriage).

The Catholics of course accused the Protestants of innovating but the Protestants also accused the Catholics as adding worldly elements upon the pure teaching of Christ. It was the "Church of Rome." This latter Critique was used between English protestants to attack each other as the English Church did not have as clean of a cut from the Catholic Church as other protestant countries have had.

Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries there were rival factions of English protestants accusing each other of popery. In the mid 16th century, Edward VI issued A Poclamation Against Those that Doeth innovate.

But the peak of anti-innovation sentiment occurred in early/mid 17th century. A representative sample of the sentiment at the time is English minister Henry Burton's political attack pamphlets he wrote where he laid out five reasons against the innovators:

Guilty by association: “If we be silent and doe not detect them, nor labour to defeate them . . . we shall be found guilty” and “so pertake of the like punishment” (Burton, 1636b: 93).
Smallest innovations snowballs to great dangers (drawing from Aristotle): "Political innovation leads to tyranny (Burton, 1636b: 93) and religious innovation to ruin, troubles and discontent in the State (Burton, 1636b: 95). Here Burton uses Aristotle’s Politics (Book V: viii) (not Republic as he erroneously suggests), in which the Greek author “compares changes in a State, which at first seeme but small and insensible, to the expenses of a house, and the wasting of a man’s substance by little and little, which in a short time consumes all” (Burton, 1636b: 93–94).
Deviation from the natural order of things (this is to be the dominant view of innovation): innovations overthrows “the State of Church and Common wealth, and mingle heaven and earth together” (Burton, 1636b: 99, 164).
Theological consequences: “may set up Antichrists throne againe . . ., Popery piety, and Superstition holiness” (Burton, 1636b: 99).
Past innovations lead to decadent Catholicism: Burton also looks at the history of the church and argues that past changes and innovations—he cites Virgil’s De Inventoribus Rerum with regard to popes’ inventions—led to the “infection” of superstition and idolatry: ceremonies, tables, altars, robes and bowing. According to Burton, these kinds of innovation had not stopped. On the contrary, the “spirit of Rome” continues corrupting the worship of God, troubling the peace of the church, captivating “man’s consciences with their humane invention”, exercising tyr- anny and seeking the ruin of Christ’s kingdom (Burton, 1636b: 109).

What Burton did was to take a political concept innovation -- meaning a defiant rebellion against established order -- and apply it to the religious realm and all men who sought change. He warned against innovation in: doctrine, discipline, worship of God, civil government, altering of books, means of knowledge, rules of manners, rule of the faith. Burton launched one of the first controversies of innovation and from that point on innovation became an everyday word.

The people who Burton attacked vehemently denied they were innovating and instead argued what they were doing was renewal, return to the true state.

The associations of innovations were extremely negative, so much so that other disciplines had to develop other terms: "The pejorative connotation of the word gave rise to a whole vocabulary on ‘renovation’, ‘restoration’ and ‘reformation’ (Erneuerung in German) in lieu et place of innovation. In fact, English Protestants denied that they had created a new religion and talked instead of a reformed one. In the ensuing centuries, innovation continued to be seen as negative. Violent, dangerous, pernicious, zealous, unscriptural and schismatic are only some of the terms used to talk of innovation among eighteenth- and nineteenth- century divines. Pejorative associations also abounded in clerical titles of the same period: ignorance and innovation, superstition and innovation, usurpation and innovation, revolution and innovation. In that same time, there were very few uses of innovation in a positive sense, whether in science, literary criticism or mechanical arts, each developing its own ‘disciplinary’ vocabulary—the terms discovery, imagination and invention, respectively."

This is perhaps why innovation and invention seem so redundant in our own age when innovation becomes rehabilitated. Because invention was used essentially as a word for innovation in mechanical arts that didn’t have a negative connotation. When innovation was a bad word, other words had to be invented in domains that wanted to convey the same meaning but not with the same connotation. Now that innovation is a positive word, every domain appropriates the language.

The Primary Domain of a Word

Innovation practically became synonymous with heresy. People's attitudes towards it were much more negative than the view of antiquity. It was considered evil. It appears the reason is because of the primary domain it was established in.

Innovation might be unneeded in politics but useful in extreme scenarios. That's what the ancients primarily thought of innovation as, human political action to obtain any new end. But when the primary domain of innovation is in religion -- a domain that prized authenticity and adherence to a tradition much more than politics it's little surprise that innovation took on the meaning of deviation from natural and good order.

What's important is how the connotations and sentiments of the primary domain seep into other domains. Burton was not just critiquing religious innovation, he became staunchly against innovation in politics all other manner of life as well.

Connotations of Innovation

Religious
Evil/Deviation from the good
Slow and gradual
- Innovation was considered a slow and gradual process borrowing from the Aristotlean tradition. An evil that slowly crept in. "Another element of interpretation takes into account a shared perception of the time: Innovation was regularly defined as a slow and gradual process, but one which, over time, gets up out of proportion. Little things do mat- ter. Put differently, over the long term, ‘minor’ innovations have cumulative and undesirable effects. To Burton, alterations and innovations “doe fill the. peoples minds with jealousies and feares of an universall alteration of Religion” (Burton, 1636b: 147).
Acting out of a concern for novelty
- Both heresy and innovation are talked of, among others, in terms of evil, sickness and dis- ease, and innovators as flatterers and seducers and eager for novelty. The lexicon of heresy is also full of pejorative references to novelty: art and craft, invention, and love of novelty (see Appendix 4).
Liberty/the choice of the individual vs. orthodoxy and tradition
- As the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid put it, innovation is a “liberty which, even when necessary, creates prejudice and misconstructions, and which must wait the sanction of time to authorize it” (Reid, 1796).

5 Republicanism as Innovation … or Not Innovation

16th, 17th century religious debates introduced innovation into the common language. 17th century failed attempts at republicanism in England transferred much of the pejorative notion of innovation into the political realm, making it a political concept.

Innovation is what the Royalists used to critique the Republicans. The Republicans never self-identified as innovators. This was a concept only used by its detractors.

The definition of Innovation

Innovation is a violation of political boundaries. I think this was borrowed from the religious definition as violating some just order. In the view of antiquity innovation itself was not defined negatively (just political change) even if it did have negative consequences. In this reformation view, innovation's definition itself is negative.
- The anonymous writer develops his whole argument against innovators based on the violation of boundaries.9 On several occasions he stresses the duty of people to keep within their just and proper “bounds”. To Goddard too, the innovator “has no religion”; he is a “dissenter”. “I do not think the Papists . . . so dangerous to our Government, as the Dissenters” (Goddard, 1684: 340). The papists “hath no ill influence upon our Civil Government” (Goddard, 1684: 350).
Innovation is violent, sudden, and large.
- Secondly, and not its least characteristic, innovation in this view is ‘violent’. This characteristic distinguishes innovation from what it had meant previously, particularly in religion. To be sure, in the 1630s–40s innovation in religion was discussed as ‘dangerous’ due to its consequences on doctrine and discipline, not because it was violent—although it was regularly stressed that innovation leads to wars. From then on, innovation is necessarily sudden and violent. Innovation is ‘revolutionary’. It is necessarily great or major change— while ‘minor’ or symbolic novelties were also innovation to ecclesiasts.
Innovation is a suspicious project from questionable motives. Entrepreneurs (economic innovators were criticized here)
- A term that recurs among all three Royalists (and King Charles’s Eikón basiliké) is design. The innovator has a design in mind. The meaning of design is a project, a suspicious project—another term that suffered from bad press (‘projectors’ were the untrusted innovators-entrepreneurs of the time). There is no reference to creativity here, but rather a machination, a subversion, a conspiracy. Poyntz, as we saw, talks in terms of a (dangerous) “experiment”, as well as design. So do the anonymous author W. W. and Goddard. Design, a key word of the political world in England and the US in the 1760s–70s (Bailyn, 1967: 94–159), would continue to characterize innovation in the next century, and then the notion of “scheme” would be added, as in Thomas Bancroft’s The Danger of Political Innovation and the Evil of Anarchy (1792). “I trust it may be expected from the good sense of English- men that they will reject their suspicious schemes of Reform and Innovation” (Bancroft, 1792: 14).
Innovation is motivated by a love of novelty.
- Henry Fly, using the “popular fury of 1780” in England and the French Revolution as examples, discussed how the “love of novelty” “plunge[s] a whole nation into the most dreadful calamities”.

If, through the religious conflicts, innovation became synonymous with heresy then, through the failed attempts at republicanism, innovation became synonymous with revolution.

6 Social Innovation from Scheme to utopia

In the 19th century, the term social innovation started catching on. Note, most people consider social innovation as being used after technological innovation because innovation's connotations had become so technological. This is true but a re-emergence. Social innovation actually appeared first. It gave way to technological innovation and social innovation re-emerged as being defined against technological innovation.

Social innovation was used in England (primarily) and elsewhere to describe socialists. Detractors of socialists wanted to borrow the negative connotations built up over the last few centuries in their political attacks against socialists.

But social innovation, mostly in France, also took on a slightly positive connotation as social reformer (especially when undertaken by the state) as trying to redesign society for the furtherance of human flourishing. Keep in mind this was all in the aftermath of the French revolution.

Social innovation emerged in the 19th century, it was mostly a negative concept, with some regional positive associations.

7 Re-imaginging Innovation

By the 19th century innovation accumulated 4 important connotations:

Political (as inherited from the Greeks)
Heretical (as inherited from the reformation)
Violent (as inherited from the failed attempts at republicanism)
Plotting/Scheming (as inherited from the failed attempts at republicanism)

The rehabilitation of innovation started happened between 1750 and 1850 what Koselleck termed Sattelzeit. Not just innovation but a whole host of words changed its meaning.

No author single-handedly resuscitated innovation but Bentham made significant contributions. He had written out The Book of Fallacies to argue against fallacies in the language/thinking in politics of his day. In it, he explicitly rehabilitates innovation, there's even a chapter on innovation in his book titled "The Hobgoblin Argument, or, No Innovation!"

Argument from Dyslogism

The first argument which Mill gives is a formal critique. He distinguishes words that are neutral, eulogistic (positive connotation), and dyslogistic (negative connotation). Most words start off neutral but then take on eulogistic/dyslogistic connotations.

It appears dyslogisms imply a negative connotation that is not fully warranted (like "innovation") and this is Bentham's critique of how innovation is being used as a scare word in politics:

Such sophisms take many forms, one of which is the fallacy of danger, as Bentham calls it, the subject matter of which is “to repress discussion altogether, by exciting alarm”. By using a single word, in this case innovation, the fallacy turns a thing into a monster: anarchy (Bentham, 1824: 144). This is a special form of the fallacy petition principii, used here employing a single word. The word alone and in itself affirms that the object to which it is applied is an object of approbation or disapprobation. This generally occurs imperceptibly. “A man falls into it but too naturally . . . The great difficulty is to unlearn” (Bentham, 1824: 215).
Certainly there is some truth in the fallacy. There may be some reasons to oppose a legislative measure: A new legislative measure “always carries a certain quantity of mischief”. To oppose a measure for mischief constitutes a just reason, if well founded. But generally, the opponent “set[s] up the cry of Innovation! Innovation! hoping by this watchword to bring to his aid all whose sinister interest is connected with his own” (Bentham, 1824: 147). To Bentham, the conservative “pass[es] condemnation on all change” by “the indiscriminating appellative” new (Bentham, 1824: 149–50). “The horror of innovation”, concludes Bentham, “is really a disease” (Bentham, 1824: 151).

Argument from Past Innovations

Bentham argues that to dislike innovation a-priori is to almost reject everything that has come before: “Innovation means a bad change, presenting to the mind, besides the idea of a change, the proposition, either that change in general is a bad thing, or at least that the sort of change in question is a bad change” (Bentham, 1824: 143–44). But: "To say all new things are bad, is as much as to say all things are bad, or, at any event, at their commencement; for of all the old things ever seen or heard of, there is not one that was not once new. Whatever is now establishment was once innovation."

Argument from Utility/Technology/Project

Bentham focused his rehabilitation of innovation in the technological/economic realm (see above comments on Smith). Technological innovator/entrepreneur was called a "project." In this domain, its much easier to see why innovation is good. It's about achieving the same thing in a better way.

Bentham critiques smith on this exact point: Bentham challenges Adam Smith on the question of projectors (Letter XIII). He accuses the Scottish economist of having, like most people in England, a pejorative understanding of projects and projectors, ranking the latter with “prodigals” and thus conveying “the idea of reprobation”. To Bentham, a project is rather the pursuit of wealth by invention and always “has this circumstance against it, viz. that it is new”. In Bentham’s view, Smith has condemned “as rash and ill-grounded all those projects by which our species have been successively advanced from the state in which acorns were their food, and raw hides their clothing, to the state in which it stands at present”. For a third time, Bentham refers to the fallacy on innovation and concludes: "Sir, let me beg you, whether whatever is now the routine of trade was not, at its commencement, project? Whether whatever is now establishment, was not, at one time, innovation?"

Because of this Bentham was ahead of his time in also trying to rehabilitate usury because usury was what enabled projectors/entrepreneurs to bring their ideas into fruition.

This focus on technological innovation marked two transformations of the underlying concept. One was a transition of innovation from political change to economic utility. It was also a transition from change qua change (Greek) or change as deviancy (reformation) to change as progress.

Perfectionism

One change in philosophical assumption that I am seeing is the answer to the question "how close we are to perfection?"

Those who want to stop innovation believe that they are quite close:

Berkley: "That our constitution is absolutely perfect, it would be ridiculous to assert. Perfection belongs not to lapsed humanity. That a better constitution may be conceived, we do not positively deny . . . It may, however, be consistently asserted that so few and so unimportant are the defects, so many and so valuable the perfections, of the nicely balanced British Constitution, as to render it highly probable that any innovations in its system will be more likely to injure than to improve it . . . No plan of representation could possibly be devised in which the whole nation would agree. Why then should we hazard the consequences of an innovation, which it is barely possible might do some good; but which is much more likely to create discord . . . My Son, fear thou the Lord and the King, and meddle not with them that are given to change."
Recall, Aristotle said that all possible forms of organization have been discovered, this is like Plato's point about we already know what the good is and looks like:
- “All possible forms of organization have now been discovered. If another form of organization was really good it would have been discovered already” (Politics II: v, 1264a).

8 Innovation Transformed: from word to concept

For many, Burke Chief amongst them, innovation was synonymous with revolution. In the 19th century these two terms get rehabilitated together. Neither innovation nor revolution are solely pejorative anymore. They even become positive.

They became positive the precise moment they became instrumental, when innovation was thought of in terms of utility and it started to mean change as in progress. It also expands beyond the political to innovation in law, language, etc. Innovation was any new movement that is useful/has good effects. It's unclear whether this was primarily material and spread into social/political or they grew together.

What underlies this, Godin argues, is what Koselleck examined as this century between 1750 and 1850 of saddletime. Four philoosphical notions took hold:

Change is everywhere
- Religion (Reformation), politics (revolutions), economics (industrial revolution), science (scientific revolution). While everything was perceived as continuous before, people now become conscious or aware of changes in every sphere of society. They accept change, even promote changes.
Change is radical and revolutionary.
- While it was previously thought that change is mainly gradual and evolutionary (Nisbet, 1969), change is now sudden. Revolutions become the emblem of change.
Change is future-oriented, progressive (as opposed to time agnostic, or reactionary)
- Change is productive (useful) rather than destructive (of customs) or, if destructive, is so in a positive manner. Radical change and revolutions announce new possible futures (Koselleck, 1969; Lusebrink and Reichardt, 1988; Ozouf, 1989; Reichardt, 1997).
Humans are responsible for change/their destiny.
- Humans become conscious of their own action. While change was previously explained by God, nature or necessity, humans become aware of history and their capacity to shape their own destiny (Koselleck, 2002a).

9 When Science Had Nothing to Do with Innovation, and Vice Versa

The thesis of this chapter is that up until the 19th century, innovation was not used as scientific language. Innovation first became positive through the useful arts and only then did it seep into scientific vocabulary.

The View of the Scientists on Innovation

Bacon recognized what he was doing is new. Godin argues that since the Renaissance there was a self consciousness that their age was distinct from their medieval predecessors. It amounted to what many have called the pathos of novelty which began to take hold.

Yet, Bacon never used innovation to describe what he was doing. He was very careful to steer clear of it, because innovation carried with it a strong political connotation. He considered technological innovation to be much better than political innovation: "can reach out to the whole human race, whereas political improvements affect men in particular localities only, and while the latter last for but a few generations, the former as good last forever. Moreover improvements of political conditions seldom proceed without violence and disorder, whereas inventions enrich and spread their blessings without causing hurt or grief to anybody."

Bacon recognizes the dangers of political innovation and the seductive (often false appeal of novelty) and ends up in a middle position: “Some intellects are captivated by admiration of antiquity, some by love and infatuation for novelty; but few are judicious enough to steer a middle ground, neither ruining what the ancients rightly laid down nor despising what the new men rightly put forward” (NO: 56). To be sure, “knowledge which is new and foreign from opinions received, is to be delivered in another form than that which is agreeable and familiar” (AL: 235). But this has to be done with “a mind of amendment [improvement] and proficience [progress], and not of change and difference [dispute]” (AL: 299).

This is the common view shared by scientists until the late 19the century (Bacon wrote these mid 17th century) TLDR innovation is political and suspicious and has nothing to do with science. Even though the fetishization of novelty, originality etc. has already taken hold, innovation itself is still not positively used.

How Innovation entered into the Useful Arts

Innovation entered into science and became rehabilitated through the useful arts (engineers, physicians, medicine, education). It was prominent first in practical manuals/treatise written by practitioners. They used it to discuss 1. practical, progress which is original 2. that is grounded on science/scientific method:

First, the practical—as opposed to the theoretical, as the Dictionnaire medical puts it. Accountant Hippolyte Vannier, for example, qualifies his new method explicitly as “practical”. The anonymous work on metallurgy claims that “La plupart [des ouvrages traitant les diverses manières d’employer les fers et les aciers] sont faits par de savants théoriciens qui ne donnent que des définitions au lieu de procédés pratiques” (Most [of the works dealing with the various methods of using iron and steel] are produced by theoretical savants who produce nothing but definitions instead of practical processes) (Anonymous, 1888: Préface). Second, the practical rests or should rest on scientific principles. Vallée contrasts the principles of the ancients to “positive medicine”, on which his innovation on the stethoscope rests. Louis Frédéric Raguet de Liman (1854) stresses the need for “sciences positives” [positive sciences] in clockmaking.55 Didacus describes his teaching (of gymnastics) as “rationnel et méthodique [rational and methodical]”, namely based on anatomy and physiology. Touchard-Lafosse and Roberge attribute industrial innovations to the scientific method.

Linking it to the practical arts further contributed to innovation being talked about in terms of utility. This is also why science was linked with technological innovation. Because the definition above is basically science (result or method) applied to useful arts. This was the 19th century view of innovation.

Note that this is not exactly the commercialization story. In the 19th century innovation just meant applying science to useful arts and didn't have connotations of commercialization yet (even if technology already had). Innovation took on this additional economic connotation in the mid 20th century.

10 The Vocabulary of Innovation

This chapter can be skipped. A summary of how the concept of innovation has transformed across these three epochs and the related words that innovation was defined against (reformation, imitation), built upon (change, action), and synonymous with (revolution, heresy).

The most interesting part of this chapter is the relationship between imitation and innovation -- that the two are thought to be in tension -- which highlights Girard's contribution to this field.

11 Appropriating Innovation

Innovation, after WWII, primarily meant technological innovation. Technological innovation expands beyond the narrow definition of innovation in the 19th century (improvements made upon the useful arts grounded on science or scientific method). The expansion of the concept went in both directions. It aimed to describe the process of fundamental scientific discoveries --> inventions/improvements upon useful arts (this was the sole definition) --> commercialization.

Innovation is now a process (a people process where proper organization and management is key).

Application Over Science

What joined this redefinition of innovation was the elevation of application/engineering/management over hard science. Since the 17th century, people always thought of science as the primary way progress is made but that changed in the 20th century.

John Clifford Duckworth is a perfect example of an engineer looking conceptually at technological innovation. Managing director of the UK National Research Development Corporation (NRDC) from 1959 to 1970, Duckworth claims that “the future national welfare of our country depend[s] largely on the speed with which industry could turn to new, commercially viable, processes and products . . . [Yet] the pure scientist appears to be held in higher esteem than the engineer and technologist . . . [There is a] lack of status of the professional engineer as compared with the scientist” (Duck- worth, 1965: 186). Similar views were expressed in the United States in the early 1960s, by Herbert Hollomon (discussed later in the chapter), among others. To Duckworth, “inventions and innovations are not necessarily meritorious in themselves, but only so far as they contribute to higher efficiency and enable us to compete more effectively in world markets” (Duckworth, 1965: 188). This is the task of the manager. “I have no regrets whatever at having deserted the more academic scientific pursuits, and I would advise any young scientist or engineer, who has other than purely academic abilities to move unhesitatingly towards application and management. In my view, it is wrong to say—as is often done—that it is a waste of a scientist when he enters management” (Duckworth, 1965: 186).

Innovation is not a linear process either, science is not the pole which "pushes" innovations out. Innovations are generated by demand-pulls as much by science-pushes.

Innovation is driven by society or social needs (demand), not by science; hence the debate in the 1960s–70s on science-push versus demand-pull, which pitted engineers, managers and management schools “against” the science-technology scholars (Godin and Lane, 2013). “Most tech- nological change, most innovation, most invention, and most diffusion of technology”, states Herbert Hollomon (successively head of General Electric Engineering Laboratory, First Assistant Secretary for Science and Technology at the US Department of Commerce, founder of the US National Academy of Engineering, then professor of engineering at MIT) “are stimulated by demand . . . and [are] only indirectly science- created” (Hollomon, 1967: 34).7 From then on, the place of science in the process of innovation shifted from being the first step to a coupling factor with demand, or one factor among many, and with feedback loops rather than strictly linear. To study this process, Morton—and others like Donald Schon (1969, 1971) and Robert Burns (1975)— promoted a systemic view of innovation (Morton, 1964, 1966, 1971), an idea that remains influential today in studies of technological innovation (e.g., national systems of innovation).

Innovation and Capitalism

In the 20th century technological innovation is good for groups and society, it brings positive revolutionary changes to the national economy and is the source of wealth.

This is why innovation studies is so often about policy. It's in the nations best interest to promote innovation.

12 Innovation Studies: Invention of a specialty

This chapter is less interesting to me. It's an overview of the landscape of innovation studies. One strand stemming from the economics of Joseph Schumpeter and another strand stemming from Chris Freeman that discusses the policy angle (how to encourage more innovation).

Conclusion

This is just a summary of the book but the most interesting commentary here is on how certain words 1. take on a life of their own, mean things beyond what they descriptively mean 2. become hollowed out through overuse:

In contrast, from the nineteenth century onward, innovation started to refer to central values of modern times: progress and utility. As a consequence, many people started appropriating the concept for their own ends. A concept that acquires a positive connotation in one sphere is soon used in others.3 In his book The Idea of Progress in Antiquity, Ludwig Edelstein suggests that “ideas themselves, once they are formulated, have a life of their own” (Edelstein, 1967: xxvii). Yet there is danger here that a word, as a “rallying-cry”, may become “semantically null” (Lewis, 1960: 86). “Terms of abuse cease to be language” (Lewis, 1960: 328). Some words, Lewis sug- gests again, have nothing but a halo, a “mystique by which a whole society lives” (Lewis, 1960: 282). The word seeps into almost every sentence. Over the twentieth century, innovation has become quite a valuable buzzword, a “magic” word. But, as John Pocock puts it on the word revolution, “the term [innovation] may soon cease to be current, emptied of all meaning by constant overuse” (Pocock, 1971: 3).

Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy by Robert Pippin | Notes & Summary

Johnathan Bi — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 22:48:37 GMT

Introductory Remarks

Nietzsche himself invites us to read him in a Straussian way where the most important truths are unspoken.
Nietzsche and Wittgenstein were both trying to say what it would mean for philosophy to end as both were trying to end philosophical theory. But Nietzsche’s texts go beyond Wittgenstein’s in that they are booby trapped, meaning they are designed so you can’t pull a philosophical theory out of it purposefully.
To make sense of his philosophy we are going to bucket what nietzsche is doing under the label “psychology”.
This book investigates four key Nietzschean figurative claims:
- truth could be a woman
- science could be gay
- God could die
- No lightning without flash
And these images carry enormous weight for two of the central concerns of Nietzsche: self-deceit and self-overcoming.

Psychology as "the Queen of the Sciences"

This chapter is to make sense of two of Nietzsche’s statements.
Psychology as Queen
- What is psychology?
  - Moral psychology: what actually happens when we express (state, feel, act on) an evaluative/normative claim.
  - Nietzsche’s claim is going to be there is no general moral psychology. Views of the soul and its capacities vary in different historical eras.
  - His enterprise is critical and deflationary: morality works in ways quite different from how moral agents would describe how it works.
- Why is psychology (not metaphysics) the foundational discipline?
  - One idea is that will to power is a metaphysics. He’s imbuing the universe with a “psychological” drive. But this isn’t right because Nietzsche is going to say that philosophers (like Schopenhauer) take the mere figurative sayings of moralists and generalize them way too far. They reify things like “will to power”.
  - What Nietzsche has in mind are the French moralists Pascal, Rochefoucauld, and Montaigne. Montaigne especially was able to have a sober, realpolitik view of the world while maintaining a cheerfulness who was thoroughly at home in the world.
  - Nietzsche is going to write substantive works with deep insights without appealing to deeper currents of human nature. What Nietzsche is after is how people, like Montaigne, can sustain pursuits in the world. That’s not something that can be brought about by systematic philosophy or revelation.
Truth as Woman, Philosopher as Lover
- The relationship between philosopher and eros
  - Love is not merely naturalistic we are evaluating someone
  - … but its not deliberate normative evaluation its a lot more intimate
  - They are both conditions of a flourishing life
  - Philosophical soul is close to the tyrannical soul, able to subjugate other desires to a master one
  - According to Plato philosophy is the highest expression of eros
    - Diorama’s ladder needs an explanation for why people progress from lower to higher: the reason is our love is only satisfied when we arrive at things that are more fixed and eternal.
    - For Nietzsche this is why Platonists (ascetics in general) are clumsy lovers. They show the love of a teenager: demanding eternal commitment. But the way they do this is by abandoning everything that is meaningful that one could possibly love: fleeting bodies.
  - Like love, philosophy (establishment of values) can fail. Nietzsche called this failure nihilism.
    - But he believes we must give an attempt even if it has no guarantee of success.
    - He wants to show what ideals are available to us now, how we came here, what could have been. This sets up a gay science.

What is a Gay Science

This chapter is to describe what Nietzsche is aiming for with a Gay Science (and what he isn’t aiming for).
Relationship with french moralists:
- Nietzsche wanted to accomplish what Montaigne accomplished: be brutally honest about the natural world, about what really happens but still maintain that optimism.
- Nietzsche wanted to go beyond the French moralists. They didn’t poke deeper at philosophical foundations, Nietzsche claims that those foundations aren’t there.
The Erotic view of human commitments:
- It’s not just about naturalistic forces (contra Leiter) that push us to make commitments, we are making real evaluations too.
- There are thin commitments like observing the rules of chess but these are grounded by deep commitments like the love of chess itself. Deep commitments are primordial in that they are pre-reason and we don’t have reasons for giving them.
Historicism:
- Nietzsche, unlike the French moralists believe that every philosophy needs to be historical, written for a particular epoch.
- This is why his books are not essays or pensees but they are about bringing a new age (Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, Daybreak, etc.)
Influences of where Nietzsche might have found “Gay Science”
- Emerson uses “gay science” to find a philosophy that can affirm life and treat the world as sacred.
- Carlyle contrasted gay science with the dismal science of economics that reduces everything to cold laws. It’s not the results of these sciences that depress us its the views.
- Troubadours used gay science. It is the knowledge of erotics.
Intellectual Conscience:
- Our particular epoch is marked by intellectual conscience which I take to be a need for things to be justified by reason.
- The issue is that we can’t naively believe in commitments anymore.
- We desire knowledge too much.
- It’s less clear what we really desire (e.g. grand theory of everything) is possible or will fulfill us. But that is what makes philosophy erotic. Irrational pursuit. Even Kant setting the limitation of knowledge did not decrease our attraction to it.
Embodied knowledge:
- What we need is an embodied knowledge.
- We don’t have a culture, we know many things about culture but we aren’t a culture.
The dualism required of a gay science. Whatever this science ends up becoming it is in a deep tension with itself
- Aeschylus’ plays have both Apollonian and Dionysian.
- Untimely meditation is about history for life but it is constrained by “justice” lest it become an ideology.
- Nietzsche talks about a lightheartedness and seriousness
What do we know about this gay science
- It needs to address the intellectual conscience that is to say, it can’t just revert back into a naive belief.
  - So this can’t be an embellishment of the truth.
- It needs to be a poetry of some form, it can’t be philosophical/scientific such that it fails to motivate us (notice the tension with the previous point).
  - Don’t confuse disenchantment for wisdom.
- Therefore, it needs to give up this very language of an inside and an outside. It can’t embellish scientific language. It needs to have one language that both can satisfy our intellectual conscience but can also do so in a form that can motivate us. In Nietzsche’s own words:
  - “To sustain the intellectual conscience constitutive of a philosophical life, but now without what had been traditionally understood as philosophy, the exposure of the reality behind, hidden beneath, the appearances.”
  - Notice, this is what Montaigne accomplished. Being real without losing affirmation of the world.
  - What’s so attractive about this is that this navigates between two extremes. One extreme is that of naivety. (Blind techno-optimists)The other is of being black-pilled and incapacitated. (It’s all a scam) The error of the first is delusion the error of the second is to mistake disenchantment for wisdom.

Modernity as a Psychological Problem

This chapter further develops the issue of nihilism, particularly as a loss of tension/sincerity/desire, and what is needed to resolve it.
Death of God
- Nietzsche does not endorse Zarathustra who proclaims that God is dead and we have killed him. He attributes this to a form of sentimentalism of christians. Nietzsche does not feel the same guilt that Zarathustra does. Zarathustra is melancholic and thinks we need God.
- Nietzsche is also critiquing the atheistic villagers who dismiss Zarathustra who are smug and boorish. He calls these atheists “pale atheists” because they lack vitality and seem sick.
- To celebrate it or to lament it are both wrong reactions for Nietzsche.
The Problem of Nihilism/Man as tension
- What nihilism is isn’t the lack of strong desires, it’s the lack of second-order ability to affirm and throw ourselves fully into those strong desires.
- The problem of nihilism isn’t intellect, it’s not knowledge, but it’s about desire.
- Nihilism is an erotic problem, it’s a bow that can’t shoot beyond the human anymore. (There are ways of shooting beyond the human that is bad, ie. Christianity)
  - Question: what would Nietzsche say about technology/transhumanism? That seems to be a way of shooting the bow beyond the human without leaving this world right?
- The problem of desire is a problem of tension. The metaphor of the bow is helpful here because the more the two parts of the bow are in tension the greater the energy.
  - It’s not just about naturalistic impulses, it’s not just about different physiological tensions and forces battling within you. It’s about not being satisfied with who you are. Self-consciousness is tension for Nietzsche.
  - Humans are odd in that what human nature is, is a rebellion from the merely natural. Rousseau, Marx, Hegel (recognition), Kant’s unsocial sociability, Freud’s self-division — all of this is about how we are not just naturalistic creatures.
  - For Nietzsche, what the sovereign individual is, is about the fragile achievement of individuality.
- This tension is also related to the problem of suffering.
  - What makes suffering bad is not having meaning around it.
  - The christian remedy for suffering worked with two caveats 1. Recently it stopped working (science its patricidal son) 2. The cost was too great.
Eros, imagery, Nietzsche’s failure
- He takes the metaphor of morality as the picture very seriously.
- He’s going to ask not what the picture hides but what it reveals. He’s not going to look “behind the picture” in the Genealogy for example trying to come up with a theory of action but rather try to examine the picture very closely and see what it confesses.
- Nihilism is so difficult to cure. Because desire is something internal.
- He thinks his mission isn’t to really provide a philosophical account of the world but rather paint images that inspire Eros.
  - Interesting that the civilizational grounding currents are more often fiction than non-fiction.
- Nietzsche ultimately fails at making his philosophy (whose presence today is felt negatively rather than positively) or himself as a good role model.

The Deed is Everything

This chapter is about RP’s expressivist reading of Nietzsche’s rejection of free will.
Against freedom
- The slaves genius is not just in flipping the referent of good and bad but flipping it and then adding the idea of freedom and thus making it good and evil. Making everyone blame worthy.
What Nietzsche is not
- Metaphysician
  - Eternal recurrence, will to power are not metaphysical claims about the world they are not psychological readings (contra Leiter) they are images designed to invoke something in us. They are literary figures.
- Naturalist (Contra Leiter)
  - Nietzsche clearly still wants to preserve the language of action.
  - He clearly posits things like the unconscious like resentment.
  - Clearly you don’t want to say that human action is in the same category as leaf blowing in the wind.
  - He says that psychology is the fundamental path to solving key issues.
  - It’s not going to help make sense of the image that lightning is the flash. Because in the naturalist view there are still motives (natural not psychological) that account
- Existenitalist
  - He is not about encouraging us to have the strength of will to create a new form of life. Because he is too interested in the social/historical contingencies. He is interested in creating a new culture not about individualistic willing meaning (it is about heroic individuals who create value, but those values are significant not just for them but because they bring about a new age).
The Expressivist Reading
- There is a doer. But the doer is “in” the deed.
- This solves the riddle/image of the lightning as flash. Because it collapses the action into the doer.
- There is a group of modern anti-cartesians (Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein) who think that an intention is not an intention without it being realized. Only once it becomes realized is it an intention and even more importantly, the process is reflective. So you update your intention/your self-view.
- If I write a bad poem, the standard reading is that I intended a good poem but expressed it poorly. The expressivist reading is that you infected intended a bad poem.
- When we observe an action, Nietzsche doesn’t locate it in a prior intention, but as saying something about what the doer is.
- Intentions need to be viewed in their social/historical contexts. So a slave intending compassion is different than a master intending compassion.
- There are many ways that we can interpret an intention and all of them can be legitimate in their own ways.
- In this model we don’t feel guilt or regret for doing a wrong action. We feel sadness that we weren’t the person we thought we were.

The Psychological Problem of Self-Deception

This chapter is to detail what self-deception means for Nietzsche.
Examples of Self-Deception
- Consciousness is a lie.
- Christian religion is deceitful. The slaves aren’t doing it for the reasons they suggested.
- Many interpreters treat the will to power as the unconscious driving that is REALLY motivating everything (but that would make Nietzsche hold a metaphysical view).
The Problematic
- What does it mean for drives to be hidden? How do we hide them?
- Even more puzzling because Nietzsche, in certain passages, doesn’t think it’s fully unconscious (they are somewhat aware of this) but its not a full awareness.
- The issue with certain readings is to think that you can take something hidden out from its covers and for the thing not to lose its mystique. e.g. you can’t translate literature into philosophy without substantial “loss”.
- How could the slave be comforted by a fake tale they themselves created? How could the fox gain any comfort in believing the grapes were sour when they really weren’t?
Two interpretations of Freud
- One interpretation is that YOU have drives that are unavailable to your conscious mind. His innovation, in this view, is to recast symptoms as motivators.
- Second interpretation is that what is going on is not ME it’s happening to me.
- Nietzsche is much closer to the first Freud.
Pippin’s solution
- All of these are issues on the intentionalist model of action (we have certain intentions that we actualize) but they aren’t problems in the expressivist model of action (where intentions are at best provisional, but really they aren’t full intentions, without being actualized).
  - In this reading, Nietzsche isn’t denying the free will but he is saying that the world has so many causal streams what portion of it that you actually choose is always going to be psychologically biased. Maybe he’s saying something even stronger that to think/to turn into language is to be biased.
- In this mode, self-deceit is not as simple as lying because self-knowledge is always provisional. What makes it self-deceit isn’t that your actions don’t match your ex-ante intentions (there are no such things) what makes it self-deceit is your stated intentions do not match your real intentions as seen through successive actions. Ie. All the institutions of hate that Christianity actually created and not the resentment they feel in the moment is the real reason.
  - Nietzsche’s positive ideal then isn’t about admitting who one is its not one should be TRUE to one’s nature it’s about BECOMING who one is. It’s about becoming and actuality.

How to Overcome Oneself: On the Nietzschean Ideal

This chapter is to argue that self-overcoming is the 1. Nietzschean ideal 2. Solution to nihilism for our time 3. What genuine freedom means for Nietzsche 4. What will to power is for Nietzsche
- He’s not interested in resolving the question of freedom as much as dissolving it. He dissolves it by always asking why someone wants to believe in what appears to be a scientific or metaphysical belief.
Nietzsche doesn’t care about freedom in most forms except what he labels as “self-overcoming”.
- Strength of freedom is measured by resistance it can overcome.
- Available to individuals as well as groups.
- It is an intellectual/erotic attitude that people can’t just will themselves into.
  - Question: how does Nietzsche’s philosophy aim to engender such a “shift”?
- What it is not:
  - Authenticity of being what one is.
  - Hierarchical unity of all one’s life and desires.
- What it is:
  - A dissatisfaction of the self that leads us to negate certain part of the self in pursuit of a positive ideal.
  - It is a tension of both 1. Ability to have whole-hearted commitment 2. Willingness to abandon such a commitment.
    - This is such a crucial point which is behind Nietzsche’s critique of the herd and how it seeks comfort. These seem to be in tension but they really imply each other, to whole-heartedly strive for an ideal means being willing to abandon current commitments.
    - One way is if we have nothing to commit to, the other way is if we don’t want to give things up.
Will to power
- Pippin interprets will to power and freedom as this state of constant self-overcoming.
- Will to power is interesting because what counts as “power” is up to interpretation. Masters gain power over the slaves but they “yield” life in order to pursue power. So masters have will to power in the worldly sense but are losing will to power in the sense of preserving life. Will to power then requires knowing when to claim something and when to yield (this exact tension of affirmation and negation).
- True will to power is to be somewhat indifferent to power, it must be re-interpreted as self-overcoming.
Ubermensch
- The overman is a man who is constantly self-overcoming. That is Nietzsche’s solution for nihilism. The point is not about establishing a new ideal a new religion but to encourage constant self-overcoming.
- Question: Kierkegaard’s critique of the aesthetic life and “crop-rotation” in Either/Or.
Freedom
- Freedom is wholehearted identification with possibility of abandonment. It’s certainly not ironic detachment but it’s also not passionate identification.
- Question: what’s wrong with Goethe’s Werther? Doesn’t this resolve the issue of nihilism or does Nietzsche simply think it is not available to us anymore?

Concluding Remarks

Concluding comments on relationship to Hegel and Montaigne.
Hegel
- Hegel felt that the 19th century (Prussian) world was sufficiently psychologically satisfying.
- But just as European society was turning for the better many of its best minds rose up in protest.
- Hegel was (judging from history) wrong on the ability for such a state to satisfy us. Nietzsche is responding to why such a world wasn’t satisfying 1. It is deceitful and hides its own brutality 2. It is boring and will lead to erotic failure.
Montaigne
- Montaigne never bothered with a deeper philosophical theory. Nietzsche wanted to show that such a theory was not there. The downside to this is that his theory needed to have a systematicity emblematic of philosophical theories.
- One reading of why Montaigne was able to achieve cheerfulness was because he didn’t live in the 19th century. But the other reading is that Nietzsche still clung to transcendence (judging things from perspective of eternal recurrence, the “over” man).

Rousseau's Critique of Inequality by Fred Neuhouser | Notes & Summary

Johnathan Bi — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 13:23:25 GMT

Introduction

Second discourse (SD) is about inquiring into the origin (cause) and foundations (whether it is legitimate) of inequality.
- This makes SD the founding text of a long line of Genealogical works.
  - One peculiar thing about SD is he’s not looking for a real, historical cause but to given an account of all the conditions that create it.
- What Neuhouser has to show is why these two questions are related and not independent.
  - One way that these things are tied together is through the concept of nature.
  - Plato and Aristotle both identified the origin of inequality in nature and, through that justified it.
  - The moderns break from Plato and Aristotle in that only what is deserved (out of your own free will and not natural gifts) can justify inequality. So nature cannot justify it because we are all equals due to freedom/reason, etc.
  - The commonsense view is to identify inequality as resulting from either nature (desire to be better or simply material scarcity) or free will and both seek to justify it.
  - Rousseau’s criteria for whether something is justified or isn’t justified won’t take the hopeless path of trying to figure out if something is deserved.
  - Rousseau will argue that nature has little to do with the inequalities but he does not collapse the foundations question into the origin question. That is to say, Rousseau will construct another criterion of legitimacy that is not natural law but constructed from natural law and applied to society.
Rousseau’s critique of inequality sheds a lot of the unattractive elements of similar analysis and prevents it from being utopian
- He is able to show why it is such a common, persistent, and almost unavoidable fact of human existence (if you couldn’t show this, your theory is in big tension with history).
- He does not attribute all of inequality to nature or human nature so that its antidote does not have to “commit violence against nature.”
- Inequality is not a moral evil in itself and is sometimes justified but is dangerous for a lot of the effects it produces.
Chapter breakdown
- Chapter 1: why the sorts of inequality that are most interesting to Rousseau is not the result of nature.
- Chapter 2: why it does have its origin in amour-propre.
- Chapter 3: Tackling the normative "foundation" question. Rousseau will suggest that most inequalities are not authorized by natural law. He gives us another standard which we can judge inequalities that is, in some way, also grounded in "nature."
- Chapter 4: Is to construct this new standard of judgement whether something is to be legitimate inequality in society.
- Chapter 5: Applying this to contemporary political theory

Chapter 1

This chapter is a reconstruction of Rousseau’s argument of why nature is not the origin of inequality
Natural vs. Social/Artificial
- Nature on one hand is contrasted against perverse. It is in this sense normative.
- Nature on the other hand is contrasted against artificial what is the result of free will. It is in this sense descriptive.
- Note that artificial/social when contrasted against nature in this second sense is not bad at all. Social implies it being malleable which is key, natural is what is given. The natural is going to circumscribe the realm of the possible outside of which all proposals are Utopian.
ONE: Natural inequalities are not the origin of social inequalities
- Social inequalities are ones that are maintained by consent/opinion/free will (e.g. the serf believing the lord to have special privileges) and are relative. Natural inequalities are given by nature (height, strength, etc.) and absolute (in the sense that they are non-relative).
- He kinda gives an empirical argument here (just look around how social inequality is not linked to natural inequalities at all). But I think there is a deeper point that social inequalities come from a different source (ie. Freedom/consent) and are fundamentally authorized in a different way (natural inequalities are not authorized at all) such that even if you were to disagree about the empirical observation it’s still worth asking where it comes from.
TWO: Human nature is not the origin of social inequalities
- TWO DISPOSITIONS in the state of nature is amour de-soi (ADS) and pity. Both are mechanical. ADS is stronger than pity. We share the same with animals.
- What separates us from animals are TWO CAPACITIES. Freedom functions without reason; ie. It’s a thin conception that chooses spontaneously and does not choose in accordance with reason. Perfectibility is not moral perfectibility but that we have latent faculties that can but not necessarily are developed e.g. language.
- What makes these part of human nature and not amour propre (AP)?
  - These faculties are pre-reason, pre-consent, pre-freedom (in the stronger sense of acting in accordance with one’s opinion).
  - ADS is largely determined already by nature even if it can be malleable (tastes in food) whereas AP is solely determined by sociality.`
  - ADS can be satisfied by one lone person whereas AP can only be satisfied in the group.
  - Rousseau wants to put into his state of nature the minimal conditions, what is the bare minimum. What he must have in his sight is Hobbes who thinks not only do we desire glory in the state of nature but we also have ability to reason and communicate and enter into the social contract.
- Rousseau wants to LIMIT the realm of the natural because he doesn’t want to smuggle things that belong in society. He wants to make sure he doesn’t paint human society as overly determined.
THREE: Natural scarcity (state of the natural world) is not the origin of social inequalities
- Nothing about ADS and pity make us pursue social inequality as an end in itself.
- However, ADS can lead us to fight for inequality out of scarcity. But Rousseau’s point is that so much of what we consider to be scarce is socially scarce… it’s to satisfy the social rather than natural part of ourselves.
The nature of Rousseau’s argument
- Is hypothetical not real.
- It is close to explaining the source of the Hudson River where you trace out the supporting conditions (the streams that flow into it), and not give a historical account it came to be.
- Modeled after physics in that 1. It is modeled off of Descartes treatise about how our world can emerge out of initial conditions of chaos from a few mechanical laws of motion. 2. It can be falsified by empirical evidence ie. It is testable even if the account of the theory cannot be.

Chapter 2

The aim of this chapter is to reconstruct Rousseau’s answer to SD’s central question of where social inequality comes from. The answer will be that it comes from Amour-Propre (AP) in combination with a host of auxiliary conditions.
AP provides the force that creates inequality.
- AP is relative in that what it seeks is comparative standing. Comparative standing is not necessarily superior even if tends to be because the way Romance forces us to become the best.
- AP is first awakened in our comparison with animals and then assumes the desire for superior standing with romance.
- AP is artificial whereas ADS is natural
  - It’s a sentiment that makes us human (whereas we share ADS with animals)
  - It’s a sentiment that is responsible for all the ills (contrasted against the positive normative conception of “natural”)
  - Sentiment that is ONLY made possible by society (because of the ways in which it is relative)
  - The right pushback would be, what do we gain out of this if AP is always necessary in society. The answer is that how AP can be directed will be shown to be incredibly malleable. They may all have bad consequences but there’s a meaningful difference in how it can be directed. In other words, inequality will always be a permanent feature of the social world because he gives us fundamental pillars of civilization as its cause. But that does not mean we still don’t have a lot of control over how that AP and, thus, inequality is directed.
But AP alone cannot be the sole answer to inequality. The first appearance of AP marks the happiest and most durable epoch where AP is directed at personal qualities.
They need a set of auxiliary conditions in order to inflame it. The order in which the conditions are presented historically are perhaps better read as the order of explanatory priority.
- Leisure precedes AP, implying that people only have time to focus on AP when they have a certain baseline of needs met.
- Leisure (free time after doing what one needs to do to address one’s base needs) by definition means that there is now time to create luxuries. He defines luxuries as objects which are not needs but start appearing to be needs.
- Division of labor starts forming 1. Distinct “types” of people (which will be later solidified to classes or guilds that are enforced by the state and 2. Increases the dependence of people.
- All to this creates differentiation among people.
- Private property is next.
  - It is reliant on leisure, luxury, division of labor, and differentiation.
  - He focuses on the owning of land in particular because it is one that exaggerates dependence. It is what the later Marx would call means of production.
  - Rousseau thinks that the continued use of a land leads to its ownership NOT as a normative point but as a descriptive phenomena. In fact he rejects the idea that use can lead to ownership and uses this as an attack of the state.
  - Rousseau does believe natural law indicates that what we create is our private property. But, unlike Locke he isn’t going to justify or condemn social institutions based only on how they conform to natural law, there will be another standard used to evaluate things like what type of private property of legitimate. But the fact that natural law prescribes private property should make us give up the idea that he was for the abolishment of all private property.
- The state is what legitimizes all of this. Backs it up not just with force but even more importantly with authority.

Chapter 3 The Normative Resources of Nature

The first two chapters deal with the question of “origin,” the next two chapters deal with the question of “foundation.”
Most social inequality is not authorized by natural law
- Natural inequalities do not need to be justified, they just are.
- Some social inequalities are justified by natural inequalities such as authority of parent over child.
- To ask what social inequalities are legitimate is to ask 1. Which ones are unobjectable 2. only a subset of these will also generate obligations for those who recognize it as legitimate.
- Rousseau suggests in the very end that social inequalities are only justified when they track natural inequalities. This clearly can’t be right because 1. He talks about legitimate ownership of property through labor that won’t track perfectly natural inequalities 2. “Natural law” only partially answers the question of “foundations.” That is to say, there is another standard, that of the “true contract,” which is going to be the standard.
- Rousseau presents a very thin view of nature.
  - Nature is going to be very “silent” in that we can’t look to if for answers. For many societal issues 1. Does not have the resources to mediate 2. Even if it does, it’s not clear what content it prescribes 3. Even when it is there may be additional, artificial reinforcement necessary.
  - Conversely moral law does not hold in the state of nature either, inhabitants aren’t moral beings who can act in accordance with prescriptions. They have natural virtue (which is to maximize one’s own wellbeing at minimum harm to others, which naturally follows from following ADS and pity in their exact proportions, and does lead to collective flourishing of the group).
  - Another way to say it is that Nature is teleologically insufficient. Nature following its own mechanisms its own logic (be it evolution, or Hegel’s spirit) is not sufficient. Conscious, artificial intervention is necessary.
Rousseau’s normative conception of human nature is going to help us arbitrate what inequalities are acceptable and what aren’t. The basic intuition is a teleological one that because humans are given certain capacities/dispositions it is good to exercise them. So the descriptive will be the basis of the normative. After Darwin, we might not be able to go as far as Rousseau in looking for something teleological but we can still retreat to the (quite strong) position that development of key capacities is a good. There are five constituent parts: Life, Well-Being, Freedom, Amour-Propre, and Perfectibility.
- Life
  - Life is a higher form of good than well-being (almost always bar extreme conditions) because the latter rests on the foundation of the former.
  - Life and freedom cannot be arbitrated (moral philosophy has nothing to help someone deciding between the two arbitrate that decision). Both are non-fungible and constitutive of a good life. (Presumably both are higher than well-being and perfectibility)
  - What this implies is that no contract where life or freedom is bargained away with can be legitimate.
- Freedom
  - There are two senses of freedom 1. The basic metaphysical freedom, the ability to choose (this can’t be taken away from us 2. The more important sense that will serve as normative criterion is social freedom, not being subject to the wills of others.
  - For Rousseau, to be free is to be freed from domination, from acting in accordance with a will that goes against one’s own even if one consents to it in a contract out of necessity.
  - This seems to be a classical Republican move but Rousseau significantly alters this conception. Because for the republicans a foreign will is a will that goes against one’s interests, even if one does not recognize those interests (paternalism is permitted). For Rousseau, a will can be foreign in two ways 1. Goes against one’s current will (even if it is wrong) 2. Goes against one’s interest. The former criterion is sufficient for domination the latter is neither sufficient nor dominant (presumably the Republicans need both to count as domination). So Rousseau is much more stringent because he does not see paternalism as free.
  - A child obeying a parent is not domination because it conforms to natural inequalities.
  - General will, when it goes against your will, is also not domination because you participate in its formation to such a significant degree that you recognize it as “mine” (not foreign in the first sense, and not supposed to be foreign in the second)
  - Rousseau also rightly thinks that it’s very difficult to get paternalism. That a will’s being foreign in the first sense means it will be foreign in the second sense.
- Wellbeing has two components happiness and need satisfaction
  - Need satisfaction is meeting our genuine needs (food, sleep, sex, shelter). Rousseau is going to claim that not only do our artificial needs balloon, but that our genuine needs are often being ignored by civilization.
  - Happiness is the absence of pain and frustrated desires.
    - In the state of nature, there is neither. Civilization, Rousseau is going to show, systematically encourages desires that cannot be met universally.
- The next two are going to be expanded conceptions of human nature (more so reading SC and E into SD)
- Perfectibility
  - In both Emile and second discourse, Rousseau rejects the path of not having frustrated desires by not encouraging any desires around development of capacities. Because that would leave a key human good out.
  - In fact, it seems like civilization is fantastic at encouraging the development of human capacities and that is the saving grace for Rousseau, why, even if we could, we should not return.
- AP is also a key good because
  - It is pervasive and unavoidable
  - It is permissible (satisfiable by all)
  - And it is essential and important for a good life

Chapter 4 Judging the Legitimacy of Social Inequalities

In the previous chapter we’ve identified the normative resources within human nature. In this chapter, we are going to transfer those normative resources into something resembling laws against which we can test whether certain inequalities are permissible or not.
The first step is to investigate the causal connection between inequality and those normative components within human nature. In other words, we are going to be judging inequality based on its consequences.
- For Rousseau equality is not a good in itself. In SC, equality is instrumental for freedom.
- Inequality damages freedom in these ways
  - It makes the lesser off dependent on the better off. What is compelling here isn’t material needs — it is clear POVERTY is more threatening to freedom than INEQUALITY. A google engineer is more unequal with google’s CEO than a migrant worker is to the family-farm owner, but because the latter is more in poverty he is also less free. In other words, if what you are really worried about is dependence (and you take the position that inequality and poverty present a choice) then I would be much worried about alleviating poverty even if that means creating more inequality.
    - The much more compelling version of this concern is the ability for inequality to create artificial needs that coerce the lesser off into doing things they don’t want, that is what hits home.
  - If someone is able to leverage their wealth into altering the law.
- Inequality damages wellbeing in the following ways (this I think to be the much more compelling critique) and it has to do with how it thwarts AP
  - The key argument is that it hurts people on both ends of the spectrum. It hurts the lesser off by making them insecure and humiliated, it hurts the better off by giving them pride — confusing the value of things with the value of people.
  - Societies with great chasms of inequality tend to inflame AP, a whole host of ills come with that: alienation, domination, triviality, you lose interest in the thing itself, etc.
  - It’s not satisfiable by all, you guarantee that a large part of your population is chronically dissatisfied.
  - People feel insecure in their relative positions.
The second step is to generate a “criterion of right” by which we can judge different types of inequalities
- This is the key passage where Neuhouser identifies Rousseau as suggesting there needs to be a new standard of right: “Perhaps his most important remarks are these: “it is the fundamental maxim of all political right that peoples [give] themselves chiefs to defend their freedom and not to be enslaved by them”; and, somewhat more informatively: why should individuals “give themselves superiors if not to defend them- selves against oppression, and to protect their goods, their freedoms, and their lives, which are, so to speak, the constitutive elements of their being?” (DI, 176/OC III, 180–1)”
- The criterion of right is essentially whether an inequality or a system is, in principle, in conflict with the satisfaction of each citizens’ fundamental interests as identified in the state of nature: freedom, AP, well-being, life, and perfectibility.
- This is a criterion that stems from nature but pushes beyond it (this universalizability criterion).
- This is not consequentialist (maximize good of all) but fits squarely within social contract tradition (protect the good of each).
- This criterion does not fully spell out what the tipping point is from benign to harmful inequality but provides a loose framework.
Now that we have our answer, what can we say about the relationship between “origin” and “foundation”?
- Inequality is to be evaluated not on its foundation but its consequences.
- However, the investigation of inequalities origins helps us to 1. Highlight the constitutive components of mankind through which we construct a criterion of right, a foundation (this is uncovering what has been obscured) 2. It reveals that inequality is not necessary, even if it is very likely 3. It helps delineate what conditions exacerbate inequality.

Rousseau's Theodicy of Self-Love by Fred Neuhouser | Notes & Summary

Johnathan Bi — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 13:14:27 GMT

Introduction

Core conclusion of the work: the desire for recognition is healthy when …
- I am recognized in both respect and esteem.
- The desire for recognition must not be so strong as to consume the logic/enjoyment of the activities I am winning recognition in.
- When I am pursuing to be better or best, I must be able to fail at those pursuits without thinking that life is not worth living.
- When I am pursuing to be better or best, I can’t be doing it to dominate others but because I can affirm the direction itself.
- I must have a strong enough internal core of judgment such that the esteem people provide me does not make me value appearance over essence.
- I must have a strong enough internal core of judgment such that the esteem people provide me makes me “exist outside of myself” (alienation).
- I only take delight in praise when two other conditions are met 1. I am indeed praiseworthy 2. The praise-giver is a good judge.
- All of these can be interpreted as esteem being secondary (in priority, in strength, etc.) and what keeps esteem secondary is that I do not conceive of my self-conception as “better in kind” or overly deserving. That will inflame all of these and turn them into their inflamed counterparts.

Amour Propre (AP)
- AP 1. Seeks esteem 2. Esteem it desires is comparative (relative in the first sense, measured against others) 3. Esteem is held in eyes of others ie. Not self-esteem (relative in the second sense, measured by others).
- His goal is to 1. Give an understanding of what AP is 2. Why it is problematic / prone to corruption 3. How it opens up far-reaching developmental possibilities.
- Rousseau places AP in a central place in his system which constitutes a theodicy
  - Like Augustine, AP is prideful and associated with the root of evil
  - It is core to humanity and not something we can abandon
  - … thus the path of salvation is to adapt it / nurture it (which is possible)
  - Wants to show why a world where evil is possible is preferable to the alternative (because of freedom)
  - Exonerates God and Nature allowing us to affirm creation. Even if this affirmation is very “lite” because unlike Hegel or Augustine, a good ending is not determined — in fact, it’s terribly unlikely. This is still quite an achievement because it gives people reason to hope and to get rid of the satanic desire of hating creation.
Peculiarities of Neuhouser's interpretation
- Draws a sharp distinction (stronger than other interpreters) between amour-propre and amour de soi. The causal force identified in SD and prescriptions in SC and E are not understandable without it.
- He treats AP as not solely bad (even if the majority of its manifestations are and it is easily corrupted). It has a good side and, even stronger, the good side, once developed, can treat the ills of the bad. This good side is overlooked because 1. E which talks about it is not read as often as SC and SD 2. It is mostly negative in SD 3. It is not explicitly identified as AP in SC so even the positives are not attributed to it.
- He focuses on SD, SC, and E but that is not because the other works aren’t noteworthy but because he thinks these three constitute a system that enable him to tease out an important feature of Rousseau’s thought on the effects of recognition on society.
- He treats SD, SC, and E as constituting a single coherent system of thought. Most people treat them as conflicting given Rousseau’s marks on incompatibility between the education of the citizen and the man in E. Neuhouser alleviates this concern by suggesting that what is incompatible is ancient citizen (Sparta, Rome) and man (modern individual). SC and E are all about creating citizen-men. E is first about the training of the man (defined by being a moral sovereign, being able to affirm things oneself through reason) and then the education of citizenship (defined by being able to will the general will). SC also reconciles this tension because willing the general will through one’s own sovereign will is how he creates societies that are aligned but still preserve freedom (something Sparta and Rome fail at).
- Neuhouser is going to interpret Rousseau without the idea of a strong difference between sexes. This goes against Rousseau but is the more philosophically productive way to partake this project. What worries Neuhouser is if Rousseau’s philosophical prescriptions are too closely tied with having a underclass of non-citizens to do the dirty work. Ie. You can only form citizen-men with a class of humans who are not in that class.

Part 1 Human Nature and Its Passions

1. The Nature of Amour-Propre

This chapter is a close reading of a crucial paragraph in the Second Discourse that draws the key distinction between Amour-Propre and Amour de Soi.
The differences between Amour-Propre and Amour de Soi
- The reward of AP is not just a mere sentiment but existence/being — a confirmation of one’s reality.
- AP is after esteem ADS is after physical goods.
- AP is much more malleable than ADS which is much more bounded.
- AP is relative in two senses of the word 1. It seeks relative social standing 2. It wants that relative social standing in the eyes of others.
  - Crucially, Neuhouser argues that recognition is desired for its own sake even outside of the fact that it is needed for self-esteem. He wants to suggest even healthy adults with non-pathological AP and strong self-esteem require recognition.
- AP is “artificial” while ADS is “natural”
  - There is a normative judgement, the former can lead us astray whereas the latter is affirmable
  - We share ADS with animals whereas AP is solely human
  - The most important part of artificial is that AP is social. That is to say its not something we invented (like the camera) but its something that ceases to function outside of social environment (because of the third constraint that what it seeks is judgement in the eyes of others).
  - It is artificial also in the sense that because it is malleable and it is highly dependent on societal organization, we have the power to change its manifestation even if we cannot be freed from it.
  - AP’s pathways are also responsible for language. Both require comparison to properly function. Each of the constraints neuhouser outlines shares an overlapping capacity that is required for another constitutive function of humanity. AP is artificial in that it is responsible for all these other distinctively human capacities:
    - Esteem —> Normative Judgement
    - Comparison —> Language
    - The opinion of others —> Reason
The similarities between AP and ADS
- Like ADS, AP is a desire and not a belief. It is a desire that is heavily determined by beliefs (specifically, self-conception) which is what makes it so malleable.
- They are both species of self-love. AP could be an outgrowth of ADS. ADS is genetically prior to AP.
Neuhouser ends the chapter by trying to answer the question: is this fundamental drive for recognition also a human Good for Rousseau? He answers in the positive because:
- It is something that almost everybody desires for its own sake.
- It is something that is universalize able and not incompatible with freedom. Hobbes thinks it is only because he has too limited a view on how AP can manifest.
- It is responsible for a whole host of goods without which one would not be recognizably “human.”

Part II Diagnosis

2. The Dangers of Amour Propre

The purpose of this chapter is to highlight key components of AP and show why it may be so prone to danger.
First half of the chapter is to understand, critique, and develop a common understanding of what “inflamed” AP is.
- The common reading of inflamed AP is simply inegalitarian AP. It is inflamed because:
  - Its confirmation requires others to value your trait more highly than their own (Seems difficult, the concern goes).
  - Recognition of superiority becomes a scarce good.
  - There exists an insatiable drive to improve one’s own lot.
- The issue with this reading is the failure to distinguish between respect and esteem. Respect is about being treated as a human (general) equal to other humans; esteem is about being praised for one unique feature of oneself as an individual (particular).
  - Wanting to be the best is the most “natural” way to win esteem but not the only way.
  - Esteem “precedes” respect in the limited sense that to desire esteem is easier because it only requires the conception of the individual, whereas respect requires a general conception of man and why he deserves respect (reason, suffering, freedom, etc.)
  - Esteem and Respect are not substitutes even if they do form some kind of economy such that the presence of one lessens the need for the other. The dominant thinks that respect is all we need, but clearly these are separate goods.
  - Once we see esteem as a necessary component of AP, we understand why an egalitarian prescription wouldn’t work: it’s unlikely that esteem (which is about particulars) will be netted out evenly.
Second half of the chapter is to highlight five features of AP that make it prone to danger/perversion/inflammation.
- The satisfaction of AP gives being to the self.
  - The force of AP is extremely strong because the social existence of the self is at stake.
  - It can infect and co-opt the logic of another pursuit. Something that you pursue for intrinsic reasons could be co-opted by AP.
- AP seeks relative standing.
  - Relative so easily means “better”.
  - If that’s the case ^ then you end up with a rat race where the goalpost keeps moving.
  - If everyone’s AP takes on an inegalitarian form, then no one will be satisfiable as a collective.
  - It gives you an incentive (not identifiable in any other of the passions to bring others down instrumentally. We can also gain a direct desire for domination.
- AP seeks standing in the eyes of others.
  - We can exist “outside of ourselves” which results in a lost of integrity.
  - One way to understand lost of integrity is that one has no sovereign core to judge whether things are good or bad. You will sacrifice other legitimate goods to conform closer to the opinions of others.
  - The other way to frame this is that one fully exists outside, fully determined by others opinions and this is alienation (for our sense of self to exist fully outside oneself).
  - Note this is not related to inegalitarian form of AP, this is also why egalitarian AP cannot be the sole prescription.
  - Rousseau tried and failed to ignore and suppress his AP but he couldn’t.
- Opinion is constitutive of the good sought by AP
  - This can lead people to care more about appearance rather than reality.
- AP is mediated by a self-conception
  - Self-conceptions can be so wildly off and inflated in all sorts of ways — overestimation is a widespread phenomenon.
  - Note: Rousseau does not see the mirage-like nature (as does Girard) to be a bad consequence of this malleability.

3. The Varieties of Inflamed AP

The goal of this chapter is to detail all the ways that AP can be inflamed so that the next chapter can detail how that inflammation can be resolved. Most of the chapter, however, deals with one specific species of inflammation: the question for superiority.
The ways that AP can be inflamed are already fully laid out to us in the previous chapter:
- AP can become feverish in strength consuming other goals
- AP seeks superiority to others that thwarts its ability to be universally satisfied, creates endless/needless desires, and gives reasons for individuals to actively bring others down.
- AP makes one lose their integrity
- AP makes people confuse appearance for reality
- AP gives exaggerated sense of one’s own importance
In what ways is the pursuit of superiority inflamed.
- Being the best is not the only but it’s the most natural form of AP. Even when it is not just about being best, esteem necessitates relativity. Because it is about being noteworthy enough to win esteem and that is comparative.
- Here is what makes desire for superiority non-problematic for the individual.
  - Superiority is not sought for its own sake or, even worse, to dominate others but only to 1. Win esteem 2. Out of a desire for excellence in the craft. Esteem can be desired for its own sake but superiority cannot be. Ie. You can desire to be better/best in so far as that will get you what you desire for its own sake — esteem.
    - Superiority is so integral to esteem (built right into the concept) that we may say someone desires superiority as well. But it’s important to only desire it for esteem. e.g. You should only want to be president and not want to get more votes for its own sake (to, say, humiliate your opponent) but they are so conjoined that you do want to get more votes too.
  - Esteem cannot be all-consuming causing you to lose your integrity.
  - The esteem you win must be both affirmable by you (subjectively) but also worthy of affirmation (objectively, actually good).
    - This may be one way of resolving the dilemma of how one can still be free while dependent on an external source. Much like how the general will is external but affirmed by the subject, the esteem-er, the recognizer only has force over you if you affirm it according to your own standard of judgement. That is to say you are still not determined by anything outside of you.
    - Recognizing the recognizer, esteeming the esteem-er is a reciprocal but not equal relationship. It does not require them to be equals but merely a good judge
- Here is what makes desire for superiority compatible with universalizability:
  - Wanting to get special respect (more deserving of goods) is not universalizable, but wanting to be most highly regarded by a specific set of people (like one’s lover) is.
  - Wanting to do well in a particular talent is also universalizable.
  - Wanting to do BEST in a particular talent clearly is not. But it is so natural a desire that it can’t really be eradicated and it is so clearly important for humanity. The way to get around this is that if you fail to be BEST, the society around you should have other available species of esteem (e.g. merely being good) that can satisfy your esteem. That means a society can’t have an all-or-none mentality where your only goal in life is to be the best and a failure to achieve that equates to a failure of life.
  - The system must net out rewards commensurate with merit.
- Once someone has achieved a superior standing they cannot believe they are “of a more excellent nature”
  - You clearly cannot believe you are more deserving of respect just because you are more deserving of esteem. And those who are incompetent (not deserving of esteem) cannot be thought of as deserving less of respect. That is to say you can’t confuse being better in specific talent to being more worthy as person.
  - You can take pride in, congratulate yourself, take delight in things that you didn’t work for (natural gifts, luck, help from others) but you cannot think that you deserve it.
  - There are two pathways of exaggeration … one is to exaggerate what one is responsible for within ones talents (exaggeration in degree); the other is to have a strong belief in ones specific talents be an indicator that one is a more worthy person (exaggeration in kind).
  - It does seem that Rousseau does permit one to be esteemed by natural gifts and even take some pride in it (while fully comprehending it is arbitrary). The vanilla/standard form of esteem implies that one is deserving of that esteem and, thus of one's gifts. But Rousseau is saying here there is a more limited form of esteem where you are esteeming someone for thing that happened to them.

4. Why Inflamed Amour-Propre is So Common

Before we can talk about prescriptions, we need to talk about why inflamed version of AP is so common ie. We need to trace out the pathways that cause their inflammation.
- All of these pathways will be revealed to be not necessary but highly natural for human (individual and social) development. What this means is that Rousseau will exonerate human nature and creation itself from blame. However he will also show how natural these pathways of inflammation are such that only very conscious, artificial intervention can resolve it (topic of next section).
- Going to look at the multivariate developmental factors in SD and E which cause inflammation.
SD: social causes
- When AP appears in SD it’s the desire to be the best (but we’ve already discussed how that’s not necessarily problematic).
- It’s more how AP is this spark and then you have four (highly likely) socio-historical conditions which act as the fuel:
  - Differentiation (inequality) amongst individuals inflame desire for superior standing
  - Division of labor make subjects dependent on each other. “What yoke could be imposed on men who need nothing?” It’s because of dependency that exploitation can exist and that the desire for mastery over others can be an end in itself.
  - Increase in productivity means that there is time for leisure (only when the lower-level Maslow’s goods are satisfied can we chase after these social goods) and luxury (which contributes to AP’s inflammation by creating different ends).
  - Private property provides limitless avenues for people to compete and show off.
- If these were the only conditions under which AP needs to be inflamed, then humanity would be in trouble since they are so common. Thankfully there are two other supporting conditions that make this combustion happen:
  - The society only gives recognition when you are the best/outdo others (only the most exaggerated versions of esteem and no respect at all)
  - Ignorance of all of this was the issue. Ignorance of how seemingly innocuous decisions (“the man circumscribing the land”) leads to disaster. This is why philosophy will have an important role to play in society’s rehabilitation.
E: Psychological causes of inflammation
- Infancy and fostering the will to dominate
  - Infants cannot satisfy their own ADS. The only way it does so is by screaming and crying.
  - The infant is a tyrant then but if they are just commanding to satisfy ADS its not inflammation and its not a drive to domination (at least not for its own sake, which would be worrisome).
  - Rousseau needs another psychological tool: the active principle, the desire to see one’s will and existence reflected in the world.
  - The crying infant discovers that it can get this active principle satisfied by commanding adults even if it doesn’t need anything. In fact, because of how impotent it is, it can get this active principle satisfied only through commanding adults.
  - The active principle is what first awakens AP. AP is a subset of the active principle as it relates to the social world.
  - Doesn’t this get dangerously close to suggesting that all babies necessarily have a drive for domination? Rousseau would say they all have done it for its own sake and thus all have a taste (importantly, drive for domination lays dormant within man) but whether it develops into an enduring desire is up to parenting (e.g. not acquiescing to a baby when it doesn’t have needs and just wants attention).
  - Another extreme would be to be violent to the baby or to ignore its needs even when they are genuine, they can grow up to have an unfillable hole with the belief that no amount of recognition can satisfy them.
- Adolescence and the drive to be the best
  - The first instance of AP in adolescence is to be #1. Why is this the case?
  - It is intimately tied with the birth of sexuality and the logic of romantic love: if I love you above all others I desire the same reciprocation (to be above all others). This is the form of romantic love and thus what form AP first takes as well.
  - But why does romantic love take this exclusionary force? Is this not a cultural contingency?
  - Neuhouser offer too interpretations that both then trace the romantic form of love to relationship of baby to caretaker.
    - The first argument is that AP is really a sprouting out of ADS in that 1. Initially ADS and AP were both about getting caretaker to serve us. Because we couldn’t satisfy our own ADS for every instance we had to have services of others (which confers AP) 2. AP, like ADS is also a form of self love. The self it seeks to benefit is the social not physical self. Because of this and the fact that ADS prioritizes itself above all others, the initial form of AP is to also prioritize oneself above all others (“I am best”).
    - The second argument is that adult love is outgrowth of infant love of caretaker. The infant both loves the caretaker totally (it is only source of nourishment) and desires the singular love of the caretaker (otherwise its survival is at risk). Adult love also takes on this form.
  - The argument is that AP first takes on the shape of the desire to be best because that is the shape of romantic desire which is itself modeled after the shape of the infant’s desire.

Part III Prescription

5. Social and Domestic Remedies

The goal of this chapter is to discuss what prescription that exist that can counteract the inflammation of AP. Latter half is pedagogical, first half is social political.
- Clearly to not have AP anymore is not possible.
- To throw our hands int he air and give up clearly is not the prescription either.
- What is the relation between the prescriptions of SC and E?
  - E is about early formation before entering into society. SC is about formation after adulthood.
  - The more important distinction is that E is about education of the individual and SC is about the education of the citizen. Prima facie, they seem to be conflicting aims. SC is about how an individual can learn to be a part of the general will and lose the I in the we. E is about forming a core and solid basis that the I can exist independently from the We.
  - Framed in a different way E is about formation and keeping the child away from society so that they can develop their own solid core before AP hits, to furnish all these defensive resources. SC is about taming and directing that AP.
SC is about addressing all of the conditions (division of labor, increased productivity, social differentiation, private property, no other channels of expressing AP)
- Rousseau clearly does not permit classes (aristocratic ranks) to form. The idea is that the most grotesque form of AP is to dominate others for the sake of domination. And domination relies on dependence and structured inequalities so these need to be eradicated.
  - Main opportunities for social standing cannot involve social subjugation of others (e.g. capturing slaves in war is another example).
- But even wealth inequality (without solidified classes) is not ok. For two reasons…
  - Disparities in wealth create the type of dependence discussed above.
  - They also create environments/incentives/foundations for grotesque displays of difference that further inflame AP. What’s crucial here is that by limiting massive differences in wealth, not only do you remove a main CHANNEL of AP’s expression you also remove a main cause of its inflammation. This is because that unlike say personal merit wealth is fungible with almost everything else and it can turn everything into a status game. Thus a society that worships wealth to a high degree inflames AP more than a certain society that worships say artistic ability (because more objects in life are transmutable with wealth than artistic ability).
- Institutions must also exist to satisfy and exist as appropriate channels and providers for AP.
  - Citizens should be recognized as equal subjects to (everyone equal before law), authors to (everyone can vote), and protected from (having a private sphere where general will does not command) the state. Of course this is only respect.
  - Rousseau hints at opportunities for subjects to channel their AP into practicing bravery or virtue to satisfy esteem.
  - A surprising institution that satisfies esteem is the nuclear family and romantic love. It satisfies even the most extreme form of AP because you are desired by your lover above all. Through institutions like marriage the state gives public recognition to this private sentiment (this is a reason why sanctity of marriage is important, because when you cheat you rob your lover of this exclusive type of esteem given to you).
Emile’s education is split into two stages, before AP is awakened and after it is awakened. More accurately, it’s about delaying the strength of AP for as long as possible until adolescence when 1. Reason emerges to constrain it 2. It becomes undeniable with the rise of sexual desire.
- The early period’s strategy is to encourage Emile to pursue things only for their own sake and try to protect him from society but even being motivated by any gaze. This is to cultivate a strong, independent core.
- When AP sprouts forth alongside sexual desire
  - Pity must be encouraged to counteract when AP starts harming others.
  - Imagination plays a key role here because one must identify with the victim as well as direct the sentiment of pity somewhere.
  - Emile is to understand the vicissitudes of fate as well as how the fortunate are undeserving of their advantages by, among other things, meditating on the likelihood of catastrophe.
  - A sense of equality of worth must be instilled in him.
  - He must realize that the traditional rewards of success are not true Goods, but even true Goods are more often than not the gift of chance rather than deserved. (Emile is one lucky recipient having had such a great education)
How the prescriptions laid out below counteract each way that AP can be unreasonably inflamed
- To counter the power of AP …
  - Domestic education prolongs the dormancy of that passion for as long as possible (before sexual desire is awakened).
  - Pity needs to be fostered and expanded that counteracts the destructive tendencies of AP.
  - Social political institutions help reduce it by offereing other avenues of recognition.
- To counter the superiority of AP …
  - In infancy not to encourage domination (distinguishing need from whim).
  - Instills principles of equality by showing the arbitrariness and unsatisfactory quality of success.
  - The state eradicates most extreme forms of inequality while encouraging institutions like the nuclear family which allow it to manifest in a healthy manner.
- To counter the dependence created by AP …
  - Political institutions that provide strong forms of respect.
  - Pre-adolescent education that cultivates in the child a strong internal core of esteem.
- To counter how AP makes people focus on appearance rather than substance …
  - Emile learns to judge for himself and have an independent core of reason to evaluate things.
- Chronic dissatisfaction stemming from inflated expectations is resolved by …
  - Helping child shape how much/what kidn fo recognition one deserves.
  - Need to be spared early experiences of humiliation and disrespect which produce unsatisfiable urges.

6. The Standpoint of Reason

AP is a necessary faculty for flourishing human life, this is the key reason we cannot follow our stoic forbearers in denying it in any strong sense. The strategy must be of molding and not abandonment.
What is AP’s positive potential?
- It is directly responsible for a whole host of human goods. In SD, the formation of AP is also the formation of “the sweetest sentiment known to man.”
- AP can be channeled for positive ends (instrumentally)
- The most original and interesting part of Rousseau’s explication of AP’s positive potential lies in how AP makes him a subject: freedom, morality, reason, and self-determination will be impossible. We are just gonna trace the development of reason because it is the central
Because Rousseau never properly gives us a definition of “reason,” we are going to have to reconstruct it from what he says about the general will.
- Perspective of the general will
  - General will is about stepping out of the position of one’s immediate interests into another normative perspective.
  - The body which one enters when thinking from the perspective of the general will is that of the collective polis which constitutes a self (1. Numerological distinct 2. Conception of what is good for it).
  - The General will seeks to satisfy the good of EACH not good of ALL. That is to say it is not a utilitarian aggregation of the happiness (permitting tradeoffs between one member and another) but to ensure that everyone’s basic/fundamental needs are satisfied. The perspective you are entering into is: “does the law proposed thwart the fundamental needs of each member.” Of course since you can’t go about doing that for everyone you generalize into a perspective that is supposed to represent “each” and not “all.”
- Normative force of the general will
  - The rule here is that you cannot overvalue any citizen’s (including your own) fundamental goods over another’s AND any citizen’s fundamental interests override any other’s non-fundamental interests. What is the normative force that enables people to go against their own immediate interests?
  - The normative force comes from 1. Distinguishing within oneself the fundamental (life, freedom) from the non-fundamental interests 2. Recognizing the moral equality of persons. It is out of ADS (1) but guided through equal recognition that this force becomes binding.
- In what way is the general will “public” reason?
  - The good/just is determined by nature and not subjective. Furthermore, a lone reasoner herself can access this good. In what way, then, is the functioning of reason “public”?
  - Seemingly contradicting ^, Rousseau declares that, in a vote, if a Majority goes against my conclusions, then I have to submit to that majority — even stronger, believe that the majority has better captured the good. He says that “conventions” are the legitimate basis of right.
  - The way these are reconciled is that humans are fallible, and even if you could grasp the principles of Justice, their application is indeterminate. Therefore the reasoner must believe in her own fallibility. The flip side is that the reasoner must also give credence to the outcome of deliberation of other reasoners IF the right circumstances are at play (they are of sound mind, know all the evidence, have a spirit of participation and not egotistically minded). Thus any reasoner, if he should judge that the majority came to an opposing conclusion through sound mechanisms, should have further suspicion of his own outcome. Not only should he practically follow the majority, he should also believe that the majority captured “right” better.
    - Hegel would go on to extrapolate this from right to many other conclusions of reason.
  - Ultimately it is the confirmation of the sound group that generates the legitimacy of the obligations of the general will … even if I am the ultimate arbiter on whether the group is sound or not. Ie. If I answer “no” that still does not give my contrary position any normative force because it does not have the backing of consensus.
  - We are intersubjective reasoners in the sense that reasons fallibility makes it such that we gain certainty by the consensus of other sound reasoners.
  - So, the full use of reason is already intersubjective because 1. By obeying reason, I am recognizing their equal moral status to me 2. By obeying a contrary majority position, I am recognizing their soundness as reasoners.

7. AP's Role in Forming Rational Subjects

In this chapter, Neuhouser is trying to articulate how AP contributes to the capacity of rational agency as described in the previous. There are two large distinctions of how AP “contributes”: 1. How AP helps one enter into the standpoint/perspective of reason and 2. How AP provides the motivational resources to execute the dictates of reason.
- Reason requires us to 1. Step back from our particular desires 2. Conceive of oneself as “equal” to others 3. Relinquish the claim to ultimate authority over reason.
- AP is not solely responsible for rational agency. ADS and pity are needed as well. Even stronger, only ideal conditions is sufficient to produce the full ideal of rational agency. Neuhouser is merely trying to show that AP is necessary.
- Both of these ways in which AP contributes can be seen as what Rousseau meant when he said to “transform into a sublime virtue the dangerous disposition out of which all our vices are born.”
The perspective of reason
- It is tempting to think that AP is what gets us out of solipsism. But ADS already does this: in my attempt of satisfying my own needs, I have to think about the needs, desires, judgements, and decisions of others.
- What is different is that AP forces you to inhabit another normative perspective different from your own. ADS treats the opinions of others as instrumental, evaluating them against one’s immediate normative goals. AP treats the opinion of others as an end-in-itself, as something that is authoritative. This is the unique pathway opened up.
  - Even more strongly, for Rousseau’s idiosyncratic understanding of reason, this authority is grounded in other ethical agents.
- Pity is not enough to generate this perspective because what you value in pity is their experiences not their judgements. Furthermore, pity is unconstrained and circumscribed to a small circle. Where we need to get to is equality for all citizens. AP provides that force as well because it is the one that seeks comparison between people.
- ADS cannot help us enter into the perspective of reason because 1. The position is “each” not “all” which is a much more theoretical perspective than, say, identifying with the fatherland. 2. The perspective of reason is constrained on the narrower, fundamental interests of self. It’s not the full set of goods that ADS is after.
The motivational forces of reason
- There is a big debate in the history of philosophy of actions that are done merely in accordance with duty.
  - Kant
    - Anything done even with a tinge of desire for anything but duty itself is not morally praiseworthy.
    - For Kant, being motivated by the moral law comes from a respect of that moral law which is an extension of the respect to one self as a rational agent. Ie. The existential consequence to doing something wrong is to despise oneself.
  - Smith
    - Distinguishes between the love of true glory (desire for esteem through virtuous actions) from the lover of virtue (desire for virtue itself) and elevates the latter over the former but still praises the former over the lover of vanity (desire for esteem for any action). It is important that smith conceives of the desire of esteem constrained by virtue as a noble desire.
    - Smith thinks that in principle an agent can be motivated by duty alone but in ordinary behavior the desire for praise and praiseworthiness are blended together.
    - Aristotle also praises the lover of true glory. “Aristotle, too, comes close to Rousseau’s view when he allows for the pleasure that is a ‘consequent end’ of virtue—a pleasure that ‘completes’ virtuous activity—to count also as that activity’s aim (NE, 1174b–1175a).”
  - Rousseau
    - On one hand Rousseau seems to agree with Kant that Emile is the lover of virtue who does not aim for praise but only for praiseworthiness. He takes DELIGHT in praise but does not aim for it. “When Emile follows his reason, he is described not as seeking the approval of others but as taking delight in it; he is said to rejoice in their good opinion of him but not to act for the purpose of attaining it. The implication is that Emile, as depicted towards the end of Book IV, does not to any degree make esteem from others the aim of his virtu- ous action, though he is pleased when he is fortunate enough to find it, accepting their approval of him as a bonus, as it were, that acting rightly sometimes brings with it. In this respect Rousseau’s well-educated man seems to approximate Smith’s lover of virtue: if Emile appreciates his fellows’ esteem but regards it merely as a bonus, then for him the satisfaction that comes simply from knowing that he has acted well must by itself be sufficient to motivate his virtuous conduct.”
    - But in other areas he is suggesting that esteem is constitutive for rational agency.
    - How do we reconcile this tension? Does Rousseau praise the lover of true glory?
      - Neuhouser resolves this antinomy (self-sufficiency vs. motivated by the group) by suggesting there isn’t one singular source of motivation for rational activity. That it could come from both sources whose alignment is a rare but full expression of rational agency but whose conflict means that philosophy has no way to arbitrate between the two because one is not prior to the other.
      - The interesting answer then seems to be that it is possible to be a man of virtue but the lover of true glory is actually superior it is a fuller expression.
    - Emile wants something more than Smith’s lover of true glory. In addition to 1. Praise and 2. Praiseworthiness (being virtuous), he also desires 3. That the Praise-giver be worthy. (He wants to form a reciprocal community)
- Here are all the ways that AP can be said to furnish the motivational resources for rational agency:
  - Even when one fully esteems himself in motivating rational action (done without the aim or possibility of praise) this still 1. Takes on the structure of AP, vis a vis Smith’s internal spectator, of an evaluative gaze of another that judges oneself 2. Is made developmentally possible in childhood by the child internalizing a parental authority. This is how Emile’s tutor as well as Freud theorized about the creation of the conscience.
    - Another way to say this is: AP motivates rational agency by helping us inhabit a practical identity with certain norms associated with it. One had to win the identity of being “roman” which came with it a set of norms and obligations. This is about winning esteem in one’s own eyes (desiring of title “roman”) as much as it is about winning the esteem of others.
  - One is motivated to act in accordance with reason through two external forces:
    - “Rational motivation normally relies also on actual esteem one receives, or hopes to receive, from one’s like-minded associates. In other words, in being moved by reason, the concern to find honor in one’s own eyes typically converges with, and is reinforced by, a concern to win it from others. This means that the drive to be recognized by others as worthy is not only developmentally necessary for rational agency; it also plays an ongoing role in motivating fully educated rational agents. There are two sets of reasons—one psychological, the other philosophical—behind Rousseau’s claim that the drive for the actual esteem of others is indispensable to rational motivation. Amour-propre is psychologically indispensable because the ‘higher’ (more sublimated) desire to be merely worthy of honor is generally too weak, and too difficult to acquire and maintain, to be relied on alone to sustain moral agency over time in the face of powerful, competing motivations. For most human beings, a wholly internally sanctioned sense of what is right is seldom enough to produce virtuous behavior over a long period of time. This psychological point converges with Rousseau’s philosophical reasons for believing that winning—if not necessarily seeking—the esteem of others is intrinsic to rational action.“
    - The very act of pursuing rational agency for Rousseau means we are both recognizing the group as valid moral actors and the group validates my interpretation and application of reason. That is to say, for Rousseau, the desire to determine one’s actions in accordance with reason IS the same as wanting to win the esteem of others (specifically that one is a competent interpreter and applier of a community’s ideals).
      - The upshot of this is that not only is AP transformed into a motor for good (rational agency) that good is able to satisfy AP: by successfully reasoning in this way, you also win recognition!
      - Someone who violates this suffers from AP. It’s interesting that he’s flipped Kant on his head. Someone who doesn’t seek recognition in rational action is worse because it represents an arrogance and narcissism.
- Neuhouser closes his discussion on AP and rational agency with a discussion of what the other sense of relative (comparison) plays in rational agency.
  - Hume, Aristotle, and Smith all suggests that to win esteem is necessarily relative.
  - At least, because the ideal of virtue is so hard to achieve we need to compare ourselves to others like us to see how we are doing. (Even if its not for superiority we compare)
  - But we can’t be aiming for the relative rather than the ideal, at the very best this is a retrospective evaluative criterion but can’t be a motivation (to do good because one wants to do better than others). If comparison is involved at all, it is the desire to be “equal” as affirmed by other reasoned subjects as part of the general will.

Conclusion

Rousseau’s theory of AP has accomplished a great deal, Neuhouser thinks he is right on
- The nature and aims of AP
- Its centrality in human existence
- Its capacity to wreak havoc
- The social institutions and educational measures to remedy the ills
- AP as an indispensable component of rationality
Despite this, Neuhouser thinks that Rousseau’s aims were too ambitious and this does not achieve the aims of Theodicy he had set forth, specifically
- The diagnosis is flawed in trying to show that all of human evil is explainable by inflamed versions of AP.
  - Neuhouser thinks that something like the active principle needs to be posited to explain a direct desire for power that clearly animates the cruelties of mankind.
- But even if we were to circumscribe his project to resolving inflamed AP, Rousseau has shown the causes of inflammation to be so many and its treatments to be so demanding that its not even clear if theoretically it constitutes a satisfying and harmonious system.

Discourse on the Arts and Sciences by Rousseau | Notes & Summary

Johnathan Bi — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 21:02:59 GMT

This discourse addresses one of the "grand and finest" questions ever raised. Because it is not concerned with metaphysical subtleties but truths that affect the happiness of mankind.
Rousseau expects universal blame for taking this negative position. He has sided with a few wise men against the fashionable intellectuals who style themselves "freethinkers" AND the public.
1. What's noteworthy is how he describes siding with someone as having been honored by them. The idea isn't to escape the desire for recognition but to delight in recognition from the right sources.
He mentioned that he restored the Discourse which it was awarded the prize with few slight changes.
Rousseau reframes the question by adding the suggestion that enlightenment may have contributed to corruption: "Has the restoration of the Sciences and Arts contributed to the purification of Morals, or to their corruption?"
1. Rousseau introduces himself as someone who "knows nothing" and is not unproud of it. This is the Socratic ignorance of the wise.
Rousseau understands the difficulty of the task in front of him to argue against science in front of a celebrated academy. The way he is going to argue against this more is to appeal to an even more important/deeply held more: virtue.
1. He is buttering up people listening to his speech. It is evident that he thinks they are neither erudite nor virtuous but he says here they are both.
Rousseau says by defending truth there is a Prize that cannot escape from him: the prize he will win from the depth of his heart.
Rousseau calls the progress in knowledge of the past few generations "a grand and a fine spectacle." The progress of knowledge combines a going out to the stars and a return to oneself. Studying of the world but also, more importantly, study of man.
He starts his history in the middle ages which is "state worse than ignorance" because it believes because it can regurgitate the big words of Aristotle it has knowledge. False knowing.
1. What ended the middle ages was the fall of the throne of Constantine that brought back Greek antiquity through the Muslims into Italy and engendered the Renaissance.
2. The letters first flourished, the sciences then followed.
3. And we began receiving "the major advantage of commerce with the muses" which is sociability that inspired in people "the desire to please one another with works worthy of their mutual approbation."
  1. IMPORTANT: he frames this as a benefit, this desire for recognition.
The body has needs which make for the foundations of political society (ruler, laws, enforcers, etc.).
1. The mind has its needs, for being agreeable/politeness/esteem? And these results in anesthetics for the foundations of political society.
  1. "The Sciences, Letters, and Arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which they are laden, throttle in them the sentiment of that original freedom for which they seemed born, make them love their slavery, and fashion them into what is called civilized peoples."
2. Arts and sciences seem to create a few things that are all about increasing dependence among people to make them easier to govern:
  1. Increase of needs
  2. Desire to have talents (instead of virtues)
  3. Easy and amicable relations
3. The conclusion is that civilized people have all the appearances of virtues without having a single virtue.
4. Footnote: princes always love it when their subjects gain a taste for the arts, because it makes them more dependent and creates unnecessary needs.
  1. Alexander forced subjects to give up fishing and eat common foods that they themselves couldn’t' produce.
  2. Native Americans who have little needs are impossible to tame.
This politeness/civility is what differentiated Athens from Rome. But Rousseau's Europe threatens to outplay even athens.
The outside does not match the inside
1. People with title "philosopher" are not genuine philosophers
2. The principles by which people declare they follow are different from the maxims they actually follow
3. An athletic body is not found underneath flowery dress:
  1. "Apparel is no less alien to virtue, which is the strength and vigor of the soul. The good man is an Athlete who delights in fighting naked: He despises al those vile ornaments which would hinder his use of his strength, and most of which were invented only to conceal some deformity."
It's not that Art corrupted human nature, humans were "at bottom, no better." (although be careful, he could mean that human nature was at bottom no better but that humans were better).
1. The big critique is that art and an artistic culture teaches us how to feign.
2. Example: first day of humanities seminar it was clear who the public school kids and private school kids were. Private school taught them the art of saying nothing in the most complex of ways.
The issue is that in an artistic culture 1. everyone is afraid of being different and following one's own genius because of the rules and regs 2. in appearance, everyone seems the same and so its impossible to know who your friends really are until its too late.
1. QUESTION: are these paragraphs the issue with civilization or with art and science? I suppose art teaches you how to behave like this?
Describing the consequences of this veil. So indeed human nature has gotten worse but humans have.
1. Important: this will appear to be enlightenment because many bad things will seemed to have gone away but they will be replaced by much more subtle offenses or the death of virtue:
  1. No direct profanities but blasphemies that do not sound like such
  2. No vaunting merit but disparaging others
  3. No direct offense to others, but artful sabatoge
  4. No national hatreds, but only because no more love for fatherland
2. The idea is that enlightenment limits certain vices but turns other vices into virtues.
3. Footnote: Montaigne says he likes doing philosophy but only for his own/its own sake. Its unbecoming to treat it like a career.
QUESTION: this means that the distant stranger would be fooled right? That he would also think modern Europeans are moral people. This is supposed to show how convincing the deception is.
Rousseau now argues that what he has observed in Europe is not just a coincidence but a necessity. This is how strong a claim he makes: "our souls have become corrupted in proportion as our Sciences and our Arts have advanced toward perfection."
1. He claims that their relation is as fixed as moon is to tides. This is a nod to Newton.
2. It is true "at all times and in all places" he now will go on to expand that history.
First example he gives is of Egypt. Which had Sesostris who conquered the world (probably got that from Herodotus), became "the mother of philosophy and the fine arts" and soon thereafter was conquered.
1. IMPORTANT: One (large) problem with this reading: native Egyptian rule spanned almost 3 Millenia from 3000 BC to 600 BC and art, architecture, and culture flourished for a long time. "Soon thereafter" is not right.
Second example is Greece people who vanquished Asia twice (Troy and Persia) who disintegrated from Arts and Sciences and fell to the Macedonian yoke.
1. This is quite accurate. Victory against the Persians were early 5th century BC. The Greek Golden Age was 5th century BC and then the domination of Macedonia was mid 4th century.
Third example is Rome. It was founded by a Shepherd (Romulus and Remus' adopted father) but degenerated with the rise of the poets: Ennius, Terence, Catullus, Ovid, and Martial. Rousseau seems to think the Roman republic reached its peak around 2nd century BC. But its thirst for conquest caught up with itself.
1. Petronius under Nero was named "arbiter of good taste" this is the "eve" of the fall.
Constantinople is a bastion of art and science when the western empire collapsed and all it had to show for was corruption, debauchery, betrayal. And it is through this route that enlightenment re-entered into Europe.
The last example he gives is of contemporary China (18th century). Despite having a system that directly funneled the best scholars into the administration, it fell to the Tartars.
1. Again, this is not a great example because the imperial exams started in the Sui dynasty (6th century) and the first Mongol conquest, the first foreign-ruled dynasty didn't happen until the 13th century with Genghis Khan.
Rousseau then contrasts these nations with the nations who were protected from vain knowledge and instead had virtue:
1. Early Persians
2. Scythians
3. Germans
4. Early Rome
5. The Americas (native).
Important, it was not owing to 1. stupidity OR 2. lack of exposure that these "barbarians" did not cultivate the arts and sciences. It was because they saw the people who did and what it was doing to them.
Sparta was the heart of culture in Greece. While athens had a tyrant assemble the works of poets, Sparta expelled all Art and Artists, Sciences and Scientists.
The paradox is that Athens is where you get beautiful buildings and art, its where you produce astounding works that stand as models in every "corrupt age." Athens is brilliant. But Sparta, all we have left are tails of heroic deeds. There, the people are actually virtuous.
1. The choice we are given is between a brilliant or virtuous state.
A few wise men did "withstand the general tide, and guard against vice in the midst of the Muses." This means that despite their education they were not corrupted.
1. He now introduces how Socrates the "foremost" and "most wretched" of the Athenian artists
2. QUESTION: Does this mean that Socrates is one of these wisemen or he has been thoroughly corrupted? I think he is supposed to be a positive exemplar "wisest of men in the Judgement of the Gods," so how could he be called "wretched?"
3. IMPORTANT: great intellectuals always complain about other intellectuals. That should be a give away: Nietzsche, Rousseau, Socrates/Plato.
The poets have impressive talents, they claim they are wise, but are not.
Socrates examines the artists and he says because he was ignorant of the arts, he thought they must have possessed fine secrets. But what he found was that they were no better than the Poets because both of them mistook their excellence in a particular field (TALENT) for wisdom (VIRTUE).
Socrates at least knows that he has no wisdom, that he is ignorant.
Socrates spoke in praise of ignorance. He makes an important point that Socrates did not write any books. He didn’t want to contribute to vain science. He taught men through virtuous action … namely through his death.
Cato continued Socrates' campaign against the Greek intellectuals. But Rome eventually succumbed to learning.
1. "Ever since the Learned have begun to appear among us, so their own Philosophers themselves said, good Men have been in eclipse. Until then the Romans had been content to practice virtue; all was lost when they began to study it."
Resurrecting two Romans from the heyday to critique Rome at its most decadent: Cineas and Fabricius.
1. IMPORTANT RHETORICAL PASSAGE
2. IMPORTANT, just like the preface, Rousseau is being somewhat disingenuous here because Fabricius fails to recognize that it is precisely the love of conquest that has destroyed Rome. That it is the conquest of the enlightened by the unenlightened that has weakened the conqueror.
Rousseau says that his time has not changed at all. Socrates/Fabricius would have given the same critique to his Europe.
Providence has made men naturally ignorant. That is why learning is so difficult: not because it is good but because it is harmful.
1. "The heavy veil it has drawn over all of its operations seemed sufficiently to warn us that it had not destined us for vain inquiries."
2. Nature preserves us from science as a mother snatches a dangerous weapon from a child.
3. IMPORTANT this is not on science's uselessness but the exact opposite fear that there is great danger from it. Rousseau has in mind the social dangers but we might as well add the technological dangers from science.
The first part of it is history we now move on to examine science and art in themselves.
1. Rousseau says that his conclusion: probity is the daughter of ignorance and science and virtue are incompatible.
Rousseau begins with a genealogical attack
1. An ancient Egyptian tradition states that a God wishing to disturb man's tranquility was the inventor of the sciences.
  1. Footnote: Rousseau's claim is that the Greeks were also suspicious of Prometheus and they were the ones who nailed them to the mountain.
  2. Example: emperor Tiberius.
2. Rousseau suggests that the origin of human knowledge is vice not virtue and thus we should be suspicious of their advantages:
  1. Astronomy from superstition
  2. Eloquence of ambition, hatred, flattery, lying
  3. Geometry of greed
  4. Physics of a vain curiosity
  5. Ethics of pride
  6. QUESTION: help me understand geometry, physics, ethics?
The flaws in their origins closely mirror the flaw in the objects. The critique is that without these "objects" we wouldn't have use for these arts. Which means the arts didn't "cause" these objects but are reliant on them (and maybe the suspicion is that they encourage them for their self-interest).
1. Arts and luxury
2. Jurisprudence and injustice
3. History and tyrants, wars, and conspirator (it would be boring if everyone just did their duties).
4. QUESTION: the metaphor he uses is we are destine to die tied to the edge fo the well into which truth has withdrawn. The implication being we have a perverse need to get at the truth (tied) but we won't be able to (withdrawn)?
5. QUESTION: what exactly is the critique here of these as the objects? This is different from effect and origin. Origin is made to make you suspicious. Effects are the most important. What do these objects tell you about art?
Rousseau continues describing the difficulty of the question for truth:
1. To get to the truth we arrive at many falsehoods that are dangerous.
2. Falsehoods have an infinite number of combinations whereas the truth only has one.
3. So few people desire the truth "sincerely" as opposed for vanity/reputation/etc.
4. How will we recognize truth when we arrive at it? And what is our criterion for it?
5. Even if we have arrived at it, who among us will know how to use it?
We now move from the origin and the objects of science to their effects. The first effect is idleness and uselessness.
1. Rousseau thinks every useless citizen is actively harmful. Perhaps this isn't just because he himself is useless but he spread that uselessness he gives a model of being useless.
2. IMPORTANT we have a very different answer to this question than Rousseau now, but Rousseau asks a rhetorical question of what has science really done for us.
  1. "Answer me then, illustrious Philosophers, you to whom we owe it to know in what ratios bodies attract one another in a vacuum; the proportions between areas swept in equal times by the revolutions of the planets; which curves have conjugate points, which have inflection points, and which cusps; how man sees everything in God; how there is correspondence without communication between soul and body, as there would be between two clocks; what stars may be inhabited; what insects reproduce in an uncommon way. Answer me, I say, you from whom we have received so much sublime knowledge; fi you had never taught us any of these things, would we have been any the less numerous for it, any the less well governed, the less formidable, the less flourishing or the more perverse?"
3. He says, if even the greatest outcome of our greatest minds are so useless, what about all those obscure writers and intellectuals who do nothing.
  1. When you talk about the power law of outcomes, surely art and science is one of the greatest.
It's even worse than that! They don’t remain idle instead they go and undermine public mores.
1. What motivates them is not a hatred of virtue or dogmas but public opinion.
The even worse evil is Luxury, it is not caused by science (as idleness is) but the arts and letters.
1. Where there are arts and sciences there must be luxury. Where there is luxury there almost always are arts and sciences.
2. Luxury causes people think not in terms of virtue/vice but in terms of commerce and money.
Gives examples of poorer nations defeating richer nations.
1. IMPORTANT: the interesting thing that this teaches about us today, is never before has commerce and intellect been so tied together.
States must choose to be brilliant (ostentatious) and short-lived or virtuous and long-lasting.
1. The concern for commerce makes minds "debased" by host of futile cares and splintered.
Artists primarily care about recognition.
1. IMPORTANT observation that scholars care a lot more about recognition than merchants, people in industry.
2. Therefore, if an artists were to be born in a tasteless time. He would sacrafice his masterpiece to create popular work
3. IMPORTANT that rousseau does not hold out the standard of an artist who does art "for its own sake" you always seek someone's recognition. The correct recognition to seek is of many centuries past.
4. This is why he thinks taste his declined:
  1. The young are in charge of setting the tone.
  2. Women are setting taste and women are not being properly educated. IMPORTANT its not the ascendency of women itself that is the problem but that they don’t have the right taste. This is why women's education is so important for Rousseau:
    1. "I am far from thinking that this ascendancy of women is in itself an evil. It is a gift bestowed upon them by nature for the happiness of Mankind: better directed, it might produce as much good as it nowadays does hart. We are not sufficiently sensible to the benefits that would accrue to society if the half of Mankind which governs the other were given a better education. Men will always be what it pleases women that they be: so that if you want them to become great and virtuous, reach women what greatness of soul and virtue is."
5. He claims that Voltaire is guilty of this, pandering to the public, to fashions.
If someone in such a society with corrupted taste were to hold steadfast of soul, he would die in poverty and obscurity.
1. QUESTION: how does Rousseau explain his own rise?
Morals were best in a simple age when men lived in huts. When people's homes started looking like magnificent temples, mores became corrupted.
Gives two examples of how study of sciences soften men's courage rather than strengthen it.
1. Italian princes amused themselves to become more ingenious and learned than to practice warfare.
  1. Important to know that Rousseau is not pro-war, but he is using this as a way to convince his readers that one wouldn't be able to defend oneself.
2. When Goths attacked Greece they didn't burn the libraries because they wanted them to keep distracting their enemies.
Roman military virtue declined in proportion as they started cultivating the arts and sciences. Rise of the Medicis destroyed whatever martial values Italy managed to recover.
Modern soldiers may showcase bravery for the day but cannot bear long periods of extreme labors.
1. It's not that they themselves have studied too much art and science but the culture they live in do not encourage these martial values. Example being them seeing that their officers do not even have the strength to go on horseback.
Success in battles (which enlightened states can do) is different for success in war (difficult for enlightened states). What you need is not only courage but judgement.
1. Question: why do enlightened states' officers lack this?
2. Answer: next paragraph.
What is also being threatened are the moral qualities. Education is disastrous teaching them superfluous knowledge while not teaching them any necessary virtue.
1. Footnote: Montaigne says that despite the Spartans being surrounded by culture they only needed role models of bravery.
  1. And he gives an example of how when the education of Persian rulers went from role models and doing to teaching about ethics, everything went down the gutter.
All of our paintings are of aberrations from ancient Mythology so that children can learn bad deeds even before they can read.
The issue is that a society has translated the appreciation of virtue to the appreciation of talents. People don’t ask whether something is useful for political society but whether it is well-written / beautiful / etc.
IMPORTANT even the wise man is not insensitive to recognition (even if he will not chase fashions). Even he needs emulation, role models to seek in order to develop his virtue which instead languishes.
1. We have developed all these professions of learnedness but we no longer have citizens.
But the remedy is right next to the injury. Monarchs built academies to 1. develop human knowledge 2. protect the morals of a society.
These societies by upholding morality will inspire men of letters, who hope to join them, to behave morally.
1. We should be very cautious of Rousseau's praise here.
2. Question: what is the charitable way to read this, perhaps rhetoric? (the uncharitable way would be ass kissing)
Philosophers are charlatans hawking on public square. The advice he gives is esotericism.
1. Philosophers ought teach their ideas to only friends and children.
2. IMPORTANT perhaps this was the biggest issue with the imperial examinations:
  1. "So many organizations established for the benefit of the learned are al the more apt to make the objects of the sciences appear impressive and to direct men's minds to their cultivation."
Printing made things much worse
1. He points out the sectarian wars that it has created ("reign of the gospel").
2. People like Hobbes and Spinoza will last forever.
3. Oddly enough Rousseau sees a future where descendants who read these works will come to his side and ask to be returned to ignorance, innocence, and poverty.
4. Footnote: Rousseau forsees a time when wise rulers will destroy printing presses. He gives examples of why the burning of the library of alexandria is a good thing. Because we need nothing other than the Holy texts.
The worst are the popularizers and the anthologizers, the big issue is spreading knowledge to those unworthy.
1. Rousseau argues that the great geniuses such as Descartes and Newton not only needed no teachers but would have been limited by them. Instead, they needed to go on a path of their own.
2. QUESTION: this is the sudden twist: "if one wants nothing to be beyond their genius, nothing may be beyond their hopes." And now he advocates for his ultimate solution which is the joining of politics and enlightenment. That these intellectuals should be directly placed into office.
  1. QUESTION: Why isn't the honor of being a preceptor of humanity not enough? Why is being advisor to some king better?
  2. QUESTION: how does this not get entangled with this "So many organizations established for the benefit of the learned are al the more apt to make the objects of the sciences appear impressive and to direct men's minds to their cultivation."
  3. "Let Kings therefore not disdain admitting into their councils the people most capable of counseling them well."
Rousseau now calls himself a part of the talentless "vulgar men." He says that he is not destined for so much glory and that he should be content in obscurity.
1. QUESTION: I thought for the entire work this would be impossible "What good is it to seek our happiness in someone else's opinion if we can find it within ourselves?"
Final paragraph tying few things together:
1. It's time to return to oneself (learn the science of man) that is genuine philosophy.
2. We should stop envying the men of letters who made themselves immortal through artistry.
3. We should be Sparta to their Athens.

Rousseau's Critique of Science by Jeff Black | Notes & Summary

Johnathan Bi — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 20:50:40 GMT

Chapter 1

Science is one of the defining characteristics of modern society. What is unique about Rousseau's critique of science is that it proceeds within that other defining tradition of modernity, democracy/egalitarianism, and not outside of it (Heidegger, Nietzsche, Plato).
Four main questions investigated
- Why do progress of the arts and sciences lead to moral corruption?
  - He criticizes their public dissemination.
  - Their public dissemination destroys the mores needed to form a healthy political community.
  - Important pg. 10, they give new avenues for pride to latch onto. Primarily this is an investigation between pride/vanity and reason.
  - His argument is against popular enlightenment on the ground of protecting popular mores.
- What does FD tell us about Rousseau's system?
  - It is a system that 1. originates through introspection 2. established by analysis and synthesis (historical evidence is subordinated to 3. interpreted in accordance with evidence from non-historical sources.
- Why is FD important to Rousseau's system
  - The role of FD in Rousseau's ouvre:
    - There are two ways to read Rousseau's ouvre. The first, prepatory way is analysis which is to read things in chronological order. The second, ultimate way is synthesis which is to read things in reverse chronological order.
    - Analysis begins from particulars and ends in abstract principles. Synthesis begins from principles and ends in particularity.
    - So the first discourse is about the particulars of political life (corruption through science of morals etc.) while Emile is about the principles.
    - FD is the beginning of analysis and end of synthesis: both the original intuition of the system and draws ultimate consequences for the happiness of mankind.
    - It implies the need for Rousseau's fundamental principle: the natural goodness of man.
- What are the consequences for Rousseau's critique of science for us?
  - Rousseau is very pessimistic about the future because the inevitability of corruption.
  - But he holds out hope for future with moral purity and maybe covert scientific progress.
How this book is structured
- Chapter 2: rhetoric of FD
- Part 1: reading FD just on its own. This is the beginning of the analysis.
  - Chapter 3: corruption of mores
  - Chapter 4: account of spread of enlightenment and corruption of mores
  - Chapter 5: ignorance and virtue
- Part 2: reading FD in context of other works. This is reading it as the end of the synthesis.
  - Chapter 6: what is meant by science and the natural goodness of man
  - Chapter 7: Virtue, vanity, and vice
  - Chapter 8: solution to moral corruption and the role that conscience plays in his thought
- Chapter 9: situating Rousseau in history of political thought and draws general conclusions

Chapter 2

Rousseau separates his readers into three
- The wise who he is writing to and will understand and maybe even appreciate his thoughts.
- The unwise (aka "the people") who will be hostile to Rousseau and his project.
  - Philosophers / Academics who fashion themselves as free thinkers / truth seekers but in reality are determined by public opinion and/or waste their time in metaphysical subtleties.
  - The rest who do not hold intellectual cultivation to be a key virtue.
The people are subject to deception which makes them think the civilized to be barbaric and the barbaric to be civilized. (The nature of this deception is topic of chapter 3)
Rousseau is writing for the wise and not the people. However, he knows that his work will be read by the people and he has limited hopes that some may be turned wise by his work. So he employs a rhetorical strategy of 1. grounding his critique as an appeal to virtue 2. exaggerating his readers virtue (flattering them).
- What's crucial is that Rousseau says he "never wants to speak" to the people and its only because his work will unavoidably be read by them that he employs this rhetorical strategy (pg. 26). The reason that the egalitarian Rousseau never wants to speak because he thinks the situation is largely helpless because people (see point above) are deceived.
Rousseau is motivated by recognition/reputation as well (pg.28) but not for the approval of his contemporaries but to establish a lasting recognition.
- QUESTION: why does Rousseau think that wise writers will be recognized by history if he thinks that moral corruption is almost inevitable (ie. It will get worse and worse)?
  - ANS: perhaps its because there will always be a small group of the wise that will carry the torch?
QUESTION: why is Socrates a hero (pg. 32)? Surely he represents the most pernicious type of questioning that hurts the mores of a society?

Chapter 3 Paragraphs 1 - 6 Moral Corruption

The first discourse attempts to answer two questions. The first question is the contingent one raise by Dijon about whether expansion of arts and sciences have contributed to moral decline. This is addressed in the first section where Rousseau traces the history of such a decline in Europe. But after that Rousseau is interested in answering the general form of that question. Whether this decline is inevitable and always paired.
Definitions
- Moral purity
  - Original state
  - Orientation towards liberty
  - Rusticity and transparency
  - Love of virtue, patriotism, and piety
  - Yields strength of soul and happiness.
- Moral corruption
  - Every change is corruption (pg. 46)
  - Characterized by politeness and deception
  - Undermines love of virtue
  - Yields weakness of soul
- Enlightenment
  - Study of the world combined with the study of man
  - This second turn is the more important turn, without which, the first is worse than useless
  - Interesting, so enlightenment itself is not the issue
  - Study of man must rely/begin with self-knowledge
    - Question: what guardrails does Rousseau have to make sure that self-knowledge is generalized. Ie. He may be more motivated by esteem than others and over-exaggerated that.
Rousseau's understanding of history (pg.51)
- Europe started off with barbarism, then shifted into genuine enlightenment that went from Egypt to Greece to Rome to Constantinople.
  - Enlightenment, very interestingly passes from the military losers to the victors. This implies that overly enlightened culture loses military vigor.
  - This chain has been broken in the 20th century when technology overcame will as the dominant force in warfare.
- As enlightenment shifted east, Europe became barbaric again but in a worse state because they thought they had access to knowledge (Aristotle, scholastics). This state is worse than the original state not because they are more corrupt.
- Rousseau's European Enlightenment is a restoration of the older knowledge. It is a positive because it was to teach the middle ages that they knew nothing.
Important (pg.52) Rousseau identifies sociability and not technology as the key "benefit" of arts and sciences.
- Question: why is that? One explanation is that Rousseau did not see the tremendous impact of technology in his time. But maybe another one (in second discourse) is that he thinks technology often makes us worse off, his mentioning of diseases. So it's not a benefit.
Sociability is the most important because politics as well as arts and sciences all originate from the needs of humans.
- Politics results from physical need.
- Art and science results from mental need for esteem.
- Art and science serves the need for the rulers because it makes subjects more petty and needy and dependent and thus easier to govern. It serves the need for the subjects because it gives them an avenue through which to win esteem.
  - The other (better) avenue to win esteem is virtue.
- Art and science also are important to subjects because it makes subjects bear political life and even enjoyable. This is a thin and fragile happiness which isn' the real thing.
  - As a result art and science will be interpreted as positive developments by people it actually corrupts. we
- Therefore the fundamnetal poltiical purpose of the arts and sciences is to decieve men about the despotic nature of political rule: that it benefits rulers more than people. This is where the egalitarian angle comes from. It's wool over the people's eyes. It's also deceptive because it gives people faux happiness, which is related to hypocrisy …
Moral corruption is tied to hypocrisy.
- Moral corruption represents
- People who adorn themselves in dress vs. rustic dress. Rousseau says that 1. it hampers one's strength 2. is usually made to hide some deformity.
- People use fancy language
- People are polite but still nasty
- Even wisemen of the age who appear to love virtue, only do it because they love esteem. They are moderate because of their immoderate concern for esteem.
- Important (pg.59) this dislike for hypocrisy is why Rousseau prefers the "generous" criminal to the weak hypocrite. The former has strength of soul intact.
- Issue with hypocrisy is a fragmentation of the soul. A lack of unity. A division between seeming and being and a dependence on transient opinions.
  - IMPORTANT (pg.56) the issue is not dependent on opinions of others but the things which you are dependent on. The good man who loves virtue as well as the man devoted to science and the arts are both proud. They both seek esteem but for very different things.
This paragraph was to answer the more limited version of Dijon's question of whether there HAS been corruption through art and sciences, Rousseau will now show how this corruption is necessary. He needs to answer 1. how, if art and science deceive people into believing they are happy when they are not, he is able to see through this veil and 2. whether moral virtue is compatible with a society built on enlightenment principles.

Chapter 4 Paragraphs 16 - 20 History

This chapter will focus on how somatic happiness (rather than psychological happiness) is related to corruption through the arts and sciences: namely, how a people (and not just individuals) experience military defeat.
- Ultimately the tie here is going to be shown to be weaker, and Rousseau is less concerned with this type of happiness than the previous. This is a rhetorical strategy to try and convince his popular readers who are more bent on traditional notions of "success".
Rousseau invites the comparison to Newton when he claims the relationship between moral corruption and enlightenment are constant like the moon and the tides (Newton was the first to observe this).
- This implies that he thinks this holds universally like a natural law.
- Specifically, just as gravity is the principle (unobservable outside its effects) on the moon and the tides, vanity (or amour propre more generally) is the principle of human nature that links moral corruption and enlightenment together.
- This also means that he is imitating Newton when he attempts to not speculate on the nature of the unobservable force and merely to posit it.
History of conquest
- Rousseau then goes on to list examples of empires that have been conquered because of too much enlightenment: Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, and Chinese.
- Chinese case is especially interesting (pg. 78)
  - Chinese regime at the time had been adopted by philosophers like Diderot and Voltaire as the exemplar of an enlightened state that held cultivation to the proper honor.
  - Rousseau's solution to a lot of the issues is going to rely on tying political power with erudition which is exactly what the Chinese state did.
- Sparta's victory over Athens is an example: "in the long run true courage won out over resources." (Final Reply)
  - Important but this chain has been broken where democracies have repeatedly defeated more austere nations with less art and science. This has to do with the weaponization of knowledge since the 20th century. Best example here is how mathematical logic which even its creators thought was a completely useless discipline became the bedrock for computing and how physics paved the way for the Nuke. Forces us to realize how modern a phenomena that is. The alliance between power and intellect.
  - (pg. 86) But even in Rousseau's time he admits the European conquest of the Americas represents example of resources triumphing against virtue. So this is not a law of the universe (unlike the relationship of arts and sciences and psychological unhappiness). So the claim isn't that military victory always comes with lack of intellectual life but merely there is strong causal relationship. That holds causal relationship holds true, however, another causal relationship has just gotten a lot stronger
People who were morally pure and protected from "vain knowledge." Rousseau seperates these people into two groups:
- The first group is people who have positive knowledge in addition to no vain knowledge
- The second group are people (American natives is one example Rousseau gives) who are protected out of ignorance.
The status of Rousseau's claims and the role of historical evidence.
- As the european conquest of americas example goes to show, or how large of a time gap there is between say introduction of imperial exams and the fall of China to the Mongols, and considering that most of Rousseau's theses are psychological, we must ask why he appeals to history? What is the role of history in his argumentation?
- This is Rousseau's method by starting from historical facts and non-historical evidence (e.g. introspection) he reasons to first principles of human nature which then helps him come back to interpret the facts. This leads to a few very interesting implications:
  - He does not care if a fact is true in so far as it points to the right principle. It is acceptable to fabricate facts.
  - One historian who recognizes the relationship between enlightenment and corruption is sufficient evidence for his position whereas ten who do not is not sufficient evidence against because 1. the first historian would be speaking against his self interest 2. historians have tendency to read their own judgements into things (read their own principles into things) which may not be correct.
  - Accurate historical facts that contradict a principle you have certainty in can be explained by secondary causes e.g. European conquest of the americas.
We have an answer to the question how Rousseau was able to see through the link between apparent happiness and enlightenment: its because he had a superior principle that allowed him to interpret the facts in a better way. Clearly history is not conclusive in showing the necessary relationship between enlightenment and unhappiness so now we are going to examine this principle which enables Rousseau to draw the "necessary" conclusion.
- There are two reasons why history is not the strongest way to argue for this conclusion. First, its because history mostly documents public phenomena (battles) but the more important one is the private phenomena (experiences/happiness). Second, because history is impotent without the underlying principles of causality that ties facts together.

Chapter 5 Paragraphs 26 - 35 Ignorance

This chapter focuses on Rousseau bringing in 3 historical personalities (and himself) sequentially to defend his position. Each of these people is going to be a manifestation of a certain positive form of ignorance.
- Ignorance of the wise
  - Socrates
    - Socrates is meant to show that in the individual, good morals and enlightenment can come together. That is to say, the wise man is both virtuous and enlightened. It's only the "people" who cannot be both.
    - QUESTION: Rousseau would go on and highly edit the translation of Plato's Apology from Diderot. The most interesting omission is Socrates going around town questioning people's mores and being executed for it. That is the bad Socrates?
    - The good Socrates is someone who admits he knows nothing. But at least compared to others who claim they know a lot he is honest in his self-assessment. Of course this type of ignorance of the wise is quite similar to enlightenment: knowing what one knows and what one doesn’t. Getting up to the boundary of knowledge.
  - Rousseau
    - Rousseau discusses how providence did not intend us to be knowledgeable (e.g. we are born in state of ignorance). The analogy he uses is of a mother taking away a dangerous weapon from a child. The implication being that in the hands of the people knowledge is dangerous, but a weapon could be suitable for the right type of person. Such is the case with knowledge, only the wise know how to wield it.
      - His lack of faith in the people: "some wise men, it is true, resisted the general torrent, and kept themselves from vice while dwelling with the Muses."
- Ignorance of the heroic / Ignorance of the public
  - Cato the Elder
    - Cato was not given a speech like Socrates, nor did Rousseau fabricate a speech like for Fabritius. Because Cato loathed philosophy. Cato is the archetype of the hero, someone whose concern is for the public good and thus finds the philosopher as useless and overly idle.
    - Cato is a lot closer to the accuser of Socrates than Socrates, so why does Rousseau suggest that he continues in the same lineage? It's because both of them protect healthy mores. Socrates does so (at least the cleaned up version of Socrates) because he keeps philosophy to himself. Whereas the hero is a role model for it.
    - But Cato is nowhere as virtuous as Socrates. The hero is not virtuous like the wiseman. The hero is concerned for his own glory that is what leads to his contribution to the society.
  - Fabricius
    - Fabricius was born in Rome's heyday and Rousseau resurrects him during Rome's decadence and gives him a speech for him to critique society. He focuses on the decadence of Rome.
    - His advice is to return to ways of conquest. This advice is meant to show that Fabricius is less wise than the wiseman Rousseau/Socrates because he fails to realize that it was not the absence of conquest but the history of conquest that lead to this decadence in the first place.
    - These heroes are ignorant in a very different way that the wiseman is. They believe in falsehoods, their beliefs aren’t grounded in reason but they genuinely believe truths that are helpful for the community or to sustain good mores (occasionally like Fabricius they aren't helpful).
- Ignorance of the savage
  - No one is brought up here partially because you couldn't formulate a speech for this type of ignorance. The person who exemplifies this is the American native who doesn’t even have the words for the vices of Europe.
There are two bad states
- Ignorance of the criminal
  - This is the state of europe after enlightenment came and then went. Remember, the original state is always pure. Enlightenment corrupts, and then when enlightenment leaves you are left with criminal ignorance.
- False claims to knowledge
  - This is really what all the three good states of ignorance are rallying against. Ie. The type of knowledge they do not have is false belief in hurtful mores.
What really separates the good from the bad states isn't knowledge/ignorance. Ignorance of the criminal is ignorance and bad. Ignorance of the wise is (basically) knowledge and yet good. The splitting line between them really is whether they challenge healthy mores or not. The wise do not challenge it. The heroes uphold it. The savage isn't even aware of alternatives. The criminal does not adhere to good mores and is ignorant like the savage (not-noble-savage). And people who have false claims of knowledge actively destroy good mores.
- Rousseau must believe then that good mores, sound political principles are accessible to a small elect, to a few wisemen, but not society as a whole. That seems quite a reasonable view. That's why enlightenment and virtue are possible in the individual but not in society and why a philosopher ought to keep his activities private.
- There's no issue with genuine knowledge. The issue is that he does not believe a society can have that on mass. American media landscape would be good example.
Summary of part 1 of this book (chapters 3-5):
- Covers both the somatic and psychological damage inflicted by enlightenment.
  - Discusses the pathways
  - Gives historical examples of failed empires due to enlightenment.
  - Invokes these figures to defend his position.
- Two great issues
  - History does not always line up to rousseau's predictions
  - His claim is we can't interpret history without deeper fundamental principles
- So we are going to move to part 2 and examine art and science in themselves.

Chapter 6 Paragraphs 36 - 38 Science

This second part is to argue for the necessity of the link between moral corruption and enlightenment. Before it was to draw historical inductions.
Rousseau compares himself to Prometheus in, like his telling of Socrates, a retelling of the Prometheus story. The main difference in this retelling is that Prometheus (Rousseau) is discerning about who to give fire (science) to. This is supposed to show that science in the right hands can be beneficial.
The origin of the arts and sciences is perverse. Rousseau ties all of the sciences with a manifestation of pride and desire to dominate/control:
- Astronomy to control the stars
- Eloquence to control others
- Geometry to control land
- Physics to control others by winning respect through reputation of intelligence
- This raises a serious challenge for Rousseau because 1. to show that the origin of something is perverse is not to show it is bad (genetic fallacy) 2. to show that the vices give rise to enlightenment also implies that enlightenment necessarily did not cause them and were proceeded by them.
Rousseau next turns to the "objects" of the arts and sciences which are also perverse.
- The object of art is luxury
- The object of jurisprudence is injustice
- The object of history are tyrants
- By object, Rousseau really means subject matter. The reading is that these things can (maybe are likely to) to be conjoined with these bad things but they don’t have to be and can even bring about the good.
After we examine the origins and objects/effects we examine science itself. Paragraph 38 is a critique of the method of science.
- There are many ways to generate falsehoods but limited ways to generate truths.
- Rousseau is between Socrates (claiming no knowledge) and total certainty. He believes he can arrive at hypothetical truths … truths that are the best we can do so far given his criterion.
- Question: for Rousseau truth and falsehoods are sentiments so the pursuit of truth can never be passionless. The question then is what are the right passions to sustain a pursuit of truth. The answer is sincerity whereas you do not want to be motivated by vanity. What does he mean that they are sentiments (pg.156)?
- The reason that the pursuit of truth is dangerous is that not only can you mire yourself in unhelpful falsehoods but even when you arrive at partial truths (the example he gives are doctors who discover the likely failings of the human body but not their cures) and not the full truth it will weaken your soul.
  - The optimistic implication is that the full truth always is good. The example he gives is the wiseman who knows not only the likely failing so the human body but also the necessity of degeneration and so does not hold false hope for cures. This relates to Rousseau's natural goodness/providence thesis that, at bottom, the universe is good so it would make sense that either full knowledge of it or complete ignorance and just following nature would both lead to good states. It's the intermediate states that are bad.
  - The citizen and the hero might know about the disease but they would disdain it/belittle it (maybe think of it as less likely/bad as it really is?) and this ignorance protects them.
- IMPORTANT So Rousseau clearly draws out truth from utility (is this where Nietzsche got his "value of truth" question?). And he says because of this we need a "criterion" to judge the value of truth. Black tries a few potential criterion and find them unsatisfactory so he leaves it as an open question.
Rousseau actually wanted to go beyond Newton because not only did he posit a hidden cause, vanity, behind phenomena, he also wanted to inquire about its nature and power.

Chapter 7 Paragraphs 39 - 54 Vanity

This chapter is to deal with the actual underlying principle which generates the issues of corruption from enlightenment: vanity. This chapter concludes the ideas pursued by the first discourse since it gives the underlying principle behind the historic inductions but the next chapter gives suggestions of how to retard this corruption.
Pride and vanity are both concerns of opinions of others and both are about wanting to be esteemed as higher than others. In Project for Constitution for Corsica, Rousseau claims that "the opinion that puts a great value on frivolous objects produces vanity" while "the one that falls upon objects great and beautiful by themselves produces pride."
- What differs of the objects of vanity and the objects of pride is 1. whether the objects are "estimable" in themselves meaning whether they are based on standards that transcends the opinions of others and NOT on 2. whether the objects are "true."
- So love of virtue, piety, and patriotism are objects of pride because they have a standard beyond opinion of others whereas admiration of talents / general opinion plunges people into frivolous and changing pursuits.
- IMPORTANT even healthy life is not free from pride, inequality and competition. The virtuous man feels proud when he looks down upon the vicious whereas the philosopher/artist feels vain when he looks upon the uneducated. It's not the form of their life that is different but the object of which it is directed to.
Here is the causal sequence:
- We begin with pride (healthy pride) which creates inequality (because it seeks it out)
  - Because this drive for difference/distinction is always at the core of social life, this is why moral corruption is inevitable.
- Inequality often begets wealth which causes idleness and luxury
- Idleness gives rise to the sciences and luxury gives rise to the arts
- Their influence causes the corruption of taste, the decline of courage and of military virtue, and deepening of inequality.
- Pride becomes vanity with this development.
- So this is why mores are corrupted in proportion to the progress of the sciences and the arts, its not that they are the only cause to corruption but that they are important cause. He is not showing that enlightenment is necessary or sufficient for this corruption. But he is showing the numerous similarities between these corruptions and the structure of arts/science.
Here are all the nasty effects of the arts and sciences. Note, this is not a genealogical, causal order but an order of increasing severity of effect as well as circle of influence (self-harm to other-harm).
- Idleness / Mis-use of Time
  - Idleness is not tranquility, which is inactivity from the fulfilment of one's desire. Idleness is activity that is not directed at the improvement of the group. Rousseau suggests that one should never be idle as long as the world has problems. Ie. The whole world is one's responsibility so leisure/idleness never makes sense. (tranquility is impossible too then?)
  - The arts and science are both produced by idleness (you need to be above subsistence to do them) and science produces more idleness (nothing useful).
  - IMPORTANT Rousseau issue is that they don't produce anything useful. This must be seriously challenged today. Science at least might be the most useful thing for societal progress.
    - I think Rousseau would have a good pushback here which is the outcome of technology is not always positive.
  - There is a worse version then just being useless where philosophers are actively hostile to the opinions of the group.
- Luxury
  - Luxury is a precondition for arts and sciences and it is further produced by the arts.
  - Luxury is a moral phenomena (unlike wealth which is a physical phenomena) and its about the attitudes of what people think are important to life. It creates weakness amongst a people.
  - Rousseau lays out a choice between a brilliant or a durable/virtuous empire.
  - Example: I do think this is right. The poor dress of tech elite. It shows where your priorities are. People have misconception that capitalists are hedonists but they are a lot more like monastics.
- Taste
  - Corruption of taste is also more influenced by arts than by science.
  - IMPORTANT Learned men in Rousseau's time have abdicated their responsibility as taste makers and given up the reigns to young (frivolous) and women (weak). Pg. 181
    - Rousseau would go on to undertake women's education because he believe that women are the "governors" of a state (also brought up in dedication in SD). Even though, or perhaps because men are the doers who make history and men care a great deal about attracting women, what women praise/desire will be what the men will do. Weird route to feminism: because males are the dominant doers, the taste of women matter more than that of men.
    - Example: Quebec's founding
  - IMPORTANT for Rosseau the two primary paths of authors in such a world with bad taste is to produce trivial, fashionable work (like that of Voltaire) or die in poverty and oblivion.
    - QUESTION: Rousseau suggests he is "living for another century" pg.181. How does the do this? Especially the oblivion part? Is it by desiring a different form of historical recognition rather than contemporary recognition? But he did desire contemporary recognition. Furthermore, shouldn't we expect mores to get worse as history develops?
  - IMPORTANT what's interesting is that the desire to seek distinction makes philosophy rebel against public opinion and art adhere to public opinion. The reason is because a corrupt public will be interested in moral opinions for their novelty and art for conforming to existing standards.
- Courage
  - Rousseau sees the cultivation of the mind as being encouraged in his day in lieu of cultivation of the body. While this doesn’t interfere with one-off courageous acts, it does interfere with "true courage" the ability to endure difficult physical tasks. That is what he sees as crucial to military victory.
  - Its not that modern soldiers themselves are dedicated to the arts and sciences but its that they see examples around them of doing so.
- Moral Qualities
  - Corollary of the above. Modern education fails to teach the right virtues of soul (not just of body). Gives example of good and bad Persian education.
  - Good education is about giving exemplars not about studying/debating what virtue is.
- Inequality
  - Rousseau primarily has inequality of esteem rather than inequality of material in mind here.
  - Since he believes that inequality is always present since pride is always present its more about the changing hierarchy of what inequality matters (from virtue to frivolous talents) that he finds problematic.
  - In such a world, people who seek glory will pursue frivolous talents.

Chapter 8 Paragraphs 55-61 Conscience

This chapter is about what is to be done about this moral corruption
Revolution
- The only thing that could cure this moral corruption would be a great revolution that would be "blameworthy" to hope for.
  - Question: why? Is it because the cost or the likelihood of ending in a worse state? Another reason could be from
  - In the Observations it is crystal clear he does not advocate burning books because that would just leave Europe in criminal ignorance (barbarism). Maybe that's an example of ending up in a worse state?
  - IMPORTANT: in this sense Rousseau is explicitly a anti-revolutionary thinker. Someone opposed to revolutions. Which is interesting given his important role in the French revolution.
Palliative Remedies for already corrupt society
- Academies
  - He is disingenuous in his praise of academies that sovereigns have imitated providence in building academies that benefit both science and the people in it. This is clearly wrong as his critique of philosophers goes to show.
  - The real reason he pushes academies is for people who are thoroughly corrupted. Mostly as a way to distract and quarantine. The idea is that by putting away all the philosophers in one place it protects the remaining uncorrupted citizens. And by giving art and science (think theatre in a bad state) it at least distracts people from doing worse crimes.
- Esotericism
  - While he is not a fan of esotericism he is even more worried about bad ideas spreading and corrupting the people. He advises esotericism for the "bad" philosophers but remains silent on what those with genuinely moralizing teachings like Montaigne or Socrates should do.
- Printing
  - He blames printing for doing the opposite of what esotericism does: which is to make bad writing permanently available all the time.
  - He also blames printing for the wars caused by the protestant reformation. He believes that for the virtuous the bible/quoran is enough. This can be generalized that it causes sectarian divides in a community.
  - But in a bad state, Rousseau does not advise burning the printing press because 1. even if it has a destabilizing quality it also stabilizes the state by weakening people and making them easier to control 2. like the academies, it gives corrupt people a place to direct their energies 3. it allows Rousseau's work to also be permanent, to be a permanent counterpoint to the bad books. This is why Rousseau believed that there could be a future society with uncorrupt morals influenced by Rousseau and why he wanted to live past this century (other than recognitive concerns).
    - This last point is key because it serves as a necessary counterpoint. It shows that Rousseau is willing to engage in a medium he thinks is ultimately corrupting (just like my relationship with social media).
Preventative Remedies for uncorrupted society
- Academies and printing
  - These should be banned / severely curtailed.
- Esotericism
  - Still practiced as above
- Aligning enlightenment with political power (bribing the intellectual class) this is the key preventative measures.
  - This is Rousseau's key move to have his cake (progress in arts) and eat it too (morally pure society). He wants to show how this blocking off of natural channels of study does not prevent intellectual greats like Newton and Bacon from forming. He calls them preceptors of the human race but these are not the virtuous wisemen these are extremely talented philosophers who are after glory/recognition and so need societal direction to be channeled positively.
  - The first thing that he says is that these people require no live teachers and teachers will likely limit their development by circumscribing them. But they will require teachers and these teachers are merely the other preceptors. That is to say they will spend their time reading the greats. But how will this be done if the printing press is banned?
  - He believes this small group will select themselves so its up to society/monarch to identify them when they emerge but not to cultivate them. Essentially, Rousseau himself is a good example here who was mostly self-educated and independent throughout his career. He underwent many troubles but emerged as a great mind.
  - This is the key: (pg. 235) these people need to be given proper "upside" to their talents.
    - "The Prince of Eloquence was Consul of Rome, and the greatest, perhaps, of Philosophers Chancellor of England. If the one had held only a chair in some University and the other obtained only a modest pension from an Academy, can it be believed, I say, that their work would not have reflected their status."
    - "The rich and the learned serve only to corrupt each other mutually. If the rich were more learned or the learned richer, the latter would not be such cowardly flatterers and the former would like base flattery less, and they would all be better off. That is what can be seen from the small number of those who have the good fortune to be learned and rich at the same time." - Observations
  - Rousseau thinks that vice is a consequence of powerlessness and insecurity and so that learned men should have open to them the highest offices.
  - Rousseau does believe that many philosophers benefit from being ostracized like Rousseau who hasn't been tempted with high office and was able to come up with his insights in seclusion.
    - What is true about both of these claims is that we need to think about the intellectuals like a class much like the capital owners are a class. It is quite striking how the fields with least prestige/upward mobility in society are the ones who are most critical of it. Economics for example is the least critical of contemporary society of the humanities (engineering is not critical at all). There are multiple reasons for this, but promise of worldly power is certainly one of them.
  - Rousseau suggest that the most learned men be advisors to kings and emperors. The curious question then is why does he dislike the Chinese case. And I think the answer is that it was too meritocratic. Imperial examinations were available to all and as a result encouraged everyone to pursue study and erudition. IMPORTANT, in this view the ideal setup would be closer to the origin of the imperial examinations where you had to be elected by an aristocrat to compete in the imperial exams. To make the competition limited to a small private group.
    - By confining an intellectual elite practicing science and art privately with the ruling class Rousseau thinks that we can both have scientific progress, military advantage while also protecting the people from moral corruption.
  - What he imagines is a society with an Athenian ruling class and a spartan civilian class. There are so many difficulties here, not the least of which being that historically they hated each other and fought terrible battles.
  - Rousseau provides the mechanism for how unlearned people abide by virtue: conscience. Essentially a Smithian impartial spectator that provides amour propre.

Chapter 9 Conclusion

To review the four questions that motivated this book.
- How scientific progress contributes to moral corruption
  - Humans have needs of the body (gave rise to political states) and needs of the soul (the need for esteem).
  - Initially pride/esteem was directed at stable basis, virtues. With development of civilization (inequality, reason, etc.), pride became directed at unstable basis of virtues: talents.
  - Pride becomes vanity and these talents are either useless or mostly harmful to society, virtue became lost. Vanity and reason enter into a death spiral.
  - This is the psychological consequence ^ but there is also a somatic consequence that does not always hold and that is how brilliant civilizations are conquered by austere ones.
- Rousseau's method
  - His method is one that begins with introspection and historical insights and using analysis to arrive at fundamental principles which he then uses to interpret those insights.
- FD place in Rousseau's system
  - It is his originating insight (that we are deceived about the criterion of right).
  - It is also his concluding synthesis about the inevitability of moral corruption and the fact that it (bar revolution) cannot be reversed.
  - What motivates most of the striking claims is his central insight on the natural goodness of man. That is the trunk which all the branches of the tree point to.
- Consequences of Rousseau's critique of science for future happiness
  - See prescriptions in last chapter TLDR there's very little one can do to stop this natural decline.
  - Therefore perhaps what Rousseau is really aiming for is simply "to destroy that magical illusion which gives us a stupid admiration for the instruments of our misfortunes."
Rousseau's place in political philosophy
- There are distinctively modern elements (like the preference for democratic republics, rejection of Aristotelean teleology in favor of naturalistic view).
- But there are untimely elements like his preference for the ancients, suggestion for esotericism, etc.
- Best way to think of him perhaps is like Nietzsche, who is post-modern. Interesting, the idea here is that post-modern is not progressive but reactionary from the modern perspective.
Is Rousseau right?
- Author thinks Rousseau is wrong about the somatic consequences of art and science: world is more peaceful, scientific progress is not useless, science has made military strong.
- IMPORTANT: but keep in mind this is not Rousseau's central argument at all, outward success. He would perhaps say "I see that one always speaks to me about success and greatness. I was talking about mores and virtue" (pg. 272).
- There author treats it as valid and open question. I think Rousseau is more right then wrong about the effects of popular enlightenment.

Rousseau as Author by Christopher Kelly | Notes & Summary

Johnathan Bi — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 20:45:17 GMT

Introduction

Goal of this work is to understand what Rousseau meant by consecrating one’s life to the truth.
- Provisionally, the answer seems to be 1. Taking responsibility for what one publishes & 2. Publishing only things of public benefit.
What’s notable about Rousseau’s life is:
- His notorious sincerity
- His devotion to philosophic inquiry
- The risks that come with speaking truth to power
  - Rousseau was bold and didn’t use pseudonyms
  - Rousseau was also self-restrained because he thought a lot about circumstances when truth is morally useful and when it is not.
Why people were surprised with Rousseau’s success as an author
- It came so late after so many failures
- Rousseau used great literary skill to attack literature (first discourse).
- He pioneered a new mode of life that was threatening to other authors who just wanted to be right. He wanted to live according to his principles and values.
  - He was very different from other “public intellectuals” out there. He was very critical of the republic of letters.
Rousseau wrote so many genres and his ambition really can’t be overstated.
- He carefully planned every aspect of his works down to the font and arguing with the publication house.
- He wrote his private letters intending them to be published.

Chapter 1 Responsible and irresponsible authors

This chapter is about the culture of anonymous publishing and the arguments for and against attaching one’s name to a work.
Rousseau’s feuds with his contemporaries were petty and vindictive.
- Voltaire would pin his own controversial works on Rousseau, making up fake stories to attack his character.
- Rousseau would expose voltaire as the true author of works
Culture of Censorship
- There were many censors who decided what can get published.
- Sometimes the censors would decline publication but hinted they won’t persecute so you would publish anonymously or in a different jurisdiction.
- Authorities were quite lax about anonymous publishing because without a name these books quickly faded in and out of culture. This is one of the key reasons why Rousseau would add his name, because it gave a gravitas.
- Most of the books were published anonymously Spirit of the laws, some works by Hume, etc.
Rousseau and voltaire all were addressing the same issue (spreading enlightenment, avoiding censorship) and they all adhered to their own principles but they had directly opposing principles.
- They all cared greatly about the effectiveness of their work in advancing enlightenment.
- They were both upset by how noble birth was more important than raw talent. Arbitrary inequality.
- Voltaire prioritized safety
  - Argument that not having one’s name was noble because you weren’t after literary fame.
  - Argument that it allowed one to speak his own mind. Whereas Rousseau had to make concessions (e.g. SD).
  - He believed the author needed to protect himself to achieve his end of increasing enlightenment.
- Rousseau prioritized responsibility
  - His actions
    - In his earlier writings sometimes he did not use his own name.
      - Like voltaire who gave himself an aristocratic sounding name, Rousseau also created a fake identity when he was young.
    - He did not dedicate his books to wealthy patrons.
    - Everyone agreed that Rousseau had an innovative and bold style. People attributed it to different drives: recklessness, celebrity, devotion to truth.
    - Rousseau did practice caution: removing bold passages, having his characters voice his own opinions. He would be the citizen of one country (Geneva), live in a second (France), and publish in a third (holland).
  - His “why”
    - On one hand for rational argumentation you want to say that rank does not matter … but the person does matter. That’s why adding name was important.
    - Rousseau’s main argument for including one’s name is that it is honorable, one must take responsibility. Whereas the culture of anonymous publishing created a culture of lack of responsibility 1. Because it was easy to claim a work as an open secret without suffering persecution people didn’t have to really believe what they wrote. It became much more of a tool for them to disavow or avow when profitable. Montesquieu and his election to the French Academy is an example. 2. It also made the government censors irresponsible. They would separate the book from the author and “punish” (ie. Censor) the book. It was quite easy to do so and (my reading) made them more trigger happy … they stopped caring as much of the actual content of the book. When Rousseau’s second discourse was burned, they argued they didn’t have to question rousseau in advance.
      - IMPORTANT: it’s a world in which books were detached from their authors.
      - Prosecutors will be even more harsh on authors who put their name on books in such a culture. Two types of authors thrive 1. Those who suck up to people who are powerful 2. Those who publish anonymously.
    - Another issue with anonymous publishing is what voltaire did to Rousseau. It enables you to say whatever you want. It might give you incentives to be more polarizing because you are still awarded from that prestiege.
    - Rousseau believed his name tied together disparate works.
    - He later would use his name even adding it to the title of the work. Turning point was first discourse when he became a celebrity. Because he felt he needed to be an exemplar.
      - question: isn’t there something self-congratulatory about that?

Chapter 2 The Case For and Against Censorship

Rousseau’s critique of censorship in previous chapter should not be mistaken for condemnation of censorship altogether. This chapter is about the types of censorship that Rousseau advised and why he advised it.
Rousseau’s critique is …
- Philosophy undermines the best part of society
- Arts enhance the worst parts
It seems like he would much prefer total censorship but that is not possible so he presents a more moderate view in the following three categories
1. censorship in religion
- 1.1 Religious mores (be kind to one’s neighbor, ethical maxims etc.)
  - Mores are not grounded on reason but on sentiments (that’s why philosophy is harmful for them)
  - Mores are more important than laws, they are the “essence” of good society
    - Laws and mores support each other. Laws without mores have no effect, mores need support from laws.
    - Most perfect subordination of mores to laws is in Sparta where the laws were all about the education of the young
    - But the most perfect balance between mores and laws is in Rome where good mores authored good law. In other words Rousseau doesn’t think having legislation protect mores is desirable for two reasons:
      - While Rome subordinated private life to public life … it kept open a sphere of private life whereas Sparta did not.
      - People with bad mores are incapable of accepting good laws. This is why he views degeneration of best communities as necessary.
  - Rousseau thinks that these are not grounded on reason but good for community to keep intact. For him attacks on mores should be censored.
    - The atheists who tried to subject these under reason under the guise of tolerance and fairness are actually deeply intolerant, because they try to attack these religious mores on reason. That’s sectarian because it brings in the assumption that reason must be the ultimate arbiter. It’s intolerant because reason claims to be this totalizing arbiter and yet religion does not proclaim that it is. So religious societies are relatively tolerant because in so far as you don’t threaten the religion it’s fine. (Kind of like Tocqueville’s argument for the tolerance of aristocracies vs. the intolerance of democracies) IMPORTANT. This is such an important insight that free speech, free debate is dogmatic because it carries the dogmatic and intolerant assumption that things need to be decided on reason.
  - But philosophy is a private activity. So you can do that in your own private space.
  - We can censor religious ceremonies in this view because he takes ceremonies not to be constitutive for a religion (jews and muslims disagree of course) so nothing is lost. But he thinks we must censor attacks on religious mores because that is critical. Almost opposite reasons.
- 1.2 Religious dogmas (e.g. freedom of the will, existence of god, and other metaphysical questions)
  - On one hand believing in divine punishment is important for justice
  - On the other hand kings have no authority over souls
  - I think where he lands is that public skepticism is ok, private denial is ok, but public denial is not.
  - The general policy is “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
  - Example
    - Rousseau praises Cato and Cicero for condemning Caesar when he publicly proclaimed the mortality of the soul even if Cicero expressed similar private opinions.
  - The key thing is that you don’t ever have to say anything you don’t think is right. This is what Rousseau meant by you have to withhold the truth know when to share. Question: what if you are asked?
    - This doesn’t make you a hypocrite because you are motivated by something more important than truth which is the sake of the community.
  - His view on religion is not to compel belief but for non-believers to shut-up / be censored.
2. Censorship in laws and policies
- Rousseau himself wrote public letters to change laws instead of trying to change them privately.
- This is because debating policies is different than debating mores. In fact, Rousseau would appeal to his readers existing sentiments.
  - He thought that even SC and SD (dedication to Geneva) are not threats to society they appeal to the same principles.
  - Question: under what circumstances should the principles of a society be challenged?
  - Question: in our global world, mores will be challenged. That presents a new dimension of the challenge?
- A way around this is if you write at a sufficient generality you should not be censored because your work is not an outright attack.
  - Rousseau thinks he is obliged to refrain from particular criticism.
  - This is why it’s ok to critique general political principles but not general religious dogmas publicly.
    - Government policies should be grounded on reasons whereas religious mores are not
    - Governments can only be stable if founded on right principles (so does that mean it’s right to upheave governments that aren’t built on this?)
      - Question: but if this is true, then, why can’t you attack particular governments?
    - But the right principles are compatible with many types of governments
- So, the answer seems to be government policies are ok to criticize, government principles are OK to criticize in the abstract. This is different from the religious case where both should not be criticized because they are not grounded on reason.
3. Philosophy (speculative opinions other than government principles and religious dogmas)
- Here the answer is that they should be done in private but not in public
- Philosophers tend to be
  - Antisocial
  - Bad citizens
  - Look down on non-philosophers
- Even worse, philosophers produce “pseudo-intellectuals” who try to imitate intellectuals.
  - They are mostly interested in being “contrarian” and standing out for attention.
- Rousseau is different because Rousseau 1. Tells the truth 2. Tells only truths that are helpful to a society 3. Wants to cure people of philosophy.
- Therefore philosophy should be something you do privately and not in society.
General principles
- Protect sentiments of sociability (mores).
- Use truth to correct bad prejudices while not questioning the good ones.
- Redirect the root passions of the bad prejudices.
- But you shouldn’t persecute someone using truth to correct a good prejudice because they are innocent after all.
- Other philosophers are...
  - Cautious when they should be bold. They do not claim authorship and take no responsibility.
  - Bold when they should be cautious. Critiquing everything with reason when they should’ve kept the good prejudices intact.

Chapter 3 The Case Against (and For) the Arts

The chapter here is to understand the relationship between art and morality
Rousseau’s own contribution to the arts before and after FD, seems to betray his principles of austere republicanism. People charged him for inconsistency.
Rousseau’s view on art
- Rousseau is part of the tradition that sees art as imitative of nature/ of the world. And Rousseau certainly thinks some music is like this, that it imitates physical sounds (e.g. strings and the human voice) but there is a second type of music that is imitative not of things but of emotions ie. They stir up one’s passions directly.
- Rousseau flips the tradition on its head, art should be judged not by how well it imitates things out there but things “in here.”
- This understanding of arts as inciting emotion is going to be key to understanding his view on the arts.
Rousseau’s critique of Art
- Art represents a society that has fallen into decadence (Rousseau thinks this is more symptom than cause)
  - Artists are motivated by praise and adapt their delivery for specific tastes.
  - Even those who produce for wholesome tastes are depraved in the sense they are not praised for their morality (goodness of their work) but talent (ability to cater to tastes).
  - Develops polished/polite manners. This is bad because 1. It hides the relationship of servitude amongst unequals 2. Festers resentment among equals whereas disputes could be resolved if people aired it out.
- The arts makes us anti-social (Political Case)
  - It’s very rare to have moral plays. Because moral lessons are boring. Voltaire and the French dramatists do a good job of this he concedes.
  - IMPORTANT:but even when you have moral plays theatrical identification (someone suffering in play) is stronger than identification in real life (someone dying on the street). Kelly calls the emotion “pure” because it is just the emotions tied to no obligation. What this does is that it allows you to discharge these prosocial motivations in the theatre without having to do anything.
- The arts makes us too social or, more accurately, social in the wrong way (Natural Case)
  - Natural man (SD) cannot extend his pity to Macbeth’s ambition or Oedipus’ regret but only physical pain. So theatre requires man to be highly socialized.
  - In Emile, his education with fine arts is seen as dangerous because he might try to do things that are “unique.” The worry here is that art provides too strong imitative models that make us lose ourselves and our own values.
    - QUESTION:well which one is it, is life imitative of art or is it a substitutive relationship? If the former then the political case seems to be wrong, if the latter than the natural case seems to be wrong.
- The Political Case for the Arts
  - The legislator is the lone person who properly directs art in Rousseau’s positive proposals.
  - Knowing what justice is and having a “reason” to pursue justice are entirely different. Only a few philosophers make decision based off of reason. Even that is rare and dependent on anti-social circumstances.
  - This leaves open room for the arts to play a crucial role in political life.
  - Rousseau gives examples of legislators like Moses and Mohammad who use religion as their grounds.
    - They do not ground their proclamations on miracles because 1. It’s cheap 2. It will keep people uneducated.
    - What he relies on is his moral character, that people want to imitate him.
  - IMPORTANT Fascinating discussion about how languages have degenerated
    - Rousseau traces a spectrum between persuasion and reason and how the very first language was essentially music that tried not to capture reason or depict the world (imitate external) but tried to convey emotion (imitate what’s “in here”). As language develops and becomes more and more rational and depicting things, it loses its persuasive force. The most extreme end of the reason spectrum is mathematical symbols (this is why I think I dislike analytical philosophy so much, at least in form).
    - European languages are great for philosophy but bad for persuasion. Classical languages are persuasive and poetic but not specific.
    - In the absence of persuasion/rhetoric at the heart of social life we don’t get a world grounded on reason but rather a world grounded on low-minded self-interest or physical force.
  - This is why music is central to legislation (because it is the peak of persuasion).
    - Most ancient traditions saw music as having a legislative role whether thats communicating the mores through epic poems or forming character with the right harmonies. Even laws that were force-based (Brutus killing his sons) were about what that force signified rather than the fear it inspired in citizens. It inspired awe not fear.
      - This is even stronger than Plato’s discussion of music and good citizenship. For Plato, music is being subordinated to reason/speech, but that’s not the case for Rousseau that sees music and art as grounding political life.
  - This is how we reconcile the political case and the natural case against art: it’s too imitative that it threatens our naturalness… but it’s not imitative enough / in the proper way to support citizenship. The surprising conclusion is that Rousseau, despite what he says in FD, thinks art needs to be more embedded into cultures, namely:
    - Making the theatre participatory
      - e.g. horsemanship competitions
    - Making the theatre never end
      - You need to imitate these practices in your daily life. Today there is a separation between walking out of the cinema and living life. But not in Sparta where life was theatrical in some sense that it was always public, that the myths you were told penetrated your life (e.g. you are in the universe of the gods).
    - Right values and support for cultivating citizenship
      - He praises the athenian theatre because it was public and not motivated out of profit
      - because all the citizens went there.
      - Because the role models they got were of exemplary citizens.
Rousseau’s Art Project
- The goal he sets for artists are not servants of patrons but founders of communities.
- Rousseau felt like there was little hope in modernity because how much language deteriorated, how much things were driven out of self-interest or physical force.
- His self-conception is that of a good but weak man and not a hero.

Chapter 4 Heroic and Anti-Heroic Citizens

This chapter is to describe the nature of the heroic citizen, his uses and abuses, and what are the alternatives to such a citizen
The heroic citizen
- Liberal democrats / egalitarians are suspicious of hero worship, they always want to equalize everything. Rousseau, being a defender of equality, is all the more interesting in his views on heroism.
- What are heroes?
  - In Rousseau’s treatise on heroes he gives three kinds conquerors (Alexander), legislators (Lycurgus), and people who make great sacrifices (regulus)
  - Rousseau does not identify a single list of virtues which he considers to be heroic. Except strength of soul. Virtu over Fortuna, the ability to overcome obstacles and to be effective.
  - Even stronger, the wiseman has all the virtues, more than a hero. But the hero is clearly more important for the community. However the hero treats the community always as a means to an end, specifically, an end to his own glory. That’s why he’s dangerous, if there were another anti-social way to win glory, he would do that.
  - Rousseau believes a feeling of existence (will to power?) is what we are after and treats the other virtues as good because of that. e.g. discipline is good because it enables us to exert ourselves.
  - Strength of soul does not always create virtue but weakness of soul always causes wickedness, hate/resentiment/etc.
- Why do people have heroes?
  - Rationally people ought to be suspicious of heroes. But people seem to worship them naturally without reservation even if they rationally disagree with all the values they represent.
    - Example: the Netflix documentary “Alexander is my hero” it was unreserved admiration.
  - Heroes imbue us with strength we exist outside of ourselves and “become” them.
    - Young Rousseau felt an acute loss of self, he felt what it meant to be Brutus before he knew what it meant to be Rousseau.
    - They not only borrow their attributes but they also borrow their strength of soul.
  - People are not naturally social so communities only form around identification of common heroes.
    - He calls a community that has a shared identity a fatherland. And a mere collection of people without shared identity a country/nation.
    - Pluralists see debate as a sign of healthy community. But Rousseau does not think so. What he is much more concerned with is defending the community from the top (government).
  - So legislators really have to be heroes that shine through with their personality. Heroes of course are very dangerous. So the solution seems to be “the heroic legislator must not be a part of the community he founds.”
Emile - The Unheroic Citizen
- Emile’s education is pretty anti-imitation in general. E.g. he learns to draw things but not to imitate artists. This is obviously the exact opposite education that Rousseau received. It’s about delaying amour-propre as much as possible.
- Emile is given a hero to imitate, Robinson Crusoe, but this hero is not the classical hero for two reasons:
  - Firstly, he is a model of independence.
    - This is one of the most important points in the book that sociality is so imbedded in us that even if we want to be independent we need to look for role models of independence.
    - "Such people need an imaginative support for a life of independence. They must be able to imagine themselves to be someone like Emile in order to keep from imagining themselves to be someone who is less independent"
  - Secondly, Emile is asked to be critical of this hero, he is taught to ask what would he do if he were in his shoes.
    - Same thing when he reads Plutarch.
- Emile has the strength of soul of a hero but not the desire for glory. He will lead people if he needs to but he does not seek to lead or that is not his telos.
- Emile is made for the current world where we only have countries and not fatherlands.
  - I think the idea is that If you were educating a child in Sparta in a genuine fatherland you would want to inflame social desires. But today once you inflame those desires what do you end up becoming, influencers? Reality TV contestants? Sociality itself is improper in modernity because of the bad structure of modernity.
  - But then Rousseau seems to suggest that the culture of heroism produces fanatics as well. And he much prefers a culture that produces neither.
- The unheroic citizen is motivated by “self-interest” properly understood. He sees how is close family and friends interests are tied to the nation at large.
  - Question: interesting, so in neither case is helping the community the actual goal! The heroic citizen does it for glory, the unheroic citizen does it for private interests.
Julie, the beautiful soul
- The novel: this is somewhat of a tangent but its to setup why Rousseau chose to write Julie in novel form.
  - When Rousseau first moved to Paris he wrote discourses and got into vicious fights because of the vices “in the air” in the city. What he failed to realize is precisely because he was right of the corrupting influence of society people were not open to his arguments from reason.
  - Due to his conclusion that most people are not creatures of reason or, more accurately, the role of reason is quite weak compared to the social passions so reason can only affect us when we are far from society he realized he had to switch genres.
  - He already had success with the theatre genre. But he moved to the novel because the novel was more solitary. His ranking is athenian theatre (genuine civic theatre) > novel > modern theatre.
    - Same thing with romantic love. He thinks it’s not as good as general community sentiment and can threaten it but much better than what we have now which are base sentiments.
    - Novels are suitable for teaching and domestic life.
    - Should not expect them to bring about total transformation of society.
  - Issues with novels:
    - Novels and books are, for Rousseau, either useless because they validate existing morals or are useless because people don’t agree with them. They are more useful in the countryside.
    - Making a certain type of life seem too nice as to trick people into yearning for a life that does not exist.
- Death of Lucretia: important play that Rousseau abandoned from which we can see the outlines of Julie.
  - Issue with Lucretia is that it was about republicanism against monarch and against adultery — two things that did not appeal to the French audience at the time.
- Julie is weak! But what makes her a heroine is she has ability to influence people within her domain because her soul is just, virtuous and beautiful.
  - It’s actually because of her weakness that she can pull people in.
  - She’s the least capable of being a citizen.

Chapter 5 A Hermit Makes a Very Peculiar Citizen

This chapter is to explain why Rousseau considered himself while being in exile a form of citizenship and why his writing is a form of civic participation.
- He clearly isn’t a form of heroic citizenship, the issue with the heroic citizen ideal is that it doesn’t leave room for dissent. This mode of civic participation creates room for dissent.
Critics critique Rousseau’s idea of unity as being coercive. There is a sense which that is true.
- The importance of consent in the general will
- States need to form citizens into people who can think about the greater good from a young age and obviously this is not consented into.
Rousseau actually is not in favor of unanimity without qualification. He traces out a path of degeneration:
- First you have total unanimity, this is Sparta of great health
- Then you have debate, this is beginning of the decline but can be manageable this is Rome can still be maintained
- Lastly you have total unanimity because people are coerced/buying votes etc.
- Even though he praised Sparta, it is Rome that is the exemplar for Rousseau of the model free society.
  - Sparta
    - Model of patriotism. Would sacrifice their lives for the fatherland.
    - Sparta worshipped its laws. It wanted its good laws to produce good morals. Its laws had the prestige of antiquity/divinity almost.
    - Plus side is that their lows never changed. Downside is they were inattentive to how the government applied laws, there was no place to critique it.
    - Sparta is the first state of total unanimity basically denied degeneration for a long time.
  - Rome
    - Model of freedom, they didn’t think Rome itself (because all of the turmoils) could outlive freedom/glory. Ie. These things will continue even when Rome fails. Rome always had the idea that freedom would die out so it had freedom front and center.
    - Rome worshipped its morals: freedom and glory. It wanted good morals to legislate good laws.
    - The emphasis on morals made its laws more fragile but it gave an independent criterion by which people can evaluate and judge the laws.
    - Rome is the second state of debate where there was no unanimity over laws but it was still healthy. They were still able to deny degeneration for a long time.
  - Sparta is not the model of the general will its too totalitarian.
How the debate that Rousseau permits (praises even in Rome) is different from current discourse
- You are supposed to argue from a disinterested place from the perspective of the community’s vantage point.
- Rousseau is opposed to interest group politics of any sort. No factions.
- General will is “discovered” not “constructed,” I think what he means to say here is this debate is not a compromise, its not I want 100 chickens you want a 100 ducks we settle for 50-50. But in my learning that you want 100 ducks I take you as earnestly suggesting what the community needs and thus I correct my original desire for only 100 chickens. We arrive at 50-50 not constructing two personal, agonistic desires but through “discovering” what the group really needs.
Rousseau’s surprising claim is that his own literary work abides by these three characteristics. That he participated in citizenship despite renouncing his citizenship, despite not being in Geneva. Kelly gives two examples. Rousseau’s letter to discuss whether Geneva should have a theatre and a group of people trying to get him un-cancelled after his book burning by the government.
- “If one wants to dedicate books to the true good of the fatherland, one must not compose them in its bosom" Such an interesting claim and the reason he gives is because 1. He has more freedom in France. 2. He might create factional intrigues if you are too deeply embedded in a community.
- IMPORTANT by renouncing his citizenship Rousseau conceives that to be an act of citizenship.Because it makes himself disinterested, it prevents the charge of self-interest.
- In the case of the theatre, he argues against his own interests as an avid theatre-goer.
- In both cases Rousseau is simply describing the situation and the consequences of their choices he is not giving advice, he is simply drawing out what each choice would mean.
- Rousseau’s voice is one among many in the formation of the general will he is 1. Speaking from community’s vantage point 2. Opposed to the forming of factions 3. Helping the community discover the general will.
Rousseau thinks that this model of public authorship is available to citizens as well. In fact citizens were doing it when they tried to get him to un-cancel his book.

Chapter 6

This chapter is about examining the philosopher: 1. Rousseau’s self-conception of being a philosopher (or not) as well as 2. The nature of writing to other philosophers instead of the general public.
- Rousseau does address himself to philosophers in some of the works like SD but even then he is imagining himself addressing his works to philosophers under the view of mankind. This is because authorship always has a public dimension to it.
- Ultimately whether we ought publish a work depends on whether we think it will do good or bad.
Esotericism
- All of Rousseau’s contemporaries were aware of esotericism.
- Argument for esotericism (championed by Diderot)
  - The general claim was that the origin of this was good even if it is prone to degeneration / it is possible for degeneration.
  - Diderot claims that those who don’t publicize aren’t interested enough in fame.
  - Most convincing one is that we can’t tell if something is positive or negative influence. This is a great point: Deng claims we still can’t even know if the French Revolution is good or bad after the fact. How could Rousseau possibly know before the fact (two layers of additional issues, you need to predict the event, you need to judge the moral valence).
    - Diderot proposes that censors only censor public works but leave freedom in scholarly language.
- Rousseau’s attack on esotericism
  - He makes two surprising claims: 1. Esotericism is the only thing that is unifying about philosophy / a philosophical culture 2. Esotericism is motivated by pride.
  - The argument is this:
    - Because the philosopher is prideful, he has contempt for everyone else.
    - They seek contrarian opinions from other people to differentiate themselves and overestimate/exaggerate the “truth” that they hold.
    - Because they did this contrarian move, they are against the mores of the community and must conceal their opinions. They reach overly dogmatic opinions to satisfy their vanity even if they wouldn’t satisfy an impartial reason.
    - They also build a coalition of yes-sayers around them to flatter themselves.
  - What esotericism does is they create a coalition of intellectuals that are harmful to society.
  - Traditional esotericism only wanted to cultivate a small community of followers. Today, new esotericism wants to convert the masses (it’s even worse). They write two books: one book (named) where they pay lip service to societal mores and another book (anonymous) where they give really poor defenses for societal mores to undermine it.
  - Keep in mind here that Rousseau’s main rebuttal of esotericism is that it is motivated by pride. That is what creates the contrarian character. Theoretically, then, there could be a healthy esotericism … which is what we will explore next.
Rousseau’s philosophic dream
- Rousseau wrote an allegory written for philosophers: TLDR
  - First philosopher is troubled by materialist vs. teleological accounts of universe. He realizes it’s unsolvable and gives up the prideful desire to settle every metaphysical question. When he let go revelation hits and he is pulled into he teleological view. He decides to spread this insight (to reduce philosophical pride of wanting to know everything).
    - Rousseau’s point is that philosophy purged of pride leads to philanthropy because philosophy is about the fundamentally miserable conditions of man. The prideful seeks to distance, but the philanthropic seeks to help.
  - The philosopher encounters a dream.
  - Evil priests bring citizens blindfolded in a temple with statues of seven sins that are unveiled and a veiled middle statue that people worship. The statues look evil in every direct except one. The evil priests lead citizens to that place and take off their blindfold.
    - This is to describe bad prejudices and the question is how do we rid people of bad prejudices.
  - The first wise man (unclear who it is) does not rip off their blindfold but gives them sight before the citizens end up in that one spot. The citizens make a big fuss and the wiseman gets caught and killed.
    - The lesson here is that gradual enlightenment is dangerous because 1. Oppressors are vigilant and 2. You might be discreet but those you tell your esoteric truths may not be.
  - The second wise man (socrates) claims he is blind so he is allowed to approach the center statue (socratic ignorance, feigning he knows less) and pulls the veil of the center statue and gives a rational account of how they’ve been tricked. The citizens see the (ugly) statue as beautiful and the wiseman fails and gets killed.
    - The lesson here is that people are more attached to their passions than you would think. And reason does not work.
  - Third wiseman (represented by Jesus) smashes the statue and puts himself on the pedestal. And it works, people start worshipping him.
    - The lesson is people are motivated not by reason but passions and idols. The second wise man sets the stage for the third by unveiling the statue. The idea that reason can tear down but not build up.
- This story is to tell philosophers to abandon philosophical pride, to understand the limits of reason, and learn how to speak to ordinary people.
  - Rousseau uses allegory even when communicating to other philosophers. Not so sure I understand the difference other than that it is shorter.
  - He uses allegory to teach the necessity of allegory.
- Rousseau is the first philosopher.
  - They both received illumination on philosophical pride.
  - This maps to Rousseau’s life and letter to Voltaire where he thinks the materialist account that voltaire is spreading causes depressing worldview. He himself cannot rationally decide but goes with teleological because it is more consoling.
    - IMPORTANT QUESTION: is that really satisfying? Because surely it is more consoling because it is true. Find the quote about I have hope.
    - In the way Rousseau deals with philosophers like Voltaire he attacks their philosophical position first by rationally showing its ungrounded and then uses allegory and rhetoric to try to change their ethical position.
Misc
- To satisfy citizenship Rousseau had to renounce his. To practice philosophy he had to denounce philosophy.
- China
  - Reports of china through jesuit missionaries prompted huge re-evaluation in the 16th century European consciousness. To know that there was a non-christian, well-run, highly civilized culture was a huge shock to europeans. It was also a shock because many interpreted Chinese as atheist/materialists who merely paid exoteric lip-service to religious practices. This played into debates whether atheism could sustain civilization.

PostScript

One of the key theses of this book is that philosophy and authorship is incompatible. The main thing to be addressed in this postscript is Rousseau’s public communication with philosophers and his own participation in philosophy.
Some people try to claim that Rousseau did not have an overly negative view of philosophy just that he and plato were responding to very different times.
- Plato was trying to give honor to philosophy when it was not respectable.
- Rousseau was writing in an age where philosophy had become too respectable.
  - Rousseau objected to being called a philosopher.
  - He called himself a “friend of the truth” which meant what classically “philosopher” meant because the word “philosopher” had become too polluted.
- Kelly thinks this is right, that there’s something bad about philosophy having so much prestige, but its philosophy itself taht is the problem.
There are three limited ways that philosophy is good for someone who already has started philosophy (presumably it would be better not have touched it, but if you are a philosophical mind, Rousseau thinks you are doomed to philosophize).
- The first is that philosophy can cure you of the vanity associated with philosophy. This is so important, philosophy as a grounding force.
- The second is to set you up to undertake good forms of contemplation like the reveries or writing novels.
- Third is for artistic contemplation (rather than prideful philosophical, or practical self-interested).
  - Rousseau conceives of three reasons to know: out of pride, out of interest (you need to survive), and an aesthetic contemplation which he associates with botany/viewing art/poetry … its that discussion about how music seeks to imitate and ignite emotions directly.

Moral Psychology with Nietzsche by Brian Leiter | Notes & Summary

Johnathan Bi — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 02:23:48 GMT

1. Nietzsche's Anti-Realism about Value

This chapter is about moral value and how it is not objective.
What is meant by objectivity?
- A realist view would mean that there are objective values that is mind/judgement-independent. Whether I choose to affirm something as good or bad, that thing has an objective quality of being good or bad.
- Nietzsche instead believes that there are few creative geniuses who are value creators.
- In other words, Nietzsche’s critique does need to rely on the objective fact to be true that Christian morality prevents Goethes from forming. But there is no objective fact about whether that is good or bad.
What is his argument for objectivity?
- It’s going to be explanatory in nature rather than a direct argument. Specifically, objective moral facts will be judged on the following scale:
  - Simplicity: no extravagant metaphysical inventions (less the better).
  - Conscillience: able to show that it influences many disparate phenomena.
  - Conservatism: not unsettling other things we have strong reason to think to be true about the world.
- Nietzsche’s claim is that psychological/biological/sociological factors are going to be the best explanation. Where things fail is:
  - Simplicity: you have to invent this new class of thing which is moral fact.
  - Conscillience: moral facts are used by philosophers and no one else.
  - Moral explanations are also superfluous. It’s much better to appeal to the psychological/social/material forces often and no need to bring in “objective injustice”. Ie. Injustice is a label we create on top of certain conditions and not something “out there”.
- Another thrust of his argument is that moral philosophy (as opposed to hard sciences) has not arrived at consensus. It hasn’t even made any progress.
  - Surely, we would have made some progress by now. The easiest explanation for that is that morality at its core is about taste. It’s grounded on certain intuitions that we like because of developmental/social/psychological reasons.
  - Not only do we disagree on whether something is good or bad (Nietzsche on suffering). We also disagree on how to weigh different things.
  - To defend this against three worries:
    - Nietzsche needs to write even more polemically in order to convince others.
    - Epistemology and metaphysics has also had considerable disagreement. So Nietzsche is going to bite the bullet and give up a lot of that as well.
    - Lastly, it’s not mere disagreement that gives cause for skepticism. It’s 1. Prolonged disagreement in ideal conditions 2. Lack of better explanation (e.g. philosophers wanting to defend their livelihoods).

2. Nietzsche's Meta-ethics

This chapter rehashes arguments from Nietzsche on morality. Copying:
Realist camp wants to say it is objectively more important to produce higher men.
- Many try to use the will to power as justification.
  - The first issue with this is that just because everything is the will to power doesn’t meant that it is the standard of measure of value.
  - The deeper issue is that will to power is not an all-encompassing claim. Nietzsche is making the limited psychological claim that will-to-power tends to be a powerful psychological force even if it can’t explain everything.
- Some try to say that because both higher and lower men aesthetically value higher men that serves as a basis to defend Nietzsche’s claims.
  - Leiter’s pushback is that it’s precisely because lower men admire and, thus, envy higher men that they want to institute this morality. Ie. Some men want to thwart higher men precisely because they find them revolting and not admirable.

3. Moralities are a Sign-Language of the Affects

This chapter tries to argue for the centrality of affect and drives in moral judgements (and not cognition).
- Definition: drives are dispositions to have certain affects/feelings in specific conditions. Ie. It is a tendency to produce an affect and not the affect itself.
Metaphor of symptoms
- For Nietzsche, moral judgements to our affects are what symptoms are to the cause.
- The phenomena of moral feeling cannot be collapsed into emotion but are 1-1 indicative and caused by them.
Cognitive content
- Base-layer affects do not have (maybe its weaker in that they “do not need”) cognitive component. This is aversion to offending a strong man.
- Meta-layer affects do have cognitive component. This is the shame in response to one’s aversion to offend a strong man.
  - This is why arguing on the level of beliefs is still important for Nietzsche’s project because it can correct meta-layer affective responses.
- Moral judgement is directly and solely caused by affects (base and meta) which themselves can be caused by beliefs.
Three reasons to believe that moralities are just representative of the affects.
- Sincere moral judgements carry with them motivational force (which only affects have) which lends credence to the idea that moral judgements are affective at their core.
- It is most compatible with an anti-realist view of morality where we project qualities onto the world.
- Empirical experiments show that 1. People arrive at moral judgements and reason their way back to justify it. 2. Emotional processing centers have huge impact on moral decision making when damaged.
  - Nietzsche was able to anticipate our psychological research because 1. Psychological research uses folk categories (drives, desires, etc.) unlike say physics research and 2. Nietzsche was also speculating off of those categories.
My biggest issue here is that Leiter has only shown for me that affects are a part of moral judgement or, even weaker, tend to be a part of normal moral judgement. Nothing he has said so far has dismissed the Kantian view (but sounds like that’s not what he was trying to argue for):
- Kant is not committed to either the claim that most people actually arrive at their moral judgments through the exercise of practical reason or that most people arrive at moral judgments that can be justified, even after the fact, by the correct exercise of practical reason. The Kantian rationalist is commit- ted, I take it, only to the claim that rational agents can, in principle, revise their moral judgments in light of practical reason, but nothing in Haidt’s research rules out that possibility—indeed, he acknowledges that sometimes reasoning can result in a revi- sion of moral judgments. But Nietzsche needs for his purposes only the descriptive thesis—that affective or emotional responses ordinarily determine moral judgment— since he has independent arguments for skepticism about practical reason against the moral rationalist like Kant that do not depend on the actual causal process by which people ordinarily arrive at moral judgments (see Chapter 1, Section 3 and Chapter 5, Sections 5 and 6).

4. Anti-Realism, Value, Perspectivism

This chapter is to defend the claim that Nietzsche’s anti-realism extends into epistemology and not just limited to morality.
What is perspectivism?
- Only discussed in two places in Nietzsche.
- He thinks that even the idea of space and time, causality and free will, even these are informed by the affects.
- He thinks that consciousness is a hallucination that resulted from the (group-selection) need to communicate.
- There is a lot of distortion happening because evolution does not select for truth-seeking behavior but, by definition, fitness (Example would be where our optical nerve enters our brain).
What is objectivity in a perspectival world?
- In the perspectival world, reality itself is made possible by perspectives. By the existence of a perceiver is reality possible. Objective reality is an oxymoron like unmarried bachelor, because what makes a reality a reality is what it appears to a subject.
- The example he gives is Thucydides who captured the partiality of two warring factions. That’s how you get objectivity: which is the excess of partiality. However, plato and socrates who try to give an objective account of justice to describe these events that’s actually ultimate partiality. Because it reflects the partiality of the disinterested philosopher.
How do you defend naturalism (the idea that the empirical mode of investigation as opposed to say speculative metaphysics) from perspectivism? Note: this is how BL is going to extend the perspectivism from morality into the epistemic/theoretical realm.
- THEORY: Naturalism works — it gives us airplanes. And BL thinks we don’t need much more beyond that. Becuase in a naturalistic world-view when we give reasons for believing something we are really just giving causes that are compelling enough to subjects. He thinks that empirical useful/verifiability/predictability is what appeals to most subjects.
- MORALITY: naturalism has not explained real morality (why it’s right or wrong to do X) but only the causal mechanisms of morality (why people think it’s right or wrong to do X). BL responds that there is no real morality. It is all just causes and not norms that explain morality. However, BL says that to a moral agent, we are forced to act under the illusion of morality, that there are things that really pull us and we aren’t just determined by certain causes … in the same way we operate under the illusion of the free will.
- WHY DO THEORY AND MORALITY DIFFER? Why is there so much consensus on theoretical view of the world (science) and not the moral world. BL’s answer is that the type of knowledge in both are perspectival and similar in kind but they are different in degree. That’s because we share similar enough interests and needs as theoretical/knowing agents such that we tend to converge on similar norms. But morality-wise we are so different (because of types) and often directly contradictory (because of resentment, and conflict of types) that we naturally diverge.
  - What follows is that when people share the same attitudes, reason can make genuine progress. When people don’t share similar attitudes, force (rhetorical or otherwise) wins the day.
I’m quite convinced by this line of thinking, here are my questions:
- What this theory really hinges on, is that humans are radically different enough in the moral world. There is a whole plethora of psychological types. Unlike in the domain of knowing.
- How do we think about improvement in this domain?
  - One area of improvement seems to be when I better align actuality with my values: America getting rid of slaves. It’s not objectively good, but good for people with US’s values and that’s enough.
  - Another way of improvement is changing my values. How does this process work? (Perhaps Quinne’s boat is helpful here; perhaps it’s identifying one value that doesn’t fit in with the rest. Ie. If I value chastity and humility and patience but also conquest, I would do well by ejecting conquest).
- Surely we want to say something more about atrocities than “bad-taste”.

5. Nietzsche’s Theory of Agency

This chapter is to explore all the arguments that Nietzsche gives against the free will.
Nietzsche’s position
- He isn’t a determinist (determinism seems to be uprooted by quantum mechanics anyways).
- He believes environment and physiological factors are better explainers for why we do the things we do. Even stronger, they exhaustively explain it. This is what BL describes as Nietzsche’s “Fatalism.” The metaphor is that of a seed growing into a plant.
  - He seems to suggest that even education is unimportant: “one will become only that which one is (in spite of all: that means education, instruction, milieu, chance, and accident)” (WP 334)
- He believes that not only is the will not free its also not causal.
Argument 1: The Phenomenology of Willing
- This is Nietzsche’s account of the phenomenology of willing
  - First there are bodily feelings: my muscles are contracting as I leave my chair.
  - Second there is the commandeering thought: I ought to go downstairs.
  - Third there is a meta-thought that I am the one who commanded me to go downstairs.
- Interesting observation that when we say I ought to go downstairs, there is a command and an obeying. But we identify with the commanding part and not the obeying part because it increases our feeling of power. The meta-feeling arises because I want to feel powerful.
- This is Nietzsche’s argument: that there is no commandeering thought to that commandeering thought so the thought arose when it wanted not when I wanted. And if there were a commandeering thought it would be an infinite regress. This is to make you distrust your phenomenology:
  - “So Nietzsche’s phenomenological point then comes to this: a “thought” that appears in consciousness is not preceded by the phenomenology of willing that Nietzsche has described, that is, there is no “commandeering thought” preceding the conscious thought to which the meta-feeling (the affect of superiority) attaches. (Even if there were such a commandeering thought in some instance, this would just create a regress, since not every commandeering thought will be preceded by the experience of willing.) Since we do not experience our thoughts as willed the way we experience some actions as willed, it follows that no thought comes when “I will it” because the experience to which the “I will” attaches is absent.”
  - My pushback against this is that there are certain thoughts that arise unwilled or even against one’s will (don’t think of a pink elephant) but there are other thoughts, like the conversation we are engaging in now that feels much more willed. So I disagree that you need a commandeering thought for this commandeering thought to be considered willed. And the example I point to is that within our phenomenology of thoughts some feel much more willed than others.
- Nietzsche wants to show that the strongest evidence for why we think free will exists is misguided.
Argument 2: Cornarism / Confusing Cause and Effect
- The example that Nietzsche uses is Cornaro who recommended a slender diet for a long and happy life. He thought that slender diet causes a long and happy life but it was really his extraordinary slowness of his metabolism that necessitated he eat little (would make him sick when he ate more) and also the cause of his life.
- Nietzsche wants to use this as an analogy which is to say that unconscious motives and drives cause both our actions and our experience of acting. We mistake the latter for the former.
  - Example of the dream: where a real world siren projects a police car and sound into my dreams. I think the sound is caused by the police car, it is actually caused by the real world siren.
  - Someone practices christianity and feels good. Nietzsche would say it’s because of the type of person that one is that gives rise to both.
- If the will is not causally efficacious, then the obvious question is why did we develop consciousness. Nietzsche’s answer is for communication with others:
  - In GS 354, Nietzsche argues that “the development of language and the development of consciousness . . . go hand in hand,” though as Riccardi points out (2015 : 225) that is hardly plausible with respect to, say, phenomenal consciousness: one can experience color or pain without any linguistic capacity; and surely non-human animals can have conscious perceptual experiences without having language (the dog sees the squirrel and chases it). The only kind of consciousness that plausibly requires linguistic articulation would be precisely the kind that Nietzsche focuses on in GS 354, namely, that which develops “only under the pressure of the need for communication,” namely, that kind of consciousness necessary to coordinate our behavior with others. Here is what Nietzsche says: Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings; it is only as such that it had to develop; a solitary human being who lived like a beast of prey would not have needed it. That our actions, thoughts, feelings, and movements enter our own consciousness— at least a part of them—that is the result of a “must” that for a terribly long time lorded it over man. As the most endangered animal, he needed help and protection, he needed his peers, he had to learn to express his distress and to make himself understood; and for all this he needed “consciousness” first of all, he needed to “know” himself what distressed him, he needed to “know” how he felt, he needed to “know” what he thought...[O]nly this conscious thinking takes the form of words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact uncovers the origin of consciousness. (GS 354) Riccardi suggests we view linguistic articulation as necessary for “self-consciousness,” since that is the kind of consciousness that “requires the capacity to self-refer—a capacity we acquire by learning how to use the first-person pronoun” (2015: 225).
  - Language is also deceitful because it doesn’t match the phenomenological richness of our inner lives.
  - But I don’t buy this because 1. Communication can happen without consciousness, computers communicate. 2. It’s not clear to me why communication requires any more consciousness than doing math (which you suggest empirically has been shown to be unconscious)
- My bigger issue with all of this is that he has shown the extraordinary ways in which we are determined but none of these arguments need to be taken to the extreme. Yes I am determined by my type-facts but why am I exhaustively determined by my type-facts.
Argument 3: The Real Genesis of action
- BL is going to discuss a series of empirical examples that show e.g. brain electroneronal activity precedes awareness of decision.
- There’s no such thing as self-mastery, its just drives battling it out.

6. A Positive View of Freedom

This chapter is to defend a Nietzschean conception of positive freedom. BL will show that when Nietzsche does talk about freedom as a positive ideal, he is always re-evaluating the term significantly.
ONE: Nietzsche’s understanding of freedom is closer to Spinoza/Stoics (who were also fatalists) but gave high priority to being determined only by oneself.
- Question: let’s understand this precisely because my worry is Nietzsche has a very naive view of not being determined by anything outside of oneself means. But there is negative mimesis… the much more sober picture of being self-determined is that of Rousseau. General will is not seen as a foreign exposition because I can identify with it. So it’s about a harmony of group and self.
TWO: Another way Nietzsche uses freedom is cheerful fatalism. Amor Fati (exemplified by Goethe) of not wanting to wish to be anything other than what one is. A sort of affirmation.
THREE: A sort of internal coherence.
But its important to note that all of these are determined.

7. The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology

This chapter is to try to 1. Offer Nietzsche as a tempting third option next to Aristotelean virtue ethics and Kantian Deontology by 2. Appealing to psychological research.
- Aristotle: important role of habituation especially childhood upbringing.
- Kant: following beliefs.
- Nietzsche: genetically determined type-facts.
The main argument between Aristotle (repeating performing of virtues habituates a character) and Nietzsche is the tension between nurture and nature. Leiter offers some experiments to show just how impactful genetics is:
- Heritability explains roughly 50-70% of variance while shared environment in upbringing explained 5-10% of variance.
- When you look at criminality: 59 percent is explained by biological parents, 19% by adoptive parents in the case of adoption!
- I think the key takeaway here is that child-rearing and self-improvement isn’t about becoming some ideal but figuring out what your nature is and designing a coherent life in accordance with that nature. This is why Nietzsche’s Ecco Hommo is subtitled “becoming what you are.”
  - What’s really important then is to understand what level genetic determinism operates on. It doesn’t operate on the level of actual beliefs (e.g. Gay marriage) it operates on psychological traits like need for closure which then determine beliefs and they could be polar opposite.
The main argument between Kant and Nietzsche is that Kant thinks beliefs significantly determine our action (is BL right here?) another critique he has of the Kantians are that many of them don’t care about the empirical studies and want to instead detail how moral agents ought act.
- Study he shows that conscious beliefs explain very little.
- If anything actions have more effects on beliefs than vice versa.

Nietzsche on Morality by Brian Leiter | Notes & Summary

Johnathan Bi — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 01:33:11 GMT

1. Nietzsche, Naturalist or Postmodernist?

The key argument of this chapter is to establish Nietzsche as a naturalist and not a postmodernist. By naturalism Leiter is going to emphasize its continuity with science (empirical methods of investigation) as opposed to speculative philosophy (German idealism, I think this is Richardson’s approach as reading Nietzsche as having constructed a metaphysical system) and opposed to postmodernism (this is reading Nietzsche as being a strong relativist, emphasizing the subjective).
Leiter gives a breakdown of the naturalist positions: many methodological naturalists are substantive naturalists but not necessarily so.
- Methodological Naturalist: continuation with the methods of science (either hard or soft science)
  - Results continuity: results of philosophy must be supported or justified by the results of science.
  - Methods continuity: employ the same methods as empirical science.
- Substantive Naturalist: the only thing which exists is natural (in varying degrees of strength, ie. Empirical things or things that can be studied by the physical sciences).
Nietzsche is not a substantive naturalist he is a methodological naturalist. And he is both types of methodological naturalist.
- Results: he seeks to be aligned with the latest results of the science of the day that man is a natural creature/animal.
- Methods: he also relies on methods such as
  - Believing in certain shapes of human nature. Ie. Will to power: how all action is expression of increasing one’s power.
  - Treating morality as a natural/physiological response. Like Hume he thinks a lot of our concepts like causation and freedom, we don’t have grounds to believe in them. What makes us want to believe in them are natural explanations.
  - Question: believing in human nature … im not sure that is a continuation of the methods of science? That almost seems speculative/metaphysical.
Leiter aims to respond to 5 objections of why Nietzsche couldn’t be a naturalist.
- Nietzsche’s perspectivism prevents him from holding any objective truths.
  - Nietzsche’s epistemic views evolve quite a bit. He begins in the Kantian position but then starts to question whether the noumenal realm is intelligible. When he concludes that it isn’t the phenomenal realm is rescued again because the phenomenal realm is only an illusion when compared to the standards of the objective realm. Nietzsche rejects Kant’s noumenal realm because it is unintelligible. It doesn’t make sense to think about what a perspective-less reality could be like.
  - Nietzsche’s perspectivism isn’t an issue because his point is simply that all reality is partial it’s from a certain perspective there is no perspective-less reality. But that doesn’t mean that some perspectives aren’t distorted or some perspectives dont have a certain vantage point. Most importantly that doesn’t mean that certain perspectives don’t have common features that they can all agree upon the good example is how sight works when we look at a common object.
    - Question: is it fair to understand this as a middle way between kantianism (there is an objective reality) and relativism.
- Nietzsche dismisses science as just one amongst many perspectives … even stronger he was anti science.
  - Nietzsche started off pro-science. Then became anti-science because science couldn’t get to the thing-in-itself but he was pro-science again because he rejected that Kantian divide.
  - So science is just one amongst many perspectives but back to the original point some perspectives are more privileged/better suited than others for certain tasks.
- Nietzsche was skeptical of causation
  - He was skeptical of in-itself causation or that the mind can reach into that. But that doesn’t mean one cannot speak of cause in a meaningful way in the phenomenal world.
- Nietzsche was hostile towards materialism
  - Only hostile to materialism of the substantive naturalists.
- Nietzsche was skeptical about human nature and essence
  - There doesn’t need to be a metaphysical nature/essence in order to speak of human nature and essence. Even in the phenomenal world certain explanatory facts have primacy over others.
Leiter understands Nietzsche’s project to be a revaluation of values.
- The morality common is a challenge to human greatness … greatness Nietzsche defines as the ability for one to create instead of just passively taking in.
  - Question: the issue he has with is not with morality per se but morality as practiced then and there right? Maybe it is with morality itself this very concept of responsibility to others.

2. Intellectual history and background

This chapter gives an overview of Nietzsche intellectual influences
Training in classical philology
- Birth of Tragedy (first book) gave him poor reputation because he wanted to answer big questions and ignored scholarly conventions. From that point on he abandoned writing to a scholarly audience to write about whatever concerned himself deeply.
- But he had deep respect for scholarly methods. Contra the deconstructivist/postmodern reading (which held that many incompatible readings of a singular text could all be right) Nietzsche was very concerned.
Presocratics and the Sophists
- Nietzsche admired the Greeks but saw socrates as marking a decline.
- What he admired most about the pre-socratics were:
  - Methodological Naturalism: Thales treated man as extension of nature, don’t appeal to weird forms and concepts and instead use things like water.
  - Limitations of Knowledge: despite his respect for science, Nietzsche thought the philosopher was after wisdom and scientist just knowledge. The former could create values which oriented life. Which meant that there are certain pieces of knowledge that’s not good for us to know even if it is true.
  - Empiricism: this is a middle way between relativism (focusing too much on subjectivity) and idealism (which doesn’t give enough weight to subjective experience and instead tries to reach at the objective).
  - Realism: (as in Real-politik) what he liked about someone like Thales is that he attributes egoistic real motives to political life and does not dress it up in moral language.
- Socrates obviously would go against all of these qualities of the pre-socratics.
Schopenhauer
- For S. The world was just the will but that was a negative thing. Because this will was unending it was unsatisfiable. And it made the justification of life difficult. Nietzsche would rebel against this pessimism and take on the challenge trying to argue that aesthetics is what makes life worth living.
- Nietzsche also Rebels against S. Emphasis on compassion and altruism. S. Took this part on because egoism is a misunderstanding of the world … like Kant in the noumenal realm we are all one (buddhist idea too). Of course Nietzsche would reject the metaphysics and also the ethics too.
- What Nietzsche will take on from S. Is theory of agency and character. Neither believed that man had free will. Practically there is fate/character that strongly determines what type of person we will become. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t quite a bit of pruning to do.
German Materialism
- The dominant school of thought in mid 19th century (reaction against Hegel) was strict materialism. Nietzsche considered him encountering the work of Lange (History of Materialism, a work of intellectual history) to be as significant as Kant and Schopenhauer.
- Nietzche would take on much of the materialist perspective. But he would rebel against the idea that natural science put an end to philosophy and not subscribe to reductionism. Even if natural forces have explanatory primacy that doesn’t mean they can capture the qualia of experience.
In short here are the six influences Nietzsche picked up:
- Reading texts properly and getting them “right”.
- Human beings can be explained in scientific terms.
- Commitment to empiricism.
- Focus on the real (egoistic) motives of human activity.
- We lack agency.
- The problem of suffering is a central challenge.

3. Nietzsche's Critique of Morality 1

This chapter is to describe what types of moral systems Nietzsche is critiquing and why focusing on the presuppositions the systems need to draw on (next chapter is on the content).
Nietzsche doesn’t critique morality in general (clearly as he suggests there are higher moralities and he provides his own). What he is doing is highlighting a specific morality to critique. He could be critiquing morality on four different grounds:
- Content: what the specific content is
- Origin: what the motives are (essentially resentment) this is the imminent critique.
- Universality: the fact that it is applied to all
- Presuppositions: what metaphysical/philosophical commitments they make.
Leiter’s claim is that its presuppositions and content that ground Nietzsche’s critique. Specifically if
- It presupposes
  - Free will - Capable of free and autonomous choice.
  - Transparency of the self - motives can be distinguished
  - Essential similarity of people
- In the content embraces norms that harm the “highest men” while benefiting the “lowest”.
Nietzsche’s view is that moral agents hold norms / want to hold norms because it favors their interests and they hold presuppositions / metaphysical doctrines that benefit those norms/morals. Leiter retreats a bit and says that just the content is enough to make a morality object of critique but that the content often/usually is accompanied by these specific presuppositions.
Nietzsche’s fatalism is causal essentialism.
- Classical determinism: billiard ball causality.
- Classical fatalism: even if through non-deterministic measures certain things are fated to happen (e.g. think prophecy).
- Causal essentialism: people are extremely bounded by their essence which determines the range of possibilities which they can become.
Nietzsche’s critique of free will (first presupposition)
- Two arguments:
  - We aren’t self-caused so we can’t be autonomous agent.
  - All consciousness (including the will) is emergent 1-1 from naturalistic causes (biological/environment factors) which means they have no causal agency even if they can’t be fully reduced down to the material.
    - (Nehamas disagrees with Leiter’s interpretation)
- Leads to a very odd understanding of autonomy. Which is autonomy is when you are only caused by factors internal to yourself and not due to external conditions.
- This means that man has absolute no agency whatsoever and so the growth of the self is really an arena of different forces that we dont have control over at all.
Critique against transparency (second supposition)
- Nietzsche believes a lot of the forces that give rise to consciousness and that motivate our decisions are not accessible to consciousness. The self is just the struggle of drives.
Critique against universality (third supposition)
- Morality is about expressing your power to the maximum.
- Some morals are relatively good for some (and that is an objective fact).

4. Nietzsche's Critique of Morality II

This chapter is to talk about the normative content of what makes a morality bad for Nietzsche.
Who are “higher men” that Nietzsche is seeking to defend and cultivate. Mostly they are men of great creativity like Goethe or Wagner but sometimes they are also men of action like Caesar.
- Someone who is solitary and treats others as instrumental (means as opposed to ends)to his project
- Someone who is building a project a unifying work that is looking for burdens and responsibilities and has vigor
- Someone is of good health and resilient which entails a non-pessimistic attitude towards life
- Someone who is optimistic about life and life-affirming. Who can say “amor-fati” to not just the ups but also the downs of life.
- Someone who affirms himself, almost worships himself. Indifference to external opinion.
How does MPS harm the higher man? His answer is going to be.
- What is bad morality.
  - If a morality affirms anything here:
    - Happiness
    - Altruism/selflessness
    - Equality
    - Peacefulness
    - tranquillity
    - Social/communal utility
    - Pity/compassion
    - Extirpation of the instincts
    - Well-being of the “soul
  - If a morality is against anything here:
    - Suffering
    - Self-love or self-interest
    - Inequality
    - Danger
    - That which endangers such utility
    - Indifference to the suffering
    - Enjoyment or satisfaction of the instincts
    - Well-being of the body
  - Makes it an object of critique for Nietzsche.
- Nietzche’s argument is going to be that what morality affirms is either 1. Not good 2. Overstated and what it is against is actually good.
  - Happiness he thinks not to be an end in itself whereas suffering is not intrinsically good but good to create artistic genius.
    - Nietzsche believed his ill health actually contributed to his philosophy.
    - Morality of happiness hurts higher men not by forcing them to stop suffering (not possible to stop someone’s suffering) but by potentially convincing many higher men to chase happiness and run away from suffering.
  - Egoism is another example where Nietzsche thinks the type of “severe self-love” where someone cares so much about developing one’s capacities to the forefront, to the max is necessary for greatness.
  - Inequality is helpful because an important driver of makes a higher man develop his faculties is recognizing that he as yet nothing. Ie. Looking down on people is useful at least in the limited case of looking down on oneself.
Why is preserving the higher man so important?
- Realist camp wants to say it is objectively more important to produce higher men.
  - Many try to use the will to power as justification.
    - The first issue with this is that just because everything is the will to power doesn’t meant that it is the standard of measure of value.
    - The deeper issue is that will to power is not an all-encompassing claim. Nietzsche is making the limited psychological claim that will-to-power tends to be a powerful psychological force even if it can’t explain everything.
  - Some try to say that because both higher and lower men aesthetically value higher men that serves as a basis to defend Nietzsche’s claims.
    - Leiter’s pushback is that it’s precisely because lower men admire and, thus, envy higher men that they want to institute this morality. Ie. Some men want to thwart higher men precisely because they find them revolting and not admirable.
- Leiter is in the anti-realist camp.
  - Herd morality is good for the herd. (I wonder if this is standard reading, because aren’t they also thwarting their own will to power by doing this I think I’m much more interested in investigating this immanent route)
    - QUESTION: maybe he is not giving enough weight to the immanent critique.
  - Even the distinction between higher and lower men is subjective.
  - The preference for higher men is just a preference for Nietzsche. This is why he is so cautious about limiting his audience.
Objections:
- Nietzsche writes with a ferocity that does not suggest he is an anti-realist
  - He tends to be hyperbolic
  - He doesn’t use language of truth and falsehood when critiquing bad morality
  - He writes such strong language because he needs to shake people out of their slumber
  - He may be upset after not receiving so much attention.
- If Nietzsche shows that bad morality is reliant on false presuppositions about say free will. Doesn’t that give us a theoretical way to privilege Nietzsche’s position?
  - No, Nietzsche holds the view that lies/deceits/falsehoods can be productive. What we must judge ta morality on is its consequence to life.

5. What is Genealogy and what is the Genealogy?

This chapter is a commentary on the genealogical form.
- Genealogy, traditionally conceived, was about identifying noble ancestors. It was supposed to be 1. Positive 2. Draw out the continuity. Nietzsche’s genealogy is going to go against both of these as it is 1. Critical 2. Supposed to create a break.
- His genealogy will be naturalistic, that we can explain this genealogy through purely psychological mechanisms.
- His genealogy purports to be historical even if it doesn’t observe scholarly conventions because his goal is not scholarly. Although some scholars have reconstructed the scholarly work for Nietzsche and it checks out.
How does Genealogy successfully engage in critique?
- The genetic fallacy is to think that the origin of X demonstrates something about the value of X.
- Nietzsche is fully aware of this. The danger is that to show that morality started off in wrong origins isn’t going to show us that it’s still motivated by those wrong drives.
- The reason Nietzsche still focuses on the origin as critique is really for the rhetorical force. It will enable you to be suspicious of it rhetorically more than it shows you conclusively it is bad. Rhetoric over theory is what Nietzsche has in mind. You attack the origin when you want to communicate an idea rather than to give a perfect argument.
The genealogy is a unified work
- The first essay is how resentment engendered christian morality.
- The second essay is about how guilt was established.
  - But the issue is that neither of these two essays gave a reason WHY this transformation happened. All it says is that it did happen.
- The third essay is an answer and completion of the former two: the revolts happened because all ascetic morality is will to power. Even that appeals to our will to power.
  - Leiter thinks the Genealogy gives two different maybe competing accounts of how this came to be. One is that a class staged this revolt (the priests) and another one is that this will to power is attractive in itself.

6. Commentary on the First Essay

The first essay is on how this shift from good/bad morality (GBM) became good/evil morality (GEM).
- Nietzsche has in his crosshairs both Jews (who started this revolt) and Christians (who universalized this revolt). He speaks of the battle, for example, between Rome and Judea.
What did we lose sight of?
- We clearly have NOT lost sight of the fact that the pagans had a different morality and there was a switch.
- What we are blind about is how this transformation has come about. We are blind about the “how.”
  - Some genealogists, even those who trace it to naturalistic/realistic explanations, they claim that it is because christian morality is useful to the receiver (of charity).
    - But that doesn’t add up because if that’s really the reason it was praised how could people have forgotten that. Ie. If it was so significant to receive charity such that it could upheave an entire cultural religious system, how could that be forgotten? What he’s really trying to say is that people don’t really care that much about receiving physical goods/aid. That form of gratitude is nowhere near as strong as the drive he’s going to point out (resentment).
    - Also doesn’t add up because the origin of the word good maps onto noble and bad maps onto base. So it’s clearly pointed at something else.
What are the differences between GBM and GEM.
- Genetic
  - You first establish yourself as good and label the different as bad in GBM. Whereas you first establish the other as evil and then label yourself as good in GEM.
  - What motivates you is a love of self in GBM vs. a hate of other in GEM.
- Evaluative
  - GBM evaluates the person and the action is something that is seen to flow out of it. GEM evaluates the action and holds the person as morally responsible for such an action.
  - GBM appreciates nobility while GEM elevates the meek virtues: patience, friendliness, humility, etc.
- Metaphysical
  - Related to the first evaluative point. It focuses on the person.
  - Noble soul is internal to itself. It’s self-standing.
  - The example of bird of prey and lamb, it would be ridiculous to say, the eagle is so evil.
  - Why do people believe in freedom
    - Might be able to convince the strong of freedom.
    - We mistake language for reality. When we say (I hit the ball) it makes it sounds like there is a person there that is distinct from the action.
What is the actual force motivating this revolution? Resentiment.
- Resentiment îs about a form of displeasure of one’s own state + an inability to do anything about it in action. (Thus, only thing people can do is in thought).
- Resentiment haș a positive side because it makes us more interesting animals.
Why did slave morality triumph?
- One answer is that resentful people are more clever and noble people are simpleminded and easy targets.
- There is another class among the high class which are the priests that will trick them.
- Leiter thinks that the first essay is not self-standing. That you need to bring in “guilt” (second essay) and “asceticism” (third essay) to really make sense of why the slave revolt happened.
- Another question is: is a psychological explanation of resentment sufficient to explain such a monumental shift?
  - The first answer is that this is a polemic and not meant to carry explanatory exhaustivity.
  - The second answer is that it is noteworthy that Christian values were not established through force. Constantine converted, some non-physical (PSYCHOLOGICAL) pathways did play a dominant role.

7. Commentary on the Second Essay

Guilt is what was missing from the account of why the masters fell for this. And this chapter is to explain how guilt came to be. It has three stages:
- How conscience developed
- How bad conscience developed
- How guilt developed
How conscience developed (1-3)
- What is required for conscience is regularity (answerable in the future/predictable) and what caused this (and thus what gave to morality) was customs (not respect for moral law).
- What is also important is memory. It’s significant that memory needs to be given an account because Nietzsche thinks forgetfulness and repression are such strong drives. The origin of memory is going to be pain and punishment that’s how you get someone to remember.
How do we get from conscience to bad conscience
- Nietzsche thinks that there is a natural drive to be cruel. When the conquerors enslaved large populations, those populations had no one to be cruel to other than themselves. That is how we developed self-cruelty.
- This is not entirely bad because this internalized cruelty gave man an inner world.
- Interesting point about how suffering is extra bad when it’s senseless. (Maybe that’s another reason we invent Gods)
How do we get from bad conscience to guilt
- Guilt is when you moralize this bad conscience.
- Guilt requires freedom. The greeks like Oedipus felt shame (when one fails to measure to one’s internal standards) even if the action was fated. Guilt is when you transgress norms when you know you can do otherwise. Example of bad conscience is “I’m so ugly or I’m so stupid.” Example of guilt is “I’m at fault for being so ugly or so stupid.”
- Guilt comes from Religion. First it began as ancestors which we owed our allegiance to and then it became gods. Then we fantasized the God who created everything so we can be most guilty. It’s the best self-torturing tool.
  - But there are better and worse ways to invent gods. Greeks invented gods who were responsible for causing all this trouble or inventing cosmic things such as fate. It kept bad conscience at bay because it could direct blame outwards.
  - So here’ the question and this is why the second essay is incomplete on its own: why didn’t we develop the greek gods. Why did we develop a god that was good and we who were debtors. It’s because we were attracted to ascetic ideal. The Greek gods were the most noble animal expressions of man… whereas modern man wants to disown the desire for food and sex. We fell in love with asceticism. And that’s what sets up the third essay.

8. Commentary on the Third Essay

The question this third essay is supposed to answer is: why did bad conscience develop into guilt (second essay) and why did the masters succumb to slave morality (first essay)?
Why is asceticism appealing to…
- Artists
  - He examines Wagner’s praise of chastity in Parsifal and concludes that artists never stand independently they are mere functions of philosophers.
- Philosophers
  - On the spiritual level philosophers need to reign in their worldly desires if they are to achieve best existence and fine productivity. Schopenhauer struggled with his own desires a lot and asceticism was a way to escape that.
  - On the practical level they need to imitate priests to show people they are dangerous. Ie. Be willing to engage in self-mortification to show that they have teeth.
  - Therefore we need to examine the priests who created this type of morality.
- Priests
  - Priests are advocates of the ascetic ideal and also achieve their maximum will to power through this ascetic ideal.
  - Priests represent life (the will to power) against life (natural impulses) they are about negating everything that has to do with being an animal.
  - But the priests will to power isn’t just about maximizing his own but it also makes life possible for others… which we have to invetigate next.
Why does asceticism aid life.
- Nietzsche following Schopenhauer (and the buddhists) takes suffering to be a key part about human existence. And conceive of his project as addressing problem of human suffering. Not alleviating it but justifying it.
- Suffering only leads to “suicidal nihilism” when it is meaningless.
- Resentment is wide-spread. Most people suffer from it. This is because suffering gives rise in people for someone to blame.
- Nietzsche believes that suffering needs to be released, it needs to be discharged.
- Someone must be to blame. This is how you make suffering meaningful.
- The priest has many ways to give meaning to suffering
  - An innocent way is to dampen awareness of suffering and have us focus on the “little things.”
  - But the real instrument of who is to blame is yourself. To make yourself responsible. To make yourself GUILTY.
- In doing so, the priest alleviates us from suicidal nihilism but at the cost of giving us more/deeper suffering. “Man was saved, he had a meaning.”
This answers the two questions:
- Why did bad conscience develop into guilt?
  - By making ourselves guilty, we were given someone to blame someone to give meaning to our struggles.
- Why did the masters succumb to slave morality?
  - Nietzsche says that before ascetic ideal we couldn’t make sense of our suffering. Why did Oedipus have to kill his father and have sex with his mother. Fate doesn’t help here. There’s no grand narrative and conclusion. But when the christians come along and say “you are guilty” that gives an object for you to push on. This is why the moralization of the natural world also imbued it with meaning. That’s why they succumbed. It was comforting for the masters as well.
    - This answer also sets us up to understand Nietzsche’s positive project in thus spoke. If the issue really is suicidal nihilism then eternal return and the ability to affirm it removes sucide as a possibility. It is an ideal to replace the ascetic ideal because to affirm the eternal return (which also shows that there is no meaning to your suffering, because 1. You aren’t responsible so you can’t be guilty 2. This suffering is NOT building up to something) is to recognize the meaninglessness of suffering and be able to will against that.
      - The greeks thought suffering could have a meaning but didn’t have one.
      - The ascetic/christians gave suffering a meaning in self-denial.
      - Zarathustra makes you will and live in the absence of any meaning of suffering.
Critique of valuing truth ULTIMATELY
- Science for Nietzsche is an extension of the aesthetic ideal. Because it’s seeking truth at all costs, even at the expense of life (think of these materialists who think we are all particles floating around).
- Atheism is an extension of christianity. It’s not rejection of Christianity its extension of it (like Girard). Atheism is about let’s get at what’s true regardless of the demands of life.
- Another reason why will to truth is anti-life is that the truth that scientists are after (grand unified theory of everything) that’s anti-perspectival, that’s the objective truth. But ceasing to be from a perspective means that you are choosing death.
  - Two ways to interpret Nietzsche’s rejection of the noumenal world 1. Metaphysically: there is no such thing as the noumenal world its unintelligible. The very idea is unintelligible. 2. Pragmatically: what you want when you want objective knowledge is a knowledge that none of us could have and, even if we could, would have no bearing on us.
- Not only is the truth seeker abandoning life he is also abandoning reason. Kant in the noumenal world. He claims that even reason cannot get at the capital-T truth.
  - Nietzsche doesn’t indict himself because he’s not after truths for truth sake but truth to liberate us to better live life.
- Nietzsche thinks that the pursuit of philosophy is rarely motivated by the pursuit of truth (weak drive) its for glory, recognition, politics, money, sex, etc.

9. Nietzsche since 1900

Nietzsche has been white-washed due to his perceived association with nazism and less than palatable political views. He is treated either as a metaphysician/postmodern deconstructivist or a benign secular humanist. This chapter is to rescue Nietzsche as primarily a moral theorist concerned about values.
People try to construct a political philosophy for Nietzsche but it’s not a good fit because Nietzsche was extremely hostile to politics throughout his entire career. He only cared about the flourishing of a few great souls and that had to be done as far away from politics as possible. He has strong views of human flourishing but no political philosophy to speak of.
It’s tempting to pushback against Nietzsche that its lack of morality/lack of justice that is stifling greatness.
- Nietzsche’s first response is to remind you he agrees there is lack of morality but the real issue is the guise of morality it proceeds through. It’s the affirmation of morality that he is worried will lead great men astray.
- But Nietzsche’s challenge to us is a serious one that especially if people became more moral we would be even more screwed. It’s not a challenge that we can just dismiss easily. Nietzsche’s elitism presents a serious challenge to our egalitarianism:
  - Why are moralities of renunciation (sexual and otherwise) so prevalent among human beings?
  - What would a culture suffused with morality actually look like, and would it be one that we would admire?
  - Can a Beethoven or a Goethe really take moral demands seriously?
  - Does commitment to morality preclude the cultivation of certain traits and talents?
  - Is moral conscience severable from the pleasure in cruelty?
  - Is the psychology of “love of truth” the same as the psychology of self-denial?
  - Are human excellence and moral commitment in fundamental tension?
  - How, in fact, can human beings be reconciled with the fact of suffering?
  - What are the alternatives to the ascetic ideal, and for whom will they work?

On the Genealogy of Morality by Nietzsche | Notes & Summary

Johnathan Bi — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 01:22:37 GMT

Preface

1

Similar to Rousseau in the second discourse he laments that we do not understand ourselves. It's the knowers especially (?) who do not understand. It's ironic that in the age where knowledge has never been more praised we are still unknown to ourselves.

2

Nietzsche traces the time when he first had the ideas of the Geneaology -- topic is origins of morality.
He has a will to truth that has made him refine these ideas, demanding something ever more precise.
Fatalism: we become who we are with the necessity which a tree bears a fruit.

3

Nietzsche first questioned morality at 13. He blamed Evil on God.
His maturity now comes form the fact that he does not seek Evil behind this world but in this world, psychology specifically.
He is interested in two questions:
- Under what conditions did man invent those value judgments good and evil. (origin)
- And what value do they themselves have. (foundation)

4

Nietzsche explains what was the efficient cause for writing the Geneaology (note: for publishing and sharing it, not for conceiving it) its because he read a bad (English) book that provided a contrary interpretation: The Origin of Moral Sensations.
This book shares affinities with Nietzsche in that it creates a cynical account of how morality came to be. But it diverges by claiming it to be self-interest (narrowly conceived) that we praise others when they do altruistic actions because it benefits us.

5

Nietzsche needed to rebel from Schopenhauer and his valuing of compassion.
Up until that point people had quite a low regard for compassion: Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and Kant all did (quite an interesting observation that for these thinkers, morality does not mean compassion).
He sees compassion as being the greatest danger to humanity worried that it will create a new Buddhism in Europe.

6

Value of compassion seems isolated but is tangled with bunch of questions around the value of values.
Nietzsche hints that perhaps morality itself is to blame. It is the cause of regression.

7

The problem with Dr.Dee (the author of the aforementioned British treatise on the origin of morals) is that he is not historical. He transposes a naïve British utilitarianism and projects it on morality. The correct method is to go back into history and trace out how morals developed.
Nietzsche thinks that the reward for this, for seeing the true origin of morality, is cheerfulness.

8

Nietzsche assumes the reader of this work will have read his others (funny as at this moment no one was reading his books).
His style is difficult because it is the aphoristic form. Aphorisms are not deciphered when they have been read. There is an art of interpretation. This is a lost art and, so, Nietzsche thinks it will be a long time before his writings are "readable".

First Treatise

1

The english psychologists are trying to highlight the shameful side of human nature. (this of course is a great similarity between Nietzsche and the psychologists but I think Nietzsche would say he is highlighting the "suspicious" and not the "shameful" side. What Nietzsche faults these psychologists on isn't their cynicism but the baseness of motivations they attribute to man)
Nietzsche speculates why they do this: pessimism, anti-Christian sentiments, taste for the questionable parts of existence.
Nietzsche has heard that the real reason is that they are "boring frogs" who are themselves so base and low-minded but he says he wished he didn't know and preferred to think of them as brave explorers who sacrificed everything for truth.

2

The issue with these English psychologists is that they are unhistorical. Meaning that they are myopically constrained to their own culture and moment in history.
Their explanation is that "good" was labeled on by those who were benefiting from "good" actions. But this was then forgotten.
Nietzsche's explanation is that the noble, powerful, high-minded labeled themselves "good" (not by others). The viewpoint of utility is completely foreign to these people.
It is from this distance. This "pathos of distance" between high and low that we initially get "good" and "bad."
He seems to give two arguments for this view:
- The first one is that Lords have the power to give names to things
- The second one is that in the outset the word "good" does not attach itself to "unegoistic" actions … only later on are those things combined.

3

The other reason that "good" cannot merely be what is "useful" to the community is that how can this be "forgotten"? If "good" actions appeared so undeniably "useful" for society, how did we "forget" this? Surely this would still be very obvious.

4

The "right" path was shown to Nietzsche by investigating the etymology of these terms. "Good" originally related to nobility. "Bad" originally connoted "commonness."
He says that modern democratic "prejudices" have an inhibiting influence on questions of all origins.

5

Nietzsche traces etymology of how the nobility/conquering races derived their own names: as a characteristic trait they were proud of (e.g. possessing money, blonde-haired, the ones who know truth) and how the conquered races were also named after a trait they were looked-down for (e.g. black-haired).
He laments that in Europe the conquered races now have the upper hand and it is due to their ascendance that we get "democracy" and inclination toward the "commune."

6.

The general rule (permits exceptions) is that superior caste means superior soul
The priestly ruling caste calls itself as "pure" and others as "impure." In the beginning all of our value distinctions were extremely simple and, thus, this just meant basic restrictions around sex, eating, etc.
It is through the priestly class that value judgements of "good" and "bad" do not track castes anymore.
The priestly class is naturally diseased:
- "ones turned away from action, partly brooding, partly emotionally explosive, habits that have as a consequence the intestinal disease and neurasthenia that almost unavoidably clings to the priests of all ages."
But the cure they invented for their own disease has haunted humanity ever since. Some examples
- Fasting
- Anti-sensuality
- Longing for the other world (takes its heightened form in Buddhism, the desire to be nothing)
Everything became more dangerous but also humans became interesting and uniquely man. Nietzsche considers depth and evil are how man is superior over creatures:
- "on the soil of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priestly form, that man first became an interesting animal, that only here did the human soul acquire depth in a higher sense and become evil—and these are, after all, the two basic forms of the previous superiority of man over other creatures!"

7

The knight/aristocrat/master values need a life of powerful physicality. Overflowing health.
The priests are the greatest haters because they are the most powerless. The hate of the powerless.
The jews were the original priestly people who, being powerless, exacted their revenge through a revaluation of values. They flipped the values (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy) to an alternate set (good = miserable = poor = powerless = lowly).
We are all inheritors of the jewish revolt (Christendom).

8

It is from jewish hate (the deepest and most sublime hate, a hate that is able to remold values) that a just as incomparable a new love. This love wasn't a negation of revenge it was revenge itself.
Jesus of Nazareth, for Nietzsche, was not the end of Judaism it was the completion of Judaism. What appeared to be Israel's enemy universalized the values of Israel. By persecuting Jesus, Israel enabled the world to take on this bait without thinking twice.

9

The Jews, the Christians, the mob -- they all represent this set of ideals that favors the common man at the expense of the great man.
This revaluation succeeded.
This revaluation has been so thorough, in fact, that the church (institution of Christianity itself) is no longer needed.

10

Ressentiment/slave morality starts with the other and then tries to negate it. They are evil and we are good.
- Master morality starts with itself as good and what is not itself as bad. That is why, in Greek, "bad" is synonymous with pitiful/unhappy/low. There is a sort of compassion the master feels for the slave. It is open and comfortable with itself.
Ressentiment requires a sort of lying. It requires a sort of falsification. I think it is falsification because they secretly desire what the master has.
- Master is truthful and honest.
Because of this, because there is so much internally going on the slave has a lot more depth: "his soul looks obliquely at things; his spirit loves hiding places, secret passages and backdoors, everything hidden strikes him as his world, his security, his balm; he knows all about being silent, not forgetting, waiting, belittling oneself for the moment, humbling oneself. A race of such human beings of ressentiment in the end necessarily becomes more prudent than any noble race, it will also honor prudence in an entirely different measure: namely as a primary condition of existence."
- Master morality on the other hand is quite simplistic. Think to the jock in highschool. So comfortable in his own skin: "To be unable for any length of time to take his enemies, his accidents, his misdeeds themselves seriously—that is the sign of strong, full natures in which there is an excess of formative, reconstructive, healing power that also makes one forget (a good example of this from the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no memory for 15 insults and base deeds committed against him and who was only unable to forgive because he—forgot)."
Surprisingly it is the master who is able to love one's enemies because he is so secured, because he is made noble by the obstacles he can overcome. Whereas the slaves they have to use words like "evil" because they are threatened by such a creature.
- "Such a human is simply able to shake off with a single shrug a collection of worms that in others would dig itself in; here alone is also possible—assuming that it is at all possible on earth—the true “love of one’s enemies.” What great reverence for his 20 enemies a noble human being has!—and such reverence is already a bridge to love ... After all, he demands his enemy for himself, as his dis- tinction; he can stand no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to hold in contempt and a very great deal to honor! On the other hand, imagine “the enemy” as the human being of ressentiment conceives of him—and precisely here is his deed, his creation: he has conceived of “the evil enemy,” “the evil one,” and this indeed as the basic concept, starting from which he now also thinks up, as reaction and counterpart, a “good one”—himself! ..."

11

Bad and Evil are completely different concepts.
Evil in good-and-evil is used to designate precisely the person who was considered good in good-and-bad.
This person is marked by a self-assuredness. They are almost marked by the innocence (interesting choice of word) of that of a rampaging child:
- "they step back into the innocence of the beast-of-prey conscience, as jubilant monsters, who perhaps walk away from a hideous succession of murder, arson, rape, torture with such high spirits and equanimity that it seems as if they have only played a student prank, convinced that for years to come the poets will again have something to sing and to praise."
Nietzsche considers some races as master races and some races as slavish…
- "At the base of all these noble races one cannot fail to recognize the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast who roams about lusting after booty and victory; from time to time this hidden base needs to discharge itself, the animal must get out, must go back into the wilderness: Roman, Arab, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings—in this need they are all alike."
- … and it is precisely these races that wreaked so much havoc on the slavish races where the term "barbarian" comes from.
Similar to Rousseau, Nietzsche sees civilization as a linear decrease also because of the introduction of "morality." Unlike Rousseau, it is precisely the expansion of equality of care and compassion for the weak and downtrodden which he sees as the ultimate knock against culture/civilization.

12

No one in Europe still yearns for more, for greatness. Nietzsche would just want one cultural exemplar to emerge to restore our faith in man.

13

Nietzsche uses the famous metaphor of the bird of prey and the lamb to show that in reality the masters cannot do anything but express their master morality.
Another core idea of Evil is freedom. Freedom was invented:
- "For just as common people separate the lightning from its flash and take the latter as a doing, as an effect of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from the expressions of strength as if there were behind the strong an indifferent substratum that is free to express strength—or not to. But there is no such substratum; there is no “being” behind the doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is simply fabricated into the doing—the doing is everything."
Freedom was invented to justify the punishment of higher men, to justify the hate felt towards them because they want to think of them as being able to do otherwise.
- Example: vegetarians don't fault lions/eagles for eating meat. They fault humans because they can do otherwise.
Freedom was also invented to show that the slaves were not impotent they were "good" ie. It was through their own choice (and not because of their weak natures) that they don't act like the masters.

14

This paragraph is a series of subversions, a series of slave morality turning the bad to the good
Reiterate the point that through freedom, slaves are able to claim that they aren't powerless, they are "good":
- “And the powerlessness that does not retaliate into kindness; fearful baseness into ‘humility’; subjection to those whom one hates into ‘obedience’ (namely to one whom they say orders this subjection—they call him God). The inoffensiveness of the weak one, cowardice itself, which he possesses in abundance, his standing-at-the-door, his unavoidable having- 5 to-wait, acquires good names here, such as ‘patience,’ it is even called virtue itself; not being able to avenge oneself is called not wanting to avenge oneself, perhaps even forgiveness (‘for they know not what they do—we alone know what they do!’). They also talk of ‘love of one’s enemies’—and sweat while doing so.”
They don't want "revenge" they want "justice," they disguise even their anger as "communal"
- Lecture example: Effective Altruism / Carl Schmitt "he who invokes humanity wants to cheat."
- "We good ones—we are the just’—what they demand they call not retaliation but rather ‘the triumph of justice’; what they hate is not their enemy, no! they hate ‘injustice,’ ‘ungodliness’; what they believe and hope for is not the hope for revenge, the drunkenness of sweet revenge (—already Homer called it ‘sweeter than honey’), but rather the victory of God, of the just God over the ungodly; what is left on earth for them to love are not their brothers in hate but rather their ‘brothers in love,’ as they say, all the good and just on earth.”
They transform their this-worldly failure as a sign of their next-worldly success.

15

This paragraph contains all the clues for Christians desiring vengeance.
The Christians want power. That's what they are really hoping for when they say that their "kingdom" shall also come. They are out to conqueror.
- Important: tie this in with Socrates and his proposal of philosopher-king. To secure political power in an alternate way.
Dante writes on the gates of hell "I was made by eternal love." Of course, everything in the inferno is terrible and cruel and reflects the slave desire to exact revenge on all the people they were too weak to exact revenge on in real life. Most of the sins that are punished (gluttony, vanity, violence, etc.) were pagan virtues. What Dante should have written was "I was made by eternal hate."
- This is even more perverse than vengeance because even though it is just as personal it is disguised as "objective" justice.
Aquinas talks about the joy of the saints when they see the punished in hell. Summa Thealogiae:
- "In order that the bliss of the saints may be more delightful for them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, it is given to them to see perfectly the punishment of the damned."
- This is like a colosseum, watching in joy as the "evil" are punished.
Nietzsche also cites Tertullian:
- "That last day of judgment … how vast a spectacle then bursts upon the eye! What there excites my admiration? what my derision? Which sight gives me joy? which rouses me to exultation? As I see so many illustrious monarchs. whose reception into the heavens was publicly announced, groaning now in the lowest darkness with great Jove (Zeus) himself, and those, too, who bore witness of their exultation; governors of provinces, too, who persecuted the Christian name in fires more fierce than those with which in the days of their pride they raged against the followers of Christ. What world's wise men besides, the very philosophers, in fact, who taught their followers that God had no concern in aught that is sublunary, and were wont to assure them that either they had no souls, or that they would never return to the bodies which at death they had left, now covered with shame before the poor deluded ones, as one fire consumes them! Poets also, trembling not before the judgment seat of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but of the unexpected Christ! I shall have a better opportunity then of hearing the tragedians, louder-voiced in their own calamity; of viewing the play-actors, much more "dissolute" in the dissolving flame; of looking upon the charioteer, all glowing in his chariot of fire; of beholding the wrestlers. not in their gymnasia, but tossing in the fiery billows; unless even then I shall not care to attend to such ministers of sin, in my eager wish rather to fix a gaze insatiable on those whose fury vented itself against the Lord. "

16.

The most important battle EVER to have taken place is this tension between good/evil vs. good/bad. Nietzsche frames it as "Rome vs. Judae, Judae vs. Rome."
For Nietzsche the Jews are ambivalent, they started this revolt which he loathed but he recognizes their genius. Like two warring generals who respect each other: "The Jews, conversely, were that priestly people of ressentiment par excellence, in whom there dwelt a popular-moral genius without parallel. Just compare the peoples with related talents—for instance the Chinese or the Germans—with the Jews in order to feel what is first and what fifth rank."
He starts tracing out a history of this war:
- Judae triumphed over Rome. The Pope sits in Rome, people everywhere worship 4 jews: Jesus, Peter, Paul, Mary.
- The Renaissance was a resurgence of Rome.
- Judae immediately triumphed again due to German and English Ressentiment (the Reformation). He said it represented an even more thorough victory of Judae (because Catholicism still has pagan elements?)
- Judae had another victory in the french revolution because 17th/18th century France represented the last of political nobility
- Napoleon (Rome) and the French revolution (Judae) which he co-opted represent another tension, another battle of these two competing ideals.
- LECTURE: if we pushed this to the 20th century, fascism would be Rome, liberalism and communism would be Judae. So Judae secured another victory. I think in the 21st century he would think judae's domination is total. The furthest right you go is the libertarians who also hold a view of equality. And now there is not only a view that advocates for the majority but advocates for the minority (the exact opposite of the "higher men").

17

Nietzsche is trying to trace out a research program that applies his mode of investigation to all values. Any "thou shalt" (obligation) needs to be subjected to 1. physiological 2. psychological critique.
He wants us to start asking about the value of values in order to determine a "order of rank among values."

Second Treatise: “Guilt,” “Bad Conscience,” and Related Matters

1

Nietzsche is now investigating how Man was able to made to keep promises, to be regular.
This is especially interesting as promise-keeping requires memory which is in direct tension with forgetfulness.
Forgetfulness is a core capacity:
- It is positive.
- It helps us "digest" all of our experiences surfacing up only the ones that are necessary. It is what makes us strong.
Memory is not just the absence of forgetfulness its something much stronger. Its not just about digesting all the PRESENT stimuli, it's about 1. being able to remember stimuli in the past (previous promises kept) 2. and imagine scenarios in the future (I will do XYZ).
Nietzsche's conclusion is that man must have first made himself calculable, regular and necessary.

2

Someone who honors promises is necessary/uniform/predictable.
This development is the "prehistoric" work of man. Meaning that history only started when man developed this capacity.
What's surprising about this paragraph is that Nietzsche is not just critical about this capacity.
IMPORTANT: its through morality and custom that man developed this (what Nietzsche is going to call "conscience"). But if an individual perfects this he will once again be freed of morality and custom because he is fully in control, fully capable of establishing one's own values.
- With the help of the morality of custom and the social straightjacket man was made truly calculable. If, on the other hand, we place ourselves at the end of the enormous process, where the tree finally produces its fruit, where society and its morality of custom finally brings to light that to which it was only the means: then we will find as the ripest fruit on its tree the sovereign individual, the individual resembling only himself, free again from the morality of custom, autonomous and supermoral (for “autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive), in short, the human being with his own independent long will, the human being who is permitted to promise— and in him a proud consciousness, twitching in all his muscles, of what has finally been achieved and become flesh in him, a true consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of the completion of man himself. This being who has become free, who is really permitted to promise, this lord of the free will, this sovereign—how could he not know what superiority he thus has over all else that is not permitted to promise and vouch for itself, how much trust, how much fear, how much reverence he awakens—he “earns” all three—and how this mastery over himself also necessarily brings with it mastery over circumstances, over nature and all lesser-willed and more unreliable creatures? The “free” human being, the possessor of a long, unbreakable will, has in this possession his standard of value as well: looking from himself toward the others, he honors or holds in contempt; and just as necessarily as he honors the ones like him, the strong and reliable (those who are permitted to promise),—that is, everyone who promises like a sovereign, weightily, seldom, slowly, who is stingy with his trust, who conveys a mark of distinction when he trusts, who gives his word as something on which one can rely because he knows himself to be strong enough to uphold it even against accidents, even “against fate”—: just as necessarily he will hold his kick in readiness for the frail dogs who promise although they are not permitted to do so, and his switch for the liar who breaks his word already the moment it leaves his mouth.
IMPORTANT: Nietzsche is betraying himself to be the priest's priest. In this idea of the sovereign individual he is simply negating the Christian ideal:
- Communitarian --> hyper individualistic
- Citizen --> lord
- Compassion --> contempt

3

Even if the perfection of conscience, the development of the "sovereign" individual is something to be celebrated, the pathway to developing such an individual is bad. It's unclear whether its bad because 1. the person who is confined by morality but not enough power to overcome it is despicable OR 2. the way that this conscience is formed is violent.
The most powerful mnemonics is pain. Nietzsche gives examples of the violence inherent in all promise-making activities in antiquity:
- Whenever man considered it necessary to make a memory for himself it was never done without blood, torment, sacrifice; the most gruesome sacrifices and pledges (to which sacrifices of firstborn belong), the most repulsive mutilations (castrations, for example), the cruelest ritual forms of all religious cults (and all religions are in their deepest foundations systems of cruelties)—all of this has its origin in that instinct that intuited in pain the most powerful aid of mnemonics.
Nietzsche says this is also the logic of asceticism. To inflict so much pain in order to make certain ideas unforgettable.
The worse humans are at memory the more severe penal codes had to have been. Interesting, so the conclusion is that we aren't more moral in modernity, we are less forgetful?
Germans can be not-cruel and can breed a "people of thinkers" (closest to the last man) because of its historically strict penal code. It's only by searing it into memory through punishment do we remember.
We have paid a great deal for "good things."
- Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over the 5 affects, this entire gloomy matter called reflection, all these prerogatives and showpieces of man: how dearly they have been paid for! how much blood and horror there is at the base of all “good things”!

4

The current genealogists of morality are committing the same mistake of projecting the modern experience to the origin.
Their issue this time is NOT that they use a modern notion of usefulness/utility to explain historical psychology, it is that they project the notion of freedom, that someone could have done otherwise, back into history.
People didn't punish because the evil-doer deserved to be punished. They punished because they themselves were angry.
What the relationship is is a relationship of debt, between creditor and debtor.

5

This relation is where/how memories were made. The debtor (criminal/transgressor) promises something valuable to give to the creditor. The debtor is in pain and a memory is made.
- Under this lens however, punishment had more function than just retribution it was also preventative: to seer a memory into the debtor so that he does not transgress -- Nietzsche does not focus on that in this passage.
Property, livestock, families were offered. But the most common offering to the creditor was the body of the debtor. The creditor was given the ability to mutilate the body of the debtor in correspondence with the crime.
This constitutes a repayment because the creditor has a feeling of satisfaction from the punishment. The enjoyment of doing violence. Cruelty is the compensation.
- Example: colosseum is an enjoyment of cruelty. There's an even modern example, where the victim's family feels that "radical" has been done.

6

Nietzsche realizes that the claim that cruelty is enjoyable seems alien to us so he is using this paragraph to defend that claim:
- "Asking once again: to what extent can suffering be a compensation for “debts”? To the extent that making-suffer felt good, and in the highest degree; to the extent that the injured one exchanged for what was lost, including the displeasure over the loss, an extraordinary counter-pleasure: making-suf- fer,—a true festival, something that, as stated, stood that much higher in 30 price, the more it contradicted the rank and social standing of the creditor."
Examples he gives to support his point:
- Chimps are said to delight in violence.
- Even today we can see the spiritualization and deification of cruelty in high culture (example of this be hollywood and violence?)
- Today we read Don Quixote with bitter taste. But in the old days, they read his suffering with light-heartedness and great joy.

7

The more that humans were NOT ashamed of cruelty (the more they celebrated it, reveled in it) the more lighthearted they were.
- We moderns on the other hand who dislike any form of violence are extreme pessimists. We find the world unbearable and shameful.
- IMPORTANT: the broader point is that Nietzsche thinks modernity suffers through a life-denial, denying natural/necessary tendencies of man.
Now we treat suffering as an argument against existence. The ancients treated suffering (ability to inflict it on others) the argument for existence, ie. Why life was worth living.
What makes suffering unbearable is not just the suffering itself but the senselessness of suffering/the meaninglessness of suffering.
- Christianity gave suffering a meaning, even stronger than the Greeks because it was shown to be the logic of salvation in the next life.
- Greeks also gave suffering a meaning because things like the Trojan wars were seen as spectacles for the Gods.
- What's consistent between the two is the idea of recognition for one's suffering. Suffering had to be a public (viewed by community or God) to be given a meaning.

8

Guilt/obligation finds its roots in the oldest relationship there is: between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor.
This relationship is about measuring one person against another person. Gauging values and prices among peers.
It is in this comparing ability that pride was first formed (like Rousseau). The word "man" (close to manas) expresses that man is the measuring/valuing/esteeming creature.
Because of this comparing/measuring capacity, the earliest moralities concluded that "every thing has its price; everything can be paid off."
Justice and settling started off meaning the same thing.

9

The relationship between community and individual is also that between creditor and debtor.
The community presents so many advantages to the individual and shields the individual from the "outside": safety and protection is what Nietzsche has in mind mostly here.
Someone who transgresses the community forfeits all this security and protection, all their rights and priviledges. They are cast back into the state of nature and the community can do to them what they see fit.

10

The stronger the community the less seriously they take the individual transgressions because it becomes less threatening to the community.
The focus now is more on making sure people get even, making sure that the anger does not spiral out of control.
- Both of these wants to make us isolate the criminal from the deed (invention of freedom, that people can change).
Just as the society becomes more lax the more powerful it becomes, the creditor also becomes more "humane" (exact less cruel punishments) the more powerful he becomes.
There comes a point where the debtor is let go for "free" this is called mercy and is the privilege of the most powerful (of course this is a critique of Christianity, as the Christians who are merciful):
- It would not be impossible to imagine a consciousness of power in society such that society might allow itself the noblest luxury there is for it—to leave the one who injures it unpunished. “What concern are my parasites to me?” it might then say. “Let them live and prosper: I am strong enough for that!” ... The justice that began with “everything can be paid off, everything must be paid off,”ends by looking the other way and letting the one unable to pay go free.

11

This paragraph is about trying to establish justice on top of ressentiment.
Nietzsche claims that ressentiment blooms most beautifully among anarchists and antisemites.
Today, justice is confused with ressentiment with reactive rather than active sentiments … whoever gets injured is just.
If justice is about viewing things "objectively" without too much personal feelings involved, then the active man (conqueror, greedy person, the one who desires to rule) is much more just than the reactive/resentful one. This proceeds from Nietzsche's discussion in the last paragraph about how the strong alone can afford not to care.
All states that have this type of justice see the active force trying to repress the reactive force.
The most powerful tool against ressentiment that states have is establishing of the law. When you break the law, the focus is on your transgression against this higher force and not against specific people. Ressentiment wants to unleash itself against specific people, so this counteracts that.
Only with the law can we talk about justice and injustice. There is no injustice in the state of nature.
Even thought law has a positive side (it restrains ressentiment), it also constrains the will to power:
- "The true will of life—which is out after power—and subordinating themselves as individual means to its overall end: that is, as means for creating greater units of power."

12

Nietzsche comments on the mistaken form of "previous genealogists," the mistake is to confuse the "origin" and the contemporary "purpose" of a practice.
- E.g. The purpose of law may be revenge of deterrence now. But that was not its original cause.
- IMPORTANT: is Nietzsche's own book subject to this critique? The critique of Nietzsche is slightly different its between origin and current foundation not current purpose. Foundation is what sustains an activity and the critique of Nietzsche is that what might have been its original foundation is not its current foundation. Purpose is different from this, purpose is about what people interpret something to be useful for. I suppose another critique of Nietzsche is to confuse origin with truthfulness ie. Christians can be both resentful and right.
One reason that Nietzsche thinks there is a break between purpose and origin is that the purpose of an activity gets reinterpreted by the dominant paradigm.
- IMPORTANT, EXAMPLE: paradigm shifts.
Another reason is that Nietzsche thinks why something is useful (e.g. eye can see) and why it came into being (e.g. evolution, not because God made it so we could see) is different.
Things do not "progress" linearly, instead it is a series of paradigm shifts.
- Therefore even loss and degenerating in so far as it represents a paradigmatic pivot can also be seen as progress:
  - "The magnitude of a “progress” is even measured by the mass of all that had to be sacrificed for it; humanity as mass sacrificed for the flourishing of a single stronger species of human being—that would be progress."
Our current paradigm is the democratic/egalitarian paradigm:
- The democratic idiosyncrasy against everything that rules and desires to rule, the modern mis-archism (to create a bad word for a bad thing) has gradually transformed and disguised itself into something spiritual, most spiritual, to such an extent that today it is already penetrating, is allowed to penetrate, step by step into the most rigorous, apparently most objective sciences; indeed it appears to me already to have become lord over the whole of physiology and the doctrine of life—to its detriment, as goes without saying—by removing through sleight of hand one of its basic concepts, that of true activity.

13

We now return to topic of punishment. We are now going to discuss what is permanent in punishment and what is fluid in punishment.
Nietzsche says that it is impossible to say today why we punish because so many different purposes/meanings have been imbued through time and now it has been tangled. An interesting consequence of Nietzsche's view on the shifting of purpose/meaning is that "only that which ahs no history is definable").
Nietzsche is showing all the different interpretations of punishment:
- Rendering-harmless (defanging)
- Payment to injured party
- Instilling fear
- Tax to the benefits that the criminal has enjoyed
- Elimination of a degenerating element
- Festival (mocking)
- Making a memory in the criminal/moral-improvement
- As a clearing of the balance sheet to protect the criminal from revenge
- As a compromise (letting one enact) the natural drive for revenge
- Declaration of war

14

What Nietzsche wants to show with his previous list ^ is that there are so many different interpretations of punishment we should not cling on to the dominant modern one.
Today punishment is done because one is considered deserving one is guilty.
- IMPORTANT: this relates to his claim of Dante that sinners are punished in the afterlife because this is what they really want, what they really desire.
To be precise, punishment is done so that the guilty may experience the feeling of guilt and have a "bad conscience."
This can't be right because 1. people who end up in prisons are not people who are likely to experience this sort of feeling 2. punishment, far from engendering guilt, gives people a dry gloomy seriousness, makes them hard and cold if not worse: it breaks their spirit.
In previous ages there was no talk about "guilt" his transgression as well as his punishment was fated.

15

Spinoza attempted to strongly defend a free will and God. But he slipped when reflecting one afternoon about the fatedness of evil.
Before the Christian era, many people felt no different than Spinoza only that "something has gone wrong here" not "I should not have done that." They dealt with their transgressions as if dealing with a sickness or misfortune.
For these people (nietzsche seems to agree with them) that punishment sharpens their prudence it doesn’t make them better. It was never about moral perfectibility.

16

Nietzsche gives us his account of where bad conscience comes from.
Bad conscience comes from man (does he mean all men or the strong specifically) finding themselves in society and peace. Even if he means all men surely the ones who were roaming free and murdering people as an outlet finds this most uncomfortable.
He compares the transition to when water animals evolve into being land animals. That before they could have water carry their weight and now they have to use their own legs (the water being the outlets of violence?)
The origin of bad conscience is men turning their aggression, now unable to be exerted outwards, internally within themselves:
- "It’s just that it was difficult and seldom possible to yield to them: for the most part they had to seek new and as it were subterranean gratifications. All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn themselves inwards—this is what I call the internalizing of man: thus first grows in man that which he later calls his 'soul.'"
But again, this is Nietzsche's ambivalence, the existence of such a soul, one turned against itself, made man interesting:
- "Let us immediately add that, on the other hand, with the appearance on earth of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, something so new, deep, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and full of future had come into being that the appearance of the earth 30 was thereby essentially changed."

17

Bad conscience grew suddenly not gradually.
It came from the sudden conquest by a race of conquerors over a conquered people.
Bad conscience did not start in these conquerors (implying that it eventually took over the conquerors?) but it was caused by the conquerors who took away the freedom of the conquered. This is bad conscience.

18

Nietzsche encourages us to not judge too harshly this bad conscience. Because this bad conscience is simply the internalization of a much more laudable drive: the desire to conquer.
This is the root of egolessness. Nietzsche identifies in selfless actions a desire for cruelty (towards oneself) … it's not as "moral" as it seems.
He called this drive the "artist's cruelty" and that it was the origin of beauty … I think its because this drive is the conscious recognition that "I am ugly" which sets up the contrast for beauty?

19

Bad conscience is a sickness but in the same way pregnancy is a sickness … it has physical downsides but is ultimately responsible for us entering into the world.
The relationship of creditor to debtor finds form in ancients' relationship with their ancestors especially the founding ancestors of a clan. They try to find ways to repay such ancestors (sacrificing first-born for example).
The stronger the clan the more is felt to be owed to the ancestors. The weaker the clan, the less the clan/ancestors are feared.
The strongest clan eventually turned these ancestors into gods.

20

On one hand, the community gave early members the good-and-bad distinction. On the other hand, they also imbued this massive amount of guilt. The feeling of guilt did not end as these communities ended.
- There is a relationship between the type of community and the type of god. Universalist empires have universalist gods.
The Christian God who is the most powerful/total god so far came with a corresponding total guilt.
Nietzsche thinks that the end of Christianity will relieve us of this guilt, it will return us to a second innocence.

21

Nietzsche says that what he just said in the previous paragraph (about us being relieved from our bad conscience) is wrong. It's going to get worse or, at least, it will be at a standstill. What we missed is that this guilt/bad conscience has been "moralized" (I think he means that we consider it to be the result of freedom?)
This searing bad conscience will turn against everyone: the debtor (people themselves) but also the creditor (Adam, the original ancestor, is given "original sin").
Christianity's stroke of genius is God (the creditor) sacrificing himself to wipe away our sins.

22

God was invented (an all-powerful God) so that we may feel an all-powerful hate towards ourselves. It’s the desire to cause maximum pain to ourselves that God was invented.
It fully allows people to imagine that they themselves can be punished without ever being able to zero out the balances.
Nietzsche has a hydraulic view of the dark forces of human nature. If they aren't permitted to be expressed in action then they are expressed in idea.

23

There are more noble ways to invent Gods then to use them as tools of self-flagellation.
Differences:
- The animal is deified in the Greek gods and myths.
  - EXAMPLE: Achilles comparing himself to a lion.
- When people make mistakes its ill fortune its not because of "sin"
- God is not the all good but sometime gods can be the cause of evil and negative emotions toward acts of ill-fortune/mistakes can be directed outwards and not inwards
  - EXAMPLE: Trojan war was started by the gods.

24

In order to bring forth new ideals we need to demolish bad conscience. Erecting new ideals always requires sacrificing of old ones.
The only person that can take us out of this swamp is someone powerful and with great health. He calls this person the "Anti-Christ."

25

Nietzsche is not this person … only someone "more future" than he will be free to help bring forth this radical future and get rid of our bad conscience.

Third Treatise: What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?

1

This paragraph is to give a summary of the answer that will be provided in this chapter on what ascetic ideals mean:
- Artists mean nothing or too many different things
- Philosophers and scholars it is their most favorable precondition for higher spirituality
- Women it is a tool of seduction
- For most people its to show that they are "too good" to want to care and engage
  - EXAMPLE: the idea try hard
- Priests it is their best tool of power
- Saints it is their desire towards nothingness
IMPORTANT this is the key insight that Nietzsche attempts to draw from the observation about how many meanings the ascetic ideal has taken on:
- "[The human will] needs a goal,—and it would rather will nothingness than not will."

2

Nietzsche is trying to ask what do ascetic ideals mean for the artist (Wagner). Specifically, Wagner flipped completely from praising sensuality to worshiping chastity.
The height of Wagner was his depiction of the marriage of Luther. It showed that sensuality and chastity were not at odds and any good marriage is proof of this (either meaning sensual to one person and chaste to everyone else, or, first chaste and then sensual).
Its only in the lowly people (think incel) does the praise of chastity become an attack on sensuality:
- "On the other hand it is only too clear that when swine who have come to ruin are once brought to the point of worshipping chastity—and there are such swine!—they will see and worship in it only their opposite, the opposite of swine come to ruin—oh with what tragic grunting and zeal!"

3

Wagner's last play Parsifal fell precisely into this chastity trap. It worshipped chastity at the expense of all sensuality.

4

We must judge the artists separately from the work.
The artist is the soil the manure upon which the work sprouts.
Wagner is compared to a woman giving birth. Just as to give birth to a child, the woman has to go through pain, Wagner was dragged through fundamental tensions (I think he refers to the eternal battle and competition of these two sets of ideals) to produce parsifal.
We need to guard against the idea that an artist is continuous with what he depicts. Even stronger:
- "The situation is such that if he were precisely that, he would certainly not depict, think up, express it; a Homer would not have written an Achilles nor Goethe a Faust if Homer had been an Achilles or if Goethe had been a Faust."
- Why might this be? It might be because you need distance to depict something. It might be because you need to be a deep/priestly character to be able to depict the inner workings of someone?
- Maybe its related to his claim in the untimely meditations about the dissolving effect of truth?
The artist is separated between the real and the ideal.
Some artists grew tired of this distance and then wanted to match the ideal with the real. This was the mistake of Wagner in Parsifal.
- The interesting consequence of this view was that Wagner was always a Christian/slavish man in reality what changed wasn't Wagner the man but his relationship with art (namely art tried to match the real instead of projecting an ideal).

5

This paragraph answers the question: what do ascetic ideals mean in the artist?
Nietzsche's answer is that it does not mean anything because the artist is derivative of the philosopher. Wagner only had his "confidence" because of Schopenhauer.
Early Wagner treated music as a medium but drawing on Schopenhauerian philosophy he started to treat music as an end. Music was speaking the metaphysical language and so its little wonder that Wagner fell prey to ascetic ideals.
The whole point of this is to redirect the question to: what do ascetic ideals mean in the philosopher?

6

Schopenhauer followed Kant in interpreting that the essence of the beautiful to be disinterestedness. He wanted to honor beauty by giving it a similar status of philosophy/rationality (also marked by disinterestedness).
This (wrong) conclusion could only be drawn from the perspective of a spectator and not an artist. The artist knows that creation is deeply interested and personal.
Schopenhauer took on Kant's position that the beautiful is disinterestedness because he was plagued by sexual desire which he could not reconcile.
We now get one clue of what the ascetic ideal is for the philosopher: to break free from torture.

7

For Schopenhauer he needed his enemies because his enemies gave him a kind of vitality (those enemies being women/sensuality and Hegel).
He observes that no real philosopher has ever been married … that the Buddha considered his child a "burden" when his child first came to this world. Herein lies the meaning of the ascetic ideal for the philosopher: it creates a condition of life (freedom in the case of not getting married) most conducive to doing one's work.

8

When philosophers embrace ascetic ideals, it is to find conditions most compatible with their work.
Poverty, chastity, humility are not their virtues but simply conditions where they can most exert themselves.
- "Whoever possess will be possessed" -- it is because of this and not "virtue" that they don't seek riches.
- Philosophers are humble because they don’t want to stand out and be disturbed.
- Philosophers are chast because their progeny is their work/the world. They have no need for children.

9

Philosophy has always been closely related to asceticism. It's imitating asceticism that philosophy knew how to take its "first steps."
Philosophy has always been viewed suspiciously from the perspective of the community/from moralists. Each of philosophies tendencies: to wait-and-see, to explore, etc.
Makes a general point about how vices and virtues have been flopped. Originally, marriage was considered a sin because it was about appropriating a woman from the community and making her "private."

10

Because philosophers were considered weird and dangerous by the community, they had to make people fear them if they were to be left alone. They developed ascetic ideals like self-flagellation in the same way a poisonous frog develops its color.
They also needed to do these things to fear themselves. Because within them the philosopher wants to invert all the values of the community while the social man wants to keep the values. Self-flagellation is a way for the man to learn to respect the philosopher (internally).
He gives the Brahmins as the paradigmatic example of this.
When the philosopher first appeared he had to disguise himself as an ascetic (the ascetic type existed before the philosophical type).
Nietzsche says that perhaps that the philosopher can roam free today without taking on the ascetic form represents a self-confidence of the community/world (that they no longer feel threatened by philosophy).

11

Just as we dismissed investigating the ascetic ideal in the artist in favor of investigating the ascetic ideal in the philosopher. We now dismiss the philosopher in favor of investigating it in the ascetic priest because it was shown that the philosopher took on the strategies of the priest.
The ascetic's conclusion is that life is the wrong path … the tendency is to go against life. Nietzsche calls it a self-contradiction because the ascetic ideal flips everything on its head.
A curious question that Nietzsche raises is how does the ascetic priest reproduce itself. Its not through hereditary means.
The will-to-power reading is that it is a desire to establish power over life itself.

12

This is the famous paragraph on perspectivism.
- "There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about a matter, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our “concept” of this matter, our “objectivity” be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to disconnect the affects one and all, supposing that we were capable of this: what? Would that not be to castrate the intellect?"
Nietzsche asks what would an ascetic say about truth if he were asked to philosophize. The ascetic would give us exactly the wrong type of truth: the type of truth that is "in-itself" that is "objective" that does not have any subjectivity imbued. Nietzsche's point is that all knowledge is perspectival and to will this objective standpoint is to will nothingness (death of the subject).
What is real "objectivity" is being able to move around in many different perspectives and see things from more angles.

13

The priest appears to represent a contradiction: life against life. But this is merely a surface level contradiction in reality the priest says "yes" precisely when he says "no."
The ascetic ideal are for creatures who are "degenerating" the diseased and its an ingenious solution for this type of creature to feel power over life. He is able to lead an entire "flock" of diseased people.

14

Lecture: great rhetoric in this paragraph.
To be diseased (and therfore tempted by the ascetic ideal) is what is normal for humans. It is only with strokes of great luck that men come out not diseased.
Important: for Nietzsche it is the weak who harm the strong and not the strong who harm the weak. The weak harm the strong by spreading their ascetic ideals onto the strong, through contamination.
The sick are look down upon anything healthy.
The danger is if the healthy start believing the rhetoric of the sick. The two have to be kept far apart. The healthy shouldn't even make it a goal to tend the sick because its improper for the higher to tend to the lower.
- "they alone are the guarantors of the future, they alone have been given responsibility for the human future. What they can do, what they should do, a sick person can never and should never do: but in order for them to be able to do what only they should do, how could they be free to choose to be physician, comforter, “savior” for the sick? ... And therefore good air! good air." Passages like this make it sound like the "higher men" are desired because of their ability to help the collective but its clear he just has an aesthetic delight in forming these figures … because his advice is NOT to help the lower men, he wants to rid the higher men of " the great compassion for man!"

15

If you understood why the healthy cannot tend to the sick, then you must understand why those who tend to the sick are sick themselves. The priests therefore are sickly.
The priests are a mix of slave and master. They are just as weak and timid as the slave…
- "He must be sick himself, he must be related to the sick and short-changed from the ground up in order to understand them—in order to get along with them; but he must also be strong, lord over himself more than over others, with his will to power intact, so that he has the confidence and the fear of the sick, so that for them he can be a foothold, resistance, support, compulsion, disciplinarian, tyrant, god."
… but they have just as strong as will to power as the master, they also have something in addition to the master: intellect.
- "He will not be spared waging war with the beasts of prey, a war of cunning (of the “spirit”) more than of force, as goes without saying—to this end he will perhaps need almost to develop in himself, at least to signify, a new type of beast of prey—a new animal terribleness in which the polar bear, the lithe cold wait-and-see tiger cat, and not least of all the fox appear to be bound into a unity just as attractive as it is fear-inspiring."
He is able to tame the beast of prey:
- "He brings along ointments and balm, no doubt; but he first needs to wound in order to be a physician; as he then stills the pain that the wound causes, he poisons the wound at the same time—for in this above all he is an expert, this magician and tamer of beasts of prey, in whose vicinity everything healthy necessarily becomes sick and everything sick, tame."
The role of the priest is to direct the direction of ressentiment to make sure it doesn’t blow up the herd or the priest.
IMPORTANT: Nietzsche here talks about the origin of ressentiment. Ressentiment is because whenever people suffer we seek a meaning to that suffering, a guilt party to be blamed for that suffering.
- "It is here alone, according to my surmise, that one finds the true physiological causality of ressentiment, of revenge, and of their relatives—that is, in a longing for anesthetization of pain through affect."
- "'Someone must be to blame for the fact that I feel bad'—this kind of reasoning is characteristic of all those who are diseased."
The twist is that the priest tells his diseased sheep that they themselves are to blame. This is how the priest keeps the flock in control.
- Question: but doesn’t the priest redirect that blame to others (first essay) as well?
This paragraph is helpful because the priest can turn the healthy sick (master to slave) and the sick tame (by making them feel guilt).

16

The ascetic priest turns ressentiment inward.
This is not a healing, this is about controlling the herd, keeping them away.
Nietzsche thinks that "sin" corresponds more to an emotional state/hallucinated belief than genuine state of affairs.

17

Priest is not a physician. He treats not suffering itself but the listlessness of suffering (the meaninglessness of it) EXAMPLE: someone who prescribes anti-depressants without treating the root causes of that depression.
All major religions are about combating this tiredness and listlessness (I take that to mean a meaninglessness).
Cultures can become listless.
Listlessness is combatted through reducing all feelings of life: no sex, no money, …
In the priest/in the extreme this is a will to nothingness, its why many religions consider the final state of rest to be freedom from.

18

Another cure than this will to nothingness which is much more common is mechanical activity: meaningless work being prescribed.
Another cure is small joy. The form of joy often prescribed is the joy of giving joy in small acts of kindness like helping one's neighbor. This joy/kindness is actually expression of will to power of one being superior to others.
Another cure is group formation because this distracts the weak. The weak love banding together, the strong always want to be left alone.

19

This paragraph begins by saying that the tactics of the priest listed previously are "innocent" tactics and that now he wants to talk about the "guilty" tactics which are tactics that arouse strong emotions.
But most of the paragraph is about how the modern mind is weak and not strong enough to take on "truth." Its conception of "good" is just meekness.

20

Now he's gonna get back on topic, about the release of emotions. He ends his discussion against the modern mind by saying that we need to distrust our first intuitions that we gain from modernity.
He claims that great emotions discharged at once is the solution for listlessness: anger, fear, lust, revenge.
But this emotional excess makes the sick sicker: why?
But the goal is not to heal the sick its to make people not listless.
The trick that the priest used was to use guilt.
Man's sickness is physiological (so I don’t think there can be a cure?) but without guilt its listless.
- Question: why couldn't they blame it on the master?
Great paragraph:
- "Everywhere that wanting-to-misunderstand-suffering made into life’s meaning, the reinterpretation of suffering into feelings of guilt, fear, and punishment; everywhere the whip, the hair shirt, the starving body, contrition; everywhere the sinner breaking himself on the cruel wheels of a restless, diseased-lascivious conscience; everywhere mute torment, extreme fear, the agony of a tortured heart, the cramps of an unknown happiness, the cry for “redemption.” Indeed, through this system of procedures the old depression, heaviness, and tiredness was thoroughly over- come, life became very interesting again: awake, eternally awake, in need of sleep, glowing, charred, exhausted and still not tired—this is what the human being looked like, “the sinner” who was initiated into these mysteries."
This is where otherworldliness comes from:
- "Every emotional excess that caused pain, everything that shattered, toppled, crushed, entranced, enraptured, the secret of places of torture, the inventiveness of hell itself—everything had now been discovered, guessed, exploited, everything stood at the disposal of the magician, everything served henceforth to the victory of his ideal, of the ascetic ideal ... 'My kingdom is not of this world.' "

21

The priest has not made the patient better but worse, more sick: more emasculated, more tamed.
Nietzsche gives as example how wherever the priest pops up, the culture gets sick.

22

Ascetic ideal also ruined taste in art and literature.
The Church fathers thought that their literature surpassed the Greeks.
Nietzsche prefers the old testament to the new. This lines well with the idea that Christianity took jewish intuition to its furthest. Jewish legalism was a step in the direction of slave morality (the strong do not observe laws, like Achilles) but Christianity took it even further "turn thy right cheek also."
- "I take my hat off to the Old Testament! In it I find great human beings, a heroic landscape, and something most rare on earth, the incomparable naïveté of the strong heart; still more, I find a people. In the New, on the other hand, nothing but petty sectarian economy, nothing but rococo of the soul, nothing but embellishment, crookedness, oddness, nothing but conventicle air, not to forget an occasional breath of bucolic cloyingness that belongs to that epoch (and to the Roman province) and is not so much Jewish as Hellenistic."
What he dislikes about Christianity is the feigned humility in combination with the pompousness.

23

Nietzsche asks us what are we to make of the enormity of this ideal that it seems to have no opposing force. It is the ideal that wants to judge all other ideals by.
Some people claim that science is this other competing ideal.
Nietzsche's claim is that 1. science does not have an ideal outside itself 2. in so far as it appears passionate and forceful it is because "it is not the opposite of that ascetic ideal but rather its most recent and noblest form."
His issue with science seems to be that science is a form of sedation:
- "science today is a hiding place for every kind of ill-humor, unbelief, gnawing worm, despectio sui, bad conscience—it is the very unrest of being without an ideal, the suffering from the lack of a great love, the discontent in an involuntary contentedness … Science as a means of self-anesthetization: are you acquainted with that?"

24

IMPORTANT: now he goes on to examine the atheistic philosophers who don't believe in God/Christianity. Are these people perhaps a counter-ideal to the ascetic?
No! This is how total the victory of the ascetic ideal is. Even the atheistic philosophers who attack god who attack metaphysicians even they are metaphysical in that they believe that truth has value in itself.
- EXAMPLE: one of the famous atheists says I want to know the truth even if it is depressing. Nietzsche wants to ask why?
These people disguise themselves as free spirits but they still worship a god: truth. Modern science does the same, we need to know more.
- Nietzsche says that the most free spirits are this order of assassins in the orient and their code was “nothing is true, everything is permitted."
Science and atheism still rest on a bedrock of faith … namely in truth. Neither one can justify themselves.
Nietzsche wants to ask: what is the value of truth.

25

Science/philosophy is on the side of asceticism/religion against art which is embodied. That is why Plato was so against Homer.
Science/scholarship also grows on the same sickness as religion. It inevitably means that a culture is in decline (Rousseau's First Discourse).
Science, like asceticism makes man to be more based, more lowly than even religion. The scientific view makes us lose even more self-respect.
The agnostics are no better, they worship the question mark.

26

This paragraph begins by critiquing historiography and "objectivity" (untimely meditations). He is saying that objectivity is an ultimate form of asceticism it is the ultimate form of nihilism. It refuses to read any teleology into history.
The paragraph continues to a whole list of people he criticizes.

27

IMPORTANT: Atheism is a Christian phenomena
- "What actually triumphed over the Christian god? The answer is found in my Gay Science (section 357); “Christian morality itself, the ever more strictly understood concept of truthfulness, the father-confessor subtlety of the Chris tian conscience, translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price."
IMPORTANT: Nietzsche says that Christian forms has already perished, Christian morality will also perish (Leiter thinks he is wrong). By Christian morality I think Nietzsche does not mean slave morality but rather the will to truth. Eventually the will to truth is going to ask: what is the value of the will to truth? This is so interesting because Nietzsche is the one who asks this question so he represents the end of Christianity but also Christian truthfulness. In other words, he is attacking Christianity but form the inside; he is confessing here that he too has a will to truth.
- "In this manner Christianity as dogma perished of its own morality; in this manner Christianity as morality must now also perish—we stand at the threshold of this event. Now that Christian truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after the other, in the end it draws its strongest conclusion, its conclusion against itself; this occurs, however, when it poses the question, “what does all will to truth mean?” ... And here I again touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (—for I as yet know of no friends): what meaning would our entire being have if not this, that in us this will to truth has come to a consciousness of itself as a problem? ... It is from the will to truth’s becoming conscious of itself that from now on—there is no doubt about it—morality will gradually perish: that great spectacle in a hundred acts that is reserved for Europe’s next two centuries, the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also most hopeful of all spectacles."

28

Summary of this treatise.
Animal man had no meaning for his suffering which is the worst.
By feeling guilty, this suffering was given a meaning, given a sense.
This enabled him to will nothingness, to will against all life. This created more suffering but it was better than not willing.

My Reading List

Johnathan Bi — Sun, 02 Jun 2024 03:15:41 GMT

Things Hidden Since the Foundations of the World

by Rene Girard

The Uses and Abuses of History for Life

by Friedrich Nietzsche

Democracy in America

by Alexis de Tocqueville

Rousseau’s Theodicy

by Frederick Neuhouser

Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory

by Frederick Neuhouser

三国演义

The Vimalakirti Sutra

The Philosophy of Right

by Georg Hegel

Recognition

by Axel Honneth

Desire, Deceit, and the Novel

by Rene Girard

The Genealogy of Morals

by Friedrich Nietzsche

西游记

Lack and Transcendence

by David Loy

The Phenomenology of Spirit

by Georg Hegel

Debt

by David Graeber

The Republic

by Plato

The Denial of Death

by Ernest Becker

The Struggle for Recognition

by Axel Honneth

The Prince

by Niccolo Machiavelli

The Theban Trilogy

by Sophocles

Fear and Trembling

by Soren Kierkegaard

Battling to the End

by Rene Girard

Confessions

by St. Augustine

The Actuality of Philosophy

by Theodore Adorno

Nichomachean Ethics

by Aristotle

The City of God

by St. Augustine

Either/Or

by Soren Kierkegaard

On the Jewish Question

by Karl Marx

In Love with the World

by Mingyur Rinpoche

The Inferno

by Dante Alighieri

Destined for War

by Graham Allison

The Straussian Moment

by Peter Thiel

Lost in Thought

by Zena Hitz

The Concept of the Political

by Carl Schmitt

The Nine Cloud Dream

by Kim ManJung

The Symposium

by Plato

The Critique of Pure Reason

by Immanuel Kant

水浒传

Paradise Lost

by John Milton

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

by Max Weber

The Gay Science

by Friedrich Nietzsche

When these Things Begin

by Rene Girard

The Elephant in the Brain

by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson

The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

Persecution and the Art of Writing

by Leo Strauss

Violence and the Sacred

by Rene Girard

Leisure, the Basis of Culture

by Joseph Pieper

Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

The Truth of Tripartition

by Myles Burnyeat

The Rise and Fall of American Growth

by Robert Gordon

The Euthyphro

by Plato

The Critique of Judgement

by Immanuel Kant

Socialism

by Axel Honneth

The Meno

by Plato

The Apology

by Plato

The Dialectic of Enlightenment

by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer

Twilight of the Idols

by Friedrich Nietzsche

Macbeth

by William Shakespeare

The Aenid

by Vergil

The Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life

by Shantideva

The Oresteia Trilogy

by Aeschylus

Man’s Search for Meaning

by Victor Frankl

The Odyssey

by Homer

Elementary Particles

by Michel Houellebecq

Das Kapital

by Karl Marx

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

by Rene Girard

Philosophical Fragments

by Soren Kierkegaard

论语

Politics

by Aristotle

Simulacra and Simulation

by Jean Baudrillard

Don Quixote

by Miguel de Cervantes

Sappho

The Origins of Totalitarianism

by Hannah Arendt

When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

On Liberty

by John Stuart Mill

Engaging Buddhism

by Jay Garfield

The Iliad

by Homer

The Essays

by Montaigne

Sacrifice

by Rene Girard

The Wealth of Nations

by Adam Smith

The Great Awakening

by David Loy

The Sickness Unto Death

by Soren Kierkegaard

Discipline and Punish

by Michel Foucault

Evolution and Conversion

by Rene Girard

Science as Vocation

by Max Weber

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

by Friedeich Nietzsche

墨子

道德经

Theory of Moral Sentiments

by Adam Smith

The Ascent of Money

by Niall Ferguson

Politics as Vocation

by Max Weber

Estranged Labor

by Karl Marx

Utilitarianism

by John Stuart Mill

The Leviathan

by Thomas Hobbes

18th Brumaire

by Karl Marx

On the Origin of Species

by Charles Darwin

Reflections on the Revolution in France

by Edmund Burke

The Second Discourse on Inequality

by Jean Jacques Rousseau

The Foundations of Buddhism

by Rupert Gethin

庄子

The Histories

by Herodotus

Second Treatise of Government

by John Locke

The Uncanny

by Sigmund Freud

The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals

by Immanuel Kant

Capital in the 21st Century

by Thomas Picketty

The Nature of Buddhist Ethics

by Damien Keown

韩非子

The Metamorphoses

by Ovid

The Scapegoat

by Rene Girard

The Religion of Technology

by David Noble

The Political Possibilities in the Long Romantic Period

by Akeel Bilgrami

The One by Whom Scandal Comes

by Rene Girard

The Ecstasy of Communication

by Jean Baudrillard

荀子

Summa Theologica

by St. Thomas Aquinas

Innovation and Repetition

by Rene Girard

The Shipwrecked Mind

by Mark Lilla

Superintelligence

by Nick Bostrom

The Mind Illuminated

by Jeremy Graves

Killing Commendatore

by Haruki Murakami

This Life

by Martin Hagglund

The Heart Sutra

Understanding Media

by Marshall Mcluhan

Theatre of Envy

by Rene Girard

On Self Rule

by Ghandhi

Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions

by Max Weber

Steve Jobs

by Walter Isaacson

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

by Mary Wollstonecraft

The Game

by Neil Strauss

Genesis of Desire

by Jean-Michel Oughourlian

Meditations

by Marcus Aurelius

The Souls of Black Folk

by W.E.B. du Bois

The Social Psychology of the World Religions

by Max Weber

The Wretched of the Earth

by Frantz Fanon

Meditations on First Philosophy

by Rene Descartes

Zero to One

by Peter Thiel

Anorexia and Mimetic Desire

by Rene Girard

The Task for Social Philosophy and the Institute for Social Research

by Max Horkheimer

Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim

by Immanuel Kant

The Sacred and the Profane

by Mircea Eliade

The German Ideology

by Karl Marx

The Lean Startup

by Eric Ries

How the Economic Machine Works

by Ray Dalio

When Genius Failed

by Roger Lowenstein

Myth of Mirror Neurons

by Gregory Hickok

Counterfeit Gods

by Timothy Keller

Resurrection from the Underground

by Rene Girard

Psychopolitics

by Jean-Michel Oughourlian

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

Essential Mind Training

by Thupten Jinpa

The Monk and the Philosopher

by Jean-François Revel and Matthieu Ricard

Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory

by Wolfgang Palaver

The Black Swan

by Nassim Taleb

The Social Contract

by Jean Jacques Rousseau

Oedipus Unbound

by Rene Girard

Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory

by Frederick Neuhouser

To Double Business Bound

by Rene Girard

On Becoming a Person

by Carl Rogers

What is Good and Why?

by Richard Kraut

AI Superpowers

by Lee Kai-Fu

Rene Girard and Creative Mimesis

by Pablo Bandera and Thomas Ryba

The Rescuer from Error

by Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali

The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

Elon Musk

by Ashlee Vance

Will to Meaning

by Victor Frankl

Data Science as Machinic Neoplatonism

by Dan McQuillan

The Once and Future Liberal

by Mark Lilla

Why we Sleep

by Matthew Walker

Driven by Compression

by Jürgen Schmidhuber

The Lessons of History

by Will Durant

The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill

by John Stuart Mill

The Lotus Sutra

Literature and Christianity

by Rene Girard

On China

by Henry Kissinger

Never Split the Difference

by Christopher Voss and Tahl Raz

Job, the Victim of his People

by Rene Girard

On Anger

by Seneca

Benjamin Franklin

by Walter Isaacson

Age of Ambition

by Evan Osnos

Hegel’s Ethical Thought

by Allen W. Wood

Einstein

by Walter Isaacson

Skin in the Game

by Nassim Taleb

Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality

by Peter Railton

The Metaphysics of Morals

by Immanuel Kant

Sex at Dawn

by Cacilda Jetha and Christopher Ryan

Economy and the Future

by Jean-Pierre Dupuy

When the Machine Stops

by E. M. Forster

A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will

by Robert Kane

Karma

by Traleg Kyabgon

The Wolfman

by Sigmund Freud

What Technology Wants

by Kevin Kelly

10% Happier

by Dan Harris

Siddhartha

by Hermann Hesse

Hayy Ibn Yaqzan

by Ibn Tufail

The Tale of Genji

by Murasaki Shikibu

Inside the House of Money

by Steven Drobny

Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

by Nathaniel Branden

Cutting through Spiritual Materialism

by Chögyam Trungpa

The Nature of Technology

by Brian Arthur

The Mass Ornament

by Siegfried Kracauer

I am a Strange Loop

by Douglas Hofstadter

How to Win Friends and Influence People

by Dale Carnegie

Debt by David Graeber | Notes & Summary

Johnathan Bi — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 15:50:14 GMT

These book notes on Debt are separated into two parts. The first part is a short summary of the book.

The second part is a reconstruction of each individual chapter.

Part I: Summary

Graeber cherry-picks his data (some of which are factually wrong) to paint a daring yet distorted picture of economic history that is illuminating as it is biased.

His project, in the first four chapters, is to dismantle two popular economic ontologies.

He first (Chapter 2) outlines the liberal/capitalist theory of Adam Smith, suggesting that Smith falsely identifies the logic of “barter” as the constitutive human capacity to justify the market and establish economics as a discipline. What’s wrong with Smith, in Graeber’s view, is that the history he depicts (Barter > Money > Credit) happened exactly in the reverse! Pre-money societies weren’t dominated by barter as so much by neighbors keeping tabs on the goods they give to each other in aid (credit). On the historical stage, credit was the first mode of economic behavior, and it was only until after money came on the stage did people begin bartering when money was not available to them.

Next (Chapter 3), he moves on to the socialist/primordial debt theory of money. If Adam Smith assumed that we don’t owe any debts to anybody to begin with (freely trading agents), then this alternative theory assumes the opposite: humans start off with infinite debt to the cosmos. As proof, these theorists cite how religions are often framed in the language of debt. They further claim that the government inherits the right to this primordial debt – this naturally leads to a socialistic logic where the government has total control over money and the market. The critique that Graeber levels against these theorists is immanent: he shows that religious debt (debt towards the cosmos/God) and moral debt (obligations towards one’s family/society) is fundamentally different from the logic of economic debt.

In Chapter 4, Graeber gives his definition of money. Money is both a commodity (Smith) as well as an IOU (primordial debt). He goes on to reject the liberal ontologies of both liberal and socialist traditions. Drawing upon Nietzsche, Graeber shows that the liberal tradition (we don’t owe anyone anything) and the socialist tradition (we owe everyone everything) stems from the same false assumption: they take reciprocity to be the only logic that governs social relations. That is why both theories are limited in expressing human relations as “owing” something to another.

In Chapter 5, Graeber introduces three distinct types of social logic that he believes governs human relations. First, communism operates on the logic of “to each according to their need, from each according to their ability.” It describes the human impulse to help without expectation of return when the need is big enough or the ask is small enough. Second, exchange operates on the logic of equality. Both sides feel obliged to return to other what they received. This obligation is debt. Lastly, hierarchy operates on the logic of precedent: what is expected from a certain group currently is simply what has been expected from them before. With these threefold logic outlined, Graeber gives his definition of what debt is: an exchange that has not been brought to completion Debt is even more unbearable than hierarchy because it operates with the premises of exchange (equality) but within the reality of hierarchy (domination). He claims that the proliferation of the market and economics, has blinded us to both communism and hierarchy.

In Chapters 6 and 7, Graeber presents his historical construction of how we transitioned from gift economies (without money, neighbors giving aid to each other operating on both communism and exchange) to market economies. This inevitably takes us to a middle stage: human economies. Human economies are where money first came to be. These currencies (“social” currencies) were never used to buy or self anything, they were used to rearrange relations between people (Think, precious objects used to settle blood feuds or rearrange marriages). Importantly, they were never seen as equivalent to the people they were rearranging. This incommensurability was an expression of the uniqueness and preciousness of human lives. In Chapter 6, Graeber details how human economies become perverted when they are introduced to market economies: these exact same social currencies which used to express the value of human life, became the price to purchase humans for slavery. In Chapter 7, Graeber details how the slow transformation of human economies to market economies corrupts social mores. A key concept for him is going to be honor because of its dual meaning. Honor used to be an expression of the dignity of a person, but with the introduction of money, honor came to measure the power through which one can take away the dignity of another.

Here is one way to reconstruct Graeber’s economic history.

First, you have primitive, communist societies. These are hunter gatherer societies operating almost exclusively on the logic of communism and hierarchy. These people rarely operate on exchange unless it is with an outsider. There is nothing like a currency.

Next, you have gift economies. These are economies where the primary mode of economic behavior is giving gifts to one’s neighbors and expecting a roughly equivalent gift in one’s own time of future need. This tab, either physical or in one’s mind, is the closest thing to a currency. But, there is no one single denomination.

The next progression is human economies. The primary mode of economic behavior might still be the same as gift economies. But key social currencies develop. What defines human economies is that these social currencies (one denomination for many different social events) are expressions of the value of each human life. They are not taken to be equivalent to human life.

Then, you have, what we can call “heroic societies.” Medieval Ireland, with its honor price, may be a good example. Again, the primary mode of economic behavior may still be gift giving within one small community. The big difference is that, now, there is a clearly defined and set price to “buy” a single person. That is to say currency is seen as equivalent to human lives.

Lastly, you have market economies. This is where almost everything is seen as being tradeable with money. Of course, market economies vary greatly based on whether humans are tradeable (i.e. whether slavery is permitted). In the market economies which they are, human trading is even more perverse than in heroic societies: in heroic societies the currencies for an “honor price” aren’t equated with regular goods. That is to say there is no equivalence between a human and X number of shoes because the social currency is only used to exchange for humans. This is not true for market economies.

As you go down this progression (expanding the realm of things commensurable with money), Graeber wants to say that more violence is required. You need some degree of institutionalized violence to rearrange people in human economies and certainly to buy and sell slaves in heroic societies. He also wants to say that the concept of honor takes on a more perverse form. Whereas it signaled the dignity of a person in earlier societies, in the latter ones, honor is about your power to control others and protect people from being controlled. The idea is this: when humans become more tradeable and more easily uprooted from their social circumstance, it matters greatly whether one is the one doing the trading or being traded. Graeber sees this as the origin of patriarchy: it is only when the prostitution of debt-peons’ daughters and wives became pervasive did the most powerful men uphold chastity as a female virtue, preventing their women from engaging with public life. Another way to put this point is: as more things in the social world are denominated by money, more things and people become easily commensurable and comparable. As a result, people’s sense of worth is defined more relatively.

Clearly, a big difference within market economies is whether people are tradeable. Another important difference is whether the underlying currency is virtual/credit or real/bullion. In the former case, such as Mesopotamia, even though all the tabs are kept in silver, silver did not circulate outside specific institutions. Virtual market economies will take on many characteristics of gift economies (e.g. one’s reputation being extremely important in doing business). Chapters 8 – 12 are a reconstruction of economic history that interprets history as oscillating between periods of virtual and real currencies. I will not summarize all the insights in this briefing, but merely highlight one last definition that Graeber makes: capital. Graeber takes capital to be currency which has an imperative to grow. One way he shows this is how politics and war served the ends of money in the capitalist empires while money served the ends of politics and war in the Axial age. Another way he shows this is by pointing to the fact that the ban against usury was circumvented in the capitalist empires because interest was seen as compensation to the creditor for the other profitable ventures he could have but did not put his money in. In other words, money was expected to grow.

Part II: Reconstruction

Chapter 1

Graeber begins by giving a set of examples to show how deeply embedded yet complex (and confused) the concept of “debt” is.

Debt, in the global economy, can take upon many different forms. It can be what the weak owe the strong (e.g. Haiti, IMF). But, in the case of the US, it can also be owed from the strong to the weak. It is not the arrow of debt that determines who has the power but who controls the means of violence that shapes what these relationships look like and who ultimately benefits.

Debt is also infused into our moral and even religious language. Jesus’ salvation is described as “redemption.” We constantly are lectured on what we “owe” others and society. And our moral language operates under the logic of debt. Yet, in this moral framework there is a moral confusion about debt. We seem to both hold the position that 1. We should all pay back our debts 2. Anyone who lends money is evil. This ambivalence manifests in another way. It seems both morally bankrupt to be in debt but also to repay all of one’s debts:

On the one hand, insofar as all human relations involve debt, they are all morally compromised. Both parties are probably already guilty of something just by entering into the relation ship; at the very least they run a significant danger of becoming guilty if repayment is delayed. On the other hand, when we say someone acts like they "don't owe anything to anybody," we're hardly describing the person as a paragon of virtue.

Chapter 2: The Myth of Barter

Smith’s Founding Myth

Adam Smith was arguing against the Statist view of money: that money was created by the government. Presumably, because this would also give the government justification to intervene in matters of money ie. private property and the market.

Smith wanted to 1. Establish private property and the free market as an institution that shouldn’t be touched by the government (ie. Relegate the functioning of the government merely to preserving the functioning of markets) 2. Found the discipline of economics. He wanted to identify laws governing the market as systematic and deterministic as those of Newton's (of course, the only way to have these laws come to be is to assume that humans are rational calculating machines in it for their own interest). To justify the former, he goes to argue that markets and money really exist before the government. In fact, it is a natural evolution of primitive barter. To justify the latter, he needs to assume that in all matters of exchange, humans are merely looking to maximize their utility . In other words, economics (the sphere of exchange) had to be completely orthogonal to war, sex, honor, adventure, and any other human sphere. This was quite a novel thought in Smith's day as the idea that there existed the "economy" as a separate sphere was something new.

So Smith locates “a certain propensity in human nature . . . the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” Graeber draws out the implications of Smith’s assumption: “Humans, if left to their own devices, will inevitably begin swapping and comparing things. This is just what humans do. Even logic and conversation are really just forms of trading, and as in all things, humans will always try to seek their own best advantage, to seek the greatest profit they can from the exchange.” Smith legitimizes this desire to barter for self-interest as a constitutive capacity of humanity and then goes on to paint a state of nature which begins with simple barter, evolves at the invention of money as a unit of account, store of value, and medium of exchange, and finally develops credit and other more advanced financial instruments. With this progression of history, Smith can relegate the role of government to merely protecting the system of exchange that existed before it.

Flipping the Story

The problem with this account of barter > money > credit is that there is no historical evidence for it. Barter only exists in two scenarios 1. When people who are used to the market (so people who exist after money was invented) live in an arrangement where money does not exist (think P.O.W. camp) 2. Before money was invented, you would only barter with strangers that you had no intention or expectation of coming across again. And this makes sense, you only want to maximize your own gain if you didn’t care about the other person:

What reason is there not to try to take advantage of such a person? If, on the other hand, one cares enough about someone-a neighbor, a friend-to wish to deal with her fairly and honestly, one will inevitably also care about her enough to take her individual needs, desires, and situation into account. Even if you do swap one thing for another, you are likely to frame the matter as a gift.

Instead what pre-money societies (what Graeber terms “gift economies”) usually operate on is more so credit than barter. You would go to your neighbor and simply ask for, say, a sandal with the expectation that you will give back something in the future in their time of need. There is also no unit of account here, as goods are separated into tiers. Where there is a social consensus that a chicken and a goose and a pair of sandals are roughly equivalent while an ox and a candle aren’t. Two important things to highlight here 1. These exchanges are usually framed in the language of gifts but there was a social expectation that there had to be an equivalence 2. This resolves the double coincidence of wants problem that money solves for Smith because you are eventually going to need something from your neighbor in the future. Ie. Everyone in a community expects to be with each other forever and so expect the balances to equal out eventually.

Even when money was invented, many times the coinage wasn’t available to the masses. So money became only the unit of account but not the medium of exchange nor store of value. People simply kept credit tabs denominated in currency:

In the marketplaces that cropped up in Mesopotamian cities, prices were also calculated in silver, and the prices of commodities that weren't entirely controlled by the Temples and Palaces would tend to fluctuate according to supply and demand. But even here, such evidence as we have suggests that most transactions were based on credit. Mer chants (who sometimes worked for the Temples, sometimes operated independently) were among the few people who did, often, actually use silver in transactions; but even they mostly did much of their dealings on credit, and ordinary people buying beer from "ale women," or local innkeepers, once again, did so by running up a tab, to be settled at harvest time in barley or anything they might have had at hand.

Graeber draws his surprising conclusion: Smith’s account of money is completely backwards. It did not go from barter > money > credit. Instead, credit was the natural arrangement (our fundamental capacity isn’t to truck and barter but to lend and repay), money was invented after (through warfare), and it is only in a society dominated by money do we start view everything under the logic of barter: reciprocation and exchange.

In fact, systematic exchange as we see today shouldn’t be recognized as a natural extension of what humans naturally do but as a violent turn away from nature. It’s not the absence of the state that allows the market to prosper but the existence of a very specific type of state:

It's money that had made it possible for us to imagine ourselves in the way economists encourage us to do: as a collection of individuals and nations whose main business is swapping things. It's also clear that the mere existence of money, in itself, is not enough to allow us see the world this way. If it were, the discipline of economics would have been created in ancient Sumer, or anyway, far earlier than 1776, when Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations appeared.
The missing element is in fact exactly the thing Smith was at tempting to downplay: the role of government policy. In England, in Smith's day, it became possible to see the market, the world of butchers, ironmongers, and haberdashers, as its own entirely independent sphere of human activity because the British government was actively engaged in fostering it. This required laws and police, but also, specific monetary policies, which liberals like Smith were (successfully) advocating. It required pegging the value of the currency to silver, but at the same time greatly increasing the money supply, and particularly the amount of small change in circulation. This not only required huge amounts of tin and copper, but also the careful regulation of the banks that were, at that time, the only source of paper money.

Chapter 3: Primordial Debts

The century before smith, attempts to create state-supported banks, based off of a completely different view of money failed spectacularly:

The century before The Wealth of Nations had seen at least two attempts to create state-supported central banks, in France and Sweden, that had proven to be spectacular failures. In each case, the would-be central bank issued notes based largely on speculation that collapsed the moment investors lost faith. Smith supported the use of paper money, but like Locke before him, he also believed that the relative success of the Bank of England and Bank of Scotland had been due to their policy of pegging paper money firmly to precious metals. This became the mainstream economic view, so much so that alternative theories of money as credit-the one that Mitchell-Innes advocated-were quickly relegated to the margins, their proponents written off as cranks, and the very sort of thinking that led to bad banks and speculative bubbles in the first place.

This chapter examines the alternative to Smith’s view: money as credit.

The credit theorists insists that money is not a commodity with an intrinsic value but it is an accounting tool, a unit of measurement:

You can no more touch a dollar or a deutschmark than you can touch an hour or a cubic centimeter. Units of currency are merely abstract units of measurement, and as the credit theorists correctly noted, historically, such abstract systems of accounting emerged long before the use of any particular token of exchange.

What does it measure? Debt: the promise of one person to pay another. You can see this is the case because gold coins usually circulate at face value and not the value of the underlying metal (which was usually less). Credit theorists insist that there is no real difference between credit such as a loan and money such as a gold coin. At the end of the day money is valuable because we always assume some person is going to accept it in exchange for a real good. Imagine if everyone in the world stopped accepting the USD, what we conceive of as “hard cash” will quickly take on the form of a defaulting credit relationship.

As primarily a mode of measurement, this theory has a more convincing story of how money came to be: the state. After all, the state is responsible for unifying the other modes of measurement. Of course unifying the measurement of debt under your currency gives you a degree of power that, say, unifying the measurement of height does not.

If we abide by the commodity theory of money, it becomes a puzzle why the state needs to collect taxes instead of, say, simply controlling the gold mines. Credit theorists explain this much more convincingly: by collecting taxes you are in effect dictating how people measure value, this often comes with enormous advantages for you since you can now create value out of thin air. Here is a hypothetical example:

Say a king wishes to support a standing army of fifty thousand men. Under ancient or medieval conditions, feeding such a force was an enormous problem-unless they were on the march, one would need to employ almost as many men and animals just to locate, acquire, and transport the necessary provisions. On the other hand, if one simply hands out coins to the soldiers and then demands that every family in the kingdom was obliged to pay one of those coins back to you, one would, in one blow, turn one's entire national economy into a vast machine for the provisioning of soldiers, since now every family, in order to get their hands on the coins, must find some way to contribute to the general effort to provide soldiers with things they want. Markets are brought into existence as a side effect.

Here is a historical example. Note that the primary role of tax collection here isn’t to collect value (he handed out the pieces of paper that he would eventually collect) but to create a cultural symbol and for formative reasons. This is even more powerful than the mere extraction of value as you are changing the rules by which the game is played:

This was particularly true in the colonial world. To return to Madagascar for a moment: I have already mentioned that one of the first things that the French general Gallieni, conqueror of Madagascar, did when the conquest of the island was complete in 1901 was to impose a head tax. Not only was this tax quite high, it was also only payable in newly issued Malagasy francs. In other words, Gallieni did indeed print money and then demand that everyone in the country give some of that money back to him.
Most striking of all, though, was language he used to describe this tax. It was referred to as the the "educational" or "moralizing tax." In other words, it was designed-to adopt the language of the day-to teach the natives the value of work. Since the "educational tax" came due shortly after harvest time, the easiest way for farmers to pay it was to sell a portion of their rice crop to the Chinese or Indian merchants who soon installed themselves in small towns across the country.

Money in today’s economy is, beyond a doubt, chartalist: created and stewarded by the state as a unit of measurement rather than a commodity with intrinsic value.

By the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the very notion that the market could regulate itself, so long as the government ensured that money was safely pegged to precious metals, was completely discredited. From roughly 1933 to 1979, every major capitalist government reversed course and adopted some version of Keynesianism. Keynesian orthodoxy started from the assumption that capitalist markets would not really work unless capitalist governments were willing effectively to play nanny: most famously, by engaging in massive deficit "pump-priming" during downturns.

To be sure this does not mean that the state is the ONLY creator of money but that it is the most natural entity to do so.

Primordial Debt Theory

This may answer why the state started to create taxes but it does not justify the act as legitimate. Here, Graeber turns to primordial debt theory that suggests we are born with infinite debt towards society and the state becomes the embodiment of that creditor:

The core argument is that any attempt to separate monetary policy from social policy is ultimately wrong. Primordial-debt theorists insist that these have always been the same thing. Governments use taxes to create money, and they are able to do so because they have become the guardians of the debt that all citizens have to one another. This debt is the essence of society itself. It exists long before money and markets, and money and markets themselves are simply ways of chopping pieces of it up.

The argument goes that this intrinsic sense of infinite indebtedness was first channeled through religion. In the earliest of Hindu texts, debt was synonymous with sin and guilt. In fact, our entire lives are plagued with guilt because we are forever indebted to the gods – a debt that we pay through ritual sacrifice.

The next move of the argument is to say that the state becomes the middleman between the gods and us in terms of repayment. We conceive the creditor of this debt as shifting from the gods to the entirety of society (not just the state but also, say, our fathers):

The first kings were sacred kings who were either gods in their own right or stood as privileged mediators between human beings and the ultimate forces that governed the cosmos. This sets us on a road to the gradual realization that our debt to the gods was always, really, a debt to the society that made us what we are.

In support of this genealogy, we can look at how often early currencies (cattle in Homeric Greece) were also what was offered in sacrifice to the gods. Ie. currency is that which was most fitting to giving to the gods.

But these debt theorists need to answer another important question: how did money become quantifiable? After all, I may wholeheartedly believe that I owe the state or someone I wronged cows, but still unsure how many cows I owe.

The next argumentative move of debt theorists is to say that currencies (that could be quantified) first developed not to acquire things but to rearrange relations, especially when settling disputes.

There is every reason to believe that our own money started the same way-even the English word "to pay" is originally derived from a word for "to pacify, appease"-as in, to give someone something precious, for instance, to express just how badly you feel about having just killed his brother in a drunken brawl, and how much you would really like to avoid this becoming the basis for an ongoing blood-feud.

The key insight here is that equivalence between qualitatively different goods (chicken vs. cows) is impossible to arrive at. The reason that we have arrived at ratios of equivalence must come from the specific instances where the human desire for equivalence is the strongest: when one feels wronged. In other words, the very ability for humans to think about any form of identity between objects and concepts lies in the strong urge to establish equivalence in moral relations between humans:

I've already remarked how difficult it is to imagine how a system of precise equivalences-one young healthy milk cow is equivalent to exactly thirty-six chickens-could arise from most forms of gift exchange. If Henry gives Joshua a pig and feels he has received an inadequate counter-gift, he might mock Joshua as a cheapskate, but he would have little occasion to come up with a mathematical formula for precisely how cheap he feels Joshua has been. On the other hand, if Joshua's pig just destroyed Henry's garden, and especially, if that led to a fight in which Henry lost a toe, and Henry's family is now hauling Joshua up in front of the village assembly-this is precisely the context where people are most likely to become petty and legalistic and express out rage if they feel they have received one groat less than was their rightful due. That means exact mathematical specificity: for instance, the capacity to measure the exact value of a two-year-old pregnant sow. What's more, the levying of penalties must have constantly required the calculation of equivalences. Say the fine is in marten pelts but the culprit's clan doesn't have any martens. How many squirrel skins will do? Or pieces of silver jewelry? Such problems must have come up all the time and led to at least a rough-and-ready set of rules of thumb over what sorts of valuable were equivalent to others. This would help explain why, for instance, medieval Welsh law codes can contain detailed breakdowns not only of the value of different ages and conditions of milk cow, but of the monetary value of every object likely to be found in an ordinary homestead, down to the cost of each piece of timber-despite the fact that there seems no reason to believe that most such items could even be purchased on the open market at the time.

The intuitions behind primordial debt theory (there is thing called society, we are indebted to it, governments are secular gods and natural representatives of it) came out of the French revolution: during the birth of the modern state. If the commodity theory of money has led to the liberal capitalist empires of the 20th century, then the credit theory of money has led to the socialist ones. The USSR, for example, often employed Vedic logic to justify preventing emigration:

The argument was always: The USSR created these people, the USSR raised and educated them, made them who they are. What right do they have to take the product of our investment and transfer it to another country, as if they didn't owe us anything? Neither is this rhetoric restricted to socialist regimes. Nationalists appeal to exactly the same kind of arguments--especially in times of war. And all mod ern governments are nationalist to some degree.
One might even say that what we really have, in the idea of primordial debt, is the ultimate nationalist myth. Once we owed our lives to the gods that created us, paid interest in the form of animal sacrifice, and ultimately paid back the principal with our lives. Now we owe it to the Nation that formed us, pay interest in the form of taxes, and when it comes time to defend the nation against its enemies, to offer to pay it with our lives.

In summary, the Primordial Debt theorists’ justification for taxation is that it is a constant in human nature to think of us as infinitely indebted to the world. We can see this urge of human nature in our earliest relationship with gods. The state is the natural entity to steward this debt.

The Problem with Primordial-Debt Theory

Graeber’s problem with Primordial-Debt theory is that it starts off on the wrong premise: that we begin with infinite indebtedness to the world. This poses a few challenges. First, who are we exactly indebted to? Is it all of humanity or a specific subgroup. Second, how do we pay a debt so diffuse and unspecified. Third, who possibly has the authority to act as the creditor: to tell us how to repay our debts.

These paradoxes become apparent when we look at how Vedic interpreters conceive of how we ought to repay such a debt:

• To the universe, cosmic forces, as we would put it now, to Nature. The ground of our existence. To be repaid through ritual: ritual being an act of respect and recognition to all that beside which we are small.
• To those who have created the knowledge and cultural accomplishments that we value most; that give our existence its form, its meaning, but also its shape. Here we would include not only the philosophers and scientists who created our intellectual tradition but everyone from William Shakespeare to that long-since-forgotten woman, somewhere in the Middle East, who created leavened bread. We repay them by becoming learned ourselves and contributing to human knowledge and human culture.
• To our parents, and their parents-our ancestors. We repay them by becoming ancestors.
• To humanity as a whole. We repay them by generosity to strangers, by maintaining that basic communistic ground of sociality that makes human relations, and hence life, possible.

What’s odd is that this logic functions nothing like a commercial debt. The way to repay here is to merge with your creditor. Perhaps the real crime is thinking that we are separate and equal enough to enter into debt relationships with these entities. Ie. Thinking that we are in debt or guilty to these entities, implies our belief in our separation from and equality with them, that is what we are really guilty of:

Or even that the very presumption of positing oneself as separate from humanity or the cosmos, so much so that one can enter into one-to-one dealings with it, is itself the crime that can be answered only by death. Our guilt is not due to the fact that we cannot repay our debt to the universe. Our guilt is our presumption in thinking of ourselves as being in any sense an equivalent to Everything Else that Exists or Has Ever Existed, so as to be able to conceive of such a debt in the first place

Perhaps what the Vedic commentators were trying to show by framing our relationship with the cosmos in the language of debt is that it cannot be fundamentally framed in the language of debt.

In fact, we can find the same tension in Christianity as well. It may be odd to think about the coming of Christ in the language of a financial transaction: "Redeemer." But if we dig closer we will see that to redeem is not referring to paying one's debts but to the removal of all debts: the destruction of the accounting system. In similar manner, financial language is used to show the inadequacy of financial language:

Nehemiah was a Jew born in Babylon, a former cup-bearer to the Persian emperor. In 444 Be, he managed to talk the Great King into appointing him governor of his native Judaea. He also received per mission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem that had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar more than two centuries earlier. In the course of rebuilding, sacred texts were recovered and restored; in a sense, this was the moment of the creation of what we now consider Judaism.
The problem was that Nehemiah quickly found himself confronted with a social crisis. All around him, impoverished peasants were un able to pay their taxes; creditors were carrying off the children of the poor. His first response was to issue a classic Babylonian-style "clean slate" edict-having himself been born in Babylon, he was clearly familiar with the general principle. All non-commercial debts were to be forgiven. Maximum interest rates were set. At the same time, though, Nehemiah managed to locate, revise, and reissue much older Jewish laws, now preserved in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus, which in certain ways went even further, by institutionalizing the principle. The most famous of these is the Law of Jubilee: a law that stipulated that all debts would be automatically cancelled "in the Sabbath year" (that is, after seven years had passed), and that all who languished in bondage owing to such debts would be released.
"Freedom," in the Bible, as in Mesopotamia, came to refer above all to release from the effects of debt. Over time, the history of the Jewish people itself came to be interpreted in this light: the liberation from bondage in Egypt was God's first, paradigmatic act of redemption; the historical tribulations of the Jews (defeat, conquest, exile) were seen as misfortunes that would eventually lead to a final redemption with the coming of the Messiah-though this could only be accomplished, prophets such as Jeremiah warned them, after the Jewish people truly repented of their sins (carrying each other off into bondage, whoring after false gods, the violation of commandments)Y In this light, the adoption of the term by Christians is hardly surprising. Redemption was a release from one's burden of sin and guilt, and the end of history would be that moment when all slates are wiped clean and all debts finally lifted when a great blast from angelic trumpets will announce the final Jubilee.
If so, "redemption" is no longer about buying something back. It's really more a matter of destroying the entire system of accounting. In many Middle Eastern cities, this was literally true: one of the common acts during debt cancelation was the ceremonial destruction of the tablets on which financial records had been kept, an act to be repeated, much less officially, in just about every major peasant revolt in history.

Furthermore in the Lord's prayer, we say "forgive us of our debts as we forgive those of our debtors." The problem is we don't forgive our debtors at all. The implicit message here could be, again, that the forgiveness by God (first half of the sentence) can't possibly be framed in the language of financial transactions:

What's more, there is the lingering suggestion that we really couldn't live up to those standards, even if we tried. One of the things that makes the Jesus of the New Testament such a tantalizing character is that it's never clear what he's telling us. Everything can be read two ways. When he calls on his followers to forgive all debts, refuse to cast the first stone, turn the other cheek, love their enemies, to hand over their possessions to the poor-is he really expecting them to do this? Or are such demands just a way of throwing in their faces that, since we are clearly not prepared to act this way, we are all sinners whose salvation can only come in another world-a position that can be (and has been) used to justify almost anything? This is a vision of human life as inherently corrupt, but it also frames even spiritual affairs in com mercial terms: with calculations of sin, penance, and absolution, the Devil and St. Peter with their rival ledger books, usually accompanied by the creeping feeling that it's all a charade because the very fact that we are reduced to playing such a game of tabulating sins reveals us to be fundamentally unworthy of forgiveness.

Graeber's claim is that all of these religions arose in the Axial age when markets and coinage first started to dominate and enter into the way that we have conceived of things. That is why these traditions framed relationships with god and morality in general as financial transactions. But they all go to show by this very framing how morality cannot be conceived of in these terms.

Chapter 4: Cruelty and Redemption

What is Money

Graeber affirms both theories’ (primordial debt and barter) understanding of what money is. Money is both a commodity and an IOU. It can’t be just the former because people never needed it to make barter easier. But it also can’t just be the latter because trust is hard to come by. In other words, if your IOU also has intrinsic value (as a commodity) it would make for better money because it would be harder to fabricate. This is why a gold coin with an emperor’s face stamped on it often went for higher than the value of the metal (added trust that the emperor would accept it).

Historically, money would alter between IOU and commodity. In periods of low trust (war) money had to be more of a commodity (gold). In periods of high trust (stability) money was more likely to be IOU (USD). In fact, learning what is accepted as currency often tells you a great deal of the political landscape:

One could often learn a lot about the balance of political forces in a given time and place by what sorts of things were accept able as currency. For instance: in much the same way that colonial Virginia planters managed to pass a law obliging shopkeepers to accept their tobacco as currency, medieval Pomeranian peasants appear to have at certain points convinced their rulers to make taxes, fees, and customs duties, which were registered in Roman currency, actually payable in wine, cheese, peppers, chickens, eggs, and even herring much to the annoyance of traveling merchants, who therefore had to either carry such things around in order to pay the tolls or buy them locally at prices that would have been more advantageous to their suppliers for that very reason. This was in an area with a free peasantry, rather than serfs. They were in a relatively strong political position. In other times and places, the interests of lords and merchants prevailed instead.

What isn’t Morality

Paradoxically, after accepting both theories’ view of money, he goes on to reject both of their views of morality: that we are either not indebted to anyone at all or fully indebted to the cosmos. He paints this as a false dichotomy that supposedly contains between them the realm of possibility. Where they both start off with (and get wrong on) is to think that commercial relations (debt and exchange) encompasses the whole of moral relations.

Graeber draws upon Nietzsche to show how, if we start off with Smith’s premise of humans as creatures of exchange, capable of creating debts freely, we will naturally conceive of our relationship with the cosmos in debt as well.

Nietzsche's second essay in the genealogy details how the logic of debt transitioned to the logic of guilt. The starting state is when punishment is conceived of as a repayment of debt. Specifically, the creditor rejoices in the pain inflicted upon the debtor. This is considered cheerful because the debts are sought to be squared after this act of punishment and both can go about on their own ways. Guilt certainly existed, but only before the act of punishment. The guilt was clearly identifiable and small enough that you would be rid of your guilt once you submit yourself to the equivalent level of punishment. This was the basis of social structures and relationships:

The feeling of guilt, of personal obligation, has its origin in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship there is, in the relationship between seller and buyer, creditor and debtor. Here for the first time one person moved up against another person, here an individual measured himself against another individual. We have found no civilization still at such a low level that something of this relationship is not already perceptible. To set prices, to measure values, to think up equivalencies, to exchange things-that preoccupied man's very first thinking to such a degree that in a certain sense it's what thinking itself is. Here the oldest form of astuteness was bred; here, too, we can assume are the first beginnings of man's pride, his feeling of pre-eminence in relation to other animals. Perhaps our word "man" (manas) continues to ex press directly something of this feeling of the self: the human being describes himself as a being which assesses values, which values and measures, as the "inherently calculating animal." Selling and buying, together with their psychological attributes, are even older than the beginnings of any form of social organizations and groupings; out of the most rudimentary form of personal legal rights the budding feeling of exchange, contract, guilt, law, duty, and compensation was instead first transferred to the crudest and earliest social structures (in their relation ships with similar social structures), along with the habit of comparing power with power, of measuring, of calculating.

(Again, we see here the thesis that our intellectual capabilities for calculation and comparison come from our urge for moral comparison)

The transition has five interlinked movements: 1. the ascription of free will to the debtor: the debtor is now being punished because he could've done otherwise 2. the expansion of the creditor: when we enter into society this logic of debt becomes natural way we conceive of our relationship with the community. The creditor expands even more when we conceive of our relationship with the cosmos or God in this way. 3. As the creditor expands so does the debt. It both increases as well as becomes amorphous to the point where there is no possibility of you paying it off. The debt becomes constant. 4. the internalization of the will to power: prior, the will to power was directed externally when experiencing joy when watching the pain of your creditor. Now, the will to power is directed within yourself, your "free will", and feeling bad about your own inclinations. 5. the shift of focus from the creditor to the debtor: the act of punishment is now not to reward the creditor but because the debtor deserves this.

With these five moments we've started from debt and arrived at an ell encompassing guilt, a bad consciousness.

Graeber emphasizes the second of these movements to show how Nietzsche's genealogical story reveals that the myth of barter and the myth of primordial-debt really start from the same premises. Specifically, if you view human relations exclusively in terms of exchange, as the former does, you will naturally conceive of your relationship with society, the cosmos, and God in such a manner, as the latter does:

When humans did begin to form communities, Nietzsche continues, they necessarily began to imagine their relationship to the com munity in these terms. The tribe provides them with peace and security. They are therefore in its debt. Obeying its laws is a way of paying it back ("paying your debt to society" again). But this debt, he says, is also paid-here too-in sacrifice:
Within the original tribal cooperatives-we're talking about primeval times-the living generation always acknowledged a legal obligation to the previous generations, and especially to the earliest one which had founded the tribe [ . . . ] Here the reigning conviction is that the tribe only exists at all only be cause of the sacrifices and achievements of its ancestors-and that people have to pay them back with sacrifices and achieve ments. In this people recognize a debt which keeps steadily growing because these ancestors in their continuing existence as powerful spirits do not stop giving the tribe new advantages and lending them their power. Do they do this for free? But there is no "for free" for those raw and "spiritually destitute" ages. What can people give back to them? Sacrifices (at first as nourishment understood very crudely), festivals, chapels, signs of honor, above all, obedience--for all customs, as work of one's ancestors, are also their statutes and commands. Do people ever give them enough? This suspicion remains and grows.
In other words, for Nietzsche, starting from Adam Smith's assumptions about human nature means we must necessarily end up with something very much along the lines of primordial-debt theory. On the one hand, it is because of our feeling of debt to the ancestors that we obey the ancestral laws: this is why we feel that the community has the right to react "like an angry creditor" and punish us for our transgressions if we break them. In a larger sense, we develop a creeping feeling that we could never really pay back the ancestors, that no sacrifice (not even the sacrifice of our first-born) will ever truly redeem us. We are terrified of the ancestors, and the stronger and more powerful a com munity becomes, the more powerful they seem to be, until finally, "the ancestor is necessarily transfigured into a god." As communities grow into kingdoms and kingdoms into universal empires, the gods them selves come to seem more universal, they take on grander, more cosmic pretentions, ruling the heavens, casting thunderbolts-culminating in the Christian god, who, as the maximal deity, necessarily "brought about the maximum feeling of indebtedness on earth." Even our ancestor Adam is no longer figured as a creditor, but as a transgressor, and therefore a debtor, who passes on to us his burden of Original Sin:
Finally, with the impossibility of discharging the debt, people also come up with the notion that it is impossible to remove the penance, the idea that it cannot be paid off ("eternal punishment") . . . until all of a sudden we confront the paradoxical and horrifying expedient with which a martyred humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity: God sacrificing himself for the guilt of human beings, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can re deem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem-the creditor sacrificing himself for the debtor, out of love (can people believe that?), out of love for his debtor!

It is this false assumption: that all morality can be framed in the language of commercial transactions that is problematic. In fact, rather than seeing the ability to calculate and keep tabs as that which is quintessentially human, egalitarian societies often saw it as not doing so as what makes us human. Graeber will later argue that to be able to reduce morality to debt, to impersonal numbers requires us to violently strip out all our moral relationships to things and other people:

Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly: "Up in our country we are human!" said the hunter. "And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs."
The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found through the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began "comparing power with power, measuring, calculating" and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt.

Chapter 5: A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations

If, as the religious traditions show morality cannot be conceived of in the logic of debt, how can morality be conceived? Graeber suggests three types of moral logic: communism, exchange, and hierarchy. Debt is merely the obligation generated within exchange. Communism and hierarchy will have their own obligations.

Communism

Communism is governed by the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” The obligation is to help others when they need it and to contribute according to one’s abilities. Any small team or social unit operates in this way.

If the “from each” element is small enough (asking for directions) or the “to each” element is big enough relative to the “from each” (someone is drowning) we expect people who are not explicitly enemies to operate under this logic.

But of course, the extent to which someone follows this logic is determined by the society. Often, if this is the dominant logic of a community, there is a presumption of eternity, that you are always going to be interacting with them. And there is some shared identity (e.g. tribesman, or humanity).

“The surest way to know that one is in the presence of communistic relations is that not only are no accounts taken, but it would be considered offensive, or simply bizarre, to even consider doing so.” For example if siblings always kept tallies of who helped who.

We almost operate on this logic to some degree even in commerce: e.g. merchants reducing prices for the needy.

Exchange

The logic of exchange is equivalence. Both sides feel obliged to return to other what they received. This obligation is debt. Framed in this abstract way it is clear that exchange is not always about sharing value (commerce) but can also be an exchange of blows or warfare. Different from communism, actors within exchange keep clear accounts.

Instead of a common shared identity, as in the case with communism, parties in exchange are defined by equality. This is also why I wouldn’t feel the need to reciprocate if Bill Gates treated me out to dinner but would if my friend did:

In exchange, the objects being traded are seen as equivalent. Therefore, by implication, so are the people: at least, at the moment when gift is met with counter-gift, or money changes hands; when there is no further debt or obligation and each of the two parties is equally free to walk away. This in turn implies autonomy.

Certainly, sometimes, what each side is aiming for is not equivalence but to outdo the other. But the logic is similar: to return what one received with interest – it is still equivalence in a looser term. (This is why exchange can transform into hierarchy) So the relationship as a whole tends towards equilibrium even if both parties aim to break equilibrium.

Furthermore, there is no presumption of eternity and there is always a possibility that the relationship could end. Thus, communities based on exchange needs to always be maintained and repayments of exactly the same amount seem offensive because they represent an urge to square accounts and stop all future dealings:

Exchange allows us to cancel out our debts. It gives us a way to call it even: hence, to end the relationship. With vendors, one is usu ally only pretending to have a relationship at all. With neighbors, one might for this very reason prefer not to pay one's debts. Laura Bohannan writes about arriving in a Tiv community in rural Nigeria; neighbors immediately began arriving bearing little gifts: "two ears corn, one vegetable marrow, one chicken, five tomatoes, one handful peanuts." Having no idea what was expected of her, she thanked them and wrote down in a notebook their names and what they had brought. Eventually, two women adopted her and explained that all such gifts did have to be returned. It would be entirely inappropriate to simply accept three eggs from a neighbor and never bring anything back. One did not have to bring back eggs, but one should bring some thing back of approximately the same value. One could even bring money-there was nothing inappropriate in that-provided one did so at a discreet interval, and above all, that one did not bring the exact cost of the eggs. It had to be either a bit more or a bit less. To bring back nothing at all would be to cast oneself as an exploiter or a parasite. To bring back an exact equivalent would be to suggest that one no longer wishes to have anything to do with the neighbor. Tiv women, she learned, might spend a good part of the day walking for miles to distant homesteads to return a handful of okra or a tiny bit of change, "in an endless circle of gifts to which no one ever handed over the precise value of the object last received"-and in doing so, they were continually creating their society. There was certainly a trace of communism here--neighbors on good terms could also be trusted to help each other out in emergencies-but unlike communistic relations, which are assumed to be permanent, this sort of neighborliness had to be constantly created and maintained, because any link can be broken off at any time.

Finally, relationships of pure exchange are hard to identify because we have an urge to pretend we are more than just calculating machines wanting nothing to do with each other after the transaction. So even parties haggling in a night market might feel pressured to put on a more personable façade.

Hierarchy

Hierarchy operates on the logic of precedent: what is expected from a certain group currently is simply what has been expected from them before. In fact, it is dangerous to give gifts to people higher up or lower than you for this precise reason: that it will be considered precedent.

And this makes sense: in communism, ability and need specify what was done. In exchange, equivalence demanded what was to be exchanged. There is no inherent logic of hierarchy (it is saying that the parties are inherently different and incommensurable) as there is in the other two, so the logic is simply based on precedent.

In relations of hierarchy, there develops identities or essential natures. Someone does something because it is in their nature to do so. That is why hierarchy may be a misleading name here, it’s not so much an objective ranking of different natures but a recognition of different natures (that may not be able to be ordinally ranked) which separates it from communism and exchange:

Often, such arrangements can turn into a logic of caste: certain clans are responsible for weaving the ceremonial garments, or bringing the fish for royal feasts, or cutting the king's hair. They thus come to be known as weavers or fishermen or barbers. This last point can't be overemphasized because it brings home another truth regularly over looked: that the logic of identity is, always and everywhere, entangled in the logic of hierarchy. It is only when certain people are placed above others, or where everyone is being ranked in relation to the king, or the high priest, or Founding Fathers, that one begins to speak of people bound by their essential nature: about fundamentally different kinds of human being. Ideologies of caste or race are just extreme examples. It happens whenever one group is seen as raising themselves above others, or placing themselves below others, in such a way that ordinary standards of fair dealing no longer apply.

In fact, something like this happens in a small way even in our most intimate social relations. The moment we recognize someone as a different sort of person, either above or below us, then ordinary rules of reciprocity become modified or are set aside. If a friend is unusually generous once, we will likely wish to reciprocate. If she acts this way repeatedly, we conclude she is a generous person, and are hence less likely to reciprocate.

We can describe a simple formula here: a certain action, repeated, becomes customary; as a result, it comes to define the actor's essential nature.

In like manner, not only is there a qualitative difference between people but there is also a qualitative difference between the goods exchanged.

Hierarchy, however, can be merely a channel of redistribution:

In much of Papua New Guinea, social life centers on "big men," charismatic individuals who spend much of their time coaxing, cajoling, and manipulating in order to acquire masses of wealth to give away again at some great feast. One could, in practice, pass from here to, say, an Amazonian or indigenous North American chief. Unlike big men, their role is more formalized; but actually such chiefs have no power to compel anyone to do anything they don't want to (hence North American Indian chiefs' famous skill at oratory and powers of persuasion). As a result, they tended to give away far more than they received. Observers often remarked that in terms of personal possessions, a village chief was often the poorest man in the village, such was the pressure on him for constant supply of largesse.

There tends to be a correlation between how much wealth is gathered on the top and how violently it is gathered with how spectacular my act of giving it away must be and how much I have to foster identities within a group. The idea must be this: if I gathered a lot of wealth through wealth and plunder, the only way I could justify this is if I tell a story about how some people (e.g. the rich) are essentially bad in nature. I must also, the idea goes, make a big show of giving it away to alleviate the tensions I created from my plundering. The redistributive state has its origins more in hierarchy then communism:

And what is true of warrior aristocracies is all the more true of ancient states, where rulers almost invariably represented themselves as the protectors of the helpless, supporters of widows and orphans, and champions of the poor. The genealogy of the modern redistributive state-with its notorious tendency to foster identity politics-can be traced back not to any sort of "primitive communism" but ultimately to violence and war.

Stage Transitions

Graeber concedes that 1. Every relationship is probably a mixture of these three 2. These three relations can easily descend into the other. (Although some transitions from communism to exchange, for example, are much more difficult) The reason we think that everything is exchange however is because 1. How much the market has penetrated into our everyday thinking (historically contingent) 2. As humans, we have a natural tendency to envision justice as symmetry and therefore reciprocity.

We are at a point where we can meaningfully answer what “Debt” is: “an exchange that has not been brought to completion.” Debt has to happen between two separate equals. It can neither be between relations of communism (where no one is keeping tallies) nor hierarchies (where things are expected from certain people). Furthermore, there must still be, at least the logical possibility, of them returning to equality:

This is what makes situations of effectively unpayable debt so difficult and so painful. Since creditor and debtor are ultimately equals, if the debtor cannot do what it takes to restore herself to equality, there is obviously something wrong with her; it must be her fault.
This connection becomes clear if we look at the etymology of common words for "debt" in European languages. Many are synonyms for "fault," "sin," or "guilt;" just as a criminal owes a debt to society, a debtor is always a sort of criminal.

What is so peculiar about debt is that it only exists when the exchange has not completed, when only one party has transacted. Therefore, debt, despite grounded in the morality of equal exchange, also somewhat operates on the logic of hierarchy. The relationship with you and your debtor is an uncomfortable mix between hierarchy and equality:

Debtor and creditor confront each other like a peasant before a feudal lord. The law of precedent takes hold. If you bring your creditor tomatoes from the garden, it never occurs to you that he would give something back. He might expect you to do it again, though.

This is neither a good nor bad thing in itself. On the positive side, debt puts people who otherwise would have nothing to do with each other (this is what equality implies: seperation) into moral relationships:

Debt is what happens in between: when the two parties cannot yet walk away from each other, because they are not yet equal. But it is carried out in the shadow of eventual equality. Because achieving that equality, however, destroys the very reason for having a relation ship, just about everything interesting happens in between. In fact, just about everything human happens in between-even if this means that all such human relations bear with them at least a tiny element of criminality, guilt, or shame.
For the Tiv women whom I mentioned earlier in the chapter, this wasn't much of a problem. By ensuring that everyone was always slightly in debt to one another, they actually created human society, if a very fragile sort of society-a delicate web made up of obligations to return three eggs or a bag of okra, ties renewed and recreated, as any one of them could be cancelled out at any time.

A Culture of “Please” and “Thank You”

Our insistence on saying “please” and “thank you” reveals the commercial nature of our culture. These words imply that you are dealing with equal and separate individuals that could have done otherwise. In hierarchy, a lord will never thank a barber for fulfilling his function: that is what he IS. Similarly, in communism, it would be extremely weird for a child to thank her mother for every act of help because it would imply that the child expected the mother to not be so caring. What this tells us is, first and foremost, that we think we live in a community of separate, equal, and essence-less individuals. “It is also merely one token of a much larger philosophy, a set of assumptions of what humans are and what they owe one another, that have by now become so deeply ingrained that we cannot see them.”

But it is even more interesting when we look at the etymologies for these phrases.

Saying please means, literally and etymologically, that you have no obligation to do something. But, of course, there is an obligation:

In fact, the English "please" is short for "if you please," "if it pleases you to do this"-it is the same in most European languages (French si il vous plait, Spanish por favor). Its literal meaning is "you are under no obligation to do this." "Hand me the salt. Not that I am saying that you have to!" This is not true; there is a social obligation, and it would be almost impossible not to comply. But etiquette largely consists of the exchange of polite fictions (to use less polite language, lies). When you ask someone to pass the salt, you are also giving them an order; by attaching the word "please," you are saying that it is not an order. But, in fact, it is.

In like manner, the literal meaning of “thank you” is that I will record done what you did for me (breaking equal relationship and entering into debt). But the implied meaning of it is that we didn’t have any relationship to begin with and you could of not done that.

In English, "thank you" derives from "think," it originally meant, "I will remember what you did for me''-which is usually not true either-but in other languages (the Portuguese obrigado is a good example) the standard term follows the form of the English "much obliged"-it actually does means "I am in your debt." The French merci is even more graphic: it derives from "mercy," as in begging for mercy; by saying it you are symbolically placing yourself in your bene factor's power-since a debtor is, after all, a criminal. Saying "you're welcome," or "it's nothing" (French de rien, Spanish de nada)-the latter has at least the advantage of often being literally true-is a way of reassuring the one to whom one has passed the salt that you are not actually inscribing a debit in your imaginary moral account book. So is saying "my pleasure"-you are saying, "No, actually, it's a credit, not a debit-you did me a favor because in asking me to pass the salt, you gave me the opportunity to do something I found rewarding in itself!"

What this reveals is two things. First, how we are really ignoring relationships that are actually hierarchical and communistic: that is why there is a dual and conflicting meaning of these phrases.

Second, it shows the fragility of equality in our culture. Much like the schizophrenic logic of debt which sits uncomfortably between equality and hierarchy so too does our everyday relationships. The literal meaning of “please” is that we are free individuals with no obligations, yet the social meaning is that you are obliged to help me. The literal meaning of “thank you” is that I am in your debt and have obligations towards you, whereas the implication of even saying it in the first place is that we had no obligations towards each other.

Chapter 6: Games with Sex and Death

If we just view economic history in the logic of equal exchange then we will be overlooking much of human activity. Even exchange itself, at the extremes, takes upon logic of communism or hierarchy.

Graeber begins telling his version of economic history that goes from credit > money > barter. Early communities begin with people operating on gifts. They kept accounting by agreeing upon a rough equivalence between goods, money didn’t necessarily have to form. Money begins forming in “human economies” and takes upon their modern form in “market economies” which tend to oscillate between virtual and real forms of money. And it is only in this last evolution to “market economies” do we establish our propensity to barter: to quantify and equate.

To understand the modern intuitions of money and debt we, therefore, have to understand the transition from human economies to market economies. In this chapter, we examine what happens when human economies are exposed to market economies. In the next, we see how the transition naturally happens.

Money in Human Economies

Graeber’s definition of human economies:

Currencies are never used to buy and sell anything at all. Instead, they are used to create, maintain, and otherwise reorganize relations between people: to arrange marriages, establish the paternity of children, head off feuds, console mourners at funerals, seek forgiveness in the case of crimes, negotiate treaties, acquire followers almost anything but trade in yams, shovels, pigs, or jewelry.
Often, these currencies were extremely important, so much so that social life itself might be said to revolve around getting and disposing of the stuff. Clearly, though, they mark a totally different conception of what money, or indeed an economy, is actually about. I've decided therefore to refer to them as "social currencies," and the economies that employ them as "human economies." By this I mean not that these societies are necessarily in any way more humane (some are quite humane; others extraordinarily brutal), but only that they are economic systems primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth, but with the creation, destruction, and rearranging of human beings.

The role of money in human economies is not to buy things, it is not to establish equivalence. It is a recognition that an equivalence can never be made. Take “bride price” for example. It may look like you are buying a wife, but that would be inaccurate because 1. You can’t sell the wife 2. You have moral obligations to her 3. There is no equivalent amount of goods you can give for her, you continuously need to pay, and no one would think that your debt to the family has been repaid. In this example, the prestigious brass rods are a symbol that you know there is a debt that can never be repaid, that money and a person are qualitatively different things incapable of equivalence:

The Tiv at that time used bundles of brass rods as their most prestigious form of currency. Brass rods were only held by men, and never used to buy things in markets (markets were dominated by women); instead, they were exchanged only for things that men considered of higher importance: cattle, horses, ivory, ritual titles, medical treatment, magical charms. It was possible, as one Tiv ethnographer, Akiga Sai, explains, to acquire a wife with brass rods, but it required quite a lot of them. You would need to give two or three bundles of them to her parents to establish yourself as a suitor; then, when you did finally make off with her (such marriages were always first framed as elopements), another few bundles to assuage her mother when she showed up angrily demanding to know what was going on. This would normally be followed by five more to get her guardian to at least temporarily accept the situation, and more still to her parents when she gave birth, if you were to have any chance of their accepting your claims to be the father of her children. That might get her parents off your back, but you'd have to pay off the guardian forever, because you could never really use money to acquire the rights to a woman. Everyone knew that the only thing you can legitimately give in exchange for a woman is another woman. In this case, everyone has to abide by the pretext that a woman will someday be forthcoming. In the meantime, as one ethnographer succinctly puts it, "the debt can never be fully paid."

The same holds true for blood feuds. You might have to pay the family whom you injured, but there is never a sense that the accounts have been settled. The only thing that is equivalent to a human life is another human life. So you would develop economies where the males all wanted to hoard females that could be exchanged with each other:

Among North African Bedouins, for instance, it sometimes happened that the only way to settle a feud was for the killer's family to turn over a daughter, who would then marry the victim's next of kin-his brother, say.

This is very much like primordial debt theory: money is a recognition that there is an absolute debt that cannot be repaid. This is also why, money in human societies were often extremely social objects:

Lele currencies are, as I say, quintessential social currencies. They are used to mark every visit, every promise, every important moment in a man's or woman's life. It is surely significant, too, what the objects used as currency here actually were. Raffia cloth was used for clothing. In Douglas's day, it was the main thing used to clothe the human body; camwood bars were the source of a red paste that was used as a cosmetic-it was the main substance used as makeup, by both men and women, to beautify themselves each day. These, then, were the materials used to shape people's physical appearance, to make them appear mature, decent, attractive, and dignified to their fellows. They were what turned a mere naked body into a proper social being.
This is no coincidence. In fact, it's extraordinarily common in what I've been calling human economies. Money almost always arises first from objects that are used primarily as adornment of the person. Beads, shells, feathers, dog or whale teeth, gold, and silver are all well known cases in point. All are useless for any purpose other than making people look more interesting, and hence, more beautiful. The brass rods used by the Tiv might seem an exception, but actually they're not: they were used mainly as raw material for the manufacture of jewelry, or simply twisted into hoops and worn at dances. There are exceptions (cattle, for instance), but as a general rule, it's only when governments, and then markets, enter the picture that we begin to see currencies like barley, cheese, tobacco, or salt.

Three Tiers of Violence

Money begins as a recognition that humans are unique qualities incapable of being exchanged for quantities. Graeber goes on to paint a picture of how violence makes humans fundamentally calculable and tradeable:

How is this calculability effectuated? How does it become possible to treat people as if they are identical? The Lele example gave us a hint: to make a human being an object of exchange, one woman equivalent to another for example, requires first of all ripping her from her context; that is, tearing her away from that web of relations that makes her the unique conflux of relations that she is, and thus, into a generic value capable of being added and subtracted and used as a means to measure debt. This requires a certain violence. To make her equivalent to a bar of camwood takes even more violence, and it takes an enormous amount of sustained and systematic violence to rip her so completely from her context that she becomes a slave.

The first level of violence comes from Lele logic itself. The equivalence of human life for human life is, in itself, an equivalence that collapses qualities into quantities. And this equivalence was only possible through the threat of violence:

Human beings, left to follow their own desires, rarely arrange themselves in symmetrical patterns [(patterns that meant equivalence could be established)]. Such symmetry tends to be bought at a terrible human price. In the Tiv case, Akiga is actually willing to describe it:
Under the old system an elder who had a ward could always marry a young girl, however senile he might be, even if he were a leper with no hands or feet; no girl would dare to refuse him. If another man were attracted by his ward he would take his own and give her to the old man by force, in order to make an exchange. The girl had to go with the old man, sorrowfully carrying his goat-skin bag. If she ran back to her home her owner caught her and beat her, then bound her and brought her back to the elder. The old man was pleased, and grinned till he showed his blackened molars. "Wherever you go," he told her, "you will be brought back here to me; so stop worrying, and settle down as my wife." The girl fretted, till she wished the earth might swallow her. Some women even stabbed themselves to death when they were given to an old man against their will; but in spite of all, the Tiv did not care.

The second level of violence comes when members internal to the Lele community break it’s own logic with violence. The only time when a human life is seen as fully tradeable to goods is when a man sells his claim on a woman to a tribe which has the means to violently cease her by force:

Sometimes when two clans were disputing a claim to blood compensation, the claimant might see no hope of getting satisfaction from his opponents. The political system offered no direct means for one man (or clan) to use physical coercion or to resort to superior authority to enforce claims against an other. In such a case, rather than abandon his claim to a pawn woman, he would be ready to take the equivalent in wealth, if he could get it. The usual procedure was to sell his case against the defendants to the only group capable of extorting a pawn by force, that is, to a village.
The man who meant to sell his case to a village asked them for 100 raffia cloths or five bars of camwood. The village raised the amount, either from its treasury, or by a loan from one of its members, and thereby adopted as its own his claim to a pawn.
Once he held the money, his claim was over, and the village, which had now bought it, would proceed to organize a raid to seize the woman in dispute.
In other words, it was only when violence was brought into the equation that there was any question of buying and selling people. The ability to deploy force, to cut through the endless maze of preferences, obligations, expectations, and responsibilities that mark real human relationships, also made it possible to overcome what is otherwise the first rule of all Lele economic relationships: that human lives can only be exchanged for other human lives, and never for physical objects.

The third and most total level of violence is when outsiders hijack the Lele logic with violence. In other words, when the market economy is introduced to human economies.

By the height of the trade fifty years later, British ships were bringing in large quantities of cloth (both products of the newly created Manchester mills and calicoes from India), and iron and copper ware, along with incidental goods like beads, and also, for obvious reasons, substantial numbers of firearms.19 The goods were then advanced to African merchants, again on credit, who assigned them to their own agents to move upstream.
The obvious problem was how to secure the debt. The trade was an extraordinarily duplicitous and brutal business, and slave raiders were unlikely to be dependable credit risks-especially when dealing with foreign merchants who they might never see again. As a result, a system quickly developed in which European captains would demand security in the form of pawns.
The sort of "pawns" we are talking about here are clearly quite different from the kind we encountered among the Lele. In many of the kingdoms and trading towns of West Africa, the nature of pawn ship appears to have already undergone profound changes by the time Europeans showed up on the scene around 1500-it had become, effectively, a kind of debt peonage. Debtors would pledge family members as surety for loans; the pawns would then become dependents in the creditors' households, working their fields and tending to their house hold chores-their persons acting as security while their labor, effectively, substituted for interest. Pawns were not slaves; they were not, like slaves, cut off from their families; but neither were they precisely free. In Calabar and other ports, masters of slaving ships, on advancing goods to their African counterparts, soon developed the custom of demanding pawns as security-for instance, two of the merchants' own dependents for every three slaves to be delivered, preferably including at least one member of the merchants' families. This was in practice not much different than demanding the surrender of hostages, and at times it created major political crises when captains, tired of waiting for delayed shipments, decided to take off with a cargo of pawns instead.

What is noteworthy here is that, as is the case with Cortes and the Aztecs, violence was not only exacted upon the debtor but also the creditor. In other words, the creditor is also motivated by the fear of violence which makes it so terrifying. One insight here is that Graeber must believe that profit-seeking is inherent in market economies to no small extent because people are often cogs in chains of debt, and the cost of not being able to pay one’s debt was so high.

In the final analysis, it is terrifying for human economies, where the goal is to manage social relationships with money, to be introduced to market economies, where the goal is to increase the amount of money. This is because the very mechanism of (human != money) that was supposed to represent the incommensurability of human life with objects becomes hijacked by the profit-seeking goal of the market (through a long chain of debt) and turned into an equivalence (human = money). The brass rods which were a recognition of the uniqueness of the bride becomes the effective price of the bride:

The pervasive climate of violence led to the systematic perversion of all the institutions of existing human economies, which were transformed into a gigantic apparatus of dehumanization and destruction.
At the same time, Aro collaborated with local elders to create a code of ritual laws and penal ties so comprehensive and severe that everyone was at constant risk of falling afoul of themY Anyone who violated one would be turned over to the Aro for transport to the coast, with their accuser receiving their price in copper bars. According to some contemporary accounts, a man who simply disliked his wife and was in need of brass rods could always come up with some reason to sell her, and the village elders who received a share of the profits-would almost invariably concur.

Of course, this hijacking of the logic of human economies could only happen with the introduction of systematic violence. The idea must be that each person exists within a social context. There is an inherent resistance to being ripped out of this context from both the point of the individual as well as their immediate context (friends, family). But to be tradeable as an impersonal quantity, one must be ripped out in this way, hence the threat of violence.

Critique: This explains how slavery (the quantification of humans) was made possible. But violence doesn’t seem to be necessary to untangle objects from their web of relations. And markets only require objects to be untangled. Certainly some objects may have such an emotional attachment that this is required. But for most consumables I’d wager that they could be bartered and traded without violence.

Critique: Graeber’s definition of violence is a bit thin. It seems to be the alienation from one’s social and moral commitments. Now, certainly if this is an involuntary, total alienation (slavery) that’s terrifying. But this critique fails to extend forcefully in today’s society: our alienation is partial and somewhat by choice. This controlled alienation (Hegel) can often be a good thing. That is to say, even if I grant Graeber the premise that to participate in the market economy requires the collapse of qualities into quantities which in turn requires violence (alienation), it is not necessarily a bad thing.

Chapter 7: Honor and Degradation

In the last chapter we examined how the immediate introduction of the market economy into human economies wrecked havoc on human economies. This chapter is to examine how the natural transition from human to market economies had been equally disastrous.

The key to understanding this transition is in our concept of honor. To understand honor we have to understand slavery. In most societies that allowed freedom the slave was thought of as legally a dead person. “If a Roman soldier was captured and lost his liberty, his family was expected to read his will and dispose of his possessions. Should he later regain his freedom, he would have to start over, even to the point of remarrying the woman who was now considered his widow.” What being dead means, morally at least, is that the slave could not form any normative relationships: no commitments, no friends, and no debts. The slave was honorless in this sense: he no longer had his basic integrity and dignity as a human.

But what makes the slave-owning master honorable is honor in a different sense: it is “surplus dignity.” The honor of the master lies precisely in his ability to take away the dignity of others and render them as slaves.

Honor has come to mean two different things: 1. Is the dignity and integrity of being human: the ability to form moral relationships 2. The very power that could rob the former away from someone and render them into objects. A person who is honorable, in the second sense, has a heightened awareness of the fragility of his power and is therefore very sensitive to provocation:

It seems to me that this is precisely what gives honor its notoriously fragile quality. Men of honor tend to combine a sense of total ease and self-assurance, which comes with the habit of command, with a notorious jumpiness, a heightened sensitivity to slights and insults, the feeling that a man (and it is almost always a man) is somehow reduced, humiliated, if any "debt of honor" is allowed to go unpaid. This is because honor is not the same as dignity. One might even say: honor is surplus dignity. It is that heightened consciousness of power, and its dangers, that comes from having stripped away the power and dignity of others; or at the very least, from the knowledge that one is capable of doing so. At its simplest, honor is that excess dignity that must be defended with the knife or sword (violent men, as we all know, are almost invariably obsessed with honor). Hence the warrior's ethos, where almost anything that could possibly be seen as a sign of disrespect-in inappropriate word, an inappropriate glance--is considered a challenge, or can be treated as such. Yet even where overt violence has largely been put out of the picture, wherever honor Is at issue, it comes with a sense that dignity can be lost, and therefore must be constantly defended.

And we saw this already in the last chapter with the Leles. Money represented honor in the first sense in human communities: as representing the dignity and incommensurability of the subject. But it eventually morphed into honor in the second sense: as the ability to remove people from their unique social web.

I think Graeber’s thesis must be that honor and money must go through a similar transition in all instances when human economies transform into market economies.

Medieval Ireland

Graeber only brings up Medieval Ireland primarily to show how money is a measurement of honor which is one’s ability to take other’s dignity away.

Ireland operated mostly on credit arrangements:

The authors of the law codes didn't even know how to put a price on most goods of ordinary use--pitchers, pillows, chisels, slabs of bacon, and the like; no one seems ever to have paid money for them. Food was shared in families or delivered to feudal superiors, who laid it out in sumptuous feasts for friends, rivals, and retainers. Anyone needing a tool or furniture or clothing either went to a kinsman with the relevant craft skills or paid someone to make it. The objects themselves were not for sale. Kings, in turn, assigned tasks to different clans: this one was to provide them with leather, this one poets, this one shields . . . precisely the sort of un wieldy arrangement that markets were later developed to get around.

What currencies it did have (slave girls and cattle) were social currencies only for rearranging relationships. Specifically, there was an honor price that you had to pay someone everytime you insulted their honor. This price was determined by social rank and you paid the price of whoever was protecting the person you insulted. This honor price is also how you acquire new dependents:

A suitor paid the value of the wife's honor to her father and thus became its guardian. What about serfs? The same principle applied: when a lord acquired a serf, he bought out that man's honor price, presenting him with its equivalent in cows. From that moment on, if anyone insulted or injured the serf, it was seen an attack on the lord's honor, and it was up to the lord to collect the attendant fees. Meanwhile the lord's honor price was notched upward as a result of gathering another dependent: in other words, he literally absorbs his new vassal's honor into his own.

Graeber’s whole point here is to show how honor is a zero-sum game, and what made slave girls an acceptable currency of honor was precisely their lack of it (it showed the master was powerful enough to take that honor away):

All this, in turn, makes it possible to understand both something of the nature of honor, and why slave girls were kept as units for reckoning debts of honor even at a time when-owing no doubt to church influence-they no longer actually changed hands. At first sight it might seem strange that the honor of a nobleman or king should be measured in slaves, since slaves were human beings whose honor was zero. But if one's honor is ultimately founded on one's ability to extract the honor of others, it makes perfect sense. The value of a slave is that of the honor that has been extracted from them.

Mesopotamia (The Origins of Patriarchy)

Graeber’s main point here is that if you looked at Mesopotamia in the 2500 – 3000 BC it was mostly a credit economy where the currency was reserved for the gods. At the time, there was abundant female participation in public life. But with the introduction of war, coinage, the markets, and most importantly massive debt, it turned “human relations and by extension, women's bodies-into potential commodities. At the same time, it created a horrified reaction on the part of the (male) winners of the economic game, who over time felt forced to go to greater and greater lengths to make clear that their women could in no sense be bought or sold.” By 1200BC women were then confined into the household. As a result, honor took upon this aura of being able to prevent one’s female relatives from entering into prostitution.

The argument was that in the pre-debt economy. Neither sex nor sex-for-money was vilified. Having one’s, say, sister engage in sex-for-money was acceptable because 1. Sex was associated with these divine temple priestesses 2. The money that was used to pay for sex was used to worshipped the gods and took upon a noble aura. Prostitution was not demonized because the connotations of sex as well as what that sex was being paid with were both, in some sense, holy:

Sumerian temples do often ap pear to have hosted a variety of sexual activities. Some priestesses, for instance, were considered to be married to or otherwise dedicated to gods. What this meant in practice seems to have varied considerably. Much as in the case of the later devadasis, or "temple dancers" of Hindu India, some remained celibate; others were permitted to marry but were not to bear children; others were apparently expected to find wealthy patrons, becoming in effect courtesans to the elite. Still others lived in the temples and had the responsibility to make themselves sexually available to worshippers on certain ritual occasions. One thing the early texts do make clear is that all such women were considered extraordinarily important. In a very real sense, they were the ultimate embodiments of civilization. After all, the entire machinery of the Sumerian economy ostensibly existed to support the temples, which were considered the households of the gods. As such, they represented the ultimate possible refinement in everything from music and dance to art, cuisine, and graciousness of living. Temple priestesses and spouses of the gods were the highest human incarnations of this perfect life.
It's also important to emphasize that Sumerian men do not appear, at least in this earliest period, to have seen anything troubling about the idea of their sisters having sex for money. To the contrary, insofar as prostitution did occur (and remember, it could not have been nearly so impersonal, cold-cash a relation in a credit economy), Sumerian religious texts identify it as among the fundamental features of human civilization, a gift given by the gods at the dawn of time. Procreative sex was considered natural (after all, animals did it). Non-procreative sex, sex for pleasure, was divine.

This all changed with the introduction of markets and debt. 1. The majority of people who performed sexual acts were no longer divine priestesses but female relatives of male debtors who were forced to pawn them away 2. The money that was used to pay these sex workers was no longer a currency that was reserved for holy occasions but something to be exchanged for everyday items. Prostitution became highly frowned down upon by the wealthier classes and women’s liberties were restricted for the honor of their male relatives.

The argument here isn’t that there wasn’t debt in the previous economy. It is a credit economy after all which produces debts. The argument here is that, with the enforcement of the state and introduction of coinage and the market which made everything impersonal, debt could be collected by commoditizing one’s relatives.

Ancient Greece

In the time of Homer, 1000 BC, Greece very much operated as a heroic society. Where honor was measured in one’s wealth and ability to subdue others (e.g. Achilles and the slave girl). Where there was clear communism and hierarchy (e.g. suitors at Odysseus’ house). But with the introduction of coinage, used mainly to pay soldiers and then produced as a mark of civic independence, the market had fully penetrated Greek society by the fifth century (the agora/marketplace was the place of debate and assembly).

Graeber’s thesis in this section is that the introduction of coinage, the market, and debt fundamentally altered the mores of Greek society, leading to moral confusion.

The first order effects of coinage was the debt crisis, military expansion, influx of slaves, and expanded citizenry:

One of the first effects of the arrival of a commercial economy was a series of debt crises, of the sort long familiar from Mesopotamia and Israel. "The poor," as Aristotle succinctly put it in his Constitution of the Athenians, "together with their wives and children, were enslaved to the rich." Revolutionary factions emerged, demanding amnesties, and most Greek cities were at least for a while taken over by populist strongmen swept into power partly by the demand for radical debt relief. The solution most cities ultimately found, however, was quite different than it had been in the Near East. Rather than institutionalize periodic amnesties, Greek cities tended to adopt legislation limiting or abolishing debt peonage altogether, and then, to forestall future crises, they would turn to a policy of expansion, shipping off the children of the poor to found military colonies overseas. Before long, the entire coast from Crimea to Marseille was dotted with Greek cities, which served, in turn, as conduits for a lively trade in slaves. The sudden abundance of chattel slaves, in turn, completely transformed the nature of Greek society. First and most famously, it allowed even citizens of modest means to take part in the political and cultural life of the city and have a genuine sense of citizenship. But this, in turn, drove the old aristocratic classes to develop more and more elaborate means of setting themselves off from what they considered the tawdriness and moral corruption of the new democratic state.

The second order effects were twofold.

First you saw a schizophrenia in both parts of the citizenry: the aristocrats and the ordinary citizens (who were mostly engaged in commerce). The citizens both despised the aristocrats but also wanted to be like them:

We see an almost schizophrenic reaction on the part of the ordinary citizens themselves, who simultaneously tried to limit or even ban aspects of aristocratic culture and to imitate aristocratic sensibilities. Pederasty is an excellent case in point here. On the one hand, man-boy love was seen as the quintessential aristocratic practice-it was the way, in fact, that young aristocrats would ordinarily become initiated into the privileges of high society. As a result, the democratic polis saw it as politically subversive and made sexual relations between male citizens illegal. At the same time, almost everyone began to practice it.

The aristocrats on the other hand, feeling themselves to be challenged by the new rich with more money than them also became schizophrenic. On one hand, they began defining virtues exactly opposite of the virtues of commerce. Honor changed drastically from the accumulation of wealth to a disdain for the pursuit of wealth. Honor also changed drastically for women:

The famous Greek obsession with male honor that still informs so much of the texture of daily life in rural communities in Greece hear kens back not so much to Homeric honor but to this aristocratic rebel lion against the values of the marketplace, which everyone, eventually, began to make their own. The effects on women, though, were even more severe than they had been in the Middle East. Already by the age of Socrates, while a man's honor was increasingly tied to disdain for commerce and assertiveness in public life, a woman's honor had come to be defined in almost exclusively sexual terms: as a matter of virginity, modesty, and chastity, to the extent that respectable women were expected to be shut up inside the household and any woman who played a part in public life was considered for that reason a prostitute, or tantamount to one. The Assyrian habit of veiling was not widely adopted in the Middle East, but it was adopted in Greece. As much as it flies in the face of our stereotypes about the origins of "Western" freedoms, women in democratic Athens, unlike those of Persia or Syria, were expected to wear veils when they ventured out in public.
…
Money, then, had passed from a measure of honor to a measure of everything that honor was not. To suggest that a man's honor could be bought with money became a terrible insult.

On the other hand, they felt irresistibly attracted to wealth because they too needed it for their endeavors:

Rather, the thing that really seemed to bother them about money was simply that they wanted it so much. Since money could be used to buy just about anything, everybody wanted it. That is: it was desirable because it was non-discriminating. One could see how the metaphor of the porne might seem particularly appropriate. A woman "common to the people"-as the poet Archilochos put it-is available to everyone. In principle, we shouldn't be attracted to such an undiscriminating creature. In fact, of course, we are. And nothing was both so undiscriminating, and so desirable, as money.
…
We might say, then, that money introduced a democratization of desire. Insofar as everyone wanted money, everyone, high and low, was pursuing the same promiscuous substance.

The next second-order effect was throwing relations of communism and hierarchy into disarray.

Communistic relations of mutual aid became much harder to sustain in a market economy because if there is a price on everything (as there wasn’t in credit-based human economies) it seems like you are taking advantage of people who are helping you:

The same tensions can be observed between neighbors, who in farming communities tend to give, lend, and borrow things amongst themselves-anything from sieves and sickles, to charcoal and cooking oil, to seed corn or oxen for plowing. On the one hand, such giving and lending were considered essential parts of the basic fabric of human sociability in farm communities, on the other, overly demanding neighbors were a notorious irritant-one that could only have grown worse when all parties are aware of precisely how much it would have cost to buy or rent the same items that were being given away.

Paradoxically, it might’ve been the breakdown of hierarchical relations into relations of exchange (really debt) that was more damaging. After all, relations of hierarchy meant that the greater person had real obligations to the lesser one in a way the creditor does not have for the debtor.

The critical thing, though, about such relations of patronage is that they involved responsibilities on both sides. A noble warrior and his humble client were assumed to be fundamentally different sorts of people, but both were also expected to take account of each other's (fundamentally different) needs. Transforming patronage into debt relations-treating, say, an advance of seed corn as a loan, let alone an interest-bearing loan-changed all this? What's more, it did so in two completely contradictory respects. On the one hand, a loan implies no ongoing responsibilities on the part of the creditor. On the other, as I have continually emphasized, a loan does assume a certain formal, legal equality between contractor and contractee. It assumes that they are, at least in some ways on some level, fundamentally the same kind of person. This is certainly about the most ruthless and violent form of equality imaginable. But the fact it was conceived as equality before the market made such arrangements even more difficult to endure.

This story contains all the moral confusion that came about from the fundamental altering of the mores of society:

We know a little about it from trial speeches, many of which have survived. Here is one from the fourth century, probably around 365 BC. Apollodorus was a prosperous but low-born Athenian citizen (his father, a banker, had begun life as a slave) who, like many such gentle men, had acquired a country estate. There he made a point of making friends with his closest neighbor, Nicostratus, a man of aristocratic origins, though currently of somewhat straitened means. They acted as neighbors normally did, giving and borrowing small sums, lending each other animals or slaves, minding each other's property when one was away. Then one day Nicostratus ran into a piece of terrible luck. While trying to track down some runaway slaves, he was himself captured by pirates and held for ransom at the slave market on the island of Aegin ... His relatives could only assemble part of the price, so he was forced :o borrow the rest from strangers in the market. These appear to have been professionals who specialized in such loans, and their terms were notoriously harsh: if not repaid in thirty days, the sum doubled; if not repaid at all, the debtor became the slave of the man who had put up the money for his redemption.
Tearfully, Nicostratus appealed to his neighbor. All his possessions were already pledged now to one creditor or another; he knew Apollodorus wouldn't have that much cash lying around, but could his dear friend possibly put up something of his own by way of security? Apollodorus was moved. He would be happy to forgive all debts Nicostratus already owed him, but the rest would be difficult. Still, he would do his best. In the end, he arranged to himself take a loan from an acquaintance of his, Arcesas, on the security of his town-house, at 6 percent annual interest, so as to be able to satisfy Nicostratus's creditors while Nicostratus himself arranged a friendly, no-interest era nos loan from his own relatives. But before long, Apollodorus began to realize that he had been set up. The impoverished aristocrat had decided to take advantage of his nouveau-riche neighbor; he was actu ally working with Arcesas and some of Apollodorus's enemies to have him falsely declared a "public debtor," that is, someone who had de faulted on an obligation to the public treasury. This would have first of all meant that he would lose his right to take anyone to court (i.e., his deceivers, to recover the money), and second, would give them a pretext to raid his house to remove his furniture and other possessions. Presumably, Nicostratus had never felt especially comfortable being in debt to a man he considered his social inferior. Rather like Egil the Viking, who would rather kill his friend Einar than have to compose an elegy thanking him for an overly magnificent gift, Nicostratus appears to have concluded that it was more honorable, or anyway more bearable, to try to extract the money from his lowly friend through force and fraud than to spend the rest of his life feeling beholden. Before long, things had indeed descended to outright physical violence, and the whole matter ended up in court.
The story has everything. We see mutual aid: the communism of the prosperous, the expectation that if the need is great enough, or the cost manageable enough, friends and neighbors will help one another. And most did, in fact, have circles of people who would pool money if a crisis did arise: whether a wedding, a famine, or a ransom. We also see the omnipresent danger of predatory violence that reduces human beings to commodities, and by doing so introduces the most cutthroat kinds of calculation into economic life-not just on the part of the pirates, but even more so, perhaps, on those moneylenders lurking by the market offering stiff credit terms to anyone who came to ransom their relatives but found themselves caught short, and who then could appeal to the state to allow them to hire men with weapons to enforce the contract. We see heroic pride, which sees too great an act of generosity as itself a kind of belittling assault. We see the ambiguity among gifts, loans, and commercial credit arrangements. Neither does the way things played out in this case seem particularly unusual, except perhaps for Nicostratus's extraordinarily ingratitude. Prominent Athenians were always borrowing money to pursue their political projects; less-prominent ones were constantly worrying about their debts, or how to collect from their own debtors. Finally, there is another, subtler element here. While everyday market transactions, at shops or stalls in the agora, were here as elsewhere typically conducted on credit, the mass production of coinage permitted a degree of anonymity for transactions that, in a pure credit regime, simply could not exist. Pirates and kidnappers do business in cash-yet the loan sharks at Aegina's marketplace could not have operated without them. It is on this same combination of illegal cash business, usually involving violence, and extremely harsh credit terms, also enforced through violence, that innumerable criminal underworlds have been constructed ever since.

Graeber even read’s Plato’s exchange with his interlocutors on justice as an example of the moral confusion that has set in to the Greek psyche:

What I want to emphasize, though, is the degree to which what we consider our core tradition of moral and political theory today springs from this question: What does it mean to pay our debts? Plato presents us first with the simple, literal businessman's view. When this proves inadequate, he allows it to be reframed in heroic terms. Perhaps all debts are really debts of honor after all. But heroic honor no longer works in a world where (as Apollodorus sadly discovered) commerce, class, and profit have so confused everything that peoples' true motives are never clear. How do we even know who our enemies are? Finally, Plato presents us with cynical realpolitik. Maybe nobody really owes anything to anybody. Maybe those who pursue profit for its own sake have it right after all. But even that does not hold up. We are left with a certainty that existing standards are incoherent and self-contradictory, and that some sort of radical break would be required in order to create a world that makes any logical sense. But most of those who seriously consider a radical break along the lines that Plato suggested have come to the conclusion that there might be far worse things than moral incoherence. And there we have stood, ever since, in the midst of an insoluble dilemma.

Rome

Graeber here wants to show how slavery has been more of a backdrop for our modern day legal and moral notions than we’d imagine. (This seems disjointed from the commentary on honor or the introduction of markets that we have been tracing)

The first definition that was defined against the backdrop of slavery was private property. It was commonly defined as 1. A relationship between a person and an object (this is peculiar because, intuitively, it should be a relationship between people with respect to an object) 2. The ability of the owner to exercise absolute power (this is peculiar because no law code before has felt this had been worthy to mention). Graeber argues that the most plausible explanation here is that this definition is created primarily with slavery in mind.

The second definition is, paradoxically, freedom. Graeber’s claim is this: freedom transitioned from the ability to form moral relations to the absolute power of the master:

The meaning of the Roman word libertas itself changed dramatically over time. As everywhere in the ancient world, to be "free" meant, first and foremost, not to be a slave. Since slavery means above all the annihilation of social ties and the ability to form them, freedom meant the capacity to make and maintain moral commitments to others. The English word "free," for instance, is derived from a Ger man root meaning "friend," since to be free meant to be able to make friends, to keep promises, to live within a community of equals. This is why freed slaves in Rome became citizens: to be free, by definition, meant to be anchored in a civic community, with all the rights and responsibilities that this entailed.
By the second century AD, however, this had begun to change. The jurists gradually redefined libertas until it became almost indistinguishable from the power of the master. It was the right to do absolutely anything, with the exception, again, of all those things one could not do.

Conclusion

It’s hard to figure out exactly what Graeber is trying to communicate in this section.

I think to try and make sense of it we need to introduce a new type of society within human societies: the honor society.

In human economies, when this ability to rip people from their contexts does appear, it is most often seen as an end in itself. One can already see a hint of this among the Lele. Important men would occasionally acquire war captives from far away as slaves, but it was almost always to be sacrificed at their funeral. The squelching of one man's individuality was seen as somehow swelling the reputation, the social existence, of the other. In what I've been calling heroic societies, of course this kind of addition and subtraction of honor and disgrace is lifted from a somewhat marginal practice to become the very essence of politics. As endless epics, sagas, and eddas attest, heroes become heroes by making others small. In Ireland and Wales, we can observe how this very ability to degrade others, to remove unique human beings from their hearths and families and thus render them anonymous units of accounting-the Irish slave-girl currency, the Welsh washerwomen-is itself the highest expression of honor.
In heroic societies, the role of violence is not hidden-it's glorified. Often, it can form the basis of one's most intimate relations. In the Iliad, Achilles sees nothing shameful in his relation with his slave-girl, Briseis, whose husband and brothers he killed; he refers to her as his "prize of honor," but almost in the very same breath, he also insists that, just any decent man must love and care for his household dependents, "so I from my heart loved this one, even though I won her with my spear."

Perhaps we can paint a history going from human societies that mostly operated on credit, whatever currencies there were is merely a recognition of the incommensurability of human life. In a pure human society even humans cannot be traded for humans. Think of the Tiv and Mesopotamia pre-coinage. In these societies, honor refers to the dignity of humanity.

Then, we have heroic societies. They are a sub-branch of human societies because it is still very much a credit society with hierarchy and communism but the big difference is that some humans can be traded for humans and even other goods. Honor in these societies is about the power one can exert over others. Think of Homeric Greece or Medieval Ireland.

Lastly, we have market societies. Here everything is in the logic of exchange. Coinage, the state, armies, and debt all come to be. Here the circle of tradeable humans expands even more broadly because of debt instruments. And honor as power becomes even more heightened creating cultural institutions like patriarchy. Think of Rome or post-coinage Greece or Mesopotamia.

Graeber’s claim could be that along this development, more violence had to be introduced, more people were seen as tradeable and torn out of their contexts, and the more people felt their worth was tied to their power over others (think of Mesopotamian patriarchy or the injustice that an aristocrat felt being indebted to someone in post-coinage Greece).

Chapter 8: Credit Versus Bullion

Graeber begins to paint his cyclical story of history here, a history that moves between periods of virtual money and bullion money. And this move is fundamentally caused by warfare. The argument goes that in periods of warfare you want transactions to be simple and hard to falsify so bullion dominated. During peace time, coinage shrinks to specific institutions and local credit relationships are what take hold:

The cycle begins with the Age of the First Agrarian Empires (35oo-8oo BC), dominated by virtual credit money. This is followed by the Axial Age (8oo BC-6oo AD), which will be covered in the next chapter, and which saw the rise of coinage and a general shift to metal bullion. The Middle Ages (6oo-1450 AD), which saw a return to virtual credit money, will be covered in chapter 10; chapter n will cover the next turn of the cycle, the Age of Capitalist Empires, which began around 1450 with a massive planetary switch back to gold and silver bullion, and which could only really be said to have ended in 1971, when Richard Nixon announced that the U.S. dollar would no longer be redeemable in gold. This marked the beginning of yet another phase of virtual money, one which has only just begun, and whose ultimate contours are, necessarily, invisible.

Mesopotamia (3500-800 BC)

Silver was the currency but it remained mostly in the palaces. People transacted with silver not as a medium of exchange but merely a unit of account. These transactions were more so credit tabs than barter. Furthermore, credit arrangements with fixed-interest loans did develop. These instruments seemed to be traded as well.

Of course, along with debt came debt-peons debt crises and peasant revolutions. Cancelling debts, destroying records, relocating wealth became the common banner for many revolutionaires.

Egypt (2650-716 BC)

Here, too, money clearly arose as a means of account. The basic unit was the deben, or "measure"-originally referring to measures of grain, and later of copper or silver.

Loans for commercial credit was rare, most of it was mutual aid between neighbors. Similarly, legally enforceable loans that could lead to family members taken way are very rare, especially because what loans there were did not bear interest.

Debt crisis were only prevalent in the new Kingdom (1550 – 1070 BC).

China (2200-771 BC)

Sources are unclear. People seem to have operated on credit with neighbors (tying knots on strings for example) and used hard currencies with passers-by. What these transactions were actually denominated in seem to have varied greatly by region: ie. there were many local currencies.

Chapter 9 the Axial Age

The axial age was a period between 800 BC to 600 AD. It saw the simultaneous development in India, the Mediterranean, and China: massive military complexes, coinage, and an outpouring of ideas (Pythagoras (570-495 BC), the Buddha (563-483 BC), and Confucius (551-479 BC)).

The claim is that the axial age first starts with warring states and military expansions never before seen. Coinage was generally invented by private citizens and then monopolized by the state to finance war. It is extremely challenging to pay your troops, a good way to do so is to give them coins and demand everyone else to pay taxes in the forms of those coins. This led to markets. War also created slaves who were often needed to work in the mines to produce even more coinage. The rise of markets, as seen in Greece, fundamentally altered our cultural mores and institutions which led to widespread debate and an outpouring of ideas.

These ideas were initially purely materialistic and cynical realpolitik from a reflection of the market economy which led to a reaction from religious leaders to create purely spiritual ideologies. This causes the division of spheres we have today (Weber).

The second phase of the Axial age is when these warring states are united under one banner into a large empire. And the leaders of these empire adopt some form of more spiritual, less brute ideology (Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism).

Critique: war is going to be a key reason for why these periods of real/virtual money sync up between these far-away nations. What Graeber doesn't properly address then is why periods of war/peace synced up between them.

The Mediterranean

Alexander (300BC) is a good example of what Graeber calls the “Military-Coinage-Slavery-Complex” and how they feed upon each other:

When Alexander set out to conquer the Persian Empire, he borrowed much of the money with which to pay and provision his troops, and he minted his first coins, used to pay his creditors and continue to support the money, by melting down gold and silver plundered after his initial victories. However, an expeditionary force needed to be paid, and paid well: Alexander's army, which numbered some 11o,ooo men, required half a ton of silver a day just for wages. For this reason, conquest meant that the existing Persian system of mines and mints had to be reorganized around providing for the invading army; and ancient mines, of course, were worked by slaves. In turn, most slaves in mines were war captives. Presumably most of the unfortunate survivors of the siege of Tyre ended up working in such mines. One can see how this process might feed upon itself.

This was also true for Rome:

In fact, the entire Roman empire, at its height, could be understood as a vast machine for the extraction of precious metals and their coining and distribution to the military-combined with taxation policies designed to encourage conquered populations to adopt coins in their everyday transactions. Even so, for most of its history, use of coins was heavily concentrated in two regions: in Italy and a few major cities, and on the frontiers, where the legions were actually stationed. In areas where there were neither mines nor military operations, older credit systems presumably continued to operate.

India

In like manner, the introduction of massive armies in India also imposed the market onto everyday life. In fact, the state even set up organizations to sell to the very soldiers they were paying. The idea must be that, in somewhat permanent settlements, people are happy to use credit. But soldiers and those who service them only accepted bullion:

These armies could be huge. Greek sources report that Magadha could put to the field a force of 2oo,ooo infantry, 2o,ooo horses, and about 4,000 elephants-and that Alexander's men mutinied rather than have to face them. Whether on campaign or in garrison, they were inevitably accompanied by a range of different sorts of camp followers-petty traders, prostitutes, and hired servants-which, with the soldiers, seems to have been the very medium through which a cash economy had originally taken form. By Kautilya's time, a few hundred years later, the state was inserting itself into every aspect of the process: Kautilya suggests paying soldiers apparently generous wages, then secretly replacing hawkers with government agents who could charge them twice the normal rates for supplies, as well as organizing prostitutes under a ministry in which they could be trained as spies, so as to make detailed reports on their clients' loyalties.
Thus was the market economy, born of war, gradually taken over by the government. Rather than stifle the spread of currency, the process seems to have doubled and even tripled it: the military logic was extended to the entire economy, the government systematically setting up its granaries, workshops, trading houses, warehouses, and jails, staffed by salaried officials, and all selling products on the market so as to collect the pieces of silver paid off to soldiers and officials and put them back into the royal treasuries again. The result was a monetarization of daily life unlike anything India was to see for another two thousand years.

China

We see the same pattern play out between 400-200 BC, the warring states period.

Mass Literacy

One of the consequences of all of this mass literacy. Graeber suggests that this was carried top-down. The idea might be that an educated citizenry is more conducive in warfare, more productive in trade etc. Not only did the market attack the old confines of hierarchy, but it itself became an educative tool:

The popular education campaigns of the period perhaps provide a clue. The Axial Age was the first time in human history when familiarity with the written word was no longer limited to priests, administrators, and merchants, but had become necessary to full participation in civic life. In Athens, it was taken for granted that only a country bumpkin would be entirely illiterate.
Without mass literacy, neither the emergence of mass intellectual movements, nor the spread of Axial Age ideas would have been possible. By the end of the period, these ideas had produced a world where even the leaders of barbarian armies descending on the Roman empire felt obliged to take a position on the question of the Mystery of the Trinity, and where Chinese monks could spend time debating the rela tive merits of the eighteen schools of Classical Indian Buddhism.
No doubt the growth of markets played a role too, not only helping to free people from the proverbial shackles of status or community, but encouraging a certain habit of rational calculation, of measuring inputs and outputs, means and ends, all of which must inevitably have found some echoes in the new spirit of rational inquiry that begins to appear in all the same times and places. Even the word "rational" is telling: it derives, of course, from "ratio"-how many of X go into Y-a sort of mathematical calculation previously used mainly by architects and engineers, but which, with the rise of markets, everyone who didn't want to get cheated at the marketplace had to learn how to do.

Material Self-Interest

The proliferation of army-driven markets led people to take a very different view on human nature. In human economies, whether it was rearranging relations with social currencies or even keeping credit accounts (these were mostly based off of the character of the person) you always assumed that there were many complex motives:

Within human economies, motives are assumed to be complex. When a lord gives a gift to a retainer, there is no reason to doubt that it is inspired by a genuine desire to benefit that retainer, even if it is also a strategic move designed to ensure loyalty, and an act of magnificence meant to remind everyone else that he is great and the retainer small. There is no sense of contradiction here. Similarly, gifts between equals are usually fraught with many layers of love, envy, pride, spite, communal solidarity, or any of a dozen other things. Speculating on such matters is a major form of daily entertainment. What's missing, though, is any sense that the most selfish ("self-interested") motive is necessarily the real one: those speculating on hidden motives are just as likely to assume that someone is secretly trying to help a friend or harm an enemy as to acquire some advantage for him- or herself. Neither is any of this likely to have changed much in the rise of early credit markets, where the value of an IOU was as much dependent on assessments of its issuer's character as on his disposable income, and motives of love, envy, pride, etc. could never be completely set aside.

But with cash transactions between strangers (soldier and a civilian), the motives really are very simple: how to get the most for oneself:

Cash transactions between strangers were different, and all the more so when trading is set against a background of war and emerges from disposing of loot and provisioning soldiers; when one often had best not ask where the objects traded came from, and where no one is much interested in forming ongoing personal relationships anyway. Here, transactions really do become simply a figuring-out of how many of X will go for how many of Y, of calculating proportions, estimating quality, and trying to get the best deal for oneself. The result, during the Axial Age, was a new way of thinking about human motivation, a radical simplification of motives that made it possible to begin speaking of concepts like "profit" and "advantage" - and imagining that this is what people are really pursuing, in every aspect of existence, as if the violence of war or the impersonality of the marketplace has simply allowed them to drop the pretense that they ever cared about anything else. It was this, in turn, that allowed human life to seem like it could be reduced to a matter of means-to-end calculation, and hence some thing that could be examined using the same means that one used to study the attraction and repulsion of celestial bodies.

As a result, people took upon a very reductive picture of human motivation that persists today. There are three key assumptions about human nature that has its roots in the market: 1. We assume that the self-interested motive is the “real” one. 2. This is not a very nuanced idea of self-interest as glory or even respect but material self-interest. 3. That human life could be thought of in the framework of a bargain: means-ends calculation. This is where instrumentalism arises.

In such a world, heroic considerations of honor and glory, vows to gods or desire for vengeance, were at best weaknesses to be manipulated. In the numerous manuals on statecraft produced at the time, everything was cast as a matter of recognizing interest and advantage, calculating how to balance that which will profit the ruler against that which will profit the people, determining when the ruler's interests are the same as the people's and when they contradict.

This view was taken upon by many philosophers. What’s interesting is that, in human economies, people would never equate the good from running a society as commensurable with the material gain from sowing the fields:

China provides an unusually transparent case in point. Already in Confucius's time, Chinese thinkers were speaking of the pursuit of profit as the driving force in human life. The actual term used was li, a word first used to refer to the increase of grain one harvests from a field over and above what one originally planted (the pictogram represents a sheaf of wheat next to a knife). From there it came to mean commercial profit, and thence, a general term for "benefit" or "payback." The following story, which purports to tell the reaction of a merchant's son named Lu Buwei on learning that an exiled prince was living nearby, illustrates the progression nicely:
On returning home, he said to his father, "What is the profit on investment that one can expect from plowing fields?"
"Ten times the investment," replied his father.
"And the return on investment in pearls and jades is how much?"
"A hundredfold."
"And the return on investment from establishing a ruler and securing the state would be how much?"
"It would be incalculable.

This was not limited to China:

Wherever the military-coinage-slavery complex began to take hold, we find political theorists propounding similar ideas. Kautilya was no different: the title of his book, the Arthasastra, is usually translated as "manual of statecraft," since it consists of advice to rulers, but its more literal translation is "the science of material gain." Like the Legalists, Kautilya emphasized the need to create a pretext that governance was a matter of morality and justice, but in addressing the rulers themselves, he insisted that "war and peace are considered solely from the point of view of profit"-of amassing wealth to create a more effective army, of using the army to dominate markets and control resources to amass more wealth, and so on. In Greece we've already met Thrasymachos. True, Greece was slightly different. Greek city-states did not have kings, and the collapse of private interests and affairs of state was in principle universally denounced as tyranny. Still, in practice, what this meant was that city-states, and even political factions, ended up acting in precisely the same coldly calculating way as Indian or Chinese sovereigns. Anyone who has ever read Thucydides' Melian dialogue-in which Athenian generals present the population of a previously friendly city with elegantly reasoned arguments for why the Athenians have determined that it is to the advantage of their empire to threaten them with collective massacre if they are not willing to become tribute paying subjects, and why it is equally in the interests of the Melians to submit-is aware of the results.

But the deeper point is that even the people who argued against these schools (say, the Legalists) did so on Legalist grounds and were therefore still stuck on the plane of materialism and profit as dominant modes of thinking. Mozi’s refutation of Legalism, advocating for pure materialistic altruism, still appeals to the very profit and calculation at the core of Legalism:

If one could add up the total costs of aggression in human lives, animal lives, and material damage, one would be forced to the conclusion that they never outweighed the benefits-even for the victor. In fact, Mo Di took this sort of logic so far that he ended up ar guing that the only way to optimize the overall profit of humanity was to abandon the pursuit of private profit entirely and adopt a principle of what he called "universal love"-essentially arguing that if one takes the principle of market exchange to its logical conclusion, it can only lead to a kind of communism.

Even the religious traditions that did aim to escape from materialism were simply the opposites of this crude materialism. Pure charity also came about for the first time in history only as a reaction again the purely greedy logic of the market. The result was a Weberian division:

The ultimate effect was a kind of ideal division of spheres of human activity that endures to this day: on the one hand the market, on the other, religion. To put the matter crudely: if one relegates a certain social space simply to the selfish acquisition of material things, it is almost inevitable that soon someone else will come to set aside another domain in which to preach that, from the perspective of ul timate values, material things are unimportant; that selfishness-or even the self-are illusory, and that to give is better than to receive. If nothing else, it is surely significant that all the Axial Age religions emphasized the importance of charity, a concept that had barely existed before. Pure greed and pure generosity are complementary concepts; neither could really be imagined without the other; both could only arise in institutional contexts that insisted on such pure and single-minded behavior; and both seem to have appeared together wherever impersonal, physical, cash money also appeared on the scene.

What’s interesting here is that I often found the modern bifurcation of self and other interest to be deeply unsatisfying. if we examine the sources before the axial age, we might be able to find a philosophical language that can truly capture and guide our complex motives and escape this binary.

Metaphysical Materialism

What the market also introduced in terms of ideas, Graeber claims, is a dualism between the physical and the spiritual. If you talk to cultures that have never been introduced to the market, you would realize that it is not the spirit that is introduced but material:

The notion that humans had souls appeared to Boesoou to be self evident. The notion that there was such a thing as the body, apart from the soul, a mere material collection of nerves and tissues-let alone that the body is the prison of the soul; that the mortification of the body could be a means to the glorification or liberation of the soul-all this, it turns out, struck him as utterly new and exotic.
Axial Age spirituality, then, is built on a bedrock of materialism. This is its secret; one might almost say, the thing that has become invisible to us. But if one looks at the very beginnings of philosophical inquiry in Greece and India-the point when there was as yet no difference between what we'd now call "philosophy" and what we'd now call "science"-this is exactly what one finds. "Theory," if we can call it that, begins with the questions: "What substance is the world made of?" "What is the underlying material behind the physical forms of objects in the world?" "Is everything made up of varying combinations of certain basic elements (earth, air, water, fire, stone, motion, mind, number . . .), or are these basic elements just the forms taken by some even more elementary substance (for instance, as Nyaya and later Democritus proposed, atomic particles . . .)" In just about every case, some notion of God, Mind, Spirit, some active organizing principle that gave form to and was not itself substance, emerged as well. But this was the kind of spirit that, like Leenhardt's God, only emerges in relation to inert matter.

What made this idea plausible is the very form of coinage. The defining characteristic of coinage was its double sidedness. On one hand, it was just material. But on the other it not only had a price that went beyond the material price but it could be traded and transformed into anything. The idea that a mere rearrangement of material (stamping a King’s face) would change its actual value was what made coinage so unique. It is exactly this duality that also exists in any Materialistic philosophy the form and the material that “really” underlies it:

Consider this word, "materialism." What does it mean to adopt a "materialist" philosophy? What is "material," anyway? Normally, we speak of "materials" when we refer to objects that we wish to make into something else. A tree is a living thing. It only becomes "wood" when we begin to think about all the other things you could carve out of it. And of course you can carve a piece of wood into almost any thing. The same is true of clay, or glass, or metal. They're solid and real and tangible, but also abstractions, because they have the potential to turn into almost anything else-or, not precisely that; one can't turn a piece of wood into a lion or an owl, but one can turn it into an image of a lion or an owl-it can take on almost any conceivable form. So already in any materialist philosophy, we are dealing with an opposition between form and content, substance and shape; a clash between the idea, sign, emblem, or model in the creator's mind, and the physical qualities of the materials on which it is to be stamped, built, or im posed, from which it will be brought into reality. With coins this rises to an even more abstract level because that emblem can no longer be conceived as the model in one person's head, but is rather the mark of a collective agreement. The images stamped on Greek coins (Miletus' lion, Athens' owl) were typically the emblems of the city's god, but they were also a kind of collective promise, by which citizens assured one another that not only would the coin be acceptable in payment of public debts, but in a larger sense, that everyone would accept them, for any debts, and thus, that they could be use to acquire anything anyone wanted.
…
The war between Spirit and Flesh, then, between the noble Idea and ugly Reality, the rational intellect versus stubborn corporeal drives and desires that resist it, even the idea that peace and community are not things that emerge spontaneously but that need to be stamped onto our baser material natures like a divine insignia stamped into base metal-all those ideas that came to haunt the religious and philosophical traditions of the Axial Age, and that have continued to surprise people like Boesoou ever since--can already be seen as inscribed in the nature of this new form of money.
It would be foolish to argue that all Axial Age philosophy was sim ply a meditation on the nature of coinage, but I think Seaford is right to argue that this is a critical starting place: one of the reasons that the pre-Socratic philosophers began to frame their questions in the peculiar way they did, asking (for instance): What are Ideas? Are they merely collective conventions? Do they exist, as Plato insisted, in some divine domain beyond material existence? Or do they exist in our minds? Or do our minds themselves ultimately partake of that divine immaterial domain? And if they do, what does this say about our relation to our bodies?

Fun fact: Miletus’ was the first Greek city to issue coinage. Thales, when asking his questions about the fundamental underlying substance was immersed in a culture of commerce.

Chapter 10: the middle ages

India

The Mauryan Empire (first to have unified India 300-100BC) spawned five hundred years of successive kingdoms. By the time we get to the Middle ages proper India experienced a confluence of changes:

Officials increasingly became paid by land grants.
Centralized armies dissolved.
Cities declined and villages became much more self-sufficient.
The rise of monasteries and gold flowing into them.
The reestablishment of hierarchy by the priestly caste. Legitimacy goes to religious authorities instead of the state.
Transactions on credit within these self-sufficient villages.
Slavery vanishes but debt peonage very much exists, although there are added protections for the debtors.

Monasteries became key financial institutions:

The key innovation was the creation of what were called the "perpetual endowments" or "inexhaustible treasuries." Say a lay supporter wished to make a contribution to her local monastery. Rather than offering to provide candles for a specific ritual, or servants to attend to the upkeep of the monastic grounds, she would provide a certain sum of money-or something worth a great deal of money-that would then be loaned out in the name of the monastery, at the accepted 15-percent annual rate. The interest on the loan would then be earmarked for that specific purpose.

Without war, priestly scholars effectively reinstated a form of local feudalism. Mass literacy was pulled back and learning became the domain of an elite class once again. What is interesting is that while the formal inequality seems to be much greater: you were now in a specific caste with a specific role, the actual burden on the poorest people were lessened since their work wasn’t extracted to sustain mega-cities anymore:

They did it above all by seizing control of the administration of law. The Dharmasastra, law-codes produced by Brahmin scholars between roughly 200 BC and 400 AD, give us a good idea of the new vision of society. In it, old ideas like the Vedic conception of a debt to gods, sages, and ancestors were resuscitated-but now, they applied only and specifically to Brahmins, whose duty and privilege it was to stand in for all humanity before the forces that controlled the universe. Far from being required to attain learning, members of the inferior classes were forbidden to do so: the Laws of Manu, for instance, set down that any Sudra (the lowest caste, assigned to farming and material production) who so much as listened in on the teaching of the law or sacred texts should have molten lead poured into their ears; on the occasion of a repeat offense, have their tongues cut out. At the same time Brahmins, however ferociously they guarded their privileges, also adopted aspects of once-radical Buddhist and Jain ideas like karma, reincarnation, and ahimsa. Brahmins were expected to refrain from any sort of physical violence, and even to become vegetarians. In alliance with representatives of the old warrior caste, they also managed to win control of most of the land in the ancient villages. Artisans and craftsmen fleeing the decline or destruction of cities often ended up as suppliant refugees, and, gradually, low-caste clients. The result were increasingly complex local patronage systems in the countryside-jajmani systems, as they came to be known-where the refugees provided services for the land owning castes, who took on many of the roles once held by the state, providing protection and justice, extracting labor dues, and so on-but also protected local communities from actual royal representatives.
This latter function is crucial. Foreign visitors were later to be awed by the self-sufficiency of the traditional Indian village, with its elaborate system of landowning castes, farmers, and such "service castes" as barbers, smiths, tanners, drummers, and washermen, all arranged in hierarchical order, each seen as making its own unique and necessary contribution to their little society, all of it typically operating entirely without the use of metal currency. It was only possible for those reduced to the status of Sudras and Untouchables to have a chance of accepting their lowly position because the exaction of local landlords was, again, on nothing like the same scale as that under earlier governments-under which villagers had to support cities of up wards of a million people--and because the village community became an effective means of holding the state and its representatives at least partially at bay.

While slavery vanished, fixed interest loans that one’s family members could be responsible for and, therefore, debt peonage was quite common. Although debt was never the binding logic that held communities together simply because it went against the caste logic of hierarchy:

There is a peculiar tension here: a kind of paradox. Debt and credit arrangements may well have played a crucial role in creating the Indian village system, but they could never really become their basis. It might have made a certain sense to declare that, just as Brahmins had to dispatch their debts to the gods, everyone should be, in a certain sense, in debt to those above them. But in another sense, that would have completely subverted the very idea of caste, which was that the universe was a vast hierarchy in which different sorts of people were assumed to be of fundamentally different natures, that these ranks and grades were fixed forever, and that when goods and services moved up and down the hierarchy, they followed not principles of exchange at all but (as in all hierarchical systems) custom and precedent. The French anthropologist Louis Dumont made the famous argument that one cannot even really talk about "inequality" here, because to use that phrase implies that one believes people should or could be equal, and this idea was completely alien to Hindu conceptions. For them to have imagined their responsibilities as debts would have been profoundly subversive, since debts are by definition arrangements between equals-at least in the sense that they are equal parties to a contract that could and should be repaid.

China

China is unique in that the other middle age empires saw religion take over the state in terms of legitimacy, but the Han Dynasty (50BC) molded them together (Confucianism + Bureaucracy).

Chinese rule was always threatened by two things: nomadic invaders and peasant uprisings. Chinese statecraft, then, was how do we collect enough taxes from the peasantry enough to sustain a strong enough army while not collecting too much taxes to create peasant revolts:

The two great threats to the authorities were always the same: the nomadic peoples to the north (who they systematically bribed, but who nonetheless periodically swept over and conquered sections of China) and popular unrest and rebellion. The latter was almost con stant, and on a scale unknown anywhere else in human history. There were decades in Chinese history when the rate of recorded peasant uprisings was roughly 1.8 per hour. What's more, such uprisings were frequently successful. Most of the most famous Chinese dynasties that were not the product of barbarian invasion (the Yuan or Qing) were originally peasant insurrections (the Han, Tang, Sung, and Ming). In no other part of the world do we see anything like this. As a result, Chinese statecraft ultimately came down to funneling enough resources to the cities to feed the urban population and keep the nomads at bay, without causing a notoriously contumacious rural population to rise up in arms. The official Confucian ideology of patriarchal authority, equal opportunity, promotion of agriculture, light taxes, and careful government control of merchants seemed expressly designed to appeal to the interests and sensibilities of a (potentially rebellious) rural patriarch.

What really helped the peasants’ case was the Confucian suspicion towards the mercantile class. This, combined with the natural tendency for rulers to be cautious of overburdening the workers meant that there were often state-led redistribution efforts to cancel debts etc.

The Confucian state may have been the world's greatest and most enduring bureaucracy, but it actively pro moted markets, and as a result, commercial life in China soon became far more sophisticated, and markets more developed, than anywhere else in the world.
This despite the fact that Confucian orthodoxy was overtly hostile to merchants and even the profit motive itself. Commercial profit was seen as legitimate only as compensation for the labor that merchants expended in transporting goods from one place to another, but never as fruits of speculation. What this meant in practice was that they were pro-market but anti-capitalist.
In Confucian terms, merchants were like soldiers. Those drawn to a career in the military were assumed to be driven largely by a love of violence. As individuals, they were not good people; but they were also necessary to defend the frontiers. Similarly, merchants were driven by greed and basically immoral; yet if kept under careful administrative supervision, they could be made to serve the public good. Whatever one might think of the principles, the results are hard to deny. For most of its history, China maintained the highest standard of living in the world.

Paper money started with Tallies that would be split in half and completed upon redemption. The creditor’s half became an IOU and started circulating as currency. In the Song Dynasty, (960-1279 AD), tea merchants started carrying promissory notes from private Chinese banks due to the danger of carrying bullion over long distances. The government initially tried to stop it but ended up issuing their own fiat currency. This system was kept by the Mongols and wasn’t abandoned until the 17th century. The Chinese view on money was always Chartalist because the internal economy was big enough that whatever the state accepted as taxes would become de facto money:

If it was only China that developed paper money in the Middle Ages, this was largely because only in China was there a government large and powerful enough, but also, sufficiently suspicious of its mercantile classes, to feel it had to take charge of such operations.

Buddhism in China was inexorable linked with trading and business. It came from caravan routes and was, in its early days, largely a religion promoted by merchants.

The language it came to describe the logic of the universe also took upon the logic of exchange: karmic debt.

As Gernet remarks, the idea of life as an endless burden of debt would surely have struck a chord with Chinese villagers, for whom this was all too often literally true; but, as he also points out, like their counterparts in ancient Israel, they were also familiar with that sense of sudden liberation that came with official amnesties. There was a way to achieve that too. All that was required was to make regular donations to some monastery’s Inexhaustible Treasury.

Finally, even more so than their Indian counterparts, these monasteries were not only investors of capital, but they were full-scaled industrial operations:

The Chinese Buddhist approach to charity was nothing if not multifaceted. Festivals often led to vast outpourings of contributions, with wealthy adherents vying with one another in generosity, often driving their entire fortunes to the monasteries, in the forms of oxcarts laden with millions of strings of cash-a kind of economic self-immolation that paralleled the spectacular monastic suicides. Their contributions swelled the Inexhaustible Treasuries. Some would be given to the needy, particularly in times of hardship. Some would be loaned. One practice that hovered between charity and business was providing peasants with alternatives to the local moneylender. Most monasteries had attendant pawnshops where the local poor could place some valuable possession-a robe, a couch, a mirror-in hock in exchange for low-interest loans. Finally, there was the business of the monastery itself: that portion of the Inexhaustible Treasury turned over to the management of lay brothers, and either put out at loan or invested. Since monks were not allowed to eat the products of their own fields, the fruit or grain had to be put on the market, further swelling monastic revenues. Most monasteries came to be surrounded not only by commercial farms but veritable industrial complexes of oil presses, flour mills, shops, and hostels, often with thousands of bonded workers. At the same time, the Treasuries themselves became-as Gerner was perhaps the first to point out-the world's first genuine forms of concentrated finance capital. They were, after all, enormous concentrations of wealth managed by what were in effect monastic corporations, which were constantly seeking new opportunities for profitable investment. They even shared the quintessential capitalist imperative of continual growth; the Treasuries had to expand, since according to Mahayana doctrine, genuine liberation would not be possible until the whole world embraced the Dharma.

These monasteries became so wealthy, with so much metal, that the state had to shut them down and confiscate their possessions.

The Near West: Islam (Capital as Credit)

Islamic attitudes should be interpreted as the exact opposite of Chinese ones: a love for law and merchants and a suspicion towards the government.

The prevailing Islamic attitude toward law, government, and economic matters was the exact opposite of that prevalent in China. Confucians were suspicious of governance through strict codes of law, preferring to rely on the inherent sense of justice of the cultivated scholar-a scholar who was simply assumed to also be a government official. Medieval Islam, on the other hand, enthusiastically embraced law, which was seen as a religious institution derived from the Prophet, but tended to view government, more often than not, as an unfortunate necessity, an institution that the truly pious would do better to avoid.

The distrust towards government is, first, because the Arab military leaders who, after Mohammed's death in 632 AD, conquered the Sassanian empire and established the Abbasid Caliphate never felt one with the people they ruled over, even after the population converted to Islam centuries later. As a result the people were always distrustful of the government. Second, religious authorities were free to set up their own judicial and educational institutions independent from the state which further weakened its power:

After Caliph al-Ma'mum's abortive attempt to set up a theocracy in 832 AD, the government took a hands-off position on questions of religion. The various schools of Islamic law were free to create their own educational institutions and maintain their own separate system of religious justice. Crucially, it was the ulema, the legal scholars, who were the principal agents in the conversion of the bulk of the empire's population to Islam in Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa in those same years. But-like the elders in charge of guilds, civic associations, commercial sodalities, and religious brotherhoods-they did their best to keep the government, with its armies and ostentation, at arm's length.

What this meant is that the Caliphate continued Axial age style of conquests without effecting its people in the same way. Rome, as an example of Axial age conquest, generated a military-coinage-slavery complex that penetrated deeply into everyday life: slaves were working everywhere, everyone in Roman cities used coinage, and law/religion/trade were certainly not outside the reach of government. But in the Caliphate, slaves ended up back in the military, coinage became mostly a means of payment to soldiers (regular commerce worked on credit).

As a result, the internal society of the Caliphate was drastically different from other Axial age empires. In fact, the religious authorities which had the authority to erect law, created many protections for debtors:

The legal system that they created also ensured that it was effectively impossible for Muslims-or for that matter Christian or Jewish subjects of the Caliphate-to be reduced to slavery. Here al-Wahid seems to have been largely correct. Islamic law took aim at just about all the most notorious abuses of earlier, Axial Age societies. Slavery through kidnapping, judicial punishment, debt, and the exposure or sale of children, even through the voluntary sale of one's own person-all were forbidden, or rendered unenforceable. Likewise with all the other forms of debt peonage that had loomed over the heads of poor Middle Eastern farmers and their families since the dawn of recorded history. Finally, Islam strictly forbade usury, which it interpreted to mean any arrangement in which money or a commodity was lent at interest, for any purpose whatsoever.

It was partially because of this ban of usury – and the terrifying consequences it had to debtors – that made commerce so well-liked. In fact, there was a massive shift of class alliances: while the merchants were previously the bane of citizens, by giving up usury and allying with religious/legal authorities, all three groups became allied against the intrusion of the state.

Of course, it also didn’t hurt that the Prophet began his adult life as a merchant and thus no Islamic thinker ever treated the honest pursuit of profit as itself intrinsically immoral or inimical to faith.

Furthermore, the ban of usury did not stall commerce and the development of other financial instruments. One example is to allow for service fees: allowing goods bought on credit to be priced slightly higher:

Still, these incentives were never enough to allow banking to become a full-time occupation: instead, almost any merchant operating on a sufficiently large scale could be expected to combine banking with a host of other moneymaking activities. As a result, credit instruments soon became so essential to trade that almost anyone of prominence was expected to keep most of his or her wealth on deposit, and to make everyday transactions, not by counting out coins, but by inkpot and paper.

Financing, on the other hand was not done through fixed-interest instruments by profit sharing agreements (equity). There was a high degree of trust and reputation was pivotal in Islamic commerce for few reasons 1. You can only enter into profit sharing agreements if you believe the other person will properly report profits 2. The currency by which you transact (promissory notes) are not backed by the state and cannot be redeemed by them 3. Contracts were not enforceable by the state either (e.g. there were no debtor’s prisons). “Its merchants shunned enforceable contracts, preferring to seal transactions "with a handshake and a glance at heaven.”

As a result, the merchant became a knightly figure:

In Islamic society, the merchant became not just a respected figure, but a kind of paragon: like the warrior, a man of honor able to pursue far-flung adventures; unlike him, able to do so in a fashion damaging to no one. The French historian Maurice Lombard draws a striking, if perhaps rather idealized, picture of him "in his stately town-house, surrounded by slaves and hangers-on, in the midst of his collections of books, travel souvenirs, and rare ornaments," along with his ledgers, correspondence, and letters of credit, skilled in the arts of double-entry book-keeping along with secret codes and ciphers, giving alms to the poor, supporting places of worship, perhaps, dedicating himself to the writing of poetry, while still able to translate his general creditworthiness into great capital reserves by appealing to family and partners.

And the market, unlike post-coinage Mesopotamia, became once-again a respectable place of community:

Once freed from its ancient scourges of debt and slavery, the local bazaar had become, for most, not a place of moral danger, but the very opposite: the highest expression of the human freedom and communal solidarity, and thus to be protected assiduously from state intrusion.

In many ways, what Medieval Islam had was both an earlier and more genuine form of the free market. The Prophet declared that “prices depend on the will of God” and, of course, to tamper in it should be considered sacrilegious. Many of Smith’s key moves are anticipated by Islamic thinkers:

If all this bears a striking resemblance to Adam Smith's "invisible hand" (which was also the hand of Divine Providence), it might not be a complete coincidence. In fact, many of the specific arguments and examples that Smith uses appear to trace back directly to economic tracts written in Medieval Persia. For instance, not only does his argument that exchange is a natural outgrowth of human rationality and speech already appear both in both Ghazali (1058-1111 AD), and Tusi (1201-1274 AD); both use exactly the same illustration: that no one has ever observed two dogs exchanging bones. Even more dramatically, Smith's most famous example of division of labor, the pin factory, where it takes eighteen separate operations to produce one pin, already appears in Ghazali's Ihya, in which he describes a needle factory, where it takes twenty-five different operations to produce a needle.

But there are two key differences of massive import between Islamic assumptions and that of modern liberalism.

First, the market is an expression of mutual aid. In other words, the market ought to operate on a logic of communism and not exchange. Smith would say that the market channels private vice into public virtue, yet Tusi’s view is that the very motives we enter into the market is mutual aid. While the end state is the same, the motivations aren’t:

Divine providence has arranged us to have different abilities, desires, and inclinations. The market is simply one manifestation of this more general principle of mutual aid, of the matching of, abilities (supply) and needs (demand)-or to translate it into my own earlier terms, it is not only founded on, but is itself an extension of the kind of baseline communism on which any society must ultimately rest.

Second, money, according to Ghazali, acts as a good unit of account not because it had intrinsic worth (Smith) but because it has no qualities whatsoever:

How do you compare two things with no common qualities? His conclusion: it can only be done by comparing both to a third thing with no qualities at all. For this reason, he explains, God created dinars and dirhams, coins made out of gold and silver, two metals that are otherwise no good for anything:
Dirhams and dinars are not created for any particular purpose; they are useless by themselves; they are just like stones. They are created to circulate from hand to hand, to govern and to facilitate transactions. They are symbols to know the value and grades of goods. They can be symbols, units of measure, because of this very lack of usefulness, indeed lack of any particular feature other than value:
A thing can only be exactly linked to other things if it has no particular special form or feature of its own-for example, a mirror that has no color can reflect all colors. The same is the case with money-it has no purpose of its own, but it serves as medium for the purpose of exchanging goods.
From this it also follows that lending money at interest must be illegitimate, since it means using money as an end in itself: "Money is not created to earn money." In fact, he says, "in relation to other goods, dirhams and dinars are like prepositions in a sentence," words that, as the grammarians inform us, are used to give meaning to other words, but can only do because they have no meaning in themselves. Money is a thus a unit of measure that provides a means of assessing the value of goods, but also one that operates as such only if it stays in constant motion. To enter in monetary transactions in order to obtain even more money, even if it's a matter of M-C-M', let alone M-M', would be, according to Ghazali, the equivalent of kidnapping a post man. Whereas Ghazali speaks only of gold and silver, what he describes money as symbol, as abstract measure, having no qualities of its own, whose value is only maintained by constant motion-is something that would never have occurred to anyone were it not in an age when it was perfectly normal for money to be employed in purely virtual form.

These are two differences of import. Merchants, for example, were expected to lower their prices for the needy, since the market should be an expression of mutual aid. Furthermore, Graeber argues that this is a more meaningful version of a “free” market because it completely pushes the state out of the picture. If, like Smith, you believe that money has intrinsic worth, then it should be the role of the state to maintain the purity of the currency. And, if you believe that the intentions in the market are purely selfish, then you need to have prisons and police to enforce contracts. But, starting with the Islamic assumptions, you can afford to push the state all the way back and create: “a genuine free market, not one created by the government and backed by its police and prisons-[but] a world of handshake deals and paper promises backed only by the integrity of the signer.”

Western Europe

Europe came into the middle ages late (the mercantile capitalism that we see in Islam did not take shape until 1200AD). But we see the same shape of events going on:

Collapse of large empires of the axial age into more localized governance systems (city-states stewarded by merchant classes).
Religious authorities regulating financial systems, especially the creation of credit.
The flow of bullion into religious institutions.
The virtualization of money: “Everyone continued to calculate costs in Roman currency, then, later, in Carolingian "imaginary money"-the purely conceptual system of pounds, shillings, and pence used across Western Europe to keep accounts well into the seventeenth century.”
Local mints coming back to operation

The Christian theologians, writing at the end of the Roman empire (which was being torn apart by debt crisis) all condemned usury:

Usury was seen above all as an assault on Christian charity, on Jesus's injunction to treat the poor as they would treat the Christ himself, giving without expectation of return and allowing the borrower to decide on recompense (Luke 6:34-35).

St. Ambrose went so far as to compare usury with theft and violence. At the same however, and this became a recurring loophole to be exploited, he made a, what was later to be called, “Exception of St. Ambrose.” He reasoned that what Deuteronomy 23:20 was really saying was that, since usury is like violence, you should be able to charge interest on those that you are also justified to kill – “Strangers”.

Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of any thing that is lent upon usury. Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury.

What is fascinating is that while the Church condemned usury, it was fine with slavery (which was often worse than debt peonage) and feudalism (which debt peonage transformed into). This goes to show how much debt – the relationship of a broken equality – is unbearable.

The “Exception of Saint Ambrose” first became significant as it made the Jews the defacto financial class. This was doubly troubling for the Jews as they were not only the creditors that were in tension with the larger community, but (because of this) Kings often chose them as scapegoats and played the populist card:

In part this was due to the habit of Christian princes of exploiting, for their own purposes, the fact that Jews did sit slightly outside the system. Many encouraged Jews to operate as moneylenders, under their protection, simply because they also knew that protection could be withdrawn at any time. The kings of England were notorious in this regard. They insisted that Jews be excluded from merchant and craft guilds, but granted them the right to charge extravagant rates of interest, backing up the loans by the full force of Iaw. Debtors in Medieval England were regularly thrown in prisons until their families settled with the creditor. Yet the same regularly happened to the Jews themselves. In 1210 AD, for example, King John ordered a tallage, or emergency levy, to pay for his wars in France and Ireland. According to one contemporary chronicler "all the Jews throughout England, of both sexes, were seized, imprisoned, and tortured severely, in order to do the king's will with their money." Most who were put to torture offered all they had and more-but on that occasion, one particularly wealthy merchant, a certain Abraham of Bristol, who the king decided owed him ten thousand marks of silver (a sum equivalent to about a sixth of John's total annual revenue), became famous for holding out. The king therefore ordered that one of his molars be pulled out daily, until he paid. After seven had been extracted, Abraham finally gave in.
The terror inflicted by kings carried in it a peculiar element of identification: the persecutions and appropriations were an extension of the logic whereby kings effectively treated debts owed to Jews as ultimately owed to themselves, even setting up a branch of the Treasury ("the Exchequer of the Jews") to manage them. This was of course much in keeping with the popular English impression of their kings as themselves a group of rapacious Norman foreigners. But it also gave the kings the opportunity to periodically play the populist card, dramatically snubbing or humiliating their Jewish financiers, turning a blind eye or even encouraging pogroms by townsfolk who chose to take the Exception of Saint Ambrose literally, and treat moneylenders as enemies of Christ who could be murdered in cold blood. Particularly gruesome massacres occurred in Norwich in 1144 AD, and in France, in Blois in 1171. Before long, as Norman Cohn put it, "what had once been a flourishing Jewish culture had turned into a terrorized society locked in perpetual warfare with the greater society around it."

Debates about usury during this time often extended to challenge the foundations of private property itself:

All this was echoed by a heady intellectual debate in the newly founded universities, not so much as to whether usury was sinful and illegal, but precisely why. Some argued that it was theft of another's material possessions; others that it constituted a theft of time, charging others for something that belonged only to God. Some held that it embodied the sin of Sloth, since like the Confucians, Catholic thinkers usually held that a merchant's profit could only be justified as payment for his labor (i.e., in transporting goods to wherever they were needed), whereas interest accrued even if the lender did nothing at all. Soon the rediscovery of Aristotle, who returned in Arabic translation (and the influence of Muslim sources like Ghazali and Ibn Sina), added new arguments: that treating money as an end in itself defied its true purpose; that charging interest was unnatural, in that it treated mere metal as if it were a living thing that could breed or bear fruit.

The debates also trended another direction, finding another loophole for lenders to collect interest. The legal term of this loophole is actually where our current word “interest” comes from:

At the same time, the revival of Roman law-which, as we’ve seen, began from the assumption of absolute private property-put new intellectual weapons in the hands of those who wished to argue that, at least in the case of commercial loans, usury laws should be relaxed. The great discovery in this case was the notion of interesse, which is where our word “interest” originally comes from: a compensation for loss suffered because of late payment. The argument soon became that if a merchant made a commercial loan even for some minimal period (say, a month), it was not usurious for him to charge a percentage for each month afterward, since this was a penalty, not rental for the money, and it was justified as compensation for the profit he would have made, had he placed it in some profitable investment, as any merchant would ordinarily be expected to do.

Merchant capitalism only came to be in western Europe around 1200AD with the rise of city states that were de facto controlled by wealthy merchant families. One peculiar difference, however between the capitalism of Europe and the other middle age regions is that there was a close symbiosis between merchants and armies (in fact, most merchants were the armies). In China, the government and armies were suspicious of merchants; In India, the government used merchants to syphon money off of the armies; In the middle east, the merchants, allied with the people, erected a wall against the army.

What jumps out, in comparison with the Muslim world, are these links of finance, trade, and violence. Whereas Persian and Arab thinkers assumed that the market emerged as an extension of mutual aid, Christians never completely overcame the suspicion that commerce was really an extension of usury, a form of fraud only truly legitimate when directed against one's mortal enemies. Debt was, indeed, sin-on the part of both parties to the transaction. Competition was essential to the nature of the market, but competition was (usually) nonviolent warfare. There was a reason why, as I've already observed, the words for "truck and barter" in almost all European languages were derived from terms meaning "swindle," "bamboozle," or "deceive."
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Most of the capital for these banking enterprises derived from the Mediterranean trade in Indian Ocean spices and Eastern luxuries. Yet unlike the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean was a constant war zone. Venetian galleys doubled as both merchant vessels and warships, replete with cannon and marines, and the differences between trade, crusade, and piracy often depended on the balance of forces at any given moment.131 The same was true on land: where Asian empires tended to separate the sphere of warriors and merchants, in Europe they often overlapped:
All up and down Central Europe, from Tuscany to Flanders, from Brabant to Livonia, merchants not only supplied warriors-as they did all over Europe--they sat in governments that made war and, sometimes, buckled on armor and went into battle themselves. Such places make a long list: not only Florence, Milan, Venice, and Genoa, but also Augsburg, Nuremberg, Strasbourg, and Zurich; not only Lubeck, Ham burg, Bremen, and Danzig, but also Bruges, Ghent, Leiden, and Cologne. Some of them-Florence, Nuremberg, Siena, Bern, and Ulm come to mind-built considerable territorial states.

This close proximity between the mercenary class and armies led to the invention of new forms of war financing:

The Genoese republic was also the inventor of a unique mode of military financing, which might be known as war by subscription, whereby those planning expeditions sold shares to investors in exchange for the rights to an equivalent percentage of the spoils. It was precisely the same galleys, with the same "merchant adventurers" aboard, who would eventually pass through the pillars of Hercules to follow the Atlantic coast to Flanders or the Champagne fairs, carrying cargoes of nutmeg or cayenne, silks and woolen goods-along with the inevitable bills of exchange.

Graeber argues that the popular middle-age image of roaming knights actually came from these wandering merchant-warriors. Knights were at most entertainers if not wandering bandits:

The curious thing is that it bears almost no relation to reality. Nothing remotely like a real "knight-errant" ever existed. "Knights" had originally been a term for freelance warriors, drawn from the younger or, often, bastard sons of the minor nobility. Unable to in herit, many were forced to band together to seek their fortunes. Many became little more than roving bands of thugs, in an endless pursuit of plunder-precisely the sort of people who made merchants' lives so dangerous. Culminating in the twelfth century, there was a concerted effort to bring this dangerous population under the control of the civil authorities: not only the code of chivalry, but the tournament, the joust-all these were more than anything else ways of keeping them out of trouble, as it were, in part by setting knights against each other, in part by turning their entire existence into a kind of stylized ritual. The ideal of the lone wandering knight, in search of some gallant ad venture, on the other hand, seems to have come out of nowhere.

Conclusion

If the defining characteristic of Axial age thought was materialism, then the defining mode of thinking of Middle age thinking is transcendence: that true value lay somewhere transcendent of the material realm. To put it crudely, if an Axial age thinker saw the world and inevitably collapsed it into some form of material, then a Middle age thinker collapses the foundations of the world in ideas and social conventions. Of course, this was, Graeber claims, influenced by the virtual nature of the currency that fluctuated depending on social convention:

If the Axial Age was the age of materialism, the Middle Ages were above all else the age of transcendence. The collapse of the ancient empires did not, for the most part, lead to the rise of new ones.141 Instead, once-subversive popular religious movements were catapulted into the status of dominant institutions. Slavery declined or disappeared, as did the overall level of violence. As trade picked up, so did the pace of technological innovation; greater peace brought greater possibilities not only for the movement of silks and spices, but also of people and ideas. The fact that monks in Medieval China could devote themselves to translating ancient treatises in Sanskrit, and that students in madrasas in Medieval Indonesia could debate legal terms in Arabic, is testimony to the profound cosmopolitanism of the age.
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If there is an essence to Medieval thought, it lies not in blind obedience to authority, but rather in a dogged insistence that the values that govern our ordinary daily affairs-particularly those of the court and marketplace-are confused, mistaken, illusory, or perverse. True value lay elsewhere, in a domain that cannot be directly perceived, but only approached through study or contemplation. But this in turn made the faculties of contemplation, and the entire question of knowledge, an endless problem. Consider for example the great conundrum, pondered by Muslim, Christian, and Jewish philosophers alike: What does it mean to simultaneously say that we can only know God through our faculties of Reason, but that Reason itself partakes of God? Chinese philosophers were struggling with similar conundrums when they asked, "Do we read the classics or do the classics read us?" Almost all the great intellectual debates of the age turned on this question in one way or another. Is the world created by our minds, or our minds by the world?

Critique: this is painting in way too broad a stroke, I think these broad conclusions are meaningless and cherry picking.

Graeber argues that the shift from bullion to virtual money (intrinsic to social value) also meant that debt had a greater role to play in everyday life: after all virtual money is, in a sense, debt. And the different religious, cultural traditions dealt with it in different ways:

On one level, this is just another version of the dilemmas that always arise when we try to reimagine the world through debt-that peculiar agreement between two equals that they shall no longer be equals, until such time as they become equals once again. Still, the problem took on a peculiar piquancy in the Middle Ages, when the economy became, as it were, spiritualized. As gold and silver migrated to holy places, ordinary transactions everywhere came to be carried out primarily through credit. Inevitably, arguments about wealth and markets became arguments about debt and morality, and arguments about debt and morality became arguments about the nature of our place in the universe. As we've seen, the solutions varied considerably. Europe and India saw a return to hierarchy: society became a ranked order of Priests, Warriors, Merchants, and Farmers (or in Christendom, just Priests, Warriors, and Farmers). Debts between the orders were considered threatening because they implied the potential of equality, and they often led to outright violence. In China, in contrast, the principle of debt often became the governing principle of the cosmos: karmic debts, milk-debts, debt contracts between human beings and celestial powers. From the point of view of the authorities, all these led to excess, and potentially to vast concentrations of capital that might throw the entire social order out of balance. It was the responsibility of government to intervene constantly to keep markets running smoothly and equitably, thus avoiding new outbreaks of popular unrest. In the world of Islam, where theologians held that God recreated the en tire universe at every instant, market fluctuations were instead seen as merely another manifestation of divine will.

This is also an age where the foundations of modern capitalism was born. In fact, the corporation was initially inspired by angels and first applied to monasteries, schools, etc:

Legally, our notion of the corporation is very much a product of the European High Middle Ages. The legal idea of a corporation as a "fictive person" (persona ficta)-a person who, as Maitland, the great British legal historian, put it, "is immortal, who sues and is sued, who holds lands, has a seal of his own, who makes regulations for those natural persons of whom he is composed"166-was first established in canon law by Pope Innocent IV in 1250 AD, and one of the first kinds of entities it applied to were monasteries-as also to universities, church es, municipalities, and guilds.

Graeber defines modern day capitalism as different from the commerce of the middle ages because it had large organizations that partnered with governments to create monopolies that systematized risk away. This was impossible for, say, Islam because of their strong distaste for the government and objections to fixed-rate interest:

Certainly, the Islamic world produced figures who would be hard to describe as anything but capitalists. Large-scale merchants were referred to as sahib al-mal, "owners of capital," and legal theorists spoke freely about the creation and expansion of capital funds. At the height of the Caliphate, some of these merchants were in possession of millions of dinars and seeking profitable investment. Why did nothing like modern capitalism emerge? I would highlight two factors. First, Islamic merchants appear to have taken their free-market ideology seriously. The marketplace did not fall under the direct supervision of the government; contracts were made between individuals-ideally, "with a handshake and a glance at heaven"-and thus honor and credit became largely indistinguishable. This is inevitable: you can't have cutthroat competition where there is no one stopping people from literally cutting one another's throats. Second, Islam also took seriously the principle, later enshrined in clas sical economic theory but only unevenly observed in practice, that profits are the reward for risk. Trading enterprises were assumed to be, quite literally, adventures, in which traders exposed themselves to the dangers of storm and shipwreck, savage nomads, forests, steppes, and deserts, exotic and unpredictable foreign customs, and arbitrary governments. Financial mechanisms designed to avoid these risks were considered impious. This was one of the objections to usury: if one demands a fixed rate of interest, the profits are guaranteed. Similarly, commercial investors were expected to share the risk. This made most of the forms of finance and insurance that were to later develop in Europe impossible.

Chapter 11 Age of the Great Capitalist Empires

The Capitalist age begins not with the introduction of armies which spawns Bullion as does the axial age, but an introduction of Bullion that spawns armies:

The era begins around 1450 with a turn away from virtual currencies and credit economies and back to gold and silver. The subsequent flow of bullion from the Americas sped the process immensely, sparking a "price revolution" in Western Europe that turned traditional society upside-down. What's more, the return to bullion was accompanied by the return of a whole host of other conditions that, during the Middle Ages, had been largely suppressed or kept at bay: vast empires and professional armies, massive predatory warfare, untrammeled usury and debt peonage, but also materialist philosophies, a new burst of scientific and philosophical creativity-even the return of chattel slavery. It was in no way a simple repeat performance. All the Axial Age pieces reappeared, but they came together in an entirely different way.

The black plague had killed off 1/3 of the labor force. This gave the peasants a lot of negotiating power and wealth. Festival days-off sometimes took up a third of the year: the fifteenth century saw massive improvements in quality of life for the peasantry. Yet this all went away in the following centuries. The common explanation is the influx of precious metals that inflated prices. The problem with this story is that most of the metals did not end up anywhere in Europe (especially not in the hands of the peasantry) but in China.

When the Ming dynasty came into power (1300 AD) they had a suspicion of commerce and merchants who worked closely with the previous, Mongol dynasty. They limited commerce and promoted self-sufficient agrarian communities taxed by mandatory labor for the state (old, Mongol vestige). People began leaving their ancestral lands and started working in illegal silver mines. By the mid 1400s, the state tried to crack down these mines, but eventually ended up adopting silver and not labor as the mode of taxation. The Ming economy and population boomed and, thus, had a massive appetite for silver to prevent deflation. It was this large demand of silver that made the conquest of the new world and the search for metals sustainable:

Had China in particular not had such a dynamic economy that changing its metallic base could absorb the staggering quantities of silver mined in the New World over three centuries, those mines might have become unprofitable within a few decades. The massive inflation of silver-denominated prices in Europe from 1500 to 1640 indicates a shrinking value for the metal there even with Asia draining off much of the supply.
By the late sixteenth century, China was importing almost fifty tons of silver a year, about 90 percent of its silver, and by the early seventeenth century, 106 tons, or over 97 percent. Huge amounts of silk, porcelain, and other Chinese products had to be exported to pay for it. Many of these Chinese products, in turn, ended up in the new cities of Central and South America. This Asian trade became the single most significant factor in the emerging global economy, and those who ultimately controlled the financial levers-particularly Italian, Dutch, and German merchant bankers-became fantastically rich.

What caused the inflation wasn’t metals entering circulation, but government bills backed by metals entering circulation:

What really caused the inflation is that those who ended up in control of the bullion-governments, bankers, large-scale merchants-were able to use that control to begin changing the rules, first by insisting that gold and silver were money, and second by introducing new forms of credit-money for their own use while slowly undermining and destroying the local systems of trust that had allowed small-scale communities across Europe to operate largely without the use of metal currency.

What is Capital

Graeber claims that Cortes and his soldiers were not particularly evil or greedy people (relative to the travesties they committed) they were merely motivated by a perverted financial instrument that was particularly harsh in its terms and unforgiving in its penalties:

After eight months of grueling house-to-house warfare and the death of perhaps a hundred thousand Aztecs, Tenochtitlan, one of the greatest cities of the world, lay entirely destroyed. The imperial treasury was secured, and the time had come, then, for it to be divided in shares amongst the surviving soldiers.
Yet according to Diaz, the result among the men was outrage. The officers connived to sequester most of the gold, and when the final tally was announced, the troops learned that they would be receiving only fifty to eighty pesos each. What's more, the better part of their shares was immediately seized again by the officers in their capacity of creditors-since Cortes had insisted that the men be billed for any replacement equipment and medical care they had received during the siege. Most found they had actually lost money on the deal. Diaz writes:
We were all very deeply in debt. A crossbow was not to be purchased for less than forty or fifty pesos, a musket cost one hundred, a sword fifty, and a horse from 8oo to 1000 pesos, and above. Thus extravagantly did we have to pay for every thing! A surgeon, who called himself Mastre Juan, who had tended some very bad wounds, charged wildly inflated fees, and so did a quack named Murcia, who was an apothecary and a barber and also treated wounds, and there were thirty other tricks and swindles for which payment was demanded of our shares as soon as we received them.
Serious complaints were made about this, and the only remedy that Cortes provided was to appoint two trustworthy per sons who knew the prices of goods and could value anything that we had bought on credit. An order went out that whatever price was placed on our purchases or the surgeon's cures must be accepted, but that if we had no money, our creditors must wait two years for payment.
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We are not dealing with a psychology of cold, calculating greed, but of a much more complicated mix of shame and righteous indignation, and of the frantic urgency of debts that would only compound and accumulate (these were, almost certainly, interest-bearing loans), and outrage at the idea that, after all they had gone through, they should be held to owe any thing to begin with.
And what of Cortes? He had just pulled off perhaps the greatest act of theft in world history. Certainly, his original debts had now been rendered inconsequential. Yet he somehow always seemed to find himself in new ones. Creditors were already starting to repossess his holdings while he was off on an expedition to Honduras in 1526; on his return, he wrote the Emperor Charles V that his expenses were such that "all I have received has been insufficient to relive me from misery and poverty, being at the moment I write in debt for upwards of five hundred ounces of gold, without possessing a single peso towards it." Disingenuous, no doubt (Cortes at the time owned his own personal palace), but only a few years later, he was reduced to pawning his wife's jewelry to help finance a series of expeditions to California, hoping to restore his fortunes. When those failed to turn a profit, he ended up so besieged by creditors that he had to return to Spain to petition the emperor in person.

This interpretation of Cortes paints an optimistic psychology of human nature but a terrifying psychology of the debtor: someone who is infuriated, and is forced to see the world in terms of value to be extracted.

All of this helps explain why the Church had been so uncompromising in its attitude toward usury. It was not just a philosophical question; it was a matter of moral rivalry. Money always has the potential to become a moral imperative unto itself. Allow it to expand, and it can quickly become a morality so imperative that all others seem frivolous in comparison. For the debtor, the world is reduced to a collection of potential dangers, potential tools, and potential merchandise. Even human relations become a matter of cost-benefit calculation. Clearly this is the way the conquistadors viewed the worlds that they set out to conquer.
…
Or, more precisely, perhaps, about the debtor who feels he has done nothing to deserve being placed in his position: the frantic urgency of having to convert everything around oneself into money, and rage and indignation at having been reduced to the sort of person who would do so.

Drawing from Cortes, Graeber paints a pessimistic picture of capitalism: financiers who are too far away from the action to care and gamblers who are too powerless to do anything.

If all this seems suspiciously reminiscent of the fourth Crusade, with its indebted knights stripping whole foreign cities of their wealth and still somehow winding up only one step ahead of their creditors, there is a reason. The financial capital that backed these expeditions came from more or less the same place (if in this case Genoa, not Venice). What's more, that relationship, between the daring adventurer on the one hand, the gambler willing to take any sort of risk, and on the other, the careful financier, whose entire operations are organized around producing steady, mathematical, inexorable growth of income, lies at the very heart of what we now call "capitalism."
As a result, our current economic system has always been marked by a peculiar dual character. Scholars have long been fascinated by Spanish debates that ensued, in Spanish universities like Santander, about the humanity of the Indians (Did they have souls? Could they have legal rights? Was it legitimate to forcibly enslave them?), just as they have argued about the real attitudes of the conquistadors (was it contempt, revulsion, or even grudging admiration for their adversaries?) The real point is that at the key moments of decision, none of this mattered. Those making the decisions did not feel they were in control anyway; those who were did not particularly care to know the details.

Graeber’s central claim is that capital in the capitalist age is different from bullion in the Axial age in that capital is money with the expectation and imperative to grow. This means that, in the first time in history (if you don’t count the inexhaustible treasuries), you have organizations that are centered around the profit-seeking motive. Whereas the profit seeking-motive was to serve empire/politics/military expansion in the Axial age, the latter is made to serve the former in the capitalist age. Ie. Capital has become autonomous:

Capital, then, is not simply money. It is not even just wealth that can be turned into money. But neither is it just the use of political pow er to help one use one's money to make more money. Cortes was trying to do exactly that: in classical Axial Age fashion, he was attempting to use his conquests to acquire plunder, and slaves to work the mines, with which he could pay his soldiers and suppliers cash to embark on even further conquests. It was a tried-and-true formula. But for all the other conquistadors, it provided a spectacular failure.
This would seem to mark the difference. In the Axial Age, money was a tool of empire. It might have been convenient for rulers to promulgate markets in which everyone would treat money as an end in itself; at times, rulers might have even come to see the whole apparatus of government as a profit-making enterprise; but money always remained a political instrument. This is why when the empires collapsed and armies were demobilized, the whole apparatus could simply melt away. Under the newly emerging capitalist order, the logic of money was granted autonomy; political and military power were then gradually reorganized around it. True, this was a financial logic that could never have existed without states and armies behind it in the first place. As we have seen in the case of Medieval Islam, under genuine free-market conditions-in which the state is not involved in regulating the market in any significant way, even in enforcing commercial contracts-purely competitive markets will not develop, and loans at interest will become effectively impossible to collect. It was only the Islamic prohibition against usury, really, that made it possible for them to create an economic system that stood so far apart from the state.

In fact, this imperative of capital to grow is precisely how medieval protestant thinkers justified usury (they also made the case that usury is still sinful but in our imperfect world it should be permitted):

Protestant thinkers all continued to make the old Medieval argument about interesse: that "interest" is really compensation for the money that the lender would have made had he been able to place his money in some more profitable investment. Originally, this logic was just ap plied to commercial loans. Increasingly, it was now applied to all loans. Far from being unnatural, then, the growth of money was now treated as completely expected. All money was assumed to be capital.

The Mores of Pre-Capital Europe

Among the commoners, cash was reserved for transactions with strangers and people with so low reputation that no one would extend credit to them. Credit (without interest) was kept on everyone else and a great public “reckoning” was held every year to square accounts. It was an economy based on credit and trust. It had elements of capitalism (market) but also communism (collective stewardship):

The reason that this upends our assumptions is that we're used to blaming the rise of capitalism on something vaguely called "the market"-the breakup of older systems of mutual aid and solidarity, and the creation of a world of cold calculation, where everything had its price. Really, English villagers appear to have seen no contradiction between the two. On the one hand, they believed strongly in the collective stewardship of fields, streams, and forests, and the need to help neighbors in difficulty. On the other hand, markets were seen as a kind of attenuated version of the same principle, since they were entirely founded on trust.

The only people who use cash systematically were government officials funding vast enterprises and the criminal underworld. This combined with the fact that the only times a commoner would transact in cash would be with people of low reputation meant that Credit was seen as morally just and the use of cash to be seen as suspect.

In these small and local communities operated on trust and credit, much like similar ones in the Islamic world, the market was seen as a form of mutual aid instead of a place that needed to be backed by governmental force to make sure that people don’t cheat each other. And this makes sense right, if the people you are trading with are people you have social ties with, then of course you won’t be trading just out of selfish interest any more than you would be trying to maximize the amount you eat at a family dinner. The basis of society is communal solidarity and not mutual restraint (as imagined by Hobbes):

For most English villagers, the real font and focus of social and moral life was not so much the church as the local ale-house-and community was embodied above all in the conviviality of popular festivals like Christmas or May Day, with everything that such celebrations entailed: the sharing of pleasures, the communion of the senses, all the physical embodiment of what was called "good neighborhood." Society was rooted above in the "love and amity" of friends and kin, and it found expression in all those forms of everyday communism (helping neighbors with chores, providing milk or cheese for old widows) that were seen to flow from it. Markets were not seen as contradicting this ethos of mutual aid. It was, much as it was for Tusi, an extension of mutual aid-and for much the same reason: because it operated entirely through trust and credit.
In 1696, for instance, Charles Davenant wrote that even if there were a general collapse of confidence in the credit system, it could not last long, because eventually, when people reflected on the matter and realized that credit is simply an extension of human society,
They will find, that no trading nation ever did subsist, and carry on its business by real stock [that is, just coin and merchandise]; that trust and confidence in each other, are as necessary to link and hold a people together, as obedience, love, friendship, or the intercourse of speech. And when experience has taught man how weak he is, depending only on himself, he will be willing to help others, and call upon the assistance of his neighbors, which of course, by degrees, must set credit again afloat.
"Amity and friendship," Bodin wrote, "are the foundation of all human and civil society"-they constitute that "true, natural justice" on which the whole legal structure of con tracts, courts, and even government must necessarily be built. Similarly, when economic thinkers reflected on the origins of the money, they spoke of "trusting, exchanging, and trading." It was simply assumed that human relations came first.

Transition to Capital I: the Demonization of Credit

The story of the origins of capitalism, then, is not the story of the gradual destruction of traditional communities by the impersonal power of the market. It is, rather, the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal-and often vindictive-power of the state.

The transformation happened first and foremost when interest was legalized. The harsh penalties that the Law often imposed on debtors also encouraged creditors from falsifying accounts to get the debtors in trouble. As a result, the moral logic was flipped: borrowing and credit took upon a bad name and it was the usage of coinage that appeared to be morally justifiable:

Even in the late Middle Ages, in the case of really large loans, it was not unusual for creditors to lodge claims in local courts-but this was really just a way of ensuring that there was a public record (remember that most people at the time were illiterate). Debtors were willing to go along with the proceedings in part, it would seem, because if there was any interest being charged, it meant that if they did default, the lender was just as guilty in the eyes of the law as they were. Less than one-percent of these cases were ever brought to judgment. The legalization of interest began to change the nature of the playing field. In the 168os, when interest-bearing loans began to become common between villagers, creditors also began to insist on the use of signed, legal bonds; this led to such an explosion of appeals to the courts that in many small towns, almost every household seemed to be caught up in debt litigation of some sort or other. Only a tiny proportion of these suits were ever brought to judgment, either: the usual expedient was still to rely on the simple threat of punishment to encourage debtors to settle out of court. Still, as a result, the fear of debtor's prison-or worse--came to hang over everyone, and sociability itself came to take on the color of crime.
The criminalization of debt, then, was the criminalization of the very basis of human society. It cannot be overemphasized that in a small community, everyone normally was both lender and borrower. One can only imagine the tensions and temptations that must have existed in a communities-and communities, much though they are based on love, in fact, because they are based on love, will always also be full of hatred, rivalry and passion-when it became clear that with sufficiently clever scheming, manipulation, and perhaps a bit of strategic bribery, they could arrange to have almost anyone they hated imprisoned or even hanged.

Of course, the animosity that the legalization of interest and criminalization of debt injected into society also made people (like Hobbes) believe that the bedrock of society is not solidarity or mutual aid but conflict. It is here that we see the term self-interest take upon a central role in explaining human motivation. One reason that interest is used is because of the desire to be more like a science and make human action calculable and quantifiable. The other is theological. Much how capital is Axial age money with the assumption and expectation of infinite growth, human desire now takes upon a similar unsatiable nature:

"Self-interest" is first attested to in the writings of the Italian historian Francesco Guicciadini (who was, in fact, a friend of Machiavelli), around 1510, as a euphemism for St. Augustine's concept of "self-love." For Augustine, the "love of God" leads us to benevolence toward our fellows; self-love, in contrast, refers to the fact that, since the Fall of Man, we are cursed by endless, insatiable desires for self-gratification-so much so that, if left to our own devices, we will necessarily fall into universal competition, even war. Substituting "interest" for "love" must have seemed an obvious move, since the assumption that love is the primary emotion was precisely what authors like Guicciadini were trying to get away from. But it kept that same assumption of insatiable desires under the guise of impersonal math, since what is "interest" but the demand that money never cease to grow? The same was true when it became the term for investments "I have a twelve-percent interest in that venture"-it is money placed in the continual pursuit of profit.59 The very idea that human beings are motivated primarily by "self-interest," then, was rooted in the profoundly Christian assumption that we are all incorrigible sinners; left to our own devices, we will not simply pursue a certain level of comfort and happiness and then stop to enjoy it; we will never cash in the chips, like Sindbad, let alone question why we need to buy chips to begin with. And as Augustine already anticipated, infinite desires in a finite world means endless competition, which in turn is why, as Hobbes insisted, our only hope of social peace lies in contractual arrangements and strict enforcement by the apparatus of the state.

One should read Smith’s famous lines: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.” In the context of this flip of morality that started to demonize debt/credit and prefer coinage:

The bizarre thing here is that, at the time Smith was writing, this simply wasn't true. Most English shopkeepers were still carrying out the main part of their business on credit, which meant that customers appealed to their benevolence all the time. Smith could hardly have been unaware of this. Rather, he is drawing a utopian picture. He wants to imagine a world in, which everyone used cash, in part because he agreed with the emerging middle-class opinion that the world would be a better place if everyone really did conduct themselves this way, and avoid confusing and potentially corrupting ongoing entanglements.

Transition to Capital II: Deflation of Bullion

One thing that eventually paved the way to modern capitalism, and the declining quality of life of the peasantry, was not the influx of bullion into European markets but the vanishing of bullion from markets. This was caused by an almost religious devotion to the intrinsic value of metals:

Some appealed to alchemy to argue that the monetary status of gold and silver had a natural basis: gold (which partook of the sun) and silver (which partook of the moon) were the perfected, eternal forms of metal toward which all baser metals tend to evolve. Most, however, didn’t feel that much explanation was required; the intrinsic value of precious metals was simply self-evident. As a result, when royal advisors or London pamphleteers discussed economic problems, the issues they debated were always the same: How do we keep bullion from leaving the country? What do we do about the crippling shortage of coin? For most, questions like “How do we maintain trust in local credit systems?” simply did not arise.

This belief in the intrinsic value of money actually prevented some of our most familiar institutions of modern capitalism (e.g. fractional reserve banking) from coming into being.

This is the story normally told as "the origins of modern banking." From our perspective, though, what it reveals is just how closely bound together war, bullion, and these new credit instruments were. One need only consider the paths not traveled. For instance: there was no intrinsic reason why a bill of exchange couldn't be endorsed over to a third party, then become generally transferable--thus, in effect turning it into a form of paper money. This is how paper money first emerged in China. In Medieval Europe there were periodic movements in that direction, but for a variety of reasons, they did not go far. Alternately, bankers can produce money by issuing book credits for more than they have on cash reserve. This is considered the very essence of modern banking, and it can lead to the circulation of private bank notes. Some moves were made in this direction as well, especially in Italy, but it was a risky proposition, since there was always the danger of depositors panicking and making a run, and most Medieval governments threatened extremely harsh penalties on bankers unable to make restitution in such cases: as witnessed by the example of Francesch Castello, beheaded in front of his own bank in Barcelona in 1360.

This belief was really disastrous in it prevented the government from being able to adjust the denomination of the prices. In the 17th century, British silver saw a spike in prices such that the face value of the coin was less than its silver content. As a result coins were being shaved off the edges to the point that only 50% of their weight remained. Locke argued that a pound of silver had a specific intrinsic value and that it was the government’s job only to ensure the weight was accurate. He campaigned for the mint to remint at the exact same face value (below metal value) with disastrous results. The reforms that counteracted the downsides of Locke’s proposal made it such that every transaction was now done on fiat.

The Treasury proposed to call in the coinage and reissue it at a 20-to-25-percent lower weight, so as to bring it back below the market price for silver. Many who supported this position took explicitly Chartalist positions, insisting that silver has no intrinsic value anyway, and that money is simply a measure established by the state. The man who won the argument, however, was John Locke, the Liberal philosopher, at that time acting as advisor to Sir Isaac Newton, then Warden of the Mint. Locke insisted that one can no more make a small piece of silver worth more by relabeling it a "shilling" than one can make a short man taller by declaring there are now fifteen inches in a foot. Gold and silver had a value recognized by everyone on earth; the government stamp simply attested to the weight and purity of a coin, and-as he added in words veritably shivering with indignation-for governments to tamper with this for their own advantage was just as criminal as the coin-clippers themselves:
The use and end of the public stamp is only to be a guard and voucher of the quality of silver which men contract for; and the injury done to the public faith, in this point, is that which in clipping and false coining heightens the robbery into treason.
Therefore, he argued, the only recourse was to recall the currency and restrike it at exactly the same value that it had before. This was done, and the results were disastrous. In the years immediately following, there was almost no coinage in circulation; prices and wages collapsed; there was hunger and unrest. Only the wealthy were insulated, since they were able to take advantage of the new credit money, trading back and forth portions of the king's debt in the form of banknotes. The value of these notes, too, fluctuated a bit at first, but eventually stabilized once they were made redeemable in precious metals. For the rest, the situation only really improved once paper money, and, eventually, smaller-denomination currency, became more widely available. The reforms proceeded top-down, and very slowly, but they did proceed, and they gradually came to create the world where even ordinary, everyday transactions with butchers and bakers were carried out in polite, impersonal terms, with small change, and therefore it became possible to imagine everyday life itself as a matter of self-interested calculation.

Despite the poor outcome of Locke’s suggestions his materialism actually became accepted by most economists at the time, simply because the governments who did not peg their paper currency to metals experienced terrible disasters:

It would appear that it's only in a resolutely materialist age that this ability to simply produce things by saying that they are there comes to be seen as a scandalous, even diabolical. And the surest sign that one has entered such a materialist age is precisely the fact that it is seen so.

Transition to Capital III: Inflation of Paper Currency

When bankers controlled the governments (and thus the armies), they could be much more creative in manipulating the finances. The venetian government of the 12th century pioneered the idea of funding through government debt which effectively circulated as a currency:

Where bankers effectively controlled Medieval governments, it proved safer and more profitable to manipulate the government's own finances. The history of modern financial instruments, and the ultimate origins of paper money, really begin with the issuing of municipal bonds-a practice begun by the Venetian government in the twelfth century when, needing a quick infusion of income for military purposes, it levied a compulsory loan on its taxpaying citizens, for which it promised each of them five percent annual interest, and allowed the "bonds" or contracts to become negotiable, thus, creating a market in government debt. They [the Venetian government?] tended to be quite meticulous about interest payments, but since the bonds had no specific date of maturity, their market prices often fluctuated wildly with the city's political and military fortunes, and so did resulting assessments of the likelihood that they would be able to be repaid. Similar practices quickly spread to the other Italian states and to northern European merchant enclaves as well: the United Provinces of Holland financed their long war of independence against the Hapsburgs (1568-1648) largely through a series of forced loans, though they floated numerous voluntary bond issues as well.

It was precisely these manipulations of money creation that caused the inflation and collapse of prices and not the influx of bullion:

While already by the sixteenth century, merchants were using bills of exchange to settle debts, government debt bonds-rentes, juros, annuities-were the real credit money of the new age. It's here that we have to look for the real origins of the "price revolution" that hammered once-independent townsfolk and villagers into the ground and opened the way for most of them to ultimately be reduced to wage laborers, working for those who had access to these higher forms of credit. Even in Seville, where the treasure fleets from the New World first touched port in the Old, bullion was not much used in day-to-day transactions. Most of it was taken directly to the warehouses of Geno ese bankers operating from the port and stored for shipment east. But in the process, it became the basis for complex credit schemes whereby the value of the bullion was loaned to the emperor to fund military operations, in exchange for papers entitling the bearer to interest-bearing annuities from the government-papers that could in turn be traded as if they were money. By such means, bankers could almost endlessly multiply the actual value of gold and silver they held. Already in the 1570s, we hear of fairs in places like Medina del Campo, not far from Seville, that had become "veritable factories of certificates," with transactions carried out exclusively through paper. Since whether the Spanish government would actually pay their debts, or how regularly, were always slightly uncertain, the bills would tend to circulate at a discount-especially as juros began circulating throughout the rest of Europe-causing continual inflation.

Critique: The process by which the bankers "endlessly-multiplied" their gold before sending it off to China was through fractional reserve banking. So it's not endless after all.

The first true currency came about with the Bank of England. This was because what was traded as currency was no longer government bonds but promissory notes (that did not carry interest):

The reader will recall that the Bank of England was created when a consortium of forty London and Edinburgh merchants-mostly already creditors to the crown-offered King William III a £1.2 million loan to help finance his war against France. In doing so, they also convinced him to allow them in return to form a corporation with a monopoly on the issuance of banknotes-which were, in effect, promissory notes for the money the king now owed them. This was the first independent national central bank, and it became the clearinghouse for debts owed between smaller banks; the notes soon developed into the first European national paper currency.

And now we see an inversion of Axial age logic. In the Axial age, money was debt owed to the king. The king would distribute taxes to his armies and demand that everyone pay taxes in that denomination. It was what you owed to the King. In the Capitalist age, money was debt owed by the king. When you are transacting paper notes, it is a promissory note that could be redeemed for gold. This is significant because for two reasons 1. The relationship of the people with the government changes. Increasingly, people began to feel like it was they who owned the government and not vice versa. 2. This goes back to Graeber’s central thesis on the capitalistic age: everything is just motivated by a long chain of debt. Even the government now has an imperative and is beholden to grow. Capital ensures its own growth by financializing and creating long chains of debt:

Starting from our baseline date of 1700, then, what we see at the dawn of modern capitalism is a gigantic financial apparatus of credit and debt that operates-in practical effect-to pump more and more labor out of just about everyone with whom it comes into contact, and as a result produces an endlessly expanding volume of material goods. It does so not just by moral compulsion, but above all by using moral compulsion to mobilize sheer physical force. At every point, the familiar but peculiarly European entanglement of war and commerce reappears-often in startling new forms. The first stock markets in Holland and Britain were based mainly in trading shares of the East and West India companies, which were both military and trading ventures. For a century, one such private, profit-seeking corporation governed India. The national debts of England, France, and the others were based in money borrowed not to dig canals and erect bridges, but to acquire the gunpowder needed to bombard cities and to construct the camps required for the holding of prisoners and the training of recruits. Almost all the bubbles of the eighteenth century involved some fantastic scheme to use the proceeds of colonial ventures to pay for European wars. Paper money was debt money, and debt money was war money, and this has always remained the case. Those who financed Europe's endless military conflicts also employed the government's police and prisons to extract ever-increasing productivity from the rest of the population.

Chapter 12 The Beginning of Something Yet to be Determined

Graeber sees the last 50 years since the USD went off the gold standard in 1971 and became the global reserve currency as the birth of a new era (a return to the virtual economy). It is defined by two movements.

First is of the USD going off the gold standard and becoming the reserve currency. This, of course, also coincides with US being the world’s debtor. If the first movement is the flipping of power between creditor and debtor (the debtor is now the more powerful one) on the international stage, then the second movement is this exact same flipping nationally:

This gave rise to a second line of argument: that no doubt the rich were the major creditors in the ancient world, but now the situation has been reversed. So Ludwig von Mises, writing in the 1930s, around the time when Keynes was calling for the euthanasia of the rentiers:
Public opinion has always been biased against creditors. It identifies creditors with the idle rich and debtors with the industrious poor. It abhors the former as ruthless exploiters and pities the latter as innocent victims of oppression. It considers government action designed to curtail the claims of the creditors as measures extremely beneficial to the immense majority at the expense of a small minority of hardboiled usurers. It did not notice at all that nineteenth-century capitalist innovations have wholly changed the composition of the classes of creditors and debtors. In the days of Solon the Athenian, of ancient Rome's agrarian laws, and of the Middle Ages, the creditors were by and large the rich and the debtors the poor. But in this age of bonds and debentures, mortgage banks, saving banks, life insurance policies, and social security benefits, the masses of people with more moderate income are rather themselves creditors.

Despite – or, in some cases, because – of these movements, Graeber levels a few critiques against our new era.

Critique One: Preserving Imbalance

It doesn’t really matter who is the creditor or debtor but who controls political power. This is true for the national stage:

In the wake of the subprime collapse, the U.S. government was forced to decide who really gets to make money out of nothing: the financiers, or ordinary citizens. The results were predictable. Financiers were "bailed out with taxpayer money"-which basically means that their imaginary money was treated as if it were real. Mortgage holders were, overwhelmingly, left to the tender mercies of the courts, under a bankruptcy law that Congress had a year before (rather suspiciously presciently, one might add) made far more exacting against debtors.

Critique Two: Debt Imperialism

This is, so Graeber claims, also true internationally. Graeber seems to suggest that America running a trade deficit is actually imposing a global tax on everyone. His argument, however, rests on two wrong assumptions: 1. That other governments have nothing to do with USD and are “forced” to buy US treasury bonds. In reality, other governments seem to be able to do many things with their USD reserves (e.g. buy goods). Furthermore, they seem to be buying American bonds because it has the highest yields in developed countries. 2. That the other governments actually lose money because the yield on treasury bonds are lower than inflation (not the case).

Because of United States trade deficits, huge numbers of dollars circulate outside the country; and one effect of Nixon's floating of the dollar was that foreign central banks have little they can do with these dollars except to use them to buy U.S. treasury bonds. This is what is meant by the dollar becoming the world's "reserve currency." These bonds are, like all bonds, supposed to be loans that will eventually mature and be repaid, but as economist Michael Hudson, who first began observing the phenomenon in the early '7os, noted, they never really do:
To the extent that these Treasury IOUs are being built into the world's monetary base they will not have to be repaid, but are to be rolled over indefinitely. This feature is the essence of America's free financial ride, a tax imposed at the entire global expense.
What's more, over time, the combined effect of low interest payments and the inflation is that these bonds actually depreciate in value-adding to the tax effect, or as I preferred to put it in the first chapter, "tribute." Economists prefer to call it "seigniorage." The effect, though, is that American imperial power is based on a debt that will never-can never-be repaid. Its national debt has become a promise, not just to its own people, but to the nations of the entire world, that everyone knows will not be kept.

Critique Three: “Free” Labor

The third critique is that modern capitalism does not operate on free labor at all that globally and nationally in the United States, people are still motivated by paying off interest-bearing loans. This is a bit far-fetched (one of the reasons being the lenient bankruptcy laws) and even Graeber admits it by calling US labor “subjective” debt peonage:

Debt peonage continues to be the main principle of recruiting labor globally: either in the literal sense, in much of East Asia or Latin America, or in the subjective sense, whereby most of those working for wages or even salaries feel that they are doing so primarily to pay off interest-bearing loans. The new transportation and communications technologies have just made it easier, making it possible to charge domestics or factory workers thousands of dollars in transportation fees, and then have them work off the debt in distant countries where they lack legal protections. Insofar as overarching grand cosmic institutions have been created that might be considered in any way parallel to the divine kings of the ancient Middle East or the religious authorities of the Middle Ages, they have not been created to protect debtors, but to enforce the rights of creditors. The International Monetary Fund is only the most dramatic case in point here. It stands at the pinnacle of a great, emerging global bureaucracy-the first genuinely global administrative system in human history, enshrined not only in the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, but also the endless host of economic unions and trade organizations and non-governmental organizations that work in tandem with them-created largely under U.S. patron age. All of them operate on the principle that (unless one is the United States Treasury), "one has to pay one's debts"-since the specter of default by any country is assumed to imperil the entire world monetary system, threatening, in Addison's colorful image, to turn all the world's sacks of (virtual) gold into worthless sticks and paper.

Critique Four: Built on Violence

The final critique that Graeber levies is that the US debt exists in the first place because of its military expenditures and the legitimacy of the USD is backed by the military:

The United States has fought no war in which it did not control the skies, and it has relied on aerial bombardment far more systematically than any other military-in its recent occupation of Iraq, for instance, even going so far as to bomb residential neighborhoods of cities ostensibly under its own control. The essence of U.S. military predominance in the world is, ultimately, the fact that it can, at will, drop bombs, with only a few hours' notice, at absolutely any point on the surface of the planet. No other government has ever had anything remotely like this sort of capability. In fact, a case could well be made that it is this very power that holds the entire world monetary system, organized around the dollar, together.

Miscellaneous

Debt vs. Hierarchy

Graeber wrestles with a paradox: why is debt often less bearable, and its removal seen as a more justified than more unequal institutions of explicit hierarchy (e.g. Caste system or slavery). Throughout history many peasant revolts were for the removal of debts compared to those that sought to topple hierarchy. His answer is because debt presumes equality between two parties but destroys that equality. In other words, in hierarchy, one both expects and experiences inequality in hierarchy whereas one experiences inequality yet expects equality in relations of debt. Furthermore, because of this, this must mean that the debtor is in some sense responsible for his lowly position. He is to blame for his ills.

It's particularly striking because so many other things do seem to have been accepted as simply in the nature of things. One does not see a similar outcry against caste systems, for example, or for that matter, the institution of slavery. Surely slaves and untouchables often experienced at least equal horrors. No doubt many protested their condition. Why was it that the debtors' protests seemed to carry such greater moral weight? Why were debtors so much more effective in winning the ear of priests, prophets, officials, and social reformers? Why was it that officials like Nehemiah were willing to give such sympathetic con sideration to their complaints, to inveigh, to summon great assemblies?
Some have suggested practical reasons: debt crises destroyed the free peasantry, and it was free peasants who were drafted into ancient armies to fight in wars. No doubt this was a factor; clearly it wasn't the only one. There is no reason to believe that Nehemiah, for instance, in his anger at the usurers, was primarily concerned with his ability to levy troops for the Persian king. It is something more fundamental.
What makes debt different is that it is premised on an assumption of equality. To be a slave, or lower-caste, is to be intrinsically inferior. We are dealing with relations of unadulterated hierarchy. In the case of debt, we are dealing with two individuals who begin as equal parties to a contract. Legally, at least as far as the contract is concerned, they are the same.
We can add that, in the ancient world, when people who actually were more or less social equals loaned money to one another, the terms appear to have normally been quite generous. Often no interest was charged, or if it was, it was very low. "And don't charge me interest," wrote one wealthy Canaanite to another, in a tablet dated around 1200 BC, "after all, we are both gentlemen."30 Between close kin, many "loans" were probably, then as now, just gifts that no one seriously expected to recover. Loans between rich and poor were something else again.
The problem was that, unlike status distinctions like caste or slavery, the line between rich and poor was never precisely drawn. One can imagine the reaction of a farmer who went up to the house of a wealthy cousin, on the assumption that "humans help each other," and ended up, a year or two later, watching his vineyard seized and his sons and daughters led away. Such behavior could be justified, in legal terms, by insisting that the loan was not a form of mutual aid but a commercial relationship-a contract is a contract. (It also required a certain reliable access to superior force.) But it could only have felt like a terrible betrayal. What's more, framing it as a breach of contract meant stating that this was, in fact, a moral issue: these two parties ought to be equals, but one had failed to honor the bargain. Psychologically, this can only have made the indignity of the debtor's condition all the more painful, since it made it possible to say that it was his own turpitude that sealed his daughter's fate. But that just made the motive all the more compelling to throw back the moral aspersions: "Our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren, our children as their children." We are all the same people. We have a responsibility to take account of one another's needs and interests. How then could my brother do this to me?

Who Pays Whom

It is common anthropological wisdom that bride wealth tends to be typical of situations where population is relatively thin, land not a particularly scarce resource, and therefore, politics are all about controlling labor. Where population is dense and land at a premium, one tends to instead find dowry: adding a woman to the household is adding another mouth to feed, and rather than being paid off, a bride's father is expected to contribute something (land, wealth, money . . .) to help support his daughter in her new home.

Cycles of Slavery

Slavery was abolished roughly in 600AD and then it made a resurgence:

On the popular level, slavery remained so universally detested that even a thousand years later, when European merchants started trying to revive the trade, they discovered that their compatriots would not countenance slaveholding in their own countries-one reason why planters were eventually obliged to acquire their slaves in Africa and set up plantations in the New World. It is one of the great ironies of history that modern racism-probably the single greatest evil of our last two centuries-had to be invented largely because Europeans continued to refuse to listen to the arguments of the intellectuals and jurists and did not accept that anyone they believed to be a full and equal human being could ever be justifiably enslaved.
What's more, the demise of ancient slavery was not limited to Europe. Remarkably, right around the same time-in the years around 6oo AD-we find almost exactly the same thing happening in India and China, where, over the course of centuries, amidst much unrest and confusion, chattel slavery largely ceased to exist. What all this suggests is that moments of historical opportunity-moments when meaningful change is possible-follow a distinct, even a cyclical pattern, one that has long been far more coordinated across geographical space than we would ever have imagined. There is a shape to the past, and it is only by understanding it that we can begin to have a sense of the historical opportunities that exist in the present.

Interest vs. Equity

Interest rather than equity sharing implies a lack of transparency within a community:

The practice is significant because it implies a fundamental lack of trust. After all, why not simply demand a share in the profits? This seems more fair (a merchant who came back bankrupt would probably have little means of paying anyway), and profit-sharing partnerships of this sort became common practice in the later Middle East. The answer seems to be that profit-sharing partnerships were typically con tracted between merchants, or anyway people of similar background and experience who had ways of keeping track of one another. Palace or temple bureaucrats and world-roaming merchant adventurers had little in common, and the bureaucrats seem to have concluded that one could not normally expect a merchant returned from a far-off land to be entirely honest about his adventures. A fixed interest rate would render irrelevant whatever elaborate tales of robbery, shipwreck, or attacks by winged snakes or elephants a creative merchant might have concocted. The return was fixed in advance.

This explains why, despite the clear normative advantageous of equity over debt financing (so Graeber claims), why societies don't always use it. 1. In some instances it is because of the negative consequences (the total control of creditor over debtor) that explains why debt financing is used in the first place. 2. Society needs to have a high degree of trust and transparency for equity financing (you need to know how much the venture made).

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Democracy in America by Alexis De Tocqueville | Notes & Summary

Johnathan Bi — Tue, 26 May 2020 03:15:31 GMT

Context

Tocqueville writes in a time where everyone had a philosophy of history. People believed that you can't understand politics without understanding the mechanisms of history.

There are two general narratives of how political revolutions/progress occurs. The Aristotelian accounts is that any regime can dissolve into any other regime. The Platonic account is that there is a teleological progression (circular or linear) between different types of regimes. In this regard, Tocqueville is more of a Platonist. He believes in the inevitable progression of democracy.

Tocqueville's philosophy of history is heavily Christian. There was once a period of a rule of law. Effectively a caste system. Christianity brought down this caste system by enabling anyone to join in the ranks of the clergy. The clergy entered the government and started wielding power. Then lawyers and the bourgeoise slowly developed. The new middle class was spawned by Christian destruction of the old caste system and it was this new middle class that yearned for a new political system.

The leftist interpretation is that society is trending towards the good after this radical break happened. The right believe that society is declining. The right have three options: 1. withdraw from society 2. attempt to undo the revolution 3. begin a new revolution that brings old aspects back stronger than before (20th century Fascism).

Democracy in America is mostly addressed to the right. He doesn’t necessarily think that democracy is trending towards the absolute good but he does believe it is unstoppable. He wants the right to give up an illusion of the return.

Tyranny of the Majority

Tocqueville worried about three forms of tyranny of the majority: 1. institutional tyranny: that existing governmental systems could be used by the majority to abuse a minority. 2. future tyranny: that government could expand or dissolve into a tyranny. 3. psychological tyranny: that the majority could exercise a form of thought control that brought the best minds to a level of mediocrity.

In almost all of these scenarios, the tyranny that Tocqueville fears is mild but pervasive, a tyranny that claws away at your character and soul rather than one that harms your body.

Institutional Tyranny

Tocqueville thinks that because we elect officials, we feel much more confident in them wielding power so democratic officials get to wield more power than their aristocratic counterparts. And since every layer of government is, in some way, elected by the people -- this is the defining characteristic of American democracies -- the whole of society is simply this one homogenous mechanism of power.

Tocqueville worries about the potential for abuse, minorities simply have nowhere to hide in such a society where the people control the government in its entirety. (Not sure how much of his argument stands given the polarization of politics).

When a man or a party suffers from an injustice in the United States, to whom can he turn? To public opinion? That is what forms the majority. To the legislative body? That represents the majority and obeys it blindly. To the executive power? That is appointed by the majority and serves as its passive instrument. To the public police force? They are nothing but the majority under arms. To the jury? That is the majority invested with the right to pronounce judgments; the very judges in certain states are elected by the majority. So, however unfair or unreasonable the measure which damages you, you must submit.

Future Tyranny

There are various ways that government can increasingly take on more power such that its domain (and therefore what they majority can enforce and control) becomes total.

We could be jealous of priviledges so much so that we hand increasing power to the state to level our differences:

The loathing men feel for privilege increases as these privileges become rarer and less important, so that democratic passions would seem to burn the brighter in those very times when they have the least fuel. I have already accounted for this phenomenon. No inequality, however great, strikes the eye in a time of general social inequality, whereas the slightest disparity appears shocking amid universal uniformity; the more complete this uniformity, the more intolerable it looks. Therefore, it is natural that love of equality should thrive constantly with equality itself: to foster it is to see it grow. This ever-burning and endless loathing which democratic nations feel for the slightest privilege has an unusual effect upon the gradual concentration of every political right in the hands of a single representative of the state. Since the sovereign authority stands necessarily and indubitably above all the citizens, it does not arouse their envy and each citizen thinks that he is depriving all his fellow men of those powers that he grants to the crown. The man living in democratic ages is always extremely reluctant to obey his neighbor who is his equal; he refuses to acknowledge that the latter has any ability superior to his own; he distrusts his form of justice and looks enviously upon his power; he both fears and despises him; he likes to bring home to him the whole time that they are both equally dependent upon the same master. Any central power which pursues these natural feelings loves and promotes equality, for equality eases, extends, and guarantees the actions of such a power to an unusual degree.

Industry and its growth could demand much more infrastructure, both material and political, to be built. Government and industry is symbiotic, the more the latter expands the more the former becomes all-encompassing:

Industry normally causes a multitude of men to congregate in one place, establishing new and complex relationships between them. It exposes them to sudden and great alternations of plenty and poverty, during which public peace is threatened. Finally, this type of work can come to damage the health and even the lives of those who make money out of it or those who engage in it. Thus, the manufacturing classes have a greater need of regulation, supervision, and restraint than all other classes and it is to be expected that the functions of government will multiply as they do.

This is not a tyranny per se but Tocqueville worries that the industrial, capitalist class could get so powerful that they form an aristocracy.

Lastly, Tocqueville also warns of the possibility of a military leader not giving up his power and seizing the country by force.

Psychological Tyranny

I know of no country where there is generally less independence of thought and real freedom of debate than in America.

This section reconstructs Tocqueville’s analysis of Democratic thought policing in Democracy in America. In the 19th century, the French Aristocrat toured the United States and spent the next decade wrestling with a central question. How can a society which guarantees the most freedoms on paper be so limited in imagination, devoid of independent thinking, and conformist in reality? This conformity isn’t just a superficial problem either, but a subtle yet nonetheless deadly bondage that chips away at our character, distorts our thinking, and corrodes our very spirit – a bondage so forceful and pervasive that Tocqueville labelled it a “tyranny”.

Unlike modern commentators who may provide a timely diagnosis – blaming a particular political ideology or the recent polarization of politics – Tocqueville locates the source of bondage in the very democratic institutions and ideals that grant us freedom in the first place. His answer may be timeless, but we still need to keep the historical context in mind. When he comments on how unfree Americans were, he certainly did not have in mind as comparison the surveillance technologies of the 21st century nor the totalitarian regimes of the 20th. Tocqueville is contrasting the bondage of the democratic citizen to the freedom of European aristocrats who had considerable independence, even from the monarch. This may seem like a reason to dismiss his observations entirely. Aristocracies are part of the past; only a tiny population enjoyed this freedom; we shouldn’t dwell in a pessimistic critique of the freest regime we have today. But it is precisely this anachronism that makes his insights so unique and valuable. By contrasting democratic life to, perhaps, the most independent class in history, we can see how our freedoms are still limited in subtle ways. Under this light, it is we who are the pessimist and Tocqueville the optimist. For we look at democracies and say: “Yes, this is as free as man can be.” Tocqueville offers instead: “No, you can be much more!”

Tocqueville draws a sharp distinction between the influence of democratic institutions (e.g. elections) and democratic ideals (e.g. equality). Both will limit independent thinking but in different ways.

The defining characteristic of democratic institutions is the self-governance of the people. The political leadership is elected and, to a large extent, directed by the opinions of the masses. Ideas flow bottom-up, not top-down. A requirement of democratic citizenship is, therefore, to have an opinion on a wide-variety of topics. Ask any American, and they will gladly go on about anything from abortion, to economic policy, to global affairs. Ask almost any other nationality, and expect a puzzled look in response, wondering why you are asking them questions reserved for experts. From a young age, the American child is encouraged to form her own opinions, so much so that we expect beauty pageant contestants to have a ready-made foreign policy response to ISIS. The oddity of this social fact is perhaps visible only to the foreign eye: a fundamental perquisite of social life in America is to hold strong opinions on issues experts devote their entire lives to investigating. This social expectation is generated by the political demands of democratic institutions. If the people are to govern, the people must make up their own minds.

Doesn’t this encourage free-thinking? Common sense suggests that the expectation to be opinionated should produce a nation of inquisitive and liberated minds. Tocqueville does not deny that the American is more educated and informed than your average aristocratic citizen, most of whom are peasants. What is worrisome is the way we form and enforce our opinions on others.

Americans do not seek opinions from traditional forms of authority. There is a subconscious assumption that if we are equals, we must have equal access to the truth and the same capacities to reason. The democratic ideal of equality makes any authority figure appear inherently false and suspicious. Cautious of intellectual tyranny from above, Americans “search by oneself and in oneself alone for the reason of things.”

How this pans out in reality is a far cry from this Cartesian ideal. Most people are simply too busy to properly wrestle with all the different perspectives, much less the underlying assumptions. Even the philosopher, who spends every waking hour engaging with ideas, “believes a million things upon the authority of someone else.” Dogma – opinions accepted on nothing other than authority – is necessary simply because there are too many perspectives to be questioned and too many assumptions to be tested. When it comes to authorities of truth within a functioning society, the question to ask is not “if” but “where” and “how”. Tocqueville urges us not to take the American and his self-proclaimed independence at his word, and instead look for hidden springs of dogma.

The same ideal of equality that leads the American to distrust any traditional form of authority, makes him more trustful of public opinion. If we are all equals in our ability to reason, then truth shouldn’t lie with any singular person, no matter their credentials, but must instead rest with the greatest number of people, in public opinion. More so than any other regime, democracies look favorably upon the wisdom of the crowds. This is a marked difference from aristocracies where the authority of knowledge rested in the hands of a visible and select few. But just as the serf may adopt the ideas of the local priest, we too copy from authorities, even if they do not appear as such. We stitch together our beliefs from public opinion: a sound blurb on the late-night news, an echo from the community gathering, a post on social media. Because there is no explicit and visible authority to attribute our views to, we readily claim them as our own. We cling onto them ever the tighter, as fruits of our own intellectual labor, out of “pride as much as conviction.” When we say we are thinking for ourselves, too often that just means we forgot where we parroted it from.

More worryingly, the issues we are required to take a stance on are often heavily politicized. Certain stances – gun control, immigration policy, abortion laws, etc. – are mostly adopted on party lines. Asking about someone’s views on abortion is often less motivated by curiosity than a desire to place them on the spectrum, to label them as “friend” or “foe”. As a result, free thinking is even more threatened because it is often easier and more socially rewarding to pick the opinion that nets political advantages. If all my friends are liberal hippies, is it even an option for me to, upon careful research, conclude that climate change is blown out of proportion? Tocqueville’s insight is that the more external rewards there are around having the right opinion, the harder it is to be a free thinker and pursue truth for truth’s sake. When you liberate political power from a specific class, as democratic institutions do, you inject the political, and political rewards, across all of society. We shouldn’t be surprised that as more and more of our life – entertainment, sports, coronavirus, etc. – becomes increasingly partisan, it is harder and harder to have sober conversations about them.

Without a clear external authority dictating opinion, people feel a genuine ownership over their ideas. As a democratic citizen, I conceive of my opinions as “mine” and genuine, even if they come from external sources and are adopted for ulterior, political motives. The medieval courtier may secretly despise what he publicly accepts from an external authority. But the democratic citizen, believing himself to be the origin of his beliefs, endorses them wholeheartedly. Tocqueville praises this phenomenon and the character of responsibility it produces, but is nonetheless cautious of the side-effects. Because everyone in society has strong opinions, political allegiances and, thus, incentives to enforce these opinions, thought-control is much more pervasive than it ever could have been in aristocracies. Tocqueville’s claim is this: in aristocracies, there is a clear separation between the ruling class and the people, and even within the ruling class itself. Ideas don’t flow as freely and, therefore, society isn’t homogeneous. There’s always some safe harbor to explore outlandish ideas or, at least, enough people who don’t care enough to bother you. Even if the monarch wanted to control thinking, he can’t mobilize all of the people, all the time: “No monarch is so absolute that he can gather all the forces of society into his own hands and overcome resistance as can a majority endowed with the right of enacting laws and executing them.”

But, Tocqueville warns, when authority is bottom-up, when the people’s will determine the direction of the leaders, there is nowhere to hide. The ruling party share the opinions of the people because they were elected by them. And the people, now with a strong set of opinions and a deep sense of ownership over the political process, all become voluntary thought police, keeping each other inside the party line. Surveillance is carried out not through force or violence, but dirty glances, nasty remarks, and social ostracism. It is total and continuous. Tocqueville insists that when a democratic people makes its mind up on an issue, there is no room to explore alternatives. Anything outside the Overton window immediately becomes blasphemy.

But even when there isn’t a nation-wide consensus, policing on partisan lines can still smother independent thinking. It is the bottom-up nature that makes it so pervasive and effective. The homogeneous intellectual climate in our liberal universities is a good example. During class, in the dorms, at a party – students police each other non-stop in speech and action. They are not following orders from a central committee of political correctness, but simply participating in the democratic process which is inherently political. The result is an almost universal enforcement of the party line and an ideological homogeneity that could rival the achievements of the most effective central committees. As this example suggests, bottom-up policing is not only more pervasive but can also be more forceful because it coerces with a moral force. When the rare student deviates from the progressive ideal, he is not beaten or tortured, but made to feel like a worthless outcast. Tocqueville explains:

Under the absolute government of one man, despotism, in order to attack the spirit, crudely struck the body and the spirit escaped free of its blows, rising gloriously above it. But in democratic republics, tyranny does not behave in that manner; it leaves the body alone and goes straight to the spirit. No longer does the master say: “You will think as I do or you will die” he says: “You are free not to think like me, your life, property, everything will be untouched but from today you are a pariah among us. You will retain your civic privileges but they will be useless to you, for if you seek the votes of your fellow citizens, they will not grant you them and if you simply seek their esteem, they will pretend to refuse you that too. You will retain your place amongst men but you will lose the rights of mankind. When you approach your fellows, they will shun you like an impure creature; and those who believe in your innocence will be the very people to abandon you lest they be shunned in their turn. Go in peace; I grant you your life but it is a life worse than death.”

Tocqueville’s surprising insight is that the threat of violence used by an aristocratic monarch to control thought is often less forceful than the social forces within a democracy. The assumption here is that there is a moral force behind the people. If you rebel against an authority, you may gain the prestige of a martyr. But if you go against the people, you are an evil and worthless person. Tocqueville’s observation is that, with this moral force, bottom-up policing doesn’t even need to resort to physical punishment because it stamps out dissident ideas from the get-go: “The Inquisition was never able to stop the circulation in Spain of books hostile to the religion of the majority. The power of the majority in the United States has had greater success than that by removing even the thought of publishing such books.”

To be sure, it is not as if everyone in an aristocracy was a free-thinker. The social forces that restrict independent thinking exists in all societies. There will always be bottom-up policing. But it is inflamed by democratic institutions which require its citizens to have opinions around a wide range of issues and to form political allegiances around them.

The advantage of aristocracies, Tocqueville must think, is not in what they do have but in what they don’t have. People just don’t care about the wide range of issues that concern the democratic mind: they have no say in these matters and no parties hoping to win their votes. This is undesirable for a whole host of reasons. But, in so far as independent thinking is concerned, there is also no constant policing around these issues. Tocqueville concedes that aristocratic peoples are more ignorant – they hold less opinions. Democracies have, without a doubt, raised the averaged level of education. But aristocratic peoples are also less dogmatic – they hold less opinions out of ulterior, political motives. In such a society, someone who has the opportunity and urge to explore truth, granted a tiny minority, could do so without a pervasive social force policing their thought. Tocqueville is concerned that the social forces within American-style democracies will smother out the great, rare, and rebellious minds from the get-go and instead herd everyone into an above-average mediocrity.

If democratic institutions unleash social forces that limit our thinking through coercion, then the democratic ideal of equality furnishes our characters with similar habits, perspectives, and biases such that we naturally arrive at the same thoughts. Equality is the belief that we are fundamentally the same in essence. Any difference is either insignificant or the result of nurture. Democracies honor equality because they are meritocratic. In aristocracies, status is determined solely by birthright and remains stable for centuries on end. In democracies, no group of people is better in stock than another. Status is determined by merit. It is fluid and hierarchies are unstable. This is also the logic of the free market. Winners and losers change rapidly; your family lineage matters less than what and how much you can produce. Evidently, the ideal of equality is not exclusive to America nor democracies. We should not be surprised to discover the same effects on free thinking from equality in non-democratic regimes. Equality influences a society to the extent that it is meritocratic and allows for social mobility.

Equality shapes the democratic character to be pragmatic and oriented towards action. With equality comes meritocracy and with meritocracy comes opportunity. But this opportunity is a double-edged sword. Tocqueville observes that the aristocrat rarely worries about wealth and his status is more or less guaranteed. This frees the mind for more noble pursuits. Even the peasant is able to, in a much more limited sense, free his mind from worldly concerns, if not only for the reason that there is not much he can do to improve it. Our stations, as democratic citizens, aren’t fixed in life. We are given license to pursue material goods and improve our status. But this license is, at the same time, a bondage. Our gaze becomes directed only to the worldly and the mundane. Free to pursue status and wealth, the liberating “can” quickly becomes a demanding “ought”. Meritocracies, Tocqueville observes, envelope everyone in a state of agitation. Because our stations are not fixed, we always want more and fear losing what we already have. We are always engrossed in a state of action trying to improve and protect our lot. Under this light, the aristocrat and the peasant are mentally freed from worldly concerns, relatively to us, by being physically limited in their ability to change them. Even the rich do not enjoy the same leisure as the aristocrat did. The latter rests in the comfort that his status will never change, while the former must remain in a state of action to maintain his standing in society.

To be sure, our orientation towards constant action and our pursuit of worldly goods does not prohibit us from valuing ideas altogether. We quickly see the importance of intelligence for success and learn to appreciate it. But, as a result, we tend to value ideas only instrumentally for their usefulness. We are focused on utility, “aided much more by the opportunity of an idea … than its strict accuracy.” This pragmatism disposes us to value the useful and digestible ideas at the expense of the complex and profound. “In ages when almost every man is engaged in action, an excessive value is generally placed upon those rapid flights and superficial ideas of the intellect while its slower and deeper efforts are considerably undervalued.”

So, even though democracies may show a strong desire for knowledge, we must remember that “the desire to use knowledge is not the same as the desire to know.” Free-thinking, in Tocqueville’s opinion, requires a certain aristocratic leisure that is simply unavailable to the action-oriented man.” The mental habits which suit action do not always promote thought.” Tocqueville’s insight is that great ideas only come about when you pursue them for their own sake. They are never the result of a pragmatic calculus:

If Pascal had had in mind only some great source of profit or had been motivated only by self-glory, I cannot think he would have been able, as he was, to gather, as he did, all the powers of his intellect for a deeper discovery of the most hidden secrets of the Creator. When I observe him tearing his soul away, so to speak, from the concerns of life to devote it entirely to this research and severing prematurely the ties which bind his soul to his body, to die of old age before his fortieth year, I stand aghast and realize that no ordinary cause can produce such extraordinary efforts.

Equality furnishes the democratic mind with generalizations. The same pragmatism also leads the busy American to prefer generalizations that explain very much with very little. We are disposed to look for “common rules which apply to everything, to include a great number of objects in one category and to explain a collection of facts by one single reason” because our action-oriented life leaves little time for thinking. There is a further reason that we are inclined to generalizations, especially in matters regarding the human condition. The assumption of equality, that all humans are the same in essence, makes it natural to project observations of one individual onto the human whole. The same virtues and vices of one must apply to another. The best regime for one nation must also be the best universally. The moral standards of one epoch should judge all of history. We lose, if ever so subtly, this aristocratic instinct that different people are of different stock and should be evaluated according to different standards. The dangers of this tendency to generalize are obvious. We lose much nuance beneath our broad strokes. And our desire for a binary “good” or “bad” overlooks the complexity of the human experience.

Lastly, equality directs the democratic gaze towards progress. Aristocratic citizens can see the bounds on their potential, the scope of their occupation, and limits of their status more or less at birth. They acknowledge the potential for progress but in a much more limited way. The son of an ironsmith may think about how he can improve his craft, but he dare not dream of one day becoming the King. Democratic ambitions are not bound by any such restraints. The American child is told from an early age that: “You can be anything you want to be!” This encouragement is not entirely deceitful either. The child has a whole host of presidents, scientists, and CEOs with humble beginnings to look up to that lend credence to this promise. Coupled with the belief that we are of the same essence, one can only explain this wide variance in outcomes with the indefinite perfectibility of man. Democratic citizens believe in the boundless potential for the human subject to adapt and progress. Consequently, we live life constantly trying to be better and self-improve.

This disposition towards progress is not limited just to our lives but becomes a general perspective through which we view the world. Tocqueville offers an example: American ship makers build less durable vessels with the assumption that “the art of navigation is making such rapid progress that the best ship would soon outlive its usefulness if it extended its life more than a few years.” This belief in our indefinite perfectibility is a generator of a whole host of philosophical assumptions. Even the way we interpret time and history is linear rather than circular: as a continued progression of mankind itself.

It is hard to see how this perspective of progress can limit our thinking. It might be odd to even think of it as a perspective and not just plain fact in the first place. This only goes to show the degree which progress is embedded into our democratic psyche. Tocqueville warns us that we may be stretching the bounds of human perfectibility to excess and exaggerating what is possible. Can the child really be anyone he wants to? Furthermore, our lens of progress is, at the same time, an orientation towards the future. Tocqueville observes how the subject of a better future populates democratic poetry, as the subject of a glorious past did aristocratic poetry. We must be cautious not to devalue the past. If we think of ourselves as progressed, as better in every way, we overlook what can be learned from those who came before us.

A character oriented towards action, a mind fascinated with generalizations, and a gaze towards progress – these characteristics generated by the ideal of equality in turn generate numerous philosophical assumptions, predispose us to certain types of ideas, and makes us look for answers in similar places. But it is clear that as much as these tendencies frame and limit thought, they also lead the American to fruitful insights and innovative ideas. These weaknesses are, at the same time, strengths. Indeed, every political regime will carry within it assumptions that color its citizens perspectives. Tocqueville is highlighting ours so that we can become aware of them and their limitations.

It should be obvious by now that Tocqueville is neither an enemy of democracy nor America. On the contrary, he is a self-described “friend of democracy” and only came to America to study the most functional democracy in his time. Indeed, he is cautious of the potential for intellectual tyranny. But even this he concedes is somewhat necessary: no society can function without unity sustained by commonly shared opinions based on nothing but authority alone. Not everyone can or should be a free-thinker. Dogma is somewhat necessary for the healthy functioning of society.

Democracy in America highlights these sources of dogma that may not be obvious at first sight: hidden and decentralized but nonetheless restraining. Both democratic institutions and democratic ideals will always limit independent thinking, both to the benefit of societal cohesion as well as the detriment of independent thinking. This will not change as long as America remains a democracy. But Tocqueville does present the American with a genuine and meaningful choice: limit and contain these forces, and gain a degree of intellectual independence; neglect and inflame these forces, and expect an intellectual tyranny pervasive and restrictive beyond your wildest imagination. Just because the freedom of the intellect is granted on paper, does not mean it doesn’t have to be continuously fought for in reality.

Barriers against Tyranny

It is impossible to summarize all the possible barriers against tyranny. That is what the whole book is about: how to preserve freedom in an age of increasing equality. But there seems to be three key pillars.

First, the lawyer class is disposed to higher learning and order from the demands of their occupation. They can form a meritocratic aristocracy that controls democratic passions. Also the process of being a juror helps. It makes men feel like they are part of something larger, makes them respect the court's decisions and inhabits them in the mindset of judges.

Second, religion greatly curbs the tyrannizing force of the majority by giving men shared opinions, making them think in the long term, establish a code of morality, etc.

The last one is more local governments that institutionally prevent the majority from exercising too much power.

Freedom and Equality

Then, with no man different from his fellows, nobody will be able to wield tyrannical power; men will be completely free because they will be entirely equal; they will all be completely equal because they will be entirely free. Democratic nations aim for this ideal.

Tocqueville insists here that not only are freedom and equality not at odds with each other, as the common political intuition suggests, but that they are in harmony or even synonymous.

To unpack this unlikely synergy, we should first clarify what Tocqueville meant by both terms. By freedom, he refers not to the classical liberal notion of freedom (although it may be intimately connected) namely freedom from coercion. His freedom is an ability for self-governance. We get a hint of that in passages like these: “Under a free government … most public offices are elective.” The aristocrat who pursues all his hearts desires without coercion yet cannot assume political power is not free for Tocqueville. His freedom can be interpreted as an equality in wielding political power. Freedom becomes a subspecies of equality. It is no surprise then that “men may not become absolutely equal without being wholly free” for to be wholly equal in all conditions is to include being equal in possession of political power and thus free. Under this lens, free institutions are not institutions that protect people from coercion but rather ones that represent the authorship and will of the people.

By equality, Tocqueville meant an equality in all social conditions (and thus political conditions). The dangers of equality is that it encourages egoism and individualism in two ways. First, since everyone’s power is relatively equal, no one has the force to really effect a large amount of people, unlike the feudal lord. Since it is not even a possibility to effect those beyond one’s immediate circle, people’s interests and scopes narrow in onto their private spheres. Second, with the removal of a stable hierarchy, equality renders society in a constant state of flux. This unsettles the individual from any embedded social context.

The heightened degree of individualism makes democracies particularly susceptible to Tyranny. Free institutions prevent this, albeit not in the direct manner we intuitively think it would. Through the participation in free institutions, people learn about responsibility and get an education of the importance of society and the collective. Free institutions protect from tyranny not by directly preventing tyrannical coercion but by creating psychologically resilient individuals who form strong societal bonds. Again what is significant here is Tocqueville’s methodolical focus on the psychological. By focusing on the psychological he is able to connect the effects from various different spheres: religion, economics, politics, etc.

Herein lies the synergy between freedom and equality. Freedom limits the negative psychological impacts of equality: individualism and egoism. Of course, freedom can have its own faults that lead to anarchy. But in his discussion of the importance of political associations for civil associations, he makes it clear that it is through the exercise of larger freedoms do people get a better grasp of its stewardship: “Thus it is by enjoying a dangerous freedom that Americans learn the skill of reducing the risks of freedom.”

Individualism

We need to separate between four concepts. Individualism, egoism, sympathy and sacrifice.

Individualism is a disposition that only extend cares within a small circle. It is related to but not necessarily egoism which is to care only about oneself and treat everyone as a means to my ends. I may be an individual who only cares and works to better my family but nonetheless not be an egoist and respect the public good.

Individualism is a recently coined expression prompted by a new idea, for our forefathers knew only of egoism. Egoism is an ardent and excessive love of oneself which leads man to relate everything back to himself and to prefer himself above everything.
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Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which persuades each citizen to cut himself off from his fellows and to withdraw into the circle of his family and friends in such a way that he thus creates a small group of his own and willingly abandons society at large to its own devices. Egoism springs from a blind instinct; individualism from wrongheaded thinking rather than from depraved feelings. It originates as much from defects of intelligence as from the mistakes of the heart.
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Egoism blights the seeds of every virtue, individualism at first dries up only the source of public virtue. In the longer term it attacks and destroys all the others and will finally merge with egoism. Egoism is a perversity as old as the world and is scarcely peculiar to one form of society more than another. Individualism is democratic in origin and threatens to grow as conditions become equal.

Aristocrats were not individualistic. They cared a great deal about their lineage and country, their superiors and inferiors. Equality makes us individualistic in two ways. First, since everyone’s power is relatively equal, no one has the force to really effect a large amount of people, unlike the feudal lord. Since it is not even a possibility to effect those beyond one’s immediate circle, people’s interests and scopes narrow in onto their private spheres. This is why Tocqueville will say that the industrialist is worse to his workers than the feudal lord is to his serfs. Second, with the removal of a stable hierarchy, equality renders society in a constant state of flux. This unsettles the individual from any embedded social context.

In aristocracies:

Among aristocratic nations, families remain in the same situation for centuries and often in the same location. This turns all the generations into contemporaries, as it were. A man practically always knows his ancestors and has respect for them; he thinks he can already see his great-grandchildren and he loves them. He willingly assumes duties toward his ancestors and descendants, frequently sacrificing his personal pleasures for the sake of those beings who have gone before and who have yet to come. In addition, aristocratic institutions achieve the effect of binding each man closely to several of his fellow citizens. Since the class structure is distinct and static in an aristocratic nation, each class becomes a kind of homeland for the participant because it is more obvious and more cherished than the country at large. All the citizens of aristocratic societies have fixed positions one above another; consequently each man perceives above him someone whose protection is necessary to him and below him someone else whose cooperation he may claim. Men living in aristocratic times are, therefore, almost always closely bound to an external object and they are often inclined to forget about themselves. It is true that in these same periods the general concept of human fellowship is dimly felt and men seldom think of sacrificing themselves for mankind, whereas they often sacrifice themselves for certain other men.

And in democracies:

Among democratic nations, new families constantly emerge from oblivion, while others fall away; all remaining families shift with time. The thread of time is ever ruptured and the track of generations is blotted out. Those who have gone before are easily forgotten and those who follow are still completely unknown. Only those nearest to us are of any concern to us. As each class closes up to the others and merges with them, its members become indifferent to each other and treat each other as strangers. Aristocracy had created a long chain of citizens from the peasant to the king; democracy breaks down this chain and separates all the links.

Despite being more individualistic democratic man are also more sympathetic to the entirety of the human race. They are more willing to help with small deeds and relate as well as pity the suffering of others. This is because 1. they all consider each other equal and 2. there are more shared experiences for them to relate to each other.

But the democratic man is not disposed to making huge sacrifices like the aristocrat. To die for one's country is foreign to the democratic psyche.
In democratic ages, men scarcely ever sacrifice themselves for each other but they display a general compassion for all the members of the human race. One never sees them inciting pointless cruelty and when they are able to relieve another’s suffering without much trouble to themselves, they are glad to do so. They are not entirely altruistic but they are gentle.

The cynical reading of this is from Rousseau, who said that the wider the scope of sympathy the less possibility for action. The enlightenment philosopher loves mankind as to not love his neighbor.

Self Interest Properly Understood

As a result, Americans are never motivated by grand virtues and aesthetics but rather by utility and self-interest. Only things that concern their immediate sphere they find reason to pursue. Therefore, they need to reason if something benefits their self-interest before doing it. This gets to such an extreme point even when you ask the American who is genuinely helping another, he would explain it as just pursuing his own self-interest. Pragmatic character means that one can only be motivated by very immediate ends:

When the world was controlled by a small number of powerful and wealthy individuals, they enjoyed promoting a lofty ideal of man’s duties; they liked to advertise how glorious it is to forget oneself and how fitting it is to do good without self-interest just like God himself. At that time, such was the official moral doctrine. I doubt whether men were more virtuous in aristocratic times than in others, but they certainly referred constantly to the beauties of virtue; only secretly did they examine its usefulness. But as man’s imagination indulges more modest flights of fancy and everyone is more self-centered, moralists fight shy of this notion of self-sacrifice and dare not promote it for man’s consideration. They are, therefore, reduced to inquiring whether working for the happiness of all would be to the advantage of each citizen, and when they have discovered one of those points at which individual self-interest happens to coincide and merge with the interest of all, they eagerly highlight it. Gradually, similar views become more numerous. What was an isolated observation becomes a universal doctrine and in the end the belief is born that man helps himself by serving others and that doing good serves his own interest.

Discontent

Despite America's material prosperity, Tocqueville observed a deep-rooted sense of suffering. Here are some of his explanations why.

Physical Pleasures

Americans are more materialistic. This is because, unlike the aristocratic peasant, the american can actually work to improve his lot. The downside of this is that the peasant, values spiritual sphere more than the material sphere and is closer to God. American's focus on materialism rarely leads to true happiness:

At first, there is astonishment at the sight of this peculiar restlessness in so many happy men in the midst of abundance. Yet this is a sight as old as the world; what is new is to see a whole nation involved. The taste for physical pleasures must be acknowledged as the prime source of this secret anxiety in the behavior of Americans and of this unreliability which they exemplify every day.

Restlessness and Agitation

Meritocracy makes people restless and agitated. Because you "CAN" be more you feel like you "OUGHT" be more. In a way, we are both worse of than the aristocrat but also the peasant who is freed from being concerned with status.

When it is birth alone and not wealth which governs a man’s class, everyone knows precisely his place on the social ladder; he neither seeks to rise nor fears to fall. In a society so organized, men from the different castes have little contact with each other but, when chance contact does occur, they are ready to come together without wishing or dreading to lose their own position. Their relations are not based upon equality but they do not experience any restraint.
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When an aristocracy based on money takes over from one based on birth, this ceases to be the case. The privileges of some people are still extensive but the potential for acquiring them is open to all. The result of that is that those who possess them are constantly obsessed by the fear of losing them, or of seeing them shared, and those as yet without them long to possess them at any cost or at least to appear to possess them if they fail, which is not impossible to achieve. Since the social importance of men is no longer fixed by blood in any obvious and permanent manner and since wealth produces innate variations, classes still exist but it is not easy to distinguish clearly their members at first glance…. Straightaway an unspoken war is declared between all citizens; some employ a thousand tricks to join, or to appear to join, those above them, while others constantly fight to repulse those who seek to usurp their rights, or rather the same person does both these things for, while he is attempting to infiltrate the level above him, he fights relentlessly against those working up from below.

Endless Ambition

Americans have endless ambition, an ambition that must be thwarted if not only for the fact that everyone else has its to. Because we are all equals and consider ourselves to have the same potential as others, we always want to be the best. But this unleashes a competitive force that inevitably upsets those ambitions:

When all the privileges of birth and wealth are destroyed, when all the professions are open to all, and when a man can climb to the top of any of them through his own merits, men’s ambitions think they see before them a great and open career and readily imagine they are summoned to no common destiny. Such, however, is a mistaken view which experience corrects daily. This very equality which allows each citizen to imagine unlimited hopes makes all of them weak as individuals. It restricts their strength on every side while offering freer scope to their longings. Not only are they powerless by themselves but at every step they encounter immense obstacles unnoticed at first sight. They have abolished the troublesome privileges of a few of their fellow men only to meet the competition of all. The barrier has changed shape rather than place. Once men are more or less equal and pursue the same path, it is very difficult for any one of them to move forward quickly in order to cleave his way through the uniform crowd milling around him. This permanent struggle between the instincts inspired by equality and the means it supplies to satisfy them harasses and wearies men’s minds.

Tocqueville Principle

The famous Tocqueville principle states that the more a society tends towards equality the more the inequalities look like great crimes. This is because they become muhc more apparent and unjust. So as society becomes more equal, people feel they are less equal and become more resentful (This is a different argument from GIrard).

One can imagine men enjoying a certain degree of freedom which wholly satisfies them. Then they savor their independence free from anxiety or excitement. But men will never establish an entirely satisfying equality. No matter what a nation does, it will never succeed in reaching perfectly equal conditions. If it did have the misfortune to achieve an absolute and complete leveling, there would still remain the inequalities of intelligence which come directly from God and will always elude the lawmakers. However democratic the state of society and the nation’s political constitution, you can guarantee that each citizen will always spot several oppressive points near to him and you may anticipate that he will direct his gaze doggedly in that direction. When inequality is the general law of society, the most blatant inequalities escape notice; when everything is virtually on a level, the slightest variations cause distress. That is why the desire for equality becomes more insatiable as equality extends to all. In democratic nations, men will attain a certain degree of equality with ease without being able to reach the one they crave. This retreats daily before them without moving out of their sight; even as it recedes, it draws them after it. They never cease believing that they are about to grasp it, while it never ceases to elude their grasp. They see it from close enough quarters to know its charms without getting near enough to enjoy them and they die before fully relishing its delights. Those are the reasons for that unusual melancholy often experienced by the inhabitants of democratic countries in the midst of plenty and for that distaste for life they feel seizes them even as they live an easy and peaceful existence.

Growth as a Requirement for Democracy

Democracies generate a lot of discontent, envy, and resentment. If they aren't channeled into productive, positive-sum ends, they are channeled into bitter party disputes. The best gift to America was its wide frontier that gave everyone a way to satisfy their ambition without stealing from their neighbor. The same could be said about economic growth. Perhaps it too is a necessity for democratic functioning.

In the lucky circumstances which have supported and confirmed the establishment and continuance of the democratic republic in the United States, the most important is the choice of the country itself which Americans inhabit. Their fathers have given them the love of equality and freedom but it was God himself who granted them the means of long remaining equal and free by his gift of this boundless continent.
General prosperity supports the stability of all governments, but especially democratic governments which depend upon the attitudes of the greatest number and primarily upon the attitudes of those most exposed to privations. When the people rule, it is vital that they are happy, to avoid any threat to the stability of the state. Wretchedness has the same effect upon them as ambition does upon kings. Now, those physical causes, unconnected with laws, which can lead to prosperity are more numerous in America than in any other country at any time in history.
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The territory of the Union provides limitless scope to human activity: it offers inexhaustible supplies for industry and labor. The love of wealth, therefore, replaces ambition and prosperity quenches the fires of party disputes.

Industry and Democracy

Wealth over Politics

Tocqueville believes that the top talent in democracies go and pursue wealth because political power is unstable and there is no real independence (you are dictated by the will of the people). They also don't get the respect they do in public life as they do in private life and so don't bother trying.

In fact the wealthy in America, in public life, have to appear to be poor, to have friends in low places. There is a deep insecurity and disdain for democratic processes by the rich, because of how powerful the people are:

Just look at this opulent citizen. Wouldn’t you say he is like a medieval Jew who dreads that his wealth might be discovered? His clothes are simple and his demeanor is modest. Within the four walls of his house he adores luxury; he allows only a few chosen guests, whom he insolently calls his equals, to penetrate this sanctuary. No European aristocrat shows himself more exclusive in his pleasures, more jealous of the slightest advantages of his privileged position than he is. Yet here he emerges from home to make his way to work in a dusty den in the center of a busy town where everyone is free to accost him. On his way, his shoemaker might pass by and they stop; both then begin to chat. What can they say? These two citizens are concerned with affairs of state and will not part without shaking hands. But beneath this conventional enthusiasm and amid this ingratiating ritual toward the dominant power, you can easily perceive in the wealthy a deep distaste for the democratic institutions of their country. The people are a power they both fear and despise.

On the Industrialist Aristocracy

The most likely way that aristocracies will reappear in democracies is through wealth and industry. Tocqueville reasons that with the division of labor, you are going to get a class of smarter and smarter class of managers that needs to deal with more and more complex problems. But you are also going to get a less and less educated working class that focuses more and more on specificities.

A naïve reader, given Tocqueville's praise for aristocracy, may take this to be a positive thing to be celebrated. But this aristocracy, Tocqueville believes will have all the negatives of the old one and none of the positives.

First, this class will not be stable enough to form a class consciousness and leisurely character that was so generative of creative insights. Because of the competitive nature of democracies and the inherit instability within them, they need to be disposed to action as well. Capitalist aristocracies do not escape the same psychological problems that plague the democratic masses. Take the urge for work and pragmatism: while aristocrats of old saw it as repugnant, and leisure as virtue, today’s elites are more enslaved by work than many of their employees! Furthermore, the capitalistic elite does not seem to have its own cultural values. In aristocracies, culture flows top-down. In democracies, culture flows bottom-up, it seems like what, in no small part, determines the cultural values of the capitalist-aristocracy starts from the masses: Hollywood, memes, pop music, major sports. Lastly, instead of nobility in character and pride, it is my observation that the richer the household the child is born in, and the more they hold equality as an ideal, the more it produces a sense of guilt. Since the default position is equality, their wealth does not bring forth a reason for pride or a legacy to maintain and standard to uphold but a sentiment comparable to survivors guilt.

Second, they are worse to their workers than the lords were to their serfs. This is because, Tocqueville thinks, by conceiving of themselves as so much better and power, and having a historical relationship, the old aristocracy felt a degree of responsibility to the people below them that isn't the case anymore in societies where people are equal:

Not only are the rich not firmly united to each other, but you can also say that no true link exists between rich and poor. They are not forever fixed, one close to the other; moment by moment, self-interest pulls them together, only to separate them later. The worker depends upon the employer in general but not on any particular employer. These two men see each other at the factory but do not know each other anywhere else; and while they have one point of contact, in all other respects they keep their distance. The industrialist only asks the worker for his labor and the latter only expects his wages. The one is not committed to protect, nor the other to defend; they are not linked in any permanent way, either by habit or duty. This business aristocracy seldom lives among the industrial population it manages; it aims not to rule them but to use them. An aristocracy so constituted cannot have a great hold over its employees and, even if it succeeded in grabbing them for a moment, they escape soon enough. It does not know what it wants and cannot act. The landed aristocracy of past centuries was obliged by law, or believed itself obliged by custom, to help its servants and to relieve their distress. However, this present industrial aristocracy, having impoverished and brutalized the men it exploits, leaves public charity to feed them in times of crisis. This is a natural consequence of what has been said before. Between the worker and employer, there are many points of contact but no real relationship. Generally speaking, I think that the industrial aristocracy which we see rising before our eyes is one of the most harsh ever to appear on the earth; but at the same time, it is one of the most restrained and least dangerous.

War

The democratic people do not want revolutions or wars. This is because of the asset owning middle class. It is clear what people will lose if they fail but it is not clear what is to be won if they win. Democratic armies want war more than aristocratic armies because it is the only way for them to win status.

Democratic armies will be worse prepared than aristocratic armies at the beginning of the war because the democratic mores of pragmatism, material comforts is in conflict with the heroism and honor virtues present in the military. As a result, the best people do not go into militaries.

He does present a very hopeful idea towards the democratic chain of command, however:

When the officer is a nobleman and the soldier a serf, the one rich and the other poor, the one educated and strong, the other ignorant and weak, the tightest bond of obedience can easily be established between these two men. The soldier is broken in to military discipline, even, so to speak, before entering the army, or rather, military discipline is merely the completion of social enslavement. In aristocratic armies, soldiers quite easily become virtually insensitive to everything except the orders of their leaders. They act without thought, they triumph without passion, and die without complaint. In this condition, they are no longer men but still very fearsome animals trained for war.
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Democratic nations are bound to despair of ever obtaining such blind, detailed, resigned, and unvarying obedience from their soldiers as aristocratic nations can impose upon them with no effort at all. The state of society does not prepare men for this and they would run the risk of losing their natural advantages by wishing artificially to acquire it. In democracies, military discipline should not attempt to obliterate men’s creative freedom; it can only hope to control it so that the resulting obedience, though less ordered, is more eager and more intelligent. It is rooted in the very will of the man who obeys it; it relies not only upon instinct but also upon reason and, consequently, will automatically grow stricter as danger makes this necessary. The discipline of an aristocratic army is apt to relax in wartime because it is founded upon habit which is upset by war. But the discipline of a democratic army is strengthened in the face of the enemy because soldiers see very clearly the need to be silent and to obey to achieve victory.

Mores and Family

Tocqueville presents a quite idealistic picture of democratic family life. His essential point, commenting on parenting and sibling relationships, is that without rigid hierarchies, the artificial is taken away and the natural emerges and shines all the more brightly because of it within these relationships:

But such is not the case with the feelings natural to man. The law seldom avoids weakening such feelings by striving to mold them in a certain way and by wishing to add some thing, it almost always removes some thing from them, for they are always stronger when left alone.
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I do not know whether, all in all, society stands to lose by this change but I am inclined to think that individuals gain from it. I think that as customs and laws are more democratic, the relations of father and sons become more intimate and kinder. Rules and authority are less in evidence; trust and affection are often greater; it seems as though natural ties draw closer while social ties loosen.
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I think that it is not impossible to encapsulate in a single sentence the main sense of this chapter and several others preceding it. Democracy loosens social ties but tightens natural ones; it draws families more closely together while separating citizens.

In an aristocratic society, familial order is given on authority "because I said so". In democracies, parents treat their kids as if they were equals.

As far as the romantic relationship goes, he believes that womanly virtues are raised to being equal with masculine ones but women are not being forced to be men. American women are much more independent but lose a degree of warmness to them:

I realize that such a method of education is not free from danger; I am fully aware as well that it will tend to develop judgement at the cost of imagination and to turn women into virtuous and cold companions to men, rather than tender and loving wives. Although society is more peaceful and better ordered as a consequence, private life has often fewer charms. But those are minor ills which must be braved for a greater good. At the point we have now reached, we no longer have a choice: we need a democratic education to safeguard women from the dangers with which democratic institutions and customs surround them.

Interconnectedness of Politics, Religion, and Industry

If there is one thing to take away from this book it is how truly interconnected every aspect of a society is. Politics, religion, and industry these activities and the rules that govern them all shape our psyche in one way or another. It is through their psychological effects that these seemingly separate domains are so dependent on each other.

How Industry Supports Politics

Take inheritance laws for example. Seems like its not a big deal. But depending on whether the eldest son inherits everything or every kid inherits an equal share, an aristocracy gets created or destroyed:

When framed in a certain way, this law unites, draws together, and gathers property and, soon, real power into the hands of an individual. It causes the aristocracy, so to speak, to spring out of the ground. If directed, however, by opposite principles and launched along other paths, its effect is even more rapid; it divides, shares out, and disperses both property and power.

But the division of property doesn't only limit a material aristocracy. It also forms a psychological character that is not too concerned with family lineage and more concerned about the present:

But the law of equal division exercises its influence not merely upon property itself, it also affects the minds of the owners, calling their emotions into play. Huge fortunes and above all huge estates are destroyed rapidly by the indirect effects of this law.
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Among nations where the law of inheritance is based upon the rights of the eldest child, landed estates mostly pass from generation to generation without division. The result is that family feeling takes its strength from the land. The family represents the land, the land the family, perpetuating its name, history, glory, power, and virtues. It stands as an imperishable witness to the past, a priceless guarantee of its future.
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When the law of inheritance institutes equal division, it destroys the close relationship between family feeling and the preservation of the land which ceases to represent the family. For the land must gradually diminish and ends up by disappearing entirely since it cannot avoid being parceled up after one or two generations.
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This so-called family feeling is often based upon an illusion of selfishness when a man seeks to perpetuate and immortalize himself as it were in his great-grandchildren. Where family feeling ends, self-centeredness directs a man’s true inclinations. As the family becomes a vague, featureless, doubtful mental concept, each man focusses on the convenience of the present moment and, to the exclusion of all else besides, thinks only of the prosperity of the succeeding generation and no more. He does not aim to perpetuate his family or, at least, seeks to perpetuate it by other means than that of a landed estate.

How Politics Support Industry

In like manner, democratic institutions which force people into congregating and expressing their will through association also teach men laws of association necessary for industrial endeavors:

In civil life, every man can, if needs be, fancy that he is self-sufficient. In politics, he can imagine no such thing. So when a nation has a public life, the idea of associations and the desire to form them are daily in the forefront of all citizens’ minds; whatever natural distaste men may have for working in partnership, they will always be ready to do so in the interests of the party. Thus politics promotes the love and practice of association at a general level; it introduces the desire to unite and teaches the skill to do so to a crowd of men who would always have lived in isolation. Politics engenders associations which are not only numerous but spread very wide.

How Religion Supports Politics

Religion also provides deep moral intuitions that are indispensable for politics. He attributes the initial democratic urge, at least in New England, to the puritan desire to build a society where people can worship God without hinderance. In a Weberian move, contra-Marx, Tocqueville finds the essence of democratic thinking in Christianity:

In my opinion, it would be wrong to see the Catholic religion as a natural opponent of democracy. Among the different Christian doctrines, Catholicism seems to me, on the contrary, to be one of the most supportive of the equality of social conditions. For Catholics, religious society is composed of two elements: the priest and the laity. The priest rises alone above the faithful: beneath him all are equal.

The Tensions of Religion and Politics

But dependencies are not always symbiotic. Tocqueville warns religious leaders from ever getting engaged with politics in fears that the fleeting nature of politics and political parties will bring down the timeless trust in religion:

Mohammed drew down from heaven into the writings of the Koran not only religious teachings but political thoughts, civil and criminal laws and scientific theories. The Gospel, in contrast, refers only to general links of man to God and man to man. Beyond that, it teaches nothing and imposes no belief in anything. That fact alone, leaving aside a thousand other reasons, suffices to show that the first of these two religions could not possibly prevail for long in times of enlightenment and democracy, while the second is destined to have dominance in these times as much as in any other.
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If I pursue this same investigation further, I discover that to enable religions, humanly speaking, to thrive in democratic periods, not only must they carefully remain within a circle of religious matters but also their power depends even more upon the nature of their beliefs, their external structures, and the duties they impose.

The Inevitability of Equality

The gradual unfurling of equality in social conditions is, therefore, a providential fact which reflects its principal characteristics; it is universal, it is lasting and it constantly eludes human interference; its development is served equally by every event and every human being.

Tocqueville, in the introduction to his book, explains one of the core reasons for the writing of On Democracy in America: the inevitable democratic destiny of Europe. While this destiny is guaranteed, for the reasons I will soon discuss, its successful implementation is not so, a fact that was blatantly obvious in, say, the French Revolution. Investigating why Tocqueville believes the march of democracy and its egalitarian ideals is inevitable is not only critical to understanding the motives behind his work but will also be informative in analyzing the trajectory of the modern world, a world in which democratic regimes are showing increasing signs of strain.

The rise of democracy coincided with one of the defining characteristics of modernity: capitalism. Capital revealed the stubborn class distinctions that were so entrenched in society to be a hinderance on commerce: before the eyes of a trader, everyone is equal in so far as they can pay. The great equalizer of the free market began eroding previous class distinctions in favor of the more egalitarian meritocratic system: “The influence of money began to assert itself in state affairs. Business opened a new pathway to power and the financier became a political influence both despised and flattered.”

While this trend may have been operating in the background, the inflection point happened, so Tocqueville suggests, at two key junctures. The first juncture is the introduction of private property as opposed to owning property within Feudal tenure. This is, for Tocqueville, an inflection point because it seems that the very introduction of private property set up a system in place that began eroding concentrated power of the wealthy that gradually lead to egalitarianism:

As soon as citizens began to own land on any other than a feudal tenure and when emergence of personal property could in its turn confer influence and power, all further discoveries in the arts and any improvement introduced into trade and industry could not fail to instigate just as many new features of equality among men. From that moment, every newly invented procedure, every newly found need, every desire craving fulfillment were steps to the leveling of all. The taste for luxury, the love of warfare, the power of fashion, the most superficial and the deepest passions of the human heart seemed to work together to impoverish the wealthy and to enrich the poor.

This, in our era when the examination of political economy has been so influenced by Marx and neo-Marxian thinking, is a deeply interesting and surprising claim. The introduction of private property, contra Marx, isn’t responsible for wealth concentration but rather wealth dissemination. (I guess Marx would agree that capitalism is more equal than feudalism) Unfortunately, Tocqueville does not give further elaboration as to why every improvement to industry and the economy post-property is an equalizing force. A first, and frankly quite uninteresting resolution, would be that it equalizes the old strongholds of power within Feudalism. While this could be included into what Tocqueville was hinting at, I doubt this explanation covers the entirety of his claim.

The second inflection point, one whose exact emergence is much harder to pinpoint than the first, is when we began to control nature with rationality:

From the moment when the exercise of intelligence had become a source of strength and wealth, each step in the development of science, each new area of knowledge, each fresh idea had to be viewed as a seed of power placed within people’s grasp. Poetry, eloquence, memory, the beauty of wit, the fires of imagination, the depth of thought, all these gifts which heaven shares out by chance turned to the advantage of democracy and, even when they belonged to the enemies of democracy, they still promoted its cause by highlighting the natural grandeur of man.

His idea seems to be that every act of human achievement over the natural world or manifestation of cultural brilliance has also contributed to the development of democracy. This may also be quite a surprising claim for the modern academic that has associated the control of nature with the oppressive and non-democratic control of society by a minority. What is most surprising is his final sentence within this arch: that even those who use these advancements of control against democracy, accelerate the emergence of democracy by displaying the goodness and power of humanity at large. What’s implicit in his argument is that should one believe in the grandeur of man then a democratic society, a mode of organization which gives the most freedom for this grandeur to naturally develop, would also be preferred.

Tocqueville further broadens the scope of this already surprising claim. Every action in history, whether for or against democracy explicitly, has engendered it in some way:

Everywhere we look, the various events of people’s lives have turned to the advantage of democracy; all men have helped its progress with their efforts, both those who aimed to further its success and those who never dreamed of supporting it, both those who fought on its behalf and those who were its declared opponents; everyone has been driven willy-nilly along the same road and everyone has joined the common cause, some despite themselves, others unwittingly, like blind instruments in the hands of God.

A Real Choice

Despite this necessity, Tocqueville is not a fatalist. We are presented with genuine choices within this inevitability.

It's not so much democracy that I believe Tocqueville argues is marching on at a steady pace but rather the ideal of equality. This is a metaphor he uses to describe this unrelenting march:

The Christian nations of our day appear to me to present a frightening spectacle; the change carrying them along is already powerful enough for it to be impossible to stop yet not swift enough for us to despair of bringing it under control. Their destiny is in their own hands but it will soon slip from their grasp.

It's really important to pay attention to metaphors in philosophy. If truth is buried, we need tools, if truth is veiled, we need to remove something. If truth is a journey, we need a map. Depending on the metaphor, we are given different suggestions. But of course, sometimes stories/metaphors are just not vibrant enough to capture the intended meaning. The message he wants to send with this metaphor is, like a boat on a river, we are all heading towards the direction of equality whether we like it or not. But there is a genuine control of the outcome, whether its positive or negative.

What he is worried about is that equality in conditions will result in the tyranny of the majority in many different ways. The tools we can protect freedom must be natural to/conducive to equality itself. Ie. We can't ever go against the value of equality, we have to work with it because it is the dominant culture force of the time.

On the other hand, I am convinced that all those who will be alive in the coming centuries and might try to base their authority on privilege and aristocracy will fail. All those who might wish to attract and retain authority within one single class will also fail. At the present time there is no ruler so skillful or so strong that he could establish despotism by restoring permanent distinctions of rank between his subjects; nor is there a legislator so wise or so powerful that he is capable of maintaining free institutions without adopting equality as his rst principle and emblem. Thus, all those who now wish to found or guarantee the independence and dignity of their fellows should show themselves friends of equality, and the only worthy means of appearing such is to be so: upon this depends the success of their sacred enterprise.
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Hence it is not a matter of reconstructing an aristocratic society but of drawing freedom from within the democracy in which God has placed us.

Responsibility and Liberty

Tocqueville articulates a reciprocal, dependent relationship between a healthy form of patriotism – which I take to be an individually rooted and initiated responsibility for the collective – and liberal political structures.

First, liberal political structures depend upon a culture of responsibility. Said political structures, as outlined by Tocqueville, could be categorized by high governmental centralization and low administrative centralization. That is to say, matters of national concern such as diplomacy are managed by a centralized authority while more specific issues such as education and the judiciary were managed by localized governments. As a result, the healthy functioning of the system required individuals who took upon more responsibility onto their own shoulders when compared to their European counterparts: “In America, not only do institutions belong to the community but also they are kept alive and supported by a community spirit.” Political freedom at the highest level requires constant restraint from institutions at the lowest level that are efficient, responsible, and careful at guarding their own interests. It has become more evident why Tocqueville was so suspicious of Democracy being enforced upon a people without the prerequisite cultural software.

Second and more insightful, liberal political structures cultivate a cultural of responsibility. Put in another way, genuine responsibility and, when that responsibility is projected on the collective, patriotism depends on liberal political structures.

Patriotism does not long prevail in a conquered nation. The inhabitant of New England is devoted to his township, not because he was born there as much as because he views the township as a strong, free social body of which he is part and which merits the care he devotes to its management.

Tocqueville seems to suggest that the very fact a citizen recognizes that the government is not made of an antagonistic body of individuals whose interests are in irreconcilable conflict with their own and instead by people who represent his interests is the dominating force that inspires them to tend to the government. In short, it is the recognition that the government is not an “other” but part of “me” which generates this attitude of responsibility. It is evident why localized government is so central then: the closer the governmental body is to me, the easier it is to identify with it.

These localized governments are also advantageous because those who pursue political power are more likely to do it out of affection than ambition: “the New England township is so constituted as to give a place to the warmest affections without arousing the ambitious passions of the human heart.” And the constituents are more willing to forgive whatever mistakes that are eventually made: “If the government makes mistakes, and it is easy enough to point them out, they are hardly noticed because the government emanates from those it governs and, as long as it acts as well as can be expected, it is protected by a sort of paternal pride.”

At the end of the day, it is not efficiency or how local governments are better suited to meet the needs of their constituents that Tocqueville appeals to; in fact, he agrees that a nation would be more efficient the more centralized it becomes, at least in the near future. But it is the ability for decentralized governing structures to create a sense of patriotic responsibility, which is more important than any other factor for the flourishing of a society, that is its prime virtue:

What I most admire in America are not the administrative results of decentralization but the political effects. In the United States, the motherland is felt everywhere and is a subject of concern from village to the whole Union. The inhabitants care about each of their country’s interests as they would their own. They rejoice in the glory of the nation in whose successes they recognize their own contribution and are uplifted. They are elated by the all-round prosperity from which they benefit. They have for their homeland a feeling much the same as they have for their own families. It is from a sort of self-centeredness that they interest themselves in the welfare of their country'.

With this twofold argument, Tocqueville argues for the necessary dependency between liberal political structures and a culture of patriotic responsibility:

Without town institutions a nation can establish a free government but has not the spirit of freedom itself. Brief enthusiasms, passing interests, the instability of circumstances may grant the external forms of independence but that despotism which has been forced back into the depths of the social fabric resurfaces sooner or later.

The American political structure is designed so that each can pursue their own interests: “Everyone is the best judge of what is in his own interest— Corollary of the principle of the sovereignty of the people.” Yet it, paradoxically, cultivates a culture which is concerned with collective interests.

Political structures that prioritize the collective, on the other hand, seem to create selfish personalities. They only care about themselves because their society is oriented to care for them. They waver between extreme slavishness and license:

Worse still, the condition of his village, the policing of the roads, the fate of the churches and presbyteries scarcely bothers him; he thinks that everything is outside his concern and belongs to a powerful stranger called the government. He enjoys what he has as a tenant, without any feeling of ownership or thought of possible improvement. This detachment from his own fate becomes so extreme that, if his own safety or that of his children is threatened, instead of trying to ward off the danger, he folds his arms and waits for the entire nation to come to his rescue.
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Furthermore, this man, although he has so comfortably sacrificed his own will, still does not like obeying any more than the next man. Granted he submits to the whim of a clerk but, as soon as force is withdrawn, he enjoys defying the law as if it were a conquered enemy. So we see him constantly wavering between slavishness and license.

This is, for Tocqueville, the strongest benefit of democracy: the responsible, action-oriented characters it produces. Democracies are much less effective at executing against any single task, but in the long term, everyone wants to help and this decentralized approach gets more things done:

When those hostile to democracy claim that one man fulfills his duties more effectively than when all are involved in government, I think they are correct. Government by one man alone is more consistent in his rule than a crowd would be, supposing equal enlightenment in both these parties. He displays more persistence, more overall vision, more attention to detail, a better judgment of men. Anyone who refutes these things has either never seen a democratic republic at work or bases his assessment on very few examples. It is true that democracy, even when local conditions and popular attitudes foster its progress, does not display method and order in its government. Democratic freedom does not carry through each of its undertakings with the same perfect execution as intelligent tyranny; it often abandons them before reaping the profit, or embarks on dangerous ones; but, in the long term, it achieves more than tyranny; each task is less well done but more tasks are completed. Under its authority, it is not especially what public administration does which is great but what is done beyond and without its help. Democracy does not give its nation the most skillful administration but it ensures what the most skillful administration is often too powerless to create, namely to spread through the whole social community a restless activity, an overabundant force, an energy which never exists without it and which, however unfavorable the circumstances, can perform wonders. Therein lie its real advantages.On the Functioning of Elections

Elections and Bad Leaders

Tocqueville does not believe that elections produce the best leaders.

When I stepped ashore in the United States, I discovered with amazement to what extent merit was common among the governed but rare among the rulers. It is a permanent feature of the present day that the most outstanding men in the United States are rarely summoned to public office and one is forced to acknowledge that things have been like that as democracy has gone beyond its previous limits. The race of American statesmen has strangely shrunk in size over the last half-century.

This is because both how people choose and what kind of person is inclined to run.

First, people usually do not have the best judgement in choosing:

Whatever one does, it is impossible to raise the intelligence of a nation above a certain level. It will be quite useless to ease the access to human knowledge, improve teaching methods, or reduce the cost of education, for men will never become educated nor develop their intelligence without devoting time to the matter. Therefore the inevitable limitations upon a nation’s intellectual progress are governed by how great or small is the ease with which it can live without working.

While he attributes the problem of intelligence to time, I think the inequality is one in recognition. Ie. The high achievers are often driven by a self-and-other conception of what their talents are, even if everyone has infinite time this will still be an unequal resource.

Second, democratic citizens can feel a certain envy for the best leader. Not only do they lack the ability to recognize them they often lack the desire to do so as well:

I willingly accept that the bulk of the population very sincerely supports the welfare of the country; I might go even further to state that in general the lower social classes seem to be less likely to confuse their personal interests with this support than the upper classes. But what they always lack, more or less, is the skill to judge the means to achieve this sincerely desired end. A long study and many different ideas indeed are needed to reach a precise picture of the character of one single individual! Would the masses succeed where greatest geniuses go astray? The people never find the time or the means to devote to this work. They have always to come to hasty judgments and to latch on to the most obvious of features. As a result, charlatans of all kinds know full well the secret of pleasing the people whereas more often than not their real friends fail to do so.

The problem is also in who wants to run for elected office. Third, the best citizens, Tocqueville reasons do not want to take a political career because it is inherently unstable in democracies. They usually opt for industry instead.

Fourth, the best characters usually have too strong principles to bend over backwards to win votes:

It is probable, in fact, that the most appropriate men to fill these places would have too much reserve in their manners and too much severity in their principles ever to be able to gather the majority of votes at an election that rested on universal suffrage.

Elected Officials have more Power

People are more willing to give elected officials power because they believe they can control them completely:

In limited monarchies, power is divided between the people and the prince. Both have a vested interest in the stability of magistrates. The prince is unwilling to entrust the fate of public officials to the hands of the people for fear that they betray his authority; the people, from their point of view, are afraid that magistrates, being absolutely dependent upon the prince, might serve to oppress their liberty; thus they are, in a sense, left dependent upon no one. The same reason which persuades prince and people to make officials independent induces them to seek guarantees against the abuse of that independence so that they do not turn it against the authority of the former or the liberty of the latter. Both agree, therefore, upon the necessity of marking out, in advance, a line of conduct for public officials and find it in both their interests to impose upon these officials rules they cannot possibly disregard.

This is one of the key structures of democracy that will increasingly worry him as a potential avenue to tyranny:

Sometimes the majority even allows them to stray from those rules. They then dare to do things which a European, accustomed to the spectacle of arbitrary power, finds astonishing; this is because they are assured of the views of the greatest number and gain strength from its support. Thus habits are forming at the heart of freedom which one day could be fatal to its liberties.

But, paradoxically, he goes on to say that elections only work if the positions do not have much power granted to them. Otherwise, we should expect all kinds of cheating. Maybe a way to resolve this is that the government as a whole is granted more and more power whereas each individual actor is granted less and less.

Effectiveness of Elected Bodies

Democracy's movements can be described as concentrated, powerful, short, and aligned with the people. Aristocratic movements are over the long run but sustained, although their intentions might diverge quite a bit from the interests of the people:

In America, a great deal more enthusiasm and energy are spent on certain improvements than would be spent elsewhere. In Europe, an infinitely smaller but more consistent force is used on these same matters.

But remember, he never expects the American government to be the main driver of progress. It is the citizenry that is supposed to make meaningful change.

The Subjects of Aristocracies

He believes that aristocratic citizens oscillate between extreme servitude and rebellion because their desire for freedom isn't properly channeled:

Furthermore, this man, although he has so comfortably sacrificed his own will, still does not like obeying any more than the next man. Granted he submits to the whim of a clerk but, as soon as force is withdrawn, he enjoys defying the law as if it were a conquered enemy. So we see him constantly wavering between slavishness and license

Elected vs. Non-Elected Bodies Response to Public Opinion

One of the most interesting observations by Tocqueville is that often, non-elected bodies are more responsive, in some sense, to public opinion. That is because they are granted the natural legitimacy that elections offer elected bodies. They have to make up for it in some sense. Of course the way that elected and non-elected bodies are responsible to public opinion are quite different.

The peace, prosperity and very existence of the Union lie continually in the hands of the seven federal judges. Without them the constitution would be a dead letter; it is to them that the executive authority appeals against the encroachments of the legislature; the legislature, to defend itself against the assaults of the executive; the Union, to enforce obedience from the states; the states, to rebuke the impertinent onslaughts of the Union; public interest against private interest; the spirit of conservation against the destabilizing effects of democracy. Their power is immense but rests upon public opinion. They are all-powerful as long as the people agree to obey the law; they are powerless when the people have contempt for it. Now, of all powers, that of public opinion is the hardest to exploit because its limits are impossible to dene with any precision. It is often just as dangerous to lag behind as it is to outpace it. The federal judges must not only be upright citizens, learned men of integrity, and possess the qualities necessary for all magistrates, but they must also display statesmanship. They must be able to perceive the spirit of their age, to confront obstacles that need to be overcome, steer out of the current whenever the wave threatens to carry them away, and with them the sovereignty of the Union and the obedience to its laws. The President may lose his footing without any damage to the state because his duties are limited. Congress may make errors without destroying the Union because above Congress stands the electoral body which is able to change its ethos by changing its members. But if the Supreme Court ever happened to be composed of reckless or corrupt men, the confederation would have to dread anarchy or civil war.

Methodology

The wide array of predictions, especially the clairvoyant lucidity of some — e.g. foreseeing race tensions as irresolvable through legal measures — contrasted with, what history proved to be, the falsity of others — e.g. the impossibility of racial reconciliation, the Mississippi basin as the center of federal power due to fertility of soil — captured my attention. It prompted me to inquire further into the methodology of Tocqueville that has enabled him to produce a work with such high consistency of penetrating insights on one hand but also seems to lead to an overly deterministic view of history on the other.

Tocqueville is not in the business of comparing ends but simply relied on empirical scrutiny to outline the causal structures of reality. This method is supposed to show the reader how little choice of ends there really is. One limitation of choice happens due to historical inevitability: since democracy is inevitable then we really don’t need to compare the ends of a content, stagnant aristocratic life to a discontent, progressive democratic life because we have no choice. Another less formal but nonetheless binding limitation of choice, is that by highlighting the full consequences of what seem to be genuine choices — e.g. respecting or not respecting free speech — one option would prove so disastrous as to be out of the question all together. Tocqueville methodology is one that comes from almost a "beginner's mind" relying heavily on empirical observation and inquiry rather than the systematization of Plato or Kant. Of course, there is also the case where, once you fully descriptively describe all the consequences and shed light on the causal nexus, what appeared to be surface level dichotomies are resolved (freedom and equality in one of the chapters).

It is precisely this deep, empirical, assumptionless scrutiny into the causal nexus that I believe allows him to consistently generate fascinating and unintuitive insights. Systems are often too rigid and outdated especially in examining new phenomena, which democracy certainly was for the political science of the day. But, a limitation of this methodology is that by focusing so much on the actual, instead of postulating a more systematic conception of human nature, he often falls prey to an overly deterministic conception of historic events. If all you have to work on are the rules underlying current society, than your imagination is naturally limited; you naturally see few choices where there may be many.

The good side of this methodology is that it prevents Utopianism. The downside is that it can see too much necessity and not enough possibility:

I would like to have faith in human perfectibility but, until men’s nature has changed and men have been entirely transformed, I shall refuse to believe in the permanence of a government which has to unite forty different nations spread over an area equal to half Europe to avoid inter-state rivalries, ambition, or conflicts and to unite all their independent wills in the achievement of common plans.
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Should the Union last, the extent and fertility of the Mississippi basin will make it become, inevitably, the permanent center of the federal government. In thirty or forty years time, the Mississippi basin will have assumed its natural ranking. It is easy to calculate that, by that time, its population compared with that of the Atlantic Coast states will be in a ratio of forty to eleven, or thereabouts. In a few years time, control of the Union will have slipped entirely from the grasp of the founding states and the peoples of the Mississippi valleys will dominate the federal assemblies.

Tocqueville reminds us that we always find ourselves in contingent circumstances with their unique tradeoff profiles, we can stop thinking and dreaming about utopia.

Ambivalence

One of the biggest takeaways in Tocqueville is his ability to rest with ambivalence. Just like Nietzsche, he rarely gives a clear cut right or wrong answer but merely seeks to explain all the consequence of a phenomena.

It shows that an action can have disadvantages without advantages but it can rarely have advantages without disadvantages.

This is why this way of political reasoning is only possible for the political theoretician and not the political activist who must deal with truth in a more binary way.

Examine Beginnings

There is a subjective and objective reason to look at the beginnings. The subjective reason is that people in the beginning were not fully indoctrinated in the system yet and thus share unique perspectives on it (why we should read Tocqueville). Tocqueville speaks of the objective reason: that things and people form their characters from an early age. This ties to his determinism:

I think that nations, like individuals, almost always reveal the main features of their future destiny from an early age. When I observe the commercial energy of Anglo-Americans, their ease of effort, the successes they achieve, I cannot help believing that they will one day turn into the leading naval power in the world. They are driven to take over the seas as the Romans were to conquer the world.
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Step back in time; look closely at the child in the very arms of his mother; see the external world reflected for the first time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding; study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen to the first words which arouse within him the slumbering power of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to undergo; only then will you comprehend the source of the prejudices, the habits, and the passions which are to rule his life. The entire man, so to speak, comes fully formed in the wrappings of his cradle. Something similar happens in the case of nations; they always carry the marks of their beginnings. The circumstances which accompanied their birth and contributed to their development affect the remainder of their existence
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When, after giving close attention to the history of America, we examine carefully its political and social state, we can feel perfectly confident of this truth: that there is no opinion, habit, or law, maybe not even an event, I would venture to say, which is not easily explained by the point of departure.

Due to this methodology, we can also conclude, normatively, how important the beginnings and the founding moment is. America was able to be so successful, parts of it at least, because the people that lived their had a clean slate to work with unlike the French:

So, it is often difficult, when perusing the first historical and legislative records of New England, to perceive the ties which connected the immigrants to the land of their forefathers. We see them at all times exercising the rights of sovereignty, appointing magistrates, declaring peace or war, establishing law and order, enacting laws as if they owed allegiance to God alone.
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There is nothing more unusual or at the same time more enlightening than the laws passed during this period; it is there that the key to the great social mystery which the United States now presents to the world is to be found.

Psychology as the Master Political Science

Tocqueville's brilliance is his ability to trace out and clearly describe the connections between all these different spheres of civil society: religion, politics, family. The way he does so is by focusing on psychology as the master political science. He is able to make all of these spheres commute with each other by focusing on their psychological impacts.

Tocqueville Principle

The idea is that as actual inequalities decrease perceived inequalities will increase. The mechanism here is slightly different than Girard. Girard says that as people become more equal, they start desiring the same things. Tocqueville says that as people become more equal, they start believing that they deserve the same things.

This principle is everywhere in Democracy in America, but most interesting in his discussion about race:

There is, moreover, a curious principle of relative justice very deeply rooted in the heart of mankind. Men are much more struck by inequalities inside the same class than those observable between different classes. Slavery is understood but how can one allow several million citizens to live beneath the burden of eternal shame and exposed to hereditary wretchedness? In the North, a population of freed Negroes is experiencing such ills and resents these injustices but it is weak and its numbers are small; in the South, it would be strong and numerous.
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In that part of the Union where Negroes are no longer slaves, have they drawn nearer to the whites? Any inhabitant of the United States will have noticed just the opposite.
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Racial prejudice seems to me stronger in those states which have abolished slavery than in those where slavery still exists and nowhere is it as intolerant as in those states where slavery has never been known. It is true that in the North of the Union the law permits Negroes and whites to contract legal marriages but public opinion regards any white man united with a Negress as disgraced and it would be difficult to quote an example of such an event. In almost all the states where slavery has been abolished, voting rights have been granted to the Negro but, if he comes forward to vote, he risks his life. He is able to complain of oppression but he will find only whites among the judges. Although the law makes him eligible for jury service, prejudice wards him off from applying. His son is excluded from the school where the sons of Europeans come to be educated. At the theatre, any amount of gold could not buy him the right to take his seat beside his former master; in hospitals, he lies apart. The black is allowed to pray to the same God as the whites but not at the same altars. He has his own priests and churches. Heaven’s gates are not blocked against him. However, inequality hardly stops at the threshold of the next world. When the Negro passes on, his bones are cast aside and the differences of social conditions are found even in the leveling of death. Thus, the Negro is free but is able to share neither the rights, pleasures, work, pains, nor even the grave with the man to whom he has been declared equal; he cannot be seen alongside this man either in life or death. In the South, where slavery still exists, less care is taken to keep Negroes at a distance; they sometimes share the work and pleasures of the whites. To a certain extent people agree to mix with them and, although legislation is harsher toward them, habits are more tolerant and kindly. In the South, the master has no fear of raising his slave to his level because he knows he will be able to cast him down at will into the dust. In the North, the white man fails to see sharply the barrier which separates him from a degraded race and he keeps his distance from the Negro with all the greater care since he is afraid that one day he might be confused for one of them.

Another mechanisms seems to be that the people who are left out of the majority grow increasingly frustrated in a way those left out of the minority don't:

For after each concession, the strength of democracy increases and its demands grow with every new power it gains. The ambition of those left below the level of qualification is frustrated in proportion to the great number of those above it. The exception in the end becomes the rule; concessions follow each other without respite and the process can be stopped only when universal suffrage is achieved.

Minorities

American Indians

Tocqueville inherits the idea of the noble savage from Montaigne and Rousseau. Savage at the time was a compliment: wild and free as opposed to civilized and domesticated. It is interesting that it is making a come back in our culture. Perhaps indicating a disbelief in progress.

After the French revolution, European aristocrats were fascinated with Indians. They didn’t see simply a noble savage but an intense form of nobility and aristocracy. The aristocrats identified with the American Indians because they perceived them both as being driven out by the democratic bourgeois class.

It's important to think how we not only demonize but also romanticize alien peoples for our own interests.

Colonization

An often overlooked method of societal rejuvenation is that it becomes rejuvenated from the inside through conquest. It's this idea that the colonizers colonize the colonized at the beginning and in the end the colonized colonizes the colonizers. Perhaps this is a reason that society's with great cultures have less to fear even when they are dominated. It is the colonizers that conform to them.

Whenever they happened to derive education from a foreign nation, they held a position of conquerors not conquered. When the conquered nation is educated and the conquerors half savage, as happened when the Roman Empire was invaded by the nations of the North or when the Mongols invaded China, the power afforded to the barbarian through his victory enables him to stay on a level with the civilized man and allows him to go forward as his equal until he becomes his rival; the one has the advantage of strength, the other intelligence; the former admires the knowledge and arts of the vanquished, the latter envies the power of the victors. The barbarians end up by inviting the civilized man into their palaces and the latter, in turn, open their schools to the former. But, whenever the nation with the physical power also enjoys an intellectual superiority, the conquered rarely pursues civilization; rather they withdraw or are destroyed. Thus one can draw the general conclusion that savages seek out enlightenment with weapons in their hands but they do not receive it as a gift.

African Americans

The north abolished slavery not for the sake of the blacks but the interest of the whites: they noticed that all colonies which removed slavery became more economically productive:

The answer is easy. Slavery in the United States is destroyed in the interest, not of the Negroes, but of the whites. The first Negroes were imported into Virginia about 1621. In America, as everywhere else in the world, slavery, therefore, originated in the South. From there it spread from place to place; but as slavery moved northwards, the number of slaves grew less and very few Negroes were ever seen in New England. A century had already passed since the founding of the colonies and an extraordinary fact began to strike the attention of everyone. The population of those provinces which had virtually no slaves increased in numbers, wealth, and prosperity more rapidly than those which did have them. In the former, however, the inhabitants were forced to cultivate the ground themselves or to hire someone else to do it; in the latter, they had laborers at their disposal whom they did not need to pay. With labor and expense on one side and leisure and savings on the other, nevertheless the advantage lay with the former. This outcome seemed all the more difficult to explain since the immigrants all belonged to the same European race with the same habits, the same civilization, the same laws, and there were only barely perceptible shades of difference between them.

The reason for this is because slave labor gave work a negative connotation:

The white man on the right bank, being forced to live by his own efforts, has made material prosperity his life’s main aim. Since he lives in a country offering inexhaustible resources to his hard work and continuous inducements to his activity, his enthusiasm for possessing things has passed the normal bounds of human greed. Driven on by his longing for wealth, he boldly embarks upon all the paths which fortune opens before him. He does not mind whether he becomes a sailor, a pioneer, a factory worker, a farmer, enduring with an even constancy the labors or dangers associated with these various professions. There is something wonderful in the ingenuity of his talent and a kind of heroism in his desire for profit. The American on the left bank not only looks down up on work but also upon those under takings which succeed through work. Living in a relaxed idleness, he has the tastes of idle men; money has lost a part of its value in his eyes; he is less interested in wealth than excitement and pleasure and he deploys in this direction all the energy his neighbor devotes to other things; he is passionately fond of hunting and war; he enjoys the most vigorous of physical exercise; he is well versed in the use of weapons and from childhood he has learned to risk his life in single combat. Slavery, therefore, not merely prevents the whites from making money but even diverts them from any desire to do so.

Ultimately, slavery has got to go because it is so in tension with the existing political ideals of the time:

Moreover, whatever efforts southern Americans make to preserve slavery, they will not succeed forever. Slavery, which is limited to one area of the globe, which is attacked by Christianity as unjust and by political economy as pernicious and which is placed next to the democratic freedom and enlightenment of our times, is not an institution which can last. It will end through the actions of the slave or of the master. In either case, great misfortunes are to be expected.

The Necessity of Dogmatism

Dogmatic is necessary, in a first sense, simply because we do not have the intellectual capacity nor time to examine each and every one of our beliefs. We must take a subset of beliefs for granted and build meaningful structures on them.

If I now consider men as individuals, I find that dogmatic beliefs are no less vital for a man on his own than for when he acts in common with his fellows. If man was forced to prove for himself all the truths he employs each day, he would never reach an end; he would drain his energies in initial experiment without advancing at all. Since there is not the time, because of the short span of our lives, nor the ability, because of the limitations of our minds, to act in that way, he is reduced to the taking on trust a host of facts and opinions which he has neither the time nor the power to examine and verify by his own efforts but which have been discovered by abler minds than his or which have been adopted by the populace. Upon this primary foundation he erects the structure of his own thought. He is not brought to this manner of advancing by his own will but is limited by the unbending laws of his own condition.
Every great philosopher in the world believes a million things upon the authority of someone else and supposes many more truths than he can prove.

Even if one could labor to examine all of his or her opinions, dogmatism would still be necessary, in a second sense, for the formation of societies. The argument goes as such: individuals will simply come to too fundamental of disagreements, they won’t be able to coordinate collaborative action, and there can be no society. I found this eerily similar to the state of nature which the Chinese political philosopher Mozi detailed. It is neither amour proper, nor glory, nor a lack of resources which troubles Mozi’s state of nature but rather a difference in opinion. From there on his elucidation mirrors that of T.’s: when people couldn’t agree on things, they couldn’t act collectively, when they couldn’t act collectively, they could not overcome nature and her challenges.

Depending on the times, beliefs of a dogmatic character are more or less common. They arise in different ways and can change their shape and object; but it is not possible for such dogmatic opinions not to exist— that is to say, opinions which men take on trust and without discussion. If every man chose to form for himself all his opinions in an isolated pursuit for truth along paths followed by himself alone, it is unlikely that a great number of men would ever come together in any commonly shared belief. But it is easy to see that no social grouping can prosper without shared beliefs or rather there are none which exist in that way; for, without commonly accepted ideas, there is no common action, and without common action, men exist separately but not as a social unit. For society to exist and all the more so, for such a society to prosper, all the citizens’ minds must be united and held together by a few principal ideas. This could not possibly exist unless each of them occasionally draws his opinions from the same source and agrees to accept a certain number of ready-formed beliefs.

The Desirability of Dogmatism

But T. goes even further, and argues that not only is Dogmatism necessary but in many instances it is highly desirable. Christianity, at least for the US, is the prime example. T. takes the conclusions of Christianity which govern one’s worldly pursuits, general duties, and relationships with others to be of immense practical benefit to society independent of its more transcendental consequences. Even if one could reach such conclusions through reasoning alone, one would still be plagued with doubt in their actions compared to the religious dogmatic. Dogmatism, then, appears to be desirable because only through it can one reach certain highly beneficial (for oneself and community) beliefs about the world and, more importantly, only through it can one hold said beliefs with high conviction.

Men have, therefore, a huge interest in creating fixed ideas about God, their soul, their general duties toward their creator and fellow men; for any doubt about these first concerns would put all their actions at risk and would condemn them in some way to confusion and impotence. This is, therefore, the most important matter upon which each of us should have settled ideas. Unfortunately, it is most difficult for each of us, if we are alone, to arrive at such settled ideas using only our own reason. Only minds freed completely from the ordinary preoccupations of life, minds of great depth and astuteness can, with the help of ample time and attention, penetrate such vital truths. Even then, we see that philosophers themselves are almost always hedged around with doubts, that, at every step, the natural light which illuminates them grows dim and threatens to be blotted out and that, in spite of all their efforts, they have as yet managed to uncover only a small number of contradictory notions upon which the human mind has floated endlessly for thousands of years without managing a firm hold upon the truths or even finding new errors. Such studies are quite beyond the average human capacity and, even when the majority of men were capable of such pursuits, they clearly would not have the free time.

Problematic Dogmatism

But in our appraisal for dogmatism, let us not forget T.’s heed against the tyranny of the majority, a form of dogmatism so crude, disastrous, and soul-sucking that he termed it “enslavement”. “I observe how, beneath the power of certain laws, democracy would blot out that intellectual liberty supported by the social, democratic state in such a way that, having broken the shackles formerly imposed upon it by class systems or men, the human spirit would be closely confined by the general will of the majority.”

Dogmatism therefore, like many things in T., occupies a paradoxical position. On one hand it is necessary for society and produces many desirable consequences, on another, it is responsible for the greatest form of tyranny. Is there something more we can say to differentiate between productive and unproductive dogmatism?

Clearly, there are not two distinct species of dogmatism that are fundamentally different. Dogmatism is dogmatism: conviction in beliefs without examination.

The distinction must be either of degree, topic, or subject. That is how much one is dogmatic, about what one is dogmatic, and who is dogmatic that may separate productive dogmatisms from their unproductive counterparts.

First, T. might hold the position that dogmatism is only productive if, when presented with sufficient evidence, one agrees to change one’s position. While this sounds productive empirical, T. might reject that it is better, at least when religious or patriotic matters are concerned, to have a high degree of dogmaticity.

The second way to distinguish between these two forms is what one is dogmatic about. Perhaps for T. we should compartmentalize our intellectual freedom and curiosity to only certain arenas that do not challenge the moral and cohesive fabric of society, like the modes by which we conduct commerce.

Lastly, T. could also plausibly hold the position that only the majority should be dogmatic, while the intellectual elite who has abundant time and talent should challenge traditional assumptions and push society forward.

Battling to the End by René Girard | Notes & Summary

Johnathan Bi — Tue, 26 May 2020 01:59:20 GMT

Introduction

Christianity is a demystifying force. It exposes the injustice of the scapegoating mechanism that has brought peace in times of social disorder. In fact, it is the only means by which we know how to bring peace. By revealing that the scapegoat is actually innocent, Christianity robs this sacrificial tool away from us. It is therefore good in the absolute, since it is just, but bad in the relative, since we have no way to contain social disorder, society becomes more and more chaotic and violent.

Before, the scapegoating mechanism was able to produce order through the deified victim. Violence brought about order by producing the sacred. Now, “violence, which produced the sacred, no longer produces anything but itself”. That is to say, people still have the urge to use violence to resolve violence and disorder but the mechanism no longer works. We recognize the innocence of the victim and therefore violence no longer produces the sacred. It simply just produces itself reciprocally. This impotent sacred is satan. “Satan thus becomes the name of a sacred that is revealed and utterly devalued through Christ’s intervention”.

In Things Hidden satan is the victimize mechanism. Here, there is an added qualification of impotence.

Girard believes we are now living in a time where this mechanism has become so weak that we officially have no means to contain violence. War is no longer “an institution [that operates by predictable, controllable rationality], which goes hand in hand with conscription and total mobilization”. War, controlled war, can no longer contain violence. It was Clausewitz who recognized this fact in on war. He discusses war as a form of duel, as an escalation to the extremes. Yet, due to his rationalism, he couldn’t draw this out to its ultimate conclusion: apocalypse. Instead, he would argue that there are still restraining forces within society that could contain war. This book is “finishing” Clausewitz in two senses of the word: 1. By fully developing the escalation of extremes to its ultimate form which is apocalypse. 2. Showing that the Duel is the fundamental mechanism which underlies all of social behavior nowadays, not just war.

Girard believes that the solution to our problem revolves around: imitating christ, identifying/loving others, and renouncing violence and retaliation.

I think that Christ alone allows us to face this reality without sinking into madness.

We can escape mimetism only by understanding the laws that govern it. Only by understanding the dangers of imitation can we conceive of authentic identification with the Other.
…
To make the Revelation wholly good, and not threatening at all, humans have only to adopt the behavior recommended by Christ: abstain completely from retaliation, and renounce the escalation to extremes.

He is not optimistic about our chances however:

However, violence is a terrible adversary, especially since it always wins … We are thus more at war than ever, at a time when war itself no longer exists. We have to fight a violence that can no longer be controlled or mastered. Yet what if triumph were not the most important thing? What if the battle were worth more than the victory?
…
The primacy of victory is the triumph of the weak. The primacy of battle, by contrast, is the prelude to the only conversion that matters. This is the heroic attitude that we have sought to redefine. It alone can link violence and reconciliation, or, more precisely, make tangible both the possibility of the end of the world and reconciliation among all members of humanity. We cannot escape this ambivalence. More than ever, I am convinced that history has meaning, and that its meaning is terrifying.

Violence always wins because you can choose to not participate and be killed or participate and perpetuate the violence. He seems to suggest that the first option is the right one and the heroic one. The fruits of victory, at best, is for the weak to triumphant the cost of succumbing to violence by participating in it, but the battle itself presents us with a genuine choice to renounce violence, to “convert”.

Chapter 1: Escalation towards extremes

War is nothing but a Duel on a Larger Scale

Clausewitz is such an important interlocutor for Girard because the former enables him to articulate his anthropological, sociological and religious theories in history. Clausewitz forcefully applies Girard’s ideas to history in general and war in particular.

At its very core, war is nothing but a duel: not the one of classic westerns but of two enemies, not holding anything back, exchanging blows until death.

I shall not begin by expounding a pedantic, literary definition of war, but go straight to the heart of the matter, to the duel. War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale. Countless duels go to make up war, but a picture of it as a whole can be formed by imagining a pair of wrestlers. Each tries through physical force to compel the other to do his will; his immediate aim is to throw his opponent in order to make him incapable of further resistance. War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.

The nature of war, contrary to what the Chinese advise, is therefore not to seek the most peaceful resolution but to subjugate the enemy with force:

Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst.

In war, this exchange of force escalates towards extremes simply because he who does not reciprocate with addition will lose:

The thesis, then, must be repeated: war is an act of force, and there is no logical limit to the application of that force. Each side, therefore, compels its opponent to follow suit; a reciprocal action is started which must lead, in theory, to extremes.

But Clausewitz quickly concedes that this is not how real wars play out. This total war is merely a “logical fantasy”. Raymond Aron, Clausewitz’s interpreter, interpreted this divide between the real and the theoretical is one between fact and fiction, casting the latter to the ranks of a merely useful thought experiment. He believed that there were fundamental forces in and around war which deescalated it. Girard disagrees. He believes that the relation between real controlled war and theoretical total war was more factual. Real wars did trend towards theoretical war and it is simply specific circumstances that prevented it from escalating. Real war would become theoretical war if:

(a) war were a wholly isolated act, occurring suddenly and not produced by previous events in the political world; (b) it consisted of a single decisive act or a set of simultaneous ones; (c) the decision achieved was complete and perfect in itself, uninfluenced by any previous estimate of the political situation it would bring about.

(a) and (c) are political frictions against escalation. We both have an idea of how much the opponent should be punished before entering into the war, we are also conscious of how certain actions in war would effect politics in the future. It would be both unfounded as well as disastrous politically to nuke a neighbor over a border dispute. (b) is the technological frictions against escalation. Its hard to mobilize troops. Navigate terrain, build factories, etc.

These frictions, combined with the human tendency against making the extreme effort and instead “to plead that a decision may be possible later on” are the brakes of war. And if these specific actions are imitated, it would deescalate the war.

But these breaks aren’t invincible. Technological development, such as the nuclear bomb, have made it possible to deploy all forces at once. Politics also follows war: civilian sentiments are led by war. “Passions do indeed rule the world.” This is made clear by Napoleon’s total ability for conscription.

Reciprocal Action and the Mimetic Principle

Reciprocal action, mimesis, is both responsible for escalation and deescalation depending on what actions are being imitated:

It is therefore true that reciprocal action both provokes and suspends the trend to extremes. It provokes it when both adversaries behave in the same way, and respond immediately by each modeling his tactics, strategy and policy on those of the other. By contrast, if each is speculating on the intentions of the other, advancing, withdrawing, hesitating, taking into account time, space, fog, fatigue and all the constant interactions that define real war, reciprocal action then suspends the trend to extremes. Individuals are always interacting with one another, both within an army (which explains Clausewitz’s long analyses defining the qualities of a war leader, to which we will return below), and of course between opposing armies. Reciprocal action can thus be a source of both undifferentiation and of differences, a path to war and a road to peace. If it provokes and accelerates the trend to extremes, the “friction” of space and time disappear, and the situation strangely resembles what I call the “sacrificial crisis” in my theory of archaic societies. If, on the contrary, reciprocal action suspends the trend to extremes, it aims to produce meaning and new differences.

But the societal conditions today render that most reciprocal action escalates violence. For example, in a gentlemen’s war there are fools and codes of honor that if imitated could lead to deescalation. The more rational a war becomes the more it is about doing anything one can to subjugate the enemy, the more the actions are less governed by ritual and trends towards escalation towards the extremes.

Attack and Defense: Suspended Polarity

Girard wants to show that in contemporary society there is no longer any genuine peace, as brought about by the scapegoating of old but only suspended victories: a temporary victory of a stronger over a weaker that produces the illusion of peace. The danger of these suspended victories are that they lead to greater violence in the future. Temporary deescalation prepares rivals for future escalation.

Suspension is only temporary because of the primacy of the defensive side over the attacking side:

The defender is thus the one who begins and finishes the war. By the nature of its fortresses, armies and command, the defending side determines what the attack will be. It has the choice of terrain and the support of the people, and benefits from the fatigue experienced by the attacking side, whose initial momentum gradually weakens. Finally, it decides when to counter- attack. It thus controls the game, in accordance with the rule that it is always easier to keep than to take. From this we can conclude that the concept of defense encompasses that of attack, and that it is the most apt to make real war consistent with the concept of war.

The defensive side is primary in two ways: first, it dictates the rules of war by choosing when to engage; second, according to the asymmetry of defense and attack, it is the one who benefits from violence and war. The defense wants war, the offense wants peace. Because of this suspended victories are only temporary. Much like a seesaw, as soon as one rival comes on top int he offense he loses the advantaged position.

Not only does the defense have the means of violence it also feels justified to do so. We always interpret ourselves as the ones reacting and the others as the initiators:

The aggressor has always already been attacked. Why are relations of rivalry never seen as symmetrical? Because people always have the impression that the other is the first to attack, that they are never the ones who begin, though in a way they are always the ones. Individualism is a formidable lie. We make others understand that we recognize the signs of aggressiveness which they manifest, and they in turn interpret our posture as aggression.

Because the defense is in a position to benefit from violence and feels justified in wielding violence, suspended victories only set up the stage for more violence back and forth. Note how long reciprocity can take between nations:

And history did not take long to prove Clausewitz right. It was because he was “responding” to the humiliations inflicted by the Treaty of Versailles and the occupation of Rhineland that Hitler was able to mobilize a whole people. Likewise, it was because he was “responding” to the German invasion that Stalin achieved a decisive victory over Hitler. It was because he was “responding” to the United States that Bin Laden planned 9/11 and subsequent events. The primacy of a defensive position is consistent with the appearance in a conflict of the principle of reciprocity as a suspended polarity in the sense that victory will not be immediate, but will be total later.

The reason that this is unique to modernity is because warring rivals in antiquity always had the sacrifice of an innocent victim to resort to to bring about true peace. “Today, [suspension] is of a piece with the escalation to extremes because there can no longer be unanimity about the guilt of victims”.

Modern society, by removing sacrifice also removed any hope for lasting peace: “He still had a foot in the time of eighteenth century wars, but the accelerated era was also already there, and Clausewitz was one of the first to see it, at a time when suspended conflicts no longer dissimulated the underlying principle of reciprocity. Violence is never lost on violence. It cannot be eliminated. This is the fundamental reality that we need to understand”.

As a result, modernity never lives in true peace but only suspension: “Humans are thus always immersed in order and disorder, in war and peace. It is becoming more and more difficult to draw a line between the two realities that, until the French Revolution, were codified and ritualized”.

Girard talks about three types of polarities. The first polarity is the superficial one of the temporary polarity between victor and loser, attacker and defender. The second polarity is the sacrificial polarity of all turned against one in sacrifice. The third polarity is the apocalyptic polarity of society trending from peace to chaos. His claim is that the superficial polarity merely hides the apocalyptic polarity because we can no longer produce the sacrificial polarity. “This is why we must always see reciprocity behind alternation, ‘absolute war’ behind ‘real war’”.

It is a good time to clarify what suspension leads to deescalation and which doesn’t. In the previous section, Girard articulates that the suspension which leads to deescalation is when friction causes both sides to reciprocate in disarmament. Whereas the suspension which causes escalation is temporary victory.

War of Extermination

There are four loosely connected topics of discussion in this section.

First, conflict resolution of America in the Middle East is failing because it uses violence which only accelerates the escalation towards extremes. Not only does America and the west at large face threats in the Middle East but also, Girard argues prophetically, China: “The exchange of attacks and American “interventions” can only accelerate, as each side responds to the other. Violence will continue on its way. A conflict between the United States and China will follow: everything is in place, though it will not necessarily occur on the military level at first”.

What is more worrying is that Girard seems to suggest that as violence is losing its effectiveness in founding, we have not renounced it. We have not even used it in hopes that it will bring about peace. He seems to suggest we use violence deliberately to cause violence and suffering: “once unbridled, the principle of reciprocity no longer plays the unconscious role it used to play. Do we not now destroy simply to destroy? Violence now seems deliberate, and the escalation to extremes is served by science and politics”. One possible explanation is that wars start from rational self-interest and then it leads into these wars of extermination where the end is to kill the hated enemy.

Second, Girard presents an anthropological reading of original sin: “original sin is vengeance, never-ending vengeance. It begins with the murder of the rival. Religion is what enables us to live with original sin, which is why a society without religion will destroy itself”. This is why Christianity exposes original sin because it robs us from the myths and archaic religions that hide and diffuse it.

Third, only a group can found institutions. Girard, brings in Pascal to critique individualism:

We absolutely need Pascal. He saw and immediately understood the “abysses” of foundation. He considered Descartes to be “useless and uncertain” precisely because he thought he could base something on the cogito and “deduce” the heavens and stars. Yet no one ever begins anything, except by grace. To sin means to think that one can begin something oneself. We never start anything; we always respond. The other has always decided for me and forces me to answer. The group always decides for the individual. This is the law of religion. What is “modern” exists only in the obstinate rejection of this obvious social truth, in clinging to its individualism.

Peace occurs in sacrifice when we all imitate each others’ accusation of the victim. Ritual is a repetition of this founding murder. And ritual becomes canonized in institutions:

Rituals then repeat the initial sacrifice (the first victim leads to substitute victims: children, men, animals, various offerings), and repetition of rituals gives birth to institutions, which are the only means that humanity has found to postpone the apocalypse. This is why peaceful mimesis is possible only in the framework of an established institution that was founded long before. It is based on learning and maintaining cultural codes.

The idea is that we can only bring about true peace if everyone agrees on the guilt of the victim with absolute certainty. And this absolute certainty is only possible individually if we look around and see everyone else is also absolutely certain. This is why institutions can only be maintained as a group, institutions are fundamentally unjust. Gradually we can gain confidence by referencing our actions to the group and to the past (think about the importance of a first case of its kind in America’s judicial system). Culture however, as is evident in the west, is being criticized and challenged more than it has ever been. It is because the foundations of culture are always unjust and violent. The role of an institution is to make us forget this violence and injustice:

Foundation is never a solitary action; it is always done with others. This is the rule of unanimity, and this unanimity is violent. An institution’s role is to make us to forget this. Pascal saw this clearly when he evoked the ruse of the “honest man” defending the “greatness of establishment.”

Conversely, we should distrust any opinion held in absolute consensus by a group: “This is why in one of his Talmudic readings Levinas says that if everyone agrees that an accused should be convicted, then he should be released right away, for he must be innocent”.

Fourth, our times is especially dangerous because not only do we not have the cultural guards against violence but our material environment has become more conducive to it. In terms we have developed already: both the political and technological frictions of violence have diminished. He compares how the spread of bird flu shows how undifferentiated we actually are:

It is a pandemic that could cause hundreds of thousands of deaths in a few days, and is a phenomenon typical of the undifferentiation now coursing across the planet.
…
Pandemics tell us something about human relations, which can now be reduced to what might be called “global trade.” Clausewitz glimpses this when he says that there are no differences in nature, only in degree, between trade and war. It is no accident that terrorist acts often take place in trains and planes.

His call to action is thus unsurprising:

It is thus urgent to develop strategies to deal with this unpredictable violence that no institution today can control. However, the strategies can no longer be military or political. A new ethic is required in this time of catastrophe; catastrophe urgently has to be integrated into rational thought.

Chapter 2: Clausewitz and Hegel

The Duel and Alternation of Opposites

Girard confesses that what he is opposing is Hegelianism, specifically the structure of the dialectic, rather than Hegel’s specific thoughts. “I am probably opposing Hegelianism, much more than Hegel himself”.

Both Hegel and Girard believes that history unfolds through revelation: “Indeed, for him there was only one Incarnation: that of God in history. According to him, only that “divine mediation” has made the emergence of true rationality possible”. The fundamental mechanism of the dialectic is about securing transcendence once one has exposed oneself to an alien other: “All of Hegel’s dialectic is therefore based on the Revelation. Here too we have to leave behind the sempiternal schema of “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.” Hegelian dialectic has little to do with that. It went from the Spirit to alienation, and then out of alienation through a transcendence or elevation (Aufhebung) that is the reconciliation of the two opposing terms. Dialectic presents a position, then the “negation” of that position, and finally a “negation of the negation.” To open up to the other, to get outside of oneself through alienation, is to prepare a return to oneself that provides true access to the real, access to real rationality free of any subjectivity”.

This led Hegel to conclude that, in anticipation of the universal state, war is a necessary process that must be worked through to develop history: “Hegel thought that churches had failed to regulate the interplay of human will, so he assigned the task to the State, the “concrete universal” that has nothing to do with specific states. The rational universality of the State is supposed to become a worldwide organization, but in the meantime individual states will continue to wage war. The series of wars is an essential contingency of history”.

Girard agrees that thesis and antithesis is the fundamental mechanism of historical development: “Dialectic is not first and foremost the reconciliation of humans with one another; it is simply the same thing as the duel, the struggle for recognition, and the ‘opposing identities’”. But he disagrees that it leads to synthesis instead of the escalation to extremes:

However, what Hegel did not see, and this is where I come to your question, is that the oscillation of contradictory positions, which become equivalent, can very well go to extremes. Adversaries can very well become hostile, and alternation can lead to reciprocity.

One contributor to why these thinkers may disagree upon the outcome of the duel they have both identified is that Hegel believes the duel is caused by a desire for the desire of others ie. recognition. Whereas Girard thinks the duel is motivated by a desire for what the other possesses. Hegel’s duel will be much less violent because the opponent has to be kept alive for recognition.

Clausewitz is on the side of Girard here with his analysis of the escalation to extremes. Hegel believed that every duel led to a greater synthesis and universality. Society got better and better as the actual became rational. The hero is one who rejects personal interests for the sake of the universal. Clausewitz on the other hand, feared the convergence of the actual, real war to abstract, total war.

Hegel spoke of the passage from individual interest to the universal: the individual must realize himself in the universality of the State. In this respect, he gave war a special role: it brings back into the whole of the nation those who had become separated because they had been focusing on their private interest. Through war, the State reminds individuals from time to time of the need to sacrifice individual interest and merge it back into the universal. The hero appears as Spirit by denying biology. This is the foundation of law, which is based on heroic, dis- interested attitudes. Hegel describes the unity of the private and the public, of the real and thought, in the “concrete universal” of a State that has to go beyond the contingencies of war. Law is the objectivized universal for which we should be ready to sacrifice our lives. It creates peoples as “ethical wholes” that are opposed to other “ethical wholes.” In contrast, Clausewitz thought in terms of greater or smaller separations and gaps between real wars and the concept of war… Hegel saw [Napolean] as an incarnation of the Spirit, but Clausewitz saw him as a “god of war” to whom we must respond.

By reading Clausewitz’s interpretation of the duel, Girard rejects Hegelianism:

This is why it is useful to read Hegel and Clausewitz together. It is immediately clear that the unity of the real and the concept lead to peace, according to Hegel, but to the trend to extremes according to Clausewitz. The latter lived in military circles; Hegel never participated in a military operation.

Two Conceptions of History

War was a scary, uncontrollable monster for Clausewitz, but it was a necessity for the Hegelian Dialectic to progress:

While war was an ideal for Clausewitz, it was a necessity for Hegel, who considered it important to distinguish “true history” from “apparent history.” True history flows from the sacrifice of individuals. Sacrificed individuals contribute to the coming of the Spirit in the form of law. For Clausewitz, by contrast, apparent history and its reciprocal engine are the only reality.

The hero in war is also portrayed differently between these two authors. For Hegel, the hero is one who gains spiritual transcendence and embodies the spirit instead of their immediate interests. For Clausewitz, the hero is simply one who masters mimesis and operates within the mechanism. The hero is without for the former and within the latter:

His rationality is thus ambivalent. He had a very cold way of viewing war as a more intense form of trade, whereas Hegel spoke of it as self-sacrifice, and as heroic, reasoned transcendence of private interest. Hegel considered that the death of a hero contributes to the advent of the Spirit: by putting his life at stake, a hero tears himself away from his own natural and animal nature. His sacrifice makes him spiritual. This is how reason tricks conflict, which can never smother it. In contrast, Clausewitz did not see the military hero as having this spiritual nature at all. For Clausewitz, a military hero is one who manages to rise above the contingencies and the many influences to which armies are subject … Thus, for Clausewitz, military heroism is less transcendence than aggravated mimetism. For example, a counter-attack is much more effective if it is a surprise or if it includes an innovation within the codified behavior of the two armies that are spying on, studying and measuring each other. A good general cold-bloodedly dominates such situations of extreme reciprocity, but he is nonetheless not for all that autonomous. The more completely he masters his defensive strategy, the more he is controlled by violence and contributes to the escalation to extremes.

Girard now believes that there is no non-sacrificial space. Hegel is too abstract and idealistic, Clausewitz is real. He goes as far as to reject his main theory of Christianity in book 2 of Things Hidden:

You cannot view it from above or get an eagle-eye view of the events. I myself thought that was possible when I was writing Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, in which I imagined Christianity provided the point of view from which we could judge violence. However, there is neither non-sacrificial space, nor “true history.”
…
I reread my analysis of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, which was my last “modern” and “anti-Christian” argument. The criticism of an “historical Christianity” and argument in favor of a kind of “essential Christianity,” which I thought I had grasped in a Hegelian manner, was absurd. On the contrary, we have to think of Christianity as essentially historical, and Clausewitz helps us do so. Solomon’s judgment explains everything on this score: there is the sacrifice of the other, and self-sacrifice; archaic sacrifice and Christian sacrifice. However, it is all sacrifice. We are immersed in mimetism and have to find a way around the pitfalls of our desire, which is always desire for what the other possesses. I repeat, absolute knowledge is not possible. We are forced to remain at the heart of history and to act at the heart of violence because we are always gaining a better understanding of its mechanisms. Will we ever be able to elude them? I doubt it.

He believes that whatever solution there is must operate within the bounds of and within mimesis, but is pessimistic that we will be able to arrive at it. Clausewitz also arrives at this apocalyptic conclusion but he hides it under enlightenment rationality. But even in his defense that policy can contain war, he concedes that politics will be affected by war:

When whole communities go to war—whole peoples, and especially civilized peoples—the reason always lies in some political situation, and the occasion is always due to some political object. War, therefore, is an act of policy. Were it a complete, untrammeled, absolute manifestation of violence (as the pure concept would require), war would of its own independent will usurp the place of policy the moment policy had brought it into being; it would then drive policy out of office and rule by the laws of its own nature, very much like a mine that can explode only in the manner or direction predetermined by the setting. This, in fact, is the view that has been taken of the matter whenever some discord between policy and the conduct of war has stimulated theoretical distinctions of this kind. But in reality things are different, and this view is thoroughly mistaken. In reality war, as has been shown, is not like that. Its violence is not of the kind that explodes in a single discharge.... That, however, does not imply that the political aim is a tyrant. It must adapt itself to its chosen means, a process which can radically change it; yet the political aim remains the first consideration. Policy, then, will permeate all military operations, and, in so far as their violent nature will admit, it will have a continuous influence on them.

Read in the light of this passage, Clausewitz’s most famous claim that war is but the continuation of politics seems to mean that war can be interpreted by politics.

But this position can be disproved through an immanent critique within Clausewitz’s own text. He believed that the more political (the more ideological, the more interests are at stake, the more hatred) the war the less politics will actually be involved in a war. Think America’s entrance into WW2 after Pearl Harbor: the country was enraged and unified, as a result the military rather than politics was center stage in the war. In this type of war, politics is actually used by and commanded by war. However, the less political (the less the hatred, the fewer the interests at stake) the war the more politics rather than the military will determine its progression. Think the Vietnam war. In this type of war politics controls war.

The more powerful and inspiring the motives for war, the more they affect the belligerent nations and the fiercer the tensions that precede the outbreak, the closer will war approach its abstract concept, the more important will be the destruction of the enemy, the more closely will the military aims and the political objects of war coincide, and the more military and less political will war appear to be. On the other hand, the less intense the motives, the less will the military element’s natural tendency to violence coincide with political directives. As a result, war will be driven further from its natural course, the political object will be more and more at variance with the aim of ideal war, and the conflict will seem increasingly political in character.

We have increasingly witnessed more and more political and ideological wars which shows that politics and rationality can no longer contain violence. This, in addition to our impotent sacrificial rituals is why politics can no longer contain war: the passions override rationality.

Clearly, what he saw here was what a century later would be called “ideological wars.” Leninism was nothing more than a form of military Hegelianism, to use Raymond Aron’s expression, an absolute war dictated by the meaning of history and involving the extermination of “class enemies” both within and without. This is how history makes its violent return. Unable to resist, reason gives it means to proceed by justifying it … Clausewitz told us in his way that reason is no longer at work in history. Everywhere, politics, science and religion have used ideology to mask a duel that is becoming global. They have simply provided themes and justifications for the principle of reciprocity.

In short, Clausewitz’s realism helps us reject Hegelian idealism:

In short, Clausewitz’s treatise constantly shows that we must not believe in the “true history” that Hegel sees growing behind the ups and downs of “apparent history,” or the history that positivists describe as a national necessity or as progress. The real principle that is latent behind the alternating victories and defeats, behind the “philosophical trend,” behind the “pure logic” and “nature” of war is not a ruse of reason, but the duel … The fight to the death is thus much more than a simple desire for recognition. It is not a master-slave dialectic, but a merciless battle between twins.

Girard ends the discussion by suggesting that China is another response from the East, in addition to Islam. This goes to show how long the periods of suspended polarity truly can be: the last three centuries, according to Girard, China has been on the losing defensive side waiting for its opportunity to regain primacy. China and the US are fighting because they are so similar. Furthermore, the Chinese are effective because they understand, much like the Clausewitzian hero, that one must operate within mimesis:

Everyone now knows that the looming conflict between the United States and China, for example, has nothing to do with a “clash of civilizations,” despite what some might try to tell us. We always try to see differences where in fact there are none. In fact, the dispute is between two forms of capitalism that are becoming more and more similar, except that the Chinese, who have an ancient military culture, have been theorizing for three thousand years about how to use the adversary’s strength against him. The Chinese thus feel less attraction for the Western model but imitate it more in order to triumph over it. Their policy is thus perhaps all the more dangerous in that it understands and masters mimetism. In this sense, Islamist terrorism is only a sign of a much more formidable response by the East to the West.

This is also an example of how countries behave like egos and experience mimetic rivalries:

The Chinese will not stop; they want to beat the Americans; they want there to be more cars in China than in the United States. We always want to be better than the one we see as our model: we’ve heard that tune before. This is the insurmountable horizon of our history, which puts the Islamic attacks somewhat into perspective.

An Impossible Reconciliation

Identity + affirmation of identity.

We are introduced to a core concept that is paramount to reconciliation: identity. Identity is the fact of equality and similarity between all humans:

Yet, with Hegel, we have seen that the spectacle of identity can lead to philosophical knowledge, and to knowledge of equality and fraternity. We thus have to try to think about identity in a different way, in terms of reverse mimetism, positive imitation.

It seems that identity has two manifestations: actualization and realization. The actualization of identity occurs when differences such as hierarchy is being torn down, when we objectively become more similar. The realization of identity occurs when we realize the truth of identity, when we subjectively percieve each other as more similar. Of course, the actualization of identity does not necessarily lead to its realization if we erect false differences. Actualization is a necessary but not sufficient condition for realization. Both its realization and actualization are first affirmed by Girard as a necessary condition for the Kingdom:

We have to affirm that modern wisdom, in so far as it aspires to non-conflicting identity, is heir to prophetic hope, the vision of universal uniformity as the imminence of harmony and peace. Enlightenment thought about equality, democracy and revolution is essentially non-Greek and Jewish in origin since it is based on the ultimate vision of identity, fraternity. We deem it messianic thought, in the sense that it is through the trials of history and through their movements that the hope of fraternity shines. It is a mistake to say that this is an imaginary “dream” or an evasion. This vision of identity is an essential product of Western history repeating myths, in other words, penetrating into places where difference oscillates and where distinctions are lost in conflict. This vision of a new order is based on the nothingness that separates foes, or certain categories of adversaries, the nothingness that must necessarily unite individuals.

But he then goes on to criticize identity from two ways: realizing identity is a necessary but not sufficient condition to bring about the Kingdom and our current ways of realizing identity is misguided.

This faith in the necessary reconciliation of men is what shocks me most today. I was a victim of it, in a way, and my book Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World expressed the confidence that universal knowledge of violence would suffice. I no longer believe that for the reasons I have just explained and which I did not see at the time.

Here Girard rejects his previous position that the realization of violence and therefore of identity is enough to reconcile mankind. I believe that what Girard thinks is a sufficient condition for reconciliation is the renouncing of reciprocity. So, in a way, he is saying that the realization of identity is not sufficient to renounce reciprocity when in cycles of violence. Perhaps he thinks that 1. our passions rule over our reason so knowledge alone is not enough to dictate action 2. the logic of reciprocal violence is to kill or be killed, it is strong enough to override knowledge 3. the mimetic drive to hurt one’s enemies is too strong 4. there are two many pressures to reinstate false differences and repress the realization of identity. The actualization of identity is necessary but not sufficient for the realization of identity which is necessary but not sufficient for reconciliation and the Kingdom.

Girard’s second critique is of the means to realize identity. Modern post-Hegelian thought operates under the false assumption that the actualization of identity, the removal of any objective difference such as class, will naturally lead to the realization of identity, the reconciliation of mankind. As a result they seek to actualize identity by leveling differences through violence. Their logic is that peace (realization) lies at the end of violence (actualization):

It is because he believed in humanity that Hegel thought that there would be a virtually automatic reconciliation of all people. However, it was on the basis of violence as a fundamental part of history. Since it affirmed that human conflict is positive, his dialectic was a phase in the philosophical and spiritual rise of violence in the modern world. Indeed, it was by criticizing Hegelian idealism that Marx urged people to take ownership of this violence. Lenin later reproached Marx for not being violent enough. Violence thus increasingly came to be seen as indispensable to the advent of peace among humans.
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Likewise, modern forms of wisdom have not wanted to give up seeing bad reciprocity as the precursor of good reciprocity. However, this alibi of the last remaining obstacle to be overcome before reconciliation, this means of postponing universal peace, has necessarily made violence grow. More violence is always needed before reconciliation. Auschwitz and Hiroshima have reminded us of this.

The drive to actualize identity by violent removal of differences often leads to totalitarianism:

They have discovered that there are differences where we had thought they had disappeared: cultural and not natural differences, differences that can be eliminated, for example, historical, educational, social, economic, family and psychological differences. Elimination of these differences has long been seen as a condition for the new order. If the identity that is immediately noticeable around us is not a source of harmony, it is because it is superficial, false. It has to be replaced with a more real form of identity. This Promethean task, which requires always more violence, has contributed to the rise of totalitarianism.

This is bound to fail because violence can never eliminate violence. Even when it seems that a group has achieved peace through violence over another group, it is only a suspended violence.

We now know that suspending violence, failing to renounce it straight away, always makes it grow. Violence can never reduce violence. Yet humans continue to refuse to see the catastrophe that they are preparing by always introducing new differences and new conflicts.

While Hegelianism believes the escalation to extremes leads to reconciliation, Girard argues that it is the opposite of reconciliation. The actualization of identity by whatever means possible does not guarantee its realization. We are living in an ambivalent age because the actualization of identity, the removal of barriers, has lead to greater mimetic rivalries and made the realization of identity more distant than it ever was.

We have to think of reconciliation not as a consequence but as the reverse of the escalation to extremes. It is a real possibility, but no one wants to see it. The Kingdom is already here, but human violence will increasingly mask it. This is the paradox of our world.

Girard’s thinking navigates between two extremes: 1. The belief that the actualization of identity by whatever violent means possible (the human level) will lead to reconciliation. 2. The belief that the actualization of identity is entirely bad and only causes chaos and therefore we must reinstate oppressive differences. Instead, the actualization of identity is both the necessary condition for reconciliation and the Kingdom as well as apocalypse:

Apocalyptic thought is thus contrary to the wisdom that believes that peaceful identity and fraternity is accessible on the purely human level. It is also contrary to all the reactionary forms of thought that want to restore differences and see identity as only a form of destructive uniformity or leveling conformity. Apocalyptic thought recognizes the source of conflict in identity, but it also sees in it the hidden presence of the thought of “the neighbor as yourself” which can certainly not triumph, but is secretly active, secretly dominant under the sound and fury on the surface. Peaceful identity lies at the heart of violent identity as its most secret possibility. This is the secret strength of eschatology.

It is precisely the fact that throughout history, identity has been gradually realized that we are in an increased state of chaos. The sameness and likeness, the nothingness between adversaries, is precisely what created the conditions for conflict in the first place.

When there is no longer anything separating enemy brothers and everything tells them to unite, since their very lives depend on the union, neither intellectual obviousness nor appeals to common sense, to reason or to logic are of any use. There will be no peace because war is fed precisely by the nothing that alone remains between the adversaries and that is nourished by their very identity.

We are at a point of paradox: “The future of the world is out of our control, and yet it is in our hands: this is something to think about“. Girard’s God is not an intervening one, whatever happens solely results from human action. History is “in our hands”. But the logic of reciprocity takes a life of its own. History is “out of our control”.

Girard’s pessimism is fully audible in this section:

The only thing that I, personally, can still do is always return to the Revelation in the New Testament.
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We must thus make decisive choices: there will soon be no institutions, rituals or “differences” for regulating our behavior. We have to destroy one another or love one another, and humanity, we fear, will prefer to destroy itself.
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BC: You are leaning toward the worst, though it seems that you are always hesitating and sometimes that you still believe in the Kingdom. Why do you think that the “epiphany of identity” necessarily has to take an apocalyptic turn?
RG: Because the Gospels say so and because the fact has become so obvious that it is becoming impossible not to put the cards on the table now. The absolute new is the Second Coming, in other words, the apocalypse. Christ’s triumph will take place in a beyond of which we can describe neither the time nor place. However, the devastation will be all on our side: the apocalyptic texts speak of a war among people, not of a war of God against humans. The apocalypse has to be taken out of fundamentalist hands. The disaster is thus insignificant in relation to its certainty. It concerns only humanity, in a certain sense, and takes nothing from the reality of the beyond.
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BC: The law of the escalation to extremes is thus inevitable?
RG: A close reading of Clausewitz’s text will gradually show this.

This section and chapter ends with a discussion of Hegel's misinterpretation of the Christian god as a dominating and violent one which, in turn, reads Christianity as myth. This is an understandable mistake given Christian similarity to myth but there is one key difference: a "dominating God is the one that is incarnated in paternal, hierarchical difference". That is to say he is involved and makes his appearance felt. But the Christian God "who arises with the consenting scapegoat is a perfectly unknown god; he is the one that is the most outside yet also the most inside common humanity. He is the most divine and the most human".

This withdrawal is central to Christianity: "Christ warns us in turn about the dangers of the Antichrists, in other words, those who want to be imitated. The aspect of Christ that has to be imitated is his withdrawal. Hölderlin made this dramatic discovery. This is why in the Bible we never find a fight to the death like that of the prophets of Thebes, for example, Tiresias and Oedipus. A fight to the death is impossible because in the Bible the point is precisely to give up claims to difference … An unambiguous answer is now possible to the question of what distinguishes true prophecy from false: true prophetic words are rooted in the truth of the consenting scapegoat. The consenting scapegoat does not claim to incarnate that truth; he says that truth is other and that it is more specifically there, out- side of the system. However, the prophet is not the truth, for otherwise other “prophets” would want to seize it. The prophet bears witness to it, announces it, precedes it and in a sense follows it". Withdrawal is central because it prevents these mimetic rivalries which lead to violence. If a prophet claimed he possessed the truth then it opens up himself to be a model-obstacle.

Chapter 3: Duel and Reciprocity

A Remarkable Trinity

Clausewitz introduces a final conception of war: it is a “remarkable trinity” of the passions introduced by the public, the calculation and randomness introduced by commanders, and the intelligence introduced by politics. “This is the result he was hoping for as he tried to hide the duel behind a rational definition of war. Thus, the ruler would “control” the strategist, who would in turn “control” public sentiment”. If the duel is the theoretical abstract conception of war, the remarkable trinity is meant to be how war actually works.

Clausewitz took the existence of “armed observation”, the deescalation of war, as a sign that war in the form of the duel was contained by something logical and rational. Girard has already shown that both escalation and deescalation are a result of reciprocal action. The latter occurs when rivals imitate each other’s withdrawals when it came to political and technological frictions. Thus politics never did control war. It was always the duel, the law of reciprocal actions, that was the hidden logic operating behind it:

However, our reading of the text challenges the notion of policy having primacy over war, and instead promotes the idea of there being only one reality to consider here: reciprocal action. Clausewitz would like to have us believe that the clash between two states sometimes takes on a warlike aspect, such as when it provokes armed conflict, but sometimes a political aspect, such as when the clash is suspended by backing down to armed observation.

The duel is a spatial/momentary conception of war: in one momentary slice, space contained all the forces between two rivals that could theoretically be unleashed at once. The remarkable trinity is in fact more realistic. Not because it operates on a logic that is distinct from the duel but because it situates the duel in time. The goal is still the exchange of force, what leads it is still the chaos of the public and commanders and not the order of politics. All that politics contributes is to prepare the best time to strike:

In order to understand reciprocity, we have to go from the simultaneity of objects in space to the succession of events in time. We thus go from the first to the second definition of war: a duel is an immediate confrontation between two armies, a combat, a fight to the death; the “remarkable trinity” is control of the duel by the government, and thus the power to suspend the conflict in order to render it more decisive.

Girard draws an equivalency: “Duel, reciprocal action and the escalation to extremes thus end up as equivalent. They correspond precisely to what I call undifferentiation“. Specifically this undifferentiation comes from a collapse of ritual. “When rituals, the “brakes” applied to reciprocity, disintegrate, we leave the sequence of peaceful exchange and enter into violent, undifferentiated simultaneity, in other words, we enter into what is proper to the sacrificial realm”.

Girard now invites us to use Clausewitz’s insights for sociological analysis. This is valid because everyday life has become more violent and conforms to the logic of reciprocal action:

While Clausewitz talked to us only about war, we would now like to make him speak about society. This will warp his thought in a way, but it will be done consciously. Our desire to do this comes simply from the fact that we are in a world that is more positively violent than his was, and where some of his observations on the military have become observations about the world in general.

War and Exchange

War is the hidden structure behind all social phenomena because all social phenomena, trade included, is governed based on reciprocal action. To see this in trade we need to trace its origins.

Girard paints two distinct eras/types of exchange and trade: gift-giving and money-facilitated. In the first era exchange was about people giving gifts and a counter-gift separated by a long interval in between. This period was integral because it prevented the exchange relationship, which was always imbalanced, from escalating to extremes. This long interval hid the fact that the gift you are currently receiving is reciprocal to the one you recieved a long time ago, preventing you from drawing direct comparisons and reading hostility into it:

Indeed, the gift I receive is never equal to the one I have given: it is worth either more or less, depending on the case. However, no one will notice if the counter-gift does not come right away. If, on the other hand, it comes too soon, it can lead to retaliation owing to what was initially only a misunderstanding, a poor interpretation. One of the individuals will provide an excessive reaction to the presumed hostility of the other, thereby very quickly transforming “good reciprocity” into “bad reciprocity,” and concord into discord. Sometimes people even kill each other to get rid of bad reciprocity. This is why the rules of exchange are so complex: their purpose is to dissimulate reciprocity, the “supreme law” of the duel, which will always reappear.

The era of money enables a more rapid form of trade. Money saves traders from reciprocity:

In this respect, money is a crucial discovery: it is a neutral means of exchanging. You bake a baguette, I buy it right away for what we consider to be the market price, and we are no longer bound up with each other. The business is finished. I do not have to give you a counter-gift and we both go home happy
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We therefore have to consider money’s tendency toward neutrality as an essential discovery in the history of human relations: up to a certain point, money makes it possible to avoid the counter-gift, in other words, to avoid comparison and the return of reciprocity.

Money is like a decisive (not suspended but total) victory in war which ends all reciprocity. In another sense, money is like the sacrificial victim that brings about reconciliation to the group. It is a ritual repetition of the founding expulsion:

What symbolizes the link among people and prevents them from “coming to blows” also has a sacred origin: money replaces the victim on whose head people used to find reconciliation.

But money is not a perfect solution because it relies on the integrity of the institution of trade whether that is a contract, a trade agreement, etc. Think about the opium wars where trade remained peaceful only up until the point where the institution of free trade was respected. Trade, whether it is gift-giving or money-mediated, operates fundamentally on reciprocal actions:

We exchange goods so as not to exchange blows, but trading goods always contains a memory of trading blows. Exchange, whether commercial or bellicose, is an institution, in other words, a form of protection, a simple means. If the institution is seen as an end, we fall back into violent reciprocity.

These reciprocal actions escalate into conflict unless certain ritualized institutions add friction to the imitation and introduce difference. That is to say, certain reciprocal actions which cause friction and difference, if imitated, lead to peace whereas acquisitive reciprocal actions lead to violence. At the end of the day, it is not whether rationality can contain trade or war but that rationality itself is a form of reciprocal action. Rationality and conflict, be it in trade or war, are all based off of reciprocal actions it is simply the type of reciprocal action that determines its effect. Whether politics can contain war or the rational part of trade can contain the emotional side is all about what type of reciprocal action the current cultural and technological atmosphere produces. Girard is arguing that throughout history we are witnessing a decrease in the conditions which cause reciprocity to lead to peace (cultural/political and technological friction) and an increase in the conditions which cause reciprocity to lead to conflict.

Thus trade is a form of war in four senses of the term “war”.

First and foremost, trade and all of human social interactions for that matter operate solely under reciprocal action. Rationalism is an illusion: merely reciprocal action as produced by certain conditions.

Second, since trade is dominated by reciprocal action, trade can quickly transform into real physical war. In the era of money, it is only when exchange is not as intense and ritualized institutions can still contain them does trade actually help to prevent war:

In a way, trade is constant low-intensity war, while war is more or less controlled by politics and most often intermittent. When it becomes continuous, we escalate towards extremes. Trade thus has all the features of war: if smooth settlement of exchanges degenerates into furious competition, a trade war can become a real war … Therefore, can trade control war, as many optimistic free marketers think? Perhaps, up to a certain point, so long as we remain within a reasonable form of capitalism.

Girard provides a historical example:

When one nation does not manage to win a contest, it quickly tends to blame its failure on unfair competition. Protectionism is a sign that competition can degenerate into military conflict. Clausewitz was obviously thinking about Napoleon’s growing hatred of England: it was for commercial stakes, which was the form the war took with England, that he drenched Europe in blood. In their ferocity, the Napoleonic Wars revealed the violence inherent to commercial competition. Those wars were to trade what the principle of reciprocity is to exchange.

Third, trade much like war is about using force to bend the opponent to do one’s will. Certainly, the outcome can be more positive sum, but trade is pursued not because it is more rational or humanistic but because it is a more effective means of getting what one wants:

From this point of view, it is not by chance that the European aristocracy went into business once heroes and warriors went out of style … France fell behind England very quickly: Louis XIV still had imperial goals in Europe when England was already conquering the world much more efficiently. Trade is a formidable form of war, especially since it results in fewer dead.

Lastly, since it is almost impossible for any traditional physical war to achieve total victory over the opponent without risking self-annihilation, trade may become the arena for a modern form of war:

Trade can transform very quickly into war, and today, since traditional war is no longer available as “cash payment,” trade can become the trend to extremes. From this point of view, we can reasonably fear a major clash between China and the United States in coming decades.

The logic of Prohibitions

Girard takes us on a detour to explain the importance and origins of myths and prohibitions. This is one of the best summaries of his anthropology:

We can thus conclude from this that hominization began when such internal rivalries became strong enough to break animal dominance networks and unleashed contagious vengeance. Humanity was able to be born and survive at the same time only because religious prohibitions emerged early enough to counter the danger of self-destruction. But how did the prohibitions emerge? Foundation myths (or myths of origin) are the only things that explain this. In general, they usually begin with a story about a huge crisis symbolized in some way: in the myth of Oedipus it is a plague epidemic, in others it is a drought or flood, or even a cannibal monster that was devouring a city’s youth. Behind these themes there is a breakdown of social ties, what Hobbes called the “war of all against all.
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What happened? As soon as the agitation “undifferentiated” all members of the society, imitation became stronger than ever, but functioned differently and had different effects. When the group became a crowd, imitation itself tended to reunite it, substitutions occurred, and the violence converged onto increasingly fewer adversaries until it focused on only one. People then discovered the cause of the trouble and they finally rushed as a single body to lynch its now universal enemy. The same mimetic energy that caused growing disorder so long as there were enough rivals to oppose one another finally brought the whole community together against the scapegoat, and thereby caused peace to return.
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The result was so sudden and unexpected that the reconciled people saw it as a supernatural gift, and the only one who could have filled the role of the gift giver was the victim of the unanimous lynching: the scapegoat chosen unconsciously by the mimetism of the lynchers. The scapegoat thus re-united the group. This is why many victims are described as “foreign visitors.” Primitive communities were probably very isolated from one another, and a visit by a stranger probably caused great curiosity mixed with fear. A single unexpected action by the stranger could cause unpredictable panic and turn the visitor into a new god. Every lynching resulting from a mimetic crisis thus gave birth to a new god. Every time a conflict later erupted in the community, the past crisis would be remembered and all contact with the individuals involved would be prohibited. If violence returned, it would be interpreted as caused by the god’s anger. Only the god’s prestige thus permitted the appearance of permanent prohibitions that were gradually turned into a system that was more or less consistent and sustainable.
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Religious prohibitions surely checked huge escalations of violence. However, the fear they inspire fades, and when that happens their ability to prevent transgressions also fades. Yet the purpose of prohibitions and ritual sacrifices was to calm the god’s anger, in other words, to keep violence out of the group. I think that the two great institutions of archaic religion, namely prohibitions and sacrifice, have played an essential role in the passage from pre-human to human societies, precisely by preventing hominids from destroying themselves. Archaic systems must also have been reborn from their ashes from time to time owing to their inability to eliminate violent reciprocity once and for all. We know this thanks to the penetrating intuitions of Greek and Indian religions.

What is most interesting in this quote is that the prestige of gods is what sustained rituals and prohibitions.

The Christian revelation robbed these mythical elements away from our toolbox:

The Biblical and Christian tradition was the first to upset the supremacy of the crowd, to see violent unanimity from the other side, and to pinpoint the principle of reciprocity. Christ, the last prophet, then places humanity before a terrible alternative: either continue to refuse to see that the duel is the underlying structure of all human activities, or escape from that hidden logic by means of a better one, that of love, of positive reciprocity. In this respect, it is striking to see how closely negative and positive reciprocity resemble each other: almost the same form of undifferentiation is involved in both cases, but what is at stake is the salvation of the world. This is the real paradox that we have to try to understand, for from now on it will not be the scapegoat who is judged guilty, but humanity itself, by history. We are thus entering into an eschatological perspective.

What is profoundly interesting is that Christianity, by being such a successful force that reveals truth, destroys itself. In the age of rationalism, which Christ is responsible for, no one takes apocalypse seriously anymore. This quote is extremely revealing why certain Christians are so deeply engaged with the world: every action contributes to the outcome of whether we end up in the Kingdom or apocalypse:

I am convinced that it is because Christians have gradually lost the sense of eschatology that they have ceased to influence the course of events. It was probably beginning with Hiroshima that the idea of the apocalypse completely disappeared from the Christian mind: Western Christians, French Catholics in particular, stopped talking about the apocalypse just when the abstract became real, when reality began to match the concept.

The End of Rules

The destruction of the political/cultural frictions within war, ie. the rules of war, combined with the removal of technological frictions have turned war into its pure theoretical form of the escalation to the extremes. As wars become more rational they conform closer to their theoretical form: the extermination of the enemy. The loss of the rules of war and a growing hatred for the enemy grow together. The loss of the rules of war create a constant state of animosity: “The loss of the rules of war leaves us facing the terrible alternative between attacking and defending, aggression and response to aggression, which are one and the same thing”. This animosity, a desire to gain victory over the rival, in turn, makes us further ignore the rules of war: “he primacy of victory, raised to the status of a rule, becomes overarching, and in the background there is deep disdain for the adversary, who finally has to be slaughtered. This attitude authorizes us to flout all the rules of honor”. Even though they are symbiotic it is the loss of the rules that occur first due to the Christian revelation. For example, we can imagine that the rule of war to respect burial rites as displayed in the Illiad which could’ve but did not facilitate peace is, after the Christian revelation, deemed superfluous and counterproductive to the real aims of war.

Schmitt identified the first signs of the loss of the rules of war in the Spanish partisans: a group of secret civilian soldiers who fought against Napoleon, their occupier. It is this irregular group who gave up all respect for the laws of war and just focused on the extermination of the enemy. Napoloeon’s “regular” army was forced to respond to this by becoming equally ruthless:

Thus, terrorism would have its roots in the Revolutionary Wars, of which Napoleon’s “regular” army was the ultimate transformation. “Irregular” war was a contemporary of “regular” war, and they strengthen each other mutually so as to finally become equivalent … This is the real structure of reciprocity, which is all the more terrible when the response is postponed. We are witnessing a fundamental breakdown in the law of exchange.

Today, we are witnessing a world with terrorism, unpredictable bursts of violence that clearly is not governed by law, but also state level actors who do not respect law. Violence has freed itself from law and has become ubiquitous:

We have indeed entered into an era of ubiquitous, unpredictable hostility in which the adversaries despise and seek to annihilate each other. Bush and Bin Laden, the Palestinians and the Israelis, the Russians and the Chechnyans, the Indians and the Pakistanis: the conflicts are all the same. The fact that we speak of “rogue states” proves how far we have left behind the codification of inter-state war. Under the guise of maintaining international security, the Bush administration has done as it pleased in Afghanistan, as the Russians did in Chechnya. In return, there are Islamist attacks everywhere. The ignominy of Guantanamo, the inhumane American camp for presumed terrorists who are suspected of having ties with Al Qaeda, demonstrates the contempt for the laws of war. Classical war, which included respect for the rights of prisoners, no longer exists. It remained to some extent in the conflicts of the twentieth century, when war still resembled a kind of contract.

What we see today is an end of war, an end of violence being able to be contained by ritualistic institutions:

In a way, we could thus say that there are fewer wars today than before. We could even say that there are no wars at all, since the institution is dead and has been replaced by unpredictable outbreaks of violence … We have to understand that the unpredictability of violence is what is new: political rationality, the latest form of ancient rituals, has failed. We have entered a world of pure reciprocity, the one of which Clausewitz glimpsed the warlike face, but which could also show the opposite countenance.

One thinker who successfully diagnosed the problem was Schmitt.

Carl Schmitt saw this when he spoke of a “theologization” of war in which the enemy becomes an Evil that has to be eradicated. His efforts to establish a legal framework for war were directly related to this observation. In order to prevent violence from spreading madly, there have to be legal limits. Carl Schmitt thus thought that the legal construction of designated enemies would represent progress.
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However, he believed that this intermediary status could be governed legally. He thought that the partisan was the symbol of a new legal-political framework that put an end to classical law and urgently called for a new legal definition of “friend” and “enemy.”

While his diagnosis was correct, his prescriptions were less than satisfactory. A legal definition of the state to define friend and enemy simply has no hold over violence in this day and age of ubiquitous violence. “It is a little like the idea of establishing a social contract when everyone is fighting. The social contract is obviously false because it is when it is needed that it cannot be made”.

In this, Schmitt misunderstood the conditions of modern war. He did not see what was at stake in nuclear deterrence, for example. Everything that worked on that principle has, since 1945, operated like a kind of agreement between mafia families rather than like something ruled by law. In other words, nothing has been legalized; nothing has gone through the United Nations. In order for deterrence to work, there had to be no meddling, so it was a kind of mafia system … He did not see that democratic, suicidal terrorism would prevent any containment of war.

The logic of violence operates upon different rules than it did in the past. War has always been reciprocal, they never were contained by rationality but by the prestige of ritual institutions which caused a peaceful reciprocity. That prestige has faded now with Christianity.

We continue to think about the acceleration of contemporary conflicts as if they followed the same rules of logic as they did in the past. People still use the rationalist reading of Clausewitz, with its refusal to see the imminence of the duel. Today we are heading toward a form of war so radical that it is impossible to talk about it without making it sound hyper-tragic or hyper-comical, so unlimited that it can no longer be taken seriously. Bush is a caricature of the warmongering violence of which Americans are capable outside of the framework of any political reason, and Bin Laden and his imitators respond in an equally “sovereign” manner.

A Return to the Simple Life?

Clausewitz was a theorist not a philosopher. He sought to understand the duel not to transcend it but to win at it. Therefore we need to turn to other thinkers to help us think about plausible ways out of reciprocity.

Action always takes precedence over speculation. In his thought, there is a theory of war, but not a philosophy of war. Conceptualizing the duel should entail trying to control it, but Clausewitz sought to serve it. This is what I see in this letter, in which he is supposed to be talking about his “religious feelings.” Thus he could not have helped us explain what is beyond the duel and that I call “good transcendence,” though he told us a lot about bad transcendence. Clausewitz’s god is the “god of war.”

We are introduced to a few thinkers who all are unsatisfactory. Levinas understands the escalations of extremes but is focused on differences and discontinuity whereas Girard’s theory focuses on continuity. Bergson realized that there existed both a dimension of passion as well as hate in rivalry but he never took it to an apocalyptic dimension. He believed it would oscillate between two extremes. Peguy realized catastrophe but resorted to a passive belief in providence.

Girard reminds us again that history is fully in our hands, God does not intervene: “Since I am apocalyptic, I reject any belief in providentialism. We have to fight to the end, even when we think it is ‘vain.’”

Chapter 4: The Duel and the Sacred

The Two Ages of War

There are two types of war. Wars of adversity has rules, codes, and rituals. Rivals in them seek to gain honor. Wars of hostility on the other hand aren’t governed by any rules. Rivals seek to completely dominate and exterminate the other. It is like object-competition and mimetic rivalries in a sense. The former is about obtaining an object in accordance to rules of conduct while the latter is about one’s relative position to a rival. The Gospels seem to advise, before the arrival of the Kingdom, that wars should always be fought with honor, with respect directed to your enemies.

Our discussion about Clausewitz sheds new light on another precept in the Gospels: “Love your enemies.” Once we have acknowledged that the Kingdom program has not been realized, this precept no longer means “make your enemies into friends,” which becomes the implicit rule of pacifism, but “respect rules of honor if you have to fight.” This is quite different. We can therefore see the distinction between a principle of adversariality and one of hostility. Hostility seeks to triumph over the opponent. By contrast, adversariality presupposes an honorable fight.

With these two species of war, comes two species of heroism:

There is a species of war that is a struggle for honor, and a completely different species that is a fight for domination. The former originates in the duel. It is the duel. The latter is not and does not have the same origin. It is even everything that is most foreign to the duel, to codification, and to honor. However, it is not at all foreign to heroism.
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This passage is relevant because Péguy came to the same conclusions as we do, first when he distinguished two opposing notions of war, and second because he defined two forms of heroism: one oriented towards the “grandiose” nature of the escalation to extremes, and another that tries to control that outbreak of violence and to neutralize war. The former fails to describe the duel; the latter conceives of it in a radical way.

Honor is an important political/cultural friction: recall how Caesar rejected the Gulls help in crossing rivers. It is also heavily linked with archaic religions and rituals: in the Iliad, we often here heroes say “Zeus granted him honor/glory…” The loss of honor as an institution results from the Christian revelation and is responsible for the acceleration of war:

The difference between the two forms of heroism is thus essential because it explains two periods of war: the age of adversariality and the age of hostility. Understood as an escalation to extremes, all codes of war implode in the duel, leading to the era in which we live today, that of unpredictable worldwide violence.

A Warlike Religion

This section contains two discussions, one on the war between violence and truth and the other on Clausewitz’s conception of the military genius.

History is animated by a battle between truth, the revelation of the innocence of the scapegoat, and violence between humans. Interestingly, in this war, truth grows alongside violence. Violence only provides more examples of truth. Truth only robs away sacrificial resources that lead to more violence:

It is a strange and tedious war when violence attempts to vanquish truth. All the efforts of violence cannot weaken truth, and only serve to give it fresh vigor. All the lights of truth cannot arrest violence, and only serve to exasperate it.
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Here, Pascal was clearly describing a manifestation of truth that would be contemporary with the escalation to extremes. Note that he no longer said “war,” but “violence.” This is already apocalyptic thought.

Truth is on the defensive in the sense that the defense can choose the battlefield. Likewise, truth can dictate what act of violence and what violent institution to expose as illegitimate. Truth wants war because truth only produces more war. Violence wants peace because sacrificial violence brings peace. But there is another sense in which this is true: truth wants change and “war” to eat away the grips of violence. Violence on the other hand wants peace to preserve its status quo:

Truth is in a defensive position, in the Clausewitzian sense. It is thus the one that wants war. Violence reacts to truth, and it is thus the one that wants peace. Yet it knows very well that it will never have peace again because its mechanisms have been revealed. This is the true and only duel that runs through all of human history, to the point that we cannot say which opponent will win. Only an act of faith enables Pascal to say that “violence has only a certain course to run, limited by the appointment of Heaven.” But will truth triumph in this world? Nothing could be less certain.

We now move on to discussion of the military genius. What is most fascinating about Clausewitz is his inability to develop the duel to its logical conclusions. “The inability to think about violent reciprocity is specifically what intrigues me about Clausewitz”. His enlightenment rationality prevented him from drawing the apocalyptic conclusion. Instead, he aimed to control war through this idea of a brilliant commander. This genius is supposed to be immersed in but not controlled by the remarkable trinity:

But now we can see that what Clausewitz called “military genius,” the topic of Chapter 3 of Book 1, seems to perform a threefold synthesis of emotions, calculation and wisdom, and incarnates a kind of resistance to the mimetic principle that eliminates everything. The genius is a temporary brake on the principle of undifferentiation.
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The ardor of his spirit must rekindle the flame of purpose in all others; his inward fire must revive their hope. Only to the extent that he can do this will he retain his hold on his men and keep control. Once that hold is lost, once his own courage can no longer revive the courage of his men, the mass will drag him down to the brutish world where danger is shirked and shame is unknown. Such are the burdens in battle that the commander’s courage and strength of will must overcome if he hopes to achieve outstanding success.
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A military genius is one who knows how to respond, and who is thus immersed in mimetism, but at the same time able to channel the unpredictable, contagious currents that result in panic or obedience. A military genius is not alone; he is always in the midst of others, in the world of the reciprocity of war.

Prussian Resentment

Clausewitz was the embodiment of the more general Prussian attitude towards France: resentment and worship at the same time. He was extremely fearful of France and wished that they had done more to contain her powers. But within this fear, lied a deep admiration:

But what is the result of this moderation? It is that France, though defeated and disarmed, will never cease to have at her disposal the means which guarantee her autonomy and independence.
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His obsession with the French threat and his fear that France, which he both admired and hated, would one day regain its “autonomy” and “independence” are perfectly consistent with what I call underground psychology in my books. The subject demands autonomy only because he thinks that the model he has chosen is autonomous or could become so.

The Military Genius and the Superman

Clausewitz saw believed that there was a truth within violence or, more accurately, the experience of violence provided the combatant with some revelation of truth, it made him complete. And this truth is accessed at the pinnacle of the escalation towards extremes in the decisive battle in the duel. As a result, he loathed any indirect strategies and always wanted to escalate towards the duel:

For him, peace is to war what strategy is to tactics, and what a firefight is to hand-to-hand combat. The “decision” becomes clearer each time, as if you were adjusting the focus on a cam- era. In a way, in relation to strategy, politics is nothing but talk. However, strategy is in turn only discourse in relationship to tactics. Within tactics, fighting with firearms is always less decisive than hand-to-hand combat. We are thus nearing the heart of violence, which is murder. There is a truth about violence, and that truth is unveiled in the primacy of combat.

Girard claims that Clausewitz had the intuition of sacrifice. That humanity is born from violence. And it is this same intuition that led him to seek humanity again in violence:

What would such an intuition mean except that it is war that makes the man? History constantly shows this. Clausewitz clearly glimpsed this fundamental aspect of violence. Just as comparison of archaic societies leads to the conclusion that humanity springs from sacrifice, Clausewitz observes that man returns to sacrifice, in a way, but for reasons he considers essential. He is not thinking about Christianity at all. The military superman is finally nothing more than an attempt to regenerate, to correct humanity to prevent it from falling back into the “brutish world.”

This intuition would preface the totalitarian regimes to come who believed that a higher state of man lied behind violence:

Totalitarianism soon emerged as a powerful form of nihilism, an impulse to take decadence to the furthest extreme so that, out of that dissolution, a superior form of humanity would emerge. RG: Indeed, by resorting to force, humanity would obtain an identity that was more real.

The discussion moves to Nietzsche who “takes his cue from [Clausewitz] when he describes the virility and courage of the superman. However, what was strictly military in Clausewitz’s case took on metaphysical aspects in Nietzsche’s”. Nietzsche realized that there is a powerful undermining force of all religions but specifically of Christianity that had been operating:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?

But then he wants to create a new set of values from sacrificial resources that are no longer there:

What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

The problem with Nietzsche is that he recognizes Christianity as an undermining force, an undermining force so strong that it caused its own death, but refuses to acknowledge this undermining. And instead aims to build a value system off of these unstable foundations:

Nietzsche’s entire tragedy is to have seen but to have not wished to understand the undermining performed by the Bible. Violence no longer has any meaning. Yet Nietzsche tried to reinvest it with meaning by betting on Dionysus. In this there is a terrible tragedy, a desire for the Absolute from which Nietzsche was not able to extricate himself.

In this way, Nietzsche and Clausewitz and their solutions, the Ubermensch and the military genius, are structurally similar. Nietzsche saw that the sacred was impotent in his death of God just as Clausewitz saw it in the increasing inability for rationality to contain violence. Instead of rejecting this imperfect sacred, Nietzsche aimed to further develop it through a new set of values just as Clausewitz sought truth in this new more intense form of war:

We have discussed the underground passion that motivated Clausewitz. However, he did not sink into despair because there was the army, that aristocratic model, that outlet that Nietzsche was lacking. Nietzsche was totally involved in what was supposed to be the creation of values, a re-invented aristocracy—which was in reality the abyss of a will to power. Clausewitz is much cooler. Without really thinking about it consciously, he glimpsed the corrupted sacred that remains in violence and war, and he made that sacred into something transcendent, an ideal to be achieved.

The Enemy Facing Me

This section begins with a Girardian reading of Levina’s Totality and Infinity which concerned with man’s escape from totality. Totality is taken as everything that hides reciprocity: exchange, institutions, trade, rituals, etc… It is all the sacrificial mechanisms that keep our world secure:

In my mind, totality is actually myth, but also the regulated system of exchange, everything that hides reciprocity. “Escaping totality” thus means two things for me: either regressing into the chaos of undifferentiated violence or taking a leap into the harmonious community of “others as others.”

The duel in the abstract and war in the concrete are means by which one can escape this totality. Because reciprocity is revealed in the duel. And with the revelation of reciprocity comes the possibility of recognizing our sameness with the enemy Other. And it is through this enemy Other that we realize reciprocity and the falseness of all the institutions surrounding us in totality. War is a means by which we escape totality because it reveals reciprocity:

War is no longer man’s essence. Man escapes that reductionist essence in his relationship to the Other, who is already the living enemy facing him:
Only beings capable of war can rise to peace. ... In war, beings refuse to belong to a totality, refuse community, refuse law ... They affirm themselves as transcending the totality, each identifying itself not by its place in the whole, but by its self.
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Levinas saw the duel, like love, as an escape from totality that we absolutely need. However, it is in the sense that it explodes totality.

We must not descend back into Hegelian error and believe that reconciliation lied after war. Levina’s position is that reconciliation was a possibility in war:

We have to at all costs avoid thinking of war as a passage towards reconciliation. In our critique of Hegel and his dialectic, we saw that such a passage was impossible. Postponing reconciliation always causes violence to increase. Levinas does not say that such a passage is possible. He says that outside of totality, there is war and love. We are faced with this alternative more than ever.

Girard’s point is that to recognize our sameness we need to be undifferentiated:

You are saying that the truth about combat, and the truth about violence is undifferentiation. In order to identify a real difference, or to make identity itself a difference, we thus have to pass through undifferentiation.

But reconciliation is not a guarantee in undifferentiation because there is an innate refusal for us to see difference:

It is because adversaries do not want to see their growing resemblance that they embark on a escalation to extremes. They will fight to the death so as not to see that they are similar, and thus they will achieve the peace of the graveyard.

Girard’s interlocutor provides a plausible path towards reconciliation in the duel as Levinas has suggested. Girard believes that it is out of one’s control, it requires both sides synchronous actions, and most importantly we need to have external meditated models. This is the first part where distance becomes important. Distance is important because mimetic rivals perceive absolute difference within the rivalries, it is only when they are looking from the outside, from a place of distance, can they perceive sameness:

However, if they recognize that they are similar, if they identify themselves with each other, the veil of the Same will fall and reveal the Other, the vulnerability of his face. I can lower my guard before the otherness of the person I am facing. Confrontation is not inevitable.
RG: What you are calling identification would be resistance to imitation, a rediscovered distance. You are being very optimistic. Lowering your guard before the sudden epiphany of the face of the other supposes that you can resist the irresistible attraction of the “same” that the “other” incarnated only a few instants before. It supposes that we both become “others” at the same time. This process is possible, but it is not under our control. We are immersed in mimetism. Some are lucky enough to have had good models and to have been educated in the possibility of taking distance. Others have had the bad luck to have had poor models. We do not have the power to decide; the models make the decisions for us. One can be destroyed by one’s model: imitation is always what makes us fail in identification. It is as if there was fatalism in our violent proximity to the other.
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The escalation to extremes is an irreversible law. It is because we are irresistibly drawn to one another that we can no longer go from war to reconciliation.
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The event you are suggesting is thus rare, and presupposes an education based on solid, transcendent models, what I call external mediation. We should keep in mind that it also corresponds to a period of war that is now obsolete. Given the increase in undifferentiation at the planetary level and our entrance into an era of internal mediation, I have reasons to doubt that this paradigm can be generalized. The escalation to extremes is an irreversible law. It is because we are irresistibly drawn to one another that we can no longer go from war to reconciliation. Of course, brotherhood would consist in acknowledging that we are all similar. If we were not so mimetic, we could even do without violence. However, the problem is once again that mimetism defines humans. We have to have the courage to look squarely at this aspect of reality.

The importance of distance makes us reject the model of the hero. The hero is one who masters mimesis of men, he uses internal mediation, much like Clausewitz did with Napoleon, to uncover brilliant strategies. Yet the saint is one who also uses mimesis, but imitates a distant external model. The first can only lead to more violence because you are too close within the scene to see difference. Only the second one can reconciliation stand.

When Levinas wrote that the process of escaping totality also has to be thought of as a passage from the sacred to the saintly, from reciprocity to relationships (in other words, religion), he was at the crux of our discussion of the transformation of heroism into saintliness.

We must be saints instead of heroes, we must worship the withdrawn God:

This paradox corresponds to reality, but Nietzsche was wrong to reject it. Christianity invites us to imitate a God who is perfectly good. It teaches us that if we do not do so, we will expose ourselves to the worst. There is no solution to mimetism aside from a good model.

“Violence is one with the god’s proximity”. A god’s proximity to us reveals our proximity to violence in three ways. First, if a god is close, that is to say myths claims he walks among us like the Greek gods, or his birth is fresh in memory, that means that the society we live in is one where sacrificial resources are still active. We still produce god from sacrifice. Thus we are a violent society. Second, the proximity of violence also means that the sacrifice and a new god is near. Third, if a god is close then that means the models we imitate must also be close, there is no beyond and transcendent models to imitate. We imitate each other instead and begin reciprocity which leads to violence. Dionysus who symbolized a god mixing amongst men, brought about mimetic contagion. Only if the god whom we imitate is far do we not imitate those around us and see sameness instead of radical difference from the perspective of the distant god. The proximity of god is responsible for both the actualization of and alleviation of violence.

Yet the Greeks never suggested we imitate the gods. They always say that Dionysus should be kept at a distance and that one should never go close to him. Christ alone is approachable from this point of view. The Greeks had no model of transcendence to imitate. That was their problem, and it is the problem of archaic religions. For them, absolute violence is good only in cathartic memory, in sacrificial repetition. However, in a world where the founding murder has disappeared, we have no choice but to imitate Christ, imitate him to the letter, do everything he says to do. The Passion reveals both mimetism and the only way to remedy it.
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Christ restores the distance with the sacred, whereas reciprocity brings us closer to one another to produce the corrupt sacred, which is violence. In primitive societies, violence is one with the god’s proximity. Gods no longer appear today because violence no longer has an outlet; it is deprived of scapegoats (those divinized victims) and is bound to escalate. Hölderlin was the only one at the time of Hegel and Clausewitz to have understood the danger of proximity among humans. Indeed, the Greeks had a name for the god who mixed with men, the god of reciprocity, of mimetic doubles and contagious madness: Dionysus. That is the name the Greeks gave to the fear they felt when the god was too close.

The Apocalyptic Turn

The theme of this section is that Christ through the cross has destroyed all foundations for institutions in the world. And we are witnessing that collapse.

Christ exasperated mimetic rivalries. He agreed to be their victim in order to reveal mimetic rivalries to the eyes of all. He caused them to appear everywhere: in the society, in families. There is no totality that does not run the risk of being affected by the doubling that used to be contained by sacrifice.

The uniqueness of Christ is that he was divine before becoming sacred. He was a God who volunteered as scapegoat to reveal the mechanism:

It is no longer men who create gods, but God who has come to take the place of the victim. The prophets and psalms prepared this fundamental interpretation of the coming of God, who is simply one with the cross. Here, the victim is divine before becoming sacred.

Before, society truly operated in circular time, there would be calamity, people would sacrifice and then the sacrifice would be repeated again and again in ritual until the next calamity, ad infinitum. But Christ, by taking away our sacrificial resources, turned history into linear time:

The linear time that Christ forced us to adopt makes the eternal return of the gods impossible, and thus also any reconciliation on the head of innocent victims. Deprived of sacrifice, we are faced with an inescapable alternative: either we acknowledge the truth of Christianity, or we contribute to the escalation to extremes by rejecting Revelation.

We do not acknowledge this escalation to extremes and our false differences because that would be equivalent to admitting guilt and responsibility into this escalation:

To acknowledge this truth is to complete what Clausewitz was unable, or did not want, to finish: it is to say that the escalation to extremes is the appearance that truth now takes when it shows itself to humanity. Since each of us is responsible for the escalation, we naturally do not want to recognize this reality.

Christ will return to judge us. Historical Christianity has already failed already. Humanity is failing the test:

This is why we should not waste time on the duel, but see it as a clear sign of what is coming to fulfillment. The reason that people fight more and more is that there is a truth approaching against which their violence reacts. The Christ is the Other who is coming and who, in his very vulnerability, arouses panic in the system. In small archaic societies, the Other was the stranger who brings disorder, and who always ends up as the scapegoat. In the Christian world, it is Christ, the Son of God, who represents all the innocent victims and whose return is heralded by the very effects of the escalation to extremes. What will he declare? That we have gone crazy, that the adulthood of humanity, which he announced through the cross, is a failure.
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No one wants to see or understand that Christ’s “return,” in the implacable logic of the apocalypse, is simply the same thing as the end of the world.

To reiterate from last section, the only hope we have is to operate within mimesis and establish distance and then identify with the warring enemy:

To convert is to take distance from that corrupted sacred, but it does not mean escaping from mimetism. We have just understood that the process supposes a passage from imitation to identification, the re-establishment of distance within mimetism itself.

This matter can no longer be served by law. All institutions will soon become impotent:

The discussion about the duel was thus necessary, even by default. Carl Schmitt’s great mistake, though his reading of Clausewitz was very pro- found, was perhaps to have believed in the fecundity of violence, whether it is founding or instituted, war or law.
RG: But Schmitt is interesting to study for this very reason. We have seen that his legal construction of the enemy was obsolete with respect to what was emerging behind the general principle of hostility. It was impossible to redefine law based on violence when widespread destruction of all foundations was already underway. Clausewitz was announcing the end of Europe. We see him predicting Hitler, Stalin and all the rest, which is now nothing, the American non-thought in the West. Today we are truly facing nothingness. On the political level, on the literary level, on every level. You will see; it is happening little by little.
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But are we still in a world where force can yield to law? This is precisely what I doubt. Law itself is finished. It is failing everywhere, and even excellent jurists, whom I know well, no longer believe in it. They see that it is collapsing, crumbling. Pascal already no longer believed in it. All of my intuitions are really anthropological in the sense that I see law as springing from sacrifice in a manner that is very concrete and not philosophical at all. I see this emergence of law in my readings in anthropology, in monographs on archaic tribes, where its arrival was felt. I see it emerge in Leviticus, in the verse on capital punishment, which concerns nothing other than stoning to death. This is the birth of law. Violence produced law, which is still, like sacrifice, a lesser form of violence. This may be the only thing that human society is capable of. Yet one day this dike will also break.

It may be hard to see how institutions derive from sacrifice. I think two things can be said. First, all institutions are founded upon sacrifice which is an expulsion of the old system: democracy expelled the monarchy, the court expelled the furies in the Oresteia etc. And all institutional power comes from the prestige of that expulsion and the sacredity of it. Second, the institutions which are built to control violence (so law and politics rather than charity and education) are still built off of sacrifice. In law, we rarely consider the social economic conditions that produced the murderer (we increasingly do because of Christianity) and the logic is very much find someone to blame and expel from society. Politics is about the friend-enemy distinction and finding a group that is responsible.

Because of Christianity which showed the illegitimacy of sacrifice, our institutions have had to hide their sacrifice more and more to become more nuanced, abstracted, rational, and objective to avoid guilt. But because of this these institutions are less cathartic and do not have the same peace-bringing response that the old ones do. Furthermore, our cultural rejection of sacrifice is ahead of our institutions adaption of sacrifice so not only are their verdicts less cathartic but we also believe them less.

TLDR: we are all violent and mimetic, we are always all responsible for a disaster. Institutions are designed to hide that. But we have begun to realize their injustice and institutions are thus crumbling. It would be much more cathartic if we attributed absolute evil to a person, but now we are beginning to recognize our interdependence, specifically, interdependence in violence.

Chapter 5: Holderin's Sorrow

The Two Circles of the Gospels

This section contains three interconnected discussions.

The first revolves around reason.

His first claim is that reality does operate under logic but it is not the logic of rationality. In other words, human interactions are not governed by rational decision making rooted from first principle ends but reciprocity. How does he explain the perceived rationality of the past few centuries where there are league of nations and rule of law etc? He either wants to say that yes we do have an independent rational capacity but it is extremely weak and no match for our mimetic urges. Or he would say that that our very capacity to reason is reciprocal, it is a type of mimetic action: we only do it when others do. HIs discussion on politics and war seem to favor this latter reading. It’s not that politics which operated under a different logic of rationality fails to contain war now but that politics never did contain war they both operate on the same logic of reciprocity. A good example is how Caesar broke the rule of law and, imitating him, the entire republic collapsed. Girard wants to show that human reality is not governed by rational calculation but reciprocal action:

Reality is not rational, but religious. This is what the Gospels tell us. This is at the heart of history’s contradictions, in the interactions that people weave with one another, in their relations, which are always threatened by reciprocity.

His second point is that reason is an institution of myth and is religious in nature. Reason, at least in the west, gained its divinity, its current sacrosanct by blaming all ills onto religion in general and Christianity in particular. From this expulsion, reason gained a degree of prestige that is unchallenged. We now believe that through reason alone can we bring peace just as we thought sacrifice could in archaic times:

It will perhaps have been our last mythology. We “believed” in reason, as people used to believe in the gods.

Of course, because the foundations of all institutions, including reason, is violent and violence has lost its founding power, reason is starting to lose its authority to. All institutions are crumbling: we now see critiques of how our logic is uniquely Western and not universal. (In the broadest sense possible, all institutions are necessarily founded on sacrifice because they had to displace an older institution that operated the same function. They always blamed the previous institution and scapegoat to an unjustified manner e.g. reason and its “killing of God“)

BC: What you are saying is that violence no longer has the capacity to produce law?
RG: That’s right.
BC: That it is incapable of producing truth, of producing reason?

The second revolves around hope.

Girard discusses how the apocalypse precedes the passion in the Gospels. His claim is that there are two “passions” one on the cross and the other at the second coming at the end of time:

There is an initial circle, which is Christ’s life and ends with the Passion. There is a second circle, which is human history and ends with the apocalypse. The second circle is contained in the first. Human history, undermined by a destructive principle, an escalation to extremes that now threatens the whole world, becomes a prelude to the Passion. What could be suggested by this structure if not Christ’s return at the end of history?

Between these two manifestations of Christ is our age where God is no longer present but neither is our sacrificial resources for peace. Humanity is driven to utter chaos:

Beware that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name, saying, “I am the Messiah!” and they will lead many astray. And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth pangs.
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Then they will hand you over to be tortured and will put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of my name. Then many will fall away, and they will betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold. But anyone who endures to the end will be saved.
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And this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations; and then the end will come.
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What is Christ announcing in this passage from Matthew? That the escalation to extremes (note the mimetic doubles: “nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom”) will make “the love of many . . . grow cold.” Thus, Providence cannot be tied to secular history, as Clausewitz wrote to his wife. Pascal was right: there is a reciprocal intensification of violence and truth, and it now appears before our eyes, or at least before the eyes of a small number, those whose love has not grown cold.

This is an age that will be dominated by false prophets. False prophets are ones who claim to posses God or truth. This is dangerous because they invite imitation:

The false prophets are the ones who claim to “have god,” to speak in his name and are therefore to be imitated. It is impossible not to think of the mimetic struggle between Oedipus and Tiresias in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. At the time of the Greeks, violent reciprocity indicates the imminence of the god, in other words, the violent sacred. What each is trying to snatch away from the other was the divinity that he claimed to have, and the more they fight, the nearer that divinity approaches, until it is tangible in the destruction threatening the group. Everyone is a false prophet at the end of the sacrificial crisis; in other words, everyone is possessed, inhabited by the god. The fascination specific to the sacred is one and the same as the contagion of violence.

This is like a removal of toddler wheels, humanity is forced to mature and complete the process of humanization without resorting to sacrifice:

Christ will have tried to bring humanity into adulthood, but humanity will have refused. I am using the future perfect on purpose because there is a deep failure in all this.
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This is why eschatology is simply the obverse of scientific reality when we look at things from a Darwinian perspective. It is because humanity was incomplete, because it was resorting to the falsehood of sacrifice, that Christ came to complete its “hominization.”

Girard almost implies that we will, with absolute certainty, fail at this task of maturity. And here is where Girard seems to deposit his hope into divine intervention, that somehow, magically we will be reconciled through the return of Christ:

The relevance of the apocalyptic texts is therefore absolutely striking when we finally accept their meaning. They say paradoxically that Christ will only return when there is no hope that evangelical revelation will be able to eliminate violence, once humanity realizes that it has failed.

The apocalyptic spirit has this profound belief that Christ will return at the end. It is not up to us.

There is nothing nihilistic about the apocalyptic spirit: it can make sense of the trend toward the worst only from within the framework of very profound hope. However, that hope cannot do without eschatology.

The third revolves around a normative solution, although it is unclear why a normative solution is needed given that disaster will bring about the second coming.

Girard believes that violence renounced only on one side is vain and useless but unilateral renunciation is impossible:

Of course, but individual resistance to the escalation to extremes is essentially vain. The only way it might work is if it were collective, if all people stood “hand in hand,” as the song goes. We have to give up this happy automatic escape, which underlies every form of humanism.

He continues to say two things about a way out. 1. We can only interact with the divine (by divine here it is important to note he means transcendence, an escape from violence, rather than the sacred which is a production of violence) if we are distant from the other humans who cause violence. This can only be done by imitating a model who is also distant, Jesus. 2. Jesus is both close and distant at the same time. Perhaps this is because he was here and now has withdrawn?

We now have to go further and say two things: one can enter into relations with the divine only from a distance and through a mediator: Jesus Christ. This contains the whole paradox that we have to deal with. It contains the new rationality that mimetic theory seeks to promote. It proclaims itself to be apocalyptic reasoning because it takes the divine seriously. In order to escape negative imitation, the reciprocity that brought people closer to the sacred, we have to accept the idea that only positive imitation will place us at the correct distance from the divine.
…
The imitation of Christ provides the proximity that places us at a distance. It is not the Father whom we should imitate, but his Son, who has withdrawn with his Father. His absence is the very ordeal that we have to go through. This is when, and only when, the religious should no longer be frightening, and the escalation to extremes could turn into its opposite. Such a reversal is nothing more than the advent of the Kingdom. What form will that advent take? We cannot imagine it. We will be able to do so only if we abandon all our old rationalist reflexes. Therefore, once again, everything depends on the meaning we give to religion.

“Near is/ And Difficult to Grasp, the God”

Holderlin and his contemporaries Nietzsche, Hegel, Schelling all have felt the absence of God. For the latter group the solution is to reintroduce the Greek gods, specifically Dionysus. “We so often hear that the great multitude should have a sensual religion. Not only the great multitude, but even philosophy needs it”. But Holderlin had the intuition that Dionysius was no longer possible after Christ, “the One who raises up the divine hidden in all religions, who frees holiness from the sacred”. “Mimetic theory has allowed us to conclude that the purpose of the Incarnation was to finish all religions, whose sacrificial crutches had become ineffective”. Dionysius no longer exists. To want to return to Dionysius is impossible, it will only lead to further violence. “To bet on Dionysius is to believe in the fertility of violence, while today we can see it as essentially destructive“.

Holderin realized and embodied the symptom of his age: bipolarity. Because the transcendent Christian God had gone and people's models were internally mediation of other men:

Everything he said about the oscillation of his relations with those close to him is impressive. From his adolescence on he suffered the agony of “bipolarity,” the melancholic shift from one extreme to the other. He himself told Suzette Gontard that the oscillation was related to “insatiable ambition.” He had to be Schelling or nothing: this was the cruel alternative facing him, for he felt in his bones that the world had become completely unstable. In a world where we are each judged by our friends and loved ones, serene models no longer have any meaning. Meditation has been interiorized: the models are there, within reach. They invade me for an instant and I think I can dominate them, but then they escape and it is they who dominate me. I am always too far from or too close to them. This is the implacable law of mimetism.
…
By contrast, Hölderlin saw his final withdrawal as the only means of ceasing to oscillate between self-glorification and self-repudiation, the only means of overcoming that torture. He finds Christ in a more heroic and saintly manner than through becoming a clergyman, as his mother had wished when he was a student. He passes through the hell of bipolarity, the never-ending come-and-go of mimetic desire that makes us feel like we are everything when the “god is near,” and like nothing when the god moves away. Christ escapes, and allows us to escape, this alternation of the pendulum; he never becomes a rival for Hölderlin.

The solutions of his contemporaries, to bring back Dionysus, could only lead to disaster. Any God that walked among us that could be grasped and appropriated made the person doing the grasping a viable candidate for mimetic rivalry. e.g. jealousy from other females when their acquaintance mates with an Olympian.

The presence of the divine grows as the divine withdraws: it is the withdrawal that saves, not the promiscuity. Hölderlin immediately understood that divine promiscuity can be only catastrophic. God’s withdrawal is thus the passage in Jesus Christ from reciprocity to relationship, from proximity to distance. This is the poet’s basic intuition, which he discovered just when he began his own withdrawal. A god that one can appropriate is a god that destroys.

The only thing left to do is for Holderlin to imitate a God that has withdrawn. Christ is near in the sense that his presence can be felt through his love or reading the Bible. Christ is difficult to grasp because, unlike the Greek gods, his presence does not lie in his proximity. He has withdrawn and no longer intervenes with human affair. Where mimetic rivalries increase, the truth of Christ, the innocence of the scapegoat, also become relevant:

Near is
And difficult to grasp, the God.
But where danger threatens
That which saves from it also grows.

Holderin’s imitates Christ for four major reasons. The first reason is that Christ establishes a healthy distance between him and God. The last three is that Christ helps him establish a healthy distance between him and other humans.

First, Christ, when compared to the likes of Dionysus, will not enter rivalry with Holderlin because he is distant. He can still be imitated and his presence can still be felt in the Bible, but no one can “grasp him”. Christ will not enter into rivalry with Holderlin nor will Christ cause Holderlin to enter into rivalry with others.

Christ escapes, and allows us to escape, this alternation of the pendulum; he never becomes a rival for Hölderlin.

Second, because Christ is so distant he does not imitate any worldly person. HIs withdrawal, specifically his refusal to imitate men, deserves to be imitated.

Salvation lies in imitating Christ, in other words, in imitating the “withdrawal relationship” that links him with his Father
…
That saves is the understanding that there is only one good distance: the imitation of Christ in order to avoid the imitation of men.

Third, Christ at the moment when he could become the model of everyone, his resurrection, chose to withdrawal. He does not want to be everyone’s rival par excellence. Therefore, what must also be imitated in Christ is, paradoxically, his desire not to be imitated.

He withdraws at the very point when he could dominate.
…
To imitate Christ is to refuse to impose oneself as a model and to always efface oneself before others. To imitate Christ is to do everything to avoid being imitated.

Fourth, to imitate Christ is to see all other humans through Christ and through His love. This enables to identify with the other and care for them and love them as sons in Christ without descending into rivalry.

Christ is the only one who immediately places us at the right distance. He is simultaneously “near and difficult to grasp.” His presence is not proximity. Christ teaches us to look at the other by identifying ourselves with Him, which prevents us from oscillating between too great proximity to and too great distance from the other whom we imitate. If we were to identify with the other, we would be imitating him in an intelligent manner.

All of this is to prevent rivalry. Girard operates under the idea that as soon as we get to close, as soon as we begin to imitate it is no longer in our control to not go into rivalry:

Imitating Christ thus means thwarting all rivalry, taking distance from the divine by giving it the Father’s face: we are brothers “in” Christ … The relationship [of love] sanctifies while reciprocity sacralizes by creating ties that are too strong.

The second, third, and fourth reasons are enough to prevent all forms of imitation with men by not imitating and not making oneself imitatable. For Holderlin, this meant literally retreating into a tower for 40 years. Here we see the true pessimism of Girard. In a way he has given up that humanity can be reconciled by itself. That we are doomed and the only thing one can wish for is individual salvation. His prescription, by recommending we become not imitatable ipso facto limits this to an individual prescription. It can never spread. In the last section he noted that individual renunciation is vain while collective renunciation of violence is improbable. He thus resorts to individual salvation.

This solution we have ended on is highly unsatisfactory. 1. This individualistic solution will never achieve a “positive contagion“. 2. It thwarts the other good of demythologization: creativity and innovation. 3. It does not actualize universal identification and positive mimesis. 4. For those who subscribe to Girard’s theory’s but do not have faith in Christianity, this is a disastrous solution because the world will descend into chaos. In Girard’s mind the moment of Chaos is the moment the second coming will occur and Jesus will award all the Holderlins left. But for someone who does not share these believes it means the utter destruction of the human race.

Rational Models and Mimetic Models

Girard confirms that our world is both the best and the worst its ever been. The former is true not only in the sense that there is the greatest possibility for reconciliation but also the greatest actuality of love:

That ideal is not mine. Up to a certain point, we might be in a state of positive undifferentiation, in other words, identified with others. This is Christian love, and it exists in our world. It is even very active. It saves many people, works in hospitals, and even operates in some forms of research. Without this love, the world would have exploded long ago. We should not say that there are no legitimate, healthy political actions. However, politics is in itself powerless to control the rise of negative undifferentiation. It is more than ever up to each one of us to hold back the worst; this is what being in an eschatological time means. Our world is both the worst it has ever been, and the best. It is said that more victims are killed, but we also have to admit that more are saved than ever before. Everything is increasing. Revelation has freed possibilities, some of which are marvelous and others dreadful.

We are introduced to the rational model which is to imitate a model and be able to switch one’s attention at will. It is the ability to shift models. Rational models were possible in the age of transcendence, of external meditation but not in our age:

The rational model tries to oppose the mimetic model, which is always stuck on a single figure who has become a rival or an obstacle. The rational model cannot thwart mimetism. Mimetism’s law is implacable, as Clausewitz constantly reminds us. The distinction between the two models shows that we have definitely gone beyond external mediation and entered internal mediation.

The rational model is a prerequisite for identification. Makes sense, in order to love everyone you need to be able to direct your attention to them. The rational model is not only a thing of the past but what we can expect in the Kingdom:

However, the rational model is not outdated. It allows us to think about what lies beyond the duel, which I call the Kingdom.

Furthermore, the heroic tendency is a type of mimetic model, and is caused by having too many heroes as models as a child. In adulthood, one cannot escape the allure of any heroic models nearby:

What I would like to call heroic temptation is a form of hypnosis, of mimetic obstruction, of fixation on a model: a blockage of the identification process that, in order to function, should move very freely from one model to the next. The movement is natural if one has met the right models during one’s formative years. It is not at all so if one has missed the crucial stages. This is a true misfortune that no psychoanalysis or psychotherapy can ever change. Clausewitz was a standard bearer when he was years old. He was too immersed in the culture of heroism to be able to resist the magnetism of the Napoleonic model after Jena.

In the age of internal mediation, Girard believes that no rational models can prevail. We can no longer begin imitating and hope to not fall into mimetic rivalry:

Given the inevitability of mimetic models, it seems very difficult to describe a model that would remain rational. From this point of view, it is vain to try to imagine infallible procedures to prevent us from succumbing to imitation….. Given the extent of its growing control, escaping from mimetism is something only geniuses and saints can do.

Identification requires empathy and rational models, both love and distance.

Excessive empathy is mimetic, but excessive indifference just as much. Identification with the other has to be envisaged as a means of correcting our mimetic tendencies. Mimetism brings me too close to or too far from the other. Identification makes it possible to see the other from the right distance.

The distance is a distance where no imitation is possible however:

It is up to us to re-establish transcendence by resisting the irresistible attraction that others exercise upon us, and that always leads to violent reciprocity. Hölderlin was sublime in this respect. The ceremonious way that he received visitors in the tower in Tübingen consisted precisely in putting them at the right distance. To imitate Christ by keeping the other at the right distance is to escape the mimetic whirlpool: no longer imitate in order to no longer be imitated.

This is why Girard said that knowledge of similarity is not enough. Clearly, in the middle of heated battle, the knowledge of reciprocity is not likely to change anything. Only love for the other through Christ and a distance through withdrawal is enough to renounce reciprocity. Distance and the refusal to imitate brings us just far enough to the other. Love brings us just close enough to the other.

Chapter 6-8

Chapters 6-8 have been skipped in this summary. In my first read through, it became clear that the most important parts of this book lied in 1-4 (historical application of mimetic theory and articulation of the apocalypse through Clausewitz) and chapter 5 (the solution). Chapter 6 "Clausewitz and Napoleon" details how Clausewitz mimetic rivalry and fixation upon Napoleon gave him a privileged position to articulate his theory. Chapter 7 "France and Germany" is an investigation of mimesis in the two societies. Chapter 8 "The Pope and Emperor" is an apology of the institutions of the Catholic church

The Philosophy of Right by Hegel | Notes & Summary

Johnathan Bi — Sun, 24 May 2020 22:22:55 GMT

* These are notes on the Introduction and Abstract Right

Hegel justifies the institution of private property on the basis of freedom. What’s interesting about this, all too familiar, move is the original and unintuitive breadth the concept of freedom takes in Hegel. Far from being merely an instrumental means valuable in so far as it can bring about other more substantive ends, freedom becomes a substantial and, in fact, the primary human end. It is within the immanent demands of freedom alone that Hegel finds reasons to justify private property. Therefore, we should expect our investigation to reveal something original and informative about the value of private property beyond what they have to offer our more concrete ends such as safety, comfort, and pleasure. The aim of this essay is to make clear how exactly freedom justifies private property. I will proceed in two steps. First, I will outline the shape and demands of freedom. Second, I will critically reconstruct how private property alone can satisfy these demands.

The Shape of Freedom

The landscape of freedom cannot be outlined without involving the will, for the will is to freedom what weight is to physical bodies (§4). The former is the constitutive characteristic of the latter. If freedom is broadly understood as self-determination, then the will is nothing but that substance which seeks to self-determine. All human beings have wills. It is what separates us from inanimate objects and instinctually driven animals.

To better understand the logic of the will and, thus, the demands of freedom, it is fruitful to understand it under the light of the more familiar faculty of thinking. In fact, thinking is contained in and nothing but the theoretical side of the more practical will. “The will is a particular way of thinking - thinking translating itself into existence [Dasein], thinking as the drive to give itself existence” (§4). For Hegel, thinking has three distinct moments. First, thought removes any determinacies from its object. When I think about the color black it is not any instance of a black object I conceive, but rather black in the abstract. Second, through thought I, the thinker, “can penetrate an object” (§4). The idea here must be that thinking is able to break apart concepts, construct new ones, and shape them according to my ends. And thirdly, because of this, I make whatever object my thinking has grasped “mine”. In like manner, the will has three corresponding moments.

The Three Moments of Will

The first moment of the will, that of universality, is the negative and abstracted state of the will. It is active when consciousness is directed at itself, when the only thing in focus is the abstract “I”. As far as the first moment is concerned, this is simultaneously a movement in which the will directs its attention back on itself and pushes away from any determinacy it was embedded in. Hegel provides us with two examples of this first moment. The French Revolution, so Hegel interprets, descended into a religious fervor that became just about negating and tearing down ideals instead of establishing any positive formations. The same negative capacity obtains full dominion over the Hindu mystic’s mind in meditative states of transcendence (§6). Lest we think that the first moment is reserved for as extreme conditions as these, I add a third, more common, example. Anytime we pull away from one of our urges – when we refrain ourselves from smoking a cigarette for example – Hegel would describe the precise psychological mechanism as a disidentification from and externalization of the urge to smoke and a retreat back into our will.

The first moment of will is free, or, self-determining in two senses. First, the form of the will is such that it gains a self-conception according to whatever object it has as its content. If I eat an apple, I take upon a self-conception of an apple-eater. Under the same logic, if the content of the will is itself then its self-conception is defined by nothing other than itself. Second, because the will always has the capacity to break free of any determinacy, it is always capable of being free from any external influence. A consequence of this position is that Hegel maintains, later on, that even a will which is coerced is, in some sense, responsible because it failed to withdraw itself from the source of coercion. “Only he who wills to be coerced can be coerced into anything” (§91).

But, in this moment, the will is also unfree for two reasons. First, the will is still determined in a particular way despite it not having any determinations. The will’s continued reflection on itself ad infinitum may seem to be infinity, but it is only an extremely limited form of it. It is an infinity that is bounded by all finite determinations instead of one which encompasses all finitudes. By refusing to be limited by any particular determination, the first moment becomes one sided, empty, and, paradoxically, limited by the entire set of determinations. It is thus defined by something distinctly other. Second, and closely related to the first, the will is not free because the will is not anything yet. There is no content nor existence to it; what is reflected to itself is vacuous. “A will which … wills only the abstract universal, wills nothing and is therefore not a will at all” (§6). The will in the first moment is free for-itself because it is only to the will looking in on itself that the will appears free. But this is a thin self-conception of freedom. Because you do not determine anything, you can’t conceive of yourself as a full self-determining agent.

The second moment of the will, that of particularity, is the state where the will resides in some determinacy. The will “emerges from undifferentiated indeterminacy to become differentiated, to posit something determinate as its content and object” (§6). It should be clarified that, in so far as my will’s actuality is concerned, I have a similar relationship to my desires and urges as I do external objects – I can embed my will in or abstract my will away from the former as I do the latter. Therefore, the second moment sees my will imbued in both subjective and objective determinations. My will first chooses between the host of subjective urges to give it character and then pursues the external objects in the objective world that would satisfy these urges. When I choose to satisfy my hunger and then pick out the type of ice cream to eat, my will is imbued in both the subjective ends and objective means. Consequently, both the ice cream and the hunger determine my will, however so subtly, by changing my self-conception. But we should not think that the constitutive capacity of the second moment is choice. In the case of, say, citizenship, my will can reside in a determinacy even if I did not actively choose. The second moment is just the state of the will that resides in some determinacy.

The second moment can be seen as a dialectical progression of the first, simply because the former resolves the ways which the latter was not free. This second moment is free because it adheres more closely to the ideal of self-determination. No longer is the will bounded by all of finitude nor is it empty and vacuous. The will is now actually determined in a real and existing object. Yet, it is only a dialectical progression and not an absolute one, because the second moment is not free in a sense that the first was. The form of consciousness makes it such that the will no longer conceives of itself in relation to itself which is freedom, but rather in relation to a finite, alien object, be it a subjective urge or objective externality. The will’s self-conception is determined by an alien other. The will is no longer free for-itself – it has lost the self-conception of freedom – but merely in-itself – it is the embodiment of freedom in the object.

To render the abstract more immediate, think of a loveless and abusive relationship. I clearly see that my partner is determining the content of my reality but not in a way aligned with the rest of my life: they may hit me, take away my savings, and verbally abuse me. And I can’t help but conceive of myself as “partner-of-my-partner”. That is to say, deep within my conception of the self lies an element that the same self finds terribly alien and unappealing. Because my life is furnished with content not determined by my self, I do not gain the consciousness of being a self-determining agent.

The third moment of the will, that of individuality, is the state where the will resides in determinacies that is not alien to it. It is an absolute progression from both the first and second moments because it is the unity of the first two moments. Like the second moment, it is free in-itself because the will resides in determinacies. But it is a greater degree of freedom in-itself because these determinacies are not alien to me. They are, in some sense, “mine” in a way that was not true in the moment of particularity. What could this mean? I will not attempt a systematic and exhaustive account of what it means for something to be “mine” but only provide suggestions to illuminate the concept. One way something can be “mine” is if it exists in harmony with the other determinant ends that I have embedded my will into. It is not unthinkable that a sibling whom I considered “mine” in childhood when we shared hobbies begins to develop an alien and other character when our interests diverge or even conflict. But we need not interpret “harmony” so thinly. I may lose in an athletic competition that upset most of the ends I held in life. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the entire competition must appear alien to me. Upon recognizing the fairness of the rules and the clear superiority of the victors, I may nonetheless consider the competition legitimate and, in some deep sense, “mine”. Another way is if I choose to determine my will in accordance to a set of ethical principles recognized as good by me. I may, reflecting on the importance of companionship, move to a foreign country for a romantic partner. Even though I am in a, literally, alien situation, I can still observe the surroundings as reflecting my principles and, thus, “mine”. There are two broad sets of strategies to unalienate the determinations of the will. I can, practically, transform these determinations. Upon seeing a hole torn into my roof by a tornado, I can go repair my roof. I can also, speculatively, change my interpretation of these determinations and look for ways that existing circumstances are already aligned with me. The same tornado-ridden home owner can, perhaps, learn to see the hole as a work of God that serves to constantly remind him of the frailty of life. As it should already be obvious, there are different degrees of freedom even within the third moment. The former homeowner may be right to question whether the latter’s reconciliation is deficient. But what is constant throughout these examples, and what I have hoped to have illuminated in Hegel’s concept of freedom, is the assumption of an immense desire to be at home in the world. This is a desire to belong and, just like when we are at home, see our needs accounted for or reflected in the world’s workings even if they are not all addressed. To the extent we don’t feel alienated but reconciled in our determinations we are free in-ourselves through the content of our will.

But “the will is determined by no means only in the sense of content, but also in the sense of form” (§8). Like the first moment, the third moment is free for-itself because it has a self-conception of freedom. This should not be overlooked. Both the fact of being determined by myself and my conception as a self-determined agent are two distinct species of reward that come from this conception of freedom. As is the case with freedom in-itself, the moment of individuality has a more fleshed out freedom for-itself than the moment of particularity because it now sees this freedom reflected in actual determinations. The idea must be this: in so far as I am reconciled to my determinations in the ways I’ve articulated and consider them to be “mine”, I also gain a conception of myself through the form of my will as a self-determining agent simply because nothing which determines me is alien. The will is free in-and-for-itself.

For an example, now consider a harmonious romantic relationship. My partner may make demands of me that don’t align with my immediate ends. But they are reasonable enough for me to see how they are in alignment with the sustainability of this loving relationship which I, without a doubt, consider “mine”. Because all the determinations – my partner, their demands, etc. – which affect me are reconciled to me and do not take on an alien character, I gain a self-conception of a being that is determined solely by myself.

The numerous examples I provided in romance may lead to the misconception that the three moments are meant to be interpreted as developmental stages. Indeed, it is often the case that we, first, do not express ourselves, second, express ourselves incongruently and then, third, find a coherent expression of who we are. But I suggest we interpret the first two moments as mere logical stages for the reason that I cannot conceive of any real instance where a human will is just for-itself without any determinacy or just in-itself without any self-conception of being a free agent. That is to say, we shouldn’t expect to find a solely universal or particular will in the real world. Every instance of will in reality is free in-and-for-itself although, of course, each may vary in deficiency of freedom in-itself or for-itself.

The Double Question

Before we continue to examine how private property is justified upon this conception of freedom I have sketched out, we must ask a question that will add complexity to our investigation: where does this conception of freedom and the forcefulness of its demands come from? Another way to put the question is: how solid is the grounding that grounds property? For, at the end of my deduction, one can agree that private property is necessary based on this conception of freedom but still fail to see why this particular conception of freedom is meaningful or should encompass the entirety of our ethical concerns. I suspect, admittedly without an understanding of the entirety of Hegel’s system but merely deducing from the fact that new demands of freedom are introduced continuously throughout the Philosophy of Right, that Hegel’s conception of freedom is not deduced completely a priori. This is a marked difference from, say, Locke and Kant who justified property on purely a priori grounds: natural law and the Universal Principle of Reason respectively. Hegel’s conception of freedom is indeed informed by some a priori analysis of the agential structure but it is also informed by empirical observation. That is to say, both the what – the specific demands of freedom – and the why – why this conception of freedom is ethically meaningful – is revealed partially in the empirical investigations of the Philosophy of Right. Having just finished the Introduction, the demands from Hegel’s will are much less forceful than those from Locke’s natural laws or Kant’s Universal Principle of Reason. It gains force and legitimacy only by revealing itself and its demands to the reader as foundational to the human condition throughout the rest of the book. According to the reading I am proposing, the Philosophy of Right is as much an account of justifying institutions based on an account of freedom as it is about justifying the ethical meaningfulness of a conception of freedom by showing how it manifests in our institutions. Therefore, the single question that motivated our investigation – “How does Hegel justify private property on a conception of freedom?” – expands into a double question – “And how does Hegel justify his conception of freedom through a discussion of private property?”

Property and Contract

The entire section on Abstract Right is grounded on the most barebones and basic conception of freedom in the three subdivisions: the freedom of personhood. Persons are those who exercise an arbitrary will, a will that chooses to engage with and disengage from certain determinations. It is the fact of choice rather than the principles of choice that are of concern in personhood. In other words, Abstract Right is the set of conditions that guarantee the person’s capacity to choose can be exercised. What is at stake here is whether a person is able to express themselves at all rather than what form that expression takes: “The person must give himself an external sphere of freedom in order to have being as Idea” (§41). As far as property is concerned, it is irrelevant whether one chooses to be the next Beethoven or a drug-dealing criminal. We should not confuse this disinterest in the principles of choice with only the second moment of particularity. It is made clear that one is only a person in so far as they have realized, at least to some extent, all three moments of the will. In personality “there is knowledge of the self as an object \Gegenstand\, but as an object raised by thought to simple infinity and hence purely identical with itself. In so far as they have not yet arrived at this pure thought and knowledge of themselves, individuals and peoples do not yet have a personality” (§35).

So how does Hegel justify private property – a normative relationship legitimizing a thing as “mine” – upon the conception of personhood? The answer is deceptively simple. Persons have an arbitrary will that demand to be actualized in the ways I have discussed. Things do not but can be vessels for the will of persons. To completely prohibit private property is to prevent the will from claiming any thing as its own. Wills will not be able to realize freedom in-itself nor freedom in-and-for-itself. Because the actuality of the will is, as Hegel puts it, “sacred”, a social order must permit a sufficient sphere of things where people can inject their will into and claim as their own as long as it is not inhabited already by another will.

This system-side argument must seem empty and weak. After all, one can question why the actuality of the will is sacred. Ceteris paribus the two species of good we’ve unveiled in Hegel’s conception of freedom – to be unalienated from the world and to hold a self-conception as a free agent – are undeniably valuable. But why are they sacred above all else? We should not expect to understand the importance of private property as an institution and, indeed, to see the sacred value of freedom in Hegel’s formal arguments. Instead, the reading I am proposing suggests we can only hope to find such reasons by wrestling with the empirical reality of property ownership as Hegel describes it. Hegel observes that what is constitutive of private property is possession, use and, alienation (§53). To this I add, while withholding an explanation of my reasons for doing so until a later section, contract. These four relationships to a thing are not the preconditions to property nor the license that property provides but what owning property is. That is to say, to the extent a thing is in my possession, used by me, has the potential to be alienated, and is verified in contract, it is my private property and my will is embedded into it. It is through an empirical investigation into each of these constitutive relationships and the goods that result from their actuality as well as the evils resulting from their prohibition that we can understand both the importance of private property as well as freedom.

Possession is the external form of property (§64). One can possess physical property through physical-seizure, form-giving, or signature. Physical-seizure, as the name suggests, is any external hold you may have over the object. This can take the form of literally picking a fruit from a tree, building a fence around a piece of land, or grabbing something with your remote-controlled robotic arm. As it should be apparent, the forms of physical-seizure greatly varies and what separates the rightful from the illegitimate cannot be fully deduced from the concept of property. This will be true for all the constitutive relationships discussed: philosophy can only provide a general outline of what owning property is, leaving the details in positive law for actors in history to flesh out based on their contingent circumstance.

Form-giving is to mold the object in some way or another, say, when you design your living room. “To give form to something is the mode of taking possession most in keeping with the Idea, inasmuch as it combines the subjective and the objective” (§56). That is to say, it’s obvious how this species of possession is fundamental to the moments of will we have discussed. To give form to something is to both fashion an object according to my will and express my will through an object.

Lastly, a signature – when you plant a flag on a building or when you write your name on a box, for example – is the most abstract and fundamental type of possession. In fact, both physical-seizure and form-giving are types of signatures. Signatures are a way of labeling an object externally as “mine”. Their necessity must come from the demands of the will: only through them can we construct a homely environment and gain a full self-conception as a free will by seeing myself reflected in objects I consider “mine”.

So, what negative formative consequences result from prohibiting possession? Let us imagine a specific communitarian outpost where workers tend to a garden owned by all. Workers would still be able to seize and give form to things (in fact, I can’t imagine a situation where they can be universally prohibited) but they aren’t able to give signs to their labor, at least not in the way Hegel instructs. Workers would look to their fruits as the outcome of collective labor; the sign is “ours” instead of “mine”. What is so disastrous about this? The answer must be that by only seeing things as owned by the collective and not recognizing anything owned by myself, I gain a false self-conception. I do not recognize myself as an agent with a free will, but only agential in so far as I can act through the larger collective. It is not that I may starve or the garden will be poorly managed but that I won’t be able to consider the communal garden a home and thus fail to recognize my freedom. Indeed, this is the charge Hegel levels at Plato’s communitarian property ideals. It “misjudges the nature of the freedom of spirit and right and does not comprehend it in its determinate moments” (§46).

If possession is the external form of property, then use is identical to the internal presence of the will in a thing (§64). Possession is the positive relationship to a thing as “mine”. Use is the negative relationship to a thing: I see it only as a function of my needs with no positive qualities of its own. “The thing is reduced to a means of satisfying my need” (§60). To own property is to be able to use it fully, to have your will embodied in it fully. The dictates of right are that not only must I be able to use things from time to time, but only by allowing me to fully hollow out objects of any other considerations than those of my will am I able to see the entirety of myself and my needs reflected in it. The negative formative consequences of prohibiting ownership may be easier to see than possession. Consider a slave that does not have full use of anything, not even their own body. Such a slave may even be permitted to do something enjoyable like to knit. But since both the tools and fruits of knitting are owned by the master, the slave isn’t able to reduce the activity of knitting solely to the satisfaction of their desire to knit. They might worry whether they have used too much of the master’s yarn, or whether they will be banned from knitting all together at a moment’s notice. The activity and, therefore, also their desire for knitting both begin taking on an alien character. They do not conceive of themselves as self-determined but heavily other-determined beings.

Alienation is the ability to disown property. It is dictated by right because it corresponds to the first moment of the will: the ability to disengage from any determination. A society can fail to protect the right to alienate in two ways. First, it can fail to provide sufficient channels to alienate our previous determinations. A real example of this is the suggestion to introduce a “right to be forgotten” which protected the individual’s ability to remove a piece of personal content from the internet. The idea here also underlies the right of alienation: if we don’t allow people ways to distance from certain identities they have chosen in the past, we do not provide the conditions for them to self-determine in the future. They will always be stuck with something alien. Second, a society can permit too much to be alienated. “The right to such inalienable things is imprescriptible, for the act whereby I take possession of my personality and substantial essence and make myself a responsible being with moral and religious values and capable of holding rights removes these determinations from that very externality which alone made them capable of becoming the possessions of someone else” (§66). The idea here is this, I can alienate something in so far as I can externalize it, stop using it, and draw my will out of it. There are a certain set of things – personality, body, morality, religion – that I can indeed abstract away from but I cannot do so without it losing its function. I can indeed, perhaps in a state of deep meditation, abstract away from my personality and body. But in so far that I have a personality, that I use my body, that I engage in moral thinking, that I am religious, it must be my will alone that is fully embedded inside these determinations. Thus, it is contradictory to be able to alienate them. This is not the case for my car, for example, which I can completely externalize while preserving its function for transportation that can be successfully used by another without involvement of my will.

I also include the contract as a constitutive relationship of property for the reason that without contracts, property is, in a certain sense, deficient. The basic form of the contract is to exchange one’s property for that of another. We should not underestimate what is at stake here, the prohibition of the contract will, at the same time, remove the very basis for the market economy. While we may make contracts for specific determinate ends, the necessity of the contract is mandated by the demands of freedom (§71). In fact, the discussion around the contract further furnishes our conception of freedom. What is required in the freedom of personhood is not only that I own property, and gain a self-conception of being property-owning, but that I see others recognize me in this way as well. “Existence … as determinate being, is essentially being for another” (§71). This reciprocal recognition required by freedom is what contracts affirm: “Contract presupposes that the contracting parties recognize each other as persons and owners of property” (§71). Imagine a society that permits the first three relations of property but not that of contract-making. An artist in such a society would be able to create, own, and even abandon artworks but not trade them for money. The concern here must be that the artist does not gain a full-conception of themselves as an artist. They may see their will reflected in the work, but without the implicit recognition that others see them in this way too – as would be gained in an art sale – their self-conception is deficient.

Conclusion

There are already fault lines beginning to emerge in this line of argumentation already. Hegel’s choice to ground his state on freedom, especially the formative demands of freedom, seems to be trapped between two horns of a dilemma. If freedom and its realization is shown to be just one amongst many of human goods, then his theory is on shaky grounds. After all, I may be able to properly conceive of myself as a self-determining agent by joining a self-sufficient but poor and starving group of nomads. Yet, after consideration, I still prefer the life of a well-fed Roman slave that is, on occasion, able to enjoy certain comforts not available to the more realized nomad. Yet, if freedom is shown to underlie all human goods, I struggle to imagine how the definition of freedom will not have been bloated and abstracted to such the extent that it is no longer a useful concept. The fear here is that freedom becomes empty and vacuous, uninformative in making practical decisions.

But even if we were to concede that the demands of freedom are indeed sacred, one can still reasonably question whether it necessitates private property in the ways Hegel has described. In ethical life, we will learn that the family does possess communal property without harming the freedom of its members. Why can’t the same not be true for our communitarian garden laborer? Furthermore, can’t our artist gain recognition from others without selling his artwork? It is intelligible how contract promotes this mutual recognition as property-owners, but why is it the only way necessitated by right? Lastly, a danger of grounding private property on its formative consequences for our self-conception is that it appears to permit the state to prohibit what we would normally consider to be protected under private property. After all, if private property is necessary only because through it we develop a self-conception that would otherwise be impossible, isn’t it enough just to give me property rights to my body and nothing else?

So, where do we stand with regard to the double question? Has Hegel shown private property to be necessitated by freedom, and that this particular conception of freedom to be sacred? In a sense, it is still too early in the book to provide a definite answer, especially for the latter question. Both property and freedom will receive much more substantial treatment in morality and ethical life. At this point, these potential problems I have highlighted should just be reasons to be even more intrigued for Hegel’s resolution in the rest of the book.

Second Treatise of Government by John Locke | Notes & Summary

Johnathan Bi — Sun, 24 May 2020 21:45:13 GMT

In the Second Treatise of Government, John Locke’s justification of private property eventually leads to the surprising conclusion that “men have agreed to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth.” This essay will reconstruct his argument, problematizing it along the way, by first elucidating the justification of private property in the state of nature. Then, I will present the restraints on the individual’s acquisition of property and therefore on inequality during this pre-civilized state, before ending with an analysis of how the introduction of money renders these restraints impotent.

Private Property in the State of Nature

The first dilemma Locke must wrestle with, given his Christian world view, is how there can be any legitimate private property at all if God has given all of humanity dominion and, therefore, ownership over nature. Constitutive in the notion of private property is the exclusionary access of the owner. How can one exclude every other human from a part of their God-given inheritance?

Locke’s justification proceeds in three steps. First, he asks us to examine that our physical bodies are not natural objects owned by mankind but ones that we undeniably own privately. It follows from this then that our actions and, more specifically, acts of labor are also our own. Lastly and more questionably, Locke concludes that whatever our labor operates upon in nature also becomes our own. “Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.” That is not to say any member within any community can legitimately acquire communal resources at will, but merely that the human can take from nature at will through labor. While this clarification renders Locke’s argument more reasonable, the intuition behind it poses a question for Locke’s third step: why does labor turn a natural object, which is the communal property of mankind, into one’s own? To this question I will now turn.

Locke makes an appeal to natural law, laws whose validity are given a priori by reason examining the human condition. Because humanity is God’s creation, these laws are also commanded by, or at least conform to, God’s will. These laws are accessible through reasoned examination alone but their integrity comes, at least partially, from an appeal to divinity. This will become important as, I will soon show, Locke’s third step not only justifies private property but transforms it into an activity commanded by God.

Locke’s first appeal to the human condition is to self-preservation: “men, being once born, have a right to their preservation, and consequently to meat and drink, and such other things as nature affords for their subsistence.” He asks us to consider what would happen if labor on nature did not lead to private possession. We would literally have to get the individual consent of all other human beings to, for example, pick berries off a wild bush. “If such a consent as that was necessary, man [would have] starved.”

Locke’s second appeal to the human condition is to human flourishing. “God, who hath given the world to men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life, and convenience. The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being.” His reasoning must be: it is within our nature not only to subsist but also to flourish. This would be impossible unless we could use a certain number of objects as we wish while excluding others from interfering.

Locke’s third appeal to the human condition is to collective subsistence and flourishing. “Labour makes the far greatest part of the value of things we enjoy in this world; and the ground which produces the materials, is scarce to be reckoned in, as any, or at most, but a very small part of it” and therefore “he who appropriates … by his labour, does not lessen, but increase the common stock of mankind.” If humanity as a whole, and not just a lone individual, is to subsist and flourish we have to acquire objects which are valuable to us. The value of objects come more from labor than natural production; he provides the example that uncultivated land produces only one percent of what cultivated land does. This is not a justification of private property per say, but a justification of labor and perhaps an implicit argument of why it should be rewarded with private property.

By drawing upon the subsistence and flourishing of the individual and collective, Locke appeals to the natural law which is inexorably intertwined with God. Not only does he manage to justify private property morally but he elevates its acquisition to a divine commandment:

God, when he gave the world in common to all mankind, commanded man also to labour, and the penury of his condition required it of him. God and his reason commanded him to subdue the earth, i.e. improve it for the benefit of life, and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labour. He that in obedience to this command of God, subdued, tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his property, which another had no title to, nor could without injury take from him.

Natural Restraints on Inequality

“The same law of nature, that does by this means give us property, does also bound that property too.” That is to say, just as the natural law justifies property, it also contains restrictions on acquisition and, therefore, inequality.

Property is restrained by the limitations of one’s labor: ”As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property.” This tautology might seem uninteresting and redundant in the state of nature, but will soon be important when money expands what one may consider “one’s labor”. For now, it is noteworthy that this limitation restrains the bounds of all property but cannot produce, as the next two can, illegitimate property.

Legitimate property is restrained by spoilage. Locke observes that the true necessities of life are often consumable perishables such as food. Therefore, property is illegitimate if it spoils before being consumed, as it shows one has taken more than one needed for subsistence and flourishing. Why might this be the case? He makes an appeal to the same natural law that justified property: “As much as anyone can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by his labour fix a property in: whatever is beyond this, is more than his share, and belongs to others. Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.”

Legitimate property is also restrained by the remainder left for others. Property is only legitimate in so far as after the act of acquisition “there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.” But what does “good” and “enough” mean? Does one need to leave enough for everyone else to flourish or merely to subsist? Surprisingly, the criteria is more stringent than both of these conditions: he needs to leave “room for as good, and as large a possession (after the other had taken out his) as before it was appropriated.” That is to say, the act of acquisition entrench upon the anyone else’s potential for flourishing. It is not just how much they will legitimately acquire to flourish which needs to be respected, but the largest amount of property that others can legitimately acquire.

The boundaries of legitimate property seem both too broad and too narrow. It is too broad in that it is not clear what constitutes labor. Does watering a tree once found in a forest render that tree and all its fruits mine? Behind this critique of the ambiguity of labor lies a deeper suspicion. Value is created mostly by nature in many useful objects such as pears or oil. It is not clear why extractive labor deserves to be awarded with property in these cases. It is too narrow in that the third restraint is suffocating. It is unclear why, as an industrious individual, my property should be limited not only by what others need to subsist and flourish but also by the maximum property they can legitimately possesses. It is even more unclear, how one is supposed to follow this restraint practically. These problems will balloon and become irresolvable with the introduction of money.

The Introduction of Money

The introduction of money – imperishables such as gold or silver – made larger forms of inequality possible. Much of this inequality is justified because, so Locke reasons, we have a “tacit agreement” to put value upon money. Since the acquisition from nature is just, and the agreement to use money is just, whatever inequality follows from it must also be just. Therefore, inequality is bounded by no more than the same restraints from the state of nature. We must investigate now, how money renders these three restraints impotent.

First, money expands, or at least facilitates the expansion of, what constitutes “my labor”. “Thus the grass my horse has bit; the turfs my servant has cut … become my property, without the assignation or consent of anybody.” Through money I can purchase property, such as a horse or a stock portfolio, whose acquisitive actions count as my labor and thus generate more property. I can also purchase the labor power of others as my own. This drastically weakens the first restraint.

Second, money, being an imperishable, allows me to store value without it ever spoiling. This renders the restraint from spoilage impotent.

But what about the third restraint, that I have shown to be quite restrictive already in the state of nature? Surely great material inequalities limit not only the potential but also the actuality of subsistence and flourishing by, say, corrupting political institutions? Locke remains quiet on this point. It is unclear how the third restraint is supposed to function in civil society, since any acquisitive action almost always limits the potential for another’s property, a potential that due to the imperishable characteristic of money is now infinite. A consistent Lockean defense would be that these restraints only limit the transfer of nature to private property. Any property gained from trading with others, which dominates civil society, is justified because it is consensual and does not fall under the dominion of any natural restraint.

But even to this charitable defense, one may object: should there not be new restraints on property acquisition from trade derived from the natural law just as there were for acquisition from nature? To put the critique more broadly: if Locke defends inequality as long as acquisitive behaviors remain within the bounds of certain restraints derived from the state of nature and are facilitated by the consent of money or trade, one can simply question whether money or trade is consensual. It seems that the agreement to use money, if there ever was such an agreement, was ill informed on the potential material and formative consequences. Therefore, one does not consent to using money or entering into civil society any more than one consents to living in the state of nature. To rescue Locke within his own framework, the restraints placed on property in civil society cannot be the same restraints derived in the state of nature and must be re-derived from examining how the natural law – the subsistence and flourishing of the individual and collective – operates under the logic of civil society.

Paradise Lost by John Milton | Notes & Summary

Johnathan Bi — Fri, 01 May 2020 22:33:00 GMT

“That to the height of this great argument / I may assert eternal providence, / And justify the ways of God to men” (1.24 – 1.26). In the early books of Milton’s Paradise Lost, he makes clear the aims of this epic. But where does providence need asserting and what ways of God require justification? This essay is a reconstruction of Milton’s theodicy.

Two Species of Freedom

To understand what may require justification in this retelling of humanity’s expulsion out of Eden, it is fruitful to distinguish between two species of freedom, one offered by Satan and the other, God.

Satanic freedom, is a negative species of freedom: to be free of external restraint. Without this specific definition in mind, it is hard for us to make sense of Satan’s first remarks upon being cast out of heaven and into hell: “Here at least / We shall be free” (1.258 – 1.259). Not only is Satan deprived of a desirable existence in heaven but also a position of power as the most powerful Archangel. Satan becomes free in hell only in this limited, negative sense: “Free, and to none accountable, preferring / Hard liberty before the easy yoke / Of servile pomp” (2.257). What Satan gains is a freedom from external restraint, in this case, service and obedience to God.

There is a degree of irony here that should not be overlooked. Readers should question whether Satan’s declaration of achieving freedom – a freedom he had mustered one-third of God’s angels to fight for – really is compatible with the gloomy, ugly, and undesirable circumstance he finds himself in. The drastic difference between Satan’s cheerful declaration and the, literally, hellish circumstance is a reason for suspicion that there must be a degree of resentment and, therefore, facetiousness in claiming this “victory”. If you can’t win a real war you can at least declare to have achieved your original aim. Behind this suspicion lies a moral intuition that will be confirmed in the following books: Satan’s negative conception of freedom is not a desirable end to aim for. Despite his rhetoric, Satan reveals, upon observing the beauty of Eden, what appears to be deep regret in his choices albeit too little, too late.

But we must also caution not to interpret these first remarks, by which we are introduced both to Satan as well as this first conception of freedom, as resulting merely out of spite. It is a consistent ideal that Satan has continuously aimed for in his struggle, even if it proves to be flawed in its obtainment. In fact, this negative freedom is precisely one of the key rhetorical moves which Satan uses to trick Eve. Through the lens of this species of freedom, Satan transforms the very idea of eating the fruit from being an unthinkable crime to an act of “dauntless virtue” that God will respect if not applaud (4.694). Under this light, virtue is defiance and vice is obedience.

God’s Freedom

Heavenly freedom is, unsurprisingly, an exact reversal of Satanic freedom. It is a positive conception of freedom; that is to say, you are free in so far as you live up to a substantive ideal. “God left free the will, for what obeys / Reason, is free, and reason he made right” (9.352). Virtue and vice reverse: what characterizes freedom is no longer defiance but obedience. Specifically, it is obedience to that which is right, the natural order of things, that makes the will free. This idea, that restraint is paradoxically what makes one free, is expressed also in Adam’s conversation with the Archangel Michael. Adam poses grand cosmological questions about God’s universe. Michael diffuses this attempt by warning Adam, as in the case with the forbidden fruit, to not let his thoughts wander where they are not meant to. God carved a sphere out for Adam which should be his sole concern. Adam’s response is revealing:

How fully hast thou satisfied me, pure
Intelligence of heaven, angel serene,
And freed from intricacies, taught to live,
The easiest way, nor with perplexing thoughts
To interrupt the sweet of life, from which
God hath bid dwell far off all anxious cares,
And not molest us, unless we our selves
Seek them with wandering thoughts, and notions vain.
(8.180 - 8.187)

Even in the realm of knowledge – perhaps especially in he realm of knowledge, given the epistemic nature of the fruit – freedom is gained in limitation. Adam is not freed from, as Satan was, externalities. In fact, it is precisely the external imposition of Michael that frees him from internal troubles: “intricacies … perplexing thoughts … anxious cares … wandering thoughts, and notions vain.” Likewise, Adam is not satisfied by a new external sphere of knowledge where he has free reign but a restriction of knowledge allowing him to enjoy “the sweet of life.” Just as satanic freedom is cautious of external tyranny, so is heavenly freedom cautious of internal tyranny.

I must emphasize, if not only for how unintuitive it is, that heavenly freedom has nothing to do with the faculty of choice. It is the mere state of obedience, of being aligned with reason. “Inordinate desires / And upstart passions catch the government / From reason, and to servitude reduce / Man till then free” (7.90). It is clear, that freedom is lost during the fall. The idea must be: what man loses in the fall is not the faculty of choice, for it is made clear that we will eternally be able to choose. What he loses is heavenly freedom, the state of being aligned with reason. It is only by distinguishing freedom as a state and freedom as a faculty to choose can we possibly make sense of this perplexing line: “freely all their pleasant fruit for food / Gave thee” (7.540 – 7.542). What is being described here is a fruit-bearing tree in Eden. But what could it possibly mean for a tree to be free in the act of giving food? Certainly, Milton is not suggesting that Eden’s vegetation is enchanted with wills of their own. The idea must be that the tree, by providing food, satisfies its function and adheres to the rational order of the universe. To be free here, as is the case with Satanic freedom, is merely a state that has nothing to do with what we normally consider freedom to be: the faculty to choose. The reversal between Satanic and heavenly freedom is where authority lies. For the former, authority lies in the self, for the latter, it lies in God and the rules that govern his universe.

There is also a normative reversal between these two states. Whereas we are often exposed to the troubled and torturous inner-dialogue of Satan, it is made abundantly clear that humanity, pre-fall, lived in a state of constant joy. “Our happy state / Hold … while our obedience holds” (5.36 – 5.38). It is unquestionable that heavenly freedom, in its consequences for life, is elevated above Satanic freedom.

The Problem of Evil

We are now ready to answer the motivating question. Milton’s theodicy – unlike that of, say, Augustine’s in the City of God – is not to tackle the broad and general question of how an all-just, all-powerful, and all-knowing God continuously permits evil. What needs to be justified is much more specific. To make God’s ways intelligible at all in this poem, Milton needs to show why God is not responsible for the fall from this heavenly freedom of happiness where we were obedient to reason to this satanic freedom of suffering where we rely only on ourselves. After all, God is responsible for creating the entire universe.

This is a project made all the more challenging by God’s perfect foresight. Even before Satan’s attempts of seduction, God, “past, present, future he beholds,” saw not only Satan’s plans but humanity’s inevitable fall (3.78). He speaks of man’s fall in the past tense before it even occurs. Yet, God does nothing to obstruct Satan. We must understand the difficulty of this project. This would be equivalent to parents watching their toddler stick their hand in a garbage disposal that the parent themselves turned on knowing full well the consequences, yet doing nothing to prevent it.

The Responsibility of Freedom

Milton’s theodicy proceeds in two steps. The first step is to take the responsibility of the fall off the shoulders of God. God comments on the forthcoming fall:

Whose fault? Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
Such I created all the ethereal powers
And spirits, both them who stood and them who failed;
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.
(3.102)

What could it mean for man to fall freely or stand freely? Evidently, the concept of freedom appealed to here is no longer a state, as it was in the first two cases, but the aforementioned faculty of choice. Those who stood, chose to stand; those who fell, chose to fall. Milton lessens the burden of responsibility off the shoulders of God by positing a will that is always free to choose. The analogy of the toddler, is no longer valid, for it does not have the faculty of choice fully formed. God’s intervention, or lack their of, is more like a negligent factory owner who prescribes safety rules but does not provide safe working conditions for their adult workers. Central to this concept of freedom is choice. And smuggled in choice is personal responsibility that draws the blame away from God.

But Milton is not content with just partially exonerating God from blame, he needs to show that the fault is man’s in its entirety. He can only do so by expanding the will’s capabilities out of proportion. If the will can only choose between a few choices, within specific circumstances, and with limited power, then it can only be partially responsible for every choice. Under this view, God must be at least partially blamed for the conditions around Adam and Eve’s choice to eat the fruit. To fully alleviate the blame of God, Milton has to point to more than just a freely choosing will. He has to posit a will that, no matter how coercive the circumstance, always has an absolute conscience to desire the good, an absolute clarity in recognizing the good, and absolute power to act according to the good. By absolute I mean a complete sovereignty from external conditions. For in so far as the conditions of Eden influenced the fall, God must be held responsible. If God is to be declared completely blame-free, then the will must be sovereign from all conditions. It is only with such a powerful will that Milton is able to describe God’s creation as blameless. Humans are “authors to themselves in all / Both what they judge and what they choose; for so / I formed them free” (3.122 – 3.124). That is to say, every single choice of man in all, not just partly, is the result of his will. Therefore, he is fully responsible. It is only with such a powerful will can we say that Eve was free, in any meaningful sense of the word, when Satan coerces her with, as Milton depicts it, eloquence fitting for the best Roman orators.

Absolutely good, absolutely knowledgeable, and absolutely powerful, the type of will that exonerates God takes on the qualities of God. Perhaps we are supposed to interpret it literally when God speaks of man: “he had of me / All he could have” (3.97 – 3.98). My unconventional reading – that the will takes on powers comparable to that of God’s – is supported by the will’s relationship to divine predestination. “Nor can justly accuse / Their maker, or their making, or their fate, /As if predestination overruled / Their will” (3.112 – 3.115). God argues that man cannot blame God because divine predestination does not override the will. In other words, God’s own plans of destiny does not hold ultimate sway over the human will. It is will that shapes destiny and not destiny which determines the will. The will is made so powerful, elevated to such a high status, that even God seems, in some sense, powerless against it. Nowhere is this more apparent than the brief consideration God gives to taking away man’s will. “I else must change / Their nature, and revoke the high decree / Unchangeable, eternal, which ordained / Their freedom” (3.125 – 3.128). The objection God gives to changing our nature and revoking our freedom is that our wills are eternal and unchangeable, even by God.

The morality of Will

Milton may have exonerated God in the moment of the fall by offering a, however unrealistic, picture of human agency. But there is another objection he needs to respond to. Why give humans this free will in the first place, especially if he knew it was going to lead to disaster? After all, why couldn’t God have made a perfectly deterministic universe where we are only free in the second sense, like the fruit-bearing tree? We may not enjoy this faculty of freedom but we would always be in a constant state of joy. God’s response reveals another dimension of the will integral to Milton’s theodicy:

Not free, what proof could they have given sincere
Of true allegiance, constant faith or love,
Where only what they needs must do, appeared,
Not what they would? what praise could they receive?
What pleasure I from such obedience paid,
When will and reason (reason also is choice)
Useless and vain, of freedom both despoiled,
Made passive both, had served necessity,
Not me.
(3.110)

God asks us to imagine such a deterministic world where we, like the fruit-bearing tree, adhere to the good but only out of necessity. How could our actions and thoughts be anything but useless and vain? How can our allegiance, faith, and love be meaningful to God, if they did not come out of our free choice? This should not be interpreted as the mere selfish remarks of a lonely God desiring attention, but true for all human relations. How can Adam take pleasure in Eve’s allegiance, faith, and love to him if she had no other choice? How can Eve even understand herself if every action was necessitated? What this thought experiment reveals is that not only does our faculty of choice have an immense metaphysical power, as previously discussed, but it also carries an immense ethical weight. Only that which is chosen by the will is authentic and meaningful. The exact same outcome is experienced completely differently by both object and subject based on whether it was the outcome of choice. God could’ve had a fully deterministic universe where there was no evil but still he chose a reality with this faculty of choice, where those who stand, stand freely, and those who fall, fall freely. The calculus must be that whatever evil may result from our free will is largely overshadowed by the goodness of this free will itself. In practical terms: look around and observe all the suffering, warfare, disaster, and disease in the world. This could’ve all been prevented, but it wasn’t, because we were made as free beings. This must mean that our faculty of will is at least as valuable and good as all our suffering is bad.

Conclusion

It is through these two movements that Milton completes his theodicy. By positing an immensely powerful will, Milton relieves God of the responsibility of the fall. And by positing an immensely good will, Milton justifies God’s decision of giving it to us in the first place.

Fear & Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard | Notes & Summary

Johnathan Bi — Wed, 25 Mar 2020 22:24:00 GMT

*Notes on Fear & Trembling, including elements of Either/Or

Kierkegaard’s system of personal development consists of a progress through four distinct outlooks on life: the aesthetic, the ethical, religiousness A, and religiousness B. A key question then, is how this transition occurs, a problem made more poignant by the fact that this progression cannot be interpreted as a steady, continuous, commensurable betterment but rather as gestalt shifts between largely-incommensurable outlooks. A necessary part of these transitions is the “leap”. Since this leap is not sufficient in itself to facilitate these transitions, I will elucidate what this leap is by first exploring what other moves one must make to facilitate these transitions, before arriving at a positive definition of the leap: the will acting on a promise legitimated by skeptical reasoning and grounded by immanent reasoning and indirect communication.

We begin our investigation with immanent reasoning for this is what a rationalist opponent, such as Hegel, may consider to be a sufficient resource to transition from one stage to the next. Such a view goes: after examining, through reflection alone, one’s immanent resources and their tensions, one can, through reason alone, determine, maybe not a fully positive conception of the next stage, but a direction to move towards that nonetheless, if one repeats this process enough, will lead one to the next stage. By “through reason alone”, I mean to say: one’s assuredness and expectation of the outcome of this transition, and consequently the motivation to enact such a transition, can be traced to nothing other than the logical coherency of a series of arguments conforming to the law of reason.

Kierkegaard would not deny that transitions between these four stages might happen in increments rather than one enormous leap, but he would disagree that the appeal to reasons stemming from immanent resources is enough to facilitate this leap for the simple fact of incommensurability between stages. This incommensurability can be seen in Fear and Trembling as Johannes De Silentio, in the ethical stage, struggles to make sense of anyone in religiousness B: “I have sought in vain to spy out the incommensurability of genius in him” (97). In other words, the immanent resources in an advanced stage are so different from a previous stage such that the latter cannot comprehend, much less, reason soundly about his path forward.

In Either/Or, the ethical Judge William struggles to explain the benefits of the ethical to the aesthetic A even when using an immanent appeal: “I wish only to force you to the point where the necessity of making a choice[, the defining characteristic of the ethical,] manifests itself and there-after to consider existence under ethical qualifications ... If only the choice is posited, all the esthetic returns, and you will see that only thereby does existence become beautiful” (76). We can imagine A’s hesitancy to such a mode of argumentation. First, he can doubt whether the ethical really does preserve the passion of the aesthetic. Second, whatever aesthetic passion that is preserved might be so alien to his current free, commitment-less experience of the aesthetic as to be considered two separate, and therefore non-commensurable, entities. Third, Judge William’s major advocation for the ethical: the meaningfulness of commitment, is completely incomprehensible to A with his current immanent resources.

It is thus better to understand, at least a large proportion, of Judge Williams’ attempt in this paragraph not as immanent reasoning but as a promise. Should A choose to adopt Judge Williams’ advice it cannot be only due to the soundness of his arguments, but because he has faith in these promises: the preservation of passion and the meaningfulness of commitment. That is not to say immanent reasoning is impossible, in fact promises would be blind and ungrounded if they weren’t grounded by immanent reasoning. My claim is this: because stages represent having different immanent resources, to the extent that an immanent appeal through reasoning alone is sufficient to motivate the transition, one already needs to adopt the resources of the next stage. Put negatively: to the extent you aren’t already in the next stage, immanent reasoning will not be enough to get you there, and you will be required to act on your faith in promises rather than being convinced by argumentation.

There is another method to ground promises, for the teacher to get the student “to consider existence under [different] qualifications” (76). That is, through indirect communication. We have already established how objective, direct, rational arguments, which falls under actuality, is limited in communicating subjective, personal states of existence, which falls under ideality: “Ideality is not a chattel that can be transferred from one person” (218). While the outer manifestations of an individual, their reasoned arguments included, can never directly gives us access to their inner world, we can however, catch glimpses of their ideality indirectly through their actuality. Through an innocuous remark, an awkward smile, etc. we get glimpses of subjectivity indirectly and, however fallible and limited, gain access into the perspective and resources that are work in their world: what it feels like to be them. These insights can also ground our faith in promises.

There is another way in which rationality and reasoning makes this promise more attractive, to be worthy to be leaped into. Unlike immanent reasoning, skeptical reasoning does not bolster the promise by grounding it but by legitimizing it. What I mean to say is that in our post-enlightenment age in particular, and especially for the rationalists, there is a tendency to view acting on promises, in the way I have defined them, to be illegitimate. A more exaggerated caricature of such a view would go so far as to claim that every action should only proceed if grounded upon reasoning as irrefutable and sound as that of a mathematical proof. The assumption is that reasoning is a legitimate impetus for action while promises are not. Skeptical reasoning directly addresses these assumptions and speaks to those who, despite the many legitimate promises offered to them, are still scavenging for more reasons before they are assured enough to act.

Skeptical reasoning works by generating doubt. It generates doubt about a specific topic initially that, if pursued to its conclusion, becomes a doubt about the legitimacy of rationality in general. The entirety of Fear and Trembling can be seen as such a doubt-generating tool of skeptical reasoning. We are invited alongside Johannes De Silentio to investigate the Abraham and Isaac story in the old testament. While, in the beginning, we merely doubt, as Johannes does, the soundness of his particular interpretations of the story, it soon becomes obvious, given the exhaustive interpretative approaches offered, that it is the very method of trying to understand Abraham rationally that is to be doubted and transcended.

Put more generally, skeptical reasoning wants to show that reason itself is to be doubted, simply because, once one starts doubting, one cannot escape doubt through reason alone. The argument goes as such, if one is skeptical about a specific topic, one is implicitly dogmatic about something they are sure of, if not their very skepticism itself. One can continue to use reason to examine the grounding of the skepticism ad infinitum but there is no stopping of this. “If I want to keep on doubting, I shall never in all eternity advance any further, because doubt consists precisely in and by passing off that certainty as something else” (222). What does stop doubting must be faith in some promise, one must state, out of faith and not reason “the buck stops here”. “If I hold on to the certainty as certainty for one single moment, I must also stop doubting for that moment. But then it is not doubt that cancels itself; it is I who stop doubting” (222).

Put another way, if you think a specific conclusion of reason, say “bring sunscreen”, is legitimate and deserves to be acted upon, while I am skeptical, you can only refer to further reasons “the sun will rise tomorrow”, “the sun has risen everyday”, ad infinitum. Through reason alone you cannot ever resolve me of my skepticism, unless I agree that one specific grounding is true, not because of even more reasoned arguments, for then it would cease to be the grounding, but because it seems like a valid promise. When you believe reason to be legitimate therefore, you really are already implicitly agreeing upon the legitimacy of promises. Skeptical reasoning renders promises an equal if not more legitimate basis of action not by lifting promises up but by bringing reasoning down, by showing how reasoning cannot gain their certainty without promises.

Socrates has such a privileged position in Kierkegaard’s works precisely because he was a master of skeptical reasoning. While the Sophists provided formulated conclusions and objective truths, Socrates went around skeptically deconstructing others’ positions while claiming his own ignorance. By doing so, he wrestled truth away from the objective sphere and placed the burden again on the subject. It was up to the subjects to gain access to truth and, importantly, in a deep and embodied way.

To make an intuition in the Socratic example explicit: another way of saying that skeptical reasoning legitimizes promises is to say that it legitimizes subjectivity, since promises are nothing but promises of a radical change in subjective experience grounded by glimpses of subjective truth and immanent objective reason. Skeptical reasoning shows us that the important truths, the truths that matter to us are not the objective ones but the subjective ones that we as finite individuals must each learn anew for ourselves. In fact, this enhanced recognition of one’s subjectivity, defined as the finitude of our existence and the private nature of our pursuit for truth, characterizes the progression of these four stages. The aesthetic life has little subjectivity: one thinks everything is possible, that there is infinite time, and makes little commitments that define a subject. The ethical life is defined by commitments that define one’s subjectivity: before I take on the objective duties of a father, I have to subjectively recognize myself as one. The religious is even more subjective as whatever objective laws and duties that might exist in the ethical is also suspended. The relationship to God is purely subjective. As a result, skeptical reasoning not only legitimates the leap but is a force in and of itself that facilitates the transition between stages.

We have come to the leap itself, the last part of the transition that needs to be explained. Perhaps we can think about the moment of the leap as the will situated in a space of many different promises. The leap itself is the act of the will which decides to change in accordance to one of these promises. This leap is not grounded on reason alone for promises are not grounded on reason alone. Yet, this leap is also not blind for promises are grounded upon immanent reasoning and glimpses of subjective truth and legitimized by skeptical reasoning.