Post Category → Philosophy

On Sheldon S. Wolin’s Interpretation of Nietzsche

In the expanded second edition of Politics and Vision (2004) Sheldon S. Wolin devotes an entire chapter to Friedrich Nietzsche, a figure omitted from the original 1960 edition. Wolin’s Nietzsche is a deeply political thinker who would do away with liberal democracy on the grounds that it fosters a “herd mentality”: an attraction to security and docility that disguises itself as an altruistic concern for humanity.

At the heart of Nietzsche’s philosophy, Wolin argues, is the concept of power. Nietzsche held that life itself is the “will to power,” understood as the drive to increase one’s strength and impose one’s will. In Nietzsche’s view as Wolin understands it, all human institutions are expressions of power relations, not of justice or morality. By making power the central value, Nietzsche denied the liberal democratic hope that politics could accommodate reasonable deliberation and the recognition of equal rights, instead conceiving of it as an arena of conflict, struggle, and domination.

Culture, not parliaments and certainly not bureaucracies, is according to Nietzsche the real shaper of humanity. Governance for Nietzsche could not be about law or procedure but must focus instead on whatever is required to cultivate a certain type of personality, one who is self-confident, assertive, domineering, and comfortable with his superiority to the majority. Instead of focusing on policies and principles, then, Nietzsche was concerned with the “revaluation of values.” Accordingly, he offered no vision of an adequate or ideal political association – a fatal flaw for Wolin – and instead undertook a kind of cultural revolution against modern liberalism.

Nietzsche’s celebration of strength naturally lends itself to an aristocratic politics for which “the political way of life … has never been … for the many but only for ‘the best.’” Wolin sees Nietzsche as longing for a “new elite” to reshape culture. This is part of what Wolin calls Nietzsche’s “cult of the exceptional,” the idea that human greatness is achieved only by rare individuals who are not inhibited by the “herd” and its norms. In contrast to the “last men” of modernity, who are complacent, petty, and devoid of creativity, the Übermenschrepresents a future type who will overcome the nihilism of the modern age by creating a new myth that celebrates domination through creative achievement.

Wolin thus portrays Nietzsche as an unrelenting critic of liberal democratic institutions. Nietzsche rejected egalitarian ideals, endorsed a politics of raw power, prioritized creative individuals over the democratic herd, and denied rational and moral constraints in favor of myth and struggle. While acknowledging the value Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism and conformity, Wolin places far more weight on Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian and anti-rationalist stance and finds in it a dangerous repudiation of “the political” as an explicitly shared or common form of life.

Continue reading →

Deleuze and Guattari on Wolves and Wolf Packs

Deleuze and Guattari claim that Freud, in his essay “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1919), fails to recognize the devenir-animal of his patient Sergei Pankejeff, a.k.a. the Wolf Man. Pankejeff had a recurring dream of being stared at by a group of wolves in a tree, and Freud wondered why there were several of them as opposed to just one. In Freud’s view dreaming of a group of wolves rather than a single wolf was a way of masking while also expressing Pankejeff’s anxiety about his father.

Deleuze and Guattari ridicule Freud’s apparent belief that the appearance of several wolves requires an explanation because, they say, “everyone knows” that wolves are always part of a “pack.” They go on to describe how exhilarating it is to be part of a pack: They go on to describe how exhilarating it is to be part of a pack: interacting with others who have no fixed roles, constantly on the move, at one moment straying from the group and at another merging with it, leading at times and being led at others, alert to and exploiting opportunities as they arrive, constantly improvising without a rigid hierarchy or enduring aim. While Freud sees his patient’s desire as possessive, repetitive, directed towards symbols and statuses, and linked to authority and repression as orchestrated by the Oedipal Triangle of “Mommy-Daddy-me,” what the Wolf Man really wants is to experience his ability to bring about states of affairs that enable growth and open-ended transformation in the real world.

Ironically, we now know that a wolf pack doesn’t consist of unrelated wolves competing for dominance. They are in fact families consisting of a breeding pair and multiple offspring, with a natural hierarchy and division of labor.

See L. David Mech, “Alpha status, dominance, and division of labor in wolf packs” (1999).

Sergei Pankajeff, Wolves Sitting in a Tree (1964).

On John Cage’s 4’33”

It stretches the concept of music beyond recognition to classify 4′33″ as a musical work. It makes much more sense to regard it as a work of performance art. However, the fact that it was created by Cage means that we inevitably think about in the context of music.

We naturally ask what was Cage’s intention, and a plausible answer is that he is drawing our attention to music – its nature and value – by denying us music. We are led to listen to the non-musical sounds in the environment with the kind of attention we normally reserve for music and to reflect on what we’re missing. The work is an opportunity to consider what we want from music.

One thing we want, typically, is to hear sounds that a composer has determined will reward our attention. Perhaps we imagine a kind of contract between us and the composer: we give the composer our time (and money), and she gives us enjoyment. In return for complete control over what we hear for the duration, we receive a meaningful expression. 4′33″ defeats these expectations – neither Cage nor the performer has any control over what we hear – and in that way makes them available for inspection. Is this “contract” the best way to imagine the relationship between composer and listener? Cage certainly didn’t think so.

According to Cage himself, 4′33″ dramatizes the distinction between traditional and modern music. He says that modern music “accepts” sounds that, when heard during the performance of traditional music, “interrupt” it. Because it consists only of such sounds, 4′33″ affords an opportunity to reflect on how our perceptions are shaped by our expectations. When we are listening to a Beethoven piano sonata, a cough is perceived as noise. When we are listening to what Cage regards as a modern performance, and certainly when we are listening to 4′33″, it is perceived as sound.

For Cage’s comments on traditional and modern music, see Conversing with Cage by Richard Kostelanetz.

Assessing Nietzsche

Nietzsche staked his reputation on the future. He believed that a great cultural upheaval was imminent and that his thought provided the resources required to make the best of it.

In some ways Nietzsche’s expectations for the future of Western civilization were borne out by the twentieth century. He said that Christian belief would decline; it did. He predicted newly destructive wars driven by ideological conflict; they came to pass. He hoped for creative geniuses who would free themselves from Christian morality and other forms of the “ascetic ideal” and create great works of art that would celebrate “this world” rather than the metaphysical “other worlds.” Here too, in my opinion, the last century did not disappoint. It would be silly to try to list the artistic accomplishments of the last 120 years. But in literature, names such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, and Wallace Stevens come to mind. In music, it’s difficult to imagine a more Dionysian composition than Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913), not to mention composers like Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. With the exception of Eliot, their works were not notably shaped by Christian morality; in fact many were inspired or influenced by Nietzsche himself. An assessment would also have to take into account the achievements of film, an art form that didn’t even exist in Nietzsche’s time.

In moral theory virtually no one working in the field relies on religious assumptions; academic moral philosophy, at least, is emphatically post-theological. It is true that most contemporary philosophers uphold the universality and objectivity of our moral obligations to one another, and Nietzsche wouldn’t approve of that. On the other hand, during the last decades of the twentieth century many philosophers (e.g. Bernard Williams and Susan Wolf) argued for a more “relaxed” understanding of the place of morality in human life, as one among other legitimate goods. Again, the influence of Nietzsche himself is at work here. In the wider moral culture, the sexual revolution beginning in the 1960s was just one expression of the emergence of a more tolerant and pluralistic atmosphere than the Victorian morality that Nietzsche found so destructive. Continue reading →

Michael Oakeshott on Conversation

The word “conversation” combines the Latin con- or com- meaning “with, together” with versare or vertere meaning “to turn, bend” to form conversation, meaning literally “to turn together” or cooperate and more specifically “to live, dwell with, keep company with,” and from the 14th century “general course of actions or habits, way of conducting oneself in the world.” In the mid-16th century, the English conversation is used to mean “informal exchange of thoughts and sentiments by spoken words,” but Cicero already used conversatio to indicate private conversation among friends as opposed to public oratory. Oratory was formal and rule-governed whereas conversation obeyed conventions of politeness but not strict rules. Conversation was important in ancient Athens and Rome and was revived by Renaissance humanism because the ability to speak well with anyone was a mark of worldliness and sophistication. Politely exploring differences such that the conversation itself was more important than any of its participants was a model for moderate political life as the alternative to revolution and anarchy. This idea was central to civic humanism and civic republicanism.

Michael Oakeshott’s view of conversation is in line with this tradition. (See his “The Place of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind.”) Conversation, he says, is what “distinguishes the civilized man from the barbarian.” The barbarian promotes his point of view and only his point of view, which is narrowly practical and concerned with survival and power. The civilized person is interested in the good things life has to offer beyond mere survival and other purely practical matters. He or she also understands that the search for good things shouldn’t depend on radically changing our conditions of existence. Carried too far, that would force one to live exclusively for the future and make it impossible to enjoy the present. A civilized person, Oakeshott says, “[a]ccepts the unavoidable conditions of life and makes the best of them.” One way of making the best of them is learning from one another about the good things life has to offer beyond mere survival. Conversation is the form this takes.

The qualities of conversation and the virtues of the conversationalist flow from its purpose. You mustn’t be exclusively or overly concerned with practical matters, and in particular you mustn’t insist that your personal practical concerns dominate the conversation (these are sure signs of barbarism). A conversation is personal: the words spoken are those of a speaker who takes personal responsibility for them and what they imply. The partners to a conversation must trust and respect one another (or at least act as if they do). They approach a theme in a variety of ways, informally trying out illustrations and hypotheses. They have no expectation that they will fully express themselves and come to a complete understanding of the topic or of one another, much less agree with one another. They don’t expect others to endorse their views and are prepared to fail to persuade, but they must also be willing to change their minds when it is reasonable to do so. Continue reading →

How does Marx’s analysis of alienation respond to Hegel’s account of self consciousness?

Imagine a community that is characterized by what I’ll call “at-home-ness.” For people who are at home in their community, there are ways of doing things that are appropriate, fitting, and right. There are things one doesn’t do under certain circumstances, and things one does.

There’s usually no need to formulate these attitudes as explicit rules because one picks them up as one learns one’s way around the world in passing from childhood to adulthood. So in doing what’s done, one doesn’t see oneself as being constrained, exactly. One identifies with the way things are meant to be done so thoroughly that in doing them one is merely being oneself. In a world of this kind, one has no sense that something is good because it is regarded as good; rather, we regard some things as good because they are good and therefore deserve and require our regard.

When I moved to Paris in the 1980s, I was surprised to be told that there was only one way to slice a zucchini (namely, using the Julienne cut). I mean this literally. It wasn’t that there was my understanding of how to slice a zucchini and another, French understanding; there was simply the way it is to be done, which one either understood or did not.

That is at-home-ness. (If you consider that another way to characterize it might be “provinciality,” you can begin to get an idea of the limits of being at home in the world and the attractions of alienation.)

In a community of people who are at home in their world, the individual identifies with the way of life of the community – its practices, its attitudes, its values. Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone in such a community is enthusiastically in step with everyone else at all times. An individual’s willingness to do what’s fitting and proper may rise and fall dramatically. But the extent to which you personally want to do what’s proper for you to do has no authority for you; it’s no part of who you really are.

The community I’ve described is a non-alienated community. It’s characterized, in Hegel’s terms, as sittlich – an “ethical” community or, to put it another way, a community unified by an ethos. It’s the way the ancients lived, on his account, at least for a while. Continue reading →

What is the banality of evil?

Hannah Arendt’s thesis about the banality of evil is widely misunderstood. I’m not sure I fully grasp it, but here’s my take.

It isn’t that what Eichmann did wasn’t evil; it was. But it was a new form of evil that didn’t quite fit our traditional moral and legal concepts.

And it isn’t that Eichmann wasn’t driven by ideology; he was. He was deeply invested in the Nazi movement, from which he derived the very meaning of his life. Contributing to the movement, carrying out his assigned tasks, playing an important role in something larger than himself, something that demanded great personal sacrifice – all of that was the basis of Eichmann’s identity. He was as fanatical as they come. Continue reading →

Reading Terry Pinkard’s “Practice, Power, and Forms of Life: Sartre’s Appropriation of Hegel and Marx” (2022), part 5.

What follows is less than a book review and more than a book report – I hope. My plan is to convey a first impression, chapter-by-chapter, every week or so.

Ethics in Politics: Rules, Groups, and Functionalist Ethics.

A fully formed or fused group is a “statutory” group, formally deduced to articulated ends and binding its members to statuses that are functional for the group in terms of its ends. The ethics of such a group are expressed as the norms required to ensure its continued functioning, and the norms are expressed in the practices followed by the members of the group. The practices, however, “require the actors to do more than merely follow the rules” (58). The actors must fulfill the function assigned by the practice, but he or she has leeway as to how the function is fulfilled. The “feints, passes, and such [of a football player] are themselves not part of the rules, nor is the decision to take the shot rather than passing the ball to a teammate something that follows from the rules” (58). In Sartre’s words, “The action is irreducible: one cannot comprehend it unless one knows the rules of the game, but it can never be reduced to these rules” (58).

A perhaps more striking model is that of a “great actor” who brings his or her unique personal style to traditional roles, making them the actor’s own. The phenomenon suggests Richard Wollheim’s distinction between generic style and individual style. A generic style is like the style of New York City as opposed to Los Angeles, or Victorian as opposed to Modern architecture. An individual style is a pattern of features possessed by a unique personality, such that they are exhibited in all the different contexts and roles the individual occupies. A certain kind of actor – Humphrey Bogart, Jack Nicholson, Seymour Philip Hoffmann – is immediately identifiable no matter what role he or she is playing. Although one cannot comprehend a great actor’s performance unless one knows the conventions of dramatic performance, the performance is not reducible to those conventions. The same can be said for the roles assigned by social practices, at least to the extent that the agent frees itself from the practico-inert. Social agents exhibit “in their individual ways the practice that shows itself through them, and they are in turn transforming, however slightly, the practice itself” (59). Continue reading →

What would Hegel think about hyperrealism as an art form?

The short answer is that Hegel would find hyperrealism too conceptual, too ironic, and too grotesque to convey the truth about the wholeness and unity of human life. A longer answer follows.

There are various ways to unify and reconcile what seems contrary, contradictory, or out of place. Unification takes place in philosophy, which understands the process as an act of thought. It takes place in religion, where unification is accomplished by the universal love of God. And it takes place as art, which exhibits unity in the form of sensuous objects produced by creative activity. The ideal work exhibits beauty, and its ultimate expression is the individual human being in his or her integrity, agency, and self-confidence.

This is best seen in classical art.

Continue reading →

Reading Terry Pinkard’s “Practice, Power, and Forms of Life: Sartre’s Appropriation of Hegel and Marx” (2022), part 4.

What follows is less than a book review and more than a book report – I hope. My plan is to convey a first impression, chapter-by-chapter, every week or so.

Actualized Freedom’s Fragility in the Myths of Self-Authorization.

Freedom, more specifically “fully actualized freedom,” is spontaneity – acting on new reasons – that has been “unhooked from exigency,” i.e. recurrent and habitual patterns of action. This happens when subjects are directly related to one another, so that what it makes sense to do or what one has reason to do is not shaped by their relations with “inert objects” (39). Subjects directly related to one another can, as a group, authorize their own actions because each recognizes all others and each is recognized by all.

Once such a group has formed it has a reason for maintaining itself, namely to maintain the freedom of self-authorization (and equality) as an “indeterminate good” (48). Self-authorization is “fragile,” however, because, being paradoxical and to that extent logically impossible, it is something of a myth (45, 47). Pinkard refers to the “paradox of democracy” (or autonomy):

the idea that a people authorizing itself, for example, to write a constitution cannot actually describe itself as an authoritative people capable of such an act until after “they” have written the constitution that creates and authorizes them as a people to do just that. (The United States Constitution, with its famous preamble beginning “We, the people …” is one of the paradigm cases.) (49.)

As an aside, I don’t see how the U.S. Constitution is paradoxical in this sense, for the people of the United States certainly existed, and were lawfully represented, when the Constitution of 1789 was being written, debated, and ratified. The United States of America was created in 1777 by the Articles of Confederation, which was an agreement among colonies or states that regarded themselves as sovereign to enter into a “Confederation and perpetual Union” of that name. Subsequently, it made sense to speak of the people of the United States, but strictly speaking the United States created by the Articles was not and did not claim to be the act of the people of the United States. The Articles do refer to “America” and could be said to allude to the American people, as the Declaration of Independence speaks for “one people” as opposed to another, but that’s not the same thing. Continue reading →