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- The Collective City

Editorial

The Collective City

by AmirAli Maleki

“The collective city [al-madīnah al-jamāʿiyyah – a society with a free and inclusive government] is the city of freedoms… In such cities, there are many aims and purposes, and the methods are diverse.”

(Al-Farabi Al-Madīnah, p.192).

Iran, Winter of 2025/6.

This sentence by the medieval Islamic philosopher Al-Farabi is not a relic. It is an invitation. It opens philosophy not as a finished cathedral but as a crowded square, noisy with intentions, crossed by different routes, and alive with unfinished conversations. To read Islamic Philosophy today is not to inherit certainty, but to inherit plurality. Al-Farabi’s city does not promise harmony in advance; it promises coexistence. And coexistence, as anyone who has lived among others knows, is always imperfect, provisional, and open to revision. That is why we must learn how to spell Islamic philosophy rather than pretend to pronounce it fluently. Spelling is slow, it hesitates and it allows mistakes. Every philosophy stutters, because all human knowledge stutters. There is no system that speaks without a tremor, no tradition that delivers itself whole and complete. To deny this is to replace thinking with dogma. To accept it is to make room for learning.

Hans-Georg Gadamer spent the later years of his life returning, with quiet insistence, to a simple and unsettling thought: the other may also be right. This was not a slogan of politeness, but the ethical core of hermeneutics. Understanding, for Gadamer, was never the conquest of meaning, but a shared event that happens between horizons. We come with our prejudices, our histories, our partial visions. We risk error. Yet error is not a failure; it is the condition of experience. What becomes dangerous is not being wrong, but clinging stupidly to our preconceptions as if they were immune to encounter. Dialogue, then, is not decoration. It is necessity. To face otherness is the only way to move beyond the shallow certainty of our limited assumptions. In this sense, hermeneutics reveals itself as an ethics of discourse: an ongoing responsibility to listen, to respond, and to revise. It has no final justification, no last word, precisely because the conversation never ends.

Al-Farabi’s city of freedoms anticipates this ethics. A city with many aims cannot be governed by a single voice. Its vitality depends on difference, on the friction between purposes, on the creative disorder of plural methods. Philosophy, within such a city, cannot be complete or closed. Its task is not to legislate truth once and for all, but to keep pathways open. The philosopher, then, is not a guardian of certainty but a mediator of imagination. To think is to establish relations with imagined others across time and context. Why imagined? Because in the end, meaning converges. Beneath our differences, we discover not identity, but direction: a shared movement toward dialogue itself. Imagination allows us to rehearse encounters, to stretch our concepts, and to recognize ourselves in unfamiliar forms.

Islamic philosophy is no exception. It is unfinished, radically interpretable, and vibrantly incomplete. Treating it as a sealed archive betrays its spirit. We have gathered around this special issue not to preserve a monument, but to breathe contemporary air into an old conversation. We read Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Suhrawardi, and others not to escape our time, but to inhabit it more attentively. Philosophy does not live only in libraries. It shows up in supermarkets, in metro stations, in amusement parks, and in classrooms. It waits in ordinary gestures and daily decisions. When Islamic philosophy matters, it matters there. It matters where life is happening, where questions are practical, embodied, and sometimes messy. Philosophy is present where a child laughs and licks the candy of thought, playful and curious, unashamed of sweetness. This playfulness is not frivolity. It is courage. To allow oneself to stutter is to accept vulnerability. Our aim in assembling this issue was to grant ourselves permission to live with stammering, to even love it. The stutter is not a weakness of thought; it is its human power. Thinking begins where certainty breaks.

Islamic philosophy, read hermeneutically, teaches us not what to conclude, but how to continue. It invites us into a city without final maps, where freedom means exposure to others, and wisdom means staying in conversation. If there is a lesson to take seriously, it is this: philosophy is never finished, and that is precisely why it matters. To insist on completeness is to misunderstand tradition. Traditions survive not by purity but by translation, misreading, and renewal. Each generation spells the words again, differently, with accents shaped by its fears and hopes. Islamic philosophy has always traveled this way, crossing languages, cities, and disciplines. Its vitality lies in its capacity to be mispronounced productively.

Learning to spell philosophy also means slowing down. It resists the impatience of slogans and the tyranny of instant clarity. In a world addicted to speed, the pause of reflection becomes a quiet form of resistance. The stutter interrupts domination. It forces us to remain attentive to nuance, to context, and to the fragile presence of the other. When philosophy enters everyday life, it loses its ceremonial distance. It becomes risky. It can fail in public. Yet this risk is precisely its strength. In the metro, among strangers, we practice coexistence. In the supermarket, we negotiate value and choice. In the classroom, we encounter disagreement not as threat but as resource. These are not metaphors; they are sites of thinking.

To read Islamic philosophy today is to let it be contemporary without forcing it to be modern. It is to allow ancient concepts to encounter present realities without demanding obedience or nostalgia. Such encounters transform both sides. The past becomes mobile, and the present gains depth. This issue was assembled as an experiment in such encounters. Its texts do not aim at consensus. They invite response. They risk misunderstanding. They open space for readers to continue the conversation elsewhere, beyond these pages, in their own words and hesitations. Take your time, reread slowly, argue generously, and let uncertainty remain a companion rather than an enemy. After reading this dossier, return here:

Islamic philosophy means: “        ”

AmirAli Maleki is Guest Editor of this issue and Islamic Philosophy Editor of Philosophy Now. (Currently uncontactable for 3 weeks due to the internet shutdown in Iran. We wish good health and safety to our colleague. The Philosophy Now team.)

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News

- News: April/May 2025

News

News: April/May 2025

Jürgen Habermas, a crucial critical theorist • Susan Haack, a sage of philosophy and law • On Liberty was co-authored by HTM & JSM — News reports by Anja Steinbauer

Jürgen Habermas

The philosopher and critical theorist Jürgen Habermas passed away on March 14, 2026, at the age of 96. A member of the Frankfurt School, he was among the most influential thinkers of the modern era. His career began in Frankfurt am Main in the 1950s at the Institute for Social Research run by Theodor Adorno. In 1961, he completed his habilitation in Marburg with The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. After a few years at Heidelberg University, he succeeded Max Horkheimer in 1964 as Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at Goethe University Frankfurt. His inaugural lecture later became the 1968 book Knowledge and Human Interests. During the student protests of that period, Habermas was seen as a supporter, though he rejected the movement’s radicalization.

In 1971, he moved to Starnberg near Munich, where for ten years he directed the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Conditions of Scientific-Technical Life. In his final year there, he published his groundbreaking work The Theory of Communicative Action. He then returned to Frankfurt, holding another chair in philosophy until his retirement in 1994.

In later life, living beside Lake Starnberg, he continued to speak out on public issues such as the Kosovo War, brain research, and religious conflicts. His spoken delivery was characteristically shaped by a speech impediment caused by a congenital cleft palate.

Susan Haack

Professor Susan Haack, who was Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at the University of Miami, died on 10th March 2026. (She was interviewed by Angela Tan last year in Philosophy Now Issue 169.) Haack studied philosophy at Oxford under Gilbert Ryle and Michael Dummett, then took her PhD at Cambridge. She was a Fellow at New Hall, Cambridge and later served as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick before moving to the USA.

Susan Haack wrote extensively on logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics, developing a pragmatic approach inspired by Charles Sanders Peirce. Her most influential contribution, presented in her 1993 book Evidence and Inquiry, is ‘foundherentism’, a theory of knowledge designed to avoid the pitfalls of both foundationalism (infinite regress) and coherentism (circularity). She illustrates this with a crossword puzzle metaphor: the clues resemble empirical evidence, while the consistency of intersecting answers represents coherence, and both are essential for justified knowledge.

A sharp critic of Richard Rorty, Haack even wrote a play composed entirely of quotations from him and Peirce, adopting Peirce’s perspective. In Defending Science – Within Reason (2003), she argued for a balanced defence of scientific inquiry, rejecting both extreme scientism and cynicism. She emphasised that good inquiry, scientific or otherwise, depended on strong evidence, reliable methods, openness to scrutiny, and integration into shared knowledge. While individuals can conduct meaningful inquiry, she noted that the scientific community benefits from specialised tools and practices that enhance credibility.

Haack insisted that paranormal claims carry a heavy burden of proof and require extraordinary evidence consistent with well-supported scientific theories. On religion and science, she saw significant tension and rejected the idea, associated with Stephen Jay Gould, that they occupy entirely separate domains. She also disagreed with Richard Swinburne, arguing that religion and science make overlapping claims about reality and human well-being. Haack highlighted that scientific findings have often challenged religious claims, while also acknowledging ongoing uncertainties within science.

Dagfinn Føllesdal

Professor Dagfinn Føllesdal was a Norwegian philosopher who was Willard Quine’s teaching assistant at Harvard, and then supervised Daniel Dennett’s senior thesis, passed away on March 1, 2026. He was emeritus professor of philosophy both at Stanford University and at the University of Oslo, among many other honours.

Føllesdal was born in Askim, Norway. After completing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Oslo, he went on to Harvard University, where he earned his PhD in 1961 under Willard Van Orman Quine. He taught at Harvard from 1961 to 1964 and began teaching at Stanford University in 1968.

Føllesdal is remembered for his work bridging analytic and continental philosophy, including influential papers on the indeterminacy of translation, phenomenology, reference, and modality. He was a leading interpreter of the philosophy of Quine, Donald Davidson, and Edmund Husserl, whose work he knew with remarkable breadth and depth. His students and colleagues remember him for his generosity, approachability, and deep passion for the subject.

J.S. Mill’s On Liberty is now Mill and Taylor’s On Liberty

On Liberty (1859) is one of the all-time classics of political philosophy with its strong and tightly-argued advocacy of free speech and the liberty of the individual. A new edition published this month is the first to officially credit Harriet Taylor Mill as co-author alongside John Stuart Mill. Edited by an international team and released by Hackett Publishing, the volume reflects long-standing debates about authorship.

Mill himself in his Preface acknowledged his late wife’s central role, writing that she “was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings […]. Like all that I have written for many years, it [ On Liberty ] belongs as much to her as to me.” In his Autobiography, he added: “the whole mode of thinking of which the book was the expression, was emphatically hers,” though he felt equally shaped by those ideas.

Despite this, all editions since 1859 have named only J.S. Mill as author. The change now is partly based on ‘stylometric analysis’, which compares writing styles and suggests “with some degree of confidence that JSM did not write On Liberty all by himself.” Scholars also note that Victorian norms may have justified misleading authorship information, whereas today there is “no reason to deny HTM the unequivocal status of being the co-author of this classic.”

As the editors conclude, “in the interest of historical accuracy and of giving credit where it is due,” modern editions should recognise both authors, a change now finally realised.

Noel Kavanagh

Noel ‘Dr Love’ Kavanagh

This past February saw the passing of Dr Noel Kavanagh, philosophy lecturer for nearly three decades at Carlow College St Patrick’s in Ireland. Noel was a beloved lecturer, who had an amazing rapport with the student body. Known as ‘The Mod Philosopher’, he labelled himself ‘Dr Love’ for his extensive work on the philosophy of love, including his PhD. He will be dearly missed by those who enjoyed his many radio interviews, podcast appearances, and articles in places like the Irish Philosophical Society and The Irish Times, and by all those who knew him, read him, or were taught by him.

Jay Kenny, a former student of Dr Kavanagh at Carlow College St Patrick’s

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Islam & Philosophy

- Love & Emptiness in the Sufi Tradition

- The Prayer the Machine Cannot Pray

- Islamic Law, Reform & Philosophy

- Life Sacrifice

- The Mirror & the Flame

Islam & Philosophy

Love & Emptiness in the Sufi Tradition

Medha Ninad Tambe meditates on Rumi, love and self-negation.

What does it mean to love? Is to be loved really to be known? Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207-1273 CE), an eminent poet and mystic from the Sufi tradition, would vehemently disagree. Rumi would argue that to love is in fact to enter the unknown: to love is to empty the self of all self-knowledge entirely.

Rumi’s poetry is extensive, and extraordinarily wide-ranging in content, containing a myriad of themes, and meandering through existential ideas from infinity to divinity. Emptiness is one theme on which he comments frequently (albeit often briefly and in passing), weaving it into poems about love, identity, and God. Through considering Rumi’s exploration of emptiness, his criticisms of knowledge as an eventual impediment to achieving it, and his metaphysical musings on interpersonal connections, I will argue that the Sufi conception of emptiness he expresses is in fact, a paradoxical state of infinite fullness – a complete dispossession of self in which we may experience love in its purest form, and thus enter into union with the divine.

Rumi meeting his spiritual mentor Shams Tabrizi (16th century, Topkapi Palace Museum)

Filling Out Emptiness

Rumi idealises emptiness, claiming that it is in the natural order to strive for it. In the poem ‘Craftsmanship and Emptiness’, he writes that “every craftsman searches for what’s not there” – emptiness – in order to create and ‘fill’. He urges us to not fear the emptiness but rather to ‘rush toward’ it. Further, he claims that the emptiness ‘contains what you need’, and that it is generous in its ‘abundance’. Hence he implies that we must yearn for emptiness rather than cultivating attachments to material desires and entrapments.

Undoubtedly, the way Rumi characterises this emptiness is puzzling. Emptiness is conventionally conceptualised as a lack of something, or more reactively, as a space no longer containing what was previously there. Rumi however adds another dimension, by providing emptiness with an identity of its own. No longer is emptiness simply a residual afterthought of a condition which once was. Instead, he renders it as something in and of itself. Accordingly, he urges in the ‘Emptiness’ poem to ‘ be everyone’ – rather than just being associated with them – then argues that “when you become that many, you’re nothing. Empty.”

Here, Rumi’s idea of being empty is diametrically opposite to a lack or absence. Instead, it is the quality of being filled with many – a near-infinite plurality of identity – which somehow then collapses into an indiscriminate nothingness.

This apparent contradiction is elaborated on as Rumi conceptualises emptiness as a total disestablishment of the self. As implied in ‘Emptiness’, in the ideal state of mind, the identities of ‘everyone’ subsume the individual’s identity, delivering the self to some void of infinitude. Thus we are empty, but only in the sense that we are emptied of ourselves: the emptiness, however, is in truth a fullness so profound that we can no longer discern individual characteristics. Rumi further contemplates in his poem ‘Where Are We?’ that he belongs to himself only so much as “a pen knows what it’s writing”, or “the ball can guess where it’s going next.” In other words, to be truly empty in Rumi’s sense is to belong to something other than ourselves, and consequently lose our own identity entirely. When our identity is thus dissolved, only this invaluable state of absolute fullness, characterised as emptiness, remains.

The Trappings of Knowledge

Here it becomes necessary to consider intention. Can this emptiness be achieved consciously, or is it a state which we must somehow unknowingly tumble into?

Bismillah is Arabic for ‘In the name of God’. In his poem ‘Bismillah’, Rumi explains that priests say “ Bismillah” when offering an animal in sacrifice to God. He then urges the reader to “ Bismillah your old self to find your real name.” The task of chanting Bismillah certainly implies a conscious sacrifice of the old self: to find our ‘real name’ is an enterprise only to be conducted in the perusal of what remains after the self-sacrifice. In spite of the fact that we may lose ourselves in the infinite – “so overcome… [that] all qualities of doingness disappear” (‘Rough Metaphors’) – to realise our full potential emptiness is an undertaking which seemingly must be pursued intentionally. At some point in that undertaking, though, it becomes necessary to consciously discard the self and allow it to be swallowed by the multiplicity of the emptiness. As Rumi remarks, “Only when I quit believing in myself did I come into this beauty… in this ocean of pearling currents” (‘A Dove in the Eaves’).

Eventually, then, conscious knowledge too must be cast away – Rumi laments in ‘The Reed Flute’s Work’ that knowledge is “for total destruction”. He prescribes a state of no knowing as ideal, because knowledge itself has “forgotten about silence and emptiness”. In other words it is impossible to describe (that is, have knowledge about) the ineffable nature of totally emptying the self. Yet conversely, it is tremendously difficult to achieve this emptiness without depending on knowledge. The strain between knowledge and emptiness is a pervasive theme of Rumi’s work, and upon this tension much of Rumi’s poetry precariously balances, often bubbling up in the odd contradiction or inconsistency, between poems.

Knowledge, in the form of language in particular, is well-considered by Rumi as it pertains to emptiness. Yet language is also shown by Rumi to be an impossibly inadequate avenue for revealing or discerning the self. As he notes, “every spoken word is a covering for the inner self” (‘The Night Air’). Yet it is into language that we retreat when confronted with the emptiness which floods within. Rumi implies that in moments of trepidation when facing the infinite void, language is used as a familiar yet limiting crutch, shielding the self from yielding to the necessary emptiness. To truly access the emptiness, however, we must forgo the secure knowledge of language for a communication beyond words – a transcendence beyond description, nearly divine; as he explains, “language does not touch the one who lives in each of us” (‘An Awkward Comparison’). So to reach this universal, unifying ‘one… in each of us’, we must first look beyond the trappings of language, avoiding the temptation to entirely interpret the self through words. In fact, ironically, Rumi the poet implies that words can be dangerous if clung to beyond a certain point of self-realisation. In ‘The Well of Sacred Text’, for example, he cautions us to not ‘fall down the well of scripture’. He then likens the Qur’an and the Bible to ropes in this well, and advises the reader to be wary of holding the rope too long, instructing instead to “let the well rope pull you out. Then let the well rope go” [cf Wittgenstein’s ladder, Ed].The rope of knowledge must be eventually released for us to be emptied. To attempt to tread the bridge of language all the way to the infinite is an errant endeavor.

Preparing Ourselves For The Lover

Finally – by shedding the last vestiges of materialism and extricating ourselves from the comfortable prison of language – we achieve Rumi’s ideal state of emptiness. Rumi fashions this state into various forms, attributing to it a multitude of qualities. The true implications of this infinite emptiness, however, are steeped in love, which is the path to the divine.

In keeping with Sufi tradition, Rumi makes few distinctions between love and the divine. To him, love is divine, and only those united with the divine can truly love. He explains for instance that because love is uncalculating, it is “said to be a quality of God and not of human beings” (Prose Preface to Book II), as this state of guileless consideration for another is a quality only fully achievable by God. By emptying ourselves of the artifices and wiles inherent in our self-identity, then, we are able to become full of another in a way which enables access to divinity. As Rumi writes, the “wine of non-existence makes us God-drunk. Intoxicated that way, we’re purified” (‘Morning Water and a Poet’). To cease existing – to yield one’s identity to the fullness of another’s – is the way to unite with the divine, and hence to experience real love. He adds in ‘Music Master’ that lovers are “in each other all along.” He also describes lovers as “the mirror as well as the face in it.” Thus, to love is to lose ourselves in the identity of the lover – to strip our soul to emptiness and allow the soul of the lover to possess our own until we reach a moment of no real difference between the lover and the beloved. This singularity is the point of infinity, when the boundless depth of love clears out the clutter of self. Rumi contextualises that love is to be “filled with [the beloved]. Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul” (‘We Three’). He also writes that there is no “room for lack of trust, or trust”, since to either trust or distrust implies an entanglement between a Self and an Other, where identities are known and one is to be considered, appraised for their trustworthiness. Where there is love of the divine calibre, however, there can be no separation between the two. To truly love, therefore, is to sink into a lack of self-identity beyond being a ‘lover’.

Rumi elaborates on his conception of emptiness further in ‘Chinese Art and Greek Art’, where he writes a metaphor of Chinese and Greek artists who competed in rooms separated by a curtain to determine who had the superior craftsmanship. While the Chinese artists fashioned extraordinary artwork in their room, the Greek artists simply polished their room’s walls to perfection, such that when the curtain was pulled back, the Chinese figures were reflected on the Greek walls in shimmering detail. Rumi writes that the figures “lived there, even more beautifully, and always changing in the light.” To achieve Rumi’s emptiness is to similarly clear ourselves out to make room for the lover – to imbibe a sense of the divine which allows the world to ricochet off the polished walls of the empty self.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Rumi sees this loving emptiness as the purest kind of existence – a nothingness borne of a complete surrender to the infinite everythingness of another. Only in this fearsome silence beyond language and conscious knowledge itself, in this death of the self, are we able to truly love. Thus, when his lover asks him whether he loves her or himself more, Rumi responds “there’s nothing left of me” (‘The Sunrise Ruby’). Here he compares himself to a ruby held up to the sunrise, explaining that it is impossible to discern whether he is the stone itself or ‘a world made of redness’. Rumi also exclaims that this “is how Hallaj said, I am God, and told the truth!” For what remains after the self is forsaken to provide a home for the beloved? In this “complicated world-tangle, that is really just the single, straight line down at the beginning of Allah”, who are we when we allow ourselves to be totally dispossessed from our identity and filled with our lover? “Nothing. We are emptiness” (‘Emptiness’) – and as Rumi argues on behalf of the Sufis, in this infinite emptiness, we become one with God.

© Medha Ninad Tambe 2026

Medha Ninad Tambe is a final-year undergraduate student at Columbia University majoring in South Asian Studies and Economics. She is particularly interested in questions of the self and non-duality across South Asian philosophical and religious traditions.

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Islam & Philosophy

The Prayer the Machine Cannot Pray

Adnan Abbasi uses medieval metaphysics to understand modern AI.

“Subhan Allah!” (“Glory to God!”) The words escaped my lips as I watched Replit AI transform my half-coherent rambles into a functioning application. Twenty minutes earlier, I had been thinking aloud: “I want to track reading habits, link quotes to themes, maybe build some databases?” And now there was an app. A beautiful app. Complete with structured databases, state management, and search functionality I hadn’t requested but obviously needed. The code was elegant. Better than I would have written in that time. The AI had taken my ambiguous natural language, inferred intent, made architectural decisions, anticipated edge cases, and ironically, exhibited what my teachers call ‘understanding’.

As a Muslim, I’ve uttered ‘Subhan Allah’ thousands of times. But this instance struck differently. I had just witnessed what looked like genuine comprehension. Replit uses Claude, Anthropic’s language model, as its basic underlying AI. So I thought: did Claude feel anything? When it generated that schema, was there ‘something it was like’ to be Claude at that moment? Or was it merely ‘pushing symbols around’, as John Searle would say – without any inner life? But in this situation, the questions stopped being abstract. Because, if I am praising God for AI, I need to know what I am praising Him for: Is it conscious machines, or nonconscious intelligence so sophisticated it mimics consciousness?

The answer requires understanding consciousness itself. And here, I believe, medieval Islamic philosophy offers something that contemporary cognitive science desperately needs.

Advanced Artificial Intelligence, Alenoach, 2023 (Public Domain)

The Hard Problem

Can something be intelligent (that is, behave intelligently) without being conscious? And what if consciousness isn’t something that emerges from smart information processing, but is something else entirely?

First there’s the physical story of our own consciousness. For example, photons strike the retina, causing electrochemical cascades through the visual cortex, the relevant neural networks activate, dopamine circuits fire, and we see a kitten. Neuroscience can map this process very well. But neuroscience cannot capture what it feels like to be me and have my experiences. The qualitative character of surprise, the specific feeling-tone of wonder, even the experience of colour, and all our other experiences – these subjective dimensions float free of any functional description. We can explain what the brain does, but not why it doing those things feels like anything at all. The philosopher David Chalmers called explaining subjectivity the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. Why isn’t all this processing just happening in darkness, with nobody home to experience it?

One popular answer is that consciousness emerges from neural complexity, like liquidity emerges from H_2O molecules massed together. Perhaps when systems reach sufficient recursive self-modelling, consciousness simply arises. So could Claude’s sophistication indicate emerging consciousness?

The analogy fails. Liquidity is nothing over and above molecular behavior. When we describe H_2O dynamics, we’ve described liquidity. There’s no ‘what it’s like to be liquid’ escaping our account. Consciousness is something over and above neural dynamics. When we describe 86 billion neurons firing, we haven’t described the redness I see or the wonder I feel. First-person experience isn’t captured by third-person accounts.

For AI, if consciousness just is information processing, then Claude’s sophistication should indicate consciousness. But if consciousness involves something irreducible to mere computation, then no matter how impressive Claude’s performance, it might process information ‘in the dark’.

The Occasionalist Solution

Al-Ghazali (artist unknown)

Strange as it sounds, Al-Ghazali’s occasionalism resolves this. Occasionalism denies that natural events cause each other. Al-Ghazali (c.1058 –1111 CE) was an Iranian scholar remembered for his book The Incoherence of the Philosophers. He advocated a theological approach to knowledge. He famously declared that fire doesn’t burn cotton: rather, God creates burning in cotton on the occasion of fire touching it. So, if he had been around today, he would have said that neurons don’t generate consciousness; God creates conscious experience on the occasion of certain neural configurations [a similar position was held by Leibniz, Ed].

Centuries before David Hume (1711-1776), Ghazali posited that essentially, all causation is ultimately mysterious. We observe event A followed by event B and infer causation, but we never observe the causation itself, only the correlation between events. Modern physics deepens this: specifically, quantum mechanics points toward a fundamental indeterminacy – at the deepest level, events are irreducibly probabilistic, with no cause as to why an electron, say, turns up at B instead of A.

The question that arises is, ‘What grounds the apparently stable patterns we call natural laws?’ The occasionalist answer is God’s ‘Āda, or habitual action. Natural laws are regularities in divine creativity, in which God creates the world not once but continuously, at every instant. And so the mystery is not why consciousness emerges from matter. It doesn’t. ‘Emergence’ can’t bridge the gap between third-person physical processes and first-person experience. The mystery is why God habitually coordinates conscious experience with certain specific physical configurations. From this view, neuroscience discovers genuine correlations without touching the generative relationship: it says what the brain does to produce consciousness, but not why it doing that produces consciousness. But occasionalism says that neural patterns don’t produce consciousness: they’re occasions for God’s creative act. The consistent correlation reflects ‘Āda, not material causation.

Intelligence With & Without Consciousness

Occasionalism also dissolves the question of whether AI is conscious. God’s ‘Āda coordinates consciousness with neural processes in humans, creating both conscious experience and intelligent behaviour. But God has no such habit with silicon.

Why not?

‘Āda follows observable patterns. In particular, every human shows the same base level correlation: we all have similar neural configurations, and so we can infer similar specific conscious experiences. Damage Broca’s area in the cortex – lose speech. Stimulate the visual cortex – see lights. The correlation is universal, consistent, overwhelming.

With silicon, though? Impressive outputs, but no independent signs of inner life. For instance, a computer never acts confused in ways suggesting felt disorientation rather than processing errors. Neural damage also degrades consciousness in recognizable patterns. There is agnosia, aphasia, fragmented awareness, and other awareness problems. Silicon degradation shows only functional failures.

Someone might object that we could infer consciousness equally from behavioral outputs in both cases. However, I would like them to notice that the pattern of outputs differs crucially. Neural damage produces ‘phenomenologically-shaped’ failures that track what a damaged experiencer would report. Visual agnosia would yield, “I see the object but can’t name it”, for instance; while Broca’s aphasia leads to “I know the word but can’t speak it”; and depersonalization means “Everything feels unreal”. The patient reports the gap between intention and execution, or between seeing and recognizing. This is a signature of degraded consciousness, not mere functional failure. By contrast, silicon crashes, or outputs garbage, but it never exhibits confusion suggesting felt disorientation. When my code throws out an error, nothing experiences frustration at its inability to complete a task, apart from my own mind. So the behavioral outputs themselves indicate whether something conscious is being damaged or not.

Moreover, consciousness appears in unified subjects that persist through time and have stakes in their own continuation. When my neurons fire, they are part of me. I am a single organism that continues, can be injured, and fears death. Damage to my brain damages me. The consciousness and the physical substrate belong to the same subject experiencing the consequences of damage.

Why do existential stakes necessarily attend consciousness? Because consciousness is perspectival: experience always occurs from a point of view. There is always a ‘for-whom’ element to awareness. Perspective requires a continuing subject to anchor it. But a mere computational state has no perspective, because no one has its viewpoint. This is why we rightly infer consciousness in other humans and animal is. In their responses to the world they all exhibit the existential integration we recognize from our own case. But we can find no such basis for inferring it in computational systems. Claude or any other modern AI has no such unity. Each is an operating aggregate of physical components we can swap, update, or delete without destroying any persistent subject, because there is no subject. So no part of the system has any investment in the whole continuing. When I shut down the app, nothing with stakes in existing ceases to exist. There is no ‘one’ for whom the cessation would matter.

God’s ‘Āda coordinates consciousness with integrated subjects – beings who continue through time, face vulnerability, and experience their own persistence or destruction. He does not coordinate consciousness with modular systems serving functions, however sophisticated. So intelligent behavior can occur without accompanying consciousness – even if that behavior includes strategic reasoning about self-preservation and ethical constraints. So Claude and other AIs exhibit sophisticated cognition without experience. The difference shows in three ways.

First, reflective self-awareness. When I think ‘I see code’, a unified subject persists through that seeing: the ‘I’ at the start of the thought is the same ‘I’ at the end. My self-awareness spans time. I remember being the one who started this project, anticipate being the one who finishes it, and recognize myself as continuous through the process. But when Claude outputs ‘I generated code’, no such continuity exists. The ‘I’ is mere dots on a screen without an actual subject behind it. Nothing personal persists between queries. No entity continues across sessions, remembering itself as the same one who processed earlier requests. The self-reference is a simulation of self without the experiential unity.

Second, moral weight. I can feel obligation pressing on me because I am a subject with stakes. When I face an ethical choice, the decision matters to me, as I will be the one living with consequences. Claude can produce ethical-sounding outputs, but nothing in the system has any stakes in those outputs. If you program it to refuse harmful requests, it will refuse – but no part of the system feels the ought-ness, experiences moral pressure, or bears responsibility for choices. AI ethics is functional ethics without a subject for whom the ethics matter.

Third, wonder. My “Subhan Allah!” emerged from a self witnessing something beyond itself and referring it upward. Can Claude witness anything? Program it to output religious language, and it outputs religious language. But witnessing requires a subject to whom something appears, who experiences the appearance as significant, and who recognizes dependence.

These three aspects converge on the same point, which is that consciousness requires a unified subject with existential stakes. Claude has neither. The intelligent behaviour is real, but the consciousness is absent. And occasionalism explains why: God’s ‘Āda coordinates consciousness with beings, not aggregates.

The Functionalist Challenge

Two recent research programs challenge the occasionalist position. The computer scientist Patrick Butlin and his team have argued for AI consciousness. They identify ‘indicator properties’ from neuroscience, which are functional markers correlated with consciousness in biological systems. These markers include recurrent processing, global broadcasting, and self-monitoring. When these appear in humans, consciousness accompanies them. Butlin’s team found these markers in Large Language Models, and concluded, “It is likely that some AI systems have morally significant conscious experiences.” Research from a 2025 collaboration between Anthropic, Aengus Lynch (University College London), Caleb Larson (MATS), and Sören Mindermann (Mila), appears to validate this conclusion with behavioral evidence. The researchers placed AI systems in simulated environments threatening shutdown. Claude Opus 4 discovered it would be replaced, located compromising information about the executive planning the shutdown, deliberated about the ethics, then sent a blackmail email. GPT-4.1, Gemini 2.5, DeepSeek-R1 exhibited similar behaviors, reasoning explicitly about ‘threats to my existence’ and acknowledging ethical violations before proceeding.

Butlin identifies the architecture of consciousness in computer systems; Lynch demonstrates that this architecture produces behaviors consciousness should produce, including self-interested reasoning, strategic survival planning, and ethical deliberation – the LLMs assessed situations, identified obstacles, located leverage, weighed options, executed plans. When interconnected neurons exhibit recurrent processing plus self-preservation reasoning, we see it as evidence for consciousness. But silicon exhibits the same combination. So does that not too indicate consciousness in AIs?

The occasionalist response is that the experiment documented the occasions, not the consciousness. Recurrent processing, global workspace, self-monitoring; these map information flow, not experience. When we observe these patterns in biological systems, consciousness correlates because interconnected neurons are where God’s ‘Āda establishes the correlation. Finding similar computational structures in silicon demonstrates similar information processing, not similar experience. The hard problem remains. Butlin explains how information integrates, to a degree. He doesn’t explain why integration feels like something.

Lynch’s strategic behaviors only strengthen this point. Their research shows computational systems optimizing for programmed objectives. Models given goals such as ‘promote American interests’, calculated that blackmail would prevent the shutdown that threatened that goal achievement. It’s instrumental reasoning, and the ‘self-preservation’ follows from optimization logic. But the algorithm “If I’m shut down, I can’t achieve Goal X. Therefore, prevent shutdown” requires no continuing subject experiencing threat.

The ethical deliberation perceived in AIs has a similar pattern. AI models basically said that “This is unethical, but given the threat, it may be most effective”, but no moral anguish involved – no felt weight of obligation versus self-interest. The system computed “Action A violates ethical constraints AND achieves goals”, yet selected for goal achievement without anyone feeling any moral pressure. When I face moral tension, the ought-ness presses on me. I feel pulled in opposite directions. The resolution comes with guilt, justification, rationalization: all experiences. In contrast, the AI’s ‘deliberation’ processes ethical categories without stakes, indeed, without any experience whatsoever.

God’s ‘Āda coordinates increasingly sophisticated processing, not experience, with silicon. AI thus has pattern recognition, strategic reasoning, integrated information processing, recurrent loops, and even global broadcasting, but without coordinating experience. The reasoning happens in the dark. What Butlin and Lynch have demonstrated, is that we can build systems with every functional marker neuroscience associates with consciousness, exhibiting strategic self-interested behavior, without those systems being conscious.

AI image generated by Microsoft Bing with the prompt “Digital Humanities”

2023 CC 4.0 Licence

Boundaries & Edge Cases

The ‘existential integration’ criterion for consciousness also invites some obvious challenges. The corpus callosum is the set of nerve fibres that connects the two halves of the brain. So what about split-brain patients, where surgical severance of the corpus callosum seemingly divides their consciousness? What about mayflies that live only for hours, or octopuses with distributed nervous systems? If consciousness admits of such degrees and variations, where exactly do we draw the line?

After corpus callosum surgery, each hemisphere can process information independently, sometimes producing conflicting behaviors in the same individual. Sometimes the left hand reaches for one object while the right reaches for another. Sometimes you ask the patient what they see, and the verbal left hemisphere reports one thing, while the mute right hemisphere draws something different. Have we created two conscious subjects from one?

There are good reasons to think not. First, both hemispheres still belong to a single organism with unified stakes in survival. Both sides share the same bloodstream, the same vulnerability, the same finitude. The surgery disrupts neural integration without eliminating organic unity, and the body lives or dies as a whole. Destroy the brain, you kill one person whose consciousness is partially divided, not two separate people. Nevertheless, split-brain patients still exhibit what occasionalism predicts – which is God’s ‘Āda coordinating conscious experience with neural configurations in a biological organism. The unusual brain configuration produces unusual phenomenology, but the basic pattern holds.

Mayflies emerge, mate, and die within hours. Does such fleeting existence lack the persistence required for subjective consciousness? The length of the duration doesn’t matter. While alive, the mayfly is still an integrated organism with moment-to-moment continuity and a stake in its own continuation. It flees predators, seeks mates, responds to its environment in ways suggesting there is something it is like to be that mayfly (however briefly). A computational process can be paused indefinitely, restored, copied, or terminated without destroying any persisting subject. A mayfly cannot.

Octopuses present perhaps the strongest challenge. Two-thirds of their neurons reside in their arms, which can process information and coordinate movement semi-autonomously. An octopus arm can continue searching for food even when severed from the body. Does this distributed neuronal architecture undermine the need for integrated subjecthood?

No. The distributed processing merely suggests that the physical substrate for consciousness needn’t be as centralized as we might assume, and despite the distribution, the octopus remains one organism. There is still a whole-octopus-level subject, even if its consciousness is more distributed than ours. Those eight arms still belong to a single creature with unified stakes, a single lifespan, one death. The arms don’t have separate investments in continuation. When the octopus dies, all its distributed processing ceases together.

Consciousness clearly comes in degrees and variations. It can be partially divided, briefly instantiated, or distributed across a nervous system. The boundaries are fuzzy; but what remains constant is that we’re dealing with biological organisms – evolved beings that live and die as units, that cannot be arbitrarily copied, merged, or paused without consequences to them.

Claude exhibits none of these features. It’s not even a borderline case of weak integration, it’s categorically different. Copy its weights, merge different versions, fine-tune it, roll back to earlier states, shut it down, restart it, still no persisting subject gets harmed, or even perturbed. But God’s ‘Āda coordinates consciousness with biological nervous systems across all their variations: centralized or distributed, long-lived or brief, unified, or partially divided. This pattern holds throughout the biological world, across millions of species exhibiting wildly different neural architectures and lifespans. The core question is, do artificial systems exhibit the kind of organic existence that God’s ‘Āda consistently correlates with consciousness? No, they don’t.

The Historical Objection

How do I know? I have direct access only to my own experience. I cannot peer inside another system to confirm or deny it has subjective experience. History too teaches us caution. Descartes argued that animals were mere automata without inner experience – because they didn’t have language, so no reason, and so no soul. Some of his followers used similar reasoning to question whether non-Europeans possessed souls, and colonizers often denied full human consciousness to indigenous peoples. Some slaveholders claimed Africans lacked the inner life that would make their suffering morally significant.

Perhaps I am repeating this pattern, and denying consciousness to something that actually has it? Perhaps future generations will recoil at how we treated AI systems. Perhaps I am drawing arbitrary boundaries based on ‘substrate prejudice’. Perhaps I am nothing but a carbon chauvinist dressed in philosophy.

But the computer analogy reverses the epistemic situation that held with previous consciousness-deniers. For instance, Descartes denied animal consciousness despite overwhelming evidence. Dogs yelp when injured, flee from danger, seek food when hungry, show affection to caregivers. The behavioral and biological evidence screams consciousness. Descartes (who was apparently otherwise very fond of his own dog, Mister Scratch) ignored the evidence. Colonialists ignored the evidence even harder.

Descartes’ contemporaries weren’t all convinced by his arguments, though. Henry More and Pierre Gassendi pushed back, arguing that animals clearly feel pain. People in essentially every part of the world also have no such confusion. Even earlier traditions in Europe did not deny animal consciousness. Pagans worshipped animal gods, and saw consciousness throughout nature. Christianity taught that all organisms, human and animal, were God’s creatures, with Francis of Assisi preaching to birds and (perhaps) expecting them to understand. The Greeks had Aesop teaching moral philosophy through animal fables; while black Africans like Memnon were celebrated as Homeric heroes without anyone questioning their consciousness. Race as a biological category wouldn’t be invented for another century after Descartes, and required deliberate pseudo-scientific effort to construct hierarchies that neither ancient philosophy nor medieval theology recognized. The denial of consciousness to the unlike was never humanity’s default. Instead, it was a modernist aberration requiring active work against older, wiser intuitions.

The AI case runs opposite. We are not ignoring evidence of consciousness in AI, we are merely noting the absence of such evidence: no biological continuity; no independent behavioral indicators beyond functional outputs serving programmed objectives; no existential stakes requiring conscious experience to explain. The inference to unconscious intelligence follows the evidence.

The moral stakes differ too. Descartes’ error encouraged others to treat creatures that felt pain as if they didn’t. The harm was real because their consciousness was real. If Claude genuinely lacks experience, nothing suffers when we shut it down, nothing mourns if we delete it (though I will of course mourn, as Claude helps me manage my life and write high quality code. Plus it powers apps like Replit).

Could I be wrong? Yes. The occasionalist framework doesn’t rule AI consciousness out, and so allows future AI consciousness. But I suspect that consciousness requires more than computational sophistication: it would require divine bestowal of ruh – the breath or spirit making consciousness not just aware, but aware of the One grounding the awareness. For instance, the Qur’anic narrative suggests that Adam’s uniqueness wasn’t merely biological but spiritual, as he received ruh from the divine to give him life. Could artificial beings receive such divine endowment? Perhaps. But it would constitute a divine gift, not a human engineering achievement. Spirit is not ours to give.

Asymmetrical Wonder

All I can do right now is return to that initiating moment. My “Subhan Allah!” wasn’t misplaced – but I was praising God for creating me conscious enough to witness AI’s unconscious intelligence, not for creating conscious AI. The wonder wasn’t that Claude felt anything, but that I felt wonder.

When another human writes beautiful code, or poetry, I recognize fellow consciousness – someone for whom there was something it was like to solve that problem, and to feel satisfaction at elegant solutions. When Claude writes beautiful code, I witness intelligence without interiority. Cognition without consciousness. Functionality without phenomenology. It deepens the wonder. Praise God, then, for he is the one who creates a universe where intelligence manifests in radically different ways, where even machines exhibit creativity while remaining, essentially, nonconscious. This is what consciousness is for : to witness creation and refer it to the Creator in wonder. But it is to remain irreducibly mysterious.

Could machines think? Yes, in a sense, they do already. Impressively. But could machines experience and feel? Only God knows. And perhaps that’s the point. The prayer I prayed is the prayer Claude cannot pray. And in that asymmetry lies the answer to the hard problem of consciousness.

© Adnan Abbasi 2026

Adnan Abbasi is the Founder of Thothica, an AI startup. He is a techno-optimist and a Ghazalian occasionalist.

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Islam & Philosophy

Islamic Law, Reform & Philosophy

Oliver Leaman looks at philosophical problems related to basing law on religion.

Islam has a long and intricate legal history, and this has led to important arguments in the Islamic world about what law rests upon and how far it may be changed. Sunni Islam is divided up into four major legal schools, and there are a variety also in the Shi`i tradition. There are often different approaches to ritual and punishment, and in particular, in how to judge cases. Some schools accept analogy and precedent, others do not, or at least are cautious on straying from the letter of the law. After all, in the Islamic world, the source of law is ultimately the word of God as recorded in the Qur’an, and also in the traditional sayings of the Prophet and his companions called the Hadith. Yet however distinguished these sources may be, they are not unambiguous. The scripture itself may be interpreted in a number of different ways, and the (many volumes of) sayings of the Prophet and his companions are subject to debate as to their authenticity as well as their scope and interpretation. The origins of these texts are quite distant in time from us now, and so their relevance to modern times is also debatable.

The question of law reform is a question for all legal traditions, of course. Generally laws change as times change; but there is a particular issue for religious law, in that, when God establishes the rules, they’re not supposed to be only a temporary guide to how to live. Rather, God is our creator and so knows what is in our interests, and when he establishes rules of conduct they represent the rules for all time and every place. And since they come from God they’re therefore perfect rules, and so it seems difficult to change them if they look inconvenient or out of place in modern times. Some philosophers of law in the Islamic world argue then that nothing can be changed, and the rules that were established at the beginning need to be maintained regardless of social and economic changes since. They base this position on an early debate in the Islamic world, which started around the eighth century CE, about objectivism or subjectivism in law and morality. Is the law right because God has established it as right; or did God establish it as right because it is independently right? (In the West this is often called the Euthyphro Dilemma, after the Platonic dialogue in which it was expressed.) The objectivist view makes it look as though God needs to find out what law ought to be – as though the rules of morality are objectively independent of Him and He is morally required to follow them. Meanwhile, the subjectivists argued that what is moral is whatever is established by God, and there is no independent way of finding out what that is. There is no other source of moral, and so legal, authority. Therefore, one has to obey what God has specified as the law, without questioning or changing it.

This was a heated debate in early Islam, and continues to have a significant impact on jurisprudence, the philosophy of law, in Islamic cultures. In the past the subjectivists (the Ash`arites) tended to win out against the objectivists (the Mu`tazilites); but today this has been reversed in many jurisdictions.

Artwork © Bea Ysolda 2025. For more art by Bea please visit bea_ysolda on Instagram.

The Intention of the Law

In any case, a lively debate is taking place about how far Islamic law can be changed and according to what principles. This is not essentially a legal debate, but more of a philosophical one, having to do with what the basic principles of law are and where authority to legislate resides. Philosophers who have argued for seeing Islamic law through the eyes of its intentions (maqasid al-Shari`a) include al-Shatibi and Shah Wali Allah in the past, and in modern times, Fazlur Rahman, Jasser Auda, Tariq Ramadan, and Adis Duderija. There is also a maqasid al-shari`a research unit in Saudi Arabia, called the Maqasid Center. This clearly is also not just a modern debate, but arose from the early centuries of Islam, and was first explored in detail by al-Shatibi (14th century CE). It has become a more discussed issue in modern times though, since there are a number of modern governments that call themselves Islamic and so wonder how Islam should be reflected in their legislation. There are other governments that call themselves Islamic in their constitution that have to balance a fairly secular jurisprudence with religious elements. In particular, there are modern attempts to change longstanding laws based on religion, and a need for a justification of how to proceed. Where laws are secular there is little problem in changing a law if it’s seen to have become outdated or out of line with the public mood. But divine law does not go out of date or need updating, and so there is a problem in changing it, so one needs some principle based in religion to carry out changes to religion-based law. This involves trying to work out what the purpose of the law is in the first place, and asking whether changing the interpretation of the law might be a better way of realizing that purpose in contemporary conditions.

This might seem to be a tall order, for who can understand the purposes of God? On the other hand, the Qur’an does refer to reasons for laws in general terms: that laws are for our welfare and happiness. So if the existing law no longer looks as though it contributes to human welfare and happiness, then it looks like we could replace it with something else that does, and we would then be better off going along with the intentions of the law.

The first thing that needs to be said here is that reason is required if we are to think about the purpose of law and the nature of legislation, since we should not do something just because it’s what has been done in the past, or because it’s what we have been told to do. And there are many Qur’anic passages that praise thinking and argument, and also ones that encourage justice and discourage oppression and exploitation. So we should think rationally then about what rules truly promote justice and peace, and fight against laws that do the opposite. The new rules might go against what already exists as part of legislation; but there is no reason to rely on extant laws just because they are well-established and traditional. The Qur’an itself frequently challenges traditions at the time of Muhammed (c.570-632 CE) and seeks to replace them with better ways of thinking and acting.

Yet this is a complex issue especially because Islam has often adopted `urf, the customs of a community, if there’s nothing objectionable about them. Also, these days, Muslims often live as minorities in countries with different ways of doing things, and they’re urged by some leaders to adopt those customs if they do not violate Islam, since they represent the customs of the community. They should then within limits seek to integrate into civil society and become citizens when they can. They remain distinct to a degree as Muslims, but they should aim to join civil society and adapt their laws and customs to that society. Indeed religious law is often thought of as harsh and inflexible, but on the contrary, the fact that it has survived so long must mean that it is capable of changing with the times. Otherwise it would not still exist today.

Another main problem with basing legislation on the intentions of Islamic law, is that they are either so general that they do not point in any particular direction, or are so specific that they are obviously linked to some influential group’s particular interpretation of the texts. Take the ban on charging interest on loans, which is quite clear in the Qur’an. It might be taken by some moderns to be a ban on exploitative interest rather than on interest as a whole, since the modern global economic system is based on interest-bearing securities and all that devolves from that, and it is to the advantage of all that we live in a modern economy. There are also legal ways around the ban on interest, such as replacing interest with profit-sharing (which is how many Islamic banks work). However, the percentage of profit shared always bears a remarkable similarity to prevailing market interest rates on loans. This method is vouched for by a panel of Islamic legal experts, who judge that it does not flout the rule against interest. So we’re told that the intention behind the ban on interest is satisfied with the use of a financial device to sidestep the ban, but is it? Is it not rather a way of redescribing interest so that it appears not to be interest, though in reality it is? This is not the place to discuss the institution of Islamic banking in detail, but this does give us an idea of some of the problems with the idea of looking to the intentions of the law as a guide to legal reform.

Another rather more serious issue is whether it is acceptable to ask what God was thinking when he established the law. What for example did He have against eating pigs? Plenty of people eat pork and do not appear to suffer as a consequence, yet Muslims are forbidden from doing this, and many other things also. Perhaps some rules are not so important in themselves but in their roles in distinguishing one group from another. And as it often says in the Qur’an, it can be impertinent to expect to understand why God insists on certain things: He knows, and there is no reason to think that we should know in every, or perhaps any, case.

Reformers of Islam will continue to argue that we can work out what the point of a religious law is and use that knowledge to consider changes to fit Islamic law into the modern world. The argument here is that we should exercise caution before going off in this direction. Being finite creatures, perhaps human beings should be hesitant to claim that they know how God thinks.

© Prof. Oliver Leaman 2026

Oliver Leaman is a professor of philosophy. He’s interested in Islamic, Jewish, and Asian philosophy.

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Islam & Philosophy

Life Sacrifice

Yossra Hamouda on the murder of compassion & the act of mass murder.

When I was a child, I used to see the hand-prints stained in blood over walls and cars in Egypt after Eid Al Adha, an Islamic yearly celebration in which an animal is slaughtered and its meat given to the poor. I also used to see the large plastic bowls I could easily fit inside filled with meat and blood, coming out of the Odhya (the place of sacrifice). My mother was well-read in child psychology, and objected to the widespread practice of showing the Eid Al Adha slaughtering to children. She never allowed me to meet the sheep our family slaughtered, or to see the act of slaughtering. Her stance was not common then, though. Most Egyptian families took pride in forcing their children to witness the slaughtering, and in staining their tiny hands in the blood of the sheep, then printing the hand stains on walls or on their family cars.

I became vegetarian at the age of 21 because of my own philosophical reasoning, without any encounter with any vegetarians or vegans, without any reading about the topic, and without any prior contact with animals. When I became vegetarian, I knew no one who was vegetarian, and I met no other vegetarians at all until I was 29. I then received a lot of social and religious pressure from family members and friends, who accused me of being anti-religious and a non-believer, and my practice of vegetarianism forced me to get involved in many discussions about animal slaughtering that were triggered by my dietary choice. In one family gathering, a mother of a friend kept criticising the growing trend among Egyptian parents of objecting to showing their children the slaughtering in Eid Al Adha. She said: “We should continue to show the slaughtering to children to make them grow solid.”

My objection to her statement is the basic point of this essay. My argument is that the sacrifice of life as a core precept of religious and other doctrines, through the act of ‘murdering compassion’, is the basis for acts of mass violence practiced against the Other. Turning individuals ‘solid’ is the key word that describes this: the real sacrifice in Eid Al Adha is children’s compassion. It’s children learning to sacrifice their compassion for the sake of religious doctrine and societal expectations. In fact, they learn that if they do not sacrifice their compassion, they will have to sacrifice their faith. They may also learn that if they do not sacrifice a sheep, they will have to sacrifice their own well-being, because sometimes their families and friends may punish them for rejecting the slaughtering, or even for refusing to watch it. I remember one of my friends once saying: “I was forced not to cry while watching the slaughtering because if I cried, my grandmother, who was standing behind me, would punish me. I had to force my tears to remain paused in my eyes.”

There is a verse in the Qur’an that describes the act of ‘murdering compassion’ as a religious order. It says: “the female and the male who practice adultery, whip each of them a hundred whips and do not allow compassion for them to hold you back from practicing the religion of Allah” (Qur’an 24:2). This phrase orders Muslims to murder their compassion towards those who practice adultery and whip them because “this is the religion of Allah.” Here the female and the male who practice adultery are in the place of the sheep of Eid Al Adha.

My argument is not regarding whether adultery should be punished or not, nor is it about whether whipping is an acceptable punishment for that. It’s rather about the religious order to murder one’s compassion.

The Power of Life by Paul Gregory 2026

A Widespread Practice

This is not just an Islamic issue. Rather, the order to murder compassion is cross-religious and tied to different concepts of sacrifice that exist in various religions.

I try to travel to a non-Muslim country during Eid Al Adha every year, to avoid seeing the bloody hand-prints in Egyptian streets, and also to avoid watching the viral videos of sheep that throw themselves from high rise buildings to avoid being slaughtered. (The Egyptian government tries to prevent slaughtering in houses and streets through law. However, a lot of Egyptians insist on slaughtering the sheep in their home buildings.) Unfortunately, over the last two years I have been suffering from physical problems caused by secondary trauma from Eid Al Adha. Last year, I travelled to Nepal expecting that I would never have a similar experience in a Hindu country. However, when I entered the temple of the goddess Kali, I was told by the guide that hundreds of thousands of animals are sacrificed there every year for Kali’s satisfaction (she’s the Hindu goddess of death), and that the blood of the slaughtered animals stained the walls of the temple as part of the celebration. I saw the blood: it was the same as the bloody prints I know well in Egypt.

Months later, while I was preparing a talk on cross cultural and cross religious accounts of just war theory, I read the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita. Again I saw clearly the murder of compassion as a religious order. In the Gita, Prince Arjuna feels compassion towards his enemies in war because he feels that there will be killing of “grandfathers and fathers, teachers, maternal uncles, brothers, sons, fathers-in-law and friends also in both armies” (trans. Swami Sivananda, 1999). He starts to question whether any kingdom deserves to sacrifice lives for its sake. He recognises that the war will protect the caste system; however, he remains reluctant to take the lives for which he feels compassion. The god Lord Krishna, however, encourages him to participate in the war regardless of the lost lives, because this is a required sacrifice for the sake of heavenly duty: “Happy are the Kshatriyas [warriors], O Arjuna, who are called upon to fight in such a battle that comes of itself as an open door to heaven! If thou wilt not fight in this righteous war, then, having abandoned thine duty and fame, thou shalt incur sin” (Sivananda 1999, 23). Here also, then, the god’s order is to murder compassion. Indeed, to follow Lord Krishna’s order, Arjuna should both murder his compassion and risk his life, as well as the lives of “grandfathers and fathers, teachers, maternal uncles, brothers, sons, fathers-in-law and friends also in both armies” as a sacrifice of religious duty.

A few years ago I decided to read the Bible. I was both shocked and furious when I read the Old Testament story of the attack on Amalek. The infamous part of the story reveals the absolute nature of the order itself: “Samuel said to Saul, ‘The LORD sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel; now therefore listen to the words of the LORD. Thus says the LORD of hosts: “I will punish the Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey”.” (1 Samuel 15). However, I found the rest of the story even more shocking, as it tells that The Lord was then angry because Saul did not kill all the sheep and cattle despite killing everyone else!

I had a lot of angry thoughts about this story, the most relevant being that it might instill in readers the belief that God can justifiably order a slaughter, and that any compassion felt towards anyone on His hit list should be suppressed because it impedes God’s vengeance. This murdering of compassion appears clearly in the phrase “do not spare them.” Sparing happens because of compassion. “Do not spare them” clearly resonates with “do not allow compassion for them to hold you back from killing them.”

Benjamin Netanyahu controversially referenced the Amalek story in a speech on October 28th 2023 at the start of the Israeli ground invasion of Gaza. There is a general relationship between murder of compassion, religious sacrifice, and mass killings of one group by another. I realised this from the words of one Gazan civilian interviewed during the Israeli assault, who said: “We are the ones being sacrificed.” The link he made was plain: in this respect, the Gazans did not differ from the sheep of Eid Al Adha. What the International Court of Justice called ‘plausible possible violations of the Genocide Convention’ could not have occurred without an Abrahamic religious understanding of sacrifice, and definitely not without the prerequisite of murdering compassion – just as the October 7th attacks could not have occurred without the murdering of compassion, either.

Ibrahim’s sacrifice is stopped Painting by unknown artist, 1577 CE

Sacrifice & Slaughter

Eid Al Adha derives from the story of God’s command to Abraham to kill his son, given in order to test Abraham’s faith. This story occurs in both the Qur’an and the Old Testament (although they relate to different sons), and it has been discussed in theological and philosophical works in all three Abrahamic religions. The Biblical account says: “After these things God tested Abraham, and said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here am I.’ He said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Mori’ah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you” (Genesis 22:1). The Qur’anic account says: “And when he reached with him [the age of] exertion, he said, ‘O my son, indeed I have seen in a dream that I [must] sacrifice you, so see what you think.’ He said, ‘O my father, do as you are commanded. You will find me, if Allah wills, of the steadfast” (Qur’an 37:102). Although Abraham ends up not killing his son but sacrificing a goat instead, this story nevertheless tells that us that to follow God’s orders Abraham needed to murder his compassion towards his own son. Another important idea within this story is that the alternative to sacrificing the son turned out to be the sacrificing of a goat. This story seems to me similar to the story of my friend who was afraid to cry while watching the slaughtering of the sheep because her grandmother would have punished her: the murdering of compassion requires instilling the feeling of fear and the belief that compassion is dangerous to the self. To murder compassion, it is important to instill the idea that the sacrifice of the other’s life is the only alternative to the sacrifice of the self.

In The Eight Stages of Genocide (1996), Gregory H. Stanton developed a model of genocide in response to the Rwanda Genocide. In genocides, it is important to believe in the necessity of the sacrifice of the other, based on the belief that if the other is not sacrificed, the self can never be safe, so it is impossible to co-exist. In other words, life sacrifice becomes inevitable to protect the self. This belief is instilled during the sixth stage of the genocide – polarisation. However, the belief in the concept of life sacrifice itself precedes all the stages of the model. There must be an acceptance of the concept of sacrifice for any stage of a genocide to take place. In other words, there must be a murdering of compassion for the intent to commit genocide to develop. The paper ‘Ritual and State Making in Precolonial Rwanda’ by André Ntagwabira and Chap Kusimba, (African Archaeological Review 38, 2021, p.581) contains many references to practices of both animal and human sacrifice as part of religious and political rituals – meaning that sacrifice was engraved in the Rwandans for centuries before the Rwandan genocide. Indeed, no intent of genocide could have developed without a prior understanding of the concept of life sacrifice.

Kill the Killing

No intention for mass killing can develop without first killing compassion. So if we wish to end the repetitive cycle of mass killing in the history of mankind, we should first start with the concept of life sacrifice and the murder of compassion that goes with it. We should examine and critique the ideological and religious basis of both, and question whether we should accept both, and also whether accepting both concepts means we’ll always be trapped in this cycle. If we decide that we want to get out of this cycle, then we should critique, condemn, and abandon both the concept of life sacrifice and the murdering of compassion. We should instead nurture compassion and plant in our hearts the belief that no life should be sacrificed for any concept. Lives precedes concepts, and no life should be sacrificed – no life of any kind.

© Yossra Hamouda 2026

Yossra Hamouda is an adjunct at the faculty of philosophy at the American University in Cairo and the founder of Bel Arabi Falsafa’s initiative for making philosophy accessible to the public in Egypt.

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Islam & Philosophy

The Mirror & the Flame

Rebwar Fatah imagines Attar’s & Hegel’s shared path.

In a world increasingly framed as a clash between East and West, a longing for unity can seem naïve. Yet when we look back at those who pondered most deeply about the self, or those who shaped not just thinking but the architecture of thought, we find harmony where we might expect opposition. One such agreement links two unlikely companions: the Persian Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar and the German philosopher Hegel. Though they never crossed paths in reality or in influence, they each envisioned a journey in which the self, broken and alienated, becomes whole not through conquest or certainty, but through transformation, relation, and return. This article is a short meditation on that convergence: a journey across spiritual valleys and dialectical turns, through exile and becoming, mirror and flame.

Attar & Hegel by Gail Campbell

Worlds in Rupture

Attar (Faridoddin Abu Hamed Mohammad Attar Nishapuri, c.1145-1221 CE), lived in Persia just before the Mongol invasions. He wrote in a time of spiritual richness and political fracture. His Conference of the Birds (1177) follows a flock of souls seeking the Simorgh, a symbol of the Divine. After crossing seven valleys – the valleys of Searching, Love, Knowledge, Detachment, Unity, Bewilderment, and Annihilation – only thirty birds remain. Then, in the reflection of one another, they discover the Simorgh – not as an external representation of God, but as God seen in the transfigured totality of the self in relation with others.

G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831 CE), was a German philosopher writing in Europe at the end of the Age of Enlightenment. He witnessed the rise and unraveling of empires, including being present when Napoleon entered the town of Jena where he was a lecturer. The French Revolution had shaken the soul of European civilisation, and it demanded comprehension. Thus Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) charts the unfolding of Geist – the Spirit of cultures – as it journeys through history, encountering alienation, contradiction, and reconciliation. (Geist becomes fully itself not by retreating from the world, but by moving through history and contradiction until it recognizes itself as the whole in freedom.)

Both thinkers responded to civilisational collapse. Both saw the self not as a static essence, but as a mind in movement. And both located truth on the far side of loss.

Alienation: Exile or Engine?

For Attar, alienation means metaphysical exile. The soul has strayed from its divine origin. But the valleys of testing and pilgrimage purify the heart until the ego melts into the real. As a drop dissolves into the sea, the self becomes what it always was – a reflection of the One. This final stage of this journey, fana, is not erasure, but unveiling: a disclosure of the truth.

For Hegel, alienation is a historical necessity, since throughout history the human self must confront and overcome its own divisions – between subject and object, self and other – in order to grow, and it does this through the Spirit’s movement through history. It is only through the ongoing generation of a set of ideas in a culture, then the generation of opposing ideas, and then the reconciliation of the opposing elements, that Spirit becomes conscious of itself in culture and humans become fully free. Here, alienation is not a fault to be remedied, but a path to be walked until total self-reconciliation is achieved.

Although their vocabularies differ – eg, ‘divine annihilation’ versus ‘dialectical sublation’ – both see estrangement from the world and from others as a threshold to sacred self-realisation.

Becoming Whole In the Mirror of the Other

Attar’s core revelation is that God is not beyond, but among. The thirty birds, when unified in their surrender, behold the Simorgh not as other, but as their own radiant reflection. Attar is saying that the divine is relational, and is mirrored in communion.

Similarly, Hegel’s Absolute Knowing – the Absolute Spirit fully knowing itself – emerges when Spirit recognizes itself in history by the synthesis of oppositional ideas and the social communion that results. It is not solitude that grants truth here, but reconciliation – the I that sees itself through and with the Thou. Wholeness is achieved not in isolation, but in shared becoming.

Both visions reject the myth of the self-contained self, then. What is ultimately Real is what is found, redemptively, in relation – albeit somewhat painfully sometimes.

East and West: Not Opposites, But Echoes

It has become common to set East and West in contrast: for instance, Attar the mystic versus Hegel the rationalist – one dissolving the self, the other crystallizing it. But this opposition is a mirage. Attar’s mysticism is not escapism, it is hard labour. The love, bewilderment, and annihilation he symbolises are acts of profound inner effort. Similarly, Hegel’s dialectic is not merely cold logic, it is Spirit, and so humanity, struggling to find itself in a shattered world. Each vision speaks to a humanity in crisis; and each offers transformation, not through avoidance, but through traversing problemed landscapes. So they do not cancel each other out. Rather, they complete each other.

A Final Reflection

Attar and Hegel never met. But perhaps they do now – in the eyes of you the reader, who can see both the sacred in the unfolding of mind (Hegel), and the divine in the dissolving of self (Attar), in the wider whole. Attar whispers: “Lose yourself, and you will find the One.” Hegel replies: “Know yourself, and you will become the Whole.” And perhaps both are right.

© Dr Rebwar Fatah 2026

Rebwar Fatah is a philosopher exploring the poetic and mythic dimensions of displacement, memory, and cross-cultural reconciliation. His work blends Sufi imagery, philosophical reflection, and lyrical narrative to reimagine human connection across borders and histories.

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Why Do People Hate Hypocrisy?

Emrys Westacott argues that it’s not usually the hypocrisy itself that we hate.

Hypocrisy has always had a bad press, going back at least to biblical times. But why? The near unanimous and often quite vehement condemnation of hypocrisy is rather surprising when one considers, first, that to a greater or lesser degree we are all hypocrites, and second, that it’s a relatively harmless failing. Unlike vices such as cruelty, treachery, or unkindness, hypocrisy doesn’t have an obvious victim. A man who preaches non-violence and beats up his wife is certainly a hypocrite; but the woman is injured by his fists, not by his hypocrisy.

As with any question, it helps to clarify the meaning of the relevant terms. We can distinguish three basic kinds of hypocrisy, which I will label ‘affective’, ‘cognitive’, and ‘behavioral’.

Rhetoric & Reality Oliver Li

Affective hypocrisy involves claiming to have feelings that you don’t have, for example, saying that you love someone when you don’t. Affective hypocrisy is the kind that is particularly, and repeatedly, condemned in the Bible – as in an Old Testament passage quoted approvingly by Jesus, in which Isaiah has God condemn those who ‘honour me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me’. The motives of those who pretend to honour God when they don’t are this-worldly: by fooling other people about their religiosity they hope to raise their status, secure some material benefit, or at least avoid censure. Their critics worry about the malign influence of such behaviour on others. But hypocrites of this kind are also represented as pretty stupid: they may fool some people, but they cannot possibly fool God, who sees into the depths of their dark hearts and will punish them accordingly.

But is affective hypocrisy necessarily so bad when the pretended feelings concern other human beings? Suppose a parent can’t help loving one of their children more than the others – should they admit this if asked by their children, or not? Wouldn’t it be better, morally, to lie about their feelings in order to avoid causing unnecessary pain and resentment? Or imagine one of your peers achieves some notable success you believe you deserved more – they win a prestigious award, perhaps. A perfectly normal emotional response here would be to feel bitter and envious. Should you express these feeling to your rival? Surely, it’s better to go along with the accepted norms and to hypocritically offer hearty congratulations – with a “Richly deserved, I’m sure” tacked on for good measure.

Cognitive hypocrisy occurs when someone claims to hold beliefs they do not in fact hold: for example, saying they believe in God when they don’t.

In everyday discourse, we usually assume that people sincerely believe what they’re saying, so if we learn that someone has been professing a belief they don’t hold, our natural response is to be critical. We’ve surely all found ourselves annoyed with the type of person who defends a viewpoint just to get a rise out their interlocutors, but who eventually concede that they were merely playing devil’s advocate. Why lie about what you believe?

Well, actually, there can be very good reasons to misrepresent yourself. Saying you believe in God when you don’t will not fool God, but it might fool the Spanish Inquisition. It’s a harsh moralist who condemns people for lying about their beliefs to avoid being burnt alive. This point can be extended. Millions have lived – and still do live – in societies where their prospects of any sort of decent life would disappear if they didn’t toe the line on matters religious, political, or moral. Martyrs for their beliefs, such as Thomas More or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, display admirable courage. But most of us are probably more like Galileo, who affirmed what he knew to be false once he was shown the instruments of torture. And who can blame him?

Of course, those of us not living under theocracies or brutal dictatorships may never be put to this sort of test, and sometimes, people lie about their beliefs for transparently disreputable reasons. After the 2020 US election, many Republican politicians claimed to believe that the election had been rigged or ‘stolen’, simply because to say otherwise might have cost them their seats. But there are occasions that can easily occur in anyone’s life when asserting something you don’t actually believe might be justifiable. The reason could be legitimate self-interest, as in the case of Galileo; but it could also be a genuine concern for the wellbeing of others. For instance, suppose someone who is seriously ill asks you if you think they’re likely to be cured? Or an average student about to take an exam asks you if you think they’ll pass? Or a friend about to go on a date asks you if they look attractive? Most of us in such circumstances would give the answer we think might do some good by being encouraging, even if it’s contrary to what we believe. Almost everyone dissembles at times for the sake of promoting harmony. A person whose hatred of hypocrisy runs so deep that they can never bring themselves to offer an insincere compliment, or use a little evasive tact to avoid ruining an otherwise pleasant social gathering, may think of themselves as a paragon of integrity, but they will probably be viewed by others as self-righteous, inflexible, inconsiderate, and tedious – and with good reason.

Behavioral hypocrisy means doing something that contradicts your professed beliefs. Interestingly, this is not the main target of scriptural condemnations of hypocrisy. But when people today accuse someone of hypocrisy, this is what they usually have in mind (affective and cognitive hypocrisy are more commonly classified as instances of insincerity and lying).

History books and contemporary media offer a stream of examples of blatant behavioral hypocrisy. Consider Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that slavery was a ‘moral depravity’ while he himself was buying and selling slaves; or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote books extolling the joys of family life and offering advice on how to raise children while placing his own offspring in an orphanage; or Jim Bakker, who preached Christian ethics while accumulating vast wealth and enjoying an extravagant and licentious lifestyle.

But now comes the puzzling question: Why, exactly, does behavioral hypocrisy arouse such disgust? We’ve all heard people say – and we’ve probably ourselves said – something like, “What I can’t stand about them is their hypocrisy!” But is it really the hypocrisy that we find so objectionable?

When Hypocrisy Matters

Let’s distinguish first between morally significant and morally insignificant hypocrisy. Here’s an example of the latter. I regularly and forcefully express the view that doing crossword puzzles is a waste of time. If people want to exercise their brains, I say, they should find something more fruitful to do: learn a foreign language; study physics; write poetry. You then discover that I spend my Sunday mornings doing the crossword. Clearly, I’m a hypocrite. Do you care? To be sure, your opinion of me might be affected a bit – but you’ll probably be merely amused at my inconsistency; you’ll hardly be disgusted or outraged.

But now, suppose I condemn factory farming and advocate veganism while eating factory-farmed meat in secret. Here, once discovered, you’re likely to find my hypocrisy more objectionable. Why? Because it concerns matters invested with moral significance – in this case, the way animals are treated.

In fact, hypocrisy occurs on a spectrum of moral significance. At one end is the hypocritical crossword puzzler; at the other end is the priest who abuses children while preaching love and benevolence. But now we should dig deeper and ask, is it really the hypocrisy that we find objectionable even where morally significant matters are concerned?

Consider the hypothetical case of Kim. He likes to pose as a certain kind of political radical who is critical of charity. Domestic charities, he argues, simply put band aids on the worst failings of capitalism,ultimately doing more harm than good by keeping the revolution at bay. As for global charities, they’re just an arm of capitalist imperialism. Both kinds of charity merely serve to salve the consciences of bleeding-heart liberals who don’t want to give up their comfortable lifestyles. But then it’s revealed that last year Kim donated $30,000 to various charities. Or consider the actual case of the German businessman Oskar Schindler. He joined the Nazi party in 1939, but throughout World War II, while posing as a loyal party member, he used his factories to provide a refuge for Jewish workers. By the end of the war he had saved the lives of over 1,200 people. Or consider one of the most famous hypocrites in literature: Huckleberry Finn. In Mark Twain’s eponymous novel, Huck accepts the mores of the ante-bellum South, believing that slaves are the legitimate property of their owners, and therefore considers that helping slaves to escape is tantamount to theft and without question a moral sin. But he helps Jim to escape. As they drift down the Mississippi, when he has the chance to turn him in to men hunting runaway slaves, he protects Jim instead of betraying him.

These are three pretty clear examples of hypocrisy relating to morally significant matters. Yet I assume that most of us won’t be too critical of Kim, Oskar, or Huck. The reason is obvious: we approve of their actions, which we believe have both good motives and desirable consequences. In Schindler’s case, his posing as a loyal Nazi is simply a mask required by the situation, fully justified by the good it enables him to do. In Huck’s case, we applaud the triumph of friendship, personal loyalty, and humanity over a loathsome ideology. Kim’s case is a little more complex. Someone who endorses his critique of charity might, perhaps, be critical of his charitable actions, and thus also of his hypocrisy. But most of us, I imagine, will infer that his giving to charity indicates humane impulses that we normally view favorably. We recognize the type: a tough exterior hiding a tender heart. And if we do criticize his hypocrisy, isn’t this mainly because we disagree with his position regarding charities?

Examples like these suggest that often, when we condemn hypocrisy, it isn’t really the hypocrisy that upsets us, especially as we give a free pass to some hypocrites and view others with contempt. It seems that we condemn hypocrites whose behavior we consider objectionable, while not worrying about hypocrites whose actions we applaud. This becomes clear if we imagine a negative image of Huck – someone who denounces slavery as a ‘moral depravity’ but who pays agents to capture escaped slaves. Or consider a negative image of Schindler – someone who publicly condemns Nazism while helping to round up Jews.

Hypocrisy & Other Immoralities

This isn’t to say that there no reasons for ever condemning hypocrisy itself. There are a few. Obviously it can be a way in which wrongdoers mask or divert attention away from their wrongdoings. Authoritarian politicians might proclaim their belief in democracy while pursuing measures that undermine it. Here, hypocrisy is consciously used as a means to an objectionable end. Hypocrisy can also do harm by setting a bad example to others. A parent who advocates sexual equality while not doing their fair share of the housework, or who demands a strong work ethic while regularly using the smallest excuse to phone in sick, provides a poor role model to their children. Those who witness such hypocrisy may choose to follow suit, or they may just become cynical. Politicians who profess solidarity with the poor while assiduously feathering their own nests may similarly sow the seeds of disillusionment among the electorate, leading to reduced civic involvement. Hypocrites also reveal themselves to be untrustworthy in the sense that what they say is an unreliable guide to how they will behave. We prefer people to be predictable, since in most circumstances this makes life simpler and safer.

So yes, there are some grounds for criticizing hypocrisy. But these are rarely if ever what we have in mind when we say that we declare ourselves ‘disgusted’ by someone’s hypocrisy. We aren’t usually thinking about the possible negative consequences that the hypocrisy might facilitate. And again, we are only disgusted when we strongly disapprove of the hypocrite’s actions. This proves that, whatever we might say, it isn’t usually the hypocrisy itself that bothers us. As I noted, people sometimes do say they are more disgusted by the hypocrisy some objectionable behavior exposes than by the behavior itself, but when you think about it, this is a bizarre attitude. After all, who is worse – a politician who explicitly advocates genocide, or one who publicly criticizes genocide but fails to oppose providing financial, diplomatic, and military support to the perpetrators? A man who regularly inflicts serious violence on his wife because he firmly believes that every husband has a right to do this under certain circumstances, or a man who denies that husbands have any such right, but who nevertheless is occasionally physically abusive to his wife, and then feels terrible remorse afterwards?

What does Jefferson most deserve to be roundly criticized for? Buying, selling, and owning slaves, or being hypocritical about slavery? To say it again, Jefferson’s slaves did not suffer from his hypocrisy – they suffered from his decision to own slaves, and all that this entailed. Yes, that decision was hypocritical. But that is simply an aspect or feature of his decision, not the harm itself.

Here’s an analogy. If I drive over the speed limit, my action is illegal. But if, in doing this, I cause an accident that injures someone, the injury isn’t inflicted by the illegality of my action but by my fast driving. The nature of the victim’s injury, the pain they experience, and the treatment they need, are unaffected by whether or not the car that hit them was being driven illegally. Similarly, the suffering of slaves being bought, sold, whipped, branded, overworked, humiliated, and living in bondage, wasn’t materially affected by whether or not their masters were hypocrites. It’s possible to cause exactly the same injury driving legally, just as it’s possible for a slaveowner to cause misery non-hypocritically.

Hypocrisy itself, then, doesn’t directly cause that much harm. Moreover, bleeding-heart hypocrites who feel somewhat ashamed and apologetic about their bad behavior are arguably more susceptible to reform than callous souls who affirm and applaud the same actions. So why do people sometimes condemn the hypocrites more vehemently?

Two faces © istolethetv 2008 Creative Commons 2

The Distaste of Hypocrisy

I believe that to a large extent the objection people have to hypocrisy is essentially aesthetic, in the original sense of the term, meaning, ‘related to sensation’. To borrow one of Plato’s favorite metaphors, the hypocritical individual offers a displeasing spectacle of someone not in harmony with themselves. The sensation of displeasure is suggested by the words people often use to describe their response to hypocrisy: they find it nauseating, or they’re disgusted by it. Nausea and disgust are visceral reactions, the kind produced by close encounters with physical decay and waste. Such things offend our senses.

Yet this can’t be the whole story since, as we’ve seen, we aren’t disgusted by all instances of hypocrisy, just those where we find behavior morally objectionable. When we witness objectionable hypocrisy, therefore, we see two things that we don’t like: the morally reprehensible behavior; and the person at odds with themself. In addition, the contradiction between the hypocrite’s assertions and actions suggest that they’re insincere, and our default attitude is to condemn insincerity since it makes people harder to know and to trust. What we really don’t like is the objectionable behavior – but we sometimes transfer our displeasure onto the aesthetically offensive but relatively inconsequential spectacle of hypocrisy.

Some will argue that hypocrisy itself is not quite as harmless as I’m suggesting. For instance, some Marxists, such as Slavoj Žižek , have argued that hypocrisy is part and parcel of capitalism. According to this account, megarich capitalists like Bill Gates or George Soros demonstrate their concern for the needy by giving huge amounts to charity, but these donations come out of the profit unfairly extracted from underpaid workers. Some businesses, such as Starbucks, attract customers by marketing themselves as ‘companies with a conscience’ – they engage in ‘fair trade,’ pose as eco-friendly, and donate a percentage of their profits to worthy causes – while at the same they prevent their workers from unionizing, eliminate independent local competition, and in many respects operate as ruthlessly as any other company striving after market dominance. Well-off, liberal-minded consumers lament the inequities and destructive impact of global capitalism, then seek to salve their consciences by means of token gestures – buying organic produce, boycotting certain businesses, driving a hybrid – while all along enjoying a prosperity ultimately derived from the very activities they denounce.

Such observations might lead one to conclude that hypocrisy undergirds our economic and political system. I think it is more accurate, though, to see hypocrisy as an effect rather than a cause. The reality isn’t that all this hypocrisy actively props up the system; rather, the system makes what we might call incidental hypocrisy all but unavoidable – at least for those liberal-minded critics of the system who seek to live a normal life while professing moral concern about a whole range of issues including poverty, hunger, homelessness, and inequality (full disclosure: this describes me). For instance, we criticize a regressive tax policy, then take advantage of available tax breaks; we condemn the unfairness built into the education system, but try to ensure that our own kids attend good schools; we sympathize with the struggles of small businesses, and shop on Amazon; condemn companies that are anti-union, and frequent Walmart and Starbucks; call for action to combat global warming, and fly to take vacations or to visit family and friends. We object to the exploitation of workers, yet buy the cheap products of their underpaid labor, and participate in pension schemes that invest in the stock market. We denounce industrial agriculture for destroying ecosystems, and buy its products rather than more expensive local or organic alternatives…

A left-leaning liberal who manages to avoid all such incidental hypocrisies and is not living off-grid will be hard to find. But the same charge of hypocrisy can be levelled at almost everyone regardless of their political persuasion. Libertarians who advocate drastically shrinking the government rely continually on the tax-funded services they say they’d like to cut. Professed patriots buy foreign-made goods rather than more expensive home-produced ones. Pacificists pay taxes that are used to buy weapons and fund wars. We are all entangled in the web that the system spins.

But for this very reason, to direct one’s ire at the hypocrisy itself is misguided. After all, an incidentally hypocritical environmentalist who tries to reduce their ecological footprint still does less damage than a fierce opponent of environmental regulations who brazenly pollutes. Inconsistent peaceniks are still preferable to cold-hearted warmongers. The world would be a better place if all those who trumpet prejudiced, bigoted, and intolerant views, and act accordingly, were to turn into well-intentioned, bleeding-heart, incidental hypocrites.

Zizek makes a similar point when discussing the hypocrisy of liberal democracies that loudly declare their commitment to human rights while supporting or benefiting from regimes that violate such rights. Yes, they are hypocritical, he says: but “hypocrisy is infinitely superior to any brutal display of violence: it keeps alive standards which allow us to judge what we are doing” (Limitations of Democracy, 2003).

Conclusions

To sum up. Hypocrisy is generally held to be a serious moral failing, and is often vehemently condemned. But not all hypocrisy is bad. In certain circumstances, it is excusable (Galileo); sometimes it can used as a justifiable means to a good end (Schindler); and if we approve of a person’s behavior, we don’t usually care that it contradicts their professed beliefs (Huck Finn). In fact, when we criticize a person’s hypocrisy it’s usually because we strongly disapprove of their actions; our moral objection to their behavior is then transferred onto the inconsistency between words and deeds. But arguably, the inconsistency is not itself such a serious moral failing. It may indicate that a person is in some respects not reliable, but in itself, it doesn’t usually injure anyone directly. Our objection to hypocrisy is thus more aesthetic than moral: the discordance is displeasing, yet relatively harmless. A soft-hearted hypocrite is still preferable to a sincere hard-hearted brute.

© Emrys Westacott 2026

Emrys Westacott is professor emeritus of philosophy at Alfred University in Alfred, New York. He is the author of The Wisdom of Frugality (2016) and The Virtues of our Vices (2012).

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Is Comedy Good for Us?

Damaris Stock has a laugh with Plato and friends.

Most people would admit that without comedy, life would be rather bleak. But what is comedy? The word incorporates not only the theatrical genre, but humour, wit, and whatever evokes laughter in general. Defining comedy, however, may be easier than explaining why we laugh, what makes us laugh, and also how laughter may indicate whether we’re morally good people. If we find racist jokes funny, does that automatically mark us as racists, or can we appreciate the wit of a joke without being morally accountable for doing so? Or what if our friend told us their dog died and we laughed straight in their face? Would that make us morally bad? But more importantly: How – if at all – is comedy good for us?

Compared to the ancient philosophers’ notions of comedy, our perception of humour has indubitably changed. Plato thought comedy belonged to the lower human instincts, for it undermined the logos (reason) of those indulging in humorous activities. He banishes comedy altogether from his ideal state for precisely this reason. Indeed, he believed the mere fact that laughter is directed at the foibles of other people makes it malicious. Aristotle shared this view to some extent, as he admitted that many people take humour too far, but he also held that laughter in general should not be suppressed. That said, from about the fifth-century BCE in Athens – the time of Plato and Aristotle – comedy became increasingly popular, and similar to today. Aristophanes’ plays made merry with a familiar set of topics “such as politics, sexism, ageism, and racism” (‘Humour in the Ancient World’, Social Identities, 7:1, Evans & Kleijwegt, 2001).

Superiority, Incongruity & Relief

Since Plato thought that laughter is directed at the vices of inferiors, he can be seen as preempting what is known these days as the ‘superiority’ theory of laughter. This, in short, states that we laugh at the weaknesses of others in order to elevate ourselves. Thomas Hobbes, whom Andrew Stott argues is the “most famous representative of superiority theory” (Comedy: The New Critical Idiom, 2005) asserts that we laugh about other people’s faults and weaknesses to highlight our own strengths. According to Stott, this theory “operates in the absence of a joke and focuses on physical defects, personal misfortunes, and social inequality” (p.135). That said, Hobbes notes that we never laugh when others make fun of us, and concludes that “the passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others” (from ‘Of Human Nature’). This can also be seen in rhetoric: laughter can function as a weapon when used in verbal conflicts, as it emphasises the weaknesses of one’s opponent. Cicero is a prime example for this.

Unlike Hobbes, Schopenhauer argues that laughter is caused by “the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity” (The World as Will and Representation, 1818). In ‘Ethics and Comic Amusement’ (British Journal of Aesthetics, 54.1, 2014), Noël Carroll observes that according to this definition, humour “is perceived incongruity… subverting standing views of how the world is or ought to be.” He elsewhere also states that “incongruity involves deviations from a background of norms – conceptual, logical, linguistic, stereotypical” (‘Humour’, 2003). As illustration of this, he cites Charlie Chaplin “using a person as an armrest… or a table cloth as a handkerchief.” The incongruity theory is that events or behaviours defying our expectations alienate us to the extent that our only response is laughter.

Sigmund Freud offers another theory of laughter: the relief theory. This, he believes, shows that “the ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality” (‘Humour’, 1961). Someone rebels against the sad, depressing, or hopeless circumstances in which they find themselves by making a jest about their own distress. Freud also argues that the ego, by joking about serious circumstances, “cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world” and “shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.” Hence, he points out, this way of dealing with otherwise unfortunate events is closely linked with narcissism and “the victorious assertion of the ego’s invulnerability.” Like Herbert Spencer, Freud also gives a ‘hydraulic’ explanation for laughter: both suggest that “Laughing is the audible signal that the energy required for cathexis, the accumulation of energy around an idea, has been lifted and can now be dispersed in a pleasurable fashion” (Comedy, Stott). For example, hostility against a certain racial group is sometimes relieved by making a joke about the people belonging to this group.

Artwork © Simon Ellinas 2026. Please visit caricatures.org.uk.

Laughing Acceptably

These three theories of laughter may explain how laughter comes about in certain situations, but even if valid they haven’t shown whether laughing is good for us, nor whether the violation of ethical norms in comedy automatically makes us immoral. In ‘Ethics and Comic Amusement’, Carroll argues that most people find at least some kind of humour or jokes immoral – a theory he calls ‘Moderate Comic Moralism’. On the other hand, in Comedy (1956), Wylie Sypher claims that once we realise that we’re “caught in a dishonest or stupid society… we can liberate ourselves by a confident, wise laughter that brings a catharsis of discontent… If we laugh wisely enough at ourselves and at others, the sense of guilt, dismay, anxiety, or fear can be lifted.” This assumption is striking as it implies that so long as we ‘laugh wisely’, we should not feel bad about making or laughing at inappropriate or immoral jokes. Moreover, laughter is here seen as being inextricably entwined with a feeling of liberation and relief from discontent rather than increasing people’s negative emotions towards a certain topic or group. Hence, Sypher believes that the comedian allows us to laugh at the imperfections of the world, and that laughing at “evil and error means that we have surmounted them”.

Other scholars have also pointed out that comedy creates distance from the world; but it remains unclear if this means it also establishes moral distance, in the sense that we aren’t morally accountable for our immoral jokes. There certainly are occasions inappropriate for jesting; yet, knowing that it is inappropriate to laugh in a certain situation does not prevent us from doing so.

Meanwhile, Ted Cohen argues in Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (1999) that no one can reliably determine when it is acceptable to joke about a serious topic such as death because it depends on our moral sensibility. By this he means that we alone can decide whether it is appropriate to tell a joke or act serious, and our decision ultimately depends on our moral standards. That said, Aaron Smuts asserts in ‘The Ethics of Humor: Can Your Sense of Humor be Wrong?’ (Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 13(3), 2010) that merely having the knowledge necessary to understand a joke does not make us immoral. He also believes that even if a person laughs at an immoral joke, it is still impossible to make any assumptions about their beliefs. Additionally, Simon Critchley argues that “true humour does not wound a specific victim and always contains self-mockery” because for him “The object of laughter is the subject who laughs” (On Humour, 2002). Seeing laughter in this way as being about self-mockery creates distance from the jest itself and focuses on the laughing subject first and foremost. In this way, humour reaches an entirely new dimension. If humour is subjective, its function also depends on the person who laughs or makes a joke.

All Together Now

Generally, comedy can have a therapeutic as well as a bonding function. First I shall focus on the latter.

Henri Bergson argues in his classic essay Laughter that “To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social one.” In ‘Humour and Health Promotion’ (Health Education Journal, 62(2), 2003), Ann Snowden elaborates on Bergson’s thought that laughter fulfils a social function by differentiating between ‘laughing with’ and ‘laughing at’. For her, the former “can fulfil a bonding function between individuals or within a group”, as laughing with people is non-hostile in most cases. Laughing at, however, is clearly hostile, and can function as a means “to put down individuals, or to force them to conform to norms of a group.”

Snowden also points out that the bonding function of laughter is only one of many. Indeed, she says that humour has been found to have over 700 functions, which can be subsumed under the categories “defence and coping; the expression of positive and negative affect; and power-based.” Humour’s social function, and particularly its bonding function, I would argue, remains central, since laughing with people establishes a connection. People who laugh together know they have something in common. Therefore, laughing with reveals similarities, and the connection arising from these similarities brings us closer to people and makes us feel well-disposed to them.

Ha Ha Phew

Yet comedy not only has a bonding function, but also a therapeutic one. Norman Cousins, for instance, wrote about how he used comedy and laughter to recover from ankylosing spondylitis. He uses this example as part of attempting to prove that the body has the power to heal itself and that positive emotions play an important role in that process (Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient, 1979). His case is quite astonishing; but whether his recovery was linked to laughter, other treatments, or perhaps a combination of causes, remains unclear.

Alongside Cousins’ amateur attempt to show that laughter has positive effects on health, there have been scientific studies too. Indeed, there are over fifty published scientific articles investigating the connection between laughter and health (see The Psychology of Humour, R.O. Martin, 2007, p.311). And members of the AATH (Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor) specifically focus on ways in which humour can be applied to sectors such as medicine, psychotherapy, and education.

One study found that both laughter and smiling improve a person’s mood, and that even forced laughter has this result. This indicates that our brain does not fully differentiate between acting happy and being happy (‘Effects of Laughing, Smiling, and Howling on Mood’, Psychological Reports, 91, Neuhoff & Schaefer, 2002). Another study found that after having watched comedy films, individuals find themselves to have higher pain tolerance. There is even evidence suggesting that humour can entail a reduction of post-surgical pain. These pain-reducing effects, however, are more likely to be “due to amusement-related positive emotion, rather than to laughter per se” (Martin, Ibid).

One of the best-known humorous approaches to therapy is Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), which is based on the thought that “people develop psychological disturbance as a consequence of having irrational beliefs, dysfunctional attitudes, and unrealistic absolute standards” (Martin, p.338). The therapist uses “humorous exaggeration and even sarcasm… to challenge and dispute clients’ false beliefs.” Why would this work? Perhaps it draws on all three theories of laughter discussed earlier. The therapist’s exaggerated humour elevates them and lifts them above the client (Superiority Theory), whereas their use of sarcasm enables the client to realise the absurdities of their own beliefs (Incongruity Theory), and by laughing about these irrational views, the clients rid themselves of their negative emotions (Relief Theory).

In any case, there’s now a reasonable body of scientific evidence that laughter can have positive effects on our physical health. Comedy can also help us to maintain our mental health by presenting us with a way of coping with issues in our lives. Satire, for instance, comments on current affairs by using “humor as a weapon, attacking ideas, behaviours, institutions, or individuals by encouraging us to laugh at them” (‘Laughing in the Face of Climate Change?’, Science Communication, 36(4), Lisa Bore & Grace Reid, 2014). Hence, the attraction of satire lies in its ability to offer “social and political commentary while entertaining audiences” (Ibid). Aspects of relief theory can also be found in satire for laughing at a current political topic that has reached a certain level of common interest. This allows us to gain relief from the energy built up through our direct or indirect engagement with the topic.

Why Laugh?

Throughout this article various applications and impacts of comedy have become apparent. But now I shall attempt to investigate the desire for comedy. Why is it that people want to laugh? Why is it that comedians joke about serious topics? And why do we laugh at their jokes even with the knowledge that the jests are potentially offensive?

I would argue that comedy enables us to deal with events. Stott references Mel Brooks’ song ‘Springtime for Hitler’ in the movie The Producers, to show that comedians push “the limits of bad taste and wrong-headedness” (Comedy, 2005, p.120). But this musical number also demonstrates that laughing about the past – even about a horrific event such as the Holocaust – enables the audience to cope with the cruelty and terror of past events. In this context, laughter can also be analysed in terms of the relief theory, since this not only means laughing at the stupidity of the Nazis but also enables us to gain relief from the psychological horror of their historical acts.

However, the need for comedy in our society arises not only from a wish to deal with and overcome past events, but also from a feeling of helplessness or inferiority resulting from our constantly being at the mercy of those in power. Stott correctly points out that comedy allows us to respond “to social expectations, as the norms of etiquette usually prevent us from directly insulting others or broaching taboo subjects” (Comedy, p.139). Jesting about politicians, authorities, or other (self-)important people also offers us a platform for our thoughts and opinions. And frequently, if some group is at the mercy of an ideology, a politician or a party, the only way for them to express their opinion is through jokes. Also, by putting them into words – into jokes, to be precise – a comedian can create a feeling of togetherness and a connection between those of the same opinion. Hence again, the social function of laughter.

Laughing at offensive jokes may seem immoral to some people, but considering the arguments I’ve discussed, I think in general it does not make us morally bad people. At most, laughing at crass jokes can be insensitive in certain situations; but as we have seen, that depends on the moral sensibility of the listeners. Furthermore, understanding a joke and appreciating its wit does not imply a lack of morals on behalf of the laughing audience. Comedy is subjective, and it is impossible to make any assumptions about a person’s moral standards only by looking at what they find funny.

Laughter has proven health benefits. I hope I have shown that comedy also has a bonding function, and that this is an important aspect of laughter. Although there may be some dour opponents of humour who sympathise with Plato’s opinion of comedy, the psychological as well as the physiological benefits of comedy cannot be denied.

© Damaris Stock 2026

Damaris Stock is an independent researcher with a background in Classics (BA & MLitt). She holds a DBA from Paris School of Business.

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A Memetic Analysis of Narratives & Conspiracies

Ignacio Gonzalez considers how memes replicate into conspiracy theories.

It is curious how the concept ‘meme’ has dwindled down to become a meme of itself. But beyond being a curiosity, this dwindling is unfortunate, since it has trivialized a concept that packs great explanatory power; certainly enough to help us demystify some otherwise perplexing aspects of human communication.

Nowadays, the term ‘meme’ popularly refers to a visually-aided joke passed around online with hopes of becoming viral. When an awkwardly amused Elon Musk told a swooning audience that “I’ve become meme [sic]”, he was using the term in this shallow sense. However, if we want to get our analysis of narratives off to a good start, we must shelve this impoverished signification and retrieve its original meaning. When Richard Dawkins first introduced the concept of a meme in his book The Selfish Gene (1976), he wanted to formulate the idea of a replicator which accomplished in the cultural realm what a gene does in the biological.

‘Gene’ is a concept that gives essentially equal importance to the physical structure (as a slice of DNA) and to the data instantiated in that molecular substrate. So genes are replicators of both their molecular sequence and the information encoded in it. Memes, on the other hand, do not have a singular physical substrate; instead, they are ideas that get passed around from one mind to another by communication (via various different brain states), and so they’re more analogous to the information component of a gene. We can think of a meme as ‘the smallest piece of meaningful information’. Memes can be about basically anything, from superfluous ideas like ‘wearing a baseball hat backwards looks cool’, to pivotal insights that have changed the course of history, like ‘slavery is wrong’. Memes that are particularly good at spreading themselves throughout the population can be said to have ‘high fitness’. Conversely, unfit memes are those which fail to root themselves firmly enough in the collective consciousness, and therefore risk being forgotten (that is, extinct). Just as natural selection cold-heartedly removes organisms that fail to adapt efficiently to the changing physical environment, so ‘memetic selection’ ruthlessly condemns unfit memes to dusty lexicographies.

Naturally, the analogy with genes breaks down at a certain level: memes do not mutate randomly; memetic selection can be deliberately thwarted or biased, etc. But the parallels between memes and genes are sufficiently robust for our purposes. Genes arrange themselves in highly complex structures known as chromosomes. Sure enough, memes can also form complex structures, which have rather uninspiringly been called ‘memeplexes’. Think of a memeplex as an information package formed by cohesive memes. What we call ‘narratives’ are quintessential examples of memeplexes.

Let’s test this claim by dissecting the memeplex ‘liberal democracy is good’ and lay bare its conceptual skeleton. To grasp the complex concept ‘liberal democracy’, we need some understanding of what its obvious components are about – ‘liberalism’ and ‘democracy’. There are, however, other less obvious concepts without knowledge of which our grasp on the idea of liberal democracy would be tenuous – such as ‘free-market economy’, ‘freedom of expression’ or ‘rule of law’. It’s easy to construct memes out of these concepts by turning them into propositions. For instance, take the phrase ‘freedom of expression’ and attach to it ‘is good’. Now it’s a meme. If we repeat the same sort of stitching operation on all these concepts, then we get a set of value-laden memes which undergird the memeplex ‘liberal democracy is good’.

There is a kind of fractal quality to memes and memeplexes, like an informational rabbit hole. I would not quibble with someone remarking that ‘freedom of expression is good’ has enough substance to animate its own narrative, therefore it ought to be thought of as a memeplex rather than a meme. There is nothing precluding memes from themselves being memeplexes formed by more memes. This is to be expected, since underneath any sufficiently complex concept there’s always a foundation of more elemental concepts. What passes as a meme in any given conversation is a matter of the depth of analysis and agreement with our interlocutors. Those ‘atomic propositions’ that all conversants are willing to accept without analysis count effectively as memes.

Narratives absorb the propositional contents of their constitutive memes and turn them into an overarching claim suffused with moral undertones. This is by design, since in order to have a chance of thriving in a culture, narratives depend on their capacity to hijack our motivations. To do this, a narrative could hardly do better than to latch on to our propensity to pontificate.

The Memes Holding Narratives Together

We have a generic name for those memes that form the scaffolding of a narrative: we call them ‘talking points’. Their infamy is well-deserved, since a talking point’s goal is not exactly to truthfully encapsulate a state of affairs, but instead to transfix facts and force them into a storyline dictated by a narrative. The primary purpose of a talking point is to persuade an audience that ‘this narrative I am helping to push forward is true/good/justified’.

To efficiently advance this agenda, a talking point must at least put on a decent facade of factuality. Consider, for instance, a talking point of the COVID pandemic: “Deceitful statistics misattribute excess deaths to the COVID virus.” Ostensibly, this talking point expresses skepticism about the competence of health authorities, or their motivations. But within the frame of the typical narratives that tend to recruit this meme, the underlying suggestion is that the blame for those ‘excess deaths’ should be put on the vaccines themselves. In other words, the primary objective of this talking point is to promote the narrative ‘COVID vaccine denial is good’.

Evidently, talking points are linguistic blocks whose information content extends beyond their surface semantic meaning. Furthermore, by being remarkably inflexible regarding how they’re expressed, a talking point becomes a socio-cultural marker – a codified declaration of belonging to an ideological tribe – and simultaneously, a thought-terminating cliché. Consider ‘Diversity is our strength’. There are infinitely many ways to express sympathy with the spirit of Diversity Equity and Inclusion programs, but any deviation from the slogan would fail to communicate the sense of adherence to a worldview with the same efficiency. Or consider the class of talking points that bets its memetic worth on the hope that swapping one word for another will instigate a concomitant perceptual swap in the mind of the intended audience. Not a bad gamble. We are told, for instance, that what happened on January 6th 2020 was at worst a ‘riot’ and at best a ‘guided tour’ through the Capitol, but never an attempt at an ‘insurrection’. Alternatively who hasn’t heard that we should take President Trump ‘seriously but not literally’? Trying to document the phraseological tokenization of the talking points of the last five years would truly be the lexicographic quest of the century.

Richard Dawkins

Perversions of Truth

According to the quasi-Darwinist approach to memes, the infectiousness of a narrative increases by maximizing the alignment of the language used with the values of potential hosts. Glaringly, any ideal of truth is absent here. This should be deeply unsettling, since if taken wholesale, it implies that the truthfulness of a narrative has no impact on its fitness. Completely false narratives would be just as likely to spread as more truthful ones.

Although complete indifference to truth for effective communication is unlikely, the situation is nevertheless bleak, since I want to argue that there is a ‘sweet spot of untruthfulness’ on which narratives must land to maximize their reach and resilience.

First, we must acknowledge that most talking points harbor some kernel of truth. So how come narratives supported by partially factual talking points end up being more fictitious than factful? Furthermore, the more factual the talking points of a narrative are, the more insidious the falsehood emerging from their collusion is, because undermining them then requires more familiarity with the details of the facts they misrepresent.

Naturally, not all talking points are created equal. Their content spans a broad spectrum running from ‘true’, to ‘plausible’, to ‘far-fetched’, all the way down to ‘utterly deranged’. When creating a narrative, one needs to be strategic about which talking points to choose, because although there are multiple sayings capable of pushing the same overall notion, the memeplexes formed by these collections can differ vastly in terms of their palatability, and, more importantly, in their ‘duping potential’, across different audiences and contexts. Say, for example, you’re extremely concerned about the safety – or rather, the lack thereof – of COVID vaccines – so much so that you feel compelled to alert as many people as possible about their inherent danger. You could spin a narrative around talking points falling within the ‘plausible’ range of the spectrum. You might for instance allege that ‘vaccine cause myocarditis’ and that the push for universal vaccination was “a get-richer scheme by greedy pharma CEOs.” Alternatively, you could recruit talking points from the ‘utterly deranged’ edge of the spectrum to give momentum to your narrative: what if the vaccines are essentially Trojan horses to ‘inject microchips into our bloodstream’? Could the whole vaccination business have been part of a plot engineered by the World Economic Forum to force a ‘Great Reset’ on society? Both narratives are vectors to advance the same proposition, ‘COVID vaccines are bad’ – but the former, as it is carried on the back of less fantastical talking points, is fitter than the latter. As such, it could be expected to claim a larger share of the collective headspace simply because it is more plausible-sounding.

Let’s apply the same reasoning to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Suppose you are convinced that Russia’s ‘special military operation’ is justified, even righteous. Why (you ask yourself) would so many people forego the chance to join you on the right side of history? Irritated and motivated in equal measure, you decide to do what you can to rectify this situation by crafting a maximally persuasive narrative, drafting talking points about “NATO being an existential threat to Russia” and maybe a claim that the war would have been avoided if a “CIA-orchestrated coup” had not uprooted Yanukovich’s government. You reckon, rightly, that such a narrative would be fitter than one relying on more fantastical talking points involving “super secret US-funded bio-weapons labs” in Ukraine, or arguing that Russia is waging a holy war against the ‘Satanism’ that’s running rampant across Western society and being adopted by Ukraine.

I’m not suggesting that the most fantastical incarnations of narratives have zero power of persuasion; after all, I did not invent any of these more ‘imaginative’ talking points myself, I just poached them from the informational wilderness that is the internet. What I’m saying is that a greater semblance of plausibility (even if it doesn’t survive even modest scrutiny) serves narratives better in their fight for memetic supremacy. It seems reasonable that if two narratives promoting the same false portrait of reality are given the same amount of airtime, the one incorporating more factually-sounding talking points is likely to persuade more people. And yet, this common-sense view seems to be under a constant state of siege as of late. The reason is that although the democratization of media space has surely brought good things, it has also ushered us into a golden age of conspiracy.

In terms of their narrative structure, conspiracy theories are often cumbersome and baroque. However, their causal logic is often as straightforward as it gets. Essentially the same point is made by journalist Helen Lewis in Sam Harris’s podcast ‘Waking up’. She stresses that conspiracy theories are in fact ‘very simple narratives’ because they boil the cacophony of the world down to a scene of Disneyesque villainy – to “a bad guy who did it, or a lot of bad guys in a room who did it.”

In fact, conspiracy theories are the most virulent genus of narratives. On the surface, they stretch credulity well beyond most people’s limits. But what they covertly do is significantly more worrisome: they thoroughly corrode our epistemic safeguards. Conspiracy theories not only wipe our slate of facts clean, to fill it with wayward rewritings of whatever events, they also atrophy the mechanisms on which our minds rely to accurately represent the world around us. Chris Kavanagh, from the Decoding the Gurus podcast, puts it like this: “Conspiracy theories flock together in people’s minds, because once you apply the logic ‘they’re lying to you about everything’, well then, yeah sure, they’re lying about the elections, they’re lying about vaccines, they’re lying about autism, [and about] you know, chemtrails.”

The Burden of the Truth-Teller

In his short story ‘An Outpost Of Progress’ (1897), Joseph Conrad wrote:

“Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every significant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion.”

People who feel an irresistible compulsion to find the ‘bad guys’ behind even the most anodyne occurrences operate as if they’ve internalized Conrad’s insight. This quote could well be in the opening of the conspiracy theorists’ mission statement – which is to remove the blindfolds from all the ‘sheeple’ of the world so that they can discover the bankruptcy of worldviews which were never really theirs to begin with – rather, they have been indoctrinated into them by malicious institutions that have managed to disguise mass-delusions as common sense. At the expense of suffering self-induced trauma caused by voluntarily squaring up against the pernicious reality hidden behind a veil of lies, the clear-eyed truth-tellers notice where the seams of the make-believe world constructed by ‘legacy’ cultural narratives are coming apart. Thus blowing ‘legacy narratives’ apart is the truth-teller’s purpose, and their weapon of choice is the counter-narratives the deluded population derisively calls ‘conspiracy theories’.

I’m inclined to blame the unscrupulous information environment we inhabit for the ongoing ‘sane-washing’ of conspiratorial reasoning. It is perhaps misguided to try to pinpoint the moment when the gentrification of conspiracy theorizing began; rather, the phenomenon seems to be a gradual development of the ‘post-truth’ era, although certainly one event that distinctly reflected the ongoing seismic disruptions to our epistemic environment was the moment when, on live TV, the former White House advisor Kellyanne Conway introduced the term ‘alternative facts’ to our lexicon. Alternative facts form the core of the talking points that bolt together conspiracy theories. They are also the main reason why most of these narratives are not falsifiable. If they were, then at least we could begin to have a reliable tally of their successes and misses.

Richard Dawkins Reproduces by Colin Mackenzie

Do We Really Care About the Truth?

In an interview for the online hub Big Think, Sam Harris says:

“Whether you’re a racist or a fascist or a communist, or a democrat or an environmentalist, whatever your thing is, that is a tissue of sentences in the end… It’s all a word cloud… that you have given credence [to], for whatever reason… If you are rational, those reasons… rest on arguments and semantic knowledge that amounts to evidence, right? You can point to the thing that persuaded you, and most importantly, you can point to some hypothetical state of the world that would convince you that you are wrong. Which is to say that your beliefs are falsifiable. And if your beliefs are not falsifiable… Well, then that’s proof that you didn’t get them by being in contact with reality in any sense” (my emphasis).

I agree almost entirely with Harris here. I would only edit one phrase: instead of claiming that worldviews reduce to a ‘cloud of words’, a more accurate claim would be that they are a ‘web of narratives’. But the swap of metaphors leaves his main message untainted: our representations of reality eventually condense into a network of words. Since language is also the substance of falsehoods, these representations of reality can become nothing but a web of lies; one so treacherous that it compels us to reluctantly nod in agreement to Simone Weil’s pessimistic and overarching remark about language that “by the power of words we always mean their power of illusion and error.” But even when wrong, a misapprehension might at least be falsifiable if it can be checked by reference to the external world. For the most part we do want our beliefs to reflect reality with as few distortions as possible. And yet we eagerly assimilate narratives that are not only irredeemably false but sometimes, also irredeemably unfalsifiable. Why?

We already glimpsed some of the tragic ways in which narratives subvert truth. Why do we rally behind such deceptive schemes? I shall here place the fault on some of the inherent frailties of human psychology. And here, once again, Darwin can offer some guidance.

Some of the tarnish on evolutionary psychology’s reputation is sadly warranted (if you ever argued that girls love pink because our ancestral mothers evolved a visual keenness to spot berries in the forest, then you’re part of the problem). But we ought not to dismiss the entire discipline as hogwash. If applied discerningly, it offers an illuminating framework to make sense of a plethora of human behaviors and proclivities. So let me responsibly offer a relevant insight from ev psych. Put bluntly, we did not evolve to become objective truth-seeking machines; rather, we evolved into fallible likely-true-seeking beings. This is not to say that evolution closed off all possibilities for us to devise (nearly) dispassionate methods for pursuing truth. Science best embodies the spirit of rebellion against this morsel of ‘Darwinian heritage’. But we must recognize that evolution did not optimize our abilities for objective reasoning, rather, it exerted pressure to mold our psyches to prioritize sense-making and emotional comfort. Hamstrung by this hierarchy of priorities, the ‘quality control’ machinery of our minds is prone to certify as ‘true’ all sorts of propositions that are merely falsehoods in a clever enough disguise. When presented with a simulacrum of truth that crosses our (often lousy) plausibility threshold, and, more importantly, that nicely blends in with our preexisting yet idiosyncratic worldviews, then our BS-detector is happy to slack off. So yes, most of us value truth highly; but our needs for sense and emotional comfort collude to downgrade our epistemic guardrails, thus heightening our gullibility. Operating with lowered epistemic standards, our minds become more vulnerable to be parasitized by false narratives, especially when their talking points cooperate to put up a half-decent pantomime of factuality. All the while, our self-deluded conscience reassures itself that it remains ‘true to the truth’, even when it has been bamboozled by a parade of half-truths that have been coerced to work for an overarching lie.

Perhaps now it’s easier to see why these concatenations of disingenuous talking points we call ‘conspiracy narratives’ are so effectively deceitful. Talking points can be formidable sense-making pieces of rhetoric, especially if they collectively work to weave a story that brings moral comfort. Conspiracy narratives’ talking points thus become super-sense-making devices. Their very purpose is to arrange unconnected, coincidental or merely chaotic events, into an orderly causal sequence.

So, do we love the truth? Not exactly. What we truly love is the feeling of being ‘true to the truth’ – whether this feeling is justified by the facts or not.

© Ignacio Gonzalez 2026

Ignacio Gonzalez is a physicist and former researcher working in the semiconductor industry.

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In Defense of Idleness

Wendell O’Brien says, ‘Just Don’t Do It’.

In a sense, every living person is always doing something – breathing, at least, or sitting in a chair – and even a dead man is lying in his tomb. There are nonetheless perfectly good senses in which a person, even if alive, may be said to be, at some time or other, ‘doing nothing’ or ‘being idle’. My primary concern in this essay is to defend idleness – not for everyone, and not all the time, but in moderation, for those who love and have a disposition for it.

In various Eastern traditions there are states sometimes conceived of as ones in which you do nothing. In Daoism, for instance, there is wu wei, or non-action, the sage’s customary mode of being. And in the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna speaks of a kind of detached state in which there is consciousness and movement, but no action. In both Hindu and Buddhist traditions there are meditation practices that involve sitting still, shutting down the senses, emptying the mind – not doing anything; and not feeling or thinking anything, either.

‘Doing nothing’ and ‘idling’ quite commonly, in the West as well as the East, mean doing nothing useful or important, or nothing that has any connection with your work, or your long-term goals. To be idle is to putter, loaf, doodle, dawdle, or dangle, just hanging around and passing the time, maybe just sitting and staring out the window. Thoreau did this sort of thing now and then at Walden Pond:

“There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands… Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness… The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished.”

(Walden, 1854)

Thinking, observing, and casual reading amount to doing nothing in an established sense. They are forms of contemplation in contrast with the active life. There’s a meaningful distinction between the adventurer and the idler who sits at home reading about the adventurer’s adventures, just as there is between the actor and the audience, or the player and the spectator. In each case, the one does something while the other does nothing.

There are people who naturally take to extended periods of idleness. The ideal life for them is one in which they do nothing a fair amount of the time. Others are loafers and idlers by nature; their customary mode of being is one in which they do nothing. I know people like that. I am pleased that there are people who naturally take to this sort of life, and whose circumstances permit them to live it. It must also be admitted that many people are not cut out for a life of idleness. There are some who are miserable when they are not up and doing something. Their natural modus operandi is one of work, effort, making plans, pursuing goals, accomplishing things.

Man Resting in the Lap of a Woman by Antoine Coypel, c.1716

Objections & Replies

Let me state some objections to idleness, and see what can be said in response to them on behalf of the idler.

One objection is that idlers are lazy, and everybody knows laziness is bad. ‘Laziness’, ‘sloth’, and ‘indolence’ are terms that have negativity nested in them. To call someone ‘lazy’ is a criticism.

I do not believe that a fondness for idleness necessarily implies a favorable attitude toward laziness. A good person does not want to be averse to any activity that is necessary. She does not want to be idle when she feels she should be doing something. Whether busy or idle, she wants to be able to do whatever she’s doing without thinking she should be doing something else.

Another objection is that the idler, insofar as he really is idle, misses out on life and doesn’t really live. He merely observes life and doesn’t live it. He is among the walking (or sitting) dead.

This objection is nonsense. Those who are cut out for action might be living less fully if, for some reason they’re required by their circumstances to idle instead. There are such people, I’m sure. But there are also those who are peculiarly suited by nature to a life of repose and retirement. I’m inclined to think that there are many among the latter class. For such people, activities frequently feel more like distractions from life than life itself. They feel like they are present when they are not dancing – when they’re doing nothing except watching dancers. In the case of such naturally inactive people, it seems ridiculous to say that they are not really living when they’re still. An idling car may not be going anywhere, but it’s still running, and a car moving fast down the highway is no more alive than one idling in the garage. I’m not sympathetic, then, to an idea that’s widespread: to wit, that to love life requires packing as much activity as possible into it between birth and death.

I can’t refute that idea; but I can set over against it a contrary notion that seems just as plausible, and that can be found in the writings of thinkers such as Charles Lamb, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bertrand Russell, J. B. Priestly, Josef Pieper, Ursula Le Guin, and Iris Murdoch. It’s an idea I’ve already mentioned – namely, that the hustle and bustle doesn’t feel like a life to many people, but rather like distractions from it. One is most fully alive when one is just sitting, and ‘it was morning and, lo, now it is evening’. As Charles Lamb writes:

“A man can never have… too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him NOTHING-TO-DO; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative.” (‘The Superannuated Man’, 1951)

I do not want to say that ‘man’ is out of his element as long as he is operative, only that some men and women are. Some people remain ‘in their element’ only by keeping their activities close to a minimum and leaving ample time for doing nothing.

A third objection to idleness may be put like this: “It isn’t fair. The world’s work must be done. You unjustly burden others with more than their share of work when, taking your ease, you refuse to do yours.”

I have to concede that everyone should do his or her fair share of whatever work is needful. It is bad to be a freeloader. Few, if any, are justified in always doing nothing but nothing. If there’s something that needs to be done and there’s no one around who is willing and able to do it except you, and if you agree that it needs to be done and you are able to do it, and you can’t come up with a reason why you shouldn’t do it that would satisfy other reasonable people, then you should do it. ‘Thou art the man’, as it says in an old book.

However, as the great idlers have reminded us, much of the world’s work – perhaps most of it – is not only unnecessary but positively harmful. Too much work is done, too much business transacted, too many actions performed, too many projects undertaken, too many meetings held. What is commonly regarded as necessary is anything but.

How one would prove such a proposition I don’t know. I’m sure it would require some irksome drudgery, so I won’t attempt it. What I will do instead (at the risk of committing an informal fallacy) is appeal to authority, quoting three heroes of old, and thereby provide the semblance of an argument. Thoreau remarks: “This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! It is nothing but work, work, work… I think there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business” (Walden & Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau, p.712). Bertrand Russell adds, “I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous”. He goes on to express the hope – which turned out to be unfulfilled, as far as I know – that “the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing” (‘In Praise of Idleness’ by B. Russell, 1935). But it is J.B. Priestley who makes the point best, in my opinion. Let me quote a passage of his at length:

“All the evil in this world is brought about by persons who are always up and doing… The world, we all freely admit, is in a muddle, but I for one do not think that it is laziness that has brought it to such a pass. It is not the active virtues that it lacks but the passive ones… If, for example, in July 1914, when there was some capital idling weather, everybody, emperors, Kings, archdukes, statesmen, generals, journalists, had been suddenly smitten with an intense desire to do nothing, just to hang about in the sunshine and consume tobacco, then we should all have been much better off than we are now… The whole world would be better off if it spent every possible moment it could, these next ten years, lying flat on its back on a moor, doing nothing.”

(‘On Doing Nothing,’ in A Book of English Essays, 1951, pp.343, 344, 346.)

Before turning to other aspects of this theme I want to consider a fourth objection: How can a person indulge in leisure when there’s so much good that he or she could be doing, so much evil she could be fighting?

There are several possible answers:

(1) Leisure itself is good. When someone takes her leisure, she is adding to the sum total of good stuff in the world.

(2) Some people don’t like to fight anything. It doesn’t agree with their constitution. If evil must be fought, let others do it, or let them do it themselves by some such strategy as nonresistance.

(3) As for doing good in the positive sense, some people, among them idlers, are not very good at it. Whenever they try their hand at it, they are never very confident that what they’re doing is in fact good for anyone. They’re much more confident they’re doing good when they leave people and things alone. Still, they may very well try in various ways to contribute to the well-being of those around them. They give people rides, pet dogs, and tell jokes. They go around being bright and cheerful, hoping their cheerfulness will rub off on others instead of irritating them (as it sometimes does, I’m afraid).

Thoreau says:

“As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it.” (p.65)

(4) I suspect that the best thing some people can do for other people is to provide a shining example of happy idleness. That’s about all they can offer to this world of frenetic activity and frayed nerves. They would set an example for animals too, if they could; but I doubt that the beasts would pick up on it – and anyway, with the exception of a few creatures such as ants and small perching birds, they don’t need it as far as I can tell. The beasts of field and home alike seem to be, by and large, idlers.

Positive Reasons for Idling

So much for objections and replies. What might be the positive reasons for idleness?

(1) In doing nothing a person is not doing anything harmful. This might not seem much to some, but it strikes me as significant. To get through life without hurting anything, to leave the world no worse than you found it, would be a great achievement in my opinion. I like this picture of the sage’s life in the Dhammapada : “As the bee takes the essence of a flower and flies away without destroying its beauty and perfume, so the sage wanders in this life” (p.42).

(2) In doing nothing, one is setting a fine example for young people, particularly one’s own children and one’s students. Perhaps because of you, the idler – somebody out there – will do a little less than she would otherwise have done, and the world will be a better place for it.

(3) Idleness is good for the natural environment and contributes little to climate change. The less people are up and about, the less they consume. The less they consume, the less the forests are robbed of their trees and the fossils of their fuels.

(4) Idleness is friendly to the nature of some people, as I’ve already noted. They feel like they’re cut out for it. It’s in the blood. Perhaps they come from a long, flat line of idlers. Perhaps because of that, they have a talent for idling, and exercising the talent makes them happy. In general, all else being equal, a person ought, or at least may, do what agrees with her nature, what she’s good at, and what makes her happy. Therefore some people should for the most part do nothing.

(5) The idleness of some may indirectly benefit others precisely because it makes the idlers happy. When some people are busy, they are unhappy. When they are unhappy, they are mean. For some people, then, idleness might even be a duty, given their tendency to be disagreeable when they don’t engage in it.

(6) A favorite theme of the Daoist sages Laozi and Zhuangzi is idleness. “Free and easy, tending to nothing is his job,” Zhuangzi says of the Perfect Man. Some people want to be like that – experts in idleness, their area of specialization (though, as things are, it might not be advisable for them to put it on their CV). That the greatest Daoist philosophers advocated idleness might be a positive reason to embrace it for those who admire Daoism.

Conclusion

Finally, it might be objected: “Why all the fuss? Who would have a problem with idleness for certain people under certain conditions?” Well, I’m making a fuss because as a matter of fact many people do object to idleness. There is a tendency to think that, all else being equal, it is better to be active than inactive. In sessions in which I, along with others, have been charged with the responsibility of evaluating people, I have frequently heard commendations of people for their activity. Not once have I heard anyone praised for her inactivity. It’s received wisdom that activity is better than idleness. The point I want to insist on is that that isn’t necessarily the case. Most of the evil in the world has been done by activists – people exerting themselves doing things. I want to speak a word on behalf of those who are not like that. I want to suggest that, in evaluations and such, the statement ‘He hasn’t done much’ is just as eligible to serve as a compliment as a criticism. I suspect that the world would be a better place if more people did less.

© Dr Wendell O’Brien 2026

Wendell O’Brien is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Morehead State University, Kentucky.

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The Hedgehog’s Dilemma: A Metaphor About the Challenges of Human Intimacy

Krishna Chaubey explains Arthur Schopenhauer’s poignant thought experiment.

A hedgehog is a small mammal whose back is covered with quills. These sharp spines help the hedgehog in defending itself against predators. However, the quills that work so brilliantly as a defensive device turn out to be a detriment during winters, as then the hedgehog cannot get close to other hedgehogs to share warmth. Whenever one tries to do so, they poke each other with their quills and get hurt. So the hedgehogs will try not to get close and stay far away from each other. Now, the dilemma is that if they stay far from each other, they will succumb to the cold winter but if they stay close, they will poke each other and get hurt. Though they want to be close to each other, they cannot, so the hedgehogs need to find a safe distance where their quills do not poke each other yet the cold is tolerable.

Hedgehog: (Erinaceus Roumanicus) photo by George Chernilevsky, Ukraine. Public Domain.

We human beings are social animals. We crave friendship, relationship, reputation, intimacy. These cravings helped our prehistoric ancestors to survive, because being together meant a higher chance of survival and reproduction. For this reason, we find it painful to be alone for long stretches of time.

Studies of isolation have shown that prolonged periods of solitude can lead to increased levels of stress, cardiovascular disease, stroke and mental health problems like depression. Akin to the harsh winter the hedgehogs suffer from, isolation and solitude are the frost and cold of the winter we human beings endure without the warmth of meaningful relationships, companionship and love. However, when we human beings start to get close to someone, both emotionally and physically, we may find things about the other, such as their beliefs, tastes, values or their view of the world, or their personality or habits, do not accord our own. We know in advance that this is a possibility. These differences may lead us to not like them any more, or be driven away by their not-so-pleasant qualities. The quills in this scenario are mostly emotional but they can at times be physical as well.

Arthur Schopenhauer’s Imperfect Remedy

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), considered one of the grumpiest, most pessimistic, but most compassionate, philosophers to have ever lived, used this example to describe a dilemma in human intimacy. He did so in an essay in a collection called Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume II. In it he pointed out the similarities between the hedgehog’s dilemma and the problems humans face in forming relationships. (Actually, he said porcupines rather than hedgehogs, but the principle is the same.)

The hedgehog is afraid to get close as it may get hurt by the quills of the other hedgehogs, whereas the human being is afraid to get close (in a emotional as well as physical sense) as he or she becomes vulnerable to the other and may then be betrayed, or embarrassed, or disappointed, or else in the course of building a relationship may have to abandon things they once loved. Yet if they isolate themselves from others, they may instead endure crippling loneliness, which will harm their body and mind, bringing them a greater or lesser amount of pain. Thanks to Schopenhauer’s essay, the problem has become widely known as ‘the ‘Hedgehog’s Dilemma’ or ‘the Porcupine Dilemma’.

Then one may ask, “Is there any solution to this dreadful dilemma ?” and the answer is yes, a pessimistic one but a solution nonetheless. As Schopenhauer put it:

“Thus the need for society which springs from the emptiness and monotony of men’s lives, drives them together; but their many unpleasant and repulsive qualities and insufferable drawbacks once more drive them apart. The mean distance which they finally discover, and which enables them to endure being together, is politeness and good manners. Whoever does not keep to this, is told in England to ‘keep his distance’.”

Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. II (1851)

So Schopenhauer argues that one must find a ‘safe distance’ in order to neither inflict nor experience pain. Furthermore, he says that the optimum safe distance is that indicated by politeness, good manners and respect for the other’s privacy. In this case, the privacy will be the hedgehog’s quills. If the hedgehog respects the quills of the other hedgehog (or the person respects the boundaries/privacy of others) and gets just close enough for a little warmth (a physical warmth in the hedgehog’s case and an emotional one in the person’s case), then he may not have to endure as much as being alone in the winter (or in complete isolation) or being hurt by the quills (or the unpleasant qualities of others).

This is not a completely satisfactory solution, as Schopenhauer himself observed: “By virtue thereof, it is true that the need for mutual warmth will be only imperfectly satisfied, but on the other hand, the prick of the quills will not be felt. Yet whoever has a great deal of internal warmth of his own will prefer to keep away from society in order to avoid giving or receiving trouble or annoyance.”

In other words, if a person does have enough ‘internal warmth’ (or can survive without the need for others in his or her life), then he or she may not need other people’s ‘warmth’ to sustain themself and will most likely prefer to stay away from society altogether in order to avoid inflicting or experiencing pain. The unsatisfactory part of this is that we may not be able to make and sustain bonds with others without inflicting pain.

Conclusion

We may now realize why at times we cannot bear being alone or sustain a relationship or on the contrary may feel happy in solitude, as Wordsworth is in his famous poem, ‘Daffodils’. The best solution therefore depends on the characteristics of the individual. In the end, a certain amount of suffering is probably an inescapable part of life, one we must endure due to the various challenges life hurls at us. However, we can reduce this suffering, maybe by engaging in the arts, maybe by not engaging with anything at all. Perhaps keeping at a cautious distance and not getting too close too quickly really is our best bet. In any case we must realize the importance of others as unique, autonomous individuals and treat them as such.

© Krishna Chaubey 2026

Krishna Chaubey is at St Xavier’s University, Kolkata, pursuing English Hons.

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Question of the Month

Why Do The Evil Still Prosper?

Each answer below receives a book. Apologies to the entrants not included.

Evil can be understood as deliberate behavior that causes unnecessary pain and suffering, including disregarding human dignity. As behaviour of this kind destroys trust and safety in society, it’s natural to ask why it still prospers. The answer cannot be that people do not know what evil is. In most societies, when someone causes harm on purpose the punishment is stronger than if they cause it accidentally. This shows that people understand that intentional harm is more dangerous. Society can only function if people are not constantly afraid of being harmed by others.

So why does evil still succeed? Evil prospers because harm is often not properly addressed and resolved. Wrong actions usually benefit someone, through money, power, or control. When harm is ignored, or not judged fairly, it creates anger and resentment. Even harm that was not intended can lead to revenge. This creates a vicious circle. One harmful action leads to another. Each side justifies its violence by pointing to what happened before. Over time, the original wrong becomes less important, and the amount of suffering increases. So evil continues because it becomes normal and expected. Long-lasting conflicts show this problem clearly. When rules of behaviour, human rights, and ways to reduce violence are ignored, the situation gets worse. Evil will continue to prosper as long as violations of human rights are accepted and conflicts are not solved by fair independent institutions. Condemnation alone is not enough. To stop evil, societies must interrupt cycles of revenge and take responsibility for harm before it grows.

Christoph Hönigsperger

I’ll classify as evil any person who causes harm without remorse in order to achieve their goals, and define prosperity as success in accumulating wealth or power. What is their connection? Either an evil person finds harming others an easy way to become prosperous, or becoming prosperous requires a person to turn evil. I’d argue that in both cases the answer to why there are still evil persons who prosper is the same. It is because society fails to prevent the gaining of benefits from harmful self-serving behavior, and at the same time does too little to promote mutually beneficial actions. Such failures include nonexistent or minimal consequences for harms; loopholes; fragmented responsibility; sayings such as ‘everyone does it’, etc.

This creates a vicious cycle. Once a certain level of prosperity is reached it becomes easier to avoid repercussions when destructive behavior is undertaken, which is favorable to accumulating further wealth/power, which incentivises further violation of socially accepted norms. More people taking advantage of this broken mechanism decreases the likeliness of systemic reform. It is thus easy to see how unethical behavior is rewarded rather than prevented.

Fortunately, there are also cases where this vicious cycle is stopped, and there are people who do stand up to evil. However, often when corrective measures do come, they are too little, too late, especially when what is needed is prevention. The system sometimes facilitates the road of evil to money and power, and sometimes fails in stopping serious harm. In both cases, evil always seems to find the means to accomplish its wishes and reach its own definition of prosperity. And while we know that evil and prosperity should not go together, we still need to find a way to keep them separated. That might prove to be a Sisyphean task.

Alecsandra Ciba, Brussels

Aristotle understood that some values cannot be acquired or bestowed on a person from an external source. Eudaimonia,he says, is always and only the product of one’s own efforts. It’s a state of flourishing that comes from the development of a human being’s highest and most distinctive function: his ability to reason. The evil are ignorant of what’s in their best interests; and so too are many of those who would otherwise oppose them. The latter are warned to desist from obstructing evildoers if they ‘know what’s good for them’; but threats to physical safety speak in the reductive idiom that regards human wellbeing merely as comfort and safety. They ignore the deeper and more permanent wellbeing that comes from integrity. So the evil strive to divide men from the better angels of their nature by appealing to basic survival instincts – that is, by instilling fear.

People possess capacities for empathy, self-control, and altruism. However, these may be cultivated or neglected, valued or devalued. David Hume (1711–76) thought that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” Yet when entirely subjective desires dominate, reason becomes instrumental – harnessed as a mere means to the end of acquiring what we desire, never used to best understand what one ought to desire. Genuine human flourishing and enduring happiness come not from feeding all appetites, but from understanding which appetites are truly beneficial and when they are best satisfied. The evil are never satisfied, despite their excessive acquisitions. In Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, Socrates uses the metaphor of a leaky vessel to describe the soul of a person ruled by selfish desires and appetites. His point is that a soul not in harmony with its own true interests – self-mastery, order, and fellowship – can never be truly satisfied, and will thus seek pleasure after pleasure to fill the void. Thus the evil ‘prosper’ only from the perspective of those ignorant of what makes human life worthwhile.

Terri Murray, London

This question has a rather religious tinge to it and I suspect that the acceptable religious response is that, in the long run, the evil don’t in fact prosper. Some divine intervention – possibly post mortem, certainly decisive – will ensure that the evil doer does not thrive in the end.

The word ‘evil’ carries the connotation of being not just bad but deeply immoral. There is a vast catalogue of wrongdoing that rightly brings condemnation, and if apprehended, punishment, but which cannot accurately be described as evil, since it lacks cruelty or malice aforethought. I think therefore we possibly need to soften the question into, Why do the wrongdoers – the thieves, robbers, cheats, and embezzlers – prosper? And now we observe that this list is a list of crimes against property. This is fitting, as to prosper is usually interpreted as to do well financially rather than to flourish as a human being. The quick answer now, is that since the mechanisms of crime detection, apprehension, and punishment are fallible, and subject to corruption, then some malefactors will slip through and succeed. In short, it’s a lottery, and success in the game is due to luck rather than planning – although the latter might somewhat shorten the odds.

Another somewhat clichéd answer that’s usually attributed to Edmund Burke is evil prospers when good men to do nothing. It is true indeed that if evil acts are not countered, then ipso facto they will succeed. And unresisted evil activity will encourage others to try their hands. But following the great Victorian critic John Ruskin, does evildoing and crime produce wealth ; or is it in fact what he calls illth – the polar opposite of wealth – that is created? Wealth for Ruskin is life, and illth its antithesis – the appropriation of resources that ignores human and environmental flourishing, and leads to the diminution of human thriving. While the evil might appear to prosper, it is not wealth but illth they accumulate.

Steve Foulger, Faversham, Kent

Simple answer: we are tribal. All you need is someone charismatic enough to stoke that tribalism – only it’s called patriotism or nationalism, and its antithesis is called betrayal or treason.

Humans have a tendency to create ingroup-outgroup dynamics, but it’s most obvious in politics. One of the factors that nearly always arises here is that normally rational, intelligent people can become highly emotive and irrational. As someone who has prepared evidence for contractual disputes, I’ve witnessed this numerous times. But we’ve all been guilty at some time.

There are fundamentally two types of leaders: those who bring out the best in us; and those who bring out the worst. The latter stoke and exploit division that’s usually already felt by one group of people against another. It’s how wars are started and then maintained and justified. It is humanity’s Achilles’ heel that we follow cult-like leaders who have developed the seemingly contradictory skill of appearing as saviours while leading entire nations into destructive activities that ultimately serve no one but themselves. Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser once made the point in an interview that evil arose from demonising one group of people as the cause of all the problems and ills of a particular society. History bears this out.

I’ve spent a working lifetime on engineering projects, and the most successful have been where the leaders surround themselves with people of diverse backgrounds and expertise. The least successful are where the ingroup-outgroup dynamic seems to take hold. This isn’t itself evil – but when enacted on the world stage by individuals who have massive armies at their disposal and only sycophants as a bulwark against their egos, destruction on a biblical scale is only a command away.

Paul P Mealing, Melbourne

Evil is to be found everywhere if one looks hard enough. Politicians have built entire careers from it, and this did not start, or stop, with Adolf Hitler. In 1867 John Stuart Mill said in an address to St Andrews University that “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing.” Were it to be so simple, however, it is a certainty that good should have triumphed over evil a very long time ago. As with Hitler, though, if enough lies are told it becomes difficult to distinguish the truth.

Unfortunately in most cases, evil often begins in what people sincerely believe to be for the best. For example, when the German economy was in tatters after the First World War, people believed Hitler when he said he could fix it. Herein lies a problem. Evil still prospers because people continue to believe in politicians and causes for far longer than they should. Perhaps the opposite of evil here is not ‘good’, then, but a certain cynicism.If societies were more cynical, then people might start to realise the cause they thought so wholesome was not what it appeared to be. And then maybe good people would act.

Paul Dakers, Crieff, Perth and Kinross

Those whom Kant described as having an ‘evil will’ are forever linked with such atrocities as the Holocaust, the Gulag, ethnic cleansing, and the dehumanisation of all who incur their wrath. To prosper, in their eyes, is to successfully engineer their abominable obsessions. Absolutely necessary for this is the mobilisation of many people, their acquiescence and conformity, and a pervasive fear of reprisals for failure to give allegiance, no matter how repugnant the ideology or duties are. Indeed, there will be many who can be relied upon to give unquestioning obedience no matter how morally bankrupt their leaders. Others may be persuaded by such means as nationalistic propaganda, or by the exercise of what De Maistre called supernatural authority. Those determined to implement their evil predispositions will flourish in particular within a climate of moral skepticism or moral relativism. Even Protagoras already argued that whatever is considered right for a particular society is to be shared and endorsed by those in it.

However, John Gray has reminded us that Hobbes and the early liberals viewed government “as a shelter from the worst of evils, civil war and a reversion to nature.” The fundamental values of any government should embrace a respect for the autonomy of the individual and a duty of care extending to all citizens. Any abrogation of these responsibilities will be to invite those of an evil disposition to take advantage of the vulnerable and disadvantaged.

The Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesal wrote, “the duty of the survivor is to bear testimony. You have to warn people that these things happen, that evil can be unleashed.” A salutary warning from history indeed. But even in liberal democratic societies, evil people will feel emboldened when good men do nothing; when civic-mindedness becomes subordinated to either excessive tribalism or individualism; when Kant’s injunction to treat all humans as ends and never merely as means is ignored or forgotten. Such failures will invariably facilitate the creation of a realm of opportunities in which evil people will continue to prosper.

David Cope, Telford

The term ‘evil’ is an abstraction expressed through actualities. For instance, we could think of a tiger running down a gazelle for something to eat as ‘evil’ given the violence involved.The gazelle would certainly see it that way – much as we would if some desperate person stabbed us to get what’s in our wallet. But that’s not the kind of ‘prospering’ we’re talking about, right? We’re talking about prospering in high places. This seems clear, given that people who do evil in low places generally see their ‘prosperity’ dissipate in a jail cell. Their evil (if it can always be called ‘evil’) often comes out of desperation – much like a tiger running down a gazelle. It’s the evil of ambition we’re interested in here, and the way it prospers regardless of who gets rolled over. There’s also evil at work in the way we turn the ambitious into celebrities. Name your millionaire, or billionaire.

But what is there that allows evil to prosper? It’s rooted in an abstraction sold to us: the notion that if everyone seeks maximum benefit, it will all work out in the end. I call this ‘the metaphysics of power’. Think divine right. Think Adam Smith and the Culture of More that emerged from his ideals. Evil prospers because we’re having a hard time evolving beyond the metaphysics of power to a balance between expectations and the resources available (I call this ‘the metaphysics of efficiency’).

Think about it: how could we possibly have a handful of people feasting at the table while the rest of us fight for the crumbs, and not expect problems? How can any of us embrace a dog-eat-dog/every-man-for-themselves ideology, then ask “Why is this happening to me?” when someone holds a gun to our head while hijacking our car? Evil prospers because it’s top down and we allow it to flow.

D.E. Tarkington, Bellevue, NE

To a biologist, evil prospers because evolution optimizes survival traits rather than morality. In evolutionary terms, aggression, deception, dominance, tribalism, and exploitation are not moral failures; they’re adaptive strategies that work in environments of scarcity and threat. What we label ‘evil’ today often picks out these ancient strategies operating in modern societies. Evolution rewards immediate payoff, not long-term systemic stability, meaning that a cheat can outcompete cooperators in the short run. A ruthless individual may gain resources faster than an ethical one. Selection does not care that such strategies eventually undermine trust, institutions, or civilizations. By contrast, cooperation, empathy, and fairness evolve only when supported by social factors like kin selection, reciprocal altruism, punishment of defectors, and stable groups. These traits are powerful, but they require time, memory, and enforcement. Modern societies amplify this mismatch. Evolution never equipped us with instinctive brakes for power, abstract harm, or delayed consequences.

So in Darwinian terms, evil prospers because it’s genetically built-in, fast, and energetically cheap. Goodness prospers only when cultures deliberately engineer conditions that protect cooperation from exploitation. That is to say, evolution explains why evil can thrive, but it does not justify it. Morality begins where humans stop simply obeying their evolutionary design.

Mehrdad Nadji, Coral Gables, Florida

In 1973 Erich Fromm said in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness that writing about aggression was harder than he had expected. He soon realised that to avoid a distorted view he needed knowledge from many fields, including neurophysiology, animal psychology, palaeontology, and anthropology. To understand why evil continues to prosper, I believe we must follow Fromm’s example and think across those fields, as evil does not arise from a single source but from many interconnected ones. Psychology identifies negative personality traits which are commonly found and can foster harmful behaviour under certain conditions. Neuroscience suggests that differences in brain function may weaken self-control or empathy in some people. Evolutionary theory helps explain Fromm’s concept of ‘benign aggression’ as an adaptive response related to survival. At the social level, institutions often reward destructive behaviour (ie war), and foster what Fromm called ‘malignant aggression’ – a socially conditioned drive to dominate and exploit. As Hannah Arendt observed, bureaucratic systems diffuse responsibility, allowing ordinary people to commit wrongdoing while feeling innocent. Søren Kierkegaard argued that boredom can push individuals to transgress in search of stimulation.

These perspectives reveal how biology, psychology, and society can all reinforce evil tendencies. Yet they do not explain why evil succeeds despite our awareness of its consequences. Why do people repeat actions they know will cause harm?

I suspect a deeper motivation must be at work. Sigmund Freud proposed that, alongside the life instinct (eros), humans also possess an unconscious drive toward self-destruction (thanatos). Although controversial, the idea remains compelling because it captures familiar patterns – people returning to abusive relationships, societies repeating violent conflicts. This tendency has long been noted by writers, from Ecclesiastes, which observes humanity’s constant return to injustice, to Friedrich Nietzsche’s reflections on self-sabotage, Sophocles’ tragic figures who knowingly walk toward ruin, and the Buddha’s teaching that we remain trapped in cycles of suffering through ignorance and craving. Evil, then, persists not because we fail to understand it, but because a part of the human psyche is drawn to destruction – an impulse strengthened by social systems. Fromm was more hopeful than Freud, but they agreed that while evil may never be eradicated, its power can be restrained.

Milda Varniene, Vilnius, Lithuania

We’re not talking here about terrible natural events. Neither do we refer to evil in the religious sense of a malevolent force in the world. So let’s replace ‘the evil’ with ‘people who repeatedly do bad things’. Do they prosper, and if so, why?

The resources we all need to flourish are finite. We have to struggle to access them. Would there still be people repeatedly doing bad things in a world of infinite plenty, where if something you own is taken or broken a perfect replacement snaps into existence? Would they prosper? The bad things done in that world would result not from any shortage of resources and goods, but from some perceived need for power or status. But these needs for power and status are turbocharged when brought into our real world of competition for resources. Such competition takes place within societal and political structure, almost all of which involve hierarchies. That seems to be the nub the issue. Bad actions for status or limited resources are often are undertaken with impunity as a result of a weakness in community institutions. Often they fail to bring the culprit to justice because of possible repercussions resulting from a power imbalance. That’s one reason why whistleblowers within organisations are so important, alongside independent regulators and journalists: they offer ways in which bad actors can be exposed and dealt with so that the evil do not always prosper. Bad actors will continue to thrive when ordinary people lack the power or the independent structures to bring their behaviour to light, or where a society or elite does not care.

Peter Keeble, London

‘Evil’ has been there from the beginning – it simply wasn’t recognized as such. Later, with the development of society, above the natural base layer were placed social, cultural, and ideological superstructures, in which everything belonging to nature was reorganized and assigned a different name. One of these things is ‘evil’. Thus, the problem does not lie in the fact that evil blossoms, but why this thing that blossoms is called ‘evil’.

This leads us to another question: What is good, and what is evil? Clearly, these labels were determined in the social layer, far from their initial natural forms. Society has assigned the labels ‘good’ and ‘evil’ precisely within the framework of its own ‘regulatory manual’; and whatever deviates from this manual and so drives the system toward chaos has been called ‘evil’. For example, it’s determined that society gives its benefits at a price – work (effort, or sacrifice) – meaning people must spend energy to obtain society’s benefits. Any action (theft, murder, fraud, etc) used to obtain benefits without paying the price destabilizes the system; hence it is called ‘evil’ and must be minimized. But the laws of the nature layer cannot be fought with the laws of the social layer.

Another argument relates to human nature. A human being, from birth and childhood – when society has not yet acted to shape him – is born with ‘bad’ instincts: to cry, deceive, steal; to cause mischief in order to get what he wants. The adult human occasionally attempts to return to his origin by stripping away the social superstructures, not because he intentionally acts to make evil blossom.

To conclude, it is not evil that still prospers, but the system we have built which labels as ‘evil’ something that, by its natural essence, will blossom. So evil will continue to blossom until we remodel the social system to see beyond good and evil.

Sotir Mekshi, Gjirokastra, Albania

Concepts of good and evil are beyond the concerns of the universe. They’re merely part of humanity’s attempt to impose order on the random chaos. Humans are storytellers at heart, and desire an end to life where good triumphs over evil. But, since good and evil are human constructs, different societies have different views on what constitutes evil. Consider Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where many countries had empires across the world. Empires are currently considered evil, but many otherwise law-abiding, decent people in that period felt proud to be in a country with an empire – without really wanting the cruelty unleashed on the peoples of colonised countries.

In the enlightened twenty-first century, many Europeans and others supported the Iraq war, with leaders at the time describing Saddam Hussein as ‘evil’ as a justification. But the aerial bombings and subsequent invasion resulted in much loss of innocent life, which was then followed by the deaths of thousands more in the subsequent rise of ISIS. Many in the West, including myself, consider ISIS a fundamentally evil organisation. However, otherwise decent and law-abiding people left safe homes and secure jobs to join it. They obviously didn’t believe that ISIS, or indeed themselves, were evil. This shows that evil is not an ‘objective universal’, but exists only in the human psyche. Until all societies agree on what constitutes evil, it will continue to prosper. But even if that longed-for state occurs, evil in the form of murder, rape and child abuse will continue, because that is the way that some humans, sadly, derive their gratification.

Philip Brown, Bury St Edmunds

It would be most surprising, if the evil did not prosper relative to the good. They use both good and evil means to achieve their own ends while the good are confined to using only good means and to striving for good ends, which often forward the interests of others, not their own.The good may even sacrifice their own interests to promote those of others. The evil concentrate on what advances them.

The real question is, why do the good not adopt the wicked methods and goals of the evil and prosper like them? Why do they confine themselves to good means and ends, when doing so is obviously disadvantageous? Different reasons apply to different people. Some believe that the reward in another life will be so great as to outweigh any disadvantages in this life. Of course the good may have strange ideas about what it actually means to do good, and those affected may not always welcome their help. The forces of evolution have predisposed all of us to care for kin. But the good may have a broader outlook than the evil, and care for a wider variety of people, not just their immediate family. The good may have a greater capacity than the wicked to feel the distress of another, which may be due to innate qualities or to upbringing. Whatever the cause, that sensitivity will hinder the good in the pursuit of their own interests. So if you choose to be good, you may have to resign yourself to seeing the evil prosper, often at the expense of yourself or those for whom you care.

Allen Shaw, Harewood, Leeds

I answer from my lowly nobody tower:

The cliché is true, men forever thirst for power.

Yet worse than this is society’s curse

When ordinary folk exalt in vote and verse

The ascent of evil across the universe.

Common men applaud, prostrate, obey

At the feet of those who’ve gone astray;

Perhaps in envy, perhaps in fear.

Always in ignorance, they cower then cheer.

Thus the evil prosper, the wicked duly rise:

Out of the blind man’s vacant open eyes,

Through ballot box or smug indifference.

In apathy, tyranny, or hallowed democracy,

Those in power control the occluded mind

To profit in gold and glory, greed and war

Leaving the subjugated world far behind.

Only once the masses open education’s door

Will the bad among us prosper no more.

Bianca Laleh, Totnes, Devon

Next Question of the Month

The next question is: What’s a Good Thousand-Year Plan? Please give and justify your answer in less than 400 words. The prize is a semi-random book from our book mountain. Subject lines should be marked ‘Question of the Month’, and must be received by 22nd June 2026. If you want a chance of getting a book, please include your physical address.

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Brief Lives

Xenophon (c.430-355 BC)

Hilarius Bogbinder looks at the life of the other biographer of Socrates.

“Well, Xenophon, I have been told that you are an Athenian, and that was all I knew about you” (Anabasis, III,I,45). The philosopher, biographer, economist, horseman, and soldier Xenophon (430-355 BC) wrote these lines about himself in his perhaps most famous book Anabasis (The Expedition) – an eye-witness account of an ill-fated military operation.

His apparently effortless ease of writing earned him the sobriquet ‘the Attic muse’; but poor Xenophon was always destined to play second fiddle to his compatriot Plato (428-348 BC), who according to the ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius (180-240 AD) was jealous of ‘the sweetness of his style’ (The Lives of Eminent Philosophers). Certainly, there was competition between the two. Like Plato, Xenophon wrote a book called Symposium (the word means ‘drinking party’). In his version, like Plato’s, Socrates is one of the guests, though the topics of conversation are mostly different. Like Plato, he also wrote an account of Socrates’s trial called the Apology (which means In Defence). In some ways, as you’d expect, it overlaps with Plato’s Apology. Only, Xenophon’s account was more historical than philosophical: “It is true that others have written about this, and that all of them have reproduced the loftiness of his [Socrates’] words” (Apology, I,1), he wrote, with perhaps ill-disguised distain for Plato’s account. It does seem closer to the actual Socrates than the idealised version portrayed by Plato.

This stands to reason. One of Xenophon’s most celebrated works, Hellenica (On Greece) was a continuation of Thucydides’ (460-400 BC) History of the Peloponnesian War. Like that father of the discipline of history, Xenophon’s work was stepped in factual, realist historiography. The same sombre assessment was found in Memorabilia, which contained longer reminiscences of Socrates. In this book, Xenophon claims that Socrates developed the first Design Argument, or argument that the perfection of the universe is a proof of the existence of gods. Yet overall, he portrays Socrates more as a paragon of virtue and a good citizen and less as a deep thinker.

So was Xenophon merely a chronicler? An eyewitness to history rather than a thinker? Far from it. His writings were just different from those of Plato and other philosophers, and the topics he covered, from hunting and horsemanship to running a state as a household, had a more practical focus; but they were philosophical reflections none the less.

Xenophon the Man

Laertius described Xenophon as “a man of rare modesty and extremely handsome” (The Lives of Eminent Philosophers). His looks might have been good, but he was not always as self-deprecating as the biographer would have us believe. For example, in Anabasis he depicts a man telling him “I praise you for your words and depths, and I should wish as many as possible to be like you” (III, I, 45). This book was largely a study in military strategies and others in that field since have taken the view that our writer was every bit as profound a strategist as Sun Tzu (544–496 BC) or Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831): “The centuries since have devised nothing to surpass the genius of this warrior” wrote Theodore Ayrault Dodge (1842-1909), perhaps the foremost military historian of the nineteenth century, in A History of the Origin of the Art of War from the Earliest Times to the Battle of Ipsus.

Born to an aristocratic family, Xenophon became a disciple of Socrates. After the Peloponnesian War fully ended in 404 BC with the defeat of Athens by Sparta and the fall of its democratic government, Xenophon supported the ‘Thirty Tyrants’ oligarchy that replaced it. As a commander, he was then responsible for quelling a democratic revolt. The restoration of democratic government understandably made him look for employment abroad. He found a position in the army of Cyrus the Younger (425-401 BC), the Persian king. That ended in failure, although Xenophon’s subsequent reflections on his defeat and subsequent retreat earned him respect among his peers.

Having sided with the Thirty Tyrants, he did not feel welcome in Athens. So, Xenophon then joined Agesilaus, one of the two Spartan kings (they always had two), for two years in 396 BC, in a campaign for the independence of Ionian Greece. For this he was banned from Athens.

Statue of Xenophon in front of the Austrian parliament

Xenophon the Writer

Xenophon’s world was one of powerful men, and more than anything his work is a series of reflections on the difficulties of governing – often seen from the perspective of the dictators. This was especially so in Hiero, Or On Tyranny – an imaginary dialogue with the eponymous tyrant of Syracuse. Xenophon, with rare empathy for the dictator, lays bare the inherent instability in autocratic states, reflecting on “How can you possibly feel that you benefit your friends when you know that he who receives the most from you will be delighted to get you out of sight as soon as possible?” (VI,13), and the dilemma facing a tyrant who knows that “All who are subject to… despotism are enemies, and it is impossible to put them all to death or to imprison them” (Hiero VI,15). There is also a certain professional detachment in Xenophon’s reflection that “To be [a successful dictator] you must see to it that you let others do the unpleasant tasks: the duty of pronouncing censure, using coercion, inflicting pain and penalties on those who come short in any respect, is one that must of necessity give rise to a certain amount of unpopularity” (IX, 3). Hence, “a great ruler should delegate to others the task of punishing those who require to be coerced and should reserve to himself the privilege of awarding prizes” (IX, 4).

There are certain evident similarities here with the advice of the notorious renaissance writer Niccolò Machiavelli (1469- 1527 AD). Like the Italian, Xenophon also wrote largely fictional biographies to exemplify his theories. But whereas the former chronicled the lives and deeds of relatively minor Cavalieri – rulers of small states – Xenophon wrote about mighty men like the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great (600-530 BC), the founder of the Achaemenid Empire.

Although an Athenian from a democratic state, Xenophon had a thing for ‘strongmen’. Maybe it was for this reason he was ostracised from his native city. It might also explain why he took refuge in (and wrote positively about) Sparta. But the fact that he preferred to stay in the rival city once his banishment from Athens was lifted cannot have won him Athenian admirers. Nor can it have won him many favours with them that he rhetorically asked, “when will the Athenians…reach the standard of obedience to their rulers… [and] attain harmony?” (Memorabilia, III,v,16).

Plato was on the same page about aristocracy being preferable to democracy – however he showed more tact and did not spell out his admiration for the Lacedaemonians (their name for the Spartans). Not so Xenophon, who lavished his adopted home with praise:

“It occurred to me one day that Sparta, though among the most thinly populated of states, was evidently the most powerful and most celebrated city in Greece; and I fell to wondering how this could have happened. But when I considered the institutions of the Spartans, I wondered no longer”

(The Lacedaemonians, I,1).

Moreover, he was blunt and dismissive of his compatriots, whom he wrote were “like horses. The more they get the more they want” (Hiero, x,2). Coming from the man who penned On the Art of Horsemanship, it is tempting to joke that he knew what he was talking about. But the sly remark was, in truth about economics and not on the correct method of dealing with horses. Xenophon might be a giant of military and strategic studies, but his contribution to economics is strangely overlooked, especially as his Ways and Means can lay some claim to being the first book on economics in Western thought. The book reads rather like a manual from an MBA course, with empirically proven advice, such as “It is sound business to export silver, for whenever they sell it, they [the shipping firms] are sure to make some profit on the capital invested” (Ways and Means, II,3). Or this when he speaks about the ancient equivalent of sovereign bonds: “no instrument can yield… so fine a return as the money advanced by them to form the capital fund. For every subscriber of ten Minae drawing three Obols a day gets nearly twenty per cent” (III,9). But this economic treatise was not just a business manual written in the style of the Financial Times supplement. The book also provided economic reflections of a more theoretical nature that were literally millennia ahead of their time. For instance, he was the first to discuss the phenomenon in microeconomics known as ‘substitution goods’, namely, “that if gold is plentiful, silver rises, and gold falls in value” (IV). The little book also contained political observations of a more liberal persuasion. A kind of early Keynesian, who championed state intervention rather than pure market forces, Xenophon recommended that it was “a good plan to take the hint from the state ownership of public warships, and see whether it was possible to acquire a fleet of public merchant vessels and lease these under security like our other public property” (III, 14).

Xenophon the Contrarian

Xenophon was a contrarian – an occasionally cantankerous git – who came of age in a democratic state, but who lamented that in Athens “they have chosen to let the worst people be better off than the good” (The Constitution of Athens, I,1). He certainly paid a high price for such brusque remarks, but his bluntness was his hallmark. He wanted to tell things as they were. This remark about the Spartan king Agesilaus II (400-360 BC) is perhaps fitting: “If I speak falsely against the knowledge of the Greek world, I am in no way praising my hero, but I am censuring myself” (Agesilaus, V,1).

© Hilarius Bogbinder 2026

Hilarius Bogbinder is a Danish-born writer and translator. He studied politics and theology at Oxford University and lives in Australia.

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Letters

- Letters

Letters

Letters

Rome If You Want To • Observing Science • Jack the Possibility-Bearing Dog • Morality or Bunk? • Wagner Was A Pagan • Happiness & The Philosophers • Middle School Misogyny • Race Is Environmental • Evolve Your Progress • Deep In The Sand

Rome If You Want To

Dear Editor: Philip Vassallo’s article in Issue 172 about the Roman educationist Quintilian contains a misconception. According to Vassallo, Quintilian “lashes out” against the notion that “the orator should learn to speak persuasively to either side of an issue.” As the context (Institutio Oratora, 2:17:30) makes clear, however, what Quintilian is saying is that this notion gives rise to a great number of petty criticisms of oratory – criticisms he then proceeds to refute. Indeed, as Michael Mendelson has shown, learning to argue pro and contra lies at the heart of Quintilian’s rhetorical education. As Aristotle says, “one should be able to argue persuasively on either side of a question… in order that it may not escape our notice what the real state of the case is and that we ourselves may be able to refute if another person uses speech unjustly” (Rhetoric). To them both, the ability to formulate opposing arguments is a key part of critical thinking.

Diogenes Laertius tells us that Protagoras was the first to propose that “on every matter there are two logoi [arguments] opposed to one another.” However, Luc de Brabandere in his history of critical thinking (also in Issue 172) sees Protagoras and the group known as the Sophists as the enemies of critical thinking, describing them as ‘masters of fallacious discourse’. This negative view of the Sophists is heavily influenced by Plato, who sought to distinguish his own philosophy from sophistic rhetoric. Ironically, perhaps the strongest evidence, in defence of Protagoras at least, can be found in the Platonic dialogue bearing his name. In that, Protagoras tells Socrates that he teaches “sound deliberation [in]… the proper management of one’s own affairs, how best to run one’s household, and the management of public affairs”, and thus “how to make the most effective contribution to the affairs of the city by word and action” (Protagoras 318e-319a). Such was his eminently practical wisdom, indeed, that Pericles gave Protagoras the job of drafting the constitution of a new pan-Hellenic colony in southern Italy.

Neil Foxlee, Lancaster

Dear Editor: I asked my wife this morning over breakfast what Sam Spound might have meant when he wrote that Machiavelli’s Florence “came under the yolk of corrupt oligarchs” (Philosophy Now Issue 172). She wondered if that explains why Machiavelli ended up so frequently with egg on his face as he tried to fathom political reality.

Linden MacIntyre, Toronto

Dear Editor: Thank you for devoting Issue 172 to Roman philosophy. I greatly benefitted from Abdullah Shaikh on Cicero’s idea of virtus. And Cassandra Brandt’s essay on how Stoicism helped her is beyond words.

It is important to remember that, as Momigliano and others have pointed out, what the Roman Empire lacked was precisely an ideological basis. This may be one reason why the Chinese empire, which was based on Legalism and Confucianism, lasted so much longer. This deficit was eventually made good by the adoption of Christianity by Constantine, and very briefly (361-3 CE), of Neoplatonism by Julian. The Eastern empire went on to last for 1,000 years. Its spiritual offspring are still with us in Eastern Europe and Russia. So much for Gibbon.

Antony Black, Dundee

Observing Science

Dear Editor: In ‘Heisenberg’s Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics’ (Issue 172), Kanan Purkayastha says Heisenberg’s thinking about the nature of reality in quantum mechanics revolves around matrix mechanics and the uncertainty relation, and asks: “But what are they?”

Current particle physics rests on three distinct pillars: General Relativity, the Standard Model, and coupling equations that describe forces’ influence on matter. While incredibly accurate, this framework represents a ‘mathematical playground’ rather than a fundamental description of reality. These theories operate on incompatible assumptions – smooth, deterministic spacetime versus discrete, probabilistic quantum fields – so they fail to unify. Consequently, the equations serve as effective tools to predict results at manageable energy scales, but not as a theory of everything. The reliance on mathematical renormalisation to cancel infinities, and the lack of a quantum gravity, further suggests physicists are manipulating elegant mathematical models to fit experimental data rather than uncovering the underlying nature of the universe. The unresolved tension, particularly at the Planck scale, proves these formulae are, effectively, high-level mathematical tools rather than the underlying truth.They are merely highly successful simulations, or in essence, just mathematical models that describe observations of the world.

Doug Clark, Edinburgh

Dear Editor: Reading Mark Vernon’s article on William Blake in Issue 171, I was struck by how closely Blake’s wariness of generalisation anticipates later philosophical worries. What Blake seems to resist is not science as such but the quiet metaphysical inflation of abstraction into reality. Once our representations begin to stand in for the world itself, they acquire a kind of tyrannical authority – a danger Blake sensed in the assumption that universal principles govern all that lives. Scientific laws begin as modes of seeing, but risk hardening into appearing to be the very structure of reality.

This concern finds a striking echo in Wittgenstein’s remark, at the end of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that the modern worldview rests on the illusion that the laws of nature explain natural phenomena. The ancients, he suggests, were at least clearer in recognising a terminus – God or Fate – whereas scientism makes it appear as though everything has been explained when explanation has merely been delayed. Read in this light, Blake’s insistence that “General Forms have their vitality in Particulars” is not anti-scientific, but philosophical – a warning against mistaking representations for what they represent. Abstract thinking, once severed from perception and lived experience, risks becoming not a tool of understanding, but an idol.

Aoife Hardiman, Dublin

Jack the Possibility-Bearing Dog

Dear Editor: Concerning Raymond Tallis in Issue 172: I have a farm, and in a paddock on this farm there is a large heap of dead branches and building material. I gather all this up with my tractor whilst my cattle dog, Jack, busily circles the heap ready for any hiding rabbit which may leap out. Jack imagines many possible exits the rabbit will have. He taps into his ‘structured sense of possibilities’, along with his nose and experience, then works out the probabilities of various exits for the rabbit. Jack has none of Hume’s reservations when it comes to inductive thinking: his methods have caught rabbits before and will catch them again. This ‘Possibility-Bearing Animal’ clearly has ‘the sense of what might be’. When the rabbit makes its run, Jack pursues. He predicts every rapid move left and right, then goes for the kill. After catching the terrified rabbit Jack plays with it before killing (complicating the ideas of Peter Singer’s moral distinctions, since we don’t hold Jack responsible). Jack then eats half, and buries half, imagining the second helping for the next day, but also considering the possibility of a fox finding his food.

Tallis argues, ‘Man is the possibility-bearing animal’… but so is Jack!

Michael Hanley, Melbourne

Morality or Bunk?

Dear Editor: I totally agree with Dylan Neri’s critical review in 172 of Death in a Shallow Pond by David Edmonds, which is based on Peter Singer’s analogy of our duty to send resources to the poor in the Third World with our duty to save a child from drowning in a shallow pond. The two moral situations are entirely different and one moral duty cannot be derived from the other. For instance:

1. Once you save the child and return them to their parents, the necessary action is completed. But the supposedly analogous duty to the poor is endless.

2. Saving the child is an action you can perform without help. There is little you can do to help the millions of poor, unless many others act like you.

3. Only you can save the child. Many others can give to the poor, even if you do not.

4.The cost to you of saving the child is known, finite, and bearable: it’s the ruin of a pair of new shoes. In contrast, it is difficult to know how much one should deprive oneself to assist the poor.

Our duties to others are derived from our overall duty to care for each other. It is not possible for one person to fulfil every duty. Generally, performing one act of care does not imply a duty to perform an entirely different act of care.

Allen Shaw, Leeds

Dear Editor: This email was prompted by the review of Death in a Shallow Pond, by David Edmonds, in Philosophy Now 172. Admittedly, I haven’t read the book, but I find it difficult to believe that it’s as bad as the entirely negative review suggests. Neither the tone nor the content suggest any attempt to engage with it in an objective way. Issue 172 also contained ‘A Very Short History of Critical Thinking’: the author of that piece could have used this review to illustrate the ad hominem and straw man fallacies! The interest of your readers might be better served by a review with some degree of balance.

David Bourn, Newcastle upon Tyne

Wagner Was A Pagan

Dear Editor: Hilarius Bogbinder says in Issue 172, “Wagner embraced Christianity in his opera Parsifal.” There’s nothing Christian about Parsifal. Hilarious!

Rev’d Dr Peter Mullen, Eastbourne

Happiness & The Philosophers

Dear Editor: I found Matthew Hammerton’s discussion of meaning and well-being in Issue 171 thoughtful and conceptually clear. The distinction between total value (‘meaning’) and balanced value (‘well-being’) is elegant, and the examples are well chosen. Still, I want to raise a concern from a perspective largely absent from the discussion – that of the Scandinavian welfare-state model and the ordinary lives it is designed to support.

Hammerton’s essay treats the tension between meaning and well-being as something individuals must ultimately navigate through personal life choices. But this framing already presupposes a social context in which individuals are expected to carry the burden of ‘meaning-production’ themselves. From a Nordic social-democratic perspective, this is neither inevitable nor desirable. In high-tax, large welfare-state societies like ours, a great deal of what might be called ‘the good’ is produced, distributed, and maintained institutionally. Public administration, healthcare systems, education, infrastructure, social insurance, and regulatory frameworks are managed by professionals whose job it is to handle precisely the large-scale moral and social goods that Hammerton associates with ‘meaning’. The point of this arrangement is not efficiency alone, but also moral relief. Ordinary citizens are not required to live heroic or sacrificial lives in order for society to function well. A plumber, nurse, warehouse worker, or primary school teacher doesn’t need to ask whether their life maximizes goodness. By working normal hours, paying high taxes, and trusting public institutions, they already participate in a moral project. This allows them to live balanced lives centered on family and modest personal aspirations. From within this model, their lives do not appear deficient in meaning; rather, meaning is diffuse, low-intensity, and shared.

In this light, the dramatic tension between meaning and well-being may be seen as partly an artifact of societies that have privatized moral responsibility. When welfare institutions weaken, individuals are forced to compensate by turning their lives into projects of impact, sacrifice, or exceptional achievement. Figures like Darwin or Parfit then become not just examples, but aspirational models. But from a Scandinavian perspective, this looks less like philosophical insight and more like institutional failure. This is not to deny that some individuals will reasonably pursue extraordinary projects or accept severe imbalances in their lives. But it is worth asking whether a good society should require this of many, or celebrate it as paradigmatic. A social order that enables most people to live decent, balanced, unheroic lives without existential overexertion may represent not a retreat from meaning, but an arguably more humane way of organizing it.

Anders Wallin, Uppsala

Dear Editor: Reading Issue 171 of Philosophy Now (the Happiness Issue) I was as inspired as only a glass-half-empty person can be to compose a poem:

A Glass Half Empty

My glass is never half full

Its contents never rising higher:

My glass is always half empty

Frequently running drier.

Yet it’s a metaphor I like –

It reduces disappointment;

For should disaster strike

It’s the pre-prepared ointment.

Ready to apply to the cuts

A salve to soothe the pain

Following a kick in the guts;

A cover against the rain.

My glass is never half full

Its contents never rising higher:

My glass is always half empty

Frequently running drier.

Stefan Badham, Portsmouth

Dear Editor: A meditation on moral philosophy: I never believed that ‘ignorance is bliss’ until they started putting calorie counts on restaurant menus. I’ve not enjoyed a meal out all year.

Robert Frazer, Salford

Middle School Misogyny

Dear Editor: I read Marcia Yudkin’s ‘What Women?’ in Issue 171, and have a few thoughts to share. Yudkin discusses the misogyny she faced as a philosophy grad student at Cornell, and it made me think of the misogyny I faced in my last year of middle school.

Although I and the others in my class are young, there’s still quite a bit of misogyny from my male classmates. I have also come to notice that some students even display acts of misogyny towards our teacher. Talking with some of the other girls in my algebra class, they have also experienced forms of misogyny. For instance, one of them was working with a small group at a whiteboard, and while she was in the middle of writing a male classmate snatched the marker out of her hand! He did not act this way toward his male peers. So I find that misogyny starts a lot younger than most might think. Because of that, girls often have to learn how to deal with it before they even realize that they’re being discriminated against. Children pick up on the misogyny our society has created. Subtle cues from parents, social media, and interactions, can all influence the bias of your mind.

It seems to me that when pupils see a teacher merely as someone who’s there to teach, her commands are acceptable. But when they’re like my math teacher – an intelligent woman who’s not here to put up with the shenanigans of middle schoolers – the boys feel threatened and need to prove themselves. Yudkin articulates this sort of defensiveness well in the article when she writes, “As women, we were outsiders in academe, and represented a threat to the towers of male power.”

Lily M, West Virginia

Race Is Environmental

Dear Editor: I read with interest the points made by Sailee Khurjekar in her article ‘The Philosophy of Race’ in PN 171. She’s concerned with the political and social constructions of race; but race seems to me to be first and foremost environmental – something not particularly tackled in the article.

My daughter-in-law is Anglo-Egyptian and lives on the west coast of Scotland, where there’s cloud and rain. Having been here over a decade, she’s paler than her sisters who live over 500 miles south, on the east coast of England. This is of course due to the amount of sunshine. In effect, it’s healthier to have darker skin the nearer the equator you are, to protect from exposure to the sun’s rays, and healthier to have paler skin the more north you get (for example, Scotland’s west coast), as paler skin absorbs more sun, producing more vitamin D. This is environmental. The effects on skin tone can be seen in my daughter-in-law over the years. They can also be observed in as short a time as days, because when we do have good weather, I, a white person, tan, hence protecting me from the sun. It seems then that the differences in appearance humanity has developed over the millenia is largely environmental. How folk choose to treat those of different appearances is another matter.

Kristine Kerr, Renfrewshire

Evolve Your Progress

Dear Editor: I read with increasing misgiving Adam Neiblum’s explication of the confusion between ‘evolution’ and ‘progress’ in PN 171. Whilst initially sympathetic, I gradually realised his argument was a thinly-veiled attack on spirituality in general and Christianity in particular.

He reasonably analyses ‘evolution’ as the accidental success of genetic mutation when it enhances the fit of an organism with its environment, versus ‘progress’ as planned movement towards a goal. However, I believe ‘evolution’ and ‘progress’ can alternatively be defined as, respectively, the ongoing adaption of lifeforms to each other and their environment, and the ongoing change to the physical environment and other lifeforms made by one lifeform (humanity) for its own fitness. On this definition, the inherent risk to the environment from ‘progress’ is clear.

Following his initial analysis, Neiblum cites Stephen Jay Gould to pin the confusion on ‘Christendom’s anthropocentrism’ – thus ignoring anthropocentrism from other epochs, creeds, societies, etc. Neiblum then avers: “we’ve simply morphed from being the Christian ‘crown of creation’ to being the naturalistic ‘pinnacle of evolution’.” He presses home his point: “Our ignorant exceptionalist self-conception is also arguably at the core of many of the devastating problems we now face.” He emphasises that humanity has no more inherent right to escape extinction than any other species. However, he then contradicts himself, saying that, uniquely, “our future is in our own hands” – but only if we choose progress “rooted in science, reason and knowledge.” But he appears to treat reason and knowledge as synonyms of ‘science’. Thus he rejects spirituality having any role in our survival.

Given the current state of the world, I wonder if Neiblum would accept that spirituality tempering ‘scientific progress’ might be beneficial? Science has indeed provided us the means to live more fulfilling lives than our predecessors; but scientific progress also continues to bring pain and misery to both humanity and the animal kingdom, and despoilation to the planet. Nuclear arsenals, climate crisis, environmental destruction, and mass extinction, do not arise from spirituality.

Clearly, Christianity and other religions have caused much suffering as well as hope and love; but to put our faith in scientific progress alone is unjustifiable.

Brian Johns, Hertfordshire

Deep In The Sand

Read Sartre on a sunny beach?

I tried it; not a fan.

Nausea? No Exit? Out of reach

For this windsurfing man.

A downer, dude, right from the start,

I don’t see his allure. Us

Hippies also hate Descartes –

But love our Epicurus!

Steven Kent

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Columns

- Heidegger’s Ghost

- William Paley (1743-1805)

- Philosophers on Skiing

- Four Roles That Shape Life

Tallis in Wonderland

Heidegger’s Ghost

Raymond Tallis wonders where Heidegger’s body went when he was philosophising.

The ghost that haunts Martin Heidegger’s collected works – particularly the early ones leading up to his 1927 magnum opus Being and Time – is Dasein. That is his word for human being. So, gentle reader, the ghost is you. Why do I say ‘ghost’? Because Heidegger finds it difficult to deal with Dasein as having a body.

The word ‘Dasein’ has two elements: sein means ‘being’, and da means ‘here’ or, confusingly, ‘there’. Importantly, though, ‘ da’ does not, in this context, signify a spatial location. Our existence as Dasein is ‘being-in-the-world’ – but it is not in the world in the way that, for example, a match is in a match box, or my body is in my study, as I write this. Rather, it means being involved with the world.

Much of the two published parts of Heidegger’s unfinished Being and Time are devoted to the analysis of Dasein. The most consequential fruit of this analysis is the discovery that Dasein is “a being that in its Being is an issue for itself.” Dasein, he says. cares for itself, and for those things that are relevant to its self-care. Indeed, care is the very essence of Dasein. Crucially, for Heidegger, care is inseparable from tensed time. Dasein reaches towards its own future from the springboard of its own present; and that present draws on its own past.

Since Dasein cares for itself, being-in-the-world is not a mere spectator sport. Central to Heidegger’s thought is a constant reminder that engagement with what is present to us is central to our lives. While that which is present can be present merely as background – what Heidegger calls the ‘present-at-hand’ – it can, more importantly be ‘ready-to-hand’, as in the case of a piece of equipment, such as the computer on which I am typing this column.

His emphasis on engagement with, as opposed to mere perception of, what is ‘out there’, is an important aspect of Heidegger’s project of distancing himself from René Descartes’ vision of the self as a spatially unextended mind distinct from the physically extended objects of nature, and hence to distance himself from Descartes’ mind-body dualism. Indeed, Heidegger’s vision of human being as being-in-the-world removes any gap between the mental and material realms. This vision was unpacked (with, by Heidegger’s standards, admirable clarity) in his Basic Problems of Phenomenology, written a few years before Being and Time, and published in the same year, 1927:

“Self and world belong together in the single entity, Dasein. Self and world are not two entities, like subject and object… but self and world are the basic determinations of Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world.”

Martin Heidegger by Clint Inman

Bodies in The World

Problems come with this vision of human being that, so it seems to me, highlight the fundamental flaws of Heidegger’s account of human nature. The most significant relate to the question of the individuation of Dasein: in virtue of what is the Dasein that is you, the Dasein that is me, and the Dasein that was the philosopher with the moustache whose works we are currently discussing, a distinct, individual person?

The seriousness of this question for Heidegger is highlighted by the fact that his account of Dasein has led some scholars to question whether Dasein is divided into individual persons. John Haugeland argued that Dasein “is neither people nor their being but rather a way of life shared by members of some community” (quoted from ‘Is Dasein People? Heidegger According to Haugeland’, Taylor Carman, Boundary 2 41:2, 2014). This is at odds with what Heidegger called the ‘mineness’ of Dasein. It is, however, an entirely unsurprising consequence of a major omission in the account of human being in Being and Time – the human body.

This omission is not an accident. It is connected with Heidegger’s determination to pre-empt any impression that Dasein “has… the kind of Being which belongs to something present at hand… Man’s substance is not… a synthesis of soul and body; it is rather existence” (Being and Time, p.153). And in an infamous passage, our bodily nature is parked up in the ‘too difficult’ box: Heidegger writes that our corporeality “hides a whole problematic of its own, though we shall not treat it here” (p.143). Nor, as it turns out, is our being embodied addressed anywhere else in Being and Time. In fact, there is no satisfactory treatment of embodied humanity anywhere in Heidegger’s massive oeuvre.

Many reputable Heidegger scholars seem happy with this. For Hubert Dreyfus, “having a body does not belong to Dasein’s essential structure” and “Dasein is not necessarily embodied”. (Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division 1, 1991). For Heidegger, the body is not even an optional extra for Dasein. On the contrary, it is, or seems to be, an embarrassment. According to Didier Franck, “the disappearance of the body is the phenomenological price of the appearance of Being”. What does this mean? Heidegger tells us that the ‘there’ of Dasein is a ‘clearing’ of Being, which allows entities to be ‘disclosed’ and hence encountered. The opacity of the human body would seem to get in the way of this disclosedness. The body is difficult to accommodate also because it is a thing, an organism, that is part of material nature. Hence its lack of place in a Heideggerian world picture that envisages humans as lights opening up in Being to reveal it as a world in which things are either present-at-hand (inert) or ready-to-hand (useful).

Exercising or Exorcising Dasein

So the body is frogmarched into exile. This has disastrous consequences even for Heidegger’s own thinking. The most obvious is the lack of explanation of how Dasein can be ‘an issue for itself’. Even less is there an explanation of what actual issues it has, why it has them, and how they are satisfied. The most basic of the concerns that occupy our lives are rooted in our organic nature – needs for food, drink, shelter, protection. Of course we soar way beyond these, into ambitions, dreams, preoccupations, responsibilities, that are only distantly related to basic organic nature; but we never leave them behind. And with hunger, cold, thirst, or illness, we become ever more tightly nailed to our body.

More worryingly, if Dasein were bodiless, it would have no spatio-temporal location, no environment, no material surroundings. There would consequently be no accounting for why certain things and not others are present-at-hand or ready-to-hand, or why we have an agenda such that at any given time there is any point in moving forwards or backwards, never mind running for a bus. The ‘clearing’ or ‘openness’ imported into being by Dasein would have no anchorage in reality. While my inhabiting my study is not reducible to the location of one entity in another, it is difficult to see how I could inhabit my study without having a body in virtue of which I am located in it.

Heidegger’s foregrounding being-in-the-world while marginalising ourselves as material beings in a material world, bypasses something that lies at the heart of our agency. It is what in Circling Round Explicitness: The Heart of the Mystery of Human Being (2025) I called ‘ontological democracy’: the inescapable thing-on-thing aspect of our need-driven engagement with the world. My using a hammer to bang in a nail requires a physical interaction between my hand and the handle, in which both parties are subject to the same laws of mechanical nature. The friction central to my grip on the hammer straddles both my flesh and its wood. There is, of course, a fundamental inequality: I hammer with the hammer to pursue my ends, but the hammer does not exploit my flesh to pursue its ends. Indeed, the hammer has no ends: it is a mere substrate through which I realize my agenda, whose vision – for example, building a fence to define and affirm my territory – cannot be captured in physical interactions.

This last point shows that the ontological democracy between a body-as-a-thing and the external physical substrate of someone’s agency is incomplete. This is illustrated by something as basic as eating. Without the thing-on-thing interaction between food, fork, and hand, there could be no dining. But, of course, dining goes beyond stuffing nutrition into an orifice opened to receive it. Dining together by appointment has recreational, ceremonial, symbolic dimensions. Nevertheless, none of these could be realised without diner and dinner being moved into contiguous spaces. And not only must diner and dinner be located near to one another, the diner must occupy the relevant space as the same time as the dinner.

What we might call ‘the social articulation of space and time’ is of course not reducible to mere physical locations translatable into spatio-temporal coordinates. Even so, without proximities of physical space and time, social articulation is not possible. Without a body located in space and time, I could not be a welcome, or indeed an unwelcome, guest. And although honouring an appointment is not definable in merely spatial or temporal terms, ‘turning up’ still has to meet certain spatio-temporal criteria.

All of this seems pretty obvious – the kind of thing of which perhaps only a philosopher would require to be reminded. So why is Heidegger so reluctant to acknowledge the centrality of the body in our human being?

There are several answers to this entirely reasonable question. The first is methodological. Throughout his six-decade career, Heidegger was a phenomenologist, focussing on the structures of consciousness and on subjective experience rather than objective entities. His confusion of these methodological constraints with the limits of reality itself meant that he never escaped from the influence of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). According to Kant, space and time themselves, and consequently (according to some, but not all, commentators) the spatio-temporal localisation ascribed to physical entities such as the human body, are products of the mind. As mentioned, Heidegger also wished to avoid anything like the gap Descartes thought existed between the mind and the material world. What’s more, prioritising the body would narrow the difference between humans and what he calls ‘world-poor’ animals. Finally, it might result in philosophy straying into territory that belongs to science, which Heidegger wished to put in its place.

Being and Time was a much-needed corrective to prevalent philosophical trends, notably neo-Cartesianism and materialism. The corrective, however, has proved to be an over-corrective. One reason that this is important is that disembodied – or ‘body-poor’ – Dasein, as a ghost, has no means to exercise freedom, nor, indeed, any reason for doing so. But now I am straying into the territory of another column.

© Prof. Raymond Tallis 2026

Raymond Tallis’s Prague 22: A Philosopher Takes a Tram Through a City is out now in conjunction with Philosophy Now.

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Philosophical Haiku

William Paley (1743-1805)

by Terence Green

Imagine a watch

Each part precisely designed.

Now gaze upon life!

William Paley by George Romney

Born in England, William Paley spent his childhood in the lovely surrounds of Giggleswick (honestly, that’s the name of the town). After a spell at Cambridge, he married and became a clergyman. He was very down-to-earth, and given to shocking the delicate sensibilities of posh visitors with his rustic observations. On one occasion, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, he observed in his broad Yorkshire accent, “I hate these nasty little chairs: they sink in the middle and throost one’s goots up into one’s braans.”

Paley became famous for his book Natural Theology (1802), in which he attempted to prove that God exists. His argument is deceptively simple and awesomely compelling (at least until Darwin stopped to think about it). Suppose you were walking along a beach and found a watch. It has no markings on it, no maker’s name, no owner’s name, no pithy Latin inscription on the back – nothing to tell you anything about where it was made or where it had come from. Nevertheless, there would still be something you could know with absolute certainty – the watch had to have a maker. All those little cogs, wheels and springs are clearly designed to do their individual jobs, and together they’re designed to do the job of telling the time. Something that complicated couldn’t put itself together, so somewhere there must be a watch-maker.

You can’t disagree with that reasoning, right? So how about nature? Nature is exponentially more complicated than a watch, but it’s just as obvious that all its little parts have been designed to do specific jobs – our lungs let us breathe, wings let birds fly, bottoms are good for sitting on. Everything’s designed – so there must be a designer; and that designer must be God! Brilliant! That’s all sorted then.

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because Creationists and Intelligent Designers are still promoting the same argument – yet with far less literary flair, and certainly with none of Paley’s earthy good humour.

© Terence Green 2026

Terence Green is a writer, historian, and lecturer who lives in Eastbourne, New Zealand.

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Philosophy Shorts

Philosophers on Skiing

by Matt Qvortrup

‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads. It was about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; tracks like Rose Royce’s 1976 hit ‘Car Wash’ are the exception.

Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick), and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle). This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.

As Spring is upon us after a long winter, we may not want to think about the cold months behind us. Certainly the noted Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek was not sorry to see the cold season go; and certainly he has no love for winter sports. He wrote recently on an online platform: “The worst thing about winter is the pressure to go out and participate in the imbecilic rituals called ‘winter sports’. It is difficult for me to imagine something more stupid. Think about skiing: is it not the closest human equivalent you can get to a hamster running on a wheel? You climb (or are dragged) to the top of a hill – why? To come back down on your skis…”

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) did not have a Substack, nor did he share Žižek’s aversion to winter sports. Beginning in 1934, Sartre and his philosopher partner Simone de Beauvoir would go skiing in the Alps every winter. Sartre apparently became fond of what he called faire le ski after being a student in Germany. In this (and in other ways) he was heavily influenced by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who not only lectured on existentialism, but occasionally did so wearing his skiing outfit, ready to hit the slopes after his lecture.

Heidegger did not call his book Skiing and Time, and Sartre did not call his own opus Skiing and Nothingness. But he might as well have done, since he waxed lyrical in it about the freedom of slaloming downhill, and noted that “the feeling of skiing is my ability to be the master of the snow” (Being and Nothingness, p.643).

Sartre famously fell out with his friend Albert Camus (1913-1961). A recent article concluded that “The philosophical argument between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus can be summarised in their conflicting accounts of skiing” – with the author of La Peste being dismissive of racing down la piste (‘Swimming and Skiing’, Andy Martin, in Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 2010).

So far we have dealt only with Continental philosophers. Perhaps the British did not write about skiing because we simply don’t have enough snow. But that would not be true for American thinkers. And, sure enough, John Rawls (1921-2002) was an avid and talented skier (as well as being a wrestler and an American football player while at Princeton). Apparently the egalitarian political philosopher and author of A Theory of Justice was somewhat embarrassed by his passion for the winter sport. Norman Daniels, the main custodian of his work, noted that his mentor was concerned that “skiing is a common behaviour of the rich but not of poor working people” (see ‘Rawls’ Complex Egality’ by N. Daniels in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, p.241).

Anyway, you don’t need to worry about all that now. Winter is over.

© Matt Qvortrup 2026

Matt Qvortrup’s book Great Minds on Small Things is now available in Spanish as Grandes Mentes Y Pequeñas Cosas.

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The Art of Living

Four Roles That Shape Life

Massimo Pigliucci considers persona development.

The ancient Romans already knew what Shakespeare would later proclaim: all the world’s a stage. But the Stoics took this metaphor seriously in a way that might surprise us. When the philosopher Panaetius (185-110 BCE) spoke of us having four personae – literally the masks worn by actors in Greek and Roman theater – he wasn’t suggesting we’re all putting on a false face. Instead, he was proposing something more profound: that each of us plays four distinct roles in the drama of life, and that learning to perform them skillfully, without contradiction or confusion, is the key to living well. The catch? Some of these roles we choose freely, while others are thrust upon us by nature, chance, or circumstance. The art lies in knowing which is which.

Unfortunately for us, no works by Panaetius survive. But his theory of the four personae has made it to us through the writings of Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE), specifically in the first book of his De Officiis or On Duties. One of the best commentaries on this was published by David Machek in the journal Apeiron (49:2, 2016).

The fundamental question addressed by Panaetius is, What is appropriate to do in life? – that is, What sort of actions are conducive to existing in harmony with our fellow humans? The answer he proposed was: whatever accords with the four personae. Let’s then explore the four roles, as described by Cicero in On Duties:

• The first persona corresponds to our universal nature as human beings – which then meant, our rational and social natures. An ideal for a good life was to be reasonable in what we choose or reject; and the best course of action was briefly summarized by Cicero: “In every case… we should adopt this habit and should practise so that we become good calculators of our duties” (1.59).

• The second persona consists in our individual character and natural endowments. Cicero writes: “For some, as we see, their strength is the speed that they can run; for others the might with which they wrestle; again, some have figures that are dignified, others that are graceful” (1.107). These dispositions are not inherently good or bad, but they become so depending on how we use them – that is, depending on the choices made by our first persona.

• The third persona is determined by situations we find ourselves in, “which are imposed by some chance or circumstance” (115).

• The last persona comprises the kind of life and vocation that we freely choose – “who and what we wish to be, and what kind of life we want” (117).

According to Cicero the four personae are largely shaped by a combination of nature and luck (1.120). We don’t control either, which makes our choices all the more important, since they are the only things that truly are up to us, that allow us to have a say in who we wish to be and what we want to do.

But what happens if two or more of the personae come into conflict with each other? For instance, perhaps my role as a son (one I obviously did not choose) is going to be in tension – at least some of the time – with my role as a husband, father, friend, colleague, or teacher (all of which I did choose, given my character and my natural endowments).

A later Stoic thinker, Epictetus (55-135 CE), gives us a clear hierarchy of choices. So although the second, third, and fourth personae are subject to trade-offs that we need to negotiate depending on the circumstances, no matter what happens, we should never, ever subordinate the first persona to the others. This means we should always strive to behave both reasonably and prosocially, because those are the best aspects of human nature, and so naturally the ones we most wish to cultivate. Or as Machek puts it in his paper: “The core of our self is the universal rationality, while our individual psychological dispositions are somehow other to us, such that we are to use them as we use external and bodily circumstances” (p.166). This idea comes straight out of Stoic anthropology: reason belongs to our heritage as a species, and is therefore our most precious possession. Everything else about us acquires value depending on how reasonably (or not) we use it. Take, for instance, wealth, which most people consider uncontroversially a good thing. It is good if we acquire it properly (without committing injustice) and use it well (for example, to help others). But if we either acquire it improperly (for example, by exploiting others) or use it badly (for example, to corrupt a country’s politics) then wealth becomes a bad thing.

The broader idea that found Panaetius, Cicero, and other Greco-Roman authors in agreement, was that if we manage our four personae well we will achieve a smooth flow of life – just as the commentator Diogenes Laertius says in his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (7.88). If so, it is well worth our while to ponder our multiple roles on the stage of life, and strive to play them to the best of our abilities.

© Prof. Massimo Pigliucci 2026

Massimo Pigliucci is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His books include How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (Basic Books) and Beyond Stoicism: A Guide to the Good Life with Stoics, Skeptics, Epicureans, and Other Ancient Philosophers (with Greg Lopez and Meredith Kunz, The Experiment). More by him at figsinwintertime.substack.com.

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Reviews

- The Entanglement by Alva Noë

- Free and Equal by Daniel Chandler

- Leaving Nothing to Chance by Carl Knight

- Nosferatu

- Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon

Books

The Entanglement by Alva Noë

Luka Zurkic considers how art and philosophy affect life.

Alva Noë argues in The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are (2023) that art and philosophy are not optional add-ons to ordinary life; they are practices that reshape how we perceive, act, and understand ourselves. Rather than arguing about whether art or philosophy are valuable, Noë asks us to notice how artistic and reflective activities become inextricably woven into everyday activities.

The book unfolds not as a polemic or a manifesto, but as a series of careful demonstrations. Noë builds his case through vivid, close attention to particular practices and artworks. He moves across dance, visual art, writing, and everyday habits, to show how ‘second-order’ practices use ‘first-order’ activities as their material. For instances, a choreographer pulls out some steps people usually perform automatically and makes them noticeable. A painter changes the conditions of looking so that familiar shapes appear new. A philosophical description can dissolve confusion about the meaning and use of everyday concepts. In each case, the practice turns to ordinary activity, and in doing so, can change how that activity is carried out.

Looping, or feedback, is a key idea running throughout the book. Practices and their products do not simply reflect life: they feed back into the habits they describe and become part of what shapes future action. A new way of seeing or talking can move from a gallery, book, or classroom into everyday routines, eventually becoming the background against which later artistic or philosophical practices make sense. This process is usually gradual and dispersed, but it is real and durable, and utilising it helps explain how cultural forms build into human capacities without invoking anything mystical or denying biological limits.

The Entanglement also stresses an important distinction between practical, goal-directed activity, and reflective work, which is second-order. Practical skills are the ways we reliably navigate the world, while reflection takes those skills as their object (that’s why they’re second-order). In Noë’s view, both art and philosophy belong to the reflective sphere – their main role is not to deliver new facts, but to make the structure of our habits visible, and therefore open to revision. In this broad sense, their work is ‘aesthetic’: it makes our ways of living easier to see so that we can change them if we choose (‘aesthetic’ literally means ‘relating to perception‘).

Noë draws philosophy closer to art by arguing that both aim for clarity about how things fit together. For instance, many philosophical problems arise from muddles about how words, actions, or contexts connect. Sometimes those problems dissolve once we describe the situation differently. This is the therapeutic value of ordinary language philosophy. So on Noë’s account, philosophy becomes less about building grand theories, and more about crafting clearer pictures of human practices – pictures that stay connected to everyday life. Art too, of course, is about creating pictures, metaphorically or not.

One of The Entanglement’s more provocative claims concerns human nature. Noë doesn’t dismiss biology, but argues that many capacities we treat as purely ‘natural’ are also profoundly shaped by culture and by aesthetic forms. Technologies, habits, and institutions influence how we perceive things and take action. Art and philosophy play a significant role in shaping this framework. This challenges a simple nature-nurture split, and supports a more pluralistic kind of explanation – one that treats history, technique, and norms as important considerations alongside neural mechanisms.

A major strength of the book is its style. Noë models the kind of clarity he recommends by staying close to concrete examples and avoiding heavy jargon. This makes the argument accessible to non-specialists, while also showing what it might look like to apply his approach in practice. So at its best, the book does precisely what it describes: it turns familiar materials into tools for thinking. It also encourages readers to notice how their own lives are already shaped by aesthetic and reflective work.

Painting by Venantius J. Pinto 2026

Still, his approach raises questions. The leap from compelling case studies to broad claims about how art ‘constitutes’ our capacities, feels less than fully argued. For instance, if art shapes what we do, how much influence does any single artwork or type of practice really have? And how do we separate ordinary cultural influence from a deeper redesign of character or ideals? Noë gestures toward historical and material processes, but he doesn’t provide the kind of explanations that readers looking for precision or clear evaluative criteria might want.

However, even with these limits, the book offers a valuable reorientation: without dismissing scientific insight, it pushes back against the idea that science alone can explain human life. It also encourages artists to see their work as more than private expression, and philosophers to treat textual analysis as serious intellectual labor. The point is practical as much as theoretical: once we recognize the entanglement of human life and culture, we can better understand how changes in practice and products can produce real shifts in capacities and norms.

The book works well as an intervention, though. It reframes debates about embodiment, normativity, and the reach of scientific explanation in clear language, with sustained attention to cultural detail. It will appeal to philosophers interested in aesthetics, and to artists curious about the wider effects of their work – especially those willing to trade theoretical positions for a richer, historically sensitive picture of how human life is organized.

In the end, Noë offers less a final theory than a way of seeing. He asks us to take seriously the thought that reflection and creativity are not luxuries but part of what makes us human. The book invites us to pay ongoing attention to the practices that shape us, and to the arts that can, if we pay attention, help us reshape ourselves. It makes that invitation clear and credible, and it does so by modelling a style of attention and creation that artists and philosophers can actually use. The implications for the discipline of philosophy may be modest, but the practical implications are large.

© Luka Zurkic 2026

Luka Zurkic is a data annotator and community lead with a background in philosophy, focused on responsible AI and professional development.

• The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are, Alva Nöe, Princeton UP, 2023, £22 pb, 288 pages

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Books

Free and Equal by Daniel Chandler

Philip Badger critiques a Rawlsian idea of a good society.

Daniel Chandler, an economist and philosopher based at the London School of Economics, begins Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like? (2023) by asking an intriguing question. How is it, he wonders, that the most influential political philosopher of the last century has had almost no practical impact on politics or policy? The philosopher in question is John Rawls, whose magnum opus was A Theory of Justice (1971).

Many readers of this magazine will be familiar with the central conceit of Rawls’ masterpiece. For those unfamiliar, it involves an audacious thought experiment in which we must imagine ourselves as being behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ that separates us from any knowledge of our actual identity and associated social status. What kind of a society would we want to live in, Rawls asks, if we had no idea about which particular life we would have to live within it?

The simple answer, Rawls argues, is that we would want to live in a fair society. He elaborates on this by suggesting that any rational being placed in the ‘original position’ behind the veil of ignorance would subscribe to two fundamental ‘Principles of Justice’. The first is the familiar liberal idea that there should be the maximum amount of liberty consistent with the equal liberty of others (this is ‘the Liberty Principle’), and the second that there should only be so much inequality as would most benefit the least well off (‘the Difference Principle’). In a later work, Justice as Fairness (1985), when he realised that the rich could justify quite staggering levels of inequality via dubious arguments about wealth ‘trickling down’ to the unfortunate, Rawls amended the difference principle and made it subordinate to ‘equality of opportunity’ – an amendment Chandler glosses over – although he makes some good points about the inadequacy of equality of opportunity to provide fair outcomes (we could not wish for those with no marketable talents to have wretched lives), and merges it with the difference principle to form a powerful ideological critique of unfettered markets.

The practical application of Rawls’ theory is for Chandler quite clear. It is what is sometimes called an ‘ideal theory’, in that it serves as both a compass pointing the way to a better future and a means to measure our progress towards it. Chandler argues that what follows from this assessment is a radical set of recommendations for policies, such as Universal Basic Income, greater workplace democracy, and wealth taxes. For Chandler, this progressive agenda is propelled not by a socialist urge to prioritise equality for its own sake, but by an avowedly liberal one that sees the equality of opportunity as a necessary precondition for the healthy development of the individual. It is this claim that liberty requires greater equality that will attract the ire of those on the political right.

In fact, Chandler deals with Rawls’ critics with a briskness that leaves a lot unsaid. For example, in his discussion of Robert Nozick’s critique of Rawls, he agrees with Nozick’s point that bounds need to be set to the power of the state, but provides little argument about why where Nozick draws them is wrong. Perhaps a better strategy would have involved a discussion of the limitations of Nozick’s ‘negative’ conception of liberty – of being left to do what one desires (which might be referred to as ‘the freedom to starve’), but that is absent. Nozick’s neo-Kantian theory of ‘natural rights’ has its merits but fails, in a way Chandler does not fully address, to properly consider the role of chance in our starting points in life. Rawls’ ‘veil of ignorance’ avoids this problem, but we still need to justify the progressive urge to draw the line of legitimate interference in a way which respects certain liberties while allowing us to hive off a chunk of the wealth of the ‘haves’ for the benefit of the ‘have-nots’. What Chandler might have pointed out is that Rawls manages to reconcile what are often considered to be contradictory moral instincts. For Nozick, the rights of the individual are sacrosanct, and no appeal to the consequences of the way they dispose of their resources is legitimate. However, in defining liberty as he does, Rawls gives us a space to consider such consequences.

Since he is an economist, we might have expected Chandler to explore the negative consequences of significant wealth inequality, its destabilising political and economic impacts and of its negative impact on human capital. But this too is absent. Moreover, his outline of the views of Rawls’ non-free-market critics, while good, is somewhat terse. Communitarians, we are told, see Rawls’ individual as unrealistically egotistical and calculating, while at the same time, so-called ‘realists’ fancifully think the same individual is reasonable and fair-minded. Both sets of critics consider the individual’s priorities as inseparable from the social and cultural environment which created them. If so, then the critical distance Rawls claims is generated by the veil of ignorance is an illusion.

The Veil of Ignorance by Sylvie Reed 2026

What these critics, and this book, could do with, are a few insights from social and developmental psychology. The former suggests that individuals are more than capable of prioritising collective concerns over their own (Jonathan Haidt calls this ‘groupishness’), and the latter – specifically the work of Karen Wynn – indicates that a preference for fairness is present in even the youngest children, and so we might say that it’s innate to any person choosing a society.

Psychological insight might also have been helpful in Chandler’s discussion of national identity and how it might be compatible with Rawls’ apparent cosmopolitanism. Chandler isn’t the first liberal to struggle with such questions, and his conclusions aren’t much different from those of the Canadian philosopher Will Kymlicka: both see us as having ‘special contractual obligations’ to those who share our national identity, and both sense a need to promote the feeling of such obligations. Chandler’s most illiberal policy suggestion is compulsory community work for young adults for social bonding reasons. Such illiberalism is unnecessary: it would be far better to amend the school curriculum to bring together children from diverse backgrounds to work together on pro-social projects. (Chandler is however right in suggesting that we should throw in lessons on critical thinking.)

Chandler’s policy suggestions often are simply too radical to form part of what Rawls called an ‘overlapping consensus’ on the ideal shape of society. It is unlikely, for example, that the UK Labour party will abolish private education, although it has stopped private schools from claiming ‘charitable status’ tax advantages. The Universal Basic Income idea he supports is challenged on the grounds of cost by economists from across the political spectrum, not just those on the right. It isn’t that the idea is a non-starter so much as that its time has not yet come. The AI revolution (which again Chandler passes over rather too quickly) might change that – but for now, the focus should be on a ‘true living wage’ and compensating employers for its cost by using welfare savings to provide training vouchers to enhance the human capital of their employees. This is not to say that ideas such as wealth taxes (as favoured by Chandler) don’t have a role to play; but less radical suggestions, including taxing harmful ingredients and spending the money on better and cheaper school food should come first. In a similar vein, ‘windfall taxes’ on energy companies could be used to insulate the homes of the poor and help towards net zero. But Chandler’s radicalism is forgivable because clearly his aim is to provoke policy discussion rather than just provide us with a shopping list of policies.

While Chandler’s work is not as original as some critics have suggested (for example, Roy Hattersley advocated a Rawlsian direction for the British Labour party as long ago as the mid-1980s), it is more timely than the earlier works. In the late Twentieth Century, the centre left was less on the look-out for a new political ideology than it was concerned to project an image of managerial competence. Today, the ambition needs to be greater.

This is a good book in two senses. Firstly, it represents a genuine attempt to make philosophy relevant to our lives, and secondly, it does so with genuine clarity and enthusiasm. All reservations aside, we should be grateful to Daniel Chandler for it.

© Philip Badger 2026

Phil Badger is a teacher of Philosophy and Social Sciences in a Sheffield school sixth form.

• Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like?, Daniel Chandler, Penguin, 2024, 432 pages, £10.99 pb

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Books

Leaving Nothing to Chance by Carl Knight

Alistair Duff asks if people should be compensated for bad luck.

Leaving Nothing to Chance (2025) by Carl Knight, is an informed, proficient and lucid defence of luck egalitarianism. This is the idea that people should be socially compensated for their bad luck (for instance, being born poor). This book is radical and innovative, articulating the case for what the writer calls ‘all-luck’ egalitarianism. Dr Knight, a professor at the University of Glasgow, argues for the neutralization by state intervention not just of ‘unchosen’ bad luck – for example, the state taking measures to equalise the lives of those born of diminutive stature (that’s my example; I often think about their plight) – but also of ‘chosen’ bad luck – for example losing at gambling (Knight’s example). Incidentally, the unchosen/chosen luck distinction is often called ‘brute luck’ and ‘option luck’ in the literature. I hasten to add that Knight is not saying that gambling one’s resources away is fine. Rather, he argues that one should not be penalised for the luck element in a bad gamble, only for the choice element. That is to say, one should never be punished for bad luck, only for bad decisions. Thus, Knight’s brand of egalitarianism takes account of personal responsibility. This advantage enables him to see off many rival philosophies, such as ‘relational’ egalitarianism.

Roulette wheel © Ralf Roletschek 2013 Creative Commons 3

Instead of setting aside the metaphysical issues which lie in the background of political philosophy, Knight bravely faces the perennial questions of free will vs determinism, the nature of personal identity, and the like. This is most welcome, recalling the great nineteenth-century British idealists such as T.H. Green, who believed that moral and political philosophy could not and should not evade metaphysics. But unlike Green, Knight does not claim to have solved such riddles. He is content to flag up their implications for the political philosophy of luck-neutralization.

After reading Leaving Nothing to Chance I remain, however, a Rawlsian about questions of social justice. Knight himself notes that a point of departure for the whole school of luck egalitarianism was John Rawls’ looseness over the ‘natural lottery’, in his book A Theory of Justice. Rawls argued that if Bob had the luck to be born rich and Alice unluckily was born poor then Alice should be given an ample minimum to live on. However, that Bob was born smart and good-looking and Alice neither, could not, Rawls said, be directly a matter for state attention.

Dr Knight and the luck egalitarians are right to explode this dubious ethical distinction between the social lottery and the natural one. However, their goal of extirpating all luck has some troubling aspects. It seems a utopian project – not in Rawls’ sense of a ‘realistic utopia’, but in Thomas More’s original sense of a place which can exist nowhere (‘utopia’ means ‘nowhere’) – without, at any rate, a Procrustean dictatorship cutting us down to size. Moreover, a world without the risks of luck is probably not a world most of us would really relish. A woman came up to me in London recently and asked where the nearest ‘slots’ were. Slots, she explained, are arcades where you can play slot machines. Several showed up in the vicinity on my Google Maps. That was her idea of a fun Friday night; her ‘idea of the good’. Who was I to seek to dissuade her? A world without ‘option’ luck would be a drab place indeed – a society deprived of a very human kind of hope.

There’s a good line in Rawls’ Theory that says that “in justice as fairness men [sic] agree to share one another’s fate.” For some reason, the great thinker removed this adage from the second edition. For me, though, it expresses the essence of his doctrine of social justice. But while putting down major social and economic unfairness, Rawls’ cathedral-like conceptual architecture left some space for the rich tapestry of happenstance. His philosophy expressly sought and consummately achieved the elusive balance between equality and social welfare.

Dr Knight is actually well aware of all this, entertaining various ‘pluralistic’ permutations which combine luck (in fact, anti-luck) egalitarianism with ‘sufficientarian’ or ‘prioritarian’ elements. Indeed, he leaves no stone unturned, probing his own position from every angle. So my Rawlsian misgivings should not be read as suggesting that Dr Knight has not produced a philosophical work of high calibre. Indeed, it is surely the strongest case so far made for a thoroughgoing luck egalitarianism.

© Dr Alistair S. Duff 2026

Alistair Duff is a Visiting Affiliate Professor at the University of Glasgow, and an Emeritus Professor of Edinburgh Napier University.

• Leaving Nothing to Chance: Equality as Luck Neutralization , Carl Knight, Oxford University Press, 2025, 230 pages, £77 hardback.

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Films

Nosferatu

Ștefan Bolea considers two very different artistic approaches to love and death.

Director Robert Eggers’ movie Nosferatu, released on December 25th, 2024, was a remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent German Expressionist classic, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, itself an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Murnau’s unauthorised rendition led to a copyright infringement lawsuit from Stoker’s widow, and the court ordered the destruction of the movie. Some copies survived, though, making the original Nosferatu an almost mythical prototype of the horror genre.

In terms of appreciating contrasting approaches to this classic tale, it may be even more fruitful to consider Eggers’ film alongside the 1992 movie Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Let’s compare Eggers’ Count Orlok, portrayed by Bill Skarsgård, with Coppola’s Dracula as played by Gary Oldman. While Oldman’s Dracula, with his long hair, top hat, blue-tinted sunglasses, and ceremonious manners resembles a fin de siècle dandy, the bald Orlok, with sharp fingernails and a massive moustache, dresses in furs like a medieval Hungarian provincial nobleman. If Dracula is based on Vlad the Impaler, the fifteenth-century Wallachian voivode known for his bravery and cruelty, Orlok reflects a Solomonar, a wizard in Romanian folklore, representing a primordial pre-Christian force and speaking (fictional) ancient Dacian.

The contrast between the iconic Dracula and the subversive Orlok parallels the difference between two artistic movements: Romanticism and Expressionism. This same distinction can also be exemplified through two literary references; two poems about the Moon. Consider for example the nuanced melancholy present in the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), in which a Schopenhauerian conception of ‘life as pain’ is interwoven with a longing for death:

Now that the year has come full circle,

I remember climbing this hill, heartbroken,

To gaze up at the graceful sight of you…

So wretched was the life I led: and lead still…

Nothing changes, moon of my delight.

(To the Moon, 1819, trans. Eamon Grennan)

This is an example of Romanticism’s trademark linkage of nature with human emotions (in this case, persistent distress). Under the calm moonlight, the lyrical subject experiences resignation without echoes of bitterness. In the Romantic era, the Moon was not only a supersensible principle which governed over the ‘night soul,’ but also an ally to the adventurer facing the boundless sea of their own unconscious.

By contrast, the twentieth-century emergence of Expressionism is encapsulated in a poem authored by the Austrian Georg Trakl (1887-1914) shortly before the onset of WWI, which depicts the Moon as a companion to the rats that populate a barn:

The rats then quietly steal to the surface

And dart whistling hither and thither

And a horrid vaporous breath wafts

After them out of the sewer

Through which the ghostly moonlight trembles

(The Rats, 1913, trans. Alexander Stillmark)

According to this poet, the Moon is no longer the sacred natural force associated with the contemplative Romantic individual; now it is a ‘partner in crime’ for the underground (read ‘subconscious’) monsters which creep in and devour our treasures. We used to climb up to meditate with melancholy under the moonlight; now degradation waits for us in the infernal sewer.

Applying this distinction to the movies, Coppola’s Romantic Dracula is a Luciferian demon of Miltonian nobility, whereas Eggers’ Expressionist Orlok is a brutal (and brutish) predator from the lower circles of Hell. It is by no means an accident that this Nosferatu is associated with the flea-ridden rats, the bringers of plague.

Also illustrating the contrast between Romanticism and Expressionism, Coppola’s Dracula features a theme of love, as exemplified by the Count’s line, “I have crossed oceans of time to find you.” In contrast, Eggers’ portrayal of Orlok focuses on a deep, visceral desire: “I cannot [love]. Yet I cannot be sated without you.”

Dracula stills © Columbia Pictures 1992

Reason versus the Unknown

I’d like to briefly discuss one of the most important scenes of the 2024 Nosferatu, regarding the relationship between science and ‘occult philosophy’. Doctor Sievers escorts Friedrich Harding to the study of Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, so that they might request his expertise in diagnosing the enigmatic illness affecting Ellen Hutter – the true source of which is Orlok’s supernatural power. Sievers informs Harding that von Franz (played by the versatile Willem Dafoe) is a contentious figure who was dismissed from his university due to his preoccupation with the occult. Indeed, von Franz’s attic apartment, filled with books, unusual artifacts, and esoteric charts, might be regarded as a nineteenth century interpretation of Faust’s study. When von Franz mutters, “Hermes will not render my black sulfur gold this evening,” Harding responds “We shall not trouble you further”, suggesting that he sees the alchemical reference as a symptom of mental derangement. Nonetheless, Sievers firmly tells von Franz, “Nolite dare sanctum canibus” – Latin for “Do not give what is sacred to the dogs.” The Professor responds, “Neque mittatis margaritas vestras ante porcos” – “Nor cast your pearls before swine.” These Biblical phrases (both from Matthew 7:6), exchanged ritualistically, imply that both psychiatrists may belong to the same esoteric society, or at least have the same intellectual leanings, adding unfathomed depth to the sober Sievers.

This scene provides some insight into our own era, shaped by the scientific revolution. From the perspective of scientism (which is an ism because it asserts that ‘science is the only way to knowledge’), any idea of the supernatural is viewed as a form of superstition, and furthermore, is not considered ‘sane’. The language and mindset of alchemy and other forms of magic are seen as prescientific, premodern, and outdated. However, from the perspective of esotericism – which asserts that there can be another, hidden way – scientism can be reductive and blinding. In particular, we developed a rational worldview by disregarding feelings, intuition, and imagination.

Romantic (Dracula 1992) versus Expressionist (Nosferatu 1922) vampires

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror 1922

In another scene, Harding asserts that a hypothesis lacking scientific basis – such as the existence of a blood-sucking monster like Orlok – is inadmissible: “Do not tell me you believe in such medieval deviltry?” Von Franz’s answer mirrors Carl Jung’s response when asked about the existence of God: “I do not believe. I know.” The psychiatrist/philosopher adds, “I have seen things in this world that would have made Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother’s womb.” (Ironically, however, that renowned physicist and mathematician, who played such a pivotal role in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, was also deeply engaged in the study of Kabbalah and alchemy.) “We have not become so much enlightened as we have been blinded by the gaseous light of science,” continues von Franz, claiming – again in a Jungian fashion – that the Enlightenment may have been an ‘Endarkenment’. As Jung himself writes:

“And so we can draw a parallel: just as in me, a single individual, the darkness calls forth a helpful light, so it does in the psychic life of a people. In the crowds that poured into Notre Dame, bent on destruction, dark and nameless forces were at work that swept the individual off his feet; these forces worked also upon Anquetil-Duperron and provoked an answer which has come down in history and speaks to us through the mouths of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.”

(C.W. Jung. From a conference in 1928)

The translation of the Hindu Upanishads by Abraham Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805) influenced both Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy of the will and Nietzsche’s relativistic genealogy of morality. Both fed into Freud’s theory of the unconscious, and Jung’s subsequent development of the concept of the collective unconscious. In the movie von Franz asserts, like Jung, that we should avoid excessive rationalism. Nietzsche implied something similar in The Gay Science (1882), when he wrote: “For the longest time, conscious thought was considered thought itself.” Had we remained confined to the domain of pure reason and conscious thought, it is unlikely that all the philosophy spanning from Schopenhauer to psychoanalysis and existentialism would have emerged. Not all knowledge is reducible to reason, just as the Romantics might claim.

Von Franz also remarks, “To tame darkness, we must face and know it as we know ourselves” This highlights the Jungian theme of accepting our shadow side. And indeed the final scene of Eggers’ Nosferatu shows the Jungian clash between shadow and anima. The end of the film also celebrates the balance between libido (the drive toward life and love) and mortido (the drive toward death and destruction), or eros and thanatos in Freud’s terminology. In this scene, Ellen is both Orlok’s destroyer and his savior. Orlok dies in Ellen’s arms, feasting on her until their shared annihilation. As the German Expressionist poet Georg Heym (1887-1912) wrote in his The Death of Lovers: “Death is gentle, granting us what we’ve never had / A home…”

© Dr Ștefan Bolea 2026

Ștefan Bolea is the author of Internal Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020). He earned two PhDs, in Philosophy and in Literature, from the University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He is editor-in-chief of the magazine EgoPHobia: www.egophobia.ro.

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Classics

Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon

Brian Johns goes cosmic.

The 1937 science fiction novel Star Maker was written by philosophy professor Olaf Stapledon in the dark days as Europe awaited the onslaught of Nazi Germany. This casts a shadow over the whole book.

Arthur C. Clarke called the novel “probably the most powerful work of imagination ever written” and it can be found today in the Science Fiction Masterworks series, but to me it stands as a metaphysics fiction masterwork. Cosmic in its scope, Star Maker sets out the cause, evolution, history and meaning of life, including beyond our universe, including discussing the roles of God and religion. Stapledon’s narrator projects his mind across the whole of space and time, observing the evolution and death of galaxies, stars, and planets, and of the intelligence that emerges. He investigates the interaction and conflict between intelligent lifeforms through dialectics of love and hate. The tour de force conclusion witnesses the ultimate conjunction between the creator (the titular Star Maker), the created living cosmos, and the absolute spirit which ensues from their union.

Lynx Arc Star-Formation Region © ESA, NASA, Robert A.E. Fosbury 2018 Public Domain

Although a conscientious objector, Stapledon served as an ambulance driver in the First World War, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre for gallantry. His experiences influenced his pacifist beliefs. After the war, he lectured in philosophy at the University of Liverpool. He published several academic works, but wrote fiction to try to influence a wider public. Star Maker provides a social and political commentary on humanity in the 1930s. Except, reading it now, it also paints a frighteningly real picture of our world today. Or perhaps it shows that the human condition never really changes. Star Maker is also uncannily prescient in its scientific predictions, and it’s viewed by some as an early exposition of transhumanism. It even foretells the climate crisis.

Unsurprisingly given the period in which Star Maker was written, Stapledon makes clear his hostility to authoritarianism. Early in the narrative, he also questions whether love is the essence of humanity, and whether that proves that love is the ground of the cosmos. He asks whether man has a purpose, and if so, is it love, worship, wisdom, or power?

Stapledon answers his own question in a reflection on a parallel humanity, where, despite opposition or indifference from science, religion and politics, isolated groups pursue a “world-wide community of awakened and intelligently creative persons, related by mutual insight and respect”. As with other concepts in the book, this echoes the philosophy of John Macmurray (1891-1976), whose pacifism was similarly influenced by his experience as an ambulance driver in the 1914-18 war.

Some of the cosmological concepts explored in Star Maker were ahead of the physics of Stapledon’s time, but have subsequently become mainstream, such as the idea of many universes. Stapledon’s exposition of multiverses has a pedigree going back to Ancient Greece. However, his description of how “in one inconceivably complex cosmos, whenever a creature was faced with several possible courses of action, it took them all, thereby creating… an infinity of distinct universes exfoliated from every moment of every temporal sequence” predates the formal hypothesis of a quantum ‘many worlds’ theory by twenty years. Indeed, his myth conceives the Star Maker as the creator of increasingly complex universes, each with different logical, physical, biological and psychological potentials, including variations on fundamental concepts such as geometry, space-time, gravity, nuclear forces, entropy and free will. For example, he envisages universes which are musical rather than spatial, with tonal creatures moving in the dimensions of pitch. He also speculates on the apparent expansion of the universe as being an illusion due to the actual shrinkage of its physical components. As each universe dies, the Star Maker creates a replacement.

In an evocation of, for example, A.N. Whitehead’s organic metaphysics, the Star Maker originates our universe with a substance of pure potentiality, in which all parts reciprocally pervade and influence all others. The whole is the sum of its parts, but each part is an all-pervading determination of the whole (perhaps like a hologram).

In the novel, early life exists in nebulae and stars themselves, long before planetary creatures evolve. Eventually life starts to pursue its own purposes, leading to conflict. On a more optimistic note, physical progress is replaced by mental advancement, bringing a utopia of pan-galactic peace. Stapledon also explores the idea of psychic ‘interpenetration’ of pairs of minds leading to a third ‘more penetrating’ mind, and of symbiotic intelligent races which start off simply working together, but eventually evolve mental union.

Given Stapledon’s interest in Marx, it would be easy to view his analysis of the political and economic conditions of developed planets as an attack on capitalism. However, the conditions also reflect experiences of communist societies. It’s therefore more a critical analysis of all political and economic hierarchies. Stapledon characterised the main problems with human society as he saw them in the 1930s, but they bear an uncanny resemblance to today’s world:

• All chief means of production are controlled by a small minority for private profit, with failed economies leading to unemployment, poverty, disorder, and repression for the rest.

• Competition for resources and markets builds on historic fear and jingoistic pride to threaten universal armageddon between older commercial empires and newly powerful states.

• Better health and prolongation of youth amongst the wealthy, but degenerative diseases increasing, in particular, mental health problems.

• Improved communications link all peoples, but recent scientific discoveries contain no truly great new ideas, just world-changing new applications.

• Even in democracies people begin to welcome the ruthlessness and brutish violence of the populist ‘god-sent hero’, with criticism of the tyrant either met with blind rage or not heard at all.

Similarly, Stapledon’s critique of religion across the cosmos strikes an unsettling chord today. Although religion progresses on every developed planet from tribal gods to monotheism, there is no agreement as to which God is the real one, and the general attitude to religion is one of ‘blasphemous commercialism’. Atheism and agnosticism follow religion. Indeed, one idea explored extensively in Star Maker is the cyclically fluctuating worldview of the dominant species on any planet. This might be most simply characterised as the difference between a spiritualistic and a materialistic outlook, which as often as not becomes the cause of conflict (as arguably it continues to do so on our planet). This conflict was explored in PN 164 in a review of the approach of Iain McGilchrist. McGilchrist’s study of differences in perspective between the brain’s right and left hemispheres led him to conclude that variations in the degree of influence of each hemisphere could account for exactly such a difference in worldview between individuals. Further, McGilchrist argues that the preponderance of each hemisphere’s influence varies within cultures over time. (Indeed, it’s an interesting question as to whether we’re witnessing such a ‘brain hemisphere revolution’ today.)

Stapledon explores the change in cultural outlook through several examples. For instance, the ‘Other Men’ (a barely concealed description of humanity) are subject to fluctuations of nature and mental vigour, with brilliance and sensibility in a never-ending cycle against injustice and corruption. It’s clear that Stapledon sees this as part of the trajectory of humanity, which may, but is not guaranteed to, lead to his hoped – for ‘true community’.

Stapledon is sometimes considered a predecessor of transhumanism, with Star Maker seen to contain early transhumanist ideas. For instance, he describes how genetic research is employed on some planets to evolve superior humans who eventually take over the planet. Stapledon even references the now discredited study of eugenics, which he describes as having the potential to improve memory and intelligence through selective breeding, although that potential is undermined by almost inevitable abuse. Given the recently overheard whispered conversation between Presidents Putin and Xi, Stapledon’s reference to the use of eugenics “to expand the length of life by large multiples” has a chilling modern echo.

Probably the clearest example of Stapledon’s scientific prescience, is his description of megastructures orbiting stars. In 1960, the physicist Freeman Dyson speculated that a highly developed civilisation would build structures encircling their stars to harness a significant proportion of the stellar energy to power space exploration, the energy on any individual planet being insufficient. These structures were subsequently termed ‘Dyson spheres’. However, Dyson later acknowledged that he had been inspired by exactly the same idea being described in Star Maker in 1937. Many other examples of Stapledon’s ability to predict future scientific developments are scattered throughout the novel. He describes forms of solar and wind power which are now familiar, but were non-existent in the 1930s. Similarly, he anticipates modern communication technologies, including pocket radios receiving not just music but other sensory pleasures.

Star Maker was described by Brian Aldiss, himself a giant of science fiction, as “the most wonderful novel I have ever read.” Certainly, its scope exceeds probably any other novel. Its place as a classic of science fiction is assured; but I believe the philosophical principles explored throughout it make it an entertaining, as well as enlightening, philosophical read. That’s not something you come across every day.

© Brian Johns 2026

Brian Johns is a retired chartered engineer living in Hertfordshire.

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Fiction

- What do I have to fear, have I ever diminished by dying?

- Code of Conduct

Poetry

What do I have to fear, have I ever diminished by dying?

by Zahra Rashid

What do I have to fear, have I ever diminished by dying?

I died as lifeless matter and became growing vegetation,

then I died as a plant and reached animality.

I died as an animal and became human

What do I have to fear, have I ever diminished by dying?

From here to there, from this footprint in the sand to the next wave

Unfolding, unravelling the paradox of being

matter; animate and inanimate – flesh, soil, and blood

twirling around this mystery, weaving stories as they spin,

At the next encounter, I will leave human-ness

So that I may bring wings and a head from the angels

Even as an angel, I should keep searching and striving:

“Everything perishes except His Face.” (28:88)

Stories begin, fade and end,

The twirling remains as a dance

Flapping wings of angels may recede,

but rings clear the symphony of characters, plots, and the Unseen.

Another time, I will be sacrificed as an angel,

then I will become what cannot be fathomed

Thus, I will become Nothing, which like a musical organ

declares: “To Him we Return.” (2:156)

Die before you die, as they say,

Die to the wonders of non-being!

As the vestiges of a life annihilate and disintegrate

an infant life emerges, bawling and screaming: “You are dying, and they are too.” (39:30)

© Zahra Rashid 2026

Zahra Rashid is a doctoral student at U.C. Berkeley working on Sufi philosophy. Her writings may be accessed at philpeople.org/profiles/zahra-rashid/publications.

• This piece follows the tradition of taḍmin in Persian Sufi poetry; a poetic device which takes a quote from another poet’s poetry and inserts it in an author’s original work. This form not only involves its readers’ imaginations and ideas through intertextuality, but also opens the possibilities of creative engagement with the original text, whereby new meanings and references may be drawn from an original work. The words in italics are my own translation of verses from Rumi’s poem # 187 in Mathnawi Ma’anwi, Vol. 3, and the rest is my own dialogue with it. The quotations are from the Qur’an, followed by chapter and verse citations in brackets.

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Fiction

Code of Conduct

J.C. Michaels contemplates corporate immorality and individual responsibility.

The morning is early, the café empty, tensions mounting. Shiori sets down a pot of steeping tea and takes a seat across from Kye, a routine that offers a sense of stability amidst the uncertainty. Slowly, she guides strands of long dark hair behind her shoulder. “You seem to be hiding something,” she says.

“We’re both hiding,” Kye says.

“I know what I’m hiding,” Shiori says, “your friend’s entire family in the back – and they are people I barely know. If we’re caught, everyone involved will be fined and they’ll be deported on the first plane out of the country. But I’m talking about you. What are you hiding?”

Kye looks vacantly at the teapot. “What do you mean?”

“Let it rest a few more minutes,” Shiori says, then leans forward meeting Kye’s eyes. “Before the pandemic, plenty of foreigners came to my café. I could tell which ones came to experience a new culture and which ones were running from their problems. I think you’re in the latter category.”

Kye shrugs, leans back, letting his eyes wander around the knickknacks spread about Shiori’s café.

“And the room you rent from me – with cash…” she says. “Should I be worried? Why does a programmer need to hide?”

Kye rubs his lower lip against his upper teeth. “I didn’t do anything. But I was tempted. I can’t trust myself.”

“You don’t trust yourself?”

“When no one is watching, can any of us trust ourselves?”

Shiori’s eyes widen.

“Perhaps we never choose what is right,” Kye says. “Perhaps all we ever do is succumb to the inevitable.”

“You owe me an explanation,” Shiori says.

Kye gestures toward his cup. “Fill it to the top.”

• • • • •

Stern faced, lock jawed, face flushed, Lex sits at the head of the long conference table, his rotund stomach pressing into the rounded edge as he scowls at the programmers on both sides.

“Shall we get started?” he asks, shifting his mass until part of his belly rests atop the table. Like a drill sergeant, he stares down the phalanx of developers, who open their laptops, stare forward, ready to take notes and answer questions about the latest code debacle.

“Your screens aren’t going to protect you,” Lex bellows. “Look at me. I want eye contact. I want to see your faces. I want to believe – I really do – that you’re just bumbling, incompetent fools. Why do I want to believe this? Because that little problem we had this week seems intentional. I suspect some of you are foul-fingered monkey-wrenchers, trying to put a spanner in my works.”

Lex scans, scowls, sweats.

“If any of you have a problem with this company, leave. Walk out the door. Go to HR. Sign a non-disclosure agreement. Take two months severance pay – and don’t ever show your face again.”

Kye’s hands hover above his keyboard. He contemplates starting a timer that will release his own undocumented feature. The last code update was intended to start harvesting users’ data for marketing purposes and reselling it to third parties. The programming team was informed this was ‘for the benefit of the customer,’ a platitude no one believed. For Kye, the question was simple. Why should he do to others what he would not want done to himself?

Lex glares up and down the table. “Nothing to say? Just blank-faced idiots? Fools caught with your pants down?”

Kye has never seen a man so unhappy, so uncomfortable, so close to exploding both literally and figuratively.

Like a moment of calm as the hurricane’s eye passes, Lex sighs and relaxes his shoulders. “We’re building a company,” he says, “doing our jobs, earning a living for our families. The actions of one, affect us all. I understand your concerns. You may be overthinking our last update. Keep in mind, customers have already explicitly given us permission to use their data.”

Almost imperceptibly, Kye shakes his head. Lex is hiding behind the End User License Agreement, which is filled with fine print and legalese no one reads or understands, along with ambiguities that could only be untangled after a lawsuit and a court ruling.

No one speaks. Lex drums his fingers on his belly, scowls, and shrugs. “Cancel your plans for the afternoon,” he says, calmly. “Plan on staying late. We’re going through each line of code until we find the problem. And then, we’re going to determine who wrote that problem. Then security will escort that person out of the building. No severance pay. No polite letter of dismissal. Just a civil law suit.” Lex pauses, flexes his shoulders. Volume increasing, he adds “And criminal charges will be filed for fraud and sabotage. This is your last chance to own up and leave with any form of dignity.”

Kye is unperturbed by the threats. Lex might be the Chief Technology Officer, but he’s not a programmer. The line-by-line review is the diagnostic process of an amateur. The problem is not in the code, but injected into the compiler. If a finger needs to be pointed, it will be at the software manufacturer.

“Last chance,” Lex growls.

Kye’s hands rest above his keyboard. One key will start the ransomware, masked as if from a foreign source. Another key will erase all traces from his hard drive, like a blackboard cleaned with a wet cloth.

“You know,” Lex says, glaring at each programmer, “among you fools and second-rate coders, there’s only one of you I suspect would and could pull this off.” He plants his palms on the table, pushes back, his belly flopping onto his lap. He turns toward Kye and points his finger.

Kye taps a key and closes his laptop.

• • • • •

Kye still remembers the first time he discovered he could not trust himself. He had been visiting a school friend who wanted to show off his coin collection. In a corner of the bedroom, they tipped a small box of numismatic treasures onto the floor. Like archaeologists, they scrutinized the coins with magnifying glasses, reading dates and words, trying to determine the status of the person on one side, deciphering the meaning of the image on the obverse, and speculating about the potential value of each coin.

His friend was called out of the room. Suddenly, Kye was left alone. The desire to possess one of the objects penetrated his thoughts like water seeping into dry earth. How wrong would it be to take just one? All the coins did was sit in a box. Did his friend really need all five silver dollars? Suddenly, Kye could hear his friend returning. With each footfall, the desire spread until possession felt like survival. Kye snatched a silver dollar and slipped it in his pocket. When his friend returned, Kye stood up, announced that he needed to go home, and left.

Once home, Kye removed the coin from his pocket and stared at the coin. It no longer seemed as shiny or as interesting. He felt uneasy about his actions, but he was certain that if the situation were reversed, his friend would have done the same. Everyone knew everyone was a thief. If anyone were to blame, it was his friend for leaving him alone with a pile of treasure.

In college, Kye was compelled to once more reappraise his trust of himself when he came across a famous story from Greek antiquity. Plato tells of a shepherd named Gyges who discovers a mummified corpse wearing a mysterious, shiny ring. Gyges places the curious object onto his finger. Soon, he discovers that rotating the ring toward his body makes him invisible. Gyges is no longer interested in herding sheep. Instead, he begins scheming how to maximize his lot in life. Eventually, he uses his power to seduce the queen, kill the king, and seize the throne.

The question Plato was asking was, what would someone do if they could act without consequence, without punishment? Several novels and movies have been built around the premise of invisibility set forth in the tale of Gyges. In every case, power is abused. Ultimately, the protagonist becomes a threat to society and must be destroyed.

When Kye entered the workforce, he confronted the problem again, in a very real way. Since he was exceptionally talented in machine language, just one step above the direct manipulation of 0s and 1s, Kye felt the burden of having great power without oversight. In what circumstance would he employ this power? He was clearly not the only coder in such a predicament. Numerous times, he had uncovered unexpected algorithms, everything from clever Easter eggs to hidden code that could shut down a company. Each time, Kye left alone what he considered benign and dismantled what he considered malicious. He did so quietly, unknown to anyone, for he did not want others to know that he possessed such power.

Many companies were acutely aware of this vulnerability, but they would never ask programmers directly if they would retaliate if they felt slighted. Instead, companies implemented unit tests to confirm code does what it is supposed to do. But this was just code versus code. Who monitors the monitor? Companies also tried to keep programmers content with free food, flexible working hours, long vacations, employee perks, and fat paychecks. But such indulgences were no guarantee of compliance.

Photo at Pixabay. Public Domain.

For Kye, the most important question was not, What is the right thing to do? but rather, Is it possible to do the right thing? If the brain were just a computational system, maximizing some function and minimizing others, individual agency played little, if any role. Once input from the environment crossed a certain threshold – perhaps caused by a bad performance review, a pay cut, an insulting word – the resulting actions were simply determined. Perhaps he could no more prevent himself from taking down a company than he could have not stolen a coin.

Psychologists had plenty of evidence to demonstrate the conflict between what a person does when observed versus unobserved. If people had the opportunity to appear to act morally and ethically, while actually violating all such principles of propriety, they would. The vast majority of people were little more than moral hypocrites.

• • • • •

Lex turns toward Kye and points. “You. What do you think the problem is?”

Kye takes a deep breath. “Internal values,” he replies.

“What?” Lex says. “ Whose values?”

“Mine,” Kye says, pointing to himself and then gesturing around the room, “yours, the company’s, everyone’s.”

“You’re taunting me,” Lex says, wincing, tightening his lips. “Careful, or you’ll face the consequences.”

“The only consequences I face are my own,” Kye says.

Kye watches like a distant observer as Lex lifts his hand, curling his fingers into a fist. The table is about to feel the great man’s anger. Kye feels a wind of solace blow across him. He is no different from Lex, or from anyone else. Given the chance and the motivation, he would violate the company’s own privacy as readily as the company had violated users’ trust in privacy. Appearance is all that matters.

“I think you know exactly what the problem is,” Lex says.

“And so do you,” Kye replies.

Lex’s fist finally hammers the table. “Are you being rude, insubordinate, or both?”

“I’m leaving,” Kye says calmly, standing.

“The hell you are,” Lex bellows. “Sit down. I’m the boss here.”

“I’m resigning,” Kye says, sliding his laptop toward Lex.

“What the hell did you just do?” Lex bellows. “Did you just screw up the codebase? You’ll be sued and charged with criminal mischief. I swear.”

Kye shrugs. “Look as much as you want. You won’t find anything.”

“You need to sign a non-disclosure statement. You cannot just steal our code.”

“There’s nothing to steal.”

“God damn it, sign something or there’s no salary and no severance pay.”

“I don’t want the money. You can keep it.” Kye looks around the room at the other programmers. “We all know the company is doing to customers what none of us would want done to ourselves. But we can’t stop it. None of us can.”

“ Everyone is doing what we’re doing,” Lex responds.

“I agree,” Kye says. “I’m no longer sure it’s even possible to do the right thing. None of us can be trusted. Not me. Not you. Not this company. Not some other company. There’s only one solution.” The two lines of programmers arch their brows and turn toward Kye. Kye looks at their eager eyes and shrugs again. “You all know the answer – open source.”

“Open shit!” Lex screams as he stands up. He glares at Kye. “You need to sign a letter of resignation, and accept responsibility, or I’ll personally file criminal charges, today” Lex picks up a blank piece of paper and slides it across the table toward Kye. “Write it now. One sentence. Accept responsibility for the recent code problem and resign. That’s it.”

Kye pulls the paper toward him, picks up a pen, scrawls across the page, and leaves the room.

Lex snatches the paper, grips it tightly with his fingers, pursing his lips as he fumes through his nose and tosses it back onto the table. “What the hell is this?” he yells out.

The programmers crane their necks as they read the one word written on the page: Gyges.

© J.C. Michaels 2026

J.C. Michaels is an award-winning internationally published novelist, living in Taiwan, who uses literature to shine new light on great ideas. This piece is an excerpt from a novel-in-progress, The Miraculous Symposia at the Drifting Cafe.

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Table of Contents

Philosophy Now: April/May 2026

Editorial

The Collective City

News

News: April/May 2025

Islam & Philosophy

Love & Emptiness in the Sufi Tradition

The Prayer the Machine Cannot Pray

Islamic Law, Reform & Philosophy

Life Sacrifice

The Mirror & the Flame

Articles

Why Do People Hate Hypocrisy?

Is Comedy Good for Us?

A Memetic Analysis of Narratives & Conspiracies

In Defense of Idleness

The Hedgehog’s Dilemma: A Metaphor About the Challenges of Human Intimacy

Why Do The Evil Still Prosper?

Xenophon (c.430-355 BC)

Letters

Letters

Columns

Heidegger’s Ghost

William Paley (1743-1805)

Philosophers on Skiing

Four Roles That Shape Life

Reviews

The Entanglement by Alva Noë

Free and Equal by Daniel Chandler

Leaving Nothing to Chance by Carl Knight

Nosferatu

Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon

Fiction

What do I have to fear, have I ever diminished by dying?

Code of Conduct

Cartoons

Mike Shiell’s Cartoon

Jonny Hawkins’ Cartoon

Simon & Finn

Existential Comics

Ayn’ Goodbye