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Editorial

- Mental Continental

Editorial

Mental Continental

by Rick Lewis

This issue has a theme of Continental philosophy. Yet some people say there is no such thing as Continental philosophy. If so, how can we have a themed issue about it? Well, we’ve had themed issues about God, who existence is also doubted, so why not?

First the premise. It is widely believed that for the last century or so there has been a split within Western philosophy. Philosophical discourse in the English-speaking nations (and Austria, for some reason) is dominated by a style of philosophy known as Analytical Philosophy, which has a particular focus on clarity about the language used to express and tackle the deep eternal questions. Meanwhile in mainland Europe a different style of philosophy prevails – called Continental Philosophy – with different priorities and different methods, influenced by a line of past thinkers including Hegel and Heidegger.

Now the doubt. Anja Steinbauer argued in her editorial for Philosophy Now Issue 127 (Aug/Sept 2018) that Continental Philosophy is not a very useful label. She wrote: “Continental climate, continental drift, continental breakfast, all of these make sense. But what is continental philosophy ?” She argued that the meaning of the term is unclear in a number of ways. Some people and organisations these days find ‘European philosophy’ a less confusing label than ‘Continental philosophy’. There are other continents, after all. Continental seems to be a category in opposition to analytic philosophy – in other words it is whatever analytic philosophy isn’t. But this doesn’t help much, because the meaning of the term ‘analytic philosophy’ itself seems to have shifted profoundly over time, as you can read in Alexander Jeuk’s article in this issue. In any case, Continental philosophy, as the term is generally used, covers a wide range of approaches and tendencies and currents which don’t necessarily have a whole lot to do with one another. Phenomenology, existentialism, post-structuralism, hermeneutics, critical theory… each with different assumptions and priorities and methods. Some share with analytic philosophy a focus on language and meaning, others are much more to do with society or value. Maybe a better term would be not Continental but ‘Continentals’ – so that is what we have printed at the top of each page in our themed section.

So, if we aren’t certain whether the term Continental philosophy is useful or not, what do we know? We know that we have a collection of articles here by a very varied group of interesting twentieth century thinkers. What they mostly have in common, it turns out, is that they are all in their different ways interested in dissecting the nature of modern society and the place of the individual human within it. Theodor Adorno certainly thought that was his aim: he was a founding member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose entire mission was to analyse society. Michel Foucault, too, did a lot of digging into the nature of society, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, The Birth of the Clinic and other works. It’s a mark of a serious thinker that their ideas about the specifics of their society connect with the universal in ways that make them relevant in other times and places; according to Daneyal Afaqui, Adorno’s ideas can tell us a lot about the ‘hustle culture’ of our frenetic modern world. And Muzainy Shahiefisally tries to show that Foucault’s delving into the historical roots of modern institutions and ideologies were not merely driven by the scientific passions of an archaeologist but by a burning commitment to individual liberty, one should make him appreciated, or perhaps even revered, by classical liberals. The rights (sometimes, the competing rights) of different groups of humans are right at the centre of contemporary politics, but Simone Weil was decades ahead of her time in thinking seriously about the rights of non-human entities and in particular about how this relates to animal suffering. Michela Dianetti and Chiara Li Mandri say that Weil’s ideas have recently gained even greater relevance as the rights of non-human entities of all kind start to be taken seriously by courts and legal systems. Weil’s analysis of the nature of rights in modern society still seems particularly modern despite all the changes since her tragic death from heart failure in 1943 while she was working in London for the Free French.

And then a completely different figure. Ernst Jünger was neither a democrat nor a liberal, but in the 1930s he rebuffed insistent Nazi attempts to recruit him to their cause. He dissected the nature of the Nazi regime under which he lived – one of the most horrifying embodiments of 20th century modernity – and developed for himself two ways to survive while keeping his personal integrity more or less intact. You can read about these two ways – the Anarch and the Forest Rebel – in T.S. Carney’s article.

Anglo-American critics of the Continentals often pan them for deliberate obscurity. Usually this is unfair, but in the case of Deleuze and Guattari, and their famously co-authored books, perhaps it is fair. D.E. Tarkington is not appalled but fascinated by this. He sees D&G as a beguiling puzzle, and wishes to share his enjoyment with you in his essay here.

What can we conclude from our Continentals-themed section? Only that just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, so there is also more than one way to dissect modernity. Monty Python once did a sketch about a man being prosecuted for selling a box of assorted chocolates with surprising and worrying fillings. In this spirit, we offer you this provoking collection of essays. ‘Crunchy Frog’, anyone?

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News

- News: August/September 2026

News

News: August/September 2026

Jobs bonanza as AI companies recruit philosophers • Researchers learn to ‘unwrap’ charred philosophy scrolls from Herculaneum — News reports by Anja Steinbauer

AI needs Philosophers

Philosophy is emerging as an unlikely beneficiary of the artificial intelligence boom, with growing demand for graduates and academics as technology companies seek expertise in ethics, reasoning and AI safety. A decade ago, humanities students were often encouraged to learn programming to improve their job prospects. Today, the picture is shifting. Recent figures from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York show that, in 2024, philosophy graduates in the United States had a lower unemployment rate (5.1%) than computer science graduates (7%), reflecting strong demand for their skills. Universities are also seeing philosophy academics recruited by AI companies. Luciano Floridi, professor of philosophy at Yale University, has described the movement of staff from philosophy departments into the technology sector as a “haemorrhaging”. The attraction lies in philosophy’s contribution to the development of AI systems. AI researchers are drawing on ideas ranging from Socratic questioning to the value theories of Immanuel Kant and John Locke to improve how AI models reason, challenge assumptions and make decisions. Philosophical approaches are also increasingly being used to reduce AI ‘hallucinations’, improve transparency and build safeguards against harmful behaviour. Major AI companies, including Anthropic, Google DeepMind, IBM and OpenAI, now employ philosophers or incorporate philosophical principles into the design of their models. These range from ‘constitutional AI’ frameworks, which embed moral rules into systems, to debates over whether AI should follow fixed principles or weigh up the consequences of its actions in different situations.

As AI becomes more deeply embedded in healthcare, transport, law and defence, questions about fairness, responsibility and accountability are becoming central to its development. For philosophers, the rapid growth of AI is creating new career opportunities, demonstrating the continuing importance of critical thinking and moral reasoning in an increasingly automated world.

AI Reveals Lost Philosophy

Part of papyrus scroll PHerc1667, an ancient philosophical text digitally ‘unwrapped’ by the Vesuvius Challenge. The top of each column has been lost due to burning of the scroll.

© Vesuvius Challenge under CC BY NC 4.0

Artificial intelligence and advanced X-ray imaging have enabled researchers to read complete ancient scrolls buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago, revealing previously inaccessible works of ancient philosophy without physically opening the fragile manuscripts. The breakthrough forms part of the Vesuvius Challenge, an international project launched in 2023 to develop AI tools capable of digitally ‘unwrapping’ hundreds of carbonised papyrus scrolls unearthed from the Villa of the Papyri in the Roman town of Herculaneum, which was destroyed alongside Pompeii in the eruption of AD 79. Among the newly deciphered texts are around 70 columns from On Vices, Book 1, and passages from On Gods, Book 8, by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus. Researchers have also recovered nearly 1.5 metres of text from another scroll dating to between 200 and 300BCE – the oldest Herculaneum manuscript to be read so far – containing reflections on ethics, art and human nature. This is the first time complete unopened scrolls have ever been read non-invasively. Previous attempts to physically unroll the manuscripts often caused irreparable damage because the papyri had been carbonised by the volcanic eruption. Project co-founder Brent Seales, professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky, described the advance as a turning point, saying researchers now believe it will be possible to read every scroll in the Herculaneum collection. The challenge has accelerated progress by making its imaging data, software and AI models openly available, supported by a US$1 million prize for the first team to read an entire scroll. Lead papyrologist Federica Nicolardi said virtual unwrapping has transformed the field by allowing scholars to preserve and study the manuscripts simultaneously. With hundreds of unopened scrolls still awaiting analysis, researchers believe the technology could dramatically expand knowledge of ancient philosophy, literature and intellectual life.

Extraterrestrial Consciousness?

What if while exploring space we find alien entities displaying complex responses to their environment? A new study in Philosophers’ Imprint argues that it would be reasonable to attribute conscious experience to such entities even if they are built from radically different physical materials than us. The paper by Prof. Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California, Riverside, and Dr Jeremy Pober of the University of Lisbon challenges the assumption that consciousness depends on the carbon-based biology found on Earth, arguing that consciousness is ‘substrate flexible’, capable of emerging in a wide variety of physical forms, provided they support sufficient complexity. The researchers argue that it is improbable that all intelligent life would share the same chemistry as organisms on Earth, and suggest that alien life could be based on alternative chemical systems, such as silicon or sulphur compounds, while still giving rise to conscious experience. Employing what they call the ‘Copernican Principle of Consciousness’ they claim that just as we now understand that it’s unreasonable to assume Earth occupies a uniquely privileged position in the cosmos, so it would similarly be unreasonable to assume that of all the entities in the universe that display complex behaviour, only humans are lucky enough to have conscious experiences. Restricting consciousness to organisms with human-like biochemistry, they contend, amounts to an unjustified form of ‘terrocentrism’. The paper draws a distinction between the appropriate response to alien entities with complex behaviour and the appropriate response to apparently conscious robots. The authors say that if we know a robot has been designed and manufactured with the express intention of mimicking consciousness, then it is more reasonable to hold back from regarding it as truly conscious, than in the case of an alien entity that has developed complexity without any intention to mimic.

University Philosophy Crisis in UK

There is renewed concern about the future of philosophy in UK universities after two of them announced plans to close down or phase out the subject. The University of Dundee has proposed ending Philosophy as a named degree from 2027 as part of a wider cost-cutting strategy aimed at addressing a major financial deficit. The university has already reduced its workforce through voluntary redundancies and is now seeking further savings, with additional job cuts and the suspension of programmes in philosophy, mathematics and languages under consideration. The proposal has prompted a petition from students, staff and supporters, who argue that Dundee’s philosophy department plays a unique role in Scotland. It is home to the internationally recognised Scottish Centre for Continental Philosophy and is the only philosophy programme in Scotland to specialise in European, rather than predominantly Anglo-American, philosophy. Supporters also point to the department’s strong teaching reputation, high student satisfaction and extensive outreach work with local schools. Meanwhile, as reported in Issue 174, University of Hertfordshire is completely closing its highly successful undergraduate philosophy programme.

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War

- Just War Theory

- Between Missiles & Morality

- On War, Kabbalah & Collateral Damage

War

Just War Theory

Keith Tidman thinks the world’s bristling arsenals and proneness to wars makes it all the more urgent.

To many people, the phrase ‘a just war’ sounds like an oxymoron. One might wonder, how can the lethal violence unleashed in war ever be just? Yet, realpolitik underscores that not all international quarrelsomeness lends itself to peaceful remedies. When is a country justified in going to war?

Notable thinkers in the ancient world, like Cicero and Plato, unsurprisingly weighed in on when and how war might be justified. Early attempts to codify this began with St Augustine of Hippo in the 5th century. Later, the 13th-century philosopher St Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, advanced the principles of ‘just war’ to a whole other level. His foundational work led to formal just-war principles, divided between the right to resort to war (jus ad bellum) and the right way to fight once war is underway (jus in bello). The so-called ‘father of international law,’ Hugo Grotius, in his early-17th-century work On the Law of War and Peace, initiated the reshaping of just-war theory – and its basis in moral, civil reciprocity – from the theory’s religious roots into secular terms. Much later, in the 20th and 21st centuries, came a third doctrinal category, the just way to act once a war has ended (jus post bellum).

Principles governing going to war came to include these:

• Just authority: Only legitimate, duly appointed national authorities may declare war;

• Just cause: The defense of self or allies, or intervening against the worst acts of inhumanity;

• Right intention: Staying focused on the just cause, and resisting the lure of material gain (that is, pillaging), expansionism, or intemperate militarism;

• Proportionality: Anticipated good outcomes must balance or outweigh anticipated bad consequences;

• Achievability: High probability of the war aims being fulfilled;

• Last resort: War is only permissible after sincere attempts to find peaceful solutions have failed.

Principles governing the fighting of wars include these:

• Targeting: only combatants and military sites, not civilians, captives, or medical resources;

• Proportionality: such that injury to lives and property aligns with expected military gains;

• Accountability: for the actions of individual soldiers and commanders;

• Necessity: such as resort to the least-harmful military options and force applied relative to objectives.

Principles governing behavior following a war’s end and during the transition to peace include these:

• Proportionality: in that peace terms should be reasonable and not the result of vengeance-seeking;

• Non-discrimination: ie not creating a framework that will treat vanquished parties unduly partially, punitively, or vengefully;

• Restorative: the peace should promote stability, redevelopment, institutional reinstatement, self-governance, and legal order;

• Accountability: to determine culpability and ensure that retribution is fair, respectful, reasonable, and measured, taking into account traditions.

To be just, a war needs to satisfy all of these criteria, not just some of them. And these need to be real, not merely token, measures, so that the temptation to breach peace for imagined gains is overshadowed by accountability to these principles.

Of course, modern, rapidly-changing military technology – being vastly more versatile, fast, furtive, farther reaching, and lethal – will necessitate revisiting the principles of just wars. The probable advent of fully autonomous weapon systems, which by definition will remove the human decision-maker all the way up to ‘pulling the trigger,’ points to further matters of ethics and accountability and threatens to exacerbate conditions. Folded into that array of frontline technologies are tactics like economic sanctions, cyberwarfare, proxy forces, asymmetric fighting, special operations, psychological operations, and mercenary insertion – individually and collectively impairing control over risk, behavior, and outcomes (intended and unintended).

Furthermore, the maturation of just-war theory from matters of states’ dominion to being part of human rights treaties and global law enforcement has led to a morphing of modern just-war theory. More of this needs to happen. Justice in war is the ultimate goal, in the face of the lamentable millennia-long predisposition of our species, perhaps hard-wired, to resort to warfare for all sorts of reasons. These have ranged from hegemonism to imperialism, ideology, fear/hatred of ‘the other,’ xenophobia, retribution, colonialism, religion, riches and resources, racism, pride, legacy, power and control, aggrandizement, dominion, and territoriality, among still others.

Current international laws and protocols, such as the aging and limited Geneva and Hague Conventions, aren’t foolproof. The often unbridled messiness and ‘fog and friction’ of modern wars have demonstrated this point, underscoring the need to bind assenting nations to obeying just war principles, perhaps in profoundly new, prescriptive ways that esteem human life. History’s chroniclers are watching. The abruptly changing landscape described above is all the more reason for philosophers and jurists to provide humankind with clear, well-crafted theories as to what constitutes ‘just war.’

© Keith Tidman 2026

Keith Tidman has written on philosophy and science, and is the author of two books: a philosophical anthology and a history of naval operations analysis.

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War

Between Missiles & Morality

AmirAli Maleki considers Hart, al-Farabi, and the Puzzled Man in wartime.

It’s the first night of the war in Iran. I am walking alone under a fractured sky lit by arcs of fire – missiles tracing paths like malicious comets. Each one sings its mechanical riddle: is it our weapon, or is it theirs? I stop near a shattered bench, crack open a can of soda, and listen to the uneasy hush that so often comes before impact.

Then I hear them: two elderly men arguing beside the ruins of an old bookstore, their presence eerily tangible. One is legal philosopher Herbert Hart (1907-1992 CE) – measured, meticulous, the weight of jurisprudence behind every word. The other, cloaked in the wisdom of centuries past, is Abu Nasr al-Farabi (c. 870-950 CE) – philosopher, statesman, and master of the virtuous city.

Hart points toward me, his voice as steady as law itself: “Here is the Puzzled Man. He did not start this war, he does not want to fight – and yet here he is, summoned to make a choice.” Al-Farabi responds, his tone both gentle and unyielding: “But precisely because he did not choose this moment, he must now choose his role within it. The preservation of order and justice demands not neutrality or passivity, but moral clarity.”

Now silent, they both turn to me, their dispute unresolved, and I am left with the question that ignites this article: In light of Hart’s legal realism and Farabi’s political idealism, what is a just response to war – not merely in theory, but under the shadow of its flame?

The Light of Shadow Friedrich Farshaad Razmjouie

The Puzzled Man in War

In The Concept of Law (1961), H.L.A. Hart distinguishes between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ points of view toward legal systems, emphasizing that law is not merely a set of coercive commands but also a normative (that is, moral) structure that presupposes a degree of voluntary recognition by its subjects (pp. 88-91). Yet Hart also acknowledges a persistent tension. Individuals often find themselves caught between the authority of law and their own moral or political uncertainty about its application. This tension becomes especially acute in times of war, when the legitimacy of state directives is clouded by economic hardship, political instability, and moral ambiguity. Hart’s notion of the ‘Puzzled Man’ – a figure who obeys the law but does not understand its justification – offers a compelling lens through which to view the wartime citizen. In Hart’s analysis, during war the puzzled person is not merely ignorant but morally disoriented, unsure whether the law deserves allegiance when it calls for involvement in the war, or merely demands it (p.137).

This figure resonates deeply with the experience of individuals in war-torn societies, particularly when the war is perceived as unjust, externally imposed, or driven by opaque political motives. In these contexts, the citizen becomes a puzzled man in Hart’s sense: someone subject to legal obligations, such as conscription, censorship, or rationing, but who lacks the internal conviction that these obligations are morally or politically justified. The bewilderment is not simply intellectual; it’s also ethical. The individual may ask: Why should I fight for a state that has failed to provide economic security or political transparency? This question echoes Hart’s concern with the fragility of legal authority when it’s divorced from evident moral legitimacy.

In a war setting, the bewildered wartime subject is not merely a passive victim of legal coercion, but a morally engaged agent, perhaps struggling to reconcile the demands of law with the imperatives of conscience. In this light, the battlefield becomes not only a site of physical conflict but also a crucible of legal and moral identity. The puzzled man, standing in-between Hart’s analytical jurisprudence and the lived reality of war, becomes a symbol of the modern subject’s fractured relationship with authority – a figure who must navigate not only bullets and bombs, but also the deeper question of what it means to obey. Hart’s legal positivism, while insisting on the separation of law and morality, does not deny the importance of moral evaluation, although he does argue that a critique of unjust laws is only meaningful if we first understand what law actually is rather than what it ought to be (pp.185-186).

Al-Farabi & the Clarification of Legal Duty

While Hart’s legal philosophy captures the moral disorientation of the individual caught in the machinery of questionable law, al-Farabi offers a complementary, and, in some ways, corrective vision. In his Fusul al-Madani (Chapters on Civil Polity), al-Farabi introduces the concept of the ‘Necessary City’ (al-madīna al-ḍarūriyya), a political formation in which the primary aim is not the realization of virtue or of philosophical contemplation as it would be in the ‘Virtuous City’, but the preservation of life, territorial integrity, and basic social order:

“A city may be either necessary or virtuous. The Necessary City is one in which its members cooperate with one another to attain what is essential for survival, livelihood, and the preservation of life. In contrast, the Virtuous City is that in which citizens assist one another in the pursuit of the highest goods.” (Chapters Chapter 28)

These two Cities are meaningful only in relation to one another. In other words, unless the first perfection – namely, the preservation of life and the fulfillment of basic needs – is realized, the second perfection – human intellectual maturity and the cultivation of virtue – cannot be achieved.

In this framework, war is not a moral aberration but an unfortunate functional necessity. The citizens of the Necessary City are not yet participants in the virtuous life, but they are bound by a shared imperative to defend the conditions that make any future growth in virtue possible. As al-Farabi writes, the Necessary City is one in which “people cooperate to attain the necessities of life and to repel harm.” This includes, crucially, the defense of the city itself – which is necessary even if its leadership is flawed or its justice incomplete.

Hart & Al-Farabi Team Up

This insight has profound implications for Hart’s puzzled man. In The Concept of Law Hart describes the Puzzled Man as someone who obeys legal directives without understanding their moral basis, especially when the law appears disconnected from justice or the public good. In wartime, this bewilderment only intensifies: why should one fight for a state that is economically unstable, politically opaque, or ethically compromised? Al-Farabi’s Necessary City offers an answer by reframing the situation: one does not fight because the state is just, but because without the state, there is no platform upon which justice can ever be built. The defense of the polity therefore becomes a precondition for any future reform. In this light, the citizen’s legal obligation to back the war is no longer morally paralyzing – it is clarified by necessity. The puzzled man becomes a resolved actor, not because he has found moral perfection in the law, but because he recognizes the existential stakes of the law’s collapse.

Thus, al-Farabi’s political realism enriches Hart’s legal positivism. And it reminds us that the legitimacy of the state and its laws in wartime does not rest on its moral purity but on its role in preserving the very conditions under which ongoing moral and legal discourse can survive. The battlefield, in this case, then, is not only a site of destruction, but paradoxically, the crucible in which the possibility of future justice is forged.

Conclusion: Choice Under Fire

The rockets have faded into distant echoes. I sit again on that broken bench, the empty soda can rolling near my feet. Hart and al-Farabi are gone. Perhaps they were never there. Perhaps they are still debating, in some higher place. But their challenge remains. Hart shows us that legal obligation without moral clarity breeds disillusionment. And in the chaos of war, his Puzzled Man becomes all of us, uncertain whether obedience is duty or merely survival. But al-Farabi counters that, in moments of existential peril, hesitation for contemplation is not a luxury one can afford. The Necessary City must be defended – not because it is virtuous, but because without it, no virtue can ever arise.

And so I return to my question: How should I respond?

I am still uncertain. Hart has taught me to interrogate authority: to remain vigilant against the seduction of blind obedience. Meanwhile, al-Farabi has taught me that ideals are hollow if they’re not preceded by actions that allow preservation. Between the two, I begin to form my response – not a perfect synthesis, but an imperfect resolve.

I rise from the bench. In the distance, sirens howl. The war continues. But perhaps now, I do not walk alone.

© AmirAli Maleki 2026

AmirAli Maleki is a philosophy researcher and the Editor of PraxisPublication.com. He works in the fields of political philosophy, Islamic philosophy, and hermeneutics.

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War

On War, Kabbalah & Collateral Damage

Anton Koslov takes a concept from the Kabbalah to understand the nature of war.

I recently spoke with an American-Israeli tech entrepreneur about the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, specifically about the deaths of over a hundred and sixty girls and staff at the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab. My interlocutor dismissed those deaths as “unfortunate but inevitable collateral damage” serving the cause of the greater good. I’d heard that phrase before. Last June, I watched Benny Morris, a historian whose rigor and courage in examining modern Israeli history I had long admired, speak publicly about civilian deaths in Gaza. He used the same words, delivered with the same calm detachment. What remained with me was not his statement, but how effortlessly it arrived and how little it seemed to cost him to say it.

War has often been described as an instrument of rational policy. Strategic planning, operational doctrine, and legal regulation, all presuppose that military violence can be directed by rational calculus and smart modern technology. But how does this correspond to the actual experience of war?

Over two hundred years ago, Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz used the term ‘friction’ to describe the pervasive discrepancy between war as it is planned and war as it actually unfolds. Friction arises from the countless contingencies that constitute combat: miscommunication, error, imperfect intelligence, logistical failures, weather, and the unpredictable reactions of the enemy. These forces transform even the simplest operation once it enters the field of action. In this sense, war follows a logic closer to chaos than to rational design. This reveals a disturbing aspect of human reality: the attempt to control violence through rational design continually encounters forces that resist such control. ‘Organized chaos’ is a contradiction in terms, yet war lives inside that contradiction. The political structures designed to govern violence operate within an order of intention and responsibility, while the violence they attempt to regulate emerges from a space far less stable. This is the disturbing aspect of warfare that no legal framework has been able to resolve, and perhaps none can resolve, because the problem is ontological rather than ethical: you can’t change the nature of war, no matter how good your intentions are. That is to say, some good intention may initiate a war, but it loses governing power once combatants enter the chaotic zone of action.

Sitra Achra

There is an older vocabulary for this domain. In the language of the Kabbalah, a medieval Jewish mystical system, Sitra Achra, literally meaning ‘the other side’, designates the realm of impurity, excess, and distortion, in which meaning dissolves and destructive forces prey on its residues. In the present understanding, war is the passage into Sitra Achra, as the entry into war is the moment at which those structures designed to regulate violence enter a territory whose dynamics continuously exceed their capabilities. Strategic strikes, misdirected weapons, destroyed infrastructure, systemic civilian casualties, are all expressions of this process. Sitra Achra also identifies the point at which the moral language of war encounters something it cannot fully incorporate, where the consequences of violence exceed the intentions that set them in motion. War, then, is the revelation of Sitra Achra, the realm of chaos, within political reality.

To use a concept invented by Mikhail Bakhtin, war also has a carnivalesque dimension. This means that it does not merely free violence from the constraints of good ethical intention, it also releases men from the identities peacetime imposes on them, as if they were taking part in a carnival. The pilot who bombs a police station or a housing complex, and who moves through the destruction with something like exhilaration, is the same man who, six days earlier, drove his children to school and complained about the weather to his wife. Thus war suspends the civilian identity and issues another in its place. This suspension is not incidental to the institution of war, though; it’s one of its constitutive features. War is the moment when a society collectively lifts its prohibitions, and the individual is temporarily relieved of the self that ordinary life requires. What is pathological in peacetime becomes not only permissible, but celebrated. To kill, to burn, to destroy – these acts, which in civilian life would require years of psychiatric elucidation, are in war the basis of medals. The transformation is institutional: here the state licenses a particular form of behaviour that it elsewhere criminalizes.

These facts of chaos and inversion are what the moral language of warfare works hardest to suppress. The idea of ‘collateral damage’ presupposes an erroneous technician, an administrator of the accidental – a man who aimed at one thing and, regrettably, struck another. The entire ethical architecture of modern warfare is built around this figure. Yet the historical record is less tidy. War has always produced men who enjoy what they’re doing. This enjoyment is something the institution enables, then needs to manage afterward.

Here the ideas of Sitra Achra and the carnival of war converge. Sitra Achra is where the ethical order of intention and accountability loses its governing power. The carnival of war is the psychological experience of that loss manifest in a felt liberation from the constraints of one’s peacetime identity. Put together, they describe a domain of chaos in which destruction is not always unintended. Here the language of ‘collateral damage’ is invoked to obscure both the chaos and also any pleasure the chaos releases. It’s used to account for the bomb that went astray, but also (more quietly), for the fire among civilian buildings that was set deliberately and gleefully. The troubling suspicion the carnival idea raises, is that ‘proportionality’ is often the story told about a violence that has already exceeded it. The perpetrators would rather not name the mere anarchy of war directly.

Language’s Double Effect

The Tree of Life. Mediaeval, Public Domain

Violent chaos is precisely the issue the term ‘collateral damage’ was invented to solve, or rather, to manage. It entered military discourse in May 1961, in a paper by nuclear strategist Thomas C. Schelling titled ‘Dispersal, Deterrence, and Damage’, where Schelling used the term to describe unintended harm to civilian areas resulting from strikes on strategic targets. It was subsequently absorbed into U.S. Department of Defense documentation, where it was defined as unintentional or incidental injury to persons or objects that are not lawful military targets, with the addendum that such damage is lawful provided it is not excessive relative to the anticipated military advantage. The concept echoes the medieval Catholic doctrine of Double Effect, whereby an action that incidentally causes harm may be morally permissible so long as the act itself is intended for good, the harmful effect is not intended, and there’s proportionality between the good achieved and the harm done. Collateral damage is this doctrine stripped of its theological underpinnings, put into administrative terminology, and issued as a bureaucratic classification. It provides a language of moral intention in a domain where that intention has already lost its governing authority. That is the central function of the concept, and also its central dishonesty: it attempts to impose a symbolic system of moral accountability onto a space of violence that Clausewitz (and warfare itself) has already shown to be ungovernable by such a category.

In practice, however, the concept of collateral damage does something even more troubling. It renders the lives of all those killed ‘by accident’ peripheral to the moral imagination, reducing them to residue. Their deaths are framed as regrettable background to the ‘real’ ethical struggle – say, Israel against its adversaries, Russia’s war against Ukraine, or the US’s ‘management’ of regional order. These victims are not mourned as ends in themselves. They are accounted for, briefly, then forgotten.

There’s also the hierarchy of civilizational proximity – an implicit distinction of whose deaths belong to the moral universe (those on our side) and whose do not. The organizing principle used to assign a population to one side or the other of the line drawn between civilization and its adversaries is political, religious, and/or cultural affiliation. Once a population has been placed on the enemy side, or in the ambiguous category of those who harbor enemies, their deaths carry a different moral weight. The division sorts the dead into the grievable and the statistical, establishing a hierarchy of whose deaths require accounting for, and whose deaths may be aggregated and approximated. Thus, Israeli deaths appear in Israeli and American news reports with names, ages, and personal histories, while Iranian deaths (say), when tallied at all, arrive as numbers. And ‘collateral damage’ is often the language used for managing the deaths of people who were already, by prior classification, on the wrong side. When a Western broadcaster describes over a hundred and sixty girls killed in Minab as ‘collateral damage’, what’s being communicated, quietly and politely, is that these lives occupied a different category of humanity from ‘our’ people. They were incidental lives, extinguished through procedure rather than malice. The distinction the term makes, intended to preserve moral seriousness, ends by evacuating it.

The question this poses is of an ontological order: who is permitted to be a victim, and who vanishes into statistics? Some civilian casualties rupture the world, while others leave no mark, like rubble cleared from a site where a building stood that was already considered expendable. The concept of collateral damage administers this inequality with the neutrality of a technical term. It drapes the decision to kill in the language of military necessity, converting an ethical consideration into an operational outcome.

Summation

Since its inception in the 1960s, the term ‘collateral damage’ has dissolved so thoroughly into the stream of evening news, press releases, military briefings, and policy papers, that its origin is easy to forget. We forget that it was designed to forestall moral judgment about violent actions; to shield power from indignation and its wielders from ethical censure or legal consequence. It performs a final act of erasure by removing the dead from moral discourse. So its victims are killed twice: first by the bomb, and then by the language that renders their deaths without moral weight. Primo Levi observed of the concentration camps that the ultimate ambition of their operators was not merely to kill, but to make it as though the killed had never existed. The concept of collateral damage works toward the same end by different means, and with considerably greater institutional respectability.

The term ‘collateral damage’ requires no cruelty in the person who uses it. It requires only habit and the willingness to accept that certain deaths need not disturb one’s morning. But the Sitra Achra is not far from us. It’s on the other side of the language we have agreed to use.

As for Thomas Schelling, who introduced the term: he went on to become one of the most influential American strategic thinkers of the twentieth century. He died at the age of ninety-five, well-regarded and at peace. In 2005, he was even awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, for “having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis.”

© Anton Koslov 2026

Anton Koslov is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Political Theory at the American Graduate School of International Relations and Diplomacy in Paris.

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Continentals

- Hustle Culture & the Illusion of Freedom

- Simone Weil & Animal Suffering

- Why Classical Liberals Should Embrace Foucault

- The Strength of Quiet Rebellion

- Fun With Deleuze & Guattari

Continentals

Hustle Culture & the Illusion of Freedom

Daneyal Afaqui critiques modern work culture, with input from Theodor Adorno.

Modern capitalism often phrases the concept of freedom in terms of productivity, entrepreneurship, and self-optimization. We are told that the key traits for success are discipline, hard work, and a willingness to push the limits of standard expectations. ‘Hustle culture’ takes this to extremes by encouraging people to work continually, turning every moment into a chance for economic gain, perhaps by having multiple income sources. In modern societies people often juggle precarious jobs, rising costs of living, and increased competition. Hustle culture turns these structural conditions into ‘chances for self-empowerment’. Social media, motivational literature, and corporate discourse promote hustle as a means of autonomy. However, this rhetoric of empowerment raises a question: Does hustle culture actually represent freedom, or is it, rather, subtly reproducing domination?

The German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) who was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, offers a strong framework for investigating this question. According to Adorno, the ideologically-driven character of ‘autonomy’ and the role of repression show themselves in modern societies by turning the promise of freedom into a mechanism of conformity. From this perspective, hustle culture can be seen not as the actualization of freedom but as a modern form of what Adorno describes as the ‘illusion of freedom’.

Actual Freedom by Melanie Wu

Image © Melanie Wu 2026. Please visit her Instagram: @melaniewu_Illu

Freedom as Ideology

Adorno’s criticism starts with the Enlightenment. This was a cultural movement in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe to free human thinking from traditional sources of authority. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) described it as “man’s emergence from his self imposed immaturity.” Thus the Enlightenment brought to birth the modern conception of autonomy, as involving an individual who is capable of rational self-determination and has the courage to use own understanding without guidance from others. Adorno and his co-author Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) themselves argue that in the Enlightenment, an attempt was made to “dispel myths and overthrow fantasy with knowledge” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947). Philosophers like Francis Bacon (1561-1626) had emphasized that knowledge of nature would give humanity control over it, and as a result human life would improve. Through reason and scientific inquiry, mankind hoped to become the master of nature and author of his own destiny.

However, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the project of the Enlightenment has a contradiction hidden within it: the same rationality that promised liberation gradually turns into a new form of domination. After the Enlightenment had produced the Industrial Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, reason increasingly became what Max Weber (1864-1920) called ‘instrumental rationality’ – thinking directed toward the efficient and effective choice of means to practical ends. In instrumental rationality, reason ceases to be a form of reflection on the purposes of life, and instead becomes a technical instrument for the achievement of goals already defined by the social system. So there is already a close interconnection between instrumental rationality and systems of administration, economic exchange, and technological control.

For Adorno, the transformation to instrumental reasoning is part of ‘the dialectic of Enlightenment’. Enlightenment thought tries to rid the world of unjustified intellectual authority and superstition by keeping its focus on calculable questions. Yet in doing so it fosters a new myth, formed around the belief in rational calculation and technical mastery as the ultimate forms of knowledge. The world becomes an object to dominate, while human beings themselves are increasingly integrated into systems of economic and bureaucratic control. Adorno and Horkheimer opine that Enlightenment rationality is therefore turned against the promise of freedom it originally held out. Instead of making real freedom, instrumental reasoning is part of a social order in which people are subordinated to systems built from efficiency calculations.

This has severe implications for human autonomy. In classical Enlightenment philosophy, especially in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, autonomy is the ability of rational agents to govern themselves in accordance with principles they freely endorse. Autonomy in this sense means independence from external authority. However, Adorno believes that in modern industrial societies, human choice gets caught in structures that hinder freedom. He argues that in modern societies, autonomy cannot be understood outside of the social totality that influences individual behaviour. In contemporary societies, the exchange relations (who owns what) and modes of industrial production form a social order where men and women must play particular roles in order to survive. Capitalism needs innovative and economically active individuals – autonomous people whose autonomy is nevertheless limited by the logic of the market. As Adorno puts it, the individual is free “to the extent to which the economic system required him to be autonomous” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947 ). The autonomy of the individual is thus turned into a requirement and tool of the system itself. Instrumental rationality therefore leads people to organize their actions according to principles of efficiency, productivity, and economic success. Individuals then internalize these ideals as normative (‘what is to be done’), and so come to identify with them as a projection of their own rational agency. In other words, people come to pretend to themselves that this instrumental set of values is what they freely choose. So individuals seem able to act freely, but in fact their choices, and indeed their values, are shaped by the requirements of the economic system.

Hustle Culture & the Illusion of Freedom

Hustle culture is an impressive contemporary product of this formulation of autonomy. The grand theme of hustle culture is the self-made person who rises socially through sheer hard work and entrepreneurial spirit. This modern motivational discourse encourages people to optimize income, such that free time – previously always considered as being for leisure or personal development is re-packaged as a chance to advance economically. Here the ideal individual is not just employed, but constantly performing self-improvement in their own productivity. Success comes to be a constituent of self-esteem, and identity to be linked with economic performance. Things that don’t seem related to work, such as hobbies, fitness, or social relationships, are frequently represented as missed opportunities to develop yourself and so increase productivity. The outcome is a subjectivity whereby people entirely measure themselves by market standards. Under this cultural atmosphere, the struggle for economic success becomes a moral duty. The system thus ensures compliance not by any direct coercion, but by facilitating an internalization of its norms. So instead of questioning the social organization of work, individuals are admonished to adjust themselves to extant society by working harder and becoming more efficient.

This process is an illustration of what Adorno calls the ‘ideological function’ of autonomy: individuals think of themselves as freely choosing to strive for productivity and success, but the goals they choose have been determined by the economic situation. Here, freedom becomes synonymous with being able to function well in the market, and the person who fails to achieve financial success is interpreted as lacking discipline or determination, rather than provoking people to confront structural problems within the system. Hustle culture thereby covers up the social forces behind individual behavior and translates system-level inequalities into moral judgments about individuals.

The critique of hustle culture is intensified when Adorno applies psychoanalytic theory, and especially the ideas of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Freud claimed that the restraining or repression of instinctive desires is necessary to ensure social order. Adorno uses this observation to propose that autonomy can be built through repression at the expense of impulses linked to the unconscious. First, personal psychological repression results in the formation of the rational ego – this creation being glorified by Enlightenment philosophy as the origin of true human liberty. But the repression in contemporary societies has a different form. People are taught to control their wants, feelings, and urges so as to be able to fit in at work. The ideal subject is one who is thoroughly in control of his or her behavior, emotions, and time, in order to be productive. Hustle culture provides a good example of such a model of self-discipline. Strict time management, productive routines, and self-observation are promoted as means of liberation and achievement. However, in most cases these practices reflect external pressures, where the person is made both the object of and the means of control.

The Power of Hustle Culture

Yet hustle culture is even more ideologically powerful, as is further explained by the critique of the culture industry by Adorno.

Theodor Adorno (right) and Max Horkheimer in 1964

Adorno believes that contemporary cultural industries generate a type of entertainment that homogenously supports the status quo. Cultural products (films, music, even magizines) reproduce and promote the dominant values of consumption, competition, and conformity. And although hustle culture seems more active than other types of entertainment, it has a similar ideological task.

This dynamic is only exacerbated by the power of digital media as it promotes motivational content, productivity tips, and stories of successful entrepreneurs. Social media sites can continually subject users to filtered pictures of victory by efficiency, and influencers and businesspeople showcase their images in the most stylized way, making it seem that success is inevitably achieved through unremitting persistence. These narratives utilise the culture of comparison, where people compare their own value to the perceived value of others. In such an environment the pressure to be productive will be self-sustaining and perpetual. This content thus make people internalize principles of productivity and competition while obscuring the forces that organize economic life. And hustle culture only enhances the association of individual identity with an economic role as people are advised to think of themselves as brands or as entrepreneurial projects.

A different approach to hustle culture follows the social roles formulated by Adorno. In contemporary societies people play various roles in the economic system – as employees, entrepreneurs, consumers, among other things. These roles give people identities, and expectations that shape their behavior. And although people can find opportunities to express themselves individually through such roles, Adorno believes that they can also be used as a means of social standardization, as a person identifies with the position he or she occupies. Thus the chances of real autonomy become narrower and narrower.

To Adorno this state of affairs is the tragic paradox of modern life. The Enlightenment aimed for the freedom of thought and action of individuals, independent of domination. However, the growth of capitalistic society as a result of Enlightenment discoveries changed this independence into a process of incorporation into the system, and now people are actively involved in reproducing the very structures that restrict their freedoms. The pretence of independence in modern culture thus turns out to be one of the best modes of control.

However, to Adorno this does not mean that people cannot be free. Instead, it implies that true autonomy presupposes critical thinking about the social conditions that define our behavior. Here freedom is not diminished into efficient self-management. Rather, it’s concerned with the capacity to challenge and if necessary invert the structures that shape social life. Critical theory thus aims at uncovering the concealed elements of domination encrypted in day-to-day practices faced with hustle culture, it prompts us to rethink ideas of work, productivity, and success. A never-ending search for efficiency and wealth does not necessarily reflect a real blossoming of humanity. The prevalence of burnout, anxiety, and alienation related to contemporary work cultures instead implies that the ‘freedom’ promise of economic productivity is highly questionable.

Conclusion

Hustle culture is part of the overall ideological trend of modernity outlined by Adorno and Horkheimer. The ‘freedom through reason’ called by Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant, has become entangled in systems of domination that define both society and subjectivity. The ideal of autonomy lives on, but it’s slowly and silently altered to become a tool of the capitalist system. This is reflected in a hustle culture that proposes ruthless productivity as the means of ‘becoming free’, while at the same time increasingly integrating the individual into the economic order. Through Adorno’s analysis hustle culture is thus seen as an illusion where seeming empowerment can be a type of social control where people voluntarily engage in subordinating themselves. Contemporary critical thinking does not simply need to point this illusion out, then, but also needs to envision other ways of living, where the definition of freedom does not lie in productivity and market value. It is therefore only through addressing the contradictions of modern rationality that the emancipatory promise of Enlightenment thought can be fulfilled.

© Daneyal Afaqui 2026

Daneyal Afaqui is currently pursuing Philsophy at Azim Premji University, Bangalore.

Some Currents in Continental Philosophy

Structuralism: From early 20th century work of Saussure, later advanced by Levi-Strauss, Lacan, and Althusser (1950s-80s). Language is a self-supporting structure of signs, each consisting of a signifier (sound) and signified (meaning). Societies organise around systems of communications.

Post-Structuralism: Later 20th century. Rejects stable or objective meanings and says language is fluid and shaped by changing power relations. Barthes, Derrida, Irigaray, Ricoeur, Kristeva, Deleuze & Guattari, Foucault

Deconstruction: Derrida and followers. Says all texts contain inherent tensions which undermine their surface meaning. By extension, suggests that the external world can be understood as a text.

Critical Theory / Frankfurt School: 1929-2010s in Germany. (early) Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Fromm (later) Habermas. Aimed to develop critical theories of society in ways that were loosely influenced by Marx.

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Continentals

Simone Weil & Animal Suffering

Michela Dianetti & Chiara Li Mandri say non-human beings don’t need to be persons for us to care about them. Simone Weil offers another way.

In New Zealand, the Whanganui River is now a legal person with legal rights. In Argentina, a court recognised the orangutan Sandra as a ‘non-human person’. Campaigns are underway to extend similar recognition to whales, through the ‘I’m a person too’ movement launched at the UN Ocean Conference in Nice; to dolphins, such as the Bottlenose population near South Korea’s Jeju Island; and even to whole ecosystems. The logic is simple: if these entities are designated as persons in the eyes of the law, then their rights will be guaranteed by the law.

Simone Weil by Darren McAndrew

When environmentalists push to give rivers, whales, or forests legal personhood, the idea sounds both strange and promising. But when such legal recognitions take place, often things can get complicated. For example, four years ago, the Magpie River in Quebec was recognised as a legal person, with nine rights, including the right to be free from pollution and the right to flow. Despite this, a hydroelectric company still retains 80% of its water use until 2039, since gaining personhood does not automatically override laws already in place. The new rights exist within the previously established norms of a Western legal system with competing interests and a long tradition of human bias. So while the Magpie River has greater standing than before, this does not mean that it is safe from over-exploitation.

Acknowledging the good faith of these efforts, however, we ask: is treating entities in the non-human realm as legal persons the only way for us to care about them and respond to worsening ecological destruction?

The ‘ethics of attention’ developed by French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943) offers another path. For Weil, the root of our moral responsibility towards other humans lies not in their agency or their individuality, but in vulnerability. To recognise the value and dignity of other people requires acknowledging the shared vulnerability we all experience. Weil called this a matter of attention: to truly see others as they are, in their independence from us, in their unique needs, and their finitude, without folding them into our own comforting narratives.

Take pigeons, for example. You might notice them approaching you while you sit in the sun, and immediately think of them as annoying animals invading your space, carriers of diseases, or thieves trying to snatch your dinner. In this way, they become little more than an outlet for your annoyance – something to blame as you move through a stressful day. Yet pigeons were once also used as companions, racers, and messengers, before humans abandoned them in favour of faster technologies. They still turn to us though, associating humans with food. To become aware of the needs of another in this sort of way is, for Weil, what allows a sense of obligation to emerge naturally. But if we applied Weil’s ethics of attention to the natural world, what would happen?

Consider our current condition: around the globe, habitats are being degraded, species are vanishing, and ecological systems are being pushed to their limits. Yet by narrowly framing environmental protection through imposing legal personhood, we risk cultivating a narrow and selective concern where only certain things – often the most charismatic animals or culturally significant landscapes – are granted recognition. A whale may easily be celebrated as a ‘non-human person’; but what of mosses, bogs, or insects, whose lives are no less entangled with ours? Moreover, the goal of granting personhood to non-human beings, adopted as a singular response to exploitation, risks reinforcing the very worldview that has brought us to ecological devastation in the first place – anthropocentrism, or the idea that only beings sufficiently like us are worthy of moral concern.

Weil’s approach, by contrast, resists this hierarchy of human significance, visibility or affection. For her, it is not beauty, usefulness, or symbolic weight to humanity that matters morally. Vulnerability itself creates the claim to moral consideration. The legal path of personhood, moreover, is inherently piecemeal. It proceeds entity by entity, and is negotiated differently across different countries and contexts, often involving long, drawn-out legal struggles. While such efforts open an important space for new forms of recognition, they also reveal the limitations of a rights-based framework for ecological protection, including that rights must be codified, debated, and defended in ways that can stall or fragment action. Moral obligations, on the other hand, generate a more immediate and holistic response: and for Weil they begin not with arguments over who or what qualifies, but with the type of attention they demand in the here and now.

Moving beyond personhood and rights, then, Weil invites us to recover the language of obligation. Not just obligations to individual beings who resemble us, nor to abstract categories of ‘rights holders’, but, extending her thought further, to all beings who are vulnerable, where this means subject to, and suffering, harm. Witnessing the vulnerability of a particular bog, bird, or river also engages us emotionally and thus also motivates the moral call to action. It requires that we acknowledge the possibility of a destruction of what is irreplaceable, or whose loss would otherwise impoverish our world as a whole.

As humanity confronts the accelerating climate crisis and the destruction of habitats worldwide, it’s worth asking whether granting ‘personhood’ to our landscapes and species is the best path forward. The crises we face are not only a matter of failing policies or weak enforcement, they’re also the result of a crisis of imagination and perception – the consequences of a perspective that treats non-human beings as resources, invisible unless useful. To respond well, we may need more than alternative political and moral frameworks. We may also need a different way of paying attention.

© Dr Michela Dianetti & Chiara Li Mandri 2026

Michela Dianetti is a postdoctoral researcher in Philosophy at the University of Galway, funded by Research Ireland.

Chiara Li Mandri is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Palermo, and a visiting researcher at the University of Galway.

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Continentals

Why Classical Liberals Should Embrace Foucault

Muzainy Shahiefisally argues that Foucault really is on the side of freedom.

The ‘godfather of postmodernism’, Michel Foucault (1926-1984), has long been deemed an enemy by defenders of classical liberalism, at least among those who get their philosophy from podcasts rather than primary sources. Within this milieu, cultural commentators, chief among them Helen Pluckrose, have made a cottage industry out of affixing responsibility for the rise of wokeness squarely on Foucault’s shoulders. Since others before me have taken Pluckrose and her merry band of self-styled ‘liberal humanists’ to task for misreading Foucault, I will not belabour the point here. Suffice it to say that treating Foucault as the progenitor of woke progressivism freezes his worldview to an early phase of his thought and thus caricatures his work to the point of parody.

These characterisations draw their force from early work, when Foucault was still an avowed Marxist. Later in life, especially in his lectures at the Collège de France near the end of his life, Foucault not only shed those sympathies but developed a positive affinity for market economics as championed by the likes of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. The nature of communism, in terms of how it prohibits people from engaging in voluntary market activity and denies individuals property rights over their creations, Foucault came to see as the death of creative life and its replacement by sterile bureaucratic apparatuses of control:

“the idea that the essential function of society or the State… is to take control of life, to manage it… it seems to be that socialism takes this over wholesale. And the result is that… a socialist State… must exercise the right to kill, or the right to eliminate, or the right to disqualify” (Society Must Be Defended, 2004).

Having dispensed with some of the hollow distortions of Foucault that abound today, I want to advance a thesis that’s altogether taboo in contemporary liberal circles: that far from being a menace to classical liberalism, Foucault’s diagnosis of how discursive power operates to rigidify state power places him among the classical liberal tradition’s most perceptive intellectual allies.

A young Michel Foucault – before he famously lost all his hair. 2026 portrait by Gail Campbell based on an old photo.

Foucault For Freedom!

To substantiate this bold claim it’s worth beginning by demonstrating the distinctiveness of Foucauldian thought in one particular area. Unlike other luminaries in postmodern philosophy and critical theory, Foucault did not believe that ‘power relations’ (his term for the external forces which serve to shape how we behave and understand ourselves) determine who we become. Instead, he insists that power relations are never totalising: that there’s always space for individuals to exercise creative agency to contest social norms, for example.

This aspect of Foucault’s oeuvre allows him to part company with those tarred with ‘postmodern’ or ‘Critical Theorist’ labels. Consider, for instance, Andrea Dworkin, patron saint of the anti-sex left. In her book Right-Wing Women (1983), Dworkin’s central contention is that women do not really possess right-wing beliefs about the traditional behaviour of women. Instead, she asserts, women on the political right espouse the beliefs they do because of false consciousness: specifically, the patriarchal structures which supposedly dictate the terms of our engagement with society have caused women to internalise misogyny.

The liberal humanists who denounce Foucault might expect him to nod along with Dworkin. Yet, a straightforward reading of Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics (2004) shows clearly that he would demur from Dworkin’s analysis. First, as I mentioned, Foucault in his latter days became a fervent believer in the creativity of the free market. Far from denouncing it as patriarchal and oppressive, Foucault lauded it for “prohibit[ing] any form of intervention and, even better, any form of overarching gaze which would enable the process [of self-creation] to be totalized” (The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979). Second, while Foucault did believe that norms can be internalised to produce forms of ‘subjectivation’ (his term for our acceptance of norms which have been thrust upon us by external forces), this internalisation process is not deterministic in the way Dworkin describes. Indeed, given the present pervasiveness of left-wing beliefs among young women, Foucault might describe right-wing belief amongst women as an exercise in creative agency resisting the dominant discourse. Even in Dworkin’s and Foucault’s own day, in light of Foucault’s adamant belief that power relations are never totalising, it is plausible that he would have characterised right-wing women not as products of a patriarchal environment, but as free agents exercising their agency to challenge ‘orthodox’ beliefs. Unlike other critical and postmodern scholars of his age, Foucault was sensitive to the fact that individuals are never simply marionettes pushed this way and that by social forces. Regardless of how powerful social forces might prove, individuals still possess the capacity to go against the grain and assert their own values.

Foucault For Truth!

At this juncture, a sceptic might object that Foucault was a moral relativist, and thus ill-suited to join the ranks of the classical liberal tradition, which emphasises that individual rights are grounded in objectively true moral facts. Such an objection, however, is a thorough misreading of Foucault. Foucault did believe in objective truth. His intellectual output, however, was not concerned with the nature of truth per se, but rather with regimes of truth – that is, with how truth is “produced and transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great political… apparatuses” (Power: Essential Works 1954-1984, 2020). In essence, a major part of Foucault’s project was structured around how institutions of power (political, scientific, journalistic, or otherwise) produce and disseminate narratives for mass consumption to be adopted as truth by society. This concerned Foucault as the ability to manipulate ‘reality’ reduces the scope for individuals to contest dominant narratives, which in turn confines them to the ordained orthodoxies created by the state and allied institutions.

Daniel Schwen © CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

Foucault’s theory of truth regimes is akin to George Orwell’s description in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) of how the totalitarian State not only disseminates norms to be internalised as truth by its subjects, but how this internalisation also leads citizens to police their neighbours. To be sure, some contemporary liberals are reticent to adopt Foucault’s theory of truth regimes because of its possible implications for scientific knowledge. Yet, this reflexive impulse among contemporary liberals to defend the objectivity of science does overlook the fact that in our age science is a highly politicised discipline. And it bears emphasising that Foucault is not critiquing genuine scientific discoveries. However, he does point out that scientific knowledge is not always pure and can be infected by ideology. In fact, nowhere is the modern regime more visible than in its politicisation of scientific knowledge. Consider for instance how the World Health Organization initially characterised transgenderism as a mental illness in its ICD-10 manual, whereas in its ICD-11 manual this was deemed an outdated diagnosis, with the conclusion that transgenderism is “not actually a mental health condition”. Whether you think the new characterisation is the result of genuine scientific advancement or not, as Foucault would tell us, we ought to be suspicious of the flip-flop. It seems plausible that modern progressive political dogmas, which stress the need to reduce stigma and foster inclusion, influenced the science to produce the paradigm shift. Generally, the fact that scientific institutions are peddling truth masks the reality that the process by which some of this ‘truth’ was produced was inherently political. By concealing the political nature of this influence under a veneer of rationality, these institutions, in Foucault’s words, ‘produce and sustain’ a progressive ideology of power. However, for Foucault, exposing how systems of power manufacture ‘truths’ to cement their power serves to “detach the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it operates at the present time” (Power: Essential Works 1954-1984, 2020).

Foucault For President!

Indeed, strip away the jargon Foucault developed , and he begins to sound downright Madisonian. One-time US President James Madison (1751-1836) argued for the separation of legislative powers to prevent the concentration of powers in the same branch of government. But whereas Madison was concerned with power in the political sense, Foucault was concerned with power in the ideological or intellectual sense, and so was equally keen to avoid the construction of regimes of truth which serve to reinforce ideological hegemony and reduce the possibility of pluralism. So although he may have adorned his insights with philosophical abstractions, Foucault preached a message of pure liberal vigilance. For him, the maintenance of freedom and pluralism in thought hinges upon our distrust of power, especially when it claims to speak for truth.

However, Foucault’s insights do not simply provide liberals with a warning to be wary of institutions which seek to unilaterally define the borders between truth and fiction. Indeed, his theories also equip liberals with the tools to combat utilitarian government initiatives and egalitarian philosophical discourses, which also trample individual rights.

In Volume One of his History of Sexuality (1976), Foucault began to note that modern life was increasingly typified by government initiatives to assume supervisory control of peoples’ lives by attempting to develop “techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations”, which he termed ‘bio-power’. Bio-power marked a shift in the techniques systems of governance deployed to maintain control over their subjects. Systems of governance were previously characterised by their exercise of ‘sovereign power’, by which Foucault meant a law-maker’s ability to decide issues of life and death for their populations. However, bio-power functions to ‘administer life’ itself, and dictate the terms for its long-term flourishing. Thus, Foucault states that the justification for instance of the death penalty under a regime of sovereign power, which focussed on a crime’s enormity, became outmoded. To continue justifying it, the death penalty had to be re-characterised in terms of denouncing the criminal as monstrous, so having society view him as a biological threat to its overall safety.

Already we can begin to see how Foucault’s notion of bio-power can be of service to classical liberals: it exposes how certain institutions, such as the death penalty, are not premised on objective justifications, but rather on contingent ad hoc rationalisations which mirror the form the power currently assumes. Yet to quote The Cat in the Hat: “But that is not all. Oh no. That is not all!” The concept of bio-power also has contemporary relevance for liberals. For instance, the arbitrary biopolitical rationale that we don face masks, socially distance, and undergo mandatory vaccination so as to safeguard the vulnerable, was commonly invoked by supposedly liberal democracies during the COVID pandemic. So indeed, it was precisely the deployment of bio-power which allowed governments that often crow about their liberal bona fides to curb individual liberties. These governments instituted what Foucault termed ‘dividing practices’ to distinguish between those who cherished individual rather than institutionalised liberties and the compliant herd: the former were demonised as biological threats to collective security, which, in turn, justified their social exclusion and criminalisation.

The biopolitical instinct for the control of bodies also plagues liberalism’s more egalitarian strains. For instance, John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971) advanced the ‘Difference Principle’, which states that social and economic institutions ought to be arranged to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged in society, and those inspired by Rawls’ brand of egalitarian liberalism have added content to this vague proposal to rearrange institutions. For instance, Brighouse and Swift argue that parents should not be permitted to spend their (post-tax) income on their children’s education, lest this violate fairness. Thus, parents who value their children’s education higher than the publicly-financed standard, and employ private tutors, or personally instruct their children on matters beyond the curriculum, ought to feel ashamed ('Legitimate Parental Partiality', 2009). On this reading, the radical egalitarian gaze is analogous to what Foucault described as the ‘economy of faults and merits’ observed by a cultish pastor whose subjects were led to believe that exercising any will of their own was evidence of their inherent sinfulness. What’s more, egalitarian liberalism’s claim to act in the name of securing justice for the least advantaged within society would justify deploying the state’s coercive powers to dictate how individuals may use their property to some degree. In effect, egalitarian liberalism permits the state, acting on behalf of the least advantaged, to impose constraints on one’s use of property. Thus egalitarian liberalism places limits on individuals’ abilities to set their own ends.

Foucault For Liberals!

Foucault’s rich analysis of power provides us with tools to expose political formulations which eat away at liberties, but also serves as a constraint for liberalism to use to contain its own excesses. Indeed, Foucault was not the relativist many farcical contemporary interpretations of his work would have us believe. The reality is instead that Foucault was thoroughly liberal in terms of his ethical outlook, declaring in his ‘Security, Territory, Population’ lectures of 1977 that “Peace will no longer come from unity, but from non-unity, from plurality maintained as plurality.” As such, he sought to develop an ethic which would allow “games of power to be played with a minimum of domination.”

Foucault’s pronounced defence of pluralism places him squarely within the liberal canon. In this regard, his devotion to pluralism converges with Isaiah Berlin’s theory of value pluralism. Like Foucault, Berlin stressed that the pursuit of a single political order – socialist, utilitarian, theocratic, or otherwise – inevitably breeds tyranny. Both thinkers recognised the freedom-diminishing effects of failing to recognise diversity in values and ways of life. However, whereas Berlin focussed his intellectual prowess on analysing the ‘monism’ (‘one thought’) generated by totalising ideologies, Foucault dissected the subtle techniques of truth-regimes through which monist systems of governance sustain themselves.

Classical liberals need not fear Foucault. He was a fellow traveller in the liberal project, and shared many of their concerns. But though I have endeavoured to demonstrate this, the only true antidote against contemporary misrepresentations of Foucault is to actually read him.

© Muzainy Shahiefisally 2026

Muzainy Shahiefisally is a Research Assistant at the National University of Singapore Centre for Biomedical Ethics.

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Continentals

The Strength of Quiet Rebellion

T.S. Carney on Ernst Jünger and internal sovereignty.

In periods of political strain, dissent is often recast as disloyalty and criticism as sabotage. The more centralized and rhetorically charged a system becomes, the more it treats deviation as threat. Under such conditions, overt rebellion is frequently imprudent and often futile. The question that arises, then, is not merely how to oppose power, but how to preserve one’s interior freedom when open confrontation is either self-defeating or self-corroding. The German writer Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) offers a provocative answer in the two related figures of the ‘Forest Rebel’ and the ‘Anarch’.

Although Jünger remains a controversial thinker, shaped as he was by the upheavals of twentieth-century Germany and associated at times with (pre-Nazi) German nationalist and militarist currents, his later political reflections turn away from mass mobilization toward the problem of inward sovereignty. Whatever one concludes about his biography, the conceptual distinction he develops between rebellion and interior independence remains worthy of consideration.

The Forest Rebel, as Jünger describes him in his 1951 essay ‘The Forest Passage’, is not a revolutionary in the modern sense. Rather, he is a figure of withdrawal. Historically, the outlaw who retreated into the forest was expelled from the civic body yet paradoxically freer for it. The forest thus becomes a symbol of autonomy – a space where one is no longer fully accountable to the state. Jünger expands this metaphor beyond geography: the ‘forest’ need not be a literal physical wilderness, it can be any domain into which an individual retreats in order to preserve their independence of intellectual, spiritual, or moral judgment.

The more subtle figure is the Anarch. Unlike the anarchist, who seeks to dismantle political order, the Anarch operates within existing political structures. He fulfills its external obligations. He participates. But he does not grant the system interior allegiance. He refuses to allow institutional narratives – whether ideological, bureaucratic, or cultural – to colonize his conscience. His sovereignty is inward. The Anarch obeys where necessary, but he does not internalize ideas he judges to be false.

The Forest Rebel represents one option – withdrawal. The Anarch represents another – presence without surrender. Both resist the total absorption of the self into the system.

The Anarch’s distinction between external obedience and internal dissent matters in an era when much political energy is directed toward spectacle. Contemporary activism often assumes that moral clarity must be public, visible, and confrontational. Exposure becomes the primary strategy; denunciation the primary weapon.

There is undeniable power in this approach. Open resistance has shaped history in decisive ways. But it also carries costs. It risks tethering moral identity to perpetual opposition. It also presumes that conflict is the most authentic register of moral seriousness. Jünger’s Anarch proposes a different posture. He asks whether freedom should first be secured internally before it is performed externally.

The Anarch’s refusal is quiet. He does not mistake compliance with endorsement, while understanding that systems – whether political, corporate, or cultural – often demand not only outward participation but inward affirmation. The more subtle form of domination in modern societies is not coercion, but that one is expected to believe, to repeat, and to do so enthusiastically. The Anarch withholds that interior assent.

Critics may object that merely inward resistance amounts to passivity. Is it not a retreat from responsibility? Yet this misunderstands the scope of Jünger’s claim. The Anarch is not indifferent to justice. Rather, he recognizes that moral integrity can be subverted as much by reactivity as by conformity. A person who allows every institutional provocation to dictate his emotional temperature is not sovereign, he’s responsive. Jünger’s model instead insists that interior steadiness is a prerequisite for meaningful action. Moreover, not every society permits open dissent without a high cost. In bureaucratic or other highly networked institutions, dissent often results not in institutional reform but in personal marginalization or expulsion, leaving the structure untouched.

Interior sovereignty has implications beyond personal psychology. Political authority ultimately relies on consent. That is, laws may be enforced externally, but legitimacy depends on something less tangible. When citizens maintain a disciplined capacity to evaluate authority without either knee-jerk submission or knee-jerk rebellion, they become harder to manipulate by either side of the debate. They’re not easily mobilized by panic, nor pacified by rhetoric. The Anarch, in this sense, is not an enemy of order, but a stabilizing presence within it.

The relevance of this posture becomes clear in climates where accusations of disloyalty are readily deployed. History offers many examples of ancient and modern regimes where critique was framed as treachery and dissent as subversion. Under such conditions, overt confrontation can be used to confirm the regime’s narrative, by presenting the dissenters as enemies of order. The Anarch’s quiet independence denies the system this drama. He neither validates the spectacle nor internalizes the regime’s categories.

Jünger’s language can sometimes be austere or militant. But beneath the stylistic severity lies a practical insight: freedom that depends on favorable conditions is too fragile, but freedom cultivated inwardly can persist even when external conditions are hostile. The Forest Rebel may withdraw when necessary. The Anarch may remain. In both cases, the essential act is the preservation of conscience. The deeper question, then, is not whether one should confront or retreat: it’s whether one possesses an interior space that cannot be requisitioned. If institution, employer, party, or movement can claim not only our labor but our intellectual allegiance, then autonomy has already thinned. If, however, individuals retain the capacity to evaluate, to dissent inwardly, and to refuse ideological possession even while participating in civic life, then some essential freedom remains intact that may eventually manifest.

The strength of quiet rebellion is not spectacle. It is endurance. Systems rise and fall. Rhetoric intensifies and dissipates. The individual who has cultivated interior sovereignty can outlast the noise. In an age inclined toward perpetual confrontation, Jünger’s Anarch reminds us that freedom is not only something performed in public squares, but also something guarded within.

© T.S. Carney 2026

T.S. Carney is a special education teacher in the Northeast. He runs on coffee and sarcasm in the basement of the school (The Oubliette).

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Continentals

Fun With Deleuze & Guattari

D.E. Tarkington offers some cool conceptual tricks to impress your friends at parties.

The pragmatist Richard Rorty once drew a distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ philosophy. This dialectic was clearly at work between Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), a private scholar focused on self-creation through abstract thinking, and Félix Guattari (1930-1992), a psychoanalyst who was very public and concrete in his activism. What resulted from this collaboration was Anti-Oedipus (1972), a synthesis of the two thinkers and a manifesto that invoked revolution through letting go of all notions of seeking power as a creative individual, and instead seeing oneself as a mere node in a rhizomatic (tangled root-like) matrix of creative exchanges. What they offer to break authoritarian thinking within ourselves is the ‘schizophrenic’ therapeutic process of schizoanalysis. This is a process of building on nomadic flights of thought that perpetually seek to break free from established thinking, even of any rhizomatic matrix it finds itself working in (thereby expanding the rhizomatic matrix!). It’s through these nomadic flights that we avoid the calcification that results in a paranoid center of ideas.

It’s a tough case to crack, Deleuze and Guattari. Their co-authored books include Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus (both part of the ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ series), What is Philosophy?, and that other book I have yet to add to my library: Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. I have sometimes argued that philosophy (especially the more abstract sort) can be a little like someone on psychedelics trying to explain their trip to you; this is especially the case with D&G. Or it’s a little – or even a lot like a Kafkaesque siren a guy experiences in a dream who falls into his arms, then just as quickly disappears, leaving him searching some labyrinthine landscape for her. Yet, I keep coming back for more. My library attests to it. It could be a kind of masochism or self-punishment. Or I could make an analogy with Jacques Lacan’s conceptual model of jouissance – the idea that sex is an experience of pleasure on a conscious level, and displeasure at a subconscious one (being the experience of working deliberately towards a threshold that will take you out of a place you’re really enjoying). As a reverse of this, I could say that for me, reading D&G is succumbing to the push/pull tension of neurotic repeating behavior that evokes displeasure at a conscious level while clearly being pleasurable at a subconscious one. Why would I repeatedly read their difficult-to-grasp books? Perhaps it’s the many conceptual models I’ve found useful along the way – the trees I have embraced without ever being able to grasp the forest, to the extent that my primary influences are those who’ve written secondary texts, like Ian Buchanan, who wrote a useful reader’s guide to Anti-Oedipus and is the main influence on this article. From Buchanan I borrowed (actually stole) some of the conceptual models I’ll feature in this article. My hope is to do as much for you here as Claire Colebrook did for me in her Routledge Guide to Deleuze, and whet your appetite for what is a vast, daunting, and yet inspiring conceptual landscape. I would offer it in a similar spirit to Brian Massumi’s A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations From Deleuze and Guattari – as a creative bounce off the conceptual slam-dance that D&G offer, to inspire us to always keep moving, even while standing still (just as Foucault does in his Intro to Anti-Oedipus).

Rhizomes, Nomadic Flights & Paranoid Centers

It was twenty-plus years ago that an entry in a guide to postmodernism set it all off for me. The trigger was reading that there’s a distinction in knowledge between the arborescent – the tree-like, which has a center: think of a ‘Tree of Knowledge’ with metaphysics at the roots and physics as the trunk, and the various disciplines branching out from there – and the rhizomatic, which has no center (it’s a biological term based on the roots of grass). That’s all it took. I always had a problem with finding a center myself. In my youth, I always wanted to bounce around between different disciplines and see what hybrids emerged. I was that cocky. Now D&G gave me license – a license I could hold up against the arborescent model, which to me has always had authoritarian implications. That always features a ‘first cause’ (or ‘core cause’) understanding of causation. This is the understanding that underlies the political right’s take on the world: it’s their paranoid center. And it’s in opposition to this way of thinking that D&G work. As Foucault put it in his intro to Anti-Oedipus : it’s about seeking out and undermining the ‘fascism’ (that is, the authoritarianism) at work everywhere, including, and most importantly, in ourselves.

Let me explain.

Deleuze & Guattari by Clint Inman

The Paranoid Center of the Oedipal

Anti-Oedipus started for D&G with a mutual agreement with Freud’s early understanding of the subconscious, and a shared disagreement with Freud’s departure from it.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) started off by recognizing the general chaos at the bottom of the mind and the base of the brain: the libido or sex drive. Then he turned to what might put it in order. He started to treat the subconscious as if it were like our conscious minds, that is, as if the unconscious mind could put together elaborate symbolic structures to tell the conscious mind something. Think, for instance, of the Freudian dream dictionaries we used to see in the seventies. What resulted is Freud’s Oedipal theory, in which raw psychic energy is channeled towards a supposed subconsciously-desired sexual relationship. However, this theory resulted in creating a hierarchical relationship of its own: psychoanalysis is about an expert (Freud or one of his disciples) casting you, the subject, in the role of a fractured soul that needs to be put back together. And it’s not a big conceptual leap from the analyst/patient relationship, to the relationship of a boss and his employee, or a despot and his subject. Plus, as D&G wrote, the Oedipal theory acted as a misdirect to the extent that it focused all its attention on the family while avoiding the fuller expanse of influences on an individual’s life. So in a very bourgeois way, it distracted from the many psychologically problematic hierarchal relationships in which an individual will find themselves outside of the family – most importantly, those involving capitalism.

It was this disagreement with Freud and psychoanalysis that brought D&G to develop schizoanalysis, which can be seen as a kind of philosophical pinball. They based it on what they call ‘the schizophrenic process’, which is a different concept from clinical schizophrenia. They also took a more biological understanding of schizophrenia itself, and advocated more pharmaceutical approaches to it, since as they saw it, the ‘talking cure’ was at best equipped to deal with neurosis, or more mild mental problems, often caused by bad experiences, but not with psychosis, the more deep-rooted mental problems, which are often brain-dysfunction based. It should be noted that here they were ahead of their time: Anti-Oedipus was published in 1972, while the psycho-biological approach to psychopathology primarily took hold in the 1990s.

Roots © Dreameryonmae 2022 Creative Commons 4

As D&G also saw it, Freud went wrong by averting his attention from the barbarian hoards of the unconscious (the libido and its urges) for the sake of a more orderly, but flawed, understanding of it (his Oedipal theory). They responded by embracing the initial aimless subconscious energy, calling it ‘desiring production’ – their version of the id – based on their observations of schizophrenics who’ve played some part in our cultural history, who seemed to just connect with their environment. They followed through by analyzing how that aimless energy might work its way into the world and produce its effects. One of the main questions they were trying to answer in schizoanalysis was that raised by the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957): What is it about people that means they would seek their own oppression? What they arrived at is a model of desiring production – that which produces purely to produce – working itself into a world where it can only become social production, that can itself turn on and condition desiring production.

Into the World

In order to understand the interaction between desiring and social production, we have to consider the three syntheses of the subconscious (the very domain of desiring production):

Connection, Disjunction, and Conjunction, each of which has an illegitimate use related to starting out with a fixed understanding of what is to be achieved: that understanding being the product of social production or over coding.

You should get connection naturally. It’s about connecting with meaning. For instance, by reading this, you’re basically engaging in a connection that produces meaning for you. Connection is also about a reality that requires we put it together, like a puzzle. It’s the way that when we first perceive anything, it starts with individual data, this data draws us to other data, and all this data fuses into the way we see the world. The catch here, as D&G see it, is when this process draws us to a preordained conclusion.

The disjunctive synthesis is a ‘catch in itself’. As our data fuses together, distinctions emerge – between male and female, black and white, straight and gay, normal and abnormal, etc, etc. This is because, in all those connections being made, there is always the meaning to be derived from ‘this compared to that’. This really becomes a problem when you reach the conjunctive synthesis. This is the ‘me as opposed to you or it’ stage of thought – the point at which you become a subjective being, then fold back into all the incoming data in order to continue the process of synthesis.

Let’s consider some concrete applications of these ideas. I’d start with comparing this synthesis of thought with the romantic process. First, lips contact lips, and connections follow. But the disjunctive gives it away: it’s always that push/pull tension of pleasure and pain that Lacan described sexually in terms of jouissance. The conjunctive reaches the threshold Lacan associated with positive jouissance, and crosses it. We can also see the process of synthesis in the storytelling process. First, connections are formed; disjunctions emerge as the established order is disturbed and chaos is created. Finally, one or more characters land with who they really are, before sinking back into a reorganized world. But at the bottom of all this, is Buchanan’s point in his user’s guide to Anti-Oedipus, that D&G think we cannot get away from this creative dynamic because it’s literally everywhere.

I suspect the theory goes back to Deleuze’s engagement with Immanuel Kant in Difference and Repetition (1968). Here Deleuze starts with ideas from Kant’s doctrine of mental faculties:

Apprehension: the immediate engagement with reality, or some aspect of reality;

Repetition: a function of memory resulting from repeated encounters with a given aspect of reality, leading to:

Recognition: the recognition of what is being apprehended.

Deleuze, however, revamped Kant’s model of understanding, dividing it into the sensible (what is immediately perceived through the senses), the imaginary (a Lacanian concept, referring to the sensible acting on the pre-linguistic mind), memory, and, finally, language-based understanding and/or thought.

It’s not hard to see how the three syntheses apply here: how the connective is at work in our immediate confrontation with reality (this and this and this together); how the disjunctive might emerge in the processing of that information (this as compared to that); and finally, how the conjunctive can turn on the process by informing a subject that places itself in opposition to what it perceives. From this we can also understand D&G’s political agenda, which is to embrace desiring production in its pure and spontaneous state (one could, for instance, become an avant garde artist). This is in order to mitigate the bad effects (the paranoid centers of authoritarian thought) that can emerge as desiring production transforms into social production – that is, as the individual creative mind gets involved with the social world. However, let me give a disclaimer. As I pointed out, what D&G are offering is a conceptual slam-dance, a creative expression with the necessary momentum to get beyond ourselves, managed through multidirectional exchanges of creative energy. It’s not hard to imagine the kind of psychic speed-smear that might emerge from this process; nor is it hard to see the kind of extremes individuals might go to facilitate their creative momentum. It was indeed these extremes that brought D&G to tone it down for the second book in the ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ series, A Thousand Plateaus (1980).

Conclusion & Approach

Confession: If I’ve succeeded at what I set out to do and inspired you to explore D&G further, I will equally have failed you. Should you choose to take on that mission, you will still find yourself as confused as I was: my experience and ‘wisdom’ will be of little help. And it won’t just be a matter of confusion over the original texts, but the secondary texts as well. Since they’re trying to explain the same psychedelic experience being described in the original text, they will likewise require multiple readings. All I’ve offered here is an entry point, a personal description of my experience with D&G and those who have sought to explain them to me.

Still, it’s as good an entry point as any. While I can’t come close to the more scholarly approach of my influences, my twenty-plus years of experience with D&G (and the fact that I stuck with it, or am stuck with it) should give me some license to invite you into the sandbox; that is, to offer you a stepping stone into a conceptual landscape I can’t seem to walk away from. Share the joy, right? At the very least, I’ve offered you a couple of tips on how to approach D&G, in terms of what’s fed me enough to keep me coming back.

At the end of every secondary text is an extensive bibliography, and we may comfortably assume that the author of that secondary text got their understanding of the primary text by reading most, if not all, of those books. This is what distinguishes a scrapper like me from a scholar like Buchanan or Colebrook. Any understanding we’ve gained is not the result of one text acting in a vacuum, but rather, each text deriving its meaning from the part it plays in the general discourse. D&G argue in A Thousand Plateaus, that a book doesn’t reflect the world; it forms a rhizome or root connection with it. To truly get it, or get anything out of it, you gotta work in the overlaps and find your own place in them; and keep testing that place against the text.

There is a poetic, or rather, an aesthetic, about D&G – they have a sense of art or style. We’ve seen this aesthetic in philosophy with many continental thinkers since Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century. So, even if you don’t get what it’s saying, you gotta love this opening passage into Anti-Oedipus:

“It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines –real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing-machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. For every organ-machine, an energy machine: all the time, flows and interruptions. Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. Judge Schreber feels something, produces something, and is capable of explaining the process theoretically. Something is produced: the effects of a machine, not mere metaphors.”

There’s something cool, even poetic, about someone well-read bouncing around their heads as D&G did. And while I find it useful to occasionally randomly go to some point in the text and work methodically through it, sometimes you just have to let it flow through you, see what catches. As Donald Finkle prescribes in his poem ‘Hands’, in words that apply to continental philosophy and to D&G as well as to poetry:

“Lean back and let its hands play freely on you:

There comes a moment, lifted and aroused,

When the two of you are equally beautiful.”

© D.E. Tarkington 2026

D.E. Tarkington is a maintenance tech for a large campus. He enjoys taking in information from different sources, letting it churn around, and seeing what he can do with it.

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Articles

What is Analytic Philosophy?

Alexander Jeuk analyses philosophical analysis with a philosophical eye.

Philosophy departments, particularly in the Anglo-American world, are overwhelmingly dominated by analytic philosophy. This dominance is so pronounced that alternative philosophical approaches have been largely displaced. In fact, we haven’t seen a single paradigm dominate Western philosophy in this way since the end of the hegemony of scholasticism in the sixteenth century. Analytic philosophers often emphasize precision and clarity in their work. Yet, ironically, it is surprisingly difficult to pinpoint what exactly analytic philosophy is. This becomes apparent when we consider the history of the movement.

Early Analytic Philosophy & the Linguistic Turn

Analytic philosophy emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pioneered by thinkers like Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. What united them was their method of addressing philosophical problems through the analysis of language, particularly the analysis of analytic statements. Analytic statements are statements whose truth or falsity depends solely on their linguistic form, or as we might say, on the meaning of the words used, independent of any empirical information (such as ‘one plus one is two’). This method is what gave the movement its name.

Western philosophy before this period was primarily concerned with the nature of reality rather than language. Analytic philosophers, however, argued that many philosophical problems were, at their core, problems of language. This claim marks the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy. According to this view:

(1) Philosophical problems are to be analyzed through analyzing language;

(2) Philosophy should ideally focus on analytic (non-empirical) statements; and

(3) Philosophical inquiry should be limited to areas where such analysis can be applied, leaving other questions to the empirical sciences.

This approach gradually supplanted a variety of other philosophical paradigms, such as pragmatism, phenomenology, and neo-Kantianism. Yet here’s the strange part: most contemporary analytic philosophers no longer view their area in these terms. In fact, many reject the idea that philosophical problems are primarily problems of language, let alone that philosophy should be concerned solely with the analysis of analytic statements. Like earlier philosophers, most analytic philosophers today believe they are examining reality (whatever that may be), not merely language.

Quine, Wittgenstein & the Shift Away from Language

The reasons for the shift away from language are varied, but a particularly influential figure in this development was Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000). Quine famously challenged the distinction between ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’ statements. Analytic statements, remember, are those that can be known to be true by virtue of their meaning alone (such as, ‘All bachelors are unmarried’), while synthetic statements (statements not evidently true or false by virtue of their meaning alone) generally require empirical verification (for example, ‘The cat is on the mat’). Quine argued that the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements could not be maintained in the simple way earlier analytic philosophers had assumed. On the one hand, he claimed that no part of our ‘web of belief’ is absolutely immune from revision: even logic, he suggested, might in principle be revised if doing so helped us make better sense of physics, as some had proposed in response to quantum mechanics. On the other hand, Quine was suspicious of meanings understood as private mental objects or fixed conceptual entities waiting to be analysed. Meaning, if it was to be scientifically respectable at all, had to be tied to public language-use, behavior, and our broader theory of the world.

Many philosophers found Quine’s naturalistic critique of the older analytic project convincing. If, as naturalists claimed, philosophy was continuous with empirical science and meanings were not fixed objects waiting to be analysed, then philosophy could no longer be understood simply as the analysis of language.

Another major shift away from language can be attributed to the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). Wittgenstein argued against the artificial use of language that many philosophers employ. For him, philosophical problems often arise when we stretch language beyond its everyday use, leading to confusion about meaning and the generation of pseudo-problems. Wittgenstein’s point was that ordinary language works perfectly well in practical contexts, but breaks down when misapplied to abstract, philosophical questions. For example, the question ‘Do I really know there’s a tree in front of me?’ seems meaningful, but Wittgenstein would argue it is nonsensical. In everyday life, the word ‘know’ functions without issue – but when we apply it in this artificial, philosophical, way, it no longer makes sense, creating a question where answers can easily go both ways.

The vast majority of Anglo-American philosophers came to agree with Quine or Wittgenstein, or came to similar conclusions. This led to a shift in focus away from the analysis of language, toward a direct engagement with reality itself.

Analytic Philosophy is Dead, Long Live Analytic Philosophy!

Given the impact of Quine’s and Wittgenstein’s critiques, one might expect that analytic philosophy would have ended in the mid-twentieth century. After all, if the whole idea of analyzing language to solve philosophical problems had been discredited, it would seem logical for philosophers to either abandon the approach or radically revise it. And yet, this isn’t what happened. Instead, something quite peculiar occurred. Rather than abandoning their methods, analytic philosophers expanded their inquiries into fields they had previously shunned, such as metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, without fundamentally changing their methods, though no longer labelling them as linguistic. What analytic philosophers seemingly took from Quine’s critique is that there should be no boundaries to the scope of their inquiry. Since all relevant concepts are seemingly both synthetic and analytic, they are no longer confined to analysing purely analytic problems. But does that make sense? Maybe not, if they continue to use a method that was developed for analyzing purely analytic concepts! Yet that’s exactly what they did.

It’s difficult to overstate how peculiar this is. Quine argued that a restriction to analytic problems made no sense because there are no (or few) purely analytic problems. But instead of reconsidering their methods, analytic philosophers concluded that, since all interesting analytic problems are also synthetic, they could now work on everything. Yet, the way in which they worked on everything remained the same as the way in which they approached analytic problems, using methods involving the analysis of concepts. In all fairness, many philosophers did start to work in a naturalistic vein. Yet, as we will see, this remained strikingly similar to early analytic philosophy. And more importantly for our purposes, if naturalism really broke with linguistic or logical analysis, why should it be called ‘analytic philosophy’ in the first place?

A very analytical philosopher: Lord Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) Portrait by Clint Inman

The Rise of Intuition-Based Philosophy

By the 1980s and 1990s some began to ask what exactly analytic philosophers had been doing for the past few decades given that only a few analytic philosophers still accepted the idea of logical or linguistic analysis. One prominent answer was that analytic philosophers had moved away from linguistic analysis, and instead begun focusing on thought experiments and intuitions.

A thought experiment is a hypothetical scenario designed to test a philosophical concept. A famous kind of thought experiment is a Gettier-style problem, which challenges the previously widely accepted definition of knowledge as being ‘justified true belief’. In one variety, that actually goes back to Bertrand Russell, someone looks at a stopped clock that coincidentally shows the correct time. Although their belief about the time is justified (because clocks usually show the right time), and true, most people’s intuition would suggest that this does not count as knowledge. Other well-known thought experiments include David Chalmers’ ‘philosophical zombie’ (which tests whether a being physically identical to a human yet without consciousness is conceivable), or Philippa Foot’s ‘trolley problems’ (which explore the moral implications of sacrificing one life to save many). In each such case, philosophers rely on their intuitions – gut feelings, if you will – to evaluate whether the thought experiment proves or disproves a particular claim.

If thought experiments about twin earths, swampmen, and thinking about ‘possible worlds’ seem to you like the brainchildren of precritical seventeenth-century rationalism, you’re not far off.

What’s Wrong with Intuitions? Not What You Might Intuit

I can’t dive into all the problems with intuitions here, nor address all the attempts by analytic philosophers to rebrand their outdated linguistic methods to appear new, such as calling them ‘experimental philosophy’, the ‘method of cases’ or ‘conceptual engineering’. However, there are a few key issues I can highlight:

(1) A Non-Critical Approach

First, using intuitions as the foundation of analytic philosophy is far from taking a critical approach to philosophical method.

Traditionally, whether in phenomenology, Neo-Kantianism, or early analytic philosophy, philosophers began with inquiries into method to justify and direct their research. But as you may have noticed contemporary analytic philosophers tend to assume that the underlying methodology is correct. At best they explain their method after the fact of its use, rather than grounding it properly from the outset.

Despite the attempts of some analytic philosophers to intellectualize them, thought experiments depend on our intuitions which are essentially gut feelings, that is to say, hunches – even though rigor and precision are qualities analytic philosophy supposedly prides itself on.

(2) Historical Revisionism

To give intuitions more credibility, analytic philosophers have constructed a rather revisionist view of the history of philosophy, arguing that philosophers have always relied on intuitions, from Plato onward. However, even if this were true, it’s hardly a genuine justification of intuitionism: if it is supposed to be one. Moreover, the historical claim is simply false. Thinkers such as Descartes, Locke, Kant, Husserl, or Heidegger, did not use intuitions in the way claimed. I don’t mean they avoided the term. Rather, they employed methods where they analyze their own experience, like phenomenological or proto-phenomenological approaches. Other thinkers, such as Marx, Nietzsche, Dilthey, or Heidegger (again), used historical-genealogical methods, and the German Idealists such as Hegel employed dialectical methods. The notion that intuitions played a central role in their work arises only from the limited philosophical framework of many analytic philosophers, who rely on a simplistic dichotomy between conceptual knowledge (which includes intuitions and analytic knowledge) and empirical knowledge (synthetic or scientific knowledge). From this false dichotomy, they infer that if past philosophers did not use empirical methods, they must have used analytical or intuitive ones. However, that inference says more about analytic philosophy than about philosophical approaches.

(3) What’s Analytic About Intuitions?

Analytic philosophy, at its core, was based on linguistic analysis, ideally of analytic statements, so it is unclear why contemporary philosophy that heavily relies on intuitions should still be considered ‘analytic’. Perhaps the persistence of this label is due to the fact that the various branches of analytic philosophy, including naturalism, share common assumptions. But analytic philosophers are not really aware of these common assumptions, since, as one of my professors in graduate school said, discussing the presuppositions of your work is “what undergraduate students do, not philosophers.” This common mindset has certainly not enhanced clarity.

The assumptions shared by different branches of analytic philosophy often exhibit a kind of what Wittgenstein called ‘family resemblance’. Classical analytic philosophers share with naturalists a belief in intertheory reduction – the idea that one set of concepts or theories can be fully reduced to another. Both are also deeply concerned with abstraction – whether they’re focusing on basic naturalistic entities to which everything could putatively be reduced (such as the mind being reduced to the brain’s activities), or categories of existence that mirror our language use. Both traditions also held, for a long time, the idea that human thought works like language, to represent the world. Many analytic philosophers also have deep admiration for formal methods of thinking and the mathematical sciences.

Finally, and importantly, it indeed seems that most cases analytic philosophers ‘analyze’ with their ‘intuitions’ are indeed linguistic hunches, that are, as mentioned, more or less indistinguishable from linguistic analysis. For example, the intuition about knowledge that the person looking at the stopped clock does not really know the time looks very much like a judgment about how we are inclined to use the word ‘know’ in the exact same case. If we can simply replace ‘knowledge itself’ with ‘our concept of knowledge’, and ‘analysing our intuition about knowledge’ with ‘analysing our concept of knowledge’, this seems like switching a label instead of a method. Likewise, naturalists basically accept the story above and add some just-so story that is ‘in accord’ with the natural sciences on top of that. For instance, knowledge is justified true belief because our knowledge-generating abilities evolved to reliably track truth. Knowledge exists because it enhances survival, and so on.

For all these reasons, it perhaps never felt necessary to change the name of the paradigm, despite its claim that it has moved beyond mere language analysis.

Joke from Colin Stott

Godfather image © Paramount Pictures 1972

Concluding Remarks

Whatever one may think of contemporary analytic philosophy, it is clear that it’s beset by methodological problems and conceptual ambiguities. Perhaps its biggest issue is that it is unclear why it is still called ‘analytic philosophy’ at all – a problem that only became worse with the rise of naturalism. It suffers from false assumptions about its place in the history of philosophy, and a lack of rigor in its methods. What began as a movement aiming to critically limit philosophy to the analysis of problems through a linguistic lens, has now transformed into a baroque discipline where philosophers speculate on the logical possibility of nonconscious zombies – something even Leibniz, when discussing possible worlds, could not have dreamed of.

Whether analytic philosophy will address its methodological issues seems doubtful. Given its dominant position in English-language philosophy there is little external (or internal) pressure for change. Fortunately, however, promising philosophical approaches already exist where philosophers engage seriously with methodological debate, such as phenomenology. Whether this will lead to greater pluralism in Anglophone philosophy departments remains an open question.

© Alexander Jeuk 2026

Alexander Jeuk is an independent researcher writing on philosophy, economics, politics, and the institutional structure of science.

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Articles

Boredom

Cheryl Fok searches for the source, and its relief.

Our instinctive attitude towards boredom is one of aversion. We tend to think of boredom as categorically undesirable. At best, boredom is unpleasant; at worst, it’s psychologically and physically painful. It’s no coincidence that intense, prolonged boredom is a device for punishment and torture. Practices such as solitary confinement, which deprive individuals of sensory stimulation and human interaction for long periods of time, can cause lasting psychological damage to their victims.

Everyday boredom is much less extreme. Yet despite the trivial way in which we think of our own episodes of boredom (“I’m just bored”), boredom, or more specifically, the avoidance of boredom, shapes our lives in drastic ways. People choose careers, friends, and spouses based on what most interests them – that is, on what will produce the least amount of boredom. We devote our spare time to hobbies and entertainment to compensate for the boredom accumulated in the week’s drudgeries. In fact, we have become so adept at manoeuvring around boredom that, most of the time, we avoid it before it can even arise. Each of us has virtually infinite access to countless distractions and diversions we may mobilize at any moment when boredom starts creeping up on us. It would not be an understatement, then, to say that many people organize their lives around evading boredom. We are, in short, boredom-minimizers.

We don’t just avoid being bored, though; we also avoid thinking about boredom – something I hope to change that now.

Madame Bovary being bored

Madame Bovary By Eugène Michel Joseph Abot 1885

What Makes Something Boring?

It’s sometimes taken for granted that ‘being boring’ is an objective quality: that there are certain features of things and situations that make them boring. Upon closer examination, however, boredom proves to be more difficult to pin down. For instance, boredom crops up in all sorts of everyday situations – yet we can easily imagine counter-scenarios that have identical features but aren’t boring. We might think boredom comes from sheer inactivity or lack of stimulation – say, when, during a prolonged wait at the doctor’s office, you realize you’ve forgotten to bring the book that was supposed to keep you preoccupied. But someone in the exact same waiting room could find themselves daydreaming, or lost in thought, and not be bored. Or perhaps boredom arises in the midst of a mundane, repetitive activity – such as performing the same action over and over again on an assembly line. But there are plenty of repetitive hobbies that people enjoy, such as paint-by-numbers or jigsaw puzzles. We might even look to boredom’s fictional varieties – such as when Madame Bovary’s titular protagonist grows despaired at the monotony of provincial life. Is her boredom solely the product of her circumstances? Surely not, as not all women in similar circumstances react the same way.

If the objective features of typically ‘boring’ situations alone don’t guarantee boredom, then perhaps boredom is subjective. So what causes it?

What seemingly unites all cases of boredom is a desire to get out of boredom: it’s a motivation to un-bore oneself. The feeling of boredom, then, implies the feeling of wanting to stop being bored. In light of this, one might surmise that boredom is fundamentally about meaninglessness: that a boring situation is an ongoing one that feels pointless. It doesn’t arouse our interest, hold our attention, or seem to contribute to our fulfilment in any way.

Indeed, this is exactly what the philosopher Lars Svendsen suggests. In his 2005 book A Philosophy of Boredom, he traces boredom back to the ‘introspective turn’ of eighteenth century Romanticism. Whereas traditionally, meaning in life revolved around participating in collective practices, for the Romantics, life became a quest for personal meaning. The consequence, as Svendsen puts it, is that we have become ‘addicted to meaning’ (p.30). And if boredom is the result of a lack of meaning, then a moment bored is a moment wasted. Not only is boredom unpleasant and even painful, it constitutes an existential failure to achieve life’s ultimate end, self-actualization.

Meaning and Boredom

While it undoubtedly is the case that we often experience boredom as the absence of meaning, there’s something Svendsen’s view can’t explain: what I call ‘self-imposed boredom’. Why do we still get bored even doing things that are meaningful to us, which we have freely chosen to do? For instance, imagine a person who has been looking forward to a vacation for weeks; yet when the long-awaited trip finally arrives, they find themselves decidedly bored. No-one forced them to go on holiday; it was done entirely of their own volition. Similarly, from my own life as an academic, I can’t count the number of times I’ve found the perfect book or article for my passion project, been excited to read it all week, then found myself bored by it after only a few pages. There might be lots of reasons for this: the book did not meet my expectations; I have trouble concentrating; it’s late at night and I’m fatigued… These might all play a part in exacerbating my boredom. But my point is this: even if none of these conditions hold, me being bored with the book is still both possible and intelligible. ‘Meaningfulness’, then, is no safeguard against boredom.

There are certainly factors that make a situation or event more likely to bore us: if we don’t care about it; if we find it uninteresting; if it’s repetitive or monotonous; if it’s too easy; if it’s too difficult; or if we’re simply tired. By the same token, there are opposite factors that make circumstances less likely to bore. But this doesn’t explain why even things that are personally meaningful and apparently deeply interesting to one are still perfectly capable of being boring. Another theory might be that even the most meaningful and interesting activities inevitably involve some boring elements, and this is just the price we pay for pursuing our passions. For example, even someone who loves cooking will still have to endure the more boring parts of that activity, such as prepping, waiting, and cleaning.

Still, I don’t think this accurately captures our experience of boredom. The bored vacationgoer isn’t only bored during the slightly tedious interstices that come with being on holiday – travelling between destinations, packing suitcases before going home – but otherwise having a blast. They are bored with being on holiday, precisely when they’re supposed not to be bored.

If anything, I find I’m even more acutely bored when the cause of my boredom is self-imposed. When the cause of my boredom is an externally imposed demand, the unpleasantness of the situation is easy to explain: “This is a waste of my time”; “I would rather be doing something else”; “I’m only doing this because I have to”. The real problem arises when there’s nothing I would rather be doing, when there’s nothing making me do something except my own choice. If even then I’m still bored, then I have no-one to blame but myself – or so we tend to think. As a result, it’s not unusual to feel a deep sense of guilt over our own boredom in these situations.

A Case of Normative Delinquency

The philosopher Cheshire Calhoun has a solution to the puzzle of self-imposed boredom. If boredom were really always about meaninglessness, then we would predict that bored people would seek out meaningful activities to remedy their boredom. But, as she rightly observes, this is not the case. If anything, we see the exact opposite: people often turn to even more meaningless activities when they are bored. If meaning were truly the antidote to boredom, it would not be unusual to see bored people procrastinating their ‘meaningless’ tasks by exercising, creating art, or spending quality time with friends. Yet this is almost never the case. Calhoun herself describes a graduate student who, bored with her dissertation, would spend hours reading and posting on inane chat groups (a trending version of this would be ‘doomscrolling’, but the structure of the behavior is the same). Though she’s fully aware that this is an utterly meaningless waste of time and that she’d get much more out of reading a book, it’s almost as if she can’t bring herself to do something more meaningful.

The idea is that when we procrastinate something we’re supposed to do, we tend to procrastinate using meaningless, unproductive activities rather than meaningful, productive ones. Calhoun calls this ‘normative delinquency’ (see ‘Living with Boredom’, Sophia 50 (2), 2011). She says that boredom tends to emerge in “contexts of normative constraint” – that is, in situations where there’s something we should be doing and a way we should be doing it. This ‘should’ can be externally or internally imposed: “I should turn in my paper by the deadline” or “I should keep up with the daily journaling goals I’ve set myself.” As soon as the ‘should’ enters the picture, boredom becomes possible. The reason these situations make boredom possible, Calhoun argues, is because boredom is the desire to escape this normative constraint. When we spend too much time under the yoke of the ‘should’, we crave ‘normative freedom’ – we want to shake off those constraints, and liberate ourselves from the ‘should’. Normative delinquents satisfy this craving by resisting those constraints. This can involve not only removing oneself from the constraining situation, but also engaging in activities that specifically violate those constraints, such as doomscrolling rather than reading a textbook. Because it is so utterly meaningless, doomscrolling, though deeply unsatisfying in other ways, at least gives us the normative satisfaction of being free of the ‘should’. We are never ‘supposed’ to be doomscrolling, and there’s no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ way to doomscroll, so doomscrolling never exerts any normative pressure on us. (One may point out that doomscrolling is most often experienced as boring – but attempts to flee boredom frequently are, themselves, boring – perhaps because they are purposely meaningless.)

When we’re bored in Calhoun’s way, we don’t just want to be rid of a particular set of normative constraints; we want to be rid of normative constraints entirely. This is why we don’t move from one ‘should’ to another to relieve boredom. It is why, when we procrastinate an impending deadline, our first instinct is not to go for a run. As Calhoun interprets the bored grad student, “Reading a good but wrong book would violate the normative claim that chains her to her dissertation; reading something totally non-educational and utterly inane violates it better” (Ibid). Put simply, one rebels against the ‘should’ by indulging in the ‘should not’.

This rebellion against the ‘should’, then, is why boredom compels us to normative delinquency rather than meaningful, productive activities. It’s because here, boredom is not a meaning problem but a normativity problem. And any situation that creates normative pressure – be it the most meaningful, or utterly meaningless – has the ability to bore. So, if this boredom is painful, then it is a uniquely normative pain.

In my experience, the pain of boredom is neither a sharp sting nor a dull ache, but rather, it’s strain. Moreover, boredom intensifies over time. Each boring moment makes the next one even more so, until our boredom reaches a pinnacle so intolerable that we’re compelled to distract ourselves – to do anything other than what we should be doing. This explains why diverting our attention from a boring task often takes the form of relief. Distraction from boredom feels like releasing a pressure valve that eases, however temporarily, the buildup of normative tension.

Calhoun’s idea helps us understand many of the puzzling aspects of boredom. It can explain why people can find themselves bored in almost any situation, even leisurely or ostensibly meaningful ones: “I’m on vacation, I’m supposed to be relaxing”; “I’m in college pursuing my dream, I should be making the most of this opportunity.” Once a situation acquires this structure – having a way things are ‘supposed’ to be – then we become susceptible to boredom. This also makes sense of why many activities that, by all rights, should be abjectly dull can actually be deeply enjoyable, even fulfilling. Many of us indulge in trivial hobbies that are essentially meaningless and involve some degree of tedium or monotony, yet we happily subject ourselves to them nonetheless. For example, I enjoy crochet, an extremely repetitive activity that contributes no wider meaning to my life. Yet, I am rarely, if ever, bored while crocheting. This is no coincidence: it’s precisely because crochet is ‘meaningless’ – because it lacks that normative ‘should’ structure – that crochet does not, and cannot, bore me.

Bored girl © R. Nial Bradshaw 2020 Creative Commons 2.0

Why Do We Get Bored?

Why do we react to normative constraints in this way? For Calhoun, the answer to this question lies in the kinds of beings we are. We are what she calls ‘evaluators’ – entities that make judgments about the values of things.

It’s because we’re evaluators that we can experience the normative pressure of the ‘should’ at all. The squirrel doesn’t judge whether it ‘ought’ to eat the acorn; it simply does or doesn’t. Humans, on the other hand, are always making value judgments about what is worth doing, how it should be done, and whether it’s being done well or poorly. As a result, human experience is uniquely contoured by conditions of success and failure that guide our actions. But though humans are essentially evaluators, our evaluative capacities are finite. We not only have to decide what’s valuable and what’s not, we also have to pick and choose which valuable things we spend our limited time and energy upon. Deciding what is worth our time and energy itself takes time and energy, too. All of this evaluating puts us at risk of boredom because it inevitably sets us up for disappointment. When we judge something to be worth doing and choose to do it, we create expectations in advance for what doing it will be like. To return to my book example: the fact that I anticipated that the book would be deeply engaging and interesting only heightened my disappointment. This is why we end up in counterintuitive situations, like the bored vacationer: the things we expect to be the most engaging can often be the things that bore us most. By contrast, when we have low, or no, expectations for how something will engage us, we’re less likely to be bored by it.

Valuing Boredom

This might seem to be a bleak picture. If Calhoun is right that boredom is largely a problem of normativity, not of meaning, then the very fact that we are evaluators dooms us to inevitable boredom. If boredom were simply a problem of meaninglessness, then theoretically we could solve boredom just by finding the right meaning (hence Svendsen’s ‘meaning addiction’). But on Calhoun’s view, to escape self-imposed boredom would require nothing less than giving up on finding things valuable altogether. The only way to truly stop being bored, it appears, is to stop caring. So long as we care, we are cursed to be bored.

But I prefer a different outlook. When we stop thinking of boredom in terms of meaninglessness, we find quite the opposite: that boredom is evidence of meaning. It’s because things matter to us that we are vulnerable to self-imposed boredom. Put differently, the fact that we can find things meaningful at all is what makes boredom possible. To my mind, this realization relieves us of Svendsen’s diagnosis that we’re hopelessly ensnared in an endless pursuit of unattainable ultimate meaning. Nor do we need to feel guilty when we find ourselves bored while doing what we love most. That we continue to put ourselves in boredom’s way affirms us as meaning-seekers who persist in doing things we find valuable, even when they cause us pain.

© Cheryl Fok 2026

Cheryl Fok is a PhD student in Philosophy at Loyola University in Chicago.

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Articles

What is Human Experience?: Psychology vs Philosophy

Ayten Nevzat watches philosophy give birth to a science.

How would you explain human experience? This question is addressed by two separate fields, which travel very different paths to get there. Both philosophy and psychology are concerned with humanity – with people and what drives them to suffer, to change, to behave, and to reason. Philosophy gets there via introspection, and psychology via empirical experiment. In this philosophy is the older sibling and psychology the younger, trying to answer questions first raised by the older one. Both disciplines aim to understand thoughts and the self, and the world that they inhibit. From Descartes to Freud, they both ask questions about the nature of the self. For instance, ethics has been explored by philosophers since Socrates and Aristotle, but childrens’ moral development was experimentally investigated by Piaget. Coining another metaphor, we could say that philosophy provides the scaffolding for what’s human, and psychology provides the bricks that build upon it. So let’s look at what it means to be human and our discovery of it through these two approaches.

© Oksana Cherepashchuk. Insta: @ksu.artlife

Early Philosophical Psychology

“Know thyself!”, which was said both to and by Socrates, is almost a psychological command centuries before psychology became a science. In fifth century BCE Athens, Socrates would go around from citizen to citizen (mostly aristocrats), trying to gather truth through conversation and debate, and asking them questions. This ‘Socratic method’ of questioning tried to expose contradictions within a person’s beliefs. Socrates’s student Plato, in dialogues such as Meno and Euthyphro, had Socrates say: “I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.”

Plato, in his dialogue The Republic, developed the theory of the tripartite soul. He divided the psyche into the reason, the spirit, and the appetite. This foreshadowed modern personality theory. Compare it to Freud’s theory of the ego, superego, and it. The divisions are notably similar.

In the Meno, Plato had Socrates remark, “We are not made good by nature, but by training.” The basic idea here is of nature vs nurture, and the effects of the environment on behaviour. It can be compared to conditioning theories, or social learning theory in psychology.

Meanwhile Aristotle, Plato’s student was one of the first people to look at the psyche from a biological and cognitive viewpoint, almost making him one of the founding voices of biopsychology. Long before cognition theory started to give experimentally-derived ideas on how people think, Aristotle wrote, “There is no thinking without an image” (De Anima, Book III, chap.7). He’s saying that mental representations are dependent on the senses – vision in particular.

The Stoics of ancient Greece and Rome said the reason for human existence was Reason (Logos). They further said we have the choice to reinterpret our suffering by applying the balm of our reason. What makes people distressed is not so much their environment, but the stories they create for themselves about it. The Stoic Seneca mentions how humans sometimes deepen their own misery unnecessarily: “We suffer more in imagination than in reality”(Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 13, ‘On Groundless Fears’).

In basic terms, Stoics say we can learn to control our emotional responses to gain peace of mind. As Marcus Aurelius said, “You have power over your own mind, not outside events” (Meditations). We cannot control our environment, and often this causes unhappiness; but our rationality lies in how we respond to the changes that happen around us. The Stoics believed that the best way to be human is to feel, think, be tested, do one’s duty, and to be able to reason calmly even when we’re challenged by everything around us.

This leads almost directly to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or CBT, which holds that people magnify their problems through their own dysfunctional thinking, but that this thinking can be retrained to work well. It’s also linked to psychological ideas about reconstructive memory and perception, because people interpret what happens to them based on their previous experiences.

The Experimental Study of Mind

Let’s fast forward to the nineteenth century, when psychology becomes a science. In 1879 William Wundt (1832-1920), a philosopher, created the first laboratory for experiments in the field of psychology. Suddenly questions from the philosophers were being answered in empirical ways, and behaviour was being recorded as data.

The word ‘psychology’ is itself taken from the Greek that Socrates and Plato spoke: psyche means the mind or soul, and logos means reason or explanation, such that an ‘ology’ means a ‘study’: so ‘psychology’ literally means ‘study of the mind’. (Compare this to ‘philosophy’, which means ‘love of wisdom’.) Through psychology, the study of human experience now proceeds in ways that are testable and where data can be compared. This is a revelation, because suddenly there are answers! For instance, statistical analysis of the data helps us measure the differences between people so we can determine normality or abnormality in a certain trait. In this way, psychology gives us greater objectivity in analysis. It also gives psychology’s findings intellectual credibility via evidence.

When defining human experience in psychology we use different approaches, such as the social learning approach, the biological approach, the cognitive approach, the social approach, or the behaviourist approach, providing a multitude of paradigms for looking at human behaviour, at how life is experienced, and why it is experienced that way. Neuroscientists map the brain and look at neuroanatomy and neurochemistry to understand the human experience biologically. Using this biological approach, we can see that speech is connected to activity in the brain’s temporal lobe, and talk about its construction specifically in Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area, for instance. Or consider behaviourism: B.F Skinner and his experiment with operant conditioning on rats allowed us to study how behaviour can be shaped with rewards and punishments (information that has been adapted and used by institutions to get the desired human behaviour). Or the behaviourist Pavlov, in his classical conditioning experiment looked at how dog’s reflexes are affected by cues, giving us a clue on people’s reflexes. Meanwhile, cognitive psychologists look at thought processes; for instance, how bias, priming and memory affect the way humans live. Moreover, technology such as fMRI scans can help us see the activity in the brain that can help us diagnose neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s.

Philosophical Conclusions

From all this, we might say that philosophy is the qualitative measure of human experience, while psychology the quantitative measure. The root of philosophy is in thought alone, in the desire to find answers through reason, as seen in Plato and his theories on the soul or Socrates through his questioning to nudge people to think in a critical way that questions their own beliefs, and possibly reshape their framework on life and morality. In contrast, the foundation of psychology is experiments and data, hoping to find answers through the most objective means. It’s not as idealistic as philosophy because it does not look at the way things should be, but at what they are.

When looking into studying human experience, psychology and philosophy are the subjects to choose. They both investigate identity, motivation, and the desire to understand what makes a human being. The difference is, one does it via rational explanation, and the other through science.

© Ayten Nevzat 2026

Ayten Nevzat is a British psychology lecturer and writer with an interest in applying psychological science to real world issues.

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Question of the Month

What’s A Good 1000-Year Plan?

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

A good thousand-year plan is one that is initiated in the correct environment, has vision, and has continuous management so we can build a brighter future.

In today’s short-term world we are lucky to get a thousand day plan from our governments, so for inspiration as to a good thousand-year plan maybe we should look to history or literature. In terms of history. the first ‘thousand-year plan’ that comes to mind is Hitler’s thousand-year Reich. This was not a good plan. Fortunately it only lasted twelve years, but it still caused the largest amount of death and destruction in history. Looking at literature, let’s consider the Seldon plan from Asimov’s Foundation series. In the novels Hari Seldon develops ‘psychohistory’, on the assumption that the gargantuan population of the Galactic Empire allows him to predict future developments using probability theory. It works for a couple of hundred years, but when an event happens that has never happened before – what probability theory calls a ‘black swan event’ – the Seldon plan unravels. Perhaps Bayesian probability theory – the updating of what is thought probable when new information is revealed – should be used to continuously update any thousand-year plan to keep it on track.

Despite the challenges, history can provide examples of successful step changes in human development, including the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. So let’s say, to start a successful thousand-year plan we need to create the environment where a new Renaissance or Enlightenment can occur. The Enlightenment for instance happened in Northern European states where relatively tight Catholic intellectual control had been overturned by the Reformation. But there are still forces that want to hold back intellectual progress. So we need a cultural environment where the general population does not fear change so that new technologies and ideas can grow unfettered. Having created the right environment for intellectual flourishing, the plan will require ambitious targets. These include nuclear fusion, which will provide humanity with cheap unlimited power, and artificial intelligence driven by quantum computing, which will aid humanity in the development of secure food supplies, cradle-to-grave healthcare, and education for all. Once this plan is underway, continual Bayesian probability analysis will be required to ensure the plan deals with unexpected events and stays on track.

Philip Brown, Bury St Edmunds

Modelling the development of human civilisation over such a long timespan is extremely unreliable. Because of this unpredictability, a step-by-step plan is practically impossible.

Since detailed planning is impossible, any thousand-year plan must be based on enduring ideas and values rather than specific policies or institutions. Over the course of a millennium, many of today’s institutions, political systems and social structures will likely disappear, or transform beyond recognition. Ideas and values, however, are able to provide direction across generations, despite changes. So rather than pursuing narrow political goals, we should strive to create conditions that enable every person to live a meaningful, fulfilling and excellent life. Therefore, Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia, or human flourishing, should be humanity’s primary goal through 3026 and beyond. To achieve this, certain core values could guide human progress across the next centuries, including love, knowledge, freedom and justice – values widely accepted as important moral ideals. While the actions taken to express these values will change over time, the values themselves can provide a stable, but adaptive, moral compass in a constantly changing future. Ultimately, the most realistic and useful 1000-year plan is therefore not a plan at all, but a shared moral direction guided by enduring values and aimed at achieving human flourishing for all.

Grete Raaymann, Düsseldorf

A truly philosophical millennium plan is not a blueprint for building monuments or systems, but a quiet, deliberate strategy for becoming worth remembering, while fully accepting that we, as individuals, might not be. Collectively, it’s a different matter.

In the first phase of the thousand years, the task is deceptively simple: do less harm. Rather than shouting our values into the void, we should begin to practise intergenerational justice for those not yet here by refusing to further damage the world. Harm is still harm, whether it happens today or ten centuries from now. The future is not an abstraction; it is a delayed consequence. This requires a shift in moral imagination. To live by this principle is to take responsibility seriously. It means acknowledging wrongdoing, repairing what we can, and resisting the urge to make reckless, irreversible decisions. Whether confronting climate change or the dream of radically extending human life, we are called to adopt a version of the Hippocratic ethic: first, do no harm; second, heal thyself. Restraint becomes a form of wisdom.

At the same time, we must create. Like the fragments left behind by past civilisations – artworks, tools, inscriptions – we should produce work so strangely specific, so distinctly human, that future archaeologists are left uncertain whether we were brilliant or absurd. In that ambiguity lies our signature. It is not perfection that endures, but curiosity. Beyond preservation and creation, our plan extends into something more abstract: we act as the universe’s conscious witness. Our role is to continue asking Leibniz’s question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ – not necessarily to answer it, but to keep the question alive. In doing so, we resist intellectual complacency.

By the end of the millennium, our descendents will not measure our success by dominance or technological triumph, but by transformation. Ideally, we will have replaced our society with something gentler, more patient, more thoughtful. Not perfect, but improved in its capacity for care. If those living in the year 3026 look back at us at all, let them see a people both primitive and sincere: poets, engineers, and philosophers, who, against the odds, managed not to destroy the fragile world beneath their feet.

Claire Keogh, Dublin

On the face of it, this is an unanswerable question. In a world where the most powerful man can change his mind, and therefore the lives of all of us, from hour to hour, who can possibly think to plan for a thousand years? Yet we feeble humans have nevertheless created much that endures. So what might we plan, conscious of the many generations to come that must build on our foundations?

First, and most vital, we must stop polluting our planet, and find ways of reversing the worst of the damage we have caused. Developing cleaner technologies and energy sources also links to the second necessity: finding a fairer way of sharing our planet’s limited resources. That will require forms of international agreement and governance along the lines of a greatly more efficient, respected, and empowered equivalent to the United Nations, to which all nations must subscribe. Capitalism, Communism, and other economic systems have contributed to both great advances and great failures. We must find ways to synthesise the best of each way of thinking in order to make our small and crowded planet a sustainable and fairer place. This will enable us to progress towards the third priority, which is eliminating absolute poverty. And our fourth priority should be the universal availability of education to all young people everywhere, irrespective of sex, religion, ethnicity, parental status, etc; including training in awareness of the world’s problems and the ongoing efforts to solve them, and what or how each person might contribute.

So four major campaigns: preventing/reversing pollution and climate change; enabling fair sharing of the earth’s resources; global governance to counter exploitation; and universal access to good education, including in social responsibility. These developments will take time, require massive resources, and demand sustained effort. To echo John F. Kennedy’s inspirational words: this will not be achieved in the first ten years ; maybe not in the first hundred years; but let us begin! – and together work towards these goals for all mankind, indeed for all life on our planet.

David Morris, Oxford

A good thousand-year plan begins with a modest assumption: we are terrible at prediction, but good at leaving traces. The Stoics knew this, the Buddhists smiled at it, and the British built an entire empire on the principle of ‘this will probably sort itself out’. (Sometimes it even did.) So the aim of a thousand-year civilisation should not be perfection. Perfection is what collapses dramatically in documentaries. Resilience is far more durable. A cathedral survives because generations keep repairing it; a garden survives because nobody expects the roses to obey management consultants.

So my proposal is this: humanity should create a distributed ‘Inheritance Network’. Every century, each community must leave behind three things for the next one: a seed bank, a library, and a joke archive. The seed bank preserves survival, the library preserves memory, and the jokes preserve sanity. (Historians underestimate how much civilization depends on people remaining amused.)

The philosophical foundation for this is simple. Aristotle argued that flourishing comes from cultivating virtues over time, while Hannah Arendt warned that civilisation decays when people stop participating in public life. Meanwhile, British history demonstrates that tea and mild sarcasm can sustain social order through astonishing levels of administrative failure.

A thousand-year plan should therefore optimise for continuity rather than conquest. Plant forests whose shade you will never sit under. Build institutions that expect corruption and survive it anyway. Design cities where children can safely walk to a bakery to get a cake, and old people can argue about weather patterns with professional dedication. Most importantly, preserve the ability to change your mind. Dogmatic civilisations become ruins with excellent symmetry.

Finally, a practical recommendation: every parliament on Earth should be required to maintain at least one official court jester. Democracies already contain clowns. This innovation is simply to make one of them qualified.

Wolfgang Steih, Usingen, Germany

Though a small blip on the timeline of eternity, one thousand years is a long time for human beings. Considering the exponential rate of growth in scientific knowledge, the developments over the next few centuries are utterly unpredictable. Any thinking for this time frame could at best be a good guess rather than a workable plan. And a plan for achieving what? Do we even have a clearly defined goal? Is it feasible or even desirable to direct and control the flow of scientific research? Would the humans be able to control their greed and envy? Such difficulties make defining any firm long-term plan well nigh impossible. However, setting up a broad direction in which such a plan should lead is worth laying down. Possibly this plan should strive to:

* Eliminate suffering for all sentient beings.

* Eliminate the possibility of any existential threat, such as collision with a meteor, the sun cooling down, or an alien attack using techniques of destruction not known to earthlings.

* Effectively prevent any annihilation of all ‘living beings’ (as understood today) by AI driven entities.

The elimination of physical suffering is perhaps not so far away. Advances in bionics and genetics should be able to provide a painless body soon. Such advancement would also contribute to economic well-being. Maybe someone could even live without needing a body – a formless existence. But what about emotional pain? Is it even worth living without emotions? And would the boundary between man and machine not get entirely blurred without emotions?

Chances are that advanced space travel and bodiless existence will provide earthlings with enough prowess to successfully obliterate threats due to celestial imbalances, aliens or an event like the earth melting away. This brings us to the technological singularity, when the growth of artificial intelligence means computers become cleverer than humans; humans might then be considered a drag upon the system.

The initial sparks of such a development are already visible. Tighter regulations and restrictions on research and development must monitor and control such developments. But is there anything wrong about the world being controlled by artificial intelligence? If so, why not leave it to the actions of nature and humanity?

Anil Kulshrestha, Uttar Pradesh, India

The allure of a thousand-year plan is not new. The Romans believed their empire would last forever, going as far as dubbing their capital Roma Aeterna (eternal Rome). Although Rome stands today, nearly 3000 years after its foundation, the beliefs of the former empire have long since been trodden into dust.

Another argument against attempting a thousand-year plan is the changes of morality that occur throughout history. For instance, only in the last century or so did women gain access to voting rights. Here there were even claims that the mental strain of political thinking for women would lead to infertility. But the point is, the moral failings of the past can largely be credited to cultural differences between then and now. So why believe that our good morals of today will not be renounced even in the next century?

It’s bad to want to impose our morals, ideas, ideals, and beliefs onto future generations. who may or may not agree with them. From this we can conclude that only plans with loosely-held obligations, and only widely interpretable suggestions, can work.

So what’s a good thousand-year plan? We don’t believe there is one. They’re futile by nature. The point of these digressions was to exemplify that plans and ideals are not built to outlast the winds of time. Perhaps the best plan one can have is to leave the world better than one found it, and to allow future generations to do the same, as they see fit. But we do owe it to the future civilizations and inhabitants of our planet to try to restore and preserve their home. So plans to maintain and to carefully remove anything that will cause harm to the ecosphere should be implemented.

Joseph Bloomer & Charlotte Wren, Glasgow

There is probably little more futile than drawing up a thousand-year plan unless you’re deeply caught up in some kind of monist future-world scenario whereby you are convinced that humanity has but a single purpose or goal that once achieved will lead to a perfect state. But the average Utopia is static; for how can you improve on perfection once achieved? The communist workers’ paradise, or the Hitlerian thousand-year Reich, have both been end-games, for once achieved there would be nowhere else to go. Any thousand-year plan drawn up under such pre-conditions will mirror the orthodoxy that the planners sought to impose on humanity, and be perfectly useless.

Imagine a grand committee of the great and the good sitting down in 1926 and drawing up a plan for the next hundred years: would that have been worth the paper it was written on? Unlikely, except as a warning against hubris and forgetting to allow for progress, failures, wars, environmental changes, and shifting geo-political realities. It would at best have a quaint historical value – like one of H.G. Wells’ forays into futurology. Now go right back to 1026, assemble your experts and ask them to make a plan for the next thousand years… The future, rather like the past, is a foreign country, and they will definitely do things differently there. Chance and contingency wreak havoc on even the best laid plans, which undoubtedly “gang aft agley”, as Robert Burns would have it.

There’s a second objection as well: Creators of a thousand-year plan, however well intentioned they may be, are seeking to bind future generations to their plan, and so preclude them from making their own decisions and deliberations. A thousand years is 40 or more generations, which is a long way for the dead hand of the past to stretch. In the UK, as elsewhere, there is a long-standing convention that Parliament cannot bind future Parliaments, and this is as it should be. A generation now should not seek to bind future generations either. So a good thousand-year plan would be to abjure any thought of drawing up any such thing as a thousand-year plan.

Steve Foulger, Faversham

In an interview for Le Figaro, Marie Perret, Head of the French Association of Philosophy Teachers, expressed how incensed she was by the downgrading of the discipline to what she described as a ‘derisory’ place in the school curriculum. Philosophy, she argued, should be valued and promoted because “it is a discipline which demands that you listen to your own thoughts and that you are able to get angry with yourself.” Further, “it leads pupils not to confuse the truth with spontaneous opinion and to construct critical judgement.” Plato famously makes Socrates say that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. Contrariwise, Isaiah Berlin cautioned that if all members of a society were sceptical intellectuals, constantly examining the presuppositions of their beliefs, ‘nobody would be able to act at all’. True as this may be, the invention of the internet, the fact that most people obtain their news from social media, the permeation of AI into so many aspects of our lives, pose problems heretofore unimagined. My plan, therefore, is to have philosophy (defined as deep rational enquiry and reflection) placed at the heart of all teaching and learning.

Helmuth von Moltke noted that “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” In the same vein, as we race headlong into an unknowable future, it is difficult to devise any plan that can survive for long with much relevance. Nor would anyone expect philosophy to provide a blueprint for living. What I would argue though, is that the study of philosophy can provide the intellectual skills necessary to interrogate and evaluate the manner and content of our discourse with one another in a rational and confident manner, as independent thinkers – fundamental skills both immediately applicable and of enduring relevance, for a thousand years, and well beyond.

David Cope, Telford

Next Question of the Month

The next question is: Is The Mind The Brain? If Not, What Is It? Please give and justify your answer in less than 400 words. The prize is a semi-random book from our book mountain. Email the Editor. Subject lines should be marked ‘Question of the Month’, and must be received by 19th October 2026. If you want a chance of getting a book, please include your physical address.

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Brief Lives

Julian the Apostate (331-363)

Eli Sclar reports on a weaponizer of tolerance.

In 361 AD, the newly-crowned Roman emperor Julian (Flavius Claudius Julianus, 331-363 AD) openly proclaimed his conversion from Christianity to the pagan faith of the ancient Greeks that Rome had previously appropriated. History would soon recognize him as Rome’s last pagan emperor and brand him ‘the Apostate’, an apostate being someone who renounces their faith.

Julian’s conversion to polytheism came at an unusual time for Rome. Thirty-seven years prior, his uncle, Constantine I (popularly known as ‘the Great’) had become the first Christian emperor. His son, Constantius II, followed in his footsteps. Constantine the Great legalised Christianity in the Empire in 313. Julian himself had received a Christian upbringing, studying with the likes of Saint Basil of Caesarea and the Bishop of Alexandria, George of Cappadocia. Yet during his youth, Julian was also introduced to works of Greek literature and philosophy, eventually culminating in his studying to become a philosopher himself, with the personal goal of stopping the spread of Christianity. However, Julian sought neither to persecute the Christians as some of his predecessors had, nor to avenge the pagans for the policies of Constantine and his son. He chose a different method to stop the growth of Christianity – tolerance.

Julian’s early life had been rife with violence. At the age of six, he and his brother Gallus watched as their newly-crowned cousin, Constantius II, assassinated members of his own family whom he deemed threats to his reign. When the dust cleared, the only living male relatives of Constantine the Great were Constantius II himself, his brothers Crispus, Constans, and Constantius Gallus, whom he assigned as Caesars, and the young Julian and Gallus. Julian’s father and older brother had been killed, and Julian himself likely survived only on account of his youth.

In the years that followed, Julian would study the Neoplatonic teachings of Iamblichus in Ephesus, becoming a pupil of the philosopher Maximus, and eventually converting to the pagan faith of his ancestors in 350, although he would not make this known until his ascension to the imperial throne in 361.

Had events played out differently, Julian would have likely lived out his days as a philosopher. Yet this was not to be. Gallus, who had been raised to the rank of Caesar, was beheaded by Constantius in 354 for his mishandling of the eastern provinces. With his brothers dead and no other familial option for an heir, the Emperor turned his sights towards Julian. However, Constantius had no love for his nephew, being suspicious of his loyalty after rumors circulated alleging that Julian had defied exile to meet Gallus in Constantinople before his execution. He raised Julian to the rank of Caesar the following year, then sent him with an army of under 400 men to Gaul to reclaim the province. If his nephew failed, no one could justifiably blame Constantius for his death; but if he succeeded, the Emperor would be able to claim the victory as his own.

Within five years, Julian had restored the Gallic provinces, freed 20,000 Roman prisoners, and expelled the Germanic invaders. Witnessing his success, Constantius sent Julian orders to send his finest troops back to him – over half his 23,000-strong army. The majority of these soldiers were Gauls, whom Julian had recruited. In 360 they mutinied and proclaimed Julian the rightful Augustus. They only relented after supposedly receiving a (polytheistically) divine sign. They then proceeded to sacrifice to the gods. Refusing Julian’s plea to be recognized as Augustus, Constantius prepared for civil war, even while carrying out a campaign against Persia. Finding no luck with his eastern expedition, the Emperor turned back towards Constantinople, yet fell ill along the way, and on the 6th November 361 he died. In his will he accepted the inevitable, passing the empire to Julian.

Now the most powerful individual in the empire, Julian was finally free from censors, and began publishing both imperial edicts and philosophical polemics aimed at weakening Christianity’s influence, although he officially maintained a stance of non-violence. After returning pagan temples that had been ‘requisitioned’ by Constantine, extending privileges he granted to Christian priests to priests of every faith, and issuing an edict proclaiming tolerance for all religions under Roman law. Julian’s first major blow against the Christians came in the form of an imperial edict directed at teachers throughout the empire. In 362, he released what’s now known as his Rescript on Christian Teachers, which articulated the principles that characterized his religious policy.

In this edict, Julian lambasts teachers who simply regurgitate knowledge without explaining how morality or honor plays into things, for Julian saw education primarily as moral formation. Instead, texts from esteemed pagan authors, such as Homer, Hesiod, or Herodotus, whose works were in Julian’s eyes a result of divine inspiration, must be taught in ways that respected the gods. Julian was not against criticism of these works or the men who wrote them; yet he maintained that if they were taught by Christian teachers, they would certainly be taught poorly: for how could Christians grasp, let alone teach, the true nature of these texts? In the edict, he said that those whose teaching ran counter to their own beliefs were doing their students a grave disservice. The same, Julian argued, would apply to a follower of the Greco-Roman gods teaching the gospels. Since they’re paid for explaining works for which they care little, such teachers, in the Emperor’s eyes, “thereby confess that they are the most shameful and greedy of gain, and that, for the sake of a few drachmae, they would put up with anything” (trans. Wilmer C. Wright, 1923). Therefore Julian decreed that Christians must teach a Christian curriculum; by attempting to teach pagan works, they would be committing grave errors. The Emperor also declared the equivalent for Hellenistic educators, but the edict was clearly one-sided: pagan works contained centuries of mathematics, literature, warfare, history, theology, science, and medicine, whereas Christianity, then still a young religion, lacked any major texts outside the Bible, letters from bishops, church histories, and biblical commentary. Any parent wanting their sons to receive an education would therefore of course turn towards a pagan educator, rejecting the small library of Christian works in favor of the full corpus of classical texts.

Julian ended this edict with a demand that students not be turned away from attending a school, nor be blamed for being too young and ignorant to decide what beliefs to follow. He even criticizes those who would overwhelm the youth into following the Greco-Roman gods. And although he thinks the Christians are dangerously wrong, he concludes, “Though indeed it might be proper to cure these, even against their will, as one cures the insane… we ought, I think, to teach, but not punish, the demented.” As a Neoplatonist himself, Julian thought that all the gods of Rome were lesser deities created by a much greater yet distant god, and were designed to shape the matter created by this highest being.

Pro-Jewish & Anti-Christian

During his stay in Antioch in the winter of 362-3, Julian composed his essay ‘Against the Galileans’, perhaps his clearest and most piercing polemic against the Christians. Throughout this work, the emperor labels the Christians as ‘Galileans’, after the region where Jesus was born, emphasizing that Christianity was not a new religion, much less one capable of being universal. Although he acknowledges Galileans using the language and symbolism of their Jewish precursors, Julian finds no basis for Christian thought within Judaism itself. Christianity, in his view, is a heretical sect appropriating the Old Testament.

Julian seems to have had a deep respect for the Hebrew people and regarded them as near-equals to the Hellenes. He attacks the notion that the Abrahamic god would create a being equal to himself: to do so would contradict the core tenet of the Hebrew religion – monotheism. Julian believed that every nation and people is under the care and protection of its own deities: for the Hellenes, there were the Graeco-Roman gods who themselves were split between different geographic locations and ethnic groups. The Hebrews were much the same, except their God jealously demanded absolute loyalty to himself alone from the Jews. For the Galileans to proclaim that the Hebrew God must be worshipped by all, not just the Hebrew people, would also be contrary to the tenets of Judaism. Owing to his Neoplatonist thought, Julian believed that all gods are lesser deities, created by a much greater and distant god, and were designed to shape the matter created by this highest being. Thus the differences of temperament and cultural achievements between the Celts and Greeks, or Germans and Romans, Julian argues, are merely a result of their respective deities’ interference, leading to a system of natural inequality between people.

Gold solidus of Julian

The Galilean adoption of the Hebrew god for all people creates an artificial homogenization, a fiction, that all people are equal in all respects, whereas Julian argues that some cultures are naturally better than others in certain activities, such as war, philosophy, architecture, or agriculture. He further explains that the Galileans do not follow the dietary restrictions or the animal sacrifices of their Hebrew predecessors, and purposely misinterpret the Jewish prophet Isaiah to fit the immaculate conception of Jesus. He even asserts that the apostles did not consider Jesus to be God until John declared it after his death.

Despite their monotheism, Julian saw many similarities between the Hebrews and Hellenes like himself: both worshipped in temples, sacrificed animals to their gods, and had purification ceremonies, as well as sanctuaries. He admired their ancient and rich history, seeing them as respectable, albeit unusual, peers of the Greeks. In his letter ‘To the Community of the Jews’, he states that he would end the overtaxation that he witnessed firsthand during the reigns of Constantine and Constantius as well as burn the records so that they may not be used as precedent to harass the Jews.

Although scholars debate whether his philosemitism was exaggerated in order to alienate Christians even further, his admiration for these people seems genuine (in the very same letter, Julian refers to Jewish Patriarch Hillel II as ‘my brother’). He even promised to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem, which had been destroyed in AD 70. By rebuilding the Second Temple, Julian hoped to refute Christianity, as this would disprove Jesus’prophecy about its destruction. Yet such a refutation would never be realized. In 363, shortly after Julian entered Antioch, fires broke out near the site of its construction, likely due to sabotage. The project never resumed.

Conclusions

From Antioch, Julian launched his campaign against Persia in March of 363. This expedition, however, was about as successful as Constantius’s had been. Caught in a withdrawal, Julian was wounded in the Battle of Samarra and died of internal bleeding the next day, on 27 June 363, at the age of 32.

The work Julian accomplished during his brief lifetime provides a fascinating, and one of the last, examples of a Roman noble attempting to refute Christianity, before it completely engulfed the Empire. One wonders what our world would have looked like had Julian’s reign not been cut short. Would Julian’s non-violent policies combating the minority, yet rising, religion of Christianity have been effective? His philosophical insights into the relations between Hellenes and Christians during a period marred by persecutions of both beg further attention. The simplification of his character as an ‘apostate’ masks the uniqueness of his writings, policies, and the world he was born into.

© Eli Sclar 2026

Eli Sclar is a writer and philosophy enthusiast from San Diego.

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Interviews

- Ulrich Metschl

Interview

Ulrich Metschl

Ulrich Metschl is an associate professor at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Thiago Pinho talks with him about philosophical collaborations.

Professor Ulrich Metschl’s topics of study are logic and philosophy of logic, ethics of science, and political philosophy. He has published many papers on these topics, as well as a book titled On the Value of Science and the Benefits of Research (2016). He was also my advisor for my postdoctoral research in political philosophy, so I’m excited to discuss with him the role of philosophy in the twenty-first century and its challenges.

In the Continental tradition, most of the time science and philosophy don’t have a good relationship. We can see this, for example, in post-structuralism and its implications for areas like postcolonial studies. For these sorts of theories, science seems like a burden that should be removed, controlled, or, at least, unmasked. How do you see the relationship between philosophers and scientists, especially today? Is there anything we can learn from each other?

Yes, of course. I am absolutely positive that we can and should learn from each other. I think philosophy is not such a freestanding enterprise, and should take into consideration what’s going on in other branches of academia. We can only benefit from learning from science, in particular from the natural sciences, but also from social sciences, or other humanities. I am also slightly reluctant simply to dismiss endeavors like postcolonial studies as being against science. In some sense, these studies can bring a huge benefit to our historical understanding, or our understanding of what is going on in our societies. Migration, for example, has become a major political issue in many countries, and an adequate understanding of its causes will certainly include an acknowledgement of Europe’s colonial past.

In sum, I think that while you’re certainly right that there is kind of a friction between much of what’s going on in Continental philosophy and science, we should not be too hard in our judgment, nor simply say that they’re completely at odds with each other. Even here we can find some sort of cooperation, and that there’s something to be learned from each other.

We live in a world where distrust has become institutionalized. What is the role of philosophy in a world where everything is subject to constant criticism? Can philosophy help address this?

That’s a good question – very timely of course – and I’m not sure how to answer it! A first point might be that certainly the public role of philosophy will probably be a very modest one. It’s for good reasons that we would not want to have philosopher kings, as Plato recommended. Moreover, even when it comes to problems like the rise of the far right, populism, and so on, it’s the task of civil society as a whole to do something about it, because society should find its own way from bottom up, so to say. But I also think that philosophy can chip in a little bit, and make itself useful, if only by trying to clarify the terms and conditions along which public discourse takes place. Improving the standards of reasonable argumentation is sometimes helpful. I hope that philosophy can be at least some help there. But I’m not sure that it will exert much influence or will be able to change the situation if it goes really wrong, and perhaps it’s gone wrong already. So, yes and no, I’d say. Perhaps philosophy can be some help by simply broadening our horizons, by bringing up alternative ways of thinking, and reminding us of good standards for discussing issues. On the other hand, the role should be a modest one. We would not want philosophy to impose itself on society or to become overly authoritative in what it does. It should not decree how societies should be governed, but rather should contribute to an ongoing public discussion on good governance by suggesting fresh ideas or reminding us of critical standards.

It seems the political realm today is a foundation for everything: at least that’s the way people feel on social media. Many non-politicians affirm their politics – whether we’re talking about soccer players, singers, actors, musicians, managers, chefs, nostalgic boomers, or even teenagers. There’s something magical about politics that attracts people. So what is the relationship between philosophy and politics? How do you see it? Is there a strong connection, or is it loose and complicated?

Being myself trained in philosophy, I could only wish that politics would be better informed by philosophy. But again we should not expect too much.

In some sense I think we could even be more interested in politics than we usually are. On the other hand, politics can also be a bit boring. What people really want, and what makes life worth living, is perhaps not politics but being creative, having friends, having a good time, caring for one’s family, having a decent life. Politics, however, is in some sense essential for achieving all that. So what we surely want is that the ideas that are essential for politics, such as freedom or equality – things that are important for us in liberal democracies – are at least sufficiently clear so that our understanding of them is coherent enough to get along with them. We also need some understanding of when these terms become problematic, and of how their meaning may shift over time. For example, when it comes to ‘democracy’, one thing that seems to me pretty clear is that democracies are not immutable, never changing, but rather need to be adapted to new social circumstances. We need some sort of ongoing renewal of our democracies, and of our understanding of democracy: a renewal of democratic procedures as societies change. This of course requires public debate, and that’s a political issue.

Philosophy, it seems to me, has one main advantage over other disciplines, namely that it must think in terms of alternatives. The basic philosophical question seems to me to be: ‘How else could things consistently be?’ This is not meant as an engagement in fiction – not even in science fiction – but rather a call for attempts to think in alternatives. In the political context it means to ask about alternative ways of life individually, and how to organize our lives in new ways collectively.

For example, nowadays, with climate change under way, ideas about alternative ways of governing societies are not exclusively the prerogative of the social sciences. Why? Because science basically informs us about what is the case, but says less about the ways things could be, and least of all how things should be. But philosophy is a discipline that can think in terms of possibilities. It should, of course, strive to think in terms of reasonable possibilities, not just fantastic imaginings, so that it informs society and politics about what improvement might be practically possible. Still we should be weary of paternalistic attempts to overrule what can only be established by public debate. And of course, philosophy must learn from other disciplines and take into account their insights and opinions. One thing we have certainly learned from feminist philosophies, is that even in philosophy we tend to ignore different perspectives for all too long. We definitely should broaden our perspectives and let in other points of view.

According to Immanuel Kant, there is no way for us to directly know the real world, only interpretations and possibilities – what Graham Harman would call ‘conditions of access’. So, we’re forever trapped in a ‘transcendental horizon’ created by language, culture, body, ideology, and other things. Can a philosopher debate about the ‘real world’, or is that old-fashioned pre-Kantian blabbering?

That’s a tricky question. My own view is that, ultimately, you cannot avoid accepting the idea of some reality that we do not create but can try to grasp intellectually. I think realism is in some sense unavoidable, but it takes sophistication. Of course, we should not be naïve realists [who think reality is exactly as we experience it to be, Ed]. But if you ask me what I mean by ‘a more sophisticated version of realism’, I would be hard pressed. It is true that many things are social constructions: Nations, the state, universities, or money, are all examples of social constructions. But even the fact that some concepts seem rather arbitrary – think of colour names, or Nelson Goodman’s example of constellations – does not imply that ultimately there is no mind-independent reality. You might say, “Well, all concepts to some extent are constructions.” I would argue, however, that instead of calling them ‘constructions’, we should see them as verbal instruments to grasp or capture something about ultimately reality.

In some sense, reality may seem elusive because all our efforts seem to leave us with an incomplete picture of the world. Questioning our picture, of reality is very Kantian of course but it’s also a pragmatist position in the vein of Peirce or Dewey. But the idea of doing away with reality altogether – of not accepting anything as being mind-independent – it seems to me is not coherent. In the end, we cannot avoid simply accepting that there is something that underlies objective truth. Think about climate change, for example: trying to deny that it’s a fact by saying “It’s just a social construction” does not take us anywhere. It is because it’s real that we have to do something about it. It’s a fact: accept the fact! How we come to accept it as a fact – how we find out about these facts – is a different issue; but here’s the situation, and I think it’s something we can’t dismiss. So in this sense, it’s indispensable that we accept some kind of realism. But as I said, much depends on how you define that realism. There are all sorts of realisms, and more sophisticated versions certainly allow integrating a [socially] constructivist perspective on some items in our reality.

As we see in many liberal democracies, dialogue is not easy. In general, people take themselves too seriously, and see others as enemies to be ‘destroyed’. Ad hominem arguments are replacing all other forms of discussion: saying ‘You are evil’ rather than why this idea is wrong. And I’m not simply talking about right vs left, but even within the right and the left, and across all of social media. Debates become ‘ideological food fights’, as Michael Sandel called them decades ago. When we think about the public space in liberal democracies, how can this be improved? Is philosophy able to help us with this task?

Again, we should have faith along the lines I pointed out – namely, that philosophy helps us to inform public debates, and clarifies ideas, concepts, and ways to present, to create, and to establish arguments in public space. However, just to make things more complicated, it is not so clear to me that our political discourse really has so much deteriorated. Sometimes we are too nostalgic about the past – due to shortcomings in our memory and also because we forget that in the past political discussions were mostly the privilege of elite groups. It was certainly not the whole population that participated, and large parts of it were excluded. Today, opportunities for participating in political debates are much broader, so it’s easier to add something to them, for better or worse. It is at least some step towards a more democratic public. Does this mean that the standards of public discussions must decline? Not necessarily. Of course, in competing for attention, voices get louder and louder, and this is perhaps not what we would desire for civilized debate. Again, the challenge for philosophy is to add a sober voice, keep some clear-minded path in these discussions, and try to correct conceptual confusions wherever they’re detected. We should not expect too much of philosophy, but we should of course also try to lend a hand to society as much as we can by bringing clarity to the public. I’m not sure that it will ultimately work to the benefit of society, but let’s hope it will.

Boethius & the Consolation of Philosophy by Mattia Preti, 1680

It’s both interesting and funny that people expect philosophers to participate in today’s ideological battles, as if they’re looking for a philosophical justification for their side of the argument. They’re seeking legitimation. They want to make their ideology more solid. But sometimes I don’t give them that, and it’s clear they don’t like it. When I try to add a little bit of nuance, or correct certain terms – like when someone says “Trump is a fascist” and I say, “Wait a minute, it’s not that simple. He’s a problematic and dangerous figure, sure, but we need to be careful with our categories because they have consequences” – people often aren’t expecting it. They instead want me to say “Here’s your justification for your political stance. Maybe use Kant here, or Hegel, so you can feel validated.” It’s a tricky situation.

We’re not around to serve partisan ends. I’m not suggesting that philosophy must simply be neutral or impartial, like an innocent bystander. This may not always be possible, and philosophy should not bend over backwards to avoid any position or commitment. But our aim is not to serve certain clients or partial ends, but rather to get the full picture. As you say, the first step here would be to see that things are complicated, in particular when it comes to politics. That may not be to everyone’s liking. Some are put off by the niceties that philosophy tries to add to debates. But I think it’s an important task to which we must remain committed. We should emphasize that we care about details because ignoring the details can be dangerous and can lead to confusion. And, if anything, philosophy should try to avoid confusion and reduce confusion where it exists, instead of creating more of it.

Thanks to social media, people are able to interact in ways that were unthinkable before. I remember that for many decades we complained that people were passive, stuck on a couch eating pizza and drinking beer, like Homer Simpson. But now there seems much more engagement. How do you see the engagement we have nowadays? Should we celebrate it? Are we finally smarter than Homer Simpson?

Can anyone be smarter than Homer Simpson, I wonder? Sometimes I see some over-engagement, but this is a personal perspective. The engagement to which you’re referring is often very personal, and, in a sense, very subjective. People are busy with their own conceptions of what’s important, whereas of course we would want to make them or keep them open-minded. ‘Open-mindedness’ is here the virtue of being interested and curious about what’s going on. The aim is to make oneself ‘objective’. This could counter the type of over-engagement to which you alluded. Personally, I am not so interested in social media and the hype around it; but over-engagement is maybe not the most pressing problem social media create. And they are a way to engage in public debates, at least to a certain extent.

No matter what happens in the world or on TV, people want to share their opinions. The funny part is that often they don’t have any real knowledge and they don’t feel they need it. On the other hand, more people are participating in discussions, explaining their views, and trying to think more critically. Maybe it’s a positive development. I’m not sure.

I’m fond of advocating the suspense of judgment. We should often be more reluctant to come up with our opinions; we should be slower in our judgment, and exert more often a simple suspense of judgment, having the courage to say at times, “I don’t know, I have no idea.” It’s not that one doesn’t care. Sometimes, of course it’s fine not to care about an issue. But if one does care, because it is something that matters, it is important to come up with a considered judgment. If one finds oneself unable to do that, a suspense of judgment is often the best choice. What we see in social media is often quite the opposite of a considered judgment – it’s just something dashed out. So there’s much to be said in favour of a suspense of judgment.

It seems like many are heading down a path of paranoia, creating their own narratives. It doesn’t matter if it’s right-wing or left-wing paranoia, it’s odd either way.

In the liberal tradition the distinction between the private and the public domain is important, because we want to set different standards for the private and the public. But the line between the private and the public, which never was so clear-cut, is getting hazier today. It’s blurred in a sense that it wasn’t in former times. I think what we find reinforced with social media, is a certain kind of overflow from the private into the public. It’s similar to our behaviour when driving. We sit in our private car, getting furious with the other drivers. They, in turn, are getting furious about us, alongside the other drivers. Each is blaming the others for things in ways they wouldn’t if they could communicate face to face. And I think something along these lines happens on social media. There’s no relicence anymore when you’re in your private bubble. People just come up with their very subjective, very spontaneous reactions, which are, as you mentioned, very often ill-founded, or perhaps completely unfounded. But that is a lack of control in a sense, as well as an insufficient understanding of what belongs to the public sphere as opposed to being simply a private emotion, a gut reaction, say.

In your opinion, what is the most important challenge for philosophy today?

That’s also a hard question. Philosophy is not a uniform, homogeneous enterprise, so we have different branches, different orientations, even in philosophy. Generally, I think a real challenge is not to lose sight of what is important for a broader public. What sometimes irritates me a bit, is that, just like any other academic discipline, academic philosophy is highly specialized. That’s fine, but I think it’s really important to have an understanding of what can be transmitted to the public, rather than being bogged down in subtle difficult academic questions that have their own purpose but are not the broader public’s foremost concerns. Of course the very sophisticated discussions in academic journals are an essential part of academic philosophy, much as what we find in mathematics, where we have elaborate theorems proved by experts, and no one except a handful of other experts would understand what they mean and what they’re good for. It’s important to have research going on like that. What I am claiming, however, is that it’s also important to add to the specialists’ perspective a broader perspective more in line with what is of relevance for societies and what’s politically important. So, developing a certain two-sidedness, including a curiosity for the public weal, is I think perhaps really the challenge for philosophy today.

To finish the interview, I’d like to ask you something special. What message can you share with the younger generation of philosophers and social theorists?

I’m not sure that I’m in a position to say anything to a younger generation; but perhaps it relates to what I just said – namely, to try to strive for that broader perspective.

One should not lose sight of how detailed academic research could be brought together with insights that inform public or social concerns. We should keep in mind that we should try to contribute to our societies, and that philosophy should not just be about very sophisticated questions not intelligible to anyone without a PhD. Try to address the public. So that’s what I would say.

• Dr Thiago Pinho teaches at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. He has written three books on Social Theory, including Decentering the Language (Zarte,2018), Symptoms (Paco, 2019). He works on topics such as Object-Oriented Social Theory and postcolonial studies. Email him at pinho.thiago@hotmail.com.

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Letters

- Letters

Letters

Letters

Living & Dead Letters • Is Antinatalism Misogynistic? • Is This The End? • Listening To The Enemy • Will to Power Over The Will to Power • Islamic Issues • Critical Habermas • Sincere Hypocrisy • Tallis’s Ghost Stories

Living & Dead Letters

Dear Editor: A long with everything else in the Life & Death Issue (174), I very much enjoyed Dan Pollen’s excellent article on the pluses and minuses of eternal life. But does having eternal life mean one is indestructible, unable to be snuffed out through murder, accident, or disease? Or would a certain amount of luck still be required to escape such mishaps? If the latter, avoiding death might prove tricky, especially in a future with a proliferation of silent electric vehicles, and especially if one is more than a hundred years old. Jumping out of the path of a speeding electric truck might prove even trickier after one has passed their thousandth birthday. But that’s presuming that along with eternal life comes aging. Or does eternal life mean age is just a number, with your mind and body remaining as they were from the moment one became immortal? Only, that would mean the body’s cells never change; so if eternal life began from the moment of conception, one would never develop beyond the moment of conception. Development into adulthood requires change, yet aging and degeneration inevitably follow as a result of that change. Therefore, wouldn’t the cellular changes necessary to development mean that eternal life would be impossible? Or perhaps the scientists will find a means of replacing cellular degeneration with cellular regeneration? Being a stoic, that seems wrong to me, inspiring me to write the following poem:

While many may embrace eternal life with glee,

The very idea seems a nightmare to me,

Akin to falling down a bottomless pit,

With no relief delivered by any ground to hit.

Stefan Badham

Dear Editor: Referring to ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’, by Dan Pollen in Issue 174, I raise three issues for the anti-immortalists:

1. If God exists, is He, She, or It infinitely bored, even though infinitely creative?

2. No one has lived long enough to be able to reflect on extremely prolonged life, especially in a state of perfect health.

3. All of these discussions are framed by the very limited horizons of our current knowledge and experiences.

I will gladly drink the Elixir of Life!

Sor Awdng, U.S.A.

Dear Editor: Jimmy Alfonso Licon’s ‘Making Omelettes & A Future Like Ours’ in Issue 174 brilliantly uses the humble breakfast table to stress-test our moral intuitions. By expanding the ‘future-like-ours’ argument to fertilized chicken eggs, Licon leaves us in a classic philosophical stalemate: either accept the moral gravity of the frying pan, or abandon the ‘potential futures’ argument altogether. But perhaps there is a third way – one that views humanity as a species in the middle of a long learning process. In Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel argues that a universe containing flourishing life is objectively better than one without it. If Nagel is right, a world where we can nourish ourselves without extinguishing potential animal futures is simply a better world. Right now, our moral imagination is bottlenecked by cultural habits and economic necessity: many of us simply cannot imagine breakfast without the egg. But history shows that our moral circle expands as our practical ingenuity grows: we once found societies without draft animals or slave labor unimaginable, until the industrial revolution. As human cleverness advances, the gap between our nutritional needs and our compassion will close. A better world is waiting, where we can enjoy breakfast without cutting trajectories of life short. We just haven’t fully figured out how to get there yet.

L. Silas Sterling, currentphilosophy.com

Dear Editor: In your magazine there is a wonderfully-curated ‘Shorts’ section, which gives us vital insights into the diverse and eclectic range of topics that have come under philosophy’s radar. It was a great match to pair ‘butterflies’ with the life and death theme in Issue 174, as they live for just a few days or weeks. But as Rabindranath Tagore mentions, “the butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” And when you featured Nietzsche, I distinctly recalled this very Nietzschean quote, “If you crush a cockroach, you are a hero. If you crush a beautiful butterfly, you are evil. Morals have aesthetic criteria.”

Zubin Zarthoshtimanesh, Mumbai

Dear Editor: I’d like to thank Joshua Clements for his article about a metaphor for death: ‘Death as Life’s Picture Frame’ in Issue 174. I found the idea of death as a frame for life to be emboldening. Joshua stated that “the method of our death may be akin to patterns or decorations on the frame, accentuating, or grotesquely marring, the picture that lies within.” This led me to think that the fear of death may have more to do with an anxiety over the manner of death than the subsequent non-existence. What we fear are the thoughts, perceptions and feelings we will have at the time of our death, and that although we may have tried to live a good life, our death may involve significant physical or mental suffering.

James Priestman, Ealing, London

Is Antinatalism Misogynistic?

Dear Editor: I picked up Philosophy Now 174 at a station before a long journey, wanting something to read. I’m not a philosopher, though I have thought long and hard about the meaning of life. Unfortunately, I was frustrated by the predominantly male perspectives; particularly so concerning antinatalism. How are antinatalist ideas taken seriously, when they seem to originate from childless, withdrawn, joyless, pessimistic, insomniac males? I have experienced many joys and pains, including those of giving birth and raising children. But nothing in the article considered the perspective of mothers. Are we supposed to be perpetually guilty for imposing life on our children? Or must the realities of sex, birth, and motherhood remain conveniently out of sight for male thinkers? Thinking particularly about Heidegger and Nietzsche my question is, to what extent does philosophy promote ideas that cause suffering? Perhaps antinatalists should be called ‘antihumanists’ instead.

Several articles in Issue 174 seemed to sidestep obvious questions. For example, why does the discussion about mountaineering ignore the perspective of those who’ve mostly lived in mountains – shepherds, peasants, sherpas etc? They have not always valued mountaineering: in the past they had neither time nor resources to be mountaineers, while later on they become the (often unrecognised) facilitators of the achievements of those more privileged than themselves. Historical context matters in philosophy, as it does with everything else. Moreover, the article about Magalit’s ‘rotten compromise’ concept did not tell me which compromises in the Middle East Magalit regards as acceptable or rotten. How does his philosophy play out in practice? What is his position on, say, new settlements? Who decides if a compromise is rotten? Might a Palestinian take a different view to an American?

In future issues I will be looking out for wider perspectives, issues regarded from more than one point of view, and commentary on the real world effects of academic philosophy.

Avril Danczak, Manchester

Is This The End?

Dear Editor: Your (Grant Bartley’s) sci fi story in Issue 174, titled ‘The Tragic Destiny of Life on Earth’ dealt with imagined scientific and technological advances as you gradually unfold life on Earth from 100 million years in the future to just over 600 million years. It reminds me of Einstein’s quote: “Imagination is more powerful than knowledge.” That is, imagination is the key to good literature, clearly; but it is also the key to good science. As the physicist Paul Davies says, “scientific research is an activity that blends logic and rigorous reasoning with a free-flowing creativity.” Just so, science fiction can generate a habit of reading: an addiction, compulsion, affliction and a necessity for sci fi!

Dr Kanan Purkayastha FRSA, Kent

Listening To The Enemy

Dear Editor: Tony Shenton’s article ‘Great Minds, Flawed Lives’ in Issue 174 has given me excellent material to frame replies to questions I get from students in my philosophy courses when they ask, “Why should I listen to someone who had so many moral flaws?” These students, forgetting about the log in their own eye, state this as though it puts them in some sort of morally superior position while they disregard philosophical thoughts and don’t engage with arguments. This applies to almost all subjects when people attack the player and not the ball. What is it in us that thinks that by making others small we’ll feel tall? A large part of how I became a philosopher was by listening to what others say. But I’m constantly amazed how often I find two people talking about another person, and usually not in a good way. Why are we so quick to blame and ridicule others? Shenton’s words should be taught in all schools.

Rob Ken, Canberra

Dear Editor: Tony Shenton (PN 174) asks: does the thing created become compromised by the life of its creator? A moral dilemma perhaps – particularly in the case of notables such as Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon, Caravaggio et al, whose ‘imperfect’ behaviour arguably enhanced their creative output.

Kevin M. Hickson, Exeter

Will to Power Over The Will to Power

Dear Editor: I feel compelled to respond to a letter in Issue 174, from Patrick West, who writes to disagree with the (I had thought) established opinion of scholars that Nietzsche’s posthumous book The Will To Power is a gross distortion of his ideas. It is! To me it’s rubbish!

West writes correctly that The Will To Power was “brought together in book form by his sister Elisabeth”. But his sister held beliefs Friedrich found repugnant. Her antisemitic views both embarrassed and disgusted him, and of all his writings, this is this work that’s most easily appropriated by the Nazis. The Will To Power is also dogmatic to a degree never found with Nietzsche elsewhere, because it’s been distorted out of whack by his sister. Assuming West has read the works Nietzsche did choose to publish, he ought to know there is flexibility in abundance with the man: he tries ‘this idea’ and ‘that one’. He experiments, and does not come across as dogmatic, as The Will To Power does . Most in the know realize the book is a farce.

David Wright, Sacramento, CA

Islamic Issues

Dear Editor: I am writing to share my feedback regarding Issue 173, dedicated to Islamic philosophy, and edited by AmirAli Maleki. While the initiative is highly appreciated, I believe the articles presented a rather narrow picture of the subject that would have left unfamiliar readers with a misleading impression. The formative period and golden age of Islamic philosophy were marked above all by strong rationalist, even materialist, trends. This is evident in early movements such as the Mu’tazilah and the Ikhwan al-Safa, and in the works of its first philosophers, such as Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, as well as its later representatives such as Ibn Rushd. Their engagement with Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotle, who was called ‘the first teacher’, reflected the intellectual openness and confidence that characterised this period. This contrasts sharply with later developments, in which theological and mystical approaches became increasingly dominant. So in my opinion, while figures such as Al-Ghazali and the great Sufi thinkers made important contributions to Islamic thought, they did represent the beginning of the decline of Islamic philosophy, opening up the road to centuries of stagnation and obstructionist thinking. For this reason, I believe that a discussion of Islamic philosophy should give greater attention to its rationalist and critical heritage, a revisiting of which is an urgent need for Islamic thought today.

Kamil Shami

Dear Editor: I read with interest Adnan Abbasi’s article ‘The Prayer the Machine Cannot Pray’ in PN 173, on an ancient Islamic take on consciousness. Some time ago I read a very different take on consciousness from Dr Eben Alexander, a consultant neurologist, and wondered if your readers might be interested in that?

Dr Alexander got a serious brain infection and was taken in as a patient to his own neurology department. There his brain scan flat-lined and his staff advised turning off life support, but his family refused. Some days later he suddenly sat up and spoke lucidly, then after a bit of gobbledegook, while his brain came online, he became lucid again and made some almighty claims about the afterlife, including his very novel take on consciousness. My interest was piqued here.

Previously, Dr Alexander had thought consciousness was somehow generated by the brain, and had given no thought at all to near-death experiences, except assuming it was the dying brain firing. Yet he says his brain could not generate experiences if it was flat-lining at the time. He goes on to claim that as your consciousness leaves your body at death, you experience the super intelligence of your soul, as it no longer has to operate through the limits of your brain. For example, as a scientist, he was interested in quantum theory, dark matter etc. As he thought about these theories while his brain was flat-lining, landscapes of knowledge came before him and he understood how the universe works! But back in his body he had no words in English to describe what he had learned, and as time passed he began to struggle to remember all this knowledge.

This certainly is not the materialist view of consciousness Dr Alexander had before his strange experience. Of course we only have his word for it. But his view is that consciousness is generated by the soul, and that’s why we cannot figure out how it comes about by looking at the brain, as the soul works through the brain.

Kristine Kerr, Renfrewshire

Critical Habermas

Dear Editor: While saddened by the passing of Jürgen Habermas (News, Issue 173), it was pleasing to reflect on his many contributions to public thought. Habermas was one of those theorists whose work was about sense-making in real life. For instance, his theorising on the ‘colonisation of the lifeworld’ made sense of the affluent world’s constant demand that everything be commodified, and insistence that worthy effort is that expended in pursuit of profit, efficiency, productivity, or some other economic measure. The pernicious infiltration of such ideas into all that was once private and social has got to the point now where three year olds don’t simply play, they’re ‘engaged in play-based learning’ as the beginning of their training to become economic actors!

When all of life becomes consumed with a preoccupation with matters of economy, it seems the process of colonisation of the lifeworld is complete; but perhaps not. Also in Issue 173, Wendell O’Brien gives us a robust defence of idleness, where idleness is not doing nothing – that’s not possible – but rather a focus on doing things that are simply pleasurable rather than productive. The simple pleasure of spending a day across which nothing memorable is accomplished; a day of reading or contemplation, of wandering and noticing surroundings at the level of bees, ants and lizards.

I am fortunate to be of an age and circumstances where I can engage randomly in idleness. If you are patient and take the time, watching bees in the garden can absorb hours saturated in quiet pleasure. And when doing this, if I think of Habermas – which I do – I know a part of that pleasure comes from realising the colonisation of my lifeworld is not complete.

Peter Pearce, Brisbane

Sincere Hypocrisy

Dear Editor: In ‘Why Do People Hate Hypocrisy?’, Issue 173, Professor Emrys Westacott distinguishes three basic kinds of hypocrisy, with the major culprit being behavioral hypocrisy – doing something that contradicts one’s professed beliefs. This is usually the one most folks condemn when there’s a hypocrisy accusation involving morally significant failures. The other two kinds – affective, claiming feelings you don’t have, and cognitive, claiming beliefs you don’t hold – are excusable or justifiable because of good ends or approvable behavior, Westacott argues. He only acknowledges rather dismissively that affective and cognitive hypocrisy are more commonly classified as ‘insincerity’ and ‘lying’ (we’ll presume white lies). Yet white lies still can have detrimental effects. In A Philosophy of Lying, Lars Svendsen argues that a white lie can be harmless, insignificant, charitable or acceptable, but some white lies have negative consequences. One determining factor is not a consideration of someone else’s feelings, but a need to spare oneself the discomfort of telling the truth. Lying for compassionate reasons, Svendson argues, is to appoint oneself the judge of what the other person can or cannot handle knowing. The white liar, Svendson continues, overlooks the corrupting effect lying has on their own moral character, in that it makes it easier to tell the next white lie, progressing to grey and black lies.

A “soft-hearted hypocrite is still preferable to a sincere hard-hearted brute” concludes Westacott, clinching his consequentialist analysis. But for Immanuel Kant, the underlying lie is a lie and could not be dismissed just because it’s white.

Michael Manoussos, Queens, NYC

Dear Editor: I enjoyed reading Westacott’s article on ‘Hypocrisy’ (PN 173), and could not help drawing a parallel with the concept of ‘bullshit’, defined by Harry Frankfurt as “being unconcerned with truth.” Both hypocrisy and bullshit involve some form of misrepresentation that causes a feeling of breach of trust. I’d suggest that the minimum requirements for social harmony are as follows:

a) Each person is expected to accept and respect the truth, given clear evidence and facts obtained through generally acceptable means; and

b) Each person is expected to behave and act consistently with her stated beliefs/values (assuming that these are within the accepted boundaries of society).

Violations at an individual level are mostly just annoying for the rest of us; but if we apply the same ideas to relationships between nations, even a minor violation could have catastrophic consequences for everybody. Sadly, this is precisely what is happening in the world today.

Quang Duong

Tallis’s Ghost Stories

Dear Editor: May I respond to Tallis’s essay on Heidegger in Issue 173? It is a mistake to think of Dasein as a ghost. Tallis criticises Heidegger for not starting with the body; but Heidegger’s project actually questions whether that is the right place to begin. If you start with the body, you’re already heading into the metaphysical weeds. Much of twentieth-century phenomenology tried to finish what Heidegger started. Dreyfus for instance turns to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to address this gap.

Translating Heidegger’s work into English remains difficult, mainly because translators often try to make it fit Cartesian ideas. Dreyfus said that Sartre, as a French Cartesian, created a brilliant misunderstanding of Being and Time in Being and Nothingness! Instead, to really understand Being and Time, one must let go of Cartesian mind-body dualism. This is challenging, but there is no other way.

John McNam

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Columns

- Martin Heidegger & the Evaporation of Freedom

- Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

- Philosophical Power Couples

- Cicero & the Value of Skepticism

Tallis in Wonderland

Martin Heidegger & the Evaporation of Freedom

Raymond Tallis watches freedom disappear in a puff of Heideggerian smoke.

It’s one of the ironies of the history of philosophy that Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was embraced as a father of the existentialist thought that dominated Continental philosophy in the middle of last century. There is no mystery as to why he was initially welcomed into the existentialist fold. His description of the relationship between ‘essence’ and ‘existence’ in humanity could have been the motto of existentialism: “ The ‘essence’ of [human being] lies in its existence. Accordingly, those characteristics which can be exhibited in this entity are not ‘properties’… of some entity which ‘looks’ so and so… they are in each case possible ways for it to be, and no more than that” (Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie, Edward Robinson, p.67, 1927). This prioritising of existence over any predetermined human essence lay at the heart of Being and Nothingness Jean-Paul Sartre’s magnum opus of 1943. We humans, Sartre proclaimed, are free to choose what we are. Our freedom is limited only by our not being able to choose not to be free. Heidegger’s ideas, then, had directly fed into the birth of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s classic version of existentialism. So whence the irony?

After initially welcoming Being and Nothingness, Heidegger changed his mind. Sartre’s book was “too metaphysical” – though it’s not clear what he meant by that. More to the point, the human body was central to Sartre’s account of human being; and yet it scarcely has a walk-on part in Being and Time (I discussed this in ‘Heidegger’s Ghost’, Philosophy Now 173). Embodiment is the necessary condition of what Sartre called ‘human reality’ – his stand-in for Heidegger’s ‘Dasein’. The Sartrean body has a three-fold existence: firstly as a ‘for-itself’, lived in the first-person; secondly as an object revealed to the others’ gaze; and thirdly in the bodily self-consciousness we feel in the presence of others. Yet as I argued in ‘Heidegger’s Ghost’, it’s impossible to understand how Heidegger’s bodiless Dasein could have had any reason to exercise its freedom, or the means to do so.

This notwithstanding, existentialists were attracted to Heidegger’s notion of ‘authentic’ as opposed to ‘inauthentic’ behaviour, with the former being closer to genuine agency.

It is not entirely clear why. After all, according to Heidegger, our customary state is that of inauthentic being. Lost in the ‘they’ (the mass of humanity), we are subservient to “the tasks, rules, and standards, the urgency and extent of concernful and solicitous Being-in-the-world” we have not chosen (Being and Time, p.268). For most of us, adherence to ‘tasks, rules, and standards’ while being ‘concernful and solicitous’ are surely the characteristics of a conscientious, reliable, trustworthy, honest, competent human being. A partner, colleague, or parent who is not, sounds like a partner, colleague, or parent from Hell. But Heidegger dismisses this inauthentic Dasein as being ‘carried along by the nobody’.

Authentic being, a genuine expression of freedom, is on the other hand for Heidegger ‘Being-towards-death’ – an anticipation that “reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face-to-face with the possibility of being itself… in an impassioned freedom towards death – a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the ‘they’, and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious” (p.311).

This rather narrows the scope of freedom. What’s more, it’s a high price to pay for what may be a contradiction: “to the extent that this Being towards its potentiality-for-being is itself characterised by freedom, Dasein can comport itself towards its possibilities, even unwillingly” (p.237). How do you act with conscientious freedom ‘unwillingly’?

To add to the confusion, Heidegger argues that describing the behaviour of the ‘they-self’ as ‘inauthentic’ is not meant to express any ‘negative evaluation’. Many existentialists would cancel their subscription to the Heideggerian Club at this point, as authenticity is one of their highest values.

Taming Time & Being

There’s worse to come. According to Charles Guignon in Interpreting Heidegger: Heidegger’s Concept of Freedom, in his pursuit of (bodiless) freedom, Heidegger seems to argue that a proof of freedom is neither possible nor necessary. Instead, proof is replaced by some spectacular assertions, according to which human freedom is found in – even founded in – the very nature of Being. (Fasten your seat belts: you’re in for an even bumpier ride.)

Heidegger took the first step of this argument in On the Essence of Human Freedom (1930), where he asserted that freedom was ‘the ground of possibility of Dasein’; in short, human being comes packaged with freedom. If freedom were written into the very nature of Dasein, however, it would be difficult to understand the contrast between free and unfree human acts, or, indeed, between authentic and inauthentic modes of comporting ourselves. This does not seem to have worried Heidegger, for he subsequently embraced the even more radical claim that freedom is ‘prior to Being and Time’, the protagonists of his magnum opus. The rationale of this leap is worth examining.

First of all, Time. In Being and Time and subsequent writings, Heidegger argued that Dasein’s time is primordial time, in that it has priority over the time of the physical world. Dasein’s time is the time of care – the time of Dasein’s way of ‘being an issue for itself’. This kind of time is however tensed time: the time of present, past, and future. In it we are for instance ‘ahead of ourselves’ as ‘Being towards one’s ownmost possibility’. This being ahead of ourselves, we are assured, is the condition of freedom.

Unfortunately, prioritising tensed, human-experienced time, does not fit with our usual understanding of our place in nature. Physical time vastly precedes (and may, alas, vastly succeed) the time of human beings: there was a lot of time before Dasein cared about anything. The sun shone before Dasein got to care for itself. But Heidegger does not seem to acknowledge that we’re late arrivals in the universe and that the earth was born billions of years before the first human. Besides, if humanity really were gathered up entirely into the tensed time of care of present, past, and future, it’s not clear how its actions could interact with a material world, which is subordinate to tenseless (physical) time.

All of this is pretty obvious. So why was it not obvious to Heidegger? Why did he overlook the difference between (tenseless) time as a property of the material world and (tensed) time as a feature of the human world?

And what of Being? According to Heidegger himself, “the decisive experience of my path of thinking which cannot be remembered enough” was a ‘thunderbolt’ that struck him early in his philosophical career and remained with him to the end of his days. What was this thunderbolt? It was the revelation that ‘Being is presence’. He means that Being itself cannot be separated from Dasein (which means, ‘being there’), that is, from experience. No Dasein, no Being. This is reflected in his never completed Introduction to his collected works, The Legacy of the Question of Being, where he argues that Being needs human being.

I don’t have space to trace all the ways in which Heidegger engaged with this thought, and the problems it presents to his scholars, and indeed to Heidegger himself. Suffice it to say that Heidegger tried to separate Being-as-presence from beings (that is, individual entities or objects). Affirming this so-called ‘ontological difference’ led him to the idea of ‘beingless beings’ – determinate things that existed before there was anyone to make them present – with which idea even he felt uncomfortable, because it sounded like idealism.

Heidegger by Darren McAndrew

To Free or Not To Free?

Underneath the priority Heidegger gives to Dasein’s time and the presence he builds into Being, is a conflation (indeed confusion) of time with ‘time made explicit’ and Being with ‘Being made explicit’. Nevertheless, with physical time subordinate to Dasein’s time, and Being-as-presence dependent on Dasein, Dasein’s freedom would seem to be guaranteed. As Heidegger put it, “Freedom alone can let a world prevail and let it world for Dasein” (Pathmarks). Yet notwithstanding the already high cost of this seemingly happy outcome, the pickings are slim. I’ve already mentioned the disappointing consequences of narrowing freedom to ‘authentic freedom-towards-death’ released from ‘the illusions of the ‘they”, and the lack of meaning, purpose, or content for bodiless freedom.

Disconnected from anything as specific or muscular as autonomy or self-regulation, Heidegger’s freedom morphed into what he called Gelassenheit. Heidegger borrowed this term from the mediaeval Catholic philosopher and priest Meister Eckhart. It means ‘releasement’ or ‘letting be’, or ‘non-willing disclosedness’. With freedom thus redefined, the voluntaristic, decisional dimension of free will, so central to existentialism, has disappeared. While it could be accepted that ‘disclosing ourselves’ to entities – locating them in an outside from which they can be acted upon – is a necessary condition of agency, ‘letting be’ is surely remote from agency – from having and fulfilling goals, or from incurring and delivering on obligations. In short, releasement is remote from living a way of life, and seems more like merely being lived by one.

At best, Gelassenheit occupies a middle position between activity and passivity. Unlike ‘willing’, which has an end – a desired outcome – it seems to have no target. ‘Letting be’ is at best a revelation of what-is rather than a shaping, defining, changing, manipulation of it. It is remote from using entities, beginning with our own body and involving a vast range of tools to serve purposes we have conceived. It seems inconceivable that the world around us would require the assistance, never mind the permission, of Dasein to exist. There is considerable difficulty, therefore, in connecting Gelassenheit with anything like individual (or cooperative, or collective) agency. At the very least, it seems to have little to do with the transformative impact we humans have had on the planet on which we live. ‘Letting beings be’ does not sound like an honest day’s work. Indeed, the lighter-than-light touch agency of Gelassenheit is not clearly distinguishable from simply going with the flow. This wilting of freedom into passivity, into what we might call ‘omnimpotence’, is captured well by Charles Guignon when he characterizes humans as “more like conduits carried along by the event of being.”

Is Heidegger an Existentialist?

We’ve travelled a long way from the Heidegger of the existentialist imagination. For Heidegger, human freedom was, at first, necessitated by the priority of existence over essence. Later, as Heidegger dug deeper for its origin, it narrowed to embrace a version of one’s self liberated from the they-self. Finally, giving way to merely ‘letting-be’, freedom became unrecognisable. Heidegger’s freedom, rooted in Dasein’s time and in Being-as-presence, has ceased to be an aspect of human life expressed in specific actions regulated by choice and volition, as the existentialists would have it. So Heidegger’s appeal to the existentialists that first propelled him to international fame, may have been based on their misunderstanding him.

© Prof. Raymond Tallis 2026

The Palgrave Companion to the Philosophy of Raymond Tallis, edited by Robert Doede, (Palgrave Macmillan) is out now.

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Philosophical Haiku

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

by Terence Green

A prophet appears.

When speaking in tongues, he says,

“Deconstruct the world!’

Derrida by Darren Mcandrew

Jacques Derrida was born in Algiers in 1930, into a Sephardic Jewish family. This may have contributed to his feeling himself to be the perennial outsider, particularly after he moved to Paris in 1949. Here he attended the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, and eventually become one of the most influential thinkers of his generation.

Alas, according to his critics, his influence is inversely proportional to his intelligibility – placing him squarely in a proud tradition of continental philosophers who seem to revel in obscurity. The English philosopher Roger Scruton once wryly claimed that Derrida is difficult to summarise because what he wrote is ‘nonsense’. Noam Chomsky said his scholarship was ‘appalling’. In an open letter strenuously opposing his gaining an honorary doctorate from their University, a group of Cambridge philosophers said his work did not meet “accepted standards of clarity and rigour.”

The bafflement of analytical thinkers, who famously prize precision of expression, was perhaps understandable, for it is true that Derrida’s prose is full of gnomic utterances such as, “No negation ought to be able to measure up to what is happening so as to be able to describe it.” His writings are permeated by word games, playfulness, and copious amounts of self-invented jargon. His key contribution was deconstruction, an approach based on the idea that any text contains hidden tensions and contradictions that, when brought to the surface, undermine its apparent meaning. These tensions include, among others, those within many binary pairs such as good/bad and male/female. Words, says Derrida, gain their meaning from their contrast with other words, but within such apparently symmetrical binaries one of the terms is privileged over the other. Derrida is often claimed to have said that there is nothing outside of the text. Some of his more excitable followers believed that the entire world is a text, which can therefore be deconstructed with the tools Derrida had developed.

Derrida died in 2004, and at his funeral was committed to the earth, there to undergo the final deconstruction.

© Terence Green 2026

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

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Philosophy Shorts

Philosophical Power Couples

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.

The word ‘philosophy’ comes from ‘love’ of ‘wisdom’ – philos and sophia in the original Greek, and the origins of two quite common English first names. So it is cute that the student philosophy society at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, is called ‘Phil and Sophie’. I don’t know exactly what they get up to in that august society, but it did make me wonder who Phil and Sophie might be, which then led me to think about philosopher power couples.

Sadly, all too many historical philosophers have been boring, middle-aged, white men (like me!). But a few have been halves of exceptional power couples, where both parties wrote philosophy. Lovers Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Hannah Arendt (1906-1973) worked independently of each other; as did Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980). All four were existentialists, though in radically different ways. Pillow talk must have been at a different level.

Other couples collaborated on joint works. Pierre Abélard (1080-1142) and Heloise d’Argenteuil’s (1101-1164) Epistolae Duorum Amantium (Letters of Two Lovers) springs to mind. Things ended badly for this star-crossed pair. Heloise’s family disapproved of their collaboration, or their love, and had poor Abelard castrated after the two had married in secret.

Another French philosopher couple were Madame de Staël (1766-1817) and Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), who stubbornly kept the flame of liberal constitutionalism alive when the French Revolution turned to Terror.

A little later, in Nineteenth Century Britain, there were John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) and Harriet Taylor (1807-1858). When the two slipped away for a romantic weekend in Paris in 1848, they penned a chapter of The Principles of Political Economy. What could be more arousing than the value theory or labour or the law of supply and demand? Later they jointly wrote On Liberty (1859). These books are normally attributed to John Stuart Mill alone, even though he was clear in his Autobiography that the latter book was “written as usual twice over, we kept it by us, bringing it out from time to time and going through it de novo, reading, weighing and criticizing every sentence” (p.249). Mill, who normally wrote dry prose except when writing with Harriet, penned this entry in his diary:

“I feel as if no really dangerous illness could actually happen to me while I have her care for me; and yet I feel as if by coming away from her I had parted with a kind of talisman, and I was more open to attacks of the enemy than while I was with her.” (Diary, 9th January 1854).

Not to be outdone, the letters written by Heidegger and Arendt were so full of desire, sensitivity, and emotion that they became pure poetry. “I kiss you on the forehead and your eyes,” Arendt wrote to Heidegger.

© 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

Cicero & the Value of Skepticism

Massimo Pigliucci is not skeptical about skepticism itself.

The word ‘skepticism’ has often had a bad reputation. My dictionary tells me that a skeptic is “one who instinctively or habitually doubts, questions, or disagrees with assertions or generally accepted conclusions.” Yet the original meaning of the word, from the Greek skeptikos, is something along the lines of ‘someone who inquires and reflects’ on things. Can skepticism be a philosophy of life rather than just an epistemic attitude?

In my recent book, How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic: The Power of Doubt in a Meaningful Life, I examine this question by considering the life and philosophy of Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE), the orator, statesman, and philosopher who lived at the end of the Roman Republic and who was both a friend and an enemy of Julius Caesar (not at the same time!).

Cicero had an outsized impact in his own lifetime, during his desperate but ultimately unsuccessful fight to save the Roman Republic from becoming an Empire. He subsequently influenced imperial authors from Virgil to Seneca. During the Middle Ages he was read by Boethius and Augustine, and his conception of natural law deeply influenced the Christian tradition of it. The Renaissance itself is sometimes said to have started when Petrarch rediscovered Cicero’s letters. Cicero was also greatly admired by Enlightenment authors from Montesquieu to Locke. His ideas on mixed government, natural rights, and civic virtue appear throughout the Federalist Papers and the U.S. Declaration of Independence. His concept of res publica (‘the public thing’) helped shape modern democratic theory. My project however, was to investigate how Cicero’s skepticism informed, and was in turn influenced by, his life experiences, in both the private and public realms.

Cicero was a student of the skeptical tradition within Plato’s Academy. This means he embraced the skeptical philosophy of Carneades of Cyrene and Philo of Larissa. The basic idea is that human knowledge is rooted in two ultimate sources, reason and sense experience, but we know they’re both fallible – which means that knowledge itself must be considered tentative. We therefore assess claims to knowledge on the basis of what Carneades called pithanon (likelihood). Cicero brilliantly translated this term into Latin as probabilis, from which we get the modern English ‘probability’.

If you apply the skeptical concept to everything, you get the refreshing notion that you can provisionally endorse a given ethical, political, scientific, or personal opinion yet reserve the right to change your mind about it, should new arguments or evidence convince you to do so. As Cicero put it in his Tusculan Disputations: “We should not be too confident in our belief of anything.”

This doesn’t mean that skeptics are paralyzed, unable to act. In fact, they devised a semi-quantitative scheme for assessing the reliability of ‘impressions’ – the opinions we naturally form about this or that idea or experience. An impression may be, in increasing order of strength, ‘apparently true’, ‘convincingly true’, ‘undiverted’, or ‘thoroughly explored’. Let me give you some examples.

Apparently true: You glance at your coffee mug on the desk and form the impression it is still half full, as it looks that way to you. The impression is plausible, so you don’t get up to refill it – but you’re not going to bet much on the idea, and you’re ready to act otherwise if it turns out you’re mistaken.

Convincingly true: You hear what sounds like your name called across a noisy train station. The impression is not just that someone was called, but that it was you, since the sound fitted the shape of your name. More than mere appearance, the experience compels assent. Still, you might be wrong.

Undiverted by other impressions: You’re about to sit down in what you believe is your assigned seat on the plane. The row number matches your boarding pass, the seat letter is correct, and the passenger in the adjacent seat isn’t challenging you. Nothing in the surroundings undercuts the impression. It coheres with all the available evidence.

Thoroughly explored: A physician suspects a patient has a particular condition. She has reviewed the symptoms carefully, ordered confirmatory tests, ruled out competing diagnoses, and consulted a colleague. Every line of inquiry she can reasonably pursue points in the same direction. She acts on this impression with the highest degree of justified confidence, while still falling short of absolute certainty.

I said this scheme was ‘semi-quantitative’ because we can assign tentative probabilities to each of the four conditions: say, respectively: apparently true: just greater than 50%; convincingly true: 60-80%; undiverted: around 90%; and thoroughly explored: close to or even above 95% certainty. This skeptical attitude, then, is that of a Bayesian updater: we keep revising the likelihood for the impression to be conveying truth as new information comes in, increasing or decreasing it according to what we learn. The more important something is, the more we want to be confident that we’re correct about it, which means that we need to further our inquiries, as any good skeptic would do.

When you have a moment, list some beliefs you currently hold, assess them using the four criteria above, and ask yourself what sort of new evidence would alter your probability estimates. Get into the habit of doing this, and you’ll be on your way to becoming a true skeptic. Of that I’m almost certain.

© 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 How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic (Penguin). More by him at figsinwintertime.substack.com.

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Reviews

- The Diversity of Morals by Steven Lukes

- Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli

- Wuthering Heights

- Tractatus Theologico-Politicus by Baruch Spinoza

Books

The Diversity of Morals by Steven Lukes

Philip Badger considers Steven Lukes’ views about the diversity of morality.

Stephen Lukes has made a long and distinguished career out of exploring the relationship between the universalist moral claims of philosophy and the range of cultural variation in morality reported by anthropologists. In The Diversity of Morals (2025) he returns to these themes with all the energy, enthusiasm and depth of understanding for which he is so rightly respected.

In the course of this book, we meet a varied cast of protagonists, and learn rather a lot about them. However, I’ll focus on just a couple of them here: David Hume (1711-1776) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). Interestingly, Hume’s role in the book is to champion the so-called ‘nomothetic’ claim that there are indeed universal values, while Herder plays the ‘idiopathic’ part of a proto-communitarian focused on the eponymous ‘diversity of morals’. I say that this is interesting because, for many readers, the big hitter when it comes to universalist claims for morality is not Hume but his philosophical sparring partner, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). The main difference between the two is, however, not their unequal enthusiasm for moral universalism but their claims about its justification. For Kant, the common capacity for reason reveals the basis of a universal human morality, while for Hume, what’s universal about us is that humanity is equipped by nature with a facility for compassion. Herder, by contrast, sees difference rather than commonality as the most striking feature of human cultures. For him, our lives are animated and made meaningful by ‘thick’ idiosyncratic cultural narratives, and any generalised feeling we might have for our fellow humans is, by comparison, rather ‘thin’ and ephemeral.

It’s at this point that Lukes makes a plea for bridging the gap between the positions of Hume and Herder by pointing out that there’s a functional need to do so: while life within a ‘thick’ (read ‘blanketing’) cultural environment might be pretty comforting (especially for those with power in it), there comes a point when it’s necessary to look over the hill into the next valley, and interact with those whose narratives are different from ours. In these circumstances, what we need is exactly the kind of sense of common humanity Hume’s position allows. Following the writings of the existentialist Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), Lukes locates the origins of this ‘thin’ appreciation of human commonality in the so-called Axial Age – roughly 800-200 BCE. This era saw a move away from tribal particularism towards a nore generalised notion of common humanity. Often this involved the emergence of a creation mythology that encompassed humanity as a whole. From this came moral claims about the relationship between God or the absolute (rather than gods) and human beings. In The European Spirit (1948), Jaspers claims this age of moral universalisation occurred in a similar way in very widely separated civilisations, from India and the teachings of the Buddha to China to the golden age of Greek philosophy.

Crossing the Moral Landscape by Oliver Li

For more art by Oliver Li please visit www.illustrationx.com/sg/artists/OliverLi

Ages & Movements

Some readers will be feeling sceptical at this point, and who could blame them? Firstly, the Axial Age seems as long as the proverbial piece of string. For example, surely we need to extend it to cover the claims of a certain Jewish carpenter who was really big on the notion of a universal morality? Secondly, it won’t have escaped anyone’s notice that the Axial Age and the ages that have followed haven’t always been about peace and love. Rather, monotheists have spent a couple of millennia contesting each other’s claims, often at the point of a sword, and latterly, a gun; and the atheists followed suit in the twentieth century, with communism and fascism contesting everyone.

What might be more plausible, is to consider the ‘Axial turn’ not as a historical moment but as a latent capacity which might be awakened at any time by cultural and material developments. For Lukes it requires a revolution in thinking, such that we attain some critical distance from our more parochial attitudes. It is, in other words, the moment when we start ‘thinking about thinking’.

For a psychologist, there are some obvious preconditions for this development. Specifically, at least some people need to be free of the kind of stress and preoccupation that has defined most of human history. I’m suggesting that systematically doing philosophy is only possible if somebody else is slaving away – in the Greeks’ case, literally – doing all the mundane stuff. Socrates might have been reliant on the kindness of strangers, but there was not much chance that he’d go hungry or without shelter. (Admittedly, the luxury of sitting around thinking about thinking didn’t end well for Socrates, but he had it pretty good there for a while.)

It also isn’t entirely surprising that Socrates – or aristocratic Plato using Socrates as a mouthpiece – wasn’t a great fan of democracy, but this might be because he mistook fully realised human potential as something exceptional. Yet perhaps most of us are capable of our own ‘axial’ revolutions, incorporating the whole of humanity into our personal moral thinking, given the right circumstances. (This is more or less the conclusion J.S. Mill came to.) A combination of evolutionary, physiological, and social psychology tells us exactly what those ‘right circumstances’ might be. To be specific, if you want to think beyond the reach of your own culture, you need the following ingredients. Firstly, lots of psychological security (including consistent care in childhood and a sense that life is going well as an adult). Secondly, good ongoing doses of appropriate nutrition (omega 3 anyone?). And thirdly, plenty of opportunities to cooperate with people unlike yourself in non-threatening situations. What you get, if all these ingredients are present, is a society that the residents of Copenhagen or any of the Scandinavian countries might find familiar (it’s no surprise that Francis Fukuyama joked that he wanted to call his book on the preconditions of political order How to Get to Denmark).

Unfortunately, all of this also points to the fragility of the Axial turn. If there are such strong preconditions for moral universalism’s achievement, it seems more than just possible that they won’t be met. Specifically, since the financial crisis and the disruption caused by Covid, our age is one of insecurity. That means we’re at a cultural moment where universalist moral thinking is at significant risk.

Weird & Insubstantial?

Two major points remain to be addressed. Firstly, some have suggested that ‘Axial’ thinking is actually the local product of Western liberalism dressed up as something more universal. In the words of Joseph Henrich (The Weirdest People in the World, 2010), this is to say that Western society is WEIRD: not just ‘Western’, but also ‘Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic’; and that any claim that liberal values are universal human values dissolves on recognition of this peculiarity.

Lukes puts some effort into defending Axial thinking against the charge. I’d suggest Lukes is right to think that global society is one where, more than ever, ‘thin’ thinking is a necessity. Unfortunately, he doesn’t identify the biologically shared human potentials that make this universal thinking possible. Hume was right about the facility we naturally have for compassion; but his ‘naturalism’ has had to wait for evolutionary psychology to intellectually underpin it.

Finally, there is the claim, explicit in Herder and in his modern communitarian counterparts, that axial/thin/liberal thinking is just too insubstantial to sustain meaningful human existence. We can hear this complaint reflected in the nativism/tribalism of the populist right across multiple societies, and it’s highly seductive. People, they often claim, need deep and rich narratives about cultural, national, and religious identity, and without these things we are ‘lost’ and ‘anomic’ (that is, identityless). Such arguments inevitably involve a retreat from the global, and with it, from the notion of a shared humanity. The result is a kind of insularity, and, in the most chilling circumstances, a desire for ‘purity’.

By contrast, liberals – such as this reviewer – have an almost visceral distrust of the idea that uncritiqued tradition confers purpose. We certainly should not take lying down the claim that life is meaningless without local tradition. The universalist idea (in my own formulation) of a life guided by respect for the individual’s right to define their own deepest commitments, lived with compassion for the suffering of others, alongside the conviction that we might help people achieve their full potential, is not, in any sense, meaningless. The idea that we can get by without the need for a local cultural foundation for our morality might enrage those less inclined to cosmopolitanism than Lukes. However, that needn’t stop us asserting that the ‘crooked timbers that make humanity’ (to paraphrase Kant) should not be forced to fit arbitrary local moulds in some Procrustean authoritarian manner.

The Diversity of Morals is a fine book by a fine writer, and readers will gain huge amounts from it (I haven’t even touched on the enlightening sections about liberals such as Isaiah Berlin, for example). Lukes ultimately doesn’t bridge the gap between the perspectives he outlines, but he deserves credit for trying.

© Philip Badger 2026

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

• The Diversity of Morals, Stephen Lukes, Princeton University Press, 2025, 256 pages, £21.45 hb, ISBN: 978-0691157191

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Books

Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli

Peter Benson marvels at Carlo Rovelli’s relational quantum theory.

Helgoland is a small, remote island off the north coast of Germany. Werner Heisenberg retreated there in 1925 to brood in solitude over the implications of quantum theory, which he had helped create. This theory is also somewhat like a strange island, set in a rough sea, at some considerable distance from the mainland of our everyday experiences. Throwing a bridge between the two, to explain how the bizarre quantum world relates to the apparently solid world around us, has been a major concern of physicists from the pioneering days of Heisenberg, Bohr, and Schrödinger up to the present.

Carlo Rovelli is one of the latest such bridge-builders. Not only has he proposed a new interpretation of quantum theory to add to the long line of such speculations, he has also written books for the general public about these ideas. Indeed, Rovelli is rightly regarded as one of the leading authors of popular science books today, with worldwide sales running to millions. Furthermore, he has a familiarity with philosophy that’s rare among scientist. He has written studies of Anaximander and Aristotle, finding a continuing pertinence in their thoughts; he also takes a strong stand against the view expressed by fellow physicist Stephen Hawking that ‘philosophy is dead’. Hawking believed that it’s now the task of science alone to resolve all the dilemmas previously discussed by philosophers. By contrast, Rovelli believes that physicists are still confronted by questions that are philosophical in nature, which the methodologies of science cannot by themselves resolve.

Helgoland

Helgoland © Dionysos1970 2021 Creative Commons 4

Multiple Worlds

Rovelli begins Helgoland by giving a succinct account of the origins of quantum theory. He then discusses several of the best-known interpretations of the theory, each of which has implications most of us would find implausible. The ‘many worlds’ interpretation, for example, claims that new universes branch off from our own at every moment of quantum indeterminacy, meaning that all possibilities actually happen, in parallel, mutually-inaccessible realms. The appeal of this probably comes from the many science fiction stories we have all read postulating alternative histories. However, given the number of quantum events that take place every microsecond, we’d have to imagine untold billions of new universes coming into existence all the time, even as we walk down the street. This is the kind of ontological extravagance that philosophers have traditionally sought to avoid. Occam’s Razor says, ‘Do not multiply the postulation of entities unnecessarily’. The Many Worlds theory extravagantly does the opposite.

Another approach is the interpretation which says that reality comes into determinate, as opposed to merely probabilistic, existence when it is observed by a conscious mind. This seems to me to be a revival of George Berkley’s contention that ‘to be is to be perceived’, where objects are ‘the permanent possibility of perception’. However quantum observations arguably do not require a conscious perceiver, but instead happen whenever the microscopic quantum world impinges on macroscopic reality.

I find Rovelli’s consistent refusal of any subjectivist interpretations of quantum theory refreshing. As he writes: “To think that human beings, their minds, their tools, or the numbers they use, play any special role in the grammar of nature is nonsense” (p.119).

Relations

After considering the mainstream alternatives, Rovelli sketches his own ‘relational’ interpretation of quantum theory. His core idea is that single entities (photons, atoms, chairs) have no existence in themselves, but only in their interactions with each other. Hence, one cannot answer any question about an object except with regard to its relation to a specified other object. Quantum theory provides mathematically accurate predictions of the effects of quantum object interactions (electrons and photons, for example), but says nothing about non-interacting entities. So, Rovelli suggests, we should deny any existence to the latter, except as retrospectively imagined sources for the interactions.

In the final chapters of the book Rovelli seeks out precursors to this idea in the works of philosophers of the past. For instance, he turns to the Second Century CE Buddhist thinker Nagarjuna, one of the founders of Mahayana Buddhism. Nagarjuna’s texts are notoriously difficult to interpret, even within the traditions he helped to found. We now have nearly two millennia’s worth of commentaries, which do not always agree. Still more difficult is it to authoritatively interpret these texts through the framework of a completely different tradition of thinking, such as that of modern science and Western philosophy. We may indeed reasonably doubt that Nagarjuna was expounding anything like a theory of the fundamental components of the material world in the manner of a modern scientific theory. Perhaps his texts might be better understood as guided meditations for Buddhist practitioners, leading them towards progressive detachment from the things of this world, until they are at rest in emptiness.

However, even if we do approach Nagarjuna’s texts as speculative ontology, I am very doubtful they would support Rovelli’s hypotheses. It’s true that Nagarjuna denies the existence of independent objects. But Rovelli’s theory replaces objects with the relationships between objects as its ontological foundation. This is what makes it a ‘relational theory’: relations are admitted to exist, but not the postulated objects which are related except in terms of those relations. Nagarjuna, on the other hand, in a manner typical of Buddhist thought, gradually dissolves everything into the void, including relations, which have no reason to be preserved from this dissolution. As Jay Garfield writes in the commentary quoted by Rovelli on p.219: “Not only are compounded phenomena empty of inherent existence, but so is the relation among their constituents.” Nagarjuna therefore goes much too far for Rovelli’s purposes.

Not So Positive

Coming closer to our own times, Rovelli’s other principal suggested precursor is the Twentieth Century Russian thinker Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873-1928).

Though there has been a revival of interest in his work recently, Bogdanov remains best known because of a book criticizing his ideas published in 1909 by Vladimir Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. This book was the only work of pure philosophy written by Lenin, who was subsequently distracted by other concerns, such as overthrowing the Czarist regime and establishing a communist society in Russia. But Lenin was an able philosopher.

Lenin’s main concern in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was to establish what ‘materialism’ means in a Marxist context. Marx himself did not consider the term problematic, because he lived at a time when science was explaining the world unequivocally in terms of material particles and the forces propelling them. Today, the situation is less clear. For instance, what exactly is ‘material’ about the probability distributions of quantum behaviour described by Schrödinger’s wave equations? Bogdanov and Lenin were writing when these problems were only just beginning to come into view.

Lenin’s definition of ‘materialism’ (quoted by Rovelli on p.179), is the idea that there’s “an objective reality, existing outside our minds.” This would seem to be a fairly minimal requirement for materialism, but Lenin argues that Bogdanov’s theories fail to satisfy it. The title of Lenin’s book is Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. ‘Empirio-Criticism’ is another name for the philosophy then being propounded by the Vienna Circle, better known in the English-speaking world as ‘Logical Positivism’. It was introduced into British philosophy by A. J. Ayer in his widely-read first book, Language, Truth, and Logic (1936). At that time it seemed to many to be a brash, no-nonsense dismissal of metaphysics, in a commonsense, de-mystified view of the world; but Ayer spent the rest of his career explaining what was wrong with this initial enthusiasm of his. Today, it would be very difficult to find anyone who would admit to being a logical positivist. In philosophical circles it is generally regarded as having been thoroughly debunked. Its problems include its need to potentially verify every possible proposition by sense-data, and its dismissal of any idea not capable of such verification, including the idea of the independent existence of the external world. So we can see how, in Lenin’s terms, empirio-criticism fails to affirm materialism, since it fails to establish the existence of a world independent of our own minds.

Lenin’s criticisms of the theory belong among a substantial body of such discussions which regard the ideas of the Vienna Circle as one of the dead-ends of modern thought. And to me the experiential demands of logical positivism resembles interpretations of quantum mechanics that make conscious perception necessary for the determination of reality from probabilities. Rovelli, however, is surprisingly generous in his view of logical positivism. He calls it “the root of so much contemporary philosophy of science” (p.104). But this is true only insofar as various reactions against logical positivism were crucial in the subsequent development of the philosophy of science – notably Karl Popper’s critique of its ‘verificationist’ principle.

Bogdanov and Lenin were rival members of the Bolshevik Party, and there were political as well as philosophical differences between them. Rovelli gives an engaging portrait of Bogdanov, which could lead the reader to speculate on what might have happened if he rather than Lenin had become leader of the Party. However, when Rovelli quotes Bogdanov as having declared that “the individual is a bourgeois fetish” (p.154), it’s alarmingly easy to imagine where that line of thinking might lead.

Another philosopher who went off the rails.

Lenin © Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

Making A Difference

Rovelli only mentions thinkers in the Anglo-American analytic tradition of philosophy. He does not appear to have any awareness of recent thinkers in the Continental tradition. This is somewhat surprising, given that he is Italian and in his youth was involved with radical politics. However, it does exemplify the regrettable lack of communication between these two traditions, which seem to be hermetically sealed from one another. It is particularly regrettable in this context though, because, if I had to suggest a philosopher whose work might be relevant to Rovelli’s relational theory, it would be Jacques Derrida (1930-2004).

Beginning with his investigations into the nature of language, Derrida developed the idea of a difference that precedes identity. According to Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic theory, language is “a structure of differences without positive terms.” In other words, words and syllables are characterizable only by their distinction from other words and syllables. Starting from this idea, Derrida developed more fundamental speculations, suggesting that difference might be characteristic of all levels of reality (see, for example, his essay ‘Différance’, 1968). Perhaps here might be a precursor worthy of Rovelli’s attention. In the meantime, Rovelli’s fascinating books continue to keep open a channel of fruitful discussion between philosophy and science.

© Peter Benson 2026

Peter Benson has been a contributor to Philosophy Now for many years. He used to work in a library, but now devotes himself full-time to writing.

• Helgoland: The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics, Carlo Rovelli, Penguin, 2022, pb, £12.99, 208 pages, ISBN 0141993278

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Films

Wuthering Heights

Michael Au-Mullaney on K.E. Løgstrup on love.

As many viewers of director Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights (2025) have pointed out, this movie’s Heathcliff is just not evil enough. Fennell makes no apologies for not following all the details of Brontë’s 1847 novel, which is all for the best, since movies that slavishly follow their source material are usually not better for it (with the exception of Holes). Fennell has said that her goal in making the film was instead to capture the feeling of reading the novel when she was a teenager. The problem is that the movie does not understand, or even seem to want to understand, what actually makes reading the book as a teenager so captivating.

In its first half, the movie makes a half-hearted attempt to understand the darkness of erotic desire. Its opening scene connects love with death by making spectators at a hanging burst into an erotic frenzy. An early scene of bondage and voyeurism promises further exploration of sexual power dynamics. But by the time Heathcliff holds Catherine’s lifeless body in his arms and the credits roll, the movie has completely lost touch with the primal feeling the novel evokes – a sense of the terrifying abyss that passionate love can be. By the end of the movie, it all turns out to not really be about anything.

What makes reading the novel in puberty so powerful is that, like the awakening sex drive itself, it awakens the feeling of terror that comes with facing one’s own erotic nature for the first time. As a teenager, our capacity for yearning both repels and attracts us. But instead of making a movie that evokes this same terror, Fennell tries to rewrite the book as a teenager would. Since we long to see Cathy and Heathcliff consummate their love, Fennell will have it so. The movie has a teenager’s same lack of understanding for what makes passion feel both so important and so dangerous.

Wuthering Heights images © Warner Bros Pictures 2025

Love & Passion

K.E. Løgstrup (1905-1981), a Danish philosopher-theologian famous in Scandinavia but still little-read elsewhere, has thought out why we love Wuthering Heights, and why its tale of love’s revenge is so disturbing. His striking essay from 1961 ‘ Hvem har ret? Digteren eller psykologen?’ [‘Who is right? The Writer or the Psychologist?’] concludes with these words (translation mine):

“The writer says: Heathcliff is a Satan, but he loves Catherine.

The psychologist says: Heathcliff is a Satan, ergo he does not love Catherine.

The writer is right; she is in this case a better psychologist than the psychologist.”

This essay (unfortunately only available in Danish) is a confrontation between Emily Brontë’s idea of love in Wuthering Heights, and that of the psychologist Erich Fromm in his 1956 book The Art of Loving. Fromm argues that love is an attempt to overcome loneliness, and achieves this through selflessly caring for a beloved’s spiritual growth. But Løgstrup hates Fromm’s view. Løgstrup thinks that even though love is undeniably central to what makes human life good, love is not the same as moral goodness. Specifically, Løgstrup claims that contrary to much popular thinking, love is not the same thing as supporting the good of another person. Love is more elemental, more wild, more involving of our own desires and claims on life. It is not just about caring for the other; it’s also about wanting to personally thrive through union with another. So Løgstrup insists, following Brontë, that not only morally good people love, the wicked love too. Sometimes, they even love better than upstanding, morally considerate people. In any case, Heathcliff is evil – and he loves Cathy.

This tension is part of what continually fascinates those of us who love the novel, and also part of what it has to say to contemporary culture. Recent popular culture has made some progress in recognizing the damage of toxic relationships and the prevalence of partner violence and abuse. Contemporary discourse has, perhaps as a result, tended to identify ‘real love’ with ‘ethical care’, such that, if he abuses you, he does not really love you. So the modern argument would be that Heathcliff and Cathy don’t really love each other, they’re just ‘trauma bonded.’

Løgstrup suggests this is mistaken. While it cannot in the end be sustained without also including respect and consideration, love is different from and more than ethics. Rather, love is part of nature, in the sense that love is part of the human being’s longing to flourish as a creature and to be fulfilled through mutual intimacy and vulnerability with another human being.

The story of Heathcliff and Cathy exhibits two divergent responses to the vulnerability to which passionate desire exposes us. Løgstrup highlights the fact that because Heathcliff and Cathy grew up together (at the house called Wuthering Heights), their love for each other has no clear beginning, since it seems already to be there before they become aware of it. It’s only once they reach puberty that the risks involved in their love become clear. To be in love means being open to the possibility of being rejected. Your desire for the beloved might leave her cold and indifferent.

Emily Brontë by Patrick Branwell Brontë. Before 1848

Heathcliff stays committed to his love even when he is rejected. Cathy, on the other hand, at first neglects their unmistakable passion in favor of a conventional, caring but passionless marriage to her wealthy neighbor Edgar Linton. Martha Nussbaum has pointed out that, in the perspective of the novel, it is not plausible that Cathy really married Linton for the money and spurned Heathcliff for his poverty. Rather, his poverty is just her excuse. She spurned Heathcliff because she was afraid of the passion of their love for each other, and of the vulnerability that such passionate love would demand of her, including exposure to the grief of the beloved’s death.

When Heathcliff is spurned, he runs away from Wuthering Heights, only to return with wealth years later. Upon his return, he demonstrates that he will not look away from his passionate love for Cathy, nor hers for him, while she attempts to deny it. Løgstrup claims that Heathcliff enacts revenge against Cathy as the only way left open to him to express his love for her. To be resigned to her marriage choice and let her go free would be a betrayal of their love. So Heathcliff manipulates Cathy’s father and brother, takes possession of Wuthering Heights, and marries Isabella Linton, Cathy’s sister-in-law, with the sole purpose of torturing Cathy. Isabella, who is in love with Heathcliff, is devastated by his harshness and indifference, and lives out her days at Wuthering Heights in misery. Heathcliff meanwhile rages at Cathy, punishing her for neglecting their love.

Unfortunately, the intensity of his rage is just not there in the movie. Heathcliff gets a long respite from his festering resentment by having sex with Cathy many times over in a montage of delight. There’s not even any angry sex! Eventually, Cathy rebuffs him out of a sudden prick of conscience – after which Heathcliff purports to ‘torture’ Cathy by marrying Isabella. However, Fennell makes sure to have Heathcliff get Isabella’s express verbal consent to being an unloved pawn in his game, which Isabella masochistically relishes. So in the movie Heathcliff does not seem to really abuse Isabella, after all, since she’s in on the plan. All of this rather neuters the insight of the novel that even truly evil people may know love and recognize its importance. It is as if Fennell cannot bear to make Heathcliff really evil, because then her audience would not be able to believe that he loves Cathy. Løgstrup’s point, by contrast, is that Heathcliff’s love for Cathy is monstrous, and the shape he gives his love must be morally condemned – but it is love.

Love Gone Wrong

Brontë asks what Fennell never bothers to ask: Why does love go wrong?

This is where Løgstrup is at his most insightful. He names two sentiments shaping the modern concept of erotic love that can help explain Heathcliff’s predicament. First, in the experience of mutual passionate love, a lover feels a rightful claim to the beloved’s expression of love in response. On this perspective, Linton has no right to Cathy’s affection or faithfulness, because neither Linton nor Cathy feel passion for the other. But it means that Heathcliff does have a certain rightful claim to demand Cathy be true to her own love for him. The love they shared is real, and they both owe some acknowledgment and faithfulness to it. Secondly, Løgstrup adds that in falling in love, we usually experience a sense of the givenness of this love. We do not create this passionate connection ourselves, it’s a kind of gift of fate.

When these two sentiments stand in a productive tension, romantic love goes well, the feeling of gratitude for the love protecting the lovers from becoming so entitled to it that they enact revenge on their partner if their partner rejects them. But when they don’t, things go bad.

Knud Ejler Løgstrup

© Friedrich Magnussen, Germany 1979 Creative Commons 3.0

The importance of living in reception of love and fellowship as a gift is one of the central ideas in Løgstrup’s fascinating and original work. He calls this idea the pre-ethical goodness of human life. In his view, life with others goes well when we live with gratitude for the goodness in our lives. But real gratitude, in his view, is not demonstrated by saying ‘thank you’. Instead, the test is whether we naturally extend caring attention to others, rooted in what the Christian tradition calls ‘neighbourly love’. In contrast, when we lose the sense that our life, love, and its goodness is a gift, we grow indifferent to the needs of others and focus mainly on our own desires and our festering resentments at having been wronged by life. When this happens, Løgstrup claims, we need ethics as a substitute for the grateful, compassionate love we ought to have but now lack. Unlike love, ethics encourages us to do what we know we should do in our encounters with others, without necessarily desiring to do it. When acting ethically, we are not necessarily emotionally wholehearted because our sense of duty may conflict with our desires. So when you no longer want to do what is best for others, you can still do it out of good moral character – but it would have been better if you wanted to care. Ethics, Løgstrup writes, is a substitute motive. (This is one of the themes of the 1956 book for which Løgstrup is most famous, The Ethical Demand, recently in a new translation by Hegel expert Robert Stern and Løgstrup expert Bjørn Rabjerg.)

Returning to Heathcliff and Cathy, Løgstrup diagnoses the root of the evil in their relationship as being that they lack gratitude for the passionate love they’ve been given by fate. Because Heathcliff and Cathy’s love grew in childhood, they both fail to realise that their love is an undeserved gift. Instead, it feels to them like an unshakable fact of the universe which makes them entitled to possess each other (Cathy even says, “I am Heathcliff!”). They’re missing the experience that people who fall passionately in love in adulthood often have, that they are so lucky to have found this love. As a result, Cathy takes Heathcliff’s love for granted, and gets engaged to Linton before she realizes what she will lose.

This is where ethics could have become a substitute for gratitude. Heathcliff and Cathy needed ethics to restrain their sense of entitlement to each other in order to be saved from their unhappy love leading them to the tragedy of revenge. But Heathcliff, lacking moral character, takes revenge on Cathy as the only way of being faithful to his love for her. His intense passion must be given vent.

The intensity of his revenge in the film is undermined by Fennell giving him another way to vent his entitlement, in the form of their adulterous affair. On Løgstrup’s reading of the novel, Brontë wants to say that ethical respect for others has a value, but not because ethical care is the essence of love, including erotic love. Instead, the value of ethics is in helping to give our passionate love a shape that acknowledges that our beloved is deserving of our respect. If we’ve lost the gratitude we ought to feel for love, we can at least save ourselves from abusing the beloved by allowing ourselves to be restrained by the respect demanded by ethics.

But – and this is Løgstrup’s major interest in the novel – ethics must contend with our lust for life as a counter-pressure.

This is Brontë’s implicit critique of bourgeois Christianity in the novel: the human longing, sexual and otherwise, to live and flourish for oneself in passionate union with others is central to what makes human life good. So the good life is a life of fellowship in which our own desire to flourish is also affirmed and consummated. Without this desire, we are left with good moral character for its own sake. But, Løgstrup claims, morality for morality’s sake is pretty much the worst attitude you can have. Nothing is more lifeless.

Here, once again, the film misses a rich opportunity – to explore the character of Edgar Linton as a picture of moral character for its own sake. What makes Linton interesting is not that he’s a cuckold who’s in love with a wife who isn’t in love with him; it is that he is not really in love with his spouse, but instead is considerate, caring, thoughtful, and understanding. Just as Heathcliff and Cathy’s love for each other is passionate, the Linton marriage is not. Løgstrup sees the Lintons’ love as instead being an example of Erich Fromm’s moral art of love, in which love is a choice to care for the beloved’s spiritual growth. One can learn how to do this, and can control this attitude oneself.

But Løgstrup says: No! That moral kind of love is just not enough! Love is not an art you practice, it’s a gift you receive. We cannot learn to create it ourselves through techniques or habitual moral virtue. You’re either given it or you’re not. The kind of care for others you make through choices is duty, not love. We need passion to make a full life, even though we also have good reason to fear that passion in ourselves, lest without having some other attitude besides, either gratitude or moral character, it may lead us to ruin. Heathcliff knows this in his bones. This is part of how he earns our interest, even though he is a Satan.

© Dr Michael Au-Mullaney 2026

Michael Au-Mullaney, PhD, is a philosophy researcher and teacher in Chattanooga, Tennessee. For more: michaelaumullaney.com.

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Classics

Tractatus Theologico-Politicus by Baruch Spinoza

Hilarius Bogbinder looks at Spinoza’s classic defence of democracy and free speech.

“A book forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil, and issued with the knowledge of Jan de Witt.” The enemies of Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677) were not kind when describing his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670). The claim of the place of drafting and the co-authorship of the book is dubious; but it was certain that the book fundamentally clashed with Jewish and Christian theology of the time. Its questioning of the mere possibility of miracles ruffled feathers. So too did Spinoza’s uncompromising defence of democracy.

To present-day readers, the Dutch-born thinker might be better known as the author of the highly complex Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order, 1677). Published after his death, the Ethics outlined Spinoza’s philosophy in the style of the ancient mathematician Euclid. But in his own lifetime, it was his Treatise on Theology and Politics that made Spinoza famous, or rather, infamous. And in many ways his Tractatus presents a better, or in any case, a far more readable account of his thinking.

Certainly, the book caused controversy. Almost a century after its publication even a heretic like David Hume was dismissive of Spinoza’s supposedly ‘true atheism’. Hume calls his pantheistic theory of the universe as a ‘hideous hypothesis’ (Treatise of Human Nature, pp.240-241). Yet the book had been admired by none other than the aging Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). He commented that his younger Dutch colleague “had out-thrown him a bar’s length, for he [Hobbes] durst not write so boldly.”

Spinoza certainly speaks through the ages. At a time when the Bible and the Quran are used to, respectively, justify opposition to LGBT groups in America and deny girls the right to education in Afghanistan, Spinoza’s Tractatus is sadly relevant and timely, even 350-plus years after its original publication.

Spinoza’s were the last major works of philosophy to have been published in Latin. Only his treatise on the rainbow and his Treatise on God, Man, and Well-Being (Korte Verhandeling van God, de Mensch, en deszelvs Welstand) were written in Dutch, and those were never published during his lifetime. Spinoza had learned Latin from Francis van der Erden, who also introduced the young man to the philosophy of René Descartes (1596-1650). On the urging of his tutor, Spinoza wrote a short treatise about Descartes’ philosophy based on Euclid’s principles, The Principles of René Descartes’ Philosophy Demonstrated by the Geometric Method (1663).

Spinoza’s Radicalism

It’s often said that Spinoza was an austere man who began training as a rabbi and learned the skill of grinding lenses (Jewish clergymen traditionally had a trade to fall back on). In fact, he never completed his rabbinical training, but he did grind lenses. He also taught in Van der Erden’s school. He refused generous academic offers. and even declined a professorship at the University of Heidelberg, as he feared that would prevent him from speaking his mind. All this has given him a rather ascetic air. This is a bit unfair. He was not a complete bore, he once defined man as “an animal capable of laughter” (Ethics 2, Prop XL), and wrote that a wise person would be invigorated by “eating and drinking and by [watching] sport” (Ethics 4, Prop. XLV). But these were not the views that caused outrage. He received notoriety not only because Tractatus inaugurated critical thinking about religion, but also because he drew political implications from his theology. These implications shaped the politics of the modern era.

At the time Tractatus was written, Spinoza’s academic compatriots were in no doubt that Jesus had performed miracles such as turning water into wine and bringing dead people back to life. Spinoza categorically rejected this idea: “nature cannot be contravened, but… preserves a fixed and immutable order” (p,82); and, he went on, to believe in miracles is “a mere absurdity” (Ibid). Generally, he gave short shrift of any supernatural interpretation of the Bible, and stated categorically that when a literal interpretation of it clashes with reason, “it must be interpreted in a different manner, ie, metaphorically” (p.102). Spinoza proposed that we “separate ourselves from the crowd.” Instead of ‘rashly accepting’ the Bible as preached by the churches, we use the same critical mindset we use when we should study the universe, since “the method of interpreting Scripture does not differ widely from interpreting nature” (p.99).

Spinoza was nothing if not radical, but he certainly didn’t make life easy for himself. Born of Sephardi Jewish parents who had escaped Portugal and settled in Amsterdam, he was a member of the Jewish congregation in his native city; but his unorthodox views on God and Scripture caused him to be expelled from the synagogue. Indeed, on 27 July 1656, the Talmud Torah congregation of Amsterdam issued an unusually harsh writ of cherem: “Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up… We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favour, or stay with him under the same roof, or within four ells of him, or read anything composed or written by him.”

Still, being excommunicated meant Spinoza was free to speak his mind, more or less. He fraternised with free thinkers (that is, atheists), and became a friend of Jan de Witt, the liberal-minded Raadpensionaris of the United Dutch Provinces (a kind of Prime Minister). With influential friends in high places, and in the company of secular-minded friends, he was confident to write that the books of Moses, or Pentateuch, as the first five books of the Bible are known, were ‘compilations’ that were not written by the prophet; rather, that “events therein were recorded as having happened in old time” (Tractatus, p.121).

Spinoza’s statements also caused concern outside the Jewish community, and not merely for theological reasons. Spinoza was not just interested in metaphysics; he had a political purpose – to rid political discussions of irrelevant superstition. This, he thought. was a source of tyranny. Spinoza was not opposed to the teachings of religions, which could be “summed up in to love one’s neighbour” (p.102). However, “We have shown”, wrote he, “that Scripture does not teach philosophy, but merely obedience” (p.190). This divinely-sanctioned obedience, in his view, only served to perpetuate tyranny. Furthermore, basing decisions on supposed divine motives resulted in a kind of intellectual laziness. This, in his view, characterised religious fanatics, who will not “cease from asking the causes, until at last they fly to the will of God, the refuge of ignorance” (Ethics 1, Appendix).

Living at the same time as Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) – whom he had read and admired – Spinoza agreed that states were established by a covenant or in Hobbes’ terms, a social contract. Spinoza wrote that “in order that men may be able to live in harmony, they cede their natural rights” (Ethics 4, Prop. Xxxvii).

Like Hobbes, Spinoza founded his political philosophy on a grand philosophical system, which was ultimately based on his idea that God and nature are one. As he summed it up, “ Deus sive Natura: God, or nature.” To elaborate, in the Ethics he wrote that God is “the immanent not the transitive cause of things”, and that he could only be conceived by two of his ‘attributes’, namely ‘thought’ and ‘extension’ (Ethics 1, XIV2). Based on this, it has been said that Spinoza was a pantheist. This is somewhat anachronistic, as this term was only introduced after his death by English mathematician Joseph Raphson (1668-1712). Certainly, Spinoza had a rather abstract conception of the Supreme Being, and he rejected the view of “those who imagine God to be like a man, composed of body and soul, and subject to passions” (Ethics 1, Prop.XV). Moreover, for Spinoza, salvation was not in living in bliss in the hereafter; rather, “Blessedness is nothing but the peace of mind which springs from the intuitive knowledge of God” (Ethics 4, Appendix IV). With such a view of the world, it’s impossible to maintain a political system based on fear of the afterlife, as the divine right of kings might be said to be based.

Politically, Spinoza was no less secular than Hobbes, yet he departed from his English contemporary in fundamental ways. As he himself wrote, “the difference between Hobbes and I consists in this: that I ever preserve the natural right intact, so that the supreme power in a state has no more right over the subject than is proportionate to the power by which it is superior to the subject” (Letter to Jarig Jelles, June 2, 1674). One of these rights pertained to free speech: “Men thinking in diverse and contradictory fashion cannot, without disastrous results, be compelled to speak only according to the dictates of supreme power” (Tractatus, p.208). He was also explicit in his support for government by the people. Foreshadowing what has become known as ‘the wisdom of the crowds’, he declared that “In a democracy, irrational commands are still less to be feared [than in a dictatorship], for it is almost impossible that the majority of a people, especially if it is a large one, should agree in an irrational design and, moreover, the basis and aim of a democracy is to avoid the desires as irrational, and to bring men, as far as possible, under the control of reason” (p.264). What’s remarkable about Spinoza’s Treatise is that it went far beyond the liberal political doctrine of his benefactor and friend Jan De Witt. The latter was progressive, but still an aristocrat. Not so Spinoza:

“We cannot doubt that [democracy] is the best form of government and open to the fewest objections, since it is one in harmony with human nature. In a democracy (the most natural form of government…) everyone submits to the control of authority over their actions but not over his judgement and reason; that is seeing that all cannot think alike, the voice of the majority has the force of law, subject to repeal if circumstances bring about a change of opinion” (Chap.XX).

For this reason, “In proportion as the power of free judgement is withheld we depart from the natural condition of mankind, and consequently, the government becomes tyrannical” (Chap.XX). Thus, Spinoza can be seen as the first political philosopher to defend the idea of the rule of law as essential to a democracy; hence “a government which attempts to control minds is accounted tyrannical, and it is considered an abuse of sovereignty and an usurpation of the rights of subjects to seek to prescribe what shall be accepted as true, or rejected as false” (p.261). A democracy was hence preferable on philosophical grounds, as this system of government will allow philosophical speculation as well as religious freedom. Moreover, as Spinoza wrote with considerable eloquence, “he who seeks to regulate everything by law is more likely to arouse vices than to reform them” (Ibid).

Ends & Legacies

As a philosopher, Spinoza largely refrained from real world examples. But he made an exception: Tractatus Theologico-Politicus ends with a somewhat effusive, but largely accurate, praise of his native city (p.264):

“In order to prove that from such freedom, which cannot be checked by the exercise of the sovereign power, and that men’s actions can easily be kept in bounds though their opinions be at open variance, it will be well to cite an example… The city of Amsterdam reaps the fruits of this freedom in its own great prosperity and in the admiration of all other people. For in this most flourishing state, and most splendid city, men of every nation and religion live together in greatest harmony, and ask no questions before trusting their goods to a fellow citizen… whether he be rich or poor… His religion or sect is considered of no importance for it has no effect before the judges in gaining or losing a cause, and there is no sect so despised that its followers, provided they harm no one, are deprived the protection of the magisterial authority.”

He spoke too soon. Two years later, Jan De Witt was blamed for an invasion by French and English troops, and was killed by an angry mob (somewhat bizarrely, they even cannibalised the corpse). For the rest of his life, Spinoza lived in fear and seclusion. He died a few years later, seemingly due to a lung complication caused by glass dust.

But Spinoza’s legacy lived on. For Romantics like the poets Goethe, Novalis, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he became a hero. But his lasting legacy was to pave the way for democracy as well as a system of politics based on free speech, reason, and sound argument. As he wrote, “If ignorance be removed, stupidity… is taken away also” (Ethics, I, Appendix). To this we can only copy the great man himself and say at the end of the argument ‘Q.E.D.’, or quod erat demonstrandum – the Latin shorthand in mathematical proofs that means ‘This was proved’.

© Hilarius Bogbinder 2026

Hilarius Bogbinder is a Danish-born writer who studied politics and theology at Oxford University.

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Fiction

- The Simulacrum Conceals, or Time Beguiles?

- The Day of Ashes

Poetry

The Simulacrum Conceals, or Time Beguiles?

by Shivangi Mishra

On a drowsy Sunday afternoon, June the fifteenth, two thousand and twenty five,

I heard Jean Baudrillard say that the simulacrum is true. He spoke about the reality it mirrors.

Baudrillard’s voice echoed in a glass jar.

Thereafter, I saw a little girl purchase a three-dimensional world-globe at the tiniest book kiosk,

The globe much tinier than the kiosk,

And I soon realised why Baudrillard reckoned that the simulacrum precedes the truth,

At the kitchen garden, I saw a petite cat strut like a giant lion,

And I saw the drooping branches of a tree hush up the speeding raindrops,

About a month later, I seem to be reading Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities,

At some odd juncture in the Two Cities, Dickens quips, ‘Time beguiles’.

Perhaps Baudrillard was right all along:

the simulacrum never conceals reality,

Time does.

As I pen down the fragments of June, 2025, it’s still Sunday, June the fifteenth, two thousand and twenty five,

But maybe a month elapsed while reading The Tale of Two Cities,

or possibly, the incandescent magnificence of May has not yet eluded us,

Or maybe it isn’t time yet.

© Shivangi Mishra 2026

Shivangi Mishra is currently pursuing a doctorate in Copyright Law at the National Law University, Delhi. Her work features in several legal journals and literary magazines. Instagram: _shivangimishraa.

Fiction

The Day of Ashes

Adam Farnsworth visits a future that reveres the philosophy of Georges Bataille.

The first painting hit the pyre. A Rembrandt, sacrificed to the solar god of excess. Jonas trembled. Bataille’s Lectures returned to him unbidden: “Sacrifice destroys that which it consecrates.”

As the Rembrandt blackened, a Sahel drone cut through the smoke, its wings scattering light like thrown coins. A child laughed, chasing its reflections with a tablet once owned by a Parisian CEO.

The noon sun glared above the plaza. Jonas squinted at it. It’s Bataille’s ‘accursed share’ made visible: energy we cannot store, only squander, or sin by hoarding. Around Jonas, people pressed in close. Hands lingered on arms and shoulders, lips brushed ears in conspiratorial whispers. A woman in crimson leaned into a man’s back, eyes half-lidded, the heat of the bonfire mirrored in the heat between them.

The voice from the high speakers rose above the murmurs: “In the Year of Endless Want, the Earth groaned beneath her children’s hunger. But the Teacher saw that want was not born of empty hands, but of hands that would not give. The sun spends itself without restraint. It burns to feed the grass, the grain, the beast, the man. To keep more than you need is to spit in the face of the giver. We will not spit. We will burn.” So the burning was not simply destruction, it was release – a permission to touch, to dissolve boundaries.

Jonas felt the pull of it in his gut, mingled with unease. “Eroticism is assenting to life up to the point of death,” the Teacher had said; and here death came dressed as beauty burning. But beauty, like desire, exists only to be consumed. To withhold the consummation was the true obscenity.

The crowd tilted their faces toward the blaze. For a moment, Jonas did too. But the stone in his chest reminded him of what he had seen two nights earlier.

The Hidden Cargo

The assignment had seemed harmless. A late shipment from the Veyran estate, requiring a Redistribution Officer’s inspection. The Veyrans were old money turned ceremonial patrons of Bataillism, famed for their flamboyant Emberday offerings. Jonas had heard about crates of fine but replaceable goods: surplus instruments, outdated AI consoles, furniture that next year’s fabricators would render obsolete.

The warehouse was quiet, the river’s tide whispering against its walls. An attendant in pale gloves unlocked the last gate.

The first half of the shipment matched his expectation: neat stacks of tools; crates marked for medical distribution; solar cells bound for highland clinics. AI had already tagged them for immediate rerouting. The machinery of peace in motion.

Then came the other section.

Inside the large container was a room dressed for a private ritual. A half-empty cask of wine, its top stained crimson like a wound. Ash smudges on the floor where a frame had been burned. Paintings in heavy frames leaned in rows, their pigments luminous, almost wet. A cello resting in a glass case.

“This is not for burning,” the attendant said.

Jonas kept his voice flat: “Nor for redistribution?”

The man’s smile was faint. “No. The Veyrans want to keep these. Or perhaps not keep. Perhaps reserve. There are ceremonies that require a different kind of expenditure.”

Jonas’ finger hovered near the cello’s case. He imagined smashing through it, shattering the instrument, feeling the wood splinter under his palm. A sovereign waste, for no eyes but his own. The thought came before he could suppress it. Perhaps that would not be hypocrisy, but a higher, rarer waste. To destroy such beauty privately, away from the crowd’s eyes – was that not closer to sovereignty than offering up mass-produced abundance to the public pyres? But the catechism pressed back: Nothing is mine. Nothing is yours. All that is, is ours. What is ours, is for the fire.

Jonas left without questioning the attendant. Yet one question lingered like the aftertaste of strong wine: Was the truest act of Bataillism to give – or to squander – in secret ?

Emberday Night

By the edge of nightfall, the city had become a living hearth. Bonfires bloomed in every square, their embers drifting upward like incandescent birds. Strings of paper suns swayed between rooftops. Music threaded through the alleys, thick with percussion and breathy flutes.

Jonas walked among bodies that moved as if untethered from gravity, like balloons. Silk brushed against bare skin. Wine sloshed over cups, onto wrists, only to be licked away by strangers. The flames roared and the people roared back.

A young man with ash on his cheeks pressed a cup into Jonas’ hand: “To the sun that spends itself!” he shouted: “And to the ones who do not hoard the light!”

Jonas drank, the wine heavy and sweet. A woman slid past him, her fingers lingering at his hip. The firelight caught her eyes, turning them gold. For a heartbeat Jonas felt the crowd’s current pulling him under. Then words from Bataille’s Lectures returned: “The embrace of lovers is a mock death, a sacrifice in miniature. The fire takes the body and the body gives itself to be taken.”

At Center Square the High Pyre was being fed its final offerings. The last was a gilded ornate antique clock, its face cracked, its hands still ticking. The crowd cheered as it vanished in the blaze. Jonas heard himself whisper, “Beauty, like desire, exists only to be consumed.” Yet the image of the Veyrans’ cello, sealed in glass, burned brighter in his mind than the flames before him.

The music swelled into a fevered rhythm. People danced in spirals, their limbs slick with sweat and smoke. A couple kissed so hard it looked like they were trying to breathe each other in. The sight made Jonas’s throat tighten. He thought of the Veyrans alone in their hidden chamber watching a painting curl and blacken, the ash rising in silence. Was that solitude more pure than this shared ecstasy?

Above the square, the sun had set, but its aftergift still lingered as the twilight. The pyres were consuming the day’s last light. The air smelled of charred wood, spilt wine, and something animal.

Jonas knew the catechism by heart, yet tonight it felt like a question instead of an answer: What is ours, is for the fire. But what if the truest fire was one no one else could see?

Fire © Bryan Tong Minh 2007 Creative Commons 2.0

The Swell & The Afterglow

Eventually, Emberday reached its final hour. The High Pyre had shrunk to a mound of glowing embers, each one the residue of something once prized. People sat in loose circles around the heat, speaking softly, or gazing into the flickering flames as if waiting for a vision.

Jonas looked round at the crowd. In the shadows behind him, the Veyrans themselves lingered, hands intertwined. He thought of their hidden hoard, the cello’s silent curves, the quiet ash smudge of their own private rite, and of the choice before him: should he tell the Ember Council of their self-indulgence? He could see the sacred order tighten its grip.

The Officiant stepped forward before the remnants of the fire, lifting a cup of wine from the communal vat: “Bataille taught us that the sun gives us more than we can use, and so we must return the excess, in fire, in dance, in love.” The words – repeated for generations – rolled over the crowd like a familiar tide. They shouted in reflection, “In fire, in dance, in love!”

Jonas sipped when the cup reached him. The wine was warm from the fire’s breath, and rich enough to cling to the tongue. A woman beside him laughed, brushing his shoulder, and he felt the unsteady thrill Bataille had named ‘the nearness of life and death’, and the way beauty demanded to be spent. In the flicker of the firelight, he imagined the ancient cello burning, its strings snapping like sinews. He imagined the Veyrans watching it alone, faces lit by their own secret blaze. But he knew Bataille was right: excess must always find an outlet. And if not here, in this communal rapture, it would leak into bloodshed, conquest, or other cruelty. Yet to expose the Veyrans would not end the hunger for such waste. It might only drive it into darker places.

The Officiant cast the final torch into the embers, and the crowd erupted in song. Jonas joined them, his voice rising into the smoke-heavy night. Above, a drone crossed the Moon, its blades scattering orange light like embers flung into the dark.

Tomorrow the city would begin again, and the sun would pour its endless gift across the earth.

Jonas turned toward home. The cello would remain where it was. The ash smudge would fade on its own. Next Emberday, when the pyres roared again, he would burn what he could and keep what he must, just like everyone else.

© Adam Farnsworth 2026

Adam Farnsworth writes speculative fiction inspired by philosophy.

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Table of Contents

Philosophy Now: Aug/Sep 2026

Editorial

Mental Continental

News

News: August/September 2026

War

Just War Theory

Between Missiles & Morality

On War, Kabbalah & Collateral Damage

Continentals

Hustle Culture & the Illusion of Freedom

Simone Weil & Animal Suffering

Why Classical Liberals Should Embrace Foucault

The Strength of Quiet Rebellion

Fun With Deleuze & Guattari

Articles

What is Analytic Philosophy?

Boredom

What is Human Experience?: Psychology vs Philosophy

What’s A Good 1000-Year Plan?

Julian the Apostate (331-363)

Interviews

Ulrich Metschl

Letters

Letters

Columns

Martin Heidegger & the Evaporation of Freedom

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

Philosophical Power Couples

Cicero & the Value of Skepticism

Reviews

The Diversity of Morals by Steven Lukes

Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli

Wuthering Heights

Tractatus Theologico-Politicus by Baruch Spinoza

Fiction

The Simulacrum Conceals, or Time Beguiles?

The Day of Ashes

Cartoons

Simon & Finn

Just Desserts

Jon Carter’s Cartoon

Guto Dias’ Cartoon