Tag: geuss

Philosophic Influences

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I just finished the writing and editorial parts of my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. It still needs cover art and some administrative odds and ends, but I’m taking a day for a breather to share something about myself and my worldview. For this, I share my philosophical influences and how they support my core insights. For dramatic effect, I’ll even try to weight them to 100 per cent, leaving an ‘others’ bucket for the unaccounted ones.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Obviously, this highly scientific accounting is about as useful as a Facebook survey or a fortune cookie, but it should reveal something. I have influences outside of philosophy, but I’ll limit this list at the start. The numbers don’t exactly add to 100% because there is a bit of cross-pollination, say, between Foucault and Nietzsche or Ĺ˝iĹžek and Hegel – or perhaps I’m just not good at maths. You decide.

Nietzsche (≈18)

Nietzsche is likely the uranium core. Haters and detractors like to diminish his contribution – and he didn’t play by the old rules – but they are wrong. He contributes value-creation, anti-moralism, perspectivism, the critique of ressentiment, the demolition of universals.

Nietzsche sits at the centre of the blast radius. Everything else is shrapnel. If there’s a thinker who detonated the Enlightenment’s pretensions more elegantly, I’ve not met them. He showed us that values are forged, not found; that morality is a genealogy of grievances; that certainty is the last refuge of the timid. In other words, he cleared the ground so the rest of us could get to work without tripping over Kantian furniture. But after Nietzsche’s uranium core, the next concentric ring becomes murkier.

Foucault (≈20%)

Foucault supplies the schematics. Where Nietzsche swung a hammer at the idols, Foucault identified the building codes. He mapped power as a set of subtle, everyday enchantments. He showed how ‘knowledge’ is simply what a society rewards with credibility. He is the patron saint of anyone who suspects normality is an instrument, not a neutral state of affairs. The world looks different once you see the disciplinary fingerprints on everything.

Derrida (≈10%)

Derrida gives me language as mischief. Meaning wobbles, slides, cracks; binaries betray themselves; every conceptual edifice contains its own trapdoor. Derrida isn’t a system; he’s an escape artist. And frankly, you can’t write anything about the insufficiency of language without genuflecting in his general direction.

Late Wittgenstein (≈15%)

The quiet structural pillar. If Derrida is the saboteur, Wittgenstein is the carpenter who informs you that the house was never stable anyway. Meaning-as-use, language-games, the dissolution of philosophical pseudo-problems: his later work underwrites virtually every modern suspicion about fixed categories and timeless essences. He doesn’t shout; he shrugs – and everything collapses neatly.

Rorty (≈5%)

Rorty replaces metaphysical longing with cultural pragmatism. He teaches you to stop hunting for capital-T Truth and instead track the vocabularies we actually live in. He’s the friendly voice whispering, ‘You don’t need foundations. You need better conversations’. His influence is felt mostly in the tone of my epistemic cynicism: relaxed rather than tragic. Besides, we disagree on the better conversations bit.

Geuss (≈4%)

If Rorty makes you light-footed, Geuss reminds you not to float off into abstraction entirely. He is the critic of moralism par excellence, the man who drags philosophy kicking and screaming back into politics. Geuss is the voice that asks, ‘Yes, but who benefits?’ A worldview without him would be a soufflĂŠ.

Heidegger (≈6%)

Selective extraction only. Being-in-the-world, thrownness, worldhood – the existential scaffolding. His political judgment was catastrophic, of course, but the ontological move away from detached subjectivity remains invaluable. He gives the metaphysics a certain grain.

Existentialists: Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus (≈6%)

They provide the atmospheric weather: choice, finitude, absurdity, revolt, the sheer mess of human freedom. They don’t define the system; they give it blood pressure. Besides, I met them before I switched to Team Nietzsche-Foucault.

Žižek, Latour, Baudrillard (≈2% combined)

These three are my licensed provocateurs.

  • Ĺ˝iĹžek exposes how ideology infiltrates desire.
  • Latour dismantles the Nature/Society binary with glee.
  • Baudrillard whispers that representation ate reality while we were looking at our phones.

They’re trickster figures, not architects.

Hume, Putnam, Dennett, and the Ancillaries (≈1% combined)

These are the seasonings.

  • Hume is the Scottish acid bath under every epistemic claim.
  • Putnam gives internal realism its analytic passport.
  • Dennett offers mechanistic metaphors you can steal even when you disagree.
  • Kant and Hegel hover like compulsory ghosts.
  • Rawls remains decorative parsley: included for completeness, consumed by none.

The Others Bucket (≈5%)

The unallocated mass: writers, anthropologists, theorists, stray thinkers you absorb without noticing. The ‘residuals’ category for the philosophical inventory – the bit fortune cookies never warn you about.

Enfin

Obviously, these ratios are more for humour than substance, but these are the thinkers I return to — the ones whose fingerprints I keep discovering on my own pages, no matter how many years or detours intervene.

Perhaps more revealing are those who didn’t make the guest list. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle remain outside, smoking in the cold. The Stoics, Marcus Aurelius and his well-meaning self-help descendants, also failed to RSVP. In truth, I admire the posture but have little patience for the consolations – especially when they become the emotional training wheels of neoliberalism.

And then, of course, the Enlightenment patriarchs: Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu and the rest of the constitutional furniture. I acknowledge their historical necessity the way one acknowledges plumbing – grateful it exists, uninterested in climbing inside the pipes. Rousseau, admittedly, I tolerate with something approaching affection, but only because he never pretended to be tidy.

I forgot Descartes, Voltaire, and Pascal, but it’s too late to scroll back and adjust the ledger. Consider them rounding errors – casualties of the margins, lost to the tyranny of percentages.

If anyone mentions another one – Spinoza comes to mind – I’ll try to figure out where they fit in my pantheon. Were I to render this tomorrow, the results may vary.

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Written by Bry Willis

microglyphics

Rhetoric and nothing more

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Morality is nothing more than rhetoric. Rhetorical devices are employed, and a person will either accept or reject the claim contingent to an emotional response based on prior experiences. This is Ayer’s Emotivist position—or even that of George Berkeley. There is no moral truth, and any moral truths are nothing more than an individual’s or group of individuals’ acceptance of a given claim. Rhetoric is used to sway the claim.

Logic is employed but only after having been filtered through the experience through the emotion and through the rhetoric. Accepting some particular truth claim does not make it true; neither does rejecting a truth claim make it false.

I’d like to expound upon this, but for now, I’ll create this placeholder.

Fast-forward, and I’ve returned. Still, I feel that morality is nothing more than rhetoric. Perhaps I’m even more convinced—and this extends into jurisprudence and politics. I’ve rather latched onto Foucault’s or Geuss’ sense of power or Adorno’s socially necessary illusion that is ideology by way of Marx.

Talking about power, Geuss says, “you may be more powerful than I am by virtue of being a charismatic figure who is able to attract enthusiastic, voluntary support from others, or by virtue of being able to see and exploit a strategic, rhetorical, or diplomatic weakness in my position”.

« One cannot treat “power” as if it referred to a single, uniform substance or relation wherever it was found. It makes sense to distinguish a variety of qualitatively distinct kinds of powers. There are strictly coercive powers you may have by virtue of being physically stronger than me, and persuasive powers by virtue of being convinced of the moral rightness of your case; or you may be more powerful than I am by virtue of being a charismatic figure who is able to attract enthusiastic, voluntary support from others, or by virtue of being able to see and exploit a strategic, rhetorical, or diplomatic weakness in my position. »

I tend to think of myself as a proponent of the Hegelian dialectic, but even this is in a rather small-t teleology manner instead of a capital-T flavour, so I feel that although history moves in somewhat of human-guided direction, there is no reason to believe it’s objectively better than any number of other possible directions, though one might be able to gain consensus regarding improvement along several dimensions. Even this will not be unanimous.

[To be continued…]

Justice or nonsense?

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Why should justice be the foundation of a society, and why not something else, say, honour or valour or wealth? What do we mean when we say justice? Do you mean the same thing as me? Dating myself to be sure, but would a Klingon from the Star Trek universe share your definition? So what is justice anyway?

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‘Justice is the constant and perpetual will to render to every man his due. Jurisprudence is the knowledge of divine and human affairs and knowledge of what is just and what is unjust’, or so writes Justinian in Institutes 1.1 in 533 CE.

“Iustitia est constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum cuique tribuens.  Iuris prudentia est divinarum atque humanarum rerum notitia, iusti atque iniusti scientia.”

This is Justinian’s answer to the question: What is justice? In his Philosophy and Real Politics, Geuss relates that ‘justice is the constant and unflagging will to render to each person what is due to him’ (or perhaps ‘what he’s entitled to’), and therein lies the rub: what exactly is one entitled to?

Geuss goes on to point out that entitlement was contingent to one’s place in society. Citizens were entitled to some things, resident aliens another, and slaves, pretty much nothing at all. In fact, giving a slave more than s/he was entitled to would be considered unjust, as it would be considered to be undeserved. As Geuss writes, ‘that to treat a slave as if he or she had any entitlements would be a gross violation of the basic principles of justice’. Of course, you are thinking, post-Enlightenment ‘all men are created equal’, or so the saying goes.

US-Camp_x-ray_detainees-Guantanamo-Bay-Jan-11-2002-Phot-Shane-T-McCoy-US-Navy-Creative-Commons-513x239[1]In practice, it’s been easy to sidestep the application of justice by redefining a certain group to be outside of some protected group. During the illegal aggression by the United States against Middle Eastern countries that resulted in extraordinary rendition of civilians spirited off to GuantĂĄnamo Bay, Cuba, off the coast of the United States and outside of their jurisdiction, their acting regime declared that the detainees were not people, strictly speaking, and as such were not subject to the protections afforded to people, therefore they had no access to justice.

“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.”
— John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

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Hermione’s Time Turner

The ancient Greeks had a different idea of justice, so perhaps we just need to break out our trusty time turner to see what Aristotle had to say about it.

Here Aristotle rather equates the notion of justice to that of equality, but that begs the question: what equality? as we understand that equality comes in a variety of colours, so I won’t belabour the point any further here.

Instead of asking about justice, why don’t we focus on the root of the word, just? This yields the following definition:

Just: (adj) based on or behaving according to what is morally right and fair

This brings us into the normative domain of morality, fairness, and reason, so it’s not much to work with—basically, we are in the realm of opinion defended by rhetoric.

For ‘all’ intents and purposes, we’ve got four forms of justice. We’ve been focused on the distributive type, but there are also procedural, restorative, and retributive varieties. In many cases, not just one form of justice is satisfying and so multiple varieties are deemed, well, just.

  • Distributive or economic justice is about fairness in how things are distributed, about getting a fair share.
  • Procedural justice is also about fairness, but it’s more about fair play, an even playing field.
  • Restorative justice is about compensating for an injustice, about restoring some perceived balance.
  • Retributive justice is about punishment—retribution.

A problem arises when we try to quantify and measure justice. Consider distributive justice: If two people work in a field and each cultivates 50% of the crop, are each entitled to 50% of the yield? If the cultivated land was the ‘property’ of some other landowner, what portion would s/he be entitled to? All of it? Some of it? None of it?

What about the court system? Procedural justice comes into play here. Should a wealthy person have access to better attorneys than a poor person? Is this just? The poor person may argue no, but the wealthy person may argue that s/he earned the ability to pay for a better lawyer, so s/he is entitled to this benefit.

Restorative justice sounds simple at the surface. If I steal a loaf of bread, wouldn’t returning the loaf (or, at least, a similar loaf) be restorative—no harm, no foul? Many people will argue that this is not good enough. Balance has not been restored.

This is where retributive justice comes into play. Retributive justice is a poorly veiled euphemism for vengeance. This is where Hammurabi‘s code (or Leviticus‘)  eye for an eye—but not Matthew‘s turn the other cheek rendition—comes in. Let’s not get into Nietzsche’s take on forgiveness as being unjust and part of slave morality.

Keep in mind that in Hammurabi’s code, as with Roman law, justice was relative: Given eyes, (NÂş 196) ‘If a man put out the eye of a nobleman (amelu), his eye shall be put out’, yet (NÂş 198) ‘If he puts out the eye of a freedman or breaks the bone of a freedman, he shall pay one gold mina’.

Through all of this, we are still left wondering: just what is justice besides some vague notion constructed solely to preserve the status quo.

Sources:

  1. http://legalhistorysources.com/LisbonRights/JusticeDefinitions.htm
  2. http://changingminds.org/explanations/trust/four_justice.htm

Geuss Who?

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A mate in an online forum turned me onto Raymond Geuss, who’s got just the perspective I’ve been looking for. I’ve felt that the concepts of rights and justice are weak on etymological grounds, but Geuss’ critique is even more fundamental. In his Philosophy and Real Politics, Geuss undercuts the positions of both Nozick and Rawls. I’ve never been a fan of Nozick, but I do consider (have considered) myself to be a bit of a Rawlsian.

Nozick is a key figure underneath Libertarianism, as this movement is very centred on rights. Opting for rights as his starting place as his preface to Anarchy, State, and Utopia:

“Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).” — Robert Nozick

As Geuss points out, Nozick ‘allows that bald statement to lie flapping and gasping for breath like a large, moribund fish on the deck of a trawler, with no further analysis or discussion, and proceeds to draw consequences from it’. In other words, Nozick leads with an unsubstantiated claim that ‘individuals have rights’, and then ‘advances’ his position tautologically.

As for Rawls, justice is his centrepiece. In his A Theory of Justice, the opening line is “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought”. He merely starts from this emotional place and advances his theory based on this basis of justice, yet nowhere does he explain of defend why this should be the foundation. As with Nozick, Rawls simply conjures this out of thin air.

“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.” — John Rawls

On top of this, Geuss comments on the shaky etymologic foundation of both justice and rights. Harkening back to the Latin origin of justice,

As Geuss writes, ‘To begin with the question of the concept of “justice,” it is striking how unclear this concept is in ordinary language and to what extent conceptions of justice differ from one context to another and in different human societies at different times. Thus at the beginning of one of the standard treatises of Roman law, the codification made for the emperor Justinian — one of the most influential texts in European history — we find that the very first sentence gives us a definition of “justice”: “iustitia est constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum cuique tribuens.” That is, justice is “the constant and unflagging will to give each person what is due to him.”

“What have the Romans ever done for us?” – Monty Python

Then he goes on to clarify that “what is due to him” is radically different dependant on being a citizen, an alien, a slave, a woman, a minor, and so on. To simplify this, we are stuck in a tautological loop: one is due what one is due, as determined somewhat exogenously.

Rights don’t fare any better, being even more ambiguous, so I don’t feel so bad about pursuing the irrelevance of these virtue concepts on etymological grounds.