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ISSUE 137 APRIL / MAY 2020

Philosophy Now
a magazine of ideas

Nietzsche
the Prophet
 CLASSICAL INDIAN
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Philosophy Now ISSUE 137 April/May 20
Philosophy Now, EDITORIAL & NEWS
43a Jerningham Road, 4 Nietzsche’s Hammer by Tim Beardmore-Gray
Telegraph Hill,
5 Report: Philosophy Now Festival by Anja Steinbauer
London SE14 5NQ
United Kingdom 56 Obituary: Roger Scruton
Tel. 020 7639 7314 Piers Benn remembers a friend and colleague

NIETZSCHE © KATIE BELL 2020

editors@philosophynow.org
philosophynow.org NIETZSCHE PAST & FUTURE
6 Eternal Recurrence Revisited
Editor-in-Chief Rick Lewis
Editors Grant Bartley, Anja Steinbauer
Brandon Robshaw looks again at Nietzsche’s idea of repetition
Digital Editor Bora Dogan 10 ‘I Am A God’
Assistant Editor Tim Beardmore-Gray David Birch compares Nietzsche, radical, to Kanye West, rapper
Book Reviews Editor Teresa Britton
14 Two Famous Philistines of Philosophy
Film Editor Thomas Wartenberg
Design Grant Bartley, Tim Beardmore- Christopher Brown studies Nietzsche’s & Plato’s attacks on art
Gray, Rick Lewis, Anja Steinbauer 18 Nietzsche & History
Marketing Sue Roberts Paul Doolan on remembering and forgetting
Administration Ewa Stacey
Assistants Madeleine Parr, Isaac Parry
Nietzschean Life 20 Our Nietzschean Future
Advertising Team How to be an Übermensch Paul O’Mahoney peers into Nietzsche’s crystal ball
Jay Sanders, Ellen Stevens
jay.sanders@philosophynow.org Pages 6-22 GENERAL ARTICLES
UK Editorial Board 24 When Moral & Causal Words Collide
Rick Lewis, Anja Steinbauer,
Bora Dogan, Grant Bartley
Toni Vogel Carey wrestles with conflicts of duty
US Editorial Board 28 To Infinity... and Beyond?
Dr Timothy J. Madigan (St John Fisher Owain Griffin explains why infinity comes in all sizes
INFINITY DOOR © LAURA MCKENZIE 2020

College), Prof. Charles Echelbarger,

31 Return To Infinity!
Prof. Raymond Pfeiffer, Prof. Massimo
Pigliucci (CUNY - City College), Prof. Les Reid wonders if the universe might be boundless after all
Teresa Britton (Eastern Illinois Univ.) 34 Escaping the Academic Coal Mine
Contributing Editors David Rönnegard asks why academics produce so much slag
Alexander Razin (Moscow State Univ.)
Laura Roberts (Univ. of Queensland) REVIEWS
David Boersema (Pacific University)
UK Editorial Advisors
42 Book: Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
Piers Benn, Constantine Sandis, Gordon reviewed productively by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
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reviewed superhumanly by Roberto Manzocco
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Vogel Carey, Prof. Harvey Siegel, Prof. 44 Book: Fellow Creatures by Christine M. Korsgaard
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Philosophy Now 3

Editorial Nietzsche’s Hammer
EMO NIETZSCHE © DEIMANTE JUDICKAITE, 2020
F riedrich Nietzsche is not known as a positive guy. Most
accounts of him give us a tender and morose misanthrope
consistently repulsed by everything he saw around him
(unless he saw a mountain; he liked mountains). As a philoso-
pher, he is widely seen as a destructive force, tearing down
anything that gave off the slightest whiff of tradition or con-
vention. There’s little doubt Nietzsche would be proud of this
reputation; in his chest-puffing autobiography Ecce Homo, he
described himself as “dynamite”. Whilst there is no shortage
of evidence for Nietzsche’s demolition programme, it is on
particularly clear show in 1888’s Twilight of the Idols. This
work is a protracted assault on the philosophical canon that
Nietzsche sees flowing forth from errors originally made by
Plato. It is subtitled: How to Philosophize with a Hammer.
Nietzsche picks up a hammer to sound out the old philo-
sophical idols. Finding them to be hollow, he takes a firm grip
to flatten and smash, claw and bludgeon. But a hammer can also
be a fairly useful tool for building new structures. In the last sec-
tion of Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche’s hammer ‘speaks’. Pre-
sumably a little work weary, the hammer cannot muster many
words and those which it can are not particularly original. The
hammer borrows from a section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘Of
Old and New Law Tablets’, in which Nietzsche sets out his
hopes for the future. It is to this more forward looking philoso-
phy that we turn as we bring you another issue on the man
behind the moustache. But don’t worry, if you came looking for
explosions and tumbling towers, there’s plenty of that too. Life-
denying art, objective history, free will, morality, and, of course,
God, will all turn to dust before your very eyes.
What will happen after the dust has settled? Does Niet-
zsche give us a blueprint for constructing a new home? Can we
use his hammer to build it? Well, sort of. Nietzsche refused to
give his readers a manual for living. Not wanting a band of fol-
lowers, he does not provide a new set of values, principles or
rules for us to follow. But he does offer an ideal to reach for.
Nietzsche’s ideal individual is someone who can build for
themselves. We are supposed to look at the dark earth smoul-
dering around us with a hungry smile. This wasteland is our
great opportunity. Grasping it involves creating our own set of
values, our own rules to follow, our own reasons for living.
Nietzsche also provides some guidance to those hoping to
reach his ideal. It is of great importance for us to embrace life
in all of its splendour, squalor and absurdity. As we shall see
4 Philosophy Now
April /May 2020
in our opening article, the idea of Eternal Recurrence could
help here. Imagining your life on repeat forever, identical in
every detail, can reveal how you really feel about it, and it
may also motivate you to make changes to the way you live
that will lead you to relish the prospect of this eternal repeti-
tion. In doing so, you may elevate yourself above the default
human condition of existential misery to become an Übermensch.
Whilst scholarly debate still rages as to whether Nietzsche
would prefer East or West coast hip-hop, David Birch
explores the Übermensch through the lyrics of Kanye West.
With God dead, Nietzsche urges us to fill the vacancy. We
must each become a god unto ourselves. Requiring strength,
courage and creativity in abundance, this is no easy task. Our
next three articles lay out some of the conditions that could
help us achieve it. Finding an unexpected similarity between
Plato and Nietzsche, we tune into the music and art that
Nietzsche recommended for those wishing to ascend his
treacherous mountain. Next, Paul Doolan looks at the cre-
ative approach to history and knowledge that is necessary for
Nietzschean flourishing. We end our time with Nietzsche by
following his wild gaze into a future where we will have no
choice but to relinquish our fanciful notion of free will. Such
a radical shift in thought may be just what is needed to nur-
ture Friedrich’s philosophers of the future.
In fact, Nietzsche’s entire demolition programme is about
clearing the ground for new ways of life to emerge. His philos-
ophy is always reaching for a daring yet innocent joy that
seems to have been absent in his own life. You’ll need to
supply your own building materials, but Nietzsche’s hammer
can be just as constructive as it is destructive.
Of course, this issue contains plenty to entertain and intrigue
the philosophers of today as well. We wrestle with conflicts of
moral duty, search for a way out of the academic coal mine,
think about whether thoughts can be thought about if thinking
is just brain activity, and find out what that stink is coming from
the job market. We also contemplate infinity, twice. So whilst
we’re not sure if our lives are set to eternally repeat, we’ll supply
the reading if that does turn out to be the case.
Tim B-Gray, Issue Editor
• The Editors would like to extend their special thanks to Zoe
Taylor and her students in the Art Department of Northampton
University for providing lots of fantastic art for this issue.

The
Philosophy Now
Festival 2020
Report by Anja Steinbauer
T he century-old doors exploded
inwards as Rick and I, laden with
crates and rolls of paper, pushed into the
eccentric Art Deco building. Conway Hall,
so familiar from many weird and wonder-
ful philosophy gatherings, was awaiting us
in all its solemn charm. The ideal setting
for an event that was equally eccentric but
also definitely aspiring to awesomeness.
It was the fifth Philosophy Now Festi-
val. In only an hour people would be
streaming in. I’ve organised philosophy
events for more than twenty years now,
but there is always this uncertainty just
before it happens: Is it going to be a disas-
ter? Have we forgotten something vital?
Fast forward three hours, and there
could be no doubt that worries were
unfounded. Even the early morning events
had been well attended, the discussions
lively and productive. Now all the talks,
debates and workshops were packed; the
audience were energised, engaged and, as
all of us, gripped by the excitement of the
day. An edifying discussion of the pros and
cons of New Year resolutions was
followed by two events on theatre and
philosophy, including a Hamlet perfor-
mance by young actor Marcel and a
presentation by the man who literally
wrote the book on theatre and philosophy,
Tom Stern.
There were three or four events running
concurrently in different rooms, ranging
from philosophy of mathematics to an art
workshop about identity; from philosophy
in prisons to philosophy and the news; from
John Locke to Blade Runner; from Androids
to Ayn Rand. The Philosophy Foundation
ran no less than four workshop events for
children of different age groups and some
sixth formers from Sevenoaks School
dazzled with their ‘philosophy snaps’.
Elsewhere in the building, discussions
about race and about straight sex were
being held by Greg Scorzo and Lizzie
Soden of Culture on the Offensive. Mean-
while Gerald Jones led a session –
cunningly labelled “adults only” in the
programme and packed from floor to wall
with people – reflecting on the blurring of
moral boundaries in matters of love and
the heart. Jones later commented: “We
proved conclusively that all is fair in love
(but not war).”
The Balloon Debate, a popular regular
fixture at the Festival, had Confucius,
Hume, Marx and Nietzsche each explain-
ing why they shouldn’t be thrown out of a
sinking hot air balloon. It featured a
memorable performance by Nietzsche
(channeled by Tim Beardmore-Grey) who
proceeded to philosophise with an actual
(toy) hammer! Two amazing round table
events saw eminent thinkers discuss
‘Climate Change and Responsibility’ and
‘Judging Religion’. Among many great
lectures, two stood out for me: Raymond
Tallis eloquently cleared up myths about
the nature of time, and Ian James Kidd,
who gave this year’s George Ross Memo-
rial Lecture, introduced us to philosophi-
cal misanthropy.
The Against Stupidity Award
The last highlight of the day was, as
always, as Rick announcing the winner of
the annual Philosophy Now Award for
Contributions in the Fight Against
Stupidity. This year we had chosen writer
Jon Ronson, who in his book So You’ve
Been Publicly Shamed gives a sensitive yet
Festival
critical discussion of the democratic
opportunities of social media, weighed up
against the public shaming in which they
can result. In his vivid, captivating style,
Ronson writes about how while we seek
justice by calling out perceived wrong-
doing on social media, the global snow-
balling of abuse can sometimes ruin the
target’s life. The colossal damage to their
reputation, career and mental health can
be out of all proportion to the original
offence and to the intentions of those
taking part. In his acceptance speech
Ronson concluded: “The truth is we are,
as humans, grey areas. We’re a mess.
We’re clever, and we’re stupid, and almost
nobody is simply bad. Those that are
deserve punishment. But if you spend
your life judging and condemning, you
can blind yourself to a much better reality,
which is that people are interesting. Yes, it
is important to think critically, to value
facts over fiction. But I do what I do
because of curiosity, not judgment. And if
you fill your head with judgement there is
no room left for curiosity.”
The Festival, in the course of which
about 2,000 people passed through the
building, was made possible by Conway
Hall and their wonderful staff, as well as
the help given to us by twenty energetic
volunteers, and of course our amazing
presenters, ranging in age from 14 to 80+,
with all their diverse interests, styles and
wonderful idiosyncrasies. Everybody gave
their time and work for free, making this
Philosophy Now Festival once again into
a truly shared project – because we all
really love philosophy! Thank you, my
friends, and I’m looking forward to the
January 2022 Festival. See you there?
April/May 2020
Philosophy Now 5
Nietzsche
Eternal Recurrence
Revisited
Brandon Robshaw looks again at Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal repetition of life.
I
read Friedrich Nietzsche with a mixture of admiration,
amusement, outrage, and exasperation. His philosophy is
the antithesis of the kind of philosophy I usually like to
read and to do (that is to say, analytic philosophy), and I
cannot read him for very long at a stretch. It’s like listening to
a man talking at the top of his voice all the time, and it becomes
wearisome. But his writing is extremely rich, stimulating, and
crammed with ideas.
One particular idea of his has always intrigued me: the idea
of eternal recurrence (or eternal return, as it is also known). It
is a bizarre, fanciful, poetic idea, and it occurred to me that
6 Philosophy Now  April/May 2020
OUROBOROS © GEORGIA HAINES 2020
applying the methods of analytic philosophy to it might be a
fruitful marriage between the analytic and the so-called Conti-
nental traditions.
Infinite Reflections
First, let’s look more closely at the idea. It’s mentioned a
number of times in Nietzsche’s works. It crops up in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (1883-5), for example, where Zarathustra repeats
seven times this incantation: “Oh, how should I not lust for
eternity and for the wedding ring of rings – the Ring of Recur-
rence! Never yet did I find the woman by whom I wanted chil-

dren, unless it be this woman, whom I love: for I love you, O
Eternity! For I love you, O Eternity!” However, the idea is not
fully examined or explored there: instead one is supposed to
ponder its implications for oneself.
The fullest treatment of eternal recurrence appears in The
Joyous [Gay] Science (1882):
“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into
your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it
and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable
times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and
every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably
small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same
succession and sequence – and likewise this spider and this moon-
light between the trees, and likewise this moment and I myself. The
eternal hourglass of existence will be turned over again and again,
and you with it, you speck of dust!’
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and
curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a
tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are
a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’”
Nietzsche did not invent the idea of eternal recurrence. The
notion that life is cyclical, that death is followed by rebirth ad
infinitum, was entertained in the ancient world not only by East-
ern philosophers but also by Greek thinkers such as Empedocles
and the Stoics, as Nietzsche would certainly have known. But
there are two key differences in Nietzsche’s presentation of the
idea. In the first place, he posited that each recurrence of history
would be identical in every respect, down to the tiniest details.
Friedrich Nietzsche
by Emalee Wickham
2020
Nietzsche
Your life can never change. So Nietzsche himself, who in many
ways had an unhappy life, full of suffering, would have to go
through the death of his father and brother when he was a small
child, his chronic ill-health, chest pains, migraines, and insom-
nia, his unrequited love, his visual impairment, his poverty and
lack of recognition, and eventually his descent into madness, over
and over again for eternity. In the second place, in his published
works Nietzsche did not advance the theory as a factual claim,
about how things really were. However, according to Kevin Hill,
an editor and translator of The Joyous Science, entries in Niet-
zsche’s private notebooks suggest that he did believe it to be true
– on what evidence it’s hard to say. As a claim it would be impos-
sible to test by scientific means, since one would have to get out-
side time to make the necessary observations. But we do not have
to follow the Nietzsche of the notebooks. We can more prof-
itably think of eternal recurrence as a thought experiment to
determine how one would react if one believed it to be true. This
is precisely how he presents the idea in The Joyous Science.
The point of the thought experiment is a sort of test of one’s
relationship with one’s life. Do you celebrate being alive; do
you savour every moment, even the most painful or challeng-
ing ones? If so the demon’s words will be wonderful news: you
will be able to savour it all over, again and again, forever and
ever and ever. If, on the other hand, your response is to feel
absolutely horrified, that strongly suggests that you are not
making the most of your time here.
Nietzsche offers only these two alternatives: horror or
delight. It is clear that he recommends the delighted reaction.
This ties in with his idea of amor fati, love of one’s fate. In Sec-
tion 276 of The Joyous Science he puts it thus: “I want to come
Friedrich Nietzsche again
by Charlotte Rudge
2020
April/May 2020  Philosophy Now 7
DEMON NEWS © CHARLOTTE RUDGE 2020 Nietzsche
to regard everything necessary as beautiful – so that I will
become one of those who makes everything beautiful. Amor fati:
from now on, let that be my love!” But there are other possible
responses. A third response which Nietzsche did not consider
would be to feel neither elated nor horrified at the idea, but
indifferent. After all, however many times one lives this life,
each time always feels like the first and only time. No memories
are carried over from one incarnation to the next, so what dif-
ference would it make, anyway?
Well (assuming that you believed the demon), it could make just
this difference: you would know for the rest of your life that every-
thing that happened would happen again. This might change the
way you regarded each of your experiences, from toothaches to
relationships, walks to washing dishes. It therefore seems to make
a difference exactly when the demon appears to you bearing the
news of your eternal repetition. If it appeared on your deathbed,
then it could occasion only a moment of elation or horror and the
whole of your life preceding that point would be unaffected;
whereas if it appeared when you were a child, it would colour your
attitude to experiences for the rest of your days.
Let’s imagine that the demon appears to you tonight with the
news of your eternal repetition. First, how would this colour
your attitude to the past? The pre-demon years cannot be
changed, of course; but the knowledge that one would have to
live them over and again, unchangingly, for eternity, would
surely change the way you regard them. I would suggest that
painful memories would become more painful. Nietzsche seems
to recommend an attitude of acceptance towards suffering,
which is, in its way, quite attractive. What I personally would
find harder to accept is my own stupid mistakes – the silly,
embarrassing, and sometimes shoddy or ignoble things I’ve done
and said. Philip Larkin once remarked that he had about twelve
memories that made him want to clutch his head and howl aloud
8 Philosophy Now  April/May 2020
– and that’s just reliving them in memory. It would be far worse
(infinitely worse?) if one knew one had to actually do them all
over again, and again. I think it would arouse in me a sort of
desperate compassion for my benighted younger self; but a futile
compassion – one that could never touch or reach its object.
On the other hand, there are lots of moments in most people’s
lives that it would be wonderful to relive: memories of families
and friendships and first loves, of holidays and parties, your first
taste of ice cream, your first kiss, the first time you discovered
a favourite author or artist or musician... It would be very nice
indeed to think of those coming round again. So I think the
result would be an intensification of all one’s feelings, both good
and bad, about the past.
Intensification also applies going forward. You would be con-
scious that every experience is a permanent possession. This no
doubt would make you attend to your experiences more, and
live a more vivid life. But there is a crucial difference between
pre-demon life and post-demon life. In post-demon life, you
can modify your attitudes, your choices and your behaviour.
You might consciously try to construct a life which from now on
would be worth the reliving. In this sense, then, eternal recur-
rence could be a marvellously positive, optimistic doctrine –
though perhaps not quite in the way Nietzsche intended. Niet-
zsche wanted to be able to love his fate whatever it was, but the
idea here is rather to choose a fate that’s worth loving.
It might be objected here that any notion of choice has to be
an illusion. Since the future is already mapped out – I have lived
it an infinite number of times before, and it is always identical –
then my actions and attitudes will be what my actions and atti-
tudes have always been. My future would be predetermined. But
this need not make one fatalistic. There is a distinction between
determinism and fatalism. With determinism, whatever I do is
caused, and as long as the causes remain unchanged I could never

have done otherwise than what I actually do. However, this does-
n’t mean that I’m being controlled. It does not mean that I have
no agency. My own aims and volitions are themselves part of the
causal factors of my attitudes, choices and behaviour. The idea
of fatalism, however, is that I am a helpless plaything of the Fates,
and I don’t really have any agency at all. Even if I went off-script
(assuming that were possible), the Fates would see to it that the
ultimate outcome for me remained the same.
It seems to me that the deterministic interpretation works
better here. It is not conscious Fates that are shaping my future,
but the unchanging laws of the universe. And armed with the
knowledge the demon has brought me, I can – which is to say,
must – make decisions about how I want my life to go (just as I
always have done anyway), and make sure it’s a life worth reliv-
ing, and one that I can love. Here one can perform a sort of
mental trick and think, ‘The idea of eternal recurrence got me
to this point, but I don’t need it any more. Let’s say it’s not true
(and actually, why would it be?); it still makes sense to choose a
fate that’s worth loving, even if it only happens the once.’
Time Heals & Wounds
If we could stop there that would seem quite a satisfactory out-
come. But here’s a thought which seems to go against the
approach I’ve just outlined.
Let’s entertain the notion that eternal recurrence is true for
another moment. There’s an important consequence of its truth
which Nietzsche does not explore, but which seems to overturn
my previous interpretation. The way that we experience time
forms and conditions our understanding of life: all our values,
our aims, the way we perceive and experience joy and suffer-
ing, ideas of earning, learning, building, progress, sacrifice,
improvement and deterioration, achievement, and loss, all
depend on a forward-flowing concept of time, in which the pre-
sent or the future can justify or redeem the past. A story of rags-
to-riches is a happy story, even if the ratio of rags to riches is
exactly equal at 50% each; while a story of riches-to-rags is a
tragic one, even though the proportions are identical. But this
normal framework for experiencing, understanding, and appre-
ciating the sequenced events of a life becomes nonsensical when
life is not linear and limited but cyclical and eternal. Then there
is no such thing as a rags-to-riches story; rather, a rags-to-riches-
to-rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches etc etc story for eternity.
There is no longer any before or after. On eternal recurrence,
losing something entails finding it again; death entails birth;
bereavement entails resurrection; experience entails innocence.
If we really took eternal recurrence on board, would we be able
to make any sense of life at all – would we have any values?
Would one thing be better than another?
So I am caught in a dilemma: Is eternal recurrence an idea
which gives me good reason to make the rest of my life a fate
worth living, and loving, or does it simply render everything
meaningless?
© BRANDON ROBSHAW 2020
Brandon Robshaw lectures in philosophy for the Open University.
His book Should a Liberal State Ban the Burqa? will be published
by Bloomsbury in June. He also has a philosophical novel for Young
Adults, The Infinite Powers of Adam Gowers (Unbound, 2018).
Philosophical Haiku
FRIEDRICH HAYEK
(1899–1992)
Reason’s poverty,
Man’s desire to control –
This road walks the serf.
H
ayek’s reputation as an economist and political philosopher has
suffered on account of his popular but vitriolic and unbalanced
rant against state power, The Road to Serfdom (1944). In it he
argued that even mild, well-intentioned attempts at central planning will
inevitably slide towards authoritarianism. The book was appropriated
by the worst zealots of neoliberalism. But there remains much wisdom
in the fundamental points he returned to time and again.
The Enlightenment bequeathed to us a seemingly unshakable con-
fidence in the capacity of human reason. Reason sets us apart from the
beasts and gives us the power to shape our world after our own designs.
It matters not that history is littered with the burnt-out wrecks of infalli-
ble schemes for the creation of the ideal society: we still cling to the
belief that by the application of reason we can diagnose the illness and
prescribe the cure for the human condition. Indeed, this belief is the
very foundation of modern government. Every policy a government
introduces is predicated on rational analysis, with the assumption that
the policy will produce the desired effects. Along with this faith in reason,
Hayek claims, humankind is possessed of a singular desire to control:
to control our environment, to control society, to control other people
(cf Nietzsche’s will-to-power). Control is hoped to be a way of ridding
ourselves of uncertainty; and more than anything else, human beings
are troubled by uncertainty. We wish to alleviate the pain of not know-
ing, and believe we have the ability to do so. But, said Hayek, this belief
is just hubris – the sort of arrogant over-confidence for which the Greek
gods were always punishing people. In the absence of the gods, we’re
punished by the circumstances we create.
For Hayek in 1944 there was a broader context – of fascist and com-
munist totalitarian regimes, that justified their murderous actions on
the basis that they knew how to create the perfect society. Even if you
start out with impeccably admirable intentions, any government that
seeks to reshape society on the basis of some ideal blueprint will risk
turning its citizens into slaves in order to realise that ideal. There cannot
be a single right way to live or to organise society; and even if there
were, we can never know enough or be wise enough to bring it into
existence. It’s a thought worth pondering.
© TERENCE GREEN 2020
Terence is a writer, historian and lecturer who lives in Paekakariki, NZ.
April/May 2020  Philosophy Now 9
Nietzsche
‘I Am A God’
On Becoming More Than Human
David Birch compares the attitudes of Friedrich Nietzsche and Kanye West.

O
n his 2013 album Yeezus, the his snub by proclaiming “I am Kanye is not merely telling us that he’ll survive
Chicago rapper Kanye West West”; “I am a man”; or “I am human”. his self-doubt, that he’ll silence the voice
highlighted something that Those statements do not convey the inde- that says “You do not belong here, you
the world had failed to fatigability of his will, or his immunity to are not good enough”. He’s telling us that
notice, namely, that he is a god. He had self-loathing and self-pity. “I am Kanye he has no such voice, that he exists above
been called many things in his life – West” is bureaucracy; “I am a man” is des- and beyond the strictures of doubt and
including a jackass by Barack Obama – perate; and “I am human” is vapid. By shame. Gods do not know how to despise
but never this. Naturally, West’s deific declaring his divinity, West was implying themselves. To say ‘I am a god’ is not a
pretensions incurred accusations of nar- that there is something limiting about commitment to persevere but a declara-
cissism and blasphemy. The offending being human. In order to express his tion of unassailability. If you are unassail-
song was unambiguously titled ‘I Am a undying thirst to become who he is, West able, lacking all temptation to collapse or
God’, and its message was clear: I, Kanye was compelled to renounce his humanity. hide, then it makes no sense to talk of per-
West, am more than human. ‘I am a god’ is more than self-belief. He severing. Without self-scrutiny there is
West later explained that the song was
born out of frustration. Desperate to
become a success in the fashion industry,
yet feeling rebuffed by the labels he
wanted to work with, he was tipped over
the edge at Paris Fashion Week when he
was pointedly asked not to attend a series
of events: “So the next day I went to the
studio with Daft Punk and I wrote ‘I Am
a God’, ‘cause it’s like, yo, nobody can tell
me where I can and can’t go. Man, I’m

NIETZSCHE BY ESSA SAMATEH 2020 ESSA’S INSTAGRAM PAGE IS CRISE60

the number one living and breathing rock
star.” Unsurprisingly, the god who
emerges from the song’s lyrics seems
closer to a diva than a divinity:

“I am a god
Hurry up with my damn massage
Hurry up with my damn ménage
Get the Porsche out the damn garage”

In a BBC interview following the

album’s release, West implied that his
critics would have been more comfortable
with the song if he’d described himself as
a ‘n—’, a ‘pimp’, or a ‘gangster’. These
latter appellations, even if proclaimed
with pride, ultimately denote an accep-
tance of the lowly and limiting identities
that WASP society and the market have
assigned to black people. By not using
these terms, West was refusing to confine
his self-expression to a lexical ghetto. But
this wasn’t all he was doing: to call your-
self a god not only resists these terms, it
negates them entirely. He did not react to

10 Philosophy Now  April/May 2020


Kanye
West
no self-doubt, and only those who worry they might fail in their
endeavours question themselves. And gods do not reflect, they
do not question themselves, since their endeavours are without
end. If one’s endeavours are without end, then judgment is eter-
nally premature. Failure belongs to the finite.
Nietzsche’s Post-Human
West’s implication that there is something deficient about mere
humanity places him well in the company of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Both see themselves as outsiders. Nietzsche felt disconnected
from his profession (his work was generally ignored), his nation
(he spent much of his life outside of Germany, alternating between
Switzerland and Italy) and his epoch (‘a weak age’). But more
provocatively, Nietzsche felt disconnected from his species: “Dis-
gust at mankind... has always been my greatest danger” (Ecce
Homo, 1888). Like West, he heard no power in the assertion, ‘I
am human’. He thought that being human was a state to be over-
come; humanity’s finest moment will be the day it becomes some-
thing else entirely, something better. The future belongs to this
new creature, the Übermensch or ‘overman’ (‘superman’).
Do you, reader, sympathise with Nietzsche’s wish for a
species revolution? Do you see some fundamental defect in
humanity? If there were a referendum on human nature, would
you vote to leave? How would you even describe human nature?
Are there words elastic enough to encompass us all? Is there a
common thread? A shared bond?
For Nietzsche, our bond is our sickness, and our sickness is
a state he called nihilism. In short, a hatred of life. Nietzsche
believed that to be human was to belong to a species-wide
endeavour to stunt growth, enervate power, deaden vitality,
limit strength, and poison joy; an endeavour impelled by so-
called ‘reactive’ attitudes such as envy and the urge to avenge
ourselves against the strong and vigorous. And although for
Nietzsche there have been great ages – history is punctuated
by glorious deviations from the norm – sooner or later the over-
whelming weight of nihilism drags us back into the gutter.
Greek culture was corrupted by the philosophers; Roman
values by the morality of Judaism; Christ’s teachings by St Paul;
and Napoleonic aristocracy by democratic ideals. This nihilism
ensures that, contra Darwin, the strong and vital will always be
defeated by the weak and envious.
To overcome this eventuality, Nietzsche proposed we over-
come humanity. Humanity is not an endpoint, but a transition –
a rope between the beasts and the Übermensch. Whereas humans
are the animal for whom life is too much, the Übermensch is the
Nietzsche
animal that says ‘Yes’ to life – to the whole of life: Yes to pleasure.
Yes to pain. Yes to the past. Yes to the future. Yes to chaos. Yes
to death. Yes to war. Yes to the body. Yes to the earth. Yes to
longing. Yes to hardship. Yes to struggle. Yes to beauty. Yes to
change. Yes to now. Yes to eternity. The life of the Übermensch
is constituted by affirmation. They live bravely, laugh heartily,
dancing and singing while they destroy and create, showing us, a
scathing herd of envious onlookers, the true complexion of health.
Although Übermensch is sometimes translated ‘superman’, it
would be a mistake to think that Nietzsche’s superman bears
any relation to a comic book hero. When Nietzsche talks of the
Übermensch in terms of power, he is not referring to Superman’s
powers. Superman uses his powers to help. He therefore reflects
and enshrines the helpless rabble’s servile dependence and man-
ifold limitations. The hero-victim dynamic is one of pity; but
to Nietzsche, “Pity makes suffering contagious” (The Antichrist,
1888). Unlike the Übermensch, superheroes cannot overcome
humanity, as they are locked into this defining dynamic: their
pity infects them with human suffering. The Übermensch is far
removed from flapping capes and weeping maidens, devoid of
humility, averse to pity, uninterested in duty. When picturing
the Übermensch, do not think of an awe-inspiring caped vigi-
lante – think instead of a naked Dionysus trailed by a merry
band of drunken maenads and lascivious satyrs. And just as no
one would think to direct their prayers to Kanye West, nor
would we project a distress call into the sky to beckon the help
of the Übermensch. Nietzsche’s superman is not our saviour.
Ex Machina
Saying “I am a god” is what philosophers of language would call
a performative utterance. Rather than using language to describe
something about the world, performative utterances use language
to enact something. This means that the truth of a performative
utterance is constituted by the utterance itself. When the groom
says “I do”, he is not describing the fact that he does; he is actu-
ally doing the doing precisely in the saying. When West says “I
am a god”, he is thereby opposing nihilistic human traits of mod-
esty and self-disgust, and thereby becoming, if not a god, at least
not quite human. When Nietzsche’s Übermensch or West’s god
speak, they breach the bounds of popular wisdom and common
sense: “I am not a man, I am dynamite”, Nietzsche said explo-
sively (Ecce Homo, 1888). Whereas the mere boaster uses language
reactively, to build fortresses against his envy of other people, the
Übermensch makes language a performance of active becoming.
Their words are soaring wings, not peacock feathers.
The Übermensch is committed to affirming the overflowing
abundance of life, which means confronting all that is painful
and wretched. And we may ask, is this not a terrible cross to bear?
Do we not imagine the Übermensch to walk with heavy feet, to
look upon the world with tired eyes, to sigh the deepest of sighs?
No. The Übermensch is possessed of an ability to transmute heav-
iness into lightness. They spurn the dignity of sorrow. They
laugh, dance and play. They take their cross and waltz with it.
Life’s abysses reverberate with their laughter. Whereas the
nihilist seeks to alchemise all that is good and light into what is
evil and heavy, rebranding acts of power as acts of sin, the Über-
mensch performs the opposite feat. Like a dancer, they transform
gravity from a force of leaden oppression to the very syntax of
April/May 2020  Philosophy Now 11
 Nietzsche
movement: “I would only believe in a God who knew how to
dance” Nietzsche has his prophet Zarathustra say in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (1883-5). Compare this to when West raps:
“I am a god
So hurry up with my damn massage
In a French-ass restaurant
Hurry up with my damn croissants
I am a god”
To declare your divinity and demand a croissant in the same
breath is ridiculous; but West is teasing us, making sure that
when we sing along with him we cannot become gods without
also becoming buffoons. To say the heaviest things in the light-
est ways elevates song to the level of play. West is refusing to
collapse under the weight of earnestness. He is enacting the
freedom to say what he wants, to make the music he wants – to
be dumb, if he wants. As he says earlier in the song: “Soon as
they like you, make ’em unlike you.” Like Nietzsche, West
believes that “the free man is a warrior” (Twilight of the Idols,
1888). Once you become preoccupied with pleasing or pleasur-
ing other people, the warrior instincts in you are suppressed,
and freedom dies.
Just as Nietzsche counsels us to be wary of our pity for other
people, so too must we be wary of other people’s admiration
for us. Admiration conscripts us into serving others as their
guides, but the Übermensch is “a law only for my own; I am not
a law for all” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra). The Übermensch is
engaged in the destruction of idols, including morality, not the
NIETZSCHE & GOD CARTOON © DEIMANTE JUDICKAITE 2020
12 Philosophy Now  April/May 2020
creation of new ones. Being admired precludes the exercise of
those instincts that delight in war – the very instincts that for
Nietzsche constitute our freedom: “One has renounced the
great life when one has renounced war” (Twilight of the Idols).
With the final line of the song West writes: “Ain’t no way I’m
giving up, I’m a god”: the warrior instincts of West as a god
mean that his is a life unblighted by regret.
If you do not cower at the obstacles before you or the desires
within you, it is impossible to turn back and curse the past. We
do not principally regret our actions, but our reactions. We
regret what we say No to, not what we say Yes to – to the lives
we don’t lead, the ones we pass up, not the lives we actively
pursue. Nietzsche, too, sees the Übermensch living in such a
way. He describes the ability to affirm the eternal return of all
things, the endless repetition of life, as the highest formula of
affirmation; an affirmation of life that marks the destruction
of nihilism and the birth of the Übermensch. It is an unequivo-
cal Yes to life. Within this eternally revolving world there is
no ultimate purpose, no end-point, no transcendent beyond.
Life has no meaning beyond itself. The passing seconds take
us closer to nothing but their own return. There is no precipice,
no void, no salvation. We are enclosed on all sides. To affirm
the eternal return of life is to “redeem the past and transform
every ‘It was’ into ‘I wanted it thus!”’ (Zarathustra). Wanting
life nothing to be other than it is, or was, or will be is to have
attained what Nietzsche called amor fati, the love of one’s fate.
Like West’s god, the Übermensch does not moan or acquiesce.
They are devoid of disappointment, only doing that which they
would willingly do forever.

I Am Not God
Yet despite the similarities between West’s god and Nietzsche’s
Übermensch, the following three lines also show their profound
differences:
“I am a god
Even though I’m a man of God
My whole life in the hands of God”
Rather than seeing life as a kind of submission to the embrac-
ing care of a higher being, Nietzsche believed that ‘life itself is
the will to power’ (Beyond Good and Evil, 1886). We are not, as
Darwin thought, primarily driven by a will to survive. To define
life as the opposition to death offers no clear idea of what life
itself is. On the contrary, Nietzsche wants to characterise life
as something that cannot be understood simply in its relation
to death. It is more than the mere flight from its absence. It is,
for Nietzsche, the will to grow, expand, and dominate.
Life exists either actively or reactively. The active will to power
creates its own values; it remakes the world in its own image and
confidently seeks to destroy all that impedes it. The reactive will
to power is not the source of its own values; it has no confidence
in itself. It exercises its power by denying the values of the active.
Lacking the strength to say ‘Yes’, it asserts itself by saying ‘No’.
The reactive will to power is dependent on the values it opposes.
If it were to destroy these values, it would instantaneously destroy
itself. Those enslaved to their reactive attitudes are both too
weak to create, and too weak to destroy.
The reactive will to power is the source of nihilism. It hates the
strong, it hates affirmation. It judges all the healthy forces of life
as evil. The reactive life is life that hates itself. What evidence is
there for the reactive will? And what forms does it take? To answer
these questions, we should consult Nietzsche’s nose. Nietzsche
said that his genius was in his nostrils – by which he meant that
he had a talent for sensing the rotting hearts within radiant bodies,
a knack for finding the corpse beneath the floorboards. As he went
sniffing through history he heaved with disgust upon encounter-
ing Christianity and its virtues of compassion, self-sacrifice, and
equality. Nietzsche thought that Christian ethics is the very
antithesis of the concept of life. Christianity believes that we are
forlorn sinners in need of salvation, too weak to survive without
constant care, too lost to cope without universal laws and subse-
quent judgment, each of us awaiting the ultimate solution to the
problem of existence – eternal peace in a heavenly hereafter. To
Nietzsche these ideas constitute a total devaluation of our terres-
trial lives. But Nietzsche wants to emphasise that this story is still
in the service of the will to power. To him Christianity is a con-
certed effort on the part of the weak to subjugate the strong and
suppress the healthy. Unable to create its own values, the reactive
will to power parasitically exerts itself by negating life-affirming
values. Whereas the active will to power creates a Yes-saying
‘master morality’, in which good is contrasted with bad, the ‘slave
morality’ of the reactive will to power contrasts good with evil.
Slave morality turns master morality on its head. All that was for-
merly regarded as bad – timidity, feebleness, deference – becomes
good; and all that was regarded as good – strength, power, vital-
ity – becomes evil. Christianity makes life worth living for the
weak. It recasts the reactive lives of the weak – ruled over, depen-
Nietzsche
dent, passive – as the pinnacle of human achievement. The Chris-
tian concept of God is the highest weapon of the reactive values:
Nietzsche called it ‘the deification of nothingness’ (The Antichrist).
We can see, then, the profound rift that opens up between
Nietzsche’s Übermensch and West’s god when the latter claims
to simultaneously be a ‘man of God’. As Nietzsche listens to
West say those lines, this is what he hears:
“I am a god
Even though I’m diseased with God
My whole life just a void of God”
This makes the song a microcosm of Nietzschean history:
dazzling flashes of powerful affirmation inevitably nullified by
reactive attitudes. West seems to be in two minds, caught
between two poles. If he is a man of God, then why does he not
pray? Why does he not call upon the divinity of the ‘most high’
instead of invoking his own divinity?
Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity may help us here. West’s
predicament is not a predicament of survival but one of frus-
trated creativity. West performs a song instead of offering a
prayer, because the God to whom he would pray has no interest
in the fulfilment of his ambitions in the fashion industry. Since
God is a reactive hatred of strength, it makes no sense to appeal
to him in the pursuit of active power. God saves rather than
invigorates life. He assists and aids, he does not empower. West
wants to thrive and flourish and conquer. Since this is not God’s
remit, West has deified himself in order to find a god who will
abet his endeavours. West’s schizoid song is symptomatic of an
artist split between a Dionysian spirit of creativity and our endur-
ing Christian culture.
The solution is clear: drown God, murder Him, and bind
ourselves to the sinking corpse. By killing God we stand a chance
of destroying ourselves. Unlike West, the Übermensch is not a
man of God but a ‘conqueror of God’; an anti-nihilist and there-
fore an anti-Christ. To be an anti-Christ is to be destructively
opposed to what Nietzsche asserts to be Christianity’s litany of
hatred; a putative hatred of pride, courage, freedom, desire,
beauty, self-affirmation.
The Übermensch is both the means and the product of a reval-
uation of all values: a rejection of all that has been regarded as
good – all that derives from reactive vengeful attitudes – such
as pity and selflessness; and a fresh adoption of all that has been
regarded as evil – all that is active and affirmative – such as lust
and selfishness. Nietzsche wants to overturn the dichotomy of
the divine and the human by annihilating it completely. To
become more than human means forgetting our concerns with
human essence and divine attributes. It means climbing down
from reactive states of being, and submerging ourselves in the
active processes of life, becoming creatures of power and
instinct, creatures of life itself. The sorry spectacle of humans
clawing after transcendence is an abhorrence to him. Nietzsche
would rather tread the Earth than touch the Sun: “I beseech
you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth” (Zarathustra).
© DAVID BIRCH 2020
David Birch’s new book, Pandora’s Book: 401 Philosophical
Questions to Help You Lose Your Mind (with answers), will be
published early next year.
April/May 2020  Philosophy Now 13
 Nietzsche
Two Famous Philistines of Philosophy
Christopher Devlin Brown sees similarities and differences
in Nietzsche’s and Plato’s critiques of art.
R
eceived wisdom says that the philosophical projects of
Nietzsche and Plato are about as diametrically oppo-
site as any two philosophical projects can be. This
impression is not without justification. Plato is the
philosopher of otherworldly order who argued that our senses do
not reveal any valuable or fundamental truths. Nietzsche is a self-
proclaimed inverter of Platonic philosophy, denying and damn-
ing all that is eternal, perfect, and transcendent. However, an over-
looked parallel between Nietzsche and Plato in their aesthetic
ideas shows they have some unexpected common ground. Specif-
ically, they both attack broad classes of art, arguing that such art
is socially problematic. The problem for both of them is that art
can negatively affect the development of higher types of people.
“But wait,” you might already be saying, “I can remember
Plato’s anti-art attitude; but isn’t Nietzsche a proponent of art,
even at times holding it above his often beloved science?”
This is somewhat true. Throughout his career Nietzsche
promotes art as one of the most important human activities,
and some of the people he most admires are artists. However,
Nietzsche’s relationship with art is more complicated than a
simple yea- or nay-saying. This is apparent from even a cur-
sory glance at his writings criticizing the life and music of his
former friend and hero, Richard Wagner. The later Nietzsche’s
sustained attack on Wagner is part of a wider account of the
nature and value of art which gives criteria for distinguishing
valuable from valueless art. As with Plato’s aesthetic philoso-
phy, these criteria are deeply related to broader moral and meta-
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“That’s it?! Your superpower is speaking in aphorisms?!”
14 Philosophy Now  April/May 2020
physical concerns. Here I will determine what the points of sim-
ilarity and difference are between how Nietzsche and Plato view
art, explaining these similarities and differences in the context
of their broader philosophies.
Nietzsche & Plato Against Art
The majority of Nietzsche’s argument I’ll use takes its most
explicit form in aphorism 370 of The Gay Science. The same apho-
rism, with slight modifications, is also in his Nietzsche Contra
Wagner. The argument is directed against Romantic and Chris-
tian art, and, in certain respects, it resembles some of Plato’s
arguments against poetry in the Ion and The Republic.
Nietzsche argues that all art serves to alleviate the suffering
caused either by an underabundance of life (I’ll call this ‘under-
abundant art/music’) or by an overabundance of life (‘overabun-
dant art’ or ‘overabundant music’). Overabundant art is socially
neutral or beneficial; but underabundant art often manifests in one
of two negative ways. This form of art either destructively takes
revenge on the world or makes underabundance into an ideal. Both
of these effects hinder the production and flourishing of great
humans, which is the ultimate goal Nietzsche promotes.
Plato’s arguments are diverse, but amount to the idea that
art is pleasurable but misleading, and so dangerous. He sees the
artist as something like a Pied Piper. For instance, in the Ion he
argues that philosophers rather than poets should be the teach-
ers of the Greeks, since poetic genius comes from divinely
inspired madness rather than from knowledge, and the knowl-
edgeable people should be the teachers. In other words, the
inspired but ignorant poets should keep quiet and not try to
teach anyone through their recitations. In The Republic he argues
that poetry should not be allowed in the ideal society because it
stimulates people to attempt to fill social roles for which they
are not ideally suited, and this would result in social disharmony.
Nietzsche’s Argument
The most well-known and important ideas of the mature Niet-
zsche first see expression in The Gay Science. The first four Sec-
tions of this work were written during 1881-82 as an outgrowth
of his previous work, The Dawn, and constitute more-or-less the
first blossoming of ideas that Nietzsche would develop through-
out the rest of his career, including the will to power, the death
of God, eternal recurrence, the revaluation of all values, and the
nature and value of human greatness. The last Section was writ-
ten later, published in the Second Edition of 1887, and contains
the thoughts of an even more mature Nietzsche.
The earlier Sections contain a series of aphorisms specifically
on art (76-107), but aphorism 370 comes from the last Section,
and as such comes from the mind of Nietzsche only a few years
before his collapse into insanity, and well after his break from
Wagner (and, perhaps tellingly, after Wagner’s death in 1883).

This is Nietzsche’s argument against Romantic or Christian
art, based on 370 and a few other aphorisms:
1. All art is produced in the service of life, to alleviate some
kind of suffering or illness.
2. Art-as-medicine can remedy either an overabundance of life,
which must be discharged, or an underabundance of life, which
must be supplemented.
3. Art that is a remedy for an underabundance of life often man-
ifests itself as revenge on life: either as a vengeful destruction
of the world which is the source of the artist’s suffering, or in
the immortalization of the artist’s suffering as an ideal.
4. Consumption of either type of underabundant art has effects
on the consumer, in particular preventing the flourishing of
great spirits.
5. Great spirits are valuable; so if something prevents their
flourishing then that thing should not be produced.
6. Therefore art that is made as a remedy for underabundance
of life – which includes Wagnerian opera, Romantic pessimistic
art and Christian art – should not be produced.
The first three premises are taken almost directly from 370.
Here Nietzsche says:
“[First Premise:] Every art may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in
the service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suf-
fering and sufferers. [Second premise:] But there are two kinds of suf-
ferers: first, those who suffer from the over-fullness of life – they want a
Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of life, a tragic insight – and
then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life, and seek rest,
stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and knowl-
edge, or intoxication, convulsions, anaesthesia, and madness. All roman-
ticism in art and insight corresponds to the dual needs of the latter
type, and that included (and includes) Schopenhauer as well as Richard
Wagner… those who suffer most and are poorest in life would need
above all mildness, peacefulness, and goodness in thought as well as
deed… in short, a certain narrowness that keeps away fear and encloses
Apollo & Dionysos:
Not Philistines, but Greeks
by Emalee Wickham 2020
Nietzsche
one in optimistic horizons… [Third premise:] The desire for destruc-
tion, change, and becoming can be an expression of an overflowing
energy that is pregnant with future (my term for this is, as is known,
‘Dionysian’); but it can also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, disin-
herited, and underprivileged, who destroy, must destroy, because what
exists, indeed all existence, all being, outrages and provokes them…
The will to immortalize also requires a dual interpretation. It can be
prompted, first, by gratitude and love… But it can also be the tyran-
nic will of one who suffers deeply, who struggles, is tormented, and
would like to turn what is most personal, singular, and narrow, the
real idiosyncrasy of his suffering, into a binding law and compulsion –
one who, as it were, revenges himself on all things by forcing his image,
the image of torture, on them, branding them with it. This last ver-
sion is romantic pessimism in its most expressive form, whether it be
Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will or Wagner’s music – romantic pes-
simism, the last great event in the fate of our culture.”
Overabundance vs Underabundance
What does it mean to be overabundant or underabundant with
life? A pre-Nietzschean use of ‘life’ might assume every living
thing to be as full of life as any other: to be full of life is to be alive,
and to be underabundant is to be dead or perhaps dying. But this
is certainly not what Nietzsche means. Nor does he mean the
more colloquial use of ‘full of life’, which perhaps refers to excitable
people, though this latter use may be closer to Nietzsche’s.
Nietzsche considers people to be constituted by various drives
and forces that operate below the level of consciousness and which
manifest themselves in character, disposition and behavior. Our
so-called ‘conscious will’ does nothing but provide false explana-
tions for action after the action has occurred. The unconscious
drives compete with each other and have varying strengths, the
victorious drives manifesting themselves in disposition and action.
Development of a drive’s power occurs through internal conflicts
between drives, which is a painful process. Looking through this
lens, we see that people overabundant with life are constituted by
strong internal forces, and these forces must sometimes discharge
April/May 2020  Philosophy Now 15
Nietzsche
in overabundant art. Underabundant people are constituted by weak
internal forces, so they need spiritual or conceptual resting places
to recover from activity, or spurs and intoxicants that temporarily
give them more energy. Nietzsche argues that underabundance is
often artistically expressed as vengefulness on the world, or ideal-
ization of suffering and underabundance. (It is unclear from his writ-
ing whether there are any socially beneficial ways for underabun-
dant people to remedy their underabundance.)
As well as the influence of art, Nietzsche is concerned more gen-
erally with the conditions that produce great people. Diets are a fre-
quent area of interest. For instance he asks, “Has anyone made a
study of different ways of dividing up the day or the consequences
of a regular schedule of work, festivals, and the rest? What is known
of the moral effects of different foods? Is there any philosophy of
nutrition?” (Gay Science, aphorism 7). Large parts of Nietzsche’s
aesthetic and psychological projects consist of sketches of such a
philosophy of consumption, in order to find what inputs will tend
to yield what outputs in character or human development. He is
looking for the means to the end he deems most valuable in human
life: not pleasure or absence of pain, not virtue, not rationality, but
greatness. Here I am mostly following Brian Leiter’s relatively well-
known interpretation of Nietzsche’s moral philosophy (Nietzsche &
Morality, 2008). Under this interpretation, Nietzsche is a conse-
quentialist, judging the moral value of an event on its effects. He is
also a perfectionist, considering something valuable only if it con-
tributes to the development of human greatness.
Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for human greatness ties together his
aesthetic, psychological and moral projects. He is always attempt-
ing to identify the conditions that encourage or discourage great-
ness. In addition, treating art and music as things to be consumed
and which have subconscious, or even physiological, effects on the
consumer, is consistent with his denial of the idea that we can con-
sciously choose or determine our character and behavior.
What evidence is there that Nietzsche thought that consump-
tion of underabundant art hinders the development of great humans?
After all, this is the Nietzsche who says “what does not kill me makes
me stronger” (though the full passage in Twilight of the Idols changes
the meaning of that saying somewhat), and who often seems to assert
some kind of adversity as a precondition for human flourishing.
Might he not therefore think that adverse cultural conditions, which
create seductive lures and traps for the weak, are actually good for
the development of great humans?
The Case of Wagner (1888) makes it clear that he does not think
this. Underabundant music is a lure that can trick even the strong,
while overabundant music emboldens and enriches already vibrant
spirits. About the music of Bizet (which he likes, and contrasts
with Wagner’s) he says, “Has anyone ever observed that music
emancipates the spirit, gives wings to thought, and that the more
one becomes a musician the more one becomes a philosopher?…
Bizet makes me productive. Everything that is good makes me
productive” (CW 1). It seems Nietzsche must think that at least
some of the value of overabundant music derives from how it elic-
its favorable changes in the listener.
On the corrupting influence of underabundant music Niet-
zsche has even more to say, targeting Wagner: “I could not think
to look on approvingly while this decadent spoils our health – and
music into the bargain. Is Wagner a man at all? Is he not rather
16 Philosophy Now  April/May 2020
a disease? Everything he touches he contaminates. He has made
music sick... And no one guards against it. His powers of seduc-
tion attain monstrous proportions... – and he has certainly not
converted only the poor in spirit to his cause!... Wagner’s art is
diseased.... Wagner is the great corrupter of music” (CW 5).
Clearly Nietzsche has a particular problem with Wagner; but
these quotes also indicate a more general worry about art and
its effects. Music can be a disease that corrupts the listener, and
not just the poor in spirit but also the strong and healthy can be
damaged by this seductive poison.
That being said, even if Nietzsche thinks underabundant art
is socially damaging because it prevents the flourishing of great
humans, that doesn’t necessarily mean he thinks such art ought
not to be created, which is the fifth premise of the argument. Per-
haps underabundant art might work against the development of
great people, but have other positive qualities that can make it
worthwhile? And Nietzsche is also the philosopher who says, “I
want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary
in things… I do not want to wage war on what is ugly. I do not
want to accuse; I do not want to accuse those who accuse. Look-
ing away shall be my only negation” (GS 276). Also: “At bottom I
abhor all those moralities which say: ‘Do not do this! Renounce!
Overcome yourself!’” (304). A call to put an end to underabun-
dant art seems like just such a morality of renunciation. However,
in the case of Wagner it is pretty clear that he thinks underabun-
dant art – at least Wagnerian underabundant art – should not be
produced: “One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner.
What has Wagner-worship made out of the spirit?... To him
belong that ambiguity and equivocation and all other qualities
which can convince the uncertain without making them conscious
of why they have been convinced. In this sense Wagner is a seducer
on a grand scale. There is nothing exhausted, nothing effete, noth-
ing dangerous to life, nothing that slanders the world in the realm
of spirit, which has not secretly found shelter in his art... He flat-
ters every nihilistic (Buddhistic) instinct and togs it out in music;
he flatters every form of Christianity, every religious expression
of decadence.... He robs our young men; he even robs our women
as well, and drags them to his cell... Ah, this old Minotaur! What
has he not already cost us?”(CW Postscript). If this is not a call to
suppress the music of Wagner, I don’t know what is. Wagner is
even likened to the Minotaur of Crete! Surely Nietzsche would
have us slay the Minotaur who is devouring the youth? So we see
that Nietzsche does himself become a nay-sayer – though perhaps
only nay-saying of things that are destructive to life and the future.
Plato’s Conception of Greatness
So far I have only examined the premises of Nietzsche’s argu-
ment against underabundant art without touching on the rela-
tion between this argument and Plato. Allow me first to give a
broad outline of Plato’s stance toward art.
In The Republic Plato tries to work out what an ideal state would
be like. The guardian class, who comprise the philosopher-rulers
of Plato’s imagined city, must be carefully educated in order to
develop both the spirited and logical parts of their souls, since
that is necessary for them to fulfill their assigned social task, and
be the providers of justice. Poetry – especially poetry that depicts
the gods doing such things as fighting, lying, seducing or trans-

forming – harms the education of the guardians by presenting
them with ideal figures who convey bad lessons. Music or dance
which encourages emotions or attitudes that a guardian ought
not to have (sorrow, for example) are likewise considered harm-
ful. However, the most interesting part of this story for us is Plato’s
view of higher-type people and how this view relates to his aes-
thetic project. This is where a great deal of his similarity and dis-
similarity with Nietzsche can be most visible.
Various Platonic dialogues make distinctions between higher
and lower types of people. In the Phaedrus, Plato describes a nine-
fold scheme into which a soul must fall, with the souls of philoso-
phers at the top and those of tyrants at the bottom. If Nietzsche
could ever be said to agree with this attitude, it’s worth noting
that for Nietzsche the true philosophers are creators of new values,
not identifiers of unchanging concepts, as they are for Plato. What
determines where a soul falls in Plato’s scheme is the degree of
acquaintance the soul had with the Forms before the soul entered
a body, as well as the soul’s ability to recollect those Forms once
embodied. Plato’s Forms are a whole other story, but, briefly, all
the things we perceive through our senses are shadowy imitations
of perfect, eternal essences that can be known through reason
alone. These essences are Plato’s beloved Forms.
This hierarchy of souls is similar to the hierarchy of govern-
ments and people in Book IX of The Republic, but most of The
Republic makes less fine-grained distinctions, offering only three
general categories to which a human may belong, correspond-
ing to the three parts of the soul: appetitive, spirited and logical.
Thus, an ideal society has three social classes. The appetitive
people are the commoners, farmers, craftspeople, merchants and
laborers who occupy the lowest rank of society, do all the actual
work, and are motivated by the desire for pleasure or money.
The most spirited people are the Auxiliaries – the military pro-
tectors of the city. And the most logical people are the Guardians
who rule the state. The Guardians are Plato’s highest types, with
the philosopher-king as the pinnacle of human excellence. They
are wise, courageous, temperate, and just, through having a mas-
terful knowledge of the Forms.
Such a mindset must be cultivated, and malign influences
must be carefully eliminated. Much of The Republic consists of
an analysis of the education that the Guardians must receive. If
the Guardians are discontented with their assigned role, or not
courageous enough, or alternatively, not gentle and reasonable
enough, then they will be unable to excel in the art of justice.
They must also have genuine knowledge of the Platonic Forms,
since this knowledge should inform the decisions they must
make. A Guardian’s ability to recollect and understand the
Forms is developed and nurtured through education. Poetry
and fiction offer no knowledge – for, as Plato already argued in
the Ion, poets are inspired by divine madness and do not pos-
sess knowledge which they can convey – and so they should not
be presented to the Guardians. Moreover, the stories portrayed
in theatre or poetry often offer bad morals and values, such as
describing supposedly perfect beings (the gods) who fight, lie,
seduce, and transform themselves.
Why are stories depicting the gods transforming themselves
harmful to the education of guardians? Plato argues that gods
are perfect beings, so they would only become less perfect
Nietzsche
through a transformation, and so would never rationally choose
to transform themselves. It would be bad for Guardians to inter-
nalize the moral that it is reasonable to become something lower
than what you are most fit for – to think, for example, that it is
fine for a Guardian to become a cobbler. This point is later gen-
eralized: poetic recitation and drama involve imitation on the part
of the reciter or actor, which is bad because it teaches that char-
acter is not fixed, and that change of habit and character are both
possible and acceptable.
At the core of these arguments lies a need for stability. A just
state is stable, and happy as a result of being organized according
to the ideal, eternal, changeless Forms. A philosopher flourishes
with virtue due to knowledge of those Forms. Being a philoso-
pher (Plato’s highest type of person) is an intrinsically valuable
state for an individual to be in, and is functionally necessary for
the operation of a well-ordered society. This is because only a
philosopher can know true reality beyond appearances, and hence
understand the world of the Forms, including the Form of the
Good from which justice derives.
Nietzsche’s and Plato’s Conceptions Compared
So Plato’s highest type of person is someone who derives his virtue
from knowledge of the Forms and is able to practically apply that
knowledge to make society more harmonious and stable. What then
is the nature and value of a great human for Nietzsche? Answering
this question will reveal the central point of dissimilarity between
Plato and Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, a great person is one who
embraces transience and facilitates change, and is moved by uncom-
mon and violent forces (cf GS 26, 55). She accepts and affirms life
and the world after fully acknowledging the death of God and loss
of any transcendental world order (GS 108, 109, 110, 125, 341). She
is an overabundant person, and if her strong drives run counter to
the norms of society then she is a destroyer of old values and a cre-
ator of new ones – and this upending and invention of norms con-
stitutes her social value (GS 4, 10, 39, 50). So the nature and value
of human greatness is opposite for Plato and Nietzsche. For Plato
greatness is derived from a relationship to the eternal and unchang-
ing, while for Nietzsche greatness is derived from an individual
embracing transience and change through an overabundance of life.
Unlike Plato, Nietszche had some positive things to say both
about the inspiration of madness and the mischievous Greek gods.
For both philosophers, certain works of art or types of art are
damaging because they impede the creation and flourishing of the
highest types of people. Their disagreement rests entirely on how
to understand human greatness. Their differing evaluations of great-
ness lead to different evaluations of what is damaging in art. Niet-
zsche’s underabundant art takes vengeance on the transient world
and depicts suffering as a timeless ideal, whereas for Plato poetry
inspires change and nonconformity with social structures and posi-
tions. So before you choose your next concert tickets, consider what
kind of greatness you’re aiming for.
© CHRISTOPHER DEVLIN BROWN 2020
Christopher Devlin Brown is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at
Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.
• Thanks to Michael Moran for his valuable comments on an
earlier draft.
April/May 2020  Philosophy Now 17
Nietzsche
To Forget or To Remember?
Paul Doolan on what Nietzsche thought we can, and can’t, get out of history.
T
he final work of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur,
History, Memory, Forgetting (2008), provides a densely
argued defence of the concept of collective memory. In
one chapter he considers the short work on historiography by
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of His-
tory for Life (1874). Ironically, what earned Nietzsche this special
attention was Ricoeur’s need to ‘set apart’ Nietzsche’s work
because it “contributes nothing to the critical examination of the
historical operation.” Ricoeur saw Nietzsche as assaulting
remembrance. By contrast, David Rieff, who attacked the con-
cept of collective memory in his 2016 book, In Praise of Forget-
ting, applauds Nietzsche, and encourages the reader to take up
Nietzsche’s moral imperative of ‘active forgetting’. Ricoeur and
Rieff are on two different sides when it comes to social memory,
but both authors share the view that Nietzsche prioritised for-
getting over remembering history. As it turns out, both are wrong.
Nietzsche did assert that forgetting is a sign of health, claim-
ing that “it is possible to live with almost no memories, even to
live happily, as the animal shows: but without forgetting it is quite
impossible to live at all” (Advantage, trans. Peter Preuss, p.10).
He further argued in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) that for-
getting is an active capacity, vital for “governing, anticipating,
planning ahead” – a capacity whose function can be compared to
that of a concierge “preserving mental order, calm and decorum”
– and repeats that forgetting is a sign of ‘robust health’ (pp.39-
40, trans. Douglas Smith). He claimed that a happy life of health,
strength, and fruitfulness can only be lived within a horizon that
one draws around oneself. The antidote he recommended to
combat an overdose of the historical was to have the strength “to
forget and enclose oneself in a limited horizon.” (Advantage, p.62)
However, Nietzsche saw his own age as being dominated by
a particular type of bad historical practise: scientific, objective
history. “History,” he wrote, “conceived as pure science and
become sovereign, would constitute a kind of closing out of the
accounts of life for mankind… With a certain excess of history
life crumbles and degenerates, and finally, because of this degen-
eration, history itself degenerates as well.” (p.14) He described
this objective type of history as aspiring to ‘the status of a mirror’.
Here the historian refrains from playing the judge but simply
ascertains and describes. He concludes, “I dislike the tired and
used-up men who wrap themselves in wisdom and have an ‘objec-
tive’ view.” (p.132) He regarded the claim to objectivity as no
more than a form of superstition. One of the fallacies of the
approach to history that makes the false claim to objectivity, is
that it leads the historian to make generalizations based on per-
ceived laws. But “so far as there are laws in history, laws are worth
nothing and history is worth nothing.” (p.55) In Nietzsche’s view
there are no absolutes and no certainties about the past (except,
perhaps, the idea that there are no absolutes).
Nietzsche opposed the type of history practiced by the stuffy
professional historians who dominated German universities also
because it stifled any life-giving impulse. However, as the
German theorist Hans-Georg Gadamer argued, “Nietzsche’s
view that historical study is deleterious to life is not, in fact,
directed against historical consciousness as such, but against
the self-alienation it undergoes when it regards the method of
18 Philosophy Now  April/May 2020
modern historical sciences as its own true nature” (Truth and
Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2013,
p.316). In other words, aiming for absolute objectivity kills what
is vital in human nature. Nietzsche’s fear was that scientific his-
tory robs living things of their vital aura.
Michel Foucault, a philosopher fascinated by historical devel-
opment, argued that what Nietzsche ultimately objected to was
the historian’s pretension to have gained a suprahistorical per-
spective that lends historical judgments an ‘apocalyptic objectiv-
ity’. Such historical accounts falsely present themselves as crys-
tal clear mirrors of completed historical developments (‘Niet-
zsche, Genealogy, History’, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and
Sherry Simon, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 1991,
pp.86-87). Foucault agreed with Nietzsche that the modern his-
torian creates a charade in which he “effaces his proper individ-
uality” and replaces it with “the fiction of a universal geometry…
to adopt a faceless anonymity.” (p.91) Nietzsche’s perspectivism
means that on the contrary, our historical interpretations will
always be coloured by our presuppositions. We might today talk
of our positionality: the socio-political contexts that shape our
identity, perspectives and biases. Any historian’s denial of his or
her own positionality is, frankly, a form of dishonesty. But, Niet-
zsche never meant to condemn the entire practice of studying
history, thereby endorsing absolute forgetfulness. Instead, he
saw the historian’s task as being to embrace the creative aspect
of representing the past. Nietzsche proposed that the historian
should “describe with insight what is known, perhaps a common
theme, an everyday melody, to elevate it, raise it to a compre-
hensive symbol and so let a whole world of depth of meaning,
power and beauty be guessed in it.” (Advantage, p.36)
This creative act of the historian seems to me to be essential.
Nietzsche practised it himself. He used historical criticism when
attacking religion in, for instance, 1888’s The Anti-Christ. He
also used a historical approach in his polemical revaluation of
Western morality in On the Genealogy of Morals the previous year.
Nietzsche understood that to demand of people that they
should never attempt to remember and never practice history
would be asking the impossible. On the contrary, “only through
the power to use the past for life and to refashion what hap-
pened in history, does man become man.” (Advantage, p.11) He
enumerated ways in which history can be useful: firstly, pre-
senting monumental examples of greatness from the past; sec-
ondly, offering contentment and pleasure through approach-
ing the past with reverence; and thirdly, using history in a crit-
ical manner to shatter and destroy something that endangers
life. What is essential in each of these approaches is that none
are objective. Rather, the historian begins her creative work
from a certain perspective.
Nietzsche realised that a historical sense always draws from
a perspective, and that this perspective should never be con-
cealed. The worst form of concealment came about through the
pretentious appeal to scientific objectivity. Nietzsche did not
prefer forgetting over remembering, but he did alert us to the
fact that remembering is a creative act.
© PAUL DOOLAN 2020
Paul Doolan teaches History and Philosophy at Zurich International School.
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 Nietzsche
Our Nietzschean Future
Paul O’Mahoney considers the awful fate Nietzsche predicts for humanity.
S
cattered through Nietzsche’s
writings are proclamations of his
‘untimeliness’, expressing the
conviction that he will be ‘born
posthumously’. He claims that few in his
time have ears to hear him, that he must
trust in future generations to understand
him, and also that he is preparing that
future audience. Along with these procla-
mations goes his prediction that one day
his name will be associated with a crisis
unprecedented in human history. Niet-
zsche appears to suggest that his work
may help precipitate the most acute stages
of this crisis; but he also positions him-
self as humanity’s guide through and
beyond the coming upheaval.
What is the nature of this predicted
crisis? The most common reading of it
represents, I believe, a misconception or
underestimation of its nature and scope.
This common idea is that Nietzsche is
speaking of the gradual erosion among
humankind of our belief in any binding,
transcendental values. This process is
exemplified by, but not restricted to, the
decline in religious faith. Without the
foundational belief in a divine sanction for
human systems of morality, and without
faith in a reward beyond it for our con-
duct in this brief life, the idea that one’s
life and actions (and especially one’s
efforts and sufferings) are meaningful
becomes inestimably more difficult to
THE LINK BETWEEN APE & SUPERMAN © CHLOE COLLETT 2020
20 Philosophy Now
April/May 2020
accept. The result is nihilism: a renuncia-
tion not only of religious belief but also
of the sustaining convictions of antiquity
that the continued flourishing of the com-
munity to which one belonged might
supply a suitable end for one’s action.
The case can certainly be made that
this strain of nihilism has spread, and one
can appreciate that this mass renuncia-
tion of inherited values was already
underway in Nietzsche’s time – as he
recognised. Indeed, Nietzsche is one of
the most astute chroniclers of this
malaise and its progress. But one need
only read a little of Nietzsche’s diagnoses
and prognoses of this to realise that what
he is describing is a more or less
inevitable process, and in some way
therefore independent of him. Nietzsche
could today be identified as one spur to
the Western decline in religious faith;
but after reading his own writing on the
subject, you might well conclude that this
process would have continued anyway,
without his contributions. That is to say,
one might concur with a famous asser-
tion from his notebooks (The Will to
Power, Preface 2) that in the rise of
nihilism, Necessity itself was at work. But
the decline of humanity’s belief in tran-
scendental values is just a preliminary.
The true looming crisis on which Niet-
zsche trains his eyes is considerably more
shattering.
No Free Will:
To Power or Otherwise
The nature of the projected crisis is indi-
cated by a conviction expressed through-
out Nietzsche’s writing: his absolute
unbelief in the freedom of human will.
Though the precise nature of his unbe-
lief in human freedom is subject to
debate, what is certain is that Nietzsche
did not conceive of human beings as
being in any traditional sense free agents,
responsible for their actions. Our
thoughts and consciousness are functions
of deeper processes beyond our ken, and
the freedom of our will is an illusion.
There are different varieties of denial of
free will, support for several of which can
be found in Nietzsche’s writings, but
none of them allows a notion of freedom
substantial enough to grant us responsi-
bility for our choices and actions. Let’s
look at three varieties here. All are easily
understood, require no philosophical
training or reading of Nietzsche whatso-
ever, and more than likely have occurred
to and been pondered by any reasonably
intelligent human being.
The first notes simply that we cannot
possibly be responsible for who we are,
because we have no say in our makeup. We
aren’t responsible for our genes, biology,
biochemistry, brain function, or the for-
mative environment in which we are born
and grow. As these factors are so profound,
go so deeply into making us the kind of
person we are, with the desires and
thought-processes that we have, we cannot
realistically be said to be responsible for
our choices and actions. Galen Strawson
believes this to be Nietzsche’s position,
and he subscribes to the same stance. He
sums up the point by saying that we cannot
create ourselves. Illustrating this, the
world’s most famous long-term develop-
mental study, the Dunedin Study, has
shown how, controlling for variables such
as social class, poor impulse control in
childhood is the most reliable predictor of
poor outcomes in health, wealth and crime
in adulthood. The study notes that cur-
rent research emphasises how genetic fac-
tors and brain function play quite signifi-

by Melissa Felder
SIMON & FINN © MELISSA FELDER 2020 PLEASE VISIT SIMONANDFINN.COM
cant roles in impulse control – and both are naturally outside of
the control of a subject who did not create himself.
The second, related but subtly different, conception of our
lack of freedom rests on the Nietzschean assertion that the body
is the self. In other words, physiological processes (dimly under-
stood though they are) contain or define the whole of the human
person. On this view, consciousness is merely a function of bio-
logical processes beyond our control. This contention could also
find support in some recent research. For instance, experimen-
tal evidence lends support to the idea that the common parasite
Nietzsche
Toxoplasma gondii may inhibit risk-aversion in its host. In other
words, playing host to this parasite makes people significantly
more disposed to taking risks. Much more banal is the increas-
ing evidence that gut bacteria play a role in the regulation of
mood, and determine our cravings for food. This research into
our physiology seems to erode the possibility of free will. The
bacteria or parasites to which we play host determine our moods
and behaviour, and so our beliefs and lives, even while we cher-
ish the idea that we ourselves determine our fates. Recent
research has even suggested that the great marker of our human-
ity, consciousness, might be the result of the long-ago binding
of the genetic code of the Arc virus into the human genome.
The final and strongest position undermining human free-
dom could be termed ‘cosmic determinism’. The argument starts
with the premises that every physical effect must have a physi-
cal cause, and that we humans, being physical, are subject to this
rule. We cannot be exempted from the chains of cause and effect
in the material world. Therefore, everything we do or think is
the result of prior physical causes, themselves the effects of still
earlier causes back to the beginning of time. This is a deeply
materialistic form of determinism, and it is perhaps the form
which has traditionally most troubled philosophy. (I happen to
believe that Nietzsche subscribes to this last and strongest form.
Despite his distaste for the vulgar ‘mechanistic’ vision of the
cosmos that it entails and his criticisms of the very notions of
cause and effect, he is ultimately a cosmic determinist.)
Acceptance of any of these positions means that one must
renounce freedom of the will, and so moral responsibility. Any
notions of blame or merit, and of justice or injustice, must also
go. One cannot any longer hold anyone criminally responsible.
One can also no longer cleave to any notion of value hierarchy
based on the ideas of ‘noble’ or ‘base’, because no one, noble or
base, can be held responsible for their actions. I believe this
dilemma to be unresolved by Nietzsche. It is the worm in the
heart of his system, condemning his practical philosophy to
incoherence. At any event, the crucial point is that Nietzsche
foresees the advent of an era in which the traditional notion of
the free human subject, responsible to and for himself and
others, becomes simply unfeasible, a ridiculed relic of the past.
Freedom is Dead and We Have Killed it
Let us assume that one of the following two situations obtains at
some not-too-distant point in the future: either that definitive
scientific proof is provided of the unreality of human choice or
that although conclusive proof of this unreality is not yet attained,
the balance of evidence suggests it. In either scenario, the ideas
of human freedom and moral responsibility must be renounced
by any honest and thoughtful individual who weighs the evidence.
Imagine next that this becomes the conventional wisdom, spread-
ing irresistibly until the idea has taken hold of humanity, com-
pelling a new and unprecedented reckoning with our nature. Only
in imagining this has one begun to contemplate the crisis which
Nietzsche predicts, and with which he envisages his name being
associated. A world in which deterministic ideas have become
moral principles, really believed in and lived by the vast majority
of humankind, defines the dimensions of the Nietzschean crisis.
Here, the conviction that a human being cannot realistically be
held accountable for their actions is the norm. This would be a
April/May 2020
Philosophy Now 21
Nietzsche
world in which there is no longer any concept of criminal respon-
sibility. No longer would blame or merit be possible. The task
confronting humanity as a whole is to wrestle with and reckon
with the consequences of this new conventional wisdom. There
are good reasons to believe that humanity, confronted with this
refutation of its most cherished and sustaining illusions, would
ultimately destroy itself.
What then is to be done if humankind is to survive passing
into this Nietzschean era where belief in the freedom of the will
has been renounced?
The Future of Philosophy
There is no doubt that the renunciation of the idea of freedom
would represent an irreversible debasement of humanity as tra-
ditionally understood, inducing a kind of vertigo in our species.
That such a renunciation might be inevitable, and belief in free-
dom irrecoverable, is however not at all difficult to imagine. How
might a person orient themselves in this vertiginous climate?
It must first be said that, despair-inducing though this future
scenario might seem, it is likely also, after some period of adjust-
ment, to be a spur to liberation – from responsibility, from hier-
archy, and from fear. Unafraid, more willing to wager the self
on an action, in this future many human beings will come by
default into possession of those Nietzschean virtues of daring
and honesty that mark them as ascending types. That no atti-
tude or action will be accounted their own choice, or worthy of
praise or merit, will only sharpen the sense of fearlessness and
commitment.
Under these conditions, the appropriate conception of life
would be that of a game: a grand, ongoing, purposeless and all-
encompassing piece of play, each person with no more agency
than a cast die or caroming billiard ball. The cosmos as a game
was a metaphor of which Nietzsche himself was fond. Seeing
the cosmos as a game is precisely the kind of god’s-eye view
appropriate to the philosopher, who looks down on creation
from a standpoint beyond good and evil. The idea, along with
the thought that not truth but illusion sustains life, is prominent
in Nietzsche’s early, unpublished writings from the 1870s (for
example in the essay ‘Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks’
and the abandoned Philosophenbuch). Both sentiments also recur
prominently in Nietzsche’s mature work, Beyond Good and Evil
(1886), which he calls ‘A prelude to a philosophy of the future’.
It is less of a surprise than one might think that in ruminat-
ing on the philosopher’s possible role in the future freedom-
free world, Nietzsche, the great anti-Christian, holds in high
regard the most genuinely religious nature – the committed
mythmaking instinct of the religious leader or founder. It is
even less surprising that, against the traditional picture, the
future philosopher is no slave to or even servant of truth, and
is instead closer to the artist. The religious nature indeed is
included among the highest ranks of artist, and the philosopher
of the future will make use of whatever relics of religion still
beset his contemporaries, and of the religious spirit in general.
The future philosopher must move in a world where the dead-
liest knowledge has been disseminated and accepted; he is no
longer the repository of dangerous or unendurable wisdom he
traditionally was. He will be, says Nietzsche, a tempter and
22 Philosophy Now
April/May 2020
experimenter among humankind – and how indeed could he be
otherwise, when the game is all? Naturally, he will have to com-
pete with other tempters and pied pipers, for this is how life
conceived of as a game, individually and collectively, purpose-
less and innocent, will tend towards order. Competing visions,
competing interpretations, competing forms of the game, or
opportunities to while away one’s short time playing it, will
arise, none of them pretending to be anything but illusions.
There is no reason that myriad forms of the game may not coex-
ist. Some may be novel, some consciously atavistic. One might
imagine a group banding together to worship Odin and live as
Vikings, fully conscious of but committed to the pretence – but
no pretence has more or less legitimacy than any other. If vio-
lence erupts between one faction and another, this will itself be
merely a form of the game: war as a game, an experiment in
living, and an experience to be had. The philosopher of the
future must stand in this Nietzschean age as the purveyor of
some compelling version of the game, describing a narrative or
vision that compels allegiance and, in what will surely seem to
that future time rather obscurantist language, creates new values
or gives meaning to existence. What life as a game can be imag-
ined to offer the individual is the invitation: ‘Choose your illu-
sion’. Choose in the full knowledge that it is nothing but illu-
sion, fully conscious that you are not really free to make the
choice anyway. The philosophy of the future says, then: sur-
render to the game, relinquish all resentment, adopt or reject
positions as you please, pass this brief existence and take your
leave of it lightly, understanding that it and you have all the
substance of a will-o’-the-wisp.
Our Possible Futures
We have not of course yet reached, or even truly reckoned with,
Nietzsche’s crisis. It is likely indeed that, to the primitive eyes
and minds of the early twenty-first century, wedded to the fic-
tion of free will and other superstitions such as purpose or the
value of truth, it appears a monstrous future. All the trends in
the sciences for the past few centuries have, however, tended
to undermine rather than bolster traditional notions of free-
dom and agency, and quite a few philosophers have admitted –
generally with equanimity– that some form of determinism is,
on balance, probably true.
Writing near the end of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche
asserted that he was recording the history of the next two hun-
dred years. Were he roughly correct in his forecast, it would be
toward the end of the present century that (if there is still a habit-
able Earth for our species) advances in our knowledge will compel
passage into the Nietzschean era of the renunciation of belief in
freedom and the advent of the great game. We might begin to
think of this future by numbering it among the existential risks to
humanity, for the loss of our sustaining illusions may indeed spur
our destruction. From that anxious beginning we might proceed
by returning to Nietzsche, who after all offers himself not only as
prophet but, at least to those with ears to hear, also as guide.
© PAUL O’MAHONEY 2020
Paul O’Mahoney completed a PhD in University College Dublin
focusing on the work of Jean Baudrillard. He works in Trinity
College, Dublin.
 THE

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OF TRAVEL
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 When Worlds
(moral & causal)
Collide
Toni Vogel Carey wrestles with conflicts of duty.
C
onflict-of-duty remains one of the most intractable
problems in moral philosophy. How to think about
situations in which a person has two or more moral
obligations, but can fulfill only one?
It was primarily to deal with this problem that W.D. Ross
introduced the concept of prima facie duty in his signature essay
‘What Makes Right Acts Right?’, (chapter 2 of his 1930 book
The Right and the Good) and . Prima facie means something like
‘on the face of it’ or ‘at first sight’. Philip Stratton-Lake claims
that within twenty years of its appearance in 1930, Ross’s theory
was old-hat and “rejected out of hand by most moral philoso-
phers.” Nonetheless, his term ‘prima facie duty’ has remained
part of the moral philosophical lingo. And if Ross’s theory is
dated, apparently so is conflict of duty itself, as I found to my
surprise when I Googled it and discovered that nearly all the
references were to conflicts of interest.
In any case, conflicts of duty remain as vexatious as ever.
Think of the infamous Trolley Problem introduced by Philippa
Foot back in 1967. This hydra-headed monster keeps spawn-
ing new variations, and you can register your two-cents worth
on some of these any time of the day or night, at
moralsensetest.com. The Trolley Problem also features promi-
nently in several episodes of the comedy series The Good Place.
Logical Maneuvers
It seems unfair to hold people accountable for doing what they
are simply unable to do. Consequently, it is common practice
to maintain that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, so that if you cannot do
both act a and act b, you are not morally obliged to do both.
The problem with this quasi-logical maneuver is that it magi-
cally makes something we experience as real and troublesome
simply disappear, or more accurately, fail to appear. If only life
were so easy.
Logic also offers other ways to deal – or avoid dealing – with
the problem of conflict of duty. The logic of obligation (deon-
tic logic) was born out of the more familiar logic of necessity,
(modal logic). If you’ve never encountered these concepts, not
to worry; what concerns us here is quite simple.
In modal logic, necessarily, “if p and q are true, then p is true.”
In deontic logic, “if it is obligatory to do acts a and b, then it
is obligatory to do act a.”
24 Philosophy Now
April/May 2020
In modal logic, “if necessarily p is true and necessarily q is
true, then necessarily (p and q) is true.”
In deontic logic, “if it is obligatory to do a and obligatory to
do b, then it is obligatory to do (a and b).
Few, if any, question the modal logic propositions here; so
the primary reason to question their deontic counterparts is to
dodge the problem of conflict of duty, which renders this ploy
patently ad hoc. Nonetheless, some who hold that conflict of
duty poses real problems, such as Bas van Fraassen, opt to reject
one or more axioms of traditional deontic logic. Others, like
Earl Conee, do the opposite; he keeps deontic logic intact and
concludes that genuine conflicts of duty are impossible! Of
course, this flies in the face of experience, although Conee tries
hard to show that it doesn’t.
When you cannot fulfill a promise, that is not the end of the
matter. If you fail to show up even for a casual dinner date, leav-
ing a friend waiting, worrying, and hungry, then even if the
reason for your no-show is that you are fulfilling a more strin-
gent duty – even if you are doing the right thing – you owe that
person at least an explanation and an apology. But if you have
done nothing wrong, what is there to apologize for?
Promises involve acts to be done in the future and the situ-
ation may change in the interim – a family emergency, a tie-
up on the highway, and so on. We give our word intending to
keep it, but even the best of us may not be able to fulfill all our
promises. And while no one wants to be saddled with repara-
tional duties, we don’t feel right about simply doing nothing.
Prima Facie Duties and Moral Rules
How then does Ross deal with conflicts of duty? He gives this
short list of prima facie duties:
(1) Fidelity: promise-keeping, and the ‘implicit promise’ not to lie;
(1a) Reparation for a previous wrongful act;
(2) Gratitude for previous services and kindnesses rendered by others;
(3) Justice, meaning “distribution of pleasure or happiness” in accor-
dance with “the merit of the persons concerned;”
(4) Beneficence, resting on “the mere fact that there are other beings
whose condition we can make better;”
(5) Self-improvement with regard to “virtue or intelligence;”
(6) Non-maleficence, such as the commandment “thou shalt not kill.”
This duty is ‘prima facie more binding’ than its positive correlative,
beneficence.
The obvious thing about Ross’s list is that it looks like a tra-
ditional list of moral rules. But in that case, what if anything
does Ross accomplish by positing a new category of prima facie
duty? I will return to this question presently.
Ross’s system contains three elements: 1) the list of what we
can call general prima facie duties, aka moral rules; 2) particu-
lar instances of 1), which we can call specific prima facie duties;
and 3) old-style garden-variety actual duties. According to Ross,
if you make a promise, you thereby incur a (specific) prima facie
duty of promise-keeping. Unlike an actual duty, a prima facie
duty is only conditional; it may be overridden by a more strin-
gent prima facie duty, in which case that becomes the actual
duty. Keeping a promise, or returning a favor, or telling the
truth, are all prima facie obligations. Whether they become
actual obligations depends on all relevant factors affecting the
actual situation. The only such factor that really interests Ross,
however, is that of a conflict of duty.
The Locus of Conflict
By using the same term prima facie to refer both to the rule-like
duty and to the act that falls under it, Ross muddies the waters
about whether the locus of conflict of duty is between particu-
lar acts or between what we normally call moral rules.
To be sure, there is a good deal of confusion in the broader
literature on this point. In A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls
talks about “a plurality of first principles which may conflict to
give contrary directives in particular types of cases,” with “no
explicit method, no priority rules, for weighing these principles
against one another” (p.34). Bernard Williams explicitly fol-
lows and cites Rawls here, and Stratton-Lake explicitly follows
and cites Williams.
But there is no reason to hold that ‘first principles’ (moral
rules or general prima facie duties) conflict, or that they can con-
flict. Were that the case, particularly without some way of pri-
oritizing them, moral rules would be no more reliable or useful
than judging every situation on a case-by-case basis. There
would be nothing fixed to rely on, which is the point of having
moral rules in the first place.
And why suppose moral rules can be prioritized? Ross con-
siders the general prima facie duty not to injure others (no.6 on
the list) more stringent than that to do them good (no.4); and
most of us would agree with him about this. But what about truth-
telling versus saving a life? Immanuel Kant is one of the most
revered figures in the history of philosophy, but almost no one
agrees with his view that lying is alway wrong, even to a would-
be murderer about the whereabouts of his intended victim.
It is untenable to hold that first principles can conflict. And
the prospects of finding a general way of prioritizing them look
dim. So let’s assume it is only specific duties, prima facie or
actual, that conflict.
Duty versus Happiness
There have historically been two basic criteria of what makes
right acts right. Duty ethicists (or ‘deontologists’) like Ross
look to the act itself, and ask whether it corresponds to an item
PHOTO BY TWINSFISCH ON UNSPLASH
Sorry I didn’t make it to dinner,
I had to fulfill a more stringent duty.
on a list of moral rules (general prima facie duties). These are
intuitive, and final; there is no higher tribunal. The main prob-
lem for duty ethicists is that the intuitions of different people
often differ. And making matters worse, intuition is often con-
fused with emotion, which nobody considers reliable.
By contrast, according to utilitarianism the right action is
the one most likely to produce the greatest amount of happi-
ness (or good, or pleasure, or maybe satisfaction of prefer-
ences...). Working that out depends on observation and reason;
so most philosophers – who, after all, think for a living – much
prefer it to duty ethics.
But utilitarianism has its own problems. Like the principle
‘ought implies can’, it has no way to accommodate the lived
reality of conflicts of duty. Suppose duties a and b conflict. If
fulfilling duty a will produce more units of good than fulfilling
b, you ought simply to do a. If a and b will produce equal amounts
of good, it is a matter of indifference which you do. Either way,
though, you will not do anything wrong, and there will be noth-
ing for which to apologize.
From J.S. Mill in the mid-nineteenth century onwards, util-
itarianism dominated, and largely eclipsed duty ethics.
Ross and Rawls
Ross mounted the strongest comeback, punching back with
some crushing counterexamples to traditional utilitarianism.
Among them:
• A death-bed promise might be broken with no perceptible
external consequences; so for the utilitarian it might be a
matter of indifference whether we keep or break it. Most of
us, however, consider such a promise as binding as any other
(p.39).
• Suppose we can confer either 1,001 units of good on a bad
person, or 1,000 such units on a good person. Are we really
obligated to do the former, as utilitarianism implies? (p.35)
April/May 2020
Philosophy Now 25
 • Having borrowed a book, our obligation is to see that it is
returned, not merely to do something that is likely to bring
that result (such as packing it up and posting it). (p.46-7).
These counterexamples helped spur a retreat from traditional
(act-) utilitarianism to rule-utilitarianism, a compromise posi-
tion in which the relevant moral rule governs what act ought to
be done, but the utility principle governs and justifies the rule.
It soon became clear, however, that the rule of justice could not
plausibly be subsumed under the utility principle via either route.
Then came Rawls in 1971. He started out with two first prin-
ciples, utilitarian: “to produce…the greatest net balance of satis-
faction,” and deontological: “to distribute satisfactions equally”
(p.36), with “no priority rule…for determining how these two
principles are to be balanced against each other” (p.37). To solve
this problem, Rawls proposed a famous thought experiment. Imag-
ine, he said, that in an attempt to agree on rules for a just society,
everyone is behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ which ensures that nobody
“knows his place in society [or] his fortune in the distribution of
natural assets and abilities” (p.12). From this ‘original position’
Rawls thinks we would all choose a principle of ‘justice as fair-
ness’, in which (deontological) fair distribution takes precedence
over (utilitarian) optimal satisfaction. He thinks the moral rule of
truth-telling and the practice of promise-keeping can be derived
from this principle (pp.344-8), and perhaps he would say some-
thing similar about the other items on Ross’s list.
Like Kant, Rawls offers an ‘ideal theory’ of “a perfectly just
society” (pp.8-9) in which conflict-of-duty is not a problem;
thus there is no entry for it in his index.
Moral Rules and Natural Laws
At one point Ross compares general prima facie duties to natu-
ral laws:
“... subject to the force of gravitation towards some other body, each
body tends to move in a particular direction with a particular velocity;
but its actual movement depends on all the forces to which it is subject. It
is only by recognizing this distinction that we can preserve the absolute-
ness of laws of nature, and…of the general principles of morality.” (28-9)
Of course, Newton’s law of gravity, far from being absolute,
was superseded by Einstein’s principles of relativity. Ross also
asserts an “important difference” between moral and natural:
“When we say that in virtue of gravitation a body tends to move in a
certain way, we are referring to a causal influence actually exercised on
it by another body or other bodies. When we say that in virtue of being
deliberately untrue a certain remark tends to be wrong, we are refer-
ring to no causal relation, to no relation that involves succession in
time, but to such a relation as connects the various attributes of a math-
ematical figure.” (29)
We routinely ask about causes: why was a flight delayed, why
did the referendum on Brexit pass, and the like. But Newtonian
physics does not deal in causes; it deals in mathematical descrip-
tion. The universe is written in the language of geometry,
Galileo famously said, and without knowing this language, we
cannot understand a single ‘word’ of it.
26 Philosophy Now
April/May 2020
Secondly, when Galileo and Newton used mathematical
description to abstract from the world we see, it was to simplify,
understand and explain it. They remained within the realm of
the empirical and falsifiable. What Ross has in mind is quite
different. According to him,
“That an act, qua fulfilling a promise...is prima facie right is self-evi-
dent... without any need of proof, or of evidence beyond itself. It is
self-evident just as a mathematical axiom, or the validity of a form of
inference, is evident...In both cases we are dealing with propositions
that cannot be proved, but that just as certainly need no proof.”
(pp.29-30)
Were the principle of gravitation ‘self-evident’, we would
not have needed a Newton to discover it. But in fact, Newton’s
principle was received with astonishment, because he subsumed
under a single explanatory principle phenomena – the revolu-
tion of the planets, the tides, and the fall of an apple – that no
one had dreamed were connected.
Moral versus Causal
In addition to conflict of duty, Ross discusses inability to fulfill
a single duty. But he treats these two phenomena very differently.
Having gone to the trouble of introducing a new theory to
accommodate the less stringent duty of a conflict, when it comes
to fulfilling a single duty, he says “success and failure are the only
test” (p.45). In a conflict of duty, ‘ought’ implies ‘can’; but with
regard to inability to fulfill a single duty, it doesn’t. If I pack and
post a book to return it to its owner, however carelessly I wrap
the book, Ross says, “if it comes to hand I have done my duty,”
whereas however carefully I do so, if it does not come to hand,
“I must send another copy to replace it” (ibid.). Thus, it is often
“our good fortune if the act we do is the right act” (p.31).
Of course, it is also our good fortune if we are not saddled
with a conflict of duty; but Ross does not seem to see that moral
luck applies here.
Why are we saddled with conflicts of duty? I think we can
answer this question. The reason is that duties are moral, whereas
conflicts are causal. And moral and causal worlds operate sepa-
rately and independently, so they can accidentally collide.
Ross’s proposed solution, as we know, is to introduce a new
category of prima facie duty. The trouble is, whether we do
something actually, or only prima facie, wrong we emerge with
the very same duty of reparation. What is to be gained, then,
by introducing this new middle-man category of conditional
duty? The plain answer, I think, is, nothing at all. We may as
well just call a spade (an overridden prima facie duty) a spade
(an actual duty). If, due to no fault of our own, we are caught
in a conflict of duty, and as a result do something morally
wrong, then no blame should attach to us on that account, any
more than for having to clean up our yards after a bad storm.
It’s just that, as Roger Trigg concludes in ‘Moral Conflict’
(Mind 1971), “Life is sometimes tough.”
© TONI VOGEL CAREY 2020
Toni Vogel Carey, PhD, is an independent scholar who publishes in
scholarly journals on topics in philosophy and the history of ideas. She
has been a regular contributor to Philosophy Now since 2002 and
serves on its US advisory board.
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Infinity
To Infinity... and Beyond!
Owain Griffin takes a leap beyond the limits of numbers, into concepts.
A
nyone who’s spent time around young children knows
that inevitably, they will try to out-do each other. It
usually doesn’t matter what the subject of the argu-
ment actually is, only who gets the last word. In order
to win this contest, children usually invoke mathematics:
“I’m cooler than you are!” says Child #1.
“No you’re not, I’m twice as cool as you!” replies Child #2
“I’m three times as cool as you!” returns Child #1.
This then continues back and forth with each party one-
upping the other with a new, larger number. The problem with
this method is that, as we know, you can always find a bigger
number and so the argument seems to have no end. That is until
one little know-it-all uses this fact to their advantage:
“Whatever you say plus one!” proudly exclaims Child #1.
This seemingly childlike manoeuvre has obvious and pro-
found mathematical power; quite simply, any response his oppo-
nent could give will always be quite literally ‘one-upped’ with
no effort. I think we know who is winning the argument now.
So far nothing too confounding has happened in the argu-
ment. That is until the other child tries to escape their loss by
saying: “Well I’m INFINITY coolest,” (although this is not a
grammatically correct sentence, we’ll let it slide).
At this point something interesting has occurred. We all
know there is no end point to the sequence of numbers, but in
order to get the last word in the disagreement this child has
somehow managed to get around this fact by talking about the
totality of the sequence itself, rather than any of the members
of that sequence. But infinity is confusing. Is it a number? Is it
28 Philosophy Now  April/May 2020
INFINITY DOOR © ERNESTA KURPEIKYTE 2020
a concept? At the very least, it seems like something worth
philosophising about.
Thinking about Infinity
Let’s start by considering how we conceptualise infinity. Usu-
ally when discussing the infinite, I am met with incredulity.
Surely ‘infinity’ is just the biggest thing possible? Any talk about
the ‘mathematics of infinity’ is nonsense because mathematics
concerns numbers and infinity is bigger than all the numbers!
Not so. This may be a tempting position to take but unfortu-
nately it isn’t wholly accurate. For one, mathematics is con-
cerned with a lot more than just numbers. Mathematicians also
study points, lines, sequences, structures and concepts. This last
addition to the list provides a more fruitful account of infinity:
the infinite as a concept. It is here that the line between mathe-
matics and philosophy begins to blur.
Mathematically speaking, we ought not to think of infinity
as a number. Rather, it is a kind of number. Such infinite num-
bers are useful when considering and comparing unending quan-
tities. ‘How could we possibly conceptualise infinite numbers?’
I hear you ask. To answer this, I will turn to a now famous exam-
ple from the mathematician David Hilbert.
Imagine booking a holiday at Hilbert’s Hotel. This hotel is so
popular that in order to accommodate all the guests who wish to
stay there, it has an infinite number of rooms. To make matters
worse, you’ve booked for the most popular time of the year, so all
the rooms are currently full. If this were a regular hotel you’d be
in serious trouble; all the rooms are full, so there’s nowhere for
 Infinity
you to stay. Fortunately for you, the management at Hilbert’s Diagonalisation
Hotel are very accommodating, and rather than turn you away, To prove that the infinity of the Real numbers is bigger than
they simply move every guest in the hotel from their current room the infinity of the Natural numbers relies on a method called
to the one next door. The occupant of Room 1 moves to Room diagonalisation. This technique is surprisingly simple and has
2, 2 to 3 and so on until every guest has moved from their current been used by logicians in a variety of proofs including Gödel’s
room n into the room next door, n+1. Thanks to the quick think- first incompleteness theorem, and the Church-Turing thesis.
ing of the hotel manager, Room 1 is now unoccupied and is ready Let’s focus on the decimals between 0 and 1. The number
for you to enjoy your holiday. By using this technique, any finite of those is infinite. If it is the same size infinite as the number
number of people can be given individual rooms in the hotel even of all Natural numbers (our counting numbers) then we should
though it is already full! Just don’t expect a good night’s sleep, as be able to pair each unique Natural number with a correspond-
you’ll have to change rooms every time there’s a new arrival. ing decimal. So below are the first eight Natural numbers, each
Mathematicians have shown that not only can a finite number paired with an arbitrarily chosen decimal between 0 and 1:
of new guests be accommodated, but an infinite number of new 1) 0.101010101010101010101...
guests can too, even though the hotel is already infinitely full! 2) 0.333333333333333333333...
The proof of this would take me beyond the scope of this arti- 3) 0. 285714285714285714285...
cle, but it is easy to find online. This raises an interesting ques- 4) 0.428571428571428571428...
tion about infinity: if the hotel already has an infinite amount of 5) 0.726539302348723932483...
guests, and another infinite amount of guests turn up, has the 6) 0.123456789987654321234...
total amount changed? In other words, can we go beyond infinity? 7) 0.111111111111111111111...
This isn’t as straightforward as dealing with a finite hotel (but 8) 0.857142857142857142857...
you’re not mathematically guaranteed a room in the finite hotel). etc to infinity...
It will seem even more confusing to those who previously
believed that infinity is just the biggest thing imaginable. As I’ve I’ve chosen these Real numbers almost entirely at random
mentioned, infinity isn’t a number, rather it is a type of number, and urge you to do the same; the point of this proof is that no
and similar to how some finite numbers are larger or lesser than matter which Real numbers you choose and no matter how
others, some infinities are simply bigger than other infinities. many of them you choose, you will always have missed some
Finding out that some infinities are larger than others can off your list.
feel like you’ve just been unplugged from the Matrix, but stick The reason this method is known as ‘diagonalisation’, is
with me. An intuitive way to try and get your head around this because we’re going to work our way diagonally down the list
claim is to firstly consider the Natural numbers. These are the to make a new number. So, let’s start by looking at the first digit
positive whole numbers we’re all familiar with and use every of the first number, the second digit of the second number, third
day to count things like the number of dogs or cats, and as we of the third etc etc.
all know, this sequence of numbers is unending and infinite. 1) 0.101010101010101010101...
However, we also know that there are other types of numbers 2) 0.333333333333333333333...
too: there are fractions, irrational numbers like √2, decimals, 3) 0.285714285714285714285...
and weird transcendental numbers like pi. So it stands to reason 4) 0.428571428571428571428...
that the set containing only the Natural numbers, whilst infi- 5) 0.726539302348723932483...
nite, is smaller than the set containing all the Natural numbers 6) 0.123456789987654321234...
and all this other stuff. 7) 0.111111111111111111111...
This compound set is known as the Real numbers, so we can 8) 0.857142857142857142857...
say more precisely that the set of Real numbers is larger than etc to infinity...
the set of Natural numbers, and what’s more, we can prove it.
Now simply add one to each of the highlighted numbers, so
that 2 becomes 3, 3 becomes 4, 5 becomes 6... (If one of the
numbers on your list is a 9, it becomes 0). From the highlighted
diagonal above, we now have a new number: .24664726.... What
EVER-EXPANDING SPACES © PAIGE BEASLEY 2020

we have created is a new Real number which is guaranteed not

to be on the original list - even though that list is infinitely long.
Why? Well, its first digit is different from the first digit of the
first number, its second digit is different from the second digit
of the second number, and so on down the list. In fact because
the diagonal crosses every single number on the list all the way
down, it must be different from all of them! So, no matter what
choices you made to construct your infinite list of Real num-
bers, we have a method to construct a new number which is
uniquely different from all other numbers in the list.
This tells us that it is not possible to uniquely pair each Natu-
ral number to a Real number. If these two sets of numbers cannot

April/May 2020  Philosophy Now 29

Infinity
be put into one-to-one correspondence, then they cannot be the
same size. We’ve shown that the Real numbers cannot be put
into correspondence with the Natural numbers. So the infinity
of Real numbers goes beyond the infinity of those Natural num-
bers. As it is these Natural numbers that we use to count, we have
proven that the set of Real numbers is uncountably infinite.
The result that some infinities are larger than others (they
literally contain more ‘stuff’) was proven by the mathematician
Georg Cantor (1845-1918), who chose to make an important
philosophical demarcation when dealing with infinite numbers.
Cantor decided to divide ‘the infinite’ into two distinct groups:
the merely infinite, which we can subject to mathematical analy-
sis like the infinities we have considered in the previous sec-
tions, and the absolutely infinite, about which we cannot even
reason without contradictions.

HILBERT’S HOTEL ENTRANCE © LAURA MCKENZIE 2020

This careful philosophical consideration of the nature of
infinity allowed mathematicians to make real progress into
understanding the infinite whilst avoiding the paradoxes that
had plagued them since the times of Zeno. Today, Set Theory
(the branch of mathematics which has developed from this work)
is regarded as the foundation for the entire discipline.

Implications
So far, we’ve covered some crazy stuff concerning infinity. We
considered an infinitely large collection of things, then we man-
aged to go beyond this infinity by showing that there can be a
collection even larger! It’s worth also considering the implica-
tions of this work for philosophy and science.
Firstly, the mathematical investigation into the philosophi-
cal concept of infinity has managed to shed light on questions
in seemingly unrelated areas of philosophy.
Philosophers of religion, for instance, often refer to an
omnipotent deity who is described as ‘infinite’. Indeed St
Thomas Aquinas claimed in his Summa Theologica that the very
essence of God is itself infinite, and that because of this, human
knowledge of God’s essence will always remain incomplete. A
more accurate understanding of infinity as a concept can help
articulate more precise claims regarding the nature of God in
philosophy of religion. For example, following the distinction
made above between the absolute and merely infinite would
lead us to believe that Aquinas had in mind an infinity abso-
lutely beyond human comprehension.
In philosophical logic these distinctions can help illuminate
concepts such as infinite regress, evaluation of arguments with
infinitely many premises, infinitary languages and infinite
domains and quantification.
Likewise metaphysics is often riddled with talk of the infi-
nite. As Bradley Dowden remarks:
“There are many other entities and properties that some metaphysician or
other has claimed are infinite: places, possibilities, propositions, properties,
particulars, partial orderings, pi’s decimal expansion, predicates, proofs,
Plato’s forms, principles, power sets, probabilities, positions, and possible
worlds. That is just for the letter p.”
Dr B. Dowden, ‘The Infinite’, in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The infinite is an inescapable topic in metaphysics for both
analytic and continental philosophers, and so whether you’re
concerned with abstract objects beyond space and time or con-
crete objects within the physical universe, an understanding of
the infinite is invariably helpful.
While these examples are by no means exhaustive it should
hopefully show that this work could have surprising fruitfulness
in your own area of philosophical interest.
Inevitably, some people will still not be convinced by the
purely philosophical and mathematical benefits of understand-
ing the infinite and want to know if this can be put to good use
in science. Well, the unfortunate answer is that at the moment,
we don’t really know. But philosophers love a hypothetical, so
let’s reason suppositionally for a moment.
Suppose tomorrow we wake up to discover that some bril-
liant physicist has proven that the universe is infinite. In which
case, we cease to be in the realm of pure theory any longer as
we can now start asking real tangible physical questions about
the size of that infinite universe and the things contained within
it. An immediate application has arisen and our knowledge of
the infinite can be put to work.
However, suppose now instead that the physicist proves that
the universe is finite. Well, at least for us philosophers, that situ-
ation might be all the more interesting. If the universe is only
finite, then we – the tiny little finite beings with our tiny little
finite brains floating on a rock in a tiny little finite part of a vast
but finite universe – have managed to uncover, comprehend and
explore truths beyond the limits of our universe. If that prospect
doesn’t excite you, you’re probably reading the wrong magazine.
© OWAIN GRIFFIN 2020
Owain Griffin is a recent graduate of the University of Bristol Logic
and Philosophy of Mathematics Masters programme. This article
developed from his attempts to explain to friends and family exactly
what it is he did for a year.

30 Philosophy Now  April/May 2020


Return To Infinity!
Les Reid wonders whether the universe might turn out to be infinite after all.
S
cientists recently managed to capture a direct image of
a black hole for the first time. M87 is a supermassive
black hole fifty five million light years away which is
larger than our entire Solar System. Twenty years ago,
black holes seemed more science fiction than science fact. Now
we have good reason to think that there is a black hole at the
centre of every galaxy, including our own, the Milky Way. So,
not only are they real, they’re commonplace! Now the ques-
tion is – will black holes swallow up Big Bang cosmology?
Although his name is prominent in cosmology, Edwin
Hubble did not invent the idea of the expanding universe. Credit
for originating that idea belongs to another American, Vesto
Slipher, who suggested in 1912 that the observed red shift in
the spectrum of light from distant galaxies is caused by their
recession. According to him, the light from distant galaxies has
been stretched into the red end of the spectrum because its
source is moving away from us. He compared the red shift of
light to the Doppler effect observed with sound waves, where a
sound source moving away from the listener (say, a police siren)
produces a deeper tone than it would if it were stationary.
Hubble developed Slipher’s idea by collating and analysing the
light from many galaxies. He organised his results in a graph,
published in 1929, which revealed a pattern: the more distant a
galaxy, the more red shift in its light, and therefore the higher
its velocity away from us. That relationship between distance
and velocity is known as Hubble’s Law. However, though the
general pattern has been confirmed in all observations, the exact
ratio between distance and velocity, called the Hubble Con-
stant, has proved very difficult to specify, and that failure has
led to an impasse in cosmological theory.
Infinity
REFLECTING (ON) THE INFINITE © KATIE BELL 2020
The idea that distant galaxies are receding from us led to cer-
tain conclusions in cosmology. First, if all galaxies are now reced-
ing, we can theoretically wind the clock back to find a common
starting point. Second, if we observe them receding in all direc-
tions from us, then this common starting point must have been
where we are now. However, the second conclusion is unac-
ceptable because it treats Earth as a very special place – the centre
of the universe. But how could we avoid this elitism?
The answer was to reinterpret recession not as physical motion
in a fixed Newtonian space, but as the expansion of space itself in
a mutable Einsteinian cosmos. The difference is that the cosmos
as Newton understood it is infinite in all directions of space: the
dimension of time is also infinite, both back into the past and for-
ward into the future. A Newtonian rocket blasted into space and
maintaining a straight line would travel forever. By contrast, the
cosmos according to Einstein is finite, and shaped by the matter
which it contains. Matter curves spacetime, and the expansion of
matter causes spacetime to expand with it. Due to spacetime’s
curvature, an Einsteinian rocket blasted into space would even-
tually return to its starting point. Hubble and fellow Big Bang
cosmologists concluded that rather than the galaxies themselves
moving away from us, the spaces between the galaxies are expand-
ing, and therefore that the universe itself is expanding. The expan-
sion causes red shift because light has a constant velocity and so
the light we observe is being stretched to fill the increased space.
Because the expansion is happening everywhere, the same red
shift and the same apparent recession would be observed, no
matter where in the universe the observations were made. In other
words, Planet Earth is not at the centre of the universe any more
than anywhere else is.
April/May 2020
Philosophy Now 31
 Infinity
concern is that as the universe expanded, regions of space which
were diametrically opposite very soon passed the point at which
information could be exchanged at the speed of light, and were
UNPACKING SPACE-TIME © KRISZTIAN KOTAI 2020

therefore absolutely cut off from each other. But if the various
regions of the cosmos were so isolated, how come the back-
ground radiation is identical in all directions? For an analogy,
think of life emerging on another planet completely cut off from
Earth. How likely is it that the life forms there will be identical
with those found on Earth? Not likely at all.
The currently accepted solution to the Horizon Problem is
to posit, prior to the universe assuming its normal expansion
rate, an ‘inflationary’ period of very rapid expansion early
enough after the Big Bang for all parts of the universe to be
within the necessary information horizon for a uniform release
of the CMBR. If that solution sounds rather ad hoc, there is an
Return to the Source alternative take, based on the findings of the COBE satellite of
The theory of an expanding universe does imply that if we wind the 1970s – namely, that the CMBR is not uniform after all.
the clock back then spacetime itself shrinks back to a condensed The COBE results have been refined into a map showing the
source. Everything emerges from that primordial egg: space, variations in CMBR across the sky. Surprisingly the new ‘con-
time, matter, energy, the lot – from which our present universe tour’ map is treated as evidence in favour of Big Bang cosmol-
is the aftermath, still expanding and cooling. ogy, just as the original uniformity of the CMBR was. It seems
Big Bang cosmology is counterintuitive for some because it the Big Bang Theory cannot lose!
posits a starting point for the cosmos. We have long been used to
the idea that stars form out of gas and dust due to gravity, ignite
as nuclear reactions, and eventually burn out, leaving gas and dust
which will be recycled into other stars. The same may be true of
galaxies, also forming out of gas and dust and then swirling inwards
until they eventually explode. Such processes could be endless,
and in contrast to Big Bang cosmology, require no starting point.
That view was the basis of Steady State cosmologies, as pro-
pounded by Fritz Zwicky, Fred Hoyle, and others, from the 1930s.
Zwicky challenged the assumption that red shift is caused by reces-
sion. He proposed that it is caused by the distance light has trav-
elled; so his theory was dubbed ‘tired light’. This successfully
explained why the most distant galaxies have the greatest red shift

BLACK HOLE CREATIVITY © LAURA MCKENZIE 2020

– the light from them has travelled the greatest distance. How-
ever, Zwicky could not arrive at a satisfactory mathematical frame-
work for his theory, so it lost out to the Big Bang regardless.
Edwin Hubble died in 1953. Astronomy has taken great
strides since then – some of them upon the Moon! Quasars and
pulsars have been discovered. Satellites have been placed in orbit
round the Earth, including the Hubble Space Telescope; and
exploratory craft have sent back detailed pictures of other plan-
ets and their moons. The Voyager spacecraft, launched in the
1970s, have exited the Solar System, and are now travelling
through interstellar space. Mapping of the galaxies has revealed
large scale structures involving huge numbers of galaxies; for
example, the Great Wall, discovered in 1989.
One discovery cosmologists thought very significant was made
in 1964. This was a low level radio hiss observed in all directions
in the universe: the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation
(CMBR). The existence of the CMBR had been predicted by
Big Bang cosmology, and so its discovery was treated as confir-
mation of the theory. It is said to be the afterglow of the initial
cosmic explosion, when a blast of light preceded the ejection of
matter, hence its uniform presence throughout the cosmos.
However, doubts later crept in, arising from that very ubiq-
uity. These doubts are known as ‘the Horizon Problem’. The

32 Philosophy Now
April/May 2020


The Last Question
With every passing moment that cannot be seized,
You discover that light cannot be captured and time
cannot be stopped,
And that life is fleeting.
You realize that most of the realities created in the
mind are illusory,
And most things in life are not important at all.
You recognize that all your efforts eventually fade
away with time,
Yet like Sisyphus you keep carrying the burden of life
in an uphill climb,
And find some measure of meaning in a seemingly
meaningless world.
You try to preserve your freedom within a nature that
enforces its rules on life,
And to maintain your dignity in a society that imposes
masks on you.
You endure through difficult challenges and failures,
And know that you must keep enduring to the end.
You wait in vain for a revelation about the unknow-
able that keeps its silence,
And admit that you will never reach a full understand-
ing of existence.
You think within the constraints of language and the
limits of reason,
And live between doubt and certainty, and between
illusion and reality.
You concede there may be no design in nature and no
Designer outside of it,
No final truth about life, and no absolute meaning in it.
You struggle not only with the answers, but with the
questions too.
Now what do you do?
© BEN G. YACOBI 2020
Ben G. Yacobi is the author/co-author of several books on
physics, as well as of a number of essays on philosophy.
But another problem has cropped up. The red shift of dis-
tant galaxies now appears to show that they are not merely reced-
ing but accelerating away from us. Big Bang cosmology being
otherwise unable explain this, it is now proposed that there is a
vast amount of otherwise undetectable ‘dark energy’, acting as
a repulsive force to push galaxies apart. As the Big Bang acquires
more bells and whistles to keep the maths right, perhaps a cos-
mological rethink might be timely.
Eclipsed by Dark Matter
A dramatic development in astronomy has been the realisation
that what cannot be seen is far more abundant than what we
can see. For instance, we cannot usually see a black hole because
its gravity is so strong that no light can escape it (hence the
name). We have to infer its presence from its effect on neigh-
bouring bodies, usually stars.
For many years black holes were thought of as merely a fan-
ciful possibility. But studies have since found evidence for a black
Infinity
hole at the centre of every galaxy, including our own Milky Way.
Black holes were also originally thought to be in a fixed state, but
theoretical work by Stephen Hawking has shown that they leak
radiation, and eventually evaporate. The largest black holes are
called ‘supermassive’, and they are vast. M87, for example, is forty
billion kilometres in diameter and therefore larger than the Solar
System. It has a mass six-and-a-half billion times that of the Sun.
Like black holes, the existence of dark matter was proposed
long before it was accepted. In 1933, Zwicky was studying the
Coma cluster of galaxies. He reasoned that the best explanation
for what he observed was that there was more ‘dark matter’ (his
term) present than visible matter. He meant by this matter which
does not reveal its presence except through its gravitational effects.
The idea lay dormant for forty years. Then in 1973, Jeremiah
Ostriker and James Peebles found that their computer simula-
tion of galaxy-formation would only produce the spiral arm
shape common amongst galaxies if they included a large amount
of dark matter. Likewise, when Vera Rubin and Kent Ford stud-
ied the rotational speeds of galaxies, they concluded that the
rotations could not be explained without large quantities of dark
matter. Astronomers now think that there is more dark matter
in the universe than ‘normal’ (baryonic) matter. What exactly
it is, though, is still a subject for debate.
The recent discoveries concerning black holes and dark
matter could be said to amount to a change of the premises on
which the argument for Big Bang cosmology was based: there
is much more matter in the universe than previously thought,
and that means much more gravity, too. These discoveries
should change our conception of the journey light takes when
it travels from another galaxy to our own. First, light is pulled
back by the gravity of the galaxy from which it departs; then it
travels across intervening gravitational fields; finally, it is pulled
inwards by the gravity of the Milky Way. So perhaps it is grav-
ity in all its forms which causes red shift, not recession, in which
case we have no need to assume that the universe is expanding.
Perhaps Slipher jumped to the wrong conclusion in 1912, and
Hubble should have looked before he leapt after him.
It is intriguing to think that we may be at the point of tran-
sition from one scientific paradigm to another. Just as Ptole-
maic cosmology gave way to the Copernican revolution, so Big
Bang cosmology may be about to give way to a cosmology based
on gravity and dark matter. It would be an upheaval of similar
significance. Big Bang Theory has given us a universe with a
starting point and a singular history, whereas the new cosmol-
ogy might imply a return to infinity – a cosmos with neither
beginning nor end, eternally recycling matter and energy as
galaxies and galactic structures coalesce, persist, explode, or
evaporate, and disperse, only to coalesce again elsewhere.
The Big Bang has been standard cosmology for so long that
it has acquired the appearance of established fact. But science
keeps moving onwards, discovering new facts and revising its
theories in the light of those discoveries. Like the Titanic,
which was labelled ‘unsinkable’, the Big Bang may have struck
a supermassive dark iceberg. We await further developments
with interest.
© LES REID 2020
Les Reid teaches a course on Humanism as part of the Edinburgh
City Council adult education programme.
April/May 2020
Philosophy Now 33
 Escaping the
Academic Coal Mine
David Rönnegard argues that academia must focus on unearthing gems.
s many as 37% of employees self-report that their jobs
A are pointless (YouGov poll, UK, 2015). The anthro-
pologist David Graeber has described a ‘pointless’ job
as one that would make no difference to anyone if it
ceases to exist. Such jobs are not confined to low qualification
tasks, such as telemarketing, but are also prevalent at various
levels of management. I would like to contend that one of the
most qualified positions one can hold, that of university profes-
sor, is pointless, too, at least in some respects.
Most professorial positions involve a combination of teaching
and research. The teaching part undoubtedly has its merits. Who
else would convey the body of knowledge that humanity has
acquired, but someone who has gained that knowledge? It is the
research part – the process of acquiring further knowledge – that
many a time seems pointless; or at least seems to miss the point.
According to some estimates, 82% of academic articles in the
humanities are not cited. Not once. The natural sciences fair
better, with only a quarter of articles never being cited. But still,
the numbers are startling. They suggest that there’s a vast amount
of research being produced that isn’t up to snuff; that’s not even
worth a mention. Is this a problem?
It need not be problematic per se. A system may need to pro-
duce waste to achieve the desired result. For example, a com-
petitive system might produce mostly losers and only a few win-
ners, but the losing competitors are needed to foster the best.
An apt metaphor for our academic setting might be that we
need a lot of coal to produce a few diamonds. But are we get-
ting enough diamonds from our coal?
It seems to me that the incentive system of academia is set
up to primarily produce coal. Academic positions, at least in the
Anglo-Saxon world, tend to be offered on a ‘publish or perish’
basis. In other words, in order to climb through the ranks to
attain tenure, every year a professor typically needs to publish
a stream of articles in peer-review journals. But is it reasonable
to expect the production of significant ideas on a schedule, espe-
cially one as short as a calendar year? By contrast, it took Charles
Darwin twenty years to publish The Origin of Species (contain-
ing perhaps humanity’s most ground-breaking idea); and
Ludwig Wittgenstein revolutionized twentieth century philos-
ophy twice during his lifetime, despite hardly publishing any-
thing for decades in between.
I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be a publication require-
ment for professors, but momentous ideas need time to mature.
Coal does not turn to diamond overnight. Indeed, seen through
this metaphor, coal production might be expected during pro-
fessorial infancy, while greater experience may eventually lead
to the production of gems. I believe that the bustle to churn
out research papers yearly helps explain the relative insignifi-
cance of many contributions. The phrase ‘least publishable unit’
(LPU) has been batted around academia for a while. It refers
34 Philosophy Now  April/May 2020
to the commonplace strategy of maximising your count of pub-
lications by making each one contain the smallest possible con-
tribution to the field needed for it to get published. This hardly
seems like a noble ambition; but it is understandable given the
perverse incentives.
However, we can’t lay the pointless research allegation entirely
at the feet of misguided incentives. Let us not forget the arcane
research interests of many an academic. I, for instance, am cur-
rently crafting an article that tinkers with aspects of John Rawls’
political theory that are so esoteric that they’re probably of no
interest to anyone not trapped inside the same isolated bubble.
So why do it? The simple answer is that the research is at least
meaningful to the author. Unfortunately, though, this sounds an
awful lot like self-gratification.
Such intellectual self-stimulation might be salvageable in a
wider context. It might be regarded as typical of primary research
that we don’t know where it’s going: it might even be the begin-
ning of a whole new way of seeing things. But ultimately, if
research is not being read beyond a nerdy few, is it worth doing,
at least in a professional context? Shouldn’t it rather be a hobby?
I am on the fence here, not least because of some of my own
geeky interests. Nevertheless, you cannot expect ground-break-
ing research from someone who is neither inspired nor encour-
aged to think freely; and in so encouraging them, some arcane
academic conversations will inevitably spring up, which might
lead to a new way forward, and so certainly cannot be censored.
But that doesn’t account for, nor justify, the uninspired, career-
driven, least-publishable-unit publications.
The incentive system could easily be improved in the spirit
of thinking freely with an eye to mining diamonds. Even within
the ‘publish or perish’ paradigm, a simple change from quan-
tity to quality would do wonders. For example, the University
of Chicago is said to more heavily evaluate the impact rather
than the number of articles in relation to career promotion, and
Chicago punches above its weight when it comes to Nobel Prizes
– it ranks #4, and is second to none within economics. Its seem-
ing wish to shun the academic paper churn not only makes sense,
it has shown results. So let’s at least start here. And for those of
us holding on tooth and nail to our pet intellectual interests, we
can continue to do so, but should know that if it gets too arcane
perhaps we’re not doing ourselves any professional favours.
After all, if academia has a purpose, it comes down to the cre-
ation and dissemination of knowledge. Research incentives
within academia should be structured with that in mind. Aca-
demic research is not just some esoteric hobby, or a series of
career hoops for tenure. It’s time to escape the coal mine.
© DR DAVID RÖNNEGARD 2020
David Rönnegard has a PhD in Philosophy from the London School
of Economics, and is a researcher and teacher in corporate social
responsibility in Stockholm.
 Brief Lives
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Mark Willingham looks at the philosophy of the great artist.

L
eonardo da Vinci died five hundred years ago last year, In his early teenage years, showing discernible talent,
and galleries all over the world commemorated this Leonardo was placed as an apprentice to the artist Andrea del
quincentenary. However, it was only long after his Verrocchio (1435-88) in Florence. Being in Florence at this time
death – after the re-discovery of his collection of note- was serendipitous for Leonardo, as it widened his horizons signif-
books – that other academic fields could legitimately start to icantly. He was not only surrounded by masters of painting and
claim Leonardo as one of their own. So, what does this polymath, sculpture, it was also a tolerant, vibrant, multicultural city – a far
Renaissance man, genius, have to add to the study of philosophy? cry from sleepy, rural Vinci. He had access to the great artists of
Well, surely if being a philosopher is anything, it is using the day, and was immersed in the cultural explosion at the very
enquiry to test claims and hypotheses from first principles, epicentre of the Renaissance. From his work there, under the
including using experiments to discern whether or not truth can tutelage of Verrocchio, we can observe the beginning of
be reached from them. Indeed, as Ludwig Wittgenstein stated, Leonardo’s epoch-changing contributions to art; notably, his
“Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity” (Tractatus unique ability to capture movement in his paintings. We can
Logico-Philosophicus, 1923) – in which case we might have plenty interpret this as his way of blending his art with his particular
to learn, not from a systematic exposition of a doctrine or the diagnosis of the human condition. In this we can sense Leonardo’s
expounding of a theory, but from Leonardo’s life, his methods, awareness that life is transient and fluctuating, not idealised and
and his spirit. From the select highlights of his life and work in overly posed, as in paintings more typical of the early Renaissance.
this brief summary, I think anyone who holds even a fraction of One instructive painting in this regard is Verrocchio’s Baptism
Leonardo’s restlessness or curiosity can find something within of Christ (1475). Commissioned as an altar piece, Jesus and John
his vast field of enquiry to deepen their own understanding. the Baptist lean towards each other in this solemn moment which
marks the commencement of Christ’s ministry, the dove of the
Leonardo Observes Life Holy Spirit hovering over Jesus as he receives the approval of the
Born on April 15 1452, Leonardo was not obviously destined for Father. Yet it is largely a static piece: it inspires reflection and
greatness. The small, provincial town of Vinci is not where one contemplation, but does not depict life as it is lived. The angel on
might expect a Renaissance master to hail from. Being left-handed
Baptism of Christ
was an inconvenience which had to be overcome (by writing back- detail
wards). He was also an illegitimate child (of a local notary), and
because of this, did not receive formal schooling. Winston
Churchill once quipped that his own education was briefly inter-
rupted by his attendance at school and perhaps in this light we
should view these circumstances of Leonardo’s early life as one of
history’s luckiest turns of events. Rather than receiving a tradi-
tional education, Leonardo had to educate himself, and as such,
became the epitome of an independent learner. Unrestricted by
subject boundaries, he became a master across an incredible range
of disciplines. Indeed, part of Leonardo’s appeal is that he seem-
ingly did not distinguish between the arts and the sciences. Life,
nature, and knowledge were for him all interconnected. If we fast
forward four hundred years to the early twentieth century, we
reach the logical positivist philosophers of the Vienna Circle, and
the idea that all theories must be verifiable, or else are meaningless.
They rejected the idea that philosophers should sit in ivory towers,
emitting unprovable metaphysical ideas. Leonardo too had a thirst
for verifiable knowledge produced through observation, hypothe-
sis, and repeated experimentation. He held that ‘wisdom was the
daughter of experience’, and his notebooks are incredible testi-
mony to his use of hypotheses and observations rather than a priori
intuitions. So, philosophically, perhaps we should label Leonardo
as an early empiricist, more than a hundred years before Locke et
al. As he wrote, “The eye, the window of the soul, is the chief
means whereby the understanding can most fully and abundantly
appreciate the infinite works of Nature.” A.J. Ayer and his Vienna
Circle friends would surely approve.

April/May 2020
Philosophy Now 35

Brief Lives
LEONARDO © KRISZTIAN KOTAI 2020
the bottom left, however, is believed to
have been painted by Leonardo. One can
immediately see that it has been painted
by an artist with a different agenda:
Leonardo’s angel is more alive, and, in
what became distinctive in Leonardo’s
style (culminating in the Mona Lisa) he
captures his subjects on the turn, showing
life in motion; capturing life in its change
and impermanence. After his painting
this, realising his apprentice’s genius,
legend has it that Verrocchio was left in a
state of despair.
Leonardo Looks Deeper
Another insight into Leonardo’s thirst
for knowledge and understanding of
what it means to be human comes from
his multiple dissections. These were not
without controversy. Although not abso-
lutely prohibited by the church at this
time, they were hardly encouraged. In
36 Philosophy Now
April/May 2020
many ways this perfectly sums up
Leonardo’s attitude to the church and
systematic religion: interested in the
same subject matter, but not one to be
constrained by a doctrinal straitjacket,
and learning by doing things himself
from first principles rather than from
established, orthodox authority. In one
notebook entry he writes in response to
the controversy surrounding his dissec-
tions that instead we should “rejoice that
our creator has provided an instrument
of such excellence”. If indeed we were
made in God’s image, Leonardo wanted
to see what lay underneath the canvas,
again blending his ability to capture
beauty externally when painting along-
side developing his scientific knowledge
of the human body. Giving advice to
others undertaking the same investiga-
tion, he notes that “You will perhaps be
deterred by your stomach”, and even if
you can withstand that “you may be
deterred by the fear of living through the
night hours in the company of quartered
and flayed corpses”.
Leonardo followed the dominant Aris-
totelian tradition of believing that the
physical bodies he was dissecting were in
some way intermingled with the spiritual
component we refer to as the mind or soul.
But, typically for Leonardo, he was not
content to accept purely speculative argu-
ment, and so his dissections sometimes
focused on finding out where the soul
might be located and how it operated. He
linked this investigation closely to his
study of optics and neurology, and estab-
lished that the brain was the recipient of
stimuli – so perhaps beginning to develop
an understanding of the link between con-
sciousness and the brain a hundred or so
years before Descartes set us ‘thinking
things’ off in a dualistic direction.
Leonardo’s dictum that ‘Simplicity is the
ultimate sophistication’ has an Ockhamist
vibe [‘The simplest possible explanation is
to be preferred’, Ed], and his observa-
tional approach would certainly have led
him towards an empirical rather than
metaphysical explanation for the soul.
Who knows what impact his findings may
have had on the mind-body debate had
they been printed and circulated? But his
notebooks lay unread, and his work as a
scientist was therefore largely unknown,
until many years after his death.
Leonardo’s astounding drawings of his
dissections were crucial for his portrai-
ture. His later paintings show a sophisti-
cated understanding of anatomy and how
the muscles worked in certain poses (espe-
cially in and around the neck, given his
penchant for capturing his subjects on the
turn). Art scholars such as Kenneth Clark
have sometimes expressed frustration that
Leonardo was so distracted by his other
interests that as a result there are so few of
his paintings for us to see. But Leonardo
saw painting as only one string to his bow.
In fact, in the early 1480s, when he was
seeking employment in the Court of
Ludovico Sforza in Milan, he set out a full
curriculum vitae of his interests and abili-
ties, notably in engineering and military
equipment design. His artistic talent is
mentioned only briefly towards the end of
his letter, almost as an addendum. This
may have been because he was more likely
to be employed because of his other tal-

ents; but surely if he saw himself as primarily a painter, he would
have introduced himself as such. More recently, scholars such as
Walter Isaacson examine how his interest in other disciplines
such as anatomy enhanced his art, and argue that we simply would
not revere his capturing of human beauty and form in the Mona
Lisa and other works if he had not acquired such knowledge.
Leonardo Lasts
Leonardo’s depiction of The Last Supper (1496) provides more
insight into his philosophical understanding of the human condi-
tion and our need for rhythm, order, and beauty. The scene cap-
tures the bombshell moment when Jesus reveals to his disciples that
one of them is shortly to betray him. Judas is caught recoiling,
unable to conceal his reaction to being rumbled. Besides the artistic
genius on display, in particular the creation of light and Leonardo’s
use of accelerated perspective (which he understood from his work
in stage productions), his use of geometry provides rhythm and
order in this otherwise noisy scene. Christ is slightly larger than the
other figures, and his head, at the precise centre of the painting (and
again caught on the turn), captures the eye first. He encapsulates
our human vulnerability and tenderness even when telling his clos-
est friends that one of them is a traitor. Leonardo’s art is here like a
Socratic dialogue in action: we are invited to fill in the backstory
and action, not simply be the recipient of instruction, as is more
typical of paintings of the early Renaissance.
This further demonstrates Leonardo’s relationship with the
Church: much more buttress than pillar – a supporter, but from
the outside. Leonardo’s homosexual relationship with Salai would
have made it impossible to have been in communion with the
Catholic Church, and one senses that he would have struggled
with some of the other doctrines of Catholicism too. In Lives of the
Artists, written in 1550 (and so our first biographical record),
Giorgio Vasari writes that Leonardo’s “cast of mind was so hereti-
cal that he did not adhere to any religion, thinking perhaps that it
was better to be a philosopher than a Christian.” But Leonardo did
not write systematically about either philosophy or his religious
beliefs, and it would be speculative to piece together the sayings
from 7,200 pages of notebooks to attempt to form a coherent nar-
rative about his beliefs. As a result we have an incomplete picture;
but it seems that at the very least he was a man with a deep under-
standing of the faith, if not its most rigid adherent.
The Last Supper
Brief Lives
Leonardo’s church designs were of the Florentine style, and so
based on strict geometrical order, in recognition of Vitruvius’s
dictum that the design of a temple should reflect the proportions
of a human body – hence Leonardo’s drawing of Vitruvian Man
(probably a self-portrait), which blends the shape of man and the
rules of geometry. One senses that Leonardo felt that religion pro-
vided order and purpose, and therefore its architecture should
reflect that. However, in his artistic masterpieces, even when
depicting sacred moments, he eschewed traditional religious dec-
oration, such as the use of haloes. This could simply reflect his dis-
comfort with convention, or the manifestation of his uncertainty
over some the Church’s teachings. However, Vasari’s account of
his death records Leonardo dying in a state of communion with
the Church, having taken the sacraments. This only serves to per-
petuate the uncertainty over his thought in this regard.
Any discussion of Leonardo normally begins or ends with his
masterpiece, the Mona Lisa. He worked on it during the last six-
teen years of his life, so clearly this was a painting of immense per-
sonal value and interest to him. In this portrait of a silk merchant’s
wife, Lisa Gherardini, we can see the apotheosis of his knowledge
and the blending of all his disciplines. The enigmatic smile is the
zenith of Leonardo’s anatomical, optical, scientific, and artistic
genius. He creates depth and perspective through the winding
river, whose gentle undulations are continued through her cloth-
ing, showing her and us to be inextricably linked with nature. The
eyes famously follow the viewer, and her pose is informal rather
than austere, capturing life as it is. Most strikingly, though, is this
theme of impermanence and transition, captured in the fleeting
smile. We catch Lisa, again on the turn, not static or posing, but
caught in a moment, and we are invited to develop our own inter-
pretation about what her expression or emotions are. Perhaps in
many ways Leonardo’s art reflects his restlessness and inquisitive-
ness; life is short and we should make the most of it.
Leonardo died, possibly of a stroke, at the Château du Clos
Lucé, Amboise, in central France, on 2 May 1519, at the age of
sixty-seven. He was buried in the church of the Chateau, which
was later demolished. What are hoped to be his remains now
reside in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert.
© MARK WILLINGHAM 2020
Mark Willingham teaches Religion & Philosophy at Bancroft’s
School, London.
April/May 2020
Philosophy Now 37

Letters About Nothing
DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 136, Sophia
Gottfried considers non-existence and
nothing. She mentions pure nothing-
ness, and asks whether empty space
would contain such a pure nothing, or
instead constitute something. In my
view, the purest kind of nothing means
the same as ‘none of anything’ or ‘not
anything’. A good way to define that
kind of nothing, would be to say that if
‘nothing’ possesses a particular attribute
X, then attribute X is not possessed at
all. By this definition, empty space
would not be nothing, because if empty
space has any attribute(s), then that
attribute is possessed by the space.
Gottfried wonders whether there can
have been a time when nothing existed.
Surely, for there to have been such a
time it would have had to exist. There
seems to be a contradiction in the idea
of nothing existing. In fact, this appears
to provide an explanation of why there is
something rather than nothing: nothing
existing is a contradiction.
Gottfried also discusses what does
not exist. I think there is also a paradox
regarding what does not exist: it would
seem that some things have to not exist
in order for other things to be able to
exist. For example, a round Earth can
only exist if a flat Earth does not. But
nothing can achieve the impossible feat
of being something that does not exist;
so, on the one hand, some things are
unreal, but on the other, nothing can be
unreal. On my website I explain why I,
unlike Bertrand Russell, believe that this
is a genuine paradox.
PETER SPURRIER
HALSTEAD, ESSEX
DEAR EDITOR: Sophia Gottfried’s essay
about nothing reminded me of a philo-
sophical joke about cars. “Nothing is
better than a Ferrari. But a 1993 Ford
Escort is better than nothing. So, a 1993
Ford Escort is better than a Ferrari.”
HELEN JARVIS, ABERDEEN
38 Philosophy Now l April/May 2020
Letters
When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up.
Email me at rick.lewis@philosophynow.org
Keep them short and keep them coming!
Climate of Change
DEAR EDITOR: As Wendy Lynne Lee’s
‘Dewey and Climate Denial2’ (Issue
135) suggests, it is crazy-scary how peo-
ple seem to be so immersed in corpo-
rate/capitalist values. The high priests
of it preach about ‘thinking outside of
the box’, but it seems the one box they
can’t seem to think outside of is con-
sumer capitalism. As a result we’re
reduced to our value as producer/con-
sumers. We see this all over the media,
especially in TV ads. The result? Go-
getters who live to accumulate, or bud-
ding entrepreneurs who are perfectly
willing to devote the time between
birth and death to an accumulation of
wealth. And if it’s not that, it’s people
driving in the latest update of a vehicle
in some beautiful panorama, with music
that suggests that we’re living in a
golden age thanks to consumer capital-
ism! We also have ads pimping services
that can get you out of the debt the
other adverts got you into in the first
place. It’s as if to say that it doesn’t
matter what consequences the market
creates, the market can always, for a
small fee, come up with a solution. It’s
become a kind of religion even. It use
to be: pray hard and follow these prin-
ciples, and you too may enter the king-
dom of heaven... now it’s: work hard
and follow these principles, and you too
may enter the kingdom of success!
D E TARKINGTON
NEBRASKA
DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 135, Wendy
Lynne Lee uses the term ‘Climate
Denial’ to condemn capitalism as an
unnatural pursuit of individual greed
destined to destroy the world. Presum-
ably, the deniers carelessly cause species
to die out, rivers to dry up, sea levels to
rise, crops to fail, etc. because they are
foolish, uneducated renouncers of true
knowledge. If only we didn’t have cars,
plastic, meat production and businesses
in general making profits, the planet
would be saved from destruction. Future
generations will thank us in centuries to
come for our actions to curb freedom
and consumption in the 2020s.
Therein lies the real danger of ‘the cli-
mate crisis’: urgent (always urgent) social
engineering. Here, the ‘deniers’ are fre-
quently the protesters and activists. Many
deny they want to change people’s
behaviour, for example. Of course they
don’t: they want to impose upon it.
Whilst the world and its billions of
people determine how to deal with
increasing temperatures, fears and crisis
scares are unhelpful and often mislead-
ing. They appear aimed not at ‘saving
the planet’ (which is unlikely to stop
orbiting the Sun), but at dictating
lifestyles and restricting democracy:
Socialism in a Green wrapper.
The term ‘climate change’ is all-
encompassing: it can literally be used to
cover any demand to restrict people’s
choices. Anyone who raises concerns is
‘denying climate change’. Moreover,
because it is a ‘global issue’, this allows
interest groups to justify overriding, or
just ignoring, national or regional con-
cerns, frequently using the legal system
to enforce unrealistic laws on unsuspect-
ing citizens. Those who vow to save the
planet by denying others cheap fuel,
meat and other resources, are seeking to
socially engineer penance on billions of
people by threat, fear and intimidation.
Capitalism, by contrast, requires co-
operation. Industry innovates, govern-
ments regulate. Capitalism can reduce
energy consumption because it wants to
produce goods more cheaply and effi-
ciently; it can create products which use
less resources by efficient production.
Other innovations, such as 3D printing,
which will reduce the need for transport-
ing goods, are led by capitalist innova-
tors. All this happens because of capital-
ism, not in spite of it. Lumbering public
bureaucracies are inflexible to change,
and often misguided by whims. Where
capitalism errs, those errors are either

corrected or the company disappears.
Freedom of choice is hard won and
easily lost. Without individual agency as
‘climate change crisis’ fatigue drains peo-
ple of innovation, the temperature may
well simply cease to be a concern. If all
this makes me a ‘denier’, so be it.
MICHAEL STABLES
HERTFORDSHIRE
There Are Others
DEAR EDITOR: I thoroughly enjoyed
Prof Kaufman’s ‘The Ethics of Discrimi-
nation’ in Issue 135. Discrimination
affects us all to a greater or lesser extent,
either as discriminators or as the dis-
criminated against. He points out ways
of using reason to identify discrimina-
tory behaviour in ourselves and others in
order to avoid its pitfalls. However, per-
haps our starting point should be accept-
ing that none of us is entirely responsible
for either our attitudes to others or our
reactions to them. Each of us is the cur-
rent sum total of our previous life, our
genes, and the fate or fortune of the cir-
cumstances into which we were born.
We have hardly any say in how we
develop and relate to others. It’s mostly a
question of our histories to date, and
pure luck.
‘What has this got to do with discrim-
ination?’ you might ask. Changing our
basic thought and behaviour patterns
and our prejudices is difficult, and often
requires psychotherapy and learning to
look at life differently. It would be much
easier if we all accepted one another as
‘subjects in progress’. Discriminating
against others can only end with being
discriminated against ourselves. What
goes around comes around.
MIKE JOSLIN
DORCHESTER
Freedom & Bondage
DEAR EDITOR: Gary Cox, in his valuable
interview discussing existentialism in PN
136, recognises insufficiently that exis-
tentialism often puts too much emphasis
on our inalienable freedom and too little
on our inalienable bondage. But we are
bound by many things. We are bound by
our genetic inheritance. If our parents
were small, most professional sports will
be closed to us; if they were of low intel-
ligence, then we will be unable to enter
the learned professions. We are bound
by the chances of conception. If a gamete
bearing a Y-chromosome fertilised your
mother’s egg, you will never bear a child.
We are bound by our upbringing. If your
parents denied you an education, then
again the learned professions are closed
to you. (This happened in my extended
family.) There are many ways in which
our early life limits our choices. But
mostly we are bound by our situation. If
you are born into a peasant family in an
impoverished Third World country,
your choices are very limited indeed.  about the existence of God. Their seven
It is not true that anxiety has been
encouraged by growth in the number of
‘support’ professionals. Pathological anx-
iety is a distressing and disabling mental
illness. It’s recognised more these days,
but still inadequately treated, because of a
lack of trained therapists. However, Gary
is right that it is a mistake to hope for or
to seek perfect happiness.
Existentialism is currently popular
with middle class European intellectuals.
Like many philosophies of life, it empha-
sises an important truth: we are respon-
sible for the effects on ourselves and on
others of our freely chosen actions.
Existentialism’s scope is, nevertheless,
somewhat limited.
ALLEN SHAW
LEEDS
Face Values
DEAR EDITOR: In her article in Issue 135,
Sally Latham proposes the theory of
Emojivism, which is based on the premise
of emotivism, that ‘moral judgments do
not have factual content but are expres-
sions of emotions’. To consider this I
would like to recall the theory of speech
acts first introduced by John Austin, then
worked on by John Searle.
According to this theory, speaking is
not only an action, it contains action. For
example, when I say “Murder is wrong”,
I am not only claiming that I disagree
with murder but also condemning mur-
der, as well as trying to persuade others
that they should not commit murder.
This is vastly different from just
expressing emotions, as emotivism sug-
gests. The fundamental problem is that
the article is based on this proposition,
which proves to be problematic when
compared to the Speech Acts theory.
Also, the closeness between action and
fact implies that moral propositions
have a basis in fact, even if they centre in
my emotions. It would have been bene-
Letters
ficial for the article to reflect about all
this, or at least to have a deeper concern
with philosophy of language, in order to
fortify its own basis.
DAVID ALVES
MADEIRA, PORTUGAL
Modern Omniscience
DEAR EDITOR: I heard a super cute story
that made me laugh. Two philosophy
professors were at home having a debate
year old son was listening nearby and
suddenly interrupted to say, “Don’t
worry. I’ll Google it.”
TERRI MURRAY
LONDON
Bad Thoughts? Full Marx!
DEAR EDITOR: I was not surprised to see
Ayn Rand make your feature ‘Who is the
Worst Philosopher’ in Issue 135. How-
ever, I was somewhat confused by the
two authors’ reasoning. Tipton claims
that “the work of a poor philosopher is
liable to consist of unclear and indistinct
ideas.” I agree; but according to this
standard Rand should be considered a
great philosopher: she regularly defined
her terms, and illustrated them with
clear examples. As she wrote, “Defini-
tions are the guardians of rationality, the
first line of defense against the chaos of
mental disintegration.” Tipton also
claims that “a great philosopher always
recognizes their influences, paying close
attention to and acknowledging the ideas
of their predecessors.” Again, I agree.
And although Rand wrote, “The only
philosophical debt I can acknowledge is
to Aristotle”, she also openly admired
Aquinas and Locke, among others.
Finally, Tipton claims, “A great philoso-
pher’s ideas must be highly original.”
Rand’s theory of concept-formation as
based upon ‘measurement-omission’ is
unique. Her theory of the needs of our
form of life as the basis of values and
ethics (which predates Philippa Foot’s
view) is also entirely original.
Tarkington groups Rand’s ideas with
Spencer’s and Nietzsche’s. This is odd
since Rand explicitly rejected the ideas of
both men: asked her opinion of
Nietzsche, she responded, “It’s a low
estimate, philosophically, I disagree with
him emphatically on all fundamentals...
Nietzsche was a subjectivist and an irra-
tionalist.” She condemned Herbert
April/May 2020 l Philosophy Now 39
Letters
Spencer because he “chose to decide that
the theory of evolution and adaptation
to the environment was the key to man’s
morality – and declared that the moral
justification of capitalism was the sur-
vival of the species... that whoever was of
no value to the race, had to perish.”
Finally, Tarkington claims Rand
believed in ‘corporate servitude’. Does
this square with her remark, “The prin-
ciple of individual rights is the only
moral base of all groups or associations.
Any group that does not recognize this
principle is not an association, but a
gang or a mob”?
Your readers may wish to take a more
considered look at the work of Ayn Rand.
RAY SHELTON
GLENDALE, CA
DEAR EDITOR: John Talley (Philosophy
Now 135) rates Karl Marx as history’s
worst philosopher. I’d like to suggest
radically different perspectives on the
three areas of Marx’s philosophy which
he highlighted for special criticism.
First, Talley claims Marx’s philoso-
phy led to inhumane political regimes.
Let’s consider China. Their communist
revolution occurred sixty six years after
Marx’s death, and it was not the result
of his philosophy; rather, it was the
product of over a century of foreign
invasion, occupation, exploitation, and
civil war. It was much the same story for
most other socialist regimes, including
the Soviet Union and Cuba.
Furthermore, despite this prior devasta-
tion, the Chinese people made major
gains during the Maoist era. Amartya
Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize in
Economics, compared the mortality
rates of India and China between 1949,
the time of the Chinese Revolution,
when they were almost identical, and
1979, three years after Mao’s death. His
conclusion – that had India experienced
the same mortality rates as China, its
population would have been over 100
million greater by 1979 than it was – is
surely a significant corrective.
Second, Talley claimed that for Marx
“the means of production determined
human history”. But in reality Marx
(unlike Hegel) was not a determinist,
and was loathe to make predictions.
Rather, he was an analyst of contempo-
rary capitalism and of its inherent insta-
40 Philosophy Now l April/May 2020
bility. Adam Smith and David Ricardo
had both noted the long-term tendency
under capitalism for profitability to fall
and lead to recurrent crises. If there
were inevitabilities within capitalism,
they were these crises. What Marx
added was an empirically-based theory
explaining this instability, based on the
‘labour theory of value’. For Marx, his-
tory was driven, not by the means of
production, but by the fetters which the
‘relations of production’ – the way that
people relate to the means of production
– put on the productive forces. While
this is a highly esoteric part of Marxist
theory, there can be no better illustra-
tion of this in our own time than in John
Talley’s own country, the USA. There,
despite an apparently healthy 80%
growth in productivity between 1973
and 2000, the bulk of the population, far
from benefitting, experienced an actual
fall in wages of 10%.
Talley’s third claim was that, accord-
ing to Marx, there is no real human
agency in history, and ideas have no
effect in it. But this is not so. It was pre-
cisely because of his recognition of non-
material factors in social and political
change that Marx was so keen on the
promotion of political education while
many revolutionaries around him were
urging immediate insurrections across
Europe. Like countless historians for
centuries before him, he did however
consider the economic ‘base’ of society
to be a more powerful force for change
than the ‘superstructure’ of social insti-
tutions such as the church, the media,
and systems of public education. (The
superstructure is listed by Terry
Eagleton as ‘the state, law, politics, reli-
gion and culture’.) For Marx, the prima-
ry role of the superstructure in class
society is to give moral legitimacy to the
base: as Marx put it in his Grundrisse
(1858), “the class that is the ruling mate-
rial force of society is at the same time
the ruling intellectual force.” Its primary
function is the maintenance of its privi-
lege. If this was so in Marx’s day, consid-
er how much more so it is today, when
the media is increasingly under the con-
trol of huge corporations. In France, Le
Figaro is owned by the Dassault Group,
an arms manufacturer, while in the USA
the CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, owns
the Washington Post.
Karl Marx’s analysis of the dynamics
and inner workings of nineteenth centu-
ry capitalism will continue to have pow-
erful resonance and provide inspiration
and hope for those seeking a safer, fairer,
more stable and more peaceful world.
NEIL THOMAS
CARDIFF
Philosophy: What Is It Good For?
DEAR EDITOR: Many people outside the
philosophical community make the criti-
cism that philosophy has drifted into
mere debate for debate’s own sake.
Some add that it’s simply become an
exercise in putting out novel ideas with
little to no evidence behind them. Much
of this criticism comes from a religious
perspective, some of it from the scien-
tific.
So where are we at? Well, I think for
starters that we need to recognise what
philosophical dialogue aims at, and what
kind of discussion is most profitable. To
my mind, all philosophy is the pursuit of
truth, of understanding, and thereby of
wisdom. This means that when we do
engage in debate or argument, our goal
should be nothing less than this truth.
How do we get there? Here is where
reason becomes significant. Each claim
and counter-claim, thesis and antithesis,
needs to be vigorously dissected and
tested. Floating theories founded upon
sheer speculation is all well and good,
but more of an imaginative and even an
artistic exercise that philosophy can
improve upon. This is not to denigrate
such speculation. Indeed, were it not for
our imagination we would not have the
poetry of the Qu’ran and the Upanishads,
the architectural wonder of Chartres
Cathedral, or the symphonies of Mozart.
Imaginative and spiritual thinking gives
us religion, and much else besides, set-
ting our sights on the infinite, and on
what lies beyond reason’s ken. Maybe we
can better organise our philosophy by
taking into account Stephen Jay Gould’s
‘Non-Overlapping Magisteria’? For
myself, I enjoy dipping into both the
transcendental mindset and also the sci-
entific. Yet, when logic and reason begin
to lose ground I take stock, lest my mind
be lost in an ocean of conflicting
assumptions and theories.
ANTHONY MACISAAC
INSTITUT CATHOLIQUE DE PARIS
IMAGE BY CAROL BELANGER GRAFTON
Life & The Mind
Peter Adamson wonders if we can learn philosophy from a life.
R
ecently I was chatting with
some bright young philoso-
phers about the role of biogra-
phy in the history of philoso-
phy. One of them, Daniel Drucker, offered
a nice observation about Friedrich Niet-
zsche. Just as, for the sake of his philosoph-
ical reputation one might see Gottlob
Frege as having been lucky to have died
before the rise of Nazism (which, given
discoveries about his rabid antisemitism,
he might well have supported), so Niet-
zsche was unlucky not to have lived to a
ripe old age, for he would then have had a
chance to explicitly reject Nazism, a move-
ment whose misplaced association with his
thought has tarnished his name.
We are drawn to the life stories of
famous philosophers, but Nietzsche’s story
has a stronger pull than most. His youthful
appointment as a university philology pro-
fessor, his withdrawal from that post to live
a rather isolated life as a philosopher, and his
descent into infirmity and madness, possi-
bly as a result of syphilis – to say nothing of
his mustache – are at least as well-known as
his actual ideas. His sister Elisabeth edited
and reinterpreted his unpublished notes to
form an association between his philosophy
and Nazism, making him seem the
harbinger of another descent into madness,
this time writ large across the globe. So,
more than most thinkers, Nietzsche raises
the question of the relevance of biography
for philosophy. Is our reading of Nietzsche
usefully informed by our knowledge of his
upbringing, his illness, his taste in music and
art? Or are these distractions? Perhaps it
would be better to know less about him, just
as we know little about philosophers who
came much earlier in the history of thought.
Or is the answer to those questions obvi-
ous? Namely, that it depends. Not all bio-
graphical information is relevant to evaluat-
ing someone’s philosophy, but some of its
surely is. If we were ignorant of his impres-
sive mustache, our understanding of Niet-
zsche would not be diminished. But our
understanding is increased by knowing that
Philosophy Then
Nietzsche’s father was a Lutheran pastor
who died when Friedrich was very young –
a vital fact for contextualizing his searching
critique of Judeo-Christian morality.
Happily, there’s plenty of material to sift
through if you want to bring his life to bear
on his life’s work. One volume entitled Con-
versations with Nietzsche (1987, Ed. Sander
L. Gilman), is devoted to the testimonies of
Nietzsche’s acquaintances. In it we find
plenty of trivia, and plenty that is not at all
trivial. Take just one witness, Resa von
Schirnhofer, who met Nietzsche numerous
times and wrote reminiscences of him in her
letters. We are glad to learn, but probably
didn’t need to learn, that to protect her
Nietzsche once gallantly chased away a herd
of cows with an umbrella. Yet many details
in her letters seem more telling. He advised
an older Catholic lady not to read his writ-
ings as they might upset her. He boasted to
von Schirnhofer that his pulse rate was the
same as Napoleon’s. He was courtly with
her, and with females generally, and some-
what apologetic for having written misogy-
nist lines such as “You are going to women?
Do not forget your whip!” As for the appro-
priation of his ideas by anti-Semites, she
tells us that he was generally not disparaging
of Jews, although he did speak of Jewish
blood in Wagner’s family “with a pejorative
nuance.”
We can learn something else from these
letters, too, which is that the line between
biographical information and philosophi-
cal discourse is a blurry one. Von Schirn-
hofer repeats direct quotes from Nietzsche
that are philosophically significant. “One
probably never discards prejudices,” he
told her, “without falling into a new preju-
dice: one is never free of prejudices” (p.148).
And in response to objections pressed by
von Schirnhofer herself, “he often stressed
I should not consider him a destroyer of
old values; he wanted to build them on a
sound foundation” (p.193-4). This isn’t
mere gossip, but a (very incomplete) report
of a bona fide philosophical dialogue. The
writings of, and about, many other
philosophers, teach us the same lesson –
that life and thought are not so easily kept
apart. This is most obvious in the case of
authors who used autobiography to
explore philosophical ideas, from Augus-
tine in his Confessions (400 AD) to Frederick
Douglass in his three autobiographical
narratives (1845 on). Douglass stressed, “I
have never placed my opposition to slavery
on a basis as narrow as my own enslave-
ment.” However, his personal account of
the injustice he suffered was a big part of his
case for a more just America. Acolytes have
also recounted stories about their masters
as a way to convey their ideas. The follow-
ers of Confucius, for instance, saw deep
meaning in his smallest gestures and
habits, such as his way of straightening his
mat before sitting down. Around the same
time, Socrates’ ideas and distinctive way of
life inspired the writings of Plato.
There is a strong temptation here – never
more powerful than in the cases of Socrates
and Confucius – to suppose that the great
philosopher must live a great life. That’s why
we’re so disappointed to learn that Frege was
an anti-Semite, or that Seneca served as a
propagandist for Nero. In extreme cases,
information about a thinker’s life may make
it nearly impossible to appreciate their
thought in a way we’d like. Many feel this
way about Martin Heidegger, for instance,
who did live at the right time to support
Nazism, and did so without hesitation. We
expect better of our intellectual heroes.
That’s a sentiment we can detect in the
letters of von Schirnhofer, who was unable
to recognize the Nietzsche of ‘immoderate’
later writings such as Ecce Homo (1888) as the
polite and well-mannered man with whom
she had enjoyed food, music, and walks. For
some philosophers, interpretation begins
early. The life is measured against the ideas,
and vice versa, even before the life is over.
© PROF. PETER ADAMSON 2020
Peter Adamson is the author of A History of
Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Vols 1-5,
available from OUP. They’re based on his
popular History of Philosophy podcast.
April/May 2020
Philosophy Now 41

Books
Bullshit Jobs
by David Graeber
IN HIS BOOK POST-INDUS-
trial Society (1969), Alain
Touraine defined a post-
industrial society as one in
which the service sector generates more
wealth than the manufacturing sector. Most
developed countries are already in this situ-
ation and most other countries are heading
straight towards it.
This shift from the industrial to the post-
industrial has advantages and disadvantages.
Among the advantages is the reduction of
industrial pollution. It has also been said that
in post-industrial societies knowledge will
become the most valued resource and form
of capital: the production of ideas will become
the main way to grow the economy. Post-
industrial societies invest in creativity, and
they appreciate the work of creative profes-
sionals such as scientists and designers.
Among the disadvantages is an intensification
of social exclusion, which Daniel Bell already
pointed out in 1973 in The Coming of the Post-
Industrial Society. But in recent years, another
problem, which I want to address here, has
moved to the foreground. The post-indus-
trial society has produced a culture in which
work is estranged or ‘alienated’ – entfremdet
in Marx’s German – not because it follows the
patterns of industrialization, as Marx once
said, but because it has lost the industrial ideal.
Since it is not bound to produce anything,
much work in post-industrial societies has
become inefficient, narcissistic, and superflu-
ous. I’m talking about the sort of work the
anthropologist David Graeber describes in
his book Bullshit Jobs (2018).
Bullshit jobs, says Graeber, are mainly
white-collar jobs. He analyzes the work of HR
consultants, communications coordinators,
PR researchers, financial strategists, corpo-
rate lawyers, and others. As the blue-collar
sector has shrunk, unnecessary workers have
been acquired upstairs in recently-emerged
management roles.
Many jobs in post-industrial societies are
meaningless. A poll in the Netherlands
found that 40% believe their jobs to be
meaningless (p.5). However, in post-indus-
trial societies we do not work less but more,
because increasingly pointless tasks are
continually invented: “Technology has been
marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to
42 Philosophy Now  April/May 2020
This issue we consider the human condition and beyond,
as Thorsten Botz-Bornstein writes in praise of Industry
in our postindustrial morass, Roberto Manzocco explores
the posthuman condition, and Chad Trainer asks whether
animals should be considered moral ‘ends in themselves’.
make us all work more. In order to achieve
this, jobs have had to be created that are,
effectively, pointless” (p.xvi). So we are
industrious in the post-industrial society;
but is it the right kind of industriousness?
It used to be thought that once the indus-
trial period was left behind, all the problems
of the industrial period would be left behind,
too. But obviously this is not the case. We
reproduce the industrial world’s major prob-
lems, and make the situation even worse by
depriving society of its productive ground.
Work is more meaningless and entfremdet
than it has ever been before. Administrators
maintain a working culture that keeps us busy
as if we were still living in an industrial soci-
ety, although in reality we aren’t. Innumer-
able white-collar workers engage in endless
sequences of box-ticking rituals revolving
around monthly targets. The post-industrial
system has created a working world of mind-
less hyperactivity (evaluations, quantitative
measuring, control, standardization) that are,
most of the time, enforced by administrators.
People spend their time handling meaning-
less numbers supposed to give the illusion of
control. Services can be multiplied as long as
service providers buy services from other
service providers. Services can also be
outsourced to agencies who will buy services
from other agencies. The logical conse-
quence is an increase of bullshit jobs in which
neither goods nor knowledge are produced.
This kind of work culture would have been
unacceptable to earlier capitalists.
Post-industrial administrators claim to
have overcome the industrial world to reach
a better, post-industrial world. The stan-
dardization and evaluation methods they
preach are meant to be humanitarian, and
supposed to guarantee social equality. The
problem is that there is not much substance
behind the façade. The positive image of the
post-industrial world crumbles away.
Social Media Is Bullshit
Another recent book bearing the word ‘bull-
shit’ in the title is B.J. Mendelson’s Social
Media is Bullshit (2012). Social media and
post-industrial society are closely linked. The
post-industrial society is an information soci-
ety, and the processing of information, useful
or not, has become an occupation of almost
everybody, from the multinational media
company to the Facebook sharer.
Social media thrives particularly well in
post-industrial societies because post-indus-
trial workers have time to spend chatting on
the net in a way their Fordist (production-
line-working) ancestors couldn’t have even
dreamt of. In this way, bullshit jobs and bull-
shit media are connected through a vicious
circle: there’s an attempt to compensate the
loss of a meaningful working life through an
increased use of social media. But the ‘mean-
ing’ found in social media activities is just as
unreal as the ‘meaning’ propagated by bullshit
jobs. Both bullshit jobs and social media, with
their illusions of recognition and gratification,
speculate with an ‘as if’ – as if something is
being made or changed – but they provide no
meaningful purposes in work or in life.
Whence came all these books with ‘bull-
shit’ in their titles? It is probably the fault of
Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt,
who turned the word ‘bullshit’ into an official
philosophical term in his short bestselling
book On Bullshit (2005). He defined ‘bullshit’
as different from lying because, contrary to
the liar, the bullshitter does not try to
deceive. Rather, he is indifferent to the truth
or falsity of what he says (p.6-7). The bull-
shitter is “bluffing but not lying, bullshit is
not false, but merely fake and phony” (p.47).
In bullshit jobs, the ‘doing as if’ creates a new
type of bullshit. The neoliberal bosses, as
well as the narcissistic social media, attempt
to establish an alternative reality that’s not
false but merely fake and phony.
The Knowledge Society Is Bullshit
Is post-industrial society a knowledge soci-
ety? Had the intention really been to create a
knowledge society, one would have suitably
revised industrial methods and made them
Book Reviews

efficient in terms of their new values and
usefulness, since without values and useful-
ness ‘knowledge’ is meaningless. But instead,
what the ‘knowledge’ post-industrial society
produces is information manufactured in the
worst possible industrial fashion and subse-
quently sold as a service. And because in post-
industrial society essentially services buy
services, the quantity of useless information
will soon become overwhelming.
Nineteenth century workers also found
their work meaningless and alienating, true;
but at least they were actually producing
something. The post-industrial economy has
not reformed industrial production in order
to install more meaning and to make it less
alienating. Instead, it has adopted the worst
elements from the industrial period, although
priding itself on having overcome the archaic
working patterns of the industry. However,
by ‘overcoming’ the industrial age in an
oblique fashion, post-industrial society has
deprived itself of the most basic ideal of the
industrial age, which is the production of
something valuable, useful, and real. The only
thing that has really been overcome is the idea
of efficiency. It was originally hoped that with
the development of sophisticated technology
much of the monotonous labor seen in factory
production would become obsolete. The
contrary is the case. It continues in bullshit
jobs, and is replicated in, for example, the
mindless overuse of smartphones.
Which problems from the industrial age
have actually been fixed? Pollution has been
reduced to a degree; but inequality is on the
rise, and working conditions in industries such
as the food industry have become even worse.
Bullshit jobs and social media keep us
busy but prevent us from producing
anything of value. A vague idea of efficiency
has been taken over from the industrial
period, but it has been deprived of meaning
because there’s no production. The ideal
tends to be reissued in the form of ‘excel-
lence.’ It is also very likely that there’s a
political program behind it.
The Busy-Bee Syndrome
Jacques Ellul said one should characterize a
society by the fundamental values it has
established (Ellul For Himself, 2008, pp.174-
175). But post-industrial society has never
established values, apart from vague ideals
of knowledge (increase of information) and
excellence (being ‘the best’ in whatever
area). And while the industrial period was
the time of revolts, populations occupied
with busywork and social media have less
time to revolt. The result is the busy-bee
syndrome of pseudoproductivity now preva-
lent in all kinds of white-collar professions.
Industrial society is often seen as an inter-
mediate phase between agrarian society and
Book Reviews
post-industrial society. The idea stems from
Jean Fourastié, the great optimist of technol-
ogy, who invented the Three-Sector Model.
Ecological romanticism holds that the defi-
ciencies of the post-industrial world can best
be solved by looking for inspiration in Sector
1, the agrarian society. Nobody looks for
virtues in industrial society. Industrial society
has been entirely discredited: ‘industry’ stands
for pollution, mechanization, low quality mass
production, and inequality. One whole indus-
trial world – the Soviet bloc – collapsed. A
flight into a brand new utopian post-industrial
world seems to be the most logical choice. And
if we manage to import some elements from
the pre-industrial period, maybe we’ll have a
reasonably good life?
However, there are a few valuable virtues
industry can offer us, such as productivity,
efficiency, and the ideal of collective work.
But post-industrial society has abandoned
those virtues. On top of this, the errors of the
industrial society have not been fixed, because
we believe we have left this era for good. The
mistakes will be repeated on another level. In
this sense, the post-industrial is the continu-
ation of the industrial. Instead of improving
industrial society by learning from its
mistakes, we introduce random virtues from
the agrarian pre-industrial period, such as
ecological ideas and alternative businesses.
Looking closer, an improved industrial
society would look very much like what many
people thought an ideal post-industrial soci-
ety should look like (but never did). Henri de
Saint-Simon, a French philosopher of the
early nineteenth century coined the term
‘industrialism’ to mean an industrial mode of
production delivering economic and politi-
cal superiority (Catéchisme des Industriels,
1824). The new industrial mode was
supposed to replace the non-productive
class, the aristocracy. Saint-Simon’s vision is
as optimistic as Daniel Bell’s later descrip-
tions of post-industrial society. It is therefore
ironic that Graeber puts forward ‘managerial
feudalism’ as the most fundamental pattern
of the new service sector jobs because these
jobs are not due to economic needs but to the
managers’ need of underlings. On top of this,
managerial feudalism is mixed with what
Christopher Lasch called ‘managerial
narcissism’, and creates an absurd working
culture of pseudo-industriousness. We end
up with the worst elements of the industrial
and the pre-industrial periods.
Welcome to the twenty-first century.
© DR THORSTEN BOTZ-BORNSTEIN 2020
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein is Associate Professor
of Philosophy at the Gulf University for Science
and Technology, Kuwait.
• Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graeber, 2018,
$18.99 hb, 368 pages, ISBN: 978-1501143311
Books
Philosophical
Posthumanism
by Francesca Ferrando
TO TALK ABOUT POSTHU-
manism we have to go back
to a relatively distant past –
to the philosophical rift that separated the
analytical philosophy of the Anglo-Ameri-
can tradition from the Continental one that
has dominated the philosophical culture of
Europe. In its constant deconstruction of
the basic assumptions of mainstream West-
ern philosophy (from Plato to the 19th
Century), modern Continental thinking
takes its main inspiration from Nietzsche.
From Nietzsche onwards, it has focused on
dismantling God, the subject, objectivity or
truth, and rationality, in a process of nihilist
liquefaction. And although some have tried
to counter this process, many more others
have decided to adopt the opposite strategy
– that is, to accept and indeed try to ‘inhabit’
this nihilistic condition. Philosophical
posthumanism can be considered part of this
wide philosophical current.
As a term, ‘posthumanism’ was born
within Literary Theory, specifically
through a now famous 1977 essay by Ihab
Hassan, ‘Prometheus as Performer: Toward
a Posthumanist Culture?’ Philosophical
posthumanism is an articulated or varie-
gated movement that aims to continue the
process of dethroning the human subject
begun precisely with the three ‘masters of
suspicion’ – Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud.
One of the central premises of this decen-
tering of human subjectivity, is that human-
ity is only one species among many. From
this it follows that the human perspective on
reality is just one of the possible perspectives
of the many species that co-inhabit our
planet. Essentially, humanity is seen as a
species among others, without a particular
cognitive primacy. The accusation raised by
posthumanists against the contemporary
cultural milieu (an accusation which, ironi-
cally, has found traction in popular culture),
is that of ‘anthropocentrism’ or humancen-
tredness, an ‘original sin’ that may or may
not be rectifiable. Posthumanism is an
attempt to escape the constraints of the
human condition; not in order to abandon
the human gaze, but rather to be inclusive
toward non-human viewpoints. It traces the
limits of human thought and knowledge,
while at the same time trying to capture the
cognitive panorama beyond the human hori-
zon. In short, it attempts to see things from
a non-human viewpoint. This is an unknown
(and largely unknowable) landscape.
Several contemporary thinkers belong to
this movement. Philosophers of posthuman-
ism include Donna Haraway, Katherine
April/May 2020  Philosophy Now 43
 Books
Hayles, Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, David
Roden, and of course, Francesca Ferrando. In
her recent erudite compendium Philosophical
Posthumanism (2019), Ferrando offers a
review of the posthumanist movement, of its
philosophical underpinnings, and of its rela-
tions with other movements, including tran-
shumanism. Indeed, Ferrando argues that
transhumanism is a manifestation of posthu-
manist philosophy.
Transhumanism is a political, cultural
and philosophical movement that aims to
overcome the limits of the human condition.
The transhumanists’ objectives are to live
longer, overcome our current cognitive
limitations, even to improve our bodies in
new ways, using technologies which are still
in the early stage of development, or yet to
be invented. We could define transhuman-
ism as an ideology; but transhumanism
possesses a peculiar characteristic that sepa-
rates it from other ideologies: its flexibility.
It is compatible with any other ideology or
philosophy willing to accept its fundamental
premise – that modifying the human organ-
ism through technology is a good idea. We
find transhumanists who define themselves
as Marxists, liberals, libertarians, even
Christians. Posthumanism itself shares
many concepts with transhumanism,
including the ideas of the ‘cyborg’, ‘morpho-
logical freedom’ (the right to change body
shape to our liking), ‘self-directed evolu-
tion’, and much more.
HUMANITY: LIFE & DEATH. PAST & FUTURE © PAUL GREGORY
44 Philosophy Now  April/May 2020
Philosophical Posthumanism contains a series
of original reflections which will not fail to
stimulate robust discussion. In particular,
Ferrando discusses the role that technology
has played in defining what ‘human’ and
‘posthuman’ mean, and how the human
subject is shaped by the technology it uses
(especially in reference to Michel Foucault’s
concept of ‘Technologies of Self’). Particu-
larly interesting to me was Ferrando’s reflec-
tion on ‘The Epiphany of Becoming Human’,
which does not neglect to mention the famous
‘Overview Effect’, the radical psychological
change many astronauts underwent after
observing the Earth literally from the outside.
Ferrando does not stop at the edge of space,
but builds an ontology of the posthuman that
embraces the whole of reality, extending
posthumanism’s scope to the entire universe,
and indeed, to all possible universes. In the
final part of her text, Ferrando analyzes the
fascinating and controversial notion of the
multiverse. Here she applies posthumanist
thought to question whether, in imagining
other universes, we do not in some way color
them with our anthropocentric prejudice.
© ROBERTO MANZOCCO 2020
Roberto Manzocco is an Italian author, journal-
ist, and historian of science who specializes in the
history and philosophy of biology, technological
innovation, and technological forecasting.
• Philosophical Posthumanism, Francesca Ferrando,
Bloomsbury, $82 hb, 296 pages, ISBN: 9781350059498
Fellow Creatures
by Christine Korsgaard
DO WE HAVE A MORAL DUTY
to treat non-human animals
well? Are they sufficiently like us to be
considered ‘moral beings’? According to
Immanuel Kant in his essay ‘Speculation on
the Beginning of Human History’ (1786),
man’s conception of himself as the ‘true end
of nature’ prompted us to exalt ourselves
“altogether beyond any community with
animals”, relegating other animals to the
status of mere means and tools for humans.
But for moral philosopher Christine Kors-
gaard, the questions of how we’re related to
other animals, and whether it matters how
we treat them, take us into the ‘existential
heart of philosophy’. It confuses her, there-
fore, that relatively few philosophers have
ventured into this territory. She sets out to
redress this balance somewhat with her book
Fellow Creatures (2018).
To Korsgaard, Kant’s outlook on animals
seems nothing short of “inherently unstable,
if not absolutely incoherent.” This is part of
the general instability in humanity’s atti-
tudes toward animals. The complaint from
people that they’re ‘being treated like
animals’ betrays the very real contrast they
make between themselves and “beings
whom we take to have a lower value.” Kant
argued that “The fact that man can have the
idea ‘I’ raises him infinitely above all the
other beings living on earth… irrational
animals… we can dispose of as we please.”
The duty Kant imagines we owe to animals
amounts to no more than the duty we might
consider we owe to great paintings, say, to
preserve them in good condition and appre-
ciate their beauty. Our motives to protect
them are not on account of any particular
obligations Kant thinks we have to the paint-
ings (or animals) themselves, but rather to
ourselves as ethical beings.
While Kant may be right that the human
sense of self entails a “kind of consciousness
that is unified over time”, Korsgaard takes
him to task for glossing over the graduated
nature of self, and consequently neglecting
any possibly equivalent ‘functional unity’ or
awareness of selfhood over time in the
consciousness of other animals. The prevail-
ing view that things are simply more impor-
tant to us than they are to other animals may,
Korsgaard argues, amount to no more than a
callous reluctance to appreciate that “the
subjectivity of others is just as real as our own.”
She writes, “I think that many people assume
that animals are simply less important than
people, and therefore that what happens to
them matters less.” “It may be true,” she later
acknowledges, “that only we human beings
Book Reviews

think about ourselves, if that means having
thoughts in which we identify ourselves as ‘I’.
But even if it were [true], the issue is more
complicated than that, for self-consciousness
is something that comes in degrees and takes
many different forms.” (p.30)
That we humans expect ourselves to live
up to various moral standards and ideals does
distinguish us from other animals. For Kant,
other animals’ inability to participate in recip-
rocal legislation due to their lack of rationality
is what frees us from any obligations to them,
as it puts them outside of the ‘moral commu-
nity’. Although Korsgaard does not reject
Kant’s tenet that ‘rational autonomous
beings have obligations to each other
grounded in relations of reciprocal legisla-
tion’, she disagrees that this implies that the
non-rational animals’ inability to participate
in reciprocal legislation simply relieves
humans from obligations towards them.
Beneficence, for instance, entails respect for
animal and rational nature alike. Korsgaard
argues that humans may very well be distinc-
tive in having capacities for empathizing with
other creatures’ importance to themselves,
and for appreciating this as grounds for treat-
ing other animals as ends in themselves. She
also argues that although autonomous ratio-
nal beings (that is, humans) alone establish the
moral presupposition that we’re ‘ends in
ourselves’, not merely means to ends, it
hardly follows that this status applies only to
autonomous rational beings, as Kant
thought. There are respects in which animals
are analogous to us, after all; and it is precisely
in these respects that animals ought to be
cherished for their own sakes, instead of for
Book Reviews
the merely salutary effects such nurture
might have on our own characters, say. Kors-
gaard’s claim that other animals have the
ethical standing of ‘ends in themselves’ has
as its foundation the idea of the ‘essentially
self-affirming nature of life itself’.
In theorizing about the moral claims of
animals, diametrically opposed views
emerge from an identical premise (Kant
called this situation an ‘antinomy’). For
some proponents of animal rights, due to the
evils of nature to which wild animals are
vulnerable, it is imperative that we make all
animals domestic. For other proponents of
animal rights, our inability to sufficiently
accommodate domestic animals obliges us
to leave them wild.
Korsgaard herself concedes that includ-
ing animals in Kant’s ‘Kingdom of Ends’
would render the hope of making the world
good for every ‘End’ null and void, since
animals’ interests are inevitably irreconcil-
able. Animals aren’t interested in morality
anyway, Kantian or otherwise: “Nature is
recalcitrant to moral standards. We can
impose the form of law on our actions, but
we cannot impose the form of the good on
nature. This… is the source of some of the
knottiest problems of animal ethics” (p.154).
And were we to set out to genetically manip-
ulate predators or rid the planet of them
altogether we would be ‘playing God’ in an
opprobrious sense. For Korsgaard, we are
obligated to put an end to predation “only if
we take on the role of the creator with regard to
them, and… we have no obligation to do
that.” But the fact that nature is rife with
conflicts among animals and “we don’t take
Books
on the role of the creator” hardly absolves
humans from their obligation to treat other
animals as ends in themselves, or at least to
not ‘undermine existing animal communi-
ties’. To be sure, Korsgaard believes we’re
basically entitled to preserve our species.
That said, according to her own variety of
Kantian ethics, this “is the kind of right we
can forfeit – we can fail to deserve it – if we
continue to abuse the individual animals and
the animal communities with whom we
share the world” (p.214). At her most arrest-
ing, Korsgaard develops the implications of
her argument to ponder how “nothing has
ever been as bad for the biotic community
as unhindered human reproduction.
Shouldn’t it follow that it is wrong for
humans to reproduce, and right for us to stop
reproducing and let ourselves go extinct?”
(p.213).
Fellow Creatures is a carefully structured
and rigorously reasoned tract. But instead of
culminating in a didactic crescendo, Kors-
gaard has the intellectual integrity to own up
to her bewilderment and dissonance. She
considers pet-keeping morally problematic,
for instance. On one hand, the lives of
animals consist, for the most part, in repro-
duction and obtaining food – the very activ-
ities of which pet owners are intent on
depriving them. On the other hand, she
muses, “I find the idea that we cannot give
dogs a good life implausible” (p.235). The
case of cats is ‘iffier’. That is, “there is
genuine controversy over whether an indoor
life is good enough for them, while letting
them live outdoors can be dangerous to
them in the city, and has a deleterious effect
on wildlife. Another problem is that they are
obligate carnivores” (p.235). Korsgaard
confesses to having kept five fellow creatures
as pets – the cats with whom she has “lived
a morally compromised life, feeding them
the meat that I will not eat myself.”
In one of Plato’s earlier dialogues, the
Meno, the eponymous interlocutor
complains to Socrates, “Socrates you are
exactly like the flat stingray that one meets
in the sea. Whenever one comes into contact
with it, it numbs him, and that is the sort of
thing that you seem to be doing to me now.”
Socrates replies: “…if the stingray paralyzes
others only through being paralyzed itself,
then the comparison is just, but not other-
wise.” To Korsgaard’s credit, one completes
her tract similarly affected by her own self-
confessed Socratic paralysis.
© CHAD TRAINER 2020
Chad Trainer is an independent scholar engaged
in a study of the history of philosophy.
• Fellow Creatures, Christine M. Korsgaard, 2018,
OUP, £14.99 pb, 272 pages, ISBN: 9780198854876
April/May 2020  Philosophy Now 45
 ZOMBIES
Film Chris Ferbrache wonders why zombie movies have
remained so popular for almost a century.

T
hese days you can hardly turn on
the television or watch a movie
without seeing slack-jawed
zombies stumbling or dragging
their limbs after a horrified person. For
those who are short on reading material, the
New York Times bestseller, The Zombie

© UNITED ARTISTS 1932

Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the
Living Dead by Max Brooks (2003) holds
critical information on how to survive the
zombie apocalypse. Zombie fever doesn’t
stop there. Gun enthusiasts may shoot
bleeding zombie targets at their local shoot-

POSTER
ing range. In Canada, you can even learn
CPR with the help of zombies from the

Heart and Stroke Foundation. And when
you are done, you can watch the all-time
most popular television series, AMC’s The
Walking Dead, which had almost twenty
million viewers a week.
If you’re unsure why zombies are so
popular, you’re not alone. To wrap our
heads round the current zombie invasion,
we must start at the beginning.
The Haitian Zonbi
In the eighteenth century, African slaves
were brought to the French colony of Saint-
Domingue, now known as Haiti. Forced to
convert to Christianity, the slaves developed
a way of preserving elements of their indige-
nous faith while living under religious
suppression, by merging African religious
traditions with Christianity to form what
became known as Voodoo. More than a
mere set of rituals, Voodoo rehearsed and
reinforced the values of the oppressed.
Haitian bokors (Voodoo sorcerers)
played a crucial part in keeping the commu-
nity in check. Among other things, bokors
were reported to have practiced anaesthetiz-
ing those who broke with the cultural norms
of the village or family. Bokors would poison
their victims with tetrodotoxin, a potent and
often fatal neurotoxin found in the flesh of
the pufferfish (Tetraodontidae) which
decreases the pulse and respiration to the
point of immeasurability – as illustrated in
the book, then film, The Serpent & the Rain-
bow (Wade E. Davis, 1985, Wes Craven
1988). With the recipient of the toxin
appearing dead, they were given a funeral,
and buried. Later, hidden by night, the
bokor would exhume the body with the hope
the person would not have succumbed to
hypoxia. The ‘rescued’ person would then be
given a continual dose of Datura stramonium,
a powerful herb that causes delirium – in
addition to the real possibility the victim had
lasting brain damage from this process of
‘zombification’. The process was known to
destroy the individual’s identity, memory,
and free will, leaving the person in an
automaton state. Once awake, and continu-
ally sedated, the zonbi (Haitian spelling)
would be forced to work under the watchful
eye of the bokor. Thus, the Haitian zonbi
served (or serves, if you believe they still
exist), as a reminder and motivator against
deviation from the essentials of traditional
Haitian culture. Yet although the Voodoo
traditions continued for generations, the
idea of zonbis radically changed as they
became the subjects of horror stories and the
Hollywood silver screen.
Originally Hollywood obtained first-
hand accounts from researchers who had
witnessed Voodoo rituals. In the 1930s, the
movie White Zombie (1932) was released.
This promoted a somewhat accurate
WHITE ZOMBIE
portrayal of the zonbi tradition: under the
command of a master, devoid of will, and
passive, the wife of a Haitian sugar planta-
tion owner becomes a zonbi. However, she
was hardly a threat to those who had not
been zonbified. Moreover, the zonbis were
limited to one village because they had to be
provided a sedating drug to remain in the
control of the bokor.
While the depiction of the zonbi was
suitable for Haiti, a radical new variant was
necessary for non-Haitian settings.
The Non-Haitian Zombie
The portrayal of the non-Haitian zombie
(note the different spelling) which defined
its place in horror culture is George
Romero’s 1968 cult film, Night of the Living
Dead. Here the zombie was not under the
control of a malefactor, but came back to life
from the dead (hence the film’s title). More-
over, the zombies were not called zombies
in the movie, but more appropriately,
ghouls. In Arabic folklore, ghouls were
creatures who resided near graveyards and
ate human flesh. Since the non-Haitian
zombies did not require a controller, these
new zombies could replicate in an exponen-

46 Philosophy Now l April/May 2020

 Film
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD IMAGE © COLUMBIA PICTURES 1990

an individual’s subconscious from birth,

tial manner, without limit.
As the non-Haitian zombie evolved,
zombification took on a post-apocalyptic
theme. Zombies were now portrayed as
hyperaggressive, and occasionally with the
ability to sprint (as in Dawn of The Dead
(2004) or the 2013 movie version of World
War Z). The adaptive capacities and rapid
mobility of the modern non-Haitian zombie
contribute to the breakdown of the social
infrastructure, typically centering on an
untreatable zombie pandemic or other disas-
ter. It is this zombie subtype that is most
popular in today’s culture, and so will be
discussed for the remainder of this article.
One must not forget that some people
like the gore of flesh-eating zombie movies.
However, although watching gore may be
entertaining (to some), it’s not the primary
reason for the zombie’s relevance today.
And although it’s well-known that many
so that we react in various ways to various
basic related stimuli. Jung believed that as a
result, people are instinctively predisposed
to react to situations or dangers that may
result in harm – for example, spiders,
heights, or the dark – so saving them from
the traumas their ancestors encountered.
Jung thought various fears are programmed
or crystallized like ready-made templates in
even though the individual has yet to
encounter the experience. For example,
Jungians believe that a child is afraid of the
dark because its unknown hazards became
associated with the death and injury her
ancestors encountered. Thus, a child’s
instinctual fear of the dark is a useful protec-
tive mechanism even if the risks do not
currently exist. According to Jung, these
atavistic fears remain deep in the subcon-
scious, becoming manifest in one’s dreams.
Perhaps this theory of Jung’s suggests a
possible connection between our instinctual
fears and the question of why zombies have
a noteworthy presence in our culture.
Unknown to Jung at the time of forming
his theory, the fear of being chased is one of
the most frequent nightmares. So the idea
is that zombies trigger fear in us by allowing
us to experience our instinctual fear of
being chased, but without the potential
consequences of being caught. This close
link with one of our most common fears is
why zombies are so popular amongst movie
monsters. The connection between the
Bela Lugosi and friend
discover they’re in
Philosophy Now
WHITE ZOMBIE IMAGE © UNITED ARTISTS 1932

people like the thrill of being scared without

risking their life, this also does not entirely
explain people’s infatuation with zombies
and their dominance in today’s culture. For
part of the answer here, we must turn to the
psychologist Carl Jung.

Zombies Chase Down Carl Jung

Carl Jung (1875-1961), the founder of
analytical psychology, thought people
subconsciously store primitive ideas, or
latent images, in what he called the collective
unconscious. These archetypes were config-
ured in and for human minds by evolution

April/May 2020 l Philosophy Now 47


collective subconscious and nightmares of
being chased might also explain why other
monsters are significantly less popular. For
instance, the werewolf is elusive, and not
typically known for its extended chase. Its
superior speed means that this beast
presents itself in your immediate vicinity
after only a short chase. Vampires, as
commonly depicted, appear in a manner
that leaves the victim with no escape, such
as one unveiling itself when the victim is
within arm’s reach. Lastly, ghosts are char-
acteristically thought of as being able to
appear anywhere, yet typically confined to a
specific location. So other popular fictional
monsters have little affinity with an
extended chase, whereas zombies excel at it.
It is also rare for other types of fictional
monsters to appear in the overwhelming
numbers that zombies do as they maraud
across our screens in their grotesque armies.
Zombies Catalyse Social Change
We have seen how zombies might unlock
instinctual fears. But there’s another reason
zombies remain a part of our culture.
Zombies are so malleable that they can take
on society’s current fears and concerns,
either by carrying out actions which living
members of the community are not allowed
to perform, or by showing what may happen
if society continues its current activities (this
idea is gleaned from ‘The Social Significance
of Zombies’, in Newsweek for October 27th
2010). For example, in Night of the Living
Dead, corpses became reanimated as a result
48 Philosophy Now l April/May 2020
of cosmic radiation. Although this premise
may seem far-fetched, the film was made
during the Cold War when people were
afraid of the effects of radiation from atom
bombs and nuclear tests. Shelters were built
across the United States and around the
world, designed to shield the occupants from
nuclear fallout and destruction. So Night of
the Living Dead appears to have had an anti-
nuclear message too: beware the unknown
dangers of working with nuclear energy.
In the movie Sugar Hill (1974), a zonbi-
zombie hybrid set in America, African
zombies carry out the wishes of their
controller, and take on white characters
portrayed as bigoted racists. Although civil
rights legislation was passed ten years before
its filming, racial tensions were still high. In
this case, zombies are used to enact a form of
social revenge not permitted to oppressed
African Americans in real life.
In more recent times, the movie adaptation
of World War Z opens with TV images of the
problems of our day – global warming,
famine, a shortage of clean water, war… etc.
At the end of the movie, once a vaccine has
been created, the message vocalized is, “It’s
given us a chance… help each other… be
prepared for anything, our war has just
begun.” Here, the zombies are showing us our
need for social change and collective
preparedness to prevent a similar catastrophe.
In the Disney movie Z-O-M-B-I-E-S
(2018), set in a modern high school, the
zombies take on a role akin to a minority
underclass, and help clarify how groups that
WORLD WAR Z IMAGE © PARAMOUNT PICTURES 2013
Zombies embody apocalyptical fears
are different should be treated – as indicated
by Meg Donelly as Addison when she says,
“I’m fighting against intolerance.” In this
scenario, the zombies represent an outcast
racial or ethnic group, allowing teenagers to
learn about diversity inclusion without
becoming distracted by any underlying
biases towards real social groups.
Most recently, The Dead Don’t Die (2019),
has a zombie apocalypse triggered by ‘polar
fracking’, which results in a shift in the
Earth’s axis. Here again the zombies are a
result of the actions of naïve humans
unaware of their impact on the environment.
Like World War Z and Night of the Living
Dead, it warns of an existential crisis due to
forces more frightening and less preventable
even than a contagious agent.
Conclusion
Zombie movies feed our desire to stimulate
our primitive fears without real danger, but
they also serve as a vehicle for addressing
social concerns and ills. This nexus of soci-
ety’s anxieties with the instinctual fears illu-
minated by Jung appears to explain why
zombies have retained a dominant position in
popular culture and refused to stay buried in
the graveyard of cinematic history.
© CHRIS FERBRACHE 2020
Chris Ferbrache is a Senior Administrative
Analyst for Mariposa County, CA and instructs
statistics for the State Center Community College
District. Chris holds a BA in Philosophy & Reli-
gious Studies and a Master’s in Business Adminis-
tration from California State University, Fresno.
Q What & Why Are
uestion of the Month
Human Rights?
Our readers give their thoughts, each winning the right to a random book.
I believe that human rights can be defined as those inalienable
rights one should have on the basis of being a human, regardless
of faith, ethnicity or political views. They include the right to life,
freedom of the self and of speech, and the right to preserve per-
sonal space from external interference. Of course, human rights
are not absolute; they are defined and redefined continuously. Yet
those I’ve mentioned are universally agreed upon, at least among
the member states of the United Nations.
Human rights stem essentially from what the Greek philoso-
pher Thales (c.624 BC–c.546 BC) said about treating others as
one expects to be treated. This principle is now known as the
Golden Rule. Every human being must enjoy a certain set of
rights for life to be tolerable. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
saw the state as based on a kind of concession people made, which
he called the Social Contract, in which they ceded some of their
rights to a government in exchange for it giving them safety and
preserving their other rights. So, in a sense, Rousseau saw the
Social Contract as an acknowledgement of human rights. I agree
with him on that. Another source of credibility of the concept of
human rights is the numerous international accords and declara-
tions issued by governments, and international bodies such as the
UN, from the Bill of Rights and Declaration of the Rights of Man
and Citizen in the eighteenth century, to the Declarations of the
UN in the latter half of the twentieth century.
A. M. FATHALLAH, ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT
H uman rights are those rights we have simply by being
human. Essential to the idea of human rights is that they
command utmost respect and consideration for each person.
Hopefully, universal recognition that all human beings have the
same basic rights will reduce our oppression and killing of our
own kind.
It is not clear if anyone grants us human rights. Who could
grant them? Not every one who believes in human rights believes
in a supreme being; and those who believe in one do not all believe
in the same one. So it seems easier and more pragmatic to just
agree that we have human rights, and then seek to agree on what
they are. For example, the United Nation’s Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, Article 9, ‘No one shall be subjected to arbi-
trary arrest, detention or exile’, seems derivable from the right to
liberty.
Although praiseworthy, the UN Declaration goes beyond
basic human rights. For sake of rigor, we need a consensus on the
set of human rights regarded as basic. Basic human rights should
be limited to those we would need within a mode of existence
without the advantage of civilization. Our ancestors lived in a
primitive condition for most of our species’ existence: back then
?
?
?
they could not have had a right to scientific health care or to a
college education. Still, as humans, they had human rights.
I suggest the question determining a basic human right to be:
What is required of an adult in society such that both the individual and
the society are in a state of well-being? A fundamental good for human-
ity and society is survival. This requires adults. A society of children
is unsustainable. And the adults must be self-directing and give
more than they receive, the surplus of their energies going to the
children and the adults in need. In a word, the adults must be
autonomous. So they must have the rights required for autonomy.
For starters, these rights would be the Lockean rights of life, lib-
erty, and property, and the Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness.
JOHN TALLEY, RUTHERFORDTON, NORTH CAROLINA
W e are social beings. When I decide to respond to other
human beings, and they in turn respond to my behaviour,
we facilitate the mutual development of our self-consciousnesses,
enabling us to develop more nuanced consciousnesses of our
selves. So a first right would be the right to choose what to do or
how to respond. But, being conscious of others who are similar
to me in essential aspects, I realise that I have to restrict the right
to choose, because all people have a similar right to choose. Oth-
erwise someone could choose to prevent me from choosing what
I want to do, even to the extent of killing me; and, being similar
to me, they must realise that I and others could prevent them from
choosing what they want to do, even to the extent of killing them.
Therefore, the right to choose is conditional on respecting the
right of each to choose to the same extent as everyone else. Thus
a second right would be the right of each person to be given such
respect from others. This has the potential for stalemate, unless
in small ways and usually for short periods of time I have some
leeway to do things which curtail the freedom of others to choose.
I must also accept a similar cost to myself. However, seeking such
leeway requires that I and others negotiate how much leeway is
permissible. This leads to a system of laws, which we agree, after
reasonable discourse, to honour. A third right, consequently, is
the right to equal treatment for all under the law. All subsequent
rights will be derived from these three.
ALASDAIR MACDONALD, GLASGOW
T he question of human rights is an aspect of the question of
justice. If human rights matter, it’s because justice matters.
In his superb book The Idea of Justice (1967), Otto Bird argues
that theories of justice (and so of rights) fall into three categories:
theories of ‘positive law’; of the ‘social good’; and of ‘natural
right’. ‘Positive law’ theories hold that justice exists only within
the context of laws in a state; ‘social good’ theories hold that jus-
April/May 2020  Philosophy Now 49
 ? ?
tice is whatever conduces to the overall good of a society; and
‘natural right’ theories hold that justice consists in ensuring that
each person gets what’s owed him. What is owed him arises, in
the first place, from his nature as a human being. Natural right
theory holds that in the name of justice we are all entitled to iden-
tical consideration in view of our shared human nature. We all
have a fundamental duty not to infringe each other’s human
rights, and each of us has a just claim for redress if our rights have
been violated. This claim is prior to any law or notion of public
welfare. So ‘natural right’ theories see human rights as funda-
mental, and prior to either enacted laws or the supposed good of
society. Natural right theories offer, in my view, the best account
of justice, and therefore the strongest support for human rights.
What these rights specifically are is less clear. I disagree with
those who favor a large number of them, hoping to achieve social
justice goals under the guise of human rights. I don’t believe there
can be, for example, a human right to housing or to clothing,
because this would amount to a right to other people’s labor. I
don’t think there can even be a human right to food – only a right
to being left free to seek it. For human rights are, at bottom, rights
to certain freedoms: freedom from being harmed; freedom from
being unjustly restricted in one’s movements; freedom from delib-
erate injuries to one’s dignity. They can’t be rights to others’ goods.
PAUL VITOLS, NORTH VANCOUVER
E ven where human rights conventions are incorporated into
national law they’re easily ignored by dictators or by short-
sighted electorates exercising their rights to vote for parties
which consider rights to have gone too far. So unfortunately, the
fight for international standards of behaviour is far from over. As
a consequence, we have to be very careful how we frame the jus-
tification for human rights law. We should not play into the
hands of those opposing human rights by our pretending that
these rights have some (easily ridiculed) justification arising from
nature, human or otherwise. We should instead be very clear that
the need for such rights is a pragmatic response to the wish to
avoid seeing a revival of the horrors of our past.
Sir Hersch Lauterpacht QC, British lawyer and a leading figure
in the drive to create a post-war charter of human rights, based
human rights on ‘natural law’. He wrote: “In a wider sense, the
binding force… of international law... is based on the law of nature
as expressive of the social nature of man.” However, the appalling
conduct in Nazi Germany, which had driven so many to want to
codify a set of human rights, is arguably just as expressive of ‘the
social nature of man’ – one feeding off resentment. So we cannot
rely on ‘natural law’ as justification for human rights.
The Nazi party had altered the law to enable their horrors to
be carried out lawfully. And so, after WWII there was a desire to
say that complying with the law of a state could not be used to
justify barbaric acts. State law itself had to be judged against an
internationally recognised standard, which defined the limits on
state actions to try to prevent any repeat of those dreadful things.
Their genesis means, however, that human rights are not really
any different in kind to the other laws we choose to accept,
although we may like to think otherwise. They do not have a
sacred source, but are the expression of a wish for self-protection.
PAUL BUCKINGHAM, ANNECY, FRANCE
M any people assert that rights are fictions. What follows from
this view? That the UN Declaration of Rights is imperial-
ism; that Martin Luther King, Jr. was mistaken for believing rights
50 Philosophy Now  April/May 2020
?
are grounded in something higher than positive law; and that Jews
in Nazi Germany did not actually have a right to life. If rights don’t
exist, how can they be violated? If rights don’t exist, it seems only
personal preferences and power struggles remain.
The UN Declaration of Human Rights states that ‘a faith and
respect for rights is necessary to prevent barbarism.’ If so, perhaps
the most important thing a philosopher can do is strengthen an
understanding of rights.
First, rights are ultimately moral, not legal. If rights were only
legal then governments could take yours away, because they gave
them to you in the first place. Rights must be grounded in some-
thing deeper than legislation. They are what we use to judge leg-
islation. Nor can rights be grounded in self-interest, for self-inter-
est sometimes supports violating the rights of the weak. So we do
not derive rights from self-interest either, but instead use our con-
cept of rights to judge self-interested acts as permissible or wrong.
Natural law is more inspirational. Rights are somehow
grounded in nature, or the God of nature, and so there is a higher
law by which we can judge any positive law. Unfortunately, this
idea presents metaphysical problems. We can see acorns in
Nature, so why not rights? Are rights metaphysical things attached
to humans? Must God ground rights?
A clearer way to understand rights is as the axioms that arise
from a loving way of being. Just as objectively better and worse
moves arise in chess when people agree to rules, so the deepest
understanding of rights arises when loving people describe their
fundamental ways of being. Simply put, rights flow from a com-
munity who wish the good of others. So rights are not so much a
fiction as they are a loving way of being and seeing. When push
comes to shove, your appeal to ‘rights’ will best work for people
running on the moral software that enables them to love or intrin-
sically value other persons. That community of people is the deep-
est source of rights.
PAUL STEARNS, BLINN COLLEGE, TEXAS
A lthough such analyses have their place, I do not want to
explain human rights in terms of mutual obligations, legal or
social contracts, or what distinguishes humans from nonhumans.
This would be like defining colour conceptually – in terms of
wavelength or reflectance – without pointing to the blue of the
sky. The latter definition is more primal, and pertains to the
essence of colour.
Unlike colour, we do not find the presence of human rights in
the world. Yet it is my contention that human rights are presented
to us precisely when they are absent. If that sounds like doubles-
peak, here’s my meaning: when I stop my debating and theorising
about the existence, foundation, or justification of human rights,
go out into society in India, and chance upon a man scavenging
for his survival, or encounter a child lying beaten up and struggling
for life, there’s an almost perceptible cry of alarm in the air – some-
thing feels deeply wrong in this state of affairs: not just wrong, but
degrading, dehumanising.
There may appear to be a conflict between rationally
philosophising about human rights and my attempts to stir your
empathy by picturing these scenes. However, I believe that our
‘moral sentiments’, as David Hume might describe them, are a
reality. Irrational, perhaps, but unmistakably real. And Richard
Rorty would say that philosophy’s job is ‘to summarise our cul-
turally influenced intuitions’, that is, our sentiments.
I also propose that it is wrong to speak of ‘depriving a person of
their rights’. This conceives of rights as distinct from people, rather
What & Why Are Human Rights??
 ? ?
than as intrinsic to their being, as they are. You cannot deprive
someone of their rights, then; but you can fail to recognise their
humanity, and so fail to implement their rights. According to
Rorty, the perpetrators of human rights violations, nay, human vio-
lations, are simply insecure and lacking in sympathy. How can sym-
pathy be cultivated in a person? By telling them stories and stirring
their sentiments, as Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for American whites.
So why are human rights? Because people have the ability to
imagine, empathise, and share stories, and, in doing so, we
encounter all the ways we are alike. Our feelings are at the heart
of our aspiration for human rights.
SWITHIN THOMAS, BENGALURU, INDIA
T he most basic human right is the right not to be murdered.
This is a so-called negative right – a protection against harm.
Rights may also be positive. They include the right to vote, given
to certain people.
Rights are tied to laws, both moral and civil. In the United
States, American citizens who are at least eighteen years old have
the right to vote, which is granted by law. Before 1920, women
in American did not have the legal right to vote. However, before
women got the legal right to vote they already possessed the moral
right to vote. Thus, the law needed to be squared with the extant
objective moral reality that women should join the franchise.
But why are human rights real?
When teaching an ethics class at a state college, I asked my
class if female genital mutilation was wrong. They all agreed that
it was. I then asked, “What if the majority of the population where
it occurred supported it, it was legal, and even the women who
experienced it supported it? Would it then be right?” They all
still said, “No.” I continued, “What then makes it wrong?”
Silence filled the room. I let them stew a bit; as I will you. If a
culture agrees with a practice and it is encoded in the laws of a
nation, what is it that makes that practice morally wrong?
True statements need truth-makers. The statement ‘trees exist’
is true if and only if there are trees. Female genital mutilation is
practically wrong because it benefits no one – it’s certainly not med-
ically necessary – and is not conducive to human thriving. It also
denies woman a fundamental negative right not to be mutilated.
But what makes the statement, ‘Female genital mutilation is
morally wrong’ true? In a word, God. God’s character is the only
basis for universal, objective, and absolute human rights. That is,
without an objective personal moral absolute, human rights dis-
solve into relative and contingent arrangements which cannot
support objective human value.
DOUGLAS GROOTHUIS, DENVER SEMINARY, COLORADO
‘R ights’ has become the most overused and misunderstood
word in political discourse. Consider this familiar state-
ment (capitalizations in the original): “WE hold these Truths to
be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with inalienable Rights, that among
these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…” As much
as I revere Thomas Jefferson, his statement confronts me with a
couple of troubling obstacles not easily ignored.
First, my rejection of the concept of a Creator yanks the foun-
dation from under the statement and leaves it insecurely resting
on an opinion – a venerable opinion to be sure, but still an opin-
ion. If Nature replaces Creator, then when and by what means
were our rights secured? Does the terminal cancer victim have a
right to life and happiness? Who or what will guarantee it? Do
What & Why Are Human Rights??
?
animals have natural – that is, Nature-endowed – rights? Does
the lion respect the impala’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness? Does the neighbor’s cat respect the rights of the
birds that come and go in my back yard?
And are we not animals? Humans evolved from a remote
ancestor we share with other great apes, unarguably animals.
When during the six million years or however long since that
creature lived did our ancestors acquire human rights? From
whom? By what means? The short answer is: they didn’t. We
have no inalienable rights endowed by any entity or thing other
than ourselves; and that’s a very unreliable endower.
“Ah!” declares the collectivist: “We give rights to ourselves
through the democratic process.”
Oh really? We can’t seem to agree on what these rights might
be, and they proliferate like mosquitos. Voters have proven capa-
ble of rationalizing their rights to the treasury, to compensate
themselves for the burdens and expenses of life. The democratic
process elected Hitler and Hugo Chavez, which brought catas-
trophe to Germany and Venezuela respectively. In the US, the
democratic process elects Republicans that the lefties hate
(Trump a notable exception), and elects Democrats the righties
hate. Lenin and Castro were not elected at all, but rose to power
on huge waves of savior worship in two variants of the democratic
process. The great majority seems to love democracy until they
don’t like the results it brings.
MICHAEL H. DAVISON, DENVER, COLORADO
Author of America’s Suicide
From the ashes of war
Rose a bird with gold wings,
A declaration of words
The phoenix sings:
Articles, promises,
Concepts of honour and hope;
Mere gestures on paper
For men to emote
Because politics eternally overrides
The good, the just, the reasoned right.
And it’s true that power curtails
That beautiful bird in exalted flight.
For there is nothing on earth –
No law, no moral, no measure –
To control man’s will
Beyond power and pleasure.
There is only this: the arbitrary,
And the acts that determine history.
No rights, no reasons, no words in stone
Like ‘dignity’, ‘liberty’, ‘equality’ –
Just a bird of gold, a phoenix, that sings alone
Testament to the tyranny of being free.
BIANCA LALEH, TOTNES, DEVON
The next question is: How Do We Understand Each Other?
Please give and justify your answer in less than 400 words. The
prize is a semi-random book from our book mountain. Subject
lines should be marked ‘Question of the Month’, and must be
received by 8th June 2020. If you want a chance of getting a
book, please include your physical address. Submission is per-
mission to reproduce your answer.
April/May 2020  Philosophy Now 51
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April/May 2020  Philosophy Now 53


allis
T in
Wonderland
I
f the neural philosophy of mind were
true, could it be entertained by a
philosopher? The question is entirely
serious. It is a challenge addressed to
those philosophers of mind who claim that all
forms of consciousness, from tingles to world
pictures, are merely activity in the brain. If
this were true, it must follow that the belief
that thoughts are neural discharges is itself
also neural discharges.
If this idea makes you feel giddy, join the
club. Fasten your seat belts for a bumpy ride.
Imagine that you’re Professor X (fill in
whatever name you like), who believes, or
claims to believe, that all her thoughts,
including her thoughts about the nature of
thought, are just electronic ripples in, for
example, the prefrontal cortex, or perhaps
that they’re discharges located in a ‘global
workspace’ of neural activity maintained by
the brain. If you try to have this thought
about the nature of thought – including the
very thought you’re having now – you will
quickly run into problems.
The most obvious is that of attempting to
imagine that two quite different things are
the same thing: the thought itself, and its
supposed neural basis. The thought seems to
be something ‘in here’, in the sense of being
private to you, while its neural basis is some-
thing ‘out there’ in the material world and
potentially visible to the objective gaze of
neuroscientists.
That the thought you’re having now is
utterly unlike the propagation of electro-
chemical waves through the wetware of the
brain of you the thinker, is equally true of less
elevated experiences. Consider a common-or-
garden experience such as seeing a red tomato.
There is nothing red or even red-like about
neural discharges in the pathways associated
with vision in the cerebral cortex, so how
could they be identical with the experience?
Many counter-arguments have been put
forward to this objection to the neural
theory of mind. Among the most popular is
one advanced by John Searle.
Searle argued that conscious experience is
an ‘emergent property’ of neural activity. He
54 Philosophy Now  April/May 2020
Against Neural
Philosophy Of Mind
Raymond Tallis argues that your brain
waves are not themselves thoughts.
invokes the analogy of the emergence of
slipperiness and shininess from collections
of molecules of H2O that are in themselves
neither slippery nor shiny, notwithstanding
that water is composed of nothing other
than such molecules.
This argument does not work. The
passage from molecules of H2O to slippery,
shiny water, is achieved by a change in the
scale of attention from the microscopic to
the macroscopic, and scales of attention
presuppose consciousness. A change in the
scale of attention cannot therefore explain
the emergence of consciousness from
neural activity – how the experienced
redness of a tomato emerges from electro-
chemical discharges, for instance.
Thinking Through The Differences
What about the claim that more upmarket
conscious contents, such as philosophical
ideas about the basis of consciousness, are
themselves identical with neural activity?
Press your mind’s refresh button and
think as follows:
“This thought that all thought is electro-
chemical activity in my prefrontal cortex is
itself [simply] electrochemical activity in my
prefrontal cortex.”
Unfortunately, if neural activity does not
have the wherewithal to be something as
basic as an experience of red, it seems
impossible that it should be identical with
something as complex as a philosophical
thought. A philosophical thought also has
some rather extraordinary properties. Let’s
examine some of them.
For a start, like other thoughts, philo-
sophical thought is both silent and heard.
We do not always hear our thoughts in our
minds – some people claim never to hear
them – but we often do when (as in the
present case for me) we articulate them to
ourselves preparatory to writing them down,
to sharing them with others, or even to be
sure what thought it is we have had. Their
heard silence is an aspect of their privacy.
Thoughts about the neural basis of mind
have other features that aren’t found in any
imaginable neural activity. First, these
thoughts belong to a longstanding philo-
sophical debate. As such, they are addressed
to an imagined community of individuals
who might agree or disagree with the
thinker. This highlights something about
thoughts in general that is not true of mate-
rial events such as nerve impulses. The
thought that some proposition p is the case
belongs to what the American philosopher
Wilfrid Sellars called ‘the logical space of
reasons’. He contrasted this with ‘the space
of causes’. Items in the space of reasons are
true or false, compatible or incompatible,
justified or not justified. These properties
do not apply to causal events in the material
world per se. And when something is
asserted as being the case, it is implicitly or
explicitly asserted against alternatives.
‘Things are like this’ implies ‘Things are
not like that’. The thought that all thoughts
are neural activity is opposed to the view
that thoughts are not neural activity. As
inhabitants of the space of reason, thoughts
are entertained, asserted, and defended.
That’s why they can be right or wrong. But
physical events such as nerve impulses just
happen.
What’s more, there’s nothing in the
material world that, like a thought, has a
subject attached to a predicate. Indeed, it is
this subject-predicate sentence-like form of
thoughts, beliefs, and other so-called
‘propositional attitudes’ that has made some
philosophers, such as Paul and Patricia
Churchland, dismiss them as the fantasy
objects of ‘folk’ (that is to say, pre-scientific;
that is to say, pre-truth) psychology. Behind
this denial of the reality of propositional
attitudes is the neurophilosophers’ belief
that if neuroscience cannot see or accom-
modate an entity then future science will
expose that entity as a myth or illusion.
There are other insuperable difficulties
with the thought that thoughts are neural
discharges. Let’s refresh our minds again,
and unpack our thought a little:

“This thought is electrochemical activity in my
prefrontal cortex because every thought is elec-
trochemical activity in the prefrontal cortex.”
If this were true, we would be obliged to
ascribe several things to the electrochemi-
cal activity in question. The first would be
self-reference: ‘This thought…’. How on
earth would bursts of discharges refer to
themselves each time the relevant thought
was entertained? Electrochemical activity
being about itself without mediation would
be a feat like standing on one’s own shadow
or walking on one’s own head.
Neurophilosophers might try to deal with
this by invoking a second set of neural
discharges that are somehow able to be
‘about’ the first set of discharges that triggers
them, and refer to them as ‘this thought’.
Alas, it is difficult to imagine how neural
activity could be about other neural activity
in this way, and even more difficult to know
how this could make the second activity self-
referring as ‘this thought’. The idea that self-
reference could be achieved by a mere causal
link between two sets of physical, neural
activity is analogous to the idea that replicat-
ing some features of the first set of activity in
the second set creates a representation of the
first set. Mere physical replication does not
generate representation or aboutness; for
example, the replication of the appearance of
a cloud in a puddle does not make the puddle
refer to the cloud. You need to add in
consciousness for that to happen.
A Class Of Its Own
By now I have probably achieved the medi-
cally impossible feat of giving you migraine
on both sides of your head. Please take a
paracetamol and stick with me, because there
is more to come, and it is of even more funda-
mental importance to my opening question.
It’s time to remind ourselves of an absolutely
fundamental feature of thoughts: thoughts
achieve their ‘aboutness’ by mobilizing
general terms. General terms gather up
elements that have salient features in common
into a single class. General terms are abundant
in the thought we’re presently thinking about:
‘electrochemical activity’, ‘pre-frontal cortex’,
and, of course, ‘thought’ itself.
For a long time it has been assumed with-
out proof that the nervous system has the
wherewithal to create such classes of things
or ideas. They are, it is argued, merely func-
tional groupings that neurologically connect
certain important, recurrent features of the
environment to appropriate patterns of
behaviour. In a gazelle, for example, they
might correspond to the association of lions
with flight and grass with eating.
It is a rather remarkable act of faith to
think this can be extended to a term such as
‘electrochemical activity’. But there is a more
radical challenge to this crude behaviourist
biological account of general terms: the
separation, most obvious in language, of
classes from their members. Thoughts –
mental events with conceptual content –
have classes as their building bricks; and
those classes are general entities liberated
from their particular instances. There are no
classes in the physical world. Yes, there are
natural kinds; but entities do not attach
themselves to categories, even less dissolve
into them, without the assistance of sophis-
ticated human consciousnesses.
This is evident in even the most basic
thoughts about lions and grass. One way of
understanding the separation of classes from
their members is to see how they’re related
to each other: ‘lion’ is horizontally related to
both ‘tiger’ and ‘elephant’, and vertically to
‘animal’. The classes belong to a system of
classification. But the terror of the gazelle
does not locate a lion in a category in turn
located in any system of classification.
T allis
in
Wonderland
The contrast between particular objects
and the classes into which they fall can also
been seen in discourse of the kind that has
set our argument going: thoughts about the
nature of thought. In the sentence “This
thought is electrochemical activity in my
prefrontal cortex because every thought is
electrochemical activity in the prefrontal
cortex”, the token of the word ‘thought’
occurs twice. This enables the thought to be
turned back on itself to be both about itself
in particular and about thought in general.
No event in the physical world, including in
the brain, has this generality.
Connected with generality is something
even bigger: possibility. Material events
such electrochemical discharges in brains
are not the realization of something first
entertained as a possibility. Without
consciousness to entertain it, there is no
basis for possibility that might go unreal-
ized. The rather obvious fact is that what is
out there in the material world simply is,
end of story.
Let us gather up these thoughts about
thought. Where there are classes, there is
generality; where there is generality, there
is possibility; and where there is possibility,
entities or states of affairs that may or may
not exist can be proposed. But all of this
presupposes consciousness. Indeed classes,
generality, and possibility demonstrate the
irreducible distance between physical
events, such as neural activity, and any
thought – including the thought that
thoughts are neural activity.
So the answer to my introductory ques-
tion is no. Neural activity, which does not
contain generality and possibility, could not
support or instantiate any general thought,
least of all about thought. So if the materi-
alist philosophy of mind were true, no
philosopher – whose mind would, accord-
ing to this view, be neural activity – could
entertain or argue for it.
© PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2020
Raymond Tallis’s latest book, Seeing
Ourselves: Reclaiming Humanity from
God and Science is out now.
April/May 2020  Philosophy Now 55
 Obituary
Roger Scruton
(1944-2020)
Piers Benn remembers his friend and colleague.
M
y first encounter with Roger Scruton, in the Autumn
of 1984, was inauspicious. It was at a drinks reception
at Birkbeck College, the purpose of which was to
introduce new graduate students to their supervisors. Back then,
he still looked like the Head Boy. Eventually I came face to face
with him. “Hello. Are you one of mine?” No, I had been assigned
another supervisor. “In that case, you cease to interest me”,
came the laconic reply.
Birkbeck College, where Roger was Professor of Aesthetics
until he resigned his position to pursue life as a freelance and
often a Visiting Professor, was founded to allow people
employed during the day to study in the evenings. It is unique
in enabling people of all ages and occupations to gain Univer-
sity of London degrees of all levels. The ethos suited Roger
well. Having grown up in a lower-middle class environment
and attended High Wycombe Grammar School, followed by
Cambridge, he believed that a first-rate education should be
open to all, regardless of class or occupation.
He dutifully delivered his evening lectures, often with drily
comic flourishes. He once turned up in evening dress, presum-
ably on his way to a formal function, explaining that the impor-
tance of the truths he was announcing made this attire a neces-
sity. Around this time, he had just completed his book Sexual
Desire, and gave lectures on the subject, explaining ideas from
phenomenology and Sartre, but concluding with the observation
that sex was a dangerous enterprise, best not embarked upon,
and enigmatically leaving the room without taking questions.
I got to know him better when I had finished my MPhil and
was thinking about my PhD, this time with him as my supervi-
sor. I became aware of a loyal coterie of graduate students
around him, some of whom were involved in clandestine activ-
ities in European countries under communist rule. Along with
others who understood the true spiritual condition of those
countries, he had founded various organisations to provide an
intellectual lifeline to dissidents. Their activities included smug-
gling subversive writings on seemingly blank computer disks,
sending speakers, acting as couriers to protect communications
from the eye of the secret police and even founding a ‘secret
university’ in Czechoslovakia. I was told that Roger was once
found in his College office operating a mysterious device that
was supposed to detect bugging equipment.
Eventually he leaned on me to teach introductory philoso-
phy classes at the Catholic University of Lublin, in eastern
Poland. Though intrigued by the offer, I initially let my suspi-
56 Philosophy Now  April/May 2020
cions and hesitancy show; I wasn’t sure what he was up to in
communist Europe and didn’t want trouble. He said I should
not turn my nose up at it and I duly applied for my visa, field-
ing the inevitable questions from the consular staff. I arrived in
Poland on a cold April day in 1989 and spent about ten weeks
there, eventually witnessing the General Election that kicked
the Polish United Workers Party from power. I owe it to Roger
that during the 1990s, I took students to discuss philosophy with
their counterparts in Poland and the former Czechoslovakia,
sometimes in collaboration with the Jan Hus Educational Foun-
dation, which Roger helped to found in the early 1980s.
It is a tribute to his commitment, as well as his extraordinary
energy, that he found time to devote himself to these projects,
while producing erudite yet readable books, teaching, editing
the Salisbury Review (a conservative journal he had founded) and
writing for newspapers. It was largely his columns in The Times
in the 1980s that brought him to public attention and, for some,
turned him into a hate-figure; indeed he thought – with justifi-
cation but also a whiff of paranoia – that his political writing
had badly damaged his career. According to one colleague, he
felt snubbed by being made ‘only’ a Professor of Aesthetics, not
a Professor of Philosophy, and his conservatism may have held
up his election to the British Academy. Much of what was said
about him was ignorant and nasty, and it could wound him. Per-
haps he did not fully realise that as well as being the recipient
of harsh words, he could also dish them out, notably in an
uncharitable obituary he wrote of A. J. Ayer. But he was much
cleverer, funnier and more erudite than most of his detractors,
even if they sometimes had a point. One opponent who was his
match was the Marxist philosopher Gerry Cohen, who once
accused him of ‘withdrawable brinkmanship’. Roger respected
him, and they ended up on friendly terms.
When Roger wanted to irritate the bien-pensants, he would
prefix controversial utterances with ‘It goes without saying
that…’ He was a master of rhetorical irony, which memorably
came out during a chaotic, fractious bookshop debate with Ted
Honderich. When Honderich described him as “the unthinking
man’s thinking man” he retorted that Honderich was “the think-
ing man’s unthinking man.” And a review he wrote of a trendy
1970s book begins: “Fashion demands that there should be a
book on the semiology of music, and that it should be long, dense,
introverted and if possible, French. Monsieur Nattiez has writ-
ten the book.” In conversation, Roger was often hesitant, even
bumbling, though with comically perceptive asides. During

AFTER A PHOTO BY PETE HELME
ROGER SCRUTON BY DARREN MCANDREW
supervisions I felt I had to earn my time;
puffing a Havana, he could assume an ‘end
of meeting’ demeanour after only a few
minutes. But he instigated bibulous group
discussions with his graduate students,
sometimes over meals he cooked in his flat
in Notting Hill Gate. Memorable too
were many winey, anarchic conversations
with him at Cumberland Lodge in Wind-
sor Great Park, where the Birkbeck phi-
losophy department went twice a year on
weekend retreats.
To sum up his life’s work is an impos-
sible undertaking, especially in a short
memoir. Roger was a rare and erudite
polymath, not only writing both scholarly
and introductory works of philosophy but
novels, two operas and copious journal-
ism. He was also scientifically well-
informed, having initially been awarded a
scholarship to Cambridge to study natu-
ral science. His fifty-odd books ranged
over subjects including aesthetics, poli-
tics, architecture, sex, religion, Wagner,
environmentalism, England, foxhunting
and wine. But if there was a unifying moral
purpose to his work, it was to resurrect
the sacred in a world of commodification
and instrumentalization. In his inaugural
lecture as Professor of Aesthetics at Birk-
beck, he remarked that what was morally
decisive about the Nazi and communist
systems was their ‘scientific’ attitude
towards humans. He saw the same
nihilism in the deconstructionist philoso-
phies whose influence he deplored.
At times, he seemed to consider
beauty, high culture and community to
be the best conduits to the sacred in a
post-Christian West. He wrote of the
dangers of scientism and the need to turn
to the human world – the Lebenswelt – and
the ‘first person perspective’ to make
sense of lived experience, with its
unavoidable moral imperatives. But as an
acute, lucid analytical philosopher he well
knew the challenges this posed and tried
to reach a synthesis of his views with the
scientific outlook, especially in The Soul
of the World (2014). He thought we had
collectively forgotten our need for unsen-
timental redemption, but as a devotee of
Kant and the ‘God-intoxicated’ Spinoza
he often found religious orthodoxy diffi-
cult. From our conversations, I suspect
that his views on religion were subject to
change and not without ambiguity – I was
never quite clear whether he believed
God existed. But his deepest impulses,
especially in his later years when he mel-
lowed somewhat, were religious, and
rather than concern himself with doc-
trines, he sought to unite these impulses
with a sacralised view of nature and the
human face, erotic love and the ‘We’ of
community. And I believe he felt he had
found a kind of redemption in his mar-
riage to Sophie (née Jeffreys) in 1996 and
the two children they had together.
Roger’s world view was premised on
the fragility of all that is precious and a
repudiation of grand schemes of perfec-
tion, whether of the left or the right. His
conservatism owed more to Hegel than
Hayek, more to Burke than to Thatcher.
It found him devoted fans, and some
haters. Among the former were a few who
hoped he would announce himself a
Catholic. But his funeral in a packed
Malmesbury Abbey was the full tradi-
tional Anglican rite, moving and fitting
for a unique man, whose death at only 75
fills his friends with sadness.
© DR PIERS BENN 2020
Piers Benn teaches Philosophical Ethics at
Fordham University London Centre and has
held lectureships in Philosophy and in Medi-
cal Ethics & Law at various UK universities.
He’s the author of Ethics (Routledge 2000)
and Commitment (Acumen Press 2011),
and is writing a book on intellectual freedom
and the culture wars. Twitter: @PiersBenn
April/May 2020  Philosophy Now 57
 Morality Games
Steve Brewer’s players discuss a strategy for selfish ethical behaviour.
It’s the 4th of July, and Max has invited Orin to a barbecue. Max,
holding a Bud in one hand and a burger in the other, approaches Orin
through swirls of choking smoke. Orin is looking rather glum, and
Max guesses it is not just the veggie burger Orin insisted on having
in order to ‘save the planet’.
Max: Congratulations! Glad to see you Brits have regained your
own independence. About time you freed yourself from your
European masters – just as we did from you guys a few centuries
ago.
Orin: Well, I’m rather disappointed, since I liked the idea of
European unity, and the ability to move freely about Europe.
But given European history and the cumbersome mechanism
needed to form even a semblance of government, I guess it may
well be for the best. The fact is, though, I still feel it was our
duty to stick it out for the common good.
Max: ‘Common good’?! What a load of socialist nonsense!
There’s only one good, and that’s the good of the individual.
Orin: It’s that sort of thinking that destroys society.
Your world of selfishness is a world of antisocial
chaos.
Max: Well that’s just where you’re wrong. You
just have to understand game theory, and all
will be clear. In game theory, ‘players’ choose
whether to collaborate or compete depending
on what’s in their best interest. If I think the
rewards of working with others are better than
those obtained when working by myself, I’ll choose
to cooperate. If it works, the result is a win-win situ-
ation for all. The classic case is where two hunters work-
ing together can kill a deer, but alone they can only catch a
rabbit each.
Orin: But the idea is fatally flawed because there’s no moral
principle stopping them from cheating on their agreement.
What happens if the hunters don’t share the rewards of their
collaboration evenly?
Max: Quite simple – the partnership ends. They might both
be losers as a result, but the players are free and can go it alone,
or search for a better partnership – one where they’re more suc-
cessful and divide the rewards fairly. And by ‘fair’ I mean pro-
portional to each person’s contribution. No contribution means
no share. None of this social welfare nonsense.
Orin: I’ve heard this being called ‘reciprocal altruism’. It’s inter-
esting because it indicates that selfishness can result in social
collaboration.
Max: I’m not sure where the ‘altruism’ comes from there, since
it’s all about being selfish. But the right to decide to cooperate
or compete according to my own best interest is what it means
to be free.
Orin: But it is interesting how game theory might provide an
explanation of our moral codes. The decision to collaborate and
share is a freely made social contract. Moral codes and laws are
made to punish those who break such contracts, by not fairly
58 Philosophy Now  April/May 2020
sharing the gains or by only pretending to collaborate. They’re
about keeping people true to their social contracts.
Max: But the freedom to choose to compete is an essential part
of the game, and that’s what your socialist moral codes try to
repress! This freedom to choose is a basic human right.
Orin: We’re fortunate to live in countries which guarantee these
rights, but many aren’t so fortunate. But maintaining a balance
between social duties and individual freedom is a problem even
in a democracy. In order to retain long-term cohesion in the face
of short-term setbacks, societies evolved complex taboos and rit-
uals to ensure compliance, often with severe punishments for
those who didn’t follow them. This is why we need moral codes:
to instruct us in the duties needed to fulfil our social contracts.
These codes recognise my dependence on others, the state and
its institutions. And when social duties become God’s com-
mandments, they can’t even be questioned. But as Nietzsche
pointed out, with the ‘death of God’, morality has lost its divine
basis. It becomes a human invention, with each society
left to make up its own rules.
Max: So we’ve just solved the problem of the foun-
dation of morality, because God’s moral com-
mands have been replaced by the implications
of game theory! What’s more, unlike the self-
sacrifice demanded by God, morality based on
game theory requires individuals to make choices
in their own best interest.
Orin: The point you’re missing there is that trust
between group members about their skills, contribu-
tion, and fairness is built up over a number of ‘games’,
often with people operating on a ‘tit-for-tat’ basis. The rules of
tit-for-tat seem to be a mixture of the Golden Rule and Law of
Retaliation: that is, keep your side of the bargain and I’ll keep
mine; but I will also take my revenge if you cheat on me. Although
this game has simple rules, the plays can become very complex,
and at any one time, we’re playing many parallel tit-for-tat games
in our ever-changing social environments.
Max: Don’t forget the rules apply to entire nations too, includ-
ing your European Union. You Europeans were brainwashed
into thinking that by collaborating you’re all doing better. But
in fact, it never delivered. Obviously lots of Brits couldn’t see
any gains either, just losses. The EU bureaucracy just isn’t rele-
vant to today’s international environment and the forces of glob-
alization. You were just supporting yet another layer of bureau-
cracy and government that adds no value.
Orin: That’s a ‘maybe’. I think we could argue the case forever
about that...
Max: But my only moral duty is to question any authority that
demands my unquestioning loyalty! So get a cool beer and a real
burger, and let’s celebrate our freedom!
© DR STEPHEN J. BREWER 2020
Steve Brewer is a retired biochemist and the author of The Origins
of Self (2015), available for free download from originsofself.com.
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