Philosophy Now
EDITORIAL
4 Sartre for Starters
NEWS
5 News in brief
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE AT 100
7 Why Sartre Matters
Benedict O’Donohoe
11 Was Existentialism a Humanism?
Gerald Jones
14 Being and Nothingness
Christine Daigle
16 Sartre Glossary
18 By Any Means Necessary?
Ian Birchall
21 Sartre’s Image in de Beauvoir’s Memoirs
Willie Thompson
OTHER ARTICLES
24 The Ontological Argument
Toni Vogel Carey
28 Is Skepticism Ridiculous?
Michael Philips
31 Socratic Humility
Glenn Rawson
37 The Machiavelli Inquiry
Casimir Kukielka
LEARNING & TEACHING
34 A Way of Thinking About Ethics
Philip Badger
LETTERS
40 Letters to the Editor
BOOKS
44 On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt
reviewed by Petter Naessan
44 Existentialism edited by Robert Solomon
reviewed by John Shand
46 Introduction to German Philosophy by Andrew Bowie
reviewed by Peter Rickman
REGULARS
43 Dear Socrates
47 Crossword Deiradiotes
48 Philosophy & Theatre:
No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
reviewed by Tim Madigan
52 Moral Moments Joel Marks
SHORT STORY
53 Understanding Sartre
Mark Richardson
Arrogance or Humility?
“...je ne
regrette
rien...”
Jean-Paul Sartre
Happy 100th Birthday!
p.7, 11, 14, 16, 18, 21, 48, 53
God and Hubris
What’s Wrong with St Anselm’s
Ontological Argument? p.24
The Trial of Socrates:
p.31
November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 3
ISSUE 53 Nov/Dec 05
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Editorial Sartre for Starters
T he quintessential – I love that word, let
me type it again – quintessential French
intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre, was 100 years
old on June 21st this year. Sadly he no
longer celebrates birthdays, having shuffled
off this mortal coil in 1980, but that hasn’t
stopped his legions of admirers from partying
anyway. There have been conferences and
seminars, in Rochester, NY, there was a
birthday party complete with a cake (see page
5), and now we bring you an issue of
Philosophy Now dedicated to the sage.
This special issue was suggested by
Debbie Evans and I’d like to thank the
members of the UK Society for Sartrean
Studies for their enthusiastic participation.
Their Secretary, Benedict O’Donohoe,
contributed our opening piece, to ask “Why
Study Sartre?” and then supply the answer.
Jean-Paul wrote plays, novels, and major
philosophical tomes, pervading French
culture for a generation. He was at different
times a teacher, resistance worker, newspaper
editor, writer, philosopher and political
activist. He spent much time sitting in the
Deux Magots café in Paris talking and
writing. His intake of coffee, nicotine and
harder drugs was prodigious, and may have
contributed to his one-time delusion that he
was being stalked by a giant lobster (I’m not
making this up! It’s in his autobiography).
but it is his contribution to our under-
standing of human beings and their place in
the world that draws people today to examine
his ideas. The articles about Sartre in this
issue focus mainly on the work he did during
and immediately after the Second World
War. Gerald Jones writes about the successes
and shortcomings of Sartre’s famous lecture
on existentialism and humanism. Christine
Daigle explains the key concepts Sartre
employed in his masterwork, the massive and
intimidating Being and Nothingness. And in
our philosophical theatre column, Tim
Madigan takes in a performance of Sartre’s
most famous play – No Exit.
I recently heard another French intel-
lectual – this one a London-based friend of
mine – remark how frustrating and puzzling
he found it that Sartre, having constructed an
uncompromising philosophy of personal
freedom, had then spent many years
4 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
entangled to varying degrees with the French
Communist Party – stalwart defenders of
Stalin’s gulags. This apparent contradiction
was, indeed, one of the causes of Sartre’s
monumental falling-out with his old friend
Albert Camus. Ian Birchall’s article on page
18 examines how Sartre’s ethics and politics
were intertwined, and how the latter led to
his involvement in, and later his alienation
from, the Communist Party. Willie
Thompson (p.21) takes a more biographical
approach, looking at Sartre through the eyes
and diaries of his longtime lover, philo-
sophical soulmate and significant other,
Simone de Beauvoir.
Essential to understanding Sartre is that
he was an atheist (unlike earlier existentialists
such as Kierkegaard). Sartre therefore
believed in no heaven and no pre-given
moral order. As you will read, Sartre failed
to develop a fully-worked out moral system
of his own. However, certain strong ideas
about how we should live permeate his
writings. He believed that you should strive
to live without self-deception. You should
live ‘authentically’, aware of your own
freedom and your inescapable responsibility
for all of your actions. To deny your own
freedom is a way of being in ‘bad faith’,
which was one of his key concepts. For
example, if your friends ask you to ride with
them on a rollercoaster, and you say “No, I
can’t – I’m a coward!”, then you are in bad
faith. Of course you could ride on the roller-
coaster – you are simply choosing not to.
And someone who thought that his role as a
magazine editor compelled him to finish
writing an editorial would similarly be in bad
faith – denying his inescapable freedom to
either continue or stop writing the editorial.
In fact he wo
Philosophy in a nutshell
Philosophy (Philo = love; sophia =
wisdom) is often translated as the love of
wisdom or the love of truth. One way to
get a vague idea as to what philosophy is
about is to dissect the subject and inves-
tigate its skeleton. Here is a short guide
to some of the bigger bones!
• Metaphysics ‘after-physics’: the
books found after Aristotle’s books of Physics
The investigation of the underlying
nature and structure of reality as a
whole. Includes questions about the
nature of time, about the different cate-
gories of existence and about whether
there is a God.
• Epistemology Episteme = knowledge
logos = explanation of
What is knowledge? What is the differ-
ence between knowledge, belief and
opinion? Can we really know anything?
How could we know that we did?
• Logic logos = explanation of
This subject consists of two different
topics. (1) an analysis of what is meant
by logical consequence. (2) an analysis
of the validity of arguments, which
nowadays employs a sort of algebra
which can be used to crunch logical
problems.
• Philosophy of Mind
What is the human mind? How does it
think? How is mind related to body?
• Ethics from Ethikos
How should we live? Why should we
live like that? What is good and
bad/evil? How should we decide that an
act is unethical? What is ‘happiness’?
• Aesthetics
aisthetikos = concerning feeling
What is art? What is beauty? Is the
beauty of music beautiful for similar
reasons to that of a landscape?
• Political Philosophy polis= city state
What would utopia be like? Is utopia
possible? How should society be organ-
ised? How should decisions be taken?
Other areas include philosophy of
mathematics, of science, of religion, of
language, of social science, of history.
Easy reads
• The Problems of Philosophy by
Bertrand Russell. A short and stimulating
introduction to philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy by
Bertrand Russell. A long, detailed and
readable history of philosophy. Although
dated, it gives a good introduction which can
then be built upon.
• Philosophy and Living by Ralph
Blumenau. Another general history of
philosophy, but with an emphasis on relating
ideas to modern life.
• Dictionary of Philosophy by Antony
Flew. Covers an immense variety of subjects,
people etc. Really useful.
• University renamed after Kant • Philos Join
ID Trial • Sartre Birthday Party • Odysseus’
Home Island Found • Ontology Hits Big Time
News reports by Sue Roberts.
Kant University
Summer 2005 saw the renaming of the
Alberta University in Kaliningrad, as the
Immanuel Kant University. The occasion
marked the 750th anniversary of the city
(formerly Königsberg) and was attended by
Chancellor Gerhard Schröder at the invita-
tion of President Putin. After unveiling a
memorial plaque at the University,
Schröder accompanied Vladimir Putin to
place wreaths at Kant’s tomb in the city’s
cathedral.
Schröder
said that they
should try to
emulate
Kant’s aim of
defending
the dignity Schröder & Putin at Kant’s Tomb
of the indi-
vidual and credited him with developing
the ideal of a modern and humane form of
government.
Odysseus’ Home Island Found?
Holidays ... .a time to dream; a time to
reflect. For Robert Bittlestone, a manage-
ment consultant, the result of musing while
on holiday in 1997 was a hunch that a
peninsula on the western side of the island
of Cephalonia was once a separate island,
conceivably home to Homer’s legendary
Odysseus.
Homer’s epic poems ‘The Odyssey’ and
‘The Iliad’ are the oldest books in Western
literature. His accounts of the events
surrounding the Trojan Wars around 1200
BC were a standard part of education in the
ancient world, greatly influencing the intel-
lectual and cultural growth of Greece and
inspiring Aristotle, Plato and Socrates.
Until now it has been generally assumed
that the island home to which Odysseus
returns after his travels – Ithaca – must
have referred to modern-day Ithaki, to the
east of Cephalonia. But Ithaki is small and
barren, with few traces of Bronze Age
occupation, making it an unlikely location
for the wealthy island kingdom described
by Homer. This has led most scholars
until now to conclude that Homer’s geog-
raphy was shaky.
Since his hunch, Bittlestone has devoted
much time to proving that Paliki, a small
island just off the western coast of
Cephalonia, became joined to it as a result
of rock fall and land-slides. Computer
analysis of geological, archaeological and
literary data; advanced satellite imagery and
3D global visualisation techniques, as well
as field trips have uncovered an impressive
trail leading to Cephalonia. He has been
supported in his search by James Diggle,
professor of Greek at Cambridge
University and John Underhill, professor of
stratiography at the University of
Edinburgh who say they have no evidence
that contradicts Mr Bittlestone’s claims.
The result of collaboration between the
three has led to the recent publication of
Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Homer’s
Ithaca.
Ask a Philosopher!
A group of professional philosophers
have just launched a new service on the
internet. The nature of the service is
neatly summed up by the name of their
website: ‘AskPhilosophers’ (askphiloso-
phers.org). The free service invites
members of the public to post their ques-
tions at the website; one of the philoso-
phers on the team may then choose to
answer the question. Question and answer
are then be displayed on the website. The
team of philosophers includes some well-
Sartre’s Birthday Cake
Dr Timothy J. Madigan, a US Editor of Philosophy Now, reports: “This cake was part of our all-
day Sartre celebration on his 100th birthday, June 21st 2005. We held it at a bookstore in
Honeoye Falls, NY run by my friend
Nick Di Chario (The Write Book and
News), and David White brought his
summer Philosophy of Education
course for the festivities. A good
time was had by all.” So was the
cake actually eaten? “We ate the
bits around his photo but none of us
had the heart to plunge a knife into
his face. So I gave what was left of
the cake to David White, who
served it up to his students the next
day – apparently they had no
qualms about butchering J.P.”
November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 5
News
known thinkers, such as Simon Blackburn,
Roger Crisp, Peter van Inwagen and
Gabriel Segal.
Another free web-service called, ‘Ask a
Philosopher’, (http://go.to/ask-a-philoso-
pher) has been operating since 1999, and
is run by Geoffrey Klempner.
Immaculate Non-Conception
British pro-life groups may be divided
over a recent development that has made it
possible for human embryos to be created
without using sperm. A team from
Edinburgh University, headed by Dr Paul
De Sousa, revealed at a meeting of the
British Association in Dublin that they have
found a way to grow an embryo by
‘tricking’ an egg into dividing, with a shock
of electricity, rather than by the normal
process of fertilisation.
The embryos, called blastocysts, consist
of about 50 cells each and can be used as a
source of stem cells which can be
programmed to grow into the various types
of cell in the human body, though this has
not yet been done successfully in humans as
it has in non-human primates. It is
reported that the embryos are grown by a
process known as parthogenensis, which
translates from Greek as ‘virgin birth’. The
eggs used are taken with consent from
women who have been sterilised; they
retain a full set of DNA from the donor.
According to Dr Da Sousa there is no

News
intention to use the embryos to create
pregnancies.
Feds to Block Oregon Suicide Bids
The status of a law in Oregon that
allows doctor-assisted suicide in the case of
a terminally-ill patient was in the news
recently when the USA’s new Supreme
Court chief justice defended the right of
the federal government to block
euthanasia. Oregon is the only state to
allow euthanasia following a referendum in
1997. The Supreme Court ruled then that
the law did not give the dying a right to
such assisted suicide but the door was left
open to the state to use its discretion. Now
it appears that door is being firmly closed.
Coming Soon to a Mall Near You
Meanwhile, Dignitas, the Swiss clinic
that carries out assisted suicide, has opened
a branch in Hanover, Germany. In spite of
vociferous opposition from politicians,
Church leaders and doctors, Dignitas
insists that under European Union law it
has the right to offer its services within the
EU. The founder, Ludwig Minelli, stated
that the office had been opened in response
Philosophy Now
Issue 53 was edited by:
Rick Lewis founded
Philosophy Now in
1991 in his spare
time while working
as a physicist for
British Telecom.
He thinks that
everyday life throws
philosophical
problems at us all, and the only question is
whether we tackle them badly or well.
Anja Steinbauer
says “The unique-
ness of the western
philosophical tradi-
tion has often been
pointed out, but
neither being unique
nor being philo-
sophical is unique to
the western tradition.” Anja is editor for
Continental, non-Western and feminist
philosophy in the magazine.
6 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
to demand from German citizens. Critics,
however, accused Dignitas of profiting
from people who are at a low ebb; not only
as a result of terminal illness but in some
cases as a result of mental illness.
Literal-Minded Complaint
A poster of a man and child beneath the
caption “Miracles, Healing, Faith”,
published by the Penial Pentecostal
Church in Brentwood, Essex, led critics to
lodge a complaint with the UK’s
Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).
This alleged that the Church was claiming
to cure medical conditions without scien-
tific proof and “preyed on the credulity of
vulnerable people.”
Michael Reid, head of the Church,
denied that the poster specifically referred
to cures or medical conditions, empha-
sizing that the words “miracle, healing and
faith” were a statement of its belief in the
Christian Gospel. Finding in their favour
the ASA stated “We consider that most
people in the UK were aware of Christian
beliefs and would understand that the
poster referred to spiritual, not physical,
miracles and healing.”
An Evolving Controversy
Educators across America have been
rivetted by an ‘intelligent design versus
evolution’ court case in Harrisburg, in
Pennsylvania – and several philosophers
have become involved in the controversy.
One philosophy professor, Barbara Forrest
from the Southeastern Louisiana
University, has been a pivotal figure in the
trial.
Professor Forrest, a researcher of the
history of ‘intelligent design’ and author of
the book Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The
Wedge of Intelligent Design, has been called
as an expert witness in the case between the
Dover School Board, near Harrisburg, and
eleven parents. The dispute arose when
the school board instructed teachers to
read disclaimer to pupils in biology classes
before teaching them about the theory of
evolution. The disclaimer states “the
theory (of evolution) is not a fact. Gaps in
the theory exist for which there is no
evidence.” It continues with the advice that
“if pupils wish to investigate the the alter-
native theory of ‘intelligent design’ they
should read a book called Of Pandas &
People.” The parents object to this state-
ment and are backed by groups supporting
the separation of church and state. The
school board maintains that ‘intelligent
design’ is science, not religion. It is a recent
theory that proposes that the ‘irreducible
complexity’ of present-day organisms
means that they couldn’t have evolved by
random mutations and must therefore have
been the work of an intelligent entity. It
has overtaken ‘creationism’ which specifi-
cally attributed such design to God.
However, the parents, backed by the
American Civil Liberties Union and
Americans United for Separation of
Church and State, are suing to demand the
abolition of the disclaimer. Step forward
Professor Forrest! Although lawyers for
the defence have objected to her creden-
tials, saying she has no background in
science, the judge has allowed her to testify.
Her evidence has pointed to changes made
to the draft versions of the book Of Pandas
& People. She claims that, following a ruling
by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987 which
barred the teaching of ‘creation science’ in
public schools, the book’s authors simply
replaced 250 references to ‘creationism’
and the ‘creator’ in the text with the words
‘intelligent design’ and ‘intelligent
designer’. A rose by any other name..?
Other philosophers to take an interest in
the case include Daniel Dennett, wo has
written a widely-quoted opinion piece in
the New York Times.
Let Me Through, I’m an Ontologist!
An impressive $18.8 million award has
been made by the US National Institute of
Health to enable the development of a
National Center for Biomedical Ontology.
In philosophy, ontology is the study of
what things exist. The relevance here is
that computers and clinicians are some-
times unable to collate different sorts of
medical information effectively, as different
branches of medicine use different – but
sometimes overlapping – concepts.
At the core of the new project will be
the University of Buffalo, NY, from where
the philosopher Barry Smith will co-
ordinate the Center’s nationwide effort to
establish and disseminate good practices in
ontology. With 30 years experience in
ontology, Prof Smith will lead scientists
from several U.S. institutions toward the
goal of designing and implementing a new
generation of ontological theories and
computer systems that will will help
researchers to share, compare and analyse
data gathered from large biomedical exper-
iments.
Socratic Irony
In March the Philosophy Department at
Mansfield University in Pennsylvania
moved to a new address: Third Floor,
Hemlock Hall, Mansfield University. The
Chair of Philosophy, Professor Robert
Timko, says he is unsure whether this is
irony or an indication of the future.
 Why Sartre Matters
Benedict O’Donohoe introduces our Sartre centenary issue.
T
he 21st June 2005 was an auspicious date – the
summer solstice, the tipping point of Gemini
into Cancer, and the centenary of the birth of
Jean-Paul Sartre. And on 15th April 1980 –
just 25 years ago – Sartre died. These two
dates are worthy of note because, in the intervening 75 years,
Sartre created a legacy that is not only memorable but is also,
and more importantly, an appeal to an unconventional
worldview and, by implication, to action.
Sartre’s attainments as writer and intellectual suffice in
themselves to ensure his eminence in the canon of French
literature. He is probably the most significant representative
of 20th century French letters, whose accomplishments, by
their breadth and their depth, their quality and their quantity,
surpass those of Gide, Proust or Camus – and he arguably
dominates the world stage too. In any case, he is, by various
accounts, the most written-about writer of the last century.
He also bears comparison with the great names of previous
French generations, against whom he measured himself from
an early age, surrounded by the leather-bound tomes of his
grandfather’s library: whether Descartes or Pascal in the 17th
century; Voltaire or Rousseau in the 18th; Balzac, Hugo or
Zola in the 19th – Sartre set out to forge a reputation equal to
any of these giants, and only the most grudging critics deny
that he realised that lofty ambition.
For both the range and the merit of Sartre’s opus are quite
amazing: he is the author of modern classics in several fields –
the novel, Nausea 1938; the short story, The Wall 1939; the
play, No Exit 1944; philosophy, Being and Nothingness 1943;
criticism, What is Literature? 1948; biography, Saint Genet,
Comedian and Martyr 1952; the polemical essay and reportage
– numerous issues of his periodical Les Temps modernes,
founded 1946 – and ten volumes of Situations; and, not least,
autobiography, Words 1964, widely regarded as his finest
literary achievement. As if this body of work were not
enough, he also wrote screenplays, journalism, art criticism,
theses on theoretical psychology – notably the emotions and
the imagination – and copious correspondence. Moreover, he
made (admittedly, ill-fated) forays into radio and television. In
short, Sartre was, in the phrase he borrowed from
Chateaubriand as an epigraph to the final section of Words, ‘a
book-making machine’, and the products of his ‘machinery’
had an impact across the spectrum of the arts, media and
social sciences.
However, Sartre does not matter simply because he was a
great writer, nor even primarily so, although his exceptional
command of styles and genres expertly complements his
missionary purpose. No, Sartre matters because so many
fundamental points of his analysis of the human reality are
right and true, and because their accuracy and veracity entail
real consequences for our lives as individuals and in social
groups. His distinction is to have obeyed his own injunction
of ‘commitment’, and to have persisted in trying to convey his
messages to as wide an audience as possible, by exploiting
every medium available to the writer.
Existentialism is the philosophical label associated most
closely with Sartre’s name. It is not a term he coined – that
was done by the Catholic philosopher, playwright and critic,
Gabriel Marcel – nor one that he particularly liked, but he
nevertheless used it and gave it wide currency through a
lecture in the immediate post-war period (given at the Club
Maintenant, Paris, in October 1945), entitled: ‘Existentialism
is a humanism’. Published as a slim volume in 1946, this little
book became the sacred text of the fashionable followers of
the Left Bank vogue, which is one reason why Sartre regretted
its publication. However, it contains a handy definition that
underpins the whole of his philosophy, and that is: ‘Existence
precedes essence’. This is a crucial principle because it runs
counter to the main thrust of western thought from Plato to
Hegel, via Judaism, Christianity and Descartes. What it
claims is that there is no a priori conception of humankind,
whether as species or individual. It therefore disposes at one
stroke with the Platonic realm of the ideal, with the Judeo-
Christian creator God, and with the Hegelian notion of the
Absolute Idea. It is axiomatic for Sartre, as it was for
Nietzsche, that we inhabit a godless universe – a common-
sense view, given the paucity and poor quality of any evidence
for his existence – so that there is no god-given spirit that is
distinct from our corporeal selves, and can exist before or after
or outside of our earthly lives. Existentialism is therefore also
a counterblast to the capital Cartesian notion of the duality of
mind and ‘extension’, or matter, summarised in the famous
aphorism: Cogito ergo sum. In effect, Sartre inverts this
premise to say: Sum ergo cogito, I am therefore I think, which is
for Sartre the natural (arbitrary but actual) order of things.
For Sartre, by contrast with Descartes, consciousness is
necessarily embodied: it comes into being only with our
advent in the world at birth, and goes out of being with our
exit from the world in death. In life, however, consciousness
itself is nothing, except insofar as it is consciousness of something.
Take away all the things of which consciousness is conscious,
and you would have nothing left. Whereas, Sartre argues,
November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 7

Chris Madden
consciousness can seize itself as conscious of something, it
cannot seize itself as conscious exclusively of itself, without
being grounded in some material object of which it is
conscious. We might well have the impression that the
Cartesian dualism of mind and matter is an accurate summary
of our condition, but this impression is a delusion. The
understanding of ourselves as individuated is an empirical
process of learning over time, not an innate awareness.
Sartre’s project in Being and Nothingness was to try to
describe the real nature of human existence in a material
world of which we are (as bodies) constituent parts, and yet of
which we are simultaneously conscious as though we were, in
some sense, not a part of it. This insight produces what is
perhaps his most profoundly true paradox, that “a human is
that being which is not what it is, and is what it is not.” But,
of course, he also wants to go beyond mere description by
drawing out the ethical implications of his ontological
analysis, and this enquiry leads him to the moral concepts of
freedom, responsibility, authenticity and bad faith, which he
discusses at some length in Being and Nothingness, and
promises to return to in a later book of ethics.
Obviously, Sartre wasn’t the first western philosopher to
dispose of God, and then find himself wrestling with the
consequences. Nietzsche notoriously declared the demise of
the deity, then confronted the corollary that humans are the
sole source of moral values, which had necessarily to be ‘re-
valued, beyond good and evil’. For Sartre, however, it is not
so much the absence of God (which he postulates a priori) as
the nature of consciousness that makes humans the authors of
all moral value. The discriminating power of self-
consciousness, enabling us to stand outside ourselves as if we
were things in the world much like other things, also enables
us to discern that any present situation could be different, and
that we could make it so: we can always (ought always, Sartre
implies) have a project to amend the status quo. Moreover, in
most situations, we can conceive of more than one way to
change things: in short, we can – indeed, we have to – choose.
What Kierkegaard identified as the inescapable ‘Either/Or’,
the source of all anguish, is, for Sartre, the defining character-
istic of human being: freedom.
Freedom is not itself a matter of choice, Sartre insists; it is
8 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
“ It flows from Sartre’s first
principles that we are embodied
consciousnesses, alone in a
godless universe, characterised
by freedom, destined to act
autonomously and by our own
lights, and to be wholly
responsible for our actions and
”
therefore open to moral
judgment on the basis of them.
the ineluctable, inherent and foundational quality of human
being. We are, as he puts it in one of his pithy formulations,
‘condemned to be free’: every time we act, we are destined to
discriminate anew between various possible courses of action
in pursuit of our project to modify our situation in the world.
Whether we like it or not, we are responsible for the actions we
commit, and we are therefore, on the evidence of these,
amenable to moral judgment: “You are nothing but the sum
of your acts.” Another way of saying that existence precedes
essence, is to say that ‘doing precedes being’, or that ‘to be is
to act’. Because we are conscious of our moral responsibility,
we feel anguish in the face of our freedom, and we are
naturally inclined to flee from that anguish.
Sartre says in his early philosophy that we always choose how
to act, whatever the circumstances might be. The exhausted
athlete chooses the moment at which she is too tired to
continue; the terrified victim chooses to faint in order to blot
out the insufferable situation. He even goes so far as to say
that the tortured man chooses when to cry out in pain – and so
on. Despite the extreme quality of some of his examples, it
seems to me that Sartre is right to be concerned by the fact
that, very commonly, we tend to deny or to disguise our
freedom in order to evade responsibility for our actions. This
tendency he calls ‘inauthenticity’ or ‘bad faith’. A typical
strategy is role-playing, behaving in a way that we feel is
dictated or required by the functions we fulfil. He exemplifies
this kind of conduct in Being and Nothingness with his
caricature of the ‘waiter who is too much a waiter’, a man who
escapes the anguish of his freedom by enacting the
exaggerated gestures of a cultural stereotype.
Another common evasive strategy, is to claim that one was
‘only following orders’, an excuse advanced in order to
exonerate all manner of abominable behaviour, ranging from
the Holocaust to the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners. These
are well-documented crimes, whose perpetrators defend their
actions on the grounds that they were ‘only following orders’.
Sartre insists that orders can never cause us to act against our
will: they only ever have the force or authority with which the
agent himself invests them. The agent always chooses to assent
or disobey, to resist or to acquiesce. Several of Sartre’s
protagonists in his novels and plays struggle with the dilemma
that they chose to obey orders which they felt they ought to
disobey, and yet to which they freely and culpably assented.
To lie to oneself about the exercise of one’s own freedom and
moral discretion is Sartre’s definition of bad faith.
The authentic person, by contrast, agrees that all his
actions flow from his inherent freedom, accepts that every
action is an implicit assertion of moral value, and realises that
our actions are the only basis on which others are entitled to
judge us. Action is our dimension-for-the-other in the world,
and we have a right of mutual moral scrutiny as if all our
actions are committed quite freely. Another entailment of this
ethical analysis is that ‘all human life is human’. This tauto-
logical maxim, adapted from Nietzsche and Heidegger, is
deployed by Sartre to undercut inauthentic interpretations of
actions as being, for example, bestial, diabolical, or inhuman.
The more apt we become to attribute inhuman or super-
natural epithets to our behaviour, the more likely we are to be
talking about conduct that is, in fact, exclusively or even
characteristically human: no other species could conceive,
much less enact, Bergen Belsen or Abu Graib.
So, it flows from Sartre’s first principles that we are
embodied consciousnesses, alone in a godless universe, charac-
terised by freedom, destined to act autonomously and by our
own lights, and to be wholly responsible for our actions and
therefore open to moral judgment on the basis of them.
Sartrean existentialism, then, is an ontology that entails an
exigent, unrelenting and burdensome deontology, or ethics,
whose premises are grounded in empirical good sense, and
whose complements derive from it logically and persuasively.
Yet there is a problem, which we might call ‘relativity’: the
individual’s relation to his situation, or the interface of subjec-
tivity and objectivity, the confrontation of person and history.
How does Sartre account for the historical moment, which he
calls ‘facticity’ and which is axiomatically contingent? How
does facticity impact upon the agent? To what extent is my
freedom circumscribed by my conditioning? In Being and
Nothingness (1943) he wrote: ‘If war breaks out, it is in my
image, it is my war and I deserve it…’ But Frantz, the anti-
hero of his play The Condemned of Altona (1960), says: ‘It is not
we who make war, but war that makes us.’ To which of these
opposing perspectives did Sartre finally adhere?
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Sartre moved away from
what he called the analytical and apolitical phase of his
thought – enshrined in Being and Nothingness which is subjec-
tivist, individualistic and asocial – towards a dialectical concep-
tualisation, culminating in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960),
which is objectivist, collectivist, and socially focused. This is
another distinctive element of Sartre’s legacy: the attempt to
reconcile, without renouncing them, the main tenets of his
phenomenological ontology and ethics with a more compre-
hensive and inclusive worldview that would take account of
the historical moment in the narrative of the individual; that
is, to incorporate the ideology of existentialism into what he
called the “unsurpassable philosophy of our time”, Marxism.
This evolution can be encapsulated as a shift from the uncom-
promising analytical dictum, ‘We are what we do’, to the more
subtle dialectical statement: ‘We are what we make of what
others have made of us’. This is a pragmatic acknowledgment
that our freedom, albeit inherent and ineluctable, is neces-
sarily conditioned by time and place. As Sartre once rebuked
Camus, in their dispute over the latter’s book The Rebel, “the
facts of life are not the same in Passy and in Billancourt” –
respectively, affluent middle-class and poor working-class
quarters of Paris.
This progressive realisation on Sartre’s part – stemming
successively from his war-time experience of relative
constraint and impotence, the random intoxication of post-
war notoriety, and the relentless struggle to be a critical
travelling companion of communism during the 1950s – led
not only to a more realistic and humane analysis of the human
agent, but also to a political insight articulated in his highly
controversial preface to Frantz Fanon’s book, The Wretched of
the Earth (1961). This is a ground-breaking analysis of
colonial oppression that prompted opponents to denounce
Sartre as an apostle of violence, and sympathisers to hail him
as ‘the first third-worldist’. Sartre was clearly ahead of his
time in declaring that the first world (the erstwhile imperial
powers) was rich at the expense of the third world (the
erstwhile colonies), and he inaugurated a new discourse which
legitimised the counter-violence of national liberation and
decolonisation as an authentic response to hegemonic,
western European domination.
Here again, it seems clear that Sartre’s analysis is spot-on
and his moral intuitions are sound. The depredations perpe-
trated by the imperialist powers against the peoples they
enslaved and the lands they expropriated, particularly during
the 19th and 20th centuries, were nothing less than institu-
tionalised violence on a massive scale, justified broadly
speaking on the same grounds as slavery in the 17th and 18th
centuries, namely those of inherent racial and moral superi-
ority. And although the colonies have in name been emanci-
pated, they remain in thrall to their former imperialist masters
through such control mechanisms as the World Trade
Organisation, the World Bank, the International Monetary
Fund, and the ever-present threat of American military might.
This is the potent infrastructure of globalisation, which
ensures that the third world remains poor enough to
underwrite the wealth of the first. Sartre’s unshakeable
commitment to freedom meant that he was always on the side
of the oppressed and dispossessed.
With hindsight, Sartre’s deep suspicion of American
intentions in the post-war period looks extraordinarily
prescient, and well justified in light of the annexation of
western Europe through the Marshall Plan, and the
Manichean demonisation of the USSR as the ‘Empire of Evil’
over a 40-year time frame, inaugurated by the manic
November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 9
McCarthyite witch-hunts of the early 1950s (which Sartre
parodied brilliantly in his satirical farce, Nekrassov,1955). It is
true that his distrust of the USA led him on occasion to be
over-optimistic about the Soviet experiment of socialism, and
to be slow to acknowledge the delirious extent to which the
Stalinist régime relied upon torture, deportation and murder.
Nevertheless, Sartre denounced the Gulags in Les Temps
modernes as early as 1950, and he remained aloof from the
French Communist Party, by whose apparatchiks he was
reviled as a ‘demagogue of the third way’ (which New Labour
fondly imagines it has invented!), because he obstinately and
admirably adhered to his self-styled status as a ‘critical
travelling companion’. When Soviet tanks crushed Hungary
in 1956, Sartre was cured of any lingering illusions about the
Soviet model of socialism, and concentrated his verbal fire all
the more fiercely against colonialism and imperialism, a tirade
in whose sights was now the empire-building USSR itself.
Certainly, some of Sartre’s later political forays were naïve
and wrong-headed, and arguably informed by anachronistic
(mis)conceptions of ‘the people, the masses, direct democracy,
revolutionary action’, and so on. Yet, whenever he defended
the right of the oppressed to meet violence with violence; or
that of working people to refuse exploitation by big business;
or that of refugees to be saved and given asylum – notably in
the case of escapees from South Vietnam after the American
debacle, known as the ‘boat people’, whom he championed as
one of his last public acts – Sartre’s social or political interven-
tions were underpinned by profoundly humane moral instincts
that remained faithful to his radical analysis of the inalien-
ability of human freedom.
Why, then, did Sartre never complete the book of ethics
that he promised in Being and Nothingness, his notebooks for
which were published posthumously in 1983? In the
immediate post-war period, Sartre was optimistic that free
human beings (i.e. everyone) could be integrated into a
socialist collectivity in which respect for individual freedom
would be the overarching and inspirational value informing all
real action in the world. In other words, that personal
relations, inevitably grounded in competition and articulated
in conflict – much as he had evoked them in Being and
Nothingness – might be mediated instead by consensual norms
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10 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
Sartre did much of his writing in Paris cafés such as Les Deux Magots
(above) and the next-door Café Flore.
of reciprocal respect and free commitment to a common
good. In short, he was a believer in the French revolutionary
mantra of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. His optimism was
dealt severe blows, however, by the tyranny of the Soviet
system, and by what he saw as De Gaulle’s subversion of
cherished republican principles. His response to these disillu-
sionments took the form of Critique of Dialectical Reason, in
which his aspiration was to “rediscover the real individual
reduced to an idea by the Marxian dialectic” and to “trace him
through the praxis of his projects in the world” – an ambitious
but ultimately doomed enterprise.
Yet Sartre was right to try. It is not his fault that
democratic socialism hides a crippling self-contradiction at its
very core: people will not freely subscribe to a scale of values
and governance that privileges the collective good above the
individual advantage. Democratic governments famously
cannot get elected on platforms to increase personal taxation
in order to improve the common weal – still less on under-
takings to cancel third-world debt! On the contrary,
democratic political parties feel constrained to vie with each
other in a reverse fiscal auction in order to sue for the support
of the greedy, self-interested, egocentric voter. None of this is
Sartre’s fault, and it is greatly to his
credit not only that his analysis of
human reality is so transparently
honest and, I suggest, accurate; but
also that he courageously drew out
the consequences of that analysis,
placing equal emphasis upon the twin
foci of freedom and responsibility;
and that he never ceased to wrestle
with the profound paradox of the
individual / social dichotomy, the
oxymoron of the man / history
dialectic, in every aspect of his vivid
life and eclectic work.
© DR BENEDICT O’DONOHOE 2005
Benedict O’Donohoe is Secretary of the
UK Society for Sartrean Studies, and
lectures at the University of the West of
England in Bristol.
 Was Existentialism
a Humanism?
Gerald Jones examines one of the most famous lectures
in the history of philosophy.
“If I choose to kill Brisseau, I am defining myself as a murderer... By choosing
my action, I choose it for all mankind. But what happens if everyone in the
world behaved like me and came here and shot Brisseau? What a mess! Not
to mention the commotion from the doorbell ringing all night. And of course
we’d need valet parking. Ah…how the mind boggles when it turns to ethical
considerations!” Woody Allen, ‘The Condemned’
I
n the autumn of
1945 Jean-Paul
Sartre gave a
lecture at a club in
Paris entitled
‘Existentialism is a
Humanism’. It was a
lecture that propelled
Sartre into the philo-
sophical stratosphere:
he became a celebrity
overnight, and an intel-
lectual icon whose
funeral in 1980 was
attended by 50,000
mourners. Sartre ignited
hearts and minds in a way
dreamt of only by princesses
and pop stars.
Sartre’s lecture was eventually
published as a short book, whose
English edition was poorly titled
Existentialism and Humanism. Although Sartre later renounced
the lecture its publication became the bible of existentialism,
selling in its hundreds of thousands. The lecture vividly
reveals the conceptual struggle that Sartre was to have
throughout his life and it was an explicit attempt to show how
this conflict could be resolved. Namely, to show how existen-
tialism, a philosophy of individual freedom, could be seen as a
form of humanism, a philosophy that locates value in
humanity.
For Sartre the success of this project depended on the
success of a certain number of steps. He needed to explain
what he meant by ‘humanism’ and how it differed from other
less savoury forms of humanism. He wished to give a
technical account of existentialism which distinguished it from
just another trendy, but vacuous, lifestyle choice – black polo-
necks, smooth jazz, random acts of personal expression (such
as Audrey Hepburn’s crazzzzy freeform dance in the film
Funny Face). Most importantly he wanted to show why his
theory wasn’t a licence for a nihilistic free-for-all, but instead
gave rise to a much more optimistic ‘existential humanism’.
This project seems to be fairly clear and straightforward,
but unfortunately (for students accustomed to the lean prose
of philosophers like A.J. Ayer) the lecture is neither of these
things. Perhaps this is due to the awkward English trans-
lation; perhaps it was Sartre’s style – he once confessed to
Simone de Beauvoir that his work was “not a masterpiece of
planning, composition and clarity” (surely an understatement,
as anyone will know who has tried to grasp the meaning of
Sartre’s claim that “Slime is the revenge of the In-Itself”).
Perhaps it was the lecture format – Sartre spoke from memory
without any notes, and simplifies or abbreviates many of his
ideas. In any case, the lecture is in turns aphoristic,
meandering and pretentious. But it’s also gripping and
inspiring and you can hear in Sartre’s voice a passion, a call for
action, which is rare in Western philosophy.
“People. You must love people. People are admirable... I feel like vomiting.”
Sartre, Nausea.
So what does Sartre mean by ‘humanism’? Humanism is a
term that alludes to a shift in our intellectual and moral focus
– from God to human beings. Sartre deplores a certain type
of humanism, one that sees all human beings as ‘magnificent’,
as people who must be loved no matter what they may have
done, simply because they are human. Sartre’s humanism
recognises that there is nothing other than ‘the universe of
human subjectivity’, that we all have the potential to invent
ourselves and change our lives, and that although moral values
are created by individuals we still have a responsibility to every
other human being.
The accusation laid at Sartre’s feet by those familiar with
his novels, short stories and earlier philosophy, is that existen-
tialism is not a humanism: it is a pessimistic and rabidly
individualistic philosophy which leads either to a concern only
for oneself, or to an abandonment of social action – the
‘quietism of despair’.
Sartre lays out his philosophical stall by defining existen-
tialism as the only theory which correctly positions our
existence as prior to our essence. Such a philosophy begins
with the individual: our subjectivity, our consciousness, and
our existence in the world. By starting here it is clear to
Sartre that we experience a radical freedom in a way that other
objects (knives, cauliflowers and of course slime) do not.
November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 11
Sartre’s account of freedom is filtered through an emotional
prism. He speaks in detail of our anguish – fear of the
responsibility that freedom brings; our abandonment – the
loss of any firm rules and principles to guide us through life;
and our despair – the frustrating realisation that our actions
can make only a small difference, yet the only difference we
can make is through action (no prayer or wish can change the
world). Our goal is to live an authentic existence, a life that
can contain these emotions without fleeing from the truth
about our freedom. Those who do hide from the truth, who
pretend to themselves that they have a predetermined essence
or unchanging personality, are living in self-denial: the sad
and contemptible state of being in ‘bad faith’.
Most significantly our radical freedom means that we are
not bound by any a priori moral principles – we do not have to
conform to the ethical principles that have been laid down in
advance by society, religion or philosophy. In fact to live an
authentic existence we must recognise that we invent moral
values through our own actions. It seems only a short step
from Sartre’s claim that ‘I create moral values’ to
Dostoyevsky’s fear that “everything would be
permitted, even cannibalism”. (When humanists
say that we should ‘like and appreciate human
beings’ they usually don’t mean this in a
culinary sense.)
So our individual freedom is the main
threat to existentialism’s credentials as a
humanism. But Sartre believes that
this freedom is the source of a new
form of existential humanism, a
‘morality of freedom’ as he puts it.
“Obviously I do not mean that whenever I choose
between a millefeuille* and a chocolate éclair, I
choose in anguish.”
Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism
How is an existentialist ethic, a
morality of freedom, possible? The answer
that first strikes us when reading Sartre’s
lecture is the adoption of a kind of Kantian
position: that when we choose we cannot help but
universalise this choice, and wish for everyone to act like
us. Our actions create an image of humanity as we’d like it to
be. This carries with it a heavy burden of responsibility each
time we make a choice (barring, apparently, those we make in
pâtisseries). But even though Sartre isn’t taking a fully
Kantian line (he is only saying that we universalise an image
or an ideal, not a rule or a principle) the argument just doesn’t
wash: it simply isn’t true that if I choose to get married I am
“committing mankind as a whole to the practice of
monogamy”. In fact I positively wish to live in a world where
people do not act like me, and do not adopt my peculiar
desires and predilections – most of us want to inhabit a world
of variety not conformity.
However, there is another tack that Sartre takes in his
lecture which is much more fruitful. This is the claim that
freedom itself is the ideal that we wish to foist upon humanity,
and that there is an interconnection or reciprocity between
12 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
our freedom and the freedom of others (our ‘inter-subjec-
tivity’).
So the real possibility of an existential humanism hinges on
the idea of reciprocal freedom – that our freedom depends
upon the freedom of others. This must have sounded odd to
Sartre’s audience, as they would have been aware that in Being
and Nothingness, as well as in his novels and plays, Sartre had
detailed the hellish relationships that we have with other
people. In our encounters with one another we fix each other
with an essence, like the Medusa turning her victims into
stone. We package, pigeon-hole and objectify other people,
attempting to deny them their freedom (admittedly an
impossible project) whilst at the same time we experience
their denial of our freedom. This power struggle between us,
with each treating the other as an object, determines all our
relationships with other people. But in a footnote we find the
tantalising suggestion that
“these considerations do not exclude the possibility of an ethics of deliverance and
salvation. But this can be achieved only after a radical conversion which we
cannot discuss here.”
Sartre, Being and Nothingness
In the years after the war Sartre (in his
Notebooks on Ethics) explored the radical
conversion that might be needed to
construct an existential morality. But
the 1945 lecture already contains in
embryonic form the foundations for
such an ethic: “I am obliged to will
the freedom of others at the same
time as mine. I cannot make liberty
my aim unless I make that of others
equally my aim.” But on what
grounds can Sartre claim that my
freedom is bound up with yours, that
freedom is reciprocal?
Sartre could mean that I cannot authen-
tically grasp my own freedom without
acknowledging the freedom of other
people. This is because my understanding of
my own self and my own freedom is filtered
through my understanding of other people. As Sartre
says in his lecture “the other is indispensable to my existence,
and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself.” If I
treat other people as objects (which is a form of bad faith),
then I also begin to see myself primarily as an object in their
eyes (also a form of bad faith). It is only by recognising their
freedom that I am able to fully recognise my own, and hence
live an authentic life that avoids bad faith.
Sartre could also be saying that I cannot consistently value
my own freedom above the freedom of other people: they
exist on an equal footing. To place a higher worth on my own
freedom implies that I am intrinsically more valuable than
other people. But to believe in intrinsic values, in other words
values that exist independently of human creation, is bad faith:
it is believing in a priori or objective morality. There is no
reason we can find, within an existentialist position, to value
our freedom but not everyone else’s. “The actions of men of
good faith have, as their ultimate significance, the quest of
freedom itself as such.” So, to be consistent, and to be
authentic, I must value the freedom of others equally to my
own.
There is a third possible explanation for Sartre’s assertion
that we must value the freedom of others: “once a man has
seen that values depend upon himself he can will only one
thing, and that is freedom as the foundation of all values.”
Sartre is clear that freedom underpins every choice we make,
and so (as our values are nothing more than our choices)
freedom underpins every value we create. So when I choose I
am not only choosing a particular action, I am also willing the
freedom which enables me to make that choice in the first
place. We can add in here Sartre’s view that whatever I
choose myself I am also choosing as an image or ideal for the
whole of humanity. Therefore, whenever I make any free
choice of my own I am also willing freedom for the whole of
humanity; I am universalising freedom.
Unfortunately Sartre provided us with only a whiff of these
positions. It is philosophers sympathetic to his cause who
have pieced together these explanations for the bridge
between the individualism of existentialism and the
community of humanism.
Sartre concludes his lecture with a typically upbeat rant.
He has defended his theory against his critics; he believes he
has shown existentialism to be a philosophy of action not
despair, a philosophy of optimism not pessimism, a philosophy
of values not nihilism. Existentialism is a humanism “because
we remind man that there is no legislator but himself; that he
himself must decide for himself; also because we show that it
is by seeking an aim of liberation that man can realise himself
as truly human.” A humanism indeed.
If it’s true that the freedom of each of us is bound up with
the freedom of everyone else, then his optimism is well
founded. But it’s a pity that Sartre’s original lecture, unlike
Sartre himself, will always remain a couple of premises short
of a sound argument.
© GERALD JONES 2005
Gerald Jones is Head of Humanities at the Mary Ward Centre, a
DfES beacon college in central London. He is the co-author of
several philosophy books, including Exploring Ethics and the
Philosophy in Focus series, aimed at coaxing philosophy down
from its ivory towers.

* A millefeuille is a block of pure pleasure, built from multiple layers

of deliciously thin pastry, buttery cream and raspberry or strawberry
jam. You can appreciate Sartre's dilemma here, as Parisian chocolate
éclairs are the best in the world.

Further Reading
• Thomas C. Anderson Sartre’s Two Ethics, Open Court 1993
(Chap. 5)
• David Cooper, Existentialism Blackwell 2000 (Chap. 10)
• Jones, Cardinal & Hayward, Existentialism & Humanism:
Jean-Paul Sartre Hodder Murray 2003 (Chapter 8)
• Mary Warnock, Existentialist Ethics MacMillan 1967 (Chap. 4)

November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 13

 Sartre’s Being & Nothingness:
The Bible of Existentialism?
Christine Daigle discusses some of the key concepts and ideas in Sartre’s most
important philosophical book.
une 1943, occupied France. A writer named Jean-Paul
J
Sartre sees his latest philosophical manuscript, Being
and Nothingness, a “phenomenological essay on
ontology”, 722 pages of fine print (in the original
French edition), published in the midst of World War
II. The presentation wrapper on the early reprint of 1945:
“What counts in a vase is the void in the middle”!
This wasn’t the first of Sartre’s writings to make some
waves. His article on Husserl’s phenomenology from 1936-
1937, ‘The Transcendence of the Ego’, had made quite an
impression in philosophical circles. Its author cleverly re-
appropriated Husserl’s goal of going back to the things
themselves by kicking the ego out of consciousness and
carefully delineating the various modes of consciousness and
its encounter with the world. No longer personal,
consciousness was presented as something that would only
form an ‘I’ through its encounter with the world. The ‘I’ thus
becomes an object, just like any other, only slightly more
personal. After all, we care more for our ‘ego’ than for a rock!
A few years later, after publishing an (in)famous novel
(Nausea), short stories (The Wall) and two philosophical essays,
one on the emotions and one on imagination, and after some
further meditations on Husserl’s philosophy and a serious
study of Heidegger, Sartre unveils his major treatise. Being
and Nothingness hits the shelves with a loud thud (rumour has
it that it weighs exactly a kilo and can be used on the market
place to measure quantities of food!) and shocks the philo-
sophical world. The historical context, combined with the
density and opaqueness of some passages, has it that the
impact of the work is not immediately felt. However, as more
and more readers delve into the complexities of the treatise, it
becomes impossible to ignore its importance. As Michel
Tournier later recalled of his, and others, encounter with the
work, the book was certainly unusual, due to both its style and
its content, but there was no doubt about its significance and
about the fact that a system was born.
How does Being and Nothingness stand out in terms of style?
Sartre biographer Annie Cohen-Solal calls it an “enormous
bastard”. Indeed, calling it a ‘treatise’ may be inappropriate in
that it certainly does not follow the typical format of philo-
sophical treatises that emanate from academic circles. Sartre
mixes theoretical reflections with examples that explore trivial
daily situations. We meet with the waiter in the café; we await
Pierre in that same café; we witness how a woman on a date
abandons her hand in that of her suitor; our heart beats in
unison with that of the peeping Tom who hears footsteps in
14 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
the hall and finds out that someone sees him; we read about
the masochist and the sadist, and about female genitalia as a
hole to be filled, as a lack of being, as an appeal… Of the
latter passages Sartre says in a letter to Simone de Beauvoir
that they are titillating (croustillants) and that they ought to
compensate for the more boring ones (emmerdants)! Many a
reader of Sartre will be drawn by the power of the examples
he gives. Sartre’s literary talent is probably to be blamed here.
His prose is at its best when he describes a situation. What
better way to be introduced to existentialism than to feel in
one’s own being the philosophy described?
What about this system, then? Setting his feet in the
phenomenological tradition, presenting himself as an heir of
Heidegger and as critical of the master phenomenologist
Husserl and of the whole idealistic and rationalistic tradition,
Sartre investigates the lived experience of the individual. True
enough, he subtitles his book “a phenomenological essay on
ontology.” However, while Heidegger had been interested
primarily in the metaphysical nature of Being and only studied
Da-sein (the being of the human individual) as an instance of
it, Sartre wanted to focus mainly on this human reality. What
of Being? The introduction of Being and Nothingness takes care
of it rather quickly and concludes: “Being is. Being is in-itself.
Being is what it is.” (p.29) Now what? Let us get down to
serious business and talk about what really matters: the for-
itself, human reality, and its relationship with the in-itself and
with others.
I will not enter into the details of Sartre’s ontological
theory, as this would entail an over-technical discussion that
would not enlighten the reader as to the real import of the
book. Rather, I will concentrate on the concepts that he
presents and that have shaped Sartre’s existentialism and
contributed to the impact of his work. Thus, what follows
will focus on freedom, responsibility, bad faith, and relation-
ships with others. But first, a word on Being.
Being
The in-itself (in other words, Being), is the first of the pair
‘Being and Nothingness’ to be investigated by Sartre. It is not
to be equated with the world. The world is a later product of
the encounter between the for-itself (consciousness, human
reality) and the in-itself. What comes out of this encounter is
the world which is truly a human creation. Sartre has adopted
the phenomenological concept of intentionality whereby
consciousness is always conscious (of) something. If there is
nothing besides consciousness, nothing of which it can be
conscious, it ceases to exist. Thus, the in-itself is needed as the
basis upon which a consciousness and a world will emerge.
We cannot say more than the ‘in-itself is’ because the in-itself
lies beyond our experience of it, our being conscious of it.
What is unveiled through our conscious grasp of being is a
world supported by being of which we can say nothing but
that it is. Hence the remainder of the treatise is devoted to
explain the for-itself and its various modes of existence as a for-
itself, i.e. a conscious being and all that this implies, as a being-
for-others and as an acting being in the world.
We thus learn that the for-itself is none other than the
nothingness that encounters Being. The for-itself,
consciousness, is conceived of as a nothingness of Being, as a
lack of Being. Indeed, intentional consciousness is initially
empty, a void that is filled through its being conscious (of) the
world. Only following this initial encounter can
consciousness move on to self-consciousness and, eventually,
ego formation. The for-itself is a being in situation that has a
certain grasp on the world and shapes itself through it. Sartre
will say that the for-itself is a ‘project’. It is constantly making
itself. Since the for-itself is a nothingness, i.e. a being that
distinguishes itself by not being the world or that of which it
is conscious, the for-itself is thus not determined. This entails,
for Sartre, that the for-itself is entirely free to become through
its actions. It can freely break from its past or even from
social or historical conditioning and affirm itself through its
actions.
Freedom and Responsibility
Although this freedom
could be seen as a great gift,
Sartre tones this down quite
a bit by insisting on the
responsibility that it entails.
In fact, the for-itself will
discover its own freedom in
anguish. If freedom is
absolute, responsibility is also
absolute and hence I am
really what I have made
myself. If I collaborate with
the Nazi occupiers my
collaboration is all my doing.
I may want to blame my
actions or attitudes on my
upbringing, my social or
economic situation, my past
history and behavior patterns but, the fact is, I made that
choice and even if everything points me towards being a
passive citizen, I may freely break with this and decide to be
involved politically. Because I can break with my past, I am
entirely responsible for it. Whatever I have done before I
have freely chosen and I must be held responsible for it.
Freedom is thus the core of our being and, one might say, a
poisoned gift, as it plunges the for-itself deep into anguish
because of the responsibility it entails. Sartre claims that we
are without excuses, we are entirely responsible for everything
with just one exception: we are not responsible for our own
responsibility. This is an absolutely contingent fact about
humans. I have to assume this responsibility just like I must
assume my own free being. Only I decide what to do with my
situation. Sartre says: “Thus there are no accidents in a life; a
community event which suddenly bursts forth and involves me
in it does not come from the outside. If I am mobilized in a
war, this war is my war; it is in my image and I deserve it.”
(p.708) Indeed, I could refuse it, commit suicide, desert… The
choice is mine.
Bad Faith
Sartre acknowledges that, most of the time, individuals will
have recourse to bad faith to hide their own freedom from
themselves. Bad faith is different from lying in that in bad
faith, the dualism ‘liar/lied to’ vanishes: I am the one lying to
myself and yet I believe in the lie. To me, the lie is the truth.
Sartre calls this state a precarious one. Indeed, for in bad
faith, I am also conscious of the lie: fundamentally, I know
that the truth I believe in is a lie I made up for myself.
In his analysis of bad faith, Sartre discusses two famous
examples. First he presents us with a romantic rendezvous. A
woman has agreed to go out with a man for the first time.
Certainly the man has something in mind and the woman
knows this. Yet, the woman wants to remain oblivious to the
man’s intentions, as she wants to postpone the moment when
she will have to make a decision. She wants to be admired in
her free being and does not want to acknowledge that she is
the object of some sexual desire. The man grabs her hand.
What does she do? Withdrawing her hand means saying no to
the man; leaving it there means a yes. Both involve a decision
she is not ready to make. “The young woman leaves her hand
there, but she does not notice that she is leaving it.” (p.97) She
makes of herself a disembodied
mind, thus denying her own
facticity, her embodied being.
She is in bad faith. To postpone
the moment of decision it serves
her well not to acknowledge her
being of flesh in this moment.
On some other occasion, or
maybe later as they are ready to
part, she may freely decide to
give in to the man’s solicitations,
thus fully acknowledging herself
and her situation, letting herself
experience the pleasures of being
desired both as a free and sexed
individual.
Dave Robinson The most famous example that
Sartre provides to illustrate the
attitude of bad faith is that of the waiter in the café. It shows
us a man who “is playing, he is amusing himself.” What game
is that? “He is playing at being a waiter in a café.” (p.102)
Indeed, since he is not a waiter in essence (in fact as a for-itself
he has no essence) he has to make himself such. However, he
never is a waiter in-itself. That is impossible. As a human
being who is fundamentally free, who is not what he is and is
what he is not, he could decide all of a sudden to quit the café
and become something else than a waiter. But no, our man
conscientiously makes himself into a waiter. All of his
gestures are carefully executed so that he can be a café waiter.
But no matter how hard he tries, he will never be such in the
mode of the in-itself. He can never be, he can become. He
can make it his project to be a waiter, a very good one at that,
November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 15
but he cannot say that he is one. He is not his behaviour nor
is he his conduct. For, as Sartre says, “if I am one [café
waiter], this can not be in the mode of being in-itself. I am a
waiter in the mode of being what I am not.” (p.103) The waiter
is playing at being a café waiter. Concentrating on the
gestures and attitudes, he is dwelling in bad faith. His focus is
misplaced. Sartre tells us that the same happens to the
student who wants to be attentive. He so “exhausts himself in
playing the attentive role that he ends up by no longer
hearing anything.”(ibid.) The play has taken over.
What Sartre wants to get at here is that when I say that I
am, I am missing my own being as a being that constantly
makes itself. To put it differently, by claiming to have a static
being (“I am”) I am denying that I am a dynamic being (“I
become”) who makes oneself via its actions. Sartre says that,
for consciousness, making sustains being. Hence,
consciousness is as making itself, “consciousness is not what it
is.” (p.105)
Is bad faith inevitable? Sartre questions the possibility of
sincerity and presents it as yet another instance of bad faith:
One plays at being sincere! In both instances, bad faith and
sincerity, one is aiming at being in-itself, hence one is fleeing
from one’s own being. He concludes this section on a rather
gloomy note that already casts a bad spell on his later attempts
at delineating an ethics: he says that the being of the human
being is bad faith. However, in a footnote, Sartre does say
that authenticity is a human possibility. Only, he does not
explain here how one can achieve it.
Relationships with Others
The last important part of Being and Nothingness that I wish
to address is that which deals with the being-for-others.
What Sartre has to say about inter-personal relationships in
this section of the book has had a tremendous impact; it is
thus fitting to turn our ‘gaze’ towards this part.
As a human being, I am both a being for-itself (conscious of
myself) and a being-for-Others (who are conscious of me in a
way that I have no access to). I encounter the Other in the
world. What happens in fact is the encounter of two bodies.
Sartre will say that there is an unbridgeable distance between
the for-itself and the Other. My consciousness encounters the
Other’s body via my own body. Thus, I do not have access to
the Other’s consciousness, nor does he to mine. There is an
ontological split between consciousnesses. Our body is an
integral part of the unity, which we are as human beings.
However, this system, which I encounter, the Other, is not my
system. It is radically other. This, along with what he further
says about the look of the Other, is what forms the ground for
the conflictual relationships between individuals in Sartre’s
philosophy. I am, first and foremost, an object for the Other.
The Other is also, for me, an object. I do not encounter his
subjectivity but rather, a body that seems to be ‘inhabited’ by a
subjectivity. In Sartre’s terms: I encounter an object that
refers to the Other as subject.
It is this objectification process that makes the Other’s
presence an alienating one. The Other’s gaze denies my
subjectivity. By objectifying me, the Other reduces me to my
bodily presence in the world, possibly to a tool, an instrument
to be used in his world. Interestingly, this alienating process is
reciprocal: I do the exact same thing to the Other. Hence, we
are bound not to understand and not to acknowledge each
16 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
other as free consciousnesses. Is that so really? Let us ‘look’ at
this a little closer.
Through my encounter with the Other, I discover that the
Other can see me just as I can see him. Thus the Other has to
be more than a mere object. The Other is a peculiar object
that can make himself into a subject who sees me. I am always
‘looked at’. Hence, a subject sees me and because of the
ontological split, of which I spoke earlier, can never see me as
I am (can I anyways?). The Other sees me as the author of
this article. By saying: “Christine is the author of the article
on Being and Nothingness”, the Other objectifies me, essen-
tializes my being. However, because I am free and because I
never fully correspond to my actual being which is in the
making, this statement does not correspond to who I am and
yet someone believes it to be the truth about me. Thus my
existence is one thing for me and another for the Other:
“Beyond any knowledge which I can have, I am this self whom
another knows. And this self which I am – this I am in a
world which the Other has made alien to me, for the Other’s
look embraces my being and correlatively the walls, the door,
the keyhole.” (p.350) Thus, it is more than just my being,
which is alienated through the gaze of the Other, it is also the
world.
In my experience of the world, I meet with a web of objects
that I make into instruments, which are given meaning
through my project, i.e. my actions in the world. Thus the
world is really a world for me. However, once the Other sheds
his look upon it, the world is alienated from me: this same
collection of objects is given a different meaning, is part of an
Other’s experience. My world is taken away from me just as
my being is, thanks to the onlooking presence of the Other.
Sartre uses another famous example to illustrate how things
collapse for the for-itself when the Other is present. “Let us
imagine that moved by jealousy, curiosity, or vice I have just
glued my ear to the door and looked through a keyhole.”
(p.347) While our peeping Tom is alone, he is controlling the
situation: he is looking through the keyhole and objectifying
Sartre Glossary
being in-itself: non conscious being, the being of things
and phenomena.
being for-itself: conscious being, i.e. the human being as a
situated embodied consciousness
being for-others: the dimension of my being that is due to
the other's perception or conceptualization of me. I have no
control over it.
nothingness: mind-dependent aspects of reality, such as
values.
freedom: ability to make choices for the future.
facticity: those aspects of my being that are fixed about
me, e.g. who my parents are or what i did yesterday.
bad faith: ignoring what is true of myself – either that I am
free or facts about me.
Christine Daigle & Anja Steinbauer
whoever is present in that room. He is his action and he is “a
pure consciousness of things”. However, as soon as he hears
footsteps in the hall, the situation is radically changed. The
looker is looked at. Being looked at, he solidifies in the role
of a peeping Tom. Alienation and disintegration of one’s
world occur as the Other arrives and transforms the situation
through his presence.
This whole discussion forms the basis for what will follow
in the sections on the body and on concrete relations with
others (where we find the sections on love, language,
masochism, indifference, desire, hatred and sadism). Overall,
one can conclude that, for Sartre, living with others is no easy
thing. Loaded with conflicts, interpersonal relationships are
not happy yet they are unavoidable. “Hell is other people!”
exclaims a character in No Exit, a play first staged in May
1944. It has been argued that since Sartre made such a good
case for this conflictual relationship, he had made it
impossible for him to elaborate a workable ethics. The
attempt made in the Notebooks for an Ethics that follows Being
and Nothingness is abandoned, as Sartre is struggling to
establish an ethics that rests on reciprocity and authenticity.

The Legacy
What then of Being and Nothingness’ legacy? I would argue
that its impact has been tremendous. Existentialism, as Sartre
formulates it in this treatise, empowers the human being in a
period when power seems to rest in the hands of only a few
individuals. The philosophy of freedom puts the individual
back in the centre, allows him to engage in his own projects
no matter what oppression or situation he is facing. Further,
in a period struck by nihilism and atheism, existentialism gives
individuals the possibility to make something of themselves, to
flourish in their project without suffering from any alienation
caused by a transcendent world of values or by a magnified-
Other like God.
The individual is thus left alone in a world where no values
are to be found already made. He must make values himself
and shape himself as he acts. No easy business. The task is
crushing and the responsibility immense. However, the
human being is up to it; he has everything one needs to take
the roads to freedom (to quote the title of the series of novels
by Sartre published after Being and Nothingness). In those
years of uncertainty, in the midst of the war in occupied
France, Sartre’s philosophy may have been just what the
doctor ordered! But its impact was more prolonged than that.
Sartre’s philosophy has been ever present since then. We
ought to take a new look at it at the start of the 21st century
as we keep struggling with the nihilistic age. We could thus
use it as a bible. Understanding the book well might allow us
to find our way out of the sticky situation we have found
ourselves in for too long now. However, we would be well
advised to keep in mind that the man himself eventually
concluded that another route had to be taken. But that, my
friends, is another story.
© DR CHRISTINE DAIGLE 2005
Christine Daigle lectures in Philosophy at Brock University in
Ontario. She is also Vice-President of the Society for Existential
and Phenomenological Theory and Culture.

• All references to Being and Nothingness are to the translation by

Hazel B. Barnes, published by Washington Square Press, 1984.

November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 17

 By Any Means Necessary?
Ian Birchall on a moral problem for Sartre.
hen Jean-Paul Sartre published Being and
W
Nothingness in 1943, his conclusion promised
a sequel. This was perhaps not the most
enticing prospect for a reader who had just
finished ploughing through 700 impenetrable
pages. But in fact the book ended on a cliff-hanger. In a
godless universe in which we are ‘condemned to be free’, it is
all the same whether one becomes a leader of nations or gets
drunk on one’s own. So did existentialism open the door to
moral anarchy? Was Dostoevsky (as quoted by Sartre) right
when he claimed: “If God did not exist, everything would be
permitted”?
Sartre insisted this was not the case: an existentialist
morality was not only possible, it would hit the bookstands
shortly. But it didn’t. Compared with JK Rowling, Sartre was
not very adept at delivering sequels. His novel cycle The Roads
to Freedom and his biography of Flaubert were both left
incomplete. This probably has something to do with the fact
that Sartre was much better at asking questions than at
answering them.
But if Being and Nothingness – 2 never saw the light of day,
it was not for the want of trying. In 1947 and 1948 Sartre
wrote some 600 pages on the question of an existentialist
morality. But he never resolved the issues to his satisfaction,
and never published the manuscript. It appeared after his
death under the title Cahiers pour une morale (1983), and was
later translated into English as Notebooks for an Ethics
(Chicago, 1992).
The problem, as so often for Sartre, was politics. For
various reasons, he was becoming more and more politically
involved. In 1948 he took part in an attempt to launch a new
political movement independent of both Washington and
Moscow.
On the one hand, Sartre recognised that any political
stance had to have a moral basis. This brought him into
conflict with many Marxists. Sartre made fun of the French
Communist Party’s contradictory attitude to morality. On the
one hand its textbooks of Marxism taught that capitalists were
obliged by inexorable economic laws to maximise profits. On
the other hand the Party’s popular daily paper denounced
‘wicked’ bosses.
But if a moral impulse lay behind any attempt to change
society, at the same time it was impossible to establish
universal moral principles in a society based on gross
inequality. Kant had argued that we should act according to
18 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
principles which we wished to become universal laws. I don’t
punch you on the nose because a world in which everybody
punched each other on the nose would be intolerable. But,
Sartre might have rejoined, suppose I have a boss who
underpays and overworks me, harasses me and bullies me and
generally makes my life a misery. Can we really say that for
him to punch me or for me to punch him are equivalent
actions?
In fact, Sartre argued, we live in a world where the distrib-
ution of wealth and property are based on past violence,
however much the present order may condemn violence.
Sartre’s position is beautifully illustrated by the story of the
Yorkshire miner walking across open moor land. The local
landlord rode up and told him he was trespassing on private
property. The miner enquired how the land came to be his.
“My great-great-great-grandfather won it in a battle,” replied
the landlord. “Take your coat off,” said the miner, “and I’ll
fight you for it now.”
Sartre’s conclusion was that “morality today must be revolu-
tionary socialist”. That is, our first priority must be to fight
for a society based on equality and common ownership of
wealth. Only when that was achieved could we have universal
moral principles. The Notebooks are a rich and complex, if
fragmentary, work, and it is impossible to cover everything
here. But one theme which has a particular importance for
Sartre’s work, and is still highly relevant today, is the question
of ends and means.
In the period that stretched from the German Occupation
to the early years of the Cold War this was a vital question.
Resistance fighters had often seen their struggles and sacrifices
as justified by the fact that they were preparing ‘singing
tomorrows’. Diehard supporters of Stalin’s Russia defended
those aspects of the regime’s brutality which they couldn’t
simply deny by saying that these were harsh necessities on the
road to the establishment of a classless society from which
oppression and exploitation would be banished. On the other
hand, anti-Stalinists like Sartre’s one-time friend Arthur
Koestler argued that Communism was such a great evil that it
was necessary to link up with the United States or right-wing
politicians such as de Gaulle in order to combat it. In the
early fifties, when Sartre had his notorious quarrel with
Camus, one of Camus’ main arguments against Marxism in
his book The Rebel was that it meant sacrificing the present to
the future, doing evil now in the hope that good would come
later.
 So Sartre’s argument about ends and means was based on
his view of history. Unlike many of the dogmatic and
mechanical Marxists whom he encountered in the French
Communist Party, he did not believe in a history which
developed through predetermined stages to a necessary
conclusion. That was, he quite rightly believed, a travesty of
Marxism. History was no more than the accumulation of
human choices. As he said in a lecture in 1945: “Tomorrow,
after my death, some men may decide to establish Fascism,
and the others may be so cowardly or so slack as to let them
do so. If so, Fascism will then be the truth of man, and so
much the worse for us. In reality, things will be such as men
have decided they shall be.”
On this basis Sartre made an important distinction. If we
believe – as he did not – that we can have a clear idea of what
a future society based on liberty and equality would look like,
if that future society will be based on a fixed and pregiven
idea, then any route that will get us there, the sooner the
better, is legitimate, and any sacrifices – or crimes – can be
justified by simple profit and loss accounting; the total sum of
human suffering will be smaller. But if there is no pregiven
end, then any end we arrive at will be the product of the
means used to get there. In Sartre’s words:
“If the end is still to be made, if it is a choice and a risk for man, then it can
be corrupted by the means, for it is what we make it and it is transformed
at the same time as man transforms himself by the use he makes of the
means. But if the end is to be reached, if in a sense it has a sufficiency of
being, then it is independent
of the means. In that case one
can choose any means to
achieve it.”
It is the difference
between travelling by
train to a well-known
terminus, with a room
already booked at a
nearby hotel, and
wandering across country
without maps, striking
camp where it appears
suitable.
In his discussion of
ends and means Sartre
refers in particular to
Leon Trotsky’s pamphlet
Their Morals and Ours.
(Trotsky’s works were
hardly easy to come by in
France in the 1940s, with Nazi Occupation having given way
to a period where the whole left was dominated by the
Communist Party. Sartre probably got the book from
Merleau-Ponty, who was knowledgeable about Trotskyism.)
Trotsky wrote with first-hand experience of the early years of
the Russian Revolution, and the harsh choices necessary when
foreign armies attempted to strangle the Revolution at birth.
Trotsky rejected the facile formulation that the end justifies
the means. A simple balance sheet of profit and loss could not
do justice to the problem; he argued that there was a dialec-
tical interaction whereby the means used conditioned the end
arrived at. Since socialism involved the self-emancipation of
the working class, then the only means permissible were those
which raised proletarian consciousness – the working class
could not be liberated behind its own back.
While Sartre noted some reservations about Trotsky’s
position, he basically accepted its logic. The problem was
examined from a different angle in his discussion of
oppression. For Sartre, oppression involved a human agent
and a human victim. We cannot be oppressed by a rock, only
by a free human will. (A rock becomes an obstacle only in
terms of a human project, so a rock can destroy a human body
but not human freedom.) Only a free human will can be
oppressed, precisely by the project of another to deny the
victim’s freedom and turn her/him into an object. The project
of oppression is always contradictory.
Thus Sartre considers the question of lying. Clearly he has
no truck with the idea of absolute truthfulness – one could
scarcely criticise Resistance prisoners for lying to the Gestapo
to protect their comrades. But as he points out, lying often
fails to achieve its purpose. Thus if I lie about my achieve-
ments in order to be praised, the praise I win will be false and
unsatisfying. Only freely-accorded admiration can satisfy its
recipient.
Sartre’s musings on ends and means undoubtedly helped to
guide his political choices over the following years. In 1949-
50, when information about Russian labour camps was circu-
lating widely, Sartre signed
an editorial in his journal
Les Temps modernes which
stated clearly that “there is
no socialism when one
citizen out of twenty is in a
camp”. By its use of
repressive means the
USSR had undermined the
very end it purported to be
pursuing.
Yet when his former
colleague David Rousset
launched a campaign
against the Russian camps
in the right-wing
newspaper Figaro, Sartre
refused to give him any
Trotsky contemplating
means and ends.
support. Believing that
Russian Communism was
still, on balance, a
progressive force, he
refused to ally with the French right-wing press against it.
In 1956, when French Communists justified the Russian
invasion of Hungary by claiming it was necessary to defend
socialism, Sartre responded in terms that might have come
directly from the Notebooks: “We agree with those who say: the
end justifies the means; but we add the indispensable
corrective: it is the means which define the end.”
Sartre attempted to dramatise the issue in his 1951 play
Lucifer and the Lord. Goetz, a brutal sixteenth-century
November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 19
German warlord, becomes converted to the pursuit of Good. deaths of hundreds of children is justified because Saddam
But the means he adopts, setting up a Utopian community for Hussein has been removed from power. The more serious
peasants, is inappropriate to the context, and provokes a question is not raised. As Sartre observed, the end of
peasant war. In the final scene Goetz is persuaded to become socialism cannot be achieved by such means as tanks and
leader of the peasant army, deploying his old military skills. labour camps. Likewise, warriors against terrorism might
Sartre carefully avoided writing a neat moral parable; as the enquire whether democracy, in any meaningful sense, can be
play ends, we do not know if Goetz’s brutal methods will achieved by the bayonets of an invading army.
succeed. His final words are: “There is this war to fight and I What Sartre would have thought of today’s world is
shall fight it”. The audience is left to make up its mind about difficult to imagine. His positions on the Middle East were
how the war should be fought. complex and sometimes self-contradictory, ranging from
In the 1960s, during the wars in Algeria and Vietnam, sympathy for Zionist terrorism before the establishment of
Sartre returned to the arguments about means and ends. In the state of Israel to qualified approval of the Palestinian
discussing Vietnam, he insisted that there could be no terrorists who killed Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
equation between the violence of the oppressed and that of Terrorism has many meanings in many different contexts.
the oppressors: “During the Algerian war I always refused to Trotsky made clear his rejection of individual terrorism,
make a parallel between the terrorist use of bombs, the only arguing that it actually “belittles the rôle of the masses in their
weapon available to the Algerians, and the actions and own consciousness”. Camus, on the other hand, believed that
extortions of a rich army of half a million, which occupied the terrorism can only be justified if the terrorist is willing to
entire country. It’s the same in Vietnam.” sacrifice his/her own life – a position which could have left
In 1961 Sartre wrote a preface to the book The Wretched of him approving suicide bombers. Sartre’s exact position cannot
the Earth by Frantz Fanon, one of the leaders of the Algerian be determined, but even if he had stopped smoking and lived
National Liberation Front then waging war against the to be a hundred, it is hard to imagine him lining up with the
French state. (Sartre was fortunate to live under de Gaulle, pro-war left.
and not Tony Blair, who would doubtless have prosecuted him © IAN BIRCHALL 2005
for “fomenting, justifying or glorifying terrorism”.) Sartre Ian Birchall is the author of Sartre Against Stalinism (Berghahn
made it clear that he regarded the violence of national 2004), a member of the UK Society for Sartrean Studies and a
liberation movements as a legitimate and necessary response longstanding member of the Socialist Workers Party.
to the violence of colonialism. But he also argued that the use
of violence helped to raise the consciousness of the
oppressed. “Others make men of themselves by
murdering Europeans, and these are shot down; brigands
or martyrs, their agony exalts the terrified masses... this
irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the
resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of
resentment: it is man re-creating himself.”
This is often dismissed as a bloodthirsty flourish; in
fact Sartre was coming back to Trotsky’s argument as
discussed in the Notebooks. The ultimate justification of
any means must be whether it enabled the oppressed to
gather the power and the confidence to overthrow their
oppression.
It would be foolish to look for direct relevance to
contemporary issues in what Sartre wrote half a century
ago. Sartre insisted that his aim was to ‘write for his own
time’. At least he helps us to cut through some of the
nonsense talked about ends and means.
In a Guardian article a few years ago George Steiner
resurrected Dostoevsky’s question: “Would you torture to
death one child to save the whole world?” In Sartrean
terms the question of means and ends is a concrete,
practical one. There are no conceivable circumstances in
which such an action could have such a consequence, so
why speculate?
It is interesting to note that in recent years the debate
has shifted. In the Cold War period it was the left who
were repeatedly denounced, sometimes with justice,
sometimes not, for believing that the end justifies the
means. In the new century it is the pro-war right who
deploy the argument. Such collateral damage as the

20 Philosophy Now November/December 2005

 Sartre’s Image in
De Beauvoir’s Memoirs
Willie Thompson tries to see Sartre through the eyes of the person who knew
him best.

I
n Erica Jong’s best-selling novel of the seventies, Fear of Adieux: A
Flying, two characters amuse themselves by telling a Farewell to
third that they’re Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Sartre) consists
Beauvoir, their acquaintance being vaguely conscious of two parts,
that these are names he ought to recognise, but unable the first
to quite locate the reference. It is presumed that the readers tracing Sartre’s
will do so and that awareness of their significance will be part physical
of an educated person’s intellectual equipment. Indeed, the decline up to
pair formed the most renowned couple of the twentieth his death, the
century – and in addition Beauvoir effectively wrote Sartre’s second being a
adult life-history as well as her own (“a dazzling biography of lengthy
Sartre in her memoirs”, according to Claude Francis and dialogue
Fernand Gontier) . Although his public image was not between
altogether Beauvoir’s creation, she was certainly its principal Beauvoir and
disseminator, and showed herself determined during her Sartre ranging
lifetime to maintain control over it. Consequently much of over his
what was known about Sartre’s private life and the image of history, philo-
their relationship was constructed on the basis of her memoirs. sophic
Even when it was significantly modified following his death by outlook,
the publication of a selection of his letters to her, it was she politics and
who edited and published them. The letters of both, together personal
with much subsequent documentation, reveal the extent to foibles. After
which the image of Sartre that appears in the memoirs was the initial
distorted and sanitised (as was her own). volume, which is concerned with Beauvoir’s personal growth,
Beauvoir presents Sartre both as an intellectual and thinker the succeeding ones all intertwine her career with the course
and a human personality. Her memoirs consist of five of Sartre’s philosophic development, imaginative creation,
volumes, published between 1958 and 1981, very differently personal relations and political trajectory.
structured in each case. In the first, (Memoirs d’une jeune fille
rangé; translated as Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) dealing with The mutual project
the years between her birth and graduation, Sartre appears Readers first meet Sartre towards the close of the first
only towards the end, though in a manner which sets the volume when, preparing for her Sorbonne degree, Beauvoir
scene for their future relationship. The second (La Force de encounters him as a member of a scarily intellectual and
l’Âge translated as The Prime of Life) describes the years up to somewhat disreputable group of Ecole Normale students who
the Liberation during which Sartre had begun to make a name mock every bourgeois convention and attitude. Sartre is
as a philosopher and author, as, more modestly, had Beauvoir depicted as the brightest of them all, the most philosophically
herself. In this, some of the complexities of their personal informed and ablest in debate, who is nevertheless endlessly
relationships are also recounted, though in a heavily censored willing to give all the others the benefit of his time and under-
fashion. The third (La Force des choses, translated as Force of standing. With money too his “munificence was legendary”.
Circumstance) covers the years of their fame, of The Second Sex, She does not fail to mention his theatrical and musical gifts;
of political endeavour and disillusionment ending in the and “Torpor, somnolence, escapism, intellectual dodges and
trauma of the Algerian war, also describing some of their truces, prudence and respect were all unknown to him” He
personal history. abhors conformity but also the pursuit of novelty for its own
The final two volumes are of a different character. The sake. His ambitions to experience life are so comprehensive
fourth (Tout Compte Fait translated as All Said and Done) is that a note of irony creeps in when she recounts them, but she
more a series of episodic anecdotes and reflections than a is deadly serious when identifying “his true superiority over
memoir. The last, (La Cérémonie des Adieux translated as me” – the fact that he “lived in order to write” and that even

November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 21

her own intense dedication to work appeared feeble beside
Sartre’s. At the same she contrasts his conviction in the
importance of his ideas with his personal modesty.
Subsequently in Beauvoir’s memoirs, though Sartre’s theory
and practice may alter, these personality characteristics do not,
and they correspond in the main with those observed by other
witnesses.
During the course of the thirties self-deceptive thought-
lessness insulated them both, she confesses, from the brutal
realities which might have intruded on their bourgeois
complacency and spoiled their holiday enjoyments. By 1939
however, Sartre’ position, influenced in part by the Spanish
Civil War, is shifting. Convinced that there must be no
further appeasement of the fascist powers and that war
represents the only alternative, he quickly erases Beauvoir’s
continuing doubts. He is setting out on the political path on
which he was to continue, albeit with alterations in direction,
for the remainder of his life. He had started to become
conscious of History. During the Occupation the devel-
opment of Sartre’s clear thinking is stressed again when he
dissolves his ineffective resistance group despite the work and
commitment he has put into creating it, and turns his
attention to action through writing.
Beauvoir represents their philosophical and political views
as being constantly in harmony – or very nearly so. Sartre’s
major work during the period covered by The Prime of Life
was Being and Nothingness, the philosophical text for which he
is most renowned, published in 1943 and dedicated to
Beauvoir, ‘Le Castor’ (‘The Beaver’). However one does not
have to accept the argument of Kate and Edward Fullbrook
(Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-
Century Legend, 1993) that Sartre’s ideas were purloined from
Beauvoir to feel somewhat puzzled at how little discussion of
22 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
it, whether of its content or its production, appears in her
volume. In fact she acknowledges that while in accord with its
premises she disagreed to some extent with Sartre’s concept of
freedom implying necessarily, as he emphasises, the potential
to actively transcend any situation. She had argued with him
that freedom of any sort was pretty meaningless for a woman
imprisoned in a harem. Sartre had succeeded in overcoming
her doubts, but clearly she was never wholly convinced, for
writing in the late fifties she declares that she was right.
Possibly the origins of The Second Sex can be detected in these
discussions.
In her subsequent volumes Beauvoir describes Sartre’s
political turns and reversals, presenting them as a logical
progression within the context of his
basic values. The fact that she is in
accord with almost all of these
positions should not be taken as in
indication that she had no political
mind of her own, for there is no
reason to imagine that they did not
work them out mutually, rather than
the decisions always being taken by
Sartre. At the last however they did
fall into deep disagreement when in
the final years of Sartre’s decrepitude
he was influenced (his friends said
intellectually seduced and manipu-
lated) by the ideas of the Maoist
turned Talmudist Benni Lévy (Pierre
Victor). In Adieux Beauvoir does not
conceal the fact that the disagreement
was severe – “I let Sartre know the full
extent of my disappointment.” She
could scarcely do otherwise, since the
episode was widely known. Even so,
she underplays the degree of her
exclusion and the full ferocity of the
dispute with Lévy and with Sartre’s
other companion and adopted
daughter Arlette El-Kaim. In
subsequent interviews she was more
forthcoming and forceful.
Not for a moment does she take Sartre’s new standpoint
seriously, but excuses him on account of his decrepitude, “Old,
threatened in his own body, half blind, he was shut out from
the future. He therefore turned to a substitute ... To doubt
Victor was to doubt that living prolongation of himself, more
important to him than the praise of future generations.”
Which is not to say that her judgement was mistaken in
dismissing the notions Lévy put into Sartre’s mouth as
nothing more than pretentious waffle.
The principal scandal occasioned by Adieux however was
not the relatively restrained presentation of the Lévy quarrel
but the unvarnished account of Sartre’s physical deterioration
in its unsavoury detail during his final decade. There is no
need to assume a form of payback, as some critics alleged. In
her earlier memoirs she had never been particularly reticent
about Sartre’s physical state or her reactions to it; we learn
that he scared her by drugging himself to the eyeballs with
stimulants to enable him to sustain impossible intensities of
work in the midst of his hectic and exacting private and public
life, (particularly while writing Critique de la Raison Dialectique)
and it cannot be doubted that his strenuous abuse of such
drugs, together with tobacco and alcohol did a great deal to
ensure that he went blind and died much earlier than he
otherwise need have done.

Conclusion
Although The Second Sex is the foundation document of
twentieth-century feminism it was not until late in life that
Beauvoir declared herself to be a feminist. Taking that step
however made no difference to her estimation of Sartre,
which never deviated, in essence, from what she had written
in the initial volume of her memoirs – she continued to regard
him to the end as the ‘dream companion’ of a lifetime, and by
all accounts never fully recovered from his death.
It is evident that the image presented in the memoirs is in
its details a very distorted picture, and not only on account of
the omissions which are in the nature of any record, or even
those which are deliberate concealments intended to mislead
the reader. The more significant distortion – though it might
be pleaded that such an outcome is intrinsic to any chronicle –
is that much, if not all, of the contingency in Sartre’s career
and in their relationship is edited out, and the result is a
literary artefact presented with a coherence and unity, a patina
of necessity, that could not possibly correspond to the
actuality.
Any outside observer taking into account both the memoirs
and other sources would be forced to the conclusion that
Sartre’s treatment of Beauvoir was less than principled. Apart
from taking advantage of all the unreciprocated organisational
assistance she accorded him, on no fewer than two occasions
he contemplated marrying one of his lovers (or would-be
lovers), promising to Beauvoir all the while that such a move
would not affect their essential relationship and eventually,
without informing her in advance, adopted one of them as his
daughter. Yet nowhere in the public record or interviews nor
in Beauvoir’s letters or diaries, does she regard his behaviour
as inexcusable.
A hostile critic could characterise this as Beauvoir
struggling to perpetuate the myth to which she had attached
her identity, but another interpretations is possible - namely
that the image presented in the memoirs reflects the basic
realities of Sartre’s life and their relationship, the deliberate
inaccuracies of which she took steps to see would be amended
at a later date.
Overall, the picture emerging from Beauvoir’s memoirs is
of a life which in spite of Sartre’s changes of political tack
formed – except in its last, short phase, which could
reasonably be attributed to waning mental powers – a unity in
a manner which is true for few individuals. Development is
recorded of course, but development along a logical pathway,
which does not reverse, or break with his earlier concepts (in
spite of his repudiations) but grows out of and incorporates
them. In the end perhaps, in spite of all the distortions,
lacunae and misleading trails, that picture is not untrue in
essence, not notably different from what is otherwise known
of the real Sartre – so far as that term has any meaning.
© WILLIE THOMPSON 2005
Willie Thompson is currently a visiting professor in History at
Northumbria University Newcastle; he has had a lifelong interest in
Sartre and his philosophy.

November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 23

 The Ontological Argument
and the Sin of Hubris
Toni Vogel Carey’s answer to the most argued-over argument for the existence
of God.

C
ommuter conversation normally amounts to The trigger for Anselm’s argument is a passage in Psalms
nothing much, or nothing at all. So what was (14:1; 53:1), about the ‘fool’ who “hath said in his heart,
my surprise when a sixth-grade teacher seated There is no God.” Nothing in the argument turns on the
next to me, seeing me red-penciling a paper, selection of this particular fool (any fool will do); but of
asked what it was, and hearing the word course, this is the one Anselm would most want to prove
‘philosophy,’ told me eagerly that his favorite philosophical wrong and foolish. Anselm actually provides two Ontological
topic is St Anselm’s Ontological Argument. Arguments, joined by a shared first premise – one for the
Smart guy, he picked the most intriguing of the attempted existence of God, the other for God’s necessary existence.
proofs of the existence of
God. Indeed, according First version:
to one claim the 1) Even the fool, on hearing the description “a
Ontological Argument has being than which none greater can be conceived,”
generated more philo- understands it. And whatever is understood exists
sophical debate than any in the understanding. Thus a being than which
other in history. And it none greater can be conceived exists in the under-
did indeed originate with standing even of the fool.
Anselm, abbot of Bec and 2) To exist in reality (in re), however, is greater than
later archbishop of to exist in the understanding alone (in intellectu).
Canterbury, in his Therefore, a being than which none greater can be
eleventh-century conceived exists in re as well as in intellectu.
Proslogion. Otherwise a greater being could be conceived than
Among its ups and a being than which none greater can be conceived,
downs, Duns Scotus and which is a contradiction.
St Bonaventure embraced
the argument, but Second version:
William of Ockham (of 1) Even the fool, on hearing the description “a
Ockham’s Razor) did not; being than which none greater can be conceived,”
nor did Thomas Aquinas, understands it. And whatever is understood exists
whose rejection was the in the understanding. Thus a being than which
scholastic kiss of death. none greater can be conceived exists in the under-
With the dawn of modern standing even of the fool.
philosophy, Descartes 2) But “it is possible to conceive of a being which
recreated and revived the cannot be conceived not to exist; and this is greater
argument, after which than one which can be conceived not to exist.”
Spinoza and Leibniz Therefore, a being than which none greater can be
added their versions of it. conceived cannot be conceived not to exist (exists
Even after Kant dealt the necessarily). Otherwise a greater being could be
argument a crushing blow St Anselm conceived than a being than which none greater
in the eighteenth century, can be conceived, which is a contradiction.
it resurfaced in a nineteenth-century Hegelian reformulation.
Bertrand Russell went from pro (1894) to con (1946). Objections from Gaunilo and Kant
Meanwhile, the argument attracted twentieth-century The earliest objection to Anselm’s argument, “On Behalf of
followers on the Continent, and in America, philosophers the Fool,” came from the monk Gaunilo of Marmoutier, and
Charles Hartshorne and Norman Malcolm upheld the it was included in some manuscripts of the Proslogion, along
argument even in the face of the Positivist values-massacre. with Anselm’s reply. “Of God, or a being greater than all
Now apparently it is a hot topic among sixth-grade teachers. others,” Gaunilo contends, “I could not conceive at all, except

24 Philosophy Now November/December 2005

merely according to the word.
And an object can hardly or
never be conceived according to
the word alone.” In fact,

“I, so far as actual knowledge of the

object, either from its specific or
general character, is concerned, am as
little able to conceive of this being
when I hear of it, or to have it in my
understanding, as I am to conceive of
or understand God himself: whom,
indeed, for this very reason I can
conceive not to exist.”

In a second objection,
Gaunilo posits a ‘Lost Island,’
abundant beyond anything ever
experienced. We can picture
this “most excellent” island, and
can accept that it exists in
intellectu; but we would hardly
say that it therefore exists in
reality.
Anselm counters that the
Ontological Argument can only
apply to God; and if anyone can
prove otherwise, Anselm will
personally find and give him (or her, I
suppose) that Lost Island. His thinking is based on the
second version of the argument, the notion that God cannot
be thought not to exist. This makes sense, because one of the
traditional distinctions between God and everything else is
that only God’s essence contains or entails existence; we would

Stephen Lahey
not say this of an island or mountain, no matter how
‘excellent’ or ‘great.’ But as we know, Gaunilo has already
testified that God can be thought not to exist. And Anselm’s
rejoinder here is lame indeed:

“If a being than which a greater is inconceivable is not understood or
conceived, and is not in the understanding or in concept, certainly either
God is not a being than which a greater is inconceivable, or else he is not
understood or conceived, and is not in the understanding or in concept.
But I call on your faith and conscience to attest that this is most false.
Hence…”
It is Kant who christened Anselm’s argument ‘ontological,’
and who provided the other most important objection to it –
itself ontological in nature. His contention is that unlike ‘red’
or ‘round,’ ‘exists’ is only a ‘logical,’ not a ‘real’ predicate.
Pierre Gassendi anticipated Kant’s point in the seventeenth-
century by saying that “existence is a perfection neither in
God nor in anything else; it is rather that in the absence of
which there is no perfection.” Existence, in short, is not a
property or a quality. So it borders on a category mistake to
say that existence in re is greater or more excellent than
existence only in intellectu, or that existence is part of the
essence or definition of God.
The Argument from Hubris
Russell expressed what no doubt most people think, that “it
is easier to feel convinced that [the Ontological Argument]
must be fallacious than it is to find out precisely where the
fallacy lies.” There are three main points where a fallacy might
occur: mid-way into the first premise, between understanding
the description and understanding the being described
(Gaunilo’s first approach); at the second premise (Kant’s
approach, and Gaunilo’s in the Lost Island objection); or at the
very beginning, with the premise that the fool understands the
description “a being than which none greater can be
conceived.” I think this is where Anselm (first) goes wrong, and
for a very simple reason, one I have not seen mentioned
elsewhere, although it is hard to believe that something so
elementary could have escaped notice for a thousand years.
Anselm is aware that a description or analysis will generally
tell us more about a thing than just a name, and that he has
cleverly chosen the particular hook on which he hangs his
argument.

November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 25

“Not irrationally, then, has the hypothesis of a being a greater than which understand it, he would see from the description alone that it
cannot be conceived been employed in controverting the fool, for the is sheer hubris to suppose this being exists in intellectu. Who,
proof of the existence of God: since in some degree he would understand after all, would be fool enough to assert that we have an idea
such a being, but in no wise could he understand God.” the equal of God’s?
The argument from hubris is not proof that we lack any
According to John Hick in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, understanding of a being than which none greater can be
“that than which nothing greater can be conceived” (id quo conceived. But such proof is unnecessary, since doubt is all we
nihil maius cogitari possit) represents the culmination of the need to defeat the Ontological Argument; and by Ockham’s
Christian monotheistic concept of deity. It seems strange, Razor, why do more when less will do? We can allow that
then, that Gaunilo simply perhaps in a revelatory
replaces Anselm’s George Berkeley moment even a babe or a
description with “a being (1685-1753) fool might have a fleeting
greater than all others,” glimpse of the true nature of
and Alvin Plantinga, with God. Indeed, according to
“the greatest possible the New Testament their
being,” particularly since chances are better than
Anselm’s version is more most. But Anselm needs
interesting and ‘infor- more than chances and
mative’ than theirs. maybes; he needs fool-
The trouble is, what it proof-ness.
tells us is not at all what
Anselm needs to show. Ignorati
Rather than a proof of Anselm himself acknowl-
God’s existence in re – or edges that “God is greater
even in intellectu – what than can be thought.” His
emerges is a reason for goodness is ‘incomprehen-
“doubt, caution and sible,’ the light wherein He
modesty,” as Hume dwells is ‘inaccessible,’ and
characterizes his He is “more than any
‘mitigated’ form of creature can understand.”
skepticism, about claiming What Anselm means,
we have any under- though, is that we do not
standing of the nature and fully understand God, not
existence of God. To see that we fail to understand
this, take a closer look at Him at all. Otherwise, he
the role played by the maintains, “you would have
fool. What a fool can to say that someone who
understand, anyone can cannot gaze directly upon
understand, fools being, the purest light of the sun
by definition, deficient in does not see the light of
candle power and wisdom. day.” But thinking back to
Why should we suppose, then, that a being than which none Plato’s Cave, when it comes to the nature of God, are we in a
greater can be conceived by the fool is as great as a being than position to claim even that we see the “light of day?”
which none greater can be conceived, say, by a smart Not according to apophatic theology, a Platonistic
Philosophy Now reader? And by the same reasoning, why Christian school that dates from the late fifth or early sixth
should we suppose that a being than which none greater can century. Its view is that God is ineffable, transcending “all
be conceived by you, with all due respect, is as great as a being reason, all intelligence, and all wisdom;” so any positive
than which none greater can be conceived by a genius like assertion about the nature of God would be an act of hubris
Einstein or a saint like Anselm? Finally, why should we than which perhaps none greater can be conceived. This is a
suppose that a being than which none greater can be theology of not-knowing, or paradoxically, of knowing by un-
conceived by Einstein or Anselm is as great as a being than knowing; it is made deliberately confounding, according to
which none greater can logically possibly be conceived – than Aquinas, so that “the sacred and divine teachings might be
which none greater could be conceived even by God? For hidden from the ridicule of the unbelievers.”
plainly this, and not merely the greatest concept of which the The apophatic writings were originally attributed to
fool is capable, is what Anselm’s argument requires. Dionysius, an Athenian converted to Christianity by Paul’s
The upshot is that Anselm has not shown that he himself, sermon on mount Areopagus (Acts 17:34). This attribution
let alone the fool, has an understanding of a being than which was later discredited, but the real author has never been
none greater can be conceived. More to the point, he has not identified, and is referred to awkwardly as Pseudo-Dionysius
shown that he understands even his own description “a being the Areopagite, or by Erasmus’ sassy shorthand, “Dionysius
than which none greater can be conceived.” For if he did the whoever-he-was.” At any rate, whoever-(s)he-was coined

26 Philosophy Now November/December 2005

the term ‘hierarchy,’ among other things, and has had consid-
erable and lasting influence. Praised by Aquinas, called “the
greatest of theologians” by Nicholas of Cusa, criticized by
Luther as one who “Platonizes more than he Christianizes,”
Eastern Orthodox doctrine today still retains Pseudo-
Dionysian elements. And many, before and since, have
expressed pseudo-Dionysian views, some closely related to the
Ontological Argument:
“The foolishness of God is wiser than men.”
First Corinthians I:25
“Our knowledge [of God] consists in knowing that we are unable to
comprehend Him.”
Maimonides (1135-1204)
“Absurd to Argue the Existence of God from His Idea…we have no Idea
of God. ‘tis impossible!”
George Berkeley (1685-1753)
The difference between Berkeley and Gaunilo is that
Berkeley’s denial is quasi-apophatic and categorical, whereas
Gaunilo speaks, more modestly, only for himself.
Cognoscenti
Far from professing apophatic ignorance, preachers assure
their congregations on a weekly basis that, among other
things, God forgives their sins. And parishioners, in turn,
seem to accept unquestioningly that those trained in
reputable theological schools and duly ordained as pastors,
rabbis, etc., must understand more than the rest of us about a
being than which none greater can be conceived. Needless to
say, clerics themselves have done little to discourage this trust.
Consider Aquinas’ objection to the second version of the
Ontological Argument:
“This proposition, God exists, is self-evident per se, for the predicate is in
the subject, because God’s essence is His own existence…But because we
do not know the essence of God, the proposition is not self-evident to
us.” Aquinas, Summa Theologica (I,ii,2,1)
If the proposition God exists is not self-evident to ‘us,’ how
does Aquinas know it is self-evident per se? Some concepts, he
says, are “self-evident only to the learned.” Well, maybe so, I
wouldn’t know. But if Aquinas has privileged knowledge,
wouldn’t St Anselm have the same? And if God’s existence is
self-evident per se, that too should be more help than
hindrance to Anselm’s argument.
Descartes emerged from thoroughgoing doubt with a
“clear and distinct” idea of God as “eternal, infinite,
immutable, omniscient [and] omnipotent;” indeed, he made
use of an Ontological Argument to prove the existence of this
being. Cardinal Newman in the nineteenth century provided
an even more fulsome list of God’s attributes; and Norman
Malcolm in the twentieth insisted that “necessary existence is
a property of God, just as necessary omnipotence and
necessary omniscience are His properties.” Even Einstein
thought he knew a theological thing or two, most famously
that God wouldn’t ‘play dice’ with the universe – one of the
few points, interestingly, on which he is generally believed to
have been wrong. Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Newman,
Malcolm, Einstein – these are the good guys, or at least the
cognoscenti. What can we expect, then, from charlatans,
fanatics, and college sophomores?
Fatal Beauty
Einstein is not the only twentieth-century theoretical
physicist to have cosmic religious leanings. The compendium
Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Great
Physicists reveals the marked spirituality of Arthur Eddington,
Max Planck, Louis de Broglie and others. And then there is
Nobel physicist I.I. Rabi and his novel teaching technique:
“Physics brought me closer to God. That feeling stayed with me
throughout my years in science. Whenever one of my students came to
me with a scientific project, I asked only one question, ‘Will it bring you
nearer to God?’ They always understood what I meant.”
The thing to keep in mind about the God of the physicists,
however, is that theirs is not the ‘Father’ to whom church-
going folks pray. In fact, Einstein considered the concept of a
God who takes a personal interest in us and intercedes on our
behalf to be the main source of conflict between science and
religion. Logos, the pinnacle of Greek thought, is the ‘word’
that in the beginning, according to John (I: 1), was “with
God,” and indeed “was God.” The God of Einstein and Rabi
is closer to God-as-Logos than to God-as-Father-figure. But
there are plenty of other alternatives. Spinoza identified God
with Nature; others, with a Prime Mover who pushes a
button, sets the world in motion, and then takes early
retirement. I am reminded here of a New Yorker cartoon
showing an unprepossessing guy on a throne labeled ‘God,’
and a crestfallen-looking new arrival; the caption reads, “You
don’t look anything like your pictures.” If even the fool has
some understanding of a being than which none greater can
be conceived, why is there so little agreement about what this
being ‘looks like’?
The traditional objection to the Ontological Argument has
been that it defines God into existence. But the fatal beauty
of Anselm’s description, I think, is that it defines God out of
conception. Einstein explains Anselm’s predicament beauti-
fully:
“The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions. How
can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand
dimensions are as one?” Albert Einstein, Cosmic Religion
© TONI VOGEY CAREY 2005
Toni Vogel Carey, a philosophy professor in a former life, is a regular
contributor to Philosophy Now, and one of its US editorial advisors.
Finding out more
• Anselm, Proslogion, trans. T. Williams (Hackett, 1995).
• The Ontological Argument, ed. A. Plantinga, intro. R. Taylor
(Doubleday Anchor, 1965).
• John Hick, on the Ontological Argument, Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, vol.5.
• E.F. Osborn, on Pseudo-Dionysius, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol.6.
• Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Great Physicists,
ed. K. Wilber (Shambhala, 1985).
November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 27
 Is Skepticism
Ridiculous?
Michael Philips asks whether anyone can really believe skeptical arguments.
M
any philosophers argue passionately about
questions that no one could possibly take
seriously in daily life. Is there a world
independent of my consciousness? Will
causal relations that have held in the past
continue to hold in the future? Are other people conscious?
Are people responsible for what they do? Is movement
possible? Some conclude that we have no rational justifi-
cation to believe these things. Yet they go on acting just as
they did before. They treat objects as if they exist when
unperceived, they treat other people as if they really do have
feelings, they expect the future to resemble the past, they hold
others responsible for what they do and so forth. In short,
they don’t put their money where their mouth is. So they
seem cowardly or dishonest. Either that or they live with
contradictory beliefs and insist on having it both ways, a
flagrant violation of the philosopher’s blood oath forswearing
contradiction. Given this tawdry state of affairs, it is
surprising that so few modern defenders of skepticism have
anything interesting to say about how to live with or
understand their skeptical conclusions. (Some Greek and
Roman skeptics actually did try to live in conformity with
their skeptical beliefs).
David Hume (1711-76), perhaps the greatest skeptic of
them all, struggled valiantly with this conflict. According to
Hume, we face a difficult dilemma. On the one hand, we
must respect philosophical reasoning (or, as he calls it, “refin’d
reflection”). It is our only defense against ignorance, super-
stition, and other beliefs governing daily life which, one and
all, originate in ‘illusions of the imagination’. On the other
hand, we can’t run our lives on the conclusions of refin’d
reflection since
“…the understanding, when it acts alone, and according to its most
general principles, entirely subverts itself, and leaves not the lowest
degree of evidence in any proposition, either in philosophy or common
life.” [This and the following Hume quotes are from A Treatise of Human
Nature, Book I, Part IV, section VII].
Midway through his discussion, Hume asserts that there is
no rational solution to this problem, but that we don’t need
one. Although reason makes no headway here, ‘nature’ seems
to solves the problem in favor of ‘common life.’ One can only
entertain skeptical conclusions for so long before
28 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
“…[nature] cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium,
either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation and lively
impression of my senses, which obliterates all these chimeras. I dine, I
play a game of back-gammon, and I am merry with my friends; and when
after three or four hours’ amusement, I wou’d return to these specula-
tions, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find
it in my heart to enter into them any farther.”
At such times Hume finds himself “absolutely and neces-
sarily determin’d to live, and talk, and act like other people in
the common affairs of life.” Thus reduced to this “indolent
belief in the general maxims of the world” he is ready to
throw “all my books and papers into the fire, and resolve
never more to renounce the pleasures of life for the sake of
reasoning and philosophy.”
But this is more easily said than done. For as he tells us
shortly thereafter, he is also constitutionally disposed to doing
philosophy. When he is “tir’d with amusment and company
and have indulg’d a reverie in my chamber or a solitary walk
by a river-side” he is “naturally inclin’d to refin’d reflection.”
And he’s not the only one. As he says, it is “almost impossible
for the mind of man to rest, like those of beasts, in that
narrow circle of objects, which are the subject of daily conver-
sation and action.” Furthermore, without philosophy
ignorance and superstition rule and philosophy is preferable
to superstition “of every kind or denomination.”
So we are left with the conflict. On the one hand, we can’t
take the skeptical conclusions of philosophy seriously in
everyday life. On the other hand, we can’t help doing the
kind of philosophy that generates those conclusions.
Furthermore, philosophy is the voice of reason and, as such,
our chief weapon against ignorance and superstition. So what
is to be done?
For a start, it’s helpful to remember that philosophy is not
the only discipline in which there are conflicts between what
one says on the job and what one believes (how one acts) off
the job. Some behavioral psychologists denied that human
beings had feelings and emotions; others, more moderately,
denied that subjective experience had any impact on our
behavior (a view still widely held by contemporary psycholo-
gists who believe that all the causal action is in the brain). But
I’m sure many of them explained surrendering to various
temptations with sentences like “It felt so good. I just
couldn’t resist” (without understanding such sentences tauto-
logically). Twentieth century sociologists of many persuasions
held that we are all simply products of our heredity and
environment and that free choice is an illusion. But I doubt
many of them adopted this attitude in relation to their
children. I would expect they delivered the familiar parental
admonitions like “Look, you don’t have to do it just because
all the other kids do. You have a choice here. Just think for
yourself.” Some contemporary literary theorists insist that
texts (all texts) mean whatever their readers take them to
mean. One doubts that they take this attitude during contract
disputes with university officials (“I have a right to my
sabbatical. It’s right here in the contract, in plain English.”).
Again, the on-the-job, off-the-job disparity that characterizes
philosophical skeptics is not unique to philosophy.
Interestingly, however, philosophers take the brunt of the
ridicule for this. And that is not entirely the result of
prejudice. It is also because people believe these other
academic disciplines bake bread. That is,
they take the on-the-job pronouncements
of these academics to
be elements of
respectable (or
once
respectable)
research
programs. As
long as these
programs show
promise, it
makes sense for
researchers to treat these elements’
assumptions as true. But this can be
understood entirely as a job commitment
and that commitment does not require off-
the-job belief. Rather, one may
regard these on-the-job commit-
ments as operating assumptions,
convenient simplifications or even
as hypotheses
currently supported by
good evidence.
Considering the
history of the social
sciences, literary
theory and so on,
chances are they will some day be rejected along with the
research programs in which they are embedded. Researchers
who understand this are not dishonest or self-contradictory
for not living as if these hypotheses are true. (I have no idea
how many of them do understand this. Some, like B.F.
Skinner, believed they had the final truth).
Can something comparable be said in relation to philoso-
phers who conclude we have no good reason to believe in an
external world, other minds or unchanging causal relations?
If these positions are elements a wider project or vision I think
it can. In fact, most of the famous skeptical arguments started
out this way. Descartes’ argues that we can’t know there is an
external world (that we’re not dreaming) as a step in
developing an elaborate metaphysical vision in which our
right to believe in an external world is ultimately grounded in
our belief in God. This vision included a physics that was
quite influential until Newton’s time. His skeptical arguments
were instrumental in developing this program. Hume
introduces his skeptical arguments in the course of investi-
gating the workings of the human understanding. Among
other things, he is interested in determining the sources or
origins of our beliefs, the powers of reason and the relation
between reason and the passions. His skeptical arguments are
instrumental to setting that up. In the case of Descartes,
Hume and others of this ilk, then, skeptical arguments are
neither ridiculous nor idle.
We can treat their skeptical conclusions in a corresponding
manner (in the end, of course, Descartes rejects such conclu-
sions). Like the social scientist and literary theorist, the philo-
sophical skeptic of this kind is entitled to treat these conclu-
sions as hypotheses (supported by argument) that help
constitute a more general theory (e.g., Hume’s theory of
the human understanding). Like the social scientist
and literary theorist, one can (if one chooses) regard
them as provisional hypotheses open to future
revision. In this way one can escape the charge of
being dishonest or self-contradictory for living
as if these hypotheses are false. In
his more ‘splenetic humours’,
Hume might welcome this
suggestion. In those moods, he
confesses, he believes that
‘refin’d reflections’ provide no
‘tolerable prospect of arriving
at…truth or certainty.’
Still, it’s not clear that Hume or
any other philosophical skeptic his
ilk would welcome this
expedient. For it seems to
resolve all conflicts between
philosophical reason and
common sense in favor of the
latter. This does not solve
Hume’s problem, it just takes a
side. As we have seem, Hume
Stephen Lahey himself rejects this side. To
wall off philosophical reason
from everyday life in this way
surrenders the field to
ignorance and superstition. But Hume and most other
philosophers want philosophy to be capable of changing our
ordinary patterns of thought. (It may be that some social
scientists and literary theorists would reject the expedient for
the same reason).
But we can defend skeptical arguments and conclusions in
the spirit of this suggestion without surrendering this
aspiration. These skeptical arguments at issue are not
directed against common sense beliefs per se. Most common
sense beliefs are artifacts of particular cultures at particular
times and rise and fall as they do. These skeptical arguments,
however, are directed at beliefs widely shared by people of
every culture at every stage of their history. These beliefs do
not change with time and circumstance. This is because it is
impossible to have a culture in which it is widely accepted that
November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 29
there is no reason to believe that objects exist unperceived,
that other people are conscious or that causal relations that
held yesterday will hold today. For example, if one really
thought one had no reason to believe that yesterday’s causal
relations will hold today, one would have no reason feed
oneself, water the crops, avoid rabid dogs, and so on. Let’s
call beliefs that are independent of time and circumstance in
this way ‘core beliefs’. My claim is that we shouldn’t reject
core beliefs in the face of philosophical argument, but that
other common sense beliefs are fair game. Core beliefs are
compelling to people of all times and places, more compelling
than any abstract philosophical argument could be. They are
not expressions of ignorance and superstition. Only lunatics
and a few philosophers are capable of sincerely doubting them
(and it’s unclear that the latter really do, given how they live).
Other common sense beliefs change with time and circum-
stances and may well be expressions of ignorance and super-
stition. They should be put to the philosopher’s test.
This, however, raises another question. If the conclusions
of skeptical arguments are inconsistent with core beliefs, how
could these arguments be fruitful, interesting or illuminating?
And how could research programs grounded on the conclu-
sions of these arguments make any real progress? Why
shouldn’t we reject such a program out of hand?
Well, to begin with, successful skeptical arguments show us
where the justifications of our beliefs currently bottom out.
This is important information that needs to be incorporated
into any theory of the fixation or justification of belief
(personal or social). In Hume’s adroit hands, it helped
generate a wider vision in which our fundamental beliefs were
said to be grounded in ‘nature’ rather than reason, a vision
firmly opposed to rationalism of all sorts (especially ratio-
nalism in the service of religion). Hume’s vision, of course,
helped awaken Kant from his ‘dogmatic slumbers’. Kant’s
Copernican Revolution in philosophy was in part an attempt
to reconceptualize our situation as knowers such that skeptical
problems do not arise. One can regard much of
Wittgenstein’s later work as an attempt to develop an account
of language that undermines the possibility of skeptical
arguments. Again, skeptical arguments provide important
data to the effect that we need to rethink something basic.
They can do this because they arise against a background of
deeply-held assumptions. These assumptions become the
targets of later philosophical investigation. In responding to
Hume, Kant questioned the assumption that ‘knowledge
conforms to objects’ (roughly, that the mind imposes no
structures at all on the world it seeks to know). In responding
to more recent versions of skepticism, Wittgenstein questioned
the assumption that a language is a self-standing system of
meanings (i.e., that utterances can be understood indepen-
dently of the ‘forms of life’ in which they are embedded).
Zeno’s paradoxes provide an interesting example which we
can discuss in more detail within the space constraints of this
essay. In attempting to prove that motion is impossible, Zeno
asks us to imagine an arrow in flight. If the arrow can move,
he tells us, either it can move where it is or it can move where
it isn’t. It can’t move where it isn’t because nothing can do
anything where it isn’t. But it can’t move where it is either.
Where it is – its position – is defined by its front-most point
30 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
and its rear-most point. And in that space, there is no room
for it to move. Another way to think about the paradox is
this: if something is at a fixed position, it’s not moving. Since
the arrow is always at some fixed position or other it doesn’t
ever move.
This intriguing argument is sound only if we make an
assumption that was apparently common in Zeno’s time (and
in our own as well, given the difficulty students have with the
argument). The assumption is that time is made up of instan-
taneous moments (that is, moments having no duration). If
there are no such moments, no extentionless points in time, a
flying arrow never is at a fixed point in space. Over any finite
duration the arrow moves. The idea of a moment is an ideal-
ization. Other things being equal, the closer we approach it,
the less the arrow moves. But there is no period of time in
which there is no motion at all. If we give up the background
assumption that there are moments in time, Zeno’s skeptical
argument fails. (Many of his other arguments presuppose that
space is made up of extentionless points). Zeno’s arguments
are valuable partly because they alert us to the fact that
something is wrong with the background assumption that
there are moments in time. They also illustrate why it is
reasonable to adopt a fallibilist attitude toward our skeptical
conclusions. Later thinkers may come to reject the assump-
tions on which they rest.
Although the idea of a core belief requires further
refinement, enough has been said to justify the following
conclusions. First, skeptical arguments can play important
roles in the development of wider philosophical programs.
When they are employed in this way, they are neither idle nor
foolish. Second, skeptical conclusions of apparently sound
arguments that challenge core beliefs need not themselves be
objects of belief. They might instead be treated as interesting
aspects of a wider research program or as data that motivate
us to look harder at certain basic structural features of our
world view. Third, philosophers who make these arguments
in this spirit are not guilty of dishonesty or inconsistency by
failing to live according to these beliefs. And finally, these
three conclusions are compatible with the use of philosophical
argument to challenge other common sense beliefs.
Not all skeptics, of course, will be willing to understand
their arguments in this way. Some conclude that we really do
have no reason to believe that objects exist when unperceived,
that other people are conscious, that causal relations that held
in the past will hold in the future, and so on. They do not
regard these propositions merely as hypotheses we should
accept on the job. They regard them as just plain true. Or so
they say. For if they really believed this they would act as if
they had no more reason than not to drink to slake their
thirst, no more reason than not to sympathize with their
children’s pain or to refrain from inflicting pain on them, and
so forth. I know of no philosophical skeptic who lives like
that. So these skeptics either lack the courage of their convic-
tions or willfully live with contradictory beliefs (thereby
violating the aforementioned blood oath of their tribe).
© MICHAEL PHILIPS 2005
Michael Philips is a professor of philosophy at Portland State
University in Portland, Oregon. In his spare time he is a photog-
rapher and performance artist.
 Socratic Humility
Glenn Rawson on humility versus arrogance in the Socratic method of philosophy.
“Gentlemen of Athens, I am far from making a defence now on my own
behalf, as you might think, but on yours: lest you do wrong to god’s gift to
you by condemning me. For if you kill me you will not easily find
another like me.
“What’s likely, gentlemen, is that in reality it’s the god who is wise, and
that in this oracle he is saying that human wisdom is worth little or
nothing ... as if he were saying ‘he among you humans is wisest who, like
Socrates, knows that he’s really worth nothing when it comes to wisdom’.”
Socrates, in Plato’s Apology of Socrates 30e and 23ab
S
ocrates, a founding figure in both the aspirations and
the skepticism of Western philosophy, was convicted
and executed on charges of corrupting the youth by
undermining Athenian traditions. The vote of the
very large jury was fairly close: Plato reports that a
switch of just 30 out of 500 votes would have produced an
acquittal. Some believe that Socrates could have spared his
life if he had only been less arrogant at his trial. After all,
Plato shows Socrates calling himself god’s gift to Athens,
calling Athens a lazy horse who needs rousing by a philo-
sophical gadfly, and suggesting that his ‘penalty’ for his
services should be free meals for life in city hall. (Apologia in
Greek means a defense speech, not “I’m sorry”!) Indeed
Socrates must have sounded arrogant; another admirer,
Xenophon, tries to explain parts of Socrates’ defense by
claiming that Socrates wanted to die. In Plato’s more famous
and more complete version (which is probably also more
accurate in spirit), Socrates defends his life in earnest and
acknowledges that he must sound arrogant – but insists that he
is not. He turns the tables on his accusers by explaining that it
is their arrogance, and their misunderstanding of his own
humble service to philosophy, which is responsible for his
being on trial.
Could Socrates be right that his life of refuting others is
genuinely humble, and that his humble philosophical
questioning must appear arrogant to those who really are
arrogant? Or is he just cleverly trying to make a bad case seem
strong with tricky arguments? That’s what his detractors
alleged for much of his life, and some say the same about
philosophers today. I’ll try to explain how Socrates’ way of
questioning could be both genuinely humble and naturally
open to the mistaken accusation of arrogance. (I use Plato’s
portrait in his Socratic dialogues, which is the best we’ve got).
Then I’ll consider a recent study of arrogance, and compare
Socrates’ style of questioning with some things that go by the
name of ‘Socratic Method’ today.
Socratic ‘human wisdom’ and the anti-hubristic
mission of the philosophical ‘gadfly’
Untying this loose paradox requires understanding
Socrates’ mission of ‘human wisdom.’ He claims that the
longstanding slander in the streets – that he’s an atheistic
quack-scientist and sophist with no concern for truth or
tradition – is more dangerous than his formal accusers, and the
main reason jurors might consider him guilty. Where did his
reputation for being such a wiseguy come from? From a
misunderstanding, he says, of the one kind of wisdom that he
is willing to claim. It’s not scientific wisdom or rhetorical
expertise, and it’s not the superhuman wisdom that would
make us real teachers of genuine virtue: Socrates always denied
that he could teach these things. The only wisdom he’s willing
to claim is what he calls ‘human wisdom,’ which is revealed to
him cryptically through an oracle from Apollo.
What is this human wisdom? Apparently, when an enthusi-
astic admirer asked the oracle whether anyone was wiser than
Socrates, the oracle said no. Socrates was puzzled, as he was
well aware that he had no special knowledge, yet he couldn’t
believe that the god could lie or be mistaken. So he set out to
discover what this riddling oracle could mean. He visited
people with a reputation for moral wisdom, but he found that
they didn’t really know what they thought they knew. He
interviewed politicians, playwrights, and others with the same
results: people always harbor inconsistencies in their beliefs
about the good life, and are unable to explain their beliefs in
the light of Socrates’ searching questions. The more expertise
people claimed about the most important things in life –
justice, virtue and the best way to live – the less they could
justify their claims. Even the knowledge some people did
possess, like the art or science of their trades, was
overshadowed by their mistaken belief that they were also
qualified to tell people how they should live.
Eventually Socrates recognized his modest superiority: “it
seems that neither of us knows anything great, but he thinks
he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not
know, neither do I think I know. So it seems I am wiser than
he in this one small thing, that I do not think I know what I
do not know.” This is the famous paradox that Socrates’
special wisdom consists in recognizing his ignorance.
Whereas others arrogantly think they know important things
that they don’t really know, he humbly acknowledges that he
doesn’t know: “it’s the god who is wise, and in this oracle he is
saying ... ‘he among you humans is wisest who, like Socrates,
knows that he’s really worth nothing when it comes to
November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 31

wisdom’.” This interpretation may at first seem far from the
original “no one is wiser than Socrates,” but the oracle had a
reputation for hidden meanings, and at any rate Socrates
could find no other way to make good sense of it. At least he
avoids the arrogance of thinking that he knows more than
everyone else.
Socrates then spends the rest of his life promoting this
humble self-knowledge that Apollo so values. Maybe he also
hopes to find somewhere the superhuman wisdom that would
teach us the true nature of the good life. But more to the
point he is continuing his modest service to Apollo,
combating the widespread arrogance of assuming a wisdom
that one doesn’t really have. He tries to make people aware of
their arrogance both when they explicitly claim to possess great
wisdom, and when their actions imply a wisdom that they
don’t possess. Thus he debates professional teachers of virtue
and practical politics (‘sophists’ like Hippias, Protagoras,
Gorgias), and he cross-examines some prosecutors, merce-
naries, and aspiring statesmen (like Euthyphro, Meno, and
Alcibiades). Refuting pretenders to wisdom, Socrates tries to
help them become more humble, and thereby remove the one
modest way in which he is superior.
Socrates’ mission is a philosophical version of a typical
Greek attack on hubris. In Greek, hubris can refer to violence
or other outrageous behavior, or to looking down on others
with an inappropriate sense of superiority. Sometimes it
refers more grandly to attempts to exceed the limits of human
nature. Greek myths and legends often tell of men who try to
cheat fate or stand with the gods, and who must fail or be
punished. Icarus falls to his death for having tried to fly too
high; Sisyphus is punished with eternal futility for cheating
death; and Oedipus seals his own miserable fate by trying to
outwit the oracle: all of these stories express an abiding
anxiety about thinking that we’re better than we are, about
32 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
not knowing our proper place. Dramatists, historians and
philosophers warn commoners, kings and communities against
the arrogance of thinking that they’re better than they are.
And Apollo was especially associated with this message. The
walls of his temple at Delphi bore inscriptions like ‘know
thyself,’ ‘nothing in excess,’ and ‘hate hubris.’ In this long
tradition, Socrates directs his antihubristic mission especially
against those who claim special moral wisdom.
Socrates’ mission is specifically philosophical, rather than
just a prudent reminder, because his examinations of himself
and others bring a new, more thorough conception of what
really counts as knowledge. He draws some inspiration from
successful explanations in the arts and sciences of his day,
applies the criterion of consistency with unprecedented rigor,
and introduces standards for proper definitions. Socrates’
inability to satisfy his own high standards in the important but
slippery field of morality led him to conclude that he doesn’t
have the ‘superhuman wisdom’ that would qualify him as a
teacher of virtue. Though Socrates is almost always more
logically adept than those he questions, his claim that he
himself doesn’t know the full answers is not merely ironic.
(These elements of Socratic philosophy have been studied
with much excitement in recent decades; see the note on
further reading below.)
According to Socrates’ story, then, he must behave like the
philosophical gadfly in order to pursue Apollo’s mission,
rousing the lazy horse that is Athens from her intellectual
laziness and arrogance by exhibiting his own ignorance and
reminding others of theirs. But those who are unwilling or
unable to recognize their arrogance are likely to interpret
Socrates as a know-it-all or a wiseguy who gets pleasure from
defeating others in debate. Socrates tells of how young people
enjoy imitating him, always trying to refute others – but
without Socrates’ earnest modesty. Socrates’ detractors hated
seeing traditions questioned and pillars of society refuted, and
they confused Socrates’ goals with those of his cynical
imitators. Eventually they brought Socrates to court on vague
charges of undermining traditional religion and morality.
In the end, Socrates’ mission requires no special command
from Apollo, and he knows that its universal value can be
understood without the oracle (which he suggests just before
the jury sentences him to death). In addition to the intrinsic
value of Socratic ‘human wisdom’ as the opposite of
arrogance, it also has a fundamental instrumental value in
education. Those who think they already know something
will of course not try to learn it. So when Socrates shows
someone that they don’t really know what they thought they
knew, he is providing a necessary condition for them to learn
it. Recognizing the problem is the first step to forming a
solution. In a dialogue about geometry and virtue called
Meno, Socrates says: “Do you recognize, Meno, where [your
slave] is now? ... At first he didn’t know what was the base of
the eight-foot square, and now he still doesn’t know. But then
he thought he knew, and answered with confidence as if he
knew, and didn’t think himself lacking. ... In fact, we have
done something useful for discovering the answer, for now,
being aware that he doesn’t know, he would be glad to
inquire.” Throughout Plato’s Socratic dialogues, Socrates
seeks to make genuine education possible by helping people to
recognize what has yet to be learned. Though Socrates can be
sarcastic, especially with openly arrogant adults, he can also be
gentle and encouraging, especially with modest youths
(compare his different approaches to different characters
within Meno or Lysis or Charmides.) If Socrates is right, then
when people get upset with him for refuting them, and
consider him arrogant for doing so, they are really testifying
to their own arrogance.
What’s a modern admirer of Socrates to do?
Philosophers are still sometimes considered argumentative
tricksters who don’t respect truth or tradition. (Sometimes it’s
true.) The ethical and educational values of avoiding
arrogance and recognizing ignorance are as great as ever. And
Socratic questioning the way Socrates does it – as a common
search for knowledge about controversial topics, with rigorous
logical standards, conducted by people without final answers –
is as difficult as ever. I teach philosophy at an American
university, and sometimes I try (among other approaches) to
conduct discussions roughly the way Socrates did. I try to
manage it without seeming or being arrogant; but I’ll bet that
I sometimes fail.
A revealing study by David Dunning and Justin Kruger at
Cornell University finds that those who are most ignorant of
logic, English grammar, or how to tell a good joke, also fail to
recognize their ignorance. The worst performers on tests of
these skills typically considered themselves above average, and
overestimated their abilities far more than others did. After
the poorest performers in grammar ‘graded’ the tests of those
who performed much better, they still thought themselves
much more knowledgeable than they were, and even tended
to raise their estimation of their own abilities compared with
their more knowledgeable peers. By contrast, the most
competent were more likely to underestimate their skills
relative to others, until they witnessed the others’ perfor-
mance. As the authors of the study point out, these new data
add colorful experimental support for Darwin’s observation
that “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does
knowledge” and Jefferson’s dictum that “he who knows best
knows how little he knows.” Let us not forget Socrates’
ancient insight that such poor achievers have no reason to try
to learn until they are convinced of their ignorance.
The practice called ‘Socratic Method’ in American law
schools has become notorious because of a tendency (perhaps
only among poor practitioners) to humiliate students by
demanding that they publicly answer questions about legal
reasoning until they fail. There are clear benefits to a system
of instruction that requires students to be actively engaged,
always prepared to use their own investigations and logical
resources to understand difficult issues in their trade. But the
method in law schools can easily become a game of ‘guess
what I’m thinking.’ And of course humiliation does not
typically promote a humble determination to keep improving
one’s understanding (even Socrates’ partners often become
more angry than curious). At any rate, questioning in which
the teacher already has the answers, and keeps them to himself
as a pedagogical tool, is not Socrates’ brand of Socratic
questioning.
Nor does Socrates use another modern strategy that’s
called ‘Socratic.’ With children and adolescents, and
sometimes at universities, open-ended questioning is designed
to promote free expression, self-esteem, and toleration of
diverse opinions. This approach can be well suited for intro-
ducing controversies, and for encouraging open discussion,
but not for logically rigorous dialogue. By itself, it can
support a healthy tolerance, or a casual indifference, and it can
be difficult to square with our general commitment that some
things really are morally wrong, and that society requires a
measure of basic agreement about morality in order to thrive.
But more to the present point, it is not Socrates’ approach.
When we see a rare case of Socrates conversing with children
(in Plato’s Lysis), he is gentle and encouraging, but he still
takes pains to refute mistaken notions and draws the boys’
attention to the fact that they don’t know as much as they
thought they knew.
The Socratic Method of Socrates is not for all occasions.
But in fields where people often think they already know the
answers – morality and religion not the least among them – a
teacher must often use rigorous standards to help students,
gently but firmly, to recognize the extent of our ignorance.
We’re not completely ignorant, of course. In courses on ethical
theories, I like to emphasize that most of us are roughly
correct most of the time about what sorts of things are
morally good or bad, and that ethical theories don’t just tell us
what to do. Ethical theories define essential terms and
ultimate goals so we can explain why things are good or bad,
and thereby better decide hard cases where good traditions
conflict or new problems leave us puzzled. When final and
precise answers are not to be found, examining the consis-
tency, definitions, and explanatory power of our most well-
informed beliefs are all we have to work with. These are the
same standards employed by Socrates. And we need them if
we are to maintain that, as difficult as some moral questions
may be for teacher and student alike, not all answers are
equally good.
But our ignorance can prevent us from recognizing our
ignorance. And I’m not just trying to be paradoxical. When
we correct others, and even take time to confront and refute
them, we can follow Socrates’ lead and reveal our own
ignorance as well, in the hope that we are genuinely siding
with humility against arrogance.
© DR GLENN RAWSON 2005
Glenn Rawson received his PhD at the University of Texas at
Austin. He teaches philosophy at the University of Rhode Island.
Further Reading
Plato’s most ‘Socratic’ dialogues include his Apology, Charmides,
Crito, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Ion, and Laches. A stimulating intro-
duction to the philosophy of Socrates, informed by the best schol-
arship and eminently readable, is P. Woodruff’s ‘Socratic
Education’ in A. Rorty’s Philosophers on Education (Routledge
1998). A thorough interpretation of Socrates’ defense speech is
C.D.C. Reeve’s Socrates in the Apology (Hackett 1989). A short
overview of Socrates’ life, philosophy and historical influence is
C.C.W. Taylor’s Socrates (Oxford 1998). A fuller overview of the
philosophy is T. Brickhouse and N. Smith’s The Philosophy of
Socrates. For yet more detail, see the four topically organized
volumes of scholarship edited by W.J. Prior, Socrates: Critical
Assessments (Routledge 1996). The study by Dunning and Kruger
is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
December 1999. Versions of the ‘Socratic Method’ in law schools
are indicted at
http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000294.html, and
defended at http://www.law.uchicago.edu/socrates/soc_article.html
November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 33
Learning & A Way of Thinking
Teaching About Ethics
Philip Badger on a classroom philosophy experiment and the ideas it provoked.
T
he ideas in this article have their origin in a
difficulty I was having in teaching a course in
Ethics to my students. I wanted to put into
action the idea that philosophy is something in
which you actively participate and something
which can help you gain a greater understanding of your own
ideas. At the same time, I wanted to introduce my class to
some of the major perspectives in moral philosophy in a way
which would help them appreciate their various strengths and
points of conflict. It occurred to me that the best way of
doing this was to build on a thought experiment suggested by
the American philosopher, John Rawls.
Rawls, famously, suggested what he called ‘the original
position’ – an imagined situation in which disembodied souls
consider the requirements of a just society while waiting, in a
state of ignorance about their eventual identities and charac-
teristics, to be born into the world. Rawls hoped that his
thought experiment would enable us to see past our particular
interests as people with specific identities (e.g. ‘white’ and
‘male’) so that we could consider the principles which would
govern a truly just and fair society.
Rawls’ thought experiment was controversial for several
reasons but one was that it seemed, in a way, implausible, to
his critics, to ask us to distance ourselves from any specific
cultural values we might hold. Thus, one of the many
criticisms levelled at Rawls by philosophers was that the
demands placed upon his participants were psychologically
implausible; the abstract, rational, individual that he imagines
is no individual at all.
The Experiment
Reflecting on Rawls’ ideas, it struck me that I could give
his thought experiment an empirical twist and do so without
requiring any psychologically implausible efforts on the part
of my students. I asked them to play the role of a new UK
Supreme Court which would rule on the merits of a series of
cases. However, before the court could start looking at
specific cases, it had the additional job of selecting, in order of
priority, the principles it would be using to judge the merits of
each case. In other words, I asked the members of the court
to begin by writing their own ‘constitution’. I provided a
series of possible principles and gave the students time to
debate their merits and order them. However, I stipulated
that, once they had settled on a set of principles, they could
34 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
not change any of them until they had looked at at least five
cases. I did this because I anticipated that, when faced with
practical cases, they would rapidly come to question the
merits of their original ideas.
Thus began a fairly exceptional experiment in what I’ll call
‘empirical’ philosophy. I realised that what I’d got was a kind
of philosophical laboratory in which I could test an important
hypothesis. I hoped we might be able to demonstrate the
possibility of a liberal ideal; that people of different cultures,
genders, class backgrounds etc, might be able to come to
some kind of workable consensus of core values. Indeed,
from Rawls’ perspective, such a consensus, attained between
ideally rational agents, is what constitutes moral knowledge.
Most of my students thought some principle about
‘preventing suffering’ was very important and several of them
considered it to be the most important principle of all. In
philosophy, this is what is called a ‘consequentialist’ moral
viewpoint because it suggests that the intended or foreseeable
consequences of our actions are the most important criteria
for deciding if an action is morally permissible or not.
The problem with this point of view, as my new Supreme
Court found out when they were faced with ‘real life’ cases,
was that it tended to lead to consequences with which they
were not at all happy. I gave them one dilemma to consider
in which they had to decide if they should allow involuntary
euthanasia in the case of a man who was ignorant of his own
terminal condition, in great pain and terrified of death. In
my fictional case, the man’s family had asked that he be
administered a lethal dose of painkillers under the pretence
that it was a routine jab.
The students thought that this would be a gross
infringement of what they called the man’s ‘human rights’ but
felt obliged to accept that it would be the best way to
minimise suffering. This case highlights a very important
problem with consequentialist moral positions and that is that
there are other things, apart from their consequences, which
we recognise as making our actions right or wrong. This was
the viewpoint taken by those of the students who placed a
principle about ‘respecting the autonomy of autonomous
beings’ at the top of their ‘constitutions’.
Various versions of this principle are at the heart of what
are called ‘deontological’ moral theories. Deontological
theories begin from the premise that some actions, such as
deciding for another rational being that it would be better for
them to end their life, are absolutely wrong regardless of their
otherwise good consequences (in this case, the alleviation of
suffering).
However, those students who wanted to put a deontological
principle about ‘respecting autonomy’ at the heart of their
‘constitutions’ were soon, like the consequentialists, met by
difficulties in applying it in fictional cases that I devised. In
particular, they were forced to agree that seatbelt use had to
be made optional in the front seat of cars and that we should
make class ‘A’ drugs freely available to those adults who
wanted to use them. The problem was that, once they
accepted the ‘autonomy’ of autonomous beings, they had no
way to argue for paternalistically enforcing any rules intended
to prevent suffering. Their position led, in other words, to a
kind of libertarianism in which the only function of the law
was to protect the rights of individuals to be left alone.
Most of my students were unwilling to accept either that
the state should play the role of parent
in deciding, in every case, what was
best for us, or that it should never
interfere to enforce our safety. A few
‘libertarians’ demanded to know if the
‘paternalists’ wanted to ban hang-
gliding on the grounds that it was
dangerous. The ‘paternalists’ retorted
that thousands of people had been
saved from death and suffering by
seatbelts and by tax revenue-supported
health services (tax was something else
a few of the libertarians seemed to
consider an infringement on
autonomy). For the most part,
though, my students didn’t want to be
either totally libertarian in their
outlook or totally paternalistic.
Suggesting Another Principle
It occurred to me that there was a
novel way of allowing them to take the elusive ‘third way’ for
which they were looking. Rawls talked about what he called
the ‘lexical ordering’ of his principles of justice so that some
could be given more weight than the others. Indeed, I had
built this into my experiment by allowing the students to list
principles in order of priority. The problem was that, in
placing either an absolutely consequentialist or absolutely
deontological principle at the head of their constitutions, they
were effectively making any subordinate principles redundant.
There was no point in, for example, placing a principle about
‘preventing suffering’ second in a list where ‘respecting
autonomy’ was first. Such an ordering would never lead to
seatbelt wearing or tax-funded health care.
In this context, I suggested that they might want to
consider the possibility that they make ‘respecting the
autonomy of autonomous beings with regard to their large scale
concepts of the good’ the first principle of their constitutions. I
explained that by ‘large scale concepts of the good’, I meant
those kinds of choices and the systems of meaning which
inform them, without which life would become meaningless
for us as individuals. My idea was to prohibit interference in
our ‘big’ life choices without ruling such interference out, on
specific grounds, in other areas. These ‘big’ choices should
be free from coercion by any party, including the state, and
include things such as our choice of life partner, our choice of
career, our religion or lack of it, and our right not to be ‘put
to sleep’ by well-meaning doctors without our consent.
This list is, of course, partial and open to discussion, but
the principle remains that, whatever conversation we might
have about its content, there is still a point to saying that
some things are so central to our own sense of our lives as
having meaning that it is intolerable that the state or anyone
else should interfere with them. Conversely, it might be
argued that there are some things that are too trivial for us to
permit the interference of others. My decision to paint my
living-room orange might not induce my guests to return but
should hardly be the subject of criminal or civil action!
However, and this is the point my students picked up with
relish, between those things which are too
important for state interference and those
things which are too trivial, there lie a vast
number of ‘medium scale’ choices upon
which the meaning of our lives do not turn
but which might be interfered with on the
grounds that, for example, doing so might
prevent suffering. Consequentialism survives,
but in a restricted form.
Making us wear seatbelts does not render our
lives meaningless but does, potentially at
least, promise to make them longer. This
doesn’t imply that the state should be able to
require us to refrain from activities, such as
hang-gliding, which are dangerous but which
we freely and deliberately enter into in order
to enrich our existences in particular ways.
Similarly, paying taxes to fund health care,
pensions and other benefits does not negate
John Rawls
(1921-2002) the meaningfulness of my life to me unless
the taxation is so punitive that my incentive
to work is entirely destroyed. The debate will continue about
when that point might be reached but the general principle
that we should not be able to ‘opt out’ of the cost of reducing
the suffering of our fellow beings is preserved.
Thus far, the ‘constitution’ I proposed to my students
contained two elements and, possibly, the solution to some
long-standing philosophical problems. Firstly, it is clear that
we can maintain that there are some things that are right or
wrong regardless of their consequence (we refuse the request
of a family to give the dying man involuntary euthanasia even
though our action will prolong his suffering). Secondly, we
can give proper place to the moral value of ‘preventing
suffering’ when we know that doing so does not contravene
anyone’s ‘large scale’ freedoms. We are not morally
compelled, in the name of negative liberty, to repeal our
seatbelt laws or give people tax refunds on the money we’ve
spent on kidney machines.
At this point, I decided to introduce to my students a third
‘constitutional’ principle, subservient to but consistent with
the first two. This principle states that we should ‘aim to
promote the autonomy of potentially autonomous beings’.
November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 35
Like the second principle, this is a positive principle in that
bids us to do things and not just to leave people alone. Note
also that it makes no reference to ‘large scale’ choices but is a
statement of the moral significance of autonomy as such. I
included it because it seemed to me that there needed to be
some acknowledgement that certain people, for example
children and the disabled, are not always in a position to
exercise autonomy fully. In the case of disabled people, this
may not be because of any intellectual incapacity but because
society does not afford them physical access to resources that
most of us take for granted. It is nonsense to suggest that a
person has a ‘negative right’ to a university education (a right
not to be formally prevented from taking up a place) if there is
no possibility that such an individual’s positive access needs be
taken into account. A person using a wheelchair needs a lift if
they are going to be able to attend a lecture on the third floor
and a ramp to get into the building at all. In a similar way, it
is absurd to suggest that a child might grow to
exercise autonomy if he or she is denied the oppor-
tunity of education.
All of this is apt to sound a little too left wing –
or perhaps a little too Scandinavian – for some
people. Many old-fashioned liberals and liber-
tarians will claim, at this point, to be able to detect
old style Soviet totalitarianism just around the
corner. Any mention of promoting ‘potential’
autonomy has tended to be regarded as dangerously
authoritarian by traditional ‘negative’ liberals (Isaiah
Berlin is one philosopher who thought this way).
They suspect that the state will want to take a role
in shaping what those ‘potentially autonomous beings’ are
going to think. Others will worry that, in our efforts to
reduce suffering, we risk reducing those people who are the
recipients of welfare to the level of debased dependents free-
riding the system (this is a view taken by the American writer
Charles Murray). However, it is unreasonable to suggest that
making people wear seatbelts, paying them unemployment
benefit or making children learn about the principle export
crops of Brazil is tyrannical (arguing that the latter is unnec-
essary is to engage in a quite different debate – one about
what content education needs to have in order to promote
autonomy). The point is that the ‘lexical ordering’ we have
been doing makes laudable aims, such as preventing suffering
and promoting autonomy, secondary and non-injurious to the
‘big’ negative liberties which traditional liberals are, rightly,
anxious to defend. We might have to reform welfare
provision to make it more ‘participatory’ – perhaps more
generous but also more demanding of the recipients (another
Scandinavian idea) but we don’t have to consider abolishing it.
A Hard Case
However, this should not be taken to mean that the ideas
outlined in this article do not have implications that are
deeply disturbing to our conventional moral viewpoints when
they are applied to what philosophers call ‘hard cases’. One
example, albeit an extreme one, will have to suffice.
Recently, there have been cases of conflict between the
parents of very ill babies and doctors about their continued
care. Doctors have claimed that some of these children will
36 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
suffer badly if, sometimes quite invasive, treatment is
continued. Parents have counter-claimed, based on their
‘large scale concepts of the good’, that treatment should
continue. In Britain, courts have so far mainly ruled in
support of the doctors in these cases.
Similar debates are taking place in Holland. There,
however, the debate is not about the withholding of treatment
but about active euthanasia for children. It is these kind of
cases which most starkly demonstrate the implications of the
moral position outlined in this article.
Let’s take the case of a child suffering from an incurable
and agonising condition, which palliative care has failed to
alleviate. We have to acknowledge that the child may not be
an ‘autonomous being’ capable of developing a ‘large scale
concept of the good’ (the extent to which a child may be said
to have such a ‘concept of the good’ will depend on a variety
of factors including his or her age and mental abilities). In
this situation, the prevention of suffering
becomes the imperative moral principle
according to my principles. If so, it seems that
there is an argument, as proposed in Holland,
for active non-voluntary euthanasia, as this is
likely to be much more effective in preventing
suffering than the simple withdrawal of
treatment. This is controversial enough in its
own right – I’m proposing that children in
circumstances of hopeless suffering be given
active euthanasia – but this is not the end of the
matter. We must envisage occasions where the
Dutch experience might, in the future, come
together with ours in the UK. Imagine a situation in which
the parents of a suffering child are opposed to active
euthanasia on the grounds of their ‘large scale concept of the
good’ but the doctors believe that it is by far the kindest way
of ending the child’s suffering. In that case, we have a choice
between assuming that the ‘large scale concept of the good’ of
the parents can somehow be thought to ‘spread’ to the child,
in which case euthanasia is not justified, or assuming that it
does not, in which case it is.
The general argument of this article would seem to point
to the latter conclusion. If it did not, then we would have to
acknowledge that those parents who object on religious
grounds to life-saving blood transfusions being given to their
children have the right to do so. The basic principle that has
been defended here is that we have a right, as autonomous
beings, to decide whether we want to bring our life to an end
(with the help of a consenting doctor if necessary) but that
others do not have any right to make that decision for us.
One person’s ‘large-scale concept of the good’ does not spread
over to or negate another’s in this case. However, in the case
of a being who is incapable of entertaining such a concept of
the good but who still has the capacity to suffer, limiting that
suffering becomes the moral imperative. Thus, there seems
to be a case for active euthanasia for children suffering
hopeless pain, even when this is against the wishes of their
parents.
© PHILIP BADGER 2005
Philip Badger is a teacher of Psychology, Sociology and Philosophy in
a school in Sheffield.
 The
Machiavelli Inquiry
Casimir Kukielka asks: What might some of history’s most
famous practitioners of power politics have thought about
the war in Iraq?

I
n Issue 50 of Philosophy Now, an article by Ian Dungate without UN approval,
called ‘The Aquinas Inquiry,’ imagined the reactions of thus he let neither moral
certain medieval philosophers to the invasion of Iraq. hang-ups, nor diplomatic
The panel, led by St Thomas Aquinas, used six criteria niceties stand in the way.
to determine whether the invasion could be morally However Richelieu,
justified; unfortunately for Blair and Bush, they ruled that it drawing on his
could not. While the conclusions of the Aquinas Inquiry may experiences in the Thirty
be comforting to some people, others who do not follow the Years War, might object
idealistic tenets of medieval Christianity may feel that what that merely taking action
Aquinas and company had to say was irrelevant. After all, a lot doesn’t necessarily prove
has changed in the last 700 years, and that includes percep- that one is not blinded by
tions of morality. ideology. For example, he
May I offer an alternative to the Aquinas panel – the might say, Ferdinand II of
Machiavelli panel, consisting of Niccolò Machiavelli, Cardinal the Holy Roman Empire
Richelieu, Klemens von Metternich, and Otto von Bismarck. turned down highly
These four statesmen are famous for basing their calculations favorable peace terms in
not on high-minded principles, but on the cold-blooded calcu- order to continue fighting
lations of Realpolitik. Though the word Realpolitik has been the Protestant heretics. It
confused and abused, and was not even popularized until after was a catastrophic
the deaths of three of our panelists, it roughly means that the decision for his Empire.
measured acquisition of power is the best way of assuring the Though Bush may not
survival of the state. It is not idealistic in outlook; it is have been inhibited by
realistic. Since this typifies the strategies of our panel popular morality, could
members, they are uniquely qualified to offer a second ‘neoconservative’ ideology
perspective on the war in Iraq. Even if they concede the have caused him to act
findings of the Aquinas inquiry, it doesn’t mean that they rashly when moderation
would have ultimately disagreed with Bush. What they will was in the best interests of
seek to find is whether the war and how it was initiated were the US? One possible
in the best interests of the United States. Did Bush analyze clue that Bush was
things in a sober way? Did his actions before the outbreak of addicted to ideology was
hostilities maximize the US’s chances for success? his seemingly unwavering
The panel members have pondered such matters deeply, belief that Iraq possessed
written copiously, and on top of that, have had a great deal of a large arsenal of weapons
experience putting their theories into practice (more than can of mass destruction.
be said for our first panel!). Though there are no clear-cut Despite the fact that Han
criteria like the Aquinas panel enjoyed, they are sufficiently Blix and his team of
crafty to put together six new criteria. Let’s review each, point inspectors had found no
by point, to see if Bush made decisions that would advance US ‘smoking gun,’
interests. neoconservatives said that
people were only living
1) Was utility placed above ideology? Personal with a false sense of
religious beliefs, prejudices, loyalties etc. must not inhibit security if they doubted
action or reduce flexibility. The first thing our panelists must the existence of these
judge is whether Bush allowed such things as international law weapons. Since the
or his own professed devotion to Christianity to stand in the resulting invasion found
way of an action that probably runs counter to both. On the no weapons it can be
surface it appears quite simple – he launched a destructive war argued that Bush was

November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 37

 blinded to reality. extend American power, and so utility and expediency were
Metternich placed above all else.
and Bismark
might counter 2) Did the decision preserve or augment the state’s
that there were geopolitical position? This is a difficult question to
many practical answer, given that the war is still in progress. Bismarck might
reasons to go to remind his fellow panelists of his great war against Austria in
war: Iraq has 1866. It was decisive first because it was quick and it
large oil deposits, increased Prussia’s position vis-à-vis the other great powers.
it is strategically Second, and equally important, it was a limited war. A person
situated next to with unlimited demands risks creating unlimited enemies, as
Iran, Saddam in the case of Napoleon. Bismarck’s victory might have
Hussein had changed the balance in central Europe, but the general
funded the European equilibrium appeared to remain intact. Thus the
Palestinians, and other powers felt they could live with the new arrangement.
a Saddam-free The invasion of Iraq was not done inside the pre-existing
Iraq would framework of international relations – in this sense, it was
present a revolutionary. Countries like Iran or North Korea are conse-
democratic alter- quently seeking to balance America’s overall global position by
native to the acquiring nuclear weapons. The current situation is too
despotism unstable for them to rely on anything less than what they
common in the consider to be an absolute guarantee of their sovereignty. And
middle east. The of course the ongoing insurgency gives these countries a
weapons of mass window of opportunity to get the Bomb whilst American
destruction forces and diplomacy are otherwise engaged. The combi-
argument was nation of insurgency in Iraq and proliferation of nuclear
only a means to weapons elsewhere has obviously decreased America’s global
garner as much position.
support as Likely Outcome: A world skeptical of America’s motives was
possible without the price Bush paid for a war of attrition. The panel votes
waiting for unanimously that the war was harmful to America.
counter
productive 3) Were political considerations kept ahead of
conclusions from military considerations? War is an unpredictable mess.
weapons History shows that clear cut, decisive victories are very
inspectors. difficult to achieve, even for an army that is vastly superior.
Success, that is When they do, it is usually a sign that the diplomats have
military victory adjusted the factors to their advantage before the shooting
and a democratic started. If the army drags a country into war, that country is
Iraq, would at the whim of fortune as much as of its own strength.
vindicate the It is well-known that the US launched its attack in March
Bush team, with ‘03 in an attempt to beat the summer heat. In addition, there
or without the was talk about the financial costs of the army sitting around in
weapons. Kuwait while Sec. Powell tried to hammer out a resolution at
Likely outcome: the UN. This seems to indicate that Bush placed military
After weighing considerations first. On the other hand, Bush might claim
both sides, the that Iraq is only one battle in a larger war that began on
panel concludes September 11th. In this globalized world what happens in
that, despite some one part of the globe has an impact on the other parts far
high-minded greater than might have been the case say, 200 years ago. If
language, there is a connection between totalitarianism and terrorism,
neoconservatism then by his very existence, Saddam was an aggressor.
is really just a Likely Outcome: The Bush team seems to be reaching here.
philosophy that Nonetheless, the panel has enough doubts to issue a 2-2 split
argues for the decision to avoid tipping the scale too early.
continuation of
the ‘American 4) Were decisive pronouncements kept concealed
Empire.’ Either until just before action? This point could also be called
way the Bush strategic ambiguity. As a rule of thumb, you should not show
team must have your cards before the betting starts. On this point, the panel
intended to reaches a decision quite quickly. Nearly a year before March

38 Philosophy Now November/December 2005

2003, there was already a lot of talk that the White House was since terrorism would continue
planning on invading. More grievously, Bush declared his with or without bin Laden, the
willingness to go it alone when there were doubts among the panel concludes that Hussein
allies, thus undercutting his own bargaining position. If there might have been the more
were any Asian or European politicians on the fence, he reasonable target. The panel
removed all incentive for them to support the unpopular votes in favor of Bush.
measure, financially or materially. Even if they agreed that
Hussein had to be eliminated, they could publicly oppose the So the panel votes three
war in order to win points with their respective publics, times in favor of Bush, twice
knowing that in the end, Bush would do the dirty work for against, and is split on another
them. point. The panel says that
Likely Outcome: Bush was too clear too early about what he Bush’s strategy had many
was going to do. The panel votes unanimously that he did not elements of Realpolitik but the
put off decisive commitments to the most advantageous fact that the war actually
moment. reduced America’s power and
influence makes it difficult to
5) Was there proper assessment of the forces at give him a high rating. Many
play? So far, the Iraq war has not created a direct politicians have been amoral
confrontation between the US and another great power; even but ultimately unsuccessful.
France now seems to be softening its stance. Bush gambled The panel is not likely to
correctly that those powers opposed to the war would or could induct Bush into the ranks of
not stop him. the great practitioners of
Where he may have gambled badly was on the effectiveness Realpolitik.
of terrorist tactics. Bush should have realized, based on © CASIMIR KUKIELKA 2005
Israel’s experience, that they are nearly impossible to stop. Casimir Kukielka is an
Even a few thousand people out of a population of millions independent writer who lives and
can, if so determined, wreak unbelievable destruction and works in Milan, Italy. He can
stalemate a powerful army for years on end. be reached at casimirkukielka@
Likely Outcome: Though Cardinal Richelieu favors the hotmail.com
insurgency and sees it as proof that Bush did not properly
assess all the various forces, Prince Metternich loathes to be The Panel:
seen on the same side as radicals and rebels. The Prince Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527).
aligns 3 votes behind Bush. Had various diplomatic assign-
ments for Renaissance-era
6. Were half measures taken? In Chapter III of The Florence. Was an early exponent
Prince, Machiavelli states that if you intend to oppose of Italian unification, and wrote a
someone, you should crush them since “they can revenge famous treatise called The Prince.
lighter injuries, but not graver. Wherefore the injury we do to
a man should be of a sort to leave no fear of reprisals.” The Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642).
emphasis here is on not shrinking from the implication of an Sometimes referred to as the Iron
action. Doing something half way sets up future wars, which Cardinal. Considered the father of
all our panelists tried to avoid when possible. the French state, broke the back of
The UN and the Security Council can be taken to task for the Hapsburgs in the Thirty Years
not heeding this warning after the first Gulf War. The War. Made France dominant in
ceasefire agreement (weapons inspectors, sanctions, the no fly Europe.
zone) left Saddam weakened but still a threat, as he naturally
sought to alter a situation that he considered humiliating. Prince Klemens von Metternich
Being a Machiavellian himself, he used any means to do so, (1773-1859). Wily opponent of
which included manipulating world opinion by broadcasting Napoleon’s. He staved off the
painful images of Iraqis suffering under the sanctions. death of the Austrian Empire by
Pressure to remove the sanctions grew, in spite of the fact that 100 years. Also credited with
the sanctions were there in the first place because the interna- inventing chocolate cake.
tional community deemed Saddam too dangerous to be left to
his own devices. The only way to safely remove the sanctions Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898).
was to first remove Saddam. In this respect, Bush gets power Called the Iron Chancellor and
politic points for his refusal to let Saddam steer world policy. considered the father of Germany.
Machiavelli might raise the point that while Bush didn’t use Famously said that the great
half measures against Saddam, involvement in Iraq has questions are not settled through
diverted men and money from the war against Osama bin parliamentary debates but through
Laden, so a half measure was actually a product of the war. “iron and blood.” It has since been
Likely Outcome: The bin Laden argument is plausible, but misquoted as “blood and iron.”

November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 39


Criminality and Cannabis
DEAR EDITOR: Robert Davies’ critique
of arguments against the legalization of
cannabis, in Issue 51, made some excel-
lent points with which I agree. It’s on
the matter of danger being the criterion
for illegality that I wish to comment.
The assessment of risk involved in
certain acts, it seems to me, is no valid
standard by which to measure crimi-
nality. Also, if acts should be banned by
virtue of their being dangerous, then a
whole host of other risky behaviors,
(including mountain climbing, skiing,
and sky diving) should suffer a similar
fate to that of heroin.
When merely dangerous, consensual
acts are lumped together with neces-
sarily coercive and damaging ones, the
concept of criminality becomes diluted
and the bright line between otherwise
tolerable acts and intolerable ones
becomes blurred.
What then is intolerable? There are
certain acts which are illegal every-
where: Worldwide you will find, in
some jurisdictions, nudist colonies, but
no rapist colonies. You can find legal
heroin, but no legal homicide.
A rough but reasonable rule of thumb
for toleration might be: If an act is non
coercive and legal anywhere, it should
be legal everywhere.
In short, shooting up and happy hour
have a lot more in common with
jumping out of airplanes and skiing than
they do with robbery, rape and murder.
What’s dangerous here is the
employment of the ‘dangerous’ standard
in determining criminality.
ROBERT KRAFT
CHICAGO, IL
The United Nations
DEAR EDITOR: Richard Winston
claimed in the June/July edition of
Philosophy Now that “a vast majority of
[United Nations] member states are
dictatorships.” This is a much repeated
but completely false claim. It’s easy
enough to check the form of govern-
ment of each member state (list available
40 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
Letters
When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up!
Write to me at: Philosophy Now
43a Jerningham Road • London • SE14 5NQ, U.K.
or email rick.lewis@philosophynow.org
Keep them short and keep them coming!
at un.org) on the CIA World Factbook
website. Doing this reveals that 17.8%
(34 states out of 191) of UN members
are not democratic, but are monarchies,
dictatorships, communist states, transi-
tional, or ‘broken democracies’ (unreli-
able voting results). The widespread use
of inaccuracies like these to defame the
only democratic international institution
we have is worrying to say the least.
HENNING STRANDIN
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN
Triads and Empiricists
DEAR EDITOR: I think there are exactly
10 kinds of philosophers: Those that
understand binary notation and those
that don’t.
JOHN RADCLIFFE
BY EMAIL
Angels and Pinheads
DEAR EDITOR: My daughter bought me
my first ever copy of Philosophy Now –
March/April 2005 – and I was once
again struck by that superficial descrip-
tion of medieval philosophy’s so called
obsession with “How many Angels can
dance on the point of a needle?” This
denigration of the great depth and
wisdom of the scholastics needs to be
challenged. I recall the simple wisdom
of Selwyn Grave, Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Western
Australia in the 1960’s, who commented
on how this question raised the issue of
the relationship between corporeal and
spiritual realities.
Why do we need to trivialise the
debate with a superficial dismissal of the
profundity of the real question? Are we
afraid of what the scholastics achieved,
or of their refinement of logic and their
gift to science or simply because we are
so limited in our own understanding? If
we looked to Quantum Mechanics and
the mysteries of entities that both are
and are not at the same time, maybe we
could appreciate that the medievalists
were also grappling with questions like
how many muons can fit into a quark?
Or how many ideas can be stored in a
cupboard?
Hey! Great magazine and lucky for
me I’ve discovered it!
JOE GOERKE
LESMURDIE
WESTERN AUSTRALIA
The Natural Basis of Ethics
DEAR EDITOR: Tim Madigan’s article in
Issue 51 explaining the scientific basis of
morality is excellent in presenting argu-
ments against a supernatural basis. It
could have been stronger in arguing for
a natural one. I disagree with one of his
fundamental arguments, “The capacity
to care for others is the bedrock of all of
our moral systems.” This is only true if
morality deals strictly with one’s treat-
ment of others.
Any observer of nature cannot help
but notice that self-preservation is the
primary motivation of all sentient
beings. This tells me it must also be the
bedrock of all moral systems.
In Ayn Rand’s ethics, caring for
others is part of one’s own rational self
interest. Violation of trust and ‘faking
reality’ are not. Indeed, the primates do
have the requisites for moral behavior.
Humans have superior ability to grasp
and communicate the reasons for
morality, including the fact that all
moral choices can be tied back to a
single guiding principle that nature
provided and we do not need to be
ashamed of.
I have taught my children a guiding
principle that serves well in every situa-
tion and eliminates every apparent social
dilemma when reasoned through.
Whenever they come to me with a
problem, I ask, “What is the guiding
principle in life?” Caitlyn, 9-years old,
answers, “Do what’s best for Caitlyn.”
She understands and lives out this prin-
ciple, and so does my grown-up
daughter. They are two of the sweetest,
most empathetic human beings I’ve ever
known.
JOE HEWLETT
RIDGECREST, CALIFORNIA

What is ‘Natural’?
DEAR EDITOR: I felt it necessary,
although a little late, to comment on the
debate about the ‘nature’ of homosexu-
ality. In a letter in response to Mr.
Voytinsky’s article in Issue 48 ‘Gay
Rights: Choice vs. Nature?’ a reader
states: “That is said to be ‘natural’ which
accords with what is good for human
beings.” Then he goes on to say that, “It
is common to the human condition for
humans to want to have sexual inter-
course with those with whom they
should not or when they should not or in
ways that they should not.” In general,
it would seem that pleasure, (the fulfill-
ment of a desire) in itself, according to
this reader’s religiously-determined
metaphysics, goes against ‘natural law’.
Sex is not pleasure but a duty. Based on
these statements, we could also infer that
this reader believes, like so many major
religions have (and still do) believe, that
the female orgasm is also unnatural.
Obviously, according to them, the
female orgasm is not necessary for
procreation, hence unnatural.
Is not the pleasure of an orgasm
something in accord with what is good
for human beings? Or is what is ‘in
accord with what is good for human
beings’ only procreation? If one would
answer yes to this latter, aside from the
fact that it is rather presumptuous of the
person to be able to determine that only
procreation is good for humans, it also
reeks of a biological basis. That is to say,
if we base what is good for humans on a
biological process, namely procreation,
then why shouldn’t we consider other
related biological processes such as the
fulfillment of desires, as also being good
for humans? But the reader had already
stated his ideas on this matter. “All
humans beings are, in fact, in an unnat-
ural and disordered condition”. So, even
though this unnatural and disordered
condition arises from the same place as
the ‘natural’ condition of procreating,
i.e. our existence as biological beings, it
is not natural/good. So, some things
which are ‘natural’ in us are good and
others are bad, and we should not
permit, (but should even punish), those
things in us which are naturally ‘unnat-
ural’. I think I’m beginning to under-
stand religious metaphysics.
To continue with the original
question: Is not the pleasure of an
orgasm something in accord with what is
good for human beings? Although the
reader may not be concerned about his
wife’s orgasm, Mrs. reader probably is
concerned. And her pleasure in sexual
intercourse may determine if she is
willing to go through any ‘natural’
biological processes. The more one
enjoys something the more they may
participate in the activity. Even work
can be fun! And this leads us to the
conclusion that the ‘natural’ which
accords with what is good for human
beings in part could very well be
pleasure. A man and a woman who enjoy
sex have more chances of procreating. A
gay man or woman in a heterosexual
relationship probably wouldn’t engage in
so much procreating. More than likely,
instead of the production of children, a
broken family would be the product. But
if kids were produced, that is okay
because there will always be a happy gay
couple out there that would be more
than happy to adopt if that broken family
decides they can’t keep the children. In a
similar case, there will always be that
young, heterosexual couple, which
thinking they were complying with the
‘natural’ law to procreate, will not be
able support the child as they would like
and will have to give it up for adoption.
That is also okay because they will
always be able to count on the happy gay
couple to adopt the child.
Moral of the story: “if everything
‘natural’ comes down to some practical
utility, then everything natural will even-
tually have some utility.”
TIMOTHY P. GASTER
PH.D. STUDENT,
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Races and Species
DEAR EDITOR: Eyvind C. Krogh states
(letters, Issue 52) “All human beings on
earth today, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, are
biologically the same race. This is a
truth without question and makes the
word ‘racism’ absurd.”
In a philosophical forum it is rash to
state that there are any truths without
question. I would like to support this
statement by questioning the truth of his
remark. In fact, all members of the
group Homo Sapiens Sapiens are members
of the same species (in so far as such a
thing as a species exists and is agreed
upon) but they are not all one race (given
the difficulty of agreeing on what a race
might be.)
Nor is the mere word ‘racism’ absurd,
though it is much misused. Looking at
characteristics of different races might be
a branch of anthropology, but when that
examination includes ascribing superi-
November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 41
Letters
ority or inferiority to individual races we
move into the realm of racism. Note
that it is not the classification of differ-
ence which is offensive, merely the value
judgement: all members of the group
canis familiaris are the same species, but
they are not all the same breed. It does
not seem to me a problem to point out
that a Rottweiler is likely to be less
friendly to strangers than a Cavalier
King Charles, but that does not mean
that one is essentially a ‘better’ dog – or
even a better pet – than the other.
IAN MCKECHNIE
RUSHMERE ST ANDREW, IPSWICH
Neurotic Science
DEAR EDITOR: Leo Westhead and Harry
Goldstein (letters, Issue 52) criticize my
argument that ‘science is neurotic’ (Issue
51). Both, alas, have misunderstood me.
I am sorry I did not make myself clearer.
Leo Westhead says “There is no
historical evidence that arbitrary predic-
tions have ever played a part in scientific
progress.” I agree. That is, indeed,
central to my argument. Horribly
disunified theories, making ‘arbitrary
predictions’, even though empirically
more successful than accepted theories,
are rejected, or rather not even considered,
because of their disunity. I went on to
argue that this persistent rejection of
empirically successful but disunified
theories means science makes a big,
persistent, problematic assumption about
the world, and it is this which contradicts
standard empiricism.
Harry Goldstein complains that I do
not provide any evidence for my claim
that standard empiricism is the official
philosophy of science. Fair enough. But
lots must be left out in a short article. I
do, however, provide evidence else-
where: see my The Comprehensibility of the
Universe (Oxford University Press,
1998), pp.38-45; and my Is Science
Neurotic? (Imperial College Press, 2004),
pp.4-7, especially note 5. Many scien-
tists accept Popper’s demarcation crite-
rion which excludes metaphysics from
science: this means they accept a version
of standard empiricism. The failure of
science courses to discuss explicitly the
problematic metaphysical presupposi-
tions of science is another indication.
And many scientists have expressed their
conviction that, in the end, evidence
alone decides what is accepted and
rejected in science. Few scientists explic-
itly declare that science accepts
untestable theses about the world as a
Letters
permanent part of scientific knowledge
(which is what is required if standard
empiricism is to be rejected).
Goldstein goes on to accuse me of
holding that science is not so very
different from religion. What I actually
argued was that scientists are reluctant to
acknowledge that science presupposes
that the universe is comprehensible out
of fear that this will make science look
too much like religion. I do not think
science is at all like religion. If Goldstein
looks again at Diagram 2 of my article he
will see that, at level 4, there is the
conjectural assumption that the universe
is physically comprehensible, quite
different from the presuppositions of
religion and politics. I agree in part
when Goldstein says science is an exten-
sion and refinement of common sense,
but in my view it also does violence to
common sense in presupposing the
physical comprehensibility of the
universe. Goldstein mentions Alan
Sokal. As it happens, Alan Sokal agrees
with my hierarchical conception of
science (personal communication).
Finally, I too want to defend science
from the attacks of irrationalists, as I
make very clear in, for example, the
Preface to my Is Science Neurotic? But it
is very important that we defend a
genuinely rational conception of science,
and not, as so often happens at present,
an irrational, neurotic one which
represses problematic assumptions,
concerning metaphysics, values and
politics, associated with the aims of
science.
NICK MAXWELL
WWW.NICK-MAXWELL.DEMON.CO.UK
DEAR EDITOR: When I got towards the
end of Nicholas Maxwell’s article, ‘Is
Science Neurotic?’, it occurred to me
that it was a satire, and that I had been
duped into taking it seriously. But, in the
past, I had met and argued with academic
philosophers who shared a similar view,
specifically relativism, which maintains
all theories are equally valid, so I decided
to take it seriously. It’s not Maxwell’s
philosophical premise that I have a
problem with, but his use of fictional
scenarios to justify a distorted interpreta-
tion of how science is realised. About half
way through his essay, he makes the
following statement: “Most scientists and
philosophers of science would agree with
the argument so far. It’s the next step
which will provoke horrified disagree-
ment.” Well, no, the rest of the essay
42 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
contained elements I agree with; it was
the preceding misrepresentation of
science which drew a horrified response
from me. I can’t believe that any scientist
or philosopher of science would agree
with his belief that “almost all the
infinitely many equally empirically
successful (and more successful) rival
theories [to Newton’s and Einstein’s
theories of gravity]” even exist. As for
meta-theories, they are even more
scarce. The problem with Maxwell’s
argument is that these alternatives, which
he presents as valid representations, are
all fictions. And the problem with his
treatise is that people unfamiliar with
science will not realise this. He is right
in quoting Popper, that all scientific
knowledge is conjectural, because that is
the secret of the success of science, and
why our knowledge and comprehension
of the natural world is never complete.
It is the discovery in the natural world
that doesn’t fit the current paradigm that
provides the key to the next paradigm. It
is also worth noting that only future
generations know how ignorant the
current generation is. But this does not
lead axiomatically to the premise that
there are an infinite number of empiri-
cally valid theories to a specific natural
phenomenon, unless one assumes, as
Maxwell apparently does, that there are
an infinite number of possible natural
worlds, of which we only live in one.
Despite his relativist arguments and
misleading representations of science, I
think his philosophical point, concerning
the comprehensibility of the universe
and its link to a metaphysical raison
d’etre, is a valid one. But this is a philo-
sophical point arising from the study of
science and not an avenue that science
can investigate, hence the ‘neurosis’
metaphor.
Philosophers are very good at
creating cogent, but ultimately irrele-
vant, arguments based on fictional
suppositions, and that’s exactly what
Maxwell has done. The evidence?
Science is not ‘swamped by an infinity of
empirically equally successful rival
theories’, because the events that support
these so-called rival theories don’t exist
in the natural world.
PAUL MEALING.
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
Convinced Utilitarian
DEAR EDITOR: I always find Moral
Moments thought-provoking but Joel
has surely got it wrong in preferring
Kantianism or deontology to utilitari-
anism.
The terrorist knows it is right to kill
just as surely as I know it is wrong. How
can we justify one course of action
against another except by reference to
the consequences? If we don’t, the
terrorist will just continue to say, “I kill
innocent people because it is right. That
is what my faith tells me to do.”
So we need to consider the conse-
quences in justifying actions and only
utilitarianism allows us to have a serious
ethical debate and assess the respective
merits of different courses of action.
TOM FISHER
EALING, LONDON W5
Occasional Liars
DEAR EDITOR: I think that the authors of
‘The Liar Lied’ (Issue 51) are a little too
restrictive in their solution to this
paradox. What about “This sentence is
true.”? Is this sentence any more mean-
ingful than “This sentence is not true.”?
I think one of their original proposals,
that a sentence cannot meaningfully
make an assertion about its own truth
value, is adequate to cover both these
cases.
As for Epimenides, at least two other
articles in the same issue (‘A Logical
Vacation’ and ‘Symbols Made Simple’)
make short work of his ‘paradox’. Is ‘All
Cretans are liars’ true or false? It’s false;
sometimes they lie and sometimes they
don’t, and this is an example of the
former. Just because it’s false that
someone always lies doesn’t mean they
always tell the truth.
GLEN CRAM
TORONTO, CANADA
Labeling Error
DEAR EDITOR: There is a labeling error
in the article by Mike Alder (June/July
2005).
On page 19 Alder refers to the
second syllogism as EAE. The syllogism
is actually AII in the first figure. ‘Some
A’s are B’s’ is an I statement, not an E
statement. Second, the premise that
contains the predicate of the conclusion
is usually stated first. The syllogism
should read
All B’s are C’s.
Some A’s are B’s.
Thus, Some A’s are C’s.
The syllogism itself is valid.
MARK ANDREWS
FAIRBANKS, ALASKA
Having returned from the turn of the Fourth Century B.C. to the turn of the
Twenty-First A.D., Socrates has eagerly signed on as a Philosophy Now columnist
so that he may continue to carry out his divinely-inspired dialogic mission.
Dear Socrates,
I hate you. I know why they killed you. You believe you are a
gadfly for the good of society, whose sting serves a greater good,
but in fact you introduced a way of thinking into the world that has
made life unlivable. “What did I do?” you might innocently inquire;
“all I do is ask questions.” Oh yes, but those questions are intended
to expose the assumptions upon which all human knowledge is
built, and you know full well that once that happens, there can be
revolutionary consequences. “That too is for the better,” you might
reply; “if the foundation is rotted out, replace it with a sounder one
to secure the future.” But the problem is that there is no such thing
as a sound foundation. According to you there must always be
assumptions; hence the questioning never stops. The only thing
that has been ‘secured’, therefore, is your profession!
Meanwhile, society is left with perpetual uncertainty. Let me
highlight just one example of the vile result. I believe that honesty
is the most important thing in the world. A cynic might respond
that its value comes from its exceeding scarcity. It is obvious to
me why there is so much dishonesty: precisely because an
automatic and healthy response has been replaced by a reflective
one.
I am a teacher of teenagers, most of whom have been infected
by the virus of doubt, just like the young Plato who was so
fascinated by your method. When faced with a decision, a few of
my students have no qualms: They choose to tell the truth and not
deceive in any way. They do this without thinking, because this is
what they have been taught from childhood is the right way, the
only way, the traditional way, perhaps the religious way.
But for the rest of my students, it is a matter of calculation.
They realize that there are many considerations, and the final
conclusion is all about assigning them various weights. Thus,
there is no predetermined outcome that favors honesty. How did
this situation come about? All because these students, who
include some of the brightest and most well-intentioned, have
become aware of the assumptions that underlie the tendency to
honesty. Sometimes, for instance, it is a belief in the word of God;
but who is this God? Sometimes it is simply that it’s the right thing
to do; but what is that? Different people believe different things
are right and wrong, so what authority has anyone’s conviction on
the matter? It is merely a feeling, or a habit caused by a particular
upbringing. And so on.
While any one question that you may pose could be apt, the
general practice undercuts the well-functioning of society. The
seed of doubt has been planted, Pandora’s box has been opened,
the genie let out of the bottle – we have many metaphors for what
happens. No one can ever settle a question once it has been
brought before the court of reason; everything becomes a
‘perennial problem.’ I conclude that morality is best left as it was,
as something unquestioned.
Regards,
Your prosecutor
Dear Prosecutor,
You have made a powerful case. I am almost ready to convict
myself! But of course in the end I must disagree with you. What
is curious is that I too favor the ‘old values’. Perhaps the
difference between you and me is that I have more faith in their
hardiness. I believe that it is precisely Truth that can withstand
questioning. Since we all are brought up in different ways and in
different cultures and have individual life histories and natural
propensities besides, we cannot rely on accustomed judgments to
reach universal agreement and discernment of what is right.
There must be vigorous and continual questioning of one
another’s (and of course one’s own) assumptions.
Is this not the way science proceeds? Suppose a counterpart of
yourself were to argue that questioning in science is inappro-
priate, damaging? Their argument could be analogous to yours:
“Continual questioning disrupts the smooth-functioning of
science. We know exactly how to proceed on, say, Newtonian
principles to reach the stars. Let us not be endlessly sidetracked
from reaching our destination by doubting the truth that has been
handed down to us.”
But of course we would never have any hope of reaching the
stars in that way. Relativity becomes a factor that cannot be
ignored on such long journeys. But if Einstein had not questioned
the fundamental assumptions of Newton’s notions of space and
time, how many goals that we have since achieved would not have
been achieved? Or indeed, in some cases not even conceived of
as goals? I think you discount the analogous progress that has
been made in morals while you focus on the unsettling
questioning that midwifed it.
I would agree, however, that there is a right way and a wrong
way to go about questioning and doubting. Sincerity has always
been the key for me. If one employs the technique of dialectic
purely for reasons of personal gain, or as a form of intellectual
adornment, or just to score points in debate, then one has
succumbed to sophistry. Philosophy is wholly different from that;
its single aim is truth. When one observes excessive ‘calculating,’
as by young people in the sort of situation to which you allude,
one suspects its employment is merely serving some short-term
self-advantage. That is an unavoidable hazard of any innovation:
witness the fire that Prometheus brought to us.
Yours as ever,
Socrates
Readers who would like to engage Socrates in dialogue are
welcome to write to Dear Socrates, c/o Philosophy Now, or
even to email him at: socrates@philosophynow.org
Socrates will select which letters to answer and reserves the
right to excerpt or otherwise edit them. Please indicate if you
wish your name to be withheld.
November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 43

Books
On Bullshit
by Harry Frankfurt
HARRY FRANKFURT, a
moral philosopher, starts
this little book with the
following observation: “One of the most
salient features of our culture is that there
is so much bullshit.” He then proceeds to
develop a theoretical understanding of
bullshit – what it is, and what it is not.
Aspects of the bullshit problem are
discussed partly with reference to the
Oxford English Dictionary, Wittgenstein
and Saint Augustine. Three points seem
especially important – the distinction
between lying and bullshitting, the
question of why there is so much bullshit
in the current day and age, and a critique
of sincerity qua bullshit.
Frankfurt makes an important distinc-
tion between lying and bullshitting. Both
the liar and the bullshitter try to get away
with something. But ‘lying’ is perceived to
be a conscious act of deception, whereas
‘bullshitting’ is unconnected to a concern
for truth. Frankfurt regards this ‘indiffer-
ence to how things really are’, as the
essence of bullshit. Furthermore, a lie is
necessarily false, but bullshit is not –
bullshit may happen to be correct or
incorrect. The crux of the matter is that
bullshitters hide their lack of commitment
to truth. Since bullshitters ignore truth
instead of acknowledging and subverting
it, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than
lies.
Having established the grave danger of
bullshit, Frankfurt’s next step is to ask why
there is so much bullshit around. The
main answer to this is that bullshit is
unavoidable when people are convinced
that they must have opinions about “events
and conditions in all parts of the world”,
about more or less anything and every-
thing – so they speak quite extensively
about things they know virtually nothing
about. Frankfurt is non-committal as to
whether there is more bullshit around now
than before, but he maintains that there is
currently a great deal.
There is an interesting problem
sketched at the end of the book, wherein
sincerity is described as an ideal for those
44 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
Petter Naessan examines Harry Frankfurt’s famous little book
On Bullshit, while John Shand enjoys a collection of essays
about existentialism and Peter Rickman peruses a thought-
provoking book on German philosophy by Andrew Bowie.
who do not believe that there is any
(objective) truth, thus departing from the
ideal of correctness. Now, Frankfurt does
not mention the word ‘postmodern’ at all
in his book (which is a good thing, I
think), but to some extent the last pages
may be understood to be a critical punch
on a postmodern rejection of the ideal of
the truth. Be this as it may, when a person
rejects the notion of being true to the facts
and turns instead to an ideal of being true
to their own substantial and determinate
nature, then according to Frankfurt this
sincerity is bullshit.
Bullshit seems to be defined largely
negatively, that is, as not lying. Frankfurt’s
discussion – which he admits is not likely
to be decisive – reveals that there is
nothing really distinctive about bullshit
when it comes to either the form or
meaning of utterances. It is predominantly
about the intention and disregard for truth
of the bullshitter. How then do we discern
bullshit from other types of speech
behaviour? Is it really possible to accu-
rately know the values (or lack thereof)
involved when a person speaks?
Probably not. One may have some
intuition that certain utterances constitute
bullshit. Frankfurt does not provide any
answers here, but one could perhaps
suggest that the ‘cooperative principle’ of
H.P. Grice (1913-1988) might provide
some further food for thought within the
emerging field of bullshitology (as I would
like to call the scientific study of bullshit).
Grice, in his 1975 book Logic and
Conversation, outlined a number of under-
lying principles (‘maxims’) that are
assumed by people engaged in conversa-
tion. Speakers and listeners assume that
the others abide by certain, predominantly
unstated, speech norms. The cooperative
principle can be divided more specifically
into the maxims of quantity, quality, rele-
vance, and manner. For bullshitological
purposes, the violation of the maxims
would appear to be relevant. So if utter-
ances convey not enough or too much
information (quantity), are intentionally
false or lack evidence (quality), are irrele-
vant to any current topic or issue (rele-
vance), and are obscure, ambiguous,
unnecessarily wordy or disorderly
(manner), they would seem to qualify,
although not necessarily, as bullshit (minus
the intentionally false utterance, of
course). These elements may be added to
the condition of the bullshitter’s indiffer-
ence to the ideal of truth. Then again, can
we be certain that to identify utterances as
bullshit in any given situation necessarily is
connected to an understanding of the bull-
shitter’s indifference to the truth?
Needless to say, there are numerous
problems which may be expanded, looked
into and analysed concerning bullshit.
And I dare say that Frankfurt’s little book
is a nice starting point.
© PETTER A. NAESSAN 2005
Petter Naessan is a PhD student in linguistics
at the University of Adelaide
• On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt, Princeton
University Press (2005). £6.50/$9.95
pp.67.ISBN: 0691122946
Existentialism
edited by
Robert C. Solomon
THIS IS AN eclectic
collection of extracts, as
befits the decision of the
editor, Robert C. Solomon, not to define
‘existentialism’ tightly. Existentialism is
undoubtedly tricky to define, but Solomon
must have had something in mind when he
put together this collection other than just
following what people habitually call ‘exis-
tentialism’. At any rate, it includes those
philosophical giants most associated with
existentialism – Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty
– as well as slightly less famous philoso-
phers similarly implicated – de Unamuno,
Marcel, de Beauvoir, Hazel Barnes, Martin
Buber, Paul Tillich, Keiji Nishitani, Colin
Wilson, Viktor Frankl – and finally those
whose existentialist credentials are
embedded in more literary genres –
Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Hesse, Rilke,
Kafka, Camus, Márquez, Beckett, Borges,
Pinter, Heller, Roth, Miller.
Going where angels, and even
Solomon, fear to tread, I shall take a stab
at defining existentialism. The core of
existentialism is a recognition of
inescapable personal responsibility. It
involves the realisation that the human
Book Reviews

individual is irredeemably free and respon-
sible for choosing his outlook on the
world, for his conduct in it, for essentially
who or what he is, and that no appeal to
external authorities such as God, or to
rational philosophical systems, or to a
predetermined ‘self’, or to the norms that
surround us, or to science, can remove this
and do the job for us if we wish to live as
fully authentic human beings and not as
‘things’ enslaved by the world. The force
of existential choice comes charging home
to us when we feel alienated from the mass
of norms by which most people around us
govern their lives, but which to the
enlightened existentialist are ‘absurd’ and
ungrounded. Solomon is right: this view
of existentialism leads not to a body of
doctrine, but to a pervasive way of
thinking about the human condition, a
comportment to the world, fired by
integrity.
Most of the above writers are well
known, so I’m going to focus on one in the
collection who deserves far greater atten-
tion than he usually gets. For among the
most welcome additions to the second
edition of this book is an extract from
Colin Wilson’s substantial essay ‘Anti-
Sartre’. This is written with all the
engaging clarity that one would expect,
and facilitated by illuminating analogies.
Colin Wilson has been unjustly neglected
by academia, in the case of philosophy
almost totally so. This may be because he
has worked outside the university system
almost all his life, and therefore attracts an
irredeemable suspicion of not really being
‘sound’. One does not have to agree with
every turn in his writings in general to
believe that his specifically philosophical
work is in fact of significant value. The
core of his philosophical ideas is contained
in ‘The Outsider’ series of books, headed
up by the first in the set, titled The
Outsider. These ideas are condensed in his
The New Existentialism and further
explored in Below the Iceberg, in the latter
of which the full text of ‘Anti-Sartre’
appears.
Wilson’s criticism of Sartre echoes
Nietzsche’s charge that what are
presented by philosophers as universally
valid conclusions based on cool reasoning
may often be “…an audacious generaliza-
tion of very narrow, very personal, very
human, all too human facts.” (Friedrich
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Preface).
Even if we regard this as an exaggeration,
it is a reminder of the way in which non-
rational factors may be the dominant
process leading someone to a belief and
others to accepting it, a process made
dangerous when what is really doing the
Book Reviews
work is hidden behind a façade of poor
reasoning that we are assured is its true
origin. According to Wilson, nothing
could be truer of Sartre. What seems to
be a complex, thought-out position in fact
manifests the drive of personal psychology
that was going to take him to that result
anyway – and, moreover, to a position
concerning the human condition that is
false. Of course, it is not false because it is
a result of personal psychology – but we
may have trouble seeing that it is false and
unjustified because to some the conclu-
sions are strangely attractive. Wilson
accuses Sartre of pessimism. Sartre, in
particular in his novel Nausea, supposedly
presents a world stripped of illusion; a
world revealed as it would be if devoid of
the ordering categories of metaphysics
and values. What we are left with is
nothing or, at most, ineffable over-
whelming existence. The giddiness of
being cut free from the only thing we
know, a life lived entirely by categories
that we suddenly realise are utterly arbi-
trary, induces in us retching nausea; an
anxious despair in which we ask, “Why am
I here doing this?”, while realising that no
answer appears ultimately justified, and
that we have no-one but ourselves to help
us answer it. We carry on, of course, but
we do so in ‘Bad Faith’, tricking ourselves
into giving significance to what we do,
while uneasily aware that our life amounts
to no more than the result of happen-
chance. If we cap this off with an aware-
ness of the immovable horizon of death
towards which we are all doomed to
progress without redemption, then the
seriousness with which we regard our lives
seems indefensibly absurd.
This absurdity has been the excuse for
much dark humour among those capable
of this sort of existentialist outlook.
Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, as anyone
with any sensitivity knows, is one of the
funniest plays you can see in a theatre. To
return to Sartre, when the good existen-
tialist strips away the contingent accre-
tions that order his world, he should be
left with the world raw, true, and as it is in
itself. Sartre thinks this is reality, and that
it is a depressing place, devoid of meaning
or, ultimately, even sense. However,
Wilson argues that Sartre’s ‘reality’ is in
fact the projection of his own subjective
view, which it so happens is pessimistic.
This is plausible; when devoid of the
constraints of the commonality of publicly
ratified categories, we are left not with
nothing, but with our subjective outlook.
There is a masochistic tendency in many
to suppose that the worse must somehow
be truer; that inevitably a grim view of
November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 45
Books
reality is what we get when disabused, free
from fairytales that comfort us and satisfy
our desires, that quell fears so deep and
terrifying that we are hardly able to admit
them to ourselves. Of course let some
people, poor dears, live with their illusions
if they can make such beliefs work for
them, but let’s not kid ourselves.
Conversely, maybe it is all right to kid
ourselves, as from the disillusioned point
of view, if nothing matters, it doesn’t
matter how you get through your life
either. (One might argue that existen-
tialism is here hanging illegitimately onto
a vestige of an external absolute moral
precept, along the lines that it is honest
and good to face the truth.) But why
should we assume that a true view would
reveal a terrible prospect?
Raising this seemingly simple question
is perhaps the most significant contribu-
tion to philosophy Wilson has made. The
correct order of priority in the reasoning
has become seductively reversed: you know
you’ve found the truth if your view of
reality is rotten. The alternative is not a
matter of having a cheery disposition.
What Wilson brings out is the way in
which, because of the psychological faults
to which we are all prone, we are unable to
reason half as clearly about the nature of
reality as we think we are. In Sartre’s case,
a grand sweeping metaphysics is built on
the peculiarities of his own psychology.
Wilson’s claim is that our subjectivity, far
from being the dependable provider of a
true view of reality, takes us over in a way
that we don’t easily recognise, and stands
as a barrier to seeing reality as it is.
Wilson’s challenge is: why should we be so
prone to think that a view of the world in
which things lack value is the true one?
That is to say, a view in which our lives
appear futile and ridiculous, a world from
which we feel fundamentally alienated.
The short answer is because it’s easy. To
live life with value and purpose is hard
work. Of course, we all get our glimpses
of such a life: when we wake on a spring
morning, refreshed after a good night’s
sleep, and our dark four-in-the-morning
worries evaporate. Now it is those anxi-
eties that seem ridiculous, absurd, and
morbid. We look upon the face of a child
who has been born to us, and the world is
lit up. We may experience this listening to
music, or during sex, or on a cliff walk.
Yet, after a little while, habit and boredom
take over again, and we for some reason
think the uplifting epiphanal view was an
illusion, and now we’re back to reality.
But why? Why that way around? Habit
and laziness are the answer. We passively
accept the view of the world that our
 Books
subjectivity ‘gives’ to us. But this is a
mistake; we don’t have to be passive; we
can do things to our consciousness aware-
ness. The fog of subjectivity descends on
us: we become obsessed with our own
trivial affairs, and can’t see beyond the end
of our noses. We see reality better when
subjectivity gets out of the way or at least
intensifies. There is nothing mystical or
wishy-washy about this. We completely
lose sight of what reality is truly like – until
the next time we hear that, say, contrary to
what we believed, our daughter has not
been run over by a bus. In times like this
our passive subjectivity is swept away, and
the world seems suffused with meaning.
Wilson’s quest has been to learn how to
sustain such yea-saying states – as it was
Nietzsche’s. He’s written much on this,
and it comes down to a sort of mental disci-
pline, not giving in, not taking the easy
way, not succumbing to being smothered
by the weak and watery view of the world
that we usually experience as our subjective
concerns obscure objective reality. Rather
one must learn to focus the mind. You may
not agree. I’m not sure I do myself, but
you ought at least to think about it and
look over your shoulder at how you came
to have the view of reality you do. Is it
reality you’re truly seeing, or is it reality as
seen by you?
© DR JOHN SHAND 2005
John Shand is an Associate Lecturer in
Philosophy at the Open University and an
author. He is Editor of the five volume
Central Works of Philosophy published by
Acumen.
• Existentialism edited by Robert C. Solomon
(Oxford University Press, 2nd edition 2005).pb
£13.99 379pp. ISBN 0195174631
Introduction to
German Philosophy
by Andrew Bowie
THE DISTINGUISHED
tradition of German
philosophy has substan-
tially affected British cultural life and
particularly philosophy. Coleridge was
deeply impressed by Immanuel Kant, by
whose writing he was – in own words –
gripped as by a giant’s hand. He spent
months in Germany studying Kant and his
philosophical contemporaries, and nearly
gave up poetry for metaphysics. Kant’s
work were translated, commentaries were
produced and Kant’s works became part of
philosophy degree courses. Hegel’s
46 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
writings were also influential and inspired
British idealists such as Bradley. One
hardly needs to expand on Marx’s influ-
ence in this and other countries. The
work of the Vienna School of logical posi-
tivism was first introduced to the English-
speaking world by A.J. Ayer and promoted
by refugees from Austria such as Carnap
and Waismann. Related to this School
were the familiar figures of Wittgenstein
and Popper. More recently we have
become familiar with Heidegger and his
pupil Gadamer; Habermas, whose roots
are in the Frankfurt School, is widely
discussed in philosophy and social science
departments.
This selective account is meant to
indicate that a book on German philos-
ophy from Kant to Habermas is very
welcome, particularly as written by a
specialist on Germany who had already
produced books and essays on aspects of
the ground covered in this book.
Starting with the Kantian revolution,
the book covers the reaction against reason
and the focus on language by Hamann and
Herder, followed by an account of
Idealism from Fichte and Schelling to
Hegel. Then comes the criticism of
Idealism by the Romantic thinkers such as
Novalis, the historical materialism of Marx
and the emphasis on the will and the
instincts by Schopenhauer and Nietzche.
There are chapters on the Vienna Circle
and Wittgenstein, on Husserl’s
phenomenology, on Heidegger and on the
Critical Theory initiated by Adorno,
Benjamin and Horkheimer. The story
ends with Gadamer and Habermas.
There are useful ‘cross references’ as to
who influenced whom. I did not know how
important was the impact of Schelling
(who is not so well known in the English-
speaking world). Several general themes
run right through the book and link the
different parts.
1) One is the relevance of social and
political developments for philosophical
thought. Industrialisation and bureau-
cratisation are two of the important
factors, but the monstrosities of the Nazi
regime, the Holocaust in particular, is
something German thought has to come
to terms with.
2) The explosive progress of science
proved a particular challenge to philos-
ophy. One response is to consider science
the sole avenue to the truth, thus making
philosophy redundant. Alternatively
philosophy could be salvaged as philos-
ophy of science. Other philosophers
rejected these solutions because they
argued for alternative roads to knowledge,
for example art.
3) Another pervasive issue is the
relation between subjectivity and objec-
tivity, between consciousness and matter.
Is one or the other an epiphenomenon – a
secondary property caused by the other? If
not, how are they related?
4) Finally there is the issue of founda-
tions of knowledge. Can they be soundly
established and if not are we confronted
with an infinite regression that spells the
death of philosophy?
The subtle interweaving of these
themes provide continuity to the story.
Bowie displays considerable scholarship in
presenting the theories of numerous
thinkers linked in this way. He also
provides judicious criticisms of these
various views.
So ambitious an enterprise suffers
almost inevitably from a particular
weakness. The author cannot have
detailed expertise on dozens of philoso-
phers, but must, in some cases rely on
selected and sometimes inadequate
secondary sources. Thus imprecisions and
distortions creep in.
I will mention only two worrying
examples which occur near the beginning
of the book. In talking about the
Copernican turn, Bowie suggests that
Kant’s revolution is the opposite to that of
Copernicus, as the latter displaced the
observer (on the earth) from the centre
while in Kant the knowing subject takes
central place. I think this misses the point.
The analogy is between the observations
of the sky being partly determined by the
movement of the observer just as cognition
for Kant is partly determined by the
knowing mind.
My second quibble also concerns the
discussion of Kant. To reconcile the
reader to Kant’s terminology he proposes
to explain, in familiar terms, his idea of
‘transcendental’. He rightly quotes Kant’s
definition of it referring to the conditions
of possibility of something, and offers as
illustration sex as a condition of possibility
of pregnancy. He forgets that part of
Kant’s definition of ‘transcendental’
contrasts it to ‘empirical’, ie not depending
on empirical evidence. Could it have
escaped Bowie that a lot of people actually
experience sex? In spite of these niggles I
can recommend this book as informative
and thought-provoking.
© PROF. PETER RICKMAN 2005
Peter Rickman was for many years professor of
philosophy and chair of the (now closed) philos-
ophy unit at City University, London.
• Introduction to German Philosophy from Kant to
Habermas by Andrew Bowie, Polity Press 2004
£16.99/$29.95 304pp. ISBN 0745625711
Book Reviews
 Crossword Corner
Test your philosophical word-power with
crossword number seven by Deiradiotes.

Down

1 Cyprus, home of the first Stoic

18. (6)
2 Twisted nail up philosopher
from Gaza! (6)
3 About to censor. (4)
4 King observed around a
cathedral in a calm way. (8)
6 10,000 quires seen during sleep.
Material for Freud! (6)
7 Turn amnesic oddly at end and
go beyond. (9)
8 Rawness can produce returns. (7)
12 Certainly no sceptic is like this.
(9)
14 Hume’s book about human
nature iterates badly. (8)
15 Space that is right is more
spacious. (7)
17 Argue concerning a child. (6)
20 Give account of explosive noise.
(6)
21 Look in Philostratos for third
head of Lyceum. (6)
24 Mars rearranged weapons (4)

Across

5 An added four inches makes utilitarian an industrial 13 Place for a paradoxical 18. (4)
worker! (4-4) 14 Sailors join us in home of a Stoic 18. (6)
7 2001 computer held by backward set, one believing 16 Cow Island. (6)
everything comes from water. (6) 18 Adze not embedded in philosopher? No, the opposite. (4)
9 Where is encyclopaedist from Seville hidden? In Paris, I 19 Philosopher from Asine. Or Chios? Or Gadara? Or
do reckon. (7) Miletus? (9)
10 South wind could be initially an unusually strong 22 A man’s better half might have trouble with this? (6)
typhoon, extremely rough. (6) 23 Run, rascal queen! (7)
11 Presumed enemy loses prey and reverses into founder of 25 Very large flower for Egyptian god. (6)
Eretrian school. (9) 26 Miners hesitation consumed can do maths. (8)
(see p.49 for solution)

November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 47


Theatre
“I’ll be your mirror/Reflect what you are/In case
you don’t know” – The Velvet Underground
or over twenty years now I have
F been using Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944
play No Exit in my Introduction to
Philosophy classes, and yet in all this time
I have never seen the play itself
performed. Imagine my surprise then,
when on a recent trip to Portland, Oregon
I read in the local paper there that the
Imago Theatre was putting on a perfor-
mance of this seminal work of existen-
tialism. I had a moral dilemma – should I
go to the academic conference I was in
Portland for, or should I play hooky, miss
a few sessions and go see No Exit instead?
Since we are nothing but our choices, I
jumped into a cab and headed for Imago.
Jean-Paul would have wanted it that way.
It’s fitting to see No Exit in 2005, the
year of Sartre’s centenary. Since his death
in 1980 interest in Sartre’s life and work
has been on the wane – almost none of my
students have heard of him, whereas for
previous generations it would have been
enough to just draw a pipe, a beret and a
glass of wine on the chalkboard to signify
this embodiment of existentialism. His
100th anniversary has revived interest in
him, though, as a spate of recent articles
and books can attest. Still, for a man who
48 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
No Exit to Portland
Tim Madigan watches a performance of Jean-Paul Sartre’s
best-known play, and learns about Anguish.
put so much emphasis on the power of
theater to bring ideas alive, it is nice to
know that his plays are still considered
worthy of presentation.
No Exit, written during the Nazi occu-
pation of France, is the story of three
characters – Garcin, Inez, and Estelle –
who find themselves in a strange afterlife.
Rather than the pit of hell, which they had
all expected to enter, they are in a gaudy
hotel room, furnished in 2nd Empire style
(an overblown décor which mirrors their
own inauthentic selves). They have no
idea why they have been thrown together,
since in their lives they came from
different social classes which meant that
their paths had never crossed, and they
had no common friends. Garcin, a
pacifist newspaper reporter who has been
killed by a firing squad, insists that he was
not a coward – the executioners had
thought he was running away from battle
when he really was trying to cross the
border to get help. Inez, a postal worker
whose lesbian lover had killed them both
by turning on the gas in their squalid
apartment, insists that she is a pitiless
woman with no concern for others.
Estelle, a beautiful young woman who had
died of pneumonia, insists that she is a
carefree, flighty dilettante who only wants
to dance and be loved. Quite soon they
The Portland production of No Exit,
showing the tipping stage.
begin to get on each other’s nerves. A
strange, unfulfilled attraction sets in –
Estelle wants a relationship with Garcin,
primarily because he is the only man
around, and despises Inez for being lower
class and a lesbian to boot; Inez wants a
relationship with Estelle, and despises
Garcin for being the object of Estelle’s
attention and a coward to boot; Garcin
desires the respect of Inez and despises
Estelle for being shallow and, it turns out,
the murderer of her own child as well as
the cause of her lover’s suicide.
It finally dawns on Garcin why this
unlikely group is together – they will all
be each other’s torturers for eternity.
“Hell”, he famously states, “is other
people.” This is Sartre’s core notion of
the way that conscious beings relate to
each other. There are no mirrors in the
room – the three characters must be each
other’s mirrors. Inez, knowing Estelle’s
self-absorption, tells her she has a pimple
on her cheek, the news of which causes
Estelle to gasp in horror. But Inez too is
vulnerable, and admits that she cannot
deny the power that Estelle’s beauty has
over her. Garcin remarks that the light in
the room is always on, and that they are
themselves no longer capable of blinking –
“4,000 little rests per hour”. There will
be no escape from each other. This is life
without a break. What could be more
horrible?
The title No Exit, though, is an ironic
one. Redolent of Dante’s admonition in
The Inferno to “Abandon All Hope All Ye
Who Enter Here”, it is not clear that in
fact there is no exit for the characters. At
one point, the door to the room, which
they had supposed locked forever, springs
open. Garcin, who had been beating on it
incessantly, now hesitates to leave, and
Inez laughingly says this proves he is a
coward. But Estelle then says to Garcin
that the two of them should push Inez out
and slam the door on her, which brings
Inez to her knees begging not to be so ill-
treated. They compromise by closing the
door and remaining together, seemingly
accepting the reality that they will be each
other’s torturers forever. But need this be
the case? As Sartre emphasized again and
again, the point of existentialism is that we
are always free, always able to change,
always responsible for our actions, indeed
even responsible for our passions. Is
Garcin a coward? No, not essentially, as
there is no human essence. He has acted
cowardly, but that does not mean he is
incapable of changing. Is Inez necessarily
a vicious person? No, she chooses to be
so. Must Estelle remain self-centered
forever? Only if she wishes to. “Alone”,
Garcin says at one point, “none of us can
save himself or herself; we’re linked
together.” That is the human condition.
Like it or not, we’re in this world
together, and it’s up to us to make of it
what we will. No god will save us – we
determine who we are.
Knowing the play so well, I was filled
with anticipation to actually see it
performed. The Imago actors were
uniformly excellent, and the stage setting
was quite intriguing. The hotel room set
was on rollers and configured in such a
way that every time one actor moved, it
caused the others to move as well – a nice
symbolic touch. I was not so taken by the
fact that Inez was played by a man, with
the insinuation that she was once herself a
man who’d undergone a sex-change oper-
ation – this added more complexity to
Sartre’s schemata than was strictly neces-
sary. My main objection, though, was to
the direction. The actors were all encour-
aged to talk in an exaggerated, overly-
enunciated way, and to generally camp it
up for laughs. There are laughs in No
Exit, but they come from the setting and
the overall absurdity of the situation, not
from broad line readings. No wonder
Crossword No.7
Solution
(See page 47 for the questions)
Samuel Beckett made it clear no directors
should be allowed to tamper with his
texts. The worst offender was the actor
playing the minor role of the attendant –
his performance was based upon the char-
acter actor Frank Nelson, famous for
drawling out the word
“yessssssssssssssssssss” in countless Jack
Theatre
Benny and
Lucille Ball
shows. All
this campi-
ness, and the
frequent long
pauses
(making me
think at
times I was in
a Harold
Pinter play
by mistake)
caused the
pacing to
drag. I had
estimated
that the
intermission-
From a production by Groupe Théatre Amitié, in Eaubonne, Val d'Oise
less play
should take about an hour-and-a-half to Theatre for having the courage to revive
perform; having consumed a few cups of this important work by one of the
coffee beforehand, my kidneys started Twentieth Century’s greatest writers.
making themselves known as the play Sartre still lives, in the only way an athe-
continued beyond the two hour point. I istic existentialist can experience immor-
grimly held on but I truly understood tality – through his works.
what existential anguish was all about as I © DR TIMOTHY J. MADIGAN 2005
waited for the final lines to be uttered. Tim Madigan is a US Editor of Philosophy
Still and all, I am glad that I saw the Now. He teaches Philosophy at St John
play, and I congratulate the Imago Fisher College in Rochester, NY.
November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 49
 Philosophy Now
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50 Philosophy Now November/December 2005

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 by Joel Marks.
Philosophical Prestidigitation
B ack in Issue 48 I wrote about my fascination with vision.
There is much more to say. I left off with the tantalizing
suggestion that everything that we see is in some sense ‘in our
mind.’ This was a version of the Argument from Illusion. A
simple example is this. You are experiencing a visual illusion,
such as the shaken pencil that appears to be rubbery. Suppose
you see me performing this trick. You see the ‘rubbery
pencil,’ which you know is in fact a rigid pencil (although the
illusion can be convincing enough to make you doubt your
knowledge, which after all could be false if I had been trying
to fool you all along). But let’s say it really is rigid.
But what is the ‘it’ that is rigid? The pencil itself, of course.
But what are you seeing? What you are seeing is decidedly
flexible, not rigid. So it seems natural to conclude that what
you are seeing is not the pencil at all, but only a visual image
of the pencil. Such an image used to be called a ‘sense datum’
in philosophical circles.
Now, the ‘So’ in the preceding paragraph may also be a
little sleight of hand, since its logic is suspect. Since the word
is so small, however, it is easy to slip it into the magician’s
patter and make you think you have concluded something
significant. Anyhow, the Argument from Illusion proceeds.
Since the pencil you are seeing is not a pencil at all but an
image of a pencil, then we suddenly face the peculiar problem:
What is holding the pencil?
Why, my hand, of course. My hand looks its normal self –
no fluid hand where there should be a solid one, for instance.
Yet, the hand is holding a pencil that isn’t there ... and there
does not appear to be any gap – visual or real – between the
pencil in the hand and the hand itself. So ... might not one
conclude that the hand you see is also not a hand, but just the
image of a hand?
If so, then it’s a short hop of inference to conclude that
everything you, or anyone, ever sees is the content of one’s
own mental experience and not a part of the physical world at
all. Indeed, I can make you disappear – that is, cease to exist in
the material world – simply by touching you with my hand!
For if my hand – that is, the visual image of the hand that you
see – is not ‘really there’ in the physical world, then – just as
the imaginal pencil ‘infected’ the hand with its immateriality –
so the hand in turn can infect you (that is, your body) with its!
(This traveling infection reminds me of the dreaded Ice
Nine in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Cat’s Cradle. I will not spoil
the ending of the book for those of you who have not read it
by revealing the details of this analogy.)
But now let me reverse the trick with a continuation of this
visual dialectic. This time I will make the image itself vanish
from existence and leave in its place the good old physical
world. The previous demonstration would seem to have
established that certainty resides in our own (in this case,
visual) experience. It might even be possible to doubt or deny
52 Philosophy Now November/December 2005
the very existence of a material world beyond our own mental
experience (as the classical idealists, such as Bishop Berkeley,
did).
But consider this argument. Imagine a nice red apple.
Now there seems to be no question at all of this being a
physical apple, because this is something you have just
summoned up in your mind. You could even have your eyes
closed. If you know anything for certain, it is that there is an
image of an apple in the universe ... even if everything else,
including your own body, should prove to be hallucinatory.
Now let me ask you a simple question: Is that ‘apple’ red?
At first it seemed simple enough to assert that it is not an
apple; there is no piece of fruit inside your skull. But why,
then, are you so sure that there is anything red there?
Well, you say, the redness is not inside my skull – no more
than is the ‘apple’. Both are in my mind, which, being by
definition non-physical, is not located anywhere in physical
space, including inside my skull.
Curious that the apple image should reside in time,
though, is it not? That is, you are experiencing it right now
and not an hour earlier or later; but is not time also a physical
phenomenon?
More directly to the point: What is red; that is, redness? If
we take the redness of an apple as paradigmatic, then is it not
natural to infer that the color is a quality of the apple – that is,
of a real, physical apple? In other words, the very notion of red
is something we know about from acquaintance with the
surface of a physical object; it is, perhaps, a particular chemical
composition of a particular substance that alters incoming
‘white’ light in such a way as to emit radiation that then
impinges on the light-sensitive cells of our retinae and
ultimately activates the optic cortex in such a way that we have
a certain experience that we have learned to label ‘red’. Yes?
If that is so, then it is clear that there is no red image in
your mind at all right now, because there is (presumably) no
apple skin, or anything comparable, inside your skull respon-
sible for the experience you are having when you summon up
a red apple in imagination. Presto! No red apple (image)!
And by analogous argument, no mental apple at all.
What there is, then, is some sort of brain event, no doubt
comparable to the event in your optic cortex when you are
seeing a real red apple (or bloody dagger) before you.
So much for philosophical prestidigitation. Let me end by
noting that vision, even if purely physical, still contains magic
– real magic, if I may use that term. For example, when you
look at the Andromeda Nebula on a clear, moonless night,
with only your naked eyes you can literally see 14 trillion
miles into the distance and two million years into the past.
© JOEL MARKS 2005
Joel Marks is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New
Haven in West Haven, Connecticut. www.moralmoments.com
 Understanding Sartre
A short-but-disturbing story by Mark Richardson.

Dear Sally,
My girlfriend and I have been together six years. She has
recently returned to college. I am a blue collar guy who barely
graduated high school. She’s asked me to read a book that she says is
very special to her. However, this book – Being and Nothingness
by Jean-Paul Sartre – is written in some kind of fancy, Einstein
language. Any advice?
Rocco, Brooklyn, NYC
two years furrow her brow in frustration: “Is this it for us?
The end of the line, as you Americans say?”
Ginger sat up. “I don’t have a choice.”
Elizabeth sat up also. She kissed Ginger’s shoulder. “Yes
you do. Your land is the land of the free isn’t it?”
“Not for people like me.”
Later, on the road, Ginger cruised comfortably through
border control. For the past year she’d regularly made the
journey from Texas into Mexico and back again. Ginger tried

R
occo read the letter again. Of course, he’d read it fifty to imagine what the Dog and Pony Show would really be like.
times that week, just amazed at the fact his words were She had a nun fetish and hoped the women, who belonged to
printed in a national magazine. Up until then his some wacky Catholic sect, wore the full sisters’ robes. But it
proudest moment had been making a ninety thousand dollar didn’t really make a difference, as Ginger had missed her
tribute payment to Anthony Sciorra, the most feared of all the opportunity.
New York bosses. But that morning was different. After Ginger turned on the radio. As the hour struck four, the
hearing the news, Rocco thought immediately about Marcia. news headlines were broadcast. Jean-Paul Sartre had died.
She would be heartbroken. Seeing as she’d left early for
college, Rocco scribbled a note: “Heard about JPS. Gone to •••••
Houston on business. Back in a couple days. Love, R.”
Driving to Numchucks, a wiseguy bar downtown, Rocco By the time the taxi arrived outside her parents’ home,
shook his head as the news of Sartre’s death was read out over Ginger had decided not to travel to Washington. The whole
the radio. Inside, he broke the news to the others. intern thing was a sham. Her father was a judge, her uncle a
“Jean-Paul who?” said Paulie, scrunching up his face. “Was senator. She wasn’t prepared to be just another spoilt rich kid
he a friend of ours?” prancing around Capitol Hill. Packing her bag, she thought
about calling Elizabeth. But Elizabeth liked surprises.
••••• Walking round the family home, Ginger thought about her
parents and siblings
It was dusk. Ginger trotted briskly in the direction of the having a great time
small tent, tucked away at the very backend of San Forda. in LA, on vacation –
Suddenly, a hand appeared out of the darkness and grabbed without her. She
Ginger’s wrist. particularly hated
“You don’t know what’s in there. It’s awful,” pleaded the grand family
Elizabeth. portraits. Why had
“That’s why I want to go.” Ginger wrestled free of she smiled on those
Elizabeth and stepped up to the entrance of the tent. occasions?
A man stood charging thirty pesos to see the show. “No no Sometimes she
no. No ladies allowed.” hated herself for
The man noticed Elizabeth standing in the shadows. He such things.
spoke to her in Spanish. Ginger realised Elizabeth was apolo- Inside the cab,
gising on her behalf. Eventually, Elizabeth dragged Ginger Ginger noticed the
away by the hand. Behind them they heard heavy tribal book sitting on the
drumming coming from the tent as the Dog and Pony Show cab driver’s
began. dashboard –
“He said if he’d let us in the police would close them Understanding
down,” Elizabeth later told Ginger. Sartre.
They were lying next to each other on Elizabeth’s bed. “Didn’t he just
Ginger stroked Elizabeth’s hair as she watched her lover of die?”

November/December 2005 Philosophy Now 53

 “That he did,” said Rocco, without even needing to ask
Ginger who she was speaking about. “A real tragedy, too.”
He’d bought the dumbed-down guide in an Austin bookstore
on the advice of Sally, the agony columnist.
Nothing more was said on the matter.
Hours later, as he covered Ginger’s mouth with a rag,
tears formed in Rocco’s eyes. “Calm down. Your uncle
wants you to know he’s still going to make the monthly
donations.”
This message was intended to reduce the potency of
Ginger’s blackmail. Since she’d turned sixteen Ginger had
insisted her uncle make hefty donations to a rape crisis centre
in Austin, otherwise she’d call the cops and his political career
would be ruined with one simple phone call. Ginger
happened to curse at this injustice just as the bullet pierced
the soft skin covering her forehead. Microseconds later, as the
bullet splintered her skull, Ginger managed to conjure up one
final mental picture of Elizabeth. Then everything went
black.
After finally understanding Sartre, Rocco managed to block
out the events of that day. But when all the anticipated
‘missing daughter of a Texas judge, a senator’s niece’ news
stories failed to appear, Rocco did some investigating. Turned
out she’d written a final farewell letter, telling the folks she
was running away to Mexico where she’d be free to pursue a
lesbian lifestyle. This really didn’t sound like the Mexico
Rocco had ever known; but he could only wonder at what
kind of arrangement might have been made between the two
of them.

•••••

The final two days it still hurt to breathe, but Jean-Paul didn’t
feel the pain. Not only was he being kept comfortable in his coma,
Philosophy Now
Binders
but he really was somewhere else entirely. It was a huge tent made
from blood-red sheets. It was night. Light came from a huge fire in
the centre. Round this fire was a stage on which women, some of
whom were dressed as nuns, performed a variety of sex-acts with
animals (mostly dogs, goats and horses) for the entertainment of an
audience. Jean-Paul was sat amongst the crowd, which encircled the
stage.
But it went on for days… A never-ending series of sexually-gross
performances. Eventually bored, Jean-Paul stood up and walked in
the direction of the exit, but was blocked by a large man who
guarded the exit and refused to let anybody past. Jean-Paul
shrugged and sat back amongst the audience. So this, he realised,
was death. He noticed that he no longer had any bodily concerns: he
grew no hair, never needed to piss, at one point realised he wasn’t
even breathing, didn’t need to sleep or eat, had no compulsion to
smoke or do speed… After the first couple of weeks, a girl across on
the other side of the tent sparked Jean-Paul’s interest. Less
Spanish-looking than everyone else (except himself) and the only
woman in the audience, she had bullet wound traumas to her head Do you yearn to acquire an air of gracious living? To
and chest, a suitcase at her side, and her eyes constantly searched the escape the swamp of clutter that threatens to engulf you?
crowd for something or someone she would, Jean-Paul presumed, Tidy away all those essential back issues of Philosophy Now
ultimately never find. – store them in our smart green binders. Each holds 12
© MARK RICHARDSON 2005
magazines securely and in style.
Mark Richardson is a final-year undergraduate in Philosophy at the
University of Dundee. For details of how to order, please see page 50.

54 Philosophy Now November/December 2005