Of Moral Physiognomy

December 21, 1757

Dear Mr. Avenger,

In your last, you told me of a witty Author of your Age (Mr. ORWELL, I believe you call’d him), who declar’d that by his fiftieth Year, every Man hath the Face he deserves. This is more than mere Wit on your Author’s Part, for only a little Reflexion will convince us that that Action which is oft repeated, over a Course of many Years, must needs leave its Traces upon a Man’s bodily Constitution. We ought not to be surpriz’d in discovering that the angry cholerick Man, who inclines much to Displays of Rage, being oft flushed, will carry with him a perpetual redness of visage, even in his cooler Hours. And your gloomy and splenetick Fellow, being much given to the furrowing of his Brow, will in Time find he hath carv’d deep Furrows thereon. Indeed, I once knew a Man, of this Neighbourhood, a Drunkard and perpetual Gin-Sot, whose Hand had cramp’d it self into a veritable Claw from the constant grasping of his Mug, which he was never without. He hath long since pass’d from this Vale of Tears, a Martyr to his particular Vice, his Children put upon the Parish.

Not only will our outward Actions, by much Repetition, produce alterations of the outward Body, but our inwards, that is, our Passions and Affections, if they be swol’n to steady Dispositions, will also work their inevitable Effects upon the outward Physiognomy. It is for this Reason that my Lord VERULAM declar’d that “the Lineaments of the Body do disclose the Disposition and Inclination of the Mind in general” [Francis Bacon, Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning (1605), Second Book, IX.2 — Ed.].

The reading of Character from Body and Countenance is not modern Philosophy, but rather ancient Lore. We read in the courtly SENECA that omnia rerum omnium, si observentur, indicia sunt et argumentum morum ex minimis quoque licet capere: inpudicum et incessus ostendit et manus mota et unum interdum responsum et relatus ad caput digitus et flexus oculorum. Inprobum risus, insanum vultus habitusque demonstrat [“all acts are always significant, and you can gauge character by even the most trifling signs. The lecherous man is revealed by his gait, by a movement of the hand, sometimes by a single answer, by his touching his head with his finger, by the shifting of his eye. The scamp is shown up by his laugh; the madman by his face and general appearance” Epistles 52.12 — Ed.]. (You shou’d know, my good Avenger, that in the Roman Times, scratching the Head with one’s little Finger was taken as a sure Sign that a Man was a Molly, that is, a Member of that infamous Race of Woman-Haters, practisers of that abominable Vice which shou’d ever be passed over in Silence.) In time, these outward Signs of Character become stamp’d upon us through much Repetition. Whether we will or no, in the very process of Age, we reveal our Minds to the World; our Souls are laid bare to Friend and Foe alike through our Habits and steady Dispositions.

You see, we wear Footpaths upon our Bodies in the Course of our Doings. Both our Virtues and our Vices leave their indelible Marks. And so it is that nec auguria novi nec mathematicorum caelum curare soleo, ex vultibus tamen hominum mores colligo, et cum spantiantem vidi, quid cogitet scio (PETRON. Satyr. 126) [“I know nothing of omens, and I never attend to the astrologer’s sky, but I read character in a man’s face, and when I see him walk, I know his thoughts.” Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon, ch. 126 — Ed.].

But the Relation of Cause and Effect may also run in the reverse Direction, from the Body to the Mind. That ill Action which is oft repeated will beat a Path to ease the Way for its after-Travellers, the Result being a well-worn Road to customary Vice. Where we once stick at committing some one Indiscretion the first Time, the third, fourth, or fifth Time finds our Will less reticent and more yielding, until she hath become a very Courtizan of easy Virtue. Whence it is that my Lord SHAFTESBURY justly observes that “the least step into Villainy or Baseness, changes the Character and Value of a Life” (Characteristicks Vol. I, p. 121).

The difficult Passage of the first Traveller invariably makes the Passage of the next Traveller just so much easier. And if enough Time be not left for the Thickets and Brambles to grow back, the soil becomes packt, trodden down, and instead of a mere Footpath, a fixt and permanent Road is form’d. As the divine EPICTETUS warns us, “the man who has had a Fever, and then recover’d, is not the same as he was before the Fever, unless he has experienced a compleat Cure. Something like this happens also with the Affections of the Mind. Certain Imprints and Weals are left behind on the Mind, and unless a Man erases them perfectly, the next time he is scourged upon the old Scars, he has Weals no longer but Wounds” [Discourses, II.18 — Ed.].

To bring this my tedious Lesson to a close, it is wise Advice when ’tis said that if we wish to gain knowledge of a Man’s Vices, we shou’d canvass his Enemies; if we wou’d know more of his Virtues, we shou’d speak with his particular Friends; and where we wou’d know about his Habits, Customs, and Times of coming and going, we shou’d press his Servants. But no little Intelligence can be glean’d of all these things by the mere observing of his Outwards, his Form, his Countenance, and his Frame.

I am, Sir, as allways, your Servant,
Jos: Darlington, Esq.
Darlington Close
Horton-cum-Studley, Oxon.

A Little Useless Learning

Sometimes, in the course of one’s scholarly travels, one stumbles upon a problem, mystery, or interesting fact that, while being too small in import to spin off into a paper, still demands to somehow reach an audience beyond the scholar himself. That is precisely the purpose of this post. It will be a depository for some matter overflowing from my scholarly waste books that I frankly don’t know what else to do with.

The learning contained herein derives from my researches on my favourite philosopher, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), about whom I’ve written before.

The best place to begin is with the picture above. It is a portrait of Shaftesbury painted by John Closterman c. 1700-1701. Considerable scholarly ink has been spilled concerning the identity of the figure to the viewer’s right, who holds the Earl’s robes of state and seems to beckon him toward the outside world and away from his books. Hypotheses as to who this figure represents have included: Thomas Stringer (superannuated steward to Shaftesbury’s father); John Wheelock (Shaftesbury’s own steward); Shaftesbury’s grandfather, the first Earl; or a psychoanalytically split-off version of Shaftesbury himself (à la the advice proffered by Shaftesbury in his work Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author). For more on this, I would simply refer the interested reader to the fascinating — though idiosyncratic and ultimately unconvincing — Chapter 3 of Lori Branch’s book, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006).

The first edition of Shaftesbury’s 3-volume masterwork, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times appeared in 1711. It was intended as a sort of collected edition of his previously published works in two volumes, tied together by a new third volume, written in the form of a free-wheeling tongue-in-cheek commentary on the foregoing by Shaftesbury in the voice of an anonymous but generally favourable modern critic.

Towards the end of his life, Shaftesbury had become gravely ill and left England to live in Naples in hopes of recovering his health. From Naples Shaftesbury directed a new edition of Characteristicks, for which he designed intricate emblematic engravings, to be executed by the masterful engraver, Simon Gribelin. These engravings were to be keyed to certain passages of the text and were to consist of three frontispieces (one for each volume), six headpieces (one for each of the separate treatises contained therein), and the circular emblem by Gribelin that had already appeared in the first 1711 edition. Shaftesbury had at hand a young Irish draughtsman named Henry Trench, to whom he dictated his plans for the designs. Trench’s preliminary drawings, along with detailed instructions for the plates and the general layout and editing of the book, were then sent to Shaftesbury’s agent and general factotum in England, Thomas Micklethwaite.

Shaftesbury died in Naples, having only seen the finished versions of three of the nine new plates for the second edition. The second edition of Characteristicks appeared in 1714/15. At some point during the process of publication two new plates somehow crept into the book. (Actually there was also a third new plate, as some copies had Shaftesbury’s work “The Judgment of Hercules” appended to them, with accompanying engraving by Gribelin of Paolo de Matteis’ painting of the same. However, this was a separate work, never intended for Characteristicks.) Who decided to add these plates (and who ultimately paid for them) is a mystery. It may have been Micklethwaite, or perhaps it was Shaftesbury’s widow. What we know is that it was not Shaftesbury himself.

Consider, for instance, one of these additional plates, the headpiece to the Preface, depicting Shaftesbury’s coat-of-arms. In his detailed instructions regarding the layout and illustrations for the second edition, Shaftesbury is very clear that there is to be no ornament over the Preface, for he writes: “The wooden Flourish or Flower-Work over the Preface [in the 1711 edition] must be taken away, and the Page left plain.” In addition, the instructions make clear throughout that, aside from the cryptic subscription to the Preface, there is to be nothing to mark the identity of the author, which obviously the coat-of-arms would have done. It should also be noted that Shaftesbury’s name was added to the title page of the second edition, contrary to his evident wish to remain anonymous.

The other of the two unintended plates would have gone even further towards identifying the work’s authorship. This was an engraved portrait frontispiece of Shaftesbury himself, again by Gribelin, modeled after the painting by Closterman already described. The engraving is a mirror image of the original, and the beckoning figure has been removed, and in its place has been added a garden landscape.

There is at least one scholar who has been unable to resist the temptation to assume that this garden is a depiction of the grounds at Shaftesbury’s seat, Wimborne St. Giles, in Dorset. David Leatherbarrow, on rather flimsy evidence, writes: “The appearance of a landscape in an eighteenth-century portrait is not uncommon, nor in earlier portraits. But this is not any landscape. I believe it is a representation of Shaftesbury’s garden at Wimborne St. Giles, the only such representation, and, as I shall try to show, of Shaftesbury’s conception of perfected nature” (Leatherbarrow 147).

If this were true, it would be very interesting, given Shaftesbury’s own influence on the history of gardening and his own writings on the same. Leatherbarrow largely bases his claim on Shaftesbury’s description of his gardening work at St. Giles, claiming it matches up with the grounds in the portrait. But alas, the evidence does not support his claim in the slightest.

First, Gribelin’s depiction seems highly stylized, and in any case it is on too small a scale to support any inference in this direction. Second, Leatherbarrow provides no evidence that Gribelin had seen St. Giles, nor that Shaftesbury had sent him any directions regarding their illustration. This does not rule out the possibility that Micklethwaite, who had seen the grounds at St. Giles, could have instructed Gribelin. But that would be pure conjecture.

In addition, there is even more reason to dispute Leatherbarrow’s claim. The latter writes: “As the engraver had already finished one emblem by the time of Shaftesbury’s arrival in Naples it is safe to assume he was in contact with Gribelin before his departure. Thus he could have supervised the execution of the portrait. I believe that he did” (p. 147). Besides being, again, little more than conjecture, this claim suffers from what I take to be a fatal flaw, for, to reiterate, Shaftesbury’s instructions concerning the illustrations to Characteristicks makes clear that there was to be no such portrait. His plans clearly dictated that the work was to contain only the circular 1711 title page emblem, the three volume frontispieces and the six treatise headpieces. In case there is any doubt of his intention, here are Shaftesbury’s exact words: there is to be no other illustration or ornament “besides what the Author furnishes, and are compris’d in the Three general and Six particular Plates, together with the round Frontispiece-Devise allready current” (“Virtuoso-Coppy-Book” 252). This list was explicitly intended to be exhaustive. There were to be no additional illustrations. He was adamant about this. Thus, it is not “safe to assume” that Shaftesbury supervised the execution of the portrait. And as I have already pointed out, the instructions make clear throughout that, other than the cryptic subscription to the Preface, there is to be nothing to mark the identity of the author.

In any case, garden historian Suzannah Fleming, Chair of the Temple Trust, has worked extensively on the grounds at St. Giles, and in a conversation in September of 2012 she reliably informed me that the terrain at St. Giles is quite flat and possesses nothing corresponding to the hills seen in the distance on this plate. Having never been there myself, I'll take her at her word. She did however tell me that a doorway has been uncovered at St. Giles, long disused and bricked up, that might correspond to the one in Closterman’s original painting. This would make sense since, as is not the case with Gribelin, we know that Closterman had been to St. Giles, and the portrait was done there. If there are actual elements from St. Giles in Gribelin’s version, it is because he copied them from Closterman’s portrait. Any new elements in Gribelin’s version have no authority as an accurate depiction of Shaftesbury’s home.

Bibliography

BRANCH, Lori. Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006).

LEATHERBARROW, David. Topographical Stories: Studies in Landscape and Architecture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

SHAFTESBURY, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of. PRO 30/24/24/13. (“Virtuoso-Coppy-Book”, consisting of Shaftesbury’s instructions for the engravings in Characteristicks, contained in the Public Records Office.) Reproduced in Standard Edition (Vol. I,3), Wolfram Benda (ed.). Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Fromman Verlag, 1992.

My Struggle with "Mein Kampf"

The Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg, today

At the end of August and beginning of September, I had the privilege of presenting a paper at a conference devoted to the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) in Nuremberg, Germany, hosted by the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (Erlangen-Nürnberg). The current Earl of Shaftesbury was in attendance for the entire three days, which I must say was sporting of him, considering that at times he must have found it  painfully boring. I, however, had a wonderful and stimulating time, seeing the sites of such a beautiful city, and meeting with fellow enthusiasts to talk about my favourite philosopher.

I cannot let this opportunity pass without thanking the conference organizer, Patrick Müller, for his invitation and for his gracious hospitality. I am not much of a traveler, and usually after a week away, I am anxious to come home. This time, however, I didn’t want to come home, and at least part of the credit for this must go to Patrick. So Patrick: If you read this, thank you. Other credit is due to the people of Nuremberg, whom, in my admittedly limited interactions with them, I found to be polite, upright, and generous (those who know me will also know that these are about the highest compliments I can bestow upon a people).

On my last day in the city, Patrick took me on a little walking tour of the former Nazi Party rally grounds. Given that Nuremberg was the spiritual heartland of Nazism, it is passing strange that although it was heavily firebombed in the Second World War — over 90% of the Altstadt was destroyed — the Allies somehow managed to leave the Nazi Party’s massive congress hall and rally grounds more or less intact. Thus, there are many reminders of the moral stain of Nazism in an otherwise stupifyingly beautiful city.

The juxtaposition of Nuremberg’s National Socialist past and its decent, generous, cultured citizenry today, left me with a need to learn more, to piece together the quasi-biological puzzle of how today’s Bavarians (or Franconians) could have been generated from such a seemingly different moral species. This is what led me to (re)read Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

If you ever want to feel very uncomfortable, make yourself seen reading this book on the subway. You will get stares. The people doing the staring generally fall into two groups. The first are the people who wonder why it is you would be reading this verboten book. You must have some scholarly reason, or else it’s assigned reading for a course, otherwise you wouldn’t touch it. They are understandably puzzled.

The other group does not wonder, and they are not puzzled. They know — or at least they believe they know — that you’re reading Mein Kampf because you’re a degenerate crypto-Nazi racist of some kind. They do not hide their expression of disgust and hostility. They secretly wish the book could be burned and that you could be quietly shipped off to some place for re-education (or worse). Their gaze is most uncomfortable. The feeling is much akin to that dream that almost all of us have had — you know the one: you are at school or work and you suddenly realize you’re in your pyjamas or are stark naked. Only imagine that instead of being in the nude, you are embarrassed to find yourself wearing an SS uniform and a monocle.

If you can stand up to the withering gaze of ill-wishers, Mein Kampf is worth reading, which is why I was appalled a decade ago when Heather Reisman, founder and CEO of Indigo Books and Music (Canada’s answer to Barnes and Noble), announced that the book would no longer be sold in her stores. It was of course her right to make that decision. But the decision was still a dumb one.

(Incidentally, I was an employee of Indigo at the time, and I’m pretty sure that I personally played an inadvertent role in her decision. But that is a story for another day.)

In any case, the following are a few of my reflections on Hitler’s manifesto.

His Shallowness

Compared to authors of just about any stripe, Hitler’s intellect is clearly in the featherweight class. Yes, he constantly — and self-consciously, in my opinion — refers to his voracious reading habits. And yet, few are the actual books he refers to, and he has seemingly read few if any of the great classics, German or otherwise. On the other hand, he writes often of his consumption of pamphlets and newspapers. But no great intellect can be formed from such ephemeral confections, any more than a healthy body can be built from bubble gum and chocolate bars.

Hitler manipulates a bastardized lexicon of quasi-German Idealism, comprising such terms as “subjective”, “objective”, “will”, “concept”, “freedom”, etc. He clearly has little notion of their original philosophical context. It is as if it took some 150 years for Kant’s ideas to filter down to the very dregs of the German people, to be finally collected into the fetid and overflowing sewers of Hitler’s mind.

His Austrian-ness

I was also struck by repeated reminders that Hitler was Austrian, not German. He considered himself to be German, in the pan-Germanic sense, but his pan-Germanism seems at its core to have been a reaction to his experience as the citizen of a decaying multi-ethnic Hapsburg Empire, in which Germans were perceived to be in political decline relative to the other peoples of the Empire. Hitler’s was a paranoid garrison mentality. Thus his constant nightmares about the “Slavization” or “Czechization” of the German people. He loathed Vienna precisely because of its multiculturalism, something which we in a country like Canada have tentatively learned to celebrate, or at least have learned not to view as an existential threat.

His Anti-Semitism

Which leads to his anti-Semitism. There is little that is original in Hitler’s worldview. As I said, he was an intellectual featherweight, and the main elements of his political fantasies were cobbled together from ideas that were very much part of the Austrian alptraum. To the extent that they could be said to hold together in some kind of a coherent whole, Hitlerian Nazism could be said to be an ideology. But upon reading Mein Kampf, I could not fail to notice the extent to which one of the most conspicuous elements of this ideology, its anti-Semitism, fails to be fully integrated into it. It is there, obviously. And it’s not that it was inconsistent with Nazism. It’s that it seems somehow tacked on, like an extraneous element having less to do with theoretical conviction than with idiosyncratic, personal hatred. Hitler’s anti-semitism is somehow Hitler’s anti-Semitism.

When Hitler describes the growth and development of his anti-Semitism, something doesn’t quite ring true. He claims to have come into it relatively late, as the result of a gradual awakening. To some extent, the Jew represents for Hitler an object case study of all that is wrong with the Other, with all the foreign elements that are infecting the Austrian body politic. Thus, the Jew is somehow both capitalist representative of Manchester liberalism (p. 93) and “the leering grimace of Marxism” (p. 51). Insofar as he is Zionist, the Jew is an ultranationalist. In any case, he is clannish, preferring his own kind, while plotting the destruction of the Austro-Germans among whom he resides. And yet at the same time he is portrayed as inherently nationless, not only through lack of a homeland, but through extreme selfishness, greed, and lack of fellow-feeling. At the same time that Hitler portrays Jews as only concerned with their own kind, he also portrays them as atavistically individualistic, claiming that if they didn’t have Aryans to prey upon, they would claw each other to death. There is more than a little tension in these contrasting portrayals.

How can all these contradictory characteristics be imputed to one people? Unless perhaps the Jew is for Hitler merely the embodiment of all that is not-German and therefore bad. But if that is the case, why is it Jews in particular that are made to play this role? Why not some other people? After all, they made up a relatively small proportion of the Austro-Hungarian population. Why not Slavs instead?

And yet, in Mein Kampf Hitler reserves a hate-filled linguistic violence for the Jews, a venomous diction he rarely if ever deploys on Slavs or Czechs or any other nationality. These latter he at least accords recognizably human motivations: they will destroy the Germans if allowed, but they do so only by playing a game that every self-respecting people must play, the game of survival. And yet, the Jews are somehow outside this brutal game and the odd sort of grudging sportsmanship it entails. They are somehow cheaters rather than players. They are not players because they are not humans. By contrast with how he speaks of Czechs or Russians or the English (he seems to have felt some degree even of admiration for the latter), here is an all-to-common animadversion on the Jews:

“Later I often grew sick to my stomach from the smell of these caftan-wearers. Added to this, there was their unclean dress and their generally unheroic appearance…. Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultured life, without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light — a kike!” (p. 57)

Such language betrays a visceral loathing that goes well beyond the putative objectivity of a political ideology. This is personal. It betrays not so much a philosophical conviction as a psychological pathology. Where it comes from, I’m not sure. But I am led to doubt that it was acquired through some passive and gradual process of “education” or intellectual realization.

His Emotional Flatness
  
 There were two occasions on which Hitler wept (or claims to have wept). The first was when his mother died. This event, which we must remember left Hitler an orphan in his late teens, is dealt with in a sentence or two. One never really gets the impression that he cared all that much — just as one never really gets the impression that he cared that much for his father, despite repeated references to him as “the old gentleman”.

The other occasion was during the First World War, when while recovering in hospital from poison gas, his eyes bandaged, he found out that Germany had surrendered. He claims to have buried his head in his pillow and cried. But his description of this emotionality somehow doesn't ring true. Again, the account seems more than a little contrived. When Hitler claims to cry, one has trouble believing it.

His Egoism

Karl Marx did not write The Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital as intellectual autobiographies. Would the history of communism have been different if he had? I don’t know. But whatever change Marx wanted to make in the world, it wasn’t all about Marx. The overthrow of the bourgeoisie would come from class consciousness, not from how Marx’s personal biography worked itself out.

It was different with Hitler. He rolled up the entire history and destiny of the German people into a little ball, and he called it “my struggle”. As if the cosmic fate of millions turned on his own fate. There is a name for such a person, just as there is a name for someone who believes he can control the weather with his thoughts: we call them “crazy”.

Another name for Hitler’s condition might be Messianism. And indeed, insanity and Messianism do often arrive at the dance as a couple. But the actual Messiah, like Marx, was clearly not as absorbed with his own unique role in history as was Hitler. Jesus offered a message of salvation, which you could take or leave. It was others who imputed to him his special role in human history and eschatology. Hitler, on the other hand, seemed to view his own life story as world history. His “struggle” to become an architect was the German people’s struggle, and every setback in his life, such as failing to get into art school, was the result of some vast conspiracy against the German people. Now, as a grad student I once failed to get a fellowship, and I have had papers rejected for publication. But it would take considerable ego on my part to view this as a vast conspiracy against my nation by some foreign enemy whom it is my special destiny to somehow defeat with the aid of the united will of my people. To think this way is, well, bizarre. It is at least a little bit psychopathic.

I have tended to be suspicious of interpretations of Hitler that make him out to be some kind of unnatural monster, a moral singularity, mostly because I tend to think that there is nothing constructive in such a view; it rather lets the rest of us off the hook for the monstrous characteristics lurking in almost all of our souls, a few rare moral saints notwithstanding. I always thought of Hitler-types as the limiting condition of the less admirable parts of our own characters. In viewing Hitler as a moral singularity, we can comfort ourselves with the analgesic thought that Hitlerism couldn’t happen here, amongst us, because maybe there will never be another Hitler, he being too strange, outlandish, unnatural. Of course, every sane person in her heart of hearts knows that this is bullshit, that Hitler was a human being of some kind. But this not-so-noble lie gives us succour.

However, reading Mein Kampf has led me to think that perhaps there is a grain of truth to that interpretation, that “moral singularity” thesis. There was a certain idiosyncratic pathology to the man. On the other hand, reading the book has also reinforced my belief that there doesn’t seem to have been anything particularly brilliant or charismatic about this little creature. Which unfortunately leaves me back where I started, with the question of how it is that he gained so many followers? And so I still find myself unable to mentally connect the humane Bavarian or German of today with the Nazi of yesteryear.
_____________

N.B. In quoting from Mein Kampf, I have used Ralph Manheim's translation (Boston: Mariner Books, 1998).

Philosophy for the Like-Minded

I have a doctorate in philosophy, to which I devoted four and a half years of my life in study and research. Therefore, I consider myself to have some residual claim to the title “philosopher”, despite no longer teaching the subject nor holding a faculty position in a university. Nevertheless, it is with a due sense of grief that I discover myself no longer able to read papers or monographs in academic philosophy without at least one of the following three reactions: (i) intense boredom, (ii) intense headache, or (iii) intense frustration at the smugness, obtuseness, and/or utter pointlessness of what I’m reading. Thus, although I still claim to be a philosopher, I generally only do so if I need to speak to or refute other philosophers. In short, I consider the title to be neither honorific nor a source of any great pride, and I wear it with discomfort.

To paraphrase that great and wise wit La Bruyère, one can mark the beginning and end of a love affair by how uncomfortable a man and a woman are when left together in a room. I have fallen out of love with philosophy. I entered the discipline with fear and trembling, and I leave it with considerable disgust and embarrassment (at ever having been in love with it in the first place). My former colleagues seem just as embarrassed for and disgusted with me. And that, I’m afraid, is the end of the affair.

Or not quite. I recently picked up a philosophy book and tried to read it. I had a fond wish to rekindle an old flame, and I thought that a newish book by an academic philosopher writing on an area of applied ethics, purporting to be based on a series of lectures, and with whose ideas I am in general agreement, just might do the trick. But alas, once you break up, things are never quite the same when you hook up again. It’s best not to even try. Since falling out of love with philosophy, I confess I have strayed. I have had flirtations with history, politics, economics, poetry, law, you name it. I have been promiscuous. And when I am left alone with philosophy, I can’t quite get my mind off the other charming ladies. With her, I am alternately ashamed, bored, and annoyed. I need to find a way of extricating myself from the relationship with some modicum of decency. So I can’t wait until this book is finished.

The book in question is Jeff McMahan’s Killing in War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009). As with much other academic philosophy, it goes out of its way to make what should otherwise be an exciting subject mind-numbingly pedantic. Needlessly complicated ways are found to state claims that are trivially true to anyone smarter than the average fruit fly; common platitudes are presented as if they were profundities that no one had ever thought of before. Or else, other claims that are by no means obvious — or even plausible — are offered as if they were self-evident, with little or no argument to back them up. To be fair, they are often claims that all like-minded academics might very well agree with, and so perhaps the author feels little need to back them up. The trouble is, if you haven’t had your common sense educated out of you, or if you lack sufficient leisure and grant funding to be able to believe in the absurd, you will be utterly baffled by what most academic philosophers write, even in ethics, a subject which we should be able to expect to have at least some connection with the lived experience of the masses outside the groves of academe.

I am being a bit cruel, a bit arch, but only to make a point. In truth, one could read far worse examples of what I’m talking about than McMahan’s book. And as I said, I’m in general agreement with much of what he argues in it. Still, there are times when he falls into the common philosophical sin of relying on what I have elsewhere called the “ethicist’s royal ‘we’”. This is the tendency to make or rely on the claim that we all believe that X is good or that Y is bad, where in fact “we” (in the universal sense) do not all believe this, or where “we” simply refers to like-minded academic philosophers of a certain disposition — usually upper middle class, white, and very uncritically left-leaning.

Here is one example from McMahan’s book. Traditionally, in “just war” doctrine, a distinction is made between ius ad bellum and ius in bello (roughly, justice in going to war versus justice in the conduct of war). This distinction has led to the tendency to view combatants in a just war as morally equivalent to their enemy combatants (who, by inference, are combatants in an unjust war). Thus, it may be wrong for one side to enter into a war with another, but once this has been done, whether the war is just or unjust, combatants from both sides are morally justified in killing one another according to ius in bello. Of course, the right to kill non-combatants in a just war is a separate matter. And I leave aside what seems to be implicit throughout McMahan’s book, that it is always or usually clear to both sides whether a war is just or unjust (it is usually not clear, which makes much of his argument moot). But the idea is that, once war is declared, combatants on the unjust side have a job to do, and they are bound to play by the same rules of “the game” as combatants on the just side. On both sides, combatants are tools or agents of the parties who declare war. Or something like that. Killing of enemy soldiers is permitted in much the same way two boxers are morally permitted to pummel each other; the justness or unjustness of the war doesn’t enter into it.

However, McMahan believes that just and unjust combatants are not morally equivalent according to ius in bello. Unjust combatants are not morally justified in killing just combatants; just combatants are morally justified in killing unjust combatants (within the constraints of just war doctrine). I am in general agreement with his position, though I’m not sure where it gets us. In any case, McMahan has to defend himself from possible counterexamples to his view. These counterexamples involve situations in which it seems that some agent is justified in acting on behalf of another in the achievement of an unjust aim. Such situations are supposed to be relevantly analogous to the case of soldiers fighting on the unjust side of a war. McMahan picks out two such cases, offered by the philosopher Frances Kamm. The cases are:

(i)    A lawyer acts to evict a poor tenant from a building on behalf of his client.

(ii)    Someone smashes a beautiful vase on behalf of a paralyzed person who owns it.

Both of these situations exemplify much of what is wrong with academic ethics, though in somewhat different ways. The second example seems horribly contrived. It is hard to imagine circumstances in which such a situation would come up. Counterexamples and thought experiments in ethics often lose much of their force when they can’t be made to seem plausible. I would almost venture to say that if you cannot find either a plausible everyday example, or else a real and poignant historical example, then you do not have a counterexample. Also, besides being contrived, the second situation is also underdescribed, and because of this the principal’s intention and the agent’s action seem unmotivated and unintelligible. If the owner of the vase wants to do this act, then one is tempted to assume he has at least some reason for it. Why does the owner wish his vase to be destroyed? Perhaps he believes it is cursed. Perhaps it was in some way the cause of his being paralyzed. Maybe he knew he was dying and couldn’t bear the thought of someone else acquiring it. Or maybe he simply doesn’t believe that it is beautiful and is just taking up space (notice that the example seems to rely on an implied claim that there is an ethical duty not to destroy something you own which someone else finds beautiful; this claim is itself dubious and in need of separate argumentative support). In short, it is a silly and unconvincing example.

The first counterexample, the one about the poor tenant, seems less contrived and therefore more plausible, at least in the sense that it is regrettably an everyday occurrence. But again, there is an “ethicist’s royal ‘we’” implied here. After all, why should we assume that a poor person, simply by virtue of being poor, has the right to squat on someone else’s property, and that therefore it would be wrong to evict him? Is it because the landlord is rich? We do not know this, nor should it necessarily make a difference in our reasoning. Does the landlord have a duty to provide a place to live for poor non-paying tenants? If so, this claim at least merits some kind of an argument in its support. It may seem obvious to comfortable left-leaning academic philosophers earning a six-figure salary and who are not being asked to make such a sacrifice themselves. It doesn’t seem all that obvious to me. It may also be of considerable relevance how the tenant came to be poor. If he is shiftless, irresponsible, and largely the author of his own miserable fate, does the landlord still owe him the same duty?

Kamm argues that although it would be wrong for the landlord to kick him out, it would not be wrong for the lawyer to do it on his behalf. When McMahan refutes this counterexample, it is telling that he doesn’t call into question its implied premise that a landlord is morally obligated to allow a poor tenant to squat on his property. McMahan accepts this antecedent, but with regard to the consequent he seems to waiver between a) biting his own bullet and condemning the lawyer for being complicit in a wrong, or b) excusing the lawyer on the grounds of his contract with his landlord client. The first strategy is at least consistent with his overall argument, though he would find many who would in fact deny the lawyer’s guilt, whatever they thought of the landlord’s. The second strategy doesn’t sit so well with his overall thesis regarding the moral status of unjust combatants. Through his tacit, unquestioningly liberal (and personally costless) support for the poor, McMahan is forced to tie himself into logical knots to defend his thesis. He has been reflexively wed to spurious but fashionable dogma and, philosophically, it has cost him.

I would have taken the different strategy of simply denying Kamm’s antecedent: other things being equal, and taking the paucity of facts provided by Kamm as it stands, I simply deny that it is wrong for the landlord to evict the poor tenant, and by extension I deny that it is wrong for the lawyer to do so on his behalf. Thus, the counterexample is really no counterexample at all. I do not deny that there would be something wrong with a landlord who felt no regret about doing so, or with a lawyer who positively enjoyed this duty (assuming again that the poor tenant is himself guiltless). But feeling regret for an action is not the same as being morally unjustified in doing it. Similarly, a just combatant in war may feel regret for killing an enemy combatant, but this does not mean that he was morally unjustified in doing so.

I don’t claim that what I have just argued is all that original or profound, and to some readers it may seem downright obvious, even if it is painful to accept. But I can tell you that most academic ethicists, well-meaning lefties that they are, would be shocked at what I have just argued — or at least at the plain way I have argued it. Luckily for them, they are rarely faced with heretics like me. So they can continue to find ways of arguing against each other on certain philosophical issues without ever really disagreeing on the basic (and unwarranted) assumptions about distributive justice they all hold dear. And thus, because they skirt around core issues, their arguments too often seem meaningless or beside the point to outsiders.

Postscript

So I have fallen out of love with philosophy. But as the song says, breaking up is hard to do. I still have personal friends who are philosophers, but as time goes on, I find I have less and less to talk about with them, and they with me. We have come almost to speak different languages on many philosophical issues. I am always ready to bring in arguments from other disciplines with which I am enamored (e.g. history or economics), and of which they are largely ignorant. I in turn, find their unwillingness to engage with other disciplines maddening. I want an open relationship. I want to see other people, and I want philosophy to do the same.

One of these philosopher friends is a case in point. I still run into her occasionally, but most of our interaction these days is conducted through Facebook, which perhaps is for the best. Even so, I keep expecting any day now to find that she has “unfriended” me for my heterodox views. This friend flies her flag high on all issues concerning “social justice” (a term of art I find almost meaningless, since it has become merely a catch-all for whatever boutique ideas are fashionable among left-leaning intellectuals on any given week). It’s not so much her particular views that stick in my craw, since I actually agree with her on a few of them. And sometimes our disagreements are more over means than ultimate goals. She wants a better world with less poverty, and so do I. I just think that in general her ideas are more likely to hurt the poor than help them. No, it’s not her ultimate goals that annoy me. It is rather the way she assumes that all “reasonable” people (i.e. privileged intellectuals like her) believe what she believes, and that if you don’t believe them, you are either stupid or morally degenerate.

I have genuine disagreements with her, and the positions that I have taken are not stupid (not to say they are not possibly mistaken), and I hold them out of genuine moral conviction rather than mere self-interest. And the fact is, when I have tangled with her intellectually on these issues, it has never taken me very long to back her into some tight corner of intellectual self-refutation. You see, she spends so much time talking among like-minded left-leaning intellectuals that she seems to become paralyzed when presented with an opponent who strays from the accepted dogmas of “social justice”, who comes at her from outside her comfortable echo chamber. And because she only communicates with the like-minded, she is never called out on those of her “arguments” that are, frankly, bullshit. So I like to play this role for her. Socrates would do no different.

In honour of Labour Day this year, this friend posted what she thought was a clever little item on Facebook. It was a Victorian picture of a child working at what looked like some kind of loom or weaving machine. The caption read:

IF YOU’RE GLAD YOUR SEVEN-YEAR-OLD CHILD DOESN’T HAVE TO WORK IN A FACTORY, THANK A UNION.

Her like-minded Facebook friends, most of them fellow academics, slapped their flippers together in approval at this cleverness. Rather than do the same, I looked upon this as a “teachable moment” for her. My comment consisted of a link to the Wikipedia entry on the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, along with the following remark:

“Actually, you can thank a certain Tory politician and aristocrat. It’s rather anachronistic to credit labour unions.”

The sound of flippers stopped, to be replaced by the sound of proverbial crickets. Labour unions, in more or less the form we now have them, arose in the last thirty years or so of the 19th century. By then, factory labour by seven-year-olds had been abolished by such legislation as Shaftesbury’s Factories Act of 1833 (outlawing the employment of children under nine in textile factories) and its successors. Unions had little or nothing to do with the outlawing of child labour in industrial nations, since that had already been largely accomplished before unions existed.

To be fair, if unions had been around, they likely would have pushed for an end to child labour, but only because children were competition, representing a downward pressure on adult workers' wages. It is for much the same reason that unions used to try to exclude Chinese and black workers from the labour force.

But hey, an academic philosopher rarely lets facts get in the way of a pet theory, especially when the theory lies entirely outside the philosopher’s professed area of expertise. I should know: I’ve devoted an entire blog to expounding ideas outside my area of expertise (tongue planted firmly in cheek).