A revolutionary new theory and call to action on animal rights, ethics, and law from the renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum.

Animals are in trouble all over the world. Whether through the cruelties of the factory meat industry, poaching and game hunting, habitat destruction, or neglect of the companion animals that people purport to love, animals suffer injustice and horrors at our hands every day.

The world needs an ethical awakening, a consciousness-raising movement of international proportions. In Justice for Animals, one of the world’s most influential philosophers and humanists Martha C. Nussbaum provides a revolutionary approach to animal rights, ethics, and law.

From dolphins to crows, elephants to octopuses, Nussbaum examines the entire animal kingdom, showcasing the lives of animals with wonder, awe, and compassion to understand how we can create a world in which human beings are truly friends of animals, not exploiters or users. All animals should have a shot at flourishing in their own way. Humans have a collective duty to face and solve animal harm. An urgent call to action and a manual for change, Nussbaum’s groundbreaking theory directs politics and law to help us meet our ethical responsibilities as no book has done before.

Author

Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, appointed in the Philosophy Department and the Law School of the University of Chicago. She gave the 2016 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities and won the 2016 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy. The 2018 Berggruen Prize in Philosophy and Culture, and the 2020 Holberg Prize. These three prizes are regarded as the most prestigious awards available in fields not eligible for a Nobel. She has written more than twenty-two books, including Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions; Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice; Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities; and The Monarchy of Fear.

Reviews

“The most important book on animal ethics written to date, Justice for Animals is a brilliant and remarkably comprehensive exploration of the ethical issues connected with human treatment of nonhumans. a milestone in the field.”—Thomas I. White, author of In Defense of Dolphins

“With urgent clarity, Martha Nussbaum explains why we must and how we can take responsibility for the multi-species world that is our reality. Justice For Animals is a celebration of the human potential for love and mutuality and a song of hope, as much as it is a steely-eyed analysis of our callous dominance of the nonhuman world.”—Amy Linch, Penn State University
 
“Martha Nussbaum’s work has changed the humanities, but in this book her focus is startling, born of an ardent love for her late daughter and for all animals on Earth.”—Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Case Western Reserve University, and Senior Research Fellow, Earth System Governance Project

“Martha Nussbaum takes an honest look at how animals may survive in a human-dominated world, and lays out a plan of action to help creatures great and small in important and critical ways.”—Dr. Denise Herzing, Founder and Research Director of the Wild Dolphin Project

“A provocative book. Nussbaum lays out a foundation for the political rights of animalsand asks what creating a world where animals could be our friends would look like. An essential read for anyone interested in what we owe to our fellow creatures.”—Nicolas Delon, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies, New College of Florida

“The morality of the human-animal relation urgently needs updating. We can’t wish for a more insightful and compassionate guide than philosopher Martha Nussbaum. She urges us to look beyond pain and pleasure and to consider all animals, not just those that resemble us. Each species’ specific needs and capabilities offer a guide of how they should be treated.”—Frans de Waal, author of Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

"A thought-provoking guide to ethical coexistence with the diverse creatures of Earth." —Kirkus Reviews

"This trenchant and masterful blend of political analysis, philosophical study, and call to action is a must-read.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

TRANSCRIPT

Timothy Williamson (Oxford, Yale)

Philosophical method: A very short introduction

From thought experiments, to deduction, to theories, this Very Short Introduction will cause you to totally rethink what philosophy is.

• Assuming no previous knowledge of philosophy, this is a highly accesible account of how modern philosophers think and work
• Presents a distinctive view of philosophy, arguing that it is far more scientific than many philosophers think
• Includes a wealth of examples from history charting the successes and failures of philosophical thinking
• Offers a timely and much needed intervention in the current hot debate on philosophical methodology

What are philosophers trying to achieve? How can they succeed? Does philosophy make progress? Is it in competition with science, or doing something completely different, or neither?

Timothy Williamson tackles some of the key questions surrounding philosophy in new and provocative ways, showing how philosophy begins in common sense curiosity, and develops through our capacity to dispute rationally with each other. Discussing philosophy's ability to clarify our thoughts, he explains why such clarification depends on the development of philosophical theories, and how those theories can be tested by imaginative thought experiments, and compared against each other by standards similar to those used in the natural and social sciences. He also shows how logical rigour can be understood as a way of enhancing the explanatory power of philosophical theories. Drawing on the history of philosophy to provide a track record of philosophical thinking's successes and failures, Williams overturns widely held dogmas about the distinctive nature of philosophy in comparison to the sciences, demystifies its methods, and considers the future of the discipline.

ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Previously published in hardback as Doing Philosophy

Preface
1. Introduction
2. Starting from common sense
3. Disputing
4. Clarifying terms
5. Doing thought experiments
6. Comparing theories
7. Deducing
8. Using the history of philosophy
9. Using other fields
10. Model-building
11. Conclusion: the future of philosophy
References and Further Reading

Sheryl Luna (poet)

Magnificent Errors is a collection of poems that shows how mental health challenges can elicit beauty, resiliency, and hope.

In 2005, Sheryl Luna burst onto the poetry scene with Pity the Drowned Horses, which quickly became a classic of border and Southwest literature with its major point of reference in and around El Paso, Texas. Now with the poems in Magnificent Errors, Luna’s third collection and winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, Luna turns her gaze toward people living on the margins—whether it be cultural, socioeconomic, psychological, or personal—and celebrates their ability to recover and thrive. Luna reveals that individuals who suffer and experience injustice are often lovely and awe inspiring. Her poems reflect on immigrants in a detention camp, a meth addict, a homeless individual, and someone on food stamps. She explores the voices of people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or PTSD, poets, visual artists, and people living in a mental health community setting. The author’s own journey to recovery from childhood abuse and mental illness also illuminates how healing is possible.

The poems in Magnificent Errors are lyrical, narrative, and often highly personal, exploring what it means to be the “other” and how to cope with difference and illness. They venerate characters who overcome difficulties including ostracism and degradation. People who live outside of the mainstream in poverty are survivors, and showing their experience teaches us compassion and kindness. Ideas of art, culture, and recovery flow throughout the poems, exploring artistic creativity as a means of redemption. With language that is fresh and surprising, Sheryl Luna shares these remarkable poems that bring a reader into the experiences of marginalization and offer hope that grace and restoration do indeed follow.

“With Magnificent Errors, Luna has broken the regional boundaries of the American Southwest and become one of America’s finest poets.” —Dagoberto Gilb, author of Before the End, After the Beginning

“In Magnificent Errors, Sheryl Luna shows us once again why she is one of America’s premier poets. Her gutsy, gorgeous language, her hard-won vision of grit and grace—all bid us enter the universe of a poetic saint whose earthy wisdom is unparalleled.” —Joy Roulier Sawyer, author of Lifeguards and Tongues of Men and Angels

"Sheryl Luna's voice is unforgettable because she has a visionary touch where her experiences become our own. As readers, we are blessed to find ourselves in her poems. We have been waiting. As a poet, she shows us, in powerful poem after poem, what it takes for the poet to reveal her place in a difficult world. The result is a book that opens when the poet says so and rests, gently, in the reader's hands." —Ray Gonzalez, author of Feel Puma

"Since her 2005 debut Pity the Drowned Horses, Luna has excelled at the elegant lyric, yet what stands out here are the interior landscapes that bridge a visionary attention to nature and raw reflections on mental illness, abuse, trauma, and healing. . . . Luna’s book beautifully expands upon the many intersections between Chicana ecopoetics and disability poetics, while claiming its own lyric territories." —The Latinx Project

"Like her acclaimed first book 'Pity the Drowned Horses' and second book 'Seven,' Luna's newest work reminds readers, no matter a person's socio-economic or mental status, all of humanity is linked. Every poem in this collection is a standout. Each piece succinctly captures the discontent of the country's working poor." —Latino Book Review

Author

Sheryl Luna’s first collection, Pity the Drowned Horses, won the inaugural Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize for emerging Latino/a poets (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, Anderson Center, Ragdale Foundation, and Canto Mundo. She received the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation Award from Sandra Cisneros in 2008. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, Kalliope, and Notre Dame Review, among others.

Transcript

August: (00:09)
"Listening to Sky: There are song shells in our pink ears. We take apart. We break. We forsake. Unthinkable girl dismembered by 17 year old boy. Sky weaving a red lit thread. We are but guests among dragging gray clouds. Tapping to the beat of stars and making music, we refuse to forget ourselves in the first snow. Newspaper stories tell us we matter, tell us we don't matter. The dying churches feed us the paradox of living, the peacock's beauty tinged pride, the Magnificence of Errors. Praise more than blackberries, praise more than sunshine.

August: (00:58)
At home in our graves, we are less than politics and language, trust and opening of windows. Let go of smug, selfish days. I hear leaves scraping across pavement, falling from above at an angle, pumpkins half eaten by squirrels. There are secrets we keep from ourselves. We're trying too hard. Language drifts, fogged and moony. We find our single voice in a flurry of birds. Forgetting the self, we can finally hear the sky sigh."

August: (01:39)
That's the poem Listening to Sky by Sheryl Luna and it's part of her book titled Magnificent Errors. Magnificent Errors, subtitled Poems by Sheryl Luna, winner of the Ernest Sanders Prize in Poetry. This volume is published by University of Notre Dame Press, 2022.

August: (02:03)
A couple of quotes about this. This is from Dagoberto Gilb. He says, "With Magnificent Errors, Luna has broken the regional boundaries of the American Southwest and become one of America's finest poets."

August: (02:18)
And this is from Joy Roulier Sawyer, "In Magnificent Errors, Sheryl Luna shows us once again why she's one of America's premier poets. Her gutsy, gorgeous language, her hard won vision of grit and grace, all bid us enter the universe of a poetic saint whose earthy wisdom is unparalleled."

August: (02:42)
And for my own testimony, I'll say this volume often I shared it with my son and my wife, and they both liked it. I liked it. It was something that was often poignant and lump in the throat, but also inspiring, or I said the word "bouncy." But I think it's the thing you read and you have a new appreciation for things, even though you're feeling more emotional.

August: (03:14)
So this is Talks With Poets and I'm pleased to welcome Sheryl Luna. She's the author of many poetry collections, including the award-winning Pity The Drowned Horses and Seven. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, Kalliope and the Notre Dame Review, among others.

August: (03:36)
Welcome, Sheryl.

Sheryl Luna: (03:38)
Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

August: (03:40)
Great. So Magnificence of Errors was in that poem and it's also the title of your book. Quite a pairing: Errors and Magnificence. I'd often thought of Errors as being sometimes brilliant, but I was certainly not boring like correctness, but Magnificent is an interesting choice there. The sentence in the poem, it', "The dying churches feed us the paradox of living, the peacock's beauty tensed pride, the Magnificence of Errors." So looking at the sentence, you might think, "Well, this is something that is being fed to us by something that's dying." But, for me, I thought that there was something magnificent about errors in this context. It wasn't, "Oh, this is something that I don't like."

August: (04:32)
Tell me about that and the decision to name the volume Magnificent Errors.

Sheryl Luna: (04:39)
I think for that particular poem when it came about, I was thinking about mistakes, mistakes I've made, mistakes people make, in general, and how there's something beautiful in that if we learn something from the mistakes. And I think for the title that has a lot to do with it. A lot of the poems, I was in transitional housing for 11 months and a lot of the poems are about people I met in that situation and they were often making mistakes. They might have been an addict or something that they were struggling with, but that there's a beauty in learning from that and overcoming such a thing. So I thought that I wanted to celebrate people who struggle and make mistakes and that there's something beautiful in coming out of that and surviving.

August: (05:47)
That came through very strongly in all of the poems really. I don't know. Let's see. For example, we can take Rubbernecking. I'll just read the second half. "We have no answers. Some of us missed the broadcast to success. The neighborhood fills with unseen, deep throated robins. Remember what it means to be alone. We say disliking or loving mad streets where the broken fearlessly ride buses. We cannot fix the contest outside even if we rubberneck our way through accident and luck."

August: (06:30)
For me, I just thought about this being someone who was on the outside and I looked at it was looking at people who were fearlessly riding buses as though for this person to ride a bus was a big accomplishment. I mean, how do they do it really?

Sheryl Luna: (06:52)
Right.

August: (06:53)
And if you have social anxiety, it's very difficult to get in the car and drive down the road. How do these people get in these buses?

August: (07:01)
Go ahead. It looked like you were-

Sheryl Luna: (07:03)
Oh no. I was just saying that that's very true. Anxiety can get in the way of that, crowds. And it's just amazing when you take the bus. It's just the people on the bus. It's very interesting. Often there's almost something interesting that goes on every time you take a bus.

August: (07:24)
But it takes some ability to open the window or to take a risk to get on the bus. And also this idea of rubbernecking, it seems if you are ... I was thinking, to me, it was, if you are trapped at home agoraphobic or social anxiety, to give the medical terms, you end up rubbernecking your life or watching the TV and seeing what is happening to other people. Was that part of what you were thinking here?

Sheryl Luna: (07:54)
Well, I think we have a fascination for accidents, and not just car accidents, but just difficulty, drama.

August: (08:04)
Absolutely.

Sheryl Luna: (08:05)
I was thinking of that Johnny Depp trial. People were involved in it and there is an isolation that comes with that, in a way, a deterioration of faith in people, but we survive and we move on. I think that's what I was getting at there. Just the fascination with difficulty. And do you believe in luck or not? A lot of people, a lot of writers, will say they don't believe in luck. I do. [inaudible 00:08:40].

August: (08:39)
Yeah. I got that sense from these poems. There's this possibility of something serendipitous happening at any time.

August: (08:48)
Another poem was Finding Water that says, "Deserts irrigated with labor. We do not understand our own messages. Cup bearers, givers of water. We can drown in the past. Drunks holding signs, begging for liquor money, forsaking our own names. We are fiery assurances, aquifers, mountain streams. What shapes us runs exhaustible, necessary. There is no meaningless voice in suffering. No one will remember the day we die in the end. In solitude heat breaks over our backs, yet all of us loving the musical sound of birds."

August: (09:36)
To me, what this poem said to me was you have these drunks and beggars, but they are actually the assurances and the aquifers. They are the fiery assurance and they have the heat breaking over their backs yet, like everyone else, they're loving the musical sound of birds.

August: (09:59)
Was that your idea that in this poem, the drunks and the beggars are ... That we are the fiery assurances?

Sheryl Luna: (10:06)
Yes. I think a lot of the book ... Well, these two poems deal a lot with idea of paradox that we can be two things simultaneously. We can be struggling with mental illness, for instance and, at the same time, beautiful and fiery, something to be celebrated. But I do think people struggling with poverty, there's oftentimes something beautiful about the way they survive and function just like that. So I think I have an interest in celebrating things that might be deemed inappropriate or abnormal or something negative to be despised or looked down upon. And so I think that may be where the fiery comes from. A fiery desire to live fully despite circumstances.

August: (11:17)
Yes. So I work in a psychiatric ward, and when you're saying that I'm thinking of, in the adolescent wing, a young woman who is in the psychiatric ward and yet playing music. She's 15, playing music. She wants to play really ... Well, music that's maybe could be said to be inappropriate. And that's lots of words that someone would say are inappropriate. As the song about quarter of the way through she climbs up on the table. This is outside in the school yard. Climbs up on the table and starts twerking and people say, "That's inappropriate. You have to stop [inaudible 00:12:03] music inappropriate." But in a way you'd think what would be better than dancing on tables? I mean, everyone would like to be able to lose the inhibitions that you could actually do that. And she's doing it, but it's all inappropriate.

August: (12:20)
Yet I walk away thinking she is so full of life. And also someone who comes to the aid of the other people when they're feeling down, more so than anyone else. I wanted to play this little clip for you. This is from Chris Farley. You remember the Chris Farley Show on Saturday Night Live?

Sheryl Luna: (12:39)
Yeah.

August: (12:39)
Okay. I'll show it.

Chris Farley: (12:45)
Mr. Daniels has done The Purple Rose of Cairo, Terms of Endearment, Arachnophobia and Something Wild, which is an awesome flick.

Jeff Daniels: (12:54)
Oh, thanks. Thank you.

Chris Farley: (12:57)
Remember, in Something Wild when Melanie Griffith had you handcuffed to the bed? Remember that?

Jeff Daniels: (13:02)
Yeah.

Chris Farley: (13:03)
And you had to make that phone call, remember? And you're chained to the thing and you couldn't get away?

Jeff Daniels: (13:11)
Yeah, yeah. I remember.

Chris Farley: (13:14)
That was awesome. Okay. So you were also in The Purple Road to Cairo?

Jeff Daniels: (13:22)
Yeah, yeah, I was.

Chris Farley: (13:26)
Remember when you were doing your movie and Mia Farrow was watching and then you came down off the screen and talked to her and you were in black and white when you were on screen, but then when you talked to her, you were in color?

Jeff Daniels: (13:40)
Yeah. What about it?

Chris Farley: (13:41)
Do you remember that?

Jeff Daniels: (13:46)
Yes.

August: (13:52)
I thought that the one way this interview could go would be, I would just read your poem and say, "That was awesome [inaudible 00:13:57]-

Sheryl Luna: (13:56)
God.

August: (13:59)
... and do you remember writing that?" But because I'm not sure about asking you other things about your biography or whatnot. In a way, the poems speak for themselves and if you thought that they needed biography, you would've added that.

August: (14:15)
But you hear a lot about culture these days where people identify as a certain thing. In the Blurb value they talked about you as being a representative of Southwest literature and as someone who has been ... Oh, it says, "The author's own journey to recovery from childhood abuse and mental illness also illuminates how healing is possible."

August: (14:43)
Is there anything about your biography that, I mean, you think is helpful, whether you'd listeners to know about?

Sheryl Luna: (14:53)
I think that our struggles come through. Well, I want to share my struggles in a sense. I had a woman that lives in my building and her mother came up to me and said, "Oh, my goodness, I can relate to the poems about trauma because it mirrors my own life." So I know some people don't like confessional type poems, but I think, in a sense, that's a silencing mechanism if you're told you can't write about certain things. So I went ahead and did that. It's not all autobiographical at all. I often write from first person with the conflating characters that I know. So I think the trauma from early childhood, maybe growing up along the border between cultures, I like to look at things as gray, rather than necessarily black and white. I like to try to do that. And I don't know how important biography is.

Sheryl Luna: (16:04)
I like what you said, you want the poems to speak for themselves. Every time I interview, I get a little anxious about having to deal with certain topics, but sometimes it's easier to write than talk about [inaudible 00:16:20].

August: (16:19)
Sure.

Sheryl Luna: (16:21)
But I think everybody has a story to tell. Everybody struggles with something and I think that's what makes us human. And the term "universality" was thrown about a lot when I was in grad school many years ago. And I think you want your poems to reach as many people as possible, but it's problematic to say something that's universal [inaudible 00:16:54] everyone. So I don't know if that answers your question?

August: (16:55)
No, that does. That's very helpful. And I completely understand the sense of anxiety about that. Someone being reduced to descriptions, I'm not interested in that.

August: (17:08)
I think I'd like to talk about some poems, both about the border and about PTSD. Would you mind reading one of the poems?

Sheryl Luna: (17:22)
No, I'll do that.

August: (17:24)
I was thinking about Tornillo's tent prison for migrant children, page eight.

Sheryl Luna: (17:30)
"Tornillo's tent prison for migrant children: There's a compulsion to sing of ranches outside El Paso, where [inaudible 00:17:44] and [inaudible 00:17:46] keep everyone happy. Meditating on the familiar, I remember the fence, the border, and being alone. Better to be in the open desert than cave. Men in rags once slept on our lawn. Look, I am honoring men and mothers who cry. Tornillo, a tent city. 471 parents deported without their children. [inaudible 00:18:25] traded for freedom that never came. What is it that divides us? A fence, metal, reaching high to the sky along a highway? Or hate? What is this huge Mexican flag flaps nearby? I walk down a sandy path. All that is familiar, a mirage.

Sheryl Luna: (18:54)
There is only one pond in El Paso at Ascarate Park. The ducks, they're thin and hungry for more than bread. The powerful have the strongest appetite. The buildings are teaching us, things fall, all things fall. The demagogue bites cleanly. If I could calm the angry mob and send Mexico a song, I would. The Rio Grande, a slow, drying hope. The Santa Fe Bridge and its crossers know what we don't or won't. The deportees are seeking tenderness. The shadow on the wall of the Oval Office berates the universe. How bitterly we argue or remain silent."

August: (20:03)
Yeah, thank you. Yeah. This was just a really powerful poem and I think, for me, it took something that was in the news that I didn't want to think about and made it very close and concrete and emotional.

August: (20:21)
I thought the image of, "The ducks were thin and hungry for more than bread. The powerful had the strongest appetite. The buildings are teaching us all things fall. The demagogue bites cleanly." Really moving. And one of the things I thought was that this way we're talking about two objects, right? Buildings that fall and fences that go high. We're talking about these physical things in the world that mean so much, that matter so much to our experience, and the deportees are seeking tenderness. Just a really beautiful thought. Also, how bitterly we argue and how bitterly we remain silent. The silence can be very bitter.

August: (21:12)
Is there anything that ... Again, if you thought that commentary on this would've helped the poem you would have added it. But is there anything that came to mind while you were reading it that you would like to mention?

Sheryl Luna: (21:27)
Well, I think I was touching a little on the polarization that goes on regarding this issue. And I think most of the people with an opinion don't really understand what it is to live on the border. And I think one thing that makes Trump popular right now with certain people is a demonization, in my opinion, of immigrants that come across the border. I think he called them rapists. Once in a video I was watching ... And they don't show this often, but someone was protesting in the audience and he said, "Are you from Mexico?" sarcastically.

Sheryl Luna: (22:20)
And so I'm sure you know about the Walmart shooting in El Paso?

August: (22:25)
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Sheryl Luna: (22:27)
I think I was writing about a lot of contemporary issues surrounding that and wanting to humanize those families that were separated. And I think that they, in a lot of ways, have been dehumanized and that's [inaudible 00:22:46].

August: (22:46)
Well, the poem really did. One of the people I showed it too, was a reflex Republican and read it and said that, "This really did show me a different side of this." It's the magic of really ... I guess the concreteness of it, of really seeing people, as opposed to these big abstract ideas. I think another person I showed the whole book to was talking about the birds. There are birds often. In this case, "The ducks were thin and hungry for more than bread." And in Rubbernecking, "The neighborhood fills with unseen deep throated robins." And The Hummingbird, which might be my favorite, "I will remember the red hummingbird I saw today hovering on the path before my heart."

August: (23:40)
I actually also, I don't mean to ... This is just for fun. I wanted to share another clip with you just to be whimsical here, something about the ducks. And I remember when I was a kid and grownups would talk about, "Oh, look at that bird there." And I was, "Yeah, whatever." And now I'm, "Oh, look at that great blue heron."

August: (24:04)
Is it something that you have always been interested in? Or recently? Or-

Sheryl Luna: (24:10)
Well, I think I grew up in the desert where there were pigeons and grackles. And now I live in Colorado, so there are all sorts of birds. I do love them. I probably could become a bird watcher.

August: (24:29)
Are you a bird watcher? Or you said you could be?

Sheryl Luna: (24:30)
No, not really. Maybe something I could do.

August: (24:36)
Right. Feel free to say this if you think you don't want to answer this question, but one of the people I show it to was asking, "So does she visualize some ... Say, take an image that she's seen and then try to get the words to match it, to capture it?"

Sheryl Luna: (24:49)
Oftentimes, oftentimes. I haven't written in a while. I've had a long dry spell with writing. But last night I jotted down some images along with some storylines or themes, I guess. And I was just brainstorming. Someone had told me, "Try brainstorming." So I guess some ways I do start with an image. It's not always something I've seen, but usually something that got my attention. I think it helps to be observant [inaudible 00:25:27].

August: (25:27)
Well, let's read, I think ... Well, the other two about PTSD, there's Adopting Stepfather and Lamentation to Praise. I guess I'll read Lamentation to Praise. They're both really moving. "Lamentation to Praise: Startled by trauma, I touch no one, hear only the silence of forgetting, talk endlessly but speak to no one. When I remember childhood rape, it is with clarity. Decades after disremembering, it all comes back. Do you want the details? I won't tell you.

August: (26:10)
Tonight a fox runs the streets, shaggy, thin and skittish. A burgeoning moon fractures the lake. I paint trees with pink, blue and purple leaves. Seasons drift like a refrain of thoughts. When I remember shock, it is as sunset and early moon hanging onto the light."

August: (26:39)
Really moving for me, this poem. For me, I was really interested in this image of the fox. "Fox runs the streets, shaggy, thin and skittish." To me, boy, I experience trauma. Is this like that? Being, you're less generous, you're more closed in, you're grasping. "Skittish" is a great word for it, though. I'd never thought of it before, but it's a great word for it. And things just seem harsh. It's not a time when you're generous and open. And I thought that really captured that nicely. And then the fractures, the touching no one. When you would most need touching and healing, you can't do it because of your trauma.

August: (27:37)
So I thought this was just very helpful even, and poignant. I wasn't sure about the title, Lamentation to Praise. I couldn't really make heads or tails of that which ... I don't know. What are your thoughts on the title or on the poem?

Sheryl Luna: (27:57)
Well, I think there are different stages to healing trauma maybe and just also grief. There are different stages you go through. So that was a lament to me, the poem. But the nature, I think, well, maybe there's not a lot of nature in it, but I think the lamentation can be followed by praise of the natural world or the things that-

August: (28:29)
Aha.

Sheryl Luna: (28:31)
... help one get through a time maybe where trauma is affecting you.

August: (28:41)
I understand that completely now. I see. So it's a progress. It's going from one A to B, as opposed to lamentation is about the praise. That's right. Okay. This phrase, "Slowly beginning to move on. I am kissed by a wet, sloppy sky." Just not what you're expecting, and it's just really with such an image you're expecting wet, sloppy kiss. Those words go together. In this case it's the wet, sloppy, everything, the way I read it.

August: (29:13)
The Hummingbird ... I guess we're running out of time. So I can't read the whole thing, but it's about ... Well, maybe would you mind reading it? It is a longer one, but if you wouldn't mind, I would really like to hear you read it.

Sheryl Luna: (29:30)
You know what page it's on?

August: (29:32)
Yeah. It's 69.

Sheryl Luna: (29:33)
"The Hummingbird: There will be exploding stars during the Armageddon of my soul. I will gather all my pretty blooms, earn them for an urn. The flash will fizzle like a sparkler. I will seek my final pulse and brief life. I will die with dilating eyes, listening to an imaginary wind, watch streams glimmer with small stars. Lovers will moan inside my heart. I will swim frothy waters. Trees will loom perfectly irregular. Saplings will survive their traumas. If longevity will have me, my hands will tremble with thick blue veins. Addendums to my past will not be added. Poets will not write poems for me. Painters will pass by. I will no longer doubt the God of childhood. They will place a Bible in my clasped hand. I will remember the red hummingbird I saw today hovering on the path before my heart, uninterested in my procession toward silence."

August: (31:18)
Thank you so much. Yeah, that was just such a tremendous poem for me. I think it's amazing how much time one spends, or I spend, thinking about one's last moments, what they will be like and trying to make sure they will not be terrifying. And this, I thought, it's very hopeful really. "If longevity will have me, my hands will tremble with thick blue veins." Not, "Ooh, it's terrible to be old but, if I get there, my hands will tremble with thick blue veins." And I just thought the idea of ... To me, I was thinking, "Well, yeah, right on your death bed you don't have to be thinking about rosebud. You can be thinking about the hummingbird that you saw today. Some detail from today." So it was very uplifting really. And, "The hummingbird hovering before my heart." Yes. That's the thing about hummingbirds. They hover and they don't really hover up in the sky. They hover right at your level and it's a striking thing.

August: (32:30)
But thank you so much for reading and for talking with me again. I don't like to be ... If someone's asking me too many questions, I feel I've been poked and pricked on and all that. I hope you don't feel that way?

Sheryl Luna: (32:43)
No, I don't.

August: (32:44)
Okay. Good. Tremendous volume, again. Magnificent Errors. Poems. Sheryl Luna: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022. Thanks so much Sheryl. It's great to meet you.

Sheryl Luna: (32:57)
You too. Thank you, August. It was really, really wonderful. Bye-bye.

August: (33:01)
Bye.

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

Crossing: A Transgender Memoir

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
 
“I visited womanhood and stayed. It was not for the pleasures, though I discovered many I had not imagined, and many pains too. But calculating pleasures and pains was not the point. The point was who I am.”
 
Once a golden boy of conservative economics and a child of 1950s privilege, Deirdre McCloskey (formerly Donald) had wanted to change genders from the age of eleven. But it was a different time, one hostile to any sort of straying from the path—against gays, socialists, women with professions, men without hats, and so on—and certainly against gender transition. Finally, in 1995, at the age of fifty-three, it was time for McCloskey to cross the gender line.
 
Crossing is the story of McCloskey’s dramatic and poignant transformation from Donald to Dee to Deirdre. She chronicles the physical procedures and emotional evolution required and the legal and cultural roadblocks she faced in her journey to womanhood. By turns searing and humorous, this is the unflinching, unforgettable story of her transformation—what she lost, what she gained, and the women who lifted her up along the way.

Brad Reedy (Evoke Therapy Programs)

The audacity to be you: learning to love your horrible, rotten self

Expanding on his first book (The journey of the heroic parent) Reedy discusses how all our relationships are connected to the relationship we have with ourselves. He shows how the foundation for intimacy with partners, our ability to parent effectively, and the meaningfulness of our lives can be tied to how well we have unraveled our unique childhood history.

The audacity to be you: Learning to love your horrible, rotten self is a simple but bold exploration into what makes us human and why happiness and connection are elusive for so many.

Reedy's work is counter-intuitive, but readers will often have the experience of being found--and understood--as they make their way through his work. Many readers say that reading Brad's work is like hearing something for the first time that you already knew but just didn't have the words for it.

Dr. Reedy is a renowned author, therapist, podcaster, and public speaker.  His approach is accessible and non-threatening. He is a prolific keynote speaker, T.V. and radio guest, and he travels the world presenting to audiences and training therapists.

Through stories gathered from decades as a therapist, co-founder, and clinical director of Evoke Therapy Programs, Reedy gives the reader an intimate picture of mental health and healing. The audacity to be you explains how our personalities are built, brick by brick. From what it means to be a Self, we learn how to authentically love others. Readers will learn the essence of mental health, and, with that, the stigma of mental illness evaporates.

Reedy debunks toxic myths so common in our culture, including: "You are only as happy as your least happy child." He shows how good psychotherapy goes beyond problem solving. Reedy teaches, "In this way of thinking, you don't get to be right anymore. But you get to be a Self. And that is so much better. That is 'The Audacity to Be You.'"

To learn more about his work go to evoketherapy.com or drbradreedy.com. You can find his podcast "Finding You: An Evoke Therapy Podcast" on your favorite podcast app or by going to soundcloud.com.

transcript

August: Welcome. I'm August Baker, and welcome to the podcast today. I've recently been working with parents of children who have been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons, and I've also had a chance to work with some adolescents directly in a locked psychiatric hospital. And in the course of that work, I came to hear about a program called Evoke Therapy in Utah and are very good things about it. And in the course of my puzzles, I decided to go to the website, it's evoketherapy.com and see what was there. And I found a book. And today we're going to be talking about that book. It's called The Audacity to Be You Learning to Love Your Horrible Rotten Self. It's 2020, and the author is Brad Reedy, who is a co-founder of Evoke Therapy Programs and the clinical director, he's also the author of The Journey of the Heroic Parent, and he's the host of Finding You an Evoke Therapy podcast. Welcome Dr. Reedy.

Dr. Reedy: Very happy to be here. Honored. Thank you for having me.

August: Oh, thanks. I tell you one of the first things that parents say is that when their kid is in a psychiatric hospital or they're adolescent, it's very different. The reaction you get with the community is very different than if your child was in the hospital for a broken leg or a tumor. And that's what part of what makes it so terrifying. Can you speak to that?

Dr. Reedy: That's a great beginning question. I have a lot of compassion for that. Sometimes doing this work. I forget how tight that the stigma and the shame of mental health grips people because talk about it, I talk about my own work and, and my own personal therapy over the years. And so I, I sometimes forget that. So it's nice to be reminded. For me, it comes back to maybe the simplest illustration of that kind of shame and stigma that I think about. I talk about this idea that if I were to say to you, my brother had a good baby that he has , they just had gave birth my brother and sister-in-law and said that, that the baby's a good baby. You would know that the baby has no needs. It's not crying, not sleeping, sleeping throughout the night probably that, that all of its needs and feelings are contained in a tight little box that makes them easier.

So I think from birth, we learned that our emotional needs are so taxing to the people who care about us and love us, that we learn that good is to not have needs. Good is to not struggle, good is to not feel big feelings. And implied in that we don't say this ever, of course, but bad is to have all of those things. And that's what these psychiatric hospitals and programs like mine are doing. They're holding on to people whose feelings are spilling out in their symptoms and their behaviors. They'll self harm, their self-medicating habits. And so I think it goes back to that, that that human idea that good is to not have needs and not to be messy, and the implication that bad. And so I think when people respond with that way in contrast to like a broken leg, or if you're having problems with your with your heart, I think we just go to that young place that the best way to stay safe and to not be abandoned is to stay quiet and not make waves and not be a mess and not need things at an emotional level, interestingly.

August: That's right. Yeah. It seems like maybe there's a, the community wants to say, not me. I'm not that person. I'm not infected by that. That's not spilling onto me.

So you're talking about parents and you're dealing with teens in your program and yet the book does not have that in its title. And I think that's because parents and teens are humans. the idea of my horrible rotten self. I was thinking it's a ancient idea, really. And job in the Book of Job, it's says first of humans before God as maggots or worms. And there is this sense that one can have that I'm not unfamiliar with. That there's a, there's something that I is bad that I don't, that I want to hide for whatever reason. I don't even know what it is. But I need to hide

Dr. Reedy: . I love that you bring up Job in the journey of the heroic parent. I go back to the first story in the Bible in Genesis. The first thing that happened when they broke the rules aid of the tree that they weren't supposed to eat, of whatever that metaphor means to you, they did wrong. The devil always speaks in half truth, right? He tells part truths and part lie. That's what makes it so insidious. And so what he said was right after they woke up, he said, cover yourselves up and you're naked and go hide from God when he comes back looking for you. And so I call that the first real sin of shame. I think about it in that way, that the shame is that experience that who our nakedness, who we are, is not going to be acceptable before God.

And we learn that again, because in our context, when we are children, this happened to me when my needs exceeded the bandwidth and the capacity that my mother had, she took that inadequacy that she felt, and she put it back on me. And said, something's wrong with you. You're being too sense. She called me melodramatic. That was the phrase that I remember as a child. And it's just another way of saying, you're too sensitive. You're overreacting, you're making mountains out of molehills. And what she was trying to do was take the inadequacy that she felt of not being able to soothe me and attend to me and put it back on me. So I felt bad and I got smaller. So I think that idea of being, being naked before God, being who we are before God is the spiritual dilemma of our lives. Can we nietzche said that after we battle the dragon of should and should not, that if we complete that battle that we turn back into ourselves. He said, as naked children, that we become who we are. And I really do think that that's the goal of therapy. The goal of therapy is to become who we are. We fear that because we had such bad experiences with being ourselves and being punished for it when we were growing up.

August: Right. One of the things I was very impressed by in your book is that in the right up front, you dedicate the book for my therapist, Dr. Jamie Gill, who showed me what it means to be a self and love another. So I'm 58 years old, and I've, as you note in your book, you've, I've been in a lot of therapy over your life. I've, I think I've been in therapy half my adult life, probably. And I've been interested in it and interested in how it works or why it works. And I've read a lot of books and a lot of, I think this is the first time I can remember reading a book written by a therapist who actually says, oh, by the way, my therapy really worked. . Often the people writing the books will say, this is the way I do it. This is the way it should be done. But they may even say, but my analyst was terrible and but they don't really point to that. The therapy process is being really important to their lives. And it was really nice to see you doing that here,

Dr. Reedy: Thank you for that. I, I have a lot of clients and people that follow me or read my work or listen to my podcast, who reach out to me because the message is resonating. I want to be clear. I'm not presenting something wholly unique. It's out there. I'm just, I've synthesized it and given my version of it to the world, it's, it w you know, DW Winnicott, it's started with Sigmund Freud and Carl Young. It's, it's Melanie Klein. You know, this stuff is out there, but I'm just putting it in my modern context. My modern life. But when people say to me, why doesn't my family therapist at home, my counselor at home, why aren't they talking about this? Why didn't I learn some of this in school? My best guess August is that they haven't done the work. I mean, when you do the work when you get seen, Carl Roger said it.

When you get seen, it's as if you can relax. And it's as if tears, the tears that come into your eyes are saying, finally, thank God somebody saw me. It's what happened when, in Victor Hugo's story, when the bishop gave the candlesticks back to Jean, Val Jean, he showed him grace, and he saw him and all he said was, take this love that I've given you. You can feel it in the story. You can feel it when you're watching it, and now give it to everybody else, which is what you want to do when you feel it. The minute you experience that kind of grace. And I don't mean from a religious context in my context, it came from a human being sitting across from me for 23 years. Once you feel that the only thing you want to do is give it to other people and say, who you are is, I know you've hurt people.

I know you've made mistakes. We all have, and I've made more than my share, but you're worthy of recovery. You're worthy of love, you're worthy of belonging. You're worthy, you matter. And that idea, that dedication is just to say, look, I'm not on some pedestal. I haven't, I'm not inventing a theory by any means. I'm just sharing with you the gift. Every time I thank Jamie every so often, I still see her. I saw her this morning. Every time I see her, or on occasion when I tell her thank you with tears in eyes, thank you for saving my life. She'll say, I'm just doing to you what somebody did for me. And that's all it is. It's just, it's the Jean Val jean story. It's like, once the bishop showed him that what the, that kind of loving grace was, all he wanted to do was spend his life helping people. And that was the rest of the story.

August: Right? Yeah. I, it's interesting that you mentioned Carl Rogers. I I've read some Carl Rogers and yeah. His idea was, as I understand it, people thought, if you're not giving advice to the your patients, then people are bad. And so you're just going to be creating these beasts. And he said, I don't know my recollection, he said, I don't really know why. It's not like it has to be this way. But the fact of the matter is, the empirical fact is that when people see themselves, they tend to move towards this more mutual position or this more, once they accept themselves, it just so happens that they often move towards being kinder to other people. Not like it has to be that way. Just that was his empirical experience.

Dr. Reedy: Hey, it is. It's what happens. You're right. He said specifically his quote that relates and teaches that story. He said, the great paradox is that it's only when I accept myself that I can change. But we're terrified of acceptance. We're terrified to not greet the tantruming child with anger and rage and punishment because we're living within the world of Darth Vader. That's what that story was about. Darth Vader's solution to the world was control and power and aggression and hate, hate for symptoms, hate for the parts of us that cause problems. And you contrast that with Yoda, who's really the model of a Buddhist monk. And his idea was, we embrace it. We listen to the crying child, because it's telling us something that we can't otherwise hear. If we learn to develop new ears and new eyes, we can hear and find the child.

And when you soothe the child, the tantrum a true modern day philosopher that talks about global warming in a philosophical and spiritual context. And he said, remember that evil is not the cause. It's the result. And so that terrifies us. We have to live then with uncertainty. We have to live with what the Buddhist would call a lack of attachment. Darth Vader didn't want to suffer again. And so he gripped on tightly to life to control it. And Yoda felt it and let the emotions and the pain and the grief pass through him. And he didn't retreat as he teaches. He didn't retreat to anger and rage and hate to control and prevent his authentic suffering.

August: Right. I really appreciated also when you mentioned Star Wars in the book in terms of, the way people, we keep having these, school shootings or whatever and everyone always acts shocked, like how

Dr. Reedy: Right.

August: Happen as though to say, I am so different

Dr. Reedy: Right.

August: From other people. And I think you were saying that we see these, these things on Star War. We're fascinated by these things.

Dr. Reedy: A child that feels alone and on the outside and powerless and disenfranchised with access to weapons of max destruction, the recipe. We go to Star Wars and droves and we understand the story. And then when we come out into the world and see the atrocity play out in real life, we are intellectually dumbfounded because we've lost contact with the parts of ourselves that when we get cut off on the street, we flip the middle finger. That's the same rage. It's not as harmful and destructive of course. But that's what Yoda was trying to teach is he said, look, if you want to understand darkness, you have to know yourself. That's what learning to love the horrible rotten self is when you come to understand not just the good and pretty and smart parts, but all of you, then you can approach the person struggling with more harmful and dangerous behaviors.

You can treat them with the compassion that heals instead of the rage and the hate and the anger that, caused the problem in the first place. So yeah, I think the story is by coincidence, there's no way you could have known this, but my family's been watching the Star Wars series, the original movie series in the last week. We watched four in a row, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Six was last night. And we watch it as a therapy family because we have four therapists in our family. And so we pause and we talk about how this motif, this myth illustrates life over and over again. You either gravitate toward hate and fear and rage and control, or you surrender to love, which comes with it pain and sadness and sorrow and loss and all of the feelings that we, that we struggle to feel, that we struggle to sit with.

August: And I think, I mean it was, I should, first of all, you're right. You're not saying, oh, I had this new method or anything. In fact, I think you say you don't like to give advice, what you really do is just say what worked for you. And I appreciate, it sounded to me like, first of all, it's facing yourself, seeing yourself . And then it's being honest towards the outside world also. Being, having one, one person that you can be honest with and you realize you not get left. And then it sounds like you then took the next step to be honest with as many people as possible. And they hesitatingly maybe see where the chips fall. And it turned out not everybody leaves when you're just honest.

Dr. Reedy: I think John Lennon said it at one point, if you just tell the truth, the people that'll be left standing around you are your people

August: Right.

Dr. Reedy: It's kind of simple. And I'll tell you the truth is, I've been a liar most of my life. I wouldn't have called it that. If you had told me that 15, 20 years ago, I would've thought you were crazy. because I see myself as having integrity and trying to do the right thing when I failed, when my marriage, the marriage that I'm still in when I thought it was over, which is what, what needs to happen to the narcissistic wound, to the narcissistic person. They have to experience failure and oftentimes go through a period of humiliation. It was either kill myself because I wasn't worth it. That was, I considered it a lot , or it was keep going and keep walking through this and you'll find something on the other side, which is what I hope for.

I was going to Jamie see Jamie all along. And so, what I'm trying to do is encourage people to find a safe place to find themselves. And then when they do that, see if they can find the people around them to tell that truth. You know, it's just, it's not like a big philosophical mystery. It's like, what do you want to eat today? Do you want to go to church with me on Sunday or Saturday? Do you like pickles with your sandwich? it's everything. And when you start to learn to tell the truth, then you find your connections. But like I said most of us spend our time this and Brine Brown, I mean, everybody talks about this. Most of us are so in need of connection that we never had. That we will fit ourselves. We will change ourselves into we, we'll, I said something to my wife last night, she asked me something and I answered, and then a minute later I said, actually that's not true,

August: .

Dr. Reedy: She said, were you lying? I said to both of us. Yes. . And I just, I said it, I tried it on for size and I sat with her for a minute and it didn't fit. And now here's what I want, here's what I need, here's what I feel. That's what we're doing. We're just trying to help people find out who they are.

August: Right. No, I got to. So in the first chapter you have, yeah. A young woman that says to you, it's so scary to stand in my own opinion.

Dr. Reedy: Right.

August: And you say it takes a rare kind of courage or audacity. I wanted to give you a quotation and see what your reaction is. Just talk about how scary it is to stand in your own opinion. This is from Robert Bal, who you quote in the book. This is from a gathering of men. The Bill Moyer's thing. Bal says, if I go into a store, if I go in, for example, with my wife into a store, and there's two sweaters. One is green and the other is blue. I can't decide. And I say to her, what do you think? She says, oh, the blue is beautiful. Immediately the green fades into some hideous color .

Dr. Reedy: Yeah.

August: Which I've had that experience so often where suddenly someone else says something and then you just adopt that.

Dr. Reedy: Yeah.

August: And so, I don't know, we just seem to be so, we're so social. That it's very difficult to, as your client said, stand in your own opinion.

Dr. Reedy: For a lot of us, the way out of childhood, the way to survive it was to do just what blinds describing. I did that. The other way is to burn the house down. The, the other day is to, to rebel. There are more than just two ways, but that's another way of doing it. And I kind of did that one also. I've done that one when things when not deciding which color sweater I liked went on long enough. And I couldn't stand at the pressure build up until I exploded. And I've exploded at several times throughout my life in big ways, kind of had these midlife crises. And, and so most of us will struggle with what I call in the book, the gravitational pull of the other, and will feel the need to unconsciously all of this is unconsciously sacrifice, dismiss, ignore, not even know what we like.

Because we need to fit in. We need to belong. We need that, what we think is connection, but it's not really connection. It's really a loss of self and an integration into somebody else's self. It's so powerful for, for us, sensitive people. I consider myself , I mean, I was called too sensitive when I was for us sensitive people. I was, my, we walk into an elevator and we know how everybody feels. And it's not an asset. It's a liability. We can feel the wants and the needs of other people. And we use that to survive childhood. That's what the drama of the gifted child is about. The most important book, in my opinion, that's ever been written about children is the gifted child was the child who could perceive what somebody else wants or needs and give it to them at the cost of the real self is what she describes. So Bal is Right. Right. Sensitively on to, to himself there.

August: So let's talk about projective identification, which I've heard a lot about, but I thought your discussion was very clear. When I first heard it, I said, oh, oh, well I do that all the time.

Dr. Reedy: Yeah. Yeah.

August:: . If the idea is if I get an email that's upsetting or something and I'm angry, I might go into the next room and pick a fight with my wife. It just seems like for some reason, something that happens or in the business setting, the client gets mad at the owner. The owner is agitated at having been lectured to. So the owner goes and talks to the middle management and agitate to them, and then the middle management goes home and pisses off their kids. And it's just like, I've heard it described also this idea of pain passing, tossing the pain. Why is it that we think it will be a, I don't know why, but I don't know if there's this sense that I'm agitated and so I'm just going to go and piss somebody else off. I don't know where that comes from. But that is the idea, right. Of projecting.

Dr. Reedy: Yeah. And working with, I have a colleague that worked with borderlines at a, at a hospital for a long time, ran borderline groups. And, and he said, they had a saying for it that they would put their stink on you. That you'd walk into the group having a typical day, and by the end of the group you'd be feeling powerless and frustrated and agitated. And then, like you said, you, if you're not aware of it and don't digest and metabolize it, you'll go home and take it on on your kids. Your kids will then kick the dog. And the dog siting, then the dog sits in the living room. The whole thing is complete. I think it's because again, it's about sitting with the feeling, digesting it, owning it, know embracing it. We want it out of us and onto the other person.

It's so, and when I'm in a therapy session and I'm starting to feel frustrated, I always ask myself, now, is this what they're feeling? Oftentimes the the obvious answer is yes. And so then I have insight into how they're, we can use, in other words, we use projective identification when it's happening to us. To understand the other, yeah. So when your child comes to you and says, you never listened to me. You're a jerk. You're an idiot, I hate you. And you have a feeling of inadequacy or you're feeling attacked. , just ask yourself, is this what the child is feeling? And you will be absolutely amazed to find out so often that's what they're feeling. , then you know how to connect to them. Then you know how to respond to them. Because now you can use that, that thing, that projective identification, that that stink, that pain passing to understand the other.

But that takes a chain breaker. That takes somebody who's going to take responsibility and say, I'm going to take this feeling. I'm not going to act it out from my own satisfaction. I'm not going to be self-indulgent in that way and go kick the dog. I'm going to sit with it, feel it. That's going to build up an empathy for me and an understanding of the other person. And I'm going to metabolize, I'm going to move through that, and then I'm going to go back to the person who gave it to me and say, in whatever way we can probably with our hearts, I see you. I get it. Now I know what you're feeling.

August: Right. One of the great things about this book is that you have cases where you talk about where they don't end pretty bow around them. And for example, I don't know if this is on top of your head, but the, you have the case where you call the the clinician Melissa and the patient.

Dr. Reedy: Oh, I know what it is. Yeah.

August: Could you tell our audience about that?

Dr. Reedy: Melissa the therapist. I was part of my job is I go around and I supervise therapist. I teach in-services. I'll go out and spend time with them, with their clients, watch their sessions, give my thoughts and insights. Maybe even model. So I'm sitting with Melissa, she's talking to this young child in our program, a teenage child who's lost parents has obvious attachment wounds that are explicit Big T trauma. And what Melissa's trying to do is she's trying to make this girl feel better. This, and this girl is accusing Melissa of not caring. She's saying, you left before we could talk last week. And Melissa's saying, wait, I talked to you twice. I had two sessions with you. I only had one session with everybody else, but I had two with you.

August: Yeah. And she says, and I saw you laughing with...

Dr. Reedy: I saw you laughing with the staff. You were, I know you were laughing about me. And I just saw Melissa wanting to make this young girl feel happy and okay and loved, which most people would say that sounds like a wonderful virtuous attempt, virtuous effort. But I had the advantage of sitting outside of that pair and watching. And I said, can I try it? And that's when I said, I think this, this young person, this young girl, I think she needs to be heard and seen and to know that yeah, you might love her for two months, three months while she's here. But she has some deep wounds that can't be fixed really easily. She has the loss of her caregivers. One is dead, one is in prison, or whatever the case is. And I think she just needs you to hear and sit with that.

And clinically speaking, what Melissa needed to, to, to allow is she needs to be the villain. Her gift would have been, my daughter has written about this, she's also a therapist. She said The greatest gift that a parent can give is to allow the child to cast them as a villain in the story. Because Melissa was unwilling to be the villain and had to be a good therapist and a good person. That's her wounding. She couldn't hold it. She had no place for it. And so she kept on trying to solve both of their, their problems. And she was causing it to escalate. So I just said this young to the young woman, I said, you're in pain, you're alone. And I hear it.

August: You say in the text, there's often no solution to these situations except to listen. In other words, hearing and sitting with someone's painful story is the solution. I have had the experience of an adolescent boy crying and saying, I just really miss my mom. She died two years ago. I really don't like being here. What are you going to say to that? I mean, I think you talk about those situations very well here about how if you're trying to accomplish something, you say, any attempt to try to get her to feel something other than what she currently felt only reinforced her feelings of aloneness. And any attempt to solve it would trivialize the immense pain and sadness that she felt.

Dr. Reedy: It's funny that you share that story in my, in the journey of the parent. That's the first story is a young man whose mother had died. Oh really? And he snapped at somebody in a group therapy session, which my old mother tongue was. I kind of punished him. And I said, go sit by yourself. because that was my training growing up. I paused after the group was over and I went over and sat with him and I said, at that time I'd gathered myself and I said, what were you doing in group? You were snapping at people. And then he started to cry. It started to rain. I remember it, this is 24 years ago, and I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember where we were sitting. He, it started to rain lightly. He started to cry and started to talk about his mother.

He said, I love my dad, but it's not the same. And all I did was cry with him. I didn't have a look on the bright side. I didn't say this will make you stronger. I didn't, I couldn't solve his unsolvable problem. I cried with him in his grief. And it was that moment, August that I had that glimpse of what I wrote about many years later, which is, that's the gift that we give, is we can sit with somebody in their unsolvable problems and cry with them. And the only thing you know, when I got MS when I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2015, I think I talked about it in the second book also. And I called a friend of a friend not knowing why I called him first, the first person, except for that he had family members that had the disease. He's an Osman and his father's Allen Osman, the oldest Osman brother. Oh, yeah. And his brother David also has MS. And they're big spokespeople for the disease. I called Tyler this friend of a friend, and I'd said, Tyler, I just got diagnosed with MS. And this 20 something year old young man said, you're not alone. I love you and I'll always be there for you. That's all he said. And I didn't even know I needed that. But what else could he say? There's a cure on the horizon or you can make,

August: You may not have the worst kind and Yeah,

Dr. Reedy: Yeah. Just, I'll be with you. And that's so hard and requires great capacity. That's why the great, I wrote about this on my social media today. The great masters of compassion, like the Buddha Clint, spent plenty of time in self care and self-reflection and meditation because they knew that kind of energy. To be there for people that are suffering requires a lot of spiritual food, a lot of, a lot of self care, a lot of time sitting and quietly meditating. So yeah, it is the, the gift of being a therapist to do it. But it asks a lot of us who have what I call empathic misery. Where we're connected to people's pain. It asks a lot. So we have to practice a lot of self-care and a lot of clear boundaries to do it Well.

August: One of the things that I think you use the word a lot, understand you want to understand the person, and I looked it up. Because I'm, we, but First of all, I thought it was interesting, the etymology, the word understand it means literally to stand among to be around. Wow. It has these two meanings. One is, has a lot of different meanings. But the two that I think might get confused, the first definition is to get the meaning of, to comprehend, to know or graph what is meant by. And to me, that has a very cognitive feeling to it not affective. There's another definition, which is number seven, which is to have a sympathetic rapport with like, no one understands me. And so, I don't know, for me, maybe it's just my own associations with the word understand. A lot of times you're saying you want your clinicians to understand, to just understand. I think to me, that means, well does that mean like figure out what happened in their background to cause this? Is it like some little theory or is it more that kind of, unconditional positive regard, I guess that more of a, it has, it's not just cognitive, it's also evaluating or . What do you think.

Dr. Reedy: I love this interview so much. This is the first time I've met you. Understanding is a shallow word. It doesn't completely communicate the robustness of the tasks that you're talking about. It comes up short for sure. Although the etymology actually kind of leans toward it.

August: Right. Yeah.

Dr. Reedy: But it is, I might get this wrong, so people are going to have to look this up, but my therapist taught me years ago that the German word for empathy was, I think it was Mitgefuhi or something like that. I can't remember. And she said it meant to sit with somebody in it. Sit with somebody. And so I think it's about just being with them at a deep level. who's the master? If, if people are wondering what we're talking about, again, since I didn't invent any of this watch, Mr. Rogers watch Fred Rogers watch the documentary that happened in 2018, 19. And the movie that came out around the same time with Tom Hanks playing the character, you will then see, he asks questions. He's curious, he, but you can sense his compassion and his feeling. He never tried to get a kid not to be scared, not to be angry. He simply listened to their fear and their anger and they were then allowed to move through it. But when it doesn't get listened to and heard and understood, then it remains fixated in the person. They remain stuck in it, they act it out. It becomes a complex for them. And so, if you want to know what I'm trying to say when I use the word understand, because it is more than an intellectual exercise, Mr. Fred Rogers is the best popular example I've ever seen of a master therapist.

August: I've often liked that. interesting thing that, Carl Rogers and Mr. Rogers had the same name. Which one are you talking about?

Dr. Reedy: They're synonymous. Right.

August: You're also, your team, I guess it seems is very, creative. It seemed. I I thought that the one example, which was quite interesting was when, well there were several. One was the example of Nick who was resistant to therapy and the parents had his brain scanned.

Dr. Reedy: Oh, yes. Yes.

August: I can tell the story. I guess from my understanding, they were trying to get understand him, get in his head. And you guys were trying to do it at a certain point. You said you realized that he was tired of people trying to poke in there.

Dr. Reedy: Yeah.

August: That was my.

Dr. Reedy: I picked up the baton of the intrusive pattern and just went along route. It was really the first really big moment where I realized what it meant to be an adult in the room and to apologize and to realize that he had a good reason for the defense. I grossly misunderstood him. And I perceived his resistance as, I didn't think of this word, but just badness, just evil. He was just being a jerk.

August: Right. He had laughed at someone had said they had gotten so drunk there, had a blackout and he laughed. Right. That was the sort of thing that a teenager would do. Yeah.

Dr. Reedy: And so I saw that as cruel because this, this boy that he was laughing with or at had almost died from alcohol poisoning.

And then I went, went to Jamie and I tell her this story. I used her as my supervisor and she's like, you could just go back out and apologize for missing him. And she walked me through what I ended up writing about, which I did. In fact, I reached out to the character that's based on, because it was too, I told this story too precisely accurate that no one would know who he is. But if he read it, I would, he might recognize it. So I asked for permission, sent him the story, and he asked me to be his therapist. And I've been his therapist since. So it made a big impact on him. When I apologized for the intrusion, when I recognized it, when I was an adult enough to say, I don't care if I want to paint myself in the light of being a good therapist and a loving person doing the right thing, the fact of the matter is I screwed up. I misunderstood. I made the mistake and I was being cruel. And when I did that for the first time, I think he started to feel that there could be somebody in his life that could understand him, somebody that could be safe. Because everybody else has been trying to drill through his defenses, which by the way, he built to protect himself from the drilling in the first place.

August: That's so profound. The other thing that, another example that was really, I thought very creative was, the one where you tell the staff he had lost both his parents, he had a significant growth in the program and then left and then came back and you say, I reflected on the job of the therapist. It wasn't to fix this young man, it was to find him. I said, rather than fixing him, and there's a lot of pressure on you to do that. You're speaking to the clinician, let's talk about what you can do. I think it is your job to find his story and tell it for him. Tell it to the staff, to his peers. Which were, that was a very interesting, just trying to do whatever out there. Can you talk a bit about, about that?

Dr. Reedy: It reminds me of the quote that I use. I think I probably mentioned someone in the book from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who says, if we could read the secret histories of our enemies, we would find in each man's story suffering sufficient to disarm all hostility. Or as Abraham Lincoln said it more succinctly, I do not like that man. I must get to know him. Once you find somebody in their context, everything that seems irrational about their behavior, self-sabotaging about their behavior, crazy pathological about their behavior makes perfect sense. So that's the job. And by telling it, I mean to the client, you reflect it back. You say, it sounds like this is what you've needed to do to survive. And you're, you're fighting the client. Then the client, again, the nervous system, the defense relaxes because they've been seen. Then they can start to deal with the trauma and the pain that's been unprocessed with the staff and the grandparents and the other professionals.

You tell this story to them so that you alchemize, if that's okay to use that there their rage and judgment and anger and impatience into compassion and love and understanding and tolerance. That's what finding the context does for the client. And that's what finding the contact can do for the treatment team, in this case, the peers and the people at home who are just wanting this child to be Okay. And so. It's something that as a supervisor is a wonderful opportunity to try to teach therapists that the goal is to find instead of fix.

August: I think also you're dealing with situations which are not long horizon situations. I mean, these are kids who could really, with their impulsivity and their amount of pain, they could die by suicide or o something. And so there's a sense that also I think to be able to verbalize feelings is very difficult. I'm almost 60 and I'm struggling with it. And to ask a teen to be able to verbalize what's going on, I just thought it was really interesting that, let's try some stories out there and see how they resonate with you. But I don't know why we would expect a teen not to act out in a way, because it's, if you're in a lot of pain and adolescent, how are you really going to be? So I have to keep, when I'm reading the book, I'm reminding myself, okay, they're not, these are not intellectual discussions here when we talk about the understanding. We're talking about building a rapport or something because it's very difficult to put these things into words for anybody.

Dr. Reedy: It is, that's why I'm drawn to myth, poetry and art, music because music, I don't use dance in my work, but a lot of people can use body movement is because these expressions are the closest we can it, it's the Star Wars motif is a better explanation than an intellectual one. You could feel it by, you watch Superman and you walk out of there feeling like a superhero because you've connected to the character. It's Deepak Chopra said, when you watch an iconic movie like that, it plants a seed of a hero inside of you and you know what it's like to transcend and become all that you are. And so I think it's really hard to describe some of these things. That's why even though this theory is out there already, I'm not writing it for the first time.

I'm telling it from my vantage point from the things that I've seen. So people have more examples, they have more mythologies, if you will. They have more stories where, oh, that's what it looks like when you see somebody hear somebody and this is what they do now I understand. And so I'm just, just telling my version of Superman, my version of the Matrix, my version of Star Wars in the life that I've lived, because that's all I can do. All I can tell is the story that I've lived and the meaning that it has given me in my life.

August: And I think, there's also some lines in here that are, unsettling or they're, they kind of shake things. For example, I've often liked the saying, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly because it kind of shocks you. And it's great for perfectionists. And one of yours is, or one of the ones in here is, strike while the iron is cold.

Dr. Reedy: Right. Right.

August: And the one about that was really striking was, this is from Jamie Gill. It took me a while to figure out the difference between the staff and the patients in a mental hospital I worked in. And then it came to me, the staff have keys.

Dr. Reedy: Right, right.

August: I think that's also kind of a myth or a different way of looking at something just to kind of flip it. And that can be helpful.

Dr. Reedy: What I'm trying to do, well one tries to do is create a shift where people can see more clearly. The fish can't see water; the fish is the last to discover water because it's, you have to, you have to know not water.

August: Right.

Dr. Reedy: To be able to see water. And so I think those clever little sayings that we have, the one that you had, the ones that I've used are you create a shift for the person. They're expecting it to end differently and they're like, oh, I have to think the quote causes me to think and see things from a, from a different perspective. And I think that's what I'm trying to accomplish is that with the keys example, I, I gave this in a speech in Nashville two weeks ago and I tell people, if you don't know that you're as sick as your clients, you're in trouble. And so are they. If you think that you've transcended everything, first of all, if you had transcended everything, you'd have only empathy and you would see yourself in them. But if you think you've trans, if you've, if you've imagined, if you've adopted the fantasy psychosis that you are above it all and that you don't have the same issues that they have, you'll never make contact with them and they'll never trust you.

It can't happen that way. And so you will laugh because you'll think I'm saying this just for this interview, but I watched The Matrix two nights ago because we took a break from Star Wars for one Night. . I haven't watched it in 10 years. And The Matrix is a metaphor for the common culture for what we've been taught as children. Part of what I'm trying to do in my books is I'm trying to speak to the part of you that knows most people when they read my stuff, say, I already believed this. I just didn't have the words for it or nobody had said it quite this way. That's what I think those sayings are trying to reach. I'm trying to reach that part of you that knows this already, but had to give it up and lose it to survive your childhood.

August: I'm, we're past time now, but I I wanted to just ask you one more question. I don't know when I read your title for the first time, learning to the Audacity to be You Learning to love your horrible Rotten Self, I immediately associated to the book Alexander and the Terrible, horrible, no. Good, good. Very bad Day. I don't know if you, I don't know if that is.

Dr. Reedy: It's one of my wife's favorite childhood books.

August: Isn't it a great book? I just, the, just the God guess because of the word horrible in there. That is a great book. And it ends with Yeah. Some days are like that . Yeah. Some days are like no solution offered. Just That does happen sometimes. Well, Dr. Brad Reedy, thank you so much for, for joining me. It's been a pleasure to speak to you and thank you for Absolutely Work and your book and for sharing all these ideas and your, authenticity and vulnerability. Thank you very much.

Dr. Reedy: Absolutely. Honestly, my pleasure.

[END]

Christos Tombras (Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, UK)

Discourse Ontology: Body and the Construction of a World, from Heidegger through Lacan

This book explores the themes within, and limits of, a dialogue between Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of being and Jacques Lacan’s post-Freudian metapsychology. It argues that a conceptual bridging between the two is possible, and lays the foundations of that bridge, starting with Heidegger and proceeding through the work of Lacan. After presenting basic aspects of Heidegger’s ontology, Tombras focuses on his incisive critique of modern science and psychoanalysis, and argues that psychoanalytic theory is vulnerable to this critique. The response comes from Lacan’s re-reading and recasting of fundamental Freudian insights, and his robust post-Freudian metapsychology. A broad discussion of Lacan’s work follows, to reveal its rupture with traditional philosophy, and show how it builds on and then reaches beyond Heidegger’s critique. 
This book is informed by the terminology, insights, concepts, hypotheses, and conclusions of both thinkers. It discusses time and the body in jouissance; the emergence of the divided subject and signifierness; truth, agency and the event; and being and mathematical formalisation. Tombras describes the ontological recursive construction of a shared ontic world and discusses the limits and historicity of this world.

Editorial Reviews
Review

“Discourse Ontology is an original, highly learned and dazzling work of scholarship, that will be an invaluable reference for those seeking an overview of Lacanian and Heideggerian thinking and how the two relate and differ, whilst offering a new perspective through an original synthesis that will reward future reflection and consideration. As such, it is highly recommended and I hope it finds a wide audience, sparking a renewed debate about, and curiosity in, the foundations of psychoanalytic thought and what this might mean for psychoanalytic practice.” (Barry Watt, British Journal of Psychotherapy 37, 1)

“Alongside this effort to construct a clear and coherent thesis Tombras equally acknowledges various points of discordance between Heidegger and Lacan, yet attempts a reconciliation through reference to Heidegger’s notion of a 'circle of understanding', as a means of generating a coherent synthesis that serves to usher in the galvanising notion of a discourse ontology. ... The scope and range of this book is impressive and goes far to set out the main precepts for a serious dialogue between these seminal figures. I am sure this book will stand the test of time.” (Gwion Jones JCFAR 30)

From the Back Cover
This book explores the themes within, and limits of, a dialogue between Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of being and Jacques Lacan’s post-Freudian metapsychology. It argues that a conceptual bridging between the two is possible, and lays the foundations of that bridge, starting with Heidegger and proceeding through the work of Lacan. After presenting an overview of key concepts of Heidegger’s ontology, Tombras sets out an incisive critique of modern science and psychoanalysis, and argues that psychoanalytic theory is vulnerable to this critique. The response comes from Lacan’s re-reading and recasting of fundamental Freudian insights, and his robust post-Freudian metapsychology. A broad discussion of Lacan’s work follows, which reveals its rupture with traditional philosophy, and demonstrates how it builds on and then reaches beyond Heidegger’s critique.

This book is informed by the terminology, insights, concepts, hypotheses, and conclusions of both Heidegger and Lacan. It discusses time and the body in jouissance; the emergence of the divided subject and signifierness; truth, agency and the event; and being and mathematical formalisation. Crucially, Tombras describes the ontological recursive construction of a shared ontic world and discusses the limits and historicity of this world. This book opens up new pathways in the study of ontology and epistemology and will appeal in particular to students and scholars of psychoanalysis and philosophy.

Christos Tombras is a supervising psychoanalyst with a Lacanian orientation, practicing in London, UK. Dr. Tombras is a member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, UK, and lectures, runs workshops and facilitates reading groups. His main research interest is in a dialogue between continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. He has published in both English and Greek.

About the Author
Christos Tombras is a supervising psychoanalyst with a Lacanian orientation, practicing in London, UK. Dr. Tombras is a member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, UK, and lectures, runs workshops and facilitates reading groups. His main research interest is in a dialogue between continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. He has published in both English and Greek.

Transcript

"Do you know my mom?"  The court-appointed monitor says that's off limits.

In this episode, Anna (pseudonym) tells her story.  Her son is 1yo, in diapers, when the police come to arrest her, while she attempts to contact her dealer for drugs before prison.  From there, she loses custody of her son, enters treatment, and tries to re-gain contact with her son.  

Strong mom love, Anna shares her hard-earned wisdom.

Chosen by New York Magazine/Vulture as a Best Book of 2022

“There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can defeat it.” So begins the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks’s reckoning with today’s flourishing cult of story. Forty years after publishing his seminal work Reading for the Plot, his important contribution to what came to be known as the “narrative turn” in contemporary criticism and philosophy, Brooks returns to question the unquestioning fashion in which story is now embraced as an excuse or explanation and the fact that every brand or politician comes equipped with one. In a discussion that ranges from The Girl on the Train to legal argument, Brooks reminds us that among the powers of narrative is the power to deceive.

Praise

A potent defense of attentive reading and its real-world applications.
—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

Brooks spent most of his career trying to impress upon readers the particular power of narrative…In his most recent book, “Seduced by Story,” he describes the horrifying feeling of having succeeded all too well.
—Parul Sehgal, The New Yorker

A succinct account of narrative persuasion, offering a solid case for the ambivalent power that stories can have in shaping us as individuals and nations.
—Caterina Domeneghini, Los Angeles Review of Books

Brooks explores various fields – including psychoanalysis, legal practice and modern political discourse – in which the distinction between narrative and “reality” has been eroded, or even collapsed. . . . It is in this context that a critical faculty – the ability to understand and critique narrative – is of vital importance.
—Jonathan Taylor, TLS

Brooks built an influential career arguing that stories are key features of how we all experience ‘human temporality’ and strive to articulate ‘meaning in general.’ This new book is, therefore, a kind of personal as well as intellectual reckoning with narrative turns and what may be their less salubrious legacies.
—Killian Quigley, Australian Book Review

Society’s obsession with résumé, and its use to construct an aura of credibility, is such a pervasive element of contemporary life that it inevitably implicates even the author and his own field of “literary humanities.” But that dynamic is exactly what Brooks parses in his terrific critical survey: the essential differences between surface stories and the ways in which they’re constructed.
—J. Howard Rosier, New York Magazine/Vulture

A bracing and insightful look at the downsides of reducing everything to storytelling. . . A thoughtful and revelatory analysis of what’s lost when story trumps all.
—Publishers Weekly

For writers, readers, and citizens of the story-addled world.
—Emily Temple, Lit Hub

A rhapsody to the partial suspension of disbelief that allows us to immerse ourselves in novels, but simultaneously and most crucially, a brilliant intervention against the complete suspension of disbelief that allows a citizenry to succumb to conspiracy theories, false-flag narratives, authoritarian fictions. An eloquent and triumphant culmination of Peter Brooks’s lifelong inquiry into the aesthetic and ethical intersection of literature, psychoanalysis, law, and politics. Impossibly good.
—David Shields

Stories are everywhere—shaping us, shocking us, showing us what really happened (or making it up). Peter Brooks invites us to step to one side of our over-storied surroundings to think about all the ways they work. . . . In the process, he tells a gripping tale of his own.
—Rachel Bowlby

This is an amazing book, crossing back and forth between literature and politics, illuminating each side by the other. It is written without fuss, continually evocative and surprising.
—Richard Sennett

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

Liberalism

By revealed preference, Prof. McCloskey is our favorite scholar to talk with.  This is our third conversation with her. Today, we discuss two working papers on liberalism.

An examination of the philosophical themes presented in Aristotle's Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics. Topics include happiness, the voluntary and choice, the doctrine of the mean, particular virtues of character and temperamental means, virtues of thought, akrasia, pleasure, friendship, and luck. Special attention has been paid to Aristotle's treatment of virtues of character and thought and their relation to happiness, the reason why Aristotle is the quintessential virtue ethicist. The virtues of character have not received the attention they deserve in most discussions of the relationship between the two treatises.

Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Happiness
2. Virtue of Character and the Doctrine of the Mean
3. The Voluntary and Choice
4. Virtues of Character and Temperamental Means
5. Justice
6. Virtues of Thought
7. Akrasia and Pleasure
8. Friendship
9. Sophistic Puzzles, the Kaloskagathos, and Luck
10. Happiness Revisited
Conclusion.

Glossary of Key Terms

References

Transcript

Speaker 1:
Hello, and welcome to Philosophy Podcasts, where we interview leading philosophers about their recent work. Today, I am pleased to be speaking with, Professor Paula Gottlieb. She was educated at Oxford and Cornell. She's the author of, The Virtue of Aristotle's Ethics (2009), Aristotle on Thought and Feeling (2021). And the book we'll talk about today is, Aristotle's Ethics, Nicomachean & Eudemian Themes (2022). Those are all Cambridge University press. Paula Gottlieb is Professor of Philosophy and the Affiliate Professor of Classical & Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Welcome, professor.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Thank you. Good to be with you.

Speaker 1:
Thank you. People have for thousands of years turned to Aristotle to help think about how to lead a happy life. I guess, the first question is, it's rhetorical, but if you could address it. One might think, a skeptic might say, "Well, why go back 2000 years? There are plenty of authors who are writing books about how to live your life today." What would be the advantage of going back so far?

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Well, I think that a lot of modern philosophers do go back to Aristotle when they start thinking about happiness. Very often, they use Aristotle to support some more modern view, or they read back some modern views into Aristotle. And I take a different tack about the way we should think about reading ancient philosophers. I don't think, for example, Andrew Melnyk, that all the good bits of Aristotle have already been taken up by later philosophers, so we don't need to look at him anymore.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
I think that there's a lot of interest going on there, and quite often it's things that we may not be still thinking about now, that's of interest. And I certainly take your point, you might wonder, "Why are we reading a dead, white man, who doesn't include women or enslaved people or whatever, in his discussion?" But I think we do look to say, the founding fathers and seeing them sort of interesting or maybe crucial ideas for today, even if they didn't see, I mean, they didn't fully grasp the insights of their own work.

Speaker 1:
Right. Yeah, that's a good point. I was actually going to ask you about that later, but maybe we could go to it now. As we talk later, we'll talk about virtues of character and virtues of thought, and I was kind of wondering what Aristotle's view on that would be. Would he say that to be a great philosopher, a great thinker, you need to be a great man also, or a person, and if you don't, that's a good sign that if there's an inconsistency there, that's a problem?

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Yeah, that's a good question. Well, Aristotle does distinguish sort of theoretical thinking from practical thinking. And on my understanding anyway, he doesn't think that you need a great deal of abstract theoretical thinking in order to be a good person. So I argue for this more in my other books than in the one you're discussing. So somebody who's very good at higher math might be hopeless and have a very happy life, or even would be able to do practical things in their own.

Speaker 1:
Sure.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
One of my favorite cases, a friend of mine who is a famous mathematician, was putting forward very abstract theories, but if we went to a restaurant, he couldn't add up the bill. I mean, that was just in a different world. So I think Aristotle's kind of familiar with that. I guess the question is, how much thinking is necessary in order to be a good person? And this is where give a new translation of phronesis, it's sometimes translated in intelligence or prudent, or practical thinking. The practical thinking is okay, but it sounds as if you've got some theoretical thinking that you're then applying to something else.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
And that's why I use thoughtfulness, because I think at this kind of thinking as a much more sort of hands-on way of thinking about things, being thoughtful rather than having great abstract views about things. I'm trying to think of an example of that, but people who talk a lot about diversity and how important it is, but don't notice there's no diversity in the classes teaching [inaudible 00:06:11].

Speaker 1:
Yes.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So I think of Aristotle's view as getting away from a more abstract, platonic view, and having a more kind of hands-on view about what it is to be a good person.

Speaker 1:
I'm just thinking out loud here, I wonder if what you're getting at is also what might be called, bad faith, now. When you're thoughtful, you don't have bad faith.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Yes. Well, I guess if you connect bad faith with what the Greeks call, akrasia, that's sort of when you know what the right thing is, but you do something else instead. He does say that the person with thoughtfulness won't be autocratic, which is kind of puzzling to many people. But if you think of akrasia as a kind of bad faith, you're not really quite into the views that you're presenting, or I will put it, they're not sort of integrated properly with your feelings and the rest of your character.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Then yes, I like that idea.

Speaker 1:
I'm going totally out of order here, but you talk about the integration of the virtues of character and the intellectual virtues. At that point, I don't know what your kind of experience of reading this is. When one reads about how to live one's life, you can either be uplifted and inspired or you can either be, "Oh, boy, this is tough. This is a long way off."

Speaker 1:
And normally with Aristotle I find it's uplifting, but when I heard about integrating everything, I thought, "Oh dear, this is difficult." I'm just wondering what your overall attitude towards that is. Do you feel it's inspiring or is it more, "Gee, you've got a long way to go. You're a bad person and you've got a long way to go."

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Yeah. Well, I'd rather it not be something that's a big ideal, because Aristotle says that, I mean, he makes a big deal of the idea that happiness is something achievable in action, and if it's going to be so difficult for people, if it's something sort of more God-like.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Say, Socrates would think of it, "That this is an ideal, but human beings can't really be like that." I don't think that's Aristotle's idea. So I guess in my book on thought and feeling, I try and explain the integration in a way that doesn't sound sort of so outlandish, like you have absolutely no feelings or whatever.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So one example, this was actually a question, I think Rechinal Kantaker raised this question of, supposing the good person needs to have a blood test and they have to fast, I mean, it doesn't make sense to say that they don't want to have anything to eat. And my thought to that was, "Well, maybe they wish to have something to eat, and maybe they plan to have something to eat afterwards, but they don't actually still want something now so that they're going to go and get it."

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So, I think that sounds a more plausible way to describe this than, it's also not, if you don't have anything, you're not hungry or something like that. I have a broader view of how the kind of bumps of desires and feelings then develop into action, based on what your character is. I think that gives a more plausible view about how this integration is supposed to work.

Speaker 1:
That makes sense. Right, I think we all have that experience. And today, I think we really emphasize the difference across people in, for example, their ability to executive control, and the difference between adolescents and adults, for example, and their ability to do these things. And Aristotle, as I understand it, was sensitive to that, to the differences across people, maybe not between youth and adult, but certainly across people, and their different, natural abilities or where they start from.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Well, how I understand the Doctrine of the Mean, I think what's the right thing for you to do is, what's correct given your circumstances and your own abilities.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So I give the example of using, somebody's on the battlefield and there's somebody drowning, if they don't know how to swim, it would be rash for them to jump in, but if they do then it would be right. This is a controversial point in Aristotelian studies. Not everybody agrees with that aspect of the Doctrine of the Mean, but it goes back to your question about, is the good being good sort of beyond people? I mean, this is saying, no, it fits whatever your own abilities are. You're not supposed to be like Hercules, or I guess in the Jewish tradition, you're not asked, "Why weren't you Moses?" You're asked, "Why weren't you yourself?"

Speaker 1:
Right. Well let's go more orderly now. One of the things that I first learned that was an issue in Aristotle, decades ago was, that he uses this word, eudaimonia. How did you pronounce it, the same way?

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Eudaimonia?

Speaker 1:
Eudaimonia.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
That's probably a horribly anglicized way of putting it.

Speaker 1:
I noticed Dewey, the philosopher, John Dewey translates that as, wellbeing, and others have translated it, Owen Flanagan, for example, translated it as, flourishing. And so there's always been an issue. Now you say in here, an interesting statement, as I understand it, you want to keep with happiness and you say, "If moderns have merely changed the subject, there would be no disagreement with Aristotle's views, and there is." You want to keep the word, happiness, that we would think of, that would be the word we would use. We understand it has different connotations, but you want to use that word to capture the final end.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Right. Now, I agree that what Aristotle is talking about with happiness is, flourishing, rather than just feeling good, which is how modern people would think of happiness. But I think that if you just translate it, flourishing, then as I said that there isn't any disagreement. I mean, moderns and Aristotle are just talking about different things, and I think that's wrong. I think Aristotle would say, "You moderns have the wrong view about what happiness is, it isn't just feeling good." I mean, it does include feeling good, so in Aristotle's view, "The happy person will have an enjoyable life," he says, but you've sort of got a rather shallow view of what happiness is.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
And so that's why I want to translate it the same way, so there's an actual disagreement about what happiness is, you're not just talking about two separate things and going off on different directions.

Speaker 1:
No, that's very well taken. I mean, I think we can all think of people who are self-satisfied and in a pleasant state of mind, and therefore could be called in happiness, that we would say we don't want that life at all.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Right. I wonder if they would even call that happy or rather, yeah.

Speaker 1:
Yeah. I don't know if you know about... I tried to look at the etymology of happy, and I think I got to hap and it was chance, and then beyond that, it was something like to be well suited, to fit.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
That is similar, because domineer literally comes from the Greek word, dimo, which is sort of like your guardian angel or something. So there's a whole lot of idea that there's luck in there, and that's something that Aristotle addresses people who say, "Well, look, being happy is just a matter of good luck." So there's nothing in particular you can do about that, either you are lucky or you aren't.

Speaker 1:
Right. And we have the word, demonic, which I think also gets at that, that kind of spirit inside, that's not necessarily negative. So you talk about three different converging approaches to happiness, teleological, the method involving endoxa, and then the functional argument. I thought teleological, we don't normally think of Aristotle as teleological, but it is in the sense that we're not following rules, we're looking for something in the future.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Right. There's sort of a goal, it definitely has the idea that you should have a goal. I mean, in Eudemian Ethics, he even says something like it's kind of foolish not to have a goal in your life. That's a bit controversial. I guess this comes from his biological views of there being sort of a goal for a particular animal to become a fully formed adult of their species.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
And he has this tag, "Nature does nothing in vain." So he's got this view that nature is imbued with goal-directed activities, and that also applies to humans. The goals in nature may not be ones that anything sort of has in mind to strive for. So an acorn might be directed to the goal of being an oak tree or something, but it doesn't have that in mind.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So this is more kind of a naturalistic, but I think that continues in his ethics. And also even with the polis or the city, he thinks that's natural in the sense that people naturally congregate in families, and then in villages and then finally in the polis.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So there's this general teleological picture that he has, which goes with a number of different things that he says.

Speaker 1:
Right. Okay. And then, endoxa, I was not familiar with that word before reading this text. And now that I have, I think of that famous Rafael painting, The School of Athens, where Aristotle is pointing to the earth, and that seems to be what's going on here, he says, "Let's look at what the opinions actually are here."

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Right. Let's start with not completely nutty opinions, but what do people think about this subject, and go from there. Modern philosophers have criticized Aristotle for this saying, it's too conservative, because you're sticking to what people already think. But as I go on to say, I think he criticizes the endoxa, based on some of his other views. But also, if you open any modern philosophy journal, it does start with, here are what the main people's thoughts on this topic are, then I'm going to proceed from there.

Speaker 1:
That's such a good point. Right. And I know you mentioned the mean though, in another section, but I also thought that we're kind of just talking about that issue of recollection, or originally there are certain views, presumably once Aristotle lays out what happiness is, we're going to recognize it. Not that we have it now, but that we will kind of remember it, or we already know it, or our current views may not be completely clarified, they need clarification, but they're a starting point, then we vary them, then we come back and see them anew. Do you agree with that?

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Yes. It seems like we start from there, and we might criticize them or advise them or whatever, or see what is the insight in these views, and then the results should be recognizable. In the last book of the Nicomachean Ethics, he even says, well, basically, "If these views don't fit in with the way you live your life, then they're not very good."

Speaker 1:
I love that.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
And he starts off with the different views people have about what's the happy life, is generally their lives.

Speaker 1:
Absolutely.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So ethics is much more related, since it is to how people live their lives, that's going to be different from thinking about math or biology, or some other subject.

Speaker 1:
Right. Yeah, that was kind of astonishing when you pointed it out. He says, "Hence, we ought to examine what has been said by applying it, and if it chimes, we should accept it, if not, it's mere words." Pretty astounding.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Right. This goes back to your sort of bad faith.

Speaker 1:
Well, it's true. That's also true, yes. So when we go to the function arguments, that would be obviously a precursor to evolution. Today, one would think about the human being in terms of evolution and what is our function.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
I'm not sure how it would apply to evolution, although we've developed various things. I mean, it seems as if the conclusion rather is, the happy life has to relate to human beings and involve thinking and feeling, that's kind of what I take away from the argument. And there's a ton of secondary literature on how to understand each line in the argument of what the argument's for, and so on.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
But I think we've got to stick with how humans actually are, although, I guess if you take the reasoning part, that's kind of broader because we can create things beyond human beings. Of course, Aristotle didn't know about that so much in his time, but still he knew about crafts people making different things, and allowing us to do things.

Speaker 1:
I see. That makes sense. And one of the things you say about Aristotle a couple of times, is that he is the quintessential virtue ethicist, which I think as I understand it, you'd contrast virtue ethics with say, utilitarianism and versus a rule based system like Kant's.

Speaker 1:
And as I understand it, in virtue ethics, you're talking about developing a character of a certain sort, as opposed to evaluating specific acts. And the word virtue to me, makes me think we're talking about excellence or achieving something great, not achieving the minimum. I don't know, how do you think of virtual ethics? Why is Aristotle-

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Discussing before that it's not an ideal. I think that there are difficulties with utilitarianism, I mean, seeming to allow some people to be used as means in order to get certain ends. I actually think that reading J.S Millen in a certain way might avoid those problems. But anyway, and the Kantian idea that there are these really hard and fast universal rules that you're supposed to be following, which aren't very plausible. I mean, people have tried to make Kant more like Aristotle, and then Aristotle more like Kant.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
I think once you're including Aristotle and Kant, you should kind of give up on the Kantian bit. But I very much like the Doctrine of the Mean and the virtues, and that's something that even modern, [inaudible 00:24:40], a Aristotelian virtue ethicist don't really pay any attention to. So I think there is a point to the Doctrine of the Mean, and I think that these triads, I mean one big issue is, since there are so many ways to go wrong, why does he pick out these three things?

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
And I think that has to do with picking out three specific mentalities to do with self-knowledge, overestimating one set of vices, and overestimating your abilities and knowledge. One is underestimating and one is sort of getting them right, so there's actually a sort of psychological point of distinguishing these characters. I also think there are other types of vice, that you can sort of waiver from one vice to the other, and so on. But kind of keen on the idea that there are these character traits, maybe we don't want to call them virtues of it, but people due to it, call the time about whether somebody's a kind person, or they're a jerk or whatever.

Speaker 1:
Sure.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Or at other times it might not be feasable for your podcast.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So we do categorize people this way, even if the terms, virtues and vices sound a bit archaic.

Speaker 1:
Okay. All right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
But there are a number of people who don't like virtue ethics and they don't want that to be in Aristotle. So for example, Broadie and Rowe's translation, translates, Arete, the term I'm translating, virtue, as excellence all the time. They do that ostensibly, because in Greek you can say things like, talk about the excellence of a knife, it cuts well, or the excellence of, I don't know, an eye is to see well.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
But I don't see why you can't use virtue, well, there is one modern philosopher, Judith Jarvis Thomson, who uses virtue for the virtue of a knife, she's happy talking about that. But even if you weren't, I mean, if you're going to go back to the etymology of Arete, it comes from Arian male, so it literally means, manliness, and that doesn't fit all the virtues that Aristotle's talking about.

Speaker 1:
Sure.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So, I don't see why we shouldn't use virtue, as I was saying, well, one class I taught Broadie and Rowe's book, and the students were all totally puzzled when I kept talking about virtue ethics. They said, "But there's nothing about virtue in the whole book."

Speaker 1:
So then if I understand it, when you said Aristotle is the quintessential virtue ethicist, you are saying that Aristotle breaks it down into certain, specific, into courage, into magnanimity, and so forth, into certain specific areas that then one optimizes for each of those. Is that the idea, and the [inaudible 00:28:06].

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So the good person, instead of somebody who learns a lot of rules, or is working to maximize happiness, every general happiness, is doing specific things to sustain their good traits of character.

Speaker 1:
I see.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
I mean, Aristotle was the original founder of the virtue ethics movement, but originally by sort of Elizabeth Anscombe and others, who saw Aristotle as sort of doing virtue ethics, and this is the way to develop things in the future. Now, since then there's a lot of different kinds of virtue ethics, sort of religious virtue ethics, environmental, feminist virtue ethic. There are a lot of developments of the core idea, but I think that they are, I mean, although there are a lot of people working on virtue ethics, it still doesn't seem to be quite as mainstream as the other versions.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So for example, Derek Parfit wrote this book on what matters, and trying to, as a realist, putting all these different theories together, Kant utilitarianism and social contract theories. And he just doesn't bother about virtue ethics at all, certainly that doesn't matter from his standpoint. So I think that to some people this view, it is still sort not as central as it should be.

Speaker 1:
It is surprising when Aristotle says, "We want to find the mean." Because you do expect, well this is philosophy, it'll be extreme, it'll be one extreme or another. Does this match up with his philosophy in any other areas? Of course he was, I mean if you think about form versus matter, or potentiality and actuality, or any of those things.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
He does have a discussion about the sensors being in a mean, in order to detect other things. One aspect of the Doctrine of the Mean, that I think is important, that others haven't taken up, although I think it's even in Alexander Grant's work, a long time ago, I got this idea in a class at Cornell by Norman Kretzmann, who discussed this idea of in the medieval philosophers, of the mean being, the person is sort of balanced or in equilibrium, so that they then register things in the outside world in the correct way. So if you imagine an old fashioned, the scales on a pivot, and if it's correctly balanced, if you put something on it, it goes down on one end and registers the right amount.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
And that's one way of thinking about the person whose character is in a mean, they're balanced in a way that they can react to external things happening in the right way and do the right thing.

Speaker 1:
The mean is an extreme in that sense, it's this point at which there is balance.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Right. And people said you could maybe call it, I mean, he does say at one point that it's an extreme as a mean, meaning sort of that's the optimum. So if you did sort of a graph, the mean would be at the top, and then the extremes would be at the bottom.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So, yes, in that sense it's an extreme, he actually says that.

Speaker 1:
Right. Okay. That's interesting. Now, a few sentences from the book that I wondered if you could elaborate on. And one sentence is Aristotle's practical syllogism is described as one of Aristotle's best discoveries by Elizabeth Anscombe. Review that concept of the practical syllogism.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Okay. It sounds like I can explain it on one foot. It's very controversial, what it is and whether it even exists.

Speaker 1:
Okay.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Carlo Natali, in his book on Aristotle, it has a chapter headed something like, "What is it and does it exist?" Or something like that. It's a way of thinking, so you have some general view, I guess that's the major premise, and the one I made up for him, because he doesn't actually give examples of really good ethical cases, or he gives examples where something's gone wrong in thinking, maybe this is because he's writing lecture notes to himself, and it's obvious to him what a good version would be, and he just writes notes about the bad ones.

Speaker 1:
Sure.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
But my idea is that say, generous people help friends in need, and then the minor premise would be, this is a generous person, this is a friend in need, and the conclusion is to help. And what I find interesting about this is, I imagine that the good person sort of using this syllogism doesn't sort of go through each of the bits in turn, or think to themselves, "I'm a generous human being, and that's been attributed to me, that's not what I think." They would just see, "This is my friend in need." And in modern philosophy, things like this and I, are called indexicals, and they kind of get you to act.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So I think that it's important that this way of thinking has indexicals in it to get you to act. So one issue with whether there is a practical syllogism, is that the theoretical syllogism is all completely general. So how could a syllogism be practical, but how's he thinking of it? And so my idea is, he's thinking of, there are these general things, although they're not totally universal, they're sort for the most part, and you have to see when to apply them. But seeing what the particulars of the situation are, are very important in prompting somebody to actually act in that way.

Speaker 1:
And one of your examples, in a later chapter was about, let's see, a healthy person, I can't remember exactly, but maybe a healthy person doesn't eat this pint of ice cream. But then when it gets down to, I'm a healthy person and here's this particular pint of ice cream right here, somehow it doesn't get applied, this is too powerful for the general statement, the conclusion doesn't come.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Right. Well, this is the case of akrasia, where you should know what the right thing is and don't do it.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
I think in that case, you aren't properly a healthy person. I mean, it might be inspiring to be it. And then since you have a desire for the ice cream that's kind of not integrated, that kind of glops onto the, "This is pleasant." And the desire kind of goes off with that part of the syllogism, and you no longer have the whole thing together.

Speaker 1:
Right. That's interesting. I like that, yeah.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So that's how I'm understanding how that works. Now that's also controversial, I mean, there's no agreement exactly on how this works. And there are also people who think that there have to be two syllogisms at play, I don't think that's the right way to go. Actually, Anthony Price's view is probably more like mine.

Speaker 1:
Okay.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Yeah. But it's still a more controversial way of thinking about things.

Speaker 1:
Understood. Another sentence that I'm just picking out here is, Dorothea Frede says, "Aristotle's treatment of pleasure is worthy of a Nobel Prize." Could you touch on that as well, what does she mean by that?

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
I think part of what she means is that, there's not very much about pleasure. I guess this is going back to somebody like Jeremy Bentham, who thinks that pleasure is just all this different stuff and you can't differentiate pleasures from each other. And Aristotle is quite sophisticated in how he does that.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Also, he doesn't think that pleasure are just processes, I mean, that was a popular view of the time, especially medical writers. Well, the pleasure is sort of coming into some natural state, and pain is going away from it. And Aristotle is saying, "No, pleasure really comes from activities, and if you're doing the various activities well, then they'll be pleasant." And so that is a rather more sophisticated view of pleasure, than other people have put forward.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Recently though, there has been discussion of the view that's quite popular in psychology about flow, the idea of, when athletes are sort of in the zone, they have flow and it's been suggested that's something that Aristotle might be getting at. It's a little bit hard to see exactly how that works for being a good person, as opposed to, well, I suppose if you're really engrossed in doing good activities, is going to be pleasant, it's not something that you're consciously thinking about getting.

Speaker 1:
Right. The other thing that people often note about Aristotle is that he talks about friendship. Friendship is an important part of happiness. And I guess, one of the things that's surprising about that is you would think he would talk about love, not friendship. Friendship seems too tame, we need something more romantic and more passionate than friendship. For the modern reader, that seems, "Why are we talking about friendship?"

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Well, I suppose in Greek friendship, for Leah, it does come from philia, to love.

Speaker 1:
Okay.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So it is sort of loving other people, in that respect.

Speaker 1:
Okay.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
It covers a whole lot of different relationships. So in Aristotle it can cover some sexual relationships or friendships, or acquaintances, or a civic friendship is the bonds you have with other people who live in the same society that you do, and so on. So it's a very broad notion, but also in Aristotle, it's quite narrow because he wants to narrow it down, in the end the best kind of friendship is between good people, and that's pleasant and useful, and based in good character. So part of the discussion I think is to show people, I mean, if he can really show you that you can't have good friends unless you're a good person, that's a pretty good incentive to become a good person.

Speaker 1:
That is.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
If you realize what people are or what friends are only transactional, and so on.

Speaker 1:
That's interesting. Right. Well, I guess part of the symptom is that it doesn't seem that important. And I take it that, well, you keep seeing in this text or in Aristotle, this symmetry between, or this mirror image between the polis and the individual, they have the same structure, and they're structured the same way, we can think of them the same way, we can reason about them. Is it true that for Aristotle to be happy, you would need to live in a good polis, or you would need to live in a just polis?

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
I think that you would, well, you certainly can't be happy or you can't even be fully human according to Aristotle, unless you live in a polis. So he says the only beings that live outside of polis would be the wild animals, or God, we're not self-sufficient, so we need a polis. It does look as if you need to have a lot of good things going on in order to become a good person. But in the politics, I guess one idea, which is [inaudible 00:42:18] by Richard Kratos, if you're living in a bad society, it would be the role of a good person to try and change things or make improvements.

Speaker 1:
Okay.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So you couldn't become good. In my book on Aristotle's Thought and Feeling, I discuss more what happens if you're brought up badly, or what if you're, say a woman in ancient Greece, could you become a good person? And if you couldn't, would you be blamed for that, and so on. So I think those are important questions.

Speaker 1:
Interesting.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
And I try and ask Aristotle then and see whether he could give a response to those kinds of issues.

Speaker 1:
Nice. The thing that really stands out is this opposition between Aristotle then, and Adam Smith, because there you have completely separating the two. We don't get our dinner because of the benevolence of the butcher and the baker and the brewer, but from their own selfishness, and that's really ingrained in the way we view society. So I think that's why it's strange to see or the way I view, it's strange to hear Aristotle say this.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Yeah, I think we're very individualistic, everybody can sort of get on, on their own. And we have the idea of self-sufficiency, and it means you can get on, on your own without any help. But then once people think about this, so I've been teaching a class on Plato's Lysis about friendship. Once people start thinking about self-sufficiency, they sort of change their mind, I mean, how did they get where they were in the first place? They needed parents and other people and a whole lot of help.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
So Aristotle says at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, that what being self-sufficiency means, what's sufficient for you and your family and the other people, and so forth. So it's a different idea of what it is to be self-sufficient.

Speaker 1:
Understood.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Unfortunately, I think he goes back a bit on this in Book 10.

Speaker 1:
Yeah, well Book 10 is kind of strange, isn't it?

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Yes, it's a bit-

Speaker 1:
It's puzzling.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
A lot of different things going on there.

Speaker 1:
Right.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
But the Book 1 discussion seems fairly clear on what he means by self-sufficiency.

Speaker 1:
Understood. Okay. Well, we're over time here, but Professor Paula Gottlieb, thank you so much. The book is Aristotle's Ethics, Nicomachean and Eudemian Themes. It was very informative to read, and I really appreciate you talking to me about it.

Professor Paula Gottlieb:
Well, thank you very much.

Lorraine Daston

Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (The Lawrence Stone Lectures) 

A panoramic history of rules in the Western world

Rules order almost every aspect of our lives. They set our work hours, dictate how we drive and set the table, tell us whether to offer an extended hand or cheek in greeting, and organize the rites of life, from birth through death. We may chafe under the rules we have, and yearn for ones we don’t, yet no culture could do without them. In Rules, historian Lorraine Daston traces their development in the Western tradition and shows how rules have evolved from ancient to modern times. Drawing on a rich trove of examples, including legal treatises, cookbooks, military manuals, traffic regulations, and game handbooks, Daston demonstrates that while the content of rules is dazzlingly diverse, the forms that they take are surprisingly few and long-lived.

Daston uncovers three enduring kinds of rules: the algorithms that calculate and measure, the laws that govern, and the models that teach. She vividly illustrates how rules can change―how supple rules stiffen, or vice versa, and how once bothersome regulations become everyday norms. Rules have been devised for almost every imaginable activity and range from meticulous regulations to the laws of nature. Daston probes beneath this variety to investigate when rules work and when they don’t, and why some philosophical problems about rules are as ancient as philosophy itself while others are as modern as calculating machines.

Rules offers a wide-angle view on the history of the constraints that guide us―whether we know it or not.

Contents

OVERVIEW
Editors’ Introduction. The Owl’s Flight. Hegel’s Legacy in a Different Voice
Stefania Achella, Francesca Iannelli, Gabriella Baptist, Serena Feloj, Fiorinda Li Vigni and Claudia Melica

INTRODUCTION
Hegel’s Theory of Absolute Spirit as Aesthetic Theory
Birgit Sandkaulen

SECTION 1 THE NIGHT OF REASON
The Dark Side of Thought. The Body, the Unconscious and Madness in Hegel’s Philosophy
Stefania Achella

The Feminine in Hegel. Between Tragedy and Magic
Rossella Bonito Oliva

A Plastic Anthropology? Dialectics and Neuroscience in Catherine Malabou’s Thought
Federica Pitillo

Maternal Consciousness and Recognition in the Anthropology of Hegel
Laura Paulizzi

The Rise of Human Freedom in Hegel’s Anthropology
Carmen Belmonte

Seele, Verrücktheit, Intersubjektivität. Einige Überlegungen zu Hegels Anthropologie
Giovanni Andreozzi

Die Behandlung der psychischen Störung. Hegel und Pinel gegen die De-Humanisierung der Geisteskranken
Giulia Battistoni

Verrücktheit und Idealisierung. Wachen, Schlaf, Traum in Hegels Philosophie des Geistes
Mariannina Failla

Im wachen Zustand träumen. Der Einfluss der Gefühle auf die Entstehung psychischer Krankheiten
Caterina Maurer

Dialectics of Madness: Foucault, Hegel, and the Opening of the Speculative
Alice Giuliani

SECTION 2 WOMEN FOR AND AGAINST HEGEL
Hegel’s Master and Servant Dialectics in the Feminist Debate
Serena Feloj

Giving an Account of Precarious Life and Vulnerability. Antigone’s Wisdom after Hegel. Nuria Sánchez Madrid

“Men and women are wonderfully alike after all”. The Practical Adaption of Hegel by Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911). Andreas Giesbert

Simone de Beauvoir Reading Hegel. The Master-Slave Dialectic. Mara Montanaro and Matthieu Renault

Irigaray as a Reader of Hegel. The Feminine as a Marginal Presence. Viola Carofalo

Domination and Exploitation. Feminist Views on the Relational Subject. Federica Giardini

Subversion without Subject? Criticism of the Dissolution of Nature and I-Identity in Performativity. Carolyn Iselt

Considerations on the Female Body between Political Theory and Feminism. The Rehabilitation of Hegel? Nunzia Cosmo

Reading Hegel on Women and Laughing. Hegel against or with Women/Other? Sevgi Doğan

SECTION 3 FEMALE CHARACTERS IN HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY

Hegel’s Constellation of the Feminine between Philosophy and Life. A Tribute to Dieter Henrich’s Konstellationsforschung. Francesca Iannelli

Von Antigone zur anständigen Frau. Hegels Frauenbild im Spannungsfeld zwischen der Phänomenologie des Geistes und der Rechtsphilosophie von 1820. Erzsébet Rózsa

„Der Stand der Frau − Hausfrau“. Hegels Affirmation der bürgerlichen Geschlechterverhältnisse. Dieter Hüning

Antigone and the Phenomenology of Spirit. Between Literary Source (vv. 925–928) and Philosophical Reading. Eleonora Caramelli

The Feminist Potential of Hegel’s Tragic Heroines. Rachel Falkenstern

Welches Recht ist gerecht? ‚Sittlichkeit‘ und ‚Gerechtigkeit‘ in Hegels Deutung der Antigone. Wenjun Niu

Antigone’s Guilt. Reading Antigone with Hegel and Butler. Yuka Okazaki

Die Tochter der Nacht: „Nemesis“ im Maß. Das Maßlose und die absolute Indifferenz in Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik. Misa Sanada

Die mütterliche Seite der Dreieinigkeit an einer Stelle der Phänomenologie des Geistes. Pierluigi Valenza

The Sphinx and Hegel’s Philosophy of History. On the Philosophical Riddle. Luis Antonio Velasco Guzmán

SECTION 4 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND HEGEL: SUBVERSION OR CONCILIATION?

Subversion or Conciliation? The Challenges of Hegel’s Legacy. Gabriella Baptist

Hegels Relevanz für den heutigen Diskurs zu „Gemeinschaft/Community“ Herta Nagl-Docekal

The Work of Man and the End-of-History. Hegel Transfigured by Kojève’s Thought. Luisa Sampugnaro

Subjects of Desire and Law Hypothesis on Kojève’s Hegel. Claudia Cimmarusti

Der Andere in der Begierde. Kojèves Hegelianismus und dessen Einfluss auf die französische Philosophie. Yufang Yang

Kreis und Ellipse Adornos Kritik an Hegel. Mauro Bozzetti

The Hegelian Influence in Adorno’s Construction of the Idea of Nature. Miriam Rodríguez Moran

Difference and Affirmation. Deleuze against Hegel. Daniela Angelucci

WO-MAN DIFFÉRANCE (I): Figuras indecidibles. Sexual Difference and Gender (Hegel read by Heidegger, read by Derrida, read by Cixous, read by Butler … et ainsi de suite) Francisco José López Serrano

The Logic of Remains in Derrida. Pablo B. Sánchez Gómez

With Portia in the Passage towards Philosophy. The Place of Translation in Hegel’s System. Elena Nardelli

Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. A Feminist Issue. Jean-Baptiste Vuillerod

SECTION 5 RE-THINKING THE ABSOLUTE SPIRIT

Suggestions on a Re-interpretation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Absolute Spirit. Stefania Achella, Francesca Iannelli, Gabriella Baptist and Claudia Melica

Friendship and Religion. Some Missing Elements in Hegel’s Conception of “Lordship and Bondage” Myriam Bienenstock

„Das Lob der Frauen“. Hegel und das ästhetische Ideal Schillers Mariafilomena Anzalone

The Reins of the Inconceivable. Contemporary Echoes of Hegel’s Theory on Symbolic Art: Interpreting Kapoor’s Art between Danto, Mitchell and Gadamer. Riccardo Malaspina

Philosophy and the End of Art. Hegel in Danto’s View. Francesco Lesce

Judaism as the Other of Greek-Christian Civilization. Samuel Hirsch, Franz Rosenzweig, and Ernst Cassirer on Hegel’s Religionsphilosophie. Irene Kajon

Von Homer bis Hegel. Die Konzeption der Geschichte in Homer und der ‚Traum des Hades‘ als vorstrukturierte Lesart der Hegelschen spekulativen Philosophie. Giuseppa Bella

Hegel’s Thought in Egypt. The “East”, Islam, and the Course of History. Lorella Ventura

The “Feminine”. A Breach in the Absolute Levinasian Anti-idealism. Giorgia Vasari

CONCLUSION

Critique, Refutation, Appropriation: Strategies of Hegel’s Dialectic. Angelica Nuzzo

TRANSCRIPT: AUGUST BAKER INTERVIEW TO CLAUDIA MELICA

August Baker:

Welcome to Philosophy Podcasts, where we interview leading philosophers about their recent work. We're based in the US, but we're reaching across the Atlantic to get a perspective from Europe and specifically Italy. We're talking about a book with a lot of great ideas and very inspiring and productive ideas. It's called The Owl's Flight and the subtitle is: Hegel's Legacy to Contemporary Philosophy. It's edited by six Italian women philosophers, and I'm delighted that one of them has joined me today to talk about the volume. I'm speaking to Claudia Melica. Her blurb says she's qualified as an associate Professor in Moral Philosophy and in History of Philosophy. She was affiliated with Sapienza University of Rome, University of Trento, and I.I.S.F. (Istituto Italiano per gli Studi filosofici, Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies) in Naples. Welcome, Claudia. 

Claudia Melica:

 
Oh, thank you very much for taking me in your podcast and to take our books in your podcast. 

August Baker:

It's a great pleasure. I want to thank you for doing this interview in English, because if we tried to do it in Italian, I would not be able to do it. I know that your ideas would probably come most naturally in Italian to you and be willing to express them in English, I really appreciate that. Let's start with Hegel. I think my overview would be that on one hand, Hegel's very important in the 20th century. He was thought of as the founder or the intellectual precursor both to Marx as a man to bourgeois liberalism. On the other hand, there was a lot of criticism of Hegel in the 20th century. And my sense, please, correct me if I'm wrong, is that there's more of an embrace of Hegel in the beginning of the 21st century.

 
Claudia Melica:

You are perfectly right. This is really a good point. But before speaking about Marx or Marxism, we should, perhaps, briefly mention one of the points of why Marx appreciated very much the Hegelian dialectical method. For Marx, such a method was able to show the contradiction implicit within history. And in Marx's opinion, such Hegelian dialectic gave a lot of importance to the so-called “negative” or “opposite”, which Marx later will call it “alienation”. Well, for Marx, this is a condition for the poor workers in a so-called “capitalistic society”. Therefore, for Marx, the worker identifies himself with his job and with the object that he produces, but, in a certain way, he will lose his independence, his autonomy. 

Claudia Melica:

 
This was clearly mentioned in some passages of the Phenomenology of Spirit, especially in chapter four, by Hegel. But Marx added that: because we are in a capitalistic society, there will certainly be someone who will profit economically from the job of those so-called “poor workers”. So, very shortly, certainly Marx and Marxist grounded on Hegel, but then they moved in a totally different direction, in the so-called historical “materialism”. It's certainly true, as you mentioned it, that also Hegel was the source for the so-called “bourgeois liberalism”, which is totally opposite from, in general, the Marxist view. Because of the Marxist view, it's more a collective idea. Let's call it like that in a very simple way.

 
Claudia Melica:

And when you speak about “bourgeois liberalism”, you push the concept a lot in the direction of “individualism”. Anyway, Hegel was able in his philosophy to recognize that the subject has got its autonomous value. Obviously, there is a risk for individualism, private purposes, and that's why we speak and we add the term, which is not simply an adjective “bourgeoisie”. Because, if in one way, it eliminates the action of the State, of the Government; on the other side, the risk is that the competition between different individual beings and, especially, in an organized society [will be that] only the bourgeoisie [will] profit of the work of the Other. That is why such liberalism could be dangerous. 

Claudia Melica:

 
Today, we assist at a re-thinking of such a concept, because the market and politics push over a lot [in such a direction] and there are a lot of difficulties in the so-called “social justice”.  Rawls' studies investigated very deeply such topics. Anyway, our volume has not taken into consideration such a point of view. Therefore, it's not analyzing which influence has got Hegel on Marx or which influence has got Hegel on such concepts on Marx which I'm trying to explain to you.

 
August Baker:

I'm a little embarrassed to ask this, but I think this is my real question. So, I'll ask it. You know, it's not a very interesting question, but it's one that comes to mind. And if we want to look at social problems today, why would we want to reread or reinterpret a man who lived centuries ago? I mean, I can think of several different reasons. One might think this was an extraordinary person, although you'd think, <> 

August Baker:

So, I don't want to put too much on him being a great man or a hero. Maybe he worked at an important time. Maybe it's just that he's part of the canon. But I guess my question is, what are your thoughts in terms of it might look strange that if you want to learn about problems today, let's read and interpret and read the prior interpreters of this man?

Claudia Melica:

I understand your point and this is a point which is not easy to reply to. But, anyway, what we try to do is to demonstrate that still in our days Hegel is not obsolete. And obviously in general, when you ask why we should go back to the past, why we should still use such a philosopher of the late 18th century or early 19th century, and why he is useful [the reply is the following]. The way in which you find him useful is when you find out some theories and you discover that such theories could be used as a paradigm still in our days. That is, such theories have been so rich in certain aspects that still can be very fruitful for our investigation. Obviously, Hegel was a man of his time and, therefore, he was influenced by the historical situation of Germany of late 18th century or early 19th century.

 

Claudia Melica:

And obviously, in a certain way, he was not so open-minded to give a role to the women at the time. But he was able to demonstrate, for example, in the social context (we spoke here about “social justice”) how two different self-consciousness could gain their “recognition”. And in this case such argument was still used in our days by activists and feminists to re-think Hegelian thought.

 
Claudia Melica:

I think for example, one very well-known part is when Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit, in the beginning of chapter six, he took the tragedy philosophically of Sophocle, and he took the character of Antigone and he was able to show how Antigone, in a certain way, she was a heroine, because she was able to broken the law of the State represented by Creonte. She represents, in a certain way, the law of the family, anyway, a different kind of law. And she represents the effort of a subjective individual to get its autonomy. And such character was very largely appreciated by the gender studies. It is still deeply studied and still in our days has got a deep value in research on Hegel and not only on Hegel. 

August Baker:

As I hear you talking, it makes me think there's a sense that Hegel also was going back to the past. He was going back to read antiquity or to interpret that. There's a sense of going back to the source as a way of getting rid of things that have covered it over since then. 

Claudia Melica:

Yes, you're perfectly right. Obviously, also Hegel was going back to the past and the fact that he was going back to the past is very important because he was trying to reconstruct the origin, for example, of the “ethical life” in ancient Greece. Once ancient Greece was organized in a so-called (in Greek term) “polis”, an independent little State. It was a way of going back to Greece to show the difficulty of an individual being to face the accustomed, the abbots, the norms of an ethical life. So, this is an important point for Hegel.

Claudia Melica:

And, anyway, Hegel was a great Historian. Hegel was the one who wrote not only the Phenomenology of Spirit, but is very well known that he wrote his History of Philosophy and, therefore, he was able to reconstruct philosophically, from his point of view, the different periods of the philosophy.

August Baker:

Right, you were talking about the Phenomenology of Spirit and how influential it is today. Incidentally, I'm affiliated with Boston College. I'm a student there. And this term, there are two classes on the Phenomenology of Spirit, two classes devoted to it, one in the Philosophy Department and one in the Political Sciences Department. I think that one of the things you are talking about is ... I'll read this sentence from your book’s introduction.

August Baker:

<> (S. Achella, F. Iannelli, G. Baptist, S. Feloj, F. Li Vigni & C. Melica, Editors Introduction. The Owl’s Flight. Hegel’s Legacy in a Different Voice, in: The Owl’s Flight. Hegel’s Legacy in Contemporary Philosophy, ed by S. Achella, F. Iannelli, G. Baptist, S. Feloj, F. Li Vigni & C. Melica, De Gryter, Berlin/Boston 2022, pp. 4-5).

I mean, you can comment on any part of that you want, but I was thinking that we're very concerned now with “differences” and groups that are opposed to each other. I'm wondering if the dialectical process somehow naturally captures such tension.

Claudia Melica:

Oh, well, we know and we wrote it in our book, and especially in our introduction, where, as you correctly mentioned, we are six women, six editors. We know that in our day, gender studies, as you quoted, are concerned with the “differences”, not only between “gender”, but also “sexual identity”. And we know (there is huge references in the secondary literature) that such “differences” are determined socially or by the culture, what Hegel called in a German expression the “Kultur”, or biologically determined, naturally determined what in German is called the “Natur”. 

Claudia Melica:

It's very well known that feminists and activists were trying all the time to discuss and to criticize as such “differences”. But the level of complexity now and articulation have reached such positions! So, for example, the re-interpretation of the very well-known French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. She was able to re-interpretate some passage of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and especially chapter four, where there is a lot of references to the “battle for” recognition” between “master” and “slave”. And she was able to insert such dialectical Hegelian argument within the feminist debate in France at the time. 

Claudia Melica:

She was also going to listen to the lectures of Kojève, who had a great influence on the French thinkers at the time. And nowadays, Simone de Beauvoir, as for example, was shown in many, many papers of our book. For example, in the paper of Mara Montanaro. The interpretation of Simone de Beauvoir was of early years ‘50 and ’60. It is still interpreted, still read as a very fruitful way to read and think on Hegel. But, anyway, we noticed that there are a lot of changes in sensibility and we could interpret Hegel from different points of view, which we call “voices” immersed in different cultures, in different perspectives.

 

Claudia Melica:

That's why we included it in the volume 40 different papers, but they are in a special form. Because the book has got a special form! Really, from all the world, we try to invite speakers from China, from Spain, from any part of the world to face such different cultures and problems. 

August Baker:

Right. Now, that's very helpful. Thank you. By the way, you are the one who is speaking to me today, but I wanted to mention the names of the other editors. Could you say something briefly about the other five please?

 

Claudia Melica:

Yes, I will be very pleased because I'm only here speaking with you and I’m giving my voice, but actually, we are six women and we are all academics. We struggle, all of us, to reach a position into the University. Let's mention all of them, because they are: Professor Stefania Achella from University of Chieti; Professor Francesca Iannelli from University Roma Tre; professor Gabriella Baptist from University of Cagliari; Professor Serena Feloj from University of Pavia: and Fiorinda Li Vigni. She's a professor, but she is also leading this important Institute for philosophical Studies in Naples (Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici), and last, really last, me.

August Baker:

I'm sure that's not true.

Claudia Melica:

That's true.

August Baker:

It's very impressive and it is interesting to see so many different voices and helpful to see so many different voices in a volume. In your editor's introduction, you use the phrased in “a different voice”. It might have been Hegel in a “different voice”, but you were pointing there to the Carol Gilligan book. Is that right?

 
Claudia Melica:

Yeah. Yeah. We also quoted it in a footnote. Yes, we appreciate very much the book of Gilligan, which was printed in the last century in the year '70 and which was translated in Italian. In Italy, it had a great influence as it's very well known. Gilligan, she is still alive and she is a psychologist. She analyzed the “different voices” of the women of the time. Our goal it's also implicitly referred to her. So, the purpose is to give “voices” for the first time, not only in a volume, which includes mostly, but not only women, also some very good male researchers and professors are included into the volume.

 
Claudia Melica:

But the conference, which was organized in Rome in 2018, was the World WoMen [Hegelian] Conference. WoMen was W., o., and M. was capital block. Therefore, we want to say Women, but, at the same time, together with Men. This is a way to assert “different voices” in such a large community in what we call “post-ideological scenario”. But yes, Carol Gilligan is very important for us and it's very important to speak of “plural voices” also in this case.

 
August Baker:

Right, and multicultural as well. 

Claudia Melica:

Yeah. 

August Baker:

Let's talk about the different sections of your book of the volume. You mentioned, I think, section two, which is about Women for and against Hegel and you talk about Simone de Beauvoir there.

Claudia Melica:

Yes.

August Baker:

One of the articles that comes up a few times is an article called: Let's Spit on Hegel. 

Claudia Melica:

Yes. Well, the title of the book Let's Spit on Hegel [Sputiamo su Hegel] was the title of a book by Carla Lonzi. She was a very well-known activist and feminist in Italy. And she was the one who was deeply, deeply critics of Hegel. This is, in a certain way, linked with the topic we are trying to develop together. Because, from one side, of the feminism at the time in early ’70 years in Italy, it was following Simone de Beauvoir as saying that Hegel could be fruitful to understand the social differences and social inequality between men and women. Even if Simone de Beauvoir told us in her book in The Second Sex that actually the women never, never struggled, never put themself into the battle for “recognition”.

 
Claudia Melica:

Well, Carla Lonzi was very explicit. She won't throw away Hegel totally. She said: ≤≤He has nothing to do with our battle. Our battles are totally different.>> So, with really a peculiar expression, she wrote this book, Let's Spit on Hegel (Sputiamo su Hegel), which had a great influence in Italy. There is a movement connected with her and there are [in our collective volume] many articles, many, many papers dedicated to Carla Lonzi too. Especially one part, by Federica Giardini. She's a very well-known professor at Roma Tre University and she is also a feminist and a very good researcher on feminist thinking. She analyzed this point too.

 
August Baker:

I'm not sure if there's a section that focuses on the “master-slave dialectic” in Hegel. Of course, it's very famous. Is there a specific section developed not devoted to it, but it goes through all of them, would you say?

 

Claudia Melica:

Well, the section concerning the “master and servant dialectics” is explicitly only into the Phenomenology of Spirit and in chapter four. I'm going to explain to you. What is the topic over there? This section was deeply analyzed by some interpreters and, especially, most of them [investigated] Hegel's “master and servant dialectics” in section two [of our book]. Serena Feloj wrote a paper with references on American contemporary debate, which is very important, because she analyzed the way in which [Judith] Butler or [Nancy] Fraser or [Luce] Irigaray they interpreted such a part of Hegel. And I quoted Mara Montanaro with Simone de Beauvoir or Federica Giardini in the re-interpretation of Carla Lonzi. Anyway, for the American audience and not the specialists on Hegel, what is it this “master and servant or slave dialectics”?

 
Claudia Melica:

To make it very easy, and clear, it is the following. For Hegel, a self-consciousness could not “recognize” its value, if it is not “recognized” by another self-consciousness. To “recognize” the value of someone else, Hegel analyzed something that is so developed into history. So, for example, the opposition, and at the same time, there's a relation between “master and slave”. But what happened exactly? The self-consciousness of the master is pushed by a desire to obtain more and more and more and more objects, but he cannot obtain them alone. He needs a huge work of the slave or of the servant. Therefore, the master is totally dependent for his desire, for his material desire, from the work of the servant.

 
Claudia Melica:

But Hegel made a good point. If, from one side, it looks like, at the first glance, that the servant looked totally dependent and submitted by the master. On the other side, the servant is able to transform the object with his work. He is not the one whom, after he has used the object, he threw it away and he doesn't need it anymore. But, anyway, this passage is important, because for the first time, Hegel is trying to speak about dialectical opposition, social justice, and inequality. This comes, in German language as recognition and it is Anerkennung. It means not only to “recognize” the value of someone else, but means also to “know” deeply, to have the self-consciousness of someone else, because I “know” myself deeply only if I “recognize” the Other and the value of the Other.

Claudia Melica:

And, therefore, this is a very important model or a paradigm, which was used also later to investigate all the oppositions within the history. And also, as I told you, through all the feminist battle. Because the question was for the feminist thought, whether such paradigm should be applied to women too. Does it work for women too? So, women (as “slave”) are submitted to a “master” as man or not? This is one of the questions, which for example, as first was questioned by Simone de Beauvoir, but it is still investigated.

August Baker:

Right. Just as much as different cultures embrace different nationalities and so forth, right? 

Claudia Melica:

Yeah. 

August Baker:

So, this is difficult because there's so much in this book, but I want to give listeners an idea of an overview of what's in the different sections. Even though it may seem surface level, it'll be a pointer, I hope. So, the first section deals with The Night of Reason. It was talking about madness dreams and passion. Could you speak a little bit about what people could find there?

 

Claudia Melica:

Yes.  Hegel is not seen from this point of view. There are a lot of generalizations about Hegel. So, for example, he's a “systematic thinker” or only a “rational thinker”. But what we would like to show is that Hegel at his time, he was studying the so-called “neurosciences”. So, he was studying psychiatry, psychology at the time. He was given a lot of importance of what as a metaphor was called “the dark side of the reason”. He was not criticizing such a part. He was able to demonstrate that the spirit (and “spirit” means our spiritual manifestations which go through our development) could be found also in illness or in dreams or as well, in this “dark side” [see paper by S. Achella, The Dark Side of Thought, pp. 23-36].

 
Claudia Melica:

That's why when he was teaching in Berlin during his lectures, which were lectures followed by thousands of students, he wrote a book, which was an Encyclopaedia, a compendium, including all the sciences. And within all those sciences, Hegel included all sciences of the time called "anthropology", which was not the anthropology of our days. Within anthropology, there was what is today called also psychiatry, psychology, and so on. And then in this part, he was able to study madness and unconsciousness. 

Claudia Melica:

This was recently discussed by a very well-known interpreter, Catherine Malabou, which is the subject of a paper by Federica Pitillo and how the neurosciences have become important in our time to communicate the concept [of  “plasticity”] and have re-interpreted such Hegelian anthropology and the implication also of the research on the brain, which started at a time and which is quite important for us, because this give us a new perspective of Hegel, which until now was not very well known for such studies.

August Baker:

That was fascinating. Absolutely. And then we have talked about section two. I will come back to section three at the end. For section four, it's entitled The Twentieth Century and Hegel: Subversion or Conciliation?

Claudia Melica:

Yes. In this section four which is the purpose? The purpose is the following. There have been many interpreters, like Jacques Derrida for example, which is the topic of the first paper by Gabriella Baptist, which totally criticizes Hegel's point of view. And the point of view, very simply, criticized by Derrida, was to destroy the subject, to destroy the effort done by Hegel to affirm the autonomy of the subject, even if for Hegel, always within a qualitative structure, which was the ethical life. But there is this paper by Gabriella Baptist, which is the beginning of section four, where she showed well, this point of view of how Derrida was going in a different [direction] of what originally Hegel did. 

Claudia Melica:

So, for example, there are many other papers like the one by Herta Nagl-Docekal. She analyzed, in the same section four, how Hegel is important today in order to discuss common values. I would like to underline that for Hegel, it's not only in German the word Gesellschaft, which you could translate in English “society”, but Gemeinschaft (or Gemeinde) which means really to do something together as society, which shares something in common. There is this paper by Herta Nagl-Docekal, a very well-known professor from Vienna. She analyzed all the social pathologies of Hegel’s concept of ethical life (Sittlichkeit). And she focused on Charles Taylor of the common constitution and individual identity which in the United States (U.S.A.) nowadays is deeply discussed.

 

Claudia Melica:

And then she also analyzed John Rawls’ thesis on Hegel crucial achievement and how it was very important for organizing a modern State and an institution in order to build a so-called real freedom, not an abstract freedom. And also, she discussed, which is very important, Axel Honneth, whom was and still he is a German a very well-known Hegelian interpreter, who claim to reformulate the Philosophy of Right of Hegel in term of social sphere, because such social problems, are really very important even today in any global society, not only in Hegel's time. I would like to stop, otherwise it is too much.

August Baker:

Yes. And I think Honneth has an appointment currently in the US at Columbia, I believe. 

Claudia Melica:

Yeah. 

August Baker:

But I should also mention that. So, when you talked about section four, you talked about first an essay by Gabriella Baptist and then the second essay by Nagl-Docekal.

Claudia Melica:

Herta Nagl-Docekal. 

August Baker:

Nagl-Docekal, and I should point out that the structure of each of these sections is that there's an introductory essay by one of the editors and then there's an essay by an invited contributor with a lot of stature. And then there's seven or eight other essays. Maybe you could go through the other invited contributors.

 
Claudia Melica:

Yes. I'm very grateful to introduce such a subject, because it's very important for us to explain the structure, the form of the book, because it's not simply a collection of different papers. We wanted to give a form of the book, which could be understandable. Therefore, we decided to organize the structure of the book in the following way. As you precisely told the audience, there is in each part an introductory essay, written by the different editors. So, Achella, another by Iannelli, another by Baptist, another by Feloj, another by Li Vigni, and the other by Melica. Then we decide that each section should be open by a contribution from a world renowned expert in Hegelian studies. And they should in our opinion, so we planned the book, coming from all different parts of the world. 

Claudia Melica:

Therefore, the invited speakers are: Rossella Bonito Oliva from Italy, Nuria Sánchez from Spain, Madrid, Erzsébet Rózsa from Debrecen in Hungary. We quoted yet, but we should quote it again, Herta Nagl-Docekal from Vienna, Austria, Myriam Bienenstock from France, from Paris, and so on. But it's also important to underline that the book, it's opened by the director of the Hegel Archive. She is a woman and she is Birgit Sandkaulen. And she is leading the famous and very important Hegel Archive in Bochum in Germany. And the book is closed by Angelica Nuzzo. She's Italian, but she's been teaching for years in New York and in the United States.

August Baker:

At CUNY. 

Claudia Melica:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the book is divided into five different sections. We can speak later about the five different sections.

 

August Baker:

So, I think we only have CUNY, meaning City University of New York. And I think the fifth section is in the interest of time, I'll leave the fifth section to just name the title, which is Re-thinking the Absolute Spirit. Spirit is one of the essential topics in Hegel, but let's close with the description of section three about the female characters in Hegel's philosophy. And if you could also mention the title of the book. People are probably wondering: "What does an owl have to do with philosophy?" I did anyway. I think I had a sense of what it was, but yeah, go ahead.

 
Claudia Melica:

Yeah. Well, it's very well known that this kind of birds normally arrive at night and this is a metaphor used by Hegel in the Preface of the Philosophy of Right (1821), where he would like to say the following. This kind of bird, it's the symbol of Minerva, it the symbol of philosophy. The philosophy arrives only in the end, but the philosophy may [understand history in conceptual thoughts]. We use it as metaphor and that's why we use it as a title “owl” symbol of Minerva and philosophy may have a female form. That's why we thought that the Hegelian philosophy may have different languages, but the title is also that Hegel told us such bird (Owl of Minerva) arrived at night and begin to flight only with the falling of the dusk. And what does it mean?

 
Claudia Melica:

It is a metaphor which became most celebrated and very well known. It means that the way of making philosophy is part of an historical process. Only when this historical process, which means chronologically, historically, it's concluded, then arrives philosophy, which it's able to understand, to comprehend with conceptual thought all historical processes. Therefore, such female figures, let's say it with that, may offer an insider view of all the historical process. That's why we decided to give a title in this way. 

August Baker:

Finally, just a survey of some of the articles in that section on the female characters or some of the other female characters. 

Claudia Melica:

Well, there are many other female characters in Hegel. Not only he took them from the ancient tragedy from Sophocles, not only Antigone, but he took them from W. Shakespeare. So, for example, just to quote Shakespeare, Julia or Miranda or even Lady Macbeth have been quoted by Hegel and re-interpreted as a metaphor as heroines to re-read the conflict within the history. That's why we decided to call also a chapter, section three of this book, Female Characters in Hegel's Philosophy, where it's analyzed also these potential in Hegelian interpretation of those tragic heroines, not only the ancient one, the Greek heroines, but also the modern one as from English Literature by Shakespeare. 

August Baker:

Fascinating. Okay. Thank you so much, Claudia Melica. The book is: The Owl's Flight: Hegel's Legacy to Contemporary Philosophy. I went longer than I told you, an hour, but there's so much to cover. It's a fascinating volume and it's published by, The Owl's Flight: Hegel's Legacy to Contemporary Philosophy, De Gruyter 2022. Thank you so much, Claudia. 

Claudia Melica:

I am really very grateful for the conversation and for the interview. Thank you. 

August Baker:

Thank you. 

Claudia Melica:

Thank you.

An innovative reassessment of philosopher P. F. Strawson’s influential “Freedom and Resentment.”

P. F. Strawson was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his 1962 paper “Freedom and Resentment” is one of the most influential in modern moral philosophy, prompting responses across multiple disciplines, from psychology to sociology. In Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals, Pamela Hieronymi closely reexamines Strawson’s paper and concludes that his argument has been underestimated and misunderstood.

Line by line, Hieronymi carefully untangles the complex strands of Strawson’s ideas. After elucidating his conception of moral responsibility and his division between “reactive” and “objective” responses to the actions and attitudes of others, Hieronymi turns to his central argument. Strawson argues that, because determinism is an entirely general thesis, true of everyone at all times, its truth does not undermine moral responsibility. Hieronymi finds the two common interpretations of this argument, “the simple Humean interpretation” and “the broadly Wittgensteinian interpretation,” both deficient. Drawing on Strawson’s wider work in logic, philosophy of language, and metaphysics, Hieronymi concludes that his argument rests on an implicit, and previously overlooked, metaphysics of morals, one grounded in Strawson’s “social naturalism.” In the final chapter, she defends this naturalistic picture against objections.

Rigorous, concise, and insightful, Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals sheds new light on Strawson’s thinking and has profound implications for future work on free will, moral responsibility, and metaethics.

The book also features the complete text of Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment.”

Transcript

August Baker: Welcome to the New Books Network. This is August Baker. Today I'm speaking with the American philosopher Pamela Hieronymi, who's professor of philosophy at UCLA, and we're talking about her Princeton University Press 2020 book, Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals. It's part of a series that Princeton University Press has called Monographs in Philosophy, edited by Harry G Frankfurt. The description is short argument-driven books by leading philosophers. This book is short, 130 pages, 100 roughly from Professor Hieronymi and 30 of it is a reprint of Classic Article by someone named PF Strawson, his article Freedom and Resentment from 1962. You can see the title of her book is Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals. The Freedom Resentment refers to this Strawson article. Professor Hieronymi has done a very close read of the crucial few pages in that article, line by line, paragraph by paragraph. One of the things that was said about this book is that it will from now on be essential as a reference for reading Strawson's paper. It would be difficult to think you could or would want to read Strawson's paper without looking through what she's done here.

Secondly, the other title of the other part of the title is and the Metaphysics of Morals. By that, I think what is meant is metaphysics of morals would be the underlying picture of morals. So that in the course of looking at Strawson's paper, she's looking at the underlying nature of what we're really doing when we hold each other morally responsible. For example, one Angela M. Smith said this book, this is an exciting and groundbreaking book that has the potential to reshape our understanding of the nature of morality and our practices of holding one another responsible. I'm very pleased to speak with Professor Hieronymi about her book. Welcome to New Books Network.

Pamela Hieronymi: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me here.

August: I have to say, set time every day or in the days that I had, I set aside time to read this book. I always really look forward to it. It has a sort of to take a classic philosophical article and go through it step by step. It's like being reading Plato or Aristotle, but without it being dated today. I really enjoyed it. Anyway, the basic question here that correct me if I'm wrong, professor, is basically on the one hand we hold people morally responsible. But on the other hand, when we learn that someone has a illness, say Charleston's example is schizophrenia, or they have a brain tumor that affected them, we naturally feel differently about them. It affects us the way we feel about whatever we thought they did that was morally illicit. On the other hand, we also all agree that we are, put on quote, determined, that is we take our genes and our environment and you get our behavior. So the question becomes why are we holding anyone responsible? Is that fair to say is the basic questions that's being addressed here?

Pamela: Yes. He's addressing the question of free will and moral responsibility as it appears in its contemporary garb, which is, as you say, a question about determinism and the possibility of freedom, or what he's in fact addressing is determinism and the possibility of moral responsibility. It's interesting that you say that most everyone agrees because in the philosophical community, there are a bunch of people who I think would not agree that we are space divides between those who are compatibles, who think that the truth of determinism is compatible with us being responsible and those who are incompatible who think that the truth of determinism is not compatible with us being responsible. Of the two, the incompatible position is the very natural one. When in my undergraduate class I put forward determinism as the claim that the movements of each macro physical object are determined by what has come before and which is in turn determined by what has come before so that given the complete description of the physical universe at one point in time, together with the laws of nature, you could, with enough computing power, deduce the complete description of the physical universe at any other point in time.

That picture seems to students very threatening to our freedom. It now seems to them that we are not free and it seems to them that it's no more sensible to hold any of us responsible than it would be sensible to hold the responsible person whose behavior we learned was determined by a tumor or by some other physical set of forces. That's the natural position to arrive at the first pass intuitive position is that if determinism is true, we couldn't be responsible. Peter Strawson really thinks that's a nonstarter given his background picture of the nature of moral responsibility, which as you said is what I'm using the word metaphysics to pick out the nature of a thing. That's a very surprising position that Strawson occupies to think that this very intuitive position is kind of a non-starter unearthing that underlying picture of the nature of what it is to be responsible that allows him to just dismiss this very natural challenge is the task of the book.

August: Before we get to Strawson's position, why is that? I mean, I could see it could be threatening in a way because it's so different than the way we think, but it also seems liberating in the sense that you might call radical acceptance is something you hear these days, radically accepting everyone that some people wouldn't find that threatening, they would find that re relieving.

Pamela: Maybe the way in which people find it threatening is that it seems to them that if the in future is already entirely fixed, given that the past is what it is, what happens people feel is no longer really up to them where they don't really make a difference. They start to feel.

August: I understand.

Pamela: this is what you're getting at, and I think it's correct, it's also the case that at least some of our moral intuitions seem to be predicated on the idea that we are free in a stronger sense and that if we aren't free in that stronger sense, then we don't deserve certain forms of punishment or harsh treatment. It's that realization that that sort of retributivists punishment may not be in place. But that I think from my point of view would be the kernel of truth and the relieved feeling you were suggesting. That there's something, I wouldn't characterize it as radical acceptance, given that I think a great deal of our moral practices remain in place, but I would characterize it giving much greater scope than we'd currently do to something I'd like to characterize as grace.

August: That sounds good. Now, I would like to just, if possible Strawson uses schizophrenia as an example, I was thinking another example that we could use think of it is what's called now borderline personality disorder, which would be someone who has a very volatile mood, very prone to anger, very prone to instability in relationships, going from idealization to complete devaluation. When you're dealing with such a person, once you realize that they have this diagnosis, you're going back and forth between getting irritated and then also thinking that the person, oh, wait a second, this is something the way they are determined. Do you think that's relevant to this discussion?

Pamela: Absolutely, yeah. It's going to be a case that I think sits right at the border in between cases that are clearly exculpatory and cases that we might think are cases of determined viciousness. One of the things that I didn't first find this attractive, but I've come to find attractive about the view is that Strawson's view I think makes that borderline difficult. I think maybe it is difficult and so I think it maybe it's the strength of the view that it reflects that difficulty.

August: Exactly, yes. Strawson starts off saying, let's move from punishment and moral condemnation to such things as gratitude, resentment, forgiveness, love, and hurt feelings. Let's keep before our minds what it's actually like to be involved in ordinary interpersonal relationships. It goes on to these distinctions if you could elaborate on reactive participant attitudes to objective attitudes and the so-called resource that we have.

Pamela: Yes. The way he makes his argument that the truth of determinism is irrelevant to the question of whether we would or should go on holding one another responsibility is to try to bring into focus as he puts it, what it's like to be involved in ordinary interpersonal relationships, which is to say he wants to identify what it is to be responsible, what it is to be a morally responsible person, or some as foster sometimes put it a morally responsible agent. He wants to identify that as being a term in certain sorts of interpersonal relationships being a part of certain sorts of relationships. He thinks that the fact that we're part of relationships in which we matter to one another in this distinctive way in which we're subject to these reactive attitudes, which I'll explain in a second, he thinks that's just a natural feature of humanity and not one that needs to be justified or not. So not one that stands unjustified if determinism is true.

But backing up, what does he mean by mattering to one another? What are these attitudes has been the main legacy of this paper, which has had a tremendous legacy, but it's made impact has been to bring into philosophical discussion this distinction between reactive attitudes and a more objective attitude. The reactive attitudes are responses we have to our perception of the quality of somebody's will towards us or other people. So roughly reactions we have in response to whether or not we or others have been respected or disregarded. These are things like resentment and indignation and distrust on the negative side or admiration and trust and gratitude on the positive side. They contrast with more objective attitudes.

For example, if I find that my car has a flat tire. I go try to drive to work and I find that my car has a flat tire because some nail I ran over a nail, I'll be frustrated, I might be somewhat angry, but if I find that somebody has slashed my tire, I will feel quite differently about it. If a board bears my weight when I need to cross some crevice, I might be relieved that the board held me up. If somebody supports me, I will be grateful. He points out this fact about us, which is extremely interesting, which is that we have a set of attitudes or a quasi-emotional responses that seem custom-made for our form of sociability and for our form of relating to other people as part of our society. They are attitudes that will in fact function to constitute a set of expectations that we hold one another to. He in fact identifies social expectations of respecting one another with our proneness to respond in these positive and negative ways when those expectations are violated or superseded. It's not that we all sit down and drop a set of moral laws and publish them. Instead, it's that we are in a system in which people react to us in this way, and being reacted to in these different ways is what holds those expectations in place.

August: So the emotions which we feel are natural, which come naturally to us, are reflecting or are the demands we're making on.

Pamela: It's the flip side of those demands. Yeah. So it's like they're two sides of one coin. So one side is we think, you know, you shouldn't lie, you shouldn't cheat, you shouldn't steal and the other side is we respond with indignation or resentment if you do those things. He's thinking that there is this moral and interpersonal framework of expectations and demands that is essential to our being social creatures who live in a society. Now, it's very important that what's natural is just that we have some or another system of these demands. The specific ones that are in existence in any particular culture that's not, not what he's interested in. He's not interested in the content. He's just interested in the general form that human sociability is such that we care about how we figure into other people's worlds. We have expectations and demands that other people will give us an hour due regard, and the manifestation of that is in this form of reactive attitudes that we have, that's the underlying metaphysic of morals in brief.

August: You say here it is not generally been noticed that Strawson is sketching in metaphysics of morals. One he paints by observing our actual practices in his style of descriptive metaphysics, which is an interesting term. Can you say a little bit more about that?

Pamela: I can say a little bit, yeah. In earlier, I think a couple of individuals...

August: Sixty-one, I think, yeah.

Pamela: Which is one of his very well-known books, individuals. He in the preface of that I think sketches what a distinction between what he calls revisionary and descriptive metaphysics. Then he starts categorizing philosophers as whether they're revisionary meta-physicians or whether they're descriptive metaphysics, where the meta-physician is again somebody who's trying to discern the nature of things that you would not discern just by doing experiments, and the visionary meta-physician is the one who pays less attention to how our actual thought and language and concepts and practices and just tries to make sensible framework, a sensible picture for us to inhabit.

August: Interesting.

Pamela: Whereas the descriptive one is the one who comes and my picture of this is like almost as an archeologist with his soft-bristled brush and tries to sweep away debris of conceptual clutter and dust that might have accumulated on our concepts and our ideas and unearth the actual form of our thought about something. Strawson sees himself as working in that second way.


August: So here I'm going to ask you a question, which it went over my head, and it may be impossible to answer in a podcast, but one of the things you said was Strawson here claims that a minimal morality is a condition on the existence of any social organization. Moreover, he thinks that the demands of such a system will be pretty regularly fulfilled. Then you say, we have here the ingredients for a transcendental argument moving from the existence of society to the satisfaction of the conditions required for it, the typical observance of a minimal set of rules. Then if you're really brave, there's a footnote, we can compare this to Donald Davidson and WVO Quine. I think I'm asking you too much, but is it possible to sketch an answer to that?

Pamela: No. I mean that's really the heart of the form of argument that he's after. A transcendental argument there, all that means in that sentence is it's an argument from the existence of something to the actuality of the conditions for its possibility. If something is actual, then whatever was required to make it for it to be possible must also be actual. Here he's saying there's certain minimal standards that have to be met for there to be a society. What are those? You can't have widespread deception, you can't have widespread killing, you can't have widespread theft. At a certain point, if there's too much of that, people will fend for themselves and not come together in the cooperative way required for there to be a society. That's pretty minimal. Right?

August: Right.

Pamela: But if you have a society at all, the thought is there's some minimal set of expectations that will be met and so you can make this transcendental argument from the fact that we do have a society to the fact that we do have some minimal set of expectations and they're generally satisfied and the comparison to Quine and Davidson, so Quine wanted us to think about the possibility of radical interpretation. The thought is you're parachuted down into a culture that you don't speak the language. How are you going to start to translate that language? The thought is, in order to do that, you have to assume that most of what's said is true.

August: I understand.

Pamela: If you didn't make that assumption, you wouldn't be able to translate. But from there you can get to the conclusion that speakers couldn't always be wrong.

August: Good.

Pamela: That's the argument that's being made. Strawson now thinking about the possibility of us being responsible, he's thinking of the threat of determinism as the threat of saying that instead of responding to one another with these participant reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation, that in light of the truth of determinism, we should instead opt for more objective attitudes of just frustration and disappointment, say the way we would react to a natural disaster. Though we do sometimes react to people like the schizophrenic as though they're in this more objective way, he thinks that we do that only, this is my argument and it's controversial, but I argue that the way to understand him is that he's saying that we do that only in the outlier cases, in those cases in which it's no longer possible to really interact with somebody in the usual way.

The range of humanity is wide, in the case of small children, in the case of advanced dementia, in the case of certain outlier cases, trying to interact with somebody in the usual, having the usual expectations, and demands and the usual responses to that becomes unworkable. In those cases, he thinks we move to the more objective attitude, but he's thinking that couldn't be the case all the time. It couldn't be the case that everyone's an outlier. It couldn't be the case that everyone's exceptional in the same way that it couldn't be the case that everything anybody says is false. So we already know, he thinks that for most of us, most of the time, this form of life is workable and all it needs to be is workable. There's no question of its legitimacy. As long as you're asking about the form itself, there might be questions of legitimacy about the particular demands we make of people, the particular ways we hold them responsible might be unreasonable. But engaging in some system like this, he thinks as long as it's workable, there's no problem with it and it's obviously workable, so there's no problem with it.

August: That's very clear and helpful. Let's back up a little bit because I think one of the interesting things about this article, and you say you remember reading it for the first time, he's rhetoric, which is he makes his central argument, which it sounds like it can't be true when he first makes it. As you say, it depends on outliers and who would think that a philosopher would be talking about outliers? There's a bit of the rhetoric of he surprises the reader because he knows the reader is thinking that he's missing something and then he says, you may think this, but if you're thinking this, you have no idea what he says. Could you take us through that, the central seemingly vaile argument and is rhetoric along that?

Pamela: Yes.

August: I was going to say, he says the participant attitude and personal reactive attitudes tend to give place and it is judged by the civilized should give place to objective attitudes insofar as the agent is seen as excluded from ordinary human relationships by abnormality. But it cannot be a consequence of any thesis which is not self-contradictory. That abnormality is the universal condition. That's so surprising.

Pamela: It's super surprising. He says this may seem altogether too facile and so in a sense, it is. Then he says, but whatever is overlooked and this dismissal is allowed for, and the only possibility that remains. Then he goes on. That was the paragraph that led me to think, I do not understand his argument here and I need to sit down and spend what ended up being a few years with it trying to unearth what would've led someone to write those sentences in that order. What were the assumptions in his head that allowed those sentences in that order to seem like the right thing to say? So the idea that it cannot be a consequence of any thesis that is not self-contradictory, that universality is that abnormality is the universal condition. That's just a fancy mid-century English way of saying it can't be the case that everyone's abnormal.

Then he earlier said that the only reason we exempt people is that they're abnormal. If it can't be the case that everyone's abnormal, then it can't be the case that we have reason to exempt everyone. That argument goes very quickly and it's overlooked by everybody because as you say, it relies on this idea that we exempt the abnormal and no ethicist is even going to see that claim that the basis for exemption is abnormality. That's just a nonstarter from the point of view of an ethicist because it opens up an objectionable form of relativism, which I try to deal with in the last chapter of the book. The challenge of the book, in a way, is to try to make sense of why Strawson thinks he can make this argument that quickly. I think once you see the underlying picture with which he's working according to which it's just part of our natural sociability that we just a fact about us, like the fact that we breathe air and live on land that we engage with one another in this way. Once you see that and accept his starting point, then I think the argument does come very quickly.

August: You point out that it depends on our capacities, right? If we had different capacities, we'd have different reactive emotions.

Pamela: Yes. This is one of the things that I think is one of the more interesting upshots of having spent so much time trying to work out what might be on this man's mind, is that the argument, the underlying picture has the feature, its the feature that allows them to avoid the bad consequence about determinism, that our expectations and demands are custom fit, so to speak, to whatever capacities we happen to have. So the way I illustrate this in the book is with a thought experiment. I start with the idea that as we are now, drunkenness often is grounds for either exemption or using the resource, we didn't talk about that, but that's a kind of version of exemption.

If you're out with your friends and for an occasional night on the town and somebody gets really drunk and says something mean, a lot of times we just say, they were drunk, whatever and we blow it off. If occasional use becomes regular abuse, we might then have to start to use our resource to work at keeping ourselves from reacting to that person in quite the same way. If we think of them as an alcoholic and as suffering from a disease, then we think of them as exempted in certain ways. We suspend our usual expectations for somebody who is drunk, just the ways I think that Strawson's framework would predict. But then I say the thought experiment is this, suppose that we all came naturally equipped with only that degree of attention, impulse control, and memory that we now have when we're pretty inebriated. In that circumstance, things might seem very similar to an outward observer because people would not respond to certain outbursts as though they were with resentment or indignation or what have you.

But in that circumstance, it wouldn't be because we were all always suspending our reactive attitudes. It would instead be that the expectations and demands had adjusted to fit our ordinary capacities. The picture that emerges, and this is one that I like a lot, I think is true, is that morality, moral expectations and demands are more like a hymn than they are like an opera. An opera you could write for your star performer, whereas a hym needs to be written for the B-minus congregant. The morality is one size fits all, and it's written in a way that captures most of us. It doesn't capture all of us, right? I'm a terrible singer and so I'm not going to be able to keep up with even the B minus hymns. But the hymns don't adjust to find me and my husband's a terrific singer, and the hymns don't adjust to show off his capacities, they're just made for most of us.

The thought here is that our ordinary interpersonal expectations and demands are similarly made for most of us and they can and will adjust to the capacities on the ground. There's ways in which that's very attractive because you can have subcultures and sub-societies in which say, in home for the memory impaired, you're going to have a different set of standards. Maybe in a juvenile detention center, you're going to have a different set of expectations.

August: In a nursing home.

Pamela: The expectations could also rise if as a culture we become more sensitive or more generous or what have you. It has a downside, and this is the relativism I meant to speak to earlier, which is that it doesn't seem that there is, in anything I've said so far, anything to stop those expectations and demands from finding the lowest common denominator. So in a situation in which people are, certain classes of people are very, it's just ordinary to treat them badly, it seems as though this picture, this metaphysics of morals is going to end up saying that that's okay. That's not a form of disrespect. The reason why this interpretation didn't occur to the ethics reading the paper is that, is that it's so obvious that this interpretation has an apparently devastating problem. Like I said, I try to give Strawson some resources to cope with it in the end.

August: In the last chapter, when you bring in ideas. I would love to talk about the last chapter, but since we're time-constrained, I was very interested in that. I think what you do, is you seem to defend Strawson, but then you also are playing chess against yourself. You're also thinking of the best possible argument against him and presenting one after the other, which is interesting. The resource, if I'm thinking about dealing with someone who has a borderline personality disorder, to me the resource is to find more specifically, but I shouldn't use the example of borderline personality disorder, but it's that moment where you think someone is normal, but you feel like you have some will where you can not go down that reactive path.

Pamela: You step away as Strawson puts it, sometimes to avoid the strains of involvement, or sometimes for curiosity, or sometimes because you're engaged in social policy making and you just have to accept as a fact that people are going to be crappy sometimes and think about how to handle that. The resource happens when you start treating a person as an issue, as we say. Like, oh him. Yeah, he's an issue.

August: Strawson has this central seemingly fast argument, and then we talk about our natural reaction is why statistics matter. He's concerned about whether the resource might be generalized. Is that...

Pamela: That's my interpretation, yeah.

August: Then goes into this social naturalism. I guess this might be the last question, but I thought it would be interesting for the listeners to hear about, I guess at the beginning you, you had a kind of human interpretation of Strawson's argument or Wittgenstein and you end up with this social naturalism, which is neither. Could you go through those?

Pamela: Yeah. In a way, we've already covered the ground for it. The article has been interpreted up till now, largely in one of two different ways. One is a broadly human way according to which Strawson's just saying that given the facts of our psychology, it's not possible for us to react to people any differently and so because it's not possible, we shouldn't worry about it. That's a very dissatisfying philosophically position. But he does say things in the paper that seem to say that the Wittgensteinian response is the one when we were talking about Quine and it's the idea that you can't criticize a practice as a whole using terms that rely for their meaning on the existence of that practice. Now that's a controversial claim, but the idea is rough, it makes no sense to claim that the game of baseball is foul in the sense that's constituted by the rules of baseball. Foul in that sense is something that makes sense within the game. You can't get outside of the game and apply it. The Wittgensteinian argument is saying that Strawson's accusing his opponent of making that sophisticated conceptual error.

August: That would be the question of whether it would be moral to suspend our reactive attitudes.

Pamela: It would be the question of whether it would be just for us to continue in morality. The thought would be questions of justice or questions within morality, just like questions of being foul or within baseball.

August: Got you.

Pamela: In the same way it makes no sense to ask whether the game itself is fair or foul, so it makes no sense to ask whether morality itself is just or unjust. That's closer to the interpretation that I think I end up with. But in a much later set of lectures, lectures given, I think in the 80s, Strawson himself goes through Fume and Wittgenstein and puts forward his view which he calls social naturalism, which he contrasts with both human Wittgenstein, but then tries to set out his own picture, which is roughly that there are certain aspects of our existence that are not up for questions of justification. They're natural facts of our existence. They set the terms for the questions of justification that we can ask within them.

One of the examples he likes to use is the case of induction, the case of believing that the future will be like the past. Hume famously pointed out that we can't justify the principle, and believe that the future will be like the past because it seems as though the only reason to do that is because the future has been like the past. Things have been the way they have gone before, but that's question. Strawson's thinking that there are certain facts about us that we need to accept as setting the terms or the framework within which we can then ask questions of justification. But Wittgenstein, thinks that those could change. It's not the case that Hume thought they were just a few things and they were given to us. Wittgenstein thought no, they're socially given and they can evolve historically, but that doesn't mean that we can, so to speak, leap outside of them and question them. That's a rough overview. This is the topic that I feel like I have the least firm grip on and it's what I'm now really most interested in.

August: Oh, interesting.

Pamela: But that's the rough idea.

August: Well, I said those are my last two. I have so many more questions, but it's a very great read. It's like going back in time and thinking about these basic principles. Congratulations on this great book and I really appreciate you talking with us today.

Pamela: Thank you so much. I'm so pleased that you enjoyed it. It's a very close read, so I'm glad that it worked out for you.

August: Thanks.

[END]

Wendy Brown (Princeton)

Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values)

One of America’s leading political theorists analyzes the nihilism degrading―and confounding―political and academic life today. Through readings of Max Weber’s Vocation Lectures, she proposes ways to counter nihilism’s devaluations of both knowledge and political responsibility.

How has politics become a playpen for vain demagogues? Why has the university become an ideological war zone? What has happened to Truth? Wendy Brown places nihilism at the center of these predicaments. Emerging from European modernity’s replacement of God and tradition with science and reason, nihilism removes the foundation on which values, including that of truth itself, stand. It hyperpoliticizes knowledge and reduces the political sphere to displays of narcissism and irresponsible power plays. It renders the profound trivial, the future unimportant, and corruption banal.

To consider remedies for this condition, Brown turns to Weber’s famous Vocation Lectures, delivered at the end of World War I. There, Weber himself decries the effects of nihilism on both scholarly and political life. He also spells out requirements for re-securing truth in the academy and integrity in politics. Famously opposing the two spheres to each other, he sought to restrict academic life to the pursuit of facts and reserve for the political realm the pursuit and legislation of values.

Without accepting Weber’s arch oppositions, Brown acknowledges the distinctions they aim to mark as she charts reparative strategies for our own times. She calls for retrieving knowledge from hyperpoliticization without expunging values from research or teaching, and reflects on ways to embed responsibility in radical political action. Above all, she challenges the left to make good on its commitment to critical thinking by submitting all values to scrutiny in the classroom and to make good on its ambition for political transformation by twinning a radical democratic vision with charismatic leadership.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and demise of the Soviet Union, prominent Western thinkers began to suggest that liberal democracy had triumphed decisively on the world stage. Having banished fascism in World War II, liberalism had now buried communism, and the result would be an end of major ideological conflicts, as liberal norms and institutions spread to every corner of the globe. With the Brexit vote in Great Britain, the resurgence of right-wing populist parties across the European continent, and the surprising ascent of Donald Trump to the American presidency, such hopes have begun to seem hopelessly naïve. The far right is back, and serious rethinking is in order.

In Dangerous Minds, Ronald Beiner traces the deepest philosophical roots of such right-wing ideologues as Richard Spencer, Aleksandr Dugin, and Steve Bannon to the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger—and specifically to the aspects of their thought that express revulsion for the liberal-democratic view of life. Beiner contends that Nietzsche's hatred and critique of bourgeois, egalitarian societies has engendered new disciples on the populist right who threaten to overturn the modern liberal consensus. Heidegger, no less than Nietzsche, thoroughly rejected the moral and political values that arose during the Enlightenment and came to power in the wake of the French Revolution. Understanding Heideggerian dissatisfaction with modernity, and how it functions as a philosophical magnet for those most profoundly alienated from the reigning liberal-democratic order, Beiner argues, will give us insight into the recent and unexpected return of the far right.

Beiner does not deny that Nietzsche and Heidegger are important thinkers; nor does he seek to expel them from the history of philosophy. But he does advocate that we rigorously engage with their influential thought in light of current events—and he suggests that we place their severe critique of modern liberal ideals at the center of this engagement.

Transcript

August Baker:
Welcome to the New Books Network. This is August Baker, and today I'm talking with Professor Ronald Beiner about his book, Dangerous Minds, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right, University of Pennsylvania Press. Welcome, Professor Beiner.

Ronald Beiner:
I'm happy to participate. Thanks so much for your interest in the book. That's great.

August Baker:
Yes. I actually listened to it on audio. It comes in audio. I listened to it but sort of read it first. Let me just, first of all, give the listeners an overview, at least through some of the reviews of the book, and I'll just read three quick paragraphs here.

August Baker:
One is from John McCormick, University of Chicago. "Ronald Beiner's Dangerous Minds is a staggeringly impressive and deeply needed book that traces the philosophical foundations of contemporary reactionary politics in the philosophical works of Nietzsche and Heiddeger. Beiner avoids both shrillness while confronting present-day opponents of liberal democracy; and shallowness while excavating the work of their intellectual heroes. Indeed, he treats authors such as Julius Evola and Aleksandr Dugin with deathly seriousness, and he soberly and with exquisite philosophical care delves into the fundamental core of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's writings. Dangerous Minds is elegantly structured and beautifully written. It will be widely read and debated in this frightening age of fascist resurgence."

August Baker:
Second one is Steven Smith, Yale University. "A great book. If it proves anything, it's that ideas have consequences, often profound and dangerous ones. One perhaps unintended benefit of the emergence of the new right is that it forces readers of Nietzsche and Heidegger to see them for what they are: apostles of a resurgent fascism. For those accustomed to reading these thinkers as prophets of individual liberation and moral self realization, Ronald Beiner has a clear message: think again."

August Baker:
Finally, from Contemporary Political Theory: "In this erudite, insightful and short monograph, Ronald Beiner takes aim at often French-inspired intellectuals who believe that Nietzsche and Heidegger can and should be deployed to advance a progressive or radically democratic politics. Beiner believes that the two philosophers often serve as better resources for fascists. Dangerous Minds mounts its critique in the light of the recent rise of far right movements, which often rely on Nietzsche and Heidegger for philosophical ballast."

August Baker:
Professor Beiner, do you have any corrections or clarifications on those?

Ronald Beiner:
No. I kind of appreciate the generous reactions to the book, and I think they all kind of stated what the basic enterprise is. So...

August Baker:
Good.

Ronald Beiner:
... I'm comfortable with those blurbs. So...

August Baker:
Right. Right. I understand that. I want to read, start off, a paragraph from your book. You say, "Hopefully, no reader of my book will draw from it the unfortunate conclusion that we should just walk away from Nietzsche Heidegger, that is, stop reading them. On the contrary, I think we need to read them in ways that make us more conscious of, more reflective about, and more self-critical of the limits of the liberal view of life, and hence what defines that view of life." Would you expand on that? I thought that was an interesting approach.

Ronald Beiner:
Yeah. Happy to do that. Someone actually said quite recently on a podcast where my book came up, said, "I don't want people reading Nietzsche. I'm trying to dissuade people from Nietzsche." Well, that's just complete nonsense. I never said that. I never have said it. I never would say it. It's kind of basically a slander. I myself been reading Nietzsche and Heidegger my whole adult life. I mean, since I became a political theorist in my early 20s. I've taught them. The book came from a grad seminar I taught on Nietzsche. So if I'm teaching him, I want people to read him and read Heidegger and learn from them and draw from them insights that will be helpful in dealing with contemporary cultural and political crises, which that's the context for the book. That gives us extra reason to read them, try and understand what their essential message is and learn from them.

Ronald Beiner:
Unfortunately, the people seem not to have gotten the core message or think that, well, there is no core message. He's just being playful or he's just tossing out ideas, or he's kind of contributing to a wonderful hyperpluralism or something like that. Well, I think that's just mistaken. I think people who think that need to reread Nietzsche or reread both of them and understand better what the core vision is. Once we understand that, perhaps it'll make it easier for us to cope with and respond to the kind of cultural and political crises we currently face. That's why I wrote the book. If you're writing a book on them, if I just wanted to shoo them away and or not engage with them and not encourage other people to engage with them.

Ronald Beiner:
The core insight one needs to get here is with respect to Nietzsche, to start with Nietzsche, and Heidegger in this respect is a kind of disciple of Nietzsche, political disciple of Nietzsche. I think he understood himself in those terms, that there is a definite political project in Nietzsche. I mean, it's just shocking the number of commentators who refer to Nietzsche as he's apolitical; he's antipolitical. There's no politics in Nietzsche; there's no political philosophy in Nietzsche. All that's just so totally wrong that it's hard to fathom how people could read this thinker and think such a thing. It may be that the majority of readers are somehow getting that crazy upside-down idea of Nietzsche from there not being a politics or political project in Nietzsche. That political project is what's powering, what's animating the whole thing. These thousands and thousands of pages he's writing, there's politics on every page of Nietzsche.

Ronald Beiner:
The core of his thought is that there is a political imperative to undo the cultural political dispensation in which we currently live, which is a kind of liberal egalitarian dispensation inherited from the French Revolution, liberal thinkers in 19th century, such as Hegel and Tocqueville assumed that that dispensation was irreversible, that the world we're launched into by the French Revolution cannot be undone and should not be undone and it raises us to a notably higher level.

Ronald Beiner:
Nietzsche thinks the opposite. That it's degrading. That it's dehumanizing, that it's impossible to have culture within the political, moral, political horizons shaped by the French Revolution. Nietzsche thinks that politics should be at the service of culture, but if you have the wrong kind of politics, you can't have culture. What is taken to be culture in a liberal egalitarian world is a non-culture, a pseudo-culture. Heidegger says the same thing, a moribund pseudo-civilization, he calls it.

Ronald Beiner:
The political project is to undo those horizons, undo that dispensation so we can once again live in a culture, live in a world where culture is possible. For Nietzsche, culture is what everything is about. But culture has political conditions. If you live in a world where everyone thinks they're the equal of everyone else... I mean, for him, the only real culture's top-down cultures. So if you live in a world where top-down cultures are unacceptable, then you live in a culture-less world. I think Nietzsche and Heidegger shared that view, and hence their political preoccupations were the same, that that world has to be swept away or it has to be razed, or we'd have to start over, wipe the slate clean and recreate a world where you can have real cultures.

Ronald Beiner:
So, the idea that this is unpolitical in any sense, that's just in insanity. If that's what most people are getting out Nietzsche, they really have to take another look at those texts and reread them because they're missing the forest for the trees. I'm trying to set that straight, not because I don't want them to read Nietzsche, but I want them to come closer to a genuine understanding of what his enterprise is such that they can then draw insights from that about our world that can help us respond to the crises of our liberal world.

August Baker:
Yes. I think you touched on this a little. It's not really the topic of your book, but you touched on it a little, that what is it about us with our intellectual heroes, that once we align with someone, we want to read everything they wrote in a positive light? It's difficult to see them complexly, it seems. I find that in myself. I'm kind of like rooting for this particular philosopher or this particular thinker, and it's difficult to see where they... It's like you spend a lot of time with them, and then it's difficult to see where they're just totally wrong and you end up wanting to defend them in some way.

Ronald Beiner:
I can totally understand that. I'd say I spent decades reading Nietzsche and Heidegger, probably read more Nietzsche and Heidegger than reading anyone else. I felt that in myself, that you don't want to think poorly of Nietzsche. He draws you into his net. You get seduced by him. He's a retortion of genius and he knows buttons to press and how to draw people's attention and how to keep their attention and how to make people feel drawn to him. Totally understandable. My way of thinking about the book was time to square accounts with Nietzsche, precisely because I was so drawn to and seduced by him myself. So, I totally understand that.

Ronald Beiner:
The times in which we're living are severely serious. Stakes are very high to understand what anti-liberal thinkers are really saying. There's much more extreme example than Nietzsche and Heidegger. Look at Carl Schmidt. Look at Carl Schmidt's reception in contemporary intellectual circles. He said [inaudible 00:11:18] the left. Well, how did that happen? He's much more evil than either of those two. He was a totally, totally committed Nazi. Not that Heidegger wasn't, but Carl Schmidt's much worse. Yet, he has the same loving defenders and people apologizing for him, people kind doing all kinds of somersaults to make him out to be a good guy and a healthy contributor to contemporary culture and theory. It's just insanity.

Ronald Beiner:
There's not much discussion of Schmidt in the book, but it's really a kind of trinity of people who being misguidedly appropriated by people, theorists and intellectuals you should know better. All three of these guys belong very much to the far, not just the right, but the far right. They themselves understood themselves that way. They all regarded liberalism and egalitarianism as a curse. They shared the project of putting an end to it and undoing the hegemony of liberalism and of the idea of the freedom and equality of all human beings. They tested that idea. They saw it as a destruction of genuine culture. We have to fight back. In order to fight back, have to understand clearly what their project is.

August Baker:
Start with Nietzsche. What does the far right find in Nietzsche? Well, he writes, you quote him in Ecce Homo, that his text Beyond Good and Evil is in all essentials a critique of modernity, encompassing the modern sciences, modern arts, and even modern politics. The purpose is to conjure up a contrary type that is as little modern as possible, a noble yes-saying type. White nationalists and fascists appear to be noble yes-saying types?

Ronald Beiner:
Well...

August Baker:
To the [inaudible 00:13:32]

Ronald Beiner:
I don't see them that way. So if a fascist is reading Nietzsche, they're going to see themselves inscribed in Nietzsche's pages. When Nietzsche gave... Often, his descriptions are kind of cryptic or incomplete or just gestures towards something without filling in the details. But insofar as he does fill in the details, it does fit what became fascism. You can't call Nietzsche a fascist because fascism didn't exist in the 19th century. But when it did come to exist, there's no question that fascists saw Nietzsche as articulating their project, their endeavor.

Ronald Beiner:
George Lickteim wrote that not a single fascist from Mussolini to Oswald, mostly, escaped Nietzsche's pervasive influence. Well, that's just a historical fact. The influence of Nietzsche on fascism, that's not something a hypothetical. That's just empirical. The breeding ground for what became fascism in the 30s was the what has been called the conservative revolution in the 1920s. Those people were Nietzschean and through in through in their self understanding. That fed into Nazism. Now, once they saw Hitler and saw the Nazis in power, they didn't necessarily like what they saw. They maybe saw it as too plebeian. It wasn't aristocratic enough. But of course, you're going to have these grand ideas of some wonderful aristocracy. Nietzsche himself did.

Ronald Beiner:
So, if Nietzsche was still around in the 30s, he might have looked down at his notes at the fascists, and says, "Well, this is more democracy. It's not aristocracy." But of course, setting some agenda for some aristocratic revolution that's going to overturn liberalism and overturn egalitarianism, well, of course it's not going to quite match what your grand vision was. That would be true of Nietzsche, too.

Ronald Beiner:
But there are the kind of rhetoric he does, the great question is where do we look to for the barbarians of the 20th century? He wanted barbarians. He praises barbarians. He praises vikings or civilizations that had no qualms about shedding blood. That's kind of almost a test of... That was part of the tragic vision, that we can fight wars and be up to our knees in blood and not worry about it, feel that it's part of what it is to have a civilization.

August Baker:
In terms of the rhetoric that is appealing to the far right, you have this quote from an early Nietzsche text on the uses and disadvantages of history for life. In talking about, you might say, the modern liberalist... I think this is what the people on the right say... The modern liberal can no longer extricate himself from the delicate net of judiciousness and truth for a simple act of will and desire. Is that what you think?

Ronald Beiner:
[inaudible 00:17:03] There's no question that Nietzsche wants to reorient the core of human life from reason to will. That whole idea that, the will to power, that if you live in a civilization that's dominated by intellect and reflection and science and reason [inaudible 00:17:23]

August Baker:
Dr. Fauci and...

Ronald Beiner:
[inaudible 00:17:25] civilization, and hence the kind of pseudo-civilization. The test is whether can you have a kind of civilization that, I don't know, builds pyramids? Well, to have pyramids, you need slaves. To have slaves, you can't believe in equality. You have to believe that there's a kind of top-down dictation of cultural norms. There have to be people who are mirror instruments of that. If you can't believe, liberalism undermines a belief in the kind of top-down vision of things that make it possible for there to be cultures, any cultures.

Ronald Beiner:
Where does liberalism come from? Well, it ultimately comes from Christianity, mediated through the Reformation, then the Enlightenment, then the French Revolution. But ultimately, it's traceable back to Christianity and the belief that we're all equal children of God. Well, for Nietzsche, those are culture-destroying premises and they have to be destroyed. So he declares war on Christianity. What's the reason for that? Well, that too is political, that if you start with the premises of Christianity, what you end up with are liberalism as egalitarian liberalism as a general dispensation. That means no culture. People have to be ruthless and impose their will and strive for the heroic and strive for grand visions of things. That's what the fascists were trying to do. Look at their architecture. Nietzsche says, well, look, at least they're trying to be a real civilization. They aspire to be around for a thousand years. Well, no liberal civilization is going to aspire to that. They hated Christianity for precisely Nietzsche's reasons.

Ronald Beiner:
There's a very powerful book, my book on Nietzsche and Heidegger's very short, 1,000 page book by Domenico Losurdo called Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel in which he kind of spells out how Nietzsche's political through and through. If you're not persuade by my little book, well, I'd encourage people to read the 1,000 pages of Losurdo. Bery incisive account of what the fascist owe to Nietzche. It's all spelled out, I think, in an utterly compelling way, in a way that's, I think, irrefutable. It's not an accident that fascists historically have looked to Nietzsche as an inspiration, including, including Mussolini, including Hitler himself, went to the Nietzsche archives and warmly embraced Nietzsche's sister and had himself photographed with a bust of his hero. And contemporary fascists all love Nietzsche. There's nothing accidental about that. They have a good case for him belonging to them rather than belonging to us. It's all fully intelligible, why fascist, whether fascists of the 20s and 30s or fascists in the 21st century would find inspiration from Nietzsche. And it all makes sense.

Ronald Beiner:
I mean, Nietzsche's fundamental purpose as an intellectual, as a philosopher, is to de-legitimize equality. In order to do that, he has to delegitimize Christianity. That's the twin project. Everything flows from that. If you can't see that as being at the core of Nietzsche's project, I don't think you can understand anything in Nietzsche. You have to appreciate what the core is because there is a core. It's not just playful pluralism. There is a hard core there. There's a political project in Nietzsche [inaudible 00:21:14] and then there's a political project in Marx.

Ronald Beiner:
For Marx, the political projects just carry forward to the next stage the egalitarianism of liberalism. In Nietzsche, it's the opposite. The civilizational commitment to equality has to be completely annulled, has completely annihilated in order that there be real cultures. I think fascists see themselves as carrying that baton and putting into practice and trying to put Nietzsche's theory into action. Whether Nietzsche would have been impressed, entirely happy with the results, well, that's a different question. But then would Marx be happy with Stalinism?

August Baker:
I...

Ronald Beiner:
It's not the point. The point is there is a vision there, and fascists saw themselves as trying to realize what Nietzsche had articulated normatively.

August Baker:
Would you say that both for Marx and Nietzsche, they were long on criticism and short on how the new world is going to be?

Ronald Beiner:
Yeah. 100%. You could say that's a kind of parallel between them, that they're both writing blank checks, very dangerous blank checks. And no. Nietzsche said that the 20th century would be ideological war the likes of which would had never been seen in human history. That was more or less true. That was pretty prophetic. The ideas, well, you have the Marxist on one side and you'd have the fascists on the other, and you'd have the liberals in the middle who would be irrelevant, and that he was on one side of that ideological war.

Ronald Beiner:
The problem is for Nietzsche as much as for Marx. They're both utopians, but they don't fill in the content of this utopia. All the emphasis is on destroying the existing order. For Marx, we wipe out capitalism, but then what succeeds capitalism? Well, we find out later. [inaudible 00:23:22] Leninism and Stalinism. In the case of Nietzsche [inaudible 00:23:28] that they're very powerful cultural critique. Sure. Let's destroy liberalism. Then what? Well, then we get Mussolini and Hitler. Nietzsche didn't spell out, well, if you follow this path, you're going to wind up with Hitler. There's society. Well, we'll get to the further shore. Well, we'll figure it out when the arrow hits the further shore. Well, by time you get to the further shore, sorry, it's too late.

Ronald Beiner:
So, yeah. It's that part of what makes him attractive as theorists is there's a kind of tremendous kind of ambition and reaching for the stars and climbing Mount Everest culturally and intellectually. That's part of what defines our theory tradition. But the theory tradition's dangerous precisely because you get in the theory can and by virtue of your ambition, but then that can turn out to be politically ambitious if all you've done is write a bunch of blank checks.

Ronald Beiner:
I think both Nietzsche and Marx did that.

August Baker:
Yeah. One of the [inaudible 00:24:35].

Ronald Beiner:
We paid the place for it in the 20th century [inaudible 00:24:37] there's no guarantee right this moment that the 21st century won't be a replay of the 20th century. God help us if it is. But there's plenty to suggest that the 21st century could turn out to be as horrifying as the 20th century was. Again, that's part of [inaudible 00:24:57]

August Baker:
Be realistic.

Ronald Beiner:
... of what I wrote, why I wrote the book. It's here we go again. It's like Weimar over again where you get intellectuals... I guess like most liberals, the assumption was, well, fascism now will never happen again. It's in the rubbish bin of history. It'll stay in the rubbish bin of history and wouldn't go to the extent of Fukiyama, that liberal democracy who will reign forever. That was, I think, obvious nonsense from the start.

Ronald Beiner:
But certainly, the idea of there being fascist intellectuals, trying to pull fascism out of that rubbish bin of history, that was sort of beyond my imagination. Then I don't [inaudible 00:25:38] starting in 2015 more or less, and then it got worse after Trump was elected. You start think, well, fascist intellectual do exist. And it's back. It's back not just in with respect to mob behavior, but it's back with respect to intellectual activity. That was a very scary realization for me. I wrote this book, I guess, as feeling a kind of citizens' imperative to say something or do something with the equipment I had, to say, well, we better wake up and smell the coffee.

August Baker:
Yep. Yeah. One of the points you made that I thought really interesting was you said Nietzsche puts a lot of energy into exposing liberal and leftist resentment, but he turned a blind eye toward or was silent about the resentment of the right, including his own. I was like, "Yes."

Ronald Beiner:
It's pretty hard not to see all the resentment in the pages of Nietzsche. For him, that's the standard of the things that he rejects, supposedly, are defined by resentment and all the business about yay-saying and that's the opposite of resentment. Well, his texts are, not always, at least not every page, but there's plenty of resentment packed into Nietzsche's texts. It delegitimizes him according to the standard he himself is applying. He's not as yay-saying as he makes himself out to be. There's this rhetoric of yay-saying, but he doesn't live up to that rhetoric. I think that that's true of the political legacy he's left up till the present. Right wing populism is powered more than anything by resentment against supposed liberal elites who are running the world and so on. Well, a lot of that you can actually trace back to Nietzche. He was completely ignored in his own time. Hardly anyone knew him. Hardly anyone knew who he was.

August Baker:
What a miserable life.

Ronald Beiner:
Yeah. Not a fun life. It's a lonely life. I think he bitterly resented the fact that he wasn't being treated as the intellectual giant that he took himself to be. He was right. He was right that people would start reading him in the 20th century, in fact, regard him as one of the leading thinkers of his time. But...

August Baker:
He only barely saw that, I think, before he went mad. Just briefly did he realize that he was becoming successful, as I understand it.

Ronald Beiner:
Well, he went mad in 1889. I don't think there was much there. Yeah. Hardly any knows [inaudible 00:28:36]

August Baker:
Hardly, right.

Ronald Beiner:
... was starting. It really picked up in the 1890s, and then as one got into the 20th century, he took off and became perhaps the most influential thinker of the 20th century or one of the most influential thinkers.

August Baker:
You talked about culture and one of the things that you say was that Nietzsche would say that modern liberals are to reflective about their membership in cultures and about the equal validity of alternative cultures. We do talk a lot about culture, but not in the way... I was trying to think how, with all the talk of multiculturalism, how that fits in with his critique of cultures.

Ronald Beiner:
Well, again, I think that you can draw a direct line from that to the contemporary far right. I think in this sense, they're precisely Nietzscheans in the strict sense, that part of what we associate with modernity and part of why Nietzsche condemns modernity is one's trying to assent to a kind of universalism where one can appreciate different cultures and what different communities within the human world have to contribute to a larger conversation and a larger human experience and a kind of impartiality.

Ronald Beiner:
Again, I think here where you could see Heidegger as an intellectual heir to Nietzsche, that real cultures are so deeply rooted that they don't see outside of themselves, don't see outside of their own [inaudible 00:30:19] want to.

August Baker:
Interesting.

Ronald Beiner:
And you could say the central rhetoric in Heidegger is that modern man is homeless. You get this idea in his important Letter on Humanism, that homelessness is the core modern experience. Again, it's like for Nietzsche, is what condemns modernity. For Nietzsche, what condemns modernity is there are no horizons, that the universalism that has been introduced into Western experience by Christianity has dissolved horizons. The horizon for much of Christianity was the idea of God itself, and God's dead, and we're left with nothing and we're just left with some kind of residues of Christian civilization. But those are fast eroding. And so we're left just drifting. Our kind of supposed openness to a variety of cultures shows we have no culture; we have no horizons of our own. We live in this horizonless world.

Ronald Beiner:
Well, Heidegger similarly, we kind of live in this homeless world where everyone's trying to be universal and they're not rooted in any particular identity or cultural experience of their own. The kind of far right attack on multiculturalism, I think, just draws straight out of that. One of these alt-right thinkers, Greg Johnson, said that the originator of the European new right was Heidegger. I think that's a plausible claim. But I think you can trace similar preoccupations back to Nietzsche, and I try and do that in the book.

August Baker:
As we go to Heidegger, I think immediately of Rorty in the New York Times said similar to you in the sense that we're not trying to say don't read Heidegger, but Rorty said Heidegger's books will be read for centuries to come. But the smell of smoke from the crematories, the grave in the air, referring back to Paul Celan's Death Fugue, the grave in the air will linger on their pages.

Ronald Beiner:
I think that's true. I discuss in the book how some of the most incriminating texts in Heidegger were taken out by Heidegger in the '60s, and then when they put together the collected works in the '80s, they were put back in. I think that that tells you a lot about Heidegger, that he was never prepared to admit that he had made any mistakes. He was silent about the Holocaust, or insofar as people forced commentary out of him, it was kind even more incriminating than silence.

Ronald Beiner:
I think it relates to what I was saying earlier, that the core project is to destroy the liberal egalitarian world founded on the idea of a universal dignity of human beings. The commitment to fascism is actually not some... I don't know... some ornament or some add-on, but what connects quite centrally to what his fundamental project was. In a sense, if fascism didn't work out in the 20th century, well, his thought will still be around centuries later and some later version will have to try and do what Hitler and Nazis failed to do in the '30s. I mean...

August Baker:
Rorty also says he lied over and over again about his Nazism, and that he did its best to ignore the murder of the European Jews. But for those who care about philosophy, things are not so simple. He says, as far as whether to read him, and this is again getting back to your point, he managed to write books that are as powerful and as original as Spinoza's or Hegel's. You can't understand really Gadamer or Levinas, Arendt, Foucault, Derrida, Habermas without reading Heidegger. That's what Rdy was saying.

Ronald Beiner:
I pretty much agree with all that. Yeah. We should read him. He earned his place in the canon of Western philosophy. I think it's almost certainly correct that people will read him long from now just as they read Aristotle store or read Hegel. I don't want to expel him from the canon and I wouldn't want to pull his books off the library, as one prominent critic of Heidegger suggested. So, I think that's right. There's a reason why people read him, and there's a reason why he's just been essential to 20th century, as he's been, and why he had the tremendous influence he's had on a whole generation of philosophers, many of whom I kind of cherish. Same for Nietzsche. I mean, they are a indispensable part of the history of modern philosophy. That's not a reason to try and whitewash them or [inaudible 00:35:32].

August Baker:
Exactly.

Ronald Beiner:
... apologize for them or kind of pretend that the project was something different than what it really was.

August Baker:
Right.

Ronald Beiner:
[inaudible 00:35:41].

August Baker:
No, absolutely.

Ronald Beiner:
Look at that clear-sightedly and face up to it and understand why these thinkers have such attraction for people who are not good liberals, but who are ferociously anti-liberal. Those people are on the rise and have a big and growing following. If they understand themselves in Nietzsche and Heidegger in terms we have to understand that and maybe if necessary, reread Nietzsche and Heidegger until we're clear about it, and trying to contribute in my modest way to that.

August Baker:
That's certainly the way I understood it. Fascinating. We don't have time. But for the listener, there's an interesting anecdote you have about your own personal interactions with Gadamer and Habermas, which is quite interesting. Time, unfortunately. But I was just wondering, what are you working on now? Freud? Is that...

Ronald Beiner:
Well, I'm writing a book called Moses and Political Philosophy, looking at the whole diversity of appropriations of the Moses story within the Western theory canon, and I'm co-writing it with my friend Harrison Floss. Freud figures in that because of course he wrote [inaudible 00:37:06] that's why he gets included in the book. But it's kind of a broader story of how Moses intersects with Western theory.

August Baker:
Well, we look forward to that. Professor Beiner, thank you so much for talking with me. Was really interesting and I really enjoyed the book, and appreciate what you've done with that.

Ronald Beiner:
Great. Well, thanks so much for your interest in it. It's been a pleasure chatting with you.

August Baker:
Same here. Okay. Bye.

William Egginton

Alejandro Jodorowsky

Filmmaker and philosopher

Alejandro Jodorowsky is a force of nature. At 95 years old he is still making films and is a cultural phenomenon who has influenced other artists as disparate as John Waters and Yoko Ono. Although his body of work has long been considered disjointed and random, William Egginton claims that Jodorowsky's writings, theatre work and mime, and his films, along with the therapeutic practice he calls psychomagic, can all be tied together to form the philosophical programme that underpins his films.

Incorporating surrealism and thinkers including Lacan, Kant, Hegel, and Žižek into his interpretation of Jodorowsky's work, Egginton shows how his diverse films are connected by interpretive practices with a fundamental similarity to Lacanian psychoanalysis. Using case studies of Jodorowsky's cult films, El Topo, Fando y Lis and Holy Mountain and more, this book provides a unique perspective on a filmmaker whose work has been notoriously difficult to analyse.

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (Cato Institute)

Beyond positivism, behaviorism, and neoinstitutionalism in economics

A penetrating analysis from one of the defining voices of contemporary economics.

In Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey zeroes in on the authoritarian cast of recent economics, arguing for a re-focusing on the liberated human. The behaviorist positivism fashionable in the field since the 1930s treats people from the outside. It yielded in Williamson and North a manipulative neo-institutionalism. McCloskey argues that institutions as causes are mainly temporary and intermediate, not ultimate. They are human-made, depending on words, myth, ethics, ideology, history, identity, professionalism, gossip, movies, what your mother taught you.  Humans create conversations as they go, in the economy as in the rest of life.

In engaging and erudite prose, McCloskey exhibits in detail the scientific failures of neo-institutionalism. She proposes a “humanomics,” an economics with the humans left in.  Humanomics keeps theory, quantification, experiment, mathematics, econometrics, though insisting on more true rigor than is usual. It adds what can be learned about the economy from history, philosophy, literature, and all the sciences of humans. McCloskey reaffirms the durability of “market-tested innovation” against the imagined imperfections to be corrected by a perfect government. With her trademark zeal and incisive wit, she rebuilds the foundations of economics.

REVIEWS

“A compact discussion of some crucial issues economists should be contemplating.” The Enlightened Economist.

"Beyond Positivism [presents] a criticism and reshaping of economic thought that departs from neoinstitutionalism and other non-‘humanomical’ movements, promoting the ethics of liberalism as the ideal foundation for an adequate economic science.” Journal of Economic Literature

“The manuscript is a collection of writings for various forums, many reviews of others and many replies to critics. One unifying theme is a critique of neoinstitutional economics. But yet another theme is a defense of the bourgeois trilogy against its critics. This book is well worth a read.” Richard Langlois, University of Connecticut

“This new book deepens the continuing conversation in Humanomics. It’s essentially about discovering Adam Smith and resuming a path that McCloskey has so magnificently helped to reinvigorate in the last half century.” Vernon Smith, Chapman University and 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction The Argument in Brief

Part I. Economics Is in Scientific Trouble
Chapter 1. An Antique, Unethical, and Badly Measured Behaviorism Doesn’t Yield Good Economic Science or Good Politics
Chapter 2. Economics Needs to Get Serious about Measuring the Economy
Chapter 3. The Number of Unmeasured “Imperfections” Is Embarrassingly Long
Chapter 4. Historical Economics Can Measure Them, Showing Them to Be Small
Chapter 5. The Worst of Orthodox Positivism Lacks Ethics and Measurement

Part II. Neoinstitutionalism Shares in the Troubles
Chapter 6. Even the Best of Neoinstitutionalism Lacks Measurement
Chapter 7. And “Culture,” or Mistaken History, Will Not Repair It
Chapter 8. That Is, Neoinstitutionalism, Like the Rest of Behavioral Positivism, Fails as History and as Economics
Chapter 9. As It Fails in Logic and in Philosophy
Chapter 10. Neoinstitutionalism, in Short, Is Not a Scientific Success

Part III. Humanomics Can Save the Science
Chapter 11. But It’s Been Hard for Positivists to Understand Humanomics
Chapter 12. Yet We Can Get a Humanomics
Chapter 13. And Although We Can’t Save Private Max U
Chapter 14. We Can Save an Ethical Humanomics

Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo145786166.html

Anne E. Parsons (UNC Greensboro)

From asylum to prison: Deinstitutionalization and the rise of mass incarceration after 1945

To many, asylums are a relic of a bygone era. State governments took steps between 1950 and 1990 to minimize the involuntary confinement of people in psychiatric hospitals, and many mental health facilities closed down. Yet, as Anne Parsons reveals, the asylum did not die during deinstitutionalization. Instead, it returned in the modern prison industrial complex as the government shifted to a more punitive, institutional approach to social deviance. Focusing on Pennsylvania, the state that ran one of the largest mental health systems in the country, Parsons tracks how the lack of community-based services, a fear-based politics around mental illness, and the economics of institutions meant that closing mental hospitals fed a cycle of incarceration that became an epidemic.
This groundbreaking book recasts the political narrative of the late twentieth century, as Parsons charts how the politics of mass incarceration shaped the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals and mental health policy making. In doing so, she offers critical insight into how the prison took the place of the asylum in crucial ways, shaping the rise of the prison industrial complex.

AWARDS & DISTINCTIONS

Co-winner, 2019 Outstanding Book Award, Disability History Association

About the Author
Anne E. Parsons is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she serves as the Director of Public History.
For more information about Anne E. Parsons, visit the Author Page.

Reviews
“Parsons has written an excellent book about hopes, frustrations, and failures of deinstitutionalization and decarceration—one that will be of interest to historians, sociologists, psychologists and psychiatrists, policy makers, and students of disability studies.”--Journal of the History of Medicine

“A finely detailed assessment . . . Parsons places punitive shifts in criminal justice system perspectives and practice . . . at the forefront of the increased use of jails and prisons for mentally ill or psychiatrically disabled persons.”--ICCA Journal

“An important work that urges scholars to consider how the contemporary mass incarceration crisis and overincarceration of people with mental illness in the United States has roots in a longer history of state-funded custodial institutions. . . . This book should garner much discussion in graduate seminars and would be a valuable read for anyone interested in the history of psychiatry, institutions, and the carceral state.”--H-Net Reviews

“Parsons advances the compelling argument that a history of deinstitutionalization must be understood as inextricably intertwined with a history of mass incarceration in the United States. . . . As From Asylum to Prison powerfully demonstrates, the racialized and punitive political calculus that drove state and federal policies toward mass incarceration in the 1980s still persists – largely unrevised and too often unchallenged – to the present day.”--Journal of Social History

“From Asylum to Prison definitively shows that asylums must be considered part of the carceral state—and that their ‘deinstitutionalization’ was less about shuttering asylums than it was repurposing them into prisons. The story of the country's move from asylum to prisons is one of reinstitutionalization rather than deinstitutionalization, not one of emptying institutions but shifting their function toward even more punitive ends.”--Reviews in American History

“From Asylum to Prison joins a rich and growing literature on the history of the American carceral state. By centering the post-World War II expansion of the U.S. prison system squarely within the history of deinstitutionalization, Parsons reminds readers that mass incarceration, far from being a distinct historical phenomenon, has deep historical roots outside the halls of the criminal legal system. At the same time, however, as Parsons is contending with an ongoing social and political problem in the U.S., From Asylum to Prison demonstrates . . . the potentially life-changing value of historical research for the present and future.”--History Teacher

240 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 10 halftones, 1 map, 1 graph, 1 table, notes, bibl., index

PAPERBACK ISBN: 978-1-4696-6947-2
Published: February 2022
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-4696-4064-8
Published: September 2018
Justice, Power, and Politics
PAPERBACK   $24.95
E-BOOK   $19.99

Speaker 1:
Today on Author Podcast, we're speaking about the book From Asylum to Prison. We're talking about how the mental asylums were, at one time, very prominent in the U.S., and they've declined over time. At perhaps the same timeframe, the prisons have become much more prominent. We're looking at that interplay between these asylums and the prisons. The book is called From Asylum to Prison. It's published by University of North Carolina Press. The author is Anne E. Parsons.

Speaker 1:
I have some reviews here from Bernard Harcourt of Columbia University. Through a meticulous analysis, rich in archival research, Anne Parsons brilliantly illuminates the historical transformations in custodial confinement from the asylum to the prison. Parsons reveals how prisons and correctional facilities filled the emptying spaces of mental hospitalization. Jonathan Metzl, Anne Parsons brilliantly unpacks a vital social justice issue of the past half century: how prisons became de facto sites of treatment for persons with severe psychiatric disabilities in the U.S. Beautifully written, persuasively argued, Parsons pushes readers to rethink many longstanding assumptions about the ways we as a society treat the most needy among us. Anne Parsons is Associate Professor, Director of Public History, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Welcome, Professor Parsons.

Anne Parsons:
Well, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1:
Thank you. The end of that review from Jonathan Metzl was talking about the basic issue here is how we as a society treat the most needy among us. You include a personal note in the book about your own personal connection to these issues and your motivations to write the book. Could you touch on those?

Anne Parsons:
Yeah, sure. One of the things that got me interested in this subject was the fact that in my own family, my grandmother's sister, Ruth, was institutionalized in an asylum for what was called the Feeble-Minded in 1929. She had severe intellectual developmental disabilities and physical disabilities, and she was institutionalized from about 1929 until her death in 1969. For me, it really resonated this period when there weren't many community options for people with severe intellectual developmental disabilities, but then also psychiatric disabilities. That really was one of the core questions of this book.

Speaker 1:
I find that, I guess this is obvious, but this is the point of history is to be able to tell us that the way things are today is not given from God. It not only can be different in the future, but it was different in the past. When I look at this, I don't know if we could just start with, maybe you could give a verbal overview of this figure one in your book or just the general trends about, well, the basic fact that jumps out to me is that who would've thought that in the 1940s and '50s, there were much fewer people in prison than in mental asylums, shocking really.

Anne Parsons:
Yes, it had me flabbergasted. I also, before going to graduate school, had worked with the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana on prison reform. And so, when I began my doctoral work, I assumed that prison rates had always been high and certainly higher than that of mental hospital rates. But in fact, the 1940s and '50s, the rates of hospitalization dwarfed the rates of people in prison. One example of that is that in the 1950s in Pennsylvania, which is the state I study, the rates of people in the state's mental health institutions was over 40,000. I think over 40,000 today is also the rates of people in prison. It was stunning to me as well when I found that.

Speaker 1:
Right. I think one of the factoids in your book was that there was one mental institution, Byberry, that had as many people in it as all of the prison population in Pennsylvania.

Anne Parsons:
Yes. It was over 6,000 at the time.

Speaker 1:
I guess we can think of two things. The time series here is that... Can you go through the time series about how things change when prison went up and institutionalized and these mental hospitals were deinstitutionalized?

Anne Parsons:
There's a wonderful statistical study by Bernard Harcourt on this and I relied on this at the beginning of the book as you mentioned. What the graphs told us for the rates of people in mental hospitals, for people within here, it's with for people with psychiatric disabilities, he did not include people with intellectual developmental disabilities, that it was almost like if you can imagine a roller coaster of really getting at its peak in the 1950s and then being high right into the early sixties. Then really just, and I think it was over half a million people in the country were in mental health institutions at that time. Then really from the 1960s, '70s, into the early '80s just dramatically going down like that roller coaster, down into, think it's certainly below 100,000, nearing 50,000 into the late 20th century. And so, it really just dramatically went down.

Anne Parsons:
On the other side, at the same time, the rates of imprisonment if we're thinking about that rollercoaster at the same time is low. In the 1950s and '60s, certainly under 100,000, well under 100,000. It really is right at the end of the 1970s to the '80s that it starts to kick up and exponentially goes high by the end of the 20th century. As we know, it has yet to dramatically go down.

Speaker 1:
That's right. The prison rate is pretty constant in terms of the rate per capita between 1928 and until the late '70s, and then it goes increasing. The mental hospital rate is high from the mid-'30s until the '60s. Then, as you say, it craters and it continued to go down. Now, one of the interesting things is you can sum them up as the figure does. You see that the combined rate in terms of both mental hospital and prison says it was high in the '40s and '50s, then it went down due to deinstitutionalization of the mental hospitals. Then it went back up and the combined rate at the end of at around 2000 was the same as it had been before. Accrued, and you say in the book an incorrect reading of this would be, oh, well the people who were in mental hospitals were released, they went out into the streets for a while and then they were arrested and they were put in prison. That would fit the story, but it's false.

Anne Parsons:
Correct. I mean, it's one piece of the puzzle, but a small piece of the puzzle. The most basic example I give of that, that people didn't just shift from mental hospitals to prisons was the fact that mental hospitals were roughly 50% female, women. Then you look at the rates of prisons and it's a minority of people.

Speaker 1:
That's a great time.

Anne Parsons:
Another big element is that people in mental hospitals, the demographics were much older. Indeed, mental hospitals in 1940s, '50s, '60s often served in some ways as a nursing home purpose for people who were elderly. And so, those age demographics were totally different too. It's one piece of the puzzle that there's some of this transinstitutionalization that scholars call, but that is not the justification for the whole-

Speaker 1:
Right. And, race, of course.

Anne Parsons:
Correct. Yes.

Speaker 1:
The population was mainly white in the mental hospitals.

Anne Parsons:
Correct. Exactly.

Speaker 1:
We could talk about the decline in the mental hospital rate, and then we can also then later talk about the increase in the prison rate, the decline in the mental hospital rate, what caused that?

Anne Parsons:
Here's the thing. I'm supposed to give answers that are 60 to 90 seconds and I want an entire lecture.

Speaker 1:
That's Twitter-like.

Anne Parsons:
Right, exactly.

Speaker 1:
I'm sorry to do that. I mean-

Anne Parsons:
No, I can answer it. Just-

Speaker 1:
Well, let me phrase it better though that your book gets into this in greater detail, but maybe you could just give a hint as to what people would find there. That's a good correction, I think.

Anne Parsons:
What I find is that in the 1960s, there really is this change in treatment and modality. There have been new developments in treating people through psychotherapy and also the advent of psychotropic medications. Treatments are changing. And so, there's more of a belief that people could be treated in communities rather than being sent away for long periods of time. It's getting away from that concept that a place, an asylum, can transform a person, which was deeply embedded in the asylum movement. That really is changing things in the '60s.

Anne Parsons:
There also is in the '60s that really leads to changes in the '70s I found is the rise patient activism, the anti-psychiatry movement, challenges to conditions in mental hospitals themselves, many of which were quite large and conditions had dramatically deteriorated in the 1940s and '50s. And so, there were a lot of exposes about mental hospital conditions. And so, with that, came this push to try to improve mental hospitals. With that, bring them down from being, in the case of Byberry, over 6,000 people down to smaller numbers. Then the final thing is really comes in the late '60s and '70s, the rise of patient's rights and major challenges to involuntary confinement, which changed the landscape of who could be confined. That's the very brief overview, and again, it could-

Speaker 1:
Appreciate that. Thank you. One of the things you brought out was who would've thought when you talk about the, I guess, public response, public attention or outrage. Interestingly, there's a big role in your story for conscientious objectors, who you would think, why are they involved in this?

Anne Parsons:
That was just fascinating to me, finding out the story of conscientious objectors and mental hospitals. During World War II, many conscientious objectors were assigned to do their service in mental health institutions. When they were there, a number of conscientious objectors based out of Philadelphia actually began organizing to learn about the conditions in many hospitals and institutions around the country, because they were seeing large amounts of violence or neglect at that time. As conscientious objectors, they did not just oppose violence in war, but also just in day-to-day life. They were seeing those terrible conditions in part because the great depression had led to diminishing state funds to mental health institutions. Then, also, the war itself pulled money away from domestic affairs to the war effort.

Anne Parsons:
And so, because of that, mental hospitals really were in terrible conditions. And so, these conscientious objectors really organized to expose through photographs, through articles, what they were finding and to advocate for better conditions. For me, personally, it was difficult to see those conditions and to know that my great aunt was in an institution like that during that period and just some of the pictures that I had seen from Stockley, which is where she was in Southern Delaware, were really disturbing. And so, it truly was a different world that these conscientious objectors were trying to really make them better. I mean, they made some significant gains.

Speaker 1:
There's no doubt prisons are today at a different world and out of sight, out of mind. The conscientious objectors then, I mean, one thing is you don't see this idea of patient rights. I think we've come a long way probably, but there's still a lot of stigma around psychiatric disability and there's still only the beginnings, I guess, of a neurodiversity, pride movement. It's not the sort of thing where people are proud to identify as someone who has had mental illness and also with incarceration, it's not a group that goes out and advocates for itself. That's my impression, I don't know, but the conscientious objectors seem to have, do you think of them as going in and getting that started?

Anne Parsons:
Certainly, the conscientious objectors were really in the 1940s and early '50s, because they form an organization that continues into the 1950s, were really putting front and center the human rights of people who are institutionalized in mental hospitals in front of people and saying that these human rights matter, these people's lives matter. That is important in laying the foundation for patients rights activism in the '60s and '70s, which really I was struck by how in the '60s and '70s, one of the rights movements that often is lost in history was mental patients rights activism. In Pennsylvania, where I had studied, there was the formation of the Alliance for the liberation of mental patients. These groups are around the country, radio shows that are trying to connect people and trying to organize and fight that stigma, but also fight against involuntary confinement in that time, which was different than today.

Speaker 1:
I think another thing you mentioned in the book is that one of the things about World War II is it showed that psychiatric distress is not a matter of genes and early childhood. It's something that can be due to an experience you have as an adult for getting PTSD. The conscientious objectors led to an article in, I guess, a couple of things that really brought attention to the asylums. One was a life article, another was the book and movie Snake Pit. I don't know, whichever one of those seems most worth talking about now, could you elaborate on it?

Anne Parsons:
One of the things that I found throughout researching this history from the '40s to the '80s, but that was particularly interesting in the '40s and '50s was that major news coverage and books and movies greatly impacted or affected the public's opinion about these places. That was one thing I was really interested in because as we're thinking today about how do we approach and make changes in our carceral system today with our incredibly high rates of prisons, looking at how the media, how books, how movies affected was really interesting.

Anne Parsons:
And so, one of the things that you bring up was the Life Magazine articles in which many conscientious objectors had taken photographs of conditions of mental hospitals. And so, there was literally photographic essays that were published that were showing people what literally it looked like. Those pictures often would have people who were only partially dressed or completely undressed, who were sitting in rooms without adequate furniture, who were in spaces that, in many ways, look like prisons with bars on the windows. These pictures at points really resembled photographs from the Holocaust.

Anne Parsons:
It's interesting, because right now, my research has taken a dramatic turn into a project on the history of the Holocaust in Ukraine. I'm working on an exhibit there. When I go back and look at those photos, again, I'm reminded how people are trying to use what had just been shown, these incredible human rights abuses and maltreatment of people that had happened in Europe during the war and they're trying to show that many of these same abuses are not the same, but that incredible abuses against humanity are happening in these mental health institutions. It's really intentionally showing these pictures in a way that evoke those extreme human rights abuses and are trying to get people to act. It very much does.

Anne Parsons:
In Pennsylvania, I think, or it might actually have been in a different state, the governor, and I almost want to say it was Kansas, the governor ends up taking all of the metal chains and restraints that are in hospitals throughout the state and brings them together and literally boils them down. It really is leading to major reforms in these areas that kick off deinstitutionalization.

Speaker 1:
Well, this is the Maryland governor. You have a photo of the Maryland governor casting the Mental Health Bell.

Anne Parsons:
Yes, that is potentially... Thank you for that.

Speaker 1:
Striking. They make a bell out of these chains and circles.

Anne Parsons:
Yes. The bell is now the symbol of Mental Health America, it's an organization that continues over time.

Speaker 1:
Yes, there's one of the photographs you include in the book called despair, which was in Life, May 6, 1946. It's just stunning. Once you look at it, you can't get it out of your head. I guess, it's out of sight, out of mind, but these articles you could say are bringing it to public mind. Then, we have also these court cases and a lot of court cases eventually ending up, and you go through it in detail, but in the end, we end up with this standard of clear and present danger of physical harm either to himself or others in order to be involuntarily committed. Then, it's only for a short period of time. Talk about how lax it was before then.

Anne Parsons:
Prior to then, the laws had allowed for commitments with doctor's approval and the support of family members, but doctor's approval. Once people had been committed, they often could not be released without the institution approving the release, that type of thing. There were very few, any due process protections at that time for people in mental health institutions. And so, one of the ironies there is that many people, in a time where due process in prisons was still quite limited, but they were in some ways, there was a little bit more due process in prisons than mental hospitals.

Anne Parsons:
One example there had been, I think, it was the case of The Laughing Eel, who was a man who was a robber and had been ultimately was institutionalized in a mental hospital and did not go to prison and ended up spending a few decades in the mental hospital. When his case came forward, probably would've faced maybe a 10-year or so prison sentence, but that lack of real due process, lack of access to attorney, that type of thing could lead to these extended sentences. Now, that was not the case all the time, but it really is trying to understand not everyone stayed in institutions for decades. It shows that there was that lack of due process protections that once people got in, it could be difficult to leave.

Speaker 1:
Right. That was fascinating. I mean, at least in jail or prison, there's a date that it's supposed to be done.

Anne Parsons:
Correct.

Speaker 1:
Right. You go through this Good Time Bill and some of the opposition from the left was, we don't want things to be up in the air. We want things to be... Because if it's just up to somebody to allow them to be released, that'll just never happen. When you get into a mental hospital, it could be forever.

Anne Parsons:
The Good Time Bill, thank you for bringing it up. The Good Time Bill is reflecting a moment in time in the 1960s and '70s, where people, policy makers, politicians, advocates were rethinking what the criminal justice system and mental health system could be. We're trying to look for more community-based alternatives. Out of that came the Good Time Bill, which prison officials were saying, "Maybe we should base this more based on rehabilitation," but you get that pushback from people in mental hospitals. But it really was an interesting moment in the '60s and '70s. This is a question for you. I know you've been raising things, but just your thoughts on that moment yourself.

Speaker 1:
Well, I thought that it was just someone who really tried to come along with a good idea. I guess it was K. Leroy Irvis if I'm reading this right. He came up with what he thought was a way of reforming sentencing and really thought through about what it would be and the bill did not pass. He ended up getting, not even, I guess, not getting support from the left or from the right. It's just made me think that so much is inertia, not good ideas, but someone who was just really thoughtful and came up with what he thought would work, but then politically, it's another question entirely whether you're going to get it through. That was my sense of it.

Anne Parsons:
Both in some ways was inertia, and in other ways, one of the things I found was that the '70s, just as people were trying to think of new solutions like K. Leroy Irvis was trying to make prisons more humane or trying to give incentives for people to readjust to society, that type of thing. At that very same moment, you see the beginnings of the penal turn-

Speaker 1:
Yes.

Anne Parsons:
... in American society. That comes, I think, he was pushing for the Good Time Bill right around the time of Attica and the Attica prison uprising in which in the popular press afterwards, it really turned prisoners into animals incredibly hard. You see the slow hardening of what prison should be as more punitive spaces where you're serving time. I think you're right to point out that from the left, there was that concern around rehabilitation at the time, that it could lead to that over extension of power like they had had in mental hospitals. And so, there wasn't a huge amount of support for those humane efforts too. Do you know what I mean? It wasn't as if the left was coming out against it.

Speaker 1:
And so, in the '80s, which I remember well, there was this fear and put people away that was what I thought it was palpable. We get this rise in the number of people in prison and in prison for a long time. I guess, there are people out there who chose to be in mental institutions. I don't think there's anyone who chooses to be in prison, or it would be difficult to think of anyone who chooses to be in a prison. This has just started in the '80s and has just continued through the end of the century.

Anne Parsons:
It's interesting when we're talking about the '80s and '90s and this politics of fear, because it's interesting because one of the things that's important to remember is the way that asylums grew so large was through a politics of fear during the progressive era and through the 1920s and '30s. There was a real fear-based politics and conception that was rooted in eugenics around people who were feeble-minded or people who were labeled as insane or mad that they were a danger to society, more likely to be criminals, more likely to... Actually, people who were feeble-minded who had intellectual or developmental disabilities for instance were more likely to be susceptible to do crime or to women were thought to be more likely to be prostitutes. This is a very different conception from today.

Anne Parsons:
And so, that fear politics really helped lead to that fueling of big asylums where people were sent. I think we see that again in the '80s in a different form, only this time, it's much more around breaking the law at the point of law breaking. People aren't choosing to go into prisons, but crimes or misdemeanors that might have previously people may have been sent to mental hospitals or just not imprisoned in the '70s, '80s, '90s, there starts to be with the war on drugs, wars on crime that putting people away for drug offenses, for new misdemeanors, trespassing, and that shift to prisons and jails.

Speaker 1:
What's the difference between prisons and jail? Jails or local and prisons are federal, or is that essentially the idea?

Anne Parsons:
That's a great question. Jails are when someone is arrested. If you are charged with a crime and arrested, then you're placed in jail pending trial. Some people do serve their sentences for misdemeanor, smaller crimes there. And so, you do have people who stay for longer periods in jails. If people are then sentenced, tried and sentenced, or plead guilty and are sentenced, then they go to state prisons separately.

Speaker 1:
I gotcha.

Anne Parsons:
And so, today, I think the rates of people with psychiatric disabilities in jail, I looked at a report that had said, it was from 2014, but it gives you a sense of the numbers, which was that 20% of the people in jails that were diagnosed with serious mental illness, that's 20% and about 15% of people in prisons. It led to, at that time, 383,000 people with severe psychiatric diagnoses were in prisons, in jails, which at that time was higher than the number of people in psychiatric hospitals.

Speaker 1:
If you think about the middle class, say, is... I think there was a book called The Search for Order, trying to find worried about people on the margins and whether it was going to disrupt their lives, and on the margins would be people who were unemployed, people who were prisoners, juvenile, delinquents, that was the word, and just a sense that these people on the outside were going to poison the system and needed to be allotted, put somewhere, done something to, and it ended up being put away where they don't have to be thought of, I guess.

Speaker 1:
One of the things that happens then is, as you say, we don't know what is a sign of insanity, what is a sign of criminality. We know that there's a sign that this person is on the margins in some way. For example, I think you mentioned homosexuality was one time... Well, certainly, at one time it was thought to be a mental illness and it was also thought to be criminal maybe, I'm not sure, but it's something that now we look at and say, "Well, it doesn't seem like it is either, but it was thought to be just disruptive in some way."

Anne Parsons:
Homosexuality was criminalized in the 20th century and it was just in 2005 with Lawrence v. Texas that the Supreme Court decision in which can no longer criminalize crimes of sodomy, that type of thing. And so, it was literally had been criminalized. People, 1950s, '40s were often institutionalized in mental hospitals around homosexuality or sexual deviance, people who were trans were more institutionalized in mental hospitals. It was both considered social deviance and led to psychiatric diagnoses and institutionalization, but then also it was criminalized during this-

Speaker 1:
That's a good example. Also, there was a story about Allen Ginsberg in your book about him getting put into a mental asylum, I think, for what we would now consider a crime. It was a traffic crime, I think, perhaps. Let me look. Now, this is from page 37, the story of another famous nonconformist elucidates the connections between law breaking and mental hospitals in the 1940s. In 1949, police arrested a young Allen Ginsberg for participating in a car ride that turned into a police chase and wreck. In lieu of jail time, Ginsberg agreed to mental hospitalization. Right. There, something like a disorderly upsetting issue with cars and accidents now would be in the courts. At the time, the person was sent to a mental hospital for a time. It's fascinating.

Speaker 1:
One of the things that I think the book is talking about is in the push to... It's always easier and possible to look at the past and try to figure it out. To predict the future is another thing. But when we think about decarceration, as tricky as this is, what are some of the lessons that we might learn that you think people should pay attention to?

Anne Parsons:
The biggest lesson really was that in the movement to deinstitutionalize mental hospitals, there was a vision of trying to make society more just and equitable. While deinstitutionalization brought about the rights of people and significantly better conditions in mental health institutions, it did not bring about full community acceptance and really robust funding of healthcare, housing, supports for people on the margins, as you said. And so, as we approach decarceration today, how can we fight not only for reducing prison beds, but also changing society so that new forms of carceral systems don't emerge.

Speaker 1:
Right. It's interesting, people say, "You need to have something measurable, otherwise you don't know what you're doing, and otherwise you don't know if you're accomplishing something." In a way, that's true. But on the other hand, once you have something measurable, if that's all you're thinking about like number of people in the hospital, and the number of people in prison, you can't focus only on that.

Anne Parsons:
It's true, that over focus on those graphs or the statistics.

Speaker 1:
Well, anyway, there's a lot more in the book and great texture, examples. There's only really that one graph in the book. The book is not a book of graphs, it's a book of stories. Thank you very much, Professor Parsons. The book is From Asylum to Prison, subtitle, Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945. The University of North Carolina Press. Thank you for talking with me.

Anne Parsons:
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Christopher Bollas

Conversations

Transcript erratum: The director of the film “Zone of Interest” is Jonathan Glazer. 

Christopher Bollas presents us with a new literary form in his Conversations: twenty-three unique dialogues to captivate, amuse, and inspire. The psychoanalyst Paula Heimann asked: 'Who is speaking? To whom? About what? And why now?' We speak with the voice and position of many others - mothers, fathers, siblings, teachers - and ordinary conversation therefore stages the history of our interpersonal engagements. Heimann's questions also apply when we talk to ourselves, and our inner dialogues reveal the hidden genius of our private world in which we are both actor and audience, poet and reader, politician and electorate. It's quite a ride, and an art form all of its own.

An incisive and sympathetic examination of the case for ending the practice of imprisonment

Despite its omnipresence and long history, imprisonment is a deeply troubling practice. In the United States and elsewhere, prison conditions are inhumane, prisoners are treated without dignity, and sentences are extremely harsh. Mass incarceration and its devastating impact on black communities have been widely condemned as neoslavery or “the new Jim Crow.” Can the practice of imprisonment be reformed, or does justice require it to be ended altogether? In The Idea of Prison Abolition, Tommie Shelby examines the abolitionist case against prisons and its formidable challenge to would-be prison reformers.

Philosophers have long theorized punishment and its justifications, but they haven’t paid enough attention to incarceration or its related problems in societies structured by racial and economic injustice. Taking up this urgent topic, Shelby argues that prisons, once reformed and under the right circumstances, can be legitimate and effective tools of crime control. Yet he draws on insights from black radicals and leading prison abolitionists, especially Angela Davis, to argue that we should dramatically decrease imprisonment and think beyond bars when responding to the problem of crime.

While a world without prisons might be utopian, The Idea of Prison Abolition makes the case that we can make meaningful progress toward this ideal by abolishing the structural injustices that too often lead to crime and its harmful consequences.

Review

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