Gordon Finlayson is the ubercool continental philosopher with Marxist-influenced radical, progressive, non-aligned politics lined up with modern Europen philosophy and critical theory. He is bold and deep. He finds Agamben on Aristotle rubbish, wonders how far the moral domain extends, throws light on what is bad about the abuse of things, believes Habermas to be very important as a political theorist, discusses the dispute between Habermas and Rawls,discusses the relevance of Kant, Hegel and Habermas on contemporary political and ethical thought, chews over the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Habermas’s objections to his critical theory, wonders about austere negativism, negative theology,the muteness of art works, the sinister crisis of Universities, the unreliability of Roger Scuton on anything left wing and how despite the overall bleakness of our contemporary world there are signs of hope. All in all, this is rad. Blowin’.

3:AM: Why did you become a philosopher? Were your politics a driver in this decision, or have they come after the philosophy?

Gordon Finlayson: I sidled into philosophy. I went to university originally to study English Literature. I took some philosophy too, but I found the introduction to moral philosophy I was given somewhat trite and uninspiring. I ended up taking Modern Languages because I was more interested in German and French literature. As my interest deepened and broadened, I branched out into 18th and 19th Century thought. It gradually dawned on me that I was more fascinated by the Denker than the Dichter, and I turned toward Modern European Philosophy and critical theory.

I won a D.A.A.D. scholarship to study ‘General and Comparative Literary Theory’ at what is now called the Peter Szondi Institute at the F.U. Berlin, where I first came to study the Frankfurt School. I already had an interest in Marx and Marxism, which meant that in Berlin in the mid-80s, when post-modernism was rife, I was a fish out of water. At the time, most of the German students, who were in perpetual occupation of some area of the Rostlaube, were reading Derrida or Foucault in autonomous seminars. I was spotted walking around with a copy of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man by Peter Halberg, translator and editor of the Swedish Edition of Benjamin’s Arcades project. He felt sorry for me and took me under his wing. I learnt a lot from him and from various of my other friends there.

I gradually worked my way into philosophy on my return from West Berlin. I planned to go to Cambridge to work on Nietzsche in the German Department. However, I heard Onora O’Neill give a talk on Kant at St. Andrews University. She was Professor at the University of Essex, which had a taught M.A. in Continental Philosophy, with core courses on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. It was the only one in the country and seemed a sensible preparation for a D Phil on Nietzsche. In the end, I stayed there, and wrote a Ph.D. on Hegel’s criticism of Kant.

My politics are largely a matter of conviction, not applied philosophy. They were mainly driven by a sense, which has never left me, that there was something deeply wrong with Western capitalist society. I was surrounded by Marxists, both at school, and at some of the Universities where I studied and worked. At St. Andrews, mind you, most students were Conservative, which at the time meant Thatcherite, and even though I counted some of them personally as friends, I was instinctively repelled by the Thatcherite ideology. Consequently, I was both pushed and pulled towards Marx and Marxism, and inclined to the progressive and radical politics associated with them. Anyway, I made it my goal to find out more about Marx, which led me eventually to study Hegel and Kant, and German Idealism.

That said, I had been brought up by liberal, tolerant and non-doctrinaire parents, and the respect for individual freedom that they instilled in me made its mark. And even some of my most radical activist friends were fiercely anti-totalitarian. Like them, I had a critical and sceptical attitude to Marxism and especially to Eastern Bloc communism. I made several good friends who were brought up in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland, respectively and who suffered under the communist regimes there, enough not to have any illusions about actually existing communism. These various convictions settled into a radical and progressive outlook, which has perhaps more pragmatic and less utopian as the years have passed. Nowadays, my politics are progressive non-aligned, issue driven, and pragmatic. It is important to be radical, where social and political problems are deeply rooted. At the same time, there is a time and place for conservatism about those things that are worth conserving. Blanqui’s radicalism – “Everything is bad. Something else must take its place!” (which could be the motto for much of Frankfurt School critical theory) – even though it might be well-motivated, is in the final analysis as undiscriminating as the reactionary instinct to preserve the status quo, and to see every attempt at amelioration as jeopardy.

3:AM: You are concerned to ensure that high standards of scholarship inform all radical thought. As an example, you criticize the Italian theorist Agamben for being sloppy. You rather think his reading of Aristotle in Homo Sacer is deeply flawed and his conclusion that ‘Today it is not the polis but the camp that is the fundamental bio-political paradigm of the West’ based on his reading is just wrong. Yet his conclusion that there is a ‘previously concealed common link secretly governing the ideologies of the 20th century totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin … and the institutions of Western liberal democracy’ is one heard quite often in some circles. Can you tell us about why Agamben shouldn’t be taken seriously, and whether there are other well-known culprits of inflamed conclusions based on poor work. Do you see philosophy as having an important role in preventing this kind of bad thinking?

GF: Well not all criticism is scholarly, but some is. And where social and philosophical critics are scholars, like Agamben claims to be, the quality of their scholarship affects the quality of their thought and can impair or enhance their criticisms. Actually, I think Agamben should be taken seriously. I find some of what he says provocative and interesting. However, what he writes about Aristotle is, well, I was going to say cavalier, but I really mean rubbish. I’ve taught Aristotle for 15 years or so, and though I certainly would not consider myself an Aristotle scholar, I know some of his work well. I noticed that many of my students – particularly MA students who were new to philosophy, and or did not know much Ancient philosophy, were taking at face value what Agamben writes about Aristotle’s Politics, particularly what he writes about the supposed distinction between ‘bios’ and ‘zoē’ as fact, on the grounds that he is supposed to be a super-erudite classical scholar.

I was suspicious. What he said clashed with everything I knew about Aristotle. Also, whenever I checked something – for example I looked up most of Aristotle’s uses of the terms ‘bios’ and ‘zōē’ and related words and phrases in Bonitz’s Index Aristotelicus – I found the evidence conflicted with Agamben’s assertions. He appeared to base his reading of Aristotle on passing remarks by Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt – thinkers, incidentally, whom I also take very seriously, and indeed admire, but not as authorities on Aristotle – and then piece these together with other bits of theory from Walther Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. The result is a preposterous thesis about the destiny of Western Politics – we are all supposed to be captivated by a paradigm of politics dating back to Aristotle, which paradigm is ‘secretly’ responsible for the worst atrocities of the twentieth Century among everything else. It seemed preposterous in at least four different ways.

First, there is not just one tradition of Western political philosophy. It’s a whole tangle of different traditions, movements and counter-movements, which pull in many different directions. It’s at least as plausible to claim that Western politics rests on a single paradigm of political thought dating from Hobbes’s break with Scholasticism and Aristotelianism.

Second, since the 4th Century B.C. there have been innumerable smart and well-informed people reflecting on politics, why has no-one noticed this hidden paradigm until Agamben?

Third, though I’m not one to downplay the role of ideas and theories in shaping political reality, their influence is diffuse, opaque, riddled with contingencies. Claiming that there is a discernible link between Aristotle’s Politics and, say, modern liberalism, not to mention the Nazi deathcamps, stretches credulity to breaking point.

Fourth, the actual passages from Aristotle that Agamben quotes do not support his claims; they say almost the opposite.

Having said that, I did not write that article to divest the crow of his peacock’s feathers. A good thing too, because, as I was revising my piece, I found that the Cornell scholar, Laurent Dubreuil had done that far more effectively than I could. I wrote the article because I think the virtues of good scholarship are fundamentally important to humanities disciplines, and that critical theorists who are worth their salt cannot afford to treat them lightly. I respect good scholarship. It’s hard, slow, and often unrewarding. The reason it is unrewarding, is that like some craftsmanship, the better it is, the less you notice it. Maurice Blanchot puts the point better than I could. “Critical writing has this peculiarity: the more it realizes, develops and affirms itself, the more it has to efface itself… Not only does it not impose itself on the object, and take care that it does not replace that of which it speaks, but rather it only fulfils and successfully carries out its aim, when it vanishes. ” It’s just the opposite with Agamben. His scholarliness is meretricious. That is why he has such a reputation for his erudition: not among classical scholars of course, but among high profile academics who you think should know better. Ernesto Laclau, for example, praises his “dazzling classical erudition.”
To my mind Agamben’s work is all about emulating a certain gesture and pathos that one finds in Heidegger about the fate of Western metaphysics, and to some extent also in Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence. Agamben’s trick is to claim to do something similar for Western politics.

But just as some Derrideans, who claim to reject an entire tradition of Western metaphysics, vastly oversimplify and homogenize that tradition in order to confect something ready for deconstruction, so Agamben makes his grand narrative up. And I don’t buy the argument that Agamben is deliberately purveying what he knows to be a fictional ‘counternarrative’, in order to contest the prevailing ideology. It is not as if his writing is redolent with irony. Dubreuil is right. Agamben’s ex cathedra pronouncements about Aristotle, and the ancient world, on which he bases his thesis about Western politics, claim scholarly authority, but don’t stand up to scrutiny.

3:AM: Your philosophy is politically engaged at all sorts of levels. So when you ask why things matter – beginning with an example of breaking things as a child and why even those things mattered even though easily replaceable – you brood on how we’ve thought about things mattering and found that actually we don’t philosophize about it. Except Heidegger, who did. And Christine Korsgaard who does in footnotes. Why do you find Korsgaard’s approach a good start and how do you develop your thoughts about things? And why do you think things matter?

GF: You’ve picked on rather quirky piece of mine. I was asked to talk to a conference entitled Real Things: Matter, Materiality and Representation. I had no idea that there was a branch of theory (in the broadest sense) called ‘thing theory’. But I had always been interested in how far the moral domain extended – to animals, to the environment, to material things. And Adorno’s work makes one think about the ethical dimension of one’s relation to the material world. So I decided to investigate to the question of whether and to what extent real things matter, morally speaking.

To your first question, Korsgaard is, to my knowledge, the only contemporary philosopher of any moment who has even begun to address this issue. And she canvasses the thought that we might have duties “not only to our fellow creatures, but to our fellow entities” only at the “risk of being thought a complete lunatic.” I don’t think she is a lunatic, but I do think that that her Kantian moral theory is not a promising basis on which to pursue such an inquiry. I take a broader, more historical, and phenomenological approach.

Ironically, given what I’ve just said above, it began with a reflection on how in the history of Western metaphysics, in what A. O. Lovejoy called ‘the Great Chain of Being’, and in the axiological hierarchy that chain represents, inanimate material objects occupy a rather lowly place. This goes hand in hand with a certain ethical outlook that is primarily concerned with the obligations that we owe to other human beings. These two views seemed to me to be natural partners.

But there are other important factors that govern our attitudes toward things. In our world, most things are the property of someone. And proprietors dispose absolutely of their property. What they do with it, is completely up to them. As Proudhon puts it, a proprietor may “allow his crops to rot underfoot; sow his field with salt; milk his cows on the sand; change his vineyard into a desert, and use his vegetable garden as a park.” Legally speaking it is in the main perfectly acceptable to maltreat one’s material (inanimate) possessions. Finally, in our commodity-rich consumer society artefacts are nearly all readily substitutable with like for like equivalents. If something gets broken or lost a replacement can in most cases easily be found, and this affects our sense of the value of things, as opposed to the value of persons.

My rather speculative idea is that these several factors have had the effect of narrowing the ethical domain to that of our relations to other persons, and thus of expelling things from the realm of ethical values and obligations. The effects of this are hard to gauge. Perhaps it helps explain why our domestic lives, and our economy and society in general, are governed by instrumental relations, and patterns of exploitation of nature and material objects, rather than, say relations of care, stewardship, trust, or whatever.

3:AM: You write: ‘The wrong or the bad in the destruction, damage, neglect, abuse of things, whether intentional or not, has a different shade. It has the shade of desuetude, the cessation of an attachment to something there is reason to value, and the desolation of something that no longer belongs.’
Is your thought that many of the horrors of the contemporary (such as the abandonment of civil values, political and intellectual decency, ecological and social care, the absence of fairness and public endorsement of greed) can be understood in these terms? Are, for example, the protests of the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring, for example, motivated by such feelings of desolation? And do you think that the difference between, say, the Occupy protests and the Tea party is largely to do with the sense of desuetude that the Tea Party lot seem to miss?

GF: No. I was trying to throw some light on what is bad about the damage, or neglect, or abuse of things. I was trying to specify the moral hue of that particular kind of badness. Maybe ‘moral’ is the wrong word to describe this. There are many varieties of badness and of human wrongs. Human life is reticulated by the things that surround them. Each of these things calls to be treated in a certain way, and accordingly can be treated well or badly. In that sense all living beings have a certain fellowship with things. If one sees things merely as property one loses sight of that fellowship. I was trying to say what the fellowship consisted in, and, at the same time, to explain why almost no philosophers or social scientists appear to find such questions worthy of philosophical interest. I don’t think I succeeded. I only managed to provide an initial orientation for an unfinished philosophical inquiry.

As for the Tea Party, the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, I’d be wary of making connections between my philosophical first thoughts about the value of things, even when more properly developed, and these difficult terrains. These are political topics which require expert knowledge I don’t possess. Of course I have opinions, worked up from my selective intake of news reports etc.. But these are not direct applications of my philosophical views.

One thing I will say is that the Arab Spring, and Occupy are genuine political movements, based on real grievances and a proper sense of injustice. The Tea Party, so far as I can tell is an entirely astro-turfed lobbying organization for far right interests, in hock to the NRA and other such organisations. I note that it is campaigning against Dianne Feinstein’s to my mind sensible bill to halt the sale, transfer, importation and manufacturing of military-style assault weapons and high-capacity weaponry. The Tea Party’s self-declared mission is to campaign on any issue that threatens “the security…or domestic tranquillity of our beloved nation.” They argue that the proposed partial gun control – limiting access to semi-automatic firearms and military assault weapons – jeopardizes their beloved domestic security and tranquillity, and that what is needed in order to protect it is for more people to carry such weapons, including armed guards in schools! What can you say to such a preposterous view? It goes beyond reactionary. The recently deceased A. O. Hirschman pointed out that perversity arguments, like the argument that the proposed measure will achieve the contrary result to the one intended, are the favoured rhetorical techniques of reactionaries. Here we have The Tea Party putting forward a perversity argument that is a reductio ad absurdum of all perversity arguments. You don’t need a philosopher, historian or sociologist to point out what is wrong with it. Rather you need a social psychologist to explain why some people are inclined to believe it in the first place. That is the kind of question that ideology criticism and later the critical theory of society was supposed to answer.

3:AM: You find Habermas enormously important in liberal political theory. Can you say something about Habermas and why he’s so important?

GF: Yes. That’s easy. First let me say that Habermas is an important political theorist, but whether he is a liberal political theorist or not is another question. He’s recently stated that he considers himself a “left-liberal”. But what the means in Germany is rather different from what it means in the UK or the US. Let me explain what I mean. There are obvious senses in which Habermas is anything but liberal. He does not begin from the assumption that the political system is there chiefly to protect private interests, and to safeguard the negative freedom of individual persons to pursue those interests (compatibly with everyone else’s freedom to do likewise) unhindered by the state or other citizens. He offers a critique of that kind of liberal political theory for bowdlerizing political reality, ignoring the social complexity and social differentiation of modern political associations. And he has quite a lot to say about the role of the state, as the seat of a political system the function of which is to produce legitimate law, and to safeguard the free flow of discourses in which public opinion and democratic opinions can form. He is no advocate of the small state, even if he acknowledges the decline in its reach.

In neither of those very common ways of understanding the term ‘liberal’ can Habermas properly be called a liberal political theorist. Nor does he think that the job of the state is merely to facilitate the free market. So he is not a liberal in that third sense either. Finally, although he argues that the liberal idea of individual human rights and the republican idea of popular sovereignty are equiprimordial and mutually complementary, it is clear that ultimately it is popular sovereignty – albeit under modern, post-conventional conditions – that is to use Austin’s politically incorrect phrase, the trouser concept, and this is true of Habermas’s understanding of democratic legitimacy, and his ideal of good functioning of the political system, his conception of the open ended, constitution, and of his interpretation of German constitutional law. In his conception of liberal democracy, it is democracy that has the upper hand.

That said, he does defend the idea of individual rights and the rule of law, in his own manner, and he also argues that a liberal political culture in which citizens are free to make up their own minds and voice their opinions is both desirable in itself and a functional prerequisite of democratic politics. So there are important components of liberal political theory that are built-in to his theory of democratic legitimacy. He has therefore always adopted a very defensive position on the rule of law, which he thinks must be preserved, albeit not at the expense of the democratic process, which replenishes the source of legitimacy on which legality depends. I guess that this is what most inclines him against Marxist theories that sees law and legitimacy as the expressions of class interests of the bourgeoisie that are bound to the capitalist relations of production. Generally speaking Habermas is accused of being a liberal by Marxists. Liberals in any of the three senses outlined above – defenders of a small state, of a free market, and believers in the pre-political rights of individuals – probably view him as a radical social democrat.
So, to answer your question, Habermas is an important social and political theorist for several reasons.

First, there is the richness and suggestiveness of his account in Theory of Communicative Action of how communication and discourse facilitate social integration and provide social cohesion in modern societies, an account which dovetails with his diagnosis of the pathologies of modern societies. One of his most important ideas is that of the colonisation of the lifeworld, and the erosion of freedom and the concomitant depoliticisation of social life at the hands of the market, and the various arms of the state.

Second, he is one of few political theorists to have has made a contribution to moral theory. In the 1980s he developed the idea for a Discourse Ethics, a discourse theory of morality, which is an intersubjective cousin of Kantian deontology, influenced by Apel, Mead and Kohlberg and others.

Third, he puts forward an extended argument for the very ambitious thesis that the modern constitutional state and the rule of law are not to be had without radical democracy, or a recognizable version of popular sovereignty that is compatible with modern, mass, complex and differentiated, multicultural societies, and a state whose reach and power, in relation to the global economy, has declined.

Fourth, he developed albeit in phases from the 1970’s onwards, a theory of deliberative democracy, long before such ideas took hold in the various traditions of analytic political philosophy. He really was a deliberative democrat avant la lettre.
There are many other reasons why Habermas has (and deserves to have) such a high cultural, intellectual and academic profile especially, but not only, in Germany and Europe.

Consider the range of his influence. His work on the public sphere, his Habilitation thesis – Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere – was and still is a seminal text in 18th Century and Enlightenment studies. In the 1970s he inherited the mantle of Frankfurt School critical theory, and proposed nothing less than a transformation of historical materialism.

One of his nicer insights was that the flawed assumption that changes in the socio-economic infrastructure would automatically bring about transformations in the superstructure, (which would then bring about individual and collective well-being), was common both to historical materialism, and to the technocratic governance of the Federal Republic of Germany in the 50s and 60s, where political ‘decisions’ were reinterpreted as the management of the effects of steering-mechanisms, implementing strategies to deliver low-inflation, economic growth, and full-employment. In Habermas’s eyes Marxist theory and neo-conservative politicians conspired to occlude, and to eviscerate what was left of, the democratic basis of political legitimacy, and thus unwittingly weakened the rule of law, and the freedoms it protected.

He has a rich and comprehensive theory of modernity which brings to light the various ways in which the process of rationalisation puts itself in jeopardy, and which has a bearing on work in an array of disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. Habermas’s work is taken seriously by academics currently working in Sociology departments, English Departments, Cultural Theory departments, Political Science, Law departments and Philosophy departments. Few theorists in any discipline command such wide appeal. That is a good mark of his significance.

In addition to that, for the last few decades Habermas has been one of Germany’s and Europe’s foremost public intellectuals. One can easily forgets that he started off as a journalist and that at least half of his work consists in articles and published interviews intended for a public readership in newspapers, weekly magazines, and other non-academic written media. In 2008 his Kleine Politische Schriften, by no means all of his occasional writing, amounted to 11 volumes. I cannot keep up with them all. And if they were his only contribution to posterity, they would be more than enough for a lifetime’s work. Habermas takes his role as a public intellectual extremely seriously.

I think he saw himself as a kind of agent provocateur on behalf of democracy and the rule of law, smoking out forces of reaction and complacency wherever he found them. In 1953 he published an excoriating article on Heidegger in the FAZ. Heidegger had just republished a speech he made in 1935 in which he talked of “the inner truth and greatness of this movement.” Habermas took that to be an allusion to National Socialism, and a sign that Heidegger had failed or simply refused to acknowledge and to deal with his association with the Nazi regime. Just 24 at the time, Habermas was criticized for undue moralism and alarmism and for wanting to persecute the greatest philosopher of the age.

In the mid-1960s during the student protests he was equally vocal in his denunciation of Police violence against the students (which culminated in the fatal shooting of a student by a plain clothes policeman in West-Berlin) as he was of the blind activism and revolutionary violence of the students. On both sides, he saw a threat to an incipient, but still fragile, democratic state and liberal democratic culture of the Federal Republic of Germany. He did not play to the radical student gallery. He was not afraid of making enemies on the political Right and the Left. It has recently been claimed by Matthew Specter, in my view justifiably, that one of Habermas’s great achievement as a (West)-German citizen was to sensitize the left to “an appreciation for the normative and institutional value of a liberal constitutional order”.

Thirdly, Habermas has a rare and enviable capacity to sense the issues that are relevant to the present. In the mid-1980s he was among the most vocal opponents of the right-wing historiographers in the Historian Controversy, whom he accused of wanting to relativize the crimes of the Nazi regime, in the interests of normalizing West German foreign policy. More recently he has engaged in debates around gene technology and their threat to our self-understanding as autonomous moral persons. He has been true to his own view that the task of the public intellectual is to “stir up critical developments when everyone else is still doing business as usual.” Philosophers should do more of that. As a bunch, we tend to be too inward looking.

3:AM: A key discussion in contemporary liberal theory of ethics and politics is the relationship and differences between Habermas and Rawls. Can you say something about what you take the main points of dispute are and where you stand on this?

GF: Sure. In my view, despite the amount of ink that has been spilt on Habermas and Rawls in their respective fields, relatively little attention has been paid to the dispute between them. This is largely because influential commentators and critics were quick to judge their exchange in the Journal of Philosophy a damp squib.

This was in part because expectations ran high, at the time, because two of the greatest social and political theorists of the 20th century, although working in different traditions, roughly analytic political philosophy and German Social theory had engaged each other in debate. It was also because in truth neither thinker was sufficiently well apprised of the detail of the others theory – unsurprisingly really, since they worked in very different traditions and each had just spent the last few years writing their own major work of political theory. Finally, everyone at the time, including the disputants themselves, were seduced by the assumption that the salient point of comparison between their respective theories was Habermas’s principle (U) and his conception of the moral standpoint, and Rawls’s argument that the principles of justice are those that would be chosen by a rational and reasonable persons in the Original Position. Almost everyone who has written on Habermas and Rawls makes that particular mistake.

My take on that is straightforward. The debate between them concerns their respective political theories. It is basically a dispute between Rawls’s theory of Political Liberalism, and Habermas’s Discourse Theory of Law. It is not primarily a dispute between Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and Habermas Discourse Ethics. Principle (U) is the central idea in Habermas’s Discourse Ethics, which is a moral theory, not a theory of law or of democratic legitimacy, while the argument from the Original Position takes a back seat in Rawls’s Political Liberalism. People who interpret the Habermas Rawls dispute in the light of the contrast between Habermas’s principle (U) and Rawls’s Original Position, are looking at the wrong thing and so miss the real points of dispute.

What people should have been asking is this. What are the central organizing ideas of their respective political theories, and on what significant points do these ideas conflict? To my mind the real point of dispute concerns their different conception of the political and of democratic legitimacy. According to Rawls “ the liberal principle of legitimacy” implies that legitimate laws, laws whose enforcement is properly justified to those who must live under them, may not appeal to principles and ideas insofar as they form part of any comprehensive philosophical or moral doctrine, but only insofar as they form part of an overlapping consensus of all reasonable comprehensive doctrines. For various reasons, Habermas has to deny this. For one thing, he maintains that morality, that is principle (U) and the norms it validates, constrain what can count as legitimate law. Habermas claims at various places that that legitimate laws must “harmonize with the universal principles of justice and solidarity”. More precisely he writes that “a legal order can be legitimate only if it does not contradict basic moral principles.” Whatever way you look at it Habermas’s conception of morality (and his theory of Discourse Ethics) is what Rawls would call comprehensive moral (or philosophical) doctrines. The fact that Habermas calls his theory ‘proceduralist’ is irrelevant. After all he claims that substantive moral norms, namely all those norms that are validated by the procedure – namely discourse in conformity to (U) – constrain legitimate laws on pain of giving rise to cognitive dissonance (between moral and legal demands). There are other important differences too. Habermas allows that conceptions of the good may be germane to the justification of legitimate law, a claim that Rawls again, must deny. Finally, Rawls is right to claim that Habermas’s conception of legitimacy is comprehensive, at least in one obvious sense: it presupposes that a controversial philosophical theory is true, namely discourse ethics.

3:AM: You ask whether Hegel’s Critique of Kant applies to Habermas’s discourse ethics. Kant, Hegel and Habermas are all philosophers people may have heard of but perhaps not really understood why they are significant for contemporary political and ethical thought. Can you say something about why we should be interested in these three figures and how you answer your question?

GF: Do you think it is the case that people have not understood why Kant is important to contemporary ethical and political thought? I’d be surprised if that were true. After all nearly every contemporary moral philosopher takes a position for or against Kant. Think of the animus of Bernard Williams’s ethical theory against “morality the peculiar institution” as he calls it: in other words, the moral standpoint as Kant conceived it. Some theorists, Habermas, George Herbert Mead, Lawrence Kohlberg, think that Kantian conception of morality is embedded deep in our moral consciousness. That may or may not be true. But it cannot be denied that Kant, in contrast to, say, Mill, whose influence has waned, has remained stubbornly central to the canon of Western moral philosophy.
In political philosophy Kant’s influence – surprisingly perhaps the influence of Kant’s moral theory rather than of his political theory, which is poorly understood – is, if anything even stronger. This is probably due to Rawls, who for one reason or another became central to modern political philosophy. He called his approach Kantian constructivism.

With Hegel the case is different. I’d say that he is the philosopher who gave not the only, but the most focused, systematic and insightful, diagnosis of the failures of the modern world, and of the habitus of modern subjects, and the most vigorous defense of its achievements. And while he undoubtedly tended to overemphasize the power of reason and the reach of philosophy, he did in the main refrain from dispensing remedies.
He also was the first political philosopher to recognize that the task of political philosophy is to render intelligible the bases and the structure of modern ethical life, both its institutions, and its non-institutional prerequisites. He realized that philosophy should leave the task of the actual politics of the moment to those whose business it was.

Hegel also has a number of very telling criticisms of Kantianism. And given the enduring importance of Kant, these are of lasting significance. In retrospect it is obvious that some very prominent debates in political philosophy, for example the communitarian criticism of Rawls in the 1980s and 90s, and some of the current discussion about the merits of ideal and real theory, are after echoes of Hegel’s criticism of Kant.

My argument that Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s moral theory also applies to discourse ethics, is an indirect way of showing the enduring relevance of Hegel’s philosophy. Habermas often claimed that his theory of Discourse Ethics reconstructs the moral standpoint in a way that is immune from Hegel’s criticisms of Kant’s moral standpoint. In an article I wrote long time ago now, I showed that it depended how one interpreted Hegel’s criticism of Kant. Hegel claims that Kant’s conception of the Categorical Imperative, as the Formula of the Universal Law, is an empty formalism because any maxim can be reformulated so as to pass the test. But that of course is an easy criticism for Kantians to rebut: they just have to show that there is at least one maxim that fails the test of universalizability contained in the Categorical Imperative. On my interpretation Hegel objects to Kant’s account of the way in which form is given to content – the very idea of maxim testing. On its own, without the institutional basis of law – Recht – and without the uninstitutionalized sense of social order, the behavioural attitudes, values and sense of propriety that people possess as citizens, without, that is, ethical life, morality as the external effect of pure reason is not in a position to regulate social actions.

[photo from www.citelighter.com]

On the face of it Habermas thinks of morality very unlike Kant as a social medium by which modern moral agents coordinate their interactions by way of communication and discourse without the need for external mechanisms or coercion. However, Habermas’s conception of the moral standpoint – discourse in accordance with principle (U) involves a similar idea to Kant’s .

Principle (U) states that: “a norm is valid if and only if the foreseeable consequences and side effects of its general observance for the interests and value-orientations of each individual could be freely accepted jointly by all concerned.”
Candidate norms are fed in from situation in the lifeworld into the procedure of moral discourse, in which norms are filtered out if they cannot be welcomed from the perspective of the interest and values conceptions of everyone affected by the(counterfactual) implementation of the norm. That is a very severe condition for a candidate norm to have to meet, especially when you consider how wide the constituency of “all affected” is. Habermas admits that as a consequence very few norms pass the test successfully. But that means that there are very few valid moral norms, in which case morality and moral discourse is not fit play the central social role of action-coordination and social integration that Habermas assigns it. So it seems that Habermas’s discourse Ethics is after all vulnerable Hegel’s argument against Kant’s moral standpoint.

3:AM: Habermas takes a cognitivist perspective to morality. He’s debated this with Hilary Putnam and thinks that it is a crucial component of his ethical thinking because his discourse ethics has got to be able to provide a justification of the moral standpoint that a rational moral skeptic will find convincing. Can you say something about what you make of this and does it survive the Frege-Geach challenge that you discuss?

JF: This point is point is of interest only to those who think that Habermas’s theory of language can be made to work, or who want to make it work. I think we need to detach the question of whether there can be a philosophical justification of the moral standpoint, and whether there needs to be, from the question of whether one is a cognitivist about morality, and if so in what sense. I believe, along with quite a few others, such as Konrad Ott, Christoph Lumer, and Joseph Heath to name a few, that Habermas does not succeed in justifying the moral standpoint, but I also think that this is not essential to his programme of Discourse Ethics.

As for Habermas’s cognitivism that is tricky. The term “cognitivist” is used in many different ways. Habermas uses it to mean that moral statements are rational, and hence reason sensitive, and that morality is learning process. That said, because of his peculiar pragmatic theory of language he denies that moral statements – or to use his terminology – statements that make validity claims to rightness, are in the running for truth, and that any are literally true. He has to deny this because on his view moral statements operate in a different validity dimension: they make validity claims to rightness, which are, he claims only analogous to validity claims to truth. This feature of his theory puts him in the same basket as emotivists, and projectivists and expressivists, who are often referred to for that very reason as non-cognitivist. (Whether or not they accept that designation is another matter.)

The Frege-Geach problem is directed at theorists who think that the meaning of moral statements is different in kind from the meaning of descriptive terms. At the time I wrote that paper I was working with a fairly restricted view of what the Frege-Geach problem was. I looked at only one part of the much larger problem, which is how the moral non-cognitivist can explain, say, why the moral modus ponens argument is valid, while denying that moral statements have truth-conditional meaning.

1. If murder is wrong, then attempted murder is wrong.
2. Murder is wrong
3. Attempted murder is wrong
This is a problem for Habermas, because it appears he must hold that while 1. makes a validity claim to truth, 2 and 3 make validity claims to rightness. What then licenses the conclusion? How does the truth claim in 1, cooperate with the rightness claim in 2. to warrant the conclusion 3?
Now the Frege-Geach problem may be more wider-ranging and complex than I assumed. Non-cognitivists typically claim that the meaning of ordinary descriptive terms like ‘red’ is different in kind from moral terms like ‘wrong’. The trouble is that in natural languages moral terms and ordinary descriptive terms play the same kind of semantic role in every complex linguistic construction. Non-cognitivists have to explain the meaning of those complex moral sentences, and indeed mixed sentences that conjoin moral and descriptive elements. They also have to produce a compositional semantics, a semantics which explains how the meaning of a complex linguistic construction is a function of the atomic meaning of their parts, and explain why ordinary descriptive terms function in exactly the same way as moral ones even though the meaning of the former is allegedly different in kind from that of the latter.

That said, the narrow problem is enough to convict Habermas, just because he insists that moral judgments make validity claims to rightness, and that these are different in kind to validity claims to truth, he is in the same boat as the non-cognitivists. On his view, it is puzzling why moral argumentation is (formally) valid, and why the patterms of inference are homologous in the practical and theoretical domains. Blithely asserting , as Habermas does, that rightness is analogous with truth, won’t wash. It merely begs the various questions against the non-cognitivist that arise from the problem Geach poses.

3:AM: A Nietzschean skeptic like Brian Leiter will argue that claims of morality are all false (although some are better than others for flourishing nonetheless.) He’ll claim that the sort of ethical accounts given by Habermas that make a certain kind of rational agency central are fantasies. What do you say to this?

GF: What I would say to him partly depends on Brian’s reasons for saying what he does: and on whether his position is that all moral judgments are literally false, or that they are not even in the running for truth. Suppose he’s an error theorist. John Mackie also thinks that although all moral statements aspire to truth, they are nonetheless all sweepingly false. I’m not convinced by error theory. In Mackie’s case it is a very clever way of marrying a certain naturalistic ontology with a fairly common sense view of the semantics of moral statements.

Moral statements must be false, Mackie thinks, because there are no queer, i.e. intrinsically motivating, properties to which they refer. But that is a fairly drastic position to take. Do we have to believe that only the existence of a queer property can make a moral statement true? No. We can make a cleaner division between our semantic theory and our metaphysics and separate out our account of what it is for a statement to be true or false, from our account of what there is. Then we have no need to invoke the metaphysical bogeyman of queer properties, even if we think that moral judgments are in the running for truth and that some are true.

What I don’t like about the position is the view that all our moral judgments are false and that, notwithstanding this, we keep believing them anyway. Why does the ordinary forensic process of experience, whereby falsehoods are eventually discovered, overturned and, when all goes well, replaced by truths, not function in this case? Skeptics about ‘morality’ owe an explanation for the fact that morality as a whole (not in part) has proven to be pretty durable and that people have continued to hold their moral beliefs, with as much certainty as their ordinary epistemic beliefs.

Marxists, most of whom are probably not error theorists, although they could be – also sometimes hold that morality is a kind of illusion, the ideology of the bourgeoisie. Their explanation for its adhesiveness is that morality is an ideology, a false belief which is functionally necessary to the existence of reproduction of the institutions of bourgeois life, in which co-operative virtues, propriety and private property are particularly highly prized. That explanation, if true, would undermine and destabilize the moral views and practice of those who held it, since it is not compatible with their continuing to be moralists or indeed to be moral. That materialist view of morality as ideology not only threatens certain philosophical views of the world, and certain approaches to law and political philosophy – theoretical moralisms – it threatens actually existing morality too, the kind of morality that Brian Leiter among others has quite a lot of.

3:AM: Talking of Nietzsche, (as an aside) you have interesting things to say about Hegel’s notion of tragedy that contradicts Goethe’s 1824 statement that ‘everything tragic rests on irresolvable opposition. As soon as resolution enters or becomes possible the tragic vanishes.’ Can you say something about this?

GF: This refers to what was my first published paper, “Conflict and Reconciliation in Hegel’s Theory of the Tragic.” Most people believe, like Goethe, that irresolvable conflict is essential to tragedy, such that genuine tragedy is inimical to resolution. Hegel does not. He holds something more like the view that a tragic conflict is a clash between two powers, two equal rights, that remains intractable at the level of the outlooks and self-conceptions of the protagonists (subjective spirit), but which can eventually be resolved at the level of objective spirit.

The most vehement critics of Hegel reject dismiss his conception of the tragic. In particular they reject his curious reading of the Antigone, which he reads as a clash of two equally righteous ethical powers represented by Creon and Antigone respectively. “Creon is not a tyrant, but an ethical power just as much as Antigone.” Hegel argues that each of these figures contains within them the force to which they think they are opposed. Antigone is not only beholden to Creon as a citizen and protegée of the Theban polis, she is also the daughter of Oedipus and Haemon’s fiancée. She is thus and should have recognized his authority, both political and familial, and obeyed his edict. Conversely, Creon is not only the ruler and protector of Thebes, but a father and husband, and more importantly an uncle to Antigone, his niece and daughter-in-law to be. So he should have respected the sanctity of familial relations and not condemned Antigone to be entombed.

Thus there is immanent to both Antigone and Creon exactly that against which each turns, so that each is gripped and shattered by something intrinsic to their own sphere of existence. (15, 549)
There is a lot of textual evidence that I won’t go into here to suggest that Hegel’s reading of the play downplays Creon’s and exaggerates Antigone’s failings, in order to make it fit Hegel’s conception of the tragic. It is also quite difficult to see where the moment of reconciliation is in this story, although Hegel insists that it is there and arises from the moment of Enlightenment where by both protagonists recognize and acknowledge their error, and thus transcend their one-sided ness. It can look as if Hegel is shoehorning the plot of Antigone in order to make it fit into his theory of the tragic, and that he does so because otherwise, without such interpretative violence, his thesis that the Antigone is “the absolute exemplum of tragedy” would convict his own theory of the tragic.

This is particularly so if one thinks of an Hegelian Aufhebung as a resolution in the musical sense as a movement from dissonance to consonance, and as a return to the tonic.
It struck me that although that there was something odd about Hegel’s interpretation of the Antigone, there was something plausible about his conception of the tragic. By no means is it the case that all tragedies end badly, with no hint of reconciliation or transfiguration: think of the endings of Sophocles, Philoctetes, Ajax, Oedipus at Colonus, and especially the last of the Oresteian Trilogy, the Eumenides.

I think that the crucial point about Hegel’s theory is that it is a theory of the tragic, rather than a theory about tragedies, and, Hegel being Hegel it is an attempt at a unified theory of the tragic on the basis of a fragmented, sparse and somewhat contradictory basis of evidence.

More interesting than the fact that Hegel’s view inclines him to a somewhat tendentious reading of the Antigone, is that however much he may exalt that drama, his model of the tragic, and its place in ethical life, is Aeschylus’s Eumenides, which ends with the founding of the court of the Areopagus and a triumphal procession whereby the Erinyes are led to their position as “venerable gods” within the new lawful order. Insofar as that is a resolution it is not one in the musical sense: dissonance conflict does not vanish. It is transfigured and preserved. That is a resolution in exactly the sense of an Hegelian Aufhebung as I understand it.

I also try to show that Hegel’s account of the truly tragic fits nicely with what Aristotle writes in the Poetics about what features the most tragic plots have, particularly his account of the ‘peripiteia’: a reversal of an intentional act into its unintended opposite, precipitated by some error of judgment.

My argument against the many critics of Hegel’s theory of tragedy is that Hegel’s theory is more nuanced than his many critics appreciate, and that it is better supported by the available evidence – extant ancient tragic dramas, and Aristotle’s theory of tragedy in the Poetics. I’m afraid I might disappoint you here. There is no dramatic conclusion about a tragic sense of life, of the kind one finds in Unamuno or the young Nietzsche. I just present an interpretation Hegel’s theory of the tragic, and defend it from its detractors.

3:AM: You are an expert the Frankfurt School theorists. Could you say something about this and why it is still a significant force, especially when discussing politics, art and ethics in modernity? In particular can you explain its relationship with Marxist and Liberal theories because where often they are seen as opposing theories they kind of come together at points in this school don’t they?

GF: I think I have answered the second of your questions in respect to Habermas’s conception of the political. And you are dead right, in Habermas elements of Marxism and Liberalism come together. As a matter of fact, I don’t consider Habermas a member of the Frankfurt School. I think the whole idea that there is a first generation of Frankfurt School theorists, comprising Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse among others, and a second generation comprising Habermas and some of his pupils, and then a Third generation, is although it can be a convenient label, factually inaccurate and theoretically misconceived. Habermas was for a very short period the assistant to Adorno at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. He was then levered out of the institute by Horkheimer who considered him a dangerous Marxist and went to Marburg to complete his Habilitation. Although he went back to Frankfurt in 1964 he refused the offer to become director of the Institute. He left in 1971 with several of his pupils as research assistants to become director of the Max Plank Institute in Starnberg. So it would me more accurate, and much less misleading to think of Habermas as a first generation Starnberg Theorist.

The Frankfurt school label applies much more readily to Adorno and Horkheimer and Marcuse, and their colleagues at the Institute of Social Research, although if anything these were the second wave of theorists. And they were not really a school. There was no shared doctrine. According to Habermas, when he was there, “there was no Critical Theory, no coherent doctrine” just a certain loose commitment to Hegelian Marxism. However, Adorno and Horkheimer collaborated very closely in the 1940s and co-wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Why should we still read the work of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse? We should read them because there is something very compelling about their diagnoses of the age. However much things have moved on historically and culturally, the problems facing us have remained stubbornly unsolved since the end of the Second World War. Technology and science develop and improve, but people’s lives don’t. Productivity increases and still poverty, inequality, and misery exist. Wealth increase, but general well-being does not. Our lives are regimented with technological devices that supposedly save time and labour, and yet people seem to be busier and have less time than ever before.

Another reason why they are of interest is that they are not shy of attempting to connect up all the various different areas of social and cultural life. This is a feature of their philosophy that they inherit from Hegel and German Idealism. They are purveyors of theory on a grand scale. Framed within wide intellectual and cultural horizons their work has a great richness and interest. Much contemporary philosophy works within narrow compartments on increasingly specialized material.

At the same time, we need to read these authors critically. Too many followers take what they say at face value. In Adorno’s case that is dangerous. What Adorno says of works of art, that what they say “is not what their words say” is true also of his own writings. The ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ Myth become Enlightenment, and Enlightenment reverts to Myth taken at face value looks like a simple-minded perversity argument, that the process of enlightenment produces the very opposite aim of the one it intended. But of course enlightenment is not a simple, monolithic process with a unitary aim. One can tell from the way he writes that he does not intend his readers to take everything he writes literally. He is continually provoking and challenging his readers to think for themselves.

The relation to Marxism and Liberalism is complicated. For one thing the members of the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’, even if one confines this to an inner circle and excludes outliers like Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, do not speak with one voice. And in each case their relation to Marxism and Liberalism is far from straightforward. I’ve talked a little bit about Habermas’s relation to liberalism and to Rawls’s political philosophy above. So let us take Adorno as an example.

He does help himself to some ideas of Marx, for example the notion of the commodity fetish and of ideology. But they become something very different in his hands, tools of analysis and criticism, detached from their original context in Marx. At the same time he is fiercely critical of productivism, the view that the increase of productive forces, once freed from capitalist relations of production, will bring about social happiness; and he is dismissive of the vulgar Marxist reduction of the cultural, intellectual and spiritual aspects of society to mere expressions of an economic infrastructure.

As for liberalism, Adorno is scathing of the liberal picture of society as a cooperative association between individuals all pursuing their private interests. At the same time he is almost pathologically allergic to anything that smacks of collectivism, and his conception of practice tends to be limited to his encouraging individuals to develop capacities to resist assimilation in the prevailing. In his hostility towards conceptions of positive freedom, where freedom is construed as the participation of individuals in forms of collective self-rule, he is on the side of the arch liberals, Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper.

3:AM: A question haunting the Frankfurt School is whether social and political theories claiming to be critical can be normative. Habermas addressed this when he looked at Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment but there are difficulties with this approach aren’t there? Can you say what these are?

GF: Yes, Habermas’s objection to the problem of the normative grounds of Adorno (and Horkheimer’s) Critical Theory has been hugely influential both in the interpretation and assessment of Frankfurt School critical theory and in the development of later variants of it. And the objection on face value is a simple and devastating one. No critical theory worth its salt can refrain from making normative claims about the society it critcizes, claims that are either implicit or explicit, the existing society its practices and institutions are bad and ought to be changed or something like that. The trouble is that Adorno and Horkheimer for various reasons don’t think of their critical theory like that.

Actually, what Habermas says is rather more complex and obscure than this. He states that critical theory has problems in “giving an account of its own normative foundations”. I asked, what would it be for a critical theory to ‘give an account of its own normative foundations’, according to Habermas?

One answer is that what critical theory requires is a normative moral theory in the basement. The corollary of this is that discourse ethics, in the case of Habermas critical theory of society, supplies the normative foundations (the normative moral theory) that Habermas thinks is missing from Adorno’s. Axel Honneth (along with Albrecht Wellmer, Seyla Benhabib and various others) appear to endorse this view of Habermas. Honneth wrote that it is with “communicative ethics” — i.e. with a moral theory — that “Habermas . . . has attempted to justify the normative claims of a critical social theory.” Honneth rightly thinks that an unpromising strategy, which is why, I surmise, in his own work he tries to ground critical theory on something less than a full blown moral theory, a kind of thin (but nonetheless sufficiently normatively rich) anthropology.

A second and different answer would be that what critical theory lacks and needs are normative moral reasons, rather than a fully blown moral theory. This is the interpretation of the remark I favour, because it seems odd to claim critical social theory requires a normative moral theory to justify its conclusions.

In either case discourse ethics would not do the job of providing the putatively missing normative foundations, because it is not the kind of normative moral theory that determines valid norms, or answers the question of what ought to be done and why. Discourse Ethics does not yield first personal, normative reasons for action, of the kind that might support the normative conclusions of critical theory. This is not bad news for Habermas. In my view, the very idea that Habermas wants to set critical theory on sure moral foundations, and that this explains the place of Discourse Ethics in his theory, is completely wrong. You can tell by looking at it that Habermas’s philosophy is not an attempt to underpin the edifice of Marxism with a Kantian moral foundation. Habermas is not like the Marburg neo-Kantian Karl Vorländer, or the Austro-Marxists Max Adler and Otto Bauer, or more recently, G.A. Cohen, all of whom have attempted to provide a Kantian Moral foundation to socialism. You’d be surprised how many people think that this is what he is doing.

In my view, which I develop in articles in Telos and Constellations, he’s doing something very different both in approach and aim to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, and from Kantian Marxism. And ironically, despite his criticism of Frankfurt School Critical Theory for its failure to give an account of its own normative, Habermas also omits to give a proper account of the normative grounds of his own social theory.

The other argument Habermas advances against Adorno and Horkheimer, is that in respect of its normative grounds, and in respect of its claim to be true, the Dialectic of Enlightenment is self-undermining, and incoherent. This is because, according to Habermas, as a meaningful theory, understood as a body of justified assertions about the social world, it (Dialectic of Enlightenment) must claim to be true, and yet the substance of the theory is that any theoretical claim is a disguised power claim, an attempt to gain mastery over internal and external nature. Basically, he says, the thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment is incoherent. The trouble is that Habermas ties this objection in to his very controversial pragmatic theory of meaning, according to which the meaningfulness of any theory depends on its making validity-claims to truth and rightness, which the authors of the theory are implicitly committed to supporting by good reasons, on pain of incoherence. This is to take a needless hostage to theoretical fortune. Habermas makes what is a powerful objection to Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical theory depend upon the truth of his own highly controversial account of meaning.

3:AM: You propose that we can retrace the discussion and rethink and reanalyze the issue don’t you? Can you say something about your approach and why you think it helpful?

GF: Yes I think it is helpful to disentangle Habermas’s good objection to Adorno’s critical theory from the complexities of his own controversial theory of pragmatic meaning. Then we get something like the following view. A critical theory of society worth its salt must at least give an account of what is ‘wrong’ with the social world, or show that it is in some way ‘bad’ or that it ‘ought not’ to be like it is. The terms ‘wrong’, ‘bad’ ‘ought not’ and their like are moral terms. I mean that in the broadest possible sense. They express important values that shape our lives. If that is right, then critical theory has, and cannot but have, in that same broad sense moral aims or conclusions. Now social theories with moral aims or conclusions require moral grounds. In that case, if a critical theory does not have broadly moral grounds, its normative conclusions are unwarranted. (OK I’m assuming that you cannot reach the level or degree of normativity required here, by configuring together normative or evaluative elements that are less than moral – rational or logical requirements or whatever. In other words doing critical theory not like baking a cake where I can make something edible and delicious by combining elements none of which are delicious on their own – like baking powder, sugar, margarine and flour.)

Adorno’s critical theory of society is, now implicitly now explicitly, redolent with such broadly moral judgements. He thinks that the social world is pervasively evil and ought not to be as it is. The interesting problem arises, and begins to reflect what is distinctive (and distinctively problematic) about Frankfurt School critical social theory, when we realise that, for all its moral aims and conclusions, critical theory does not, and in some respects had better not, avail itself of any broadly moral standard, be this a thick conception of good, bad, or thinner ideas of right, or wrong.

So why is this? Well for a whole variety of different reasons. One of these is that Adorno believed that the whole ensemble of abhorrent events he called ‘Auschwitz’ manifested the failure of an entire culture, and with it morality. Not only does he think that nothing remains unaffected by Auschwitz, he believes that everything is complicit with it. This is a key motivation for Adorno’s negativism, his interpretation of the significance of the “ban on images.” There is “no right living in the false life” there is “nothing innocent left”. There are no reliable or worthwhile ideals or values to provide the standard of criticism. One cannot picture or represent a reconciled society, or a good life, indeed on cannot so much as conceive of it, without disfiguring and devaluing it. Another reason is that Adorno and Horkheimer sometimes think of bourgeois morality as Marx did, namely as the ideological expression of bourgeois interests. Finally, they follow Hegel in arguing that the task of philosophy is to explain the way the world is and not to lecture it on how it ought to be. (Insofar as he maintains this, Adorno, for reasons given above, is being inconsistent.) Anyway for all these reasons and others besides Adorno’s (and to an extent also Horkheimer’s) critical theory must eschew any broadly moral or ethical standard of criticism, and this gives rise to a dilemma: either critical theory relies on broadly moral premises (or broadly moral considerations) and is therefore self-contradictory, or it does not, in which case its conclusions are unsupported. This is what Habermas’s objection to first generation critical theory amounts to, once it is divested of his controversial theoretical assumptions.

3:AM: You argue that Adorno had a minimal normative ethics. It was a negative ethics of resistance. But then the question is how can philosophical negativism and normative ethics be consistent? We ask whether Adorno’s aporetic philosophy lead to irrationalism and mysticism. You answer that this is not the case, and draw on a comparison with negative theology to defend this view. Can you say more?

GF: There are two related questions here. Let’s assume I’m right that Adorno has a normative ethics, which, incidentally, many people deny. There is a life that one should live, namely one of active and self-conscious resistance to prevailing norms, values and practices.

How does this fit with the interpretation I have just given of Adorno’s philosophical negativism, which we can call austere negativism? Austere negativism is the view that when he says that there is “no right living in the false life” and there is “nothing innocent left” he means it literally. The social world has been entirely denuded of no reliable and intrinsically worthwhile ideals or values. There is only the system of instrumental value, where everything is valued as a means to the promotion of some other end, however there are no intrinsically worthwhile ends to put value into the system. In that case, the task of criticism cannot be, as he sometimes claims it is, to confront existing reality with its own unrealized standards. There are no worthwhile or reliable standards of criticism to which the social critic can appeal. As he puts it in Minima Moralia “there is no crevice in the cliff of the established order into which the (critic GF) might hook a fingernail.”

(If Adorno does not subscribe to austere negativism, but to partial negativism, that allows, say, that there are some worthwhile values and ideals, which are not entirely complicit with the otherwise corrupt social world, then immanent criticism can resume business as usual, criticizing social reality in the light of its own worthwhile standards to which, however, it fails to live up. Modern society may be inimical to a good life, but a good life can be lived on the basis of whatever remains of uncontaminated ethical life there happens to be.)

At the time when I wrote ‘Adorno on the Ethical and the Ineffable’ I thought that a coherent overall position had better be available to Adorno, and that the job of a philosophical interpretation of his work was to provide him with one, even if that meant reconstructing his views. That is why I came up with my characterization of Adorno’s ethics, according to which three ‘virtues’ of Mündigkeit, humility and love are required by a life of vigilance and resistance to the totally administerd society. I try to show how these are the practical counterpart of the paradoxical task that Adorno sets philosophy in his Negative Dialectics, namely to think what is non-identical to thought. The view I end up with is quite baroque, but does capture important elements of Adorno’s ethical views.
Nowadays I’ve given up on that kind of reconstruction. Adorno just is inconsistent. Really, he does not try very hard to work his thoughts up into a stable and coherent theory. He espouses different views on different occasions, and in different contexts. I’ve given up trying to make it all hang together. Adorno is not one of those thinkers who accepts that the best theory is the most consistent one, and that tensions and contradictions between the different positions he takes up are a sure indication that his theory cannot be true. On the contrary, he eschews that kind of formal theorising. He gives various different reasons for this, not all of them convincing. Anyway the upshot is that he is a thinker who prizes depth of insight, and the elegance and acuity with which those insights are expressed above the philosophical values of consistency, soundness and logical validity. That being so it is far from than obvious that the best philosophical interpretation of his work is one that attributes the most coherent position, defensible by contemporary standards of philosophy rather than his own. The best interpretation might be one that simply allows his work to be inconsistent, to bring these inconsistencies to light and to explain why he holds the views he does.

So now I’m inclined to point out that Adorno does not consistently embrace austere negativism, although he does endorse it most of the time, and that it is just difficult to reconcile this with the fact that Adorno’s criticism is, albeit in an unconventional sense, nevertheless deeply moral.

On the second question, it always struck me as funny that many of Adorno’s otherwise most insightful critics, who observe that some of his more paradoxical claims resemble the kind of paradoxes one finds in apophatic theology, or what is sometimes called negative theology, think that this is a good argument against them. Again, some big beasts of German philosophy make this claim, for example Habermas, Wellmer, Schnädelbach, and where they go others inevitably follow. They are right there are genuine parallels, although with the conspicuous exception of Michael Theunissen and Michael Pauen none of these commentators deigns to elaborate them.

The ontological question if what God’s essence or being consists in, poses peculiar difficulties when God is supposed to be wholly transcendent and therefore unknowable and ineffable. Apophatic (or negative) theology is the strategy of responding to these peculiar difficulties through negation or denial, the so-called negative way. Now one way of reading Adorno’s notion of non-identity is as the figure of what is absolutely and wholly other to thought. And in Negative Dialectics, Adorno claims that the “true interest of philosophy” lies “in what is non-conceptual” and that the task of philosophy is to think the non-identical , or to go beyond the concept by means of it. Both then, in different ways and for different reasons, attempt to think through the prima facie paradoxical attempt to think what cannot be thought.

Adorno’s detractors maintain that since there is a resemblance between Adorno’s philosophy and the ideas of some negative theologians and mystics, this is, without further ado, a powerful objection to it. Then, of course, Adorno’s defenders pile in from the other side and deny that there is a parallel between Adorno’s thought and negative theology. Curiously, neither Adorno’s detractors nor his defenders spend any time setting out what the supposed analogy between Adorno and negative theology is. To do that you actually have to examine what certain theologians say with care and attention. If one does not do that one runs the risk of falling foul of various misconceptions about negative theology, for example that it works by approaching the question of the divine essence through negations rather than through affirmations. That is actually not true. Apophatic theology must eschew both negation and affirmation equally, along with all finite categorization. To that extent, the labels ‘negative theology’ and the ‘via negativa’ are misnomers. It is kind of ironic that many Adornos most stringent critics and ardent defenders who respectively assert or reject the idea that there is a strong parallel between Adorno’s philosophy of non-identity and negative theology, both do so on the basis of not-knowing what negative theology is.

By contrast, I suppose because I find apophatic theology philosophically interesting, I try to show with the help of examples, first, Nicholas of Cusa, and later with Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Meister Eckhart the extent to which there is or is not an illuminating parallel with Adorno. The chief difference is that aphophatic theology is chiefly concerned with our inability to capture, know, or even conceive of the divine essence, because of its ultimate concern with divine transcendence, whereas Adorno is primarily concerned to transcend existing forms of thought and action for the sake of redeeming and transforming existing social reality.

Having said that, it is not clear how much negative theology Adorno knew, and it is unlikely that there was any direct influence, even though he studied briefly under Paul Tillich. The Messianic and Theological dimension to Adorno’s work seems to something he picked up from Walter Benjamin and immediately presses into the service of his own project of developing a negative dialectic through a critical engagement with Hegel.

3:AM: Does Adorno face a similar challenge when we consider his claims that art inhabits an autonomous region and yet at the same time he wants critical theory to apply? Is this a case of having your cake and eating it which is what some have accused his ethics of being? Is his art theory another version of his thought comparable to the apophasis theology you discuss above?

GF: Yes, some people say, I think Wellmer does, that Adorno’s aesthetic theory is a negative theology of art. But he does not really explain what he means. He just joins in the refrain. And the same difficulties with Adorno’s thinking crop up everywhere. It is not the case that Adorno has a general view that only really makes sense in the aesthetic domain. Art works, in Adorno’s eyes are mute, and aesthetic experience calls for philosophical interpretation. But philosophical interpretation attempts to makes sense not of the content of art, of what art works say, but only of the way their content is manifested in their sensuous form. There is a lot to say about artworks and what Adorno calls their promise of happiness, the various way in which they point beyond themselves and transcend the social conditions of their existence. But there is not a single, coherent theory of art that would, say, that would evince general conclusions about standards of judgment, or ideas of beauty. What Adorno gives us is an ensemble of analyses and essays about works of art, mainly about individual pieces of music, that do not and are not supposed to add up to a single coherent overall theory.

3:AM: Is the clash between the nihilism claims of Critchley and the Stalinism of Zizek anything more than showbiz for people wanting to avoid genuine political issues without admitting it?

GF: Hmm. I guessing that is what you think. I’m sure that is what Brian Leiter thinks. I know where you are coming from, but in truth I haven’t read enough of the recent work of either of these thinkers, so I ‘m not in a position to way whether either indulges in political grandstanding.

It is very easy to think that one’s work has more political significance than it does. Both journalists and academics tend to be walled up in their own worlds. I’m often made very aware of this. It is tempting to think that if one works on Adorno and critical theory, one is doing critical theory. That would be wrong. A critical theory of society is meant to understand, explain and criticise the society in which it is written. To write a book on Adorno or critical theory is not to do that. It is to do something else, philosophical interpretation or intellectual history. That is not to say it is not worthwhile to approach his work as a philosophically informed intellectual historian of 20th Century German thought or something. It is very worthwhile. But doing that is not doing critical theory. To do that you have to be a social critic, and that means criticising today’s society.

Much of what Adorno wrote was relevant to his era, but is not straightforwardly applicable to ours. For example his critique of the culture industry presupposes something like a Fordist conception of mass production and consumption. Things have changed. Yes some of what Adorno wrote about his world is still very much applicable to ours, but where it is, it is so mutatis mutandis. I don’t find applied Adorno very fruitful or appealing. As I often try to show my students to merely emulate his thinking, or repackage it in a new form is to betray the animus of his work. To be true to Adorno is to think for oneself, and to criticise existing society where appropriate.

I admire Habermas’s way of going about things. He has two distinct careers as a journalist and as an academic and he writes in two different genres. In his political writings in newspapers and interviews he gets engaged in real politics. His academic writing rarely reflects his own substantive political and moral views. This has the advantage that his political interventions reach the right audience, not just an audience of philosophers, and that his political writings are not merely an academic exercise largely ignored by fellow citizens. Other people, like Joe Heath do something similar.

3:AM: You’re working in a university but you are concerned about Universities aren’t you? You take university to be an institution that fulfills what Cardinal Newman said it should be doing: forming the individual’s intellect and developing and transmitting culture in all its dimensions. Can you say more about what you think is so good and necessary about this idea of a university?

GF: Well I think that Universities still should, as Cardinal Newman said in 1858, aim at “the perfection or virtue of the intellect” which is an old fashioned way of saying that they should educate well. The idea of excellence in education is not – as Bill Readings has argued – vacuous and part of an outdated ideology.

However, Newman thought of universities as primarily teaching institutions, whereas I think that they should also be research institutions, and that teaching and research should go hand in hand, because they are mutually enhancing. To that extent Wilhelm von Humboldt’s idea of the university was more up to date than Newman’s which was old fashioned for Victorian times. The reason is that philosophers who also research generally make better teachers. It keeps them fresh. I mean, you would not employ a piano teacher who only taught piano, but did not actually play the piano. I think it works the other way round too. One’s research in philosophy benefits from teaching, in various different ways.

It seems a truism to say that the purpose of a university should be to educate well, and to that extent to perfect the intellect of students (and teachers). It also can seem, rather quaint. Funding bodies and Government Higher Education ministers don’t want to hear about the intrinsic value of a education, and are not impressed by the argument that educated minds are a public (not just a private and individual) good. One of the stated justification of the recent reforms of university funding in England and Wales is that University is a private benefit to the individual who acquires it and hence should be paid for by those individuals, not by the public purse (which raises the question of why the Government undertakes to heavily subsidize student loans.)

Anyway, the direction of HE policy over the last 15 years has been to dismantle the autonomy of the Universities, and make their teaching and research serve the perceived interests of the business sector, and the UK economy. Whether this aim is a good one, and whether the reforms undertaken will even succeed in realizing this aim, are debatable questions. For it was not as if universities served the intrinsic goods of educating well, perfecting the intellect, and producing excellent research across a range of disciplines, instead of the instrumental good of serving the economy and the business sector. On the contrary, teaching students to think for themselves, which is what philosophy does, is to equip them with arguably the most important transferable skill all. This means that the recent attempt to transform Universities into training programmes for the acquisition of transferable skills, which involves the dangerous game of second guessing which disciplines will do this most effectively, (the game is currently skewed against humanities disciplines and in favour of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, so-called STEM subjects) might end up shooting itself in the foot, because it turns out that traditional autonomous Universities geared towards the goal of educating well do this rather better after all, than the reformed institutions.

Anyway, I think that we are in the midst of a very dangerous experiment. Universities in this country have not been allowed to adapt and change organically. They have been dragooned into rapid unplanned expansions, thoroughgoing restructuring of their administrative and management systems along corporate lines. University faculties and departments have been bundled up (in many cases arbirtarily) into schools or clusters, which function as autonomous budget holding entities that purchase and sell services to one another, and are evaluated in terms of the profit and loss they generate.

Vice chancellors have become like CEOs behaving as if they have large equity holdings in the companies they direct. University councils are populated with representatives from the business sector, and tend to rubber stamp decisions taken by small-scale management teams around the Vice Chancellor. Their powers are almost unlimited. Senates, the academic bodies which oversee University management, on which traditionally there have been a majority of academics, have been drastically downsized, filled with people with management positions, with the result that academics have been largely cut out of the decision making process. As a consequence there few, if any, academic constraints on the measures that University managements can implement.

Both nationally, and locally within Universities, institutional change is being brought in at breakneck speed. ‘Experiment’ is the wrong word here. Experiments are conducted under controlled conditions. Causes are isolated and their effects closely monitored. This is, as Andrew McGettigan puts it, not so much and experiment as “The Great University Gamble” whose odds are too difficult to reckon, conducted in the blind hope that creating a market in Higher Education, and reforming Universities along business lines, will magically produce more employable graduates, make universities both more economically useful and more ‘accountable’ to their Government paymasters and their clients (students), save money, as well as promote the excellence of research and teaching. Whether or not any of these aims are actually achieved is a completely open question, and the Governments of Blair, Brown and Cameron who introduced the policies, anyway won’t be around to monitor and evaluate the consequences.

Meanwhile, the best Universities in the world, the big private and public Universities in the US have seen nothing like this degree of policy induced change. According to Jonathan R. Cole’s analysis of the rise of the Great American University is due mainly to the way in which they, have been allowed to adapt and change organically, as autonomous and more or less democratic institutions, run by academics, with the academic values of excellence in teaching and research as the guiding aim of their organisation. Cole, a Professor of Sociology, who went on to be Provost and Dean of Columbia University, writes: “research universities should not attempt to imitate corporations in their organizational structure. The hierarchical culture of the corporate world would not further the other important aims of the university.”

Finally, there is an even more sinister scenario taking shape. Large private companies are hovering to buy up the HE institutions lower down the food chain which will be crippled by the current funding reforms. They are attracted by the huge income streams made available due by heavily subsidized Government backed student loans. At the moment the title of University and its degree awarding powers is protected by legislation, and most Universities are charities. The Government is consulting with these corporations to lower the eligibility criteria for that protected title, in order, eventually, to allow for profit companies to buy into Universities. If successful, this will allow companies to bleed money out of institutions in terms of dividends and profits, which up to now, has not been legally possible. The trouble with that is, as is evidenced by the for profit sector in the US, corporate aim of maximising profits and dividends is incompatible with the academic aim of excellence in teaching and research. As John Sperling, founder of Apollo Group, put it brutally and revealingly: “This is a corporation… Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop [students’] value systems or go in for that ‘expand their minds’ bullshit.” It is no surprise that such organisations are teaching only institutions that tend to put more time and effort into recruiting students, than to teaching them well, and that offer very poor terms of employment. Since 2008 the Apollo Group has faced numerous investigations into its unfair and deceitful recruitment practices. Apollo Group are of course eager to expand into British market as soon as it is opened up, and are in prime position to do so as the parent Company, since 2009, of BPP, which runs law and accountancy colleges in England, and which has been among the firms intensively lobbying the Higher Education minister, David Willetts, to make the necessary changes in legislation, that would allow them to compete with publicly funded UK institutions.

3:AM: What’s gone wrong? Is the future bleak, not just for Universities but given the mass inequalities, the wars, the reactionary politics that seems to be dominant, for all areas of life?

GF: Quite a lot. And yes it is, but there are also signs of hope.

3:AM: You write poetry don’t you? What are the books, films, artists that have inspired you? What’s the role for art and culture in all this? Are you sympathetic to Adorno on this, or is he, as Roger Scruton asks (in relation to his theories concerning music), a dead duck?

GF: Funnily enough, I don’t write poetry any more. The last one I wrote was a very long time ago. I did recently publish a poem I wrote long ago in my early twenties, at the invitation of my friend and colleague Keston Sutherland, who is a poet and critical theorist.

Oh dear. Such questions are hard to answer. I can say that, as a graduate student, when I read books like Raymond Geuss’s The Idea of Critical Theory, Onora O’Neill’s Constructions of Reason, I was inspired, and that more recently when I read A.D. Smith’s Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations, I realized that these were wonderful examples of how to write about the philosophers I was interested in, examples that I still give to my own students.
As for books that have inspired me, there are far too many to list. I can name some books off the top of my head that I have in recent memory recommended to others, because I found them particularly good. For example, Too Loud A Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal; Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities; The Infinite by Adrian Moore; Philosophy as a Way of Life, by Pierre Hadot; Agape and Eros, by Anders Nygren; The Darkness of God, by Denys Turner; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel by Hans-Friedrich Fulda.

It is hard to say with paintings. Every time I visit friends and family in Brussels, I find myself sneaking into the Musée des Beaux Arts, and looking again at David’s The Death of Marat and Pieter Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. I was captivated by Domenichino’s, Diana and Acteon, when I visited the Villa Borghese in Rome, some years ago. But I’m not pictorially literate enough to have much of interest to say.

Am I sympathetic to Adorno, or is he a dead duck? Well, I could be both. But obviously I find Adorno’s work rewarding, otherwise I would not still be reading, writing about, and teaching his work to students. I certainly do not agree with all of what he says, but who could. Last Summer I spoke at a Music and Philosophy conference at KCL where Roger gave his ‘dead duck’ talk. As I remember, he thinks Adorno is a dead duck, primarily because he was a Marxist, and because in Scruton’s view Marxism is “crap”. His word not mine! He seems to arrive at this view by modus ponens: All Marxism is crap. Adorno is a Marxist . Therefore, Adorno’s work is crap.

Scruton is a clever man. But he is far from a reliable judge of Adorno. His allergic response to Marxism, and left-wing politics, impair his judgement. Somewhat uncomfortably Scruton finds himself in agreement with all those aspects of Adorno’s critique of the Culture Industry that he shares with conservative critics of culture. He deals with this by claiming that nothing that Adorno said on those issues was particularly new, and said better by the conservative critics of culture he identifies with. (Actually, one can say something very similar about Scruton’s views on Marxism and Leszek Kolakowski).

Adorno was primarily a music critic, and also a philosopher. He did not have a philosophy of music or a philosophical theory of music of the kind that Scruton does. He certainly was not interested in sideways on accounts of what music is. He is not interested in general aesthetic theories, or theories of music, which would provide general criteria for successful works of art. Also to say that Adorno is “the critic of tonality and advocate of the New Music” is to vastly oversimplify what he says. If that is what makes him a dead duck, it is easy to show that he is not.

The best way to evaluate Adorno’s writing on music is to look at what he says about each individual composer, and their compositions. If Scruton can find nothing of interest in what Adorno says about Wagner, Mahler, Beethoven, Berg, and their works, then so much the worse for him. There were many musicologists, musicians and philosophers at the conference of a discerning, erudite, well-informed, and critical cast of mind who still found Adorno’s musical writings intriguing, interesting and engaging. Had they not been there, of course, Scruton’s talk would have utterly failed to provoke. I’m sure he wished things had been otherwise, but in fact, in that context and to that audience, Adorno sat among the canonised, establishment figures, whose work had become the target for Scruton, the critical theorist.

3:AM: And finally, are there five books that you could recommend to the readers here at 3:AM that would help them delve further into the issues you’ve discussed here?

GF: It is hard to nominate only five, but here are five good books of relevance to this interview.
Philosophy as a Way of Life, by Pierre Hadot.
The Politics of Aristotle, by W. L. Newman.
The Idea of a Critical Theory, by Raymond Geuss.
The Darkness of God, Denys Turner.
The Great University Gamble, by Andrew McGettigan.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Edouard Machery is a killer cool philosopher working on the cutting edge of interfaces between analytic philosophy, psychology, xphi and cognitive science. He’s a continental doing analytic philosophy who thinks philosophy without science is blind. He’s always investigating social phenomena like racism and the ‘integration challenge’, alongside the nature of concepts and whether they are the same as perceptual representation. This month he’ll be going head to head with the chillin’ blue-haired philosopher Jesse Prinz in Latvia on this very issue. He thinks concepts aren’t a natural kind and kind of thinks that studying them is like studying a science of Tuesdays. He’s also brooding on what the folk think and whether experts have judgements that can be trusted, suggesting that philosophy needs to be humble. Everything he does goes to the heart of how we think about ourselves and all in all is one hell of a badass groove. Shakin’.

3:AM: How did you become a philosopher? Were you always thinking about philosophical stuff or were there experiences that brought you to the subject?

Edouard Machery: I am French, I grew up in France, and I did most of my studies in France (at the École Normale Supérieure—where Sartre, Merleay-Ponty, and Foucault studied and where Althusser taught—and at the Sorbonne). In France, philosophy is taught during the last year of high school. In high school, I was very much into math, and I wanted to become a mathematician. When I encountered philosophy, I discovered a form of rigor that was distinct from mathematical rigor, but that was nonetheless genuinely rigorous. It was also harder than math, more precisely than the kind of math we were taught in high school, and it had a broader significance. In brief, I fell for it, and I specialized in philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure.

I became somewhat disappointed with philosophy as it was taught in France, which was way too historical for my taste. American philosophers sometimes think French students are taught a huge amount of so-called continental philosophy, but in fact Derrida, Deleuze, and others are not central to the teaching of philosophy in French departments of philosophy. Fortunately, I think. Phenomenology and history of philosophy are the bread and butter of a French philosophical education. In any case, philosophy felt stale, and I was longing for the energy that was animating the French philosophy of the first decades of the 20th century or the debates between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.

By accident, I discovered analytic philosophy, which rekindled my philosophical desire. The rigor as well as the commitment to clarity and argumentation that attracted me to philosophy in the first place are central to much (if not all) of analytic philosophy. I was lucky to get involved with the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris, where some of the best French analytic philosophers were already working, and I was also lucky to meet Steve Stich, who invited me to visit Rutgers and who exerted an extraordinary influence on my thinking and my approach to philosophy.

3:AM: I think one way that we can immediately see the importance of your approach to philosophy and cognitive science is by discussing your work on racism. Racism has traditionally been thought of as either a question of nature – roughly, the thought that we’re born to think in racial terms– or nurture – roughly, our culture, upbringing, environment constructs races, and that they don’t exist in nature. You took the two research traditions, the nature tradition and the nurture tradition, and combined them. Can you say something about why you thought this combined approach was important at the time and what difference such an approach has made on research into this? Has it been an approach that has been well received by those in the previously opposing camps?

EM: Many social phenomena, such as racism, have been studied by, one the one hand, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and historians, and on the other hand, by biologists and by evolutionary-minded behavioral scientists (anthropologists and psychologists). Sadly, these two traditions have failed to engage with one another, and, as a result, our understanding of many social phenomena remains incomplete. In my opinion, it is uncontroversial that social and psychological phenomena like racism or morality result from evolved cognitive structures, whose understanding requires an evolutionary perspective, but that many of their properties are the product of contingent historical trajectories. Integrating the two explanatory traditions is what I called the “integration challenge.” In my view, the theory of cultural evolution provides a framework for this integration.

[Photo of Gil-White from his home page.]

Racism is a case in point. As I have argued, following in part Gil-White’s groundbreaking work, we have evolved a sensitivity to “ethnic markers” (roughly, to markers such as clothes, accent, etc., that indicate what cultural group one belongs to) and a motivation to interact preferentially with members of own our cultural group. Racism is a by-product of this evolved sensitivity and motivation, and it emerges when skin color and other physical properties trigger our sensitivity to ethnic markers.

This hypothesis is useful to understand the unity of a large range of social and psychological phenomena, whose fundamental identity has often been ignored, or even denied, by historians and cultural anthropologists. On the other hand, research in history and cultural anthropology is needed to understand the peculiarities of racism in different historical contexts.

This hypothesis and this integrative approach have been overall well received, and some anthropologists such as Ray Scupin have been looking for evidence of the universality of our sensitivity to cultural markers.

3:AM: So this willingness to merge different research programmes is very much part of your approach to philosophy. You are a well known member of what has been labeled xphi. Were you always looking to do interdisciplinary work, blending psychology and cognitive science with philosophy, or was it something else that got you into it, maybe the feeling that sticking to one discipline was too limiting for the questions you were raising?

EM: I got into a naturalistic approach to philosophy when I was writing my dissertation on concepts. I felt that philosophers of mind such as Peacocke and Fodor had misunderstood the point of the psychology of concepts, and had failed to say interesting things about it. I also thought, and I still think, that the debate about concept individuation in philosophy had reached an impasse, and I found in the psychology of concepts a way to broaden the range of issues of interest.

In addition, as I mentioned earlier, my philosophical orientation was very much influenced by Steve Stich. I can’t express my views on this matter better than him: “There are no proprietary philosophical questions that are worth answering, nor is there any productive philosophical method that does not engage the sciences. But there are lots of deeply important (and fascinating and frustrating) questions about minds, morals, language, culture and more. To make progress on them we need to use anything that science can tell us, and any method that works.”

3:AM: Now the big idea that you’re thinking about is the concept of ‘concept.’ It’s a particularly important area of research because concepts are usually thought of as the things or vehicles of our thought. The idea is that we can’t think without concepts, conceived in some way. Now you are not happy with that, but before we get to your ideas, I think it’ll be useful if the topography of the domain is mapped out for us. You wrote a seminal piece, ‘Two Dogmas of Neo-Empiricism’ that actually does that. So could you summarise the general options that you discuss there so that non-specialists get what the various positions are between different conceptions of concepts?

One of the most interesting questions about concepts is whether concepts and perceptual representations are of the same kind, as traditional empiricists such as Hume and neo-empiricists such as psychologist Larry Barsalou and Jesse Prinz would have it, or whether they form two fundamentally distinct kinds, as Fodor has argued. The first option has become influential in philosophy and in psychology, but I have expressed skepticism about it in a few places. Incidentally, this is one of the questions that will be debated in a conference that Prinz and I are organizing in Latvia in May.

3:AM: I guess that most of the sassy readers at 3ammagazine will have read Pinker but the big names on the divide between the neo-empiricists and those that oppose it are Jerry Fodor and Jesse Prinz. They both think concepts are required, but disagree in fundamental ways. Could you flesh out the schema you gave in the last question by saying what the big divide is between these. Can you give examples as to how differently they’d answer the same question? I ask this because when we look at your approach these two figures are interesting points of contrast.

EM: We can illustrate the contrast between neo-empiricists and proponents of amodal cognition such as Fodor by focusing on categorization. Suppose that you see a dog, and that you judge that it is a dog: you are then categorizing the object of your perception as a dog. According to amodal theorists, to do so you retrieve from memory a concept of dog, which is a representation that has nothing to do with the perceptual representation of the dog you are perceiving. It may be something like a word. According to Prinz and Barsalou, the concept of dog you are retrieving from memory is itself a set of perceptual representations of dogs, and you match these perceptual representations (consciously or unconsciously) to your current perceptual representation of a dog. So, for neo-empiricists, but not for amodal theorists, entertaining a concept is a form of imagining or simulating. Jesse Prinz and I discuss this issue in our Philosophy TV dialogue.

3:AM: Now all that is by way of throat clearing for your own theory. You depart from both these approaches in a subtle way. You deny that concepts are a natural kind. Your book ‘Doing Without Concepts’ elaborates this idea. You argue that we should do away with talk about concepts, which is really very radical. Some might say you’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater and the bath as well! Can you explain your idea?

EM: It IS a fairly radical idea! And not one everybody is happy with!
In any case, psychologists and philosophers of psychology often assume that concepts share many scientifically important properties, and that the goal of a theory of concepts is to identify these properties. In philosophical jargon, concepts are supposed to form “a natural kind.” So, psychologists and philosophers of psychology have developed various theories of concepts, and have defended their pet theories by undermining the competing theories. The take-home message of Doing without Concepts is that this “natural kind” assumption is fundamentally misguided, and that as a result many debates between psychologists and philosophers about what the right theory of concepts is are empty.

To make that claim, I review in great detail and I assess the psychology of concepts of the last 40 years. Many good responses have been written in response to this idea and to the evidence I put forward, but I still find my views compelling.

3:AM: I asked about Fodor and Prinz because in a way these two are representative of different approaches to concepts that your position challenges. In a way you say Fodor is talking about something orthogonal to your concerns, but Prinz is being directly contradicted by your view. Is that right? Can you say something about this and the general significance for philosophy of mind that your approach brings to the table.

EM: This is correct. The question Fodor is asking, viz. “In virtue of what are we able to think about the objects of our thoughts as such (e.g., about dogs as such, about water as such),” is orthogonal to the question I am asking, which focuses on the bodies of information that determine the course of cognitive processes such as the processes underlying categorization or induction. In contrast, Prinz’s views are at odds with mine, since Prinz’s neo-empiricism amounts to an empirical hypothesis about the nature of these bodies of information. Prinz has a great discussion of the contrast between our views in Can Concept Empiricism Forestall Eliminativism?.

On my view, the mind turned out to be much more complicated and to have a much more baroque structure than philosophers of mind traditionally assume. We typically have many distinct ways, partly disconnected, to think about the same thing (dogs, water, presidents, visit to the dentist), and many words turn out to be polysemous, even if we are not aware of their polysemy. I have tried to provide some empirical evidence for this latter claim with Selja Seppälä in an essay Against hybrid theories of concepts, and Josh Knobe and Sandy Presada have a recent paper in Cognition Dual character concepts and the normative dimension of conceptual representation that fits with the gist of my views.

3:AM: Now when we talk of natural kinds we contrast them with non-natural kinds. So water is a natural kind and science can investigate it, but Tuesday isn’t. So we are used to thinking that there can’t be a science of Tuesdays. But you’re saying concepts are like Tuesday. So could there be a science of Tuesdays, just as there is of concepts? I guess what I’m wondering is whether your approach to concepts really does change how we think about how we think in pretty significant ways.

EM: Yes, that’s a nice way to put my views. A science of concepts would be like a science of Tuesdays. As you can imagine, not all psychologists are thrilled!

But this view has a silver lining for psychologists. If I am correct, there are a bunch of exciting empirical questions that have been ignored by psychologists, and that should be tackled urgently. These include, How are the concepts organized? Do some concepts have priority over others? How are resulting conflicts resolved? Are they triggered in different contexts? And what is the relevant mechanism? How are different types of concepts acquired?

3:AM: As with many of the xphi community you are interested in investigating folk theories of various phenomena. In a paper with Jonathan Livengood you give a couple of reasons for this interest: firstly, ‘folk metaphysics ought to be dragged out into the open and exposed to criticism,’ and secondly ‘folk metaphysics ought to be studied , because metaphysicians often assume without evidence that they know what the folk think, and these assumptions are sometimes wrong in important ways.’ In that paper you were looking at causation by absence. So can you give examples of some of the things you have done to find out what the folk are thinking and how it isn’t what we think they do?

EM: For a large part of philosophy (e.g., for the kind of questions about concepts we just discussed or for whether human nature exists—one of my research interests), lay opinions or folk theories do not matter at all. But for other parts of philosophy, they do, in part because philosophers appeal to them.

Examining folk theories or judgments empirically may turn out to be surprising in more than one way. Sometimes, we find that philosophers just don’t have that good a grasp of what lay people think. This is what the paper with Jonathan Livengood tried to establish. We show that some claims made by David Lewis and by Helen Beebee about lay people’s understanding of causation by absence are mistaken (but see Dunaway, Edmonds, & Manley, The Folk Probably Do Think What you Think They Think for an empirical criticism of our work).

In other cases, philosophers assume that judgments about philosophical cases or thought experiments (what is often called, misleadingly, “intuitions”) are likely to be true or reliable. A huge amount of work in experimental philosophy casts doubt on this view, by showing that these judgments are influenced by irrelevant variables such as culture, age, order of presentation of cases, and so on. My 2004 paper in Cognition, “Semantics Cross-Cultural Style” (with Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols, and Steve Stich), illustrates this approach. We presented participants in the USA and in Hong-Kong with cases inspired by Kripke’s famous Gödel case, and, as we had predicted, we found that Americans tend to have Kripkean intuitions (“Gödel” refers to the man originally called “Gödel”), while Chinese tend to have descriptivist intuitions (“Gödel” refers to the man originally called “Schmidt”)! This finding has now been replicated several times, including in Japan (by Jonathan Livengood and Justin Sytsma), My collaborators and I have also used various formulations of the cases to address some concerns with my original work. To give another example, David Colaço (a grad student at Pitt, HPS), Was Buckwalter, Steve Stich and I have recently shown that some important epistemological judgments (for the aficionado: judgments about fake barn cases) vary with age: Older people are much less likely to ascribe knowledge to an agent when she could easily have formed a false belief instead of the true belief she did form.

It is common to respond that findings on the vagaries of lay people’s judgments say little about experts’ judgments such as philosophers’ judgments (a response known as “the Expertise Defense”). This response has now been challenged experimentally. I have shown that intuitions about reference of linguists and philosophers are influenced by their theoretical commitments (Michael Devitt and I have been discussing this issue in a recent exchange in Theoria): Semanticists and philosophers of language, who are likely to have read Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, are more likely to have Kripkean intuitions than linguists who pay attention to the descriptions associated with words such as (sociolinguists, terminologists, anthropological linguists, etc.). Eric Schwitzgebel and Fiery Cushman (Expertise in Moral Reasoning? Order Effects on Moral Judgment in Professional Philosophers and Non‐Philosophers as well as Kevin Tobia, Wes Buckwalter, and Steve Stich in Moral intuitions: Are philosophers experts? have shown that philosophers’ judgments about trolley case and other moral cases are influenced by various biases. In brief, philosophers’ and other experts’ judgments too are influenced by irrelevant variables.

To be honest, we do not yet know how often judgments about cases of philosophical interest are influenced by irrelevant variables. To address this question, Steve Stich and I have recently been awarded a large grant by the Fuller Theological Seminary / Thrive Center in concert with the John Templeton Foundation for a project on “Intellectual Humility and Cultural Diversity in Philosophy: An examination of the extent and implications of cultural diversity in philosophical intuition.” The goal of this grant is to run the first large-scale, systematic empirical study of the diversity of intuitions and to assess the implications of this diversity for the practice of philosophy.

3:AM: So can you say something about the general significance of this work. For instance, do you think that the new ways of understanding who we are is leading to a pretty radical new view of what people are. Is our self image changing because of this philosophical work?

EM: Some of this work is surely changing our self-image, or at least it should! Many philosophers of mind such as Dave Chalmers and Ned Block are convinced that phenomenal consciousness is a real phenomenon in part (perhaps in large part) because its reality strikes them as introspectively obvious. Well, if phenomenal consciousness is really obvious, as Justin Sytsma and I have argued in Two conceptions of subjective experience, then lay people should have a concept of phenomenal consciousness: They should draw a sharp distinction between mental states that have a phenomenal character and those that do not. But we have shown experimentally that they don’t, which suggests that they do not have a concept of phenomenal consciousness. We take this to suggest that phenomenal consciousness is not obvious at all, and, if it is not, why would we believe it is a real phenomenon at all? If our argument is convincing (and there are many responses one could make—we discuss them in our paper), then we need to revise our view of the mind dramatically! There may be no qualia, there may be no phenomenal consciousness.

In addition, the project “Intellectual Humility and Cultural Diversity in Philosophy” may lead us to advocate for a greater humility in philosophy. The methods commonly used in contemporary philosophy may be challenged by the diversity we expect to find. So, for example, how should we investigate moral permissibility if judgments about permissibility vary dramatically across cultures? Why should we care about what philosophers call “knowledge” if billions of people in other cultures don’t value this particular epistemological condition? That’s the type of question that philosophers would have to face if our project is successful.

3:AM: Are there some things that from this new perspective that we should be thinking about more seriously than perhaps we have done. I’m thinking about the tv show ‘Fringe’ which imagines that research on the fringe of science (or pseudo-science!) into things like ESP, life after death and stuff like that has borne fruit! This stuff is often characterized as being nutty, because it is in conflict with what proper science tells us, but given that this is probably just a folk intuition, isn’t there a possibility that the belief that nutty pseudo science is nutty is just another bias of our cognition and so should be revisited?

EM: Mmmh. There must be room for mavericks and heretics in science, a point highlighted by recent research on the social structure of science (for instance in Ryan Muldoon and Michael Weisberg’s work). After all, Darwin’s views were once marginal. On the other hand, the difference between Darwin and ESP advocates is that the former made a compelling case for evolution, while decades of research done by the latter have failed to produce even vaguely suggestive evidence.

3:AM: Do you find yourself having difficulty with people now that you know that so much mental life is kind of strange? And doesn’t it make you worry that much of what we are is mysterious given that you argue that much of the important conceptual work is not open to introspection?

EM: One of the things psychology has taught me is that we are sometimes poor at predicting how we would behave, and I often express skepticism at my friends’ and acquaintances’ assured predictions about how they would behave in such and such situations. When I predict my behavior, I tend to assume that I would behave like most people, and I often try to determine what psychological research predicts about the relevant type of behavior. This sometimes leads me to predict that I will behave in particular way, while I feel, with great confidence, that *I*, in contrast to other people, will behave differently. Weird mind split.

3:AM: Looking forward, where are your investigations going next? You’re working in a very exciting field with some very smart people. If you were to predict the state of play in say a decade, what do you think we’ll know then that we don’t know now? And who are the people to watch out for (alongside yourself of course!)

EM: I am working on several projects at the same time in addition to the project on philosophical humility I mentioned earlier.

For a few years now, I have been involved in a very lively debate about how human nature should be reconceptualized in light of progress in biology, genetics, and psychology. Steve Downes and I have just published a reader on this question, Arguing about Human Nature , and we hope that an increasing number of philosophers will turn their attention to this question. I have further ideas about this question, which I hope to write in the coming years.

I am slowly writing a new book about the foundations of statistics and about methodology in psychology and the behavioral sciences. I am defending classical statistics (the type of statistics developed by R.A. Fisher and Neyman and Pearson) against various criticisms, arguing for what I take to be the only consistent interpretation of classical statistics,a nd proposing various inferential norms for scientists. The book mixes fairly abstract arguments and concrete proposals about particular norms of inference. I hope it will be of interest to philosophers and psychologists alike.

Somewhat related, I am also working on the methodology of cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology, and I have recently published several papers on the topic.

In the philosophy of psychology, I have developed fairly heterodox views about what is known as “implicit bias,” and I am turning the talk I have been giving into an essay for a fantastic volume edited by Jenny Saul and Michael Brownstein.

In moral psychology, I have interest about whether the concept of morality is a universal or whether it is, as I suspect, a cultural invention. I am doing some empirical work to try to get at this question, and I hope to be able to tell a broadly Nietzschean story about the invention of morality. I have already argued in detail with Ron Mallon that, while our sense of norms evolved, morality itself as a distinct kind of norms is probably a cultural invention (see the chapter on the evolution of morality in John Doris’s fantastic Moral Psychology Handbook with OUP).

As for the people that you should keep an eye on, I’d like to put a plug for my former and current graduate students. Justin Sytsma is one of the most interesting experimental philosophers, and his work on consciousness is extremely influential. Jonah Schupbach has done some groundbreaking work on explanatory power and on inference to the best explanation, and he brings together formal and experimental methods in the philosophy of science. Elizabeth O’Neill, who is finishing her PhD with me, is doing some really exciting work in moral epistemology, Greg Gandenberger, another of my PhD students, is working on incredibly difficult issues on the foundations of statistics, and has developed a new proof of the likelihood principle, and Joe McCaffrey, who is just starting his dissertation, is scrutinizing the project of localizing cognitive functions in the brain, which is at the core of contemporary cognitive neuroscience. All these research projects are incredibly exciting.

3:AM: And finally, are there any books you’ve read whilst engaged in this fascinating work that have been illuminating for you?

EM: The Fragmentation of Reason and Deconstructing the Mind by Steve Stich have been very influential for my intellectual formation. I am also a huge fan of Fodor’s early books, The Language of Thought and Representations, and of Dennett’s Brainstorms. I re-read these books regularly.

My work on concepts was very much influenced by Paul Griffiths’s book on emotions, What Emotions Really Are. This book illustrated how philosophy of psychology should be done. The same is true of Shaun Nichols’s, John Doris’s, and Jesse Prinz’s books.

Boyd and Richerson’s Culture and the Evolutionary Process as well as their collection of articles (The Origin and Evolution of Cultures) played a large role in my attempt to meet what I called earlier the integration challenge.

Nisbett’s work on cultural diversity, The Geography of Thought, woke me from my dogmatic slumber. I used to ignore the role of culture in shaping our thoughts, and Nisbett and his colleagues’ research led me to revise my views (although I am not entirely convinced by Nisbett’ historical explanation of the differences his book reviews).

Finally, E.O. Wilson’s On Human Nature is a fantastic, though often erroneous, read. It has convinced me of the legitimacy of viewing human beings as one would view any other species, by identifying the modal, stable patterns of behavior or of thought. This remains a very provocative read.

3:AM: And finally, finally, the smart set at 3:AM always like a reading list. So can you give us your Top 5 books that we should be reading to understand better your field?

EM: I recommend the books I cited earlier in this article, but here are a few additional suggestions (more than five, sorry!):

Stich’s collections of articles (Collected Papers I and II) is a great read.

Knobe and Nichols’s anthology, Experimental Philosophy, is a must read if one is interested in experimental philosophy.

Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the south by Nisbett and Cohen also illustrates the importance of culture.

Doing Bayesian Data Analysis by Kruschke is the best introduction to Bayesian methods in statistics. Although I am skeptical of the call for statistical reform in psychology, psychologists should be better acquainted with Bayesian methods.

Finally, two fantastic handbooks: The Moral Psychology Handbook by John Doris and the Moral Psychology Research Group and The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science by Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels, and Steve Stich.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Thom Brooks kicks philosophy onto the Global streets looking for justice. He’s at home with law, philosophy and public policy. He’s got hard things to say about the UK Citizenship test, finds the issue of global justice a core issue for us all, and Hegel’s Philosophy of Right a key text. He broods deeply on theories of punishment and thinks he’s continuing the tradition of the British Idealists. He thinks hard about natural law internalism and theories of just war. He judges John Rawls a deep groove, Martha Nussbaum his fave living philosopher both for her capabilities approach and large vision and considers Indian philosophy part of the increasingly global philosophical scene. Like, Holy Funkadelic!

3:AM: What made you become a philosopher? Were you always wondering about the kinds of issues you now wonder about?

Thom Brooks: I never imagined that I’d become a philosopher and the decision did not happen overnight. My youth was spent in New Haven, Connecticut dreaming about playing lead guitar in the rock band Kiss. I saw them play on television when I was about six years old and started to learn the guitar almost immediately afterwards. My passion for music continued and I later entered university to study music at William Paterson under Hugh Aitken. I sat Aitken’s class on Indian music and developed a deep interest in the subject. He advised me to meet with Maya Chadda, a professor of political science. Chadda was a classic Indian dancer and long-time friend of Ravi Shankar. She recommend that I consider studying Indian politics to better grasp elements of Indian music and culture at a deeper level. I soon took an unusual double major for my BA in music and political science. While my ambition for a music career began to wane, my plan at this time was to work in government, probably the US State Department, and South Asian affairs a strong interest. Before graduating, I sat classes with Stephen Shalom who deserves credit for first arousing my interest in political philosophy. I also took an ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ with a terrific teacher, Daniel Kolak.

I quickly ruled out a move to Law School, but opted to pursue a MA in political science at Arizona State University where I studied under Joyotpal Chaudhuri and my plan was to pursue a job in government upon graduation. Things did not go as planned. Chaudhuri convinced me that I had to engage with Indian philosophy and religion to better understand the politics of the region. Thus started a still present love for Indian philosophy. I found the rich use of vivid analogies, the robust ‘communitarian’ view of the individual and novel understandings about pluralism and difference all highly appealing. So my interest in Indian thought is mostly ethical and political rather than religious. I have since published several papers with much more planned.

One problem for me was that this interest in philosophy was from an non-traditional point of entry. This made conversations difficult at first. My canonical figures, such as Nagarjuna or Shantideva, remain all but unknown in Western philosophical circles. It was always more cumbersome to raise objections or defend positions through the lens of such fascinating figures. All this changed when I sat a class by Avital Simhony on Hegel and the British Idealists. Much of my career has been spent trying to gain a better understanding of the texts by Hegel, Green and others we read in that class. Something clicked when I read Hegelians. It wasn’t because of clear prose or deep agreement, but rather I discovered that many of the ideas and views that attracted me to Indian philosophy could be engaged with using Hegel and the British Idealists instead. This made it easier to engage with others because the figures and texts were better known, however complex and often obscure.

I had not travelled much until this time and only now coming to the view that perhaps my future is in academia as a political theorist and not working in politics. But I still lacked confidence in my philosophical abilities. So I took a gamble on what turned out to be a transformational experience that has shaped everything that has happened for me since: I decided to pursue a second MA, but this time in Philosophy. And I was going to live abroad and chose to study at University College Dublin. I sat a terrific class on Hegel’s Logic taught by Brian O’Connor who also served as my dissertation supervisor: unfortunately for Brian, my MA dissertation ran to about 220 pages – and much longer than my PhD thesis. I wrote about capital punishment and the philosophy of punishment has occupied a central place in my work ever since.

My plan was never to stay in Europe, but return to the US for any PhD studies. But again things didn’t work out that way. I grew to love my time in Dublin, Ireland where I enjoyed the philosophical scene and also actively gigged in a jazz trio in Temple Bar most weekends. I took a year out after completing my MA in philosophy at UCD and worked as an Executive Assistant in the department. One of my tasks was to serve as a managing editor for the International Journal of Philosophical Studies still based at UCD. This role further improved my confidence in my abilities as I became introduced to academic publishing from the other side, one of the most rewarding experiences I have enjoyed. I learned a tremendous amount about how the publishing world works and attending publisher’s meetings, engaged with annual reports and so on. This was all put to good use in two ways. First, I used the insights gained in this role to develop my first paper – published on Kant, Hegel and retributivist punishment in Philosophy – at this time. Secondly, I launched a new journal, the Journal of Moral Philosophy, a couple years later employing the lessons learned with the IJPS.

I left Dublin in 2001 for the University of Sheffield where I studied for a PhD in philosophy under Robert Stern and Leif Wenar on the topic of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. I could not have asked for a more friendly or supportive place to study. I am particularly indebted to Stern for his advice on Hegel and so much else. I was now clear that I wanted to become a philosopher and work in a philosophy department. Once again things did not go according to plan. Jobs were scarce, especially when limiting my search to the UK. Eventually, I took a job as Lecturer in Political Thought in the Politics Department at Newcastle University with only a few months left on my student visa. Last December, I joined the Law School at Durham University and I’m also an Associate Member of the Philosophy Department. So I’ve made it to Philosophy at last although my main appointment is in Law.

I wouldn’t have had it any other way. My career path has been uncommon moving across several subjects. One consequence is that my training and interests are deeply interdisciplinary. I’m now equally “at home” in Law, Philosophy, Politics or Public Policy although I would consider myself first and foremost a Philosopher. The ideas that drove me in graduate school continue to be present in my thinking today, such as punishment, although I have developed new interests, such as in the capabilities approach, global justice and also criminal law.

3:AM: You’re involved in making current legislation about the UK Citizenship test, which you have called ‘unfit for purpose.’ Before looking at the issue, could you say something about your involvement in this as a philosopher – you took the test yourself didn’t you? It seems philosophers are eminently suitable for engaging in public issues – and policy issues – where big philosophical ideas are involved. Is this something you enjoy and feel philosophy might be more engaged with?

TB: I sat the “Life in the UK” citizenship test in 2009. You must pass the test in order to qualify for permanent residency. I became a British citizen in 2010. Philosophers should become more politically engaged and I’m surprised more are not so. The UK has several great examples of philosophers impacting on practice at its best, including several academic philosophers now appointed as Life Peers in the House of Lords, such as Onora O’Neill, Raymond Plant and Bhikhu Parekh – Parekh is an especially close friend of mine. The UK recently incorporated a requirement that departments provide some evidence for the “impact” of their research in the regular research performance monitoring now called the Research Excellence Framework (or REF). This has attracted much criticism for fear that it would privilege some subjects over others with special concerns expressed by many working in the arts and humanities. I believe such worries are misplaced and say so in a forthcoming piece on political philosophy and research impact for the Political Studies Association’s special issue of Political Studies Review on impact. Philosophers are well placed to provide the necessary critical scrutiny through rigorous examination that often eludes others. I was once asked by a student why I demanded his class read Plato’s Republic rather than something more practical, such as a business plan. My response was that if he could critically examine the Republic in its rich complexity, then he could scrutinize any business plan. Philosophy is perhaps far more practical than many realize.

Furthermore, I have found that it is much easier to engage directly with policy makers through political parties. I’ve been an active supporter of the UK’s Labour Party for several years and have benefited from a sustained interest in my work. Indeed, next month my book Punishment will be formally launched in Westminster by a panel chaired by Lord Parekh. Such engagement between academics, politics and policy makers is – I suspect – much less unusual here in the UK than in my native USA. There is an interest in academic research and its potential use for policy making that is strongly encouraging. Yet, I’ve been surprised nonetheless at how few other academics more directly engage with politicians. Most of those I know are keen to listen if only more cared to speak.

3:AM: So what’s wrong with the test and what general philosophical issues arise here? What are you proposing should be done?

TB: Where to begin? The test was brought in as part of a broad spectrum of policies meant to better control immigration to the UK. I have no problem with the use of citizenship tests, but I have several criticisms for how these tests have been designed in the UK. One issue is that the test had been outdated. When I sat the test, the “correct” answers to several questions were factually untrue. This is because until a fortnight ago the test was published in March 2007. The problem is that many programmes have since changed or closed, departments merged or rebranded and the demographics have changed. A second issue is that the test didn’t include much, if anything, about British history and culture. Instead, its focus was on practical knowledge and daily living. These problems have been addressed by the newly published 2013 test in the wrong ways. So the problem that programmes and departments may change overtime is overcome by not asking about them at all. The previous test required applicants to know how many MPs there are in Westminster (correct answer for the test was 646, but 650 in fact), but the new test does not require this knowledge (but it does require knowledge of how many members there are in devolved assemblies in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales which is curious). The problem of having too few questions about British history and culture has been addressed by asking too many, often highly trivial. You might say the test has gone from asking useful trivia to the purely trivial.

One key example is Sake Dean Mahomet. Applicants must now know his dates of birth and death (1759-1851), where he grew up (Bengal), which army he served in (Bengal army), when came to Britain (1782), when moved to Ireland (1786), how he married (he eloped), who he eloped with (the handbook states “an Irish girl called Jane Daly”), when he returned to England (1786), when he opened Britain’s first curry house (1810), what the curry house was called (the Hindoostane Coffee House), what street it was located on (George Street in London) and that he introduced the Indian art of head massage to Britain. An eminently important figure that I agree deserves inclusion, but in every detail? Applicants need not know the spouse names for virtually every other person that might be tested about. Why this exception?

I propose some practical changes. The new test no longer requires applicants know how to report a crime, how to contact an ambulance or register with a doctor. There is no information about the different types of schools in the UK or the background checks that may be required to work in them. Permanent residents ought to know information like this and it’s shocking to see it has all been removed. It is all the more surprising when you see the test’s handbook claims to be “a guide for new residents” while failing to include such fundamental details.

There are also deep, philosophical issues at stake: should a test be relevant for citizenship? What should such a test achieve? These were highlighted in a paper published in The Political Quarterly, but these issues remain prescient with the new test. There appears to have been little, if any, engagement with the many tens of thousands who have sat the test to gain some indication about whether the test has served a useful purpose or rather seen and endured by immigrants as little more than another unnecessary, costly hurdle to jump through. While the test is embedded in current immigration policy, there has been no substantive analysis of its principled purpose since its original launch a decade ago. I have argued that citizenship tests can serve a useful purpose when designed correctly. I have further recommended that the test be understood not as a barrier to keep others out, but instead as a bridge linking people in. Immigration policy has also centred on form filling and test taking, but perhaps there might also be much more done about community involvement that has not been explored that I believe should happen. I have had a unique perspective as a political and legal philosopher who has worked on citizenship and as someone who has immigrated after taking the UK’s test. I know several fellow philosophers (many of them American like me) who also sat the UK test. The problem is there are not enough of us – informed about issues of citizenship and sharing the experience of being an immigrant – with a voice on these debates. I’m hoping to change this and I’ve been active within Labour politics and beyond trying to make a difference. This June I’ll be publishing a comprehensive and highly critical report of the UK citizenship test at my college, known locally as Durham Castle.

3:AM: This issue connects directly with issues of global justice. What are the key philosophical questions that concern you in this area?

TB: Several questions have attracted my interest in global justice: can there be a just war? Is there a “solution” to climate change? How to best address the problem of severe poverty? Each area has seen an explosion of interest and the field is robust with great talents. These questions are addressed in some recent work of mine both published and to be published, including a forthcoming companion book, Global Justice: An Introduction, to a new and revised edition of my The Global Justice Reader next year. Other key issues include what I call “global philosophy.” It is striking to me how much work in “global” justice addresses international problems from a culturally-specific approach or single tradition. Those who argue that different traditions share little in common know little about them. One of the many things I find so inspiring in the work of Martha Nussbaum – probably my favourite philosopher working today – is how her work illuminates bridges between East and West. For example, the capabilities approach is no less true for the citizens of Chicago as it is for those in Calcutta. Additionally, the resources employed to make her claims (and a tactic also found in different ways in Amartya Sen’s work) are not exclusive to one tradition. We are offered a coherent and compelling philosophical vision that is Nussbaum’s, but which builds off of a wide array of others from Aristotle and Kant to Gandhi and Tagore. This approach to philosophy is not comparative, but “global” bringing together different traditions within a unified account. Or at least how I see it. And if I predicted the future for philosophy, then it is that we will see much more to come as I argue for in a recent Metaphilosophy piece. As our classrooms and faculties become more internationalized, this may be inevitable – and a welcome move forward. Long may it continue.

3:AM: A figure you have thought hard about is Hegel and in particular his ‘Philosophy of Right’. It’s noticeable that in your writing about him you focus on issues such as punishment , ethics, the state, war which have been central aspects of your work. And you link him with Rawls and Marx who are also of interest to you. Some will be surprised that someone with an interest in Global justice and so on are interested in a philosopher endorsing dangerous conservativism bordering on fascism and totalitarianism. But you think this Popperian view is a bad reading don’t you?

TB: I most certainly do! Popper calls his attacks on Hegelian philosophy a part of his war effort. It certainly wasn’t an effort at improving our philosophical knowledge. Hegel’s philosophy has been subjected to countless misinterpretations and it is hardly surprising because Hegel did himself few favours. Most of his work takes the form of lecture outlines. Hegel would have his students consider some passages and then lecture about them in class. They were all meant to be elaborated in class and long before podcasts became a reality. Moreover, these lectures were to be more than elaborated in class, but also understood within a particular encyclopaedic structure. Hegel’s work is not meant to be read in isolation, but in combination with his other work forming – in his view – a coherent, philosophical system. Thankfully, philosophers have largely given up on such grandiose exercises. But it can be stimulating to think more about such ambitious enterprises. I’ve enjoyed studying Hegel because he helps me think more clearly about philosophical problems, but not because I agree with his solutions. Or rather: Hegel’s philosophy for me is like a mine that is mineral rich where I’ve discovered countless gems, but each gemstone requires much polishing and care when extracted from the rock and brought back to the surface.

Hegel scholars today are fairly united in the view that Hegel’s politics were moderate and neither conservative nor liberal. There is greater controversy over his contributions to discussions about global justice. I don’t believe Hegel has much of a theory about global justice because, in my view, his concerns lay elsewhere. Indeed, the section of the Philosophy of Right concerning international affairs is merely schematic. We might still offer a Hegelian-inspired vision and I’ve attempted this, but I’m less convinced Hegel has a clear and distinctive contribution in this area. So my Hegelian interests have largely been domestic rather than international.

3:AM: Someone like Fred Beiser is suspicious of Hegelians who eschew the metaphysics of the Spirit and other semi-theological concepts. What do you say?

TB: Our views have much in common, but for different reasons. Hegelian scholars have often divided themselves between “metaphysical” and “non-metaphysical” readings of his work. This distinction is misleading. It leads to the mistaken view that non-metaphysical readings of Hegel’s work deny there is metaphysics to be found. A further problem is that “metaphysical” readings will often overemphasise Hegel’s views about Geist and religion – as if their opponents deny their relevance – which defend a reading of Hegel’s text at the expense of making them more penetrable or defensible. “Non-metaphysical” readings typically overstate other elements presenting a reading perhaps more philosophical defensible, but at a lack of deep connection with the text. Too often a claim about “Hegel’s theory of x” is perhaps more a reflection of “my new theory of x” concealed behind the illusion that Hegel argues for the same.

In my Hegel’s Political Philosophy: A Systematic Reading of the Philosophy of Right (2d 2013), I argue that the distinction between metaphysical and non-metaphysical readings is best characterized as a difference about the systematic nature of Hegel’s philosophy. At its heart, non-metaphysical readings typically play down the systematic relation between texts in order to inoculate certain ideas. For example, the Philosophy of Right is interpreted largely independently of the larger system in order to bracket the concerns many have with other parts of his system, such as Hegel’s logic, with his political philosophy. If such texts can be understood independently of the system, such non-systematic readings may offer more direct interpretations of Hegel’s arguments without bringing into consideration the more controversial claims made elsewhere.

I’ve argued that this is unsuccessful. One reason is that it counters Hegel’s self-understanding: to read his work systematically is to interpret his ideas in the context he has clearly intended. A second reason is that the interpretation of the Philosophy of Right as a part of Hegel’s larger philosophical system helps clarify controversies about his political philosophy. Finally, this can be done without writing a book mostly about the logic and system, but rather focused on the Philosophy of Right. My book considers various topics including property, punishment, morality, family, monarchy, law, war and (in the new second edition) democracy and history to show what a systematic reading entails and how it can reveal new insights into Hegel’s ideas. So I agree with Beiser that many interpreters defend an incomplete or misleading view about Hegel’s philosophy. But the answer is not to overplay the metaphysics. Rather we must consider the systematic nature of Hegel’s philosophy and argumentation.

3:AM: Hegel’s theory of punishment – the unified theory of punishment – is the subject of one of your books. You challenge previous interpretations of Hegel’s theory don’t you. Before presenting your reading, could you say what people previously thought Hegel was arguing?

TB: Hegel’s theory of punishment is often defended as retributivist. Broadly speaking, this is the view that criminals should be punished when it is deserved and in proportion to what is deserved. This interpretation is almost entirely the result of focusing on one set of comments in the section “Abstract Right” to the exclusion of much else that Hegel has to say elsewhere. In fact, I’d say the view that Hegel’s theory of punishment is substantively contained in this one section has become fairly dominant.

3:AM: And how do you disagree with this? So what are you saying Hegel thought about punishment? Was this position close to that of the British Idealists?

TB: It’s an odd view to believe Hegel could or should have held. The Philosophy of Right moves in three stages: Abstract Right, Morality and Ethical Life. This three-stage progression charts the development of our consciousness of self with others from an abstract conception one-to-one building up toward our relation to others in ‘Ethical Life’ which brings together the institutions of family, civil society and the state. If we believe that ‘Abstract Right’ contains Hegel’s substantive views about punishment and that he defends a retributivist theory, this is implausible when you consider that Abstract Right is a sphere where there are no laws, there are no courts and there is no state, and there is no considered view of morality. Each of these dimensions – central to any theory of punishment – all come afterwards. Hegel does discuss ‘punishment’ in ‘Abstract Right’, but in relation to the violation of contractual stipulations agreed between two persons in a hypothetical situation and not for violating laws enacted by a state.

A common reply is that Hegel may offer comments later in the Philosophy of Right in his discussion of law, but they offer no substantive change to what Hegel claims previously. But this cannot be correct. Hegel is explicit in his later discussion that he is recasting his earlier comments within his now more complete view of civil society. We move from a hypothetical relation to our concrete, ‘real’ relation to each other. A retributivist might be expected to claim that we punish a criminal to a degree deserved by that person and not according to the desires of others. However, Hegel is clear that the degree criminals should be punished will change depending upon the context and that greater punishment may be deserved where ‘we’ in civil society believe we are more threatened by a crime. So the relationship between crimes and their punishment may change over time in relation to public perceptions. Context matters. This can only be best appreciated by interpreting Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in its systematic structure. Hegel’s texts do not proceed chapter after chapter like most other authors, but where chapters are interrelated in a particular, dialectical way.

Finally, Hegel’s Science of Logic reveals a fascinating insight into the philosophy of punishment. He writes that punishment should not be considered as either retribution, deterrence or rehabilitation. Instead, punishment is grounded in retribution – those punished must deserve it and cannot be innocent – but retribution is only one part of a larger view. Punishment is not retributivist, preventative or rehabilitative, but rather all three in one. Three in one. Why would we expect to find anything different in Hegel than this anyway?

This view is extraordinarily close to the British Idealists writing in the late 19th Century. Figures such as Green, Bosanquet, Bradley, Seth and others all defend a similar view of punishment. I have called this view ‘the unified theory of punishment’ to draw attention to an existing tradition of scholarship that has attempted to provide us with a genuine alterative to the standard fare of having to choose one or other theory of punishment. Why not bring them together if we can?

I have tried to develop this further by eschewing Hegelian metaphysics and building a new rights-based framework. This helps avoid the obvious problem that a pluralistic theory of punishment will be incoherent if a new framework is not provided to guide and shape the exercise of penal pluralism. For example, the retributivist aim of punishing the deserving to the degree deserved may justify a very different amount from a preventative aim of deterring others. We require a new framework that different principles can work together within to avoid clashes. I argue that the criminal law should be understood in terms of rights protection and where crimes occur these are rights violations that may require a response. I call this response ‘punishment’. Note that not every violation of right may require a response for its protection. But where a response is required, then punishment aims at restoring and maintaining the protection of rights. This may take many forms and I argue in Punishment that this can provide a model for a unified theory that brings together principles of desert, crime reduction and rehabilitation as well as other principles, such as expressivism and restorative justice. So the inspiration comes first from Hegel, but more clearly arises in my view through the brilliant work of long neglected British Idealists. (In essence, I would understand much of my work as part of the British Idealist tradition – why must it end with Michael Oakeshott or be Oakeshottian?) I must add that a unified theory of punishment attempts to provide a coherent, normative justification for current sentencing practices. Many countries including the United States and the United Kingdom employ sentencing guidelines that claim they bring together multiple penal principles. The problem is this has lacked a workable framework that the unified theory of punishment provides. Punishment does more than survey existing theories about punishment, but it defends a novel view – the unified theory – and it offers several public policy proposals for how criminal justice may be improved.

3:AM: You have developed your own approach to punishment haven’t you? Can you say why we should punish criminals, whether the death penalty is ever justified and whether age has a bearing on what should be done?

TB: Punishment offers an analysis of both capital punishment and youth offending that defends the unified theory of punishment approach. Ideally, the death penalty ought not be practiced. I am strongly opposed to its use, but I’m unsure if any absolutist position can be maintained. If the aim of punishment is the protection of rights, then punishment must not undermine rights protection – so prison conditions that may contribute to offenders be more likely to reoffend are deeply problematic. Similarly, executing murderers is even more problematic and difficult to justify. This does not mean it is impossible, such as cases of extreme emergency. In short, much of my problem with arguments about capital punishment is not that I believe it must always be unjustified, but none have convinced me that it can be justified in more than the most exceptional circumstances. I’ve argued in a few places that any retributivist that takes desert seriously cannot justify the practice of capital punishment given the problems with certainty of guilt, for example.

Youth offending is a great challenge to much thinking about punishment. Age has traditional had a bearing on the proper response of the criminal justice system. One argument is essentially retributivist: if we punish the deserving to the degree deserved, then what to do with those whose moral powers are in development. There are also interesting issues concerning deterrence: if the criminal law should communicate a clear message to all potential offenders, what to do where there are different messages expressed to persons over time? Again, I argue that a rights-based framework is useful in navigating issues of paternalism and the more specific particular needs of youth.

I argue that a rights-based approach only has purchase in a social world where we would want such rights. I defend the view of a stakeholder society and the importance of our each believing we have a stake in society. I also argue that a model of stakeholding is useful for thinking about criminal offending. Often different lists of risk factors are offered, such as unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse or housing insecurity. These factor may be best captured by a theory about stakeholding and its exercise, a view that I adopt from both Will Hutton’s work on the stakeholder economy (briefly promulgated by Prime Minister Tony Blair) and Hegel’s theory about the rabble. For Hegel, the rabble pose a major problem for modern society. This is often characterized as a problem of poverty, but I believe Hegel is clear that it is a problem about consciousness, about the self and others. The rabble look to society as an other, as something alien. The rabble may often be composed of persons in poverty, but Hegel is careful to include the very wealthy, too. Stakeholding captures the essence of this position: that the rabble fail to perceive themselves as having a stake in society. Society should not only protect and promote our rights. It should also be world worth having a stake in. Risk factors go some way to helping highlight important issues, but there is also a fundamental problem about our identity that stakeholding helps us clarify. Or so I argue in Punishment and recent papers.

3:AM: You also discuss his theory of law in terms of ‘Natural Law internalism.’ What is this, and what’s at stake?

TB: The closer that I examined Hegel’s legal philosophy, the more clearly I came across a curious problem. Seemingly every text I came across identified Hegel’s legal thought in a different way. Some said he was a natural lawyer, but others a positivist. And so on. Even more curiously, the same might be said for Ronald Dworkin’s legal theory. I came to realize that the problems so many had in coming to a firm view about how Hegel’s and Dworkin’s legal theories might be classified is because each defends a novel view of natural law.

Virtually all natural lawyers defend what I call Natural Law Externalism. This is the idea that we first agree some external standard for the assessment of law and then apply it. This is true even for Lon Fuller’s view about internal morality where we first consider what this morality should be and then apply it. Natural Law Internalism does not look for a moral standard external to the law, but instead for a standard internal to it. So for Hegel law’s internal morality is developed from within and discernible over time. Likewise, for Dworkin, moral principles shape the law from the inside. The problem for both is confirming that what we find is really there and not a projecting of what we want to discover. In a few papers, I’ve raised various criticisms of this theory of law and I find natural law unconvincing. But I also find it fascinating and think there may be something to be said for this novel contribution to the natural law tradition that has been overlooked. For what little it may be worth, I would consider myself a Legal Realist.

3:AM: You’ve also thought about just war theory. This is another live issue what with Libya, Afghanistan , Iraq fresh in our minds. So is war justified in some circumstances or should we stop giving philosophical justifications for bloodletting?

TB: There has been an enormous amount of literature produced about the so-called just war tradition. Much of the more exciting work, such as by Jeff McMahan who is a clear philosophical hero of mine, overturns orthodoxy in compelling and wide-ranging ways that has been highly welcome. At least one orthodoxy remains that I believe we should do away with and that is the idea that there can be any ‘just’ war. Wars are almost always conflicts where innocent civilians pay the highest price with their lives and livelihoods. I’m thoroughly unconvinced any such horror can be ‘just’ and prefer to think it better to conceive it as excused or a defence. It is not ‘just’ nor morally right to strike back at those who harm or threaten to harm us, but such a reprisal might be excused where specific conditions apply. So I can accept that war may be excused – and here I agree with much of what McMahan has argued on this subject – but I’d also like to see an end to any talk of ‘just’ war. This doesn’t mean they should never be fought, but rather that we should not be blind to the inevitable moral wrongs any so-called ‘just’ war will commit.

3:AM: As someone working on moral and political theory John Rawls is kind of unavoidable. In respect to Rawls and his legacy do you see your work on Hegel, ethics , law and global justice as part of his legacy?

TB: Rawls has had an enormous influence on my thinking, especially his Political Liberalism and the challenge of forging an overlapping consensus. This is the subject of my piece in a new book, Rawls’s Political Liberalism, co-edited with Martha Nussbaum that should be published later this year. What I get most from Rawls is the wonderful toolbox he provides of the consensus, of basic liberties, of public reasons and much more. I am less convinced by his larger theory and more committed to trying to construct an alternative theory of capabilities. Nussbaum is probably my favourite philosopher today and the greatest influence over me. I envy her countless contributions to how we understand justice in its rich complexity as well as the elegant prose she employs. I also share a similar interest in Indian philosophy and culture which has importance for my thinking about so many problems as well.

Plus, I admire the breadth of her work. Too many philosophers focus too narrowly in not only work, but across several works. Perhaps the age of philosophical systems like Hegel’s is long gone and so all the better for contemporary philosophy. But philosophers often seem to lack to my mind a philosophy, a larger vision. Nussbaum, for me, is one of the few that has this broad philosophical vision. I find it enormously inspiring. While I’m not a major fan of his, this is also something I admire about Dworkin’s work as well. I wish such a broad philosophical vision were more, rather than less, common.

3:AM: Zizek’s book on Hegel is one of the few recent philosophy books to reach a massive audience. Is his approach interesting to you? I suppose he’s often linked more with ‘continental’ philosophy, so I guess this raises the rather tricky issue of the relationship between so-called analytics and continentals. You seem to straddle both camps. Is the distinction real?

TB: I’ve never been a major fan of Zizek. Perhaps I should be more embarrassed than I am that I’ve not read nor seen this book. I don’t accept the so-called ‘analytic’ versus ‘Continental’ divide although it has been remarked before that I straddle this well. Brian Leiter has clarified elsewhere that one can be both and perhaps neither. It is true that what is taken to be analytic philosophy can often be presented in manner that is dry and perhaps technocratic. So-called Continental work can appear more alive and engaging. I certainly get this from Indian philosophy and once upon a time you’d rarely see me without something by Camus or Sartre in my hands. There is something to be said for making clear philosophy more alive which too few achieve.

Perhaps the best way of understanding the differences between the two camps is between scepticism and hero worship. So-called analytical philosophy strikes me as far more sceptical about the merits of different views and subjugating every claim to close scrutiny when done well. You see similar developments in some work on Continental philosophy, too – and recall I reject the standard distinction between analytic and Continental philosophy. Nonetheless, much that is characterized as ‘Continental’ strikes me as too concerned about highlighting why some favoured philosopher has some remarks found compelling by its author in something approaching intellectual shrines celebrating the lives of often now dead patron saints whose authority is more assumed than defended. Everyone has their heroes, but our project as philosophers is not to repeat Hegel in Hegelese. Instead, philosophy should focus more on the ideas than their creators, thoughts instead of subjects, in a rigorous pursuit of clarity and insight, if not truth.

3:AM: Do you see recent events like the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring as signaling a change in global politics and perhaps ethics, or do you think they are temporary and not important?

TB: I am no authority on this subject, but both events struck me as important events – and we may not have seen the last of either as events continue to play out.

3:AM: And finally for the readers here at 3:AM are there five books you could recommend to help us delve further into these philosophical issues?

TB: Thomas Hill Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation. The first major work of British Idealism that brings together Kantian and Hegelian elements together in a novel and groundbreaking theory about ethics, law and politics.

GWF Hegel, Philosophy of Right. One of the important philosophical texts of all time that revolutionizes how we might understand our relations to each other.

Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Still my favourite work by Nussbaum. It offers an insightful normative theory of capabilities and so much more, touching on feminism, global justice, political liberalism, religion and even non-Western philosophy.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles Moore (eds), A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy. Still the most authoritative anthology of readings covering the full range of this fascinating tradition.

John Rawls, Political Liberalism. Perhaps his most underrated contribution. Today’s world faces challenges from reasonable pluralism and difference that this work helps clarify.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Karl Ove Knausgaard‘s first novel, Out of the World, was the first ever debut novel to win The Norwegian Critics’ Prize. His second novel, A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven, was widely acclaimed. A Death in the Family was awarded the prestigious Brage Award and is being heralded as a masterpiece wherever it appears.

3:AM: I’d like to start by asking about the book’s title. The working title was Argentina. However, you changed it to My Struggle. How do these two titles relate to the book and what makes My Struggle more appropriate?

KK: This book is really about being at a place in life and wanting to be somewhere else and Argentina has always been a sort of a dream country for me. I had always wanted to go there and had never been. The first time I was aware of it was in the football World Cup Final in 1978 but then it became a kind of a mythical country for me: Borges is from there and for me he is an incarnation of literature, and Gombrowicz he wrote his diaries there, so it was the place of literature and myth, the place all my longing was directed towards. However it’s a bad title because nobody would understand that. But My Struggle, Min Kamp, is different. Well first of all it says ‘Fuck you I don’t care about you, I’m just doing this’. But then there is also something basic in that title, it’s my struggle, and the book is a description of a struggle, it’s a small struggle, a real struggle which is also the book itself.

Another good thing was that it meant I had to read Hitler’s Mein Kampf and in the end it meant I also had to write about it too. I wrote about four hundred pages in the last volume about Adolf Hitler  mostly about his path to Mein Kampf because there are a lot of similarities in there, a lot of parallels in the descriptions of my life and the young Hitler’s because we are both sixteen and in love and wanting to be artists and so on and so on.

But most of all, that difference and relation between: overall construction, life, the world, the biggest concepts, and the smallest ideas is something which is perfectly captured in the title.

3:AM: I wanted to ask you now about the mechanical aspects of writing My Struggle, in particular the length of the book and the speed with which it was composed. How important were they and what did these mechanisms allow you to do?

KK: The speed is the most important thing. Both challenge the concept of form but the speed has a practical element as well for me because I am a perfectionist in my writing, in my way of thinking and I want to be clever and I want to make it into real art, real literature. But I had to fight against that thing in me because I became so critical of my own writing and I needed to get over that, and the only way I could do it was by speeding up because then you don’t have time to be critical at all.

It also allowed me to escape the notion of knowing what to write.  If you know what you’re going to write then that’s death for me, then nothing is happening. If I plan something it’s just dead. And almost everything I write is dead in that sense really, but if I speed up then something, all of a sudden, is happening because I can no longer control it.

There’s also something else in there too. When I was nineteen I went to a creative writing course and we were basically taught that if something is bad then you should just take it away, essentially a very minimalistic approach to writing. It took me ten years to overcome that and to understand it’s possible to do the opposite, that if it’s bad you can just add more in because then something else is happening.

It’s the same thing with the length. If you write a hundred pages then it’s all about concentration, it’s all about sentences or language. But if you write 3600 pages the sentences are no longer the important thing, it is something else that is going on that’s difficult to explain.

Writing about life I just love the thought of being able to write a hundred pages, two hundred pages, three hundred pages about one day and then just spend maybe ten sentences on ten years and try to make a dynamic. But I am really sorry for doing this because now I cannot do it again. I’d love to do something like Marcel Proust because for me that’s the perfect novel but I have wasted it away. It’s too late. It was this, this is the result.

3:AM: There’s a point in the first volume where you write about a  ‘calibration of the senses… the point where all necessary distances have been set’, was the form an attempt at  breaking free from what you describe?

KK: Yes, that’s absolutely so. That has to do with concepts and ideas. The way we think of ourselves is static, it’s unmoving and fixed and I just wanted to crush all that up. To move in those directions where I don’t know what things really are. I mean I wrote a lot of pages about taking care of children, doing all these things which don’t have any meaning but I just go in there amongst the everyday and describe it and hope that something will show itself.

Another thing is that when I turned forty it was kind of like I was dead. I thought ‘This is it and it’s going to be like this for the rest of my life.’ And the only way for me to deal with that was through literature. It’s difficult to explain but I had to attempt to get closer to life, which is a stupid thing to do but that’s what I was trying to do, to avoid all the structures and forms of the novel.

A Man in Love really has no dramatic plot, it’s a really horizontal book in a way, whereas the third book is a very ordinary classic childhood description, almost like a cliché. That’s the danger with writing fast, you write quickly to get away from something but that means you also do it mechanically and you can end up with a cliché.

3:AM: That’s one of the things I like most about the book, unlike the so much of the over crafted, sentence obsessed literature of today, My Struggle has a complete lack of fear of cliché.

KK: That’s the risk in this book, to bathe in banalities is a dangerous thing for a writer to do. But then you need to ask yourself what quality is, what is quality in literature?

3:AM: You wrote in Volume II that literature’s sole obligation is the search for something different. What difference is it that you are searching for in My Struggle?

KK: Literature when I was a kid was always a place I could escape and when I grew up and became a writer myself it was still a place where I could get away and get outside of everything and use it as a kind of perspective for everything. But this time I am deciding not move away, not to go away but just try to describe this here as it is. The only thing I was looking for really was meaning, because I  started off with such a desperate feeling of meaninglessness and knowing that that feeling  isn’t like things should be. To consider everything meaningless is one of the deadly sins, so I just try and make things alive and the only way I can do that is in writing.

3:AM: Does it have any relation to the notion of difference Foucault describes?

KK: Definitely.  His book The Order of Things is one of the two or three most important books in my life as a writer, reading it was a revelation for me so he has to be in there somewhere.

3:AM: Death, of course has a commanding presence in your work. How did your Father’s death change how you thought about death in  general?

KK: His death or seeing him dead confirmed something for me which is very important: the physical material element of death which is something I have been very occupied with. When I was twenty I worked at a hospital for the mentally ill, the patients didn’t have much of a life and their strange forms made me see the body for the first time in that biological, materialist sense.

At the same time my grandmother was very ill and I saw her too and had never seen the body in that sense because we tend to hide these things away. When I saw my father dead it was the same thing, I saw how individuality, psychology, culture, all those things just disappear. In this book I have tried to write about all things in a strictly physical sense and I also view death from this perspective because so much of our lives are made up of other things, images, abstractions and concepts so that’s the real subject in My Struggle, that there is a difference between the way we think of ourselves and the way we really are.

We can say something about who we are but that doesn’t really mean anything. And in the end, it ends with a poem by Paul Celan, He is someone trying to move in those directions where there is no language at all, no world of material things. This is the exploration which is going on all the time in the book but only among the most banal events. Like the end of The Order of Things where Foucault describes man disappearing like a face in written in sand at the edge of the sea.

3:AM: Heidegger features a number of times in My Struggle. What effect do you think his thought has had on your work?

KK: I have never finished Sein und Zeit and I don’t know if I get more than five or ten percent of it but I just love to be in his language and the way her forces you to follow his path. There is also something attractive in his ideas about our automatic lives and of course his reading of Hoderlin is very important to me and my work. My thoughts about Heidegger also reached a conclusion in the sixth book writing about the Nazis because he was of course a Nazi for a while and it’s very interesting how he got to that point. I feel the same longing and the same affection for him when I read Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity, I am completely on Heidegger’s side. I am not a philosopher at all but I love to read his works and they relate to my writing in ways I don’t even know, but then I feel his ideas are sophisticated and difficult and writing is not. But still he deals with life and I deal with life.

3:AM: One quote in the book which really stuck with me was ‘The difference between nineteenth century nihilism and ours is the difference between emptiness and equality.’ I wondered if you might talk about what you meant by this.

KK: I cannot really talk about this at the moment but if you wait it will come in the sixth book where there is a long discussion on the idea of equality.

3:AM: Poetry features quite heavily in the books too. I was wondering what influence poets and poetry have had on you as a writer?

KK:  If you are a writer you will recognise what you think the best is,  the pinnacle of writing, the place where you think ‘this is really the point of everything’; and for me this is almost exclusively poets because of what they can evoke.

I never really talked about poetry or painting or art at all before because it is something totally different to writing, but in this book I tried to. I read Paul Celan, I had never talked about him or even really understood the work but I just read and was struck thinking ‘Wow this is really something else’ the ultimate place of words. I read Celan’s poems slowly, one word at a time, trying to see what’s going on but it was a strange experience as unlike most poets the words are not the important thing, there is something else there in between.

And it is the same with art. It is a mystery for me as I find I am often moved by it, and think it is very meaningful and very important but I can’t integrate it into my own life and make it relevant there, it’s something outside of what’s going on here, now.

Poetry is also the source of a lot of longing for me. If I read Hoderlin I feel almost only longing and sorrow, it has to do with the feeling of being alive I think.

3:AM: I wanted to ask about the religious themes in the book and how they relate to your materialism.

KK: My last book before this was about angels and the fall of angels and my fascination there was of the double character of angels, both divine and human, they have bodies and are wandering on Earth.

The idea for this book [A Time for Every Purpose under Heaven] was that the angels were tempted by life on Earth, they came closer and closer and eventually became Darwinist, they evolve until they eventually become like seagulls. Afterwards I was invited to do a retranslation of the Bible into Norwegian and then I was writing with theologians and of course Hebraic experts and when I was working on the first four books of Moses and I was amazed by the fact that there are no abstract motives, no abstract thoughts, it’s all read through the body all related to movement which is the opposite of what my image of the Bible was. And it is that which I saw and have been using ever since really.

I am not a religious person so for me religious ecstasy has the same meaning as it does in literature, as ecstasy in Holderlin and whatever is strongly connected to me. I am interested in those kinds of experience.

In the research for A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven I read a lot of theological texts and found some amazing things. One of the most important things was that the story of Cain and Abel, the story of one brother murdering another, is only eight lines long. It’s a really short story and yet it has been constantly reinterpreted for thousands of years and when I was writing about Hitler, the incident with the mass murderer Brevik happened and I ended up writing about Hitler, Brevik and Cain & Abel because there was something there in the story of Cain and Abel which was connected to these figures.

3:AM: You wrote that you are ‘never one for receiving’ and that you desire distance/turning away and quite clearly you have transmitted much of yourself in the book and may who read it will feel that they know you intimately. How has that outpouring or act of transmission allowed you to distance yourself and are these two things reconcilable?

KK: That is the paradox of this whole situation really. I turned away from everybody, even my family to do this and to hide really. Then the reverse of this is that I am recognised everywhere and people send me letters and speak to me as if we have known each other forever. But that has to do with what I was searching for: to be free in literature, and to be free in literature you really cannot allow any other to be present.

If you have a voice in your head saying ‘I can’t do that’ or ‘I should do that’ then it’s no good. And in social situations that voice is constant and I really am no good at dealing with it because I’m so occupied with it but in literature I can be free from that and just be, with no other there at all. And it’s interesting because in the other where there is the moral or ethical component of everything and if you want to do what I did you have to overcome the ethical, you have to overcome the moral, which is impossible in a social situation but is possible in the novel.

I never thought that this was going to be read and I honestly thought that people would hate it, but I still did it so there is obviously something I want to say. It’s strange turning away from life, which is necessary to write or do anything really, and at the same time doing it in order to make life more rich or more meaningful or more intense.

At the same time as I was writing My Struggle, Anders Brevik wrote his manifesto and we are pretty much the same generation and he did the same, he turned away, there is no other there in his work and there’s no moral component there, no ethics. The strange thing is he transgressed the literature to act on it in real life but it is the same mechanisms in action. The only thing I learned from this project is to do with this: with the social and the self and relations and with freedom and what freedom is.

3:AM: The book is also about the inadequacy of writing. At one wonderful moment you write ‘And writing, what else was it but death?’. How can the ultimate impossibility of writing, the fragmentary nature of memory reconcile itself in this work/in literature?

KK: That’s a very good question and to the point but it’s impossible for me to answer.  It’s impossible for me to reduce it.

3:AM: Finally I just wanted to ask, seeing as though you end the book with the line ‘I am so happy I am no longer an author’, if this is the end of writing then?

KK: Not the end of writing, the end of being an author. Since then I have been writing essays which is a completely different form. I wanted this book just to end in life and to turn away from literature into life. And I wanted it to end there and the sentence should be true I really must be filled with desire to live and it was like that, it was a relief to write that sentence. Now I want to write again but really there is nothing. I have some strong fascinations I want to write about but not the urge. I don’t know.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Daniel Fraser is a writer and critic who lives in London. He has written for 3:AM, ReadySteadyBook and The Quietus among others and can be found here.

Stephen R Grimm has a chillin’ $3.85 million for a philosophical project looking at ‘Varieties of Understanding’. He thinks interdisciplinary approaches are crucial and hopes the x-phi crew will join the work. He thinks understanding may have a different object than knowledge, and that understanding how the universe works has intrinsic value. He thinks about whether practical stakes can effect whether someone knows or not, about wisdom and whether reflection has anything to do with that, about the relationship between his theological and philosophical commitments, about naturalism, and the role of understanding in universities. All in all, this is a deep mull groove.

3:AM: What made you become a philosopher? You began as a theologian didn’t you? What happened?

Stephen R. Grimm: From a very young age, probably as young as 5 or 6, I felt a basic wonder at the world—that it existed at all, why it existed, why things were one way rather than another. Wordsworth’s description of a sense of “something far more deeply interfused” was not too far off the mark.

This interest in basic questions grew when I took a philosophy course in high school at about the age of 17. There I read Plato, and Aristotle, and Machiavelli, and fell in love with the kind of fundamental topics we were discussing, along with the give-and-take of argument. There were about 9 people in that class, and 3 of us went on to get doctorates in philosophy. It was a very inspiring course.

My study of theology came later, after majoring in philosophy at Williams College and doing a year of volunteer work with the Jesuits. Theology was attractive because it too asked very fundamental questions, and as a Catholic I was interested in learning more about the history and development of the Church. Soon enough, it became clear to me that the questions that were really driving me were philosophical ones—now not just the basic ones that drove me when I was younger but more focused ones about what we can know, what it is rational to believe, and how we should live. So I turned again to philosophy, happily.

3:AM: You’re the project leader for a new research initiative ‘Varieties of Understanding’ worth $3.85 million. The first thing to note is that this is a multi-disciplinary approach. Is this cross fertilization with other disciples something you see as being valuable to philosophy? It seems closely aligned to the approach found in x-phi. Is this an x-phi project?

SG: I do think that an interdisciplinary approach is crucial to the project. At one level, the project is focused on the sort of understanding that science offers of the world. Does it come from a grasp of laws, or causes, or mechanisms, or some combination of the above? And what sort of cognitive resources, exactly, are important for scientific understanding?

But in addition I am also very interested in trying to clarify the sort of understanding that other disciplines offer. For example, how does the sort of understanding offered by philosophy, or history, or the study of literature differ from the sort of understanding offered by the sciences? Do these different areas require the exercise of different cognitive resources—for example, empathy or imagination or something else—that one does not find in scientific understanding?

But all of this talk of “cognitive resources,” by my lights, begs not just for a philosophical treatment but for a psychological one. It’s the psychologists who can best inform us about the different ways in which the mind grasps or makes sense of the world. So it’s not exactly x-phi in the sense that it is often carried out these days, but I do welcome input from that approach and I hope experimental philosophers will apply for funding.

3:AM: Can you give us the background issues that the project is going to be looking at? Is the issue a new version of the Sellarsian one which wonders how folk understandings can survive the new frontiers of scientific understanding?

SG: The broadest issue, the one that unites the particular questions mentioned a moment ago, is: What is understanding, and how does it differ from other cognitive accomplishments such as knowledge? The sort of knowledge that has mainly interested epistemologists to this point has been knowledge of discreet propositions: what it takes to know that I have a hand, or that murder is wrong, or that 7+5=12. But understanding by its nature seems to be focused on larger structures or systems or relationships. We desire to understand how Congress works, or why the Yankees are going to be bad this year, or what makes Americans reluctant to believe in evolution.

So understanding seems to have different objects than knowledge, and it also seems to have a different psychology. When it comes to understanding, we often speak of “grasping” or “seeing” how different elements of a system are related to one another—acts of grasping or seeing that seem to be much richer than the simple acts of belief or assent we often find with cases of knowledge. But how should we unpack these metaphors of “grasping” and “seeing”? And how does something like the celebrated “Aha!” experience fit into the story?

These basic questions about the nature of understanding—how to characterize, at a general level, its distinctive psychology and objects—then break out into the sort of more specific questions mentioned a moment ago: How does scientific understanding differ from the sort of understanding we receive from philosophy, or literature? Are there different background psychologies that ground the moment of grasping in different areas, and so on?

3:AM: You’ve written about understanding as a species of knowledge – the knowledge of causes. Is this your position?

SG: Yes, of a sort. As I think about this, to know the cause in a way that yields understanding is to have a very distinctive sort of knowledge, not primarily directed at propositions. On my view understanding instead comes from grasping how the various elements of a system (or structure or network) depend upon one another. If you think of causation broadly enough, perhaps in the broad sense that Aristotle thought of it, I’m happy to say that understanding comes from a grasp of causes.

3:AM: The project raises issues about the value of understanding. Why investigate ‘understanding’ rather than ‘knowledge’?

SG: That’s a very good question. Ultimately, I don’t think this is an either/or issue. Knowledge is obviously important to us as we navigate the world—we need to know where our keys are and what time the next train arrives and who just knocked at the door, but there is something about understanding that makes it seem more desirable in itself.

We naturally want an understanding of what the world is like and how we fit into it—even if no practical payoff were to come from this understanding.

Stephen Colbert recently had a great exchange about this with one of the guests on his show.

Stephen Colbert: “What do we get from knowing about the Higgs-boson? Do I get my jet-pack now, or teleportation, or light sabers?”
Sean Carroll: “We get the happy feeling that we understand how the universe works.”
Stephen Colbert: “So…how much did this cost?”
[The Colbert Report, airdate Nov. 29, 2012]

This is funny, I take it, because we all seem to recognize a kind of intrinsic value in understanding how the universe works, light sabers and jet packs aside. Our epistemology would therefore be impoverished if we focused only on simple or commonplace epistemic goods, such as knowing that there’s a table in front of me, or that Jones owns a Ford.

3:AM: Are there really different ways of understanding things? A skeptic about this sort of pluralism might push back and say that there is just one way of understanding but some of us are just making mistakes and getting things wrong. Is this something you’ll be trying to work out or are you already pretty clear on this?

SG: I’m definitely still trying to work this out, but my own inclination is to say that there are a variety of ways to understand the world, and that there’s no single method or perspective that encompasses them all.

Perhaps I can only understand your own experiences, for example, if I have lived through something comparable. If I relied only on the detached, 3rd person sort of understanding employed by the sciences, I might well miss something important.

And perhaps there are different sorts of prerequisites for other forms of understanding: perhaps volitional or emotional prerequisites. Tolstoy for instance once claimed that “without love there is no understanding.” I’m not sure exactly what he meant by that, but perhaps it is the idea that without love, or sympathy, or something along those lines, you cannot truly understand another person. Similarly, St. Augustine was fond of saying “unless you believe you will not understand,” suggesting that there is a kind of volitional aspect to certain sorts of understanding, and perhaps especially to religious understanding.

I am also very interested by the idea that there are certain types of understanding that can only be achieved through literary devices such as metaphor and analogy—that if all of your understanding of the world were at the propositional level you would be leaving something out. That when Shakespeare has Romeo say, “My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand,” some sort of understanding is conveyed that cannot be conveyed in more direct form.

So I’d like to get as good of a sense as possible of all of the different ways in which we understand the world.

3:AM: You have thought about how knowledge and practical interests are related. Can you say something about this? And what have rising tides got to do with this issue?

SG: This has to do with the question of whether practical stakes can effect whether someone knows, or whether it can become harder to know some proposition when the stakes go up (say, when lives are at stake) than when nothing much is at issue.

I’m one of those who think this is true, that knowledge is harder to come by when the stakes go up. In fact, I do not quite understand how something other than practical considerations could determine what it takes to know. Are our “purely epistemic concerns” supposed to determine this? Since I don’t even know what our purely epistemic concerns are, I’m not sure how this could do the trick.

That said, it is not easy to determine exactly whose practical stakes matter. If I’m wondering whether your belief on a topic amounts to knowledge, is it your stakes that determine what it takes to know, or my own as an evaluator? Different people in the literature have defended different views. My own view is that elevated stakes for any of the parties at issue could raise the stakes for all, in virtue of how we depend on one another as information-sharing beings. This is where the “rising tides” idea comes in: rising costs for any person in the relevant information context makes it harder for anyone in that context to know.

There are of course things to be worried about with this view—such as why it doesn’t have sceptical consequences—but I currently like it a lot better than the alternatives.

3:AM: Do you see understanding as closely aligned with wisdom? And are these both connected to reflection – and is this something that makes them distinct from knowledge?

SG: In ancient and medieval philosophy there was a close relationship between understanding and wisdom. Understanding was taken to be a grasp of causes or dependencies, and wisdom was taken to be a grasp of the most basic causes, especially those pointing to God.

One thing I’m very much interested in is why the concept of wisdom dropped out of the picture in contemporary philosophy. We usually tell our students on day 1 that “philosophy” means “the love of wisdom” but then wisdom is typically never mentioned again, and it is unclear how the philosophy we practice in the classroom or in the study is supposed to lead to wisdom.

Your mention of reflection is also very interesting to me, because I don’t fully understand why philosophical reflection was supposed to have such a special relation to wisdom or happiness. Suppose Socrates is right that the unreflective (unexamined) life is not fully happy. Why can’t we satisfy this need for reflection through non-philosophical means—through therapy, or Buddhist mindfulness, or the sort of spiritual exercises that Igantius of Loyola (the founder of the Jesuits) developed?

3:AM: How much of your philosophical thinking is rooted in philosophy of religion – and is this philosophy possible without belief? And would different beliefs make a difference?

SG: As a sub-discipline of philosophy, “philosophy of religion” can definitely be practiced (taught, written about) by philosophers of all stripes. In my own home department at Fordham, one of my colleagues is no believer but has recently written a great book about the problem of evil.

Of course, if you think talk about God is just pure foolishness or nonsense you will not find the philosophy of religion interesting or important. But I’m not sure how many philosophers fall into that group, or who would simply deny the significance of arguments for or against God’s existence, or about the relationship between science and religion.

Although I’m interested in many topics in the philosophy of religion, since most of my reading and writing is in other areas (epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics), I’m afraid I just don’t have time to keep up with the literature there as well as I would like.

My guess though is that you’re asking more broadly about the relationship between my philosophical and religious commitments, and taken in this way there is certainly a deep connection. It is hard for me to see how there could not be. The raw materials of thinking aren’t the conclusions of arguments but rather things that are true to our own experience of the world. That God exists is very true to my own experience of the world, so I would be a dishonest thinker if I tried to deny this or if it didn’t bear on my conclusions.

That said, along with many other philosophers, I take it that the goal of philosophical discourse is (as Charles Taylor once put it) to try to engage honest thinkers of any and all metaphysical or theological commitments. So the most productive philosophy starts with premises that are true to the experience of as many people as possible. In my own work I therefore try to begin from places that most people will find compelling.

3:AM: Your work is largely epistemological. But many things people claim to understand seem to commit them to ontological commitments that are false. How do you approach this issue?

SG: I think you can certainly understand claims and views that are false—the views of a conspiracy theorist, for example. What you’re doing in that case, roughly, is supposing for the sake of argument that a certainty dependency or relation obtains that (by your own lights) really does not. Or you’re accepting certain premises for the sake of argument that you take to be false.

One interesting question is what we should say of people who are fully immersed in a false understanding of the world—who would take these dependencies to really exist, and so on. What I want to say is that they have a kind of understanding of the world, because they have done the special cognitive work of “grasping” how different elements are related, but this is only a subjective kind of understanding, or a subjective kind of grasping. It is grasping that fails to latch onto anything in the world.

3:AM: I guess this is linked to the last question: some understanding seems to be self generating rather than based on evidence. This is the sort of approach naturalists and scientists have taken against superstitions in the past. Are they mistaken? Surely understandings untethered by evidence are too precarious to defend?

SG: There are definitely dangers to some of the views about understanding I identified above. Augustine’s claim that “unless you believe you will not understand” could lead one into a cult, with its own peculiar explanations and ways of life, perhaps as easily as it could lead one into a realm of genuine understanding. And similarly Tolstoy’s claim about the relationship between love and understanding might concern some, if one worries that love might distort the truth rather than reveal it.

Ultimately, though, I do think there is something right about the claim that some kinds of understanding are only revealed to those who take risks of a certain kind: perhaps risks involving trust, or friendship, or love, or faith. Perhaps one needs to take these risks even to acquire the sort of evidence you mention.

3:AM: What do you think you’ll have found out by the end of your research project into understanding? And why will it be important?

SG: My hope is that we’ll have more clarity about the various ways in which human beings understand the world, how these types of understanding might be improved, and how they might be combined to form an integrated understanding of the world.

I’m particularly interested in this last point in the context of universities. Presumably the goal of universities is not just to pass along isolated bits of knowledge, but to reveal the connections or relationships among these bits of knowledge. Since I think it is in the appreciation of those connections and relationships that understanding is to be found, it seems best to say that the goal of university education is not knowledge but understanding.

But if that is right, then I think as residents of the university we need more self-conscious reflection on what understanding is, and the various forms it might take—on what enhances understanding and what diminishes it. As Aristotle says, the more we know about a goal, the greater our chances of realizing it.

3:AM: And finally, for the epistemically precocious here at 3ammagazine, can you give us five books that we should be reading to help us with this fascinating stuff?

SG: When it comes to epistemology proper the two people whose views have been most influential on my thinking are Ernest Sosa and John Greco, and I can particularly recommend their books Knowing Full Well (Sosa) and Achieving Knowledge: A Virtue-Theoretic Account of Epistemic Normativity (Greco). Sosa and Greco’s views are closer to the truth than anyone’s in epistemology, I think, and they both explicitly try to make room for understanding within their general epistemology.

In terms of specific work on understanding and explanation, I particularly like Peter Lipton’s Inference to the Best Explanation, and several of the essays in Jaegwon Kim’s Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind. Peter Lipton was my first teacher of epistemology when I was an undergraduate at Williams, before Lipton left Williams for Cambridge, and he was just an extraordinary person who died too young at the age of 53 in 2007. In many ways I’d like to dedicate this project to him; there are not many people who manage to combine Lipton’s exceptional intelligence, good humor, and personal warmth.

The last book I can enthusiastically recommend that touches on knowledge, understanding, wisdom, and much else is Linda Zagzebski’s Virtues of the Mind. I taught it again recently at Fordham for a graduate class and it struck me forcefully as a masterwork that is standing the test of time. The way Zagzebski weaves history, philosophy, and literature together into a fascinating, original view is extremely impressive. It’s really a tour de force book.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

[photo: Kit Schluter by Nik Jaeger]

Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) is one of the great secret influences on 20^th century literature. He was admired by contemporaries and a handful of prominent literary descendants, including Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolaño. To those who know of him, Schwob has come to represent a symbol of the vagaries of literary fortune: touted during his lifetime, his star has diminished in the century following his premature death, though here and there his influence can be felt. With Wakefield Press’s publication of his haunting Book of Monelle, translated by poet Kit Schluter, perhaps we are witnessing the beginning of a long-overdue revival.

3:AM: A question any reader of Marcel Schwob asks another is “How did you discover him?” It seems best to start there.

KS: It’s funny you say that, because it’s absolutely true—that really is the big question with Schwob. It seems to be the question that binds any community around a figure or work with cult-status: the obscurantist’s ice-breaker, the love of hearing how and why someone else has also made the choice to devote some part of him or herself, large or small, to something overlooked, under-appreciated.

I discovered Schwob a couple years ago, thanks to a friend of mine, Sylvain Burgaud. We were working together outside Tours, the city in France, and after work every day we would head over to this bar called Le Serpent Volant to translate each other’s poems into each other’s language—his into English, mine into French. One night—this was out in a little town called La Roche Bernard, where Sylvain was living at the time—we came to a passage in a little poem of mine that reminded him of a passage in “The Words of Monelle.” (In English, this passage goes “Be sincere with the moment. All sincerity that lasts is hatred.”) After he showed me the book, which struck me right away, it didn’t take long to figure out that it was no longer available in English, and probably hadn’t been since around the time of its first and only English translation in 1929, the one by William Maloney. So something of a promise or dare to translate the book took place, and the idea just stuck.

What was so funny about it was that he couldn’t bring himself to lend it to me. No bad blood, of course—he’s really such a generous person, one of the most generous I know. It was just that he had already lost too many copies of Monelle by lending them out to friends before. No one ever returned them to him, he said, because it seemed that by the time he would ask for them back they had already lent them out to some other friend—and so the lent copies were always getting lost in that sort of constant exchange, that kind of sharing. The French might jokingly call that exchange of Monelle an “échange sous le manteau,” “under the coat,” a sort of secret exchange, the passing on of something illicit or, in this case, just something really special.

It has seemed to me from that time on that Schwob’s books invites that sort of exchange: the initial excitement of the first reading leads to lending, and lending leads to further lending, and further lending leads to the book getting lost—though the eventual loss is accompanied by the satisfaction of knowing you’ve passed on something unknown and beautiful and, in doing so, kept its torch alive.

3:AM: There have been several (or maybe only a few) attempts to account for Schwob’s virtual obsolescence. Some argue that Schwob died too young and left incomplete too many projects, or that his interests were too esoteric, that he was too closely aligned—or not aligned enough—with the Symbolist movement. Do you have a theory of your own, or feel that one previously put forth sufficiently explains the vagaries of literary renown?

KS: I have never quite been able to put my finger on a definite reason for Schwob’s obscurity. All I can say for sure, however, is that literary renown is very fickle—something very fortunate for minor literature, which always has the potential of taking off.

I have always seen Schwob’s work as an interesting, though overlooked, forebear of the Modernist and Postmodernist practice of citation and repurposing, which Schwob used as primary means of composition. In fact, Schwob’s claim, reported by his biographer Pierre Champion, “I never composed a single one of my books,” could be viewed as a prescient credo of appropriative strains of Modern and Postmodern literature exemplified by, say—to take it to an extreme—Kenneth Goldsmith, even if the results are profoundly different. And Champion’s analysis, seems to confirm this: “Marcel Schwob did not believe in the gift of imagination, and to say it plainly, in originality. He knew that all had been said and forgotten. His art was crafted with the gift of choice and amalgamation. He discovered the origin of all his books. He was not unaware that his were works made out of the debris of many others.” This description brings to mind a whole spectrum of work, from Borges’ fictions, which are kindred with Schwob’s work, Pound’s Cantos, collage works by Ernst, whose Saison de bonté actually uses a passage from Schwob’s L’Anarchie as an epigraph, and of course, Duchamp’s readymades.

In any event, however, it was exactly this quality of his works—the one that embodies practices most interesting to us today—that polarized his own contemporaries. It was hard for this public to understand that Schwob’s creative act depended on appropriation and recyclage of his erudite research. On the one hand, certain authors praised this process. Take Léon Daudet, for example:

History, linguistics, poetry, prose, astrology, chemistry, criticism, English, German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew – Schwob animates, sets in motion, orders, reconstitutes, associates all these branches of knowledge in his immense and precise imagination. He evokes adventuring sea-captains with the exactitude of Quicherat and the verve of Cervantes. He describes the customs and manners of prostitutes and pimps in the city rookeries as eloquently as he does those of sixteenth-century scholars or Spanish conquistadores. With all that goes a perfect taste; never a false move, never is anything over-stressed. His whole attitude is summed up in pity, pity which he applies without distinction to criminals and saints, to traitors and heroes.¹

On the other, it had its detractors, such as Paul Léautaud:

My opinion, as of a long time ago, on Schwob’s literature. At its core, at its very core, I have no interest. It is fabrication,  marquetry, and I can tell how and with what it is made. Vast readings in every genre—phrases and ideas jotted down on scrap paper—then: arrangement, combination of these phrases and ideas arranged by category, into a characterless ensemble. There is a marvelous art, an inimitable dexterity,  a great delicacy in the art of choosing, a considerable knowledge, but, at its core, it all stinks of old books. It’s rigged as much as possible…²

What I find so interesting about these remarks is the fact that they are discussing the very same aspect of Schwob’s work with perspectives that couldn’t be further polarized. Anyhow, Schwob really is one of the first literary exemplars of this practice of collage, and it may be time to give his work a closer look, to undo the reputation laid upon it by his contemporaries.

As you mentioned, Schwob’s relationship with the Symbolists was complex. To name a few instances, Apollinaire wrote a eulogy on the occasion of Schwob’s death, Alfred Jarry dedicated his seminal Ubu Roi to the author, as Paul Valéry did with his first book, Introduction to the Method of Da Vinci, and Oscar Wilde with his story, “The Sphynx”. Each of the stories of Schwob’s second book, The King in the Golden Mask, is dedicated to a contemporary author with whom Schwob was friends: Anatole France, Edmond de Goncourt, Octave Mirbeau—the list goes on and on. These are authors who have been treated more kindly by literary history. Unlike these figures, Schwob died in 1905, before World War I and the formal explosion of Modernism in literature, the effect of which on traditional poetic and narrative structures of course can’t be stressed enough: for the first time, the literary forms were being radically altered, the material of language was being played with by those writers whose work we continue to inherit as the foundations of experimental poetry. Schwob, who died before the war, never had to come to terms with such a clear symbol of the decline of that “Old Order” to which his imagination was devoted and by whose terms he lived. So, it could be argued that his work does not feature certain elements of Modernism, especially those more experimental, which have helped keep the work of his contemporaries vital to our contemporary moment, the narrative of the literatures we have inherited and inhabit. But really, this is just a conjecture, and a dangerous and reductive one, especially concerning the work of those now united under the title of the “Symbolists,” so please do take it with a grain of salt.

But, what’s certain is that, as you mentioned, his tastes were very esoteric—even for his own times, even among the Symbolists. In his work, Schwob created diverse worlds whose truths were culled from Middle-Eastern and Eastern folklore, the fairy tales of the Grimms and Perrault, classical histories and occult texts, studies of Europe’s lost languages, primary-source accounts of medieval thugs and their slang, the picaresque, the unabashedly fantastical. To access his work—to really get into it, I mean—you have to be willing to go to a mental space that is quite unique to his imagination, which was totally saturated with this vast reading. So far as I can tell, that world I’m talking about, which is built around myth and folklore and ancient and medieval history has fallen out of favor in our literature to make way for structures more grounded in our moment and its rapidly changing capitalized and globalized infrastructures, its trends. Though, I should say, I think there are still plenty of people who are willing to meet Schwob’s imagination halfway, and these are the people who won’t let his memory be forgotten. As these structures that fundamentally influenced Schwob become more and more obscure, I think his status as a person of truly singular creativity could become increasingly clear to us, if by dint of its contrast to much of what is being written today.

Lastly, Schwob died relatively young and, on top of that, was one of those unfortunate Proust-types who, after his mid-twenties, spent the majority of his time in a sickbed. Although his Complete Works is well over 1,000 pages, we have to remember that he died at the age of 38, and spent the last decade of his life tending to, in the words of Robert Ziegler, “the mysterious and variously diagnosed ailment” that would eventually cut his life short. The wonderful Italian novelist Fleur Jaeggy, in her great essay, “Marcel Schwob: The Passive Adventurer” (translated here by Herbert Pfostl for the blog of his wonderful press, Blind Pony Books), describes this final decade of Schwob’s life as a series of “moments of magnificent solitude. When the friends have left, he bolts the doors and windows, no sound gets through. They are the everlasting hours, eternity piled in layers in his room.” This sickness, which led to a series of stomach surgeries, as well as his later dependence on morphine, struck him just after the publication of The Book of Monelle, when he was only twenty-seven. Although he surely still wrote during this last decade of his life, we can imagine that he wasn’t able to devote quite as much of his energy to his work. As a result, Schwob is one of those unfortunate cases where we are left wondering: had he been healthy, had he lived longer, where would he have been able to take us? Would his legacy be more coherent or, maybe more importantly for literary histories, more assimilable?

In the end, with literature it’s “here today, gone tomorrow,” but it’s always possible to come back again. Time and time again we see it’s never too late for that.

3:AM: Schwob’s anonymity is particularly baffling given his profound, if secret, influence. In fact, when he is spoken of at all, it’s almost always regarding this influence, rather than on the basis of his artistic merits. Perhaps this is because the list of those indebted to him includes overshadowing figures like Paul Valery, Jorge Luis Borges, and Roberto Bolaño (who urged would-be writers of short stories to “above all, read Schwob”). Can you speak about Schwob’s influence?

KS: Understanding Schwob’s influence is a very important part of understanding his person. It allows us to know who has been reading him, whose work was influenced by him, what imaginations he made spark. Though, like every aspect of Schwob’s person, it is very difficult to pin down.

My understanding of his influence is that it is vast, though inconsistent. For instance, there is the letter of Rilke that mentions his having read and loved The Children’s Crusade, his amazement that he had never heard of Schwob before reading this work. There is Borges’ Universal History of Iniquity, which borrowed the structure and philosophy of Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, though there was no published material proof of this influence until later in Borges’ career, when he wrote an introduction for the Spanish translation of Schwob’s work, and even later when he included Schwob’s book in his “personal library” catalogue. (Borges did, however, translate “ Burke and Hare” from this collection of Schwob.) There is the Pablo Neruda’s translation of Schwob’s story, “The Death of Odjigh,” which resembles the structure of his own later book “La Espada Encendida,” though he credits instead a Chilean author’s book of oral myth as the source. There is André Breton’s claim that Schwob’s “Words of Monelle” was one of the earliest instances of the surrealist principle of “l’anarchisme noir,” black anarchy, which can also be found in other more recognized works, such as Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat,” Baudelaire’s prose poems, or Lautréamont’s “Songs of Maldoror”. There is the fact that Schwob and André Gide’s relationship was broken by the fact that the latter’s book, The Fruits of the Earth—such a good book, by the way—so closely resembles The Book of Monelle, all the way down to a whole number of almost exact sentences, though Gide never gave Schwob any credit. There is Michel Leiris’ statement late in his career that The Book of Monelle was a book that was very important to him as a young writer developing a voice and philosophical approach in literature. There is Bolaño’s claim, which you mentioned, that a young writer studying the art of the short story should “above all, read Schwob.” And then there’s Fleur Jaeggy, who translated Schwob’s Imaginary Lives into Italian. Again, the list goes on.

As you can see, his work has influenced some great minds. These points of influence, however, don’t cohere into a clear narrative. Instead of forming a linear structure—being passed from individual to individual or school to school—the structure of Schwob’s influence seems defined by a constellation of isolated flashes, and that’s what makes it so interesting, yet difficult to grasp.

3:AM: And, since you are a poet, I’d like to know if Schwob has influenced your writing as well.

KS: I think, more than anything else, Schwob’s work has influenced my own writing by getting me to read a lot I otherwise may have neglected. Without translating Schwob and being led on so many wild goose chases for the sources of his references, I may never have read De Quincey, Stevenson, the Arabian Nights, Charles Perrault and French folktales, certain Biblical books or plays by Shakespeare, studies of François Villon and the slang of his coquillards, his fellow thieves. Again, the list goes on and on. These books were just for The Book of Monelle.

For the past several years, no matter how many wonderful Jean Day poetry collections my friends lend me (thank you, Andy), or how many unpublished works by brilliant contemporary poets I have had the privilege of reading while editing CLOCK magazine, there’s always Schwob urging me to keep looking backward in time as well, and that’s been very important to me.

3:AM: The Book of Monelle is a strange creation, being something of an exorcism and elegy disguised as a collection of fairy tales. It is also oddly confessional, even with the distance Schwob places between himself and the text. What were the circumstances leading to the book’s creation?

KS: In 1892 or 1891, while spending a night in the slums of Paris—which were his preferred neighborhoods—the twenty-five year old Schwob met a young girl named Louise, who suffered from tuberculosis. Scholarship has found it extremely important to emphasize her way of making money, which was likely sex-work, because of the theme’s central role in Monelle. The two came to be inseparable, and she lived in such a way that made the otherwise anxious young Schwob feel free and alive.

Over the course of the next year or so, Schwob wrote Louise a series of short stories, the protagonists of which were young girls. In the beginning, they were discrete lighthearted tales, but as Louise fell deeper into the tuberculosis, the plotlines and characters darkened and wove tightly together. By the time Louise was lying on her dying bed, Schwob had transformed her into the character of Monelle, who seems something of a cross between Thomas De Quincey’s Ann, Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.

When Louise passed away, he spent the next several months in an incurable state mourning of mourning, and after burning his entire correspondence with Louise—this is particularly striking because Schwob was known for the meticulous preservation of his correspondence—Schwob completed his stories to Louise by writing a few more shorts centered on the character of Monelle, and rearranged the series into a coherent three-part collection structured around this character, giving it the title Le Livre de Monelle. And that’s what we’re left with: this secret tribute to Louise, something like a journal that Schwob kept as he gathered the fruits of the Earth and watched them slowly rot.

The afterword I wrote for the Wakefield publication tells this story in detail, for anyone who might be curious to know more.

3:AM: Schwob was a great imitator: his variations on Herodas’ Mimes—discovered and published near the end of the 19^th century—were, for some, a little too convincing. His collection of Imaginary Lives draws heavily on classical sources and demonstrates Schwob’s ability to re-purpose (as we would characterize it today) material. On its surface, Monelle seems a more personal book, but Schwob’s writing is inextricable from his scholarship. What, if any, were Schwob’s references for Monelle?

KS: The Book of Monelle is unique among Schwob’s works, as it required him to put aside his dependence on recycling in order to conduct a sincere investigation of his personal experience. To be sure, while Schwob was composing those stories for Louise (now gathered under the section title, “The Sisters of Monelle”), he composed through recycling symbols and characters from folklore. It was with this material that he created Cice, who believed she was Cinderella; the little boy and girl who believed they were Bluebeard and his wife; Marjolaine, who believes that characters from the Arabian Nights are living in the seven jugs on her mantelpiece; the wandering poet who comes to the farmhouse and declaims folktales from Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. And it should be said, too, that it even allowed him to conceive of Monelle, for as hinted to above, without Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, the Biblical Gospels, Andersen’s little match girl, and the speeches of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, her character could not have existed.

What is important to see, though, is that as Louise slowly passed away, Schwob began to explored and develop a personal mythology of this time they had spent growing up together, which provided The Book of Monelle a constellation of symbols and imagery that refer to his life, and not his library. All that said, I have to admit that I still lose sleep some nights, thinking of the references I may have missed.

3:AM: How would you convince someone unfamiliar with him to read Schwob?

KS: I would send them to Herbert Pfostl’s translation of Fleur Jaeggy’s essay “The Passive Adventurer.” It is the most concise and intriguing introduction to Schwob’s work that I know in English.

3:AM: Can we hope for more translations of his work?

KS: Absolutely. I’m excited to say that Wakefield Press and I are continuing our work on Schwob, and you can expect the first ever complete translation of Schwob’s 1892 short-story collection The King in the Golden Mask later on next year. Of the collection’s twenty-three stories, I believe only ten have been translated into English. The book’s just about as different in tone from Monelle as you could imagine, but I have to say, it’s just as much of a treat. As a teaser, I’ll leave you with this quote of Paul Léautaud, which perfectly reflects its spirit:

Schwob had a love of the strange, the satanic, the ambiguous, the unhealthy and the supernatural, and this love can be found on every page of his work, in his choice of characters, in the figures he has created. No spiritual company was more pleasing to him than that of the writers and ‘low people’ of the fifteen century, emaciated poets, sewage workers in the ditches, wandering clerics and beggars, extortionists and thugs, madams and window-washers, this whole world of dives, of crime and vagabondage, colorful to the extreme, of which he knew every names, every vocabulary, and every attitude. But this love, this preference was, for him, not merely an entertainment, an artiste‘s educative inclination. It was, for him, something greater—more troubling, as well—: the effect of a strangely complicated and clairvoyant consciousness that sought out and confronted itself without end, that examined every possibility it could possibly take on, in the past as in the present, in order to elevate itself or degrade itself just as much.³

NOTES
1 Daudet in Schwob, Marcel. The King in the Golden Mask and Other Writings. Trans. Iain White. Manchester: Carcanet New, 1982. xi.Print.
2 Trembley, George. Marcel Schwob, Faussaire De La Nature. Geneva: Droz, 1969. 18. Print. Translation by KS.
3 Léautaud, Paul. “Marcel Schwob par Paul Léautaud”. Marcel Schwob, D’hier Et D’aujourd’hui. Ed. Christian Berg and Yves Vadé. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2002. 29-33. Print. Translation by KS.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
Kit Schluter is a poet and translator currently occupying the space under a table in Queens, New York. Mark your calendars for his translations of Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz’ 1967 long poem, “The Cold” (Circumference, summer 2013), and Marcel Schwob’s 1892 short-story collection, The King in the Golden Mask (Wakefield Press, 2014). Help yourself to free .pdfs of CLOCK magazine, which he edits with Philadelphia poet Andrew Dieck.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Stephen Sparks (@rs_sparks) lives in San Francisco. He blogs at Invisible Stories and contributes to Tin House and Writers No One Reads.

[Photo: Steve Pike]

Robert Stalnaker is the grandmaster flash of contemporary metaphysicals. He thinks that a language-first approach to philosophy is ludicrous, Paul Grice an inspiration and Saul Kripke very important to his early thinking. He broods on issues about internalist and externalist doctrines and approaches, on our knowledge of the external world, about the nature of phenomenal knowedge, about the view from nowhere, the opacity of transparency, contextualism, relativism, possible worlds, the entanglement of semantics with metaphysics, haecceitism and the beauty of metaphysical theories, amongst other things. He is currently on a phased retirement at MIT and becoming a Visiting Professor at Columbia. He is simply a modern daddy of the mac!Chillin’!

3:AM: What made you become a philosopher? You’ve been a big player in many fields of the philosophical landscape which could mean that, like a fox, you have many independent questions – or it could mean that in order to get an answer to one big question you need to approach it from different angles, like a hedgehog. So are you a foxy or hedgehoggy philosopher?

Robert Stalnaker: That’s an interesting question. I certainly started off in a foxy way, reacting to things I read about different issues. First (in high school) I got interested in questions about the nature of mathematics from readings I happened upon and grasped only dimly. Mathematical Platonism seemed to me a crazy view, but a couple of papers by Ernest Nagel and Carl Hempel (who was later my graduate school teacher) struck me at the time as the unalloyed truth. When I got to college and took a yearlong history of philosophy class in my freshman year, a new intellectual world opened up, and my enthusiasm for the logical positivist picture dimmed. My teacher was an advocate for each philosopher we read, and I enjoyed getting into the different ways of thinking. St. Augustine was my favorite, even though I had and have no inclination to take religion seriously. Spinoza was another favorite. I decided that the positivist stuff that had impressed me in high school was narrow-minded and superficial. As I read more philosophy later in college, I went back and forth in my thinking about more expansive and more restrictive approaches – an ambivalence that I still have.

I got interested in the philosophy of history in college, under the influence of a wonderful teacher, Louis Mink, and that later became the area of my dissertation. But in the end I turned to more general issues in the philosophy of language and mind. Saul Kripke, who visited Princeton and taught a seminar in my last year of graduate school, was a big influence. The seminar was officially about Wittgenstein on rule following, but this was mixed with the presentation of ideas that later became Naming and Necessity, and I was convinced, both by many of the substantive points, and by the power of Kripke’s way of thinking. I had some thoughts about counterfactual conditionals as I was finishing my dissertation and the ideas about possible worlds that Kripke was presenting helped me to see how to make them more precise. My first job after graduate school was at Yale, where the faculty of a large and dysfunctional department consisted mostly of an assortment of phenomenologists, Whiteheadean metaphysicians, eccentrics of other persuasions, and logicians. I gravitated to the logicians, and collaborated with Rich Thomason in developing a semantics for conditionals.

So my way into philosophy was foxy, but a general picture inevitably emerges when one thinks about a lot of philosophical problem. One finds oneself reflecting on how it all hangs together, noticing recurrent themes and ways that one’s views reinforce each other. I like, and have quoted, a remark that David Lewis made in the introduction to his first collection of papers: “I should have liked to be a piecemeal, unsystematic philosopher, offering independent proposals on a variety of topics. It was not to be.” He tried to be a fox, but couldn’t help turning into a hedgehog. I suspect that the best hedgehogs – those that are not blinded by their big idea – come to their systematic theory in something like this way, and that the best foxes see the interconnections between their different projects, and the general ideas that motivate them, even if they resist building them into one grand system.

3:AM: By not assuming the priority of linguistic over mental matters, where a philosophy of thought is best approached through philosophy of language, you were taken to be a heretic of analytic philosophy by Michael Dummett. (There were quite a few of you!) Dummett didn’t think it actually made all that much difference in the end to what you did, but you disagreed with his evaluation of the situation. So why was Dummett wrong?

RS: When I first read Dummett’s remark (that philosophers who reject the priority of language over thought are “overturning the fundamental axiom of all analytic philosophy and hence have ceased to be analytic philosophers”), I thought it must be at least half a joke, since the idea that a philosophical tradition as diverse as the one labeled “analytic philosophy” should have a defining dogma – a litmus test for membership – is ludicrous on its face. But it is true that the “language-first” approach to the explanation of speech and thought has been a recurrent theme in analytic philosophy, and it is a good question whether and why it matters. I think the linguistic picture has distorted the discussion in many different ways. Let me mention just three:

First, the most central problem about speech and thought is the problem of intentionality – the problem of explaining how our words and thoughts, and more generally our representational states can be about the world. It is not just human beings who represent the world – who take in information and use it to guide their behavior. Perception and memory are capacities of primitive animals as well as humans, and I think the best way to understand the sophisticated kind of representation that is manifested in human inquiry, deliberation and communication is to see it as a special case of a more general phenomenon, and continuous with it. The “language-first” approach takes rational, articulate, sophisticated adult human beings as the paradigm representors, with the representational capacities of the rest understood by analogy with them. I think it is more fruitful to start with the simplest cases, and understand human cognitive capacities as more complex systems of essentially the same kind. By starting with language, we over-intellectualize perception and cognition, which I think results in a distorted picture, not only of the cognitive capacities of nonhuman animals, but also of human knowledge and communication.

Second, even if our main concern is to understand human speech, and the more theoretical aspects of thought that essentially involve language, I think it is important to start with an account of representation that is independent of language. Our languages are all highly context-dependent in the sense that the content of what we say depends on the contexts in which we say it, and speech contexts are best explained in terms of the attitudes, intentions and expectations of the parties to the conversation. If this is right, then linguistic content depends on the contents of the states of mind that define the contexts in which linguistic content is expressed. The language-first approach presupposes that we have a language – perhaps a language of thought – that has an autonomous semantics – a semantics that can explain the relation between the expressions of the language and their content or meaning independently of context. I am doubtful that there could be such a language.

Third, speech comes in units – sentences – with complex compositional structure that explains how they have the content that they have. A linguistic model of thought tends to assume that a belief state is appropriately modeled by a set of sentences with this kind of structure, mental sentences or mental representations of natural language sentences that describes the way the world is according to the believer. But the idea that mental representation should take this form is a speculative hypothesis about cognitive architecture, and one that I think has little support or plausibility. It seems reasonable to think that we represent the world in a diverse mix of ways – with images and maps and procedural organization, as well as with mental structures that are sentence-like. Psychology and neuroscience will eventually tell us more about the mechanisms of mental representation, but we can and should separate questions about what it is to represent, and about how we represent the world to be from questions about the means that our brains use to do it. The linguistic picture of thought tends to blur this line.

3:AM: Paul Grice was influential in your rejection of the priority of language because he made you see that speech was action that required explanation in terms of beliefs and purposes wasn’t he? Who else was helpful to you as you set off?

RS: Right – Grice was a major early influence on my thinking about intentionality and the structure of discourse. The influence continues, as will be evident in my forthcoming book on context. It was not just his emphasis on the fact that speech is a kind of action that was distinctive to his approach – that emphasis was common to Grice and others such as J. L. Austin in the British “ordinary language” tradition. The central issue that divided Grice from Austin was the question whether communicative action essentially involved a conventional, rule-governed practice. Grice’s aim was to characterize communicative action, in general, in terms of beliefs and intentions that were independent of any conventional practice with constitutive rules. Grice’s motivation, which I share, was to provide for the conceptual separation of an account of the functions of language from the means that languages use to serve those functions. For this, one needs an account of what it is for a speaker to mean something (to perform a communicative action) that explains this notion independently of the rules a device (a language) whose function is to facilitate the performance of that kind of action. My forays into pragmatics have all been attempts to develop this kind of Gricean program.

As mentioned earlier, Kripke was very important early influence on my thinking, both about intentionality and about metaphysical issues. Another early influence was the work of Keith Donnellan. My first paper on pragmatics was in large part an attempt to provide a framework for representing his distinction between referential and attributive definite descriptions.

3:AM: You’ve been a big player in philosophy of mind and have made significant arguments against the internalist view. Can you set out what you think the debate between internalists and externalists is about, why its important and why non-philosophers ought to be interested in getting the answer right (if you do)?

RS: There are different internalist and externalist doctrines and approaches that play a role in ethics and epistemology as well as the philosophy of mind, but there is a common theme that I think is important, and that I tried to articulate in the first chapter of my book, Our knowledge of the Internal World. The externalist approach is to try to understand ourselves as thinkers, experiencers and agents from the outside, as things in the world that we find ourselves in. Even if our main concern is with questions that arise from the first-person perspective (what shall I believe? what do I know? how should I act? what must I do?), it is fruitful to ask, from a third-person perspective, what it is to be a creature with a first-person perspective, to be someone who has the capacity for thought, experience, knowledge and rational action. Externalism in this broad sense is a strategy for formulating philosophical questions, and not a philosophical thesis, but it is a strategy that helps to motivate specific theses in epistemology, ethics and the philosophy of mind to which the label “externalism” has been applied. For example if you start by asking from an external standpoint what it is for a thing in the world to be a knower, it is natural to answer that it is (at least) to be a creature that has the capacity to take in information about the world – to be in states that tend to be sensitive in specific ways to the state of its environment. The picture suggests an explanation of the content of thought (or more generally of the representational states that are, when things go right, states of knowledge) in terms of the features of the environment that those states tend to be sensitive to. This conception of content is one that conforms to the more specific externalist thesis that was summed up in Hilary Putnam’s notorious slogan, “meanings just ain’t in the head.” More soberly, the thesis is that the content of thought is determined, not just by the intrinsic states of the subject, but also in part by the features of the subject’s environment. And this general picture of knowledge and content suggests that there is no way to factor propositional content (the subject’s conception of the world) into a purely internal component (the narrow content of the thought) and an environmental component.

Why does this kind of externalism about intentional content matter? Because it is incompatible with a seductive foundationalist picture according to which we can form, a priori and independently of any presuppositions about contingent fact, a conception of the space of possibilities in which we locate our world. It would be nice if we could separate the question, what are the alternative possibilities, from the question, which of them is actual, but I think it is a utopian fantasy to think that we can do so. The externalist picture suggests that we can articulate and understand the possibilities that we distinguish between in thought only with the materials – the things, events, properties and relations – that we find in the actual world, and we can’t know what those materials are without doing empirical inquiry. If this is right, then even the most basic inquiry will have factual presuppositions. We have to muddle through, bootstrapping our way to a conception of what the world is like.

3:AM: You draw an analogy between knowledge of phenomenal experiences (eg seeing red) and self locating knowledge to develop your version of externalism don’t you? Could you sketch out the basic contours of your theory?

RS: A number of philosophers have been struck by an analogy between Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument against materialism and John Perry’s argument that indexical or self-locating knowledge is irreducible to knowledge of impersonal fact about what the world is like in itself. In both cases, it was argued that one could know all the facts of a certain kind (physical facts in the case of the knowledge argument, impersonal facts in the case of the argument for the essential indexical.) while not knowing facts of a different kind. But there was also a striking disanalogy between the two arguments: Jackson’s argument draws a metaphysical conclusion (that a materialist metaphysics leaves out certain facts about the objective world), while Perry’s argument concluded that a certain kind of knowledge didn’t concern the objective world at all, but was about the knower’s perspective on the world. The hope was that the analogy could help us to see how to reconcile materialism with the knowledge argument by seeing phenomenal knowledge – knowledge of “what it is like” – as a kind of knowledge of one’s perspective on the world, and not of what the world is like in itself. But reflecting on how to do this required, I thought, rethinking how to understand perspectival or self-locating knowledge. I see the perspectival feature of a state of belief, not as a feature built into the content of thought, but as a way of connecting the content of a thought to the thinker who is thinking it. It is a crucial feature of the representational content of thought and speech that it be public and communicable (a feature that Frege emphasized). When I tell you who I am (say by introducing myself at a party), if you understand me, then the information you acquire is the information I express. The information is self-locating for me, but not for you. The problem of self-locating communication (really, of communication generally) is the problem of calibrating the contents of the thoughts and speech acts of different subjects – of seeing how each is locating him or herself, and the other, in an objective world.

So what does all this have to do with phenomenal experience? It is not that getting clear about the relation between an objective conception of the world and a subject’s perspective on it automatically provides some solution to the puzzle that Frank Jackson posed. The starting point for the connection is just the idea that phenomenal experience is essentially perspectival. For the materialist, the state I am in when I am having a particular kind of experience – seeing red, say – is a physiological state, but knowing what it is like to see red requires a first-personal way of identifying that state, just as knowing that it is now noon requires a first-personal way of identifying a certain time.

3:AM: Are you saying that phenomenal knowledge and intentionality – all our mental goings on – don’t give us more information about the world as such, but just tell us where we are?

RS: No, though I admit that what I have just said may seem to suggest that. While the information expressed by saying “seeing red is like this” is not detachable from the context in which it is expressed or thought, it is (I want to say) a piece of information about what the world is like, which means that we understand the content of the thought by the way it distinguishes between alternative possibilities. The analogy with simple self-locating thoughts is intended to make it less mysterious how a thought can be both “information about the world as such” and also essentially about where we are in the world. When Dorothy says “We’re not in Kansas anymore”, she is contrasting two objective possibilities, and ruling one of them out. What is ruled out is a possibility in which a particular person who was in Kansas, and is now having certain particular experiences in still in Kansas. The thought is self-locating because the person who is still in Kansas in the possible situation being ruled out is the same as the one who is thinking the thought.

3:AM: Is phenomenal knowledge just a species of self-locating knowledge, or is knowledge that is self locating the essence of intentionality?

RS: I want to agree that phenomenal knowledge is a species of self-locating knowledge in the sense that phenomenal knowledge is essentially first-personal – it is knowledge of what it is like for me to have a certain kind of experience. But I am also saying that in calling knowledge self-locating, or first personal, I am not talking about the content of the knowledge, but describing a distinctive way in which a knower is related to the content of what she knows. I also want to say that we can’t make sense of any kind of knowledge without locating the knower both in the actual world, and in the worlds that are compatible with the way the world is taken to be. This is because all knowledge is about the knower’s relation to other things in his or her world. In that sense, I can agree that self-locating is part of the essence of intentionality.

3:AM: Is your externalist argument intended to defend it against charges from the internalist view that to be an externalist about intentions is to set up an objectivist stance, a view from nowhere?

RS: “The view from nowhere” is Tom Nagel’s phrase, but the idea is an old one that has taken many forms: There is the God’s eye view, which sees the world from outside of space and time. There is the omniscient narrator who tells a story from no particular perspective. There is something real that these metaphors are trying to get at, but they do it by mixing two incompatible ideas: first, there is the idea that we can make sense of a conception of the way the world is or might be in itself, independently of anyone representing the world as being that way; second, there is the idea that every conception of the way the world is needs a conceiver – someone who is both the one doing the representing, and also a part of what is being represented. One combines the two ideas by imagining an observer who part of the story, but who also stands outside of it, seeing the world it describes from a perspectiveless perspective. We can agree that all stories that are told (both fiction and nonfiction) are told by someone who tells the story from some point of view, but the teller of the tale need not him or herself be a character in the story, or a person in the world being described. Even when one is trying to tell the truth about the actual world – the world that one inhabits – the content of the story one telling need not identify a perspective from which it is being told. Stories (whether fact or fiction) must have authors, and they may in addition have narrators (omniscient or otherwise, more or less intrusive), but they need not. An author who is not herself in the story may just tell us what happens in it. One might think of “the view from nowhere” just as the perspective of a teller of a tale who is not a character in the tale, or who does not identify herself, in the story, as the teller of the story. But what is misleading about the image is the idea that this absence of a perspective, as a part of the content of a representation, is a distinctive kind of perspective.

I think what you mean by my “externalist argument” is the argument that one can approach questions about the world and our place in it (including questions about our perspective on it) in this way – by asking what a world must be like in itself in order for creatures like us to exist and have the distinctive capacities for experience and thought that we have. If all that is meant by viewing the world “from nowhere” is conceiving of it in this way, then I see nothing objectionable about it. We can study perspectives as features of the world as it is in itself, but they will all be perspectives from somewhere.

3:AM: Contextualism and perspectivalism are key ideas you use to draw the important distinction between internalism and externalism in terms of how to understand transparency, which is the term of art used by philosophers to talk about the supposed direct contact with our own minds. You want to remove transparency as a true picture of intentionality don’t you?

RS: As you say, “transparency” is a term of art, but the fact that it is a technical term does not mean that it is clear what it means. You are right that I want to reject the idea of some kind of direct contact that we have with the contents of our own minds, but it would seem paradoxical to deny that our thoughts are transparent in this sense: that when we entertain a thought, or form a belief, we know what the content of that thought is. This truism needs interpretation, but we need to make room for a sense in which it is true. I agree with philosophers such as Donald Davidson and Tyler Burge that the thesis that we necessarily know what we are thinking when we think it can be clarified and reconciled with an externalist account of content, and with a rejection of intentional foundationalism. There are interesting problem cases, and the reconciliation brings out the ways in which the ascription of content is dependent on context, or so I argue.

3:AM: Contextualism is a given a big role not just in theories of phenomenal knowledge but in terms of meaning generally isn’t it? Does your view of why context matters to meaning amount to saying not just that context is useful but actually indispensible?

RS: That is exactly right. The general picture I have been sketching implies that context-dependence is not just a convenient feature of the languages we happen to speak, but is essential to both speech and thought. Knowledge is essentially contrastive; it is a capacity to distinguish the way the world is from certain alternative ways that it might have been, and we can inquire and debate about what the world is like only in a context that presupposes that the world provides us with certain resources for characterizing the possibilities we are distinguishing between. Some kinds of context dependence are more superficial. In these cases, context mediates between linguistic expressions and the propositions they are used to express, and the propositions themselves could be expressed in different contexts, using different mean. Alice says, pointing at Michael Jordan, “He is a great player”. She can say what she says with that sentence only because of certain ephemeral features of her local context, but what she said can be detached from the context and said or reported in a different way. “Alice said that Michael Jordan was a great player.” But the propositions themselves are ways of distinguishing between possibilities, and we can’t identify the possibilities without drawing on what the actual world offers us. We aim, in our conceptual and empirical inquiries, to move from the local contexts provided by our immediate environment and idiosyncratic knowledge of it to larger and more robust contexts, but we never find a platform outside of the world from which to describe it.

3:AM: Why doesn’t this threaten to be a kind of relativist stance?

RS: It does threaten to lead to a kind of relativism, or anti-realism. The picture suggests that learning about – even thinking about – the real world is hard, and more disorderly than one might hope. The challenge to reconcile realism with radical contextualism is real and important, but I think it can be met. In any case, the right response is not to opt for an indefensible picture of our conceptual and epistemic connection to the world.

There is a philosophical problem that needs to be addressed, but the threat is not just an abstract philosophical concern. The contextualist picture also points to a practical threat that is worth worrying about. The contexts in which discourse and inquiry take place can be, and are, manipulated in ways that distort the outcome. If, as I believe, we can make sense of rational discourse, deliberation and inquiry, only in a given context which involves substantive presuppositions, we face a daunting challenge when the contexts we find ourselves in are skewed – when the basic presuppositions that define the context are false. When disagreements are deep, or when one judges that our whole way of looking at things is radically mistaken, we need to find our way into a new context, and there may be no neutral way to do so. But we have rich and diverse resources for talking and thinking about the world and for deciding what we must do, and even if there is no absolutely neutral set of rules governing rational activity, and no safe platform where we are guaranteed to find common ground on which to settle our disagreements and find the truth, with good will we can usually find a way to get to a place where we can understand each other, and engage in what we can agree is rational debate.

The more philosophical challenge, for a realist, is to explain the resources we use to do this, and to justify the claim the methods we use are ways of discovering objective truths.

3:AM: Is it in relation to context that possible world theory becomes important here? Why are possible worlds required and are these possible worlds to be understood in terms of the philosophy of language, or metaphysics? I guess this asks whether the possible worlds theory here is about a metaphysical theory distinguishing possibilities or a semantic theory about how we represent those possibilities. Can we disentangle metaphysics from semantics?

RS: Yes, I do think that possible world theory is a helpful tool for characterizing context, and for answering the challenge to realism. I talked a lot earlier about the relation between a perspective on the world and a conception of the world as it is in itself, arguing for a way of understanding propositional content in terms of alternative ways that a world might be in itself. Our contexts are defined by our common perspective on the world – by our shared presuppositions – but I want to represent the content of our presuppositions by sets of possible worlds – ways a world might be in itself. Even our most local contexts – alternative states of our immediate environment, and of ourselves – are ways of distinguishing objective possibilities. We use ourselves and our local environment to identify and to fix reference to the relevant objective possibilities that we are distinguishing between. The point of all this fuss about perspectives and worlds as they are in themselves is motivated by the concern to clarify and defend the claim that the contextualist picture I sketch is compatible with realism. But the defense will work only if we have a conception of a possible world as something that is independent of the mental activity and linguistic practices that we use the possible worlds theory to help explain.

So does possible worlds theory belong to semantics or metaphysics? If the question is about what kind of thing possible worlds are, then we should locate the theory on the metaphysical side. Possible worlds, or possible states of the world, are properties that a total universe might have. But much of the interest of the theory is in its role in explaining thought and speech. Semantics is concerned with explaining the relation between linguistic expressions and what they are use to say. We can do this only if we have some apparatus for talking, in an abstract and general way, about what language might be used to say, and the role of possible worlds theory is to help with this task. But when we ask specific questions about the structure of the space of possibilities, we have to answer the questions in a language whose semantics may be contentious, and this is why metaphysics and semantics are difficult to disentangle.

3:AM: You think metaphysical possible worlds are real but abstract objects don’t you? I think this makes you a species of actualist realist doesn’t it? Other philosophers disagree, not just about the way you characterize possible worlds, such as Plantinga and Peacocke, but even with the idea that there’s anything other than what actually exists or that anything exists that might not have done – such as Wittgenstein, David Lewis and Tim Williamson.

RS: You’re right that my view is a kind of actualist realism, but I don’t think that properly understood, this is such a controversial doctrine. Plantinga certainly counts as an actualist realist, and while Peacocke may be skeptical about the fruitfulness of the possible worlds framework, he is not going to disagree that there really are different ways that the world might be, or might have been. All actualists agree that there is nothing other than what actually exists. The disagreements are about how to account for apparent facts (such as that there might have been things other than those there are) that seem to suggest otherwise. David Lewis – the non-actualist – is the outlier here – the only one of those you mention who would say that it is literally true that there exist things other than those that actually exist. But ironically, it was the austerity of Lewis’s metaphysical resources – his nominalism about properties – that led to his modal realism.

3:AM: What’s at stake in this work that non-philosophers as well as those in the business can grasp?

RS: Metaphysical disputes about individual essences and merely possible things certainly have the feel of scholastic exercises that are irrelevant to real life issues. It is often hard to see what is at stake, and I do think it is important to reflect both on general questions about what one is doing in doing metaphysics, and on why it matters how specific metaphysical questions are answered. The positivists, writing in the first half of the last century, argued that metaphysics was an illegitimate enterprise that arose from equivocation between semantic and empirical questions. In my view, there is a grain of truth in this critique of metaphysics, but also a serious mistake. The grain of truth is that metaphysics involves a mix of semantic and factual issues, and that much of the dialectic of metaphysical argument involves clarifying the language with which we debate fundamental questions about what the world is like, and diagnosing equivocations in the use of that language. The serious mistake is to think that we can separate, at the start of our inquiry, the semantic questions from the substantive empirical question – that we can first clear the ground and establish, by a priori stipulation, a perspicuous and unambiguous language for describing all of the alternative possibilities for the way the world might be, and once we have done that, carry out the task of empirical science. This is the utopian intentional foundationalism that I was going on about earlier in our discussion. Once we reject this fantasy, we can agree with the positivists that it is the essential nature of metaphysics to mix semantic with empirical issues, and an important task of philosophy to separate them out. But one must also acknowledge that the task of separating the semantic from the substantive can’t be done without making substantive commitments about what the world is like, and for this reason, metaphysics is inescapable. Even if we agree with Carnap’s aim – the elimination of metaphysics – we can get there only by doing metaphysics.

Now with some classical metaphysical issues such as the problem of free will, the nature of consciousness and thought, the analysis of causation and chance, it is easy to see some connection with the concerns of those outside of philosophy. The more abstract questions of modal metaphysics are harder to motivate on their own, but these issues are connected with the others. All of the more accessible metaphysical problems I just mentioned essentially involve the notion of possibility, and getting clear about just what possibilities are is crucial for addressing those questions.

3:AM: You are arguing for a very subtle version of possible worlds – you want to avoid extravagant metaphysical commitments – the kind that I suppose give room for Plantinga and Van Inwagen finding a metaphysics that doesn’t rule out God – but you seem to take seriously that your theory may be construed as a realist one. How can ‘we affirm the existence of possible worlds’ whilst avoiding ‘commitment to the existence of nonactual objects’, as you say in your latest book?

RS: I’ve argued, following Quine, that there is no absolute, once and for all neutral framework in which to theorize, but (also following Quine) that we do aim to find a framework that is neutral between alternative answers to questions at issue. One theorizes at two different levels: first we strive to make questions clear without begging them, and this requires some relatively neutral apparatus for formulating them. Second, one uses the framework to state and defend one’s own answers to those questions. In my book Mere Possibilities, my main aim was to develop a framework for talking about possibilities that was as neutral as possible about the character of those possibilities. I argued that (despite some arguments to the contrary) the framework itself is not committed to individual essences, the necessary existence of all that actually exists, or other theses that I (contentiously, obviously) described as extravagant metaphysical commitments. The framework is compatible with these commitments, and I don’t offer arguments against them. What I do offer is just arguments that the abstract framework of possibility, interpreted realistically, does not force us to accept these commitments.

At first pass, it is easy to reconcile an affirmation of the existence of possible worlds with a denial of the commitment to nonactual objects. “Possible world” is a colorful label for a kind of property that a universe might have, and merely possible worlds are uninstantiated properties of this kind. The properties themselves exist, and actually exist. But since the properties are uninstantiated, there do not exist any universes that have those properties. Possible worlds are like the possible sisters that sisterless people have. All there really is in such a case is the possibility that the person have a sister, and not a possible sister that the person has. (I say “at first pass” since one needs to tell a longer story to reconcile possible worlds semantics, with its domains of individuals, with the thesis that there might have been things that don’t actually exist. I try to tell the longer story in the book.)

The general framework, as I understand it, certainly does not rule God either in or out, and I assume that Plantinga and van Inwagen would both agree that theological questions are not settled, one way or the other, by our general theory of the nature of modality. Some “extravagant commitments”, I would argue, are motivated only by bad modal arguments of the kind I try to diagnose, and I think the motivations for those commitments will disappear if we succeed in defusing the bad arguments. But even though there are some bad modal arguments for the existence of God, I certainly don’t think theists’ belief in God depends much on such arguments. My own metaphysical views are thoroughly secular and naturalistic, and so contrast with those of Plantinga and van Inwagen, but I think this disagreement is independent of any disagreement about the commitments of a modal framework.

3:AM: You ask what haecceitism is and whether it is true. So what is it, and is it?

RS: Those are fair questions, since I ask them in the book, so let me start by giving the short answers before taking them back – or at least qualifying them. Haecceitism is the doctrine that individuals are not definable, or supervenient on, their qualitative character. So according to haecceitism, it is metaphysically possible that there be an individual qualitatively exactly like me, but not me. I think haecceitism is true. Or at least (which may not be quite the same thing), I think that the anti-haecceitist metaphysical doctrine is false. The reason for hesitation is that the characterization of the doctrine depends on the distinction between the qualitative and non-qualitative character of an individual, and on the notion of a purely qualitative description of the world, or of a possible world. I am skeptical about the distinction, and so skeptical about a reductionist thesis that depends on it. So it is not that I accept haecceitism because I think individuals are something over and above their qualitative properties. The point instead is that I am inclined to be skeptical about the distinction that the anti-haecceitist doctrine presupposes. One thing I argue in my chapter about haecceitism is that one can’t give a metaphysically neutral definition of the thesis, and then argue about whether it is true or not. One can give a precise articulation of the thesis only by using certain conceptual and metaphysical resources that are themselves contentious, so the process of explaining what the thesis means and the process of defending or attacking it cannot easily be separated. I think this is a general feature of the dialectic of metaphysical debate – it is part of what makes metaphysics hard (as well as part of what makes it interesting).

3:AM: Kripke’s ‘Naming and Necessity’ is clearly important in setting an agenda for philosophers handling Frege problems about how references get fixed and so on, but your way of responding to Kripke is not straightforward is it? How would you characterize Kripke’s influence on what you’ve been doing, and has his influence diminished or changed in significant ways as you’ve developed your thoughts? I guess this is partly about how much over the years since Kripke metaphysics and philosophy of language has changed?

RS: As I said earlier, Kripke was a big influence on me at the beginning of my career, and while a lot has happened in metaphysics and the philosophy of language since his early work, I think his insights have stood the test of time, and still have a lot to teach us. The internalist and descriptivist doctrines the Kripke criticized have proved to have a tenacious hold on our way of thinking about semantics and metaphysics, and new and more sophisticated forms of these doctrines that take account of some of Kripke’s points have kept them alive. As David Lewis wrote in 1984, “description theories of reference are supposed to have been well and truly refuted,” but “I think not: we have learned enough from our attackers to withstand their attacks.” Lewis’s development and defense of an internalist account of intentionality is the most explicit and well developed account of this kind, but I don’t think it works, and some of the reasons why it is on the wrong track are implicit in Kripke’s early work.

3:AM: How do you work out how to weigh up the beauty of a metaphysical theory with ugly facts that it can’t accommodate? Do you think that the balance between theoretical virtue and what there is seems to require an appeal to hunches or intuitions rather than facts in the end, and that threatens the whole project of metaphysics?

RS: I don’t entirely understand how a grand metaphysical theory can be not only beautiful, but clarifying, despite the fact that almost all such theories have consequences that are difficult to take seriously. But it seems that by tying ideas together, seeing interconnections, and following their consequences wherever they lead (as grand metaphysical theories do), one can illuminate a conceptual landscape, and discover presuppositions that are hidden in a way of thinking. Even if the end result is to reject the presuppositions, and the basic principles of the theory, it can be an advance. David Lewis’s modal realist theory, combining an austere nominalism with a rich ontological plenitude of parallel universes, is our best modern example of a grand and beautiful metaphysical theory. Many of us are dazzled by Lewis’s system, even if few of us can take it seriously as something we might believe. But this system, like its predecessors (for example, Leibniz’s metaphysical system, with its windowless monads) had a wealth of spinoffs: arguments, analyses, bits of apparatus that can be detached from the grand theory and appropriated for one’s own philosophical use (and for uses outside of philosophy). It may not seem fair, but I think the best way to achieve the balance you ask about is to admire and appreciate the grand theory, and then loot it for what you find of value in it.

3:AM: And finally, for the budding metaphysicians here at 3am are there five books (other than your own) that you could recommend that would help us further understand your philosophical issues?

RS: I’ll mention three classics that you can predict from what I have said already, and then two more recent books that I found particularly illuminating. First, everyone interested in issues at the intersection of metaphysics and the philosophy of language should read Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, and if you already have, you should read it again, since it is one of those books one keeps finding new things in. Second, David Lewis’s On the Plurality of Worlds is the best place to get a sense for his metaphysical system, and for his philosophical style, which is crystal clear, direct and unaffected. Third, Paul Grice’s Studies in the Way of Words is a collection of most of his published papers, and includes the William James lectures and a long and fascinating set of retrospective remarks. One can see a lively and subtle philosophical mind at work. Two more recent books: Timothy Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy is a sharp and highly original set of reflections on philosophical method, but with plenty of substantive ideas and arguments as well, for example about the analytic/synthetic distinction, about knowledge and intentionality, about modal epistemology. Finally, I recommend Tyler Burge’s masterful treatise, The Origins of Objectivity. This is interdisciplinary philosophy at its best, drawing on a wealth of empirical research about human and animal perception, but keeping its eye on the philosophical issues, and with an unerring sense for the relevance of the empirical results to those issues.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

[Photo; Steve Pyke]

David Papineau is still roving in the deep philosophical waters even though he knows that he’ll never know everything. He keeps writing hard core books about his philosophical thoughts covering things such as physicalism and how come everyone isn’t a physicalist, substance and property dualism and Kripke’s worry that the mind brain identity is just contingent. He wonders why philosophers think there’s something wrong with just knowing the facts. He thinks about the nature of colour experiences, representation, and avoids mixing up methodological issues with metaphysical ones. He thinks about the significance of Schrodinger’s cat,about whether there are any special laws that are not reducible to physics and about the usefulness of ‘historical kinds.’ This is a deep water big beast from the philosophical depths: bangin’.

3:AM: What made you become a philosopher? Has it been worth it?

David Papineau: My first degree was in mathematics. That was great, but it didn’t help with many of the things that puzzled me. I became a philosopher because I wanted to understand everything, especially those things that didn’t make sense. And that has continued to be my philosophical motivation. That’s one reason I have such a roving philosophical eye— once I have figured out a philosophical topic to my satisfaction, I find myself moving on to new problems.

Has it been worth it? Absolutely. (I now realize that I won’t have quite enough time to understand everything—but that hasn’t stopped me wanting to understand as much as I can.)

3:AM: You are an ontological naturalist. You think that modern science makes some species of physicalism an irresistible position don’t you? Can you explain what your arguments are?

DP: It’s simple enough. Nearly everybody nowadays accepts the ‘causal completeness of physics’—every physical event (or at least its probability) has a full physical cause. This leaves no room for non-physical things to make a causal difference to physical effects. But it would be absurd to deny that thoughts and feelings (and population movements and economic depressions . . .) cause physical effects. So they must be physical things.

Note how this argument only bites for those things that do have physical effects. If numbers say, or moral properties, have no physical effects, then this argument gives us no immediate reason to say that they too must be physical.

You might want to ask—if there is such a simple argument for physicalism, how come everybody hasn’t always been a physicalist? That’s a good question, and there is a good answer. The ‘causal completeness of physics’ wasn’t widely accepted until recently. A century ago mainstream science was still quite happy to countenance vital and mental powers which had a ‘downwards’ causal influence on the physical realm in a straightforwardly interactionist way. It was only in the middle of the last century that science finally concluded that there are no such non-physical forces. At which point a whole pile of smart philosophers (Feigl, Smart, Putnam, Davidson, Lewis) quickly pointed out that mental, biological and social phenomena must themselves be physical, in order to produce the physical effects that they do.

3:AM: This is not an eliminativist position regarding the mind but is reductionist isn’t it?

DP: Yes—at least in the sense in which ‘reductionist’ simply means neither eliminativist nor dualism. Philosophers sometimes also use ‘reductionist’ more strictly, to mean ‘type-identities’ between mental and physical categories, and to exclude ‘non-reductive physicalisms’ like metaphysical functionalism. I’m not so sure that I am a reductionist in the strict type-identity sense. The issues here are messy. But I certainly a reductionist in the more general sense which is opposed to eliminativism and dualism.

3:AM: Substance dualism is a target of this approach isn’t it?

DP: Yes. But so is property dualism.

3:AM: Tim Crane, for example, might happily concede the arguments about substance dualism but not concede that this means no species of dualism can’t be sustained. How do you respond to that sort of challenge?

DP: Well, the causal argument I gave above doesn’t just imply that there can’t be a non-physical mental substance, but also that there can’t be non-physical mental properties. (Tim is always a bit cagey about exactly what he thinks at this particular point. I’m having dinner with him on Saturday and will press him about it.)

3:AM: Kripke has anti-materialist arguments at the end of his Naming and Necessity and you think he’s wondering how mind brain identity seems false even to people like yourself doesn’t he? How do you handle his challenge?

DP: Kripke says that physicalists like me can’t explain the ‘apparent contingency’ of mind-brain identities. He maintains that, if I really believed that pains are C-fibres, then I ought no longer to have any room for the thought that ‘they’ might come apart. His argument is that, since pains aren’t identified via some contingent description, but in terms of how they feel, I have no good way of constructing a possible world, so to speak, where C-fibres are present yet pains absent.

(For the experts, note that I’m here reading Kripke quite differently from the widespread ‘two-dimensionalist’ reading which takes him to be saying that the problem for physicalists is simply that mind-brain identities are a posteriori. This seems to me an absurd misreading of Kripke.)

My response to Kripke is simply to point out that mind-brain identity claims are very counter-intuitive. They continue to seem incredible even to committed physicalists like myself. And that is why I go on half-thinking at an intuitive level that there is a possible world with C-fibres and no pains. I simply haven’t fully freed myself from the dualist intuition that even in the actual world pains involve something more than from C-fibres. So of course I intuitively think that they might come apart in other possible worlds, even if they contingently co-occur in the actual world. (If pains are extra dualist states ‘generated’ by brain states, courtesy of the contingent laws of nature operating in this world, then it immediately follows that those brain states could occur without the conscious states, in a world with different laws of nature.)

In truth, as Kripke points out, a clear-headed physicalist shouldn’t be thinking any of these dualist thoughts. If pains are one and the same as C-fibres firing, then there really isn’t any possibility of having ‘one’ without the ‘other’. Once you properly appreciates physicalism, this dissociation should cease to appear possible—C-fibres with pains should strike you as no more possible than squares without rectangles.

From my perspective, then, Kripke’s ‘intuition of contingency’ isn’t a thought that physicalists are somehow required to continue respecting even after they have embraced their physicalism. Rather it is simply a manifestation of the psychological difficulty of fully embracing physicalism in the first place.

This is a very straightforward response to Kripke, one that cuts through the huge literature on the ‘explanatory gap’ and two-dimensional semantics. This whole literature is motivated by the idea that there is something deficient about our current theoretical understanding of the mind-brain relation, and that therefore we need some different and deeper perspective that will somehow render mind-brain identities transparently true. I say that there is nothing deficient about our current theoretical grasp of mind-brain identities. The problem is only that they are counter-intuitive. This doesn’t show that there is anything wrong with our theoretical understanding, any more than the intuition that the Earth is at rest shows that there must be something theoretically wrong with Copernicanism, or the intuition that time is moving shows that there is something theoretically wrong with the block universe ‘B series’ view of change. (A hankering for ‘transparent understanding’, ‘grasp of natures’, ‘having things revealed as they are’, and so on, seems to run through a lot of current philosophical debate. I don’t get it. What’s wrong with just knowing the facts?)

Of course, there remains the question of why we should find mind-brain identities so persistently counter-intuitive, if they are true. But this is a simple psychological question, and there are a number of plausible explanations. Indeed this is a topic that is quite extensively discussed outside philosophy, by developmental psychologists and theorists of religion among others, under the heading of ‘intuitive dualism’. It is rather shocking that so few of the many philosophers working on ‘the explanatory gap’ are familiar with this empirical literature.

3:AM: While we are on conscious experience, you deny that we can really see a million colours. This is territory that Pete Mandik is also looking into isn’t it? You offer an alternative to the orthodox view, and then argue that phenomenological scrutiny isn’t going to help decide which is right. So first could you set out the two views?

DP: Colour experience is a new topic for me. I’m not sure how closely it relates to my previous work.

The orthodox view of colour experience assumes that, when we see a colour difference between two surfaces viewed side-by-side, this is because we have different responses to each of the two surfaces viewed singly. Since we can detect colour differences between something like ten million different surfaces, this implies that we are capable of ten million colour responses to surfaces viewed singly.

I don’t think that we are capable of anything like this many possible colour responses. Instead I argue that the perception of colour differences between two surfaces viewed side-by-side is a gestalt phenomenon. There is a brain mechanism that works to identify colour differences directly, without first identifying the absolute colour of each surface. So on my view there is no reason to suppose anything like ten million colour responses to surface viewed singly.

I think my view is rather more radical than Pete Mandik’s. Both of us want to show that colour perception doesn’t transcend what can be conceptualized, but I don’t think he goes so far as to deny that it doesn’t involve different responses to all the discriminable surfaces.

On the methodological issue, I think that would be hopeless to try to adjudicate between my view and orthodoxy by appeal to phenomenological introspection. We need to know about brain mechanisms.

3:AM: So why does phenomenological scrutiny not help? Does this relate your enthusiasm for phenomenal concepts? You’ve written about Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument and argued that phenomenal concepts are inconsistent with Wittgenstein. So who wins—Wittgenstein’s argument or phenomenal concepts? Or both?

DP: The ‘phenomenal concept’ issue is rather different, I think. Here the question is whether there are concepts of experiences that are made available to subjects solely in virtue of their having had those experiences themselves. Is there a way of thinking about seeing something red, say, that you get from having had those experiences, and so isn’t available to a blind person? Many contemporary philosophers would say ‘yes’, despite the fact that such concepts seem to conflict with Wittgenstein’s private language argument. I have written a paper arguing that phenomenal concepts do indeed conflict with the private language argument, and that this is bad for Wittgenstein.

Still, as I said, this issue about phenomenal concepts is different from your previous question of whether we can decide the structure of colour perception by phenomenological introspection. After all, in supporting phenomenal concepts I am in a sense siding with introspection against the more behaviourist Wittgensteinians. But even so I don’t think that introspection is powerful enough to resolve the specific issue about how many colours you can see.

3:AM: So what approach do you recommend?

DP: As I said, I don’t think that we can figure out what is going on in conscious colour perception just by phenomenological introspection. We need to know about brain mechanisms as well. We need to figure out what information is present in the mechanisms that constitute conscious colour perception. If neuroscientific research shows that those mechanisms only contain comparative information about colour differences, and have ‘thrown away’ more fine-grained information about the absolute colours of single surfaces, then that would support my position, in a way that just introspecting our colour experiences can’t.

The use of neuroscientific data to help resolve phenomenological questions is proving a common theme in much contemporary thinking about the mind. How rich are the contents of visual perception? Does vision only tell us about shapes and colours, or does it also represent higher categories like lemon or umbrella? Again, when we view a scene fleetingly, do we consciously see all the details even though we don’t retain them, or do we not see them in the first place? Neurological information is crucial to deciding these questions. After all, they are so interesting precisely because unaided introspection cannot resolve them. Rather we need to know what is going on in the brain activities that constitute visual awareness.

Of course, without any appeal to introspective phenomenology at all, we couldn’t get started on this kind of analysis in the first place, since the initial identification of ‘the brain activities that constitute visual awareness’ must depend on correlating brain processes with phenomenological reports. But we can engage in a kind of useful bootstrapping here. First we use uncontroversial aspects of introspective phenomenology to figure out which brain activities are in general responsible for visual phenomenology and other features of consciousness. And then we use the neuroscience to tell us what information is present in those brain activities, and so to decide the trickier questions about the structure of consciousness. We start and end with phenomenological data, but we couldn’t have completed our inferential journey without the detour through brain science.

3:AM: Does this relate to your anti-conceptualism about psychological representation? Don’t you want to defend your views about psychological representation as scientific reductions, rather than as results of conceptual analysis?

DP: I think it helps to distinguish the local semantic question about the specific representational contents of perception—what things do perceptual states represent?—from the more general meta-semantic question of the nature of representation—what it is for psychological states to have representational contents at all?

On the former question, I rather incline towards ‘conceptualism’, in line with my view of colour perception—I don’t think that we can represent objects and properties for which we have no concepts, not even in perceptual experience. In this sense I differ from those who defend ‘non-conceptual content’ like Michael Tye and Chris Peacocke.

But this local semantic question isn’t something that I have written about much, apart from my recent interest in colour vision.

On the general meta-semantic question, by contrast, I have written a lot, mostly under the heading of ‘teleosemantics’. And here—though this is an entirely distinct issue—I am very much inclined to be anti-conceptualist, in the sense that I think that the philosophical task (as always) is to come up with a synthetic theory that fits the empirical evidence, and not to analyse our a priori concept of representation or anything like that.

3:AM: You also look forward to reducing causality to probabilities as part of this same approach don’t you? And an issue here is avoiding mixing metaphysics with methodology. Can you explain this, and also why this is not a methodology issue but a metaphysical one?

DP: A certain kind of methodologically-minded philosopher of science is quick to read off metaphysical conclusions from features of scientific practice. Chemists don’t derive their laws from fundamental physics, so reductive physicalism must be false. Biologists refer to natural numbers in some of their explanations, so numbers must exist. I think that this kind of thing makes for bad philosophy. The relevant features of scientific practice often have mundane explanations which don’t point to any deep metaphysical moral. (Thus it would simply be messy and pointless for the chemists to essay physical reductions, or for the biologists to offer number-free explanations. It’s a weird kind of science-worship that views these practical considerations as clues to the nature of reality.)

Recent work on causation is a case in point. The metaphysical question is whether causal relations can be reduced to non-causal general regularities in some Humean style (though the modern Humean will work with probabilistic generalizations rather than deterministic ones). Now, methodological philosophers working on causal inference in practical areas of science (epidemiology, economics, agriculture, . . .) have observed that in practice causes are never inferred from probabilistic patterns alone. When scientists do infer new causal conclusions from probabilistic information, it is always against a rich background of prior causal assumptions. (‘No causes in, no causes out.’) And many philosophers of science then move quickly from this practical methodological observation to the metaphysical conclusion that causation must somehow transcend any Humean pattern of probabilistic generalizations. But this is not a good inference. Even if causation is at bottom constituted by patterns of probabilistic generalizations, there are obvious practical reasons for using prior causal knowledge to help identify new causes, rather than trying to work everything out from first principles every time.

The funny thing is that recent methodological work on causation itself opens the way to a successful metaphysical reduction of causes to probabilistic generalizations. I am thinking of ‘Bayesian Nets’. The Bayesian Nets literature shows that, for any arrangement of causes, there is a possible set of probabilistic relationships that entails that arrangement. (‘No causes in, no causes out’ is a practical precept, not a principled constraint.) Dan Hausman has written a terrific book—Causal Asymmetry—building a reductive account of causation on this basis, and I have written a couple of articles in the same strain. But as far as I know we are the only two people who read the Bayesian Nets stuff in this way. The reason, I suspect, is that nearly everybody else who works on Bayesian nets is a methodologist rather than a metaphysician, much more interested in the way science proceeds than in the nature of reality. And so they think that if scientific practice treats causes as irreducible, then that’s good enough for them. Still, as I said, it is a bad idea to run metaphysics together with methodology in this way. I’ve nothing against philosophers who are interested in the practicalities of science per se. It’s their metaphysical aspirations that irk me.

3:AM: Why don’t you want to get into the box with Schrodinger’s cat and what is the significance of this thought experiment?

DP: Schrödinger’s cat has a 50% quantum chance of coming out of the box alive and a 50% quantum chance of coming out dead. If you got in the box with it, the same would apply to you. So you really don’t want to do that.

I favour an interpretation of quantum mechanics (the ‘Everett interpretation’) according to which reality branches in any chancy quantum situation. On this view, Schrödinger’s set-up will give rise to in two future branches of reality, one with a live cat, and one with a dead cat—and the talk of ‘50% chances’ just indicates that the two branches are both equally real futures of the cat that originally entered the box.

Now, some philosophers have tried to make trouble for this interpretation by arguing that, if it were true, then you would have no reason not to get in the box with the cat. For on the Everett interpretation you would be sure to come out of the box alive. True there’d also be a future in which you come out dead. But what’s so bad about that, given that you won’t be there to experience it, and that you survive happily in the only future that you will experience?

This is a terrible argument (and not made any better by David Lewis defending it at length in his last published paper—see my ‘David Lewis and Schrödinger’s Cat’.) There may be good objections to the Everett interpretation, but this isn’t one.

Everybody agrees that a future in which you are dead is a very bad thing, and that it isn’t made any better by your not being around to notice how bad it is.

Everettians will simply agree with this, and observe that it follows that it’s a bad idea to get in the box with the cat. Doing so will cause the universe to contain a future where you are dead, alongside the one where you are alive, rather than leaving it as a universe where you are alive in all futures. Since a future where you are dead is a very bad thing, you really don’t want to do that.

3:AM: It seems to many people thinking about such matters that many of our complex cognitive capacities are innate, but that raises the issue about how they could be? How could we have evolved an innate capacity to recognize doorknobs, say, given that presumably when we were evolving our minds we didn’t have doorknobs?

DP: I don’t have much use for the concept of innateness. The everyday concept incorporates a number of different notions that can come apart in in many ways, and as a result encourages a range of dangerously fallacious inferences.

Nor is it easy to tidy up the concept. I guess the best move is to try to equate innate with ‘not learned’. But this really only works as a necessary condition. It looks a bit dotty as a sufficient condition. (Is my newfound ability to sing innate, just because it wasn’t learned, but caused by that bang on the head last week?)

Even if we go with the idea of innate as ‘not learned’, I doubt that anything worth calling a cognitive capacity will come out as innate. This is because it seems unlikely that evolution would ever bother to write the whole of any cognitive capacity into the genes, so to speak, instead of allowing information from the environment to play at least some part in shaping it. Of course our genes will make some capacities very much easier to learn than others, and of course our genes themselves are not learned. But the point remains that genes themselves are not cognitive capacities, and that anything worth calling a cognitive capacity will depend to some degree on learning and so not be innate.

Having said that, I do have quite a lot of sympathy for Fodor’s picture of concepts as information-free atomic entities which get locked onto their referents causally, and to that extent they needn’t involve anything much in the way of learning. But even so it seems perverse to call them ‘innate’. Here we see again the oddity of treating ‘not learned’ as sufficient for innate. Even if no learning to speak of was involved in locking my mental term onto doorknobs, it is odd to say that therefore my possession of a doorknob concept is innate, just as it is odd to say that my head-injury-caused singing is innate.

3:AM: As a physicalist you’ll say that all laws are physical laws I guess. But a non-physicalist will say that there are non-physical laws – such as laws in economics, or biology and psychology. Fodor writes about these as ‘special sciences’. Do you think there can be special sciences?

DP: No, I think that there are non-physical laws all right: genuine (if not strict) laws written in the language of biology, economics, and so on. But I don’t regard that as a contentious issue. Even reductionists about chemistry will think that there are special chemical laws whose formulation makes essential use of chemical terminology.

The contentious issue is whether there are any special laws that aren’t reducible to physics. Fodor says yes, but I have always thought that there are issues here. It has always puzzled me, along with Jaegwon Kim and Ned Block, that there should be genuine lawlike patterns at the special level, if physicalism is true (as Fodor agrees) yet the special laws are ‘variably realized’ by different physical processes in different cases (as Fodor insists). Why should we always get the same results in the same circumstances, if what is going on at the physical level is so different in each case?

In a number of papers I have explored the idea that natural selection might fill the gap. Sometimes selection processes can ensure that there is always some mechanism to produce such-and-such an effect in such-and-such circumstances, even though that mechanism will be different in different cases. All territorial birds have some way of discouraging conspecific invaders, but the mechanisms vary (songs, displays, odours, . . .). Natural selection has ensured that each species achieves the requisite effect somehow, but it doesn’t care, so to speak, how the trick is done.

I still think that this story works in some cases, especially in the case of people learning skills and other social behaviours (individual learning is a kind of selection process). But more recently I have become interested in another possible source of variably realized special science laws. The idea is inspired by Ruth Millikan’s notion of a ‘historical kind’. Millikan observes that some categories—chemical compounds, clouds, stars–enter into a range of generalizations because their instances have a common physical essence. These are ‘eternal kinds’. But other categories enter into a range of generalizations because they are all copied from a common source. These are ‘historical kinds’. For example, all the many copies of the Bible have the same first word, the same second word, and so on. Each individual version of the Nuer belief system contains the same tenet about twins, about ancestral spirits, and so on.

I now think that many generalizations of interest in the special sciences have this kind of basis. Entities share properties not because of any common physical basis, but because of copying mechanisms. And, because of this, these generalizations may well be variably realized at the physical level (think of all the physically different versions of the Bible, or the physically different Nuer brains). It is an obvious idea, when you think of it, and I’m kicking myself for having missed it all these years. I haven’t written anything on this yet, but my ex-student Marion Godman, now a postdoc in Helsinki, has some very nice papers on the subject.

3:AM: And finally are there five books (other than your own) you could recommend to the readers here at 3ammagazine to help them further delve into your philosophical world?

DP: Saul Kripke. Naming and Necessity. Everybody knows that this is a terrific book, but it may not be obvious to younger philosophers how much it reshaped the philosophical landscape when it came out. It contains two ideas—externalism about representation, and the difference between necessity and a priority—that just weren’t there when I started doing philosophy. Kripke persuaded us of both of these ideas pretty much single-handedly, and they now inform all serious philosophical writing.

Jerry Fodor. The Modularity of Mind. Fodor has become increasingly opinionated and eccentric, culminating in the embarrassment of his recent What Darwin Got Wrong. But his earlier work set the agenda for many philosophers of mind working in the naturalist tradition. The subject of cognitive architecture as we know it scarcely existed before The Modularity of Mind, and subsequent views on this topic still define themselves against that book.

Hartry Field. Science without Numbers. I wish more philosophers worried about the topic of this book. I don’t mean the ‘fictionalism’ about numbers, but rather the general puzzle about the relationship between abstract objects and the concrete world. How can references to abstract objects be important for understanding the concrete world? Field explores this question in connection with the physical applicability of mathematics, but his book also holds many lessons for those contemporary philosophers of mind and language who bandy ‘propositions’ about so freely without stopping to wonder what difference they can possibly make to concrete reality.

Let me finish with more two recent books that I learnt much from.

Peter Godfrey-Smith. Darwinian Populations. This book focuses on concepts that are generally taken for granted in philosophic thinking about natural selection, such as ‘organism’, ‘heredity’ and ‘reproduction’. By challenging these notions Godfrey-Smith brings out what is and isn’t essential to natural selection and opens up a fascinating range of new issues in the philosophy of biology.

Richard Holton. Wanting Willing Waiting. Holton distinguishes two notions of ‘weakness of will’—acting against your better judgement, and failing to stick to your resolutions—and shows that they are quite different. The book explores the latter idea, and uses a wide range of empirical studies to cast new light on such topics as will-power, temptation, addiction and free will.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Paul Buck interviewed by Richard Marshall.

3:AM: You approach the film from a series of angles – the art scene, the London drug scene, the gangster scene, the film scene and so on. This gives the reader a very intense and close up way in to the film. Was that your intention, can you say something about your approach?

Paul Buck: Performance is an extraordinary film in that it didn’t fit into the known patterns of filmmaking, whether mainstream or art-house or underground or whatever term you want to use. It didn’t fit categories in that respect. Or even genres. Is it a crime film? It’s often pushed into that field. But it isn’t. It blends and jags or Jaggers its way into all manner of fields. Thus the idea that one can write about it in a conventional manner seems a bit misguided. That approach is destined to fail on some levels. I thought the best way would be to unravel the film by taking the main protagonists, in front and behind the camera, and try to explore each and see how they fitted together as a team, or bunch of travellers. Because it seems to me that the film is more the result of a composite of people and trends and the zeitgeist that made that film, and made that film what it was and what it was to become. In that respect that approach also moves away from the old chestnut of was it Cammell’s film, or Roeg’s film. I didn’t want to give too much attention to that dispute, though I acknowledge it. I wanted to try to piece together the kernels, the essentials, essences and interests of the contributors and see where they meshed together, whether in the morning, afternoon, evening or night, how they came to make this enormous psychodrama. Though I didn’t pursue Maya Deren’s film in the book, that first ‘poetic psychodrama’, that I just alluded to, perhaps I could have made some further interesting inroads there too.

The other thing I wanted to do was pursue some parallels with the film. For example, to plant information out of sequence in the reader’s mind, sometimes gradually with respect to an idea, so that when I required the reader to notice the point I could trigger their memory and they’d understand the point on more than one level. This is something the film does. Indeed this idea, and the way it is pursued by Roeg in his subsequent films, is something I’ve taken on board in my own writings over the years, it’s part of my modus operandi let’s say. Thus it had a point here, I was acknowledging one of my key influences. Of course I knew this approach might well go over the heads of some of the readers who might just want the book to tell the story of the film, as I did call it a biography, not specifically an analysis or overview of various interpretations. Effectively I thought the way to talk about the film was to treat it on biographical terms, as least theoretically, because labels are anathema to me and present themselves as ripe for breaking or reconstructing. I was also aware that there could possibly be a wide range of readers, given that Jagger features and the publisher is known for its music output, not that any pressure was exerted to bear that in mind, or to conform in any way.

As I saw it, you have to decide early on whether you are trying to write a book for readers, to seduce them into seeing the film, if they’ve never seen it, or to resee it if they have. Isn’t that the nature of such a book? It’s no good being smart and showing how clever you can be, filling it with really obscure references so that you leave the vast majority of its readers in limbo. I don’t do what I just did above with Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon. I needed to find references that could be noted clearly and easily understood or pursued further by anyone who was interested in particular points. Fortunately the film does keep to a series of references of the time that were quite clear, at least clear to me, references that have grown in stature since the 60s. But there are others that are more tangential, but just as vital. So I needed to find ways to bring them in. And yet, to keep piling facts after facts after facts runs the risk of walking the whole project into a treacle tart. I’ve seen that done before. So I set myself challenges too, one of which was to go back in time and plant myself in that period, which happens to have been my own formative time. The other was to attempt to view it from various angles, various disciplines and interests, as that approach, which forms and informs the film, fitted my own method. But perhaps I should say more on those points later.

As the areas covered have been part of my life for many years, the film has been ticking away inside me. Notes have been made when teaching and using the film as a point of discussion. Notes have been made when reading. Notes made when watching other films. I had around 150,000 words before I had been asked to write it, before I had even started thinking of it anew. I did say 50,000 in one interview, but that was wrong. I rechecked. It was 150,000 that I’d typed and filed over the years. When one has spent a lifetime building an archive of books and references, clippings and notes, I think one owes it to oneself, and indeed one’s family, to justify a cramped home environment and make that giant step of finding ways to inveigle some ideas from the mass and spin them together, hopefully to make an interesting read.

3:AM: The scene out of which the film emerged is intense and brilliant and also dangerous. That sense of violence – real physical violence as well as the metaphorical representation of violence – is a constant presence in your book. The use of real gangsters and hard men breaks down the line between pretence and actuality – and this is a theme of the film too, isn’t it?

PB: The film has two elements that are strong: sex and violence. But neither can be neatly parcelled in conventional terms, or neatly presented and tied with a bow, particularly the violence. It’s too easy to tag it to the East End, Bow Bells and neat ribbons. It was the era of the Krays. But it was also the era of the Richardsons, south of the river. And there were others, like Jimmy Evans, who didn’t fit into the gang structure as shown in the film. So the reality is jagged anyway. And there’s the violence of the music world. A double-edged sword where the Stones, as an obvious example, were using violence in their assault, both lyrically and aurally, and indeed physically in their presence and performance. They had that image and were also still in the process of image building as they dragged the violence across the room, and yet at the same time they were denying and decrying with innocent eyes in their interviews. And I use other examples of that time, like The Who, and Hendrix, because it is easy to check and see some footage, and ponder the myths, as they are well-documented. And then there is the violence in the theatre, which I show in various ways, not only with the situation like Bond’s Saved, or Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience, or Brook’s production of Marat/Sade, and US, or underground theatre, like Nuttall’s People Show in their early days… which blends into the world of Happenings, like the Actionists from Vienna… or the acid painting of Gustav Metzger… These were some of the artistic violences, part of the times. Fortunately I was there and involved in some of these activities, directly or as an observer, a close in observer, a youngster with eyes wide open.

So I ran with some of the violent sources and echoes. I say some, because I could keep adding more here, now, or over the pages as I did in the book. And yet, as you say, I did use it to a high degree. I tried to keep it as a motif in each and every chapter. I was drawing out the violence, dangling the threads of violence, indeed the sexual aspects too, right the way through. I was making a bed of violence, a carpet perhaps, for the film to be lain on, or more correctly to meld into. And I was binding the sex and violence together too. Everything entwines, nothing just runs around without catching on something else. And that’s what I think is important. If I keep going here then I’m writing the book again. 300 pages might seem a lot, but in reality given the enormous composite of people involved, the actual book does rather proceed at a pace, and I think I could or should have taken things further. Or I should have written a bit about some others that I left out, or barely mentioned. And it’s not trying to be excessive when I say it could easily have run into a thousand pages of facts and ideas without too much effort. But I really had to keep the momentum going, just as in the film. That’s what was important to me, to keep up to speed with the film. It’s not an academic treatise. I also wrote it on purpose with the threads hanging loose, not tied together, not neatly packaged. If anyone wants to pull at some of the threads I hope I’ve given them enough material to pursue matters further. Besides the layers of violence in all those artistic disciplines, and indeed in the cultural angles, I also wanted you to understand the violence of the language itself, the violence of shooting film, the violence of editing, the violence of the sounds, the music and other effects. In other words, the whole process and fabric of the film. And I tried to do that in the writing, to use certain words with their inherent violence, to write in ways that conveyed violence.

The use of words in this manner is derived from my 60s education with the French, being involved with the writings of Bataille, Artaud and others. I think of Agnès Rouzier, one of the Change Collectif. I translated some of her work. If I recall well, Deleuze said that she sexualised language. It is what I try to do, have always done in my own writing. I try to get inside the words themselves and find their inner rhythms, explore their inner being, and bring out elements, whether it can be termed sexualising, or making violent, or whatever it is I’m exploring at that point. Of course when writing an essay, particularly as in the case of Performance, it is not so easy to do that without driving everyone mad. But I do choose my words, I do construct sentences in certain ways, I do juxtapose and reorganise paragraphs or ideas to conflict. When I talk about these ideas I use terminology like ‘fault line’, ‘precipice’ and other physical geology terms to describe my approach. It comes from the fact I was studying chemistry and geology after I left school. So it is no accident that I see Performance in these terms too, that I was drawn to Performance years ago. The very fabric of the film is permeated with violence and I tried to bring that out as much as possible in my book. But if the reader wants they can take it further, watch every scene, every shot from that perspective. There is more to be drawn out.

There is one gesture of violence that I’m not sure I really pointed out enough in the book, and that is the one engineered by The News of the World. In their attempt to prevent Jagger from suing them after their two incompetent journalists had mistaken Brian Jones for Mick Jagger in Blaises’ one night, they tipped off the police to make the drugs raid at Redlands. The irony is that as a result of all that happened, the harassments, the trial, the Hamilton images that live on forever… it was that press exposure and infamy that gifted Jagger to the Hollywood purse and enabled Performance to be made. Perhaps it might never have happened otherwise. I like that. Turn it up, to paraphrase Harry Flowers. So the thought, as you mentioned, of real gangsters and hard men being involved, whether in informing the research, or whether there on the set, as with Johnny Bindon, would go without saying. And one can extend this further. In the fight scene, Cammell asked the participants if they could do it for real. Anthony Valentine as Joey Maddocks was none too keen. He was strictly an actor, you stage these scenes. James Fox said he wasn’t perturbed, he could handle himself, after all he’d been in the Thomas à Becket gym daily for some months and was quite keen to test his abilities. In the event, as I understand it, the initial takes were made with others from the gym who became damaged and retired hurt. So Fox and Valentine came to an agreement to stage it. Cammell’s ideas were always to do it for real. Hence the issues that evolved with some of the sex scenes. That said, real violence and real sex might not always look too spectacular to the viewer. Things are staged because of the look to the outsider, the voyeur, not for the feelings of the participants. However, they seem to have found a way as the essence of these activities of violence and sex come across on the screen.

3:AM: There are several moments in the book where you show the link between acting and violence. The two central performers in the film, Mick Jagger and James Fox fascinate you as they seem to be working out this acting/performance/violence equation as the film is being made. Was it a matter of them finding something in themselves or were they being changed through the process?

PB: What you see is a film. The results of that film are accomplished in many ways. That is the case for all films. There are stories that surround many directors, many actors, stories about their methods. To take Jagger and Fox, as you suggest, you have to plot back through their histories up to that point. Jagger wanted to act, had Marianne Faithfull at his side at the time, a singer, but, more importantly, an actor in her own right, frustrated and restrained, but with possibilities, as William Gaskill, who was running the Royal Court, has noted. Fox was an actor, had made The Servant. The edge that you see on the screen for The Servant, that underlying violence, was what was going to be explored in Performance. Though I didn’t write about it, the actual filming of The Servant didn’t necessarily have unanimous appeal as I heard from those on the floor. A lot of what struck us about the greatness of that film, the captivating image of Fox, was to do with the editing process.

Back to Performance. There’s a clash of two cultures in acting terms with those two. Jagger’s role-playing as a singer had evolved in a personal and experiential way, and Fox’s had followed a more traditional acting route. That created some ground for friction. But really the edge that is explored and brought out on the screen was fed and blossomed in the dressing room, having had its foundation secured earlier in private life, for there was already a personal relationship between Jagger, Fox and their respective partners. I bring out some of it, but you can go much further, piecing together what you think is true. So I explore this and also bring in that sense of menace that goes on within Harold Pinter’s early plays. To add, you need to know that The Servant was scripted by Pinter, and that Roeg was cameraman on The Caretaker. And also that you’re running with a feeling of the times when Pinter was very much part of the contemporary fabric. And I also bring in Peter Hall talking about directing Pinter to give further credence and understanding. And if we want to bring in further ingredients, we can add David Litvinoff, who was a friend to all the main participants. His role as ‘researcher’, catalyst, agent provocateur, and goodness knows what else, also involved bringing his sharp wit to the proceedings. Iain Sinclair and others have told us things about this character. At the moment someone is writing his biography. Hopefully they’ll succeed, because the evidence seems elusive, many of those who could supply interesting angles are dead, others have vague memories, as occurs when one is trying to write a biography when the sand in the hourglass has almost run its course through the neck. I’m hoping however that just a bit more will be revealed to fuel further the tensions that were living under this Performance project.

3:AM: I’ve got to say this is a much more interesting Mick Jagger (and Rolling Stones) than we find in the loads of books and films appearing at the moment. The contrast between the sexually ambiguous appearance of Jagger and the genuine smell of evil in the film contrasts with the fake image of ‘bad boy band’ branding that was artificial, doesn’t it? It’s as if you’re saying that the fake image of being bad was made real here in aspects of making the film?

PB: I think I have left quite a bit to be read between the lines, particularly on the level you are talking about. A biography, or a film book, or a book about a book, these works are supposed to unravel and explain and effectively close down most of the readings and understandings of the work under research. But Performance is about mystery, has loads of questions that one could resolve, falsely I suspect. It just doesn’t fit the pattern of other approaches to my mind. It needs some mystery, some aspect of being unresolved. That’s why I didn’t want the main protagonists to give me answers now, I didn’t want that closure, whether it was true, or not, whether it was their agenda now, to add a neat bow to their own lives. It needed those shifting and drifting sands, those illusions and sparkling lights on the mosaic. Performance is a bit like an oasis in the desert, a Marrakech, with the image that the bandits are in the mountains just outside the city, overlooking the city.

Things are suggested. I was very careful in my wording at times. I might have known more than I let on, I might not have wanted to step into legal quagmires, and quite rightly. I love this film, and I love the participants, the roles they play, and I also mean those behind the camera. They have become a kind of family, not a fictional one, but a real one, one that lives in my house, on my shelves, in my head. I don’t need to meet these people necessarily. In fact, as people will tell you, never meet those you admire, or love. It’s partly true as I’ve discovered over the years. But on another level it’s okay because we are so far from this film now, little can damage it for me. In other words you have to decide whether you say things, or let things remain that can be misread or taken out of context, and which could easily distort the picture you’re trying to create. There’s enough to work with, I concluded, without that added burden.

For example, there’s a moment in the 2001 documentary that Jagger produced on himself, Being Mick, where his daughter asks him not to bring home a woman who is as young as her, or similar words. It’s humourous. But it could also have a greater importance to viewers than it might have otherwise. Indeed it can overshadow the film to some degree. Of course, Jagger could have made them cut it. But he probably decided it was funny, let it stay. I think he might have done better to drop it. That’s not censorship, it’s just finding the right tone for the overall documentary. These subtle touches can become important, show whether you are still understanding what is going on. I think he might have kicked himself afterwards. Hoped the damage wasn’t too bad, given that he was trying to build a positive image with that documentary. I mean, unlike Keith Richards, Jagger has too many interests to sit and write a book, or oversee the writing. It is easier to let others shoot a documentary and then oversee the production, make that a kind of personal statement. As the whole Redlands fiasco shows, life can hang on little incidents. That’s why people try to manipulate such moments. Or cause them in the first place. The lure of fame, fortune, power, immortality.I don’t want to fuel speculations and acrimonious tales about further goings-on, or salacious stories that were part of the 50s and 60s when everyone was trying to find a new world, stepping from the black-and-white into a colour-filled world, expanding their minds, opening their bodies, spreading wide their limbs, liberating all aspects of the psyche. There was no one correct path. There were paths. Some aspects we look back on with hindsight are naff, some are dubious, and some today we see as no-nos. But haven’t we got better things to do than generate some miserable stories? Are we all so perfect? Are there not more pressing social problems today for the world? So I can’t ignore, but I can leave another layer to say that this was also part of what makes the film uncomfortable, part of what makes it work, makes it ‘happen’, as Pherber says. They were all trying to make it happen, let things happen. It was frustrating on the set too, as she shows, banging at the kitchen table, a very good moment where the reality blends into the film itself.

I guess the person who comes out of this film, and my book, as a fascinating character is Jagger. I’m as surprised as anyone to say that. We all have our views of him, whether true or not; we have all constructed our bad boy, in all manner of ways. We all hate him is the accepted view. He hasn’t helped it either. But what do we expect from him? What does he expect from himself? These are unanswerable. And that’s what is intriguing. Even if I was to meet him tomorrow, I have no idea what to expect. I have no idea what his agenda would be, whether those five minutes would mean anything. You’d have to live with him for quite some while to get a good sense. And that’s not on. And I wouldn’t want it to be on. But everyone seems determined to parcel him up, everyone seems to want to say they’ve got him right in their summarising. I think what I do bring out is that at the time when the film was made he shows his middle-class roots, his very good middle-class upbringing. A very proper one. And perhaps some of the others involved, from a higher class, if we’re using that means of categorisation, are not so proper in their middle-classness as the rest of us think they should be. What is middle-classness about? And the other thing is that at the end of the day Jagger comes across as very caring for children, which was probably unusual, given that he was only 25 and living in this whirlwind of not only the times, but his own career. I would expect that aspect of him has never changed.

3:AM: Donald Cammell comes across here as complex and intense – and brilliant – a figure as any we might find in the so-called Swinging Sixties. Looking at his pivotal role in the scene and in the making of the film, how would you summarise his role in the project to make the film?

PB: I think I paint the picture that the film is, in essence, Cammell’s project. It was his baby. But it was also created by the very real contributions of all those brought in. Whether it be Jagger and Fox, or indeed Anita Pallenberg (who made a big contribution on many levels), and Nic Roeg, of course, who I paint in with the backstory of the earlier films that he was involved in that show through, at least a few of them, no-one can command space for an extended focus, again there’s a very long essay, if not a book, on the Roeg before Performance, leaving aside what came later. And there were all the others too, like Marianne and her role, or Christopher Gibbs, Robert Fraser, and Deborah Dixon, who we have to remember was living with Donald from the late 50s through to when the film was being set up, and who was brought into the film not as a costume consultant, but as a set consultant, Donald deliberately wanting to create the ambience of their home in Paris, and more than that, aspects of their relationship. She was in London to check out whether Tuesday Weld was right for the part. Once the role of Pherber switched to Anita then it was another kettle of fish, part of another story of the intimate world of Donald and Deborah. At every step Donald is there, part of it, leading it, but at every step, the others are contributing. It is very much a team work. It couldn’t exactly be run as a democratic organization where everyone has a say, even if it is suggested as such. Someone has to take control. And Donald did. His character might have been self-defeating at times, as anyone will tell you, but things happened because of him, and things happened that went wrong, but which were turned to an effective positive aspect in the end. Not that I’d advocate trying to make films or anything in that manner. It’s a huge destroyer of time, energy and more. Witness how many films Donald made, and the nature of those films he did make. It is difficult enough to sustain a life as a film-maker. Nic Roeg had a great burst for years, produced some amazing and key films, before the system managed to find the right set of reins to keep him under control, one could say.

3:AM: It’s a scene that involves both artists and writers who have become recognised now as tremendously important – Balthus and Hamilton, for example, and Pinter – it always strikes me that the script is very Pinteresque. And when I read Sinclair today I hear that same power – all that aggression and violence, and beauty. I sense that you are very attracted to elements of this scene?

PB: The thing is that some viewers take on some references and sources, while others take on a different bunch. One can run with a lot of references in this film. You chose Balthus and Hamilton as examples. I’m sure we could find references that ran to a virtual blank in terms of sustainability in today’s sense of art or cultural history. But during that period few would have picked up on Balthus and Hamilton, whereas now it all seems quite clear. And the way they are tied in is not difficult to ascertain. They are not hiding or veiled. I reference Paul Mayersberg pointing out the way in which Godard used references, by not using obscure ones. He tended to draw from those that were part of the French education system, ones that many people knew. Whereas Cammell and Roeg went for those they felt part of, not concerned whether a wider public knew them to any great degree. What cannot be qualified is the role an artist will have in his time or after. As examples I could use Bataille and Artaud. In their lifetimes both were known by the few, not by the many. The two influential French shapemakers of their time were Breton and Sartre. And then, after both of those dominant characters died, their influences waned to some degree. Why should that be? A brief answer could pursue the notion that both Breton and Sartre published their work as they produced it. Both of them lived with a public face, both of them created their empires, their worlds that counted on being in the limelight. On the other hand, Artaud had issues that limited his ability to be public, and Bataille was just not interested in devoting time or energy to that part of the business. Bataille was working away, drawing together threads from various disciplines. Bataille started magazines, spread his ideas in more private and secret ways. His work has been published, almost all of it now, but it has been a long process since his death. It was with a handful of intellectuals that his influence was felt, people who carried his name and influence further, people like Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lacan, Artaud had a similar influence, his ideas about theatre and more, most of his writings coming after his death thanks to the devotion and hard work of Paule Thevenin who selflessly transcribed his notebooks and fought against a family that would have destroyed all his papers if given the chance. I use those examples because Bataille was influential for me starting way back in the 60s. It was not just his ideas, his books, which of course took years for me to read as few were around and I had to wait for the next volume in the Collected Works being published by Gallimard. For me Bataille was important as an editor, as someone who brought together ideas and disciplines, something I’ve tried to do in my own life and adventures. So you can see that a film like Performance is a godsend to me, drawing in all those references from literature, film, art, theatre, counter-culture, crime, transgressive behaviour.

So you see it in my work, not only in the book about Performance, but in my book, A Public Intimacy, that draws on my collection of scrapbooks, that seeks to find a new narrative for autobiography. Or the book Lisbon, another way to explore a city, a cultural biography masquerading as a travel book. Or Spread Wide, that works with my letters from Kathy Acker, dating from 1979 when she was discovering Bataille and preparing to move to Britain, delving playfully into her text to find other courses that reflected our common interests, both of us determined to journey within the language, and here also being mischievous with the personal and public faces, relevant too as regards the Performance book. Or my own editings, particularly with my magazine, Curtains, that chased its way through the 70s, setting the foundations for my juxtapositions and weaves of ideas, its traces linking back into Performance as I noted. It’s become a distinct way of working for me, though one I’m not prepared to settle with in an armchair beside the blazing logs on the fire. Thus, the exhibition In the disappearing mist, the gift whispers, out at Focal Point Gallery through last autumn, which should manifest itself as a catalogue, a catalogue with a surprise twist if all goes along with the suspect ideas in my head, an exhibition that developed as an extension of just being a one person exhibition, because I brought in other people’s work and my relationship to certain ideas within their work. It was in fact a concept that echoes an exhibition around Jean Paulhan that I saw at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1974. Thus I explored weaves and echoes through work by Susan Hiller, Clunie Reid, Lucy McKenzie, Kathy Acker, Richard Prince, Tatjana Doll, twelve people in all, right through to the work by Claude Royet-Journoud where I made a pinboard by selecting from around a quarter of his notes and letters to me in the 70s that flowed from Paris on a weekly basis, his notes giving me addresses, things of interest to pursue, enthusiasms, encouragements, passions – all that was feeding my Curtains project, which has carried forward to now, driven as I still am with passions to open up areas and ideas, to introduce one thing into another, to show how works and ideas rub against each other, and spark further interests. Some of these notions I take up in my own writings, others I’m trying to edge and seduce others into pursuing. That’s the fun of this life I think, the pleasure of the passion.

Joel David Hamkins interviewed by Richard Marshall.

Joel David Hamkins is a maths/logic hipster, melting the logic/maths hive mind with ideas that stalk the same wild territory as Frege, Tarski, Godel, Turing and Cantor. He thinks we all can go there and that we all should. He gives tips about the Moebius strip to six year olds and plays around with his sons homework. He has discovered all sorts of wonders involving supertasks, infinite-time Turing machines, black-hole computations, the mathematics of the uncountable, the lost melody phenomenon of infinitary computability (which really should be the name of a band), set theory and multiverses, infinite utilitarianism, and infinite chess. He’s also thinking about whether we really have an absolute notion of the finite and doubts if any of this is brain melting, which is just a testimony to his modesty. He also thinks that although maths is open to all he thinks mathematicians could use more metaphors and silly terminology to get their ideas across better than they do. All in all, this is the grooviest of the hard core maths/logic groovsters. Bodacious!

3:AM: You work in the philosophy of maths and logic. Did you think you’d become a philosopher early on, or was it maths that first took your fancy? Or is your career a surprise?

Joel David Hamkins: Logicians have always been hard to categorise. Even Frege complained that the philosophers took him as a mathematician and the mathematicians as a philosopher, and Tarski sought in Berkeley to forge a unity between mathematical and philosophical logic. For my part, I would be happy in the company of Frege and Tarski, whatever category that may be. Meanwhile, my original training as a logician was in pure mathematics. As a freshman at Caltech, in the midst of my first genuine logic course and pondering registration for the next semester, a friend came running up to me with the news that there were many further courses in logic. There was evidently an entire field of study called “logic,” and I was in rapture; this was to be my future. I was fascinated early on by the incompleteness theorems and the independence phenomenon, by the idea that one could prove things about the nature of proof itself. We can prove that our fundamental mathematical theories are simply unable in principle to validate themselves, to prove their own consistency, like the fantastic pronouncements of a strange gentleman whom we are unsure is a con man or a sage. For every such theory, furthermore, there will be true statements that we are unable to prove in them, and so ultimately none of our fundamental theories can have the whole story. The idea that we can prove such things about the nature of truth and provability was incredible to me, and I sought to get to the bottom of it.

3:AM: Many people find logic and maths very very hard. Philosophy of maths and logic is kind of taking hard to another level! So perhaps you could begin by explaining why you think some people get maths and others don’t. Do you understand people having these feelings? Is it maths that’s the problem, or just the way its been taught or are there just some minds that are better suited to it than others? Have you ever been stumped in a way that is common to most folk?

JDH: I’m not sure that I agree with the premise of the question — that many people simply can’t appreciate mathematical ideas — and I believe instead that a fascinating world of mathematical ideas awaits anyone who is open to discovering it. This morning I went into my daughter’s first-grade classroom, full of inquisitive six-year-old girls, and we all made Möbius bands by cutting out paper strips and taping the ends together, after a twist. The children proved that a Möbius band has only one side by colouring it all the way around, whereas with a simple untwisted band they could colour the outside one colour and the inside another colour. We explored what happens with two twists, or more, and what happens when you cut a Möbius band down the centre, all the way around. Give it a try! Try cutting a Möbius band one-third in from the edge, all the way around, but make your prediction for the outcome before finishing the cut. Mathematics is full of such playful ideas; there is no reason for someone to feel that they just cannot “get” it. These ideas lead, for those who take ideas seriously, to deeper and more abstract mathematical ideas, which can illuminate a greater mathematical truth, while remaining playful for those with the right attitude. The curious properties of the Möbius band lead to further examples of non-orientability, such as the Klein bottle, and ultimately one lands in the main ideas of algebraic topology. Many sophisticated mathematical ideas similarly have their origin in an intriguing puzzle; we begin with a curiosity or paradox and in resolving it gain genuine mathematical insight. But to answer the last part of your question, of course every mathematician and philosopher finds themselves stumped with the problems that vex them. We persevere, and often enough overcome the initial confusions and find ourselves a way through the tangle. What a great feeling it is when one solves a long-troubling question. It is surely one of life’s great enjoyments. I’d prefer that we get away from the idea that a person may not be a “math person” or may just not “get” math. Such a person is unlikely to assert in the same sweeping manner that they just don’t get literature or humour or art, or that they are not an “idea person”. Meanwhile, I guarantee that there are some fascinating mathematical ideas, at just exactly the right level, waiting for them to ponder. Anyone, even a child, can learn to count into Cantor’s transfinite ordinals, and there are fun elementary problems in graph colouring or game theory. Some beautiful classical arguments, such as the proof that the square root of 2 is irrational or the proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers, stand as pinnacles of human achievement, known for two thousand years, yet are accessible enough for any intelligent person to grasp.

3:AM: There are some really cool philosophical problems that you’ve been engaged with that I think anyone will appreciate. So can you say something about supertasks and the infinite time Turing machines? In a paper you ask what would we and what could we do with an infinitely fast computer. This sounds like science fiction but its what people are working on. So firstly, what’s a supertask and what could such a computer do? And are we going to be building one anytime soon?

JDH: A supertask is a process involving infinitely many steps, and it is interesting to imagine performing the steps faster and faster in such a way that all are completed in finite total time. That may seem perplexing, but Zeno long ago pointed out that in walking from here to there, we accomplish the supertask of first traversing half the distance, and then half the remaining distance, and then again half the remaining distance and so on ad infinitum. After only finitely many such traversals, we are not quite there, are we, and the full supertask is completed at the instant of our arrival. Similarly, if one performs the first of infinitely many steps in a process in half a minute, and the next in a quarter minute and then an eighth and so on, then the whole infinite process will be completed in one minute, in an instance of the geometric series (1/2)+(1/4)+(1/8)+ … = 1. In the Zeno example, this corresponds simply to walking from here to there at constant speed. Suppose now that we successively add two marbles to a giant bag and then take one out, repeating this action over and over, faster and faster, infinitely many times. What is in the bag when we have completed all these actions? On the one hand, since we seem to be steadily increasing the number of marbles in the bag, it would seem natural to expect that the bag has infinitely many marbles at the end. But suppose that the marbles are numbered 1, 2, 3 and so on, and that at each step we always remove the smallest-numbered marble currently in the bag, never using that marble again. With this procedure, the bag will actually be empty at the end. If there were any marbles in it at the end, then among those marbles, there would have to be one with the smallest number. This marble, if you think about it, would have to have been the smallest-numbered marble at an earlier stage in the process, when all the even-smaller-numbered marbles had been dealt with, and therefore it would have been removed at that earlier stage. But this would have prevented it from being in the bag at the end, and so indeed the bag must be empty then. I find this kind of supertask to show that certain intuitions that we have about the nature of finitary processes are no longer valid for infinitary processes, and so we must be very careful when reasoning about supertask procedures.

Jeff Kidder and Andy Lewis and I developed the theory of infinite-time Turing machines to provide a theoretical tool for analysing the nature of infinitary computation. What does it mean exactly to carry out a computational procedure with infinitely many steps? The infinite time Turing machine model provides an answer, a theoretical answer, which helps us to understand the resulting class of infinite-time computable functions and infinite-time decidable sets, in the same way that the standard Turing machine model underlies our conception of what it means to be computable in finite time. We don’t actually build these machines, of course, in either the finitary or infinitary realm. Rather, the machines are used in what amounts to thought experiments, guiding our understanding of the resulting concepts of computability and decidability. It turns out that the infinite time Turing machines describe a rich level of complexity that was not yet captured by the other notions of complexity in descriptive set theory, and it is in this context that one should think of the subject. Nevertheless, there are several groups of researchers working on the fantastical idea that it might be consistent with the laws of physics to have a physical realisation of a supertask computational device. This line of thinking can be seen as an attack on the widely-held Church-Turing thesis, which asserts that the Turing machine model of computability correctly captures what it means for a function to be computable in principle or for a set to be decidable in principle by effective means. Turing had argued and indeed even derived his Turing machine model by thinking carefully about what it was that a human did when carrying out a rote computational procedure with paper and pencil, thereby arriving at his original formulation of the thesis. The new objections, however, are aimed at refuting a stronger thesis, for which the notion of computability allows the human computer not only to compute with paper and pencil, but also to take advantage of whatever strange and wonderful computational powers might be possible in a physical universe, using whatever bizarre quantum-mechanical or relativistic effect might be useful for computation. For example, some of the infinitary computational procedures work by exploiting relativistic time contraction (as in the twin paradox), so as to carry out an infinite procedure in finite time for one observer. Similarly, in black-hole computation, a computational device achieves super-Turing capability by falling into a black hole, finding inside another physical universe, while observing whether a certain signal follows or not sent from a component of the device that remains outside the black-hole.

3:AM: You presented some of your thoughts about this at a conference about effective mathematics of the uncountable. In your paper you liken the uncountability to being able to recognise a tune but not being able to hum it. Is that a picture of what maths of the uncountable is about? Can you say something about this kind of maths that sounds really cool?

JDH: The lost-melody phenomenon for infinitary computability expresses one of the unusual features of it that Andy Lewis and I discovered, hinging on the distinction between the ability to produce a particular complex object and the ability to recognise the object when it is presented to you. What we realised is that there can be a mathematical object m, a certain infinite string of binary digits, such that the infinitary computers cannot produce m on their own, but they are capable of recognising in a computable manner whether a given object is m or not. The idea is that m is extremely complicated, too complicated to produce by any computable procedure, but at the same time it exhibits certain pertinent internal consistencies, which are sufficient to characterise m uniquely, thereby allowing an infinitary computer to verify whether it is dealing with the real m or not. So the object m is computably recognisable, but not computable. It is a lost melody — perhaps from some classical symphony — a tune that you are not able to sing on your own, but nevertheless you can recognise correctly yes-or-no when someone else sings it. This lost-melody phenomenon has now been established for many of the various models of infinitary computability, and one of the necessary features when it occurs is that the computational devices, unlike classical Turing machines, should not be able to undertake a computable exhaustive search of their entire input space.

3:AM: Another big idea that you’re thinking about at the moment is the dispute in set theory between a universe and multiverse. Can you say what this dispute is about? I guess one of the things that interests me is the idea that the multiverse approach challenges the notion that every set-theoretic assertion has a final definitive truth value. Does this then touch on issues outside of maths, such as vagueness? And does the idea intersect with ideas in physics about the nature of reality?

JDH: Set theory can be and often is taken as an ontological foundation for the rest of mathematics in the sense that abstract mathematical objects can be construed fundamentally as sets, and being precise in mathematics often amounts to specifying one’s context in set-theoretic terms. We identify a function, for example, with its graph, a set of ordered pairs, and essentially all mathematical objects can be construed as sets in a similar way. The existence of a common foundation like this for the whole of mathematics has been extremely important for the unity of the subject, for mathematicians often borrow a result from one area for use in another, applying a result of complex analysis, for example, in algebra; this would become incoherent if each sub-area had its own separate foundation. A dominant perspective within set theory itself, what I have called the universe view, holds that there is an absolute background concept of set, giving rise to the unique cumulative universe of all sets, in which every set-theoretic assertion — and hence also every mathematical assertion — has a definite truth value. On this view, statements such as the continuum hypothesis and others have definite final answers, and the goal of set theory is to find these fundamental truths. The widespread independence phenomenon, where such statements turn out to be neither provable nor refutable in our best and strongest theories, is seen on this view as a distraction, telling us about the weaknesses of our theories rather than about what it really true.

Meanwhile, there is tension between the universe view and what is surely the principal set-theoretic discovery of the twentieth century, namely, the unexpected but pervasive phenomenon of diverse set-theoretic possibility. It turns out that almost every nontrivial statement of infinite combinatorics, for example, including the continuum hypothesis and hundreds of other similar assertions, is independent of the axioms of set theory, even when they are strengthened by any of the various large cardinal axioms. What set theory is about is exploring the full range of this set-theoretic possibility. The most powerful tools in set theory, such as forcing, ultrapowers and inner models, are most naturally understood as methods for building alternative set-theoretic universes, realising different mathematical truths. We have discovered an entire cosmos of alternative mathematical universes, related to each other as forcing extensions or through large cardinal embeddings in complex commutative diagrams, like the lines of a constellation in a dark night sky. The competing multiverse position takes these alternative universes to be fully as real as the cumulative universe on the universe view, and the debate on pluralism sets these two perspectives against each other. We may fruitfully consider the analogy with geometry, which for centuries was taken to be about the absolute concepts of point, line and space. The discovery of non-Euclidean geometry in the late nineteenth century was shocking, and the formerly crystalline concepts of geometry splintered into a multitude of non-Euclidean geometries, including spherical geometries, hyperbolic geometries and so on, with different geometrical truths and properties. Nevertheless, geometers today regard these alternative geometrical worlds to be fully as real and geometrically legitimate as classical Euclidean space, and one may find mathematical videos showing what it is like to wander around in certain hyperbolic spaces. Similarly, the multiverse position in set theory takes those alternative set-theoretical universes as fully real and set-theoretically legitimate.

3:AM: I noticed you’ve done some work on the theory of infinite utilitarianism. Can you give us some idea about that?

JDH: A simple extension of the theory of utilitarianism from finite worlds to the infinite might direct one to compare two worlds simply by computing the total sum of utility in each world, even if this should be infinite; but such an approach leads to some counterintuitive conclusions. For example, compare a first world with infinitely many people, each having happiness level 1, with a second world, in which we’ve improved each of their lives, so they now have happiness 2 each. The overall sum is the same infinity, but it seems that we might want strictly to prefer the second world over the first. The theory of infinite utilitarianism is about the various principles that we might appeal to in order to do so, and various researchers have proposed and defended a number of very specific principles. In joint work, Barbara Gail Montero and I have argued that a number of these proposals founder on a similar extension to the infinite of a cardinality principle that holds for finite sets but fails for infinite sets. For example, consider a strong version of the Pareto principle, asserting that if we are comparing two worlds with the same people, and everyone in the first world is at least as well off in the second, with at least one person becoming strictly better off, then the second world is strictly better than the first overall. This sounds good at first, but some examples may loosen that intuition. Suppose we have a soccer team with infinitely many players, some very good and some terrible, with their spectrum of abilities given by the integers: ⋯ -2 -1 0 1 2 ⋯ . Now suppose that they go through spring training, and each player improves by one unit. Has the team strictly improved? According to the strong Pareto principle, yes, but if one considers the overall spectrum of ability, it appears to be exactly the same as it was before, ⋯ -2 -1 0 1 2 ⋯, with the only difference being that each player has moved one place to the right, a difference that doesn’t seem to matter in term of the team’s ability. Montero and I argue that the intuition we have for the strong version of the Pareto principle is essentially similar to and ultimately as flawed as the naïve intuition that adding an element to a set always produces a set strictly larger in cardinality. This principle is true for finite sets, but false for infinite sets. A slightly weaker Pareto principle, which we believe is the correct principle, asserts that if every individual in one world is made at least as well off in another (with the same individuals), then the second world is at least as good overall as the first. The topic has numerous papers on these and similar questions, with some of the proposed collections of principles turning out to be subtly inconsistent, as well as dozens of fascinating thought experiments, which test our intuitions about the comparative value of worlds.

3:AM: And a very groovy paper you’ve just produced is about infinite chess. What is infinite chess? Have you proved that there can or can’t be check mate in such a game?

JDH: Last year when I was visiting at NYU, I put up on my office door in the philosophy department a poster of one of my infinite chess positions, a little puzzle, on which there gradually appeared scribbled comments and post-it notes from the graduate students and post-docs who proposed solutions. Infinite chess is chess played on an infinite chess board, a boundless plane tiled with alternating black and white squares on which the familiar chess pieces— kings, queens, rooks, bishops, knights and pawns — move about according to their usual movement rules, striving to place the opposing king in checkmate. Checkmate, when it occurs, does so after only finitely many moves, and infinitely long play counts as a draw. There is no standard starting position, but rather one considers the game beginning from a specified initial position, not necessarily finite. Although unfortunately we cannot sit down in a café for a game of infinite chess, it remains a game of the mind, and there are interesting game-theoretic questions about it remaining open. For example, it is not known whether there can be, even in principle, a computable procedure giving optimal play from any finite position of infinite chess. In ordinary finite 8 x 8 chess, in contrast, like any finite game, there is in principle a computable procedure for optimal play, simply because the entire game tree — the tree of all possible legal moves — although vast, is finite, and one may compute optimal play by recursion backwards from the finitely many positions where the game has been already won or drawn. So as our computers gain power, it is inevitable that they will be able to implement this procedure and when they do, computers will achieve absolutely perfect play in chess. Already computers can beat any human player essentially by searching huge parts of this game tree, which amounts to an approximation of this ideal algorithm.

In infinite chess, however, this game tree argument breaks down, because the tree is infinite and cannot be searched in finite time. And not only is the game tree infinite, but it is also can be infinitely branching, because queens, bishops and rooks may have the choice of infinitely many legal moves from a given position. Thus, we cannot hope even to search the game tree to finite depth. This observation had strongly suggested that the mate-in-n problem for finite positions in infinite chess the problem of determining whether a designated player can force checkmate from a given position in at most n moves — might not be computably decidable. Meanwhile, Brumleve, Schlicht and I proved that the mate-in-n problem of infinite chess actually is decidable. Our algorithm does not search the game tree, which as we’ve said is impossible, but rather it interprets the mate-in-n problem as an assertion in what we call the structure of chess, whose theory we proved is a regular language in the sense of finite automata theory and therefore decidable. The fact that checkmates, when they occur, do so after only finitely many moves makes infinite chess technically what is known as an open game and therefore subject to the theory of transfinite ordinal game values, a powerful theory that applies to any open game. In this theory, the transfinite ordinal value of a position is a kind of abstract measure of the distance of a position from a win for a designated player. A position has finite value n, for example, when the player can force checkmate in at most n moves. The position has value ω, for example, when any move by black leads to a mate-in-n position winning for white, but black may choose n as large as desired. Such transfinite values and higher occur in infinite chess, but it is totally open how large they may become. The omega one of chess is the supremum of the game values that arise. In our recent paper, Evans and Woodin and I prove that the following infinite position has value omega squared times four, with black to move, and we have other positions with value omega cubed and higher. We conjecture that the game values will go considerably higher. We had an idea for establishing this, but unfortunately, it didn’t quite fit into the two dimensions of ordinary infinite chess. But the idea does work, if you can believe it, in infinite 3D chess! The history of 3D chess, you may be surprised to learn, spans several centuries, going back at least to Kieseritzky’s Kubikschack in 1851, including Maack’s raumschach chess clubs in Hamburg from 1919, and running well into the twenty-third century, in light of the games played by Spock and Kirk on several Star Trek episodes. We may be the first, however, to have established nontrivial facts about the infinite version of 3D chess. What we proved is that every countable ordinal arises as a game value of an infinite position in infinite 3D chess, and thus the omega one of infinite 3D chess is true omega one, as large as it could possibly be.

3:AM: So can you introduce the lay folk to some of the really interesting ideas that you’re brooding about in the philosophy of maths? What are the cutting edge thoughts around and why are they significant? And are there some way out, weird calculations that would melt our brains?

JDH: One idea I am brooding on — I’m not sure it will melt anyone’s brain — is the question of whether we really do have an absolute notion of the finite, as many seem to say we do, for example, when describing the natural numbers as the set containing, 0, 1, 2, and so on. My question is whether that “and so on” is really as meaningful as some people take it to be. Mathematicians, of course, give some substance to the idea by proving that the natural numbers are categorical, in that there is one and only one structure satisfying the second-order Peano axioms, and this is the structure of the natural numbers. My objection to this explanation is that this second-order proof in effect establishes the uniqueness of the concept of finiteness by relying on the presumed absoluteness of our concept of set of natural numbers, which is surely a murkier realm in comparison. So how can people think this approach succeeds? Ultimately, I find myself increasingly led to the idea that there may be an undiscovered plurality of finiteness concepts, going along with the plurality of set concepts, that different mathematical universes may have incomparable concepts of the finite, each of them improved by a stronger concept of the finite. Indeed, I speculate that this kind of plurality is ultimately what underlies the pervasive logical independence we find in our theories as well as the pervasive phenomenon of computable undecidability. I await technological developments in set theory that will provide an arithmetic analogue to forcing, allowing us to modify the arithmetic of a model of set theory in a controlled way that does not seem to give preference to the legitimacy of one model over the other, just as forcing does in the higher-order realm.

3:AM: One thing that strikes me is that maths is dead important but the higher end of maths is largely inaccessible to ordinary folk like myself. However, it is this higher stuff where a lot of maths becomes both significant and really weird and exciting. I noticed that your intro to your paper ‘Set-Theoretic Geology’ had a very neat picture that helped guide a reader someway into what you were analysing, so do you think perhaps pictures are underused in making higher maths comprehensible to the folk? So is there any way that I could become maths literate without being able to do the calculations? Could there be a use for maths teaching for the non-specialist so the sorts of issues you are examining become more widely known about, in the way that science literacy might be promulgated?

JDH: Mathematics is a very tall subject, in that new knowledge often builds on earlier knowledge, and it can be difficult to understand or appreciate the new knowledge without mastering the old. Euclid famously told Ptolemy that “there is no royal road in geometry,” no shortcut for kings. Nevertheless, I also believe that mathematicians can often do a much better job of explaining their ideas, in particular, by making more room for metaphor and soft explanations, which help to explain the idea behind an argument. Such explanations are useful not only for beginners, but also help experts to organise their thoughts about a topic in a more enlightening and higher-level manner, allowing them to apply those ideas elsewhere. How frustrating it is to read an incomprehensible mathematical argument, which contains numerous details while omitting the most important part, a high-level description of the argument. I try in my own writing to explain my ideas on many levels, using pictures, metaphors or whatever I think might be helpful. I’ve realised in retrospect, however, that this has often caused me to introduce odd or even silly terminology, such as the lost-melody theorem, the hypnagogic digraph, and buttons and switches in the modal logic of forcing, to name a few. I am trying in each case to convey a particular idea as best I can, but does the silly terminology make me absurd? Probably, but if it helps people understand the idea, then so be it.

3:AM: I’ve noticed that you are the top-rated user on MathOverflow, the new online forum for mathematics questions and answers. What can you tell us about that?

JDH: MathOverflow is a new online forum for asking and answering research-level questions in mathematics, with dozens of new posts every day on diverse topics, including many on logic and foundations, including the philosophy of mathematics. The forum provides a vastly more focused manner for mathematicians to interact than was previously possible, connecting researchers who are interested in or knowledgeable about a particular topic, drawing from a large pool of users ranging from graduate students and post-docs up to senior faculty, including a surprising number of extremely prominent mathematicians. Faced with a puzzling mathematical issue, you can tap into this collective expertise simply by posting a question. In very short order, you will find that someone, somewhere in the world, who has thought deeply about that very issue, will post an expert reply. Indeed, you may receive several answers giving perspectives on your topic that hadn’t occurred to you. Young researchers can experiment with the ideas they are learning, by posting questions right at the boundary of what they understand. I have used MathOverflow not only in this ordinary way to learn a topic I was curious about, but also to confirm, for questions arising in my own work that I suspected were difficult, that they did not admit of an elementary solution I had missed. People now say that a problem is “MathOverflow-hard” — a pun on the terminology such as NP-hard from complexity theory — to mean that a problem was asked on MathOverflow, but not answered there, a rare occurrence indicating that a question is difficult. Part of the success of MathOverflow, in addition to efforts to maintain a high-level of discourse, is attributed simply to its manner of social design, using principles or even tricks of social engineering to motivate people to participate, and the software model, built by Stackexchange, seems to have hit upon some successful ideas. The result, though, is a slightly game-like nature for the forum, since contributors earn “reputation” points when other users vote up their contributions. This may sound silly, and some may find it off-putting, even if it does stimulate the competitive instincts of others, but the voting and particularly the sorting of answers by votes does seem effectively to communicate the community’s perspective on a post, because quality answers generally rise to the top, while junk answers inevitably sink to the bottom. So people are motivated to provide explanations that other users find valuable. Personally, I am engaged on MathOverflow because I find the mathematics there to be compelling. I was surprised to find such a strong interest in mathematical foundations among non-logicians there, with numerous questions about set theory and the philosophy of set theory coming from other parts of mathematics, and of course I was pleased to find that my explanations were appreciated. So, yes, I am the top-rated user there, and I can joke with my colleagues that at least in this sense I can claim to be the most “reputable” mathematician in the world. In any case, I’ve learned an enormous amount of mathematics there.

Meanwhile, there is also the companion site, Math.Stackexchange, which is open to lower level material. You can check out a question I asked there about the large numbers in what I call the googol-plex-bang-stack hierarchy and another concerning a homework assignment my fourth-grade son brought home from school. There are also an astounding number of fantastic mathematics blogs, at every level of expertise, many of them written by enthusiastic youngsters who take pains to explain an idea very well; search MathBlogging to find one to your taste. And please climb into Cantor’s Attic, a site I founded with Victoria Gitman, a Wikipedia-style compendium of information on all notions of infinity, large and small.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

E.J. Lowe interviewed by Richard Marshall.

E.J. Lowe is a frost-cool deep fry who goes to the heavy core of the metaphysical lodestone and thinks about kinds of being all the time by building a system in the old style in order to get a grip on the very nature of reality itself. He thinks metaphysics is a slow business but we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking slowness is stasis, doesn’t think that common sense is riddled with confusions but there are some inconsistencies in it, thinks ontologies are expensive and in-car/out-car ones are too cheap, thinks there’s a four category ontology, thinks Aristotle the king of the metaphysicians but prefers his own version of the ontological square, thinks hard about the nature of the laws of nature, thinks about universals and particulars, about powers and categories, can count tables but not red things, thinks empty sets can’t be empty sets, thinks he has hands, thinks freewill can’t be disproved by any empirical evidence, and thinks scientists should be more philosophical when entering important philosophical debates than they have tended to be recently. Which makes him hard-core.

3:AM: What made you become a philosopher? Were you always having these metaphysical thoughts even when young? Or did they just emerge?

EJ Lowe: As a schoolboy, I was extremely interested in science and mathematics, but especially in astronomy and cosmology. I had my own telescope – a 6-inch Newtonian reflector – of which I was inordinately proud and fond, although light pollution in my home town was so bad as to make it pretty useless for observing the stars. Cosmology was in an exciting state of turbulence in those days, with the rivalry between the now accepted ‘Big Bang’ theory and Fred Hoyle’s elegant theory of the continuous creation of matter and energy, according to which the universe, even as it continuously expands, remains spatiotemporally homogeneous on the large scale. I might even go so far as to say that Hoyle was my scientific ‘hero’ at that time. I went up to Cambridge University in 1968 – where Hoyle was Professor of Astronomy – to read Natural Sciences, with the hope of eventually getting into cosmology. But I found the first-year course dull and tedious, especially the experimental side of it, and also began to realise that I probably didn’t possess the necessary mathematical aptitude to be really successful as a theoretical physicist. So, after one year, I changed to History, and took a BA in that subject two years later (1971). I’d always been interested in history anyway, and soon discovered that I could concentrate a good deal on the history of political thought, which especially attracted me. This introduced me to early modern political philosophy, including the works of Locke, which soon led me on to early modern metaphysics and epistemology. However, this wasn’t what first acquainted me with philosophy. My eldest brother, who is 11 years older than me, took a degree in physics at Oxford and then went on to do the BPhil in philosophy, eventually becoming a lecturer in that subject in London for a while, so even as a young teenager I had a pretty good idea of what philosophy is. As a teenager, I started to try to work out a metaphysical system of my own, partly drawing on my (admittedly rather limited) understanding of developments in modern physics, especially the idea of symmetry and equivalence principles of the sort that lie at the heart of Einstein’s theories of relativity – which I tried my best to understand.

My idea was that one might hope to frame some very general equivalence principle which enabled one to see that all the great metaphysical systems are ultimately just different ways of formulating the same basic facts about the ultimate structure of reality, one implication of this being that no empirical test could possibly choose between them. This, I thought, fitted in well with Karl Popper’s idea that what distinguishes science from metaphysics is that scientific theories are empirically falsifiable whereas metaphysical theories are not – although this doesn’t mean that metaphysical theories are meaningless or worthless, indeed, quite the contrary, since they provide indispensable ‘framework’ principles for scientific theorising. Actually, I still believe something like this to be the case. Anyway, in time I began to realise that my early interest in cosmology was really an interest in fundamental metaphysics and ontology, and this is what eventually took me away from history and political philosophy to pure philosophy. After completing my BA degree, I wanted to switch to do a PhD in philosophy, but Cambridge wouldn’t let me do that, so I departed to Oxford to do the BPhil in philosophy and subsequently a DPhil. At that time, I concentrated in metaphysics and the philosophy of science, having Rom Harré as my BPhil dissertation supervisor and Simon Blackburn as my DPhil supervisor, with a thesis entitled ‘Induction and Causal Inference’ (1975). In that thesis, I criticised Hume’s account of induction and causation (while recognising that he espoused what later came to be known as a ‘sceptical realist’ view of causation and causal powers) and developed a theory of ampliative reasoning which appeals to our knowledge of causal powers, linking the notion of such powers with a ‘dispositional’ account of natural laws according to which such laws primarily concern natural kinds and only derivatively their particular instances (a view which resembles the Armstrong-Dretske-Tooley view of laws as involving universals rather than regularities amongst particulars, but also differs importantly from that view with regard to the type of universals involved). These ideas eventually developed into the view that I defended in my first book, Kinds of Being The foregoing is, in as short as space as possible, a summary of my philosophical development and education.
 
3:AM: Armstrong, van Inwagen and Lewis (and Lewis in particular I guess) kind of give the general options for contemporary metaphysics. Are you cutting free from these and setting out a new option? You think Lewis’s approach tends to be engaged in an exciting battle between revisionary and merely descriptive metaphysics, which is a thrill but may not help us understand better the nature of the world don’t you? Is serious metaphysics dull?

EJL: I have always thought that metaphysics needs to be tackled systematically, rather than piecemeal. I liken the task to that of putting together the pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle: it’s no use just trying to perfect many small but disconnected parts of the puzzle in the hope that these will eventually fit together, since it’s likely there are several different ways in which any small number of pieces will fit together, no more than one of which will be correct. Rather, you need to work simultaneously on the ‘big picture’ and on its many parts.

I don’t altogether accept P. F. Strawson’s distinction between ‘revisionary’ and ‘descriptive’ metaphysics, much though I admire his book Individuals, which was in fact one of the first serious books in metaphysics that I read, long before I became a student of philosophy. I do, however, follow Aristotle and Locke in taking it that ‘common sense’ is a reasonable – indeed, the only reasonable – starting point for philosophical thinking. But it is only a starting point, and some common sense ideas will inevitably have to be abandoned by the philosopher, since some of them, when pursued to their logical conclusions, give rise to puzzles and paradoxes, which it is the task of the philosopher to try to resolve – an idea, of course, that goes back at least as far as Socrates. The revisionary/descriptive distinction is best seen as marking the poles of a spectrum of positions, with the most sensible and defensible positions lying somewhere in the middle. Common sense cannot intelligibly be abandoned completely, but neither can it be defended from every charge of incoherence. The task of the philosopher is to strike the right balance between its rejection and its revision. Russell once said that common sense leads to science, and science shows common sense to be false. But that is too stark a judgement. Certainly, many common sense notions – for instance, those of so-called ‘folk physics’ – are shown to be false by modern science. But a physics which is so disconnected with common sense as to be nothing more than an abstract mathematical formalism can at best be of only instrumental value: it cannot help us to understand the fundamental nature of reality, which is the aspiration of metaphysics. In pursuing its task, metaphysics must take notice of developments in theoretical science, but should not be in servitude to them. It will need to deploy distinctive formal methods and tools of its own, but these too should not simply be carried over slavishly from logic and mathematics – for instance, in the shape of formal logic, set theory, and classical mereology – as though metaphysics were some kind of applied logic or mathematics. In my view, metaphysics, with ontology at its heart, is an autonomous and fundamental mode of inquiry, beholden neither to the empirical sciences nor to the a priori sciences of logic and mathematics. It really is, as Aristotle said, ‘first philosophy’, and as such an implicit pre-requisite for any more specific form of intellectual inquiry whatever. In that sense, I am not a ‘naturalistic’ metaphysician. But my kind of metaphysics is far from being ‘dull’, I would venture to say. It seeks to articulate a coherent system of ontological categories and a consistent account of the fundamental formal relations obtaining between entities belonging to these categories, in terms of which we may hope to understand the fundamental structure of reality as a whole. That is just about the most ambitious intellectual task that anyone could hope to undertake. And because it is so difficult, we should not be surprised that progress in it is slow – much slower than in theoretical physics or mathematics, for instance. We should not mistake its slowness for complete stasis. Genuine progress can be and has been made in metaphysics.  
 
3:AM: You say that common sense ontology is riddled with confusions – are these errors? If so, how come we manage to survive? Survival suggests either that they can’t be all that confused, or that common sense ontology isn’t that important. Both alternatives seem to be threats to the whole business of metaphysical examination of ontologies, especially revisionary metaphysics. What’s your push-back?

EJL: I’ve already implicitly answered this question. I don’t think that common sense ontology is ‘riddled’ with confusions, only that it harbours some inconsistencies which emerge in the form of various puzzles and paradoxes. These inconsistencies only manifest themselves when common sense notions are pushed to their limits, and that’s why common sense thinking serves us well enough for everyday purposes, or is ‘adaptive’, to use the jargon of evolutionary psychology. One task of philosophy in general and of metaphysics in particular is to tease out these hidden inconsistencies and consider how best to deal with them – either by replacing common sense notions with significantly different ones, or by revising common sense notions in certain ways. It is this process that eventually leads to the development of a comprehensive system of ontology, such as the one that I currently favour, the ‘four-category ontology’, as I call it, which has its historical roots in Aristotle’s early work, the Categories. A good example of the sort of puzzle or paradox that I have in mind is the ancient problem of the Ship of Theseus, which forces us to rethink certain aspects of our common sense understanding of the identity of material objects over time (their diachronic identity). Another equally ancient one is the problem of Dion and Theon (Theon being Dion except for, or ‘minus’, one of his feet, so that when Dion loses that foot he coincides with Theon, even though, it seems, Dion and Theon must remain numerically distinct). This problem forces us to rethink our understanding of the identity of material objects at a single time (their synchronic identity).
 
3:AM: I think we get a good handle on the way you come at metaphysics in your subtle argument against Hawthorne’s views about ‘parity’ and ‘plenitude lovers’ when discussing the in-car/out-car example of Eli Hirsch. You conclude that we shouldn’t be supplementing common sense ontology on the grounds of parity but instead ‘rather than either embrace and add to that ontology or simply reject it, we do better to reform or refine it.’ You worry that contemporary metaphysicians don’t handle common sense ontology carefully enough don’t you. You are kind of harsh: you say that if you’re a young metaphysician wanting to discover new kinds of objects you should retrain in physics! Could you explain why you disagree with the ‘plenitude lover’ and their notion of ‘parity’ – and just explain the Hirsch example which is a pretty cool and weird scenario?

EJL: The in-car/out-car example can be summarised this way. Consider your drive to work each morning. As we ordinarily think of it, you get into your car and drive it out of the garage. Here, a single object – your car – moves continuously across a borderline, marked by the door of your garage. But it seems that we might think of this situation differently, as follows. Inside your garage there is your ‘in-car’. As you drive out, this in-car shrinks until it eventually disappears, and at the same time another object, your ‘out-car’, grows outside your garage until it eventually reaches the same length that your in-car originally had. Here there are two adjacent objects, neither of which moves, but one grows as the other shrinks. (If you drive further than the door of your garage, the same process is repeated with a subsequent series of non-moving but alternately growing and shrinking objects.) The first way of thinking is the common sense way, but can we really charge the other way with being any less satisfactory as a way of thinking of the situation? Should we say that the two ways are just two of many ‘equivalent’ ways of thinking of the situation, no one of which should be privileged as being the ‘true’ way? My answers to these questions are ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ respectively. I think common sense is correct in supposing there to be objects which retain their identity through processes of movement across space – at least, if this is wrong, then it is only wrong for reasons to do with issues in fundamental physics. I don’t think that there are any such things as in-cars and out-cars. Just thinking about the example in isolation may not reveal any problem with the in-car/out-car way of describing the situation. But we have to remember that what we are looking for, as metaphysicians, is a comprehensive system of ontology, not just a piecemeal treatment of particular cases. To be consistent in the example under consideration, we have, for example, to apply the in-car/out-car mode of description also to you, the driver. We shall have to speak of ‘you’ not in terms of your being a single person who moves from being inside to being outside your garage, but in terms of a shrinking ‘in-you’ and a growing ‘out-you’, which are numerically distinct objects. So, suppose you start having a thought as you go through the door of your garage (as we would ordinarily describe it). On the in-you/out-you model, we’ll have to say that in-you begins the thought and out-you completes it. So one and the same thought must be attributed to two distinct subjects, and this appears to make no sense.

As I’ve just suggested, there might turn out to be reasons based in fundamental physics for thinking that the common sense notion of objects moving through space is problematic – for instance, that we do better to think of ‘movement’ as really consisting in variations of mass/energy density across tracts of spacetime. An analogy would be with the way in which we now understand that sea-waves don’t literally move in from the sea towards the beach, but consist in the regular rising and falling of the seawater’s height above the seabed, giving the illusion of real movement. But there’s no reason to abandon the common sense notion of moving objects, or to regard it as merely ‘conventional’, on purely philosophical grounds. It is deeply entrenched in common sense ontology, which is largely very successful in this regard, and it’s very difficult to see how it could be rejected without rendering other aspects of that ontology – such as its inclusion of ourselves as objects which both move and think – incoherent. So it should only be rejected as a last resort. The in-car/out-car fantasy might sound exotic and intriguing, but this is a cheap way to try to install a radically new ontology. Fundamental physics, with its invocation of such strange entities as superstrings, which have a genuinely explanatory role to play in physical science, is the place to look for interesting new and non-commonsensical types of entity. Such entities can genuinely earn their keep, but not so entities such as in-cars and out-cars. In fact, the latter are really just parasitic upon common-sense ontology, as their very names suggest: the only way to introduce them into philosophical discourse is by way of redescribing a common-sense scenario, such as your morning drive to work, in a bizarre new fashion. Our understanding of the in-car/out-car description of the scenario would be impossible without this reliance upon our prior common sense description of it. That’s not the case with entities like superstrings, where even the ‘string’ metaphor is not essential to understanding their nature.
 
3:AM: You’ve written a couple of books about Locke. Do you find Locke’s metaphysics of more than historical interest? And is he a good example of the way you think contemporary metaphysicians should operate?

EJL: It was more by accident than by design that I wrote the first of these books on Locke. A former student of mine – Tim Crane, in fact – asked me if I’d write it for the new ‘Guidebook’ series that Routledge was starting, in the mid-1990s. I lectured on modern philosophy for many years, and maybe Tim enjoyed my lectures on Locke – I do hope so! Anyway, I was happy to write on Locke, both because he is, like Aristotle, a philosopher with a healthy regard for common sense, combined with a respect for developments in empirical and theoretical science, and because I felt, and still feel, that Locke is often traduced by his commentators, who are too often willing to attribute indefensible and even downright silly views to him. Moreover, I share Locke’s general opinion about many key matters in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind and action. For instance, like him, I defend volitionism in the philosophy of action. So, in that first book, Locke on Human Understanding, I tried to offer sympathetic but faithful interpretations of Locke’s views and defences of modern versions of some of them. But one deficiency of Locke’s overall approach, I feel, is that it is not sufficiently systematic – it is too piecemeal. In this respect, as well as others, I consider Aristotle to be the vastly superior philosopher, indeed as being unsurpassed.
 
3:AM: You have defended what you call a ‘four-category ontology’, something that has an ancestry that traces back to Aristotle. It’s often useful to know what a philosopher sees as rival positions that require seeing off. So before telling us about this ontology, what are the rival positions that you are facing up to and why do you find them inadequate?

EJL: I am first and foremost opposed to those metaphysicians who see no need at all to frame a system of ontological categories (categories of being). I describe them as espousing a ‘no category ontology’. Typically, these philosophers think that we can just talk indiscriminately of ‘entities’ or ‘things’, distinguishing between them merely in terms of different descriptive predicates whose application is determined purely empirically. This is the ontology of Lewis Carroll’s walrus and the carpenter, who spoke of many things – of ships and shoes and sealing wax, cabbages and kings. In logico-philosophical terms, an ‘entity’, for such a theorist, is just any possible value of a bound variable, in line with W. V. Quine’s famous dictum, ‘to be is to be the value of a (bound) variable’. Even Quine himself didn’t really espouse a no category ontology, but rather one containing two basic categories: spacetime regions and sets (although at one point he thought that the regions could be reduced to sets). Such an ontology clearly has very little in common with common-sense ontology and that, fundamentally, is why I am not at all sympathetic to it. I don’t believe, for instance, that it can find a satisfactory way to accommodate ourselves, as thinking subjects, amongst the furniture of reality.

Other fashionable modern systems of categorial ontology include D. M. Armstrong’s ontology of states of affairs, with particulars and universals as their ‘constituents’, and the pure ‘trope’ ontology, which is a one-category ontology of property-instances. With regard to states of affairs, I find difficulty in understanding their supposedly ‘non-mereological’ mode of composition (as, notoriously, did David Lewis). With regard to pure trope ontology, I find difficulty in understanding how tropes are supposed to be individuated – that is, what determines their identity conditions. I think much better of the two-category ontology of C. B. Martin and John Heil, which includes not only tropes (or ‘modes’) but also, as an irreducible type of entity, objects or ‘individual substances’, conceived as bearers of such tropes. Where I disagree with this system is with its rejection of universals of any type, which I, like Armstrong, regard as indispensable for a satisfactory account of natural laws.
 
3:AM: So you defend your ‘ontological square’. How does this work?

EJL: The term ‘ontological square’ is not one that I coined myself, but I am very happy to use it. The square is a diagram depicting the formal ontological relationships between the entities in my four fundamental ontological categories: the categories of object (or individual substance), (substantial) kind, attribute, and mode. The bottom left corner of the square is occupied by objects, the bottom right by modes, the top left by kinds, and the top right by attributes. Kinds and attributes are universals, whereas objects and modes are particulars. Accordingly, objects instantiate (are particular instances of) kinds and modes instantiate (are particular instances of) attributes, so each vertical side of the square consists of an upward-directed arrow denoting the formal ontological relation of instantiation. Next, attributes and modes are properties, whereas objects and kinds are property-bearers, i.e. are entities which are characterized by properties. Accordingly, each horizontal side of the square consists of a right-to-left-directed arrow denoting the formal ontological relation of characterisation. Finally, there is a diagonal arrow leading from the bottom left (object) corner to the top right (attribute) corner, denoting the formal ontological relation of exemplification.

Kinds characterisation Attributes

instantiation exemplification instantiation

Objects characterisation Modes

My version of the ontological square is based on a four-fold distinction that Aristotle introduces very early in the Categories, utilising the notions of ‘being in a subject’ and ‘being said of a subject’. According to Aristotle, individual substances (my ‘objects’) are neither in a subject nor said of a subject, substantial kinds (in his terms, species and genera) are said of but not in a subject, attributes (as I call them) are both in a subject and said of a subject, and modes (individual accidents or particularised properties) are in a subject but not said of a subject. Naturally, I prefer my version to Aristotle’s, but the difference between them is not enormous. Both his and my version map rather nicely on to syntactical features of sentences in everyday natural language, and this is part of what makes them align with common-sense thinking. For instance, there is a clear difference between saying something like ‘Rover is a dog’, in which we assign Rover, a particular animal, to a certain natural kind or species, and saying something like ‘Rover is brown’, in which we attribute a certain property or quality to Rover. Modern first-order predicate logic completely obliterates this distinction, representing both sentences as having the logical form ‘Fa’. My view is that our formal logic should perspicuously reflect our fundamental categorial ontology, so that modern first-order predicate logic is, in my view, deficient and in need of revision in this respect. Too many modern metaphysicians uncritically accept the formalism of modern first-order predicate logic and allow it to influence their thoughts about ontology. Ontology should drive formal logic, not the reverse, in my opinion.
 
3:AM: This is a system that you think handles laws of nature and the power-categorical distinction better than rivals. Starting with laws of nature, how does your theory conceive of laws of nature and what does it do better than Armstrong’s view, which I guess is the most powerful contemporary rival view?

EJL: My view about laws of nature can be explained fairly simply in terms of the ontological square. There is an arrow denoting characterisation going from the top right (attribute) corner of the square to the top left (kind) corner. In other words, attributes (which are one type of universal) are said to characterise kinds (which are another type of universal). Sentences expressing such facts have the form ‘Ks are F’ – for example, ‘Dogs are carnivorous’ and ‘Planets move in elliptical orbits’. Linguists call such sentences ‘generics’. ‘Dogs are carnivorous’ doesn’t mean the same as ‘All dogs are carnivorous’, which attributes the property of being carnivorous to each and every individual dog. The truth of ‘Dogs are carnivorous’ is consistent with the truth of ‘Rover is a dog and Rover is not carnivorous’, because Rover might be an abnormal dog. Armstrong, like me, thinks that natural laws involve universals rather than particulars, but he recognises no distinction between substantial universals (kinds) and attributes. Thus, he takes the basic form of a natural law, in the simplest sort of case, to be ‘N(F, G)’, where F and G are first-order attributes (that is, attributes of particulars) and N is a second-order relational universal of ‘necessitation’, holding between first-order attributes. So, for example, he would regard Kepler’s first law of planetary motion, which I earlier expressed in the form ‘Planets move in elliptical orbits’, as having the logical form ‘Being a planet necessitates moving in an elliptical orbit’. My way of expressing the law is clearly much more in tune with everyday natural language and avoids any appeal to a ‘second-order’ relational universal. Armstrong’s account is particularly vulnerable to what is known as ‘the inference problem’, posed by critics such as Bas van Fraassen. According to Armstrong, ‘N(F, G)’ entails ‘For all x, if Fx then Gx’ (where the variable ‘x’ ranges over particulars), but it’s not clear what licenses this inference, which doesn’t appear to be formally valid. My account doesn’t have this problem because, according to it, ‘Planets move in elliptical orbits’ – for instance – doesn’t entail ‘Every planet is moving in an elliptical orbit’ (which is clearly not strictly true, given the gravitational interference between the planets and other disturbing factors) but only ‘Every planet is disposed to move in an elliptical orbit’, in which only a disposition or tendency so to move is ascribed to all individual planets: and my theory of dispositions or powers explains why this is so and why the corresponding inference is formally valid. (The technical details are rather too complex to be described here, but can be found in the last few chapters of my book More Kinds of Being; I also say more about these matters in my newest book, Forms of Thought.)

Colin McGinn interviewed by Richard Marshall.

Colin McGinn has no time for interviews because he’s too busy writing his books, practicing his backhand and doing the philosophical stuff – but even so he took time out for a swift fly-past for the benefit of 3:AM Magazine. He’s funny, caustic and a guy who reckons he has the measure of what needs to be said and done. His blog is an evergreen provocation and he’s not out to make friends but to keep the controversies hot. Best thing to do is to read the damn books I guess. His is the kick-ass obloquy done in the high-handed Swiftian style. Raw!

3:AM: You have lectured on the inner philosopher in us all. Were you even as a child someone listening to those philosophical questions?

Colin McGinn: I am still a child, and was an old man then. And yes, I was studying philosophy in the womb (see Descartes on the innateness of metaphysical ideas).

3:AM: You are a famous exponent of mysterianism, ‘a philosophy proposing that certain problems will never be explained or at the least cannot be explained by the human mind at its current evolutionary stage. The problem most often referred to is the hard problem of consciousness.’ I remember reading your book The Mysterious Flame when it was published in 1999 and being impressed by a really smart philosopher ‘fessing up to the futilitarian idea that something was just too hard to solve. But I wonder whether you still think that we’ll never understand the nature of consciousness. Do you think there’ll never be a time when we get machines smarter than us? So I gues my general question is about philosophers changing their minds. Is there anything that could make you change your mind?

CM: I think we know the nature of consciousness better than anything else. What we don’t know is how it springs bright-eyed from the heaving of matter. Many machines are already smarter than us—at dumb things. My mind could easily be changed: by seeing consciousness leaking from the atomic nucleus, say. I also think physics is a hotbed of mystery (see my book Basic Structures of Reality).

3:AM: One of the cool things in your autobiography was the detail about you playing endless games of pushball. Your approach to philosophy seems very enamored with an American, hip sense of style. Philosophy in the UK seemed drab by contrast. Is that right?

CM: I don’t know what pushball is and have never knowingly played it. I have played quite a good deal of pinball, as well as old video games like Galaga and Defender. My sense of style is not American-inspired: it is a combination of Steve Marriott and Vladimir Nabokov. I never found philosophy in the UK drab, just underpaid.

3:AM: You’re an iconoclast. You write things that cause a stir and shake up establishment figures. You seem to kick up. This seemed to me to be the heart of your attack on Honderich in a book review a few years ago that got everyone very worked up. Honderich seemed to be a snob and elitist who was happy to be super critical of others but didn’t approve of someone like you. Am I right to read this into your attitude to some of your peers. I recall in your autobiography that you had a kind of unhappy crossing with Michael Dummett which again seemd like a story of a grand big ‘un being impossibly rude to a young turk.

CM: I am a moral and intellectual elitist of the most extreme and repellent kind. I simply thought Honderich’s book was terrible. Dummett was just being Dummett. I think young people should be encouraged.

3:AM: Recent work in philosophy by, say, experimemtal philosophers like Josh Knobe, seem to be much less inclined to elitism and far more constructively engaged in dialogic philosophical conversation. Do you think that philosophy is less the preserve of dull elitism than it was when you began?

CM: Philosophy now is horribly democratic. I used to be a psychologist, so I know about experiments; people who do “ex-phi” don’t seem to. I don’t mind surveying people’s conceptual opinions, but I find the hostility to traditional philosophy ludicrous and pernicious (I’ve written about this in Truth By Analysis).

3:AM: You wrote about philosophy and sport in your book ‘Sport: Art of Living’. You once compared Obama and Bush in terms of both sporting and linguistic prowess. Can you say more about your philosophical interest in sport, an unusual topic for philosophical reflection, and how such reflection helps us think about the world?

CM: I am an athlete by nature—it is in my blood. I spent a lot of yesterday in the howling wind practicing my backhand slice with a ball machine. I would rather throw a couch than sit on it. Philosophically, games and sport are the meaning of life (see Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper).

3:AM: You are a serious writer about literature. You have written about Shakespeare as a philosopher. Can you say something about him, about the problem of evil in his plays, his epistemology, ethics, happiness and the meaning of life?

CM: Shakespeare stands above and below human life. As to evil and what not, I suggest reading my book Shakespeare’s Philosophy (I write books so as not to have to answer questions).

3:AM: Can you say something about how studying Shakespeare has impacted on your philosophical outlook? Are there positions you argue now that you doubt you would have argued had you not read Shakespeare?

CM: Shakespeare has had no impact on my philosophical life, except to make it seem less worthwhile.

3:AM: You argue that philosophy is generally an atheistic discipline these days. Yet you argue that ‘tolerating somebody else’s beliefs is not failing to critisise them. It’s not persecuting them for having those beliefs. That is absolutely important. You should not prosecute people for their beliefs. It doesn’t mean that you can’t criticize their beliefs.’ Given that most people now live in hugely diverse and pluralistic social groups, this is a subtle and civilized position that many people find hard to understand and accept. It’s something that I think Brian Leiter has discussed in terms of religious belief. Can you say more about why you think this tolerance is of such fundamental importance?

CM: Tolerance is about freedom of thought and speech. Such freedom is the most precious thing in the world.

3:AM: One thing you say about philosophy is that to be philosophically smart you need to get to grips with some foundational stuff first before moving on to more esoteric subjects like whether God exists. So you argue that before considering Theism we need to know what knowledge is, what logical reasoning is and what truth is and so on. To some this might seem the wrong way round. They will say that we start with the esoteric question and we work out answers to what you’re calling the basic questions through thinking about those? So how do you answer that sort of thought?

CM: I have nothing to say about this question. I would be boring even myself. (All right: a bit of both.)

3:AM: Last year you published your book on disgust, ‘ The Meaning Of Disgust.’ The problem of disgust as you address it arises because of its nature as a sui generis aversive emotion ‘importantly different from its aversive cousins’. It is the uniqueness that makes it philosophically interesting to you. It raises the question: ‘ Why should we be so averse to what is not intrinsically harmful to us?’ So can you tell us how you go about answering this question.

CM: My book on disgust is about the nature of that emotion, as it now exists, not about its evolutionary origins. Similarly one might write a book about knowledge and not bother too much with how knowledge evolved millions of years ago. As it happens, I have recently completed a book about human evolution and the hand. Both types of investigation are worthwhile.

3:AM: Josh Knobe and those in the experimental philosophy movement may argue that analysis without experimental data is blind. They might object that your approach is too rooted in armchair investigation. What would you say to this criticism?

CM: Conceptual analysis is not about concepts—it is about the world. We can analyze the world conceptually from both a first-person and a third-person viewpoint. I bang on about this in Truth By Analysis.

3:AM: You wrote about imagination in your 2004 book ‘Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning’ that you had decided to write on imagination because ‘contemporary philosophy of mind contains little directly on the imagination.’ You make the distinction between images and percepts. Can you say what this distinction is and why it is crucial for your overall understanding of imagination.

CM: Imagination is a big subject. It is becoming hip. It is fairly elitist. Images differ from perceptions in many ways; I seem to recall that my book relentlessly lists these ways. I was rehashing Sartre and Wittgenstein.

3:AM: Finally, you have written in your book ‘Ethics, Evil and Fiction’ that fiction can enrich the study of ethics. Can you say something about this and tell us which books you have found enlightening and which authors you’d recommend for readers here at 3:AM?

CM: Fiction makes evil bearable (herein lies its danger). I recommend my self-published novel Bad Patches to readers of 3:AM (available from Amazon for $3.99!). It is about the evil of banality.

3:AM: And finally finally, could you give us a top five list of philosophy books you’d recommend to the smart readers of 3:AM (other than yours of course, which they’ll already be reading!)?

CM: I never read philosophy books anymore unless at the point of a gun. I recently read Richard Dawkins’s The Ancestor’s Tale, which I found very informative. I also read Tivadar Soros’ powerfully understated Masquerade about a very real evil (one of his sons gave it to me). I think The Cleveland Show is the funniest thing on television, closely followed by Downton Abbey.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Visual artist & writer Matias Viegener interviewed by Maxi Kim.

3:AM: With the rise of e-book and print-on-demand, it appears that we are at the dusk of the paperback revolution (1932-).  In fact, your new book 2500 Random Things About Me Too was wholly written on Facebook. You recently said on Huffington Post that, “While technology makes it easier than ever to get a book into print, getting it in people’s hands and getting them to sit still to read is harder than ever.” My understanding is that in February 2009 you logged into Facebook and wrote a short list of random things about yourself in response to a friend’s meme, “25 Random Things About Me.” From there things kind of snowballed. Can you tell us a bit about the origins of this project? 

Matias Viegener: I suppose it began like a lot of my work, in resistance. I hated the idea at first. I didn’t like the meme, didn’t ask for it, tried to avoid it, and finally challenged myself to do it. Then I did a few more. Then a few things I liked started to emerge: the quixotic, doomed appeal of randomness, the plodding delight of systematicity or constraint. Vanessa Place says something like: don’t like it, do it again, and then another time; and then do it again, do it over and over until something happens. At least I think she says that. Or if she doesn’t, she could. Vanessa in fact proposed the 100 list mark, one hundred being a nice decimalised number, an honest dollar, so to speak. About a third of the way through I was exhilarated because I found a way to work polyphonically and a way to turn my inability to stick to a topic to my advantage. And not only could I converse with myself, but I had a troupe of faithful readers whose comments resonated and worked their way back into the following lists. Since we couldn’t include the comments without everyone’s permission, we decided not to try. I think the book reflects the dialogic nature of the project but perhaps not its full energy. Of course some comments fell flat or missed the point, but even these had an effect, if only to illustrate the way our misreadings fulfill a hidden purpose. There are no misreadings in that sense, only readings whose reference we can’t apprehend.

3:AM: Your academic criticism has appeared in the queer theory issue of Critical Quarterly, Queer Looks: Lesbian & Gay Experimental Media, and Camp Grounds: Gay & Lesbian Style. Do you have any strong feelings about the state of today’s queer theory? Specifically, I’d be curious to know how you feel about Gaga Feminism author J. Jack Halberstam and Halberstam’s negative stance on gay marriage?

MV: I think it’s tempting to hold on to the idea of the homosexual as an outlaw figure, but for the most part gay people are completely bourgeois. There’s nothing oppositional about them, nothing revolutionary. We hold on to this idealised queer criminal as some form of alterity, and I understand why. Sometimes I’d like to be Jean Genet, but I’m not. That’s why I guess figures like John Cage and Joe Brainard appeal to me. They were gay nerds, ambling between insiderhood and true geekiness. That said, the exception to my tirade is the queer kid. I think it’s hell for a lot of young gay people, probably even more now than when I was a kid. Fags were like elves or ghosts then, not characters on reality-TV shows. I think a lot of the protection I got was because the people around me were too naive to believe it was possible for a kid to be gay. So where the politics and the social focus needs to go is to those kids, not to marriage rights. Oh and queer theory. I love Jack Halberstam but I’d call what he does queer polemics, not queer theory, whose heyday (though not relevance) has passed. It’s the presence of things like gay marriage (and the rise of queer studies and the gay bourgeoisie behind it) that even lay the groundwork for a queer to rant against gay marriage. I myself don’t want marriage, don’t need it (keep the government out of my body please), but could hardly care to make myself the measure of queer politics, much like Cage and Brainard in that respect. Why stand in the way of the (apparent) gay masses cheerfully lined up for their marriage licenses? Each of us deserves the fetishes we choose.

3:AM: What was the thinking behind transforming the original online texts of 2500 Random Things About Me Too into an actual book? What was it like working with Les Figues on transferring the e-lists onto the printed page?

MV: The text is largely the same as the online version, but I’d say a third of the sentences were edited for consistent punctuation. Who knew that consistency (the hobgoblin of little minds) really does matter? What I learned was that stylistic inconsistency distracts the reader, even if subliminally, from the content. Another way of saying this is that I discovered in the editing that what I was saying, the ideas especially, were more important than how they originally came out. I saw certain through-lines that needed to be cleared, and also red herrings in a sense, that needed, I dunno, a little sauce. So ironically in order to make editing disappear, I had to focus on it even more. I tinkered a lot with word order, believe it or not, and also a little with the numeration and order — I decided that in the online version I had made some mistakes. Much of what I wrote on Facebook was in the context of (an extended) conversation, and some of it felt forced as a book manuscript. I had to make a certain set of edits to evoke the quality of the conversation in what is, in its final version, a monologue. A book is monological no matter how dialogical its generation. Many of the edits amped up or undercut this monologue to heighten the animated quality the writing had when posted on Facebook. Also as I was generating the work, I had two constraints of a sort: to be random and to not repeat myself, but also to not re-read what I’d written (because that’s too deliberate, and diminishes the potential of randomness). In editing the book I saw that of course I did repeat myself, not verbatim, but that like everyone I have a repertoire of images, words, memories and ideas. So part of the intention to be random has to accommodate our tendency to fall into ruts. When you read it as a book, rather than as a daily posting, you really understand this. The book is less about randomness than about human nature, about our weakness, and our feeble dependence on narrative. I didn’t want to appear to be expending too much effort in being random. If I exerted myself unduly, the enterprise would be compromised. Randomness and intention are opposites and to make them snuggle together you need some slight of hand.

3:AM: As I was reading your book it dawned on me that Facebook and Twitter have become so nearly naturalised for my students that, to them, social media hardly seem to have been designed or to have a history. They are quite intrigued by your book, they really like the way the book emerged originally as a non-book. However, are there any traps of writing in this “random” style? You’ve said that trying to be random is not easy: “As soon as you’re focused on it, you’re deliberate, not random. John Cage moved from rolling dice to getting programmers to generate random sequences for him.” Your quote reminded me of how Philip K. Dick resorted to using the I Ching to write his novel The Man in the High Castle. Any literary advice or words of wisdom for this generation of emerging writers?

MV: Facebook and Twitter et al haven’t just wrought great social change, but also a transformation in language and social relations. Our visual literacy accelerated first and fastest, but I think now it is text’s turn. People argue that visual literacy has displaced textual literary, but new technologies have opened up a new kind of writing, and certainly a new kind of reading, in some ways a better kind: a whole generation of readers is learning to scrutinise the 140 character tweet, for example. A whole set of close readers who see language more as a veil than a signboard. Add this to the short attention spans and extreme condensation of these forms and you have a cultural shift. Many writers I know react against it, longing for long, discursive styles of the last two centuries. I love these too, but my impulse is to move with this flow, not against it. Part of me feels also feels resistant to what you’d call the bloggish voice, but the other part recognizes not only that others are drawn to it, but that I am too. It’s related to my understanding of gossip, and seeing its social meaning. The content of gossip is filled with ethical (and even aesthetic?) peril, but its role is essential. Gossip is primal, related to the way mammals groom each other’s fur. We’re not just pulling out the nits (which we could do to ourselves), we’re forging primary bonds.

I see gossip as a deep form of grooming in language. Losing your lice is less ethically fraught than gossip, but they’re both forms of exchange in which the benefit of the things exchanged, bugs or trivia, is less important than the effect: the production of intimacy. Part of the internet’s intimate power arises through its cold and depersonalised structure. Social media has cracked something open: a way for writers to speak and be heard outside the usual, policed distributions of the literary. Tweeting and texting may not have led to better writing, but I’d argue that they’ve led to better close readings. Look at the way a cryptic tweet gets scrutinised. For many people today, reading is a kind of code-breaking. I’m fascinated by the powers of condensation, quotation, and metaphor, for which social media has tremendous potential. If an emerging writer wanted a form of realism that reflected our “lived” experiences, it seems to me that working in and through these new modalities has more potential that the narrative novel, essentially a 19th century invention. Vernacular forms always seem depleted and ubiquitous, so they most often get ignored, but it’s both of these qualities that make them appealing. I love bad tweets, for example, especially illiterate celebrity tweets. If you compare them to the slickness of today’s user-generated YouTube videos, you’d see a lot more rawness and immediacy. I see what I’m doing as being in a line from the origin of realism, from when ordinary life was not something that literature could depict, to modernism, when aspects of the unconscious, stream of consciousness, allegory and popular culture, kitsch or mass media started pulling at the fabric of that depiction. On the other hand it’s also a break from realism as a direct discourse. My text, probably in part because of was generated online, is indirect, and often tends to litotes or understatement, if as only be both being indirect and restrained can anything actually be expressed. The written style of narrative realism was modeled as much by speech as literary writing. Speech dominates our everyday world, but the internet, Twitter and SMSs have supplanted speech as the way we communicate. I’m all for textuality.

3:AM: I loved how you intertwined both the political and personal in your lists. Strangely enough, your lists reminded me of artist Ai Weiwei‘s tweets. I’d be curious to know, who do you follow on Twitter? Which bloggers/Facebook friends inspire you?

MV: I don’t follow anyone right now, and in fact I’m trying to escape the internet. I want to live in the world! I feel like I have less and less of an inner life, one based in presence, observation and attentiveness. I’ve spend most of my free time over the last 15 years online in some form, and I notice that even my dreams have a quality like webpages: things move fast, and everything comes in image and text, in pages even. (No doubt some of what we once thought of as a dream-like quality came from cinema, and before that, theater, but still). Lately I feel like I’m dead, or some kind of ghost in the world: I can hear and I can make contact, but can’t really touch anything. In a permissive culture in which all dissent is so easily commodified you need to find a new ways of speaking politically. Breaking formal rules used to be one, but I don’t think is anymore. Also, I’m kind of sorry for Ai Weiwei, but I think he does create his own problems. He’s quite a strategist. What saves him from being another ambitious artist for me is his sense of humor: look at the caption on his self portrait: 草泥马挡中央, whose words, “grass mud horse covering the middle” sound almost the same in Chinese as “fuck your mother, the Communist Party Central Committee.” Talk about the personal and the political!

3:AM: You’ve been published in Artforum, Art Issues, The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, and X-tra, for whom you’ve written regularly on visual art. In 2500 Random Things About Me Too readers gain a sense of the artistic and literary milieu that you move in and out of. What initially attracted you to the art world? What would you like to finally see in a museum that you have yet to see?

MV: I’d like to see writing examined with as much intensity as visual art. I’d like a cultural revolution in which we take writers and artists and put them to work together on farms and make them talk to each other. Once they’ve talked for 10,000 hours (the threshold for expertise, or the transformation from incapacity to mastery), what might happen? Right now there are thick walls between these two fiefdoms. Sometimes I feel like serf, wandering from one gated city to another. The fields are cold and wet, and there’s nothing to eat, but still we whisper about the revolution. What came first for me, the literary or the art world? Like many people I know, I take flight for one mostly to escape the other. Every haven is potentially a hell of its own though, and maybe the suffering is productive. It’s certainly vivid, which is why everyone reads Dante’s Inferno, but not the Paradiso. I’ve been lucky to have a career in both art and writing. For one thing, there’s a carryover, where I escape some modal confines of writing by pulling in ideas from visual art, and vice-versa. What irks me sometimes in art is the tyranny of the visual and the way that so much contemporary art only converses with or comments on other contemporary art — its self-referentiality. A lot of writing I see doesn’t interrogate its textual status at all, and that frustrates me too. Exceptions abound of course, but I try to work between these poles.

3:AM: What struck me, at the time, about your project was the buzz generated by the people who read your daily lists; your friends even came to anticipate the comments generated by your lists. As you point out, “It’s exciting to get daily feedback, but the truly revolutionary thing was that the lists slowly became an extended conversation.” You recently had a book launch event with writer Chris Kraus at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. How has the reception been thus far? How do you think this “extended conversation” will morph and change as your project is now principally in the world as a hard copy?

MV: The reception has been positive, some of it glowing in fact, especially from writers whose opinions I value most. But it yes, it lost the energy it had online. I think that energy had something to do with reader’s responses coming in every day, the quality of conversation. I’ve been thinking a lot about what to work on next. The temptation is to repeat myself, with some kind of clever variation. For a while I was working on 2500 Random Things About You, all of the text appropriated from Facebook updates, following a procedure as with the original 2500, but it was terrible, truly banal. To be a true conceptual writer you have to embrace banality, but I can’t put my heart into it. I need a reference point outside a constraint or device, and not just a conceptual goal. Overall things often seem heavy-handed or ham-fisted to me.

Part of my desire to escape social media and the internet is driven by the desire to escape humans. By making everything in the universe about us we’ve made an inhuman world for ourselves. There’s an illusion that conceptual writing somehow removes us from humanism, while I think it’s the most humanistic of all enterprises, rendered fashionable by its nihilistic and clinical veneer. My current work is on plants, animals and objects — the world without us. There’s a great nonfiction book that describes how traces of the human would disappear over time should we all finally destroy ourselves. I read it years ago and it stays with me in a comforting, almost Buddhist way. I’m collaborating with artist Susan Silton on a chapbook related to her whistling women performances; Dodie Bellamy did the first one. My text is about birds and their whistles, especially these two parrots I know, and how their use of sound actually causes us to imitate them. It might not look like it on the surface, but in my head it’s a logical step from 2500 Random Things About Me, Too.

3:AM: For myself, what made your lists especially addictive was all of the French theory-adjacent art school gossip. In particular, I’m thinking about your entries on the historiographer Sande Cohen and the Lacanian Slavoj Zizek. Your book takes it all on: philosophy, identity politics, literary conventions, semiotics, the (non)linearity of time and memory, etc, etc. How right would it be to read your work as an extension of Barthes’? Specifically, 2500 Random Things About Me Too as interrogating ways of reading, like negative habits the modern reader brings into experiencing a text?

MV: Post-stucturalist theory infected me at an early age, and I was lucky to have Sylvère Lotringer as my first nurse-practitioner. It’s fair enough to say that it informs everything I do. There began my Twilight/theory saga. I think that finally what pulled me out was the AIDS crisis, and a sense that these sparkling analytical tools were actually a distraction to taking real political action. I got politicised. Freud entered my life in form of a three year psychoanalysis. Academics like Sande Cohen showed me the dangers of French theory aka continental philosophy as tool of manipulation and control: theory as a blunt object rather than a surgeon’s scalpel. The collapse of my enchantment with theory led to a pretty poisonous fallout. But like religion, or anything you learn when you’re young and credulous, my formation in critical theory comes back in endlessly surprising symptoms. I’ll never be cured.

3:AM: I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Kathy Acker in this interview. As a close friend and literary executor to the writer Kathy Acker, you have written and lectured extensively on her work, you even teach a class on her at the California Institute of the Arts. You write about Kathy in 2500 Random Things About Me Too. What’s your biggest pet peeve concerning readers or fans of Kathy Acker? Can you tell us an anecdote about Kathy Acker that you haven’t written about? Or perhaps expand on one of the Kathy anecdotes that goes beyond the hard tattooed image of her?

MV: I think I put most of my Kathy Acker anecdotes in the book! I was surprised, actually, how much she came into the text, but some kind of triangulation got formed between her death, my mother’s (who died 18 months late) and my dog’s, who was dying as I was writing. I think in the end it became a kind of Trauerarbeit. People often notice that after you experience one significant death, all deaths start to connect to each other in some way. Kathy taught me about death. A great gift, to be there with her while she was dying. I took care of her in a way, but it was’t that hard because she wanted a minimum of fuss. What she craved was a sense of connectedness, someone to tie her to the world. She was weaker and weaker, and for the last weeks we had different conversations: telegraphic, laconic, but every word counted. Kathy never wasted time, and she lived by her principles to the end. Death is bigger than our theoretical or linguistic capacities to contain it. It has a terrible gravity, and swallows up whatever is nearby. I can’t tell you any reason that Kathy Acker, my mother, and my dog Peggy would become linked in a text other than that they all died, and I witnessed it. Any effort I could make to be random would never escape that: it bends my light. There are slight overlaps like gender, and they fact that both women knew and loved my dog, but in the end the book reckons with the unrepresentable, not what is known. So maybe this brings me right back around to Kathy despite myself. Our last conversations were really about the unknown, about death, but they were always in the form of allegories or dreams. She couldn’t say she was dying, so everything happened in fragments or between the lines.

3:AM: Are there any other social media projects in the works? What’s next?

MV: My escape from social media at the moment is into something even more sinister: surveillance technology. I got a consumer-grade drone for an art project and on my first outing, it failed, crashed and was lost, my project a failure, or so I thought. Even the video footage got messed up, and I was completely terrorised by the whole project. It’s haunted my dreams for six weeks: my desire to see and my guilt about it; my fear of being arrested (long story); the looming political reality of this apocalyptic technology I accessed through an adolescent’s toy; my determination to be omniscient, and the way that the all-seeing slides metonymically into the place of all-knowing, the way that visibility dominates and structures us perhaps even more than language. So I’m writing in the frenzy of the visible: seeing-as-knowing, and controlling everything.

This text will be part of a monograph series edited by artist and writer Nicholas Grider, Public Access.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Maxi Kim co-edited Stewart Home’s newest anti-novel Mandy, Charlie & Mary Jane and is now working on a documentary about the cultural worker Norman Klein and his 900-plus page novel.

Virginia Held interviewed by Richard Marshall.

Virginia Held is the philosopher of care ethics which she thinks is a feminist ethics that preserves the persuasive aspects of kantian, utilitarian and virtue ethics but is better. She thinks the strength of her ethical position is that it is based on experience and that it should be equally considered from the point of view of the recipient as well as the provider and it implies a lot of liberal values. She thinks all the time about the nature of care relations, meeting the needs of others, and how paying attention to these things has radical transformational implications. She thinks that its hard to know which are the right questions to be asking but easy to see that neoconservatives have been wrong on all foreign policy since Vietnam and that the US is more deluded than bewildered these days. This all makes her a deep-fried and funky feminist philosojive-sister.

3:AM: What made you become a philosopher? Has it lived up to expectations so far?

Virginia Held: I had intended to be an architect, but in my first course in philosophy in college, I fell in love with philosophy. By the time I graduated, however, I had travelled in Europe and become directly aware of the horrors of war, and I became disillusioned with philosophy. It was not addressing the problems that really mattered, and it seemed to me to be an intellectual luxury. After a year of graduate work in Europe, I left philosophy for a decade and worked for a political magazine in NYC. Another reason was that my husband was a graduate student and one of us needed to earn some money. But then I had a serious falling out with the editor of the magazine over US foreign policy, and the intellectual independence of academic life looked extremely attractive, so I went back to philosophy. At that time, jobs for women were very rare, but I was lucky. And yes, it has lived up to expectations in the sense that the field has changed and it is now possible to deal with what seem to me the most important questions, and I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been able to earn an adequate income doing something I am really interested in doing.

3:AM: You’ve developed an ethical theory around ‘care.’ You see this as an alternative to the dominant ethical theories of the last couple of centuries. It’s important to you that it isn’t an ethics to be added on to Kantianism or utilitarianism or virtue ethics. Can you say something about why it is so important that a care ethics is not an adjunct but is a fresh start? The Kantian Christine Korsgaard has placed reciprocity and human relations at the heart of Kantianism. Onora O’Neill has argued that justice and care are not opposed. In the light of these views, would you still defend the break, or would you be happier to see it as a continuation?

VH: I don’t find it satisfactory merely to add some considerations of care to the traditional moral theories for reasons similar to why it is not enough to simply insert women into the traditional structures of society and politics built on gender domination. Feminists should understand that the structures themselves have to change. The history of ethics shows it to be a very biased enterprise. Very roughly, what men have done in public life has been deemed important and relevant to moral theory, and what women have done in the household has been considered irrelevant. I think it plausible to see Kantian ethics and utilitarianism as expansions to the whole of morality of what can be thought appropriate for law and for public policy.

I have come to see, in contrast, caring relations as the wider network, and the ethics of care as the comprehensive morality, within which we should develop legal and political institutions. Caring relations should be guided by the ethics of care, which we can best understand and which is most applicable in contexts of families and friendship. But we can and should also have weaker forms of caring relations with all persons, and within these, the more limited institutions of law should be guided, roughly, by Kantian norms, and the more limited political institutions by utilitarian ones. Yes I see the legal and political as importantly different, and both as significantly different from the contexts of family and friendship. This is a very oversimplified statement of a complex position but I try to clarify and delineate these matters in my written work.

3:AM: So ‘care’ is at the heart of this new ethic but it isn’t to replace justice. So how do you get from care to justice in your system? Do we end up losing the common use of ‘care’ for a more term of art, technical use, as is the wont with philosophers? And isn’t that a cheat?

VH: Yes, various Kantians are trying to acknowledge the concerns of care, and various philosophers interested in the ethics of care are trying to combine it with Kantian ethics. I think the ethics of care has the resources to be an alternative moral theory that can include persuasive aspects of Kantian ethics and also of utilitarianism and virtue theory. It’s nevertheless a feminist ethics that includes the goal of overcoming gender domination, in our thinking as well as our institutions. And I see it as the more comprehensive view. Korsgaard and O’Neill are still Kantians, though more persuasive ones than some traditional Kantians. I think ethics should start with a vast amount of experience (the experience of caring and being cared for) overlooked by traditional moral theories, and see how the many important and valid concerns of other moral theories can be brought into care ethics. I think it is a strength of care ethics that it is based on experience. It is experience which everyone has had: no one would have survived without enormous amounts of care, in childhood at least. Most women, and increasingly men, have also had a great deal of experience providing care, especially for children.

3:AM: So ‘care’ is at the heart of this new ethic but it isn’t to replace justice. So how do you get from care to justice in your system? Do we end up losing the common use of ‘care’ for a more term of art, technical use, as is the wont with philosophers? And isn’t that a cheat?

VH: The values incorporated into this care can be reflected on. Existing practices of care can be evaluated, and reformed as appropriate, for instance so that parenting is shared and not primarily the responsibility of women. Care should always be considered as much from the point of view of the recipient as of the provider, and care that is domineering or demeaning should be reformed. Rationalistic moral theory purports to be universal but is less so than it imagines. Another advantage of the ethics of care is that it has no need to appeal to religion, which can be divisive, whereas the experience of care really is universal. Of course care ethics builds on previous moral theory. The sentimentalist tradition and Hume are important for the ethics of care. I’m very sympathetic to aspects of Kantian ethics, for instance that actions should be judged by the intentions with which we act. But the ethics of care can include this, as it evaluates what our actions express as well as being concerned with the effectiveness and results of our caring labours. The centrality of respect for persons in Kantian ethics is appealing, but can too easily be combined with notions of negative freedom such that we respect people by just leaving them alone. Kant’s imperfect duties seem to me weak motivation for actually meeting people’s needs. The concerns of care are much more compelling.

I think caring relations should form the wider network within which we should develop various more limited ties that give priority to justice. But care is more fundamental. We need to care enough about distant others to care that their rights are respected. Justice should be the primary value for interactions that are primarily legal ones, but many relations should not be interpreted as primarily legal. Our relations with our children, for instance, are primarily caring ones and only legal in a minimal sense. Justice, or fairness, should not be absent in these relations, but it doesn’t have priority here.

3:AM: You place your ethics in a traditional liberal setting. Why do you argue that it is a better approach than its rivals, not just in personal morality but also on wider political and cultural issues? You even see it as playing a decisive role in global politics, so that for example the current crisis in the Eurozone would benefit from a dose of care. Is that right?

VH: Rather than saying that care should be developed in a liberal setting, I think I would say that care implies a lot of liberal values. Good care requires respect for others, including for their individuality and often developing freedom. Yes, the ethics of care is better than other moral theories at handling many global problems, such as the vast migrations of care workers that are occurring. And as I have recently argued in an article in ‘Ethics and Global Politics’, I think it is a better foundation for international law than are the traditional moral and political theories with their Hobbesian assumptions about states. The ethics of care has fundamental implications for economic activity – that it ought to be structured and engaged in to promote the well-being of all, not primarily the economic interests of those with economic power. And it implies that markets and market values should be appropriately limited, and that market values should not be increasingly the dominant values, as in the U.S., in areas where other values should have priority, such as in childcare, healthcare, education, and the production of culture.

3:AM: You note that virtue ethics seems at times to have some things in common with care but nevertheless think care is a superior approach? Can you say something about this and how that particular contrast works?

VH: Virtue ethics seems to me focused on individuals and their dispositions, their virtuous characters etc. Care ethics focuses instead on caring relations, and evaluates relations, such as whether they are trusting, characterised by mutuality, etc. The activity of care involves meeting the needs of another, with sensitivity and responsiveness. This is not altruism because the situation is not a zero-sum contest between individuals but the building of a relation good for both or all persons involved. When parents care for children, they benefit together. When members of a community care for one another, all can gain.

3:AM: Now this ethics of care could well be seen as a ‘feminist ethic’ and you’re well known for writing about that. But I started asking questions like I did just to see if gender doesn’t actually need to be a starting point for understanding the theory. So I guess I’m wondering whether we need feminism to get the theory, or is the point that in enacting the theory of care we’re implicitly engaged in feminism? How important is it that this is positioned as an explicitly feminism position?

VH: Historically, it was through paying attention, often for the first time, to caring activities, especially mothering, that the ethics of care was developed. This was experience of which women had a great deal and most men rather little. As men assume more responsibility for caring for children and engage more equally in other caring activities, I think they are quite capable of appreciating the values of care. But I think it would be a mistake to forget the feminist origins of these ways of thinking, or to overlook the feminist goals embedded in them. The implications of the ethics of care for transformations of society are very dramatic. Imagine, as a thought experiment, a society that really did make childcare of central importance, and economic or military power of more marginal interest, or that paid kindergarten teachers more than bank executives.

3:AM: You approach feminism to remind us about the pernicious omissions and commissions that make traditional liberal theories of ethics fatally flawed. You want to get us to see how a sexist gaze holds our institutions in their thrall. You wrote Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics back in 1993. Have things changed in the intervening time to an extent that you’d reject some of the things you set out there, or add stuff?

VH: In Feminist Morality I was just beginning to work out what I thought about the ethics of care. In The Ethics of Care, and in quite a few subsequent papers, I’ve come to have what I think is a much better picture of it as an alternative moral approach.

3:AM: I guess what might seem strange to some is that you continue to work in the liberal tradition even though liberal individialism seems anathema to you. Why not go Marxist or anarchist?

VH: I’ve been very influenced by Marxism in the past. I’ve always found anarchism too unrealistic about human beings. I don’t think I see liberal individualism as anathema. I think it’s often appropriate for limited domains of human activity and interactions, like legal ones. What I object to is the prevalent way it is seen as applicable everywhere and to everything, or as the way to think about all sorts of domains where it doesn’t belong, or only belongs in very limited ways.

3:AM: We’re in a continuous state of war and terrorism is the justification for lots of it. You’ve written extensively on political violence and I’m struck that you say it’s not just the answers that are hard but knowing which are the right questions to ask about this subject. Why do you think it is so hard, and what questions are beginning to feel like the ones we should be asking? I’m interested in your idea of wide and narrow definitions of ‘terrorism’ guiding our thinking. You prefer a wide definition don’t you? Why is this a superior approach?

VH: It’s often hard to know if we are asking the right questions in a lot of domains, but perhaps especially so with violence and terrorism because so much of the discussion has been distorted by strongly identifying with those on “our side.” Frequently, in violent conflicts, both sides think that violence is being used against them and that they themselves are using violence to defend themselves. They use the weapons available. The definitions are often chosen so that the conclusion can be reached that what “we” do is to justifiably defend ourselves, and what “they” do is engage in terrorism.

3:AM: I guess the ethics of care guides much of your thinking here: what kinds of answers have you to these questions? How different would the political landscape of terrorism look if your ideas were taken into the policy arena do you think?

VH: Care encourages us to try to understand the feelings and thinking of our opponents as well as of our friends, of those our actions harm as well as those they protect. Violence is most obviously antithetical to care. As I have put it: violence destroys what care takes pains to create. With an outlook guided by care we will be steadily reminded that our goal must be to reduce the use of violence. Care does not, in my view, imply pacifism. It can recognise that some violence will be with us for the foreseeable future, and it can see some genuinely defensive uses of violence as justified, but it will work tirelessly and effectively to greatly reduce the uses of violence in multiple areas of life. It will point out that using violence to maintain a status quo needs moral justification as much as does using violence to change it.

3:AM: You worried in your early book Rights and Goods: Justifying Social Action about clever casuists constructing ethical arguments to defend whatever they liked. But you defended the idea of an applied ethics. I’d have thought these days it’s been difficult to get ethics into any policy discourse. Economics since the Reaganite/Thatcherite eighties has been part of a neo-liberalism of performativity and managerialism marketisation that has successfully ousted moral talk about fairness and justice, hasn’t it? So how do you see the place of ethics in policy discourses at the moment?

VH: I think it is actually easier now than it used to be to raise moral questions, to frame an issue as a moral one: what ought we to do about climate change, health care, education, and so on. Moral positions are not so often thought to be nothing but mere personal preferences. I agree that in the wider culture, “the market” has taken on mythical proportions as it is imagined to be capable of achieving best outcomes without requiring that we bring in moral considerations. But I think, or at least hope, that this very ideological and distorted way of thinking has about reached its limits and more plausible ways of understanding the issues will prevail. Certainly among thinking persons there is a willingness to ask about the morality of for-profit schools and hospitals and the buying and selling of human organs. And, for good reason, the satisfactoriness of a moral theory has seldom been judged by its immediate influence on policy.

3:AM: In her recent ‘Tanner Lectures’ the economist Diane Coyle argued that we need to bring back ethical discourse into economic theory and that economists were at fault for mistaking market mechanisms for distributing ideas and materials and describing the processes of making stuff with markets as arbiters of value. And also of associating markets with a business lobby. This seems to be close to what you are arguing for. What sort of approach does your care ethics take in economics?

VH: I agree that we need to bring ethical discourse into economic theory, in the sense that economic processes ought to be evaluated morally. Many questions in economics are straightforwardly empirical rather than normative or moral, but we ought to ask routinely about the moral justifiability of economic arrangements and activities. I have argued in The Ethics of Care that education, healthcare, childcare, and the production of culture, ought not to be in the market, where economic gain has the highest priority. Yes they should value efficiency, and competition can often be helpful, but other values than profit should be given priority.

3:AM: An alternative to your care ethics position is the ‘civic friendship’ ethic proposed by Sibyl Schwarzenbach. Why is your approach preferable?

VH: I think care is a more fundamental and a wider concept than friendship. No one can exist without having been cared for. So I would see civic friendship as a more limited kind of caring relation, relevant especially to political life. It’s closer to the social contract model of agreements between equals voluntarily entered into, a model that plays such a central and often misleading role in political theory and then is expanded, often wrongly in my view, to the whole of moral theory. Care is more of a contrast and I think there are good reasons to make this contrast for understanding human relations and the moral questions involved. Caring relations are often unchosen and between those of very unequal power, and lots of other human relations than family ones are more like this than like voluntary contracts between equals, so it’s illuminating to explore this contrast even if we want to conclude by supporting social contract models for legal matters.

3:AM: Although a top philosopher yourself, the position of women in academic philosophy is pretty bad, although improving by all accounts. So what’s your thinking about this? Why is philosophy so much worse than other humanities subjects which you’d think shared a profile? What can be done?

VH: As you say, the position of women in academic philosophy is improving. Some parts of philosophy are more like mathematics and science than like other humanities, so perhaps these are relevant comparisons. Progress has been slow, but to someone my age it has been significant.

3:AM: In 1962 you wrote a report on the ethical attitudes in the USA. 40 years on, is the US still bewildered? And are you optimistic or pessimistic about the way things are going?

VH: More deluded than bewildered, perhaps. People are less hesitant to take moral positions or positions that might be considered based on ideology, but I think the positions taken are often wrong. I have been appalled by the success of the imperialism of the market, with market takeovers of all sorts of activities where market values are not the right ones to be dominant. And I find the corporate control of culture very depressing. And the neoconservative influence on foreign policy has been almost entirely a bad influence.

The neoconservatives have been wrong about just about every foreign policy issue from Vietnam to Iraq, and yet they continue to have a thoroughly outsize influence. So my optimism and pessimism vary. When I read that as many people in the U.S. believe in creationism as in evolution, and that the figures are the same for college students, or when I hear about how many people in this country have been misled into doubting that climate change is a problem, it’s very depressing. But then I watch Stephen Colbert puncturing such delusions, and that he can appear on television night after night, with his extraordinary cleverness and effective wit, and actually be a commercial success doing so, restores my sense that there’s hope. And if I reflect on the progress that women, and gays, have made in my lifetime, I am sometimes cautiously optimistic as the diplomats may say.

3:AM: And finally, for all us feminists here at 3:AM Magazine, which five books (other than your own which we’ll all be dashing away to read straight after this) would you recommend to give us deeper insights?

VH: I spend more time reading the New York Times than I wish I did, but I find it so hard not to! All my life I have been especially attracted to art museums, so I like going to exhibitions at the Met and elsewhere. I’d like to read more novels but I rarely do. If I’m not working on care I’m apt to be trying to read up on international law or global theories of justice or some other topic I plan to write some essays on.

Five books I’d recommend to understand how the ethics of care developed and where it may be going are:
Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace

Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care

Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education

Engster, The Heart of Justice: A Political Theory of Caring

Fiona Robinson, The Ethics of Care: A Feminist Approach to Human Security.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Lisa Downing interviewed by Richard Marshall.

Lisa Downing gives us the deep scoobies about the problematic relationship between the aesthetical and the ethical, about Derrida, Levinas, Lacan and Foucault, feminism, queer theory, pornography, and post-modernism. She is intrigued by film director Patrice Leconte and the birth of necrophilia and other perversion-types in French literature of the nineteenth century. She gets jiggy about the death-drive and its importance to ‘shadow feminism,’ and the various images of Catherine Deneuve. She traces the way ‘queer’ has become a badge of resistence as she worries about the dangers of a Western supremacist discourse. Her new book is about murderers and how the idea that they are ‘exceptional figures’ has a deeply conservative function. All in all, this is one hell of a turgentimous blast.

3:AM: In Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters, you and Libby Saxton set out an approach to film analysis that introduces an ethical perspective developed from a postmodern theory challenging a dominant aesthetic theory largely formed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy. Is it fair to say that a critique of Kant, Schiller and Hegel informs much of your critical work, (if not all of it) and if so, can you outline what elements of their beliefs are you challenging?

Lisa Downing: The problematic relationship between the aesthetic and the ethical in the contexts of cinema production and spectatorship is one of the central concerns of Film and Ethics. While acknowledging analogies between strands of pre-structuralist film criticism and Kant’s account of aesthetic experience as conducive to moral awareness, the book takes issue with a Kantian view of ethical subjectivity as rational, centred and autonomous, arguing that this is challenged by filmic investigations of ethical encounters. We harness the insights of thinkers such as Derrida, Levinas, Lacan, and Foucault, whose work constitutes a challenge to a classical Enlightenment view of aesthetics as sublime, or beyond ethical scrutiny, and who critique the dialectical model assumed to underpin both relationality and reason.

As to whether such concerns inform my critical work as a whole, it is certainly the case that I always attempt to challenge and upend discourses that appear to be disinterestedly describing the world, but that are in fact wholly grounded in historically and culturally specific hegemonic modes of thought. In fact, I return to Kant again in my most recent book, on the construction of the figure of the murderer. Kant argued that, where nature could be considered beautiful in her acts of destruction, human violence appeared instead as monstrous. However, a misreading of Kant in Romantic philosophy led to the idealization of the murderer as a sublime genius that has colored constructions of that criminal figure ever since. So perhaps an awareness of the problems resulting from such Enlightenment thinking does, at some level, shape my work as a whole.

3:AM: Your postmodernist aesthetics approaches film using the theories of Emmanual Levinas, late Derrida and the ethical dimensions of Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonialism and queer history. Before discussing the “ethical turn” which your approach seems to embed, can you say how Levinas and Derrida and Lacan in the guise of Zizek are helpful in discussing film as you do?

LD: Libby Saxton and I were working in adjacent offices at Queen Mary, University of London in the early 2000s, and we were both interested in the broad idea of “film and ethics”, but we were approaching it from different philosophical – and, I think, personal – perspectives. And that led to some fascinating conversations that resulted in the book.

Where Libby engages specifically in all her work with those philosophies that foreground responsibility for the other, coming out of a Judaeo-Christian tradition (especially Levinas and Derrida), I am more interested in, and wanted to move the debate on to, the ethics of the self (via poststructural psychoanalysis and also Foucault). I wanted to see what it means to think about taking responsibility for one’s own desires and choosing to foreground desire as an ethical principle. I also wanted to find ways of asking what the limits of agency are for subjectivities that are not unmarked or hegemonic. Much ethical writing ignores the fact that one might be – in gendered, ethnic, sexual, class-bound, or (dis)able(d) terms – the presumed “other” of Western discourse. What does ethics mean if we don’t assume that the “I” is the fictional, unmarked, would-be neutral subject?

In short, Libby and I agreed that any discussion of the ethical with regard to spectacle has to be also political – to engage with social power. Political applications of Lacanian theory, such as those produced by Zizek and Zupancic, that take desire as a political category, but refuse to subject it to normalizing energies were useful, as was Foucault’s work on surveillance and the “docile body”, in helping me to formulate politicized responses to questions of viewers’ desires when confronted with ethically ambivalent spectacles – especially if the spectator is not assumed to be a normative “I”.

3:AM: Can you say what is meant by the ethical turn in postmodernity’s aesthetics? Is this in some peculiar way a rather conservative move? By this I mean that although postmodernists like Danto would say that the identity of art lay in the theory that inspired it, or George Dickie would say that it lay in the institutions that support it or Noel Carroll would say that it lay in the cultural traditions that support it wouldn’t they all have agreed that art was an autonomous realm. Surely this was one of the key results of the rejection of the German rational aesthetic movement of the eighteenth century that culminated (and terminated) with Lessing. Doesn’t assimilating the ethical with the moral fatally threaten this?

LD: The “turn to ethics” describes a current in poststructuralist criticism that is perhaps more strongly associated with literature and textuality than with art or the image. It is characterized by a rejection of the study of cultural products as self-reflexive and hermetic (the principles of structuralism). It re-figures writing and reading experiences as encounters with otherness, demanding a response that is ethical as well as emotional or intellectual. In a sense, then, Libby Saxton and I are expanding the scope of this debate by examining the possibilities of its application within the realm of film.

Throughout that book we insist upon the disconnect between morality and ethics, and foreground, as I have explained above, a concept of the “ethico-political”. I think, actually, that Foucault’s late work on ethics is useful here. He distinguishes, doesn’t he, those cultural and epistemic contexts in which “code” predominates from those characterized by “ethics”. The former presupposes moral edicts to which one must adhere, while the latter places responsibility for “good conduct” on the subject’s own negotiation of acceptable mores. If we abstract those models from an idea of civic organization and relocate them in the service of critical strategies, I would say I am very much more interested in ethics than in code/ morality. I think it’s in this way that one avoids the conservatism inherent in “the moral”.

3:AM: Isn’t there a contradiction in using both Zizek and Levinas, in that Levinas is all about responsibility to the other in any encounter, whereas Zizek (and Lacan) is all about denying any responsibility to anyone else in that encounter? I think some commentators have considered you as a reader of Levinas who reads against the grain. Is this right? Could you say more about your reading of Levinas?

LD: As I said above, it was a deliberate strategy to explore so-called ethics of otherness alongside ethics of the self, and to let apparently contradictory perspectives sit alongside each other, remaining in tension, rather than try artificially to integrate them. One of the reasons for this was precisely to avoid the conservatism of didactic or moralistic discourse. The book offers a range of ethically-inflected reflections on spectacle and spectatorship, rather than a single manifesto on “how to look”.

We decided that Libby would write the chapter on Levinasian ethics in the co-authored book. Any reading of Levinas alongside film inevitably demands a reading against the grain, given Levinas’s suspicion of the aesthetic and the visual realms as potentially violent. In her chapter on Levinas, I think Libby manages brilliantly to keep in productive tension Levinas’s resistance to the image with his suggestive and perhaps contradictory notion that ethics must be understood as an “optics”, a distinctly visual metaphor.

You’re right that in my writing about Levinas elsewhere, such as in the Film-Philosophy special issue on Levinas and film edited by Sarah Cooper, I have tended to read him deliberately against the grain or even to “pervert” him a little bit. This is partly because I think Levinas produces a theory that, if taken at its word and read faithfully, cannot be applied either to cultural/ critical products, or to human relationships.

“Absolute respect for irreducible otherness” suggests precisely, when literally interpreted, a sort of non-relationality, since any approach to the Other in Levinas’s terms can be construed as violence. The ethical-emotional world he describes is a fascinating one which, to me, suggests a lot of fragile human subjects suspended in space, each in their own hermetic bubble, absolutely unable to touch the other, all the while being impelled to be responsible for him or for her. It’s a beautiful schema, but it is hard to see what one can do with it. And I think it’s designed precisely as a thought experiment, not a workable ethical theory. It’s also designed, of course, to expose and critique the normativity and symbolic violence of phenomenology, in which the “other” becomes a mere object of “my” perception. It is ironic to me that those working in queer theory and critical psychology in recent decades have flocked to phenomenology as if it’s a radical new theory and consummately ethical. I feel a very strong urge to tell everyone in those fields to read some Levinas in order to relativize the insights of e.g. Husserl or Merleau-Ponty. And I think it’s there that Levinas is most valuable: in showing the relative and flawed nature of other would-be ethical discourses.

3:AM: In Foreclosed Encounters you consider how your approach might help a feminist response to pornography. Can you say something about this?

LD: This is an issue I’ve written about quite a lot. It’s an issue about which I am uneasy, and with regard to which I keep changing my mind. It’s a very fraught area since debate in feminist philosophy and politics on this topic is so extremely polarized between those pro-pornography, sex-positive arguments and the anti-pornography radical feminist ones. I reject the “either-or” absolutism of the two strands of thought, because I think each proceeds from false premises.

The liberal feminist, pro-porn position ignores valid critiques of the “liberating” value of sexual expression and representation, such as those that a Foucauldian perspective can lend us. The radical position, by contrast, seems lacking in nuance, in that it does not differentiate between contexts in which pornography may be produced and consumed, and it assumes that all pornography has only one, fixed meaning. Increasingly, however, I have some sympathy for the latter position, because I don’t believe that power operates wholly outside of hierarchized, oppressive systems (even though Foucault shows us that it can), and I broadly accept the idea of patriarchy as a descriptor for the organization of power relations, in gendered terms, in modern and even postmodern culture.

What I tried to do in Film and Ethics, is to argue that the excessive, frenzied focus on pornography qua category of representation may in fact, paradoxically, distract attention away from a clear analysis of the workings of power with regard to the regulation of sexuality. For example, the possession of so-called “extreme images” (BDSM images, simulated scenes of erotic death) is criminalized in UK law. Focusing on the danger of the category “pornography” in this case entails ignoring the ways in which certain subjects (BDSM practitioners, “perverts”) are being marginalized and, indeed, criminalized, while the vanilla heterosexual mainstream is ignored or even exculpated. For me, legal, hegemonic, heterosexual commercial pornography is much more ethically pernicious than niche kink porn, as it reifies and falsifies, by means of endless repetition, ideas of “normal” male and female sexuality, that are made in the context of a patriarchal and capitalistic society and reflect its fantasies and beliefs.

3:AM: Foucault is another figure who figures large in your work, especially in terms of an ethics of Eros. Foucault “re-eroticized the activity of the philosophical or critical thought for our times.” Can you say how Foucault’s work, in particular his History of Sexuality and its influence on the development of Queer Theory, involves consideration of the ethical implications for considering the power relations implicit in cinematic viewing? Again, he seems to a figure deeply opposed to the psychoanalytical model of desire that we find in Lacan and Zizek and someone whose theory you take to have ethical undertones. Do you see Foucault as, in respect of ethics, a figure close to Levinas, in particular in respect of the divinity of the other in his History of Madness, but also in his rejection of humanist conceptions of ethics, (“I think there are more secrets, more possible freedoms, and more inventions in our future than we can imagine in humanism”) and in his rejection, as with Badiou, of an ethics that is constructed through contrasts with others such as the pervert, the criminal and so on?

LD: I think there are definitely more resonances between Levinas and Foucault than are commonly perceived. Crucially, both refuse dialectical thinking, Levinas by insisting on the non-dialectical relation between two entities irreducible to each other (“infinity”, rather than “totality”), and Foucault by putting forward an idea of ethical transgression, or a limit experience outside of a dialectic, as “non-positive affirmation”.

I included a chapter on Foucauldian perspectives in Film and Ethics since, despite Foucault’s primary concern with the order of discourse rather than the visual, his understanding of the workings of power as panoptical and multi-directional seems to me to be crucial to ethical debate and a very suggestive way of thinking about surveillance and looking that are implicated in cinema. Moreover, I don’t know what a truly ethico-political theory without a concept of power would look like, and to this extent, Levinas’s more metaphysical ethical model lacks something, for me at least, that Foucault’s analysis of power relations can provide.

In my Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault, I focus more closely on how his work in the modes of genealogy and problematisation have given rise to some of the insights of queer theory that I consider properly ethical, including, as you posit in your question, his demonstration of how culturally reviled “others” (the homosexual, the pervert, the criminal) have been constructed by modern forms of individualizing and normalizing power. In seeking to question the ontology of identity, and locate identity-formation instead in specific discursive-historical contexts, Foucault enables us to understand how power is at the heart of the very mechanism of othering.

3:AM: You have written about French film director Patrice Leconte. You devote a chapter to discussing his films from this postmodern ethical-aesthetics perspective don’t you? I guess many of us are pretty ignorant about this director who seems to be a fascinating figure, happy to make popular comedy as well as cutting edge art films, critical of French film snobbery and generally somewhat destabilizing. Can you say something by way of an introduction and say what you find interesting about this figure?

LD: I wrote a director study of Leconte for Manchester University Press’s French Film Director series in 2004, and reprised elements of the argument made in that book in the chapter of Film and Ethics to which you refer. Leconte is, as you say, an intriguing figure, a chameleon of a director, who has made films in numerous different modes and genres, and whose work has often received a rather unfavorable critical response in France, though a few of his works – such as Monsieur Hire (1989), Ridicule (1996), and La Veuve de St Pierre (2000) – have been judged to pass the arbitrary “art film” test by the French critical institution.

My book on Leconte was very much an exercise in showing how any cultural product (regardless of its “brow-elevation level”) can be productively read in dialogue with questions that are central to philosophical enquiry, and can illuminate them. I find in Leconte’s cinema many of the same concerns that underpin recent debates in critical theory regarding identity, gender, power, and ethics. The method I employ resembles Zizek’s aim of finding in Hollywood cinema a “phenomenology of the Lacanian spirit, its appearing for the common consciousness”. I am doing likewise with continental thought and European cinema.

Also, to some extent, my reading of Leconte pre-echoes and resonates with very recently published work on the idea of queer failure by Judith Jack Halberstam. There is a vulnerability in the portrayals of masculinity in some of Leconte’s films, for example in his depiction of fragile, ageing, unattractive masculinity in a film like Tandem (1987) or L’homme du train (2002), that distinguishes his work from a mode of cinema-making that glamorizes its subject matter and shores up ideals of heterosexual masculinity. There’s something potentially queer in Leconte’s self-deprecating portrayal of the male, which is paralleled by his own ambivalent, fractured relationship with traditional notions of success. (It is indicative that his autobiography is titled Je suis un imposteur/ “I am an imposter”.)

3:AM: One of the received views about Leconte that you challenge is that he is fetishistic and misogynist. You disagree don’t you and think he’s more commenting on than endorsing these things?

LD: I think Leconte is certainly cleverer than some critics have given him credit for, and that, when he is at his best, there is something strategically hesitant, self-critical, and reflexive in the way that looking is carried out and encouraged in some of his films. This is especially true of Monsieur Hire, which I would describe as a study of the mechanics of voyeurism, rather than a voyeuristic film. Leconte uses the camera critically in this work to expose the power of surveillance and the multiple means by which the social demarcation of non-normative individuals is achieved. While I do have some reservations about the quality of some of Leconte’s films, I continue to think that Monsieur Hire is a brilliantly executed – and genuinely ethically insightful – film.

3:AM: You wrote about necrophilia in nineteenth century literature as a manifestation of extreme desire. [You suggest that it was a symptom and pervasive fantasy of modern subjectivity, a model of desire that conflicts with conventions of Freudianism, of nineteenth century literary scholarship and feminist critiques of a masculine morbidity.] Can you say something about this and its significance for understanding sexuality and gender in nineteenth-century France?

LD: That first book started life as my doctoral thesis. I noticed an inordinate amount of eroticized and aesthetic morbid subject matter in nineteenth-century literature and European art, and I was aware from my reading of historical tracts of sexology and alienism that the diagnostic category of “necrophilia” – along with other perversion-types – came into being at roughly the time that these creative works were being produced. (The term was coined by the Belgian alienist Joseph Guislain in 1850.)

The book has a tripartite argument. Firstly it shows the interrelatedness of literary/ artistic and scientific/ medical discourses in shaping cultural ideas of “normal” and “abnormal”. Secondly it takes necrophilia as paradigmatic for apprehending desire, in the psychoanalytic sense, in that it shows the futility, irrationality and excess of desire and its refusal to be reduced to a utilitarian principle of sexuality being for procreation. A further, third, argument of the book is that previous treatments of the nineteenth-century necrophilic aesthetic have seen it only as a misogynistic cultural symptom, ignoring somewhat the extent to which female authors and artists have also explored an eroticized relationship to death, the dying and the dead. I argue that the ascription of death-drive/ destructivity to the male and life-giving/ nurturing to the female is itself an example of a sexist, regressive discourse, relying on binary stereotypes and taking the female capacity for childbearing as essential to woman’s “nature”.

3:AM: Was it just in France that this model of desire was prevalent – you look at works of Baudelaire and Rachilde – or were there writers outside of France also working with the same model?

LD: This was not a purely French phenomenon by any means – though, as stated above, the perversion-type “necrophilia” was named by a Francophone Belgian and, of course, as a good Foucauldian, the context of naming has import for me beyond the superficial and can never be considered coincidental. But cultural transfer and translation between European and Anglophone contexts in the nineteenth-century meant that “the necrophilic aesthetic” was a cross-cultural phenomenon. American-born Edgar Poe is often considered the archetypal necrophile writer, but during the nineteenth century, he was much more popular in France, via Baudelaire’s and Mallarmé’s translations of his work, than in his native USA. And it was a French psychoanalyst, Marie Bonaparte, who “canonized” Poe as a necrophiliac writer in her study of his works, written in French. So national and linguistic boundaries have to be understood as permeable.

The limitations of the disciplinary organization of the University system, especially traditional institutions such as Oxford where I wrote my thesis, result in the production of these slightly artificial or skewed delimitations being placed on research. So I ended up overstating, perhaps, the French specificity of the nineteenth-century “culture of necrophilia” because I happened to be writing my thesis within French Studies.

3:AM: One of the things you argue is that necrophilia has not been properly analysed before. So it’s been called transgressive and a perversion and so on, but there’s been a failure of analytic attention. You are interested primarily in its aesthetic incarnations, and write: “the desire for the dead other (as the iconic proof of the other’s death), [which] would appear a more primary perversion than the other perversions described in literature because it plays out an underlying wish to return to what one never was, to a state of non-being”. In this are you challenging the psychoanalytic orthodoxy that dismisses the usefulness of the death drive and is it something that, once analysed, sheds light on aspects of contemporary aesthetics, especially film and documentary, where necophilia may still be a prevailing presence?

LD: I wrote that sentence a very long time ago! I was a much closer adherent of (Freudian) psychoanalytic method then than I am now. You are right that I was trying to restore the death drive to theoretical prominence within psychoanalytic theory, by reading the efflorescence of the nineteenth-century necrophilic aesthetic as a cultural event that can only be understood by re-focusing on Freud’s meta-psychological model of the tension between Eros and Thanatos. My critical focus has shifted considerably since then, away from thinking about how perversions might work and what they might mean, and towards interrogating the epistemological and political conditions under which such questions are asked.

The death drive remains, however, a metaphorical model for something that I consider crucial. It thematizes that counterintuitive pull against the positive/ positivistic. I suppose what I gained from working on the death drive for three years has been imported directly into my later work on anti-social queer and what Halberstam calls “shadow feminism”. The concept of death drive in psychoanalysis and the antisocial turn in queer theory are two models of – or names for – resistance to normativity, particularly normative ideologies of productivity, production, and reproduction.

3:AM: Are you theorizing aspects of perversion in order to get us to think about the difficulties of ethical engagement with difference? And in so doing, is this itself then an ethical motivation, which would make you a postmodern moral philosopher of sorts?

LD: This is very nicely put. I like the idea of being a postmodern moral philosopher – or perhaps a perverse moral philosopher. I have taken a deliberate (ethical, political) strategic decision not to focus critical interrogation on the meaning of the perverse or exceptional subject, but rather on those normative and hegemonic discourses that constitute subjects of perversion and exceptionality. It is broadly a move from psychoanalytic excavation of meaning to Foucault- and feminist-inspired queer theoretical destabilization.

3:AM: Your book with Sue Harris on Catherine Deneuve’s stardom is called “From Perversion to Purity”. Can you say what makes Deneuve of interest from your philosophical perspective, and perhaps give some examples to illustrate how you are thinking about her stardom.

LD: The book is a co-edited collection, so it brings together a range of perspectives and theoretical positions that – inevitably – do not represent uniformly my thinking about film or stardom, or that of my co-editor, Sue Harris. Broadly, Sue and I wanted to exploit the single star study to build on Richard Dyer’s assertion that stars are glamorous sites onto which normative ideas about gender, class, beauty, ethnicity and sexuality are projected, and which may function in ways that are alternately conservative (in their reconciliation of ideological contradictions) and subversive (in their failure or refusal completely to suture over these contradictions).

We argue in our co-authored introduction that Deneuve is an especially intriguing figure with which to explore this idea, in that her image has been used to exemplify apparently incompatible stereotypes of femininity: virgin and whore; pervert and venerable grande dame, showing up both the limited and polarized roles available for women in patriarchy, and the illusory and fetishized nature of “woman” as a fantasy of a masculine cultural imaginary.

Sue addresses this idea head on in her single-authored chapter, which treats the mature Deneuve’s roles in patriotic French heritage films and her immortalization as the face of Marianne in 1985. She argues that the material rewards and cultural capital that accrued to Deneuve’s enshrinement as a national institution paradoxically freed her to accept more unconventional roles in subsequent years (as an ageing and ultimately suicidal lesbian in Techiné’s Les voleurs, 1996; as a dowdy mentor figure to Björk’s tragic character in von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, 2000); these are roles that would progressively undermine and demolish that image of perfect, establishmentarian femininity.

My single-authored chapter in that book is exemplary of one of my favourite exercises in criticism: the placing into dialogue of artists and thinkers operating from very different ideological orientations in order to point up unsung resonances between apparently incompatible discourses, and thereby challenge critical commonplaces. I write about Deneuve’s role in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), in which she plays a sexually “frigid” young woman who suffers from psychotic hallucinations. I argue that, via its deployment of cinematic point of view, and our identification at numerous crucial moments with Deneuve’s character’s perspective, the film offers a critique of the dubious benefits for heterosexual women of the so-called sexual revolution.

Deneuve’s character can certainly be read, in psychologically normative terms, as a mentally ill victim, but equally she can be interpreted resistantly as (in Deleuzian terms) a figure of schizoanalysis, casting light on the sickness of her society. In creating this ambivalent female figure, I argue that Polanski makes a point similar to that of anti-pornography, anti-heterosexuality feminist Sheila Jeffreys. I take a sort of malicious pleasure in finding in the work of a director whose biography is so problematic for feminism a (probably unintended) radical feminist agenda. Again, it’s a sort of perversion of the common-sense reading of a given body of work or thought in the interests of forcing ethical or political reflection.

3:AM: Queer in Europe, the book you edited with Robert Gillett applies postmodernist queer theory to the political idea of Europe. Queer is “the obstreperous offspring, nurtured in the Academy, of the marriage between Continental philosophy and Anglo-American direct action… the counter-discursive gesture par excellence.” For those new to it, could you briefly say what it is and then say more about why queer theory is so attractive? Is it because it posits a freedom from identity imposition?

LD: I’d rather say what queer theory does than try to define what it is, since part of the agenda of queer is to challenge the status of ontology. At its best, queer operates both politically and intellectually to jam the machinery of (hetero-)normative meaning-production. It emerged out of grassroots AIDS activism in the 1980s, transforming the slur “queer” into a badge of resistance (an example of Foucauldian reverse discourse in action). In its academic forms, it built on the work of such thinkers as Foucault and Derrida, particularly in their challenge to binary and categorical thinking about sexual and gendered identities, sexual practices, and forms of relationality. And it considered for the first time the intersections between sex/ gender on the one hand and race, class, and (dis)ability on the other(s). By incorporating intersectionality into the study of sexuality and power, it effected a change from identity-based gay and lesbian studies and women’s studies to queer and gender studies.

That said, as a feminist appalled by the rise of so-called post-feminism, with no sign of a post-patriarchy in sight, I mourn the loss of women’s studies and feel that there is room for this disciplinary praxis to survive alongside gender and queer studies. Fundamentally, resistant, non-normative politics needs to be strategic, and sometimes queer offers the most efficacious strategic response to a given threat or crisis. At other times, we might need to march, provisionally at least, under a banner or a label, as Judith Butler put it several years ago in her essay “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” (1991). Queer can, and should, work hand-in-hand with forms of identity-based dissent.

3:AM: The book offers a survey of how various queer theorists have analysed their particular part of Europe. Could you say something about the overall picture that you glean about the state of queer in Europe. Is it a positive picture, or are there worries?

LD: I think there is a danger here of slipping into a Western supremacist discourse, where we worry about rights abuses in less “progressive” countries, implicitly assuming the ethical/ political superiority of where “we” are from. Robert and I were very aware of this danger while co-editing Queer in Europe, and worked to avoid suggesting the notion that some European countries are more “advanced” than others. In fact, a key facet of queer is the destabilization of the grand narrative of progress. Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of queer time characterized by “temporal drag” and Lee Edelman’s call for resistance to “reproductive futurity” both thematize this queer deconstruction of the ideal of “progress”.

That said, certain trends and events in parts of Europe are, of course, politically worrying. The Russian ban on so-called “propaganda of homosexualism among minors” and the preponderance of homophobic violence in Serbia discussed in our book by Nick Givens and David Nixon do not spell a happy picture for international LGBTQ welfare. Meanwhile, here in the UK, the very recent display of overwhelming parliamentary support for gay marriage, while undeniably a triumph for liberal notions of equal rights, strikes me as heralding a distinctly un-queer moment. Queer is about being disobedient. It is not a complete surprise to me that a conservative government should promote that most conservative, conformist, and un-feminist of institutions, and extend its reach to ever more citizens. Queer probably appeals to me because I am abidingly and obsessively suspicious of the institutions of marriage, the family – and reproduction itself. (But that may be the subject for another interview altogether.)

3:AM: Do you have a new book? What is it about?

LD: I’ve spent much of the past 10 years thinking about, writing, and then waiting for publication of, a monograph on the construction of the figure of the murderer as a specific type of modern individual. I noticed that in all types of discourses – criminological, medical, journalistic, legal, artistic – from the 1800s to the present day, the murderer is (mis)understood as ontologically different from the ordinary, non-murdering subject. It is an excellent example of Foucault’s theorization about the effects of the modern “specification of individuals”.

I wanted to write a book that showed how the subjectification of the “the murderer” has changed little in over a hundred years, and to argue that this “exceptional figure” serves a conservative function in modern culture that bears closer interrogation than it has commonly received. My contention is that we focus attention on the extravagant personage of “the murderer” as a way of distracting attention from the more mundane, everyday instances of actual and symbolic violence and iniquity that characterize our culture. So, the mystification and demonization of killers of children, such as Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, who committed crimes in the north of England in the 1960s, allow us to imagine that the threat to children lies with rare monsters rather than at the heart of the nuclear family. And the media furore over children and teenagers who kill, exemplified in the recent high school shootings in the USA, diverts attention from questions about the violence of the institution of childhood itself, which turns underage human beings into abjected non-subjects; the possessions of their parents. It comes out on the 1st March.

3:AM: Finally, for the perverse readership here at 3ammagazine, are there five books you could recommend (other than your own which we’ll be dashing away to read straight after this) to help us understand more about your world?

LD: Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (1970).
I’m increasingly returning to the foundational texts of feminism. This is a brilliant, not nearly sufficiently widely read, radical feminist tract. It targets the institutions of motherhood and the family, biological reproduction, and childhood as the cornerstones of patriarchy. Firestone died last year. I hope to start a new book project on her work and that of proto-queer feminist Monique Wittig shortly.

Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004).
This is a polemical analysis of the pernicious discourse of “reproductive futurism”. It is probably the bible of anti-social queer. In lots of ways, it is a postmodern, gay male-authored version of Firestone’s book. It does not acknowledge its debt to her, but it should.

Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk about Kevin (2003).
This stunning first-person novel leads us on a journey alongside the mother of a child who grows up to be a high-school killer. I wish I were a novelist, and this is the novel I wish I’d written.

Joanna Greenberg, I Never Promised you a Rose Garden (1964).
This is a beautiful, semi-auto-biographical account of the writer’s treatment with the pioneering psychoanalyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and the ambivalent pain of relinquishing schizophrenia.

Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (1988).
Malcolm supervised my DPhil thesis at Oxford in the 1990s. He was one of the most brilliant humanities scholars of his age, and an inspiration for my generation. In his gift for the written word, his commitment to fostering interdisciplinarity, and his intellectual passion, he remains unmatched. He died in 2007.

Lisa Downing would like to acknowledge the help of Libby Saxton, Sue Harris, and Robert Gillett in preparing and approving answers to the questions on co-authored and co-edited works.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Jeff Malpas interviewed by Richard Marshall.

Jeff Malpas takes on the deep philosophical issues of our contemporary times. He argues that truth is central to our humanity, that transcendental philosophy is ontology (about what there is) not epistemology (about what we know), isn’t a fan of thought experiments, works out our conceptual grasp of space and place, doesn’t think the analytic/continental divide can be simply discarded, thinks hermeneutics is the key and takes Heidegger, Davidson and Gadamer to be doing hermeneutics. He thinks contemporary society has no real sense of its own foundations, has a notion of unity that is very important but insists that it has to be understood in the right way, doesn’t think Heidegger’s environmentalism is tainted by his Nazism but that he overlooked the boundedness of technology, thinks philosophy can be seen as essentially topology, and all in all is the slow-burning topological hipster on the philosophical highway of deep ecology. Groovy.

3:AM: You’ve defended Danto’s ‘ideal chronicler’ against views that suggest that the notion of telling history ‘as it was’ as opposed to telling a story as a person constructs it or narrates it. This seems a crucial argument where constructivist and skeptical notions of objective truth and history are thick on the ground. This is an issue that you return to, for example when challenging Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa’s rejection of ‘robust realism.’ They say that because the way we normally access the world is so enmeshed with our attitudes and concerns that getting a view of the world outside of those things, pure so to speak, is hopeless. But you disagree, don’t you? So how do you argue that history really should strive to tell it as it was, and that Dreyfus and Spinosa’s view is wrong?

Jeff Malpas: The essay on the ‘Ideal Chronicle’ is rather old now, and I actually don’t recall all the details of its argument. Essentially what you find in that essay, however, is a defense of the centrality of truth that is similar to that which I have developed elsewhere (although inflected by the particularities of the context). My view of Spinosa and Dreyfus’ position is that it misrepresents Davidson’s position (that was also Davidson’s view). It also seems to me to repeat a set of standard misunderstandings about the nature and significance of truth against which both Davidson and I have argued at length in many different places. When I wrote the my reply to Dreyfus and Spinosa, ten years or more ago, I was still more inclined to view my position as in some sense ‘realist’, and the essay reflects that (Davidson had already moved away from the term, and although it took me longer, I have also abandoned talk of ‘realism’ in my own work). So far as history is concerned, the concept of truth is as important to historical discourse and inquiry as it is elsewhere (a point for which I argue explicitly in a couple of other papers), and inasmuch as the ‘Ideal Chronicle’ can be construed as a way of articulating the centrality of truth in this regard, so one can say that history strives and should strive to ‘tell it like it was’ (although I probably wouldn’t use quite the same language now). Why are Dreyfus and Spinosa wrong? Largely because the distinction between what we say and what we speak about in such saying is an absolutely basic one that underpins the very possibility of speaking. It is that distinction that is the basis for whatever truth is to be found in the idea of “realism”. At the same time, that distinction cannot be reified into some general metaphysical distinction between language (or belief or knowledge) and the world, and that is partly why realism is also misleading.

3:AM: How does this link – and I’m assuming it does, but I’m often wrong – with the idea of transcendental philosophy is actually ontology rather than epistemology? You have argued that like Kant’s Critique the transcendental philosophy of Heidegger is also. Is this a way in to begin to answer the question why place is so important to you, an interest that perhaps you first registered when looking at Proust’s Madeleine where phenomenology and hermeneutics seem to be of interest in terms of a kind of transcendental approach?

JM: The link is in the idea that what is at issue in the transcendental is nothing other than the revealing of the originary space of appearance as such, and that space is also the space of the possibility of truth. So transcendental thinking is always ontology because of its concern with the very ground of the possibility of appearance, which is given in and through the articulation of the structure of truth. (Although the way “ground” functions here is in a way quite different from that which is usually assumed). I am often criticised for holding that Davidson’s position is not to be construed as merely ‘epistemological’ – that it involves a set of ontological claims (in similar fashion, Heidegger argued, against the neo-Kantians, that Kant was doing metaphysics rather than epistemology). That Davidson is indeed to be understood in this fashion is clearest, it seems to me, in his account of the ‘three varieties’ of knowledge. Here the focus is on what might be termed the ontology of knowledge – the three forms of knowledge are ontologically interdependent (they are constituted only in relation to one another), and they also imply an interdependence (evident elsewhere in Davidson’s thinking) between self, others, and world. One might say that this is an outcome of Davidson’s development of the Quinean rejection of any substantialist conception of meaning – not only are meanings not to be construed independently of other meanings, but neither can selves be construed independently of other selves or of the objects with which they are involved, nor can language be construed independently of the world. I would also suggest that Davidson’s articulation of the “three varieties” of knowledge is the articulation of what is an essentially transcendental structure – it is not merely an account of three different kinds of knowledge, but rather an articulation of the way knowledge is constituted in terms of the basic interconnection of self, other, and world (it is worth noting that something like this same structure also appears in Heidegger’s early work – see the Grundpropleme der Phaenomenologie, 1919/20 where Heidegger talks of the self-world, with-world, and surrounding-world).

3:AM: You ask: does our idea of ourselves as social beings depend on a grasp of sociality? This gives you an opportunity to further consider space, this time the connection between space and social. You argue as a transcendental truth that a creature with the idea of space must have a concept of sociality as well. This might strike some as improbable: why isn’t it possible for there to be a creature, say on a faraway planet, that understands itself in terms of having a place on the planet but not having any sense of society at all? Or aren’t there forms of life floating around in the sea that have a sense of space – they hunt and so map themselves out is spatial coordinates and the like – but are unaware even of themselves as selves or of others? Why is this just not a possibility?

JM: I am afraid I am not much of a fan of so-called ‘thought experiments’. They usually depend on too many hidden assumptions to be reliable indicators of anything of major philosophical import. As Wittgenstein says in the Investigations: “Could one imagine a stone’s having consciousness? And if anyone can do so — why should that not merely prove that such image-mongery is of no interest to us?” In considering the connection between space and sociality, my interest is in the conceptual dependencies that obtain between those concepts, and between them and others. The analysis of such conceptual dependence is part of what I think transcendental reasoning is directed toward. In claiming that a grasp of sociality requires of space and vice versa (since I really view these as mutually related concepts or structures), I rely on the fact that the social and the spatial both call upon similar notions of materialised externality. The spatial, understood as spatial, is just the idea of a realm that allows for the simultaneous presentations of nevertheless distinct particulars, and allied to this, of multiple presentational perspectives that always imply some possibility of their mutual correlation. The social entails an externality within which other subjects, and objects, can be positioned in relation to oneself and to one another. The possibility of conceptuality that is also at issue here, whether in the form of the concept of space or of the social, also entails a mode of externalisation that is possible only through the spatial and that is a presupposition for the possibility of language – for language not only depends on sociality, and so in turn on spatiality, but the possibility of representation, on which language also rests, is in turn dependent on a mode of externality (as Kant makes very clear).

The idea that spatiality and sociality are connected is already suggested by the Davidsonian idea of knowledge that you asked about earlier: there the idea of subjectivity and objectivity are seen to be interconnected with the idea of the intersubjective, and if we understand these forms of knowledge as also corresponding to forms of spatiality, then subjective and objective spatiality are interconnected with the spatiality of the intersubjective. From this perspective, there can be no grasp of self or world (and so no understanding at all) that does not presuppose spatiality (since, as I indicated earlier, the very idea of simultaneous but distinct existence is precisely what is at issue in the idea of the spatial), and because, once again, there can be no grasp of spatiality that does not also involve the idea of the possibility of other selves who can be differently positioned in relation to us, or to our own bodies, and to the ‘common objects’ that surround us both and with which we causally interact and towards which are intentionally directed. The network of concepts that appears here is something I have tried to delineate in a number of places in my work. Unfortunately, I find many philosophers are simply unwilling to try to think through such networks of conceptual connection, preferring to assume that we already know the nature and boundaries of our concepts from the start. It should be clear, even from these few comments, that I tend to distinguish between different ways in which spatiality might be grasped. In particular, I distinguish between a capacity merely to operate spatially – that is to have what might be construed as a purely behavioral grasp of space – and the capacity for a conceptual grasp of space, which includes a capacity to be able to represent space to oneself and others (notice that I don’t speak here of behavioral and representational, or conceptual and non-conceptual, spatial content, but rather of different capacities to grasp spatial content which capacities are behavioral or representational, non-conceptual or conceptual). Every being that can move in a directed and coordinated manner must have a capacity to distinguish between itself and its world, but that capacity need not extend beyond the behavioral level. Even a robot vacuum cleaner can exhibit behavior attuned to spatiality, but I wouldn’t say that it has any sense of space nor of itself. Although there is an important difference between the different ways in which space can be accessed or ‘grasped’, there are also similarities – to be capable of movement and action at all, regardless of whether it is shaped by conceptually, requires a capacity to engage with space.

3:AM: A cool part of your approach is the way you harness your interests in topography with writers unusually considered together. So you have no problem discussing Heidegger with Davidson and seem to be equally at home in traditions usually considered deaf to one another. So before looking at your thoughts here, what do you think about the recent discussion about the analytic/continental divide? Is it useful or a barrier to a more ecumenical, open spirit in philosophy?

JM: There is a Monty Python skit in which Karl Marx, presented as a quiz show contestant, is asked the following question: “the struggle of class against class is a ‘what’ struggle?” The answer, which Karl provides immediately, is that it is a political struggle. The same point applies here: the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy is a political distinction. This is important, because we often mistake it for a philosophical distinction. But it isn’t that, at least not primarily, and that is why the ‘discussion’ has been going on for so long (it certainly isn’t recent), and shows so little sign of going away. Unlike some analytic thinkers, who seem to want to abandon the analytic/continental distinction in favour of just ‘philosophy (but who then often go on to make clear that when they talk about ‘good philosophy’, they almost always mean ‘analytic’ philosophy), I don’t think the distinction can simply be discarded, since to do so is to blind oneself to the political realities that are at work, and I also tend to identify myself most closely with what is usually viewed as a “non-analytic” tradition, namely, the hermeneutic. Nevertheless, I find myself increasingly frustrated by the whole analytic-continental opposition, it seems less and less relevant to my actual philosophical work, and whereas once I thought there was the possibility of opening up genuine dialogue between the two traditions, I now think that is a vain hope. Moreover, even though, as I say, I tend to identify politically with the non-analytic, I don’t find myself altogether at home in either the analytic or continental camp. In this respect, I probably occupy a rather anomalous position in the contemporary landscape of academic philosophy (maybe ‘hermeneutics’ and ‘philosophical topography’ are necessarily anomalous) – in fact, officially, I am no longer even in a philosophy department – and in lots of ways that anomalous position actually suits me quite well. What I do as a philosopher doesn’t fit readily into any of the usual categories, and I am more and more engaged outside of the discipline anyway – although there other sets of political distinction and division often become operative as well.

3:AM: As we’ve seen in your earlier remarks, ontology and hermeneutics are conjoined in your approach, and they have to be. That’s what I take to be your argument about transcendental commitments, but I may have got that wrong so you may need to clarify and set me straight. So Heidegger is the philosopher who you argue is important because he is interested in investigating ontology through an enquiry into the structure of understanding. Davidson in the so-called analytic tradition is someone I think you argue is doing the same kind of thing. Is this right and can you say something about how you connect these strands through what you label the ‘hermeneutic turn’?

JM: Heidegger addresses the nature of hermeneutics in only very few places in his work – primarily in the 1923 lectures on the hermeneutics of facticity and the 1950 ‘Dialogue on Language’ (something I explore in a recent paper called ‘The Beckoning of Language’). Moreover, the term ‘hermeneutics’ is not one that figures at all in Davidson’s work. Nevertheless, I view the work of both thinkers as essentially hermeneutical in character, and for me this means at least two things. First, a concern with the nature and possibility of understanding (which I would argue is at issue in Davidson’s talk of a concern with ‘objective thought’ and so does not imply a concern with something ‘subjective’). Second, a recognition, sometimes implicit, of the fundamentally situated, ‘placed’ or ‘topological’ character of understanding as such. So hermeneutics is, for me, always topological or topographic; it is also always ontological. What ontology means here is not the same as ‘metaphysics’. Ontology names, instead, the inquiry into the ground, unity, and limit of things – and in its most fundamental sense, into the ground, nature, and limit, of the very appearing of what appears, the presencing of what presences.

Ontology understood in this way is not ‘subjectivist (meaning it does not look for a ground understood as some underlying subjectum), but rather understands the task of grounding as identical with the task of delineating limit, and so also with the articulation of a certain unity. In this respect, ontology is not only essentially transcendental in character, but it is itself topological or topographical – it is concerns itself with what Heidegger calls the topos of being. Topos being understood here as that bounded, unitary locale that is also the ground of appearing or presencing (a more detailed discussion of these issues can be found in my recent Heidegger and the Thinking of Place). I would argue that the ‘hermeneutic turn’, if there is such a thing (and I would claim that Davidson, Heidegger and Gadamer can all three be seen as making such a turn, even as they also open it up as a possibility), is thus a return to a basic form of ontology that is transcendental as it is also topological. It also entails a rethinking of the philosophical as itself essentially configured around the concern with place – with place as such (so the concern is a substantive one), with place as determinative of thinking (and so the concern is also methodological), and with the place of thinking as such (and so the concern is always self-questioning and self-reflective).

3:AM: Davidson himself was intrigued by the way you hooked his ideas up with Gadamer and Heidegger, wasn’t he? And a key interest in Davidson that connects with what you’re doing is the notion of truth and the role it plays, isn’t it? Like you, he argues that truth is objective (and so disagrees with people like Rorty’s relativism I guess) but there are no body of eternal truths. Can you explain this and say where you stand?

JM: I think Davidson was intrigued by the idea of connecting his ideas to those of Gadamer and Heidegger, and he and I did talk about that connection, but Davidson did not find Gadamer or Heidegger very accessible, and I don’t think I was ever able to offer him an easy way to gain access to their thought. It seemed to me that the differences in philosophical upbringing and orientation were just too great for Davidson to make the move to a Gadamerian or Heideggerian perspective (the same was true of Gadamer in relation to Davidson’s work). Nevertheless, Davidson was not antagonistic to connections being made between his thought and theirs. When it comes to the question of truth, the key point from a Davidsonian perspective is the rejection of the idea of the proposition. For Davidson (and for me), there are only sentences, and it is only sentences that can be true or false. For this reason, truth is always a matter of the truth of this or that sentence, and sentences exist only in relation to languages and speakers. The immediate conclusion is that what is true depends on who speaks and what they say, as well as on what is spoken about. Truth is thus relative to languages and speakers (although in a quite unproblematic sense), and in a certain sense contingent (simply because meaning is contingent), even though truth is also objective – that is, it involves a commitment to the possibility that what we say is open to correction on the basis of what we take to be the case with respect to the objects of our speaking. This conception of truth is what sets my position, and Davidson’s, apart from the position espoused by thinker such as Rorty and Vattimo, with whom Davidson and I otherwise have much in common.

3:AM: You ask whether commitments to truth and honesty are just a sham because the public sphere is full of lies and liars. But you don’t think those commitments are a sham. Some might point out that it has always been thus, so there’s nothing broken, rather, business as usual. But you take the widespread abuse of truth to indicate a breakdown in public and political life, don’t you? Can you say something about this?

JM: My claim is that the commitment to truth, and to speaking the truth, is a basic commitment that underpins the possibility of human, which is also to say, social, life, and therefore also to the possibility of meaning and understanding. Since I think this is such a fundamental commitment, it is not a commitment that can ever be dispensed with. Even when we claim to have abandoned truth, as Rorty and Vattimo do, we remain committed to it. This is why the lie, when it becomes widespread, is both epistemically and ethically problematic. Lying is a practice that can only exist as a practice parasitic upon truth-telling, and the idea of a society in which the lie became the norm, is not the idea of any genuine society at all. The problem that afflicts contemporary society is that the idea that truth does not matter has become commonplace – it is generally assumed that what matters is what people take to be true, not truth, and truth is not only open to manipulation, but is also a means of manipulation, is nothing but a means for the exercise of power. Although lying is an age-old phenomenon, it has seldom been the case that there has been such a widespread suspicion of and disregard for truth. Moreover, this lack of concern for truth is something that our own institutions and practices seem actively to promote. Thus the focus on systems of audit and quality assurance, which now operate much as did the old systems of surveillance and control under communist regimes, promotes modes of behaviour that are often hypocritical and emptied of meaning, that prioritise compliance over genuine commitment, that are corrosive of basic ethical ideals of trust, honesty and respect, and that are directed at control above all else. As a result, we live in a society that no longer has any real sense of its own foundations.

In this respect, I do think there is something radically different about the character of the contemporary world (and some of my analysis here follows Heidegger’s, although I give it a more explicitly ethical direction), but even were this not the case – even if it were true that society was always given over to vice rather than virtue, still I would argue that this should not be a reason for withholding criticism. Whatever the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves, we should not cease insisting on the need for political and personal life to be more in accord with the fundamental values and commitments that make it possible. No matter how widespread the disregard for truth has been in the past, or how widespread it is now, that does not mean that we should therefore be more accepting or tolerate of the lie or the falsehood. Indeed, it should perhaps make us even less accepting and less tolerant. I would add that the insistence of attending to truth – of not accepting power truth as that to which truth is reduced, but of seeing truth as that which operates against power – seems to me to be the very basis for the possibility of political opposition and resistance, and so Foucault comments, as I have quoted him elsewhere, that “[t]he task of speaking the truth is an infinite labour: To respect it in its complexity is an obligation that no power can afford to short-change, unless it would impose the silence of slavery”.

3:AM: So is it because you approach Heidegger and Davidson that place, situation, topography are so central to your philosophy?

JM: I would say that it isn’t because I approach Heidegger and Davidson as important thinkers that place, situation, and topography are so central to my thinking, but rather it is because I approach place, situation and topography as such important concepts, that I give such centrality to Heidegger and Davidson. It seems to me that few other philosophers have taken up these notions in the way that they are taken up in Heidegger and Davidson – and even though such concepts are present in the work of thinkers such as Bachelard (whose work I also love), the development is not so philosophically acute or penetrating as it is in Heidegger and Davidson.

3:AM: The unity of consciousness is a key to your approach and getting this right makes a huge difference to whether claims like the possibility to have a robust realism or not go through, don’t they? You argue that the nature of the unity of consciousness are grounded in Davidson in organised, oriented, embodied activity – and this again seems to connect with Heidegger too doesn’t it? Can you say what the significance of this issue is for you and how you understand the best way to approach it?

JM: Unity is a key notion in my account, but it has to be understood in the right way. Unity is never the simple unity of what is numerically one or the simple unity of a static system. Genuine unity always presupposes both differentiation and activity. I take this to be a lesson to be found originally in Aristotle, but it is also present in Kant. In addition, this way of understanding unity seems to me to imply a relational conception of unity, although such relationality is always and only worked out topologically – that is in terms of modes of bounded, embodied activity. I find such a conception of unity, particularly as applied to ideas of meaning and mind (where both are now understood in a way that might be called “externalist”), to be central to Davidson and to Heidegger (as well as Gadamer). You mention the idea of ‘robust realism’. But remember that term is actually one that Dreyfus and Spinosa use – it isn’t mine – and in fact, following Rorty’s advice, I no longer refer to my position as ‘realist’ at all. If anything, my account of the nature of mind and meaning tends to run contrary to the sort of ‘robust realism’ of such as Dreyfus and Spinosa. Their position actually relies on a form of separation of mind from world (enshrined in their emphasis on the ‘independence’ requirement – a requirement that, as they employ it, cannot be made coherent or precise) that Davidson, Heidegger, and I would all reject. In this respect, I tend to think that in many respects Dreyfus himself remains much more of a Cartesian than is often assumed (although the fact that he is so much closer to Merleau-Ponty than to Heidegger might suggest as much). My account, and the account that I think is to be found in Davidson and Heidegger, refuses the usual dichotomy of mind and world, beginning with the fact of meaning and mind as always embedded in the world, as part of it, and then understanding action and meaning as arising through the dynamic interconnection of agents with themselves, with one another, and with the things around them (an interconnection that cannot be reduced either to externalised behaviour or internalised brain-states alone – in this respect, the ‘externalism’ at issue here itself undercuts the usual ‘internal-external’ dichotomy). It is precisely because of this prior and active embeddedness – this active placing – that both robust realism and skepticism turn out to be incoherent or irrelevant positions, since they both depend in one way or another on treating meaning, mind, and action apart from the world in which they are always already embedded and with which they are inextricably intertwined.

3:AM: When Davidson answers the question about what the relation is between our beliefs and the perceptual world he sounds like he doesn’t think our experiences of the world count as grounding those beliefs. John McDowell has claimed that this is a mistake because it severs the connection between our experiences and our beliefs. But you defend Davidson don’t you, using a transcendental argument about the concept of belief? You say that what Davidson is arguing is that just being aware of being located in space embeds us in the world and it is that which grounds our beliefs in the external perceived world. Have I got that right? Are you also saying that this is what Heidegger was arguing too?

JM: Yes, I think that is a pretty accurate account of the core of my position. It is our dynamic placing in the world that is the ground for meaning, and so also, I would say, for belief, and this seems to me a view to be found in Davidson and in Heidegger, as well as in Gadamer, in Camus, and in most of the other thinkers on whose work I draw. One might argue that this is actually a position not too far from McDowell’s own, however, since part of what McDowell aims to do by his treatment of conceptuality is to break down the problematic gap between mind and world that he sees as undermining any possibility of grounding belief. I just think that his reading of Davidson, in particular, is wrong on this point, and that he misinterprets Davidson’s emphasis on the distinction between, reasons and causes, or more generally, between causes and grounds. Incidentally, Davidson originally saw McDowell’s position as close to his own, and was bemused by the fact that McDowell saw him as an opponent rather than an ally.

Quentin Skinner interviewed by Richard Marshall.

Quentin Skinner is a deep-fried political historian who thinks all the time about the philosophy and history of liberty from Ancient Roman times through to the present. He finds the contrast between freedom and slavery a key and live issue and it filters his discussions of Ancient Romans, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Marx through to the contemporary scene. He has written many books about all this and is the series editor of the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series. Which of course makes him a dude of a most bodacious cool.

3:AM: You are known as a leading historian of political history and in particular the formation of ideas around human liberty. One of the key ideas you’ve written about is what you label ‘neo-Roman’ liberty.‘ This began back in Ancient Rome didn’t it, where freedom was contrasted with slavery, wasn’t it? Can you tell us what its distinctive traits are?

Quentin Skinner: The vision of personal freedom that interests me is articulated most clearly in the Digest of Roman Law, which is why I have wanted to describe its later manifestations as examples of ‘neo-Roman’ liberty. The fundamental distinction drawn at the outset of the Digest is between the liber homo, the free person, and the servus or slave. The law needed to begin with this contrast because law applies only to free persons, not to slaves. So one crucial question was: what makes a slave? The answer given in the legal texts is that a slave is someone who is in potestate, in the power of a master. The contrast is with someone who is sui iuris, able to act in their own right. Long before these argument were summarised in the legal texts, they had been elaborated by a number of Roman moralists and historians, above all Sallust, Livy and Tacitus. These writers were interested in the broader question of what it means to say of individuals – or even of whole bodies of people – that they have been made to live in the manner of slaves. The answer they give is that, if you are subject to the arbitrary will of anyone else, such that you are dependent on their mere goodwill, then you may be said to be living in servitude, however elevated may be your position in society. So, for example, Tacitus speaks of the servitude of the entire senatorial class under the Emperor Tiberius, so wholly subject were they to his lethal caprice.

3:AM: It developed into a formidable political idea during the Italian Renaissance, didn’t it? Was Machiavelli influenced by it, either negatively or positively?

QS: Yes, this vision of freedom is the one that underlies Renaissance Italian discussions about the vivere libero, that is, the sort of constitution that is needed to uphold a free way of life. Machiavelli was undoubtedly deeply influenced by these ideas. You ask if this influence was positive. If by that you mean to ask if he agreed with the neo-Roman analysis, I would say that he emphatically endorsed it.
Machiavelli’s main engagement with the neo-Roman view of freedom can be found in his Discorsi, completed around 1520. These ‘discourses’ take the form of a commentary on the opening ten books of Livy’s history of Rome.In his opening two book Livy had contrasted the lack of freedom suffered by Rome under her early kings with the civitas libera, the free state, that the people were able to set up with elected consuls in place of hereditary kings after the expulsion of the Tarquins. Machiavelli fully endorses Livy’s assumption that the fundamental question to ask, when thinking about political liberty, is about the distinction between freedom and servitude, and he further agrees that the arbitrary power wielded by the early kings of Rome left the citizen body living as slaves. The term servitù is always the one he uses when speaking of how an individual or a whole people living subject to the discretionary power of someone else will suffer loss of liberty, whether the power be internal to the polity (in the form of a prince or ruling oligarchy wielding arbitrary control) or external (in the form of a colonising power).

3:AM: Was it influential in the development out of Lutheran and Calvinist and other religious groups of that time of the right to protest, resist and revolt?

QS: The right of resistance developed in the course of Reformation struggles was chiefly based on classical ideas, but mainly on the Roman law maxim that vim vi licet repellere, that it is always lawful to resist unjust force with force. The contrast between freedom and servitude is certainly important to the leading Reformation thinkers, including both Luther and Calvin. But this is mainly because they were predestinarians, and rejected the very idea of human freedom in the name of the claim that we are all slaves to sin, and are freed only by divine grace.

3:AM: How was it developed in Britain? Was it the sort idea of Rome Shakespeare would have known about and presented?

QS: Shakespeare has much to say in his Roman plays, and especially in Julius Caesar, about the allegation that, if a polity falls under the will of a single person it becomes enslaved, just as individuals becomes enslaved if they become subject to a master. When Brutus addresses the plebeians in Act III, his justification for assassinating Caesar is that his death was necessary to keep Rome free and prevent her citizens from becoming slaves.

3:AM: It became prominent during the English civil war of the 1640s, didn’t it? Didn’t Milton develop his ideas around the ideas of a politics against slavery?

QS: Yes, John Milton offers a purely neo-Roman view of freedom and free states in both the major political tracts he published after the execution of Charles I. In his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) he argues that, unless the people are able to govern themselves, then they will live as slaves, since they will be living under the will of someone else. On the eve of the Restoration he published The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), in which he presents monarchy as an enslaving form of government. His argument is that kings always enjoy prerogative powers, and that such powers are by definition discretionary. But to live subject to the mere discretion of another person is what it means to live as a slave. So he exhorts the people, in both these texts, to retain political power in their own hands as the only means to uphold their political liberty.

3:AM: Hobbes opposed the Roman republicanism view of liberty, didn’t he? What different view of liberty did he present? Was he drawing a different tradition or was he developing his ideas through his polemics, kind of making it up from whatever argument carried the day?

QS: Hobbes changes his mind about the nature of political liberty. When he circulated his first political treatise, The Elements of Law, in 1640, he still accepted the classical view that individuals are unfree if they are dependent on the will of someone else. He argued, however, that in order to assure peace and prevent a return to the state of nature – which he equates with a state of war – it is essential to set up an absolute form of sovereign authority to which we submit ourselves. But he agreed that, if you submit yourself to the will of such a sovereign, you thereby forfeit your liberty, which consists in the absence of any such submission and dependence. His answer at this stage is that, if what you want is peace, then you will have to give up liberty. By the time he published his next political work, his De cive of 1642, he had changed his mind. He now argues that, in establishing sovereign power, we do not have to give up our freedom, and he makes this point by way of arguing that everyone has misunderstood the true character of personal liberty. Personal freedom, he now insists, consists not in being independent of the will of others, but merely in not being obstructed from acting as we will. Freedom is not absence of dependence; it is simply absence of external impediments to motion. This view is grounded in Hobbes’s basic belief that there is nothing real in the world except matter in motion. Given this ontology, he is committed to the view that the only sense we can make of the idea of human liberty is to think of it as the freedom of an object to move. On this account, you are unfree if your movements are impeded by external impediments, but free if you are able to move without being obstructed.

3:AM: So Hobbes thought that even under the most coercive force of law left people free. How does he make this argument as it doesn’t seem on the face of it very convincing?

QS: Hobbes’s argument about law and liberty, which he develops most fully in chapter 21 of Leviathan – which is entitled ‘Of the liberty of subjects’ – depends on his view about how laws operate. He maintains – and this is surely plausible – that the main reason why people obey the law is that they are more frightened of the consequences of disobedience. But as he now argues, fear does not take away freedom. Freedom, according to Hobbes’s new definition, is taken away only by external and physical impediments to motion. But fear is not an external impediment. On the contrary, fear is a motivating force, and one that generally drives us to obey. So he insists that, when we obey the law, we always do so freely, and we are always free to disobey. I agree that at first sight the argument does not look convincing, but if you recall how Hobbes defines human freedom then you can see that it is at least wholly consistent.

3:AM: Why was Hobbes so against the Roman idea? Was it that he wanted peace at any price, or didn’t he like the parliamentarians personally?

QS: One can only speculate, but I have the impression that Hobbes was worried about the extent of the demands that might be made in the name of liberty if the neo-Roman theory were left unchallenged. It is an obvious and crucial implication of the neo-Roman theory that you can be unfree even in the absence of any coercive threat. This is because, if you are living in dependence on the goodwill of someone else, you will be sure to self-censor in the hope of keeping out of trouble. But this will have the effect of limiting your own liberty. This limitation, however, will arise merely from your standing in relation to another person, not necessarily from any act of coercion on their part. To secure your liberty, then, what needs to be secured is your freedom from any such dependence. But that is to ask a lot of the state, and Hobbes seems to have felt that the demand was an excessive one. A further and connected reason for Hobbes’ hostility was I think his strong desire to vindicate, against the republicans of his age, the validity of absolute monarchy. As we’ve seen, in the hands of a writer like Milton monarchy is stigmatized as an inevitable source of enslavement. Hobbes wants to defend monarchy as a lawful form of government, so he needs to reject the view that he had previously espoused, namely that dependence in itself takes away freedom.

3:AM: So after this period, what happened to the two species of liberty? Locke presumably was more Hobbesian and Rousseau more Roman?

QS: Hobbes’s view was not immediately taken up in Anglophone political discourse. On the contrary, there was something of a reaction against it. Locke continues to insist that arbitrary power takes away freedom. This claim is indeed the main argument out of which he develops his views about the right to resist tyranny. Hobbes’ rival claim that freedom consists not in absence of dependence, but merely in absence of impediments, only became orthodox in English political theory with the rise of classical utilitarianism in the eighteenth century. Hume in several of his essays ridicules the notion that dependence in itself takes away liberty, and with Bentham and Paley at the end of the century you find a clear articulation of the view that we are free provided that no one is interfering with the exercise of our powers. By contrast, Rousseau is indeed, as you say, the leading writer who continues to insist on a Roman view of liberty. For Rousseau you can never claim to be free if you are subject to the will of anyone else. Rousseau is obsessed with the importance of maintaining one’s independence and evading the servility which he saw all around him.

3:AM: And would Marx have been aware of this distinction? Would he, or did he, side with Hobbes or the Roman idea?

QS: That is a question which would bear a great deal more investigation than it has received. I am very stuck by the extent to which Marx deploys, in his own way, a neo-Roman political vocabulary. He talks about wage slaves, and he talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat. He insists that, if you are free only to sell your labour, then you are not free at all. He stigmatises capitalism as a form of servitude. These are all recognizably neo-Roman moral commitments.

3:AM: This distinction seems a crucial one and might explain why republicanism can seem to accommodate such a wide range of political views, from extreme authoritarianism in the name of liberty to collectivism? Is our historical blindness an impediment to our ability to understand many of the cross currents of our contemporary situation? I guess the issue here is the role of history and having an historical perspective.

QS: I do not myself associate neo-Roman theories with what you call authoritarianism in the name of liberty. Such authoritarianism generally springs, it seems to me, from the assumption that there are certain true ends for mankind, and that liberty consists in following them. An example would be the Aristotelian belief that our freedom is best realised in serving the community. Another example would be the rival Christian belief that we attain true liberty (‘Christian freedom’) only in serving God. These paradoxical arguments – in which freedom is connected with service – differ from the core neo-Roman ideal that freedom consists in independence from the arbitrary will of others. The desire to be free of such discretionary power does not have to be held in virtue of the belief that we ought then to proceed to use our independence to act in specific ways. The neo-Roman theory is not interested in telling you how you should make use of your liberty; it merely wants you to espouse a particular view of how liberty should be understood. I strongly agree with you when you speak about our current historical blindness. I think that we have closed ourselves off from understanding a lot of our history by failing to see that, until relatively recently, the concept of liberty was generally understood in a way that we now find unfamiliar and even hard to grasp. We tend to think of freedom essentially as a predicate of actions. But the earlier tradition took freedom essentially to be the name of a status, that of a free person by contrast with a slave. Let me end by following out your last train of thought. I believe that there is certainly a sense in which we fail to understand some features of our contemporary situation through not having a grasp on the neo-Roman way of thinking about liberty. For a neo-Roman thinker, many of the situations that in a market society are regarded as free – even as paradigmatically free – would appear as examples of servitude. The predicament of de-unionised labour, of those who live in conditions of economic dependence, of those in particular who live in dependence on violent partners, and of entire citizen-bodies whose representative assemblies have lost power to executives – all these would appear to a neo-Roman theorist to be examples of being made to live like slaves.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Kathleen Higgins interviewed by Richard Marshall.

Kathleen Higgins is always jiving on the big philosophical questions and so she thinks German Idealism is a golden age up there with Ancient Greece, thinks Kant invokes God as a moral not epistemological point, thinks Hegel lasts because he offers something to everybody, thinks Schopenhauer has a sense of humour, agrees with Danto that Nietsche shouldn’t be caged by systems, thinks erotic love is philosophically important, thinks non-Western philosophy should be taken more seriously by Western philosophers, and that Adorno is right in saying music can have positive political effects. Every which way, she’s there putting in her thoughts and so without doubt she’s all amped up and awesome.

3:AM: What made you become a philosopher? Were you always thinking big questions even as a child or was it something that happened? And does it help to have a partner to work with on many of your projects?

Kathleen Higgins: I think I was into big questions pretty early on. When I was still pretty little I wondered if you would necessarily like heaven if you got there. Maybe I was just morose: the first time I noticed clouds moving, I was convinced it was the sky that was moving and thought that perhaps Chicken Little had a point. In the early grades Dominican nuns were my teachers, and I perked up when they would talk about Aquinas and “the Philosopher” (Aristotle). When I was about eight, a Catholic comic book called Treasure Chest ran a series called ‘This Godless Communism’, which I read eagerly. Although it featured typical Cold War images of Soviet heartlessness, it also showed the young Karl Marx as he was formulating his ideas. I found it fascinating that these ideas had launched the whole saga of Russian communism. Then when I was a sophomore in high school, I turned in a paper that prompted my English teacher to say that it was philosophy that I was evidently interested in philosophy. He recommended a variety of philosophy texts, and that’s when my interest really took off. Yes, it was wonderful to have a partner involved in philosophy as well. We had many collaborative projects, but best of all was the on-going conversation. And since we both thought that philosophy is about life as a whole, conversations about all sorts of things were part of our philosophical interaction.

3:AM: In your book with your man, Robert Solomon, you’re focusing on German Idealism. You say that this is one of the ‘richest and most exciting explosions of philosophical energy and talent’’, up there with Ancient Greece. So for the uninitiated, what is German idealism in broad terms, what made this so important and who were the names we should be focusing on?

KH: German Idealism was a movement of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thinkers who sought to use reason and ideas as the basis for a systematic account of how everything fits together. What was so exciting about German Idealism was its ambitious scope; it sought to understand nothing short of the big picture, a complete account of reality. The Idealists also saw themselves as bringing long developments in philosophy to fruition, as well as resolving the issue of the place of contemporary science in human efforts to understand reality. “Idealism” means that the ideas of the mind (as opposed, most often, to sensory perceptions) are the basis for knowledge, and there were idealists long before the German Idealist movement. But a new impetus for idealistic thought came with the work of Immanuel Kant, who argued that the world as we come to know it is constructed through the activity of our minds. He traced the processes through which the mind through its own faculties and principles orients itself within the external world, imposing its own shape on the world as we know it. At the same time, he sought to demonstrate that human reason, through its own activity, could determine the moral law. While many of Kant’s successors questioned the particulars of his story, they were inspired by his work to formulate their own accounts of the way that the mind and its organically interconnected ideas operate in our efforts to know and act in the world. Besides Kant, some of the thinkers associated with this label include Johann Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, Georg W. F. Hegel, and Arthur Schopenhauer.

3:AM: Kant was the starting figure then, and you say he was ‘an unabashed rationalist.’ His account of reason highlights its limits, doesn’t it? So he puts forward the idea that reason can’t actually grasp anything of things in themselves, and so we are necessarily shut out from ultimate reality. But he was also a Lutheran, and he argued that faith in God made everything okay because God would make sure what we knew didn’t deceive us. This seems a pretty desperate attempt to keep the idea of knowing the world doesn’t it, and seems to undermine the claims of rationality by claiming that only through faith can we be assured that we have a ready made world, doesn’t it?

KH: Kant certainly argues for the limitations of reason, but I think you are being unfair in your suggestion that he invoked religious faith to escape skepticism. I don’t think Kant ever seriously considered the idea that we were systematically deceived about reality, as Descartes did, at least methodically. In fact, his account of how our minds construct the phenomenal world might be seen as just the opposite of what you suggest. It is an explanation of how our minds can organise the various input from the external world into something coherent, something we can make sense of. We can’t be deceived about the structure of the phenomenal world, since our own minds construct it. As for the thing-in-itself, reality as it exists independent of our minds, by definition we don’t know it. But it is reality that we know phenomenally, albeit reality organised and structured in such a way that our minds can grasp it. The main rationale Kant gives for belief in God is a moral argument, not an epistemological one. In order to be able to persist in living morally in a world in which we see evil going unpunished and moral goodness often unrewarded, we have to believe that ultimately goodness and happiness coincide. This leads us to postulate the existence of God and an immortal soul. But Kant insisted on the independence of our insight into the moral law and religious belief. We can recognise right and wrong through reason, whether or not we believe in God. Descartes might be criticised on the grounds you suggest, but I don’t think Kant can.

3:AM: Hegel studies are booming at the moment it seems, what with the McDowelians in Pittsburg and Robert Stern and Zizek and a host of others all thinking about him. What do you think is significant about Hegel, and why do you think he is generating so much interest in contemporary thought given that he seems to use a vocabulary that mixes rationality with spookier terms like Spirit which you’d imagine might be anathema to secularists? Or is he anathema to secularists, and maybe we should detect a non-secular substrata in this new interest? What do you think?

KH: In general, Hegel has staying power because his systematic efforts encompass so much, including many critical analyses and insights, that he offers something for everybody. Hegel was not afraid to articulate strong positions, and these provoke discussion, both by enthusiasts and critics of his views. His Phenomenology of Spirit charts the reasoning leading to various metaphysical orientations as well as the reasoning showing their limitations and unsustainability (except in the case of his own metaphysical view). The challenges he offers to certain received views offer launching points for some thinkers. His Philosophy of Right takes strong stands on the organisation of society and the nation-state, certainly a timely topic for us today. Hegel’s analysis of the master and slave in the Phenomenology and his point that a sense of identity depends on recognition by others has been utilised by many political and moral thinkers. His suggestion that art in its “highest vocation” is a thing of the past is provocative, too, particularly at a time in which art’s ambitions are not clearly defined. Arthur Danto has pursued this line of Hegelian thought. One of the reasons that Hegel interests contemporary analyic philosophers is that he endeavors to systematically connect various basic concepts that we use to make sense of our world. In this respect, analytic philosophers, with their interest in concepts generally, can find common ground in Hegel. As for the “spookiness” of Hegel, Geist, the word translated “Spirit,” can also be translated as “mind.” And even rendered as “Spirit,” one need not see this in religious terms in a conventional sense, which is one of the reasons why Hegel’s philosophy has given both religious and secular readings. The fact that Hegel’s Absolute ultimately involves the end of any duality between God and humanity enables interpretation from either direction.

3:AM: You write about the ‘crankiest Kantian’, Schopenhauer. He was an early influence on Nietzsche wasn’t he, but what attracted you to him? And is he still saying something important?

KH: Schopenhauer was certainly a major influence on Nietzsche, and the latter’s philosophy engages with Schopenhauer throughout his career, not just early on. Schopenhauer’s ideas that I consider important is the idea that what he called the will, the dynamic, driven aspect of our nature. He considered all of reality to have something analogous to what we call the human will, and he uses the term “will,” by extension, for the true nature of everything. Will, according to Schopenhauer, is the single metaphysical reality, with everything else in the world as an illusory manifestation of this principle. Although most of us would not accept this metaphysical claim, the idea that we are fundamentally driven beings and the related claim that will directs our intellects, and not the other way around, are ideas that we have culturally accepted. Freud, who acknowledges Schopenhauer as an influence, has convinced most of the Western world (at least) that our psychologies are a function of drives, which in turn shape how we interpret our situations. We all are intellectual heirs of Schopenhauer, though most of us don’t realise it. Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Wagner, and Freud, among others, ran with ideas from Schopenhauer, but theirs are the names that are better known. One of the things that attracts me to Schopenhauer is his sense of humour. He may really have been a curmudgeon, but he was a funny one. I get the impression that he often takes a curmudgeonly tone for effect. Nietzsche was right, I think, when he said that Schopenhauer needed enemies to stay cheerful. He seems to genuinely enjoy his pessimism. And even though he presents lots of evidence for his grim views, one always has the impression that he savors life, even when he is telling some grizzly tale from nature. Nietzsche also suggested that Schopenhauer’s pessimism masked a real enthusiasm for life. Noting that Schopenhauer played the flute each evening, he asks, “Was that really a pessimist?”

3:AM: If Hegel’s stock is rising, Nietzsche’s has never fallen it seems. But what Nietzsche’s philosophy is about is hugely contested. Brian Leiter reads him as a naturalist philosopher, a precursor to Freudianism, denying freewill, with a modest metaphysics of anti-realism concerning morality and who sees the spectacle of the genius as salvation for civilisations. Jessica Berry sees him as a Pyrrhonian skeptic eschewing all metaphysics and recommending Homeric well being. But Heidegger saw him as the last metaphysician. Others see him as a dogmatic relativist and metaphysical nihilist. And of course, there are the different disciplines that have responded to him in various ways – philosophers, literary critics, theologians. Do you agree with Arthur Danto that scholars have tried to ‘cage him into a system of repressive categories, put his toxin on ice, slip the manacles of asceticism onto his wrists…locate him in the history of thought’ and that this is a bad thing, or do you think that good philosophy and scholarship obliges us to do this, contra Danto?

KH: I’m totally with Danto on this one. Sure, sometimes these terms and categories help us hone in on some aspect of Nietzsche’s thinking, especially if we ourselves tend to think in these terms. But Nietzsche is not aiming at defending any party line. As often as not, he presents a point that seems to locate him somewhere on the theoretical map, only to challenge it in the next sentence. I think Nietzsche tried always to think further whenever he reached some conclusion, and when he couldn’t, he at least viewed this as a limitation. Like everyone else, he had his relatively stable tendencies and relatively fixed ideas, but he tried not to be trapped by them. He has some consistent targets, and the labels that suit him best are probably those that are most antithetical to what his targets stood for (at least under the description that leads him to target them).

How we label Nietzsche says as much about us as it does about him, perhaps more. We label him according to our own interests. I tend to read him as a religious thinker, a religious desperado. But I find that every time I read one of his books, it has changed since I last read it, just as my interests have. Funny thing, that.

3:AM: The role of the artist in Nietzsche is very important, isn’t it? What is the role of art for Nietzsche?

KH: Nietzsche sees art as the celebration of humanity. It is a means of furthering culture, offering us hints as to how best to life, and restoring our sense of meaning in life when it is challenged. Art is the best model for life, as Nietzsche sees it. He talks about “giving style to one’s character” as an ideal. Instead of trying to conform to some universal standard of “a good person,” he thinks we would do best to try to work our individual, somewhat quirky traits into a character that is as coherent and pleasing as artists (traditionally) tray to make their artworks. Nietzsche also sees the point of view that art develops in us as valuable for seeing value in our lives. Taking a somewhat distanced point of view on ourselves, for example, enables us to idealise ourselves somewhat and to overcome self-loathing that might be inspired by too much awareness of our own imperfections. Theatre, in particular, helps us to see ourselves in a nobler light, and to see others in that way as well. The distancing perspective of art can help us to overcome both shame and a tendency to condemn, both of which Nietzsche frequently claims to want to help us move beyond. Art’s captivating power, particularly evident in music, is also a means of reminding us that we are powerfully in love with life. When faced with tragic horrors and recognizing our own vulnerabilities, we find challenges to a sense that life has meaning. Through music, we feel our connection with the powerful flow of life and recognise that we are deeply appreciative of being part of it. In this sense, art helps us to gain and maintain a sense that life is meaningful, despite the fact of suffering.

3:AM: Robert Solomon writes, ‘Nietzsche, like Sartre’s Proust, is no one other than the net effect of his writings’, but is that the limit of how to understand him as existentialist, because there seems to be a tension in Nietzsche between self-creation and his denial of freewill? What are we to make of this tension – is he an existentialist at all?

KH: I don’t think Bob was trying to sum up all that can be said about Nietzsche in that comment. This was likely an illustration of the Sartrean way of understanding anyone’s life, an orientation that Bob largely agreed with. We are what we do and what comes of those doings, according to Sartre. The apparent tension between Nietzsche’s themes of self-creation and his denial of free will is a major topic among Nietzsche scholars. My way of explaining this tension is as follows: Nietzsche saw the idea of free will as incoherently implying that even with the situation and the person’s own motivations geared to a person’s acting in one way, the person can nonetheless (seemingly for no reason) act in another. But Nietzsche seems to have been a compatibilist. Some of the causal determinants of our actions come from ourselves. We aren’t free to choose our drives, but Nietzsche often talks about ways that we can manage them. He often uses gardening metaphors for such self-cultivation. It takes time to rearrange our psychic landscapes, but it is certainly possible and desirable. That is what “giving style to our character” involves. And with enough cultivation, Nietzsche suggests, someone who is initially rather negative about life can become deeply life-affirming, though he isn’t too optimistic about most people’s doing this.

3:AM: Zarathustra is a strange parody of a sacred text isn’t it? What’s Nietzsche parodying? Is it Christianity, or Buddhism’s Three Baskets, or what?

3:AM: You’ve also edited a book on The Philosophy of Erotic Love. This sounds fab. What is the philosophy of erotic love – you have Spinoza, Hegel, Sartre, de Beauvoir in there – so is there a philosophy as such being developed, or is it more that philosophers take their philosophical position and then apply it to the erotic? Could you perhaps give an example of what you’re getting at?

KH: Our intention in the book is to present the accounts of various thinkers, both across the Western tradition and in contemporary times. We included psychoanalytic and literary writers as well as philosophers because we wanted a broad constellation of approaches to this timelessly interesting topics. The thinkers included approach the erotic along various lines. For some it is a central concern. According to Plato, eros is what draws us toward the Forms in the first place, and the starting point is love of the beauty of another person. Plato may have been interested in love as a starting point for philosophising, but many philosophers already had developed philosophical outlooks before they took up the topic of love. How erotic love relates to the broader philosophy is one of the themes we hoped to illuminate with the book. One question Bob and I were interested in as we organised the book was whether erotic love, as a concept, is constant, or whether those who discuss it are actually discussing different things. Is Freud’s “libidinal cathexis,” for instance, the same thing as “romantic love”? Even if the word “love” (in the erotic sense) is used by most of the thinkers we anthologise, we found their discussions inseparably bound to their immediate cultural context, with its specific mores and social practices. The connection of erotic love with a whole way of life is what leads some thinkers, like Sartre, to criticise love as inherently manipulative and a means of domination. And the connection of the idea of erotic love with a larger philosophical outlook on the world is evident in the writings of philosophers on the subject. In a sense, the history of the idea of erotic love offers an angle on the history of Western philosophy as well.

3:AM: Although you’ve done a lot of work with German philosophy, you’ve also pioneered work in world philosophy, haven’t you? Was this a conscious move to counter a Western bias in philosophy as taught in English speaking universities? And did this come about as you began working surveying philosophy’s history?

KH: Actually, I got interested in non-Western philosophy very early. The high school English teacher that told me that philosophy was what I was interested in read an excerpt from J. Krishnamurti in his class one day, and I insisted after class that he loan me the book. I also took a Chinese philosophy seminar my first semester in graduate school. Another motivation for my interest was that, having majored in music as an undergraduate, I’d been fascinated by a course I’d taken on Indian music. Indian music was tremendously sophisticated, but based on very different structural choices than the Western tonal tradition had made. I was quite interested in the philosophy of music, and I was rather disappointed, studying philosophy in grad school, to discover how much of Western tradition after the ancient Greeks more or less ignored music. When I was introduced to Chinese philosophy, I found just what I was looking for, a philosophical tradition that paid a lot of attention to music and its relation to the good life quite generally. I’ve pursued that interest more recently by participating in summer institutes on Chinese philosophy sponsored by the National Endowment on the Humanities. In any case, my conviction that non-Western philosophy was part of philosophical history preceded my writing books about that history.

3:AM: How far have we got with moving away from seeing non-Western philosophies as ‘alternatives’ and seeing them instead as partners in philosophical discourse. I suppose my worry here is that if the western tradition is always at the centre then by definition alternatives will be peripheral? I wonder if the huge explosion of university life in India and China has brought about greater connections between these traditions of philosophy?

KH: Unfortunately, Western philosophers have not, for the most part, taken a lot of interest in the rest of the world, although this is changing. One reason in the Anglophone world, I think, is the tendency to approach philosophy as a series of problems and puzzles and to conduct their philosophising by means of countering moves that have recently been made in (Western) philosophical journals. This does not allow much room for considering alternative perspectives on what the important problems might be, an interest that would naturally lead to consideration of how other traditions have formulated their philosophical inquiries. Nevertheless, I’m convinced that it is only a question of time. As interaction with other parts of the world becomes more and more a daily occurrence, interest in other cultures will follow naturally, even if it is motivated by perceived clashes in outlook. Once this interest becomes more common in the culture at large, I think philosophers in greater numbers will take an interest, too. I only wish more philosophers were leading the way in investigating what the rest of the world has to offer.

3:AM: I was impressed that you included African philosophy and Mesoamerican thought in your overview. I’m very ignorant of these traditions so I wonder if you could say something about these two areas and say what’s distinctive?

KH: African philosophy includes critical investigations of the wisdom traditions of Africa, and some African philosophers devote themselves to such work. One of the fascinating things about contemporary African philosophy is that it is so self-reflexive. A big issue being considered is whether there is such a thing as “African philosophy.” Of course, this depends on what is meant by “philosophy,” so recent African philosophy has engaged in a consideration of the nature of philosophy itself, as well as a comparative consideration of philosophical problems considered in the West and traditional African answers to these questions. African philosophers, in this respect, are paying more attention to comparative philosophy, on the whole, than are Western philosophers. Much of African thought in recent times, however, has been concerned with the impact of colonialism. This approach has also led to consideration of the relevance of Western thought to African issues, often in a critical way.

The pre-Columbian Meso-Americans were traditionally interested concerned about how best to relate to the supernatural beings who occupied a different plane in both time and space. Their elaborate calendar systems were devised in order to determine when these beings and other cosmic forces would cyclically influence this plane. They believed that the planes of reality were interconnected, and that human beings had the responsibility to provide sustenance to the gods, who had sacrificed some of their life energies in creating the terrestrial plane. Practices of blood-letting and human sacrifice reflected this belief that human beings should restore life energies to the gods. However, philosophical thinkers did offer critical alternatives to standard views within their society, though we have limited information about them because of the wholesale destruction of their records by the Spanish. The Aztec thinkers known as tlamatinime (“knowers of things”) engaged in reflection on the nature of reality. They sought to find ultimate truth, which they believed was attainable through artistic inspiration and the creation of poetry that was derived inspiration from the supernatural plane. In more recent times, Meso-American philosophers, along with their South American counterparts, have attempted to articulate a truly Latin American philosophy, not just a spin-off of European thought, in the wake of colonialism. Some have elaborated social critiques of power structures that have oppressed many in Latin America. Some have also emphasised the importance of the creative, aesthetic dimension for being fully in touch with reality, in keeping with the orientation of their pre-Columbian counterparts among the Aztecs.

3:AM: You’re also a philosopher of music and argue that music that is politically effective is music that is relatively transparent. You say music can lead to insights about the way in which human beings are related, even beyond sectarian boundaries. This sounds attractive. Can you say what you mean by ‘transparent’, and whether your argument means that avant garde music and experimental stuff is politically bad?

KH: What I mean by “transparent” is music whose conventions are already assimilated by the audience. Transparent music is easy to follow because it involves no surprises. I think that people are likely to be roused by this kind of music more than music that is more challenging. I don’t think avant-garde music and experimental stuff is politically bad at all. It just doesn’t speak to the masses. I think Adorno is right in his suggestion that music that challenges people can have positive political effects, in prompting them to go beyond their usual way of looking at things and in helping them to engage in appreciation of something beyond the latest commodity. But I also think that music that is within people’s comfort zone plays an important role in their lives, and that it is best to recognise this when attempting to use music in moving people politically.

3:AM: Adorno is considered a great philosopher of music but recently Roger Scruton has asked whether he is relevant any longer? What do you think?

KH: As I suggested in answer to the last question, I think Adorno makes important points about music that retain their relevance, even if I think he doesn’t appreciate the psychological, and hence political, value of music that makes people feel secure. He was critical of the commodification of music, and I don’t think that’s gone away. Even Scruton agrees that Adorno’s concern about the “regression of music” (dumbed-down music that offers little to the mind) has its point. I agree with Scruton that Adorno missed the mark when he analysed jazz as music of this sort, but I agree with both of them that there is much to be said for enjoying musical works that develop musical materials into interesting structures. (I don’t, however, think short and simple is necessarily bad in music – music can do lots of different things and be enjoyed for different reasons).

3:AM: And finally, for the philosophically intrigued here at 3:AM Magazine, can you recommend 5 books (not your own, which we’ll be running off to read straight after this) that will take us further into your philosophical world?

KH: It is hard to limit myself to five, and I’m not sure whether you have classics or contemporary books in mind, but here goes (with some of both):

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Chuang Tzu, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu
Robert C. Solomon, Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life
Peter Goldie, The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind
Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Lars Iyer interviewed by Antônio Xerxenesky.

Originally published in Portuguese at the IMS blog, to mark the publication of Iyer’s ‘Nude in the Hot Tub’ manifesto in Serrote magazine, issue 12.

3:AM: Other than an essayist, you are also a fiction writer. Is your manifesto connected to your fiction, and do you think it may help explain your approach to novel writing?

Lars Iyer: Sometimes, it is by saying stupid things, simple things which you would never usually allow yourself to say, that you say something valuable. I tried to say something simple, something stupid, in my manifesto – something I felt strongly, and which I wondered whether others might feel. As for my novels … I have always wanted to attain the kind of stupidity of which Beckett spoke in his only interview. ‘I invented Molloy and the rest on the day I understood how stupid I’d been. I began then to write down the things I feel’… It was a marvellously propitious stupidity, I’m sure you’ll agree…

Michelet writes somewhere of being a ‘link of time’; of opening between past and present, and maintaining that relationship, in spite of the tendency to forget and move on. Both my manifesto and my novels are intended to foreground the difficulty of maintaining such a link between past and present, between neoliberal capitalism and European Modernism. For me, neoliberalism has deprived us of the conditions under which a certain literature – the literature, in particular, of Modernism – thrived. The vanguards have disappeared because there is no one in particular to offend. Literary fiction lives on, but it has become, for the most part, a kind of kitsch, depending on the most schematic ways of presenting character, plot, etc. – on a ‘realism’, a standardised system of representation, that is completely at one with the generic models of taste on which advertising and marketing depend.

Wasn’t it ever thus?, you might say. Hasn’t there always been good and bad literature? Aren’t there still authors worth seeking out? Aren’t there notable books published every year? Why speak of ‘literature’ as such and in general? Why not ‘literatures’? The literary fiction of this country, or that? The literary fiction that speaks for this minority, or that? How absurd to think that ‘literature’, as a word, could connote anything that could be left behind! Hasn’t literature survived every supposed death?

Andrew Gallix suggestively distinguishes between two kinds of belatedness. There is the belatedness already present in Don Quixote: the novel as a ‘fallen’ form, coming in the wake of older forms. And then, there is the romantic and Modern dream of the ‘Literary Absolute’, which expresses belatedness with respect to a total work of art – like Mallarmé’s conception of The Book, for example. Such belatedness, for me, holds in particular for those Modernist vanguards which sought in some way to link art to politics, which sought to change life, to change the world. As I argue in my manifesto, the conditions for such vanguards have vanished, and with them a whole dream of Literature, with a capital ‘L’.

Good!, you might say. We have no need for those old idealisms! for retired Marxisms and anarchisms! for dead-end experimentation and vanguardism! Literature cannot change the world – and how absurd to think otherwise! The literary arts, in the end, have nothing to do with politics! History is over, and so, too, is a certain dream of what literature could be! Of what the arts could be! We are more modest now, you might say. We expect less of life, and less of literature.

Freud contrasted mourning with melancholy. You can ‘work through’ mourning, he allows, re-integrating the losses you have undergone into a new whole. Modernism mourned can be absorbed into whatever the period is in which we now live – Postmodernism, or post-Postmodernism. It can be studied, dissected, its authors profiled in the Sunday supplements. Its memory can be reactivated – why shouldn’t Modernist techniques inform the modern novel? Can’t contemporary literary fiction incorporate the lessons of the past?

But melancholy, according to Freud, continues indefinitely, and promises no new integration. And I am melancholy about our relationship with Modernism. Modernism is mute, in a certain sense. It doesn’t communicate with us. The link between past and present is broken. Literature survives today in literary fiction, which means literature no longer survives, or survives under erasure. The ‘realism’ of literary fiction is continuous with what Mark Fisher has called ‘capitalist realism’: the sense that our neoliberal present is the natural result of societal evolution, that it is eternal, that this is the only world there could be.

3:AM You make a solid defense of Vila-Matas’s metaliterary devices in your essay, that in writing on the impossibility of writing, he is creating one of the only possible forms of literature nowadays. However, don’t you think that this sort of device will become tiresome – and isn’t Vila-Matas destined to repeat himself?

LI: Writing on the impossibility of writing: it sounds very sterile and academic! It also sounds hackneyed: isn’t this what Blanchot wrote in the preface to Faux Pas? Isn’t it what Beckett said to Duthuit in their dialogues? But there is a crucial difference between writing on the impossibility of writing in the 1940s, and today. In a nutshell: the modernist experience of the impossibility of writing is still framed and validated as the impossibility of something worthwhile; but those times have passed, as I argue in my manifesto. Montano, in Vila-Matas’ novel, lives in an age which no longer accords literature its older prestige. There is something grotesque about the anachronism of Montano’s relationship to literature, which doesn’t mark that of Blanchot or Beckett. Montano’s problem is not the impossibility of writing, but the impossibility of experiencing the impossibility of writing. Montano only half-knows that he has come too late for literature. He nearly gets it. But for us, Vila-Matas’ readers, as well as for Vila-Matas himself, the situation is perfectly clear: Montano’s feeling of literary melancholy is laughable, even while we, too, share something of the experience.

Of course, I am not claiming that we should all write like Vila-Matas. But he has shown us the situation that the literary-fiction writer inherits, and the task that this situation gives to us: the task of registering what has happened to literature in the literary work itself; the task of writing without naiveté.

Will Vila-Matas repeat himself? He hasn’t done so in the books in English translation that I’ve read. Will his devices become tiresome? Not so long as they negotiate our relationship to Modernism as skilfully as they do.

3:AM: Scott Esposito, in his reply to your essay, claims that this sort of discourse may only be projecting its own limitations. How do you reply to that?

LI: Esposito’s essay is interesting, but I disagree with the way he frames my argument: I do not complain about the fragmentation of the novel; I do not seek for a work to overcome the fragmentation of our civilisation: far from it! And I disagree with Esposito’s account of Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives: I don’t think it ‘exult[s] too much in its purposeful marginalisation to aspire to the world’. Bolaño’s novel, like Vila-Matas’, laughs at the impossibility of literature in our times. At its imposture. And at the imposture of beginning again – of writing, still writing, amid the ruins… It shows an exuberant melancholy very far from the ‘wizened resignation’ Esposito finds in my manifesto…

3:AM: Even though you create a link between Roberto Bolaño, Vila-Matas and Bernhard in your essay, they are very different novelists. Bolaño’s fiction is highly political, and his criticism of literature is much related to the fact that art (and literature) didn’t have any effect on stopping dictatorships and violence. Do you think that Bolaño’s approach to the subject of the end of literature is significantly different than Vila-Matas’s and Bernhard’s?

LI: What is the connection between these authors? A distance from literature as something possible for ‘us’. A distance from a certain modernism, which is inflected in a different way for each author.

In periods of revolution, Marx says, revolutionaries conjure the ghosts of the past to help them. The wardrobes and dressing up boxes of history are raided, and names, slogans and costumes tried on for size. The danger is that revolutionaries repeat what has happened as farce, merely parodying what has gone before. For me, the three authors I mention do more than simply parody past glories. They understand that the literary gesture itself is parodic.

Bolaño, perhaps more than Vila-Matas and Bernhard, foregrounds the grotesquery of this parody. The literary visceral realists seem no more than a farce, when pitched against the horrors of Pinochet-led Chile, against the laboratory of neoliberalism. Its political aims seem particularly pathetic. But there is a glory to this parody. Bolaño is not one of the literary Last Men. History hasn’t quite ended for him. In The Savage Detectives, perhaps more than in the work of Vila-Matas and Bernhard, melancholy blossoms into a kind of promise. The disjunction between Modernism and the present, between Literature, capital ‘L’, and Politics, capital ‘P’, becomes utterly unbearable. For me, that unbearableness allows Literature to appear in its impossibility, as a kind of present absence, as a kind of disappearance, and along with it the vanished legacy of Modernism.

Let me put it programmatically: Without a relationship to Modernism, no future. Without knowing that the relationship to Modernism is utterly impossible, no future. Without knowing that there is no future, no future.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Antônio Xerxenesky was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He is the author of the novel Areia nos dentes (2008), a postmodern Western, and the short story collection A página assombrada por fantasmas (2011). English translations of his work can be found at Words Without Borders, Two Lines Magazine and Granta: The Best of Young Brazilian Novelists.

C.G. Prado interviewed by Richard Marshall.

C.G. Prado is dangerously frank about the current state of analytic philosophy, thinks we’re always stuck with the divide between analytic and continental, thinks much epistemology a dead end, thinks Rorty wrong on objectivity but read his work as a wake up call, thinks Churchland right on self, thinks academic writing is concerning in several important respects, thinks Foucault very cool, novel and unfairly ignored by analytic philosphers and all in all goes deep-fried and heavy. He also has brooded on elective suicide and related issues, which all in all makes him inescapably a happenin’ muckety-muck big gun of the philosophical slam.

3:AM: What made you become a philosopher? What have been the significant changes you’ve noticed since you began back in the 60s?

C.G. Prado: I took a philosophy course out of curiosity and found the instructor to be the most intelligent person I’d ever met. I took every course he offered and more or less found myself majoring in philosophy. The biggest change I’ve seen since I started out is a division of philosophy into hard-core and applied, with the former being mainly philosophy of language and logic and the latter largely medical and business ethics.

3:AM: From the very start you were wide ranging in your interests: you wrote about D.M. Armstrong’s materialist theory of mind, cybernetics, perception, Aquinas, the Ancient Greeks and Indian philosophy. Were you looking for your focus back then, or was there already a core focus in all this?

CGP: I worked at changing my focus because so my colleagues seemed to me too entrenched in particular areas. I was also looking for what I could do best. Meeting Dick Rorty in the middle of my career provided me with a new perspective. I didn’t stick to Rorty’s work very long; frankly I found the criticism of analytic philosophy exciting but saw little of a new, positive direction. But Rorty enabled me to take Foucault seriously — something my colleagues didn’t do, and that was like a door opening.

3:AM: In 2003 you said to Richard Rorty that when younger you had expected philosophy in the English speaking world to shift to Rorty’s approach to epistemology but this never happened. Were you disappointed and how do you account for the fact that the shift never happened?

CGP: When I said that, I was already aware that the lack of a positive direction in epistemology, which Rorty essentially dismissed, proved something of a dead end. In retrospect I’m not surprised nothing developed. When Rorty shifted his focus to more socio-political stuff, I lost interest.

3:AM: Can you say what you take to be Rorty’s important contributions to epistemology and is your epistemological position broadly in line with Rorty’s critique of Cartesian epistemology?

CGP: Rorty’s critique was a wake-up call. It forced serious reflection. But in the end, I couldn’t give up what John Searle consistently defended against Rorty: objective truth. Thanks to the reflection Rorty prompted, though, I was able to appreciate the complexity of the issue of truth and of Foucault’s multifaceted position on truth, a position I’ve tried to explain in some of my work.

3:AM: If Rorty’s position contrasts with Descartes, another figure you contrast with Descartes is Freud in your essay ‘Reference and the Composite Self.’ You say that for Descartes ‘self reference is always self awareness’ whereas for Freud ‘self reference may be to the subject aware subject, or to a putatively continuous subject.’ Which of these two has the best resources to deal with the problem of reference and the composite self you identify in that paper? And is your use of Freud an attempt to introduce ideas which at the time were rarely found in much of the philosophy you were looking at?

CGP: This is a very complex matter. The basic issue is the split between those who believe we are discrete, singular selves or egos — whether substantive or brain-dependent, and those who believe each of us is a bundle of somehow interconnected brain-dependent mental states. The question for this second group is what provides the unity of the self, our sense of self. Here I endorse Patricia Churchland’s comment that “the self is a tool created by the brain to make sense of the world” in her piece in the New Scientist, ‘Do We Have Free Will?’. For the first or Cartesian group, the unity of the self just is its singularity, and Freud makes no sense because the self is transparent to itself. Their problem is that such a singular self really has to be a thing separate from brain activity, and the question is what that might be.

3:AM: However in Descartes and Foucault you analyse a contrast that involves one of your central concerns: Foucault. In that book you contrast Descartes’ Meditations with Foucault’s History of Sexuality. What are the salient contrasts you discuss here?

CGP: Answering that would take another book. Let me just say this: Foucault, while focused on the shaping of behaviour, offers us insights into how we are each molded by others’ behaviour and by how we respond to that behavior. For Descartes, the self, the ego, is paramount and wholly independent. Descartes’ Meditations is essentially an exercise in total self-determination, something requiring only discipline and thoroughness. The adequately reflective self is impervious to the influences of others.

3:AM: In Starting with Foucault you continue with your attempt to show that the historicity of knowledge and the formation of subjectivity, captured in Foucault’s term ‘Genealogy’, ought to be more central to the concerns of many Anglo-American philosophers than they have been. Do you connect Foucault with Rorty, in that they both show that modern societies have imposed constraints on how to live and think that pre-moderns wouldn’t have accepted?

CGP: Not really. I don’t think Rorty was as despairing about how we are shaped as persons as was the genealogical Foucault. There was a deep sense of individualism in Rorty that was not just missing but basically rejected by the genealogical Foucault. But in Foucault’s last two or “ethical” works some of that creeps back in.

3:AM: Reading Frederick Beiser’s book on German Historicism it seems Foucault is part of a long tradition of philosophy which Chladenius, Moser, Herder, Humboldt et al inaugurated and which was completed with Max Weber. Is this something you’d recognise when assessing Foucault’s importance?

CGP: Sorry, but this question raises one of my major concerns about academic writing. If you work at it, and are selective enough, you can make practically any original and complex philosopher part of one or another favoured tradition. Sure, Foucault had obvious ties to the work of Heidegger, for one, and sure, he wrote in a canonical tradition — the “Continental” — as opposed to another, particularly the Anglo-American analytic tradition. But Foucault offered brilliant insights that whatever their general intellectual backgrounds or contexts were very much his own and articulated in very much his own manner. I read writers like Foucault for ideas, not similarities and dissimilarities with others.

3:AM: In your book Searle and Foucault you present these two thinkers as converging on several of their ideas about truth. Foucault claimed that all his books were fictions, which at first blush seems to take him miles away from Searle. So can you say why these two can be discussed as working in converging fields of interest?

CGP: This question relates to your last one. I wasn’t trying to bring Searle and Foucault together on anything as individual philosophers. I took each as representing a fairly extreme position on truth and related epistemological matters. I then tried to show that their positions — or anyone’s similar positions — have important concurrences. As for Foucault saying his books were fictions, that was just Foucault being Foucault. Fictions in a sense, yes, so far as we focus on intellectual interpretation and possible alternatives, but hardly just stories. Foucault worked at his commitment to any history or position being just one more interpretation among many, but as I try to show in Starting with Foucault and other places, he continually slides back into putting his views forward as the right views, inconsistent though that may be.

3:AM: Was Foucault more interested in thinking ‘differently’ to escape intellectual normalization than in ‘advancing’ thinking? Does this explain to some extent the changes of mind in Foucault over his life and why a Whiggish interpretation of Foucault is a mistake?

CGP: Yes. The overriding objective was novelty of thought. However, in connection with the last question, he was like someone aspiring to moral perfection and constantly slipping up. While the goal was novelty, and the implication was therefore that other novel views were as desirable as his own, time after time after he has presented his alternatives Foucault treated them as preferable to others.

3:AM: Connected with the last question, how far was Foucault just working out elements of Heidegger and Nietzsche and how far was he an original thinker? I think you feel that some philosophers sometimes miss how original he was?

CGP: All intellectuals have precursors, and Foucault certainly owed much to Nietzsche and Heidegger, but he was an original thinker. One indication of this is how, like Wittgenstein’s central ideas, Foucault’s ideas, especially about power, have worked their way into our thinking and now are used with little or no mention or even knowledge of their origin.

3:AM: The analytic-continental divide is the elephant in the room when discussing Foucault (and Rorty too I guess). Was your book on Searle partly aiming at bringing the two tribes together and see that there were important positions being developed in both camps? One reviewer of the book of essays you edited on this subject commented that he felt the selection there strongly favoured the continental. Is that fair? Of course several philosophers now find that the distinction one of little merit. What do you think? What are we talking about when we say the house is divided? Is there such a divide? Is the divide what it thinks it is?

CGP: No, I don’t think there’s much chance of bringing them together. What I tried to do was to get analytic philosophers to take Foucault seriously. Too many wrongly lump him in with Derrida and dismiss him as another postmodern. He was that, to a point, but his genealogical works in particular deserve to be read and appreciated by philosophers who don’t happen to share his canonical position. I thought the reviewer was more or less right. To be dangerously frank, I feel analytic philosophy has declined significantly in intellectual productivity. Journal papers are getting more and more infarcted. Rorty made fun of a whole series of papers on heaps (on just what constitutes a heap) and I thought him right. The papers seem to be written only to add one more footnote to ongoing and often uninteresting and unpromising debates, and seem driven more by the need to publish than to contribute philosophically. I used to advise my graduate students: find a journal debate you can stomach, write a short paper turning the most recent contribution on its head, and you’ll get published. As for the divide, Foucault himself would describe it in genealogical terms. On both sides people do what they were taught to do; what their peers expect.

3:AM: The philosophical issues of elective dying are a major concern in your later work and continues to be of importance. I guess the obvious question to ask is whether suicide is rational in the context of terminal illness? And was this a topic that sprang out of your reading of Foucault?

CGP: Suicide most certainly is rational in any circumstance where the alternative is being lessened as the person one is. That’s what I’ve argued in all my writings on the topic. I have even argued that it is rational to preempt such lessening. And no, my interest had little or nothing to do with Foucault; it had to do with experience with Alzheimer’s sufferers and what I learned about the Sue Rodriguez case.

3:AM: In your 2009 book, Choosing to Die you note that ‘there has been growing recognition that life is not of ultimate and unquestionable value.’ Is this true of all cultures or just some? What is the role of multicultural perspectives here? And you link this with changing attitudes towards elective death, shifting from being though immoral and cowardly to brave and wise. Should this be welcomed? Aren’t there slippery slope dangers that this will erode many of the safety devices in culture against taking life?

CGP: Another tough one. I think recognition of the relative value of life is limited to some cultures, and at the risk of being offensive I’ll add that it is limited to the more mature and sophisticated cultures. As for the shift from seeing suicide as cowardly to seeing it as wise, it is a welcome change but a very dangerous one. If it becomes engrained in popular culture and thinking it will cease to be adequately reflective and will lead to perilous expectations.

3:AM: In your latest book you examine how people close to those who elect to die due to terminal illness cope. What are the philosophical issues that you discuss here and why do you think that a philosophical treatment of this issue is of help?

CGP: This is not a philosophical issue. I wrote the book because my philosophical position on the rationality of suicide in dire circumstances called for something about those affected by suicide. In this way the book was “philosophical” only in the broad sense that people use when they consider or discuss basic questions.

3:AM: Felicia Cohen raised an important and interesting point about your book Coping with Choices to Die. She thought it brilliant, but too hard to be a practical book for most people not trained in philosophy. Many philosophy books are like that and I have smart friends who often complain that philosophy books are too dense. Does philosophy have to be hard to read? Can we get the insights into the public domain without losing the complexity and subtlety? And in subjects like yours, isn’t there a moral dimension to this: are we obliged to get the philosophical views to survivors and indeed everyone involved in elective death issues?

CG.: All I’ve written about elective death has come up against this point. Some of my stuff has been ignored or dismissed by health-care professionals who see it as too theoretical and who seem to care only for case-based works. I’ve tried to make my work accessible, and I think I’ve succeeded to a modest degree, but I’m treating elective-death issues at a very basic level — at the level of rationality and not even at the level of morality. I guess my ambition is to at most provide some with material they can apply in helping and counseling others who might not get much out of my books themselves.

3:AM: You have recently begun to return to think about issues in philosophy of religion. Can you say something about these issues and whether they are issues that you have been drawn back to through your work in suicide?

CGP: Yes. Reliance on religion in cases where elective death is an option returned me to my ideas on religion. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked. I’ve not been able to come up with anything novel or worthwhile regarding the role of religion. As we are seeing in the domestic and international political realms, religion has gained new significance and with it has come greater intractability. I’m afraid that I have nothing productive to offer on the topic.

3:AM: And finally, are there five books (other than your own which we’ll be rushing out to read straight after this) that you could recommend that would help the readers here at 3:AM understand further some of the complex philosophical ideas you have been grappling with?

CGP: What? Recommend other people’s books? Okay, these are “must reads” (and I hope it’s okay that I’m mentioned in a couple):

Margaret Battin, The Death Debate.

D. Micah Hester, End of Life Care and Pragmatic Decision Making.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (Vol. 1).

Gary Gutting, The Cambridge Companion to Foucault.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.