For China’s intellectuals, restrictions started long before the pandemic and will continue after Covid is over

SOUTH CHINA MORNING NEWS

Guo Rui Jun Mai in Beijingand William Zheng in Hong Kong

Published: 10:30pm, 2 Jan, 2023

For Sheng Hong, a prominent economist based in Beijing, in-person academic events and overseas trips were restricted long before the Covid-19 pandemic, and they are likely to outlive the pandemic too.

As Sheng tried to host a biweekly panel discussion in the summer of 2018, the small group of scholars were expelled and forced to move twice during the half-day meeting.

They ultimately wrapped up their discussion of complexity economics, a cutting-edge branch of economics, on the pavement.

Later that year, on his way to a conference at Harvard University, Sheng was stopped at an airport in Beijing by the authorities who warned that his travel posed a threat to state security.

He was director of the Unirule Institute of Economics think tank which promoted liberalisation of the country’s economy and that was shut down by the government in 2020.

“It started before the pandemic,” said Sheng, referring to Beijing’s rules in the name of preventing Covid-19 that restricted in-person events and international travel.

“The direct reason is simply restrictions set by the authorities.”

Sheng is among a number of Chinese intellectuals who have found it increasingly difficult to publicly express their academic views or exchange them with fellow scholars, especially when those views are at odds with those held and promoted by the Communist Party under the leadership of President Xi Jinping.

Since Xi assumed power in 2012, he has conducted a far-reaching project to reshape the country’s intellectual and ideological outlook. During the 20th party congress in October he declared that in the past 10 years China’s ideology landscape had seen an “all round and fundamental” improvement.

The project, as Xi summarised in a series of speeches over the decade, involves chipping away all platforms or spaces where views are unflattering to Beijing, as well as flooding the public discourse with narratives and values favoured by the party.

According to scholars who spoke to the South China Morning Post, at universities the evaluation of professors in the social sciences has become more focused on their contribution to the party’s ideology, and people who dare to deviate from it must constantly look over their shoulder for student informants and surprise inspectors sent from high authorities. 

The scholars expressed concern that these settings would seriously impair the ability of the country’s intellectuals to expand their knowledge in social sciences, as well as the next generation’s ability to think critically, a trend some said had already become obvious.

A literature teacher at a Guangzhou-based university surnamed Liu – who did not wish to give her full name due to the sensitivity of the subject – said at each faculty meeting she was reminded she was not supposed to talk to students about seven subjects. They include universal values, press freedom and civil rights.

Those seven topics were designated taboo in college courses in 2013, the year Xi became president, and have since been established as a firm red line in ideology in Chinese universities.

“The [school’s] secretary emphasised that at almost every meeting,” Liu said. “So in classes, we need to conduct some self-censorship and think of a way to say certain things so it’s acceptable to all, including the student informants.”

In her classes, Liu must navigate talking about women writers without getting too much into feminism, and determine how to teach the Divine Comedy with as few details about Christianity as possible.

Any scholar without a clear state affiliation seeking to publish findings on Hong Kong, Taiwan and Muslim groups in China could expect to be rebuked by Chinese journals, she said. She added that invitations to any guest speaker in class must be preapproved.

A direct result of these restrictions on social sciences is that the country has stopped acquiring new knowledge on those topics, according to a Beijing-based political scientist who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“All these censored areas have stopped developing,” the person said. “Look no further than the Cultural Revolution. The studies abroad are much better than those inside the country. There is almost no one studying it now.”

In addition to the various restrictions on topics available to be studied, Chinese scholars are assessed under a system based on political indoctrination, with various Marxist schools and university courses at its centre, according to a professor surnamed Li who teaches media studies at a university in Guangdong.

“Regardless what subject is being taught, one needs to establish some links between it and Xi’s thoughts,” said Li, referring to the president’s political theory that has been enshrined in the state constitution since 2018.

“Once you spend all your daily energy on these things, you become a different person. You’ll be unable to conduct international academic discussions, address trending social topics, or anything a real scholar is supposed to do,” Li said.

By March, there were more than 1,400 Marxist schools inside China’s universities, according to the Ministry of Education. There has been a rapid proliferation in recent years of these institutes, which were set up not only in comprehensive universities but also medical schools and art academies around the country.

They are heavily focused on courses as well as studying the achievements of the party’s governance, especially under Xi.

In various speeches in the past 10 years, Xi has repeatedly called for the work on thought politics – or political indoctrination – to permeate “the entire process” of education in colleges and universities.

He has also said the ultimate purpose of education should be to train for the future of China’s political system.

“We need to be clear about the goal of educating people, and it’s very clear that the goal is to nurture builders and successors of socialism,” he said in a 2019 speech. “If we spend much time nurturing people who are grave diggers of our system, what is the point of education?”

But in the fresh faces joining her university, communications professor Li noticed an obvious pattern of students’ weakening ability to analyse.

“The consequence is they are getting worse at critical thinking,” she said. “The homework I’ve received after the pandemic is very different from that received before it. And there’s blatant hostility towards foreign matters.”

The intellectual landscape in China’s social sciences has even troubled some of the firmest supporters of the Communist Party and staunchest defenders of its policies.

“The US and the West kicked off decoupling with China in high technology and that made people here realise technology is the fundamental power of innovation. And my understanding is that ‘original ideas’ in social science matter just as much,” said Zheng Yongnian, director of the Institute for International Affairs at Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.

Zheng said a thinker was “not something that could be brought up, but something that grows in a tolerant environment”.

Official interference with academic work must be minimised so scholars could have room to research and express themselves freely, he said.

Zheng is a seasoned political scientist well respected by the Communist Party. He was among a handful of scholars invited for a 2020 lecture for the Politburo – the country’s highest policymaking body, led by Xi – on China’s five-year plan.

But Zheng said that given China’s academic environment – made worse by a rigid evaluation system heavily focused on the publishing of papers – it would be a “fairy tale” to see important thinkers on social sciences emerge.

“The evaluation system [for scholars] here is simply suffocating people’s minds,” he said. “China is now big on the number of papers being published, but small on original ideas.”

Sheng Hong used to sit on a panel of 50 economists that advised the Chinese government. The panel was co-founded in 1998 by Liu He, the outgoing vice-premier.

Sheng is among a handful of prominent economists who lost their seat on the body during a reshuffle in 2019. During that reorganisation, a few officials in regulatory agencies gained seats.

The Beijing-based economist does not know how his activities are still being restricted in 2023.

“The only way to figure out if I’m still on the exit ban list is to try to fly out,” he said. “It’s so tiring after preparing all the materials for academic conferences and being stopped at the airport.

“Academic development is doomed to be stalled, and so is cultural diversity and the general public’s knowledge. The public is no longer in somewhat neutral information surroundings.”

 

Is there a common good?

Both conservative and leftwingers have maintained that there is a common good which we should set out to realize. But other conservatives and leftwingers have declared with equal conviction that there is any such common good. Could it be that both sides are unclear about what is at stake?

The case against the assumption of a common good is usually made in the name of moral pluralism or individualism. The claim is that there exists a plurality of different conceptions of the good which can lay equal claim to validity.  In one version of this claim, this moral pluralism manifests itself in the existence of different cultures; another, more radical version assumes that moral pluralism is grounded in human individuality.

Stuart Hampshire argues vividly argument against the idea of a common good t in his 1989 book Innocence and Experience. He asserts that the only thing that can hold society together is a commitment to procedures for negotiating our moral differences.  The key to the social order is what he calls “procedural justice” — which he contrasts to a substantive conception of justice which, according to him, is always the expression of a particular understanding of the good. Procedural justice, he writes, is a means for enabling human beings “to co-exist in civil society, to survive without any substantial reconciliation between them, and without a search for a common ground. [My emphasis] It is neither possible nor desirable that the mutually hostile conceptions of the good should be melted down to form a single and agreed conception of the human good. A machinery of arbitration is needed and this machinery has to be established by negotiation. Justice can then clear the path to recognition of untidy and temporary compromises between incompatible visions of a better way life.” (p. 109)

This account suffers from a number of flaws. The first is that it treats conceptions of the good as if they were necessarily disjoint. But we know from history and experiences that such conceptions may overlap in part and that the communalities they share may serve as a basis for mutual recognition and peaceful coexistence in society. We also know that parties that meet will try not only to identify existing common ground but set out to create new such ground. Societies are never held together only by a shared sense of procedural justice. they also seek to foster common sentiments.

We must accept that there is no complete vision of a common good shared by humanity at large and that there cannot be such a thing. But that should not deter us from striving to achieve a limited sort of social consensus. This is, indeed, what we generally set out to do in politics. We can, for that reason, characterize politics as an ongoing search for a common good. But we must allow at the same time that there is no single ultimate good of this kind to be found. Our search does not have a single, fixed target. We must also acknowledge that even when we agree, for the time being, on a particular conception of the good, there are likely to be those excluded by that conception. Social consensus is never the consensus of everyone in society.

INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE: Stuart Hampshire on morality and politics

Stuart Hampshire’s book Innocence and Experience from 1989 is one of my favorite works in philosophy. Hampshire’s star in philosophy seems to have faded somewhat, but his work deserves our continued attention. Innocence and Experience is an original and provocative work of philosophy. It is also a testament to its author’s humanity, experience, and wisdom.

The book brings together and elaborates ideas about morality that Hampshire had first voiced in earlier years. It has illuminating things to say about the importance of conditional judgments in morality and elsewhere, about the difference between substantive and procedural justice, and the role of imagination in moral thinking. Hampshire’s critique of Aristotle’s psychology with its overemphasis on reason is well-taken. So is his criticism of Hune’s detached treatment of morality. And so is also his critique of John Rawls’ attempt to pin down substantive principles of justice.

Hampshire is particularly clear-sighted on the difference between morality and politics. “Observation of the politics of the immediate pre-war years, ” he writes, “first made me think about the unavoidable split in morality between the acclaimed virtues of innocence and the undeniable virtues of experience.” And he complains that “most Anglo-American academic books and articles have a fairy-tale quality because the realities of politics, both contemporary and past politics, are absent from them.” With his background as a diplomat as well as a philosopher, Hampshire is keenly aware of the difficulty of maneuvering the gap between moral principles and the practical necessities of human politics. There is, he thinks, no  theoretical resolution of that issue.  “Once again the philosophical point to be recorded is that there is no completeness and no perfection to be found in morality.”

Hampshire’s view of our moral virtues and capacities is expansive: “Courage, a capacity for love and friendship, a disposition to be fair and just, good judgment in practical and political affairs, a creative imagination, generosity, sensibility: tese are all dispositions and capacities which are grounds for praising men and women.” But we know, he adds that historical circumstances and personal preferences and choices limit our ability to pursue all those virtues at once. Some of them are, indeed, incompatible. “Lopsidedness is a fact of human history and therefore a fact of human nature.”

What I appreciate most in the book is that Hampshire is writing from a broad range of human experience. His book gives testimony to a mature and humane wisdom as well as to exceptional philosophical acumen.

I remember Stuart Hampshire with gratitude as a friend and mentor and teacher of philosophy.

Adrian Vermeule: The confusions of the common good

Conservative legal scholars have discovered the common good.  And that might be a good thing. What calls itself “conservatism” in modern parlance is often associated with a radical individualism and has thus little or no regard for common concerns. With Adrian Vermeule is the eloquent spokesmen for a group of conservative legal scholars who have rediscovered the common good. Here is a report from Politico on one of their recent conferences:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/12/09/revolutionary-conservative-legal-philosophy-courts-00069201

But the devil is, as always in the details in these debates. One may be attracted to speak with Aristotle and in accord with Catholic social doctrine of the common good, but who determines what that good is? 

Will it be Professor Vermeule at Harvard and his fellow warriors? Will it be some doctrinal authority in Rome? Or an assembly of evangelical clergymen reading the tea leaves of the Bible?

Is there even one single fixed common good? Do we not commonly need to compromise between what is good for some and what is good for others? How will we go about determining that compromise? There are, as we have found out, irreconcilable differences in what people regard as a common good? How much order and how much freedom are called for in a good society? There are likely to be deep disagreements between us concerning this question and these are will be linked to our most profound understandings of who we are.

If the common good is what benefits most, but not necessarily all, who will have to be sacrificed and how extreme may that sacrifice be? Aristotle spoke of the common good of the Greek polis, and he tried to convince himself that even slaves would be its beneficiaries.  But were they? In the footsteps of Aristotelian philosophy, the Catholic Church has advanced its own understanding of the common good.  Protestants may be forgiven for thinking that the Church’s conception of the common good has been somewhat self-serving.

If there is to be a politics of the common good, there must be a political process for determining that common good, The task can’t be left to Professor Vermeule and his fellow members in the Federalist Society. But what shape would that process have?

Would the common good be determined by majority opinion?

Would there be the need to achieve some consensus?

I would despair of the Congress of the United States or the Supreme Court declaring what the common good is. The best we can imagine is an open, political process in which we struggle together to define the parameters of a good society. The outcome of any such struggle will inevitably tentative and in need of revision. Aristotle once argued that all our actions aim (though perhaps only indirectly) at a single ultimate good. But what reasons do we have to accept his conclusion. His argument for it is certain flawed.

There may be no such thing as “the common good.” What there is and has to is rather the ongoing search for such a good. Human social life in its historical dimension is that search, In trying to make a life together we are travelers on a long road into the future but there is no single, ultimate destination to which the road leads. There is only search just as music there is only the search for harmony, not a single, fixed, eternal harmony to which all our musical efforts aspire.

Let’s resist those who want to use the idea of the common good to subject us to their will.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/politics-and-the-search-for-the-common-good/6850B6D511984131083F7E6540352EF3

 

Xi Jinping: From collective to authoritarian government

About a year ago, at the end of 2021, The State Council in Beijing published a remarkable document with the title: “CHINA: A DEMOCRACY THAT WORKS,” It argued that China had developed a “whole process democracy” that was, in fact, superior to its Western model which consisted of an array of democratic practices at various levels of government and society.

 

The description of these practices was, indeed, intriguing, though one was left with the question to what extent they were implemented in a way that preserved their democratic character. At every point, the document insisted that they would of course have be “under the guidance of the Communist Party.”

 

But the document certainly revealed the democratic aspirations in some China’s leadership. We should certainly not take their expression for mere propaganda. The question is only whether those sentiments are shared at the highest levels of the Chinese government and specifically by its supreme leader, Xi Jinping.

 

What gives reasons for doubt is Chi’s apparent preference for authoritarian rather than collective government. The “Democracy” document had given an explicit endorsement of collective government. It said:

 

“China draws on collective wisdom and promotes full expression and in-depth exchange of different ideas and viewpoints through democratic consultation. Parties to these consultations respect each other, consult on an equal footing, follow the rules, hold orderly discussions, stay inclusive and tolerant, and negotiate in good faith. In this way, a positive environment for consultation has been cultivated in which everyone can express their own views freely, rationally and in accordance with the law and rules. Through democratic consultation, China has built consensus and promoted social harmony and stability.”

 

This appears to be far from Xi’s preferred way of governing as his recent re-organization of China’s government makes explicit. It was Deng Xiaoping who had implemented the system of collective leadership in order to prevent the excesses of the Mao period.  In a 1980 speech Deng had criticized the “overconcentration of power” and had emphasized the need to guard against a future political strongman. Chi as now gone back on those reforms. He has, instead, taken full control of the political system arguing that a concentration of power was necessary as a solution to the acute political and economic problems faced by China.

 

It seems that China is right now moving further away from democracy> I wonder what the authors of CHINA: A DEMOCRACY THAT WORKS are thinking.

 

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3198865/xi-jinpings-end-chinas-collective-leadership-model-was-years-making?module=perpetual_scroll_0&pgtype=article&campaign=3198865

Frege and Nietzsche

It must seem odd, to put the names of Frege and Nietzsche together.  At first sight, the two appear to have little in common. The content and style of their thinking diverge in obvious ways; they come out of two different philosophical traditions; and their names are associated with two mutually hostile groupings in recent philosophy.

But the two men have nonetheless some important things in common. They were born just four years apart from each other. They also grew up in the same region of Germany and both grew up under the influence of German Lutheranism. What is more, they received a similar education. And they both endeavored to develop a new set of ideas that was so radical as to gain them only limited recognition during their lifetime.

These are, of course, in some sense only external characteristics that don’t bear on the content of their respective thought. But they point to the fact that the same environment produced such diverse ideas. We may ask then what it was about this environment that made this possible. Can we identify a deep structure in this environment that made the thought of both Frege and Nietzsche possible?

In order to understand the course of philosophy over the last 150 years, we cannot limit ourselves to studying the development of just one or the other of the philosophical schools that emerged in this period.  We need a comprehensive view of the age that shows us how and why became such a fertile ground for new philosophical ideas. There emerged in this time a whole slew of philosophical movements which went on to flourish in the following century.

That wave of creative philosophical thought is now receding. Looking back at it, we can see clearly that Frege and Nietzsche belonged to the same historical moment and that they were motivated, despite all their differences, by certain common concerns. Not on their own, of course, but in the company of others they felt dissatisfied with the philosophical tradition and sought for a new beginning in philosophy. Among the shared characteristics of their thinking was a new interest in language and in the associated notions of meaning and truth. Both Frege and Nietzsche endeavored to deal with those topics and so have, of course, many other philosophers since then.  But such observations do not yet reveal the total deep structure of this historical period. Its episteme, do used Foucault’s useful term, is still to be discovered,

“Women hold up half the sky,” as Mao famously put it – but not in Chinese politics

The new Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo will once again contain no women. In the course of the last seventy years no woman has ever been a member of that all-powerful body of the CCP. A few women have made it to longer rungs in the party hierarchy. But the Chinese Communist Party remains a strictly patriarchal organization. It is dominated by elderly men who seek to make themselves look alike as much as possible in their dark suits, white shirts, discrete ties, and their carefully groomed and blackened hair. They form a male phalanx to which no woman will have an easy entrance.

The normal course of successful political parties is from obstreperous upstart to preserver of the  status quo. The CCP is no exception. Its revolutionary energies have dissipated and traditional patterns of thinking have come to prevail. This consolidation of power may look like strength, but it reveals in fact a growing weakness. Parties age, just like people. They forget that they once meant to be a vanguard of social change and they retreat to the comfort of what is and has always been.

Not Thinking Like a Liberal

Philosophers should write about their own lives, was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s advice even though he himself never tried to do so. He was probably thinking of Augustine’ Confessions as a template – a work that sought to be both biographical and philosophical at once, not just an unreflective retelling of its author’s life.[1] Augustine initiated in this way a form of writing that confronts the self with the thought that prevails in its world.[2] Montaigne rightly counts among the great practitioners of this art and Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo has to be seen as one of its most memorable examples. Raymond Geuss’s latest book, Not Thinking Like a Liberal, is no doubt, an original and captivating contribution to this genre.  Augustine, Montaigne, and Nietzsche were evidently among Geuss’s inspirations for his new book, though obviously in very different ways.[3] Augustine because, like Geuss, he was much preoccupied with the course of his education, Montaigne because he expressed himself in an essayistic style akin to Geuss’s way of writing, and Nietzsche most of all because, like Geuss, he was driven by a sense of alienation from his own world. “We feel disfavor for all ideals that might lead us to feel at home … in this fragile, broken time of transition,” Nietzsche had written in The Gay Science. “As for its ‘realities,’ we do not believe that they will last.”[4] The words might well have served as the motto for Not Thinking Like a Liberal.

Instead, Geuss has chosen a passage from Robert Musil’s novel Die Verwirrungen des Zōglings Tőrleß in which the young hero begins to read a book “with so many parentheses and footnotes hat he did not understand a word” and “had the feeling that an aged, bony hand was slowly extracting his brain from his skull, winching it out as if winding it around a screw.” (p. v) This is not the last moment when the reader of Not Thinking Like a Liberal will experience a sensation of this sort. Geuss’s book is full of unforeseen turns, unsettling insights, challenging opinions richly interspersed with qualifications, parentheses, and footnotes. It is a book by a philosopher on philosophy but quite unlike most of such productions. It is a piece of autobiography that tells us only a few, select things about its author. It illuminates its author’s state of mind as well as the state of our contemporary culture but in depicting both as puzzles. Geuss concludes his preface appropriately with the words: “The exact relevance of my account is something I must leave up to the reader’s judgment.” (p. xv) Like young Tōrleß, we may find it difficult to reach a settled judgment on the book but with the worrying sense that this uncertainty is precisely what the author intends to leave us with.

What contributes to this feeling is Geuss’s way of writing. He explicitly repudiates the style of writing that has become common in philosophy today with its linear argument leading from sharply defined premises to definite conclusions. His way of writing is exploratory rather than argumentative. The examination of one idea leads him to that of another often in unexpected transitions until the circle is in some way completed. Geuss explains his way of writing in words reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s preface to his Philosophical Investigations: “It often seemed like aimless wandering in a singularly inhospitable environment.” (p. xiv) He has perfected this distinctive style of writing in recent years in a series of essays published in books with intriguing titles like A World without Why (2014), Reality and its Dreams (2016), and Who Needs a World View? (2020).  His new book is probably best read in conjunction with those earlier works – as an extended essay of reflections on a variety of interrelated topics rather than a straight-forward autobiography. It expands in fact on the lead essay of Who Needs and World View? and it may be fully accessible only in company of that piece. The reader of Not Thinking Like a Liberal is, in any case, well-advised to ask constantly: if not like a liberal than like who? To which the answer has to be: like its author who refuses to be pinned down.

The book begins and ends with an indictment of liberalism and that theme maintains a constant presence in the book. The reader may, for this reason, want to look at the discussion of liberalism as the first, upper-most layer in the critical reflections of the book.  Geuss fastens initially on the Anglo-Saxon world with what he takes to be its abiding faith in the conjunction of capitalist economics and liberal democracy. That world is now in steep, even staggering decline, he insists, citing the financial crisis of 2008, the rise of Donald Trump in the US, and the UK’s break with the European Union. But the rot goes much deeper in his eyes and extends beyond the Anglo-Saxon sphere and the West. Our species as a whole appears to be set now on committing suicide by destroying its natural environment.  (p. 167) What has brought about the rise of the West and its increasingly evident decline and what is also bringing ecological disaster upon us now is the “fantasy” we have of ourselves as sovereign individuals with its accompanying illusion of “purity, absolute autonomy, and self-dependence.” (p. 41). Geuss considers this fantasy to be the core of a deeply entrenched version of modern liberalism committed to the inviolability of individual taste and opinion and the protection of unfettered individual choice and free commercial enterprise. His judgment on liberalism (or, rather, this particular form of liberalism) is uncompromising. He finds it impossible to see “how the traditional remedies of liberalism will be of any help in the world we now inhabit.” (p. 165) Liberalism, he adds, has begun to show itself “in an increasingly unmistakable way to be at best irrelevant and at worst actively deleterious to human well-being.” (pp. 165-166) The paradox is that our world is increasingly out of control while we stubbornly hold on to the belief in human autonomy. Given this state of things, Geuss concludes, liberalism is “not the place to seek insight into anything.” (p. 161)

Such bold assertions would seem to need backing up. But that is not what Geuss is after. He writes: “I am not, that is, trying to refute liberalism.” Readers may come to change their views as a result of reading his book “but I realize that that is largely out of my control.” (p. 167)  One has to look for an argued critique of liberalism elsewhere in Geuss’s oeuvre.  In his History and Illusion in Politics of 2001 he had characterized liberalism as a historical movement in which notions of toleration, freedom, individualism, and the limitation of power coalesce in various and contingent ways and he had then proceeded to subject each of those notions to detailed critical analysis. Some of them, he had concluded, were highly confused, others extremely implausible, and several of them stood in severe tension with each other. For all that his judgment had not been completely dismissive. In his 2008 essay on “Liberalism and its Discontents” Geuss acknowledges a “continuing vitality of this tradition” and  allows that a  certain kind of liberalism – one that is anti-Kantian and anti-Rawlsian in spirit – may provide a “promising orientation for thinking and acting politically in the future.”[5] But since writing those words Geuss has become profoundly more negative in his assessment of both liberalism and the situation in which we find ourselves today. He has also become more pessimistic about the use of philosophically systematic arguments than he was twenty years ago. Over the years he has come to see that despite everything that has been or may be said against it, the liberal ideology still prevails. Argument, seems thus unable to dislodge it. Despite all its weaknesses, which Geuss does not tire to point out, the faith in liberalism persists.

His book is, however, by no means a single-minded diatribe against liberalism. It is just as much a critique of authoritarianism and this critique forms what we might call the second layer of Geuss’s book. His initial statement that the world is in the unwavering grip of an individualistic liberalism was, of course, in any case a wild overstatement. So is his unqualified assertion that “the vocabulary of ‘liberalism’ is the dominant and virtually all-pervasive idiom of our thought and speech.” (p. 163) This may hold true in some corners of the world and in some powerful places, but liberalism is surely no longer an uncontested political ideology. There exists today a whole roster of authoritarian powers, starting with China and Russia down to numerous petty autocracies sprinkled across the globe. In the West, too, there have arisen authoritarian parties, politicians, media outlets, and websites with millions of followers. The critique of authoritarianism proves therefore just as urgent as the indictment of liberalism. Geuss can have no doubts about that even when his eye remains mostly focused on the challenge of liberalism.  Some of his critical remarks on liberalism appear, in fact, due to nothing other than his strongly anti-authoritarian sentiments – but directed in his case against the liberal claim to authority

In reflecting on this situation we are in danger, Geuss argues, of assuming that the choice is between liberalism and authoritarianism. And that would generate yet another misconception. It is true that liberals tend to see no other alternative. But “Liberalism or authoritarianism” is a false dichotomy. We must refuse to reflect on these matters in binary terms. Geuss makes his case for such a refusal with what he calls “a kind of ethnographic account, with a strongly autobiographical component.” (p. 2) His goal is , he writes, “to paint a picture of a form of life” which depicts “one particular niche in the ecology of modern societies,” and thus “to trace one life-path that diverges from the liberal consensus without being authoritarian.” (pp. 2 and 9)

Having grown up with “the general authoritarian tendency of the Catholic Church in the United States,” Geuss sets out to describe how he found himself by luck in an extraordinary Catholic boarding school that was both “anti-liberal and non-authoritarian” (p. 43). And later on as a student of philosophy at Columbia University he became acquainted with teachers who, in a very different way, combined the same attributes. To be more specific, he encountered two extraordinary teachers: a Hungarian émigré priest, Father Bela Krigler, at his boarding school and the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser at Columbia. “None of the many philosophers I met later in life, despite the evident intellectual power and seriousness many of them had, had nearly the real, continuing effect that Bela and Sidney did,” Geuss writes in his essay “Who Needs a World View?”[6].

For Krigler, liberalism was “a clumsy and completely unphilosophical rubbish heap of narrow-minded prejudices, bits of wishful thinking, and random observation,” a debased form of ancient humanism.[7] He thought that there were only two major spiritual powers in the world, two coherent world-views: Catholicism and Communism.[8]  But he also  dismissed traditional Thomism, considered the authoritative philosophy of the Catholic Church,  as “a particularly sclerotic form of late Aristotelianism” and nurtured a passion for contemporary philosophy (including Heidegger) and psychoanalysis which he freely communicated to his students. While he rejected liberalism and its belief in the autonomous individual, his exposure to Communism also made him shun any kind of authoritarianism. His entire school operated, in fact, on such principles.

In contrast to Krigler, Morgenbesser did not address himself directly to liberalism. Instead, he bypassed it in his thinking. The most important thing Geuss learned from him was a distinction between accepting a philosophical theory on the basis of conclusive arguments and accepting it on the basis of a commitment that outruns the evidence.  Ideally, one should of course, be guided, in one’s beliefs, engagements, and actions by evidence but that is often lacking or inconclusive. Commitment to a theory (we might even say to a faith) or. alternatively, refusal to commit oneself to it can thus not be accounted for entirely in terms of its evidential support. The distinction serves Geuss to explain  Morgenbesser’s attitude to liberalism. Influenced by Dewey, Marx, and the Jewish sense of community, liberalism proved a view of the world that was deeply unsympathetic to Morgenbesser’s way of thinking. He could not even be bothered to find arguments against it. “He simply found he lacked motivation to engage with it on its own terms.” (p. 135) Geuss adds, that he discovered quickly at his boarding school that he lacked similarly the motivation to accept Krigler’s version of Catholicism even though he was deeply attracted to his rejection of both liberalism and authoritarianism.

From Columbia, Geuss moved on to Freiburg as a result of a flirtation with the thought of Martin Heidegger. There he discovered the poet Paul Celan and the philosopher Theodor Adorno. Celan’s poetry taught him the sobering lesson that “the basic fact about the universe that it is infinitely pointless, utterly lacking in any kind of meaning.” (p. 150) It is in this stark condition, according to the poet, that humans “encounter each other, can experience human contact and even a certain limited understanding.”

Geuss found that that this harsh lesson to be re-enforced by Adornos’ observation that there is no right way to live in our false society: “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen.” (p. 82) Adorno’s Minima Moralia appealed to him thus as “an extended criticism of some of the central tenets of liberalism.” (p. 157) Adorno ‘s reflections showed him that the subject is not naturally autonomous, that the self is constituted by social relations, and that we can hope to achieve at most a partial autonomy but that only by recognizing our dependence.[9]

By telling this story of his own intellectual development, Geuss seeks to subvert both liberalism and authoritarianism. And he is surely right in thinking that such a narrative, when  properly told, will undermine the belief in a naturally given human autonomy as well as that in a naturally determined order of submission to authority. For the biographical story will make evident that the development of human individuality takes place in a shared environment, that there are always others who have guided and accompanied the narrator, that the individual is embedded in and defined by a surrounding world and inherits from it much of its way of thinking. It will also reveal that this course of development allows a degree of liberation from authority, a partial escape from dependence, and it shows how to achieve that partial escape. In Geuss’s account, Father Krigler, Sidney Morgenbesser, and the author himself are meant to illustrate that complex reality.

The indictment of liberalism, the critique of authoritarianism, and the search for a way of thinking that is neither liberal nor authoritarian constitute successive moments in Geuss’s reflections. Those consideration are, however, not their end-point. They take us, rather, to a further and deeper layer of thought Liberalism and authoritarianism are world views (or follow from broad views of the world) and that is one reason why neither of them can be defeated by argument. In order to oppose and defeat them, it may seem necessary to come up with another more satisfying view of things.  One might for that reason assume that Geuss’s autobiographical account is intended to make such an alternative world view plausible and attractive. Developing such an alternative worldview had been Father Krigler’s project. Through him, Geuss learned of the work of progressively minded Catholic philosophers and theologians in Europe who were engaged in devising such a world-picture. For a while Geuss himself became an avid reader of the  Austrian magazine Wissenschaft und Weltbild which actively pursued that agenda. But he did not, in the end, make it his own. While Krigler was sure that humans must have a world view, Geuss writes: “I did not find myself able to respond to Father Krigler’s eloquent appeals… His project didn’t seem to be likely to be achievable… It certainly had no attraction for me.”[10]

His association with Sidney Morgenbesser at Columbia and his reading of Adorno in Freiburg were, in any case, to take him in a different, more skeptical direction.  Morgenbesser was convinced  that the logicians Tarski and Gōdel had  dented the idea that there could be a comprehensive world view.  According to Tarski there can be no single all-encompassing definition of truth and according to Gōdel there can be no single complete theory of elementary mathematics. How then could there be a single true theory of everything, a comprehensive Weltanschauung?[11] And from Adorno, Geuss received the idea that philosophy cannot be “directed at producing detachable propositions or theses that could be extracted and taken away from the whole of the text at the end.” (p. 152)

Geuss concludes from this that “we have become rightly suspicious of all totalizing constructions.” This, he writes, may, indeed, be “the defining philosophical difficulty of our time.” (p. xiii) Our paradox is that we can see the untenability of total world views but don’t seem to be able to do without them.  We need them, so it looks, even though it is evident that none of them is likely to be satisfactory. And because of this need our views of the world will not be defeated by showing that their claims are false. No formal refutation will dislodge them. We should then not be surprised to find that formal arguments against either liberalism or authoritarianism are useless. We need to identify, rather, the underlying needs that give rise to them and hold them in place.

Not Thinking Like a Liberal seeks thus to diagnose the seemingly primal needs that make us hold on to the picture of ourselves as autonomous beings. The need in question may turn out to be that of affirming our power over a world that proves our transparent and growing powerlessness. Not Thinking Like a Liberal also seeks probe the need that makes us cling to an authoritarian world view. It appears as the natural counterpart of liberalism. It is motivated, like liberalism, by a fear of powerlessness but turns that fear – as it does in Calvin’s Geneva – into a belief in absolute authority. Geuss’s reflection on the life of Father Krigler is thus meant to show us what needs support the adoption of one world view as against another. And his account of the life of Sidney Morgenbesser and his own autobiographical narrative intimates how to overcome those needs.

With this we finally reach the final layer of Geuss’s reflections. Philosophy as we have understood it so far has either concerned itself with specific arguments or sought to devise world views (or pursued a combination of the two). But if neither argument nor the construction of world views can help us to overcome our illusions, philosophy itself becomes problematic. Geuss concludes his book by writing that “philosophers cannot pretend to be the voice of universal reason or propose an all-encompassing worldview.” (p. 164) He returns at this point to a theme of his 2017 book Changing the Subject. Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno. The philosophical tradition that started with Socrates, he claims in that book, has come to an end in the late twentieth century. He quotes Celan’s description of poetry as “that form of speech which declared that mortality and futility were infinite.” But he adds immediately that philosophy, by contrast, presupposes a minimum of optimism though certainly not the “almost dementedly sunny view” that the tradition has drawn.[12] There remain philosophical questions that are worth exploring and, as he adds in Not Thinking Like a Liberal, some of the analyses and proposals philosophers have offered may still be of interest. But it is clear, on Geuss’s view, that philosophy cannot in good conscience continue along its well-trodden paths.

The lessons he draws for himself are stark: Not to think like a liberal and not to think like an authoritarian either; and not to look for an alternative world view that is both non-liberal and non-authoritarian; in fact, not to look for any world view; not to expect to sort these matters out by constructing deductive arguments; not to follow the dried-up main-stream of philosophy; not to expect a positive answer. Geuss is surely right in maintaining that critical thinking does not have to come up with positive conclusions and that action does not require hope its ends will be realized. We may still want to ask: what is left after all these negations? It is thinking reflectively and in personal terms, writing in the form of an autobiographical essay, continuing in the task of changing the subject. There are no fixed routes in the place in which we are traveling. Our journey through it will have the character of a ramble characterized by spontaneity, even whimsy and occasionally by the pleasure of the moment. “The text that follows,” he writes in the preface of his book, “tells the story of one individual path through this landscape.”  (p. xiv)

Notes

[1] See in this context Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 1

[2] Thomas Mathien and D. G. Wright, Autobiography as Philosophy. The Philosophical Uses of Self-Presentation, Routledge, London 2006.

[3] The three are included among twelve philosophers Geuss examines in is 2016 book Changing the Subject. Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno (Harvard U. P., Cambridge/Mass.) though not specifically with respect to the autobiographical aspects of their work. While Geuss takes a favorable view of Montagne and Nietzsche, he writes unsympathetically of Augustine’s “repellent self and … the unattractive flabbiness of his written style.” (p. 95)

[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 377.

[5] Outside Ethics, p. 28.

[6] Raymond Geuss, “Who Needs a World View?” in Who Needs a World View?, Harvard U.P.,  Cambridge/Mass. 2020, p. 39..

[7] “Wo Needs a World View?”, loc. cit., p. 6.

[8] “Who Needs a World View?, pp. 6 and 2.

[9] Not Thinking Like a Liberal is a book full of diverse ideas. But there is also much that it leaves out. Its autobiographical narrative, for one thing, is highly selective. The book covers no more than a dozen years of the author’s life. And even those are retold with great circumspection. We never even find out what the main protagonists of the story, Krigler and Morgenbesser, looked liked. They remain mere voices. Geuss himself appears mostly as a listener who records what others have said. One emotional outburst is recalled in the essay “Who Needs a World-View?” where Geuss tells us of his irreparable break with Morgenbesser.  We have to assume that Geuss’s intellectual development did not end around 1970, as he claims. What did he learn from teaching at Princeton and Columbia? How did the move to Cambridge and England change him? At the end we may feel that Geuss has not told us enough about himself. He certainly does not seek to bare his innermost self to us. In Changing the Subject he dismisses the “Christian-inspired” probing of the depths of the self that he finds in Augustine. He prefers, instead, Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo “with the extensive discussion of his life by reference to his preferred diet, the landscapes he loves, and his favourite meteorological conditions.” (p. 191) Not that he follows Nietzsche in this respect.

[10] “Who Needs a World View?” p. 14.

[11] Ibid. p. 20

[12] Changing the Subject, pp. 299-300.

 

Who needs a worldview?

Worldviews are aplenty. There is, for instance, “A Christian Worldview” neatly mapped in the featured image — which I have gratefully borrowed from the site of the “Metro Praise International Church”. It obviously means to contrast its worldview to secular views of the world and, perhaps, also to other Christian worldviews. I am looking at it because it provokes some interesting questions about what worldviews. I am not so much concerned, on the other hand with the particular worldview expressed in the featured diagram – about which there is, of course, much to say.

The language of “worldviews” is familiar to us. We speak, for instance, of “the modern worldview” as against the medieval or the ancient one. We say of Aztecs, Communists, and “primitive man” that they have or had their view of the world. And we identify “pictures of them world” – “Weltbilder” to use the convenient German word – as the product of such worldviews. But what are worldviews and what are world pictures? And why do we need them? Or seem to need them?  I have never seen as concise a depiction of a Christian worldview as the above image. It must be the work of a philosophically minded theologian with its pyramid of axioms and deductions, its certainties and opinions.

Seeing and Seeing-as

 

The diagram depicts the world view as a set of propositions with different cognitive status. Some are said to be axioms, others are presuppositions, a third group are the “theorems” that can be deduced from the preceding two, and then finally there are the mere opinions of empirical science. Why then do we need to speak of a view world and a resulting picture of the world? Is the language of vision and depiction just metaphorical? Do Christians actually “see” the world differently from non-Christians and is the modern way of “seeing” the world different the medieval one?

We moderns can certainly see things with the help of optical instruments that the medievals could not. We can see galaxies, for instance, and bacteria. We can see more things than our forbears and we perceive many things in different ways. Our “view” of the world differs in this way from that of the medievals. But when we consider more closely what is meant by “seeing something as something” we discover that the apparently sharp distinction between perception and belief is not we may have thought it to be. Our seeing something as something is characteristically connected with some beliefs about what we see. What we think of as a worldview may thus be a syndrome of perceptions and beliefs. We must conclude that a worldview is no more than a set of beliefs of which, at least, some are related to visual perceptions. That characterization is, of course, too vague to be fully satisfactory but it does tell us that worldviews ae not organic wholes but somewhat shaky composite structures.

 

A view of everything?

 

We speak of worldviews sometimes as if they were comprehensive visions of everything or possibly universal theories of everything.  There are, of course, reasons to think that there are no such all-encompassing views or theories. But we need not think in that way and the above diagram manages to do so.  It depicts the Christian world view, rather, as laying down a series of normative principles for adjudicating which beliefs should be treated as certain and which as conjectural.

It is, in fact, plausible to think of a world view as a set of beliefs of two different kinds. Some of them will be first-order beliefs about what there is in the world others are second-order beliefs about what cognitive status are to be assigned to beliefs.