China’s Decoupling from the World

The Chinese President, Xi Jinping, is calling for China to be “self-sufficient” in strategically important areas. There is talk also of an outright decoupling of the economic relationship of the US and China.  At the same time, China is seeking to enhance its status as a global power. It is clear that different and opposing forces are at work.

China has a long history of isolationism. And with the current rise of nationalistic sentiment in China, these isolationist tendencies are once again becoming visible. They have manifested themselves in China’s way of handling the Covid pandemic. The protective barrier between the country and the outside world that has been in place now for more than two years may eventually come down but the mentality it has created may linger on.

We also hear now increasingly loud voices calling for the reduction of teaching English in China’s schools. Deng Xiaoping’s opening of China included the promotion of instruction in the English language.  It was understood that proficiency in English was essential for connecting China to the world. Now there are calls to reduce the influence of Western thought, to promote Chinese culture, and cut back on the hours students spend on learning a foreign language.

It would be impossible for China to withdraw entirely from the rest of the world and its leaders are not likely to pursue such a policy, but we can be sure that the balance between engagement and isolation will remain a live issue in its politics.

 

A new world order?

Just a few years ago China’s Belt and Road Initiative looked like an inviting project. But today in 2022 its prospects have become dimmed.  How Beijing’s belligerence over Taiwan is connected to a Belt and Road Initiative in distress | South China Morning Post (scmp.com)

Here is what I wrote at the time about Bruno Maçães’ 2018 book Belt and Road. A Chinese World Order. 

“During the extended period of agricultural society, China was an economic power in the world … but it later missed out on the industrial revolution … and it gradually slipped into a position where it was passively subjected to abuse,” the Chinese scholar Zhi Zhenfeng wrote in 2018. But, hadded, there was now “the historical opportunity of the millennium” to catch up with the West and possibly overtake it. The project to bring this about had been announced in 2015 by the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping under the name “One Belt, One Road.”

Bruno Maçães’ recent book Belt and Road. A Chinese World Order, from which the above quotation is taken, provides a fascinating account of the “One Belt, One Road” project: what it is, what its economic and political implications are, and what the world will look like at its outcome. Maçães, a Portuguese politician, political scientist, and business strategist, writes that “Belt and Road,” as he calls it for short, is not just one project, “it is an idea, a concept, a process, better captured through a metaphor, not an exact description.” (p. 24) “The Belt and Road,” he adds, “is the name for a global order infused with Chinese political principles and placing China at its heart. In economic terms this means that China will be organizing and leading an increasing share of global supply chains, reserving for itself the most valuable segments of production and creating strong links of collaboration and infrastructure with other countries, whose main role in the system will be to occupy lower value segments. Politically, Beijing hopes to put in place the same kind of feedback mechanism that the West has benefited from: deeper links of investment, infrastructure and trade can be used as leverage to shape relations with other countries even more in its favor.” (p. 30)

Maçães goes on to describe how, in pursuit of “Belt and Road, China has set out on the economic development of Central Asia, particularly that of Kazakhstan, how it is building an economic corridor all the way from Kashgar in Xinjiang to Karachi in Pakistan and on to Gwadar on the coast of the Indian Ocean, and how it is establishing port facilities in Djibouti in Africa with plans for a high speed rail system crossing the entire continent to the African West Coast, thereby establishing at the same time a new route to South America. “Belt and Road” is certainly not one project, as Maçães shows,  but a flexible program of global development. It envisages lines of economic development and infrastructure that will reach by land and sea to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The assumption is moreover that the countries connected in this way will also have to harmonize and coordinate their political arrangements. Due to negative reactions from the West to this vastly ambitious undertaking, the Chinese have, in fact, now given up using the term “One Belt, One Road.” But they have by no means cut back on their plans.  They continue to invest vast sums of money, thereby diverting also their foreign exchange reserves from American government securities in which they had previously invested them.

Maçães is certain that the project will eventually re-organize the entire existing world order – even if it is never fully realized. He has accordingly argued already in a previous book that we need to abandon some of our familiar geo-political concepts. We must, in particular, learn to speak once again of “Eurasia” as a single economic and political space and thus move beyond n thinking of Europe and Asia as different continents. In his new book he reminds us that strategists have already begun to write similarly of the “Indo-Pacific” instead of the Indian and the Pacific oceans as separate domains. Maçães understands that “Belt and Road” will, no doubt, undergo changes as it evolves, that over time it may even become less Sinocentric, and that as it develops it will also run into increasingly stronger headwinds – coming in particular from the United States who will inevitably feel threatened by the rise of this alternative world order but also perhaps by an increasingly more ambitious India. He concludes his book by sketching four possible scenarios for China’s place in the future world system.

The most likely outcome, he argues, is not that of a convergence of global systems. He agrees with James Mann in his 2007 book The China Fantasy that American policymakers have used the myth of convergence as an anesthetic and tranquilizer, allowing them to believe in the invulnerability of the Western system. “Instead, Mann predicted, China would remain an authoritarian country, and its success would encourage other authoritarian regimes to resist pressure to change.” (p. 177) And so it seems to have turned out. “The new world order towards which we are moving is not one where there is a clear centre, but rather one distinguished by the search for balance between different poles. So when we describe a new Chinese world order we have to keep in mind that there will be other shareholders, other shapers, other balancers.” (p. 191) So, it turns out, that we have entered a second age of globalization, “where borders become increasingly diffuse but cultural and civilizational differences do not, giving rise to a permanently unstable compound of heterogeneous elements.” (p. 192)

I found Maçães’ book incredibly helpful in trying understand the meaning and implications of the One Belt, One Road project. The book is certainly an informed, well-written, and well-argued guide to what may be ahead.

Bruno Maçães, Belt and Road. A Chinese World Order (Hurst & Co, London 2018)

Here is a link to a podcast with Bruno Maçães and Linda Yueh on the topic of China’s new world order: Maçães’ https://player.fm/series/series-1264716/bruno-macaes-and-linda-yueh-on-the-chinese-world-order

 

Raymond Geuss: The task of political philosophy

There is often a significant time lag between an idea and its expression. Being aware of that gap maybe necessary for appreciating the original idea for what it is. I am reminded of this in reading Raymond Geuss’ book Philosophy and Real Politics which was published in 2008 but draws its inspirations ultimately from the late 1960s and early 70’s when its author was a student at Columbia University in New York City. In his recent autobiographical essay Not Thinking Like a Liberal Geuss write: “Nothing that has happened in the fifty years since I finished my doctoral dissertation in 1971 has really had a radical effect in shaking the basic way of viewing the world which I had acquired.” How then – we want to ask – is Philosophy and Real Politics rooted in that earlier period and why is its lesson still useful to us in the third decade of the 21st century?

Columbia University was a place of political agitation during Geuss’ time as a student. He may not have been much of an activist, but he was certainly touched by the events. At one point his most important teacher and intellectual role model, Sidney Morgenbesser, was bloodied in a confrontation between the protesting students and the police. This local unrest was part of the political and social turmoil that extended at the time across the globe from the United States to France, Germany, China and numerous other places – including Tunisia where it spawned Michel Foucault political engagement. We can see today that the upheavals had far-reaching effects in all those countries. Our world would look entirely different without them – though they didn’t necessarily bring about the changes their protagonists had hoped for.

One outcome of these happenings was the revitalization of political philosophy in the United States, a topic that had been languishing for some decades. Starting in the early 1930s and accelerated by the arrival of émigré philosophers from Europe, American philosophy had come to focus on the study of logic, language, and the sciences, largely by-passing the problems of politics. What had come to dominate was a somewhat restrictive form of “analytic philosophy.” But in the social and political upheavals of the 1960s the philosophers were suddenly confronted with students who challenged the “relevance” of what they were doing. The result was a renewal of philosophical interest in political philosophy. Of particular importance in this turn were the Harvard philosophers John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Rawls published his acclaimed book A Theory of Justice in 1971 and Nozick followed hm in 1974 with Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Each of those books defended a political view that was widely popular in America: Rawls a mainstream progressive liberalism and Nozick a libertarian anarchism. It was in this period that Geuss also turned to political philosophy.

But he moved from the beginning outside the emerging current of American political philosophy. In his autobiography he writes of his “naturally contrarian temperament” and his feeling “distant from the prevailing philosophical culture.” Having gone to Freiburg/Germany for the academic year 1967-1968 with an interest in Heidegger, he discovered there the writings of Theodor Adorno. Their critical, skeptical, even pessimistic tone attracted him. But this did not mean that he began to think of himself as a fully committed member of the Frankfurt School and its critical theory. He had, in particular, not much sympathy for Juergen Habermas’ attempt to construct a systematic socio-political theory. He remained, rather, true to Adorno and his critical approach to philosophy. It is with this in mind that we must approach Geuss’ Philosophy and Real Politics.

Geuss taught at Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Chicago in the early parts of his career but then moved to Britain in 1993 to take up a position of lecturer and professor of philosophy at Cambridge University.  There he discovered a more congenial intellectual environment than he had known in in the US. Where American political philosophy tended to be affirmative, optimistic, and moralistic, the English political philosophers proved to be more skeptical, more pessimistic, and more “realist” in their thinking. (Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams, John Dunn, Quentin Skinner, and John Gray come to mind.)

While teaching in the US, Geuss had been slow to publish. His only book at the time was small volume on The Idea of a Critical Theory that appeared in 1983. But since then, he has published eight books, most of them collections of essays. In that series of publications, Philosophy and Real Politics may be the most important. It is certainly Geuss’ most programmatic statement in political philosophy.

Geuss begins the book by drawing a distinction between “ideal” and “realist” theories in political philosophy. In the book he clearly identifies with the latter but has since come to regret calling himself a political realist. A better description would, indeed, be to call him a diagnostic political thinker (a term he doesn’t us) because the starting point of his philosophical thinking is a diagnosis of what he conceives to be the dominant liberalism of our era. What he opposes, in particular, is the moralistic conception of politics in Rawls’ political liberalism. This, he thinks, derives ultimately from the philosophy of Kant. He writes: “A strong ‘Kantian’ strand is visible in much contemporary political theory, and even perhaps in some real political practice. This strand expresses itself in the highly moralized tone in which some public diplomacy is conducted, at any rate in the English-speaking world, and also in the popularity among political philosophers of the slogan ‘Politics is applied ethics.’”  He adds: “In this essay I would like to espouse and advocate a kind of political philosophy based on assumptions that are the opposite of the ‘ethics-first’ view…”

In the introductory section of the boo, Geuss makes four observations about how we need to think about politics and political philosophy. The first is that “political philosophy must be realist.” It must be concerned “not with how people ought ideally (or ought ‘rationally’) to act … but rather with the way the social, economic, political etc. institutions actually operate.”  Political philosophy must recognize furthermore that “politics is in the first instance about action and the context of action, not about mere beliefs or propositions.” Politics is, moreover, to be understood as “historically located,” And it is, finally, “more like the exercise of a craft or art” than an application of a theory. Its exercise relies on skill rather than theoretical understanding. He summarizes his view later in the book provocatively as a form of neo-Leninism. “In my view, if political philosophy wishes to be at all connected with a serious understanding of politics, and thus become an effective source of orientation or a guide to action, it needs to return from the present reactionary forms of neo-Kantianism to something like the ‘realist’ view, or, to put it slightly differently, to neo-Leninism.”

To explain this surprising claim, he adds: “Lenin defines politics with characteristic clarity and pithiness when he says that it is concerned with the question that keeps recurring in our political life: ‘Who, whom?’ ” He admits that Lenin’s formula is perhaps too dense and needs to be expanded. “First of all, the formula should read not merely ‘Who whom?’ but, rather, ‘’Who [does] what to whom for whose benefit?’ with four distinct variables to be filled in, i.e., (1) Who, (2) What, (3) To whom, (4) for whose benefit? To think politically is to think about agency, power, and interests, and the relations among these.” One consequence of this view is that it helps one to overcome some of the currently popular views in political philosophy. “If one takes this extended Leninist model as the matrix of political philosophy, certain consequences would seem to follow. The first is that it would be a mistake to believe that one could come to any substantive understanding of politics by discussing abstractly the good, the right, the true or the rational.” Another implication of Lenin’s view is that “every theory is ‘partisan.’” This implies that “any kind of comprehensive understanding of politics will also have to treat the politics of theorization.” Political philosophy must, in other words make itself a subject of examination. We must ask such things such as: What is the political background from which a political philosophy emerges? The political philosopher always occupies a place within a political context. So, how does his/her thinking reflect that context? And how does a political philosophy shape actual political practice?

Lenin conceived politics in terms of power and the understanding of the concept of power has to be, indeed, one of the tasks of political philosophy. But Geuss considers it a mistake to treat ‘power’ as a single, uniform substance or relation wherever it is found. We should, instead, speak of a variety of qualitatively kinds of power. “In this account ‘power’ is to be construed as connected with general concepts like ‘ability to do’ “To illustrate this, Geuss offers us these examples: (1) Coercive power by virtue of physical strength, (2) persuasive power “by virtue of being convinced of the moral rightness of your case and having a special training or natural talent for speaking,” (3) the power of a charismatic figure due to an ability to attract enthusiastic, voluntary support, and finally (4) power due to one’s belief that one has power and that one is perceived to have power.

But Geuss adds that the political philosopher needs to think about more than power; other major concerns should be the notions of political priorities, timing, and legitimacy.  Priorities involve an opting for A rather than B or before B. Politics characteristically demands the choice between different options, none of which may be ideal, rather than an unconditional pursuit of an absolute good. We always act politically under non-ideal conditions. Timing is all-important. We usually can’t wait to make decisions and are forced to take action when the opportunity or the need arises without having a full understanding of this situation, of the consequences of our actions, nor even of what the best outcome would be. There is finally also the question of legitimacy. Max Weber distinguished three sources of legitimacy, that is, our reasons for accepting political authority: tradition, charismatic leadership, rational-legal. All these notions call for clarification and providing such must be a basic task of political philosophy.

These then are the tasks of a realistic political philosophy:

  • Understanding: describing and analyzing the actually obtaining political reality
  • Evaluation: assessing features of this reality. Geuss holds, in contrast to Weber, that there can be no “value-free” political philosophy.
  • Orientation: providing us with a more or less comprehensive vision of the political situation
  • Conceptual innovation: by providing a set of new concepts the political philosopher may get us to see our situation in an entirely new way.
  • The critique of ideology as a form of power that is used “to shape opinions, attitudes, and desires and thus to manufacture what look like ‘consent.’”

In the second part of his book Geuss criticizes a number of “ideal theory” versions of political philosophy distinguishing “two influential contemporary views that represent almost the direct opposite of ‘realism.” The first involves an attempt “to construct a society along the lines of an idealized legal system structured around a set of rights.”  These rights may be conceived as “either legal rights or some more vaguely envisaged ‘human’ rights.” He takes as his target, specifically the first sentence of Robert Nozick’s State, Anarchy, and Utopia according to which: “Individuals have rights, and there are things which no persons or group may do to them (without violating their rights).” From where do these rights come? How is the claim justified? “It is not that Nozick got something wrong by specifying the wrong set of rights or making mistakes of argumentation, He does not ask the right questions, and by presenting ‘rights’ as the self-evident basis for thinking about politics, he actively distracts people from asking other, “highly relevant questions.”

Geuss’ second major target of criticism (here and in other writings) is John Rawls who wants to conceive of politics in terms of the implementation of the virtue of justice. His immediate target of attack is Rawls’ initial statement in A Theory of Justice that “justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought… Truth and justice are uncompromising.” Geuss comments: “This brings us to the most general line of criticism of Rawls as a political philosopher. If one looks at the body of his work … one is immediately struck by the complete absence in it of any discussion of what I have described as the basic issues of politics. The topic of ‘power,’ in particular, is simply one he never explicitly discusses at all… Rawls’ view is seriously deficient, because it does not thematize power.”

 We can read Geuss , perhaps, most profitably as spelling out the ways a diagnostic political philosophy should proceed. But he does not, in fact, offer us an example of a worked out political diagnosis. While his eye is critically focused on political liberalism as a formative conception of contemporary politics, he does not proceed to a detailed diagnosis of this conception either in this book or in his other writings. He proves to be, in fact, more of a critical than a constructive thinker and, in this respect, a faithful follower of Adorno. He is more eloquent in his attacks on ideal theories than in developing a realist  and diagnostic political philosophy of his own.

 

Hannah Arendt as a diagnostic political thinker

Hannah Arendt’s 1958 book The Human Condition is an unusual and entirely original contribution to political philosophy. It is distinguished, in particular, by the diagnostic approach to politics it pursues. The book can serve as an illustration of characteristic features of this type of political thinking.

The title of the work deserves our attention in this context since it may easily mislead us. Arendt does not, in fact, assume that there is a single and fixed “human condition” which determines how we can, do, and should act politically. She holds, rather, that the human condition changes over time; that it is historically specific and profoundly variable. It is because of her adherence to this view that Arendt avoids talk of “human nature” – a term which is usually taken to identify a determinate human essence from which we can deduce both how humans act and how they should act. For Arendt there is, in fact, no human nature in this particular sense. There are only the varied conditions in which we find ourselves. The conditions of life in “the modern age” which are the predominant concern of her book thus differ for her profoundly from those of previous eras – such as, in particular, the condition of life and politics in classical Greece at the time of Socrates. While she often refers back to the classical period, she does not believe that we can or should try to re-enact it. Her reference is meant, instead, to highlight the radically distinct character of our modern situation.

Arendt’s begins The Human Condition not with a general reflection on what that condition might be. The first sentence of her book reads: “In 1957, an earth-born object made by man launched into the universe.” The book begins, thus, with a reference to a particular, contingent, and recent event, a singular historical fact: Russia’s 1957 launch of the first extra-terrestrial satellite (“Sputnik”) one year before the publication of Arendt’s book. To grasp the implications of that beginning, contrast it to the first sentence of Hobbes’ De Cive which says: “The faculties of human nature may be reduced unto for kinds.” Hobbes starts in this way with a general and dogmatic assertion about “human nature” from which he proceeds to derive the supposedly universal “conditions of society or of human peace “ as “fundamental laws of nature.” (De Cive, chapter 1) Equally striking is the contrast between Arendt’s first sentence and that of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia which asserts dogmatically that human beings are bearers of rights with which the state may not interfere. Where Arendt begins thus with a reference to a simple empirical fact, Nozick starts off from a large-scale and unargued normative claim. The contrast between Arendt on the one side and Hobbes and Nozick on the other, provides in this way a vivid illustration of the difference between diagnostic and non-diagnostic approaches to political philosophy. Where the one proceeds “inductively” from the particular to philosophical reflection, the other starts deductively from general, high-level claims about human nature or human rights and seeks to derive from them conclusions about politics. Where the one begins with a current contingent event, the other advances from supposedly timeless truths.

The Soviet authorities had launched Sputnik to signal the technical and military prowess of Russia. The event sent shockwaves through America’s political establishment and led to vast new investment in education, science, technology, and military preparedness. But this is not Arendt’s concern. She does not see herself as a political commentator. Her goal is, rather, to reflect philosophically on the event. She is concerned thus with the way the extra-terrestrial satellite changes how we see ourselves, our relation to the earth, and to the other living things on it. Quoting a contemporary comment that Sputnik signals a first step “toward escape from man’s imprisonment to the earth” she contraposes to this the fear that it might lead to a “fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living things under the sky.” The earth has until now been “the quintessence of the human condition.” Cutting that link or seeing it in a new way will thus transform that condition. An escape from the earth would mean that we cut our last tie that makes us “belong among the children of nature.” The future man who makes his appearance in this way seems to be possessed by “a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift, from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange … for something he has made himself.” But is this how we want to turn? What will we lose of the human condition as it now is? Our question has to be “whether we wish to use our new scientific and technological knowledge in this direction,” Arendt concludes, “and this question … is a political question of the first order.”

There are other signs of profound changes in the human condition to which Arendt proceeds at this point to draw our attention. The truths of the modern scientific world view, she writes, can only be demonstrated in mathematical terms and established through technological means, they “no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought.” This means ultimately that we can no longer understand the world in human terms and will need artificial machines to do our thinking for us. And that, she concludes, is surely a matter of political significance. Another disturbing fact is the advent of automation which may liberate us from “the burden of laboring and the bondage to necessity.” While this development may be attractive, our problem is that the modern age has created a society in which human beings are measured entirely by their labor. “We are confronted, in consequence, with “the prospect of a society of laborers without labor… Surely nothing could be worse.”

Sixty-five years after the publication of The Human Condition the world looks somewhat different from the way Arendt describes it. She has no sense that extra-terrestrial life is a far way off and exists even today mostly only in the wild imaginings of Elon Musk and the writers of science fiction. Arendt has as yet no inkling of the digital media and how they have begun to transform all aspects of human interaction. She pays no attention to the growth of the human population and the shifts in global population patterns. She knows nothing of the devastations of the environment and their political bearing. She is unaware of a decline of Western power and the rise of other centers of global influence. A diagnostic view of our own time will, no doubt, look different from hers. This is to be expected because the diagnostic perspective is always limited and constrained by the place of the diagnostician.

What is surely of major interest in Arendt’s book is the way it illustrates the diagnostic approach to politics. This is how Arendt describes her own, diagnostic agenda: “What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears…. What I propose therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”

 

Taking Frege Seriously

 

Joan Weiner, Taking Frege at His Word, Oxford University Press 2020, xxvii + 317 pp.

In 1936 Edmund Husserl wrote in a private letter to Heinrich Scholz, the collector of Frege’s writings, that he had never met Frege in person and that Frege was considered at the time “a sharply intelligent outsider who bore fruit neither as a mathematician nor as a philosopher.”[1] That was, of course, a misjudgment. We can see now more clearly that Frege contributed, in fact, at least three things to mathematics and philosophy after him. The first was his new logic (the propositional and predicate calculus) that replaced the old Aristotelian logic. Given the important role that the Aristotelian syllogistic had played in philosophy for more than two thousand years that was, indeed, a significant achievement. The second was Frege’s attempt to show that arithmetic can be reduced to logic. Frege’s logicist thesis has not remained uncontested and his way of trying to prove it has turned out to be defective, but the considerations that led him to it are still being taken seriously by philosophers of mathematics. The third are his thoughts about signs – the symbols and formulas of his logical calculus and the words and sentences of ordinary language – and the way they serve to convey meaning. These “semantic” considerations have contributed much to the subsequent development of the philosophy of language.[2]

Joan Weiner’s new book pays a great deal of attention to the logical calculus that Frege developed, his Begriffsschrift, whose originality and significance she fully recognizes. Her account of that logic is detailed, precise, and illuminating. She also acknowledges clearly that Frege constructed his logic precisely to establish the truth of the logicist thesis. According to her: “Frege was engaged, for virtually all his career, in a single project: that of showing that the truths of arithmetic are truths of logic.” (p. vii) For all that, she does not delve far into the philosophy of mathematic and Frege’s place in it. She does not concern herself, in particular, with the difficulties the logicist thesis faces and whether it can be salvaged. Her discussion focuses, rather, on the question whether or to what extent we should think of Frege as a philosopher of language.

The object of her critical attention is specifically what she calls “The Standard Interpretation” of Frege’s work which she summarizes in four points: (1) Frege aimed at constructing a theory of meaning, (2) he sought to develop a compositional semantics, (3) he was concerned with giving metatheoretical proofs in his logic, and (4) he was an ontological Platonist. Weiner’s ambition is to set out an interpretation of Frege that is “deeply at odds with the Standard Interpretation.” (p. ix) That interpretation, she believes, is now so deeply entrenched in the literature that it takes a most careful re-reading of Frege’s words to dislodge it. In undertaking that task, Weiner seeks to expose “the difference between the words that actually appear on Frege’s pages, and the words that many contemporary philosophers believe are on Frege’s pages.” (p. 10)

Weiner’s book puts forward a compelling case for rejecting all the four assumptions of the Standard Interpretation that she identifies. Others, myself included, have repeatedly made similar claims. This leaves me with two questions. The first is whether she does full justice to the adherents of the Standard Interpretation and the second whether her alternative interpretation gives us a fully rounded view of the real Frege. As to the first question, we need to consider that when philosophers read the writings of others they are sometimes motivated by the question “what did the author mean by his words?” and sometimes with the question “what can we do with the author’s words?” And these two questions are not always clearly distinguished in their minds. They are trying to get at the meaning but always with an eye to the usefulness of what they find to their own way thinking. And they also often assume that what they themselves think may be a clue to what the other author must have meant. This is the way Aristotle read the Presocratics and Plato’s dialogues and this is how contemporary philosophers read Frege among others. From a scholarly and hermeneutic perspective that can be annoying. It is from this point of view that Weiner’s irritation with the adherents of the Standard interpretation stems.

Weiner traces the belief that we should read Frege as being primarily a philosopher of language and theorist of meaning back to Michael Dummett’s seminal book Frege: The Philosophy of Language from 1973. I find myself agreeing with her that Dummett is mistaken in maintaining that Frege’s explicit goal was to construct a theory of meaning for natural languages. But this does not undermine the fact that Frege did, indeed, make observations that have since led to the construction of such theories. Weiner does not explore the question how Dummett came to read Frege in the way he did. She seems to ascribe it simply to a lack of reading skill. That surely does injustice to Dummett’s competence as a philosopher.  We can grant that Dummett overstated his case, but that may still leave it worth asking why he came to read Frege the way he did. This is not something Weiner is interested in. Dummett was, of course, well aware of Frege’s preoccupation with the logicist thesis.  But by the time he wrote Frege: The Philosophy of Language he had given up on the idea that this thesis could be salvaged and he had opted instead for an intuitionist constructivism. That view, as developed by Brouwer, Heyting and others, seemed to him, however, to lack a proper philosophical grounding. Expanding the constructivist view to non-mathematical statements, Dummett ended up questioning Frege’s apparently “realistic” conception of meaning and its associated notion of truth in the hope of developing in this way an alternative constructivist sort of semantics. His engagement with Frege had turned thus into dialogue concerning language and meaning.

That linguistic turn in the interpretation of Frege was not entirely Dummett’s doing. He had, in fact, been anticipated in this by Wittgenstein. It is Wittgenstein more than Russell who has brought Frege to the attention of English-speaking philosophers and he was concerned from early on more with Frege’s thoughts on language and meaning than with his logicism. That logicism he had already rejected in the Tractatus and over time he was to become increasingly sympathetic to the mathematical formalism that Frege had so vigorously attacked.  He remained, however, very much interested in Frege’s thoughts on language and meaning. Not that he found all of it plausible. Like Dummett after him, he completed rejected Frege’s idea that propositions are names of a sort and that they refer to truth-values. But he remained attracted to Frege’s principle that words have meaning only in the context of a sentence which he repeated both in the Tractatus and in Philosophical Investigations. He also retained an interest in Frege’s distinction between the sense and the reference, the Sinn and the Bedeutung, of words and sentences to which he returned again in those two books while giving the distinction his own very different slant. When Max Black consulted with him over which of Frege’s writings he might most usefully translate into English, Wittgenstein advised him to take on the essay “Über Sinn und Bedeutung.” The translation appeared in Philosophical Review in 1948 and was the first piece of Frege’s writings available in English. For many English-speaking philosophers it became the gateway into Frege’s thinking and it is still today the one piece of Frege’s work with which students are most familiar. It is this text more than any other one in Frege’s oeuvre that may give the impression that he was a philosopher of language, that he sought, in fact, to advance a theory of meaning for ordinary language, and that this theory had the intended form of a compositional semantics.

Weiner is right in arguing that this imisinterprets Frege’s intentions. She writes that in order to understand Frege’s purpose in “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” we must read the essay as one of three which together set out a major revision of the Begriffsschrift logic of 1879. The first and most important of those pieces is the monograph “On Function and Concept,” (1891), the second the essay on “Concept and Object,” (1892) and the third “Über Sinn und Bedeutung,”(1892). This last essay was, in effect, a mere corollary to  the initial monograph and quite possibly only a belated addition. That it did not refer to Frege’s logical calculus but discussed the issues only in terms of examples taken from ordinary language was the result of limitations set by the editor of the journal in which Frege published the essay.[3] Frege had argued in “On Concept and Object,” among other things, for a revision of his earlier account of identity and “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” was meant to show that this revision called for a distinction between the sense and the reference of signs that he had not made in the first exposition of his logic in 1879. While I find myself in substantive agreement with Weiner’s account of “Über Sinn und Bedeutung,” I don’t think that she takes her case far enough. She does not ask herself, in particular, why Frege considered his revision of the earlier account of identity was so important. The answer, I believe, is to be found in the fact that the axiom V he was to add to his logic in Basic Laws in order to achieve the desired derivation of arithmetic is for Frege an identity statement and one that, according to the 1879 characterization of identity would not have counted as a logical truth. Frege’s new account of identity allowed him, however, to argue that the two parts of axiom V conjoined by the identity sign do not only have the same reference (that axiom V is true) but also that they have the same sense and that this allows us to see that the axiom is a logical truth. I have myself argued repeatedly for that view since 1980.[4] I am surprised to find that Weiner does not pursue that point.

I agree once more with Weiner that the single most important new idea in Frege’s logic of 1879 was his introduction of the concept of function and that the single most important revision of his logic in 1891 concerned that notion. In terms of the history of mathematics, Frege should be seen as a descendant of the Gaussian school for which the notion of a mathematical function had become increasingly important. Frege himself had studied at Göttingen, the headquarter of the Gaussians, and so had his teacher and mentor Ernst Abbe. Both Abbe and Frege had, moreover, worked on the theory of function. Frege’s Habilitationsschrift of 1874 had dealt with the topic even before his interest in logic and the logicist thesis had developed. This function-theoretical view stood in contrast to the set theoretical conception, elaborated by Cantor, for which functions were simply certain kinds of ordered sets. Weiner bypasses this historical context and thus misses out on two important insights into Frege’s work. The first is the conflict between the function-theoretical and the set-theoretical view of logic in which the former was represented by Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein but in which the latter has largely prevailed. The second is the paradox that Frege’s attempt to show that the truths or arithmetic are truths of logic required as a first step a mathematization of logic.

Her silence on this historical context is characteristic of Weiner’s entire approach to Frege. Her book is an exemplar of classical analytic philosophy: clear, organized, thoroughly argued, but moving in a narrow circle of formal concepts and in this respect almost old-fashioned in style. It has certainly all the limitations of classical analytic philosophy in particular in being so thoroughly unhistorical.  Concepts exist for this kind of thinking in a vacuum and their meaning and interrelations can be analyzed without reference to any historical realities. In this respect, Wiener is certainly just like Michael Dummett, whom she otherwise dismisses. Dummett once wrote that Frege’s thought sprang from his head almost entirely unfertilized by outside ideas. In her own account of Frege, Wiener tells us correctly that Frege was for much of his philosophical life preoccupied with sowing that arithmetical propositions are logical truths. But she does not and cannot explain to us why this project should have mattered to him. Ordinary mathematicians and everyday used of mathematics may, in fact, not be much concerned with this matter. But it is one of major importance for Kant and subsequently for John Stuart Mill, both figures of the greatest significance, as Frege was writing. Frege himself made clear in his Foundations of Arithmetic that he sided with Kant’s apriorism and against Mill’s radical empiricism.  This conformed to the position of the Neo-Kantians of Frege’s own time. For both Kant and Mill the question of the epistemic status of mathematics was a key to their thinking very broadly about human knowledge and the way it maps on to the world.

Weiner describes Frege’s new logic as “a major advance”; but over whom and over what? She mentions Boole in this respect, but one would think that Frege’s logic was first of all an advance over the Aristotelian syllogism and then over the logics developed by some of his contemporaries (Lotze, Sigwart, Wundt, to name a few). One thing that distinguished Frege from all of these is that he approached logic from the perspective of a mathematician. We can discern this most clearly in his introduction of the notion of function into his logic. Mathematically inspired was also his use of inductive proofs in his logic. The paradox is that Frege sought to reduce arithmetic to logic by making logic more mathematical. The first to understand this circularity in Frege’s argument was Wittgenstein who, for this reason, rightly rejected Russell’s and Frege’s logicist program.

Weiner’s preoccupation with showing the failings of the standard interpretation limits her reading of Frege also in some further respects. She has no interest in the fact Frege was almost as much interest in geometry and its foundations as he was in arithmetic. It is not easy to say what this came to. His discussion of this topic in The Foundations of Arithmetic is rudimentary and other relevant (but unpublished) writings were destroyed in the Second World War. But there can be no doubt that Frege was committed to the idea of synthetic apriori truths.

However far she seeks to distance herself from the way analytic philosophers read Frege today, she stays close to them in one significant respect. Her reading of Frege is just as ahistorical as theirs. Frege’s own words remain for her placed in a historical vacuum and so are the words of those who subscribe to the Standard Interpretation. We are told in neither case from where those words come. That limits what we can learn from Weiner’s take on Frege. Why did he concern himself so much with the logicist thesis? In his Foundations of Arithmetic he writes that both mathematical and philosophical reasons motivated him. The fist concerned the nature of the numbers and the second the epistemic status of the arithmetic propositions. And with respect to the second we find him arguing vigorously against the view that they are empirical generalizations and for the view that they are apriori truths. John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant are for him the respective representatives of those two views. Their names refer us, in turn, to an ongoing struggle in Frege’s time between an influential empiricist naturalism on the one hand and a reviving Kantianism on the other. The urgency of logicism for Frege derived precisely from this historical constellation. That is, however, something with which Weiner doesn’t concern herself. Similarly, she does not try to explain to us the conditions for the rise of the Standard Interpretation. She does seek to explain in the last two chapters of her book what her own interpretation of Frege can do for us.

 

 

NOTES

 

[1] Gottlob Frege, Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, p. 92. It is unclear from the formulation whether Husserl agreed with that judgment or was only reporting a widely held opinion.

[2] In light of the fact that Frege may have been instrumental in Husserl’s turning away from his early, psychologistic view of arithmetic, we may want to add that Frege contributed also to the decline of psychologism and the rise of the phenomenological movement in philosophy.

[3] Hans Sluga, „Wie Frege zu Sinn und Bedeutung kam,“ in Frege: Freund(e) und Feind(e), Proceedings of the  Gottlob Frege Conference 2013, Logos Verlag, Berlin 2015, pp. 14-23.

[4] Hans Sluga, Gottlob Frege, Routledge, London 1980, pp. 149-157.  See also Sluga, „Frege on Meaning,” Ratio, vol. 9, 1996, pp. 218-223, and most recently and most succinctly in „Wie Frege zu Sinn und Bedeutung kam,“ loc. cit.

The Murder of Professor Schlick

David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick. The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle, Princeton Univerity Press 2020, xiv + 313 pp, $ 27.95.

It was the morning of June 22, 1936. Shortly after 9 am Moritz Schlick, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, was on the way to his lecture when one of his former students intercepted him on the university staircase. “Now, you damned bastard, there you have it,” the man was heard shouting as he unloaded a pistol into his victim. Schlick was instantly dead. The student, Nelböck by name, remained on the scene, waiting to be arrested. When he was questioned, he gave a variety of confused reasons for his attack. It became quickly clear that he was mentally unstable.  At his trial, Nelböck settled on saying that Schlick’s anti-metaphysical philosophy had undermined him morally. Two years later, after Hitler had marched into Austria, he changed his story and declared that he had acted on the conviction that Schlick was Jewish. He was duly released by the new Nazi authorities and he eventually died twenty years later, still a free man, in post-Second-World-War Austria.

After the murder, Austria’s increasingly strident right-wing press found all kinds of justifications for Nelböck’s deed. Schlick’s philosophy had been damaging “the fine porcelain of the national character” according to one newspaper. Others wrote that the professor had perhaps not been Jewish (he was so neither by religious affiliation nor by family background), but he had promoted a Jewish kind of thinking: anti-metaphysical, anti-religious, and given to “logicality, mathematicality, formalism, and positivism” whereas philosophical chairs in “Christian-German Austria should be held by Christian philosophers.”

David Edmonds puts the harrowing story of Schlick’s murder into the broader context of the emergence of a new kind of philosophy that had been gestating in Vienna since the first decade of the century. It had all begun with a group of young mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers who had met for informal discussions in a Vienna coffeehouse. Later, the group had become consolidated under the leadership of Schlick, a German philosopher known for his book on Einstein’s theory of relativity, who had arrived in Vienna in 1922.  The group now held regular meetings to which not everybody was invited. It began to call itself “The Vienna Circle,” proclaimed its scientific world-view in a 1929 Manifesto, published a journal, organized international conferences, and planned for a multi-volume Encyclopedia of Unified Science.  Its declared heroes were Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, himself a native of Vienna and the author of the stunning Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus that had been published in 1921. His book came soon to be a center piece for discussion at meetings of the group. Schlick himself and his assistant Friedrich Waismann succumbed most strongly to its beguiling influence. “What would Wittgenstein say?” became Schlick’s standard question when discussions ran into the ground.  Not that the members of the Circle agreed on a single philosophy. Otto Neurath, Schlick’s voluble counterpart in the Circle, was prone to dismiss Wittgenstein’s pronouncements as badly “metaphysical.”  The members of the Circle were united most by their desire to break with old ways of doing philosophy that still flourished at the university of Vienna and elsewhere. Their slogan was that they rejected metaphysics in whatever for it might come; their commitment was to take the empirical sciences seriously and to use the new, mathematized logic that Russell and Gottlob Frege before him had developed as an alternative to the old-fashioned Aristotelian syllogistic still being taught in philosophy departments.

The members of the Vienna Circle were not the only ones looking for new ways to do philosophy. There were also, for instance, Hans Reichenbach and Carl Gustav Hempel in Berlin with their Society for Empirical Philosophy. Others were looking for a renewal in other directions. Edmund Husserl at Freiburg sought a phenomenological way back “to the things themselves” from abstract philosophical theorizing. His way of doing philosophy spawned, in turn, Heidegger’s existential ontology with its distinctively anthropological dimension. During the same period, Horkheimer and Adorno in Frankfurt were seeking to recast philosophy in the form of a critical social theory. At Cambridge, Wittgenstein was abandoning the assumptions of his Tractatus. Philosophical problems were now to be treated by attending to the features of ordinary language. And in this he was followed by a generation of younger Oxford philosophers. After 1945, Sartre’s existentialism took off from Paris along yet another trajectory and in reaction to it there arose eventually a whole line of ever more radical challenges to the tradition, from Foucault’s archaeology and genealogy of knowledge, to postmodernism and Derrida’s deconstruction. All of those thinkers and movements were set on redefining philosophy, what it was, how it should be conducted, on what sources it was to draw, what domains of knowledge or of human experience it should build on. And they fought bitter battles over these questions. The members of the Vienna Circle gleefully denounced Heidegger’s “metaphysical nonsense.” Heidegger, in turn, laughed off Sartre’s existentialism. Russell complained that the later Wittgenstein and his followers had given up on serious thinking. Foucault and Derrida poked each other with their verbal stilettos. The panoramic story of this great revolt against the tradition is still to be told. What set it off? Why did it take such different forms? We are still far from a full account of this multi-fronted rupture of the tradition. We don’t even know yet whether it has run its course.

The new movements in philosophy did certainly not emerge organically from the tradition. That is, presumably, one reason why the traditionalists proved so hostile to the upstarts. Outside forces were pushing the subject in new and unexpected directions. While the Circle’s Manifesto listed a long line of philosophical forerunners, its way of thinking was the product, rather, of the explosive growth of the sciences (the hard sciences like physics, first of all, but also of newer ones like psychology and sociology), of changes in the prevailing social values, and shifts in the institutional environment in which philosophy operated.  New developments in physics and the other empirical sciences were stripping philosophy of some of its old problems. (Could it really tell us something about the causal, spacio-temporal structure of the universe?). Its way of dealing with those problems came to be dismissed now as “metaphysical.” New  problems concerning the meaning of the scientific theories and their epistemic status were, instead, coming into view. Mathematics had been undergoing its own revolution since Gauss, turning more abstract and formalized in the process. This induced the mathematicians in the Circle to turn to Frege’s and Russell’s new logic. Meanwhile social changes encouraged more sober, “utilitarian” forms of thinking and with that a devaluation of “belief” of the religious kind and of the “speculative” forms of thinking practiced by the traditional philosophers. The encasing of philosophy in the university and the appearance of a welter of new academic disciplines, were undermining its customary self-understanding as the ultimate, foundational science. Philosophy, it seemed obvious to the member of the Vienna Circle, was being pushed off its old pedestal.

To find a new way of doing philosophy became thus their prime objective. But they came to project in different ways. While many of them were born in Vienna, others came from Bohemia, Hungary, and Germany and later on there would be visitors from England and the United States, from Poland and from as far away as China. Two of its most influential members (Schlick and Rudolf Carnap) were Germans. A substantial number were Jewish – at least by family background – but Schlick and Carnap were, once again, not. Most of them veered to the political left (Otto Neurath, above all, as well as Carnap) but others were neutral. They came also from different disciplines (physics and mathematics but also biology, medicine, economics, and jurisprudence) and thus different perspectives into their discussions. What they shared was an attitude, an ethos, a commitment to science, to critical argument, to reason, to the pursuit of truth. They represented, in other words, a new, up-dated Enlightenment.

If this was one thing that distinguished them from others who were looking for a philosophical renewal, the second was that they engaged in their project as a group, reading, discussing, arguing with each other, seeking to refine their ideas in interaction with each other. Since the beginning of the modern period philosophers have pursued their calling for the most part individually, each seeking to develop their own distinctive way of thinking. This is how it has been with Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz and others. With Kant, the creative philosophers had begun to work within the framework of the university. Even so they continued to develop their philosophies largely on their own. That pronounced individualism is, indeed, still alive in philosophy today. The Vienna Circle represented a very different way of doing philosophy. It pursued a collaborative form of philosophizing, reaching out to each other in pursuit of what they called “the unity of science.”

There is yet another thing that set the Vienna Circle apart. Unlike the other movements that aimed at a reformulation of the task of philosophy, the members of the Circle were keen to disseminate their thinking not only into the academy but also beyond it and beyond even the educated elite. In its Manifesto the Circle declared it one of its goals “to fashion intellectual tools for the everyday life of the scholar but also for the daily life of all those who in some way join in working at the conscious re-shaping of life.” Given the political leanings of its membership, it came natural to them to engage in leftist causes. Neurath, half a Marxist and half a Benthamite utilitarian and the most politically engaged in the Circle, sought to pursue the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people by socialist means. Austria’s Social Democratic Party was their natural home. The Circle also associated itself with the Ernst-Mach-Society founded in Vienna in 1927. Named after the philosopher-physicist the Mach Society was dedicated to spreading the new insights of the natural sciences into all social groups. Members of the Vienna the Circle soon began to dominate the Mach Society and provided much of its programming. They also served as lecturers in Vienna’s adult education program which addressed itself primarily to a working-class constituency. That kind of teaching also provided them with an income since university positions were almost impossible to obtain for the Jewish members of the Circle.  All this activism did not mean, however, that the Vienna Circle itself was a political forum. Its internal discussions were limited strictly to scientific and philosophical matters. Schlick, in particular, strongly insisted on the separation of philosophy and politics. Their empiricism made them, in any case, antipathic to doctrinaire forms of politics. But the links between their philosophical and their political commitments were nevertheless strong and visible enough to make the Vienna Circle a target for the rising forces of Austrofascism in the 1920s and of Nazism in the 1930s.

Edmonds places his account of the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle into this historical context. His book provides in this way a valuable contribution to social history as well as to the history of  a philosophical movement.  He tells his story persuasively by focusing on individual personalities in and around the Circle.  His goal is thus not give a detailed exposition of the ideas and problems that motivated their discussion. But he tells us just enough about those idea and problems to keep the story together.  More would have produced a less readable and less useful book to the general reader. Edmond’s account of the members of the Circle ranges from the patrician Moritz Schlick, an accomplished philosopher who had come to Vienna with a recommendation from Einstein, to the oversized figure of Otto Neurath, loud, boisterous, full of irrepressible energy, a political agitator and born organizer. Another central figure was the kindly, scholarly, somewhat austere Rudolf Carnap who had been one of Frege’s students and maintained close links with Russell in the Circle. Other members were typically introverted academics; others had careers in business and law that kept them somewhat apart fro the others. Kurt Gödel, the mathematician, managed to attend the meetings without ever saying anything and then stunned the group (and the mathematical world) with his incompleteness results.

The two most remarkable figures associated with the Circle were, however, not members of it. One was Ludwig Wittgenstein and the other Karl Popper, both powerful and disturbing personalities. Wittgenstein had been living in Austria during the 1920s and he returned frequently enough from Cambridge in the years after that. But all attempts to bring him to the meetings of the Circle failed. He finally agreed only to meet a select few in Schlick’s house or on his own ground. Later, in 1938, when the members of the Vienna Circle were congregating at Cambridge for their fourth Unity of Science Congress, Wittgenstein was seen demonstratively leaving the town. In contrast to Wittgenstein, Popper was never invited into the Circle and he began to consider himself the group’s appointed opposition. His interests certainly overlapped with theirs. Like them, he was interested in the physical sciences and in the question of the relation between theory and observation. He also saw his work as close to that of Alfred Tarski, the Polish logician, who came frequently to attend Circle meetings. But his abrasive and self-aggrandizing personality kept the two sides apart.  In retrospect we see, however, that those two outsiders actually produced work that had the widest philosophical impact. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and his Philosophical Investigations and Poppers Logic of Scientific Discovery and The Open Society and Its Enemies became classics of 20th century philosophy. The writings of the members of the Vienna Circle, on the other hand, are read today only by specialists. Schlick’s and Neurath’s publications are barely remembered and Carnap’s have proved too technical to attract wide attention.

The murder of Schlick occupies just one chapter in Edmonds’ narrative. But he treats it as a pivotal moment in the history of the Vienna Circle. In the years heading up to that moment, the Circle had grown and flourished but it had also become the target of right-wing agitators. Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, the ever more tenuous political situation in Austria, and the increasingly vociferous attacks on the Circle was already making evident that the future of the Vienna Circle might be uncertain. Schlick’s murder had thus a devastating effect.  In 1937, Waismann left for the UK, the physicist Philipp Frank, one of the senior members of the Circle, went to Harvard, the mathematician Karl Menger to Notre Dame University in the US, and Karl Popper took a job in New Zealand. Most of the others were to follow soon. By good luck all of them survived. But none of them ever went back to live in Vienna after 1945. Many of them never even visited their old haunts. The loss, they felt, was too great. The magic that had created the Circle and so much else of Vienna’s cultural life was gone.

During its life, the Vienna Circle attracted many philosophical visitors from abroad. Among those who came was a 23-year-old Englishman, A. J. Ayer, who afterwards condensed what he had learned in the months he had spent attending the Circle into a brashly provocative book entitled Language, Truth, and Logic. It was the first work to acquaint English-speaking readers with the outlook of the logical empiricists. In later years, after he had recanted his attachment to the ideas of the Vienna Circle, Ayer said with cruel wit that its greatest defect was that nearly all of what it believed had proved false. But he added at once that Circle’s way of thinking had nevertheless been “true in spirit.” Contemporary philosophers do, indeed, not worry much any longer about “the verification principle” that had occupied the Vienna Circle so intensively or many of other issues that kept its discussions going. But when we look closely, we can see that the Vienna Circle has still made a permanent contribution to the way philosophy is now being done. The contest between the various schools and movements seeking to renew philosophy has, of course, not been resolved. They go on living side by side, only occasionally making contact but more usually at growling distance from each other. Traditional ways of doing philosophy are also persisting. Still, the Circle lives on today in some strands of that motley we call “analytic philosophy.” There is a new respect for the empirical sciences in almost all philosophy. Modern, mathematical logic has become a standard part of the syllabus. Philosophers speak more with each other. None of this might have happened without the efforts of the Vienna Circle. What has disappeared, however, is their exciting sense that philosophy is embarking on a new path. We are no longer living in a revolutionary age of philosophy. Analytic philosophy insofar as it is an heir of the Vienna Circle has become a professional, disciplinary, and often self-contained enterprise. It has little ambition to change its surrounding society. Immanuel Kant, who was one of the thinkers the Vienna Circle most sought to oppose, has been anointed a forerunner of the analytic tradition. The Vienna Circle is history; all of its members are gone. The one to live longest was Karl Popper who died in 1994 after a long career at the London School of Economics. There he had ruled like a king, always alert to anyone seeking to challenge him. Attending his seminars in the 1960s. I don’t recall that he ever mentioned the Vienna Circle.

Edmonds tells his story in vivid terms. Like his earlier bestselling Wittgenstein’s Poker his book is meant for a broadly educated public with a taste for philosophy but for personalities and social environments. His story of the rise and fall of the Circle is at the same time one of the rise and fall of Vienna as a vibrant center of creative and intellectual life. Since so many members of the Circle had Jewish roots, it is a story also of the destruction of a unique moment in Jewish and European culture. Hitler and his Austrian allies destroyed It all: the Vienna Circle, Vienna as a cultural capital, and that miraculous union of Jewish Viennese sensibility.  Vienna would eventually regain its wealth, but never its energies, Edmonds writes in a voice of regret. He himself, it turns out, has roots in the Vienna that is gone. “My family like many in the Circle was middle class, assimilated Jewish,” he writes, “and, like many in the Circle, blind for the extreme turn that politics would take.”

 

 

Political Philosophy: What to read

Philosophers have written copiously about politics. There is, moreover, no sharp dividing line between “philosophical” writings on politics and other kinds of writing on this topic. So there is no end to what one might read under the heading of “political philosophy”. Here is a list of 17 significant texts, some classical and some modern, some short and some long, some famous and some not so famous, some highly readable and some very demanding. The selection is, of course, mine; others might add to it or subtract from it. I will add some comments on what makes these writings interesting and important.

 

  1. Plato, Protagoras

The ancient Greeks invented democracy, but we know little of their reasoning about this new form of government. The first philosopher to have developed a “democratic theory” seems to have been Protagoras, the founder of the Sophistic School and a close associate of Pericles, the great democratic leader of Athens. Unfortunately, all of Protagoras’ writings have been lost. The best account we have of his thinking about democracy is found in the dialogue Protagoras written by Plato, a sharp critic of both the sophists and of democracy.

Protagoras appears to have argued that all human beings have an equal basic capacity for fairness and companionship. We can develop this capacity through education and thus create a condition in which all (mature, educated) citizens are equally capable of making political judgments.

Also of interest is Plato’s dialogue The Statesman (Politikos) in which he lays out his counter-picture to Protagoras’ democratic conception of politics.

2.  Plato, Republic

The ancient Greek title for this dialogue is Politeia which means the constitution or order of the polis, i.e., the Greek city state, and this is, in fact, the concern of the dialogue. The name “Republic” goes back to Cicero’s Latin and may be misleading for modern ears.

This dialogue is the first comprehensive treatise on politics written by a Western philosopher – at least, the earliest we have. Protagoras is supposed to have written another Politeia, now lost, from which Plato is said to have borrowed. We are, however, not in a position to say whether and to what extent he did.

Plato’s dialogue covers a wide range of topics: the concept of justice and of a just institution, the origin of the polis, forms of government, the rise and the decline of systems of government,  the place of the philosopher in the polis, and, above all, the blue-print of an ideal (or happy) city ruled by philosopher kings who live a completely socialized life without private property and without individual families. In addition there is in this happy city an athlete-warrior class and a civil society concerned with the matters of daily practical life; in a well-ordered city each class will perform its assigned role and not aspire to more.  On the basis of this account Plato has been hailed as a forerunner of a socialist conception of the state and also derided as a proto-fascist. A third possibility is to see Plato as anticipating the modern idea of the political rule of experts.

One of the central themes of the dialogue is the assumption that the order of the polis corresponds precisely to the order of the human soul. There is thus not only a democratic form of government but also a democratic man; not only tyranny but also tyrannical man. In Plato’s story, a well-ordered human mind corresponds to the order of the ideal, happy city.

Plato’s dialogue raises fundamental questions about politics that are still of interest today and it remains for that reason still worth reading, even though our political world is so very different from Plato’s.

As far as Plato’s political thinking is concerned, it is also useful to look at his later dialogue The Laws which offers what one might call a more realistic picture of politics.

3.  Aristotle, Politics

Like his master, Plato, Aristotle wrote philosophical dialogues; but in contrast to Plato’s dialogues, none of Aristotle’s have survived. His Politics contains – scholars assume – an edited version of Aristotle’s lecture notes. These may even have originated on different occasions. This would explain certain apparent inconsistencies in the text.

Aristotle begins his Politics famously with the claim that we are political beings by nature. Even some animals, such as the social insects, are political beings, though in a lesser sense than humans.  Distinctive of human beings is that they possess reason and can therefore deliberate on which form of life is the best.

Like Plato, Aristotle holds that we have the choice between different forms of government and that we must determine which of them is the best. Also like Plato, he argues that this is not democracy. But he is equally opposed to the Platonic idea of a state ruled by philosopher-kings. In book 2 of the Politics he strongly defends private property and the individual family as natural and, indeed, necessary for a good life.

In a further contrast to Plato, Aristotle concerns himself also with the question which form of government is viable at a given moment, departing from Plato’s idealistic reconstruction of politics and adumbrating thus a standpoint of political realism. That inclination towards realism is particularly evident in Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, an account of the development of Athenian democracy and a fascinating description of its institutional structures and practices.  No student of Aristotle’s political philosophy should miss this short treatise which went missing for two thousand years and was rediscovered in Egypt only in the late nineteenth century.

Aristotle’s Politics should be read in conjunction with his Nicomachean Ethics which adds significantly to his understanding of politics. In particular, Aristotle elaborates his conception of justice in two books of the Ethics. In Book 1 he argues, moreover, that ethics should be considered a part of politics since it is the political community that ultimately determines what ethical principles get taught. And in book 10, he maintains that political life is not the highest possible form of existence. Higher than it is contemplative life which we can partake in when we philosophize. But we have practical needs and even the philosopher is human. Pure contemplation is possible only for “the God.” For us, political life – complemented, it seems, by philosophical reflection – is the highest, most desirable, and most natural form of existence.

4. Xunzi, Xunzi

Political philosophy as we know it in America and Europe tends to be focused narrowly on the West. The history of politics extends for us from the Greek polis to a modern nation state in the West. Political philosophy begins for us with the Greeks and ends with John Rawls. We are rarely concerned with the political history of other parts of the world and when we are, we project our Western philosophical concepts and ideas outwards .and apply them unthinkingly to other parts of the world.

The Chinese thinker Xunzi (ca 310-238 BCE) and his eponymous treatise may be a good antidote to such forgetfulness. The Classical thinkers of ancient China were intensely concerned with politics. Confucius argued in his Analects that rulers must rule through moral example. Shang Yang and Hanfei, his legalist opponents, maintained instead that the state must be ruled by law not by personal virtue. Xunzi, a heterodox Confucian, holds that humans are by nature deficient. They require nurture and social order to flourish, but this can be created and preserved only if there exists a social hierarchy. Subjects must be subjects and rulers must be rulers . The proper education of the prince becomes for that reason an essential political task.

5.Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

This is really a political pamphlet rather than a philosophical treatise but it reverberates with political idea. Machiavelli seeks to instruct a prince on how to establish and maintain a territory and to eventually unify Italy under his rule. Such a prince must be both strong like a lion and wily like a fox. He must be ready to use violence, though in a controlled and deliberate fashion. Conflict is an inherent part of politics. The prince can’t be guided only by moral principle but must act according to political opportunity and necessity. He has to rely on reason but is also dependent on luck (fortuna).

Machiavelli seeks to advance in this way a “realist” view of politics. This view is further developed in his History of Florence. In his writings we also find a new emphasis on the distinction between the institution, the state (lo stato), and its ruler.

6. Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan

7.  Benjamin Constant, Political Writings

8. Immanuel Kant, Toward Eternal Peace

9. F. W. G. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of Right

10. Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

11. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

12.Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

13. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

14.  Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty

15. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

16. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

17. Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics

 

 

How to Democratize Hong Kong

Hong Kong has never been a democracy and it is certainly not one now. It has, in fact, become decidedly less democratic in the last few years. And that is a reason for the friends of a democratic Hong Kong to feel down-hearted. But there is no need for despair. There is need rather for a strategic retreat and for tactical rethinking.

Democracy is, after all, more than a governmental system; it is, first of all, an ideal – one  that  is never fully realized but can only be approximated. It is the ideal of a group of people who together rule themselves. This is most easily pursued in a small group of mature, informed, and like-minded people. But states and, in particular, modern states are not like this. There are vast numbers of citizen of all ages in all kinds of condition, with degrees of knowledge or ignorance, who are anything but like-minded. The ideal of democracy thus becomes easily confused. And, worse, we lose sight of what lies behind it which is a conception of human nature as capable of a proud self-determination.

No political order, whatever its arrangements may be, can be considered genuinely democratic unless it is animated by this understanding of human nature and by the consequent ideal of shared self-rule. In order for a society to be democratic, the ideal of democracy must, in other words, be a live idea to its members. They must, moreover, be willing and able to relate to each other in terms of this ideal. They must be capable of a democratic practice not just at the level of government but in their daily interactions. Only in this way can a democratic politics be most fully realized.

There is today no democratic politics in Hong Kong. But it is still possible to foster the idea of human self-determination, to engage in democratic practices, and to nurture the ideal of democratic rule.  To this end it is all important that there still exists in Hong Kong today the opportunity for association. The time for protest marches may be over; the electoral and legislative process has been stripped of its democratic elements; policy is no longer made by Hong Kongers themselves but by patriots in Beijing. There are, however, still ways to nurture the spirit of democracy and that has to be the task now for dedicated Hong Kong democrats. There are a number of ways this task can be pursued. Here are six thoughts on this topic.

  • Associate with others dedicated like you to the exploration of democratic ideals. Democracy is a social ideal built not only on the notion of self-rule but also that of mutual support. You can have democratic thoughts when you are alone. But you cannot be a democrat on your own.
  • You don’t need to fret all the time about Hong Kong or Chinese politics. Devote yourself, instead, to the study of other times and places: the development of democracy in ancient Greece; the French Revolution and its aftermath; the founding of the American Republic. There are important elements of democracy to be found even in early Chinese history. Look for them.
  • Study political philosophy. Reading Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics might be a starting point. Combine this with Aristotle account of the democratic constitution of Athens. Read Hegel’s Philosophy of Right together with Marx’s critical notes on that book. Read Hannah Arendt. They all open your eyes to other and broader ways of thinking about politics. Authoritarians want you to believe that there is no alternative to the status quo. It is important to see how wrong they are.
  • Learn from those who have lived under authoritarian regimes how to say things without exposing yourself to danger. One can write or speak about ancient Egypt and mean the here and now. Make the spaces between your words do the work. Be eloquent with your silences.
  • See your opponents not as oppressors, which they certainly are, but as victims of a narrow and demeaning view of themselves, of what it is to be human. Pity them, not for the constraints they impose on the liberty of others, but their own inner lack of freedom.
  • Above all, make sure that you and your group rule themselves in a democratic fashion. Be aware of the danger of being undemocratic in the pursuit of democracy. Practice democracy locally, in relation to those next to you. Make this the ferment that will eventually transform all of society.
  • Finally, remember that all this takes time (A generation? A century?). Be patient. In the drought my nasturtiums died in the garden. But now the rain has brought them back and we can suddenly hope to see them bloom again.

The Triumph of Institutional Nihilism: Hong Kong’s new M+ Museum

On the outside Hong Kong’s new M+ museum has all the charm of a cigarette box; inside it is as heart-warming as an oversized car garage.  There is nothing intimate, personal, attractive, alive, or memorable about this building. Many years in the planning and fantastically expensive, it is a structure without recognizable architectural merit put into an anonymous development area, the work of an over-rated firm from Switzerland. Herzog & de Meuron is the current go-to place for the kind of people who commission new museums across the globe and it is responsible for a series of architectural disasters such as San Francisco’s De Young Museum and the Vancouver Art Gallery. The Hong Kong museum now joins that group. It is part of a new institutional genre representing the full marketizing of “art” and “culture” for the sake of governments and corporations who see a need to adorn themselves, for millionaire and billionaire “benefactors” who are trying to enhance their financial and reputational status, and for “art professionals” set on making a decent living from all this. M+, like its sister institutions, is in fact nothing but a monument to a cold institutional nihilism.

M+ is the dream project of Hong Kong bureaucrats with no special taste for art but determined to put Hong-Kong on the “artistic” map. According to the bloated promotional verbiage the new building is already “among Hong Kong’s most iconic landmarks, both monumental in its architectural form and radically open in its position in the urban landscape.”  Iconic, certainly not; and does the phrase “both monumental … and radically open” mean anything?  Anyone who has actually stumbled through the concrete wilderness of the area will equally wonder about the implausible claim that “the West Kowloon Cultural District is one of the largest and most ambitious cultural projects in the world.” The new museum is, in reality, meant to bolster Hong Kong’s increasingly dubious claim to being “Asia’s world city.” It is intended to draw tourists who have otherwise not much to look at in this city where so many traces of the past have been obliterated or ruined. It is also meant to confirm the city’s claim to being an international art market. And in this description, it is the words “international” and “market” that matter. What Hong Kong’s thoroughly parochial bureaucracy has produced has little to do with art. There is a real art scene in Hong Kong but it is far from this museum and not large enough to establish a local identity on which a living museum could be built. The M+ that Hong Kong has ended up with is, in effect, no more special than K 11 or IFC 1 or any other of its many shopping malls – the only difference being that it is unlikely to draw the same crowds.

How Hong Kong became a police state

September 19, 2021

The first round of a so-called “election” process under a new National Security Law has just taken place in Hong Kong. Out of a population of 7,5 million inhabitants, just 4,800 were qualified to be voters. The process has, in fact, more of the character of an appointment process than of an election. All the candidates have been carefully vetted. They were ultimately cleared as the result of a police investigation. It is evident then that the final controlling authority in Hong Kong is today the national security police. The most powerful figure in the city is a former policeman, John Lee, who now serves as the security minister. Carrie Lam, the official chief executive of Hong Kong, has been demoted to being the spokesperson for the new regime.

 

This transformation of Hong Kong is surprising since it has been brought about by the authorities in Beijing — and mainland China is not a police state. It is, rather, a Party state in which the Communist Party determines who represents the people and who rules. Beijing obviously decided not to remold Hong Kong at this moment in the image of the mainland. The goal was, rather, to preserve the “one country, two system” principle enshrined in the Basic Law, but in a profoundly altered fashion. Some kind of rudimentary election process was to be maintained. One might call it a veneer. But that still leaves the question who was likely to be deceived by it. Certainly not the democratic states around the world with their wide-open election systems. And it is difficult to imagine that the citizens of Hong Kong would be impressed by this “improvement” (as Carrie Lam has called it) of the democratic process. Being stripped of a right you have previously had is unlikely to be seen by anyone as an improvement.

 

The police state system in Hong Kong is, rather, the outcome of a twofold thought in the minds of the Beijing rulers. The first part of it is that some kind of electoral process may, indeed, serve a positive purpose. (But which one?) And that means that the Communist Party cannot officially be given a hegemonic status in the city. The second part of the thought is that Beijing must keep tight control over what happens in Hong Kong. The electoral process must thus be subjected to the most stringent controls. This requires the creation of a new controlling body, the national security police, which will, of course, have to be acting strictly on behalf of the Beijing authorities. The Hong Kong police state must be under the control of the Beijing party state. The result is the Byzantine mechanism now in place meant to make sure that that the “patriots” selected will serve the purposes of the central government.

 

It is difficult to imagine that this system will continue for long since it is so counter-intuitive. As Hong Kong is integrated more and more into China, as Beijing clearly intends to do, some kind of decision will have to be made. One possibility is the complete abandonment of Hong Kong’s Basic Law and the expansion of the party state into the city. The other is a reform of the political system of the mainland to include an electoral element under tight control – that is, the extension of the police state to all of China.

The Private and the Public. What we can learn from Wittgenstein

On a Canadian website devoted to the translation of writings by contemporary Chinese intellectuals, its creator, David Ownby of the University of Montréal, writes: “China is, if not totalitarian, surely authoritarian, and I readily admit that I do not fully understand the relationship between the Chinese state and the intellectuals I study.  It is obvious that their published work is not a perfect reflection of their private thoughts, which surely means that many times they cannot say what they really think, but what trade-offs they make and how they make their calculations remain obscure.  While I prefer to believe that what they publish is a fair if perhaps partial reflection of what they think, many people do not, and I admit that now and again I wonder if I’m being played.”[1]

Those living in repressive societies will be familiar with the distinction between what they feel able to say or write and what they must keep to themselves. And they will also know to distinguish between what is written or said and the private thoughts of its author. The distinction is, in fact, known to all of us even in so-called free societies. Considerations of prudence, politeness, propriety, shame or guilt make us refrain from giving expression to many things we think or feel or they get us, at least, to modify and tame our words. I may not tell my boss what exactly I think of him for reasons of prudence. I may not give voice to the pain I feel in order not to upset my companions. I may not comment aloud on a lecture in progress for reasons of propriety. I may not use the swear word that has come to my mind for reasons of politeness.  But we also look at others and wonder whether any of those reasons have made them be silent about their inner feelings and thoughts or circumspect in expressing them. We describe the distinction that opens up in this way as one between the public and the private. Thoughts and feelings are private, we say, whereas words and actions are public.

I want to talk here about Wittgenstein’s remarks on privacy in his Philosophical Investigations but will do so in a roundabout manner. For his thoughts are narrowly focused on issues in the philosophy of mind and concern, so it seems, only what privacy is not. In his Blue Book Wittgenstein characterizes the proposition ‘A man’s sense data are private to himself’ as both metaphysical and misleading and he describes his own undertaking as an attempt to rid us “of the temptation to look for a particular act of thinking, independent of the act of expressing our thoughts, and stowed away in some peculiar medium.”[2] The formulation is awkward because it sounds, as if Wittgenstein meant to deny the distinction between thought and its expression. The Chinese intellectuals of whom Owenby speaks and, in fact, all those living in repressive societies will easily disabuse us of that idea. But Wittgenstein’s point is not to deny the existence of unexpressed thought; it is rather to deny their existence in a peculiar medium. His goal is, in other words, to dismantle Descartes’ metaphysics of mind and body. But as he focuses so sharply on this issue, he entirely bypasses the social and political aspects of the private-public distinction. I consider it useful to look first at the broader context in which that distinction occurs in order to situate Wittgenstein’s considerations in it and to ask only afterwards about the practical import of what he writes.

The first thing to note is that the term “private” has a wide range of uses and certainly a wider one than Wittgenstein acknowledges. We do, of course, speak of unexpressed thoughts and feelings as private. But we can also keep a private diary that records those thoughts and feelings and we can engage in a private conversation with close friends and associates. And there are other, broader uses of the term. My letter to the public media is considered my private opinion if I am not speaking in an official capacity. We have private phone numbers in addition to job related ones, and these may be listed as such in a public directory. The home is my private domain, but everyone in the family may also have their own private bedroom and we all treat the shared toilet as private.  There are private membership clubs whose doors  display the words “STRICTLY PRIVATE.” There are private collections of art that are shown in public. There are private businesses that operate as publicly registered companies. The private is, in these cases, what is unexpressed, what is personal, what is meant only for a few, what is of limited access, what is shameful, what is not official, what is owned by me, what is for my own use, what is a personal pursuit and not a business, and finally even what is a business but not traded on the stock market and not owned by the state. The private is, in other words, many different things and the boundary between the public and the private falls accordingly in different places. Note also that something can therefore be private in some sense and at the same time public and thus not private in another.

Wittgenstein wonders in his Philosophical Investigations what it is to say that sensations are private. An interlocutor insists that this means that “only I can know whether I am in pain; another person can only surmise it.” But Wittgenstein dismissively retorts: “In one sense this is false, and in another nonsense.”[3] In an adjoining passage, he considers the possibility of a private language which he describes as follows: “The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know – to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.” (PI, 243) The two passages raise various questions about the notion of privacy. The “privacy” of our sensations and the “privacy” of the private language are obviously not the same thing, though they are related. The private sensation is assumed to be private by being “in the mind”; the private language is not in the mind, but it’s subject-matter is said to be private. The words “can” and “cannot” in the cited passages alerts us to further meanings of privacy. The private is that which another person cannot know. The private language is one which only the speaker can understand. Of what kind of “can” do these sentences speak? Are we to think of logical, physical, physiological, or psychological possibility? Think of these three examples: Chinese intellectuals cannot say everything they think. We cannot say who invented the wheel. I cannot adequately describe the sunset. In the first case, the “cannot” is due to a threat of sanctions; in the second to a lack of historical knowledge; in the third to the limitations of my vocabulary. Not only the word “private” but also the words “can” and “cannot” have multiple meanings and these introduce inflections into the meaning of privacy.

Speaking privately

We will find it easier to consider initially the idea of a private language and only then the privacy of thoughts and feelings. Can there be such a thing as a private language? In some sense of the word “private, the answer is: obviously yes. It is clearly not difficult to set up a language which only I understand, my own private code. Wittgenstein himself occasionally used a code to keep his thoughts hidden from prying eyes – though the code proves, in fact, easy enough to decipher. Criminal gangs, underground political parties, and anybody else who wants to keep a secret will often devise a code for their own private use. This may not be what Wittgenstein has in mind as a private language, but thinking about what it means to be able or not to be able to decipher a coded language throws light on the different ways in which we use the word “can” that Wittgenstein employs in his formulations.

If it is possible to decipher Wittgenstein’s code, in what sense can it be called private? The experts tell us that there is, in fact, only one unbreakable code and thus, only one inherently private language in the sense right now under consideration. Invented by Gilbert Vernam for use in the First World War, the code requires a key that can be used only once and must consists of a series of genuinely random numbers longer than the message to be encrypted. Those requirements make the code, however, practically useless. In encrypting messages for the internet, we use therefore codes that are in principle breakable but (hopefully) not in practice because the deciphering would take too long or we currently lack the computing power to do so. We are distinguishing thus two kinds of possibility and impossibility and thus two notions of privacy. There is what one can do or not do in principle and what we can or cannot do in practice. We may want to add here a further distinction between two kinds of practical possibility or impossibility. Something may be practically impossible for incidental reasons as when I can’t decipher a code because I am too sleepy. But the deciphering may also be impossible for reasons intrinsic to the code as that it would take five hundred years to break it. We can distinguish thus three kinds of potentiality (possibility/impossibility): potentiality in principle, practical incidental potentiality, and practical intrinsic potentiality.  Only the Vernam code is in principle unbreakable. Wittgenstein’s own code is easily broken and only some incidental reason will stop s from breaking it. But the code that is meant to secure the internet is not only unbreakable in practice but hopefully so for intrinsic reasons. We can call this third type of code also in principle practically unbreakable. We will see in due course that this three-fold distinction is helpful when thinking about Wittgenstein’s reflections on privacy.

I have spoken so far of how we keep thoughts and feelings private by not expressing them or by expressing them in a secret code. We can also attain privacy of a sort by restricting access to the expression of thought or feeling. I can keep a diary and hide it away in a hole underneath the floor so that only I have access to it. I can reveal my thoughts and feelings only to a circle of close confidants. We call an expression of thought or feeling public in this context when it is left open to whom it is addressed. Much of our speaking and writing is not in fact public in this sense and is not meant to be. What I say at my kitchen table is likely to stay there and is, in any case, intended only for those immediately present. The note I pass to you under the desk is meant for your eyes only. Both my kitchen table remarks and the note I send you are private in intention and, hopefully, also in fact. Much of our speaking and reading is of this sort. Our expressions of thought or feeling are, as a matter of fact, not promulgated to everybody and are commonly meant only for those specifically addressed. The assumption that our words have for the most part only a specific range is, in fact, inherent in and even constitutive of our common linguistic practice. Politicians, preachers, novelists, actors, and others of that sort may aspire to speak to the broad public but even that public has a specific range in that it consists of citizen, the faithful, the literate, theatergoers, etc.. Only philosophers are tempted to think that they are addressing the universe.

Even when we speak privately, we may, of course, be overheard. An outsider may catch what I say in confidence to a friend. A curious bystander may try to listen in to my private conversation. We may or may not be concerned abut that possibility. I sometimes overhear people in the street discussing their private lives on their cell phones. Long gone is the time of the glazed-in telephone cell. The standards of privacy seem to have changed. But we may still hesitate to let outsiders know of very intimate or embarrassing things or matters; we don’t want them to hear something that would be to our detriment or not in our interest. We operate in a sphere of privacy, but that sphere can grow or diminish according to circumstances. This is part of the ordinary use of language and of other expressive means.

  This should remind us of the fact that the idea of language as a medium of representation is a derivative and belated notion. The fundamental linguistic relation is not “A represents B” but “A communicates B to C.” The first question is never simply: what is said? But always: who is speaking to whom and who is heard by whom. That is a lesson Wittgenstein had to learn after he finished his Tractatus. It is as a result of this lesson Wittgenstein begins his Philosophical Investigations with Augustine’s account of the communicative use of language. It is, in any case, only by paying attention to this aspect of language that we will understand how considerations who is or is not addressed and thus considerations of privacy are integral to its use.

The deprivation of privacy

There are always those who want to know who spoke or wrote what to whom.  This holds in particular of repressive governments which have two reasons for keeping tabs on their people. Having eliminated free expression, public media and debate, polls and elections, such governments find it difficult to judge their citizens’ mood and thinking. To overcome that handicap, they will take active measures to peer into the lives of their citizens. Spying and surveillance become their substitute for the public sphere they have destroyed. The surveillance is, of course, not a purely cognitive undertaking. It is designed, rather, to help the authorities to shape their policies, manipulate the public’s thinking, feeling, and acting, and to ferret out and crush potential opponents. The intervention includes thus a massive intrusion into the privacy sphere of the subjects of surveillance but extends also to their public existence. This does not mean, however, that the division between the private and the public has been obliterated. It has, instead, become relocated and redefined. The results of governmental spying on its own citizens are not generally publicized. The information gained is most often kept in secret files by the secret police and only used when needed. Even the fact of surveillance is often denied or downplayed. The result is a peculiar deformation of the entire  domain of privacy. Boundaries of privacy remain in place between the subjects of surveillance but the government has now inserted itself as an intruder into every individual sphere of privacy and of all the information gained in this manner, it will publicize some and keep other bits private.

Governments are not the only parties keen to discover our private thoughts and feelings. These have also commercial value and the technology of the internet has made it increasingly easier to harvest what is useful and monetizable in them. Economic enterprises thus hack into the confidential data of their competitors. Criminal gangs snoop into private, corporate, and government accounts for purposes of theft and extortion. Companies operating on the internet accumulate information on the users of their services. In each case, the information used to be private in the sense that it was practically inaccessible (for incidental or intrinsic reasons) except to those specifically meant to have it. Technological advances have broken that barrier and have given the unauthorized access. And this naturally redraws the boundary between the public and the private.  The private information gathered by economic enterprises, criminal gangs, and internet companies has not, of course, become public in the sense of being now publicly accessible. Like government spies, those harvesting that information have an interest in keeping the results of their fishing to themselves. The information they have gathered retains its commercial value often only as long as they can keep it secret. The internet provider who exploits our private data is thus genuinely concerned with defending our privacy from other intruders though, of course, not from themselves.  And China’s extensive surveillance program is completely compatible with its recent adopted “Personal Information Protection Law” that seeks to assure the “legitimate rights” of individuals from “the use of new technologies such as user profiling and recommendation algorithms, the use of big data in setting [unfair] prices for frequent customers, and information harassment in the sale of products and services.”[4] Being free from governmental surveillance is, notably, not among those legitimate rights.

Shoshana Zuboff, who has studied the development of what she calls “surveillance capitalism” concludes that “the assault on behavioral data is so sweeping that it can no longer be circumscribed by the concept of privacy and its contests. This is a different kind of challenge now, one that threatens the existential and political canon of the modern liberal order defined by principles of self-determination.”[5]  Zuboff draws in these remarks on Hannah Arendt who has argued that all our classical forms of politics are built on the duality of household or family on one side and city or state on the other.[6]  But is the distinction between household and city the same as that between the private and the public? Were the households of ancient Greece or Rome private in the same sense as a modern home? Is there a distinction between the private and the public in simple tribal societies and their politics? A modern liberal political order certainly assumes the existence of a private domain to which the state has only limited access. Zuboff may be right in worrying that the foundations of this sort of society is threatened. That realization forces us to ask with what kind of politics we may be left, what kind of social order, and with what kind of distinction between the private and the public.

A recent report on China shows what is at stake.[7]  Its two authors have studied procurement documents of local, provincial, and national authorities to determine how surveillance capacities and objectives are changing. They write: “The PRC’s leaders have always excelled at surveilling their countrymen, and [the] lack of a “countervailing price” has allowed them to do so in varied ways over the past 70 years. During the first few decades of the PRC’s existence, the state-controlled labor system tethered workers and their families to their places of employment… Work units served as the eyes of the state, maintaining their residents’ dossiers, compiling information about them at work, at mandatory Party meetings, and in their homes—information often supplied by neighbors and coworkers. Reporting on members of one’s own community reached frenzied heights during the Cultural Revolution, when people had to publicly accuse their acquaintances, friends, and even loved ones of real or imagined political transgressions in order to avoid becoming targets themselves.” The frenzy came to an end in the late 1970s with Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms. “For a few decades, Chinese citizens became accustomed to relatively more robust levels of personal privacy.” But the procurement documents reveal that China’s government is now acquiring new tools to help the authorities at every level to monitor large swathes of the population at a time. The authors of the report write that the characterization of China in 2020 as an Orwellian surveillance state “is inaccurate and silly, but it could be reality down the line.”

The surveillance regime is currently most intense in Xinjiang where it operates with frequent ID checks at police cordons, self-incrimination campaigns in re-education camps, and surveillance cameras with face recognition capacity at street corners, police checkpoints, the entrances to mosques, and sometimes in individual homes. Access to printed and digital resources is strictly controlled. The internet is searched to determine who goes to what website, who communicates with whom, and who writes or reads what.  Surveillance is not as extensive in other parts of the country. The Xinjiang system of surveillance is a response, in the first instance, to some 200 terrorist attacks carried out by Uighur radicals in the 1990s. Their radicalism is linked to the Turkestan Islamic Party whose goal is to establish an independent East Turkestan Republic.  The desire for political independence is, in turn, due to the Uighurs’ consciousness of a distinct cultural, religious, and historical identity. The prevention terrorist attacks, the identification of potential troublemakers, The suppression of the secessionist movement, and control of the cultural expression of the region are thus the motivating factors of the surveillance system. In China at large, the system of surveillance is also used, as it is in the West, to prevent and solve ordinary crime, and to regulate public services, and to improve civic planning. The technology is thus seen as essential to the functioning of mass society. But the Chinese authorities’ understanding of what a well-ordered society should look like is peculiarly constricted. There must be no questioning of the status of the Communist Party. The bureaucratic state must not be challenged. Certain topics cannot be publicly discussed. “Politically harmful information” must be policed.[8] Yet another purposes the surveillance system serves is as a source of information for an envisaged social credit system. The system is meant to punish or reward Chinese citizens for socially detrimental or socially beneficial  behavior. Among the detrimental forms of behavior have been listed smoking violations, playing loud music, and eating on rapid transits, as well as jaywalking, failing to correctly sort personal waste, and even making reservations at restaurants or hotels without showing up, in addition, of course, to more serious matters such as fraudulent financial behavior and crime in general. Volunteering for community services, donating blood, and praising government efforts on social media have, on the other hand, been listed as deserving social credit rewards.[9] To gather relevant information the social credit system has to rely on mass surveillance systems, facial recognition software, big data analysis, and artificial intelligence. The envisaged system approximates the function, though not the layout and technology, of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and sis meant to establish a society that is both disciplinary and biopolitical in character, to use Michel Foucault’s language. In addition to mass surveillance for policy purposes and the individualized surveillance is support of system of social control, there is finally the sharply focused surveillance of suspected or potential dissidents. It is in this last form of surveillance that the intrusion into the target’s sphere of privacy is most pronounced. The agents of this sort of surveillance want to find out not only what their targets say or write or but wan to penetrate also into the inner space of their private thoughts and feelings.

What would the expansion of this technology that is suggested by the Chinese procurement documents mean? “Would there be any semblance of privacy left—the sort of going-about-one’s-business, blend-into-the-crowd privacy that many of us implicitly expect in public spaces—to people living in the PRC? What does it portend for public spaces beyond China’s borders? A number of democracies are already struggling with the implications of these technologies, which often pit a desire for public security against an expectation of privacy and consent. What happens as China normalizes, or sells, these technologies to places where public debate about them is quashed before it can occur? Will PRC surveillance tech strengthen the wave of authoritarian governance that seems to be rolling across the globe?”[10]

Surveillance government and surveillance capitalism do not form a single institutional whole. They are often even at odds with each other. Functionally they belong nonetheless together. We still tend to think about politics in terms of its institutions and distinguish between the public institutions of the state and private corporate institutions. But politics is perhaps better looked at as a process involving the organized exercise of power and institutions are better understood as being among the products and instruments of that process. Surveillance government and surveillance capitalism both exercise power with the help of newly developed technological means that to some extent obliterate, to some extent weaken, and to some extent relocate various distinctions between the public and the private. Surveillance government and surveillance capitalism produce in in this way comparable effects. We see in this development the emergence of a system of power relations that overrides the traditional distinction between public political and private economic enterprises .We can cll the emerging formation provisionally by the name of “the corporāte.”[11] The history of the modern state has been described as a process of emancipation of economics from politics which has reached ts epitome in the free-market system of modern capitalism. If this were true, the historical process would mark the triumph of the private over the public. But the endpoint of this process has proved to be not a neo-liberal nirvana of complete economic autonomy but (in different forms in China and the West) the convergence of state and corporate power – neither liberal nor socialist, neither public nor private, the amalgamation of the two into the functional syndrome of the corporāte.

Private sensations

Will there be any privacy left in the corporāte? I return at this point to Wittgenstein’s examination of privacy. It will be obvious to any careful reader that Wittgenstein doesn’t use the term “private language” to refer to an encoded language or one that is restricted in its use.  The language whose possibility he considers is supposed to be private rather in the sense that its content is private. The words of this language, he says, are meant to refer to “immediate private sensations” and thus to something that “only the speaker can know.”  We must turn then to the idea of the privacy of sensations and to the thought that these can only be known by the speaker, that is by the one who has the sensations and who says that he has them. If our inner states truly have that characteristic, it appears that there is a sphere of privacy that cannot be punctured by any kind of surveillance.

But Wittgenstein seeks to reject this idea of absolute privacy. And that raises the question whether anything stands in the way of the complete surveillance and control of our most private thoughts and feelings. Is there any possible escape from surveillance and any possibility of resistance to the power of the corporāte? Can there still be a sphere of privacy protected from the intrusions of the corporāte?

Wittgenstein dismisses the claim that only the person who says “I am in pain” can know what his words mean: “It can’t be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know that I’m in pain. What is it supposed to mean – except perhaps that I am in pain.”  I am not sure that we want to agree with this line of thinking. Is it in principle impossible to have knowledge of one’s own pain and why would that be so? We can certainly say “I remember I was in terrible pain when I had that kidney stone some years ago” and that utterance appears to be in all respects an expression of knowledge. But what then prevents me from having knowledge also of my present pain? Wittgenstein is right, however, in saying that being in pain is not the same as knowing that one is. I don’t mean here that the pain might be unconscious, but that having a consciousness of pain is still different from knowing that one has that pain. Feeling pain is not a state of cognition and we can add that thinking is also not the same as knowing that one has thoughts. But isn’t it possible that I am in pain in the sense of feeling it and also know that I am in pain? Feeling drunk and realizing that one is drunk are not the same. Similarly, I may have a thought and recall at the same time that I have had that same thought before. But why does Wittgenstein even raise the question whether the person who feels pain or thinks can know that he does? The decisive point is, after all, the question whether another person can know this. And here Wittgenstein is obviously right when he says: “If we are using the word ‘know’ as it is normally used, … then other people very often know if I’m in pain.” The interlocutor who insists on the absolute privacy of sensations objects at this point that another person cannot have that knowledge “with the certainty with which I know it myself.” That may or may not be true. But it does not bolster the interlocutor’s claim. Knowledge does not require absolute certainty. Otherwise, there would be no empirical knowledge.

On the view that Wittgenstein’s interlocutor advances we cannot have real knowledge of another person’s feelings because these are located in a sphere which is in principle inaccessible to others.  And this view may, in turn, be backed up by the Cartesian assumption of two different substances. But Cartesian dualism is not essential for the claim that what is in the mind is inaccessible to others. I don’t believe that Descartes himself actually assumed such an inaccessibiity. According to Wittgenstein’s interlocutor, however, the inaccessibility thesis means that the only thing others can know are verbal or behavioral expressions of private sensations. The interlocutor concludes that one can only make tenuous extrapolations about the other’s inner feelings from those expressions. But if we can in principle know nothing about the other’s inner states, our statement that the other is in pain can refer only to the other’s words and behavior. The interlocutor who wants to insist on the uniqueness of the inner life, is thus reduced to some kind of behaviorism. He seeks to avoid that behaviorism by concluding that if the other one says “I am in pain” he must be feeling what the interlocutor feels when he says “I am I pain.” But there seems to be no basis for that analogical inference. To avoid the behaviorist turn, we must, instead, follow Wittgenstein and argue that there is no absolute barrier between inner feelings and their external manifestation. The two belong together and we can therefore often know of the private sensations of others. That conclusion leaves many questions open. In particular the question of the exact nature of the link between the inner and the outer. It appears to be, however, the way we avoid the drift into behaviorism. That is ironic, in that Wittgenstein has been often accused of being a behaviorist, despite his claims to the contrary. To the question whether he will admit a difference between pain and pain behavior, Wittgenstein responds firmly in the Philosophical Investigations: “Admit it? What greater difference could there be.” (PI, 304) That there is such a difference does not mean, however, that there is not an inherent link between them. Sensations are not private in principle, though they are practically so in many situations.

Wittgenstein’s interlocutor will presumably want to make his case not only for sensations but also for thoughts. Thoughts, too, are, according to him, located in the private medium of the mind and must therefore be in principle inaccessible to others. All we have, accordingly to the interlocutor, are public expressions of thoughts. And from those, the interlocutor will say, we can tentatively derive conclusions about the inner thoughts. But it is once again difficult to see how the interlocutor can avoid a behaviorist turn. What reasons can he have for assuming that when the other utters the sentence “p” he must be thinking privately what the interlocutor thinks when he utters “p”? Wittgenstein’s rejection of an absolute division between the private thought and its public expression appears the only way to avoid the behaviorist turn.

Being in principle practically private

But let us assume for a moment that the interlocutor can maintain the absolute division between the private and the public which he is after. Can that give us comfort in the face of an expanding surveillance industry? The answer has to be no. The surveillance industry is after all, primarily interested in manipulating the behavior of the subjects of their surveillance and what they seek to survey are, the expressed feelings and thoughts of their subjects. If sensations and thoughts occur only in the absolutely separate sphere of the inner world, they will, presumably, be of small interest to the surveillance regimes. The inaccessible sensations and feelings would be like Wittgenstein’s imagined beetle in the inaccessible box. It would not matter whether they were there or not. The surveillance regime are interested in our thoughts and feelings only because they affect our speaking, writing, and doing. But as soon as we assume that there is such a link, we have abandoned the idea of an absolutely separate private sphere.  Some neuroscientists have suggested that we might one day be able to trace and decipher brain activity and thus gain direct access to people’s sensations and thoughts. But we are are certainly not there as yet and it is not obvious that this can ever be done. In the meantime, the surveillance regimes are busy recording what we say, what we do, where we go, whom we meet, what websites we visit in the hope of being able to control and manipulate our actions.

If the interlocutor is, however, pushed into revising his view and to adopt a form of behaviorism that view will prove to be even more amenable to the surveillance regime. There would then be no reason for it to worry that the secret thoughts and feelings of its subjects might escape surveillance.

Does Wittgenstein’s account offer us a contrasting way of distinguishing between the private and the public that allows us to identify genuine limits to the technology of surveillance? Does it have a place for thinking that there may be space for the privacy of feelings and thoughts and thus for a potential freedom from the intrusiveness of the powers of surveillance and a potential even for resistance to the manipulative power of the corporāte? How could that be? Wittgenstein assumes that there are internal links between the inner phenomena and their outer expression. We can know of other people’s private sensations because there exist natural links between them and their expression. Wittgenstein asks in this spirit whether the statement “I noticed that he was out of his humor” is a report about a person’s behavior or his state of mind. He answers compellingly – I think – that the report is both: “Both, not side by side, however, but from the one through the other.” But note that the published translation says at this point, instead, that the statement is a report “about the one via the other.” (PI, p. 188)  This would mean that the proposition is to be considered a report about a state of mind that has passed through a report on behavior whereas Wittgenstein’s German says more strongly that the proposition is a report on a state of mind by means of or even by reason of being a report on a behavior. Wittgenstein add at this point: “A doctor asks: ‘How is he feeling?’ The nurse says: ‘He is groaning.’ A report on his behavior. But need there be any question for the two of them whether the groaning is genuine and really the expression of something?” (PI, p. 188) And we can similarly speak of a natural link between thoughts and their expression. Does this mean that if there were no possibility of expressing thoughts or feelings they would, inevitably, dwindle away? We would certainly not be able to speak or to conceive of them in the way we do. Wittgenstein: “Look at the stone and imagine it having sensations – One says to oneself: How could one so much as have the idea of ascribing sensations to a thing? … And now look at a wriggling fly, and at once these difficulties vanish, and pain seems able to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to say, too smooth for it.” (P!, 284)

On Wittgenstein’s account then there is nothing in principle that stands in the way of recognizing another person’s thoughts and feelings. Thoughts and sensations are not hermetically sealed off in an inner world of which others can know nothing. And this is, indeed, essential to the ways we interact and to what kind of beings we are. We can co-operate efficiently with each other and come to each other’s assistance in the way we do only because we can recognize each other’s thoughts and feelings in expression and action. One might look for an evolutionary explanation of why this has to be so. But if this is so, there seem to be no limits to the potential powers of surveillance and our worst fears about the consequences of losing the distinction between the private and the public seem to be realistic.

But that recognition is always limited in reach. There is always the possibility of misunderstanding and misinterpretation, of deception, pretending, acting, and lying. There is always the possibility of keeping one’s thoughts and feelings to oneself. The link between inner thoughts and feelings and their expression is never smooth. Our interactions are for that reason always marked by a degree of uncertainty. We may know another person well and may have known him for years but still be surprised about something he says or does, thinks or feels. That, too, is characteristic of human sociality.

Your thoughts and feelings may not be in principle inaccessible to others. They are not absolutely private. But, in practice, they may not be freely accessible. Consider all the things that go through your mind in the course of a day. None of them may in principle be beyond the reach of being known by others. But that other person would have to be at your side all day long and pay constant attention to everything you do and say, to every frown, every sigh, and every word you whisper. Once we abandon the idea of mind and body as separate substances, it become plausible to think that our mental states will be in principle just as accessible to knowledge as the other states of our bodies. But this knowledge in principle does not come to a knowledge in practice. So, are thoughts and sensations in principle private in the sense of being in principle inaccessible to others? They are accessible in principle but not always practically. And they are practically inaccessible not only for incidental reasons, but intrinsically so. We can say then that they are in principle practically inaccessible. Whether they are or not will depend on the means we have available for following the other’s words and actions. In our normal, everyday interactions there are narrow limits to this. Individuals are thus left to a wide sphere of privacy. The size of that sphere varies, however, according to how close two human beings are. But even between those who are intimate, the sphere of privacy remains intact. And it is, moreover, essential, if the parties will have mutual trust in each other, that this sphere of privacy shrinks to the same degree in both.

Technological means of surveillance have, however, created new ways of following the words and actions of others. Here the penetration into the sphere of privacy becomes one-directional. The agents of surveillance resist being surveilled. The shrinkage of privacy occurs only for the subject surveilled. This must result in a shrinkage of trust since the surveilled subject has less reason to trust the surveillor.  The defenders of governmental surveillance often reason that those who do nothing wrong, will have nothing to fear from surveillance. But that assumes that he surveilling government organs cannot or will not do wrong. Surveillance government and surveillance capitalism are thus likely to spawn a regime of deepening distrust. The technological means of surveillance are not likely to go away; the reality of increased surveillance is with us. The question must be how trust can be maintained in this situation. The simple answer is that there needs to be increasing transparency between the parties. Bu that will not be easy to attain. Repressive governments have an interest in opacity, so do exploitative commercial undertakings, so do criminal gangs. In an age of surveillance, citizens must insist on a form of government that fosters openness and responsiveness to its citizens, that constraints the economic exploitation of the means of surveillance, and that prevents the operation of criminal forms of surveillance. It is difficult to see how any but a genuinely free a democratic form of government could provide such services.

Hiding in plain view

I want to turn here at the end to a passage of the Philosophical Investigations that appears to me relevant to this discussion. Wittgenstein writes there that “we don’t have an overview of the use of our language.”  His next sentence is in German: “Unserer Grammatik fehlt es an Übersichtlichkeit.“ Our published translation makes this: „Our grammar is deficient in surveyability.” I would make it: “Our grammar lacks surveyability.” The difference in wording is due to two different interpretations of the entire remark. The translators (and many other interpreters)  take Wittgenstein’s words to be prescriptive. Our grammar is deficient. We must therefore devise a surveyable representation of it. The interpreters believe tat this is what Wittgenstein is after. I believe, by contrast, that Wittgenstein is speaking  descriptively. I take him seriously when he writes: “Philosophy must not interfere in any way with the actual use of language, so it can in the end only describe it.” (PI, 124) And when he adds: “We don’t want to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of our words in unheard of ways.” (PI, 133) I take Wittgenstein to have made an observation about the nature of our language when he speaks of the unsurveyability of our grammar and thereby implicitly also of the entire human form of life. That our grammar is unsurveyable is due to the malleability and openness of language. There are, after all, “countless kind of use of all the things we call ‘signs’, ‘words’, ‘sentences’. And this diversity is not something fixed, given once and for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we say, come into existence and others become obsolete and get forgotten.” (PI, 23) Our language is not one thing, built on a single ground plan. It is like “a maze of little street and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses.” (PI, 18)[12]

I believe that these words tell us something about the limits of surveillance. Such a limit is not set by there being an unbreakable code, nor does it result from our ability to limit the circle of those to whom we speak, and it is also not due to our private sensations and thoughts being absolutely inaccessible to others. The limit of surveillance lies in our capacity to think and speak in new, unanticipated ways. This is not a merely speculative remark but one with immediate practical applications. Those who wo want to protect the privacy of their digital phones find it necessary to change them frequently to avoid an infection with malware.  Those who need the privacy of their internet communications will regularly change their addresses and servers. Those who speak and write in public will find it necessary to change the words they use and the ways they express themselves. We can learn here something the Chinese intellectuals on the Canadian website. They are often able to write in a surprisingly open and critical manner about the political, social, and intellectual realities of contemporary China. But they know, of course that they are under observation and that they need to tread carefully. They need to reconcile a number of different motivation. They are, of course, motivated first of all to communicate their own thinking. But they will at the same time want to express their thoughts in ways that escape the censor and do not provoke prosecution. They will also be concerned to keep private what they fear may get them into trouble with the authorities. Though they may also want to give others hints of those unexpressed thoughts. They are forced to become like foxes, outrunning the slow-moving hedgehogs of surveillance and censorship that seek to keep track of us with their cumbersome algorithms and rigid rules.

To be private does not mean to be confined in an inaccessible space. Privacy can also be found in the open where it is least expected. It is there where the agents of control cannot discriminate it. It is where the wind keeps shifting directions and contours keep changing. “Where do you hide a grain of sand?” G.K. Chesterton once asked. The answer, he thought, was: “On the Beach.”

Notes

[1] David Ownby, “Am I Being Played?” Reading the China Dream, February 15, 2021, https://www.readingthechinadream.com/david-ownby-am-i-being-played.html

[2] Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, Harper & Row, New York 1960, pp. 55 and 43.

[3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P. M’ S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester 2000, 246. All subsequent references to this text marked as “PI” with the appropriate section or page number.

[4]  “China set to pass new law to protect ‘legitimate rights’ on personal data,” South China Morning Post, August 17, 2021, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3145390/china-set-pass-new-law-protect-legitimate-rights-personal-data

[5] Shoshana Zuboff, “The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 5, 2016.

[6] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago U. P., Chicago 1958, Part 2 “The Public and the Private Realm.”

[7] Jessica Battke and Mareike Ohlberg, “The State of Surveillance. Government Documents Reveal New Evidence on China’s Efforts to Monitor Its People,” China File, October 30, 2020, https://www.chinafile.com/state-surveillance-china.

 

[8] “From ‘rice bunny’ to ‘back up the car’: China’s year of censorship, The Guardian, Dec. 30, 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/31/from-rice-bunny-to-back-up-the-car-chinas-year-of-censorship.

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System#:~:text=The%20Social%20Credit%20System%20%28%20Chinese%3A%20%E7%A4%BE%E4%BC%9A%E4%BF%A1%E7%94%A8%E4%BD%93%E7%B3%BB%3B%20pinyin%3A,Communist%20Party%20of%20China%20Xi%20Jinping%20%27s%20administration.

[10] Battke and Ohlberg, loc. cit.

[11] Hans Sluga, Politics and the Search for the Common Good, Cambridge U. P., Cambridge 2014, chapter 8.

[12] Hans Sluga, “Our grammar lacks surveyability,” in Language and World. Part One. Essays on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, ontos verlag, Frankfurt 2010.