Wittgenstein’s Transitions

 

 

 

 “In this work more than in any other it is worth looking at apparently solved questions again and again from new sides as unsolved,“ Ludwig Wittgenstein jotted in his philosophical notebook in November of 1914. “Don’t get stuck with what you once wrote. Think always of a fresh beginning, as if nothing had as yet happened.” (p. 30) [1] The First World War had been raging for months; Wittgenstein was serving as an outlook on an Austrian gunboat; but he remained determined to continue the philosophical work he had been doing before the war with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. “Logic must take care of itself,” had been the opening entry in his new notebook on August 22. He called it “a singularly profound and significant insight.” (p. 2) The sentence was intended to say, first of all, that logic is self-contained, that it does not rest on anything outside it. But by putting it at the head of his notebook Wittgenstein may also have been expressing the hope that his work in logic would not be affected by the vagaries of the war. “Will I be able to work now?” he had asked himself anxiously on the first page of the private diary he attached to his philosophical notebook.[2] It turned out that he could do so even under heavy bombardment. “Canons shook the boat as they fired near us at night. Worked much and with success,” he wrote on December 6.[3] But progress was often slow and he feared that “the redeeming word has not been spoken.”[4] As long as that was the case, he could only go over the same ground again and again. His most vexing problem at the time was that of “the logical form of the proposition,” a topic he had been exploring with Russell in the preceding years. But his view on the topic was still far from settled. “Does the subject-predicate form exist,” he now asked himself. “Does the relational form exist? Do any of the forms exist at all that Russell and I were always talking about?” (pp. 2-3)  And so it went with questions but no definitive answers.

Some fifteen years later, Friedrich Waismann was trying to pin down Wittgenstein’s thinking for an expository book he was hoping to write.  Wittgenstein had by then achieved some fame with his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, composed as the war was ending and published in 1921 with Russell’s effusive introduction. Back in Austria, the scholars in the Vienna Circle treated the work as a revelation. But their attempts to get its author to explain the book to them met with little success; Waismann’s discussions with Wittgenstein proved equally frustrating. “He has the wonderful gift of always seeing things as if for the first time,” Waismann noted. “He always follows the inspiration of the moment and tears down what he has previously sketched out.”[5] After ten years of almost complete philosophical silence, Wittgenstein’s thinking had just entered a newly volatile phase. In 1930 he returned to Cambridge to sort out what he now thought to be missing in his earlier work. He began to lecture on the themes of the Tractatus, but the book struck him now increasingly as a piece of unbearable dogmatism. That conclusion sparked new investigations which led him on an exhausting journey, ”criss-cross over a wide field of thought,” in which “the same points were always being approached afresh from different directions and new sketches made,” as he wrote later in the preface to his Philosophical Investigations. Many of these sketches, he added, “were badly drawn or lacking in character, marked by all the defects of a weak draughtsman. And when they were rejected, a number of half-way decent ones were left, which then had to be arranged.”[6] This is how the new book was composed. It was a collection of remarks, no more than “an album.”

Wittgenstein never quite finished his Philosophical Investigations. Its initial parts were firm enough in his mind, but he was unsure about how to complete the book. In 1948 he began to look at the issues once again in new ways. At the end, he confided to yet another notebook: “I do philosophy now like an old woman who is always mislaying something and having to look for it again: now her spectacles, now her keys.”[7]

There emerges from all this the picture of a restless thinker set on constantly revisiting and reworking what he has previously thought. Waismann who had initially heard of Wittgenstein as the author of the Tractatus had expected a very different person. The book consisted of apodictic statements put forth with a minimal amount of argument and formulated in an often hieratic style. Its aura of absolute certainty was reenforced, moreover, by the elaborate numbering of its propositions that Wittgenstein had adopted from Principia Mathematica, Russell and Whitehead’s majestic logical treatise. The Tractatus presented itself thus to the unwary reader as a work of a stern, logical order and the author as someone endowed with unconditional truths.

That was, however, a piece of fiction. The book was, in fact, largely composed by extracting diverse propositions from earlier writings and each one of them had originally been surrounded by doubts and questions. Some of those propositions came from notes Wittgenstein had compiled for Russell in 1913; many others were taken from the philosophical notebooks he kept during the First World War. The Tractatus was, in this respect, just like Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, more of “an album” of sketches made on an extended intellectual journey than a tightly constructed treatise. We can see this clearly when we turn from the book to the source of its propositions in the war-time notebooks. Though not all of them have survived, the three notebooks that have permit us to reconstruct much of Wittgenstein’s course of thinking from the beginning of the First World War to January 1917. What we find in them is the record of an intricate back and forth in his thinking on a wide range of philosophical topics. They document continuous small shifts as well as some major turns in Wittgenstein’s thinking and in the end the emergence of a radically new way of conceiving philosophy. The Tractatus was a record of this entire development. Taking note of the long, treacherous journey that led to its composition is, in fact, indispensable for understanding its highly condensed formulations and for recognizing their varied and unstable subsoil.

The journey recorded in Wittgenstein’s war-time notebooks begins with questions provoked by Russell’s logical atomism. Russell had come to that doctrine in the late 1890s as a result of his break with F. H. Bradley’s monistic idealism.  His friend G. E. Moore had led the way in an 1899 essay on “The Nature of Judgment.” With the help of a somewhat rudimentary logic Moore had sought to establish that reality was not a single thing – Bradley’s “One” – but  consisted of a multitude of concepts.[8] This so-called turn to realism was thus, in effect, one to a metaphysical pluralism. Russell readily adopted Moore’s pluralistic view and found support for it in the philosophy of Leibniz.[9] His view was, as he later put it, “that you can get down in theory, if not in practice, to ultimate simples out of which the world is built, and that those simples have a kind of reality not belonging to anything else.”[10] But he remained quite uncertain about the nature of those simples. Were they concepts and judgments, as Moore had maintained? Were they particulars or universals or, perhaps, both? Could they be spatial points or even sense data? When Wittgenstein arrived in Cambridge in 1911, he found Russell at work on a theory of knowledge that was to settle the issue. Russell’s tool for achieving that end was the logic he had devised in the previous years and, in particular, his theory of descriptions which seemed to allow one to distinguish between merely apparent objects that could be analyzed away and objects resistant to further analysis.

While Wittgenstein’s war-time notebooks show him deeply immersed, from the first page,  in the problems of logical atomism it wasn’t, however, this doctrine that had initially brought him to work with Russell. When Wittgenstein got to Cambridge in 1911, he was mostly familiar with Russell’s 1903 book The Principles of Mathematics. As a result he had visited Gottlob Frege in Jena, whose logical theories Russell had discussed in a long appendix, and Frege had advised him to go to Cambridge to study with Russell; he had also become fascinated with Russell’s discussion of the logical paradoxes in a second appendix to his book and had written short piece on that topic. He was thus initially primed to focus on Russell’s logic and convinced that he could make a contribution to its further development. “Logic is still in the melting pot,” he wrote brazenly to his mentor in 1912 within a year of having embarked on that project. He was sure that it “must turn out to be a totally different kind than any other science.”[11] Russell, who had spent years of excruciating work on his logic, seems to have taken the remark in good spirits. But, as far as Wittgenstein was concerned, that logic still lacked sufficient unity and simplicity. In logic, he wrote later on in the Tractatus, simplicity was a sign of correctness. In June 1913, he informed Russell accordingly of some ideas he had in this respect: “One of the consequences of my ideas will – I think – be that the whole of logic follows from one proposition only.”[12] His efforts to improve on Russell’s logic took form in two early writings: a set of dense notes written for Russell in 1913 and another set of equally dense remarks dictated to G. E. Moore a year later.[13] Fundamental in them was the distinction between propositions and proper names. “Frege said ‘propositions are names’, Russell said ‘ proposiitons correspond to complexes’. Both are false; and especially false is the statement ‘propositions are names of complexes’,” he wrote in the first set of notes. (p.97) The distinctive characteristic of propositions was that they had two poles of in that they could be either true or false. This bi-polarity of the proposition he expected to be one of the unifying principles of his logic. It justified truth-functional logic, it suggested a diagrammatic representation of their relations, and eventually their depiction in a system of truth-tables. But that still left the logic of generalized propositions unexplained and Wittgenstein found himself wrestling with that topc.  In addition there was also still the need to solve the logical paradoxes with helps of a theory of types whose justification was, however, again a problem. Wittgenstein’s notes for Russell and Moore were suggestive, but they did not make a conclusive case for a newly unified and simplified science of logic..

Wittgenstein’s preoccupation with these technical problems, however, made Russell anxious that his student would remain a narrow specialist, lacking an understanding of the broader and deeper philosophical issues with which Russell saw himself concerned. That was, however, a misjudgment. At the end of his notes for Russell, Wittgenstein had sought to to soothe Russell’s anxieties by announcing that “philosophy consists of logic and metaphysics. Logic is its base.” (p. 106) So, metaphysics was after all the goal of Wittgenstein’s project. But he added at this point three other propositions that must have given Russell some pause. “In philosophy there are no deductions; its is purely descriptive. Philosophy gives no picture of reality. Philosophy can neither confirm nor confute scientific investigation.” (p. 106) These posed, in effect, a direct challenge to Russell whose logical atomism was meant precisely to give a deductive and scientific picture of reality. It is far from clear how Wittgenstein himself thought of ho those claims were to be reconciled with his belief that philosophy consisted of logic and metaphysics. He held consistently that philosophy was not a science and in this respect he was certainly at odds with Russell and that proposition was not necessarily incompatible with saying philosophy was made up of logic and metaphysics. But the two other propositions were more of a challenge. How could philosophy be purely descriptive and how could it not give a picture of reality while being at the same time a metaphysics?  As it turned out, Wittgenstein was not to make anything more of these pronouncements till later. It was only in the 1930’s when the Tractatus system had broken down that he came back to the idea of philosophy as a purely descriptive undertaking. And that philosopher might not be able to provide a picture of reality became clear to him only in the course of his war-time reflections. It entered from there into the Tractatus and became one of Wittgenstein’s leading ideas in the 1930s.

Two things are, in any case, clear from Wittgenstein’s notes for Russell. The first is that already in 1913 Wittgenstein subscribed to a broader philosophical agenda than Russell realized and the second is that this agenda remained undeveloped until he turned to Russell’s logical atomism. That his wartime notebooks begin with than examination of key issues of logical atomism signals, thus, one of those transitions in Wittgenstein’s thinking that were to become definitive of his philosophical life. But it is not difficult to understand why he embarked at this point on the exploration of logical atomism. Atomism has proved an attractive position in the history of philosophy. Democritus and Leucippus were inspired by it and they invented the word “atom for the assumed simple elements.  Plato sketched a version of it in the Theaetetus. Leibniz became its most prominent exponent in modern philosophy and even today it lives a ghostly life in what we call model theory. Wittgenstein himself had, however, grown up with other, more holistic forms of thinking and so Russell’s atomism must have come to him as an appealing and liberating alternative.

His war-time notebooks indicate that he initially identified with much of the program of Russell’s atomism though by no means to all of its details.  He never bought into his mentor’s entire philosophy and certainly not into his social and political opinions. His philosophical discussions with Russell were often stormy. In the notes he wrote for his mentor in 1913, he highlighted various disagreements and laid out how he meant to go beyond Russell’s work.  The war-time notebooks continue that independent line of thinking. From the start, Wittgenstein objects to Russell’s appeal to self-evidence in order to settle questions about logical structure and the nature of the simple objects. “Russell would say ‘Yes! That’s self-evident,’” he wries, but Wittgenstein considers this ridiculous. (p. 3)  Russell had, in fact, devoted a whole chapter of his Theory of Knowledge to defend his reliance on self-evidence, but for Wittgenstein the idea of self-evidence “is and always was whole deceptive.” (p. 4) Such disagreements did not mean that Wittgenstein rejected logical atomism altogether. But the doctrine needed sifting and clarification. In contrast to Russell – and, in fact, in contrast to all the earlier atomists – Wittgenstein recognized the profound challenges the doctrine raises. The most difficult one was, perhaps, how the doctrine could be justified. It could, obviously, not be deduced from observation since that would never deliver “ultimate constituents.” Some kind of analysis was called for and that analysis had to use some kind of logic. That raised, however, immediately two set of questions. The first concerned the logic to be used in the process of analysis, and the other the outcome of the analysis, the determination of the sought-after simples. Wittgenstein’s notebooks show him to be working tenaciously and for months on these interconnected issues.

As for the logic, Wittgenstein asked himself at the start of his notebooks what logical structures the process of analysis could discover. Hence, his preoccupation with the question of the logical form of propositions. How could one be sure that one had given the right analysis? And how could one determine that the analysis was complete? Wittgenstein struggled hard over these questions. There were seemingly insurmountable difficulties with negative propositions and likewise with the generalized ones. The notebooks contain, in consequence, repeated reminders such as: “In all these considerations I am somewhere making some sort of FUNDAMENTAL MISTAKE.” (p. 10) Russell had naively assumed that one could read the structure of reality off from the logical form of our propositions.  But he had no satisfactory account of how this was to be done. In his Theory of Knowledge he had said only that the proposition “A is similar to B” is true “when there is a complex composed of A and B and similarity.”[14] Wittgenstein had at first agreed with this, writing in his 1913 notes: “The form of a proposition has meaning in the following way… I say that if an x stands in the relation R to a y the sign ‘xRy’ is to be called true to the fact and otherwise false. This is a definition of sense.” (p. 91) But that was certainly no definition. Both Russell and Wittgenstein were considering  only particular relational propositions. They soon moved on, however, to a more considered view, if we can trust the lectures on the philosophy of logical atomism Russell delivered in 1918. According to Russell, those lectures reflected the state of their joint thinking at the moment the war broke out and Wittgenstein was forced to return to Austria. Their view was, in Russell’s words, that “in a logically correct symbolism there will always be a certain fundamental identity of structure between a fact and the symbol for it …and the complexity of the symbol corresponds very closely with the complexity of the facts symbolized by it .”[15] But this was not yet enough in Wittgenstein’s eyes. Early on in his war-time notebook he still expresses uncertainty over “the logical identity of sign and signified.” (p. 3) We must, perhaps, think of a proposition as a model in which “a world is as it were put together experimentally.” Or, better still, we must think of it as a picture. (p. 7) But was that satisfactory? “On the one hand my theory of logical depiction seems to be the only possible one, on the other there seems to be an insoluble contradiction in it.” (p. 17) It is not obvious what contradiction Wittgenstein has in mind. It seems to have involved generalized propositions. His dissatisfaction with the “theory of logical depiction” is, any case, evident. One of its problems is that there are different ways or methods of representation.  And: “The method of depiction must be completely determinate before we can at all compare reality with the proposition to see whether it is true or false.” (p. 25) That answer created, however, problems of its own. Would one not have to be able to identify both the structure of the proposition and that of the fact in order to see whether they were one and the same? The logical atomists assumed, however, that one could read the structure of reality off from that of the fully analyzed proposition. That was the whole strategy of their position. But what would guarantee that the structure of the proposition was a clue to that of the facts? .

Considerations of this kind led Wittgenstein, in turn, to ones concerning the supposed elements of reality. Like Russell, he kept going back and forth over the possibilities. Were they sense-date? Could they be universals? Were they spatial points?And so on. In the end he came to ask himself whether logic could even tell us in principle what they were. Perhaps it could assure us only that there were such but without identifying the atoms themselves. He was certainly ready to assume that “the world has a fixed structure.” (p. 62) This was equivalent, he thought, to saying that our words must have definite sense since “the demand for simple things is the demand for definiteness of sense.” (p. 60) One could then conclude that there were ultimate constituents of reality, “simple objects,” without having to specify their exact nature. “It seems that the idea of the simple is already to be found contained in that of the complex and in the idea of analysis, and in such a way that we come to the idea quite apart from any examples of simple objects, or of propositions which mention them, and we realize the existence of the simple object – a priori – as a logical necessity.” (p.62) But was it obvious that the analysis would lead to simple, unanalyzable elements? Was that already contained in the concept of analysis? Or could the analysis go on ad infinitum? Perhaps, one could even speak of simple constituents. Wittgenstein was willing to put particular weight on the transcendental argument that Leibniz had used in his Monadology to argue for the existence of simples. There had to be simples because there were complexes.[16] Had Wittgenstein been inspired by Russell’s book to adopt this Leibnizian line of reasoning? Or had he read Leibniz on his own? There are certainly surprising similarities between Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the Monadology even though the simples they speak of are quite different. What unites the two writings is their logical starting-point, their contraposition of will and representation, the denial of causal relations, and most of all the course of their reasoning from metaphysical foundations to the questions of ethics, not to speak of the numbering of their propositions. It is useful to remind ourselves here that Wittgenstein drew not only on Frege and Russell for philosophical inspiration. From the private war-time diaries we learn that he was also reading Tolstoy, Emerson, and Nietzsche at the same time as he was laboring over Frege’s and Russell’s ideas. Traces of all these influences are, in fact, noticeable at some point in his notebooks.

His attachment to Russell was to weaken as the war went on. Nine months into the conflict, Wittgenstein’s notebook records a first rupture with Russell’s way of thinking and an indication that a major transition in Wittgenstein’s thinking is on the way. The passage in question occurs in the middle of extensive reflections on the simple constituents of reality. On May 23, 1915, Wittgenstein writes in a tone quite alien to anything he had written before in his notebook: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. There really is only one world soul, which I for preference call my soul and as which alone I conceive what I call the souls of others.” This, he adds, provides the key for deciding “in how far solipsism is a truth.” (p. 49) In the same tone he continues two days later: “The urge towards the mystical comes from the non-satisfaction of our wishes by science. We feel that even if all possible scientific questions are answered our problem is still not touched at all.” (p. 51) None of those words had been prepared by anything earlier in his notebooks. The limits of language and the world, the stress on “my language,” the conception of a world soul, solipsism, the limits of science, the non-scientific character of “our problems,” the mystical — none of those themes had been addressed in the earlier pages. All of them were, moreover, entirely foreign to Russell and his mode of thinking. In his Introduction to the Tractatus, Russell would later dismiss such speculative thoughts with the words: “Mr. Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said.”[17] His caustic remark provoked Wittgenstein, in turn, to accuse Russell of not having understood his book. May 23, 1915 marks thus a first major break-with Russell and his way of doing philosophy even though its full implications may not have been obvious to Wittgenstein at the time since he turns immediately back from his speculative remarks to further reflections on the nature of the simple objects – almost, as if nothing had happened. But those few sentences mark, nonetheless, a first step away from Russell and his program and, as it turns out, also from Russell’s understanding of philosophy itself.

From where, then, did these strange new thoughts come? What motivated their intrusion into Wittgenstein’s apparently straightforward attempt to sort out the problems of logical atomism? We don’t know exactly what occasioned them. Was there an external motivation for them? Wittgenstein’s first sentence on May 23 may, in fact, be read as continuing his preceding discussion of simple objects but In a new register suggesting that we have no language-independent means of establishing what is simple. Some such thought had, indeed, already occurred to him two weeks earlier: “The simple thing for us is: the simplest thing that we know – the simplest thing to which our analysis can advance – it need appear only as a prototype, as a variable in our propositions.” (p. 47) Even so, the new emphasis on language being “my language” introduces an element of the subjective into Wittgenstein’s thinking that had not been visibly there before and that has no equivalent in Russell’s philosophy. Wittgenstein’s turn against Russell becomes even more evident in the next two sentences with their talk of solipsism and the world soul, themes onc again alien to Russell. And, if this is not enough, his subsequent appeal to the mystical and his insistence that there are “personal” problems that cannot be resolved scientifically are clearly meant to draw a line between his own view and Russell’s scientistic outlook.

Though none of these reservations had made an appearance before in his notebook, Wittgenstein was also not making them up on the spot. He was not just relying here on momentary inspiration. His turn against Russell signaled, rather, a return to another, earlier set of ideas that had become submerged when he went to Cambridge and had aligned himself there with Russell’s program. Those earlier ideas had come to Wittgenstein largely from Arthur Schopenhauer’s book The World as Will and Representation. Georg Henrik von Wright recalled later that Wittgenstein had told him once that “his first philosophy was a Schopenhauerian epistemological idealism.”[18] This is not implausible since Schopenhauer’s book had been immensely a popular in Fin de Siècle Vienna. Its pronounced pessimism and implied skepticism fitted the mood of the Austro-Hungarian empire in decline. From Ludwig Boltzmann to Sigmund Freud and from Fritz Mauthner to Otto Weininger, the Viennese authors with whom Wittgenstein was familiar, had all been affected by Schopenhauer’s philosophy. But we have to assume that by the time he arrived in Cambridge Wittgenstein had abandoned (or was about to abandon) this early excursion into philosophy. He may have been drawn to Russell’s atomism, in fact, precisely because it provided an antidote to the overwhelming cultural influence of Schopenhauer’s view of the world as unindividuated metaphysical will. But it would be mistaken to think that the association with Russell completely extinguished Wittgenstein’s interest in Schopenhauer.  The later parts of his war-time notebooks and the Tractatus itself show how much Schopenhauer was still very much on his mind. He appears to have remained particularly attracted Schopenhauer’s heterodox views on ethics which rejected moral rules and, in particular Kant’s categorical imperative, and described ethics as a way of seeing the world rather than of acting in it. Wittgenstein’s notebooks and the Tractatus also draw on   Schopenhauer’s reflections on the will and, not least, on his philosophy of art.  Most striking is perhaps that the beginning and end of the Tractatus mimic the first and last sentence of Schopenhauer’s book.

Just as significant as the presence of Schopenhauer in the notebook passage from May 23 is that of Fritz Mauthner, the author of three expansive volumes of Contributions to a Critique of Language. The work argued for “a critique of language which would be a meta-critique of reason” in a phrase Mauthner had borrowed from Fritz Jacobi, the friend of Immanuel Kant, who had taken the idea in turn from the dark musings of Johann Georg Hamann. Wittgenstein had certainly read the first volume of Mauthner’ book by the beginning of the war and would later familiarize himself with Hamann’s writings.[19] He was interested, thus, in ways of thinking about language that were distinct from what he had learned from Frege and Russell. It was Mauthner who impressed on him the idea that what we abstractly call “language” is  in reality always “my language.” It was Mauthner also who had discussed solipsism and the world soul in his magnum opus.. Wittgenstein’s notebook entry of May 23 marks thus a tur and return not only to Schopenhauer but also to Mauthner. And this return to Mauthner was potentially most devastating for his attachment to Russell’s atomism For it would lead Wittgenstein in the later parts of his notebooks to adopt Mauthner’s skepticism about all philosophical theorizing. It was this “pyrrhonian” Mauthner who supplied him with his concluding metaphor in the Tractatus of the ladder one must throw away after one has climbed up on it. Even so, Wittgenstein’s adoption of Mauthner’s views had been selective. In the  Tractatus he was still sufficiently in the thrall of Russell’s logic to conclude that critique of language could not be conducted “in Mauthner’s sense” by remaining within the confines of ordinary language.[20] At that point Wittgenstein had still faith in Russell’s distinction between the apparent and the real logical form of the proposition. It was only after he had abandoned the Tractatus that he discovered the whole force of Mauthner’s meta-critique of reason by means of a critique of language.

Perplexing as Wittgenstein turn and return to Schopenhauer and Mauthner on May 23 proves to be, just as perplexing is the abrupt way the excursion ends. Within two days, we find him back at the pains-taking task of trying to determine the identity of the simples of atomist lore. It was as if nothing had happened. But how solid was his apparent recommitment to the atomist program? Where was he moving to at this point? We have unfortunately no record of the course of Wittgenstein’s thinking between June 2015 and April 2016 since the notes covering that period are now lost. But it is clear from the following notebook that a year later he has not yet given up on logical atomism. That notebook begins with further reflections on simple objects and the form of the proposition.  But his words echo now what he had said the previous year about the subjective character of our thinking about them. On April 15 he writes: “We can foresee only what we ourselves construct. But then where is the concept of the simple object still to be found?” (p. 71) Since simple objects are not immediately accessible to us, our claim that there are such comes to being a prediction that logical analysis will ultimately deliver them. But if we can foresee only what we ourselves construct then our account of the simple objects will depend on our construction. He goes on to speak similarly of the construction of simple functions and since such functions determine the form of the propositions in which they occur, it now appears that the forms of propositions we can identify must also be relative to what we are able to construct. The realistic picture of logical atomism seems to have given way here to a constructivist one. But the issue is not yet completely settled. A year earlier he had already entertained the possibility that one might need to distinguish between what is simple for us and what is simple absolutely speaking. Could it not even be the case that when we speak of an ordinary object, such as the watch on the table, we treat it, in effect, as logically simple? Even so, there may still be absolute simples in addition.  What if our construction is somehow determined by what is out there? In that case, it may still be possible to give a definite and “objective” answer to the question of the simple objects and the logical forms of the proposition. Towards the end of the notebook, on Nov. 11, Wittgenstein gets back to this point once more when he writes that it must be possible “to set up the general form of the proposition, because the possible forms of propositions must be a priori.” (p. 89)

All the same, his notes indicate also a growing distance to Russell’s version of logical atomism. That becomes dramatically apparent in the spring of 1916. The episode begins on May 6 with Wittgenstein addressing once more the theme of the limits of science. “The whole world view of the moderns is grounded in this illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of the natural phenomena. We thus stop with the “laws of nature” as something inviolable just as the ancients did with God and fate.  And both are right and wrong. The old ones are, however, clearer in that they acknowledge a clear endpoint, whereas it appears in the new system, as if everything was grounded.” (p. 72) This renewed critique of scientism expresses at once reservations about Russell’s world view and fresh attention to Schopenhauer and Mauthner who both question the explanatory power of science. There follows a short passage on logical operations followed by a hiatus of three weeks in which Wittgenstein remains silent. When he resumes his notebook entries on June 11 we are faced with the unexpected question: “What do I know about God and the purpose of life?” (p. 72) The two topics prove to be intimately linked for him. “To believe in God means that life has a sense,” he writes shortly later. (p. 74) We can, in fact, call the meaning of life by the name of God. We can also identify God with fate and even with the world. Prayer he says is “thinking of the meaning of life.”  The question about God and the purpose of life initiates a whole series of further thoughts on the world and our place in it, on good and evil, and the nature of the will.  As he pursues these themes still other topics make their appearance: the human self, idealism and solipsism, ethics and art, happiness, death and suicide. The tightly argued examination of logical atomism in the earlier pages of his notebooks has exploded into a wild array of bewildering new thoughts. “Yes,” he writes, “my work has expanded from the foundations of logic to the essence of the world.” (p. 79)

In contrast to the previous moment in May 1915 when he had turned away from the problems of logical atomism only to return to them shortly afterwards, these new reflections continue for several months interspersed with only occasional glances back at his previous concerns with the atomist program. Finally, on November 21, the current of speculative thought appears to be running dry and we find Wittgenstein fretting once more over the question of the general form of the proposition. While we can’t say what had occasioned the disruption of his train of thought in May 1915, we do know what triggered this one. On May 6, five days before Wittgenstein asks his disturbing question about God and the purpose of life, his private diary records that he feels in imminent danger of losing his life in the war. How can one find inner peace in this situation?  “Only by living in a way that pleases God. Only in this way is it possible to bear life.”[21] He adds on May 10: “I am doing well now due to the grace of God. … He will not abandon me in this danger.” On May 16: “I am sleeping today under infantry fire and will likely perish. God be with me. I surrender my soul to the Lord.” [22] Worse is still to come. In June, the Russians launch a major attack on the Austrian forces in the so-called “Brusilov offensive.” Thousands of Austrian soldiers lose their lives, many others become Russian prisoners of war. Wittgenstein’s own unit is directly engaged in this deadly battle which lasts till the middle of August. He is certain that he will not survive. On July 29 he writes: “I was shot at yesterday. Was scared. I was afraid of death. I have such a wish now to go on living. And it is difficult to renounce life…”[23]

His thoughts in this period are often feverish and obscure – as he realizes. “Here I am still making crude mistakes. No doubt about that.” he notes on July 29. (p. 78) “I am conscious of the complete unclarity of all these sentences.” (p. 79) They are driven by existential anxieties rather than logical ratiocination. Only some of them will make it into the Tractatus. His reflections on God do not, but those on the meaning of life will become essential for the coda of his book. The world” will also remain a topic of concern in it and that in two ways.  The world is all that is the case, as the first sentence of the book will say, and as such a matter of logic.. But ethics also demands that we see the world in the right way, as the end of the book will declare. “Ethics does not treat of the world,” he writes in his notebook. It is, rather, “the condition of the world, just like logic.” (p. 77) We don’t have to look far to find the inspiration for this dual picture. We can find it in Schopenhauer World as Will and Representation.

But what is the right way to look at the world? The question leads Wittgenstein to pose two others. What is the place of the subject, the I, the self in relation to the world? And where do we find good and evil? As to the first question, he says that what we call “the world” is really always only “my world.” Or as he puts it provocatively: “The world and life are one.” (p. 77) Death is therefore not an event or fact in the world. In death the world ceases to be. But what makes the world my world? What is the subject? Russell had talked of knowledge as based on a fundamental relation of acquaintance and of acquaintance as “a dual relation between a subject and an object.”[24]  But this subject, he had insisted, was not to be identified with an I or self. There was no need to assume a persistent self. Wittgenstein had never felt much attraction to Russell’s doctrine of acquaintance. His work was not meant to be epistemological in character. Epistemology is the philosophy of psychology,” he had written to Russell in 1913, and as such of minor interest. (p. 106) That was also something he also meant to convey in his programmatic statement that logic must take care of itself. In his notebook he rejects Russell’s conception of acquaintance out of hand. “The representing subject is surely mere illusion,” he writes. But: there is still the I or self to be considered as distinct from the Russellian subject. “The I, the I is what is deeply mysterious.” (p. 80) The I is mysterious because we never confront it as an object. I am in the world, he writes, in the way my eye is in my visual field. The perceiving eye is, in fact, not part of the visual field. It is what makes the visual field possible. In the same way the I is not part of the world but makes my world possible. It makes its appearance “through the world’s being my world.” (p. 80) This I is, however, not the individual self, but the “one world soul” of which he had said a year earlier that it manifests itself as that “which I for preference call my soul.” (p. 49) This subject or self it to be conceived will as he writes, once again in line with Schopenhauer. While the representing subject is a mere illusion, “the willing subject exists.” (p. 80) But the will must not be conceived as a causal power by which the individual can affect events in the world. For “the world is independent of my will.” (p. 73) Standing apart from the world, the will can only define an attitude to the world as a whole. It can lead us to reject or accept the world for what it is.

With this we have entered the domain of value or ethics and aesthetics. To accept the world for what it is means to be happy and happiness is what we should strive to attain. The happy life, is one lived in accord with the world. It is in this state that we grasp the meaning of life. “Is this not the reason why human beings to whom after many doubts the meaning of life has become clear, cannot then say in what that meaning consists.” (p. 74) The problems of life find their solution in their disappearance. Ethics is thus not concerned with advancing a theory; it does not assert propositions or promulgate rules. It is, in fact, clear that ”ethics cannot be expressed in words.” (p. 78) . Ethics, he says, is thus “transcendent” – or, rather, “transcendental,” as he will phrase it in the Tractatus. It is a way of seeing the world from outside as a whole sub specie aeternitatis. And this is, at the same time, the aesthetic way of seeing things. “The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis, and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.” (p.83) Ethics is the aesthetics of the world.

The claim that ethics cannot put into words puts Wittgenstein on the path to an even more radical conclusion. He had previously talked of logical limits to what can be said. What do I know when I understand a proposition but do not know whether it is true or false, he had asked himself in 1914.  And he had replied to that question: “At this point I am again trying to express something that cannot be expressed. (p. 31) That had been, in fact, yet another thought embedded in the first, introductory sentence of his war-time notebook. That logic must take care of itself meant among other things that “all we have to do [and, in fact, all we can do] is to look and see how it does it.” (p. 11) But Wittgenstein’s conclusion that ethics, too, cannot be put into words, adds a new dimension to those earlier considerations. Since logic and ethics form the arc on which Wittgenstein’s philosophical thinking in this period moves he is made to conclude: “The correct method would be to say nothing, except what can be said, i.e. what belongs to natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy.” (p. 94) And with this conclusion, the break with Russell has become complete. The entire project of logical atomism has been consigned now to what cannot be said and is therefore without sense. Wittgenstein’s thinking has broken through all the earlier layers in which it had been confined and confronts philosophy now in a new, profoundly different way. It will take him the rest of his life, though, to discover the consequences of this revelation.

But his thoughts in the summer and fall of 1916 were not yet the end of the road he had been traveling since the beginning of the war. The year before he had written to Russell: “I have recently done much work and, I believe, with good result. I am now busy bringing the whole thing together and writing it down in the form of a treatise.”[25] That treatise was still to be written a year later. Wittgenstein did not get around to that concluding task till the middle of 1918. The war-time notebooks in our possession end unfortunately in January of the preceding year. It is thus impossible for us to track the course of Wittgenstein’s thinking to the moment when he set to work on the text of the Tractatus. The assumption is that he completed at least one more notebook and possibly two before that he began work on his book.  It is plausible to think that whatever he wrote in that period was more or less like the earlier notebooks, that he continued to record individual thoughts on variety topics and put them down as they struck  him. Those lost notes may have covered much of the same ground as the notebooks we have and displayed the same kind of  back and forth in his thinking. There was, no doubt, also additional material in them. Some passages in the Tractatus have no precedents in the existing notebooks. One striking example is the discussion of mathematics in the Tractatus. Was that part of the book based on notes he made between the end of 1916 and the middle of 1918? We can be fairly certain, however, that he did noy sit down in this period two write a deductive treatise. All he had, when he finally began to write the Tractatus was a set of scattered notes from which he quickly excerpted his text.  That should, in fact, be evident from the look of the finished product.

When he started the composition of his book in the summer of 1918, Wittgenstein was on  a temporary leave from the war front. Time was short and he was determined to bring the work to an end. There was no other option for him than to draw on what he had written earlier. He relied for this purpose on all the notes he had made in the previous five years and selected from them what he found suitable. That was no easy task, since his thinking had changed so much in those years and in so many different directions. His ambition was, surely, to present the material as a single coherent whole. In putting it together and selecting from what he had, he must have sought to clarify and unify what he wanted to say. But how far did he succeed in this? How far could he have succeeded, given that his thinking had moved across such a wide arc from the foundations of logic, through Russell’s atomism, to Schopenhauer’s ethics and Mauthner’s critique of language.

In putting his material together, Wittgenstein sought to impose on it a semblance of order by arranging his propositions according to the numbering system he had borrowed from Principia Mathematica. There were the major proposition numbered 1 through 7. Others were given decimal figures to indicate their place in the text and their relations to each other. Proposition 1.1 was meant to be subsidiary to proposition 1 and proposition 1.11 to 1.1, and so on. Some propositions ended up with lengthy decimals to indicate their minor place in the whole, as, e. g., proposition 5.47321. The scheme was ingenious and the scholars have been busy trying to decipher its significance. But how seriously can one take it? Not all of the seven major propositions appear to be of equal weight. Proposition 6 provides a notation for truth-functions which appears to be a greatly more specific subject-matter than the ones he addresses in the other major propositions. The principle that “logic must take care of itself” has been relegated to number 5.473 even though Wittgenstein had declared it to be a singularly profound insight in his initial notebook entry and the proposition retained a fundamental significance. Russell’s distinction between the apparent form of a proposition and its real logical form on which so much in Wittgenstein’s own account of atomism depends is mentioned only in 4.0031. The claim that logical constant do not represent anything, which Wittgenstein himself characterizes a Grundgedanke, is stated only in 4.0312. Caution is thus in place. One must not be seduced by Wittgenstein’s numbers.

While the formal presentation, the sustained voice of certainty, and the rhetorical pull of the propositions suggest a unitary system of ideas, it is far from clear that Wittgenstein has succeeded in producing any such thing. Looked at from the perspective of his war-time notebooks, the text suggests rather a course of thinking that leads from an apparently self-evident logical atomism to the concluding call to overcome its propositions in order to see the world in the right way. We should the perhaps read the Tractatus despite its name not as a treatise but as the record of a philosophical journey that Wittgenstein has undertaken in the previous years. Interpreters tend to look at philosophical texts in another way. They operate on a principle of charity which assumes that a philosophical text must be advancing a a coherent theory. In the face of obvious difficulties in applying that principle they often struggle in their attempts to find the expected theoretical lesson. The readers of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus have often done so by focusing only on part or another of the text. Some have taken it to be a straightforward contribution to the philosophy of logical atomism; others have considered it to be of piece of logic and a theory of meaning. For yet another group of interpreters the Tractatus is a lesson in philosophical skepticism. There are finally those for whom it is an essay on ethics. Each one of those interpretations has to ignore, reject, or downplay parts of the text. The Tractatus is, in fact, all and none of what the interpreters have made of it. It is an exercise in philosophical thinking that takes one over uncharted territories and produces a map that can be confusing. It exemplifies what philosophy is like when once one has crossed such territories and tried to decipher their maps. Wittgenstein’s hope in the Tractatus was that after this exercise one might be able to leave philosophy alone. Philosophy is “not a doctrine but a practice. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.”[26] At the time, Wittgenstein thought that one would have to give such elucidations only once and could thus be done with the work of philosophy. That was an error as he came ultimately to see.

When he spoke to members of the Vienna Circle in 1929 Wittgenstein appeared once again to be drawn to the question how to understand atomism. He still wanted to think of  propositions as pictures of states of affairs, but he allowed now that they might turn out to be  “incomplete pictures” that represented only some features of what they depicted. An identity of sign and signified was thus not required. The form of the elementary proposition could, moreover, not be determined once and for all by logic. It could be determined only in an empirical fashion. “It is simply ridiculous to believe that we can do here with the usual forms of ordinary language, with subject-predicate, with two-place relations, and so on.”[27] Objects were simply “equivalent elements of the representation;” they might be represented, for instance, by the equations of physics.

But after his return to Cambridge, there was no more talk of simple objects. G. E. Moore attended his lectures in this period and kept copious notes of them but in none of them did Wittgenstein contemplate such simples. Instead, he said now that both he and Russell had been confused about what logical analysis could deliver, “thinking that further work at logic would show us the elements…. Russell had no right to say that the result of analysis would be 2-term, 3-term relations, etc. … I was wrong in supposing that it had any sense to talk of [the] result of [a] final analysis.”[28]  They had both been misled by relying on an idea of analysis derived from natural science. “To analyze water is to find out something new about water… In philosophy we know all we need to know at the start, we don’t need to know any new facts.”[29]

That doesn’t mean that he had given up altogether on the pluralism that had been integral to the atomistic view-point. But his pluralistic outlook took now a different form. How many kinds of sentences are there, he asked in his Philosophical Investigations. “There are countless kinds, countless different kinds of use of all the things we call ‘sign’, ‘words’, sentences’.” [30] There were numerous kinds of language-games. There were multiple world views, he said in his late notes, each with its own internal logic. And there were even multiple kinds of mathematics. Russell’s atomism, it appears, had cured him once and for all of a hankering for an ultimate unity of things.

But his own reflections on logical atomism had also cured him of the wish to look for a single, unifying philosophical theory. Looking back at the Tractatus in 1932, he told his students: “Philosophical trouble is essentially this: You seem to see a system, yet [the] facts don’t seem to fit it; & you don’t know which to give up. Near it looks like a stump., then like a man. Then again…” His experience with the atomist program made him give up on the traditional understanding of philosophy as aiming at the construction of a theory. He now thought that this kind of theorizing was due to philosophers being blinded by the method of science which had tempted them “to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.”[31] That sort of  philosophizing he now considered to be dead and what was left of it was dispersed in different places. His own work concerned only some of what remained. ”One might say that the subject we are dealing with is one of the heirs of the subject which used to be called ‘philosophy’.”[32] In a daring metaphor he suggested that the only kind of philosophy that was now possible was like arranging books on a bookshelf. The goal was to achieve a transparent order but there was no ideal, absolute, final arrangement. He tried several formulas for characterizing the task of this new philosophizing. Philosophy, he said, was purely descriptive. Its goal was to describe the different ways we speak and think. It was phenomenological in trying to present a perspicuous overview of our grammar. It was therapeutic somewhat in the way Freud’s psychoanalysis was, relieving us of our perplexities. It was meant to liberate us from ways of thinking that  entrapped our minds like flies in a fly-bottle. Philosophy was, in fact, a continuous battle against the bewitchment of our mind by language We were bound to find ourselves again and again not knowing our way about. There could be no end to these entanglements. We were bound to remain in transition.

 

 

Notes

[1] Page references are to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916, edited by G.H. von Wright and G.E.M Anscombe; 2nd edition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1979. Translations modified (Text also referred to hereafter as NB)

[2] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Geheime Tagebücher 1914-1916, edited by Wilhelm Baum, Turia & Kant, Vienna 1991, p. 13. (Hereafter referred to as GT)

[3] GT, p. 49.

[4] GT, p. 45.

[5] Brian McGuinness, “Vorwort,” in Friedrich Waismann: Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis, edited by B. F. McGuinness, Basic Blackwell, Oxford 1967, p. 26.

[6] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester 2009, p. 3.

[7] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, Harper & Row, New York 1972, p. 70.

[8] G. E. Moore, “The Nature of Judgment,” Mind, vol. 8, 1899, p. 182: “It seems necessary then to regard the world as formed of concepts.”

[9] Bertrand Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, Cambridge U. P., Cambridge 1900

[10] Bertrand Russell, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism,” in Russell, Logic and Knowledge. Essays 1901-1950, edited by Robert Charles Marsh, George Allen & Unwin, London 1956, p. 270.

[11] Letter to Russell of June 12, 1912, NB, p. 120.

[12] Letter to Russell of October 30 1913, NB, p. 123.

[13] Published as appendix I and II in NB.

[14] Bertrand Russell, Theory of Knowledge. The 1913 Manuscript, edited by Elizabeth Ramsden Eames, Routledge, New York and London 1992, p. 149.

[15] Russell, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomismn,” p. 275.

[16] Leibniz, Monadology 1-3.

[17] Bertrand Russell, „Introduction,“ in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1922, p. 22

[18] Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein. A Memoir with a biographical sketch by Georg Henrik von Wright, Oxford U. P., London 1962,  p. 5.

[19] Alexander Stern, The Fall of Language: Benjamin and Wittgenstein on Meaning, Harvard U. P. Cambridge Mass. 2019.

[20] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 40031.

[21] GT, p. 70.

[22] GT, p. 71.

[23] GT, p. 74.

[24] Russell, Theory of Knowledge, p. 5.

[25] Georg Henrik von Wright, “The Origin of the Tractatus,” in v. Wright, Wittgenstein, Blackwell, Oxford 1982, p. 70

[26] Tractatus, 4.112.

[27] Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis, p. 42.

[28] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures, Cambridge 1930-1933. From the Notes of G. E. Moore, edited by David G. Stern, Brian Rogers, and Gabriel Citron, Cambridge U. P., Cambridge 2016, p. 253

[29] Lectures, Cambridge 1930-1933, p. 88.

[30] Philosophical Investigations, 23

[31] Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, Harper & Row, New York 1960,  p. 18.

[32] The Blue and Brown Books, p. 28.

Michel Foucault a pedophile?

The sordid story is going around that Foucault sodomized little boys in Moslem graveyards while he was teaching at the University of Tunis in the late 1960’s. It is due to a certain Guy Sorman who describes himself as a “leading French intellectual” but is in reality a self-promoting right-wing hack who has spent his career lauding the miracle of unrestrained capitalism. Sorman launched his attack in the middle of March on French media and then repeated it to The Times of London on March 28, 2021. He said that that after more than fifty years his conscience had suddenly awoken and forced to tell his story. We don’t know what really motivates him. Is he just someone who is pining for attention? An idle gossip? Is he simply mistaking the facts after so many years? Or suffering from the first signs of dementia?

It is certainly convenient for him to make his accusation after half a century. The accused is no longer there to defend himself. There are no witnesses we have heard from, memories have become blurred. Sorman’s story is, in any case, full of holes. I assume that he was not in the graveyard to watch the events. How then did he know what happened? Was it all hearsay? He is not the type to have been close to Foucault, though he is now said to have been a friend. Foucault did not gladly suffers types like him. He does not even say that had any conversations with Foucault – certainly not about sex. The words he records can mean anything and nothing. He claims that the boys were more than keen to take part in their own abuse but also that they were forced.

What is clear that the story is designed to do the maximum of damage to Foucault’s reputation. Not only is a he pedophile but he also desecrated Moslem graves thus revealing himself, in addition, to have been a racist. The right-wing have predictably made the accusation already grist for their mills. On April 2, The American Spectator published a piece under the headline “Michel Foucault and the Glamour of Evil” which said: “Foucault’s classroom ideas…  achieved the downfall of the university not by violent campus takeovers or hiring crackpots dispensing academic credit on public transportation. It came through the fact that a child rapist killed by the reality he dismissed as socially constructed convinced a massive portion [of] academia to cite him, assign him, and praise him. How to take such people seriously let alone as seriously as they take themselves? Pedophilia remains but one way to damage young people.” (https://spectator.org/michel-foucault-pedophilia/)

Another website casts the net even wider and includes also “progressive activists and politicians” in its catch. “Foucault is, unfortunately, one of the most influential philosophers of our era, the founder of “wokeness,” the father of critical race theory, and the man who lent academic credibility to progressive activists and politicians. His work was the inspiration for “queer theory.” Never mind that everyone of these points might be disputed.(https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/philosopher-michel-foucault-founder-of-wokeness-may-have-been-pedophile-rapist)

A third goes on to list names: “Every weirdo, every nutjob academic, every outlier, every criminal, every degenerate, has the roots of their intellectual justifications found in this deeply evil man’s brain. Among those who were comprehensively influenced by Foucault were Giorgio Agamben (“biopower”), Edward Said (“Post-colonial Studies”), Pierre Bourdieu (anthropology), Gilles Deleuze (metaphysics), Talal Asad (“Cultural Anthropology’), David Halperin (“Queer theory”), Hubert Dreyfus (AI), Paul Rabinow (Anthropology), Jacques Rancière (neo-Marxism), Félix Guattari (“Schizoanalysis”), and Stephen Greenblatt (“New Historicism”).” The article goes on to reserve. its special venom for Judith Butler. It concludes with the words: “If you are the disciple of a predatory child rapist, you need to re-evaluate your ideas. If your academic hero is a serial pedophile, there is no reason for anyone to listen to a word you have to say.” (https://devilslane.com/michel-foucault-prolific-serial-paedophile-rapist/)

When Foucault came to California, I had opportunity to talk to him extensively about sex and sexuality. There was never any suggestion in his words that he was drawn to pedophilia. He was preoccupied, rather, with the gay leather scene of San Francisco. One day he asked me about the bars South of Market. But since I had never been to any of them, I couldn’t tell him much. I knew, though, that they were hangouts for macho guys and not havens for pedophiles. On weekends he would occasionally pass by my house on the way to one of those places, dressed in black leather and wearing a motorcycle cap. I sometimes wondered what role he preferred in the volatile game of sado-masochism. My sense was that he was sexually submissive and that this was part of his fascination with the leather crowd on Folsom Street. He was certainly nothing like the child rapist that Sorman and his gang have unearthed in order to frighten postmodern thinking.

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome to the New Reality: Chinese farmers expelled from land to create “an old village to attract tourists”

Four people were killed when a man detonated a homemade bomb in a village in southern China. Local media said the blast occurred at the village committee office, which decides on matters linked to land use. Officials had given 270 acres of land to a developer in Shanghai last year to recreate an old village to attract tourists. Several people who claimed to be living near the area said online that the attack was triggered by a dispute over compensation.

 

The Deficiency Theory of Human Nature and Its Deficits

Thomas Hobbes writes famously in chapter 13 of his Leviathan that human life under natural conditions is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”[1] In order to live a social rather than a solitary life, a comfortable rather than a poor one, in order to live in a pleasantly civilized way rather than a nasty and brutish one, and in order to be long-lived rather than cut short in years, Hobbes argues, humans need to overcome their natural condition and create an artificial world, a second nature, a state, a commonwealth. Fortunately, they have “reason” which “suggesteth convenient Articles of Peace, upon which men may be drawn to agreement.”[2] These “laws of nature” allow them to create the desired “commonwealth” with its “commodious living.” But it is not inevitable that they will succeed in this undertaking. Hobbes writes in De Cive: “Men come together … not because naturally it could happen no otherwise, but by accident.”[3]

We can summarize his view in five points. (1) Humans must pursue a common good, if they are to thrive, (2) but they lack the natural capacity to pursue that end. (3) For they are naturally concerned only with their own private interest. (4) That may still allow limited and unstable forms of social interactions but it prevents the formation of organized society. (5) With the help of reason they can, however, construct conditions which make it possible to pursue the common good.

It is evident that Hobbes does not mean to say that human beings are like a species of solitary animal. For unlike solitary animals, humans cannot flourish in the wild. “It is true, indeed,” Hobbes writes, “that to man, by nature, or as man, that is as soon as he is born, solitude is an enemy.”[4] But man is also not “a creature born fit for society.” The Greeks and specifically Aristotle, called him a zoon politikon; “and on this foundation … they build up the doctrine of civil society … the preservation of peace and the government of mankind.” But this is “certainly false and an error proceeding from our too slight contemplation of human nature.”[5]

The natural inclination of human beings is rather to look only after themselves, their own private interests, and their own business. In the human case – in contrast to the genuinely solitary species – that turns out to be a serious deficiency. Even in the state of nature, human beings can and do, however, engage in some social interaction. In order to overcome someone stronger, a person may, for instance, even in the state of nature act “by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself.”[6] Humans will thus act at times with “forces united.”[7]  They also compete with each other for scarce resources and thus become “enemies.” Mutual fear (or “diffidence” to use the original term) will make them seek “augmentation of dominion over men” and in their effort to gain glory, they will strive to “over-awe” each other. It is for such reasons, “that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war.”[8]  Competition, mutual fear, the desire to over-awe others, and warfare are, of course, all social phenomena. Human beings in the state of nature are for this reason not really  solitary beings. Their sociality is, rather, of an exclusively negative sort, restricted to eliminating, terrifying, over-powering, and fighting others.  Their kind of sociality is, moreover, highly unstable; it certainly cannot provide peace or security and thus prevents, among other things, the formation of any organized form of “society.” The most we can expect in this situation is “that brutish manner” which consists in “the government of small families, the concord whereof dependeth on natural lust.”[9] The conundrum is how to overcome this deficit in human sociality, how to create a positive sociality that allows for peaceful interactions, co-operative forms of living, of living well despite the preoccupation of human beings with their own private interests.

If “deficiency” refers to the absence of some quality and “deficit” to an insufficient degree of a quality, we can say that Hobbes combines a deficiency and a deficit view of human nature. Human beings lack, according to him, a natural capacity to pursue the common good and are in this way deficient.  And their deficiency restricts them to a limited, negative form of sociality. This is the deficit for which they are trying to make up. We can call this, then, the deficiency/deficit conception of human nature.

This conception was not Hobbes’ invention. We can find an earlier version of it in Protagoras, the sophistic Greek philosopher. In Plato’s eponymous dialogue, Protagoras explains his understanding of politics by means of a creation story in which human beings are initially left “naked, unshod, unbedded, and unarmed” and thus in a state of deficiency.[10] Their lack of social skills prevents them from living and working together. “They sought to save themselves by coming together and founding fortified cities, but when they gathered in communities, they injured one another for want of political skill.”[11] We can’t quite say then that these creatures are genuinely solitary since they appear to have the need and the desire to form communities, but they definitely lack the social skills for doing so. They can’t even successfully join forced long enough to defend themselves against wild animals, they are incapable of conducting war, and have no grasp of “the art of politics, of which the art of war is a part.”[12] Thus far their deficiency. But humans are also given a sense for mutual respect and justice, but this only in a rudimentary or dispositional form.  Wit the help of these, they can begin to form human communities but they suffer initially from a deficit in social skills which they need to overcome with nurture and education.

Protagoras’ story was given a new life in another creation myth that Plato told in his dialogue Politikos (The Statesman). In Plato’s version, the God Kronos created the world and initially took care of everything. But at some point, he withdrew from the cosmos and thus left humans to take care of themselves. But they turned out to be insufficiently equipped to rule themselves. The consequence is that they are bound to come to a bitter end unless the God returns to resume his divine nurture and save them. In this version, the human deficit is not apparent at the beginning, as it is in Protagoras’  account; it becomes manifest only after God has withdrawn. Politics is thus the doomed effort of human beings to take care of things in the face of God’s absence. Plato’s story is, in turn, reminiscent of that told in the Biblical book of Genesis. It, too, can be said to contain a version of the deficit conception of human nature. In the Garden of Eden, so we are told, Yahweh took care of all human needs. When Adam and Even make an attempt to take care of themselves, they are expelled from the garden and find themselves leading a life of bitterness and struggle. In the end God must come back once more to redeem his creation.

Hobbes will have known the Biblical story, but was he familiar with his other antecedents? His words certainly remind us of Protagoras, though it will become evident on a closer look that there are significant differences between the two views. We can see in any case that the deficiency/deficit theory of human nature has in one form of other had a long career.

I note in passing Nietzsche’s characterization of the human being as an underdetermined animal (das nicht festgestellte Tier), a more recent version of the deficit theory of human nature which has exerted influence on both philosophy – Max Scheler and Martin  Heidegger – and  anthropology – Helmut Plessner and Arnold Gehlen. Gehlen speaks thus explicitly of humans as “deficient beings” (Mängelwesen).  Deficit theory is, moreover, not confined to the Western tradition of political thinking. We can find another version of the it in the Chinese philosopher Xunzi. who is commonly said to have held that human nature is evil. But this rendering of his thought is misconceived for two reasons. The first is that the Chinese tradition does not operate with the Western and Christian concept of evil and the second that Xunzi is not arguing that human beings are permanently flawed. He is arguing instead, like Protagoras, that human beings are initially deficient and need to be socialized through nurture and education.

For all its wide spread and attraction, the deficiency/deficit theory of human nature is, however, incoherent. We can see this most clearly when we return to Hobbes. The first thing to notice is that his account of the all-important moment of transition from the state of nature to that of social and political order is utterly sketchy. It is, in fact, incomprehensible. We must ask: would solitary beings or, rather, beings restricted to pure negative forms of sociality be sharing a language in which to settle on articles of peace? And why would such nasty and brutish creatures be willing and able to negotiate with each other and put trust in the outcome of their negotiations? The answer has to be that asocial or minimally and negatively social beings can’t turn themselves by negotiation into positively social beings. Something similar holds for Protagoras and Xunzi. Beings with an innate deficit in social skills will not be able to turn themselves into social beings through education for it is only positively social beings that can educate each other.

Given this evident shortcoming of the deficiency/deficit theory, we need to ask why it has nonetheless been considered plausible. The answer seems to be that its proponents, either consciously or unconsciously,  see the life of the species on the model of the life of the individual human being. This looks at first sight like an attractive comparison. Don’t we sometimes speak of early human history as “the childhood of mankind”? The comparison is nonetheless misleading. It is, of course, true that the new-born baby is helpless and appears to lack functional social skills. Protagoras’ description of the initial condition of the human species as “naked, unshod, unbedded, and unarmed” fits precisely that state of a new-born baby. The denizens of Hobbes’ state of nature are, of course, more sinister creatures. Protagoras’ natural man is said to lack even the art of warfare whereas Hobbes’ counterpart is mysteriously equipped with precisely that art. For all that, he/she/it is just as helpless in trying to establish a proper social life as Protagoras’s unformed baby-like being.  Like new-born children, Hobbes’ creatures could, of course, never survive on their own. The new-born baby does so only because it is born into a social group (“the family”). It is this group which takes care of the child and helps it to become socialized. It should be obvious that the human species would be long extinct, if its initial state had been akin to that of a new-born because there would have been no one to take care of it.

The theory of evolution tells us that at any point in its development, the human species must have been fairly well adapted to its conditions of life because otherwise it would not be here today. There is no moment in that history in which the human species was in a state of deficiency or deficit. Human sociality is not a belated product of rational choice, but the outcome of a long, slow process of habituation and adaptation. The evolution of social behavior, it turns out, has proved beneficial in the process of natural selection. It is true that human beings are born helpless and without immediately available social skills. But this does not indicate that the species as a whole was initially in that state. The helplessness of the human child indicates, rather, that it belongs to a highly socialized species. Asocial species have no helpless offspring – otherwise they would die out.

Aristotle was closer to reality at this point than Hobbes, Protagoras, and Xunzi. He said that human beings are by nature political and that political institutions exist by nature. Hobbes attacked him, of course, for comparing animal gregariousness to human sociality. He had some justification for this in that neither he nor Aristotle had an evolutionary outlook. Both treated species as substantially fixed. And in that case it is not obvious why features found in one species should help to explain those in another.

The lack of an evolutionary perspective had another limiting effect on Aristotle. Like others, he found the closest affinity to the sociality of the human species in the life of the social insects. But insects are far apart from us on the evolutionary tree of life. A more instructive comparison is that of human sociality with the social life of primates. We can see from it that complex forms of social interaction, including nurture of the young, are already highly developed in some of primate species. It is reasonable then to conclude that the human species is “naturally a social species with complex skills that include both the capacity for teaching and for learning as well as a variety of other social and political skills.[14]

Aristotle appears right, also, in thinking that the distinctive form that human sociality has taken is largely due to the possession of a capacity for an advanced form of language. But his claim to that effect has been widely misinterpreted.  It has been taken to mean that humans have a mental capacity for rational thought whereas Aristotle’s term “logos” refers to language as a social phenomenon. Aristotle  recognizes  that some animals use primitive sign systems to communicate with each other. But only human logos or language allows for complex forms of deliberation. The possession of such language characterizes the distinctive form of human sociality and it provides the human species with a tool for conceiving new forms of socialization. Where animal gregariousness is fixed, human sociality is thus malleable. It is characteristic of human sociality that we can choose between different forms of political order. It is from this kind of sociality that also our distinctively human individualism has emerged. That is evident from the fact that we define ourselves as individuals by means of language.  Human individuality is, in other words, a product (we might even say, a by-product) of human sociality and it is maintained only by this form of sociality. It is this individuality, moreover, that gives human politics its distinctive character.  Aristotle conclusion that political institutions are by nature prior to the individual – an idea that was, surely, incomprehensible for Hobbes – is the outcome of this line of thinking.

Aristotle’s lack of attention to the social life of primates (in fact, his lack of knowledge of this pre-human form of sociability) had, however, also the  consequence that he downplayed the role of conflict in human life, in contrast to Hobbes who highlighted this aspect of human behavior. Warfare, competition for resources, and social fear are not fundamental to Aristotle’s way of thinking. He knows that there is warfare and that political institutions must be ready to deal with conflict and violence. But war signals for him a failure of politics. Aristotle would never have been able to assent to Clausewitz’ characterization of war as the continuation of politics by other means and he would have been even less receptive to Carl Schmitt’s and Michel Foucault’s reverse description of politics as the continuation of war by other means. For Hobbes there is a constant struggle for power in the natural condition of the human species. Where human beings seek to over-awe each other in his world, Aristotle assumes that there is a natural and fixed order of rank between them. The struggle for power is thus secondary for him. This view is once again linked to Aristotle’s conception of animal gregariousness and its relation to human politics. The interactions of the social insects are  genetically determined and there is, as a result no warfare, no competition for resources, no mutual fear, nor a struggle for power in the beehive or the antheap. The life of the social insects is one of positive sociality. To say it in other words: where Aristotle’s sees human society as a fundamentally collaborative undertaking and based on a natural drive to cooperation, It is for precisely this reason that Hobbes considers Aristotle’s account of animal gregariousness irrelevant to the understanding of human sociality and politics.

If Aristotle and Hobbes had paid attention to (or known of) the sociality of primates, they  might, however, have both felt the need to revise their accounts. For in primate life we certainly find all the elements of negative sociality that Hobbes had identified. There is conflict, competition for resources, there is mutual fear, and there is a constant ongoing struggle for power. But this is not sufficient to justify his account of human politics. The actual situation is, rather, that in primate life we find both negative and positive sociality conjoined. It is thus not the case, as Hobbes thought, that negative sociality is primary and fundamental and that positive sociality is a secondary and derivate construction designed to overcome or, at least alleviate the facts of negative sociality. But Aristotle’s view is also unsatisfactory for looking only at the life of the social insects he did not see that species more closely related to us depict a more complex pattern of sociality. The right picture is then that Aristotle and Hobbes have each identified only one side of human sociality and thus of human politics. A properly evolutionary view will have to recognize that we share with our pre-human relatives a mixture of both negative and positive social drives and capacities. It is this mixture that contributes to the characteristic complexity and volatility of our kind of social and political life.

There is, however, nothing inherently deficient in this. The peculiar dual nature of human sociality has contributed greatly to the success of our species. The deficiency/deficit theory of human nature is for that reason misguided. This does not mean that the combination of positive and negative social drives and capacities that has proved so successful in the struggle for human survival will continue to do so forever. It may turn out that our specific biological endowment will eventually bring about the decline of the species. At that point we would discover that human nature has finally become deficient. It is not the case then that deficiency marks the initial state of human evolution (and is “natural” in that sense). The deficiency of human nature may rather be still ahead of us. And it may then turn out that we lack the means for creating a second nature that will allow us to overcome that deficiency.

Notes

[1] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by Michael Oakeshott, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, p. 82 (Hereafter cited as “L”)

[2] L, p. 84

[3] Thomas Hobbes, De Cive or The Citizen, edited by Sterling P. Lamprecht, Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York 1949, p. 22. (Hereafter cited as “C”)

[4] C, p. 21, note.

[5] C, pp. 21-22.

[6] L, p. 80.

[7] L, p. 81.

[8] L, pp. 81-82

[9] L, p. 83.

[10] Plato, The Protagoras, 321c in Plato, Protagoras and Meno, , translated by W.K.C. Guthrie, Penguin Books, London 1956

[11] Ibid, 322b.

[12] Ibid.

[13] In De Cive, though not in Leviathan, Hobbes also recognizes the role of education in socializing human beings. He writes there: “Man is made fit for society not by nature, but by education.” (p. 22. footnote)

[14] Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics. Power and Sex Among Apes, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, rev. ed. 1988.

“Benevolent Autocracy.” The case of Hong Kong

On January 4, 2021, 1,000 Hong Kong police went out to arrest fifty-three democratic lawmakers, politicians, and activists. The event was as much a demonstration of unrestrained police power as an actual  police operation. The arrested were, moreover, charged with a strange crime, namely “trying to use strategic voting to secure a legislative majority, with an ultimate goal of shutting down the government.”[1] They had organized a primary election to produce a slate of democratic candidates for the then upcoming election to Hong Kong’s legislature. 600,000 Hong Kongers had cast their vote on that occasion.  The democrats had also expressed hope that their united front might gain a majority of the seats in the new legislature. Benny Tai, one of the initiators of the event, had, moreover, suggested in a newspaper op-ed that such a majority might eventually be able to veto the city’s budget and, perhaps, even push its unloved Chief Executive to resign.

According to the city’s Basic Law “Hong Kong residents shall have freedom of speech, of the press and of publication; freedom of association, of assembly, of procession and of demonstration, and to form and join trade unions, and to strike.” It also promised that “the freedom of the person of Hong Kong residents shall be inviolable. No Hong Kong resident shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful arrest, detention or imprisonment. Arbitrary or unlawful search of the body of any resident or deprivation or restriction of the freedom of the person shall be prohibited.”[2] So, how was it possible that residents were arrested for organizing a primary election, for making it their goal to gain a majority in the legislature, and for describing how such a majority might be used? In a normal democracy those activities would be considered unproblematic; How could they be illegal in Hong Kong? The answer is to be found in a National Security Law that had been impose on the city half a year earlier. Article 22 of that law declared, among other things, any person “who organises, plans, commits or participates in … seriously interfering in, disrupting, or undermining the performance of duties and functions in accordance with the law by … the body of power of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region” to be guilty of an act of subversion punishable in the most serious case by life-imprisonment. The terms of the article are obviously slippery and wide enough to catch anyone trying to mount a serious opposition to those in power.

The January 4th arrests occurred in the middle of coronavirus epidemic that occupied the attention of people both in Hong Kong and the rest of the world. It took place also as the world’s political attention was focused on the dramatic struggle of the presidential transition in the US. The arrests nevertheless evoked widespread condemnation. But broadside attacks on democratic activity had, in fact, had a long history in Hong Kong and went back to the very beginnings of the city.[3]

The accidental city

When the British took possession of Hong Kong Island in 1841, they chose it as a trading center and military outpost. They never envisaged that they were founding a city which would one day have millions of inhabitants with their manifold economic and administrative needs and their personal and political aspirations. At the time the island was only sparsely populated, mostly by the descendants of Ming dynasty loyalists who had fought a losing battle against the incoming Manchu Qing. Over time these people had turned into pirates making their living from the sea. In 1860, the British forced the Chinese into a treaty “in perpetuity” that awarded them Kowloon, an undeveloped strip of the mainland across from the island. Almost twenty years later, in 1879, the British got China to cede them an additional area of agricultural land,  “the New Territories,” on a rent-free 99-year lease.  Like the original island colony, these new possessions were only thinly populated.  There were numerous villages but no towns or cities. In 1851, the size of the population in the entire British area was estimated at roughly 34,000 inhabitants. Fifty years later that number had increased tenfold to 370,000. By 1951 it had grown to two million and today the Special Administrative Region counts almost eight million inhabitants. In the 180 years since the British came to the island, Hong Kong had developed from an insignificant spot in the South China Sea into a global city with a teeming population and the densest collection of high rises on earth.

These circumstances have shaped the unique political destiny of the British colony. From the start it was located at the intersection of two great empires. It was not a city with a deep history, a long-settled population, with a clear perception of its identity and traditional institutions and practices. It was never planned or even conceived to be what it has become.

The British colonialists who took the territory had no idea of what they were getting into. From their point of view the new colony was a place from which they could trade their opium and other goods more safely than from the ancient Chinese city of Guangzhou upstream on the Pearl river.  The deep harbor, sheltered from the southern Typhoons, also proved a suitable stopover for Britain’s globe-spanning navy. But there were no political institutions to take over, no city or state to govern.

If you went into India, you knew that you were dealing with a country, a people, with own rulers and ancient political institutions. None of this was true in Hong Kong. And so the British ruled their colony as a possession directly from London and continued to do so from 1841 to the moment of its return to China in 1997. None of their other colonies was treated in that way.  Over time, the colonial rulers advanced a variety of reasons why they persisted in this manner, even as a city was coming into existence on their territory.

The crown colony

For the British colonialists “Hong Kong’s original status as an integral part of the Chinese empire could never be discounted because the Chinese themselves refused to do so, leaving uncertain the exact nature of its standing as a full-fledged British possession.” (p. 27) The task of the first governor was thus simply to create and maintain “‘an emporium for our trade and a place from which Her Majesty’s subjects in China may be alike protected and controlled.;” (p. 38) Hong Kong – “the Gibraltar of the east’ as the British came to call it – could for this reason be only a “crown colony” – forever ruled directly from the Colonial Office in London. The appropriate form of governing the place was a “benevolent autocracy.” (p. 19)

As more people settled in the colony this policy became, however, inevitably a point of contention. When local merchants in the 1880s called for some form of accountability for the taxes they were paying, the then Governor George Bowen insisted that elections were only “an inconvenience” and impractical at that because of Hong Kong’s heterogeneous population. Chinese views, habits, and customs on social and political questions were “widely different from those entertained in Europe,” he argued, and a local council “in which the Chinese element would be largely predominant” could not be trusted to deal with “arrangements necessary for the health, good order, and general administration” of the territory. (p. 51)

Over time the authorities in both London and Hong Kong came up with ever new reasons why there could be no politics in the colony, no political representation, no elections, and no democracy. Though there had been political agitation and organizing in the territory since the beginning, the British kept insisting that the Chinese were inherently apathetic and politically indifferent. “These claims persisted, incredibly, throughout the turbulent events of China’s 20th-century history, all off which spilled over one way or another into Hong Kong.” (p. 66) The authorities also maintained that the Chinese inhabitants of the place were not really settled in Hong Kong, that they were rally only transients, and they pointed out that they were, in any case, not British subjects and hence could not be given political rights. Democracy and elections, they said, were, in fact, essentially Western and in conflict with the Confucian way of thinking. James Lockhart, the Colonial Secretary of Hong Kong, in the 1890’s was to write: “The modern idea of ‘one man, one vote’ is one which the Chinaman can hardly comprehend, and if he does succeed in grasping its meaning, it is an idea which does not appeal to him, as it is opposed to the constitution of society and the theory of government of China.” While some Chinese might be attracted to the idea of democracy, as they showed by agitating for it, such people were “not representative of the Chinese view.” (p. 74)

This attitude did not change much over time. In 1965, Alexander Grantham, another governor of Hong Kong, maintained once again that the Chinese were “generally speaking, politically apathetic. They did not regard themselves as permanent citizen and felt little loyalty.” (p. 101) Two years later, yet another governor, David Trench, wrote: “We have hitherto always been cautious about explaining publicly the basic reason why Hong Kong cannot develop fully representative institutions.” Normal self-government was not possible in Hong Kong because of its “particular relationship with China.” (pp. 144-145)

Throughout the colonial period, there had nevertheless been continued political agitation by the inhabitants of the growing city. In response, the British authorities proposed and abandoned a series of plans for reform; they took steps forwards and back, they made this or that small political concession. But at the end there were still no elections, there was no representative legislature; there were still only the English officials appointed in Whitehall. Political protests were ignored, downplayed, or suppressed. In order to maintain their control over the colony, the British instituted a multiplicity of repressive measures during the 1950s. “A new Registration Ordinance required everyone to be photographed and fingerprinted. Deportation ordinances were strengthened … The old sedition law was updated, but definitions remained expansive, being applied both to speech and the printed word, including its publication, sale, distribution, possession, and reproduction. Seditious intent was equally expansive, meaning anything from encouraging ‘discontent or disaffection’ to inciting contempt for the government… All groups were required to apply for registration. Grounds for denial included affiliations of a political nature outside the colony, as well as purposes deemed inimical to its ‘peace, welfare or good order.’ A new labor law banned strikes for purposes other than work-related disputes.” The governor was given blanket powers “to make any regulation whatsoever” in case of danger or emergency. “In rapid succession hundreds of activists were deported to China. … Deportees found themselves arrested and escorted to the border, all within hours. Dozens of social groups were also denied registration, declared, illegal, and dissolved.” (pp. 111-112) And while these policies were meant in the first place to suppress communist agitation, they extended at the same time liberally to all other political activity.

When the Chinese introduced their own tough national security measures in Hong Kong in 2020 after months of civil unrest, they could gleefully refer to these British colonial policies as the precedent and justification for their own way of dealing with dissidents. It turned out that both London and Beijing were motivated by the same idea and that was not just to control dissent and to resist democratic reform, but to stop all political activism in its track.

Political agitation came from both communist and the democratic activists. Polls show that the communists had a core constituency of about 25% of the population but could draw at times on support from more than a third of the people. This support was particularly strong among working-class Hong Kongers. The strongest labor union was n fact, firmly on the communist side. The democrats who attracted more of the middle-class could, in turn, rely on a core constituency of 30% with broader support from up to 60% of Hong-Kongers. The disequilibrium was due to the fact that many of the city’s inhabitants had fled from the mainland at some time or other after the Communist victory in 1949. Both sides were nonetheless sufficiently strong and committed to cause trouble for the authorities, first the British and then the Chinese, and the two responded to that threat with comparable measures. While the two sides subscribed to very different ideologies, the technical means for controlling dissent proved essentially the same and thus ideologically neutral. Or to say it in another way: The means of social control and political suppression are not political in that they are readily available to any political system.

An experiment in democracy

Political change had been slow in the crown colony from the time of Queen Victoria to the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. But things began to change in the 1970’s when China made clear to the British that they were demanding the return of the entire colony with the expiration of the 99-year lease of the New Territories. The British, who were keen on expanding their economic opportunities in China at the time saw no other option than to prepare for that event. They now set belatedly new policies into motion such as a public housing program and a public education and health care system all of which had been limited and in private hands until then. They also began to negotiate with Beijing the conditions of the return of Honk Kong to Chinese sovereignty.

The outcome of that negotiation was a joint declaration concerning the future of Hong Kong signed on September 26, 1984. The document declared that “the current social and economic systems in Hong Kong will remain unchanged, and so will the life-style. Rights and freedoms, including those of the person, of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of travel, of movement, of correspondence, of strike, of choice of occupation, of academic research and of religious belief will be ensured by law… Private property, ownership of enterprises, legitimate right of inheritance and foreign investment will be protected by law.” The document was less specific about the future political arrangements. It declared that the government of the new Special Administrative Region (SAR) “will be composed of local inhabitants” including Chinese, British, and other foreign nationals. It also specified that the new chief executive would be “appointed by the Central People’s Government” though “on the basis of the results of elections or consultations to be held locally.” And a new Basic Law for the SAR was to be drafted by a working committee chosen by Beijing.  But the joint declaration made no other promises concerning the political freedom of the people of Hong Kong.

It was at this point that the British decided to implement a series of political reforms to be put in place before the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. In London, Margaret Thatcher had been replaced by the more liberal John Major who was determined to advance this cause and in Hong Kong Chris Patten, the new and last British governor, eagerly pursued the issue. Suddenly, political parties were permitted and elections were to be held for district councils and the legislature. A new openness was practiced in the actions of government. This belated move provoked, however, heated protests from Beijing. The British were not acting in line with the Joint Declaration, the Chinese complained and they had a point.  Beijing’s campaign “focused its venom on London’s duplicity, on its determination to retain influence in Hong Kong beyond 1997, and on the old idea of a Western conspiracy updated for 1990’s use: Hong Kong was to become a bridgehead for democratizing China.” (p. 246) The popular Chinese press denounced Governor Patten as the “demagogue of democracy” and “sinner of the millennium.” (p. 246)

The last-minute changes in the governance of Hong Kong, in fact, brought together a curious coalition of opponents. The pro-Beijing leftists in Hong Kong concurred, of course, with the rhetoric coming from the mainland. But they gained surprising support from the conservative Hong Kong business sector. “Politically ‘conservative’ pro- and anti-communists were now discovering they actually had more in common with each other than with what they regarded as the ‘radical’ reformers in their midst.” (p. 233) And if this was not enough, a third front of opposition was opened up by conservatives outside Hong Kong.

In the Hong Kong business community the anti-democratic were strong. Hong Kong conservatives were taking their inspiration from Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman and feared above all that an electoral system would lead inevitably to welfare economics. To combat that development, the electronic manufacturer and conservative politician Allen Lee founded a pro-business party in 1993, misleadingly called the “Liberal Party,” which from the start took a strong a pro-Beijing stance. His successor as leader of that party was  James Tien, chairman of the General Chamber of Commerce who “went on the offensive in 1996, targeting Legco’s new grassroots representation.” (p. 289) Tien deplored, in particular, the attempt of the new legislators to push towards “severance pay, maternity leave, gender discrimination, and disability allowances.” He looked forward, instead, to the handover and a new administration that would seek to recreate “Hong-Kong’s business-friendly environment.” (p. 289)

Such arguments were taken by others looking at Hong Kong from the outside. Murray Maclehose, a former governor, complained bitterly about the belated democratic reforms. The fact that there were different political parties with their opposing agendas was threatening Hong Kong’s stability, he maintained, and investor confidence.  Lee Kuan Yew came specially to the city to warn against democracy.  “He commended instead the formula he had perfected for Singapore: concentrate on economics, learn better English, and leave politics to your leaders.” (p. 250)

The economic city

              The formula on which all these parties came to agree was that of Hong Kong as an “economic” city, not a political one. With this idea both the anti-democratic left and the anti-democratic conservatives could be happy. Beijing went on to accuse the British of turning Hong Kong into political city with their belated democratic reforms and announced its determination all such measures with the handover. “Colonial Hong Kong’s mix of capitalism and autocratic rule was just the sort of combination Beijing aimed to achieve nationwide, even as the West saw in Hong Kong’s economic rights and social freedoms the thin edge of a wedge, that anticipated Chinese communism’s demise.” (p. 9)

The Chinese resistance to the political city was encoded in the new Basic Law for the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong which had been worked out by a carefully selected working committee in Beijing. The Basic Law promised elections at some time in the future as the ultimate outcome of a slow, step-by-step process. “The most feared elements of mainland-style dictatorship were kept in check, but so too were local aspirations for a faster pace of democratic reform.” (p. 297) The political system was to be one of “executive-led government” not of the people or the legislature. The legislature was to have only a limited powers and an essentially consultative function. This was, in effect, the original British conception of “benevolent autocracy” all over again. What this meant became quickly clear from the figures Beijing appointed to govern the autonomous region.

The first chief executive was to be Tung Chee-hwa, a wealthy Hong Kong tycoon without previous political experience or interest. Forbes magazine estimated the wealth of the family as being at 3 billion US dollars in 2008. The son of a shipping magnate, Tung had spent several years in England and the United States. He had not been affiliated with any political before the handover, but his thinking about the city ran in perfect parallel to Beijing’s. For Tung there was an ongoing struggle between Western and Confucian values. And he perceived his task for that reason to be that of containing the dangers of Western permissiveness and politics, Hong Kong needed for this reason to tighten its rules governing civil liberties and elections. “The image his staff spun out was one of a paternalistic executive toiling from dawn to dusk and beyond on Hong Kong’s behalf.” (p. 325)

Other prominent Hong Kong tycoons found themselves in agreement with these sentiments. Ronnie Chan, the billionaire property magnate came to insist that Western style liberal democracy was imperfect, contrary to human nature, and bad for business. (p. 339) Peter Woo, like Chan a major real estate holder, argued that there was link between electoral politics and government deficits, and Gordon Woo, a Princeton alumnus and chairman of Hopewell Holdings, maintained that democracy would spell disaster because democrats knew nothing about economics.  Tung Chee-hwa was, in turn, to come back to this point later on, in 2016, when he “hailed the Chinese model of democracy, while warning that competitive elections could lead to political instability and separatism.” The Hong Kong Free Press reported him at the time as saying:   “We are not denying the importance of democracy, but we are definitely wrong if we consider competitive elections to be a main – or the only – component of democracy.”[4]

Capitalism vs. democracy

It has been said again and again that there exists a natural affinity between capitalism and democracy and perhaps even a necessary relation that economic and political liberty go together. The argument for this claim has always been murky. If I want to be free to do one thing and you want to be free to do another, what we both want is, in one sense the same. But our shared pursuit of freedom may nonetheless lead us into conflict.  If I want to be free to engage in an unhampered pursuit of economic gain and you want to be free to organize politically to regulate and constrain my actions, then it is evident that your economic freedom and my political freedom conflict.  The story of Hong Kong teaches us, in any case, that capitalism and democracy do not necessarily go together. In the 150 years of the crown colony, autocracy and capitalism always found it easy to coexist and, indeed, to profit from each other. And when change finally came, the Hong capitalists had compelling reasons for resisting democratic reform. They have found it convenient ever since to align themselves with the anti-democratic policies of the Beijing authorities.

Hong Kong’s Basic Law was, in fact, an unstable compromise and this ensured that the conflict over democracy would continue after the handover. On the one hand the Basic Law was meant to reverse the democratic reforms that the British had finally put into place, but it also made some concessions to the demand for democracy and promised more for later. In its preamble, the Basic Law invoked the slogan of “one country, two systems” slogan and declared that under this principle “the socialist system and policies will not be practised in Hong Kong.”  For Beijing this meant the coexistence of two kinds of economic system, not that of two political systems. The final version of the Basic Law had been approved in February 1990 only nine months after the bloody evens in Tiananmen Square. “Tiananmen and its aftermath may have shocked Hong Kong into an unprecedented level of agreement with liberal demands, but the shoe was no on the other foot as Beijing adopted London’s old logic about democracy’s disruptive potential.” (p. 222)

Beijing made sure for that reason that it kept complete control over the choice of the chief executive.  Article 45 of the Basic Law specified that “the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall be selected by election or through consultations held locally and be appointed by the Central People’s Government.” But it went on to say that “the method for selecting the Chief Executive shall be specified in the light of the actual situation in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.”  An appendix to the Basic law then specified the composition of an election committee which permanently restricted democratic representatives to an ineffective minority. And while article 45 also envisaged that the ultimate aim was the election of the chief executive by universal suffrage, it didn’t say when this moment would come. Beijing, in other words, reserved for itself the right to control the he appointment of the Chief Executive.

Another sticking point was article 23 of the Basic Law which said: “The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People’s Government.” But when the administration of Chief Executive Tung set out to implement such a law article 23, it provoked  strong public protest which culminated in a devastating mass demonstration on July 1, 2003. The outcome was an indefinite postponement of the bill. This turned out to be deadly blow to Tung’s administration and after a series of further missteps Tung resigned prematurely in early 2005 to be followed the former finance secretary, Donald Tsang.

If this was not enough, the Basic Law also reserved for Beijing the right to “interpret” and “amend” it. (Articles 158 and 159). When it became clear after the July 2003 demonstrations, that the democrats might actually win a legislative majority in the next election, Beijing decided to step in and make use of its power of interpretation. “Beijing’s Hong Kong policy was driven thereafter by two aims: denying the goal of full democracy in 2008-2008, and preventing ad democratic Legco majority in September 2004.” (p. 370) Beijing decided to intervene in the upcoming election by denouncing the democratic leaders as “unpatriotic.” In the end, the democrats won only 25 out of sixty seats. And Beijing also ruled out any political reform for 2007-2008. Election by universal suffrage for the chief executive and the legislature were definitely ruled out.

In the years that followed, the Beijing authorities and their Hong Kong followers continued to hack away at the freedoms the Basic Law guaranteed the city’s residents. In 2019 unrest erupted over an extradition law that the administration of Carrie Lam sought to implement. The turmoil lasted for months and ended with Beijing’s imposition of a National Security Law on the city.  This was in clear breach of the Basic Law which specified that it was up to Hong Kong to implement such legislation. But by that time, it was clear that the mainland authorities were set to override the Basic Law wherever they saw fit. The Chinese Foreign Ministry had had already, in 2017, dismissed the original Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong as a “historical document that no longer has any realistic meaning” The Declaration, so the Ministry had said, “does not have any binding power on how the Chinese central government administers Hong Kong. Britain has no sovereignty, no governing power and no supervising power over Hong Kong.”[5] It was, of course, on this Declaration that the “rights and freedoms” of the people in Hong Kong, their freedom “of the person, of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association” was ultimately based. With the national security law of 2020, that  initial guarantee of autonomy for fifty years and the promise that the Hong Kong citizens could maintain their freedom and life style in this period had lost their validity. Hong was now to be integrated into the mainland and its political culture. All the while, Beijing was insisting that the “one country, two systems” policy would be continued. But it was clear that this meant only the continuation of the capitalist market system in Hong Kong not that of its previous political structure. The upcoming elections for the legislature in which the democrats might have triumphed were postponed for at least year – due, it was said, to the coronavirus pandemic – Meanwhile Beijing was pondering a drastic overhaul of the election rules to make sure once and for all the democrats would have retain no practical influence on the selection of the next chief executive and prove unable to take control of the legislature.  “As part of sweeping proposals that sources said were meant to disempower the district councillors – many of whom were protesters and activists who won their seats riding on a wave of public discontent in last year’s elections – the city’s pro-establishment members were also lobbying Beijing to get rid of five so-called super seats from the local electoral map. Again, the intent was to erode the relevance of the opposition councillors.”[6]

The implementation of the national security law initiated a series of measures evidently designed to silence political activity. They ranged from serious to small-minded. A sample will have to suffice to indicate their nature.

Hong Kong, it was clear, was to be an economic city and not a political one. After Beijing expelled four democratic lawmakers from the legislature for being insufficiently patriotic and the remaining democratic legislators resigned, Carrie Lam, the chief executive, expressed her satisfaction. A legislature without opposition was so much “more rational” she said. “Now… with the security law, law and order has been restored. Chaos has been replaced by peacefulness.”[7]

Conclusion

For almost two centuries, Hong Kong has played a pivotal role in the West’s relation with China. Much can be learned from this story about British and Western colonialism and imperialism and about China’s struggle with these outside forces. But equally important lessons can be derived from it concerning the general themes of autocracy and democracy, of capitalism and communism, and of the meaning of politics itself.

The distinction between economics and politics which both the British colonial authorities and the post-colonial Chinese and Hong Kong powers have evoked deserves our particular attention. It denies, of course, that mainstay of capitalist theorizing according to which there is an integral link between capitalism and democracy. But it is of even greater interest for the light it throws on the implied understanding of politics. The understanding is that the organization, administration, government, and maintenance of a city (or a state) is a technical and economic matter and as such apolitical. Politics, on the other hand, is a matter of giving those who are administered in the city a voice in how they are governed. As such it is inherently democratic. But as democratic it also involves debate, argument, disagreement, partisanship, opposition, and even conflict. These activities are a mere hindrance to the technical task of administering.

That there is such a distinction has been made plausible by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition. In a more common usage, we tend to think of politics as embracing everything that has to do with government and the state. That formula goes back to Plato and Aristotle who characterized politics as the rule of the polis. Arendt may be right in saying that Plato and Aristotle have made us think about politics above all as establishing and maintaining order, and therefore also as crucially concerned with the making and applying of law. On Arendt’s view this has opened the possibility of a totalitarian politics committed to establishing a single, all-embracing order in the state. On this view, the most totalitarian state is also the most political one. But once we focus on the other side of politics, its participatory character, we will conclude that the totalitarian state is, in fact, the least political. The conception of a merely economic city approximates the totalitarian understanding of politics.

Notes

[1] “Hong Kong police say 53 were arrested for trying to use strategic voting to win election, veto budget & shut down gov’t”, Hong Kong Free Press, January 5, 2021

[2] Basic Law, articles 27 and 28.

[3] The following account draws substantially on Suzanne Pepper’s Keeping Democracy at Bay. Hong Kong and the Challenge of Chinese Political Reform, Rowman & Littlefield, London 2008. All further references are to that book.

[4] HKFP, Dec. 20, 2016

[5] “Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong ‘no longer has any realistic meaning’, Chinese Foreign Ministry says,” South China Morning Post, June 30, 2017

[6] “Beijing mulling drastic overhaul of Election Committee deciding Hong Kong’s chief executive and Legislative Council to curb opposition’s influence,” SCMP, Dec. 22, 2020

[7] KHFP, Nov. 24, 2020

Breaking Democracy’s Spell

 “It is hard to see the citizenry of the United States at present as especially successful in furnishing themselves with good government under their uniquely time-tested and elastic democratic formula,” John Dunn, the English political theorist, observes in his profoundly unsettling book Breaking Democracy’s Spell.[1] He goes on to ask: “Is American government today so confused, so fractious, and so dysfunctional despite democracy or because of democracy?”[2] Americans are confused, he says, about what democracy means and what it can do. The idea of democracy has become a baffling maze with many dead ends. Democracy is in a state of disorientation.

Published in 2014, Breaking Democracy’s Spell is based on lectures Dunn had delivered at Yale University three years earlier.[2] If Dunn was right in his judgment on American politics in and 2011 and 2014, he is proven even more so today in 2020. The Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has made the current lack of good government in the United States all too obvious. That is particularly jarring when one compares the American  response to the pandemic with China’s. After some fumbling, China’s authoritarian regime managed to get the spread of the virus under control, whereas the United States has failed spectacularly both at the federal and the state level. The pandemic has exposed serious fissures in the American healthcare system, deep social and racial inequalities, the incapacity of the incumbent president to deal coherently with an unexpected situation and the ideological blinders of his party. Add to this Trump’s lack of will to deal with an ever more urgent environmental crisis, his neglect of the national infrastructure, and the increasing noise of an aggressive nationalism that he has promoted and you are facing a disturbingly malfunctioning political system. How can one avoid Dunn’s questions about the state of American democracy? Why is American government so confused, fractious, and dysfunctional and how does democracy contribute to its inability to solve even its most pressing problems?

Dunn’s concern stems from years of reflection on democracy and the state of global society.[4] Democracy, he concludes in Breaking Democracy’s Spell, has become “the master idea” in terms of which we seek to understand and assess almost all politics today. But in this process the concept has lost its precise contours. Dunn is convinced that “we need to learn to understand democracy very differently, hear it with less self-congratulatory ears, recognize more accurately where its real potency comes from, and face up to the limits of its capacity to direct our political purposes.”  As we find ourselves confronted with numerous intractable problems and, in particular, with threats to the survival of the entire human species,  “we need to find a way out of the maze democracy has become for us and face the awesome decisions that lie ahead as directly and lucidly as we can.”[5] The financial crisis of 2008, the uncontrolled  turmoil of the Middle East, and the nuclear disaster at Fukushima serve him as evidence that nothing less is needed than a determination “to reconsider and reengineer the entire causal web within which our species now lives.”[6]

In addressing his American audience in 2011, Dunn’s had meant to dislodge what he took to be a wide-spread American complacency about its political system. “It is natural for Americans … to think of democracy as a synonym for good government,” he writes in Breaking Democracy’s Spell.[7]  The Americans have seen themselves, in fact, as uniquely blessed by their democratic form of government. “The American Dream has exerted astonishing power over a large and extravagantly variegated population across an impressive arc of time.”[8] But not everyone shares this view. “To others in lands at varying distances away, the power held and exerted by the United State has usually seemed very different… It has looked and felt far less mesmerizing and also often quite menacing.”[9] It is necessary therefore to break the mesmerizing spell that the idea of democracy still exerts on the American imagination because it prevents a realistic, sober, and properly skeptical assessment of democracy.

Dunn’s book is not limited to a critique of the American conception of democracy and of the American style of politics. The problem Dunn seeks to identify is rather inherent in the very idea of democracy. He argues that the term democracy has acquired for us an equivocal meaning in that it refers to both an abstract ideal concerning the exercise of power and to a particular conception of the practical arrangement of government. And: “A term that equivocates in this way between an authoritative standard of right conduct and the practical character of an existing regime,” Dunn argues, “is a ready source of confusion even for those professionally dedicated to keeping their own thinking and speech clear.”[10]

The confusion matters for all of us, because all other forms of rule – monarchical or oligarchic in the broadest sense – have become “obsolete and inherently implausible.” We must face then “the deep unclarity and instability of the master idea through which we seek to take our bearings.”[11] What does democracy as an ideal or standard come to? Dunn seeks to avoid idealizing all hyperbole and describes democracy as being fundamentally “a formula for imagining subjection to the power and will of others without sacrificing personal dignity or voluntarily jeopardizing individual or family interests.”[12] All exercise of governmental power “asserts, requires and imposes” and thus calls for subjection. But “subjection is an inherently distasteful and degrading condition.” The allure of democracy is that it promises to ensure the service of the interests of the citizens better than other regimes and thus makes subjection to power more bearable. But in reality, democratic government has “sometimes come out badly wrong and will surely often do so again.”[13] The promise of democracy is for that reason always tentative.

Dunn’s characterization of democracy assumes an original and prevailing inequality among human beings. Subjection to power is inevitable but the inequalities on which it operates can be mitigated. Dunn’s formula bypasses the idea of self-rule as constitutive of the concept of democracy. He writes: “Collective action very much remains, and is certain to continue to prove, an inherently puzzling project.”[14]  Such action is conceivable only if there exists a demos. But how can a demos exist? “There is a clear and perhaps unwelcome answer. It can do so only where shared sentiments, perceptions, and beliefs arise and persist in time and space, and by doing so, create at least the possibility of a common interest.”[15] And there is no guarantee that there is such a demos.  “Where there is no such reasonably convergent orientation (no clear common interest), what emerges from democratic decision is either contingent confusion or, at best, a lucky fluke.”[16] It is, in any case, true that a demos “plainly cannot in practice now rule in the United States or anywhere else.”[17] (p. 28) It does not help much to think about democracy in terms of the notion of the sovereignty of the people.

 

Democracy is also not the same as the rule of law and “the rule of law is, still more evidently, not democracy.” Dunn is convinced that, “on balance, the populations of Europe and North America today probably value legality quite a lot more than they do democracy.”[18] The benefits of legality are, in any case, often more direct and more tangible to the individual than those of democracy. It follows, if Dunn is right, that this preference may incline people in favor of authoritarian and non-democratic forms of government as long as that government can more or less guarantee the rule of law – at least, for a substantial number of the population.

Democracy is also not the same as a socially and culturally tolerant liberalism; it is equally not the same as adherence to a free market capitalism, even though these have come to be associated for us, and, in particular, in the American imagination with the idea of democracy. What we have in the American understanding of democracy is a historically contingent amalgam consisting of the minimal conception of democracy contained in Dunn’s own formula, an unrealistic belief in the sovereignty of the people, in the rule of law, in policies of toleration, and in a free market system. If we are to achieve a better understanding of democracy, Dunn s convinced, we need to sort out how these components may come into conflict with each other and how they are, in fact, doing so in the United States and other places.

Democracy, it turns out, ”has not proved a dependable heuristic for a latent normative order in any society we know.”[19]  The result is a deepening sense of political disorientation. “All this too is part of democracy’s disorientation – the degree to which it confuses our efforts to judge collectively and the intimidating impact of the consequences of that confusion on our disposition even to try to.”[20]

Our problem is ultimately a cognitive one and as such a problem that goes far beyond the issue of democracy. “We do not understand the world we so precariously share, and we do not understand it, in very large measure, because of the severely limited degree to which we understand one another or grasp what virtually all the world’s other inhabitants really care about or why they care about it as they do.”[21] Dunn seeks to remind us of the cognitive limitations of our understanding of our social and political reality. “That cognitive constriction is not an intellectual failure of the present membership of our species (or professions), which might in principle be remedied by future enhancements of our performance.  It is an ontological feature of the world, given by where and what we are, and we cannot hope to move briskly beyond it.”[22]

Dunn ends his book with sobering words: “Could human beings do any better in the face of the chaos they have made together? The answer to that can only be yes. Will they do any better, and, above all, will they do better enough? Quite probably not… How far can human beings learn? In the end they will find out.”[23]

 

Notes

[1] John Dunn, Breaking Democracy’s Spell, Yale University Press, New Haven & London 2014, p. 44.

[2] Recordings of these lectures, delivered under the title “Beyond the Democratic Maze,” are available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FSywObIwTw&t=72s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtR7I77VFYo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nWfUOflFog

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKXfJ8_1wZI

[4] Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, 1979; Democracy: the Unfinished Journey, 1992; The Cunning of Unreason, 2000; Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy, 2005.

[5] Ibid., pp. 151-152

[6] Ibid., p. 156.

[7] Ibid, p. 9.

[8] Ibid., p. 83

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., p. 135

[11] Ibid. p. 10

[12] Ibid. p. 14

[13] Ibid., pp. 17-18

[14] Ibid., p. 145

[15] Ibid. p. 24.

[16] Ibid., p. 132.

[17] Ibid, p. 28

[18] Ibid. p. 33.

[19] Ibid, p. 129

[20] Ibid., p. 131

[21] Ibid., p. 53

[22] Ibid., p. 69

[23] Ibid., p. 162

The Critique of Justice

Justice is not a free-standing virtue. It needs to be backed up by other virtues, if it is to be a virtue at all. Justice alone is cold and potentially deadly. It can and does kill (think of the death penalty); it does not nourish, vitalize, and revive. It can punish a murderer but cannot bring the victims back to life. Justice is not truly redemptive.

Justice is the institutionalized form of revenge.

Justice is a minimal virtue. It spells out a required minimum in the relations between us. It defines what must not be the case but cannot say what may be. Justice is the virtue of lawyers and law-courts.

Justice is the virtue of a vengeful god. It is an essentially Calvinist virtue. Our persistent  concern with it reveals the secret power a certain kind of Protestant way of thinking.

Justice is a mean virtue. It aims at a mean in the relation between humans. It is a calculating virtue. It asks: what do I owe you and what do you owe me. No more than that. It sees to it that the terms of the contract between us are satisfied.

Justice is necessary but it is never enough. We also need love, compassion, gratitude, good will, grace, and friendship. These virtues outshine justice whose ultimately value is utilitarian. Justice can only provide the platform on which a genuinely human life is to be lived. It cannot generate that life.

Our singular preoccupation with justice is a testimony to the poverty of our social reality.

 

The Critique of Justice

Justice is not a free-standing virtue. It needs to be backed up by other virtues, if it is to be a virtue at all. Justice alone is cold and potentially deadly. It can and does kill (think of the death penalty); it does not nourish, vitalize, and revive. It can punish a murderer but cannot bring the victims back to life. Justice is not truly redemptive.

Justice is the institutionalized form of revenge.

Justice is a minimal virtue. It spells out a required minimum in the relations between us. It defines what must not be the case but cannot say what may be. Justice is the virtue of lawyers and law-courts.

Justice is the virtue of a vengeful god. It is an essentially Calvinist virtue. Our persistent  concern with it reveals the secret power a certain kind of Protestant way of thinking.

Justice is a mean virtue. It aims at a mean in the relation between humans. It is a calculating virtue. It asks: what do I owe you and what do you owe me. No more than that. It sees to it that the terms of the contract between us are satisfied.

Justice is necessary but it is never enough. We also need love, compassion, gratitude, good will, grace, and friendship. These virtues outshine justice whose ultimately value is utilitarian. Justice can only provide the platform on which a genuinely human life is to be lived. It cannot generate that life.

Our singular preoccupation with justice is a testimony to the poverty of our social reality.

 

The Transfer of Power. The model of Hong Kong

We commonly distinguish regimes by how they are ruled – or, rather, by the way we say they are ruled. Thus, a democracy is a regime in which, as we say, the people rule. In reality, “the people,” of course, never rule. It would be more correct to say that in democracies someone rules with the approval of the people. But even that is usually only a euphemism since the people get only ever so often a chance to express their approval or disapproval. Of monarchy we say similarly that it is a system in which a monarch rules when it may be in reality a powerful minister who does the ruling while the monarch provides a pleasing façade.

It is more helpful to distinguish regimes by the way power is transferred. We can then say that democracies are regimes in which power is transferred on someone by the approval of the people. A transfer of power can, of course, take a variety of forms. In democracies, for instance, it may be brought about through regularly scheduled elections. In a monarchy that transfer may, on the other hand, be regulated through a system of inheritance. If the king does the actual ruling, this may involve the transfer of power to his oldest son. If the king’s minister did the ruling, the transfer may be still be effected through the system of inheritance but in an indirect fashion. Power is transferred from one minister to another through the system of inheritance that elevates the oldest son of the king. There is, of course, also the possibility that no actual transfer of power occurs, if the old king’s minister stays on with the new one.

The transfer of power takes on a particularly interesting form when it involves a change of regimes not only one that exchanges those operating within a regime. A transfer of power from one political party to another in a democratic election is one thing, the transfer of power – e.g., from a monarchical system to a democratic one – is something quite different. We then often speak of a “revolution.” The event may even involve some violence. But not always and the regime-transformation is not necessarily a revolutionary one. Regimes also change though processes of slow attrition. A democratic regime may thus turn by stages into an autocracy; elected leaders may slowly become a ruling family. The façade of the earlier form of regime may hold up for a while, even as the system of power behind it and the way power is transferred is changing.

I have been particularly interested in recent years in the hybrid political system of Hong Kong adopted in the handover of the British colony to China in 1997. The agreement struck between two countries was supposed to guarantee political autonomy to Hong Kong for the next fifty years under the formula “One country, two systems.” One weakness of the agreement was, from the start, that it never specified the exact nature of the distinctive Hong Kong “system.” The other one was that the agreement had nothing to say about what would happen at the end of the fifty-year period.  For the British government the hope was, probably, that in those years China would adopt a more democratic system and that there would be eventually an easy merger of the Hong Kong and Chinese political systems. But China has, in fact, remained firmly in the control of its Communist Party. And so we are left with the question of how the transfer of power in Hong Kong is to be reconciled with the Chinese one. In mainland China that transfer is not effected by the will of “the people” but by secretive maneuverings in the higher echelons of the party. That has left the question of the ultimate relation of Hong Kong to China at the end of the “one country, two systems” period wide open. Would the political autonomy of Hong Kong be re-affirmed at that point by the Beijing rulers, as some have hoped? Would the People’s Liberation Army one day march into Hong Kong and overthrow its political system?

The National Security Legislation that has recently been imposed on Hong Kong by the Beijing authorities provides some answers. The first thing to note is that this legislation may not have the support of the citizens of Hong Kong, but it has definitely been accepted and even hailed by the supposed rulers of Hong Kong. That class, which had never been elected in a genuinely democratic fashion, had obviously already been coopted by Beijing. We can only speculate on their motivations. Had they always been silently adherents of Chinese Communism? Had they cynically calculated that Beijing would, in any case, eventually take over and that it was in their own best interest to go along with this? Did they see themselves perhaps as being no more than helpless driftwood on the stream of historical inevitability? Or were they calculating that Hong Kong could maintain and perhaps even increase its economic wealth by politically giving in to China?

For all its political limitations, Hong Kong has until now had many of the trappings of a liberal democracy: the right of people to express their views freely, a colorful, free press, the right to demonstrate, a variety of political parties. The puzzling question (certainly for the powers in Beijing) was always: how do you integrate such a system into the one-party, heavily controlled system of China? The new National Security Law is meant to provide tools for achieving that end. By means of threatened and actual punishments it is meant to limit the expression of public and democratic opinion. Certain things can no longer be said; certain political candidates may no longer be active; certain rebellious individuals are to be silenced.  Changes in the education curriculum are to produce a more pliant generation. Plans for the integration of Hong Kong into a new Southern Chinese Economic zone (“The Greater Bay Area”) and the resulting promise of increased wealth are supposed to sweeten the bitter political pill.

Will these maneuvers succeed in merging Hong Kong smoothly into the Chinese political system? Or will Beijing eventually be forced to use stricter measures as in Tibet and Xinjiang? It is clear, in any case, that the policies the Chinese authorities are pursuing in Hong Kong are not uniquely tied to the Communist system. They are just as available elsewhere. We have seen democracies overthrown by a variety of means: by military take-overs, by invasion, by violence in the street, even by democratic elections. China is now trying something else, a new kind of transfer of power from one kind of regime to another brought about through a co-option of the established elite, the step-by-step reduction of political liberties, the re-education of a new generation, and the promise of economic development. These tools are available also elsewhere and one can see them, in fact, being used by interested parties in a number of Western democracies. The transfer of power within democracies is always in danger of becoming a transfer of power from democracy into another kind of regime.

 

 

Berkeley Years

 

Berkeley days

 

Shades of blue

My first, overwhelming impression was that of the color Blue. I had just stepped off the plane that had brought me from London to San Francisco and everything I saw was bathed in an incredible, sharp, bright, magical blue. Outside the airport, gusts of wind carried a whiff of the ocean we had seen when our plane descended. The air felt prickly and cold, but the intense sun light made up for it. A typical Bay Area morning, I was to find out. The flight had been full of English holidaymakers decked out in Hawaiian shirts. They had obviously seen too many Hollywood movies, imagined themselves splashing in the ocean surf, and didn’t know the difference between Southern California and the North. When the captain announced that the temperature in San Francisco was a brisk 59 degrees, a shudder went down the spine of the plane. Tarski had prepared me, though, by saying that the weather in Berkeley was like an eternal spring; but he hadn’t forewarned me that it could also be like the first, coldest day in spring.

One of my new colleagues was waiting to take me back to Berkeley. I was to stay at the Durant Hotel till I could move into my new apartment. We crossed the Bay Bridge and drove up University Avenue. As I looked out of the car, my first sense of elation gave way to second thoughts. I saw giant billboards, shabby motels, dusty parking lots along an uninspiring street. My European sense of public order was being shattered. Where had I come to? After London, Berkeley looked unappealing.

But the hotel proved a comforting place. From my room on the seventh floor I could see the whole San Francisco Bay and beyond it a glimpse of the ocean. Soon, low clouds rolled in from the West, split open by shafts of golden light from the sinking sun. Perhaps I had come to the right place after all. But I had to admit to myself that it was different from what I knew. At the door to the old-fashioned dining room a sign read: “Gentlemen are expected to dress formally for dinner (jacket and tie).”  Even formality seemed to have a new meaning in California. I was soon to find out that everything else had, too.

The next morning, I went to visit my new department. I did not have far to go to find Moses Hall on the well-tended campus. Built in the early 20th century, the structure had the re-assuring look of a minor Oxford or Cambridge college. Ahead to one side stood a red-brick French mansion, the University’s oldest building. On the other, Berkeley’s landmark, a proud replica of a Venetian campanile. The mixing of styles, I soon came to appreciate, was part of California culture. Later on, my future (and past) colleague Richard Wollheim drew my attention to the ubiquitous restaurant sign announcing: “Breakfast served 24 hours a day.” This is the story of American cooking, he said. To an Englishman, used to teatime sharply between 3:30 and 5, such a confusion of categories would seem bewildering. It was certainly American and Californian but also curiously liberating.

The department of philosophy was ready to sign me up with a slew of forms. Academic bureaucracy had been minimal in England. At Balliol it had consisted of an old lady and a half-time help. In America it was in full bloom and growing more massive by the day. The land of the free, I learned, was also the land of endless forms and rules – all designed in the name of efficiency and fairness. Having checked in, I sought the way to my new office. The building was a warren of corridors and no one was there to ask. The staircase gave off that odor of quiet boredom that seems to haunt every philosophy department.  Someone had been cooking soup in the basement. I finally found my room looking out pleasantly over a wooded creek. Not bad, I thought. In London I had looked into the trees of Gordon Square; now I was right in the greenery.

On the Avenue

My next turn was, inevitably, a walk down Telegraph Avenue. I found the street alive with visitors from all over the world and, on this very first day, ran unexpectedly into one of my students from London. The Avenue had become famous as a hang-out for hippies, long haired in their tie-dyed shirts and flouncy, flowery dresses, luxuriating in the sweet smell of marijuana. Hare Krishna disciples were snaking through the crowd singing and dancing to their god. This was the epicenter of the world-wide counter-culture together with the Haight-Asbury across the Bay – the place where one experimented with exotic life-styles, exotic faiths, and equally exotic drugs.

I knew of Berkeley also as a place of political agitation and didn’t have far to go to find it. Almost every day demonstrations filled the plaza in front of Sproul Hall on the campus, often disrupted by the police wheeling their rubber truncheons. Clouds of tear gas would occasionally drift into class rooms. But at 5 pm the demonstrators would usually disperse. Everybody would rush home to see whether they were on the evening news. This was California, after all, where media mattered. The “community” was also being informed by a weekly rag called “The Berkeley Barb” whose headlines ran from “Kops Krack Kurfew Kids” to “Oodles of Love and Grass.” Inside, the paper advised on the safe use of illegal substances, reviewed classes in witchcraft, and provided telephone numbers of lawyers in case of arrest.

Campus life was like nothing I had known in Oxford or London. Herds of abandoned dogs chased each other across the campus and sometimes invaded lecture halls. Try to keep going in front of 100 students while a German shepherd is busy undoing your shoe laces. A “post-modern” philosopher came to speak on the difficulty of lecturing while eating an ice-cream cone – while eating said ice cream cone. Someone threatened to blow up Moses Hall and the building was flooded. One of my graduate students was shot to death while working in a second-hand bookstore. My colleague Paul Feyerabend promised every student an A in his class. 700 enrolled, including the entire Athletics team. It felt at times, as if I had landed in an alternative universe.

Drugs were difficult to escape. I was happy to experiment but remained cautious. My brain was, after all, my major asset and I did not intend to ruin it.  One day, Alison, who worked in our office at the time,  talked me into a drive to the sea at Point Reyes, some forty miles away, in order to spend an afternoon on mescaline. The beach was inviting at first but then the fog came in and the icy wind forced us to return to Berkeley. I had never before noticed the extraordinary beauty of changing traffic lights. Back home I lay exhausted on the floor listening to music. The ceiling in my modern apartment consisted of embossed plastic tiles which would sometimes start rotating to the sound of the music. When the movement finally stopped, I realized that the effect of the mescaline was wearing off. The next morning, I woke up and discovered to my surprise a smooth ceiling above me. No tiles, no embossed decorations, just smooth, white plaster.  I had learned a lesson about the distinction between appearance and reality. You may think that you know what is real and what is not, but the reality may turn out to be just another illusion.

One of our graduate students financed his studies by traveling to Asia to return with Buddhist statues stuffed with all kinds of forbidden marerials. At the time, we began our fall semesters by taking the graduate students to a three-day retreat at Asilomar, 100 miles down the coast. On the first visit, our in-house dealer plied everyone who wanted with LSD. At the end of a long afternoon on the beach, the scheduled evening discussion was disrupted by inexplicable gusts of laughter. My conservative colleagues found it bewildering. They had never imagined the free will problem to be so hilarious. The following year, our students decided they only wanted to smoke marijuana. The third year we were reduced to beer. And then no one wanted to go anymore.

Things began to simmer down. Berkeley became more normal. Meanwhile, it had begun to change me, though in ways I still find difficult to assess. I had arrived as a low-level assistant professor; but my Berkeley salary was three times what it had been in London. I felt suddenly rich, bought sunglasses and my first car, and became instantly a Californian. To be precise, I became a “Bay Arean.” What did I know of California and what did I care for the rest of the United States? The Berkeley Hills were behind us and behind them were the Sierras. Our view was to the Pacific Ocean. Far ahead were Japan and China. I was living on the edge of the Western world. That realization has, perhaps, changed me more than anything else.

I have lived in Berkeley now longer than in any other location. I have accommodated myself to the local culture. I have got used to dressing in jeans and t-shirts. I have become more relaxed in the ways I think and behave. I have become a vegetarian. I buy organic produce at our farmers’ market. Practice yoga. Go out hiking in the wilderness. I have become an environmentalist. I gave up on my earlier uninformed conservatism. My political views became radicalized. Also more American? Perhaps not. I still hold my German passport and still think of myself as a European. The longer I live in America, the more I have become aware of the subtle differences that separate me from those who were born and grew up here.

Normal philosophy

In those early days, it was difficult to keep one’s head above water in the daily turmoil of Berkeley. But Moses Hall was a refuge. Inside, philosophy was churning away along its slow, long-suffering tracks. There was plenty of talk about metaphysics and Stoic logic, about numbers and cylindrical algebras, about skepticism and what it is to see a tomato, about the variety of speech acts and the types of implicatures. Politics I heard of only in the quiet words of praise for Ronald Reagan when my senior colleagues spoke to each other. Even Feyerabend, who liked to see himself as a radical outsider and epistemological anarchist, was politically disengaged. I was no different from them in closing my ears to the sounds of the revolution outside.

Only occasionally would our students raise their voice to challenge the political relevance of what we were doing. Shortly before I arrived in Berkeley, the department had denied tenure to Richard Lichtman, a Marxist philosopher with a large student following. My colleagues argued that they could find someone more qualified, but, of course, made no effort to do so once Lichtman was gone. Most of my colleagues thought of philosophy as akin to science and as such entirely unpolitical. There was no place for Marx nor for the rest of 19th century philosophy with all its political entanglements. The history of philosophy ended with Kant and contemporary philosophy began with Frege and Russell. What had come in-between could be safely ignored.

I still do not think that everyone has to join in during moments of political agitation. There should be nooks and crannies where the usual affairs continue unhindered. A place for monks to copy manuscripts which no one else cares for. My colleagues were surely right in thinking that not every important philosophical problem is political in nature. But a colleague from the English department told me one day that our problem was not that we were detached from the events in the street. It was, rather, that the model of philosophy on which we were operating had run its course We were doing normal philosophy, a learned endeavor carried out, admittedly, by smart people – but to what end? I was shocked but had to admit that in other departments philosophical ideas were examined and philosophical texts were read that we were neglecting. An alternative kind of philosophical engagement was taking shape in these places. At some point, I joined colleagues from other departments who were gathering around  Leo Loewenthal, an exile from Frankfurt and a venerable representative of critical theory, in wide-reaching, exhilarating discussions.

The philosophy department at the time was full of logicians. They were all eager to teach our  standard in that area. One of them said to me that teaching the same logic class over and over again allowed him to do so without having to think about it. That was not what I wanted to do. I had taught logic continuously in London and was happy to leave that task behind. My enthusiasm for technical work in that field had definitely faded. I felt drawn to broader, more philosophical topics. Tarski, who had sponsored my move to Berkeley, was, no doubt, disappointed. But he still kept inviting me to his Polish Thanksgivings where his home-made vodka sometimes made us forget the turkey.

I had given up on work in technical logic but continued to occupy myself with the philosophical aspects of Frege’s work. His discovery of a new logic after two thousand years of Aristotelian syllogisms was a decisive break in the history of philosophy. But what had brought it about and what did it signify? I turned to the study of the history of logic, to the 19th century development of mathematics, to the Leibnizian and Kantian roots of Frege’s thinking. Years went by before I finished my book.  For a long time after that I came to be thought of as a Frege scholar and specialist. But that was, in reality, only one side of my philosophical interests.

I was becoming more deeply drawn into Wittgenstein’s work and concern with language in Wittgensteinian terms. More than anything else that would irritate my old teacher, Michael Dummett, who had once assured me that Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics was worthless. I also renewed my early acquaintance with Heidegger. I was little worried over the supposed incompatibility of analytic and continental philosophy. What kind of distinction was this anyway in which one term referred to a methodology and the other to geography? There was good and bad thinking to be found on both sides of that shaky divide, I thought, and the issues often overlapped. My colleague Barry Stroud encouraged my study of Wittgenstein, and my colleague Hubert Dreyfus that of Heidegger. I talked much with them, attended their seminars, and co-taught classes with them. I also rediscovered my interest in epistemology and the philosophy of science. Paul Feyerabend was both an inspiring and a disruptive presence in Berkeley. His concern with the actual history of science disabused me of the narrowly structuralist view of I had learned from Stegmüller in Munich and his rejection of the idea of a universal scientific method appealed to my Wittgensteinian instincts. But he could be harsh in his judgments, telling me at times that I and the rest of the Berkeley philosophers were like rodents gnawing away on moldering bones.

How we got to where we were

The Berkeley department had a curious history but which had been largely forgotten.  But I cam to realize eventually it was still at work in the routines that we were taking for granted.

The first professor had been George Holmes Howison who had come to Berkeley on the recommendation of William James. At the time the connection between Harvard and Berkeley was strong and the Berkeley faculty often referred to the place as “Harvard-by-the-sea.” Howison had made it a condition for accepting the job that the University would supply him with his own private lecture room, furnished according to his precise instructions. Astonishingly, the request was granted. The lecture room had a fire place and a raised stage with a chair and a writing desk. Late in the afternoon, with the students waiting, Howison, tall, bearded, and dressed in a long cloak, would sweep into the room carrying a lapdog. His first task was to answer his mail, while the students were watching. Finally, as darkness fell, he would rise, stir the flames in the fire place and begin to speak about there being no material world, only spirits, Leibnizian monads in space. His students – presumably offspring of California gold diggers – were duly impressed by this ennobling message. Howison became a sought-after public speaker. Even today, the department benefits from an endowment built on his lecture fees.

Not that everything went well for him. Every summer Howison would make a pilgrimage to Göttingen where the great Hermann Lotze had taught whom some considered the new Leibniz. But when the First World War broke out, everything German became taboo. German Americans anglicized their names. The German community in San Francisco renamed their meeting place California Hall. The English broke their Faber pencils and killed their dachshunds. American professors put their German philosophy books away and Howison died heart-broken in 1916.

After Howison, the department settled into humdrum solidity. I had to look for the names of those who came after him and still do not know what they stood for.  We imagine the history of philosophy to be a parade of great thinkers and memorable writings but the truth is that most of that history is forgotten. Only one of the second generation of Berkeley philosophers came to stick in my mind. A man by the name of Jacob Loewenberg– not because of his philosophical work, which I still do not know, but because of his remarkable life recorded in an autobiography he called Thrice-Born. His first birth, Loewenberg wrote, had been in Latvia, the second at Harvard, and the third when he came to Berkeley.  Loewenberg was born into a modest Jewish family in rural Latvia but managed to move on to study philosophy first in Berlin and then at Harvard. He arrived in Berkeley in 1915 as a disciple of Josiah Royce who had persuaded him to devote himself to the study of Hegel. In Berkeley, Howison took his young protégé aside and said: “They tell me that you have a deep interest in Hegel and Royce. You must not allow them too strong an influence. At another time I will show you the error of their ways.” The battle between Howison’s personal idealism and Harvard-style Hegelianism never happened because of Howison’s death the following year. So, Loewenberg stuck to Hegel for the rest of his life and retired from Berkeley fifty years later. What astonished me in the story is that my department has a history of idealist philosophizing of almost a century which had, however, entirely disappeared except for some unread volumes in the department’s library. At faculty meetings, my colleague Benson Mates would sometimes object to a job candidate by saying: “But we don’t even have anybody to teach Hegel.” His tone of voice always made clear that a Hegelian  was, in fact, someone he was least interested in.

Loewenberg had come to America with an idealized vision of its liberal and democratic credentials. Harvard had fully lived up to those expectations and so, it appears, had Berkeley. But his vision would eventually be shattered when the president of the University of California, Robert Gordon Sproul, in 1949 decided to root out “Communists” from the faculty. A loyalty oath required professors to declare that they had never been members of the Communist party or sympathetic to it. At first, there was loud resistance. But after some wrangling, most of the UC faculty decided to provide their signature. This was no big deal for the conservatives and the few genuine radicals considered the document, in any case, worthless. In the end only 16 well-meaning liberals refused to sign up. One of them was Loewenberg. The refuseniks were duly dismissed and Loewenberg spent some years in exile at various Eastern colleges teaching his usual course on Hegel. Eventually, the State Supreme Court re-instituted him and the other dismissed professors. Loewenberg retired, sobered but resigned to the realities of American life. His autobiography describes how he spent his last years sitting in the plaza in front of Dwinelle Hall, contentedly watching the students pass by and looking with sympathy at their new found political activism.

Loewenberg was at peace with himself also as far as the changing philosophical scene was concerned. “Nothing in his life impressed Berg so much as the mutability of philosophical trends and allegiances,” he wrote of himself in the third person. William James, Dewey, and Bergson had come and gone. Pragmatism had flourished and disappeared. The new realists and the critical realists had had their day. “And who could have predicted that logical positivists, so robust and so strident only yesterday, would find themselves so soon moribund?” Loewenberg‘s long experience allowed him to look with equanimity and tolerance at the current idols of the philosophical theater. He was sure that they too would pass.

When Hannah Arendt visited Berkeley in this period, she observed acidly that the philosophy department was “all philosophy of language, and second-rate at that.” Both Loewenberg’s and Arendt’s assessment of the state of philosophy in Berkeley were, in fact, not quite right. Logical positivism was by no means dead and the department was by no means entirely dedicated to the philosophy of language. In the post-Second World War period it had been dominated by Paul Marhenke who had breathed the positivist spirit. Marhenke was known to cite passages from classical philosophy in his classes, beating his forehead while groaning: “I don’t know why we even teach such nonsense.” In his logic class he used Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica as his textbook – surely an impossible undertaking – but with no interest in its philosophical underpinnings. His one purpose was to find shortcuts for proofs. Marhenke was long gone by the time I arrived but some of the positivist spirit sill lingered on.

Philosophers among themselves

But the department was definitely changing. It was not the residue of positivism that struck me, when I arrived, but the pervasive influence of Wittgenstein. Thomas Nagel, Thomas Kuhn, and Stanley Cavell had all begun their careers in Berkeley and had brought Wittgenstein with them from the east Coast. By the time I arrived, all three had moved back to the East, but the Wittgensteinian seeds they had sown had kept growing. Kuhn had gone to MIT after the Berkeley department had denied him tenure. My senior colleagues had judged his Structure of Scientific Revolutions to be insufficiently philosophical. The misjudgment was, perhaps, another sign of the lingering spirit of positivism with its characteristic blindness to the history of science. But Nagel, Kuhn, and Cavell had certainly left a Wittgensteinian aura behind. Those who arrived after them were all, in one way or other, indebted to Wittgenstein. That was evidently so, in different ways, of Tom Clarke, Paul Feyerabend, John Searle and Barry Stroud; but it was equally true of Hubert Dreyfus whose Heidegger sounded at times like Wittgenstein’s nephew.

Another sign of change was that the Americans were becoming a minority in the department. Up till then it had been sturdily American with Loewenberg the single exception.  The newcomers were Barry Stroud a Canadian, Paul Grice from England, and Frits Staal, the Indologist. from the Netherlands. Our specialists in Greek philosophy were both foreigners. Michael Frede a German and Gregory Vlastos a Greek. The same held for our two philosophers of science, Feyerabend was an Austrian and Michael Scriven an Australian. Searle was an American by birth but he had spent years at Oxford ad brought with him an international philosophical outlook. Somewhat later, two more Englishmen, Richard Wollheim and Bernard Williams arrived, not to forget Kwong-loi Shun, originally from Hong Kong, and Paolo Mancosu from Italy, who came both via graduate work at Stanford. Finally, there was myself from Germany, Oxford, and London.

That we came from so many different places contributed, probably, to the fact that we were not much of an intellectual community. Most of us went our own ways. In London I had been used to a different environment. We had met regularly to talk about our work and thus developed a sense of sympathy for what each of us was doing. In Berkeley, one saw many colleagues only at faculty meetings where we bickered over the usual administrative matters. Some of my colleagues traveled incessantly from one continent to the other. This was true not only in our department. Someone joked that the Berkeley faculty was like the US strategic bomber command. At every moment one third was airborne. I had got to know Feyerabend while I was still in London. In the first half of that year he taught at both Berkeley and Yale; in the second in London and Berlin. He was flying back and forth between all these places and it turned out that he was losing money on this deal. Later, in Berkeley, I sometimes thought that Howison had been right and that we were all like monads in space.

To make up for this, there was the seminar given by Paul Grice. I knew him from Oxford and had attended one of his classes which he often suspended when he was playing cricket. His Berkeley seminars had a character of their own. They drew scores of graduate students as well as colleagues from philosophy and other disciplines. Grice spoke in a free-wheeling manner on a wide range of topics. He was not much interested in what other people had written. His goal was to be entirely spontaneous in his thinking. Philosophy, he said, was “thinking on one’s feet” or, at other times, that it was a competitive game. Like cricket? I wondered occasionally. The result could be brilliant but on other days excruciatingly slow. One time, Grice set out to invent a new logic. Afterwards, Richard Grandy and I told him that this logic already existed and was known as combinatory logic and that his version had already been shown to be inconsistent. Grice responded that he would rather discover this for himself. That was heroic but not necessarily productive.

Grice had left Oxford because he felt he deserved the professorship that was given to his colleague Strawson. I don’t know how good the shift to Berkeley was for him philosophically. Grice was a remarkably intuitive thinker. His distinction between natural and non-natural meaning had been an eye-opener. And so was his recognition of the phenomenon he called implicature, the fact that we convey meanings with our utterances that are not literally contained in our words. Only someone English could have seen the importance of this phenomenon. Conversations in England were always laced with implicatures. In Berkeley, Grice began to think that he needed to systematize and formalize his insights. He saw himself in competition with our resident logicians. But doing this was not his personal strength. For this kind of work one needs to attend to the small technical details. Grice assumed that there were “little men,” as he put it laughingly, who could do that work for him.

Grice was a Falstaffian figure; a man with a belly, wild strands of white hair, irregular teeth and an endless appetite for the pleasures of life. What made his face unforgettable were his sharp blue eyes with their intensely intelligent look. He usually dressed in old pair of pants held up precariously with a tie and a blue sweater with holes at the elbows. One of our incoming graduate students had been fascinated by the street life of Berkeley and, in particular, by one street bum whose remarkable face had impressed him – only to discover, once he was enrolled in our program, that the bum in question was his new faculty advisor.

One attraction of Paul’s seminar was the social gathering that followed it. We would go out to eat and drink till late, talking philosophy till we were hoarse. Paul’s favorite spot was an Italian restaurant all the way out on Telegraph Avenue which was mostly deserted except for some sinister looking Italians in the back room. Paul was known there as “il professore” and they would give him second helpings on anything he would ask for, the minestrone, the pasta, the cheap red wine. Paul amused himself with the thought that the place was a local Mafia hangout.

Barry Stroud was one of the colleagues who would usually come along. His family was also of English extraction but he was a very different type of Englishman. Cool, reserved, and fastidious, his work in philosophy was always precise and controlled. Later in life he discovered Italy and spent his sabbaticals in Venice and Rome. The experience gave him a sheen he had previously lacked. Barry’s first book had been on Hume. I had been brought up on the German prejudice that one could safely ignore the English philosophical tradition – quite in contrast to contemporary English thought. It was through Barry’s book that I came to a different view. But I could never decide whether his later concern with Wittgenstein was colored by that bok on Hume, or whether the Hume book had already been written under the influence of Wittgenstein. Like both these philosophers, Stroud was a skeptic at heart but one who felt skeptical even about skepticism. My other friend, Dreyfus, had, of course, nothing to do with the circle around Grice. His thinking revolved entirely around Heidegger and he had no interest in the analytic tradition. I have never known another philosopher so dedicated to one single figure. He once said jokingly that he had never found a single philosophical statement in Heidegger to disagree with. He certainly judged all other philosophers in that light. His real ambition was to apply Heidegger’s philosophy to extra-philosophical problems, which he had done in a provocative book on the limits of computer technology. I liked Bert particularly for the way he taught. There was nothing authoritarian in his style. Instead, he asked his students to help him with some confusion he had got himself into. His courses drew hundreds of them  to the study of Heidegger. His graduate students became a generation of Heidegger scholars. Stroud’s classes were different and attracted a different type of student. They were probing,  meticulous, with intricate arguments on fundamental, though abstract philosophical questions often arising out of Wittgenstein’s writings.

When I arrived in Berkeley, John Searle’s Speech Acts was a philosophical bestseller. Searle was at the time at the height of his powers. In philosophical discussion he was impressively quick, imaginative, and to the point. He could instantly identify the weak spot in someone’s argument and attack it with well-aimed blows. His great contribution to philosophy was to have worked out J.L. Austin’s informal reflections on performative uses of language. Searle had been Austin’s student at Oxford. At some point, the Berkeley department had sought to hire Austin away from Oxford. But when Austin had died suddenly, the department hired Searle instead.  Searle took it into his head to teach me the local customs, He invited me to the winery in which had a stake to acquaint me with the secrets of California wines. He also thought that I needed to know about Baseball and American Football. How could I understand America otherwise? Indeed, how could I understand the examples he used to illustrate his theory? So we went to the games together. But I can’t say that I have kept it up. Was that why, eventually, we gave up on each other? He thought I was reading too many books. I thought that he was increasingly caught up in his own theories.

But where do I fit into this story?

The question kept nagging where I fitted in. Reading was one of my ways to avoid the issue. I had always enjoyed that activity and continued to do so. It was like an addiction. Not that I had a program of what to read. I worked myself forward from one text to another. Later on, I came across Foucault’s description of what he called the warm brotherhood of useless erudition of which he considered himself a member. I recognized myself in this and that was probably one of the reasons for my subsequent interest in Foucault’s work.

After a couple of years in Berkeley, I decided that I wanted to live once again in a real city and so moved to San Francisco.  Th city was still affordable at the time and not as yet crowded with high-rises and corporate headquarters. I found an apartment in the Duboce Triangle at the foot of the Buena Vista hill. The neighborhood had once been the center of Swedish life in the city. There were still a Swedish Seaman’s Mission, a Swedish delicatessen; and a Swedish real estate office. The house in which I lived belonged to people of Swedish extraction. Their grandfather had built many of the neighborhood houses with their elaborate woodwork facades. An Italian grocery store, an Armenian bakery, and a Greek cakeshop rounded things out.

I lived in San Francisco for ten years and enjoyed its amenities. It was a place where people of different origins and different ethnicities had found a way of living harmoniously together. Or so it appeared to me. I told my American students that they should try to live for some time in the city. Many of them were familiar only with the blandness of suburban life and needed to learn of riches of urban existence.

Eventually I left San Francisco and moved back to Berkeley because I was tired of the increasingly difficult journey to the campus. The Bay Bridge was becoming more crowded with cars and public transportation was not always convenient. In order to get to the BART underground train to Berkeley, I had to catch the local tram which was often so full in the morning that it would slide by without stopping. When it did stop, the driver often turned out to be one of my former undergraduate students who would welcome me loudly over the public address system: “Good morning, Professor Sluga.” Even today I often think of San Francisco as my home city.

Was it only the yearning for city life that had brought me there or had I been looking also for some daylight between me and my department? I was becoming increasingly politicized at the time and felt alienated from my department where politics was, at best, a marginal concern. That did not mean that I felt ready now to join the protesters in Sproul Plaza. My demons were different from theirs. I was, in fact, wary of the ongoing agitation. The chanting crowds reminded me of the German students would had helped to bring Hitler to power and of the Chinese students in the Cultural Revolution. I shied away from the irrational energy of such crowds. I was not attracted to messianic political speakers, to flags, uniforms, political conformity. I still feel uncomfortable in a large crowd. I don’t want to march for any cause. I dislike the uniformity of academic robes; I even resist the name tags one is given at conferences. I don’t like to sign public statements. I have never been a member of any party. I don’t like political labels.  I am most skeptical of politicizing philosophers.

What then did it mean that I myself was become more political? What kind of “anti-political” politics was I getting into? Was I an anarchist or libertarian? Those labels did also not fit me. I was sure that there had to be a political order. But I was at the same time suspicious of its realization. I had come of age after the Second World War and like other Germans of my generation I was scarred by the Nazi regime, the war, and the holocaust. I could not extirpate the images of human suffering and wholesale destruction from my brain.

I was certainly not politically detached. On the contrary: with the German history of the first half of the last century before me, I could think of nothing more important. The question was rather: if it’s so easy to go politically wrong, what other, better way is there?

This was the question I came to think about more and more, even as I was working on Frege, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. The matter came to a head for me when I learned that Frege had kept a political diary after the First World War in which he had expressed his admiration for Hitler and had reflected on how one could identify Jews more easily with the help of an appropriate label. I found it all nauseating. In his diary, Frege wrote that he had previously been a liberal. The war and its aftermath seem to have turned him around. I thought that it had, perhaps, been a good that he died in 1924. Otherwise, he would most likely have become an eager camp follower of the Führer in 1933. The discovery made me look anew at Frege’s surrounding. My attention was drawn to Bruno Bauch, one of Frege’s colleagues at the University of Jena, where Frege had spent his career. Bach was a Neo-Kantian philosopher, but also an organizer of rightwing intellectuals, a nationalist extremist and radical anti-Semite who had founded a philosophical society and a journal to promote those causes. Frege, it turned out, had been an early member of that society and had published his late work in its journal. A third figure at Jena was the philosopher Max Wundt, the son of the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, who was an idealist in the mold of Fichte and even more virulent in his nationalism and anti-Semitism than Bauch. So, I said to myself, you can be rational thinker and a great logician and still hold abominable political views. You can be dedicated to Kant’s philosophy with its ethical principles and still be a Nazi. You can be an idealist and still subscribe to the crude Darwinism of Nazi ideology.

I had known, of course, for along time of the controversies that have swirled around Heidegger’s political past. Some of his critics believed that every word he ever uttered was tainted by his Nazi engagement. At the other extreme were those who denied any connection between the philosophy and Heidegger’s politics. My colleague Dreyfus argued that he could always distinguish between Heidegger’s philosophical statements and the political ones and that he was not interested in Heidegger’s politics. But hadn’t Heidegger insisted that his Nazi engagement was rooted in his philosophy? Dreyfus’ response was straightforward. “That,” he said, “is a political statement and I am not interested in it.” This seemed too simple a solution but what then was the connection? Could it be found somewhere in the intricacies of his philosophy? In is existentialism? His critique of reason? His view of history? His notion of community? But since Frege, Bauch, and, Wundt – such different thinkers – had taken the same political route, one had, perhaps, to look more broadly at the philosophical profession to see whether there existed perhaps not common attitudes and beliefs that drew them all in the same direction. Further exploration of this question made me realize that there had been still other German philosophers with yet other different philosophical commitments who had equally joined the Nazi cause. Not all of them had, of course, been drawn into this quagmire. There had been those who had left Germany and Europe for racial or political reasons or both. Ernst Cassirer, Hannah Arendt, Rudolf Carnap, Horkheimer and Adorno come to mind. And a few had been able to stay in a state of inner emigration such as, in particular, Carl Jaspers. But the majority of German philosophers had fully conformed themselves to the Nazi regime. Was there perhaps a problem with the entire profession or, at least, a prevailing way of thinking about the relation of philosophy and politics? This, then, was my next philosophical project, my next book, to try to determine what had made it so easy for all of those philosophers, differently as they were, to accommodate themselves to that forsaken regime.

Taking turns

The department and, in fact, the entire University operated in a more democratic than I had been used to from England. There was no permanent head of the department who could make all the major decisions, but a rotating office with relatively few powers. The important decisions were made at faculty meetings where everybody had a vote. There were numerous committees and subcommittees, some permanent and some ad hoc which wrote and submitted reports. The chair was often merely a channel between the department and the higher levels of the administration – the one who had to pass on the good or bad news coming down from the top.

And the same pattern repeated itself in the Berkeley faculty a large. In theory, at least, the campus was a self-governing academic community with a Senate, an elected leadership, Senate committees and subcommittees, and, of course, Senate meetings and Senate reports. In reality, the bureaucratic machinery of the administration, set up by the “Board of Regents of the University of California,” had the final say since they held the purse strings. We were slowly turning into “employees” of a professionally run and bureaucratically organized corporation.

In the natural course of things, Paul Grice one day became chair of the department. It was felt that we needed with his international stature to represent us to the administration. Paul was not exactly born to that task. He was as careless with paper work as he was with his own appearance. When he finally retired, I helped to clear out his office. There were boxes of unopened letters from pleading deans and desperate publishers. Paul asked me to serve as vice-chair to take some of the burdens of his shoulders. We certainly made an odd pair. Neither of us were familiar with American bureaucracy, its demands, deadlines, and forms. Eventually our administrative assistant blew up and refused to have any more contact with Grice. I had to serve as conduit moving back and forth between their offices. I still had no tenure at the time and when I was finally promoted our Dean of Humanities, a distinguished classicist, said to me: “You know that tenure is there to protect you from your colleagues.” I took the message to heart. Not that I needed to be protected from Grice but I took the remark as an invitation that I should be going my own intellectual way.

One day when I complained to Feyerabend about my administrative work, he said to me: “You have done this all wrong. The first time they asked you, you should have proven complete incompetence and unreliability. They would never have asked you again. That’s what I did.” I could only respond jokingly that he, of course, was a Viennese who was understood to take life easy, but I was a German burdened with an unbearable sense of duty. Feyerabend: “Ach. ‘duty’ is a misprint for beauty.” In other words, I should be doing some beautiful rather than worry about duties.

My vice-chairing of the department did not really prepare me for the moment, a few years later when became department chair. I was certainly not willing to abandon my work in philosophy for this job and so was, probably, less effective in it than I should have been. One of my objectives was to push our offerings in ethics in a new direction by appointing a female candidate who worked on feminism and medical ethics. Some of my colleagues, unfortunately, never accepted her and she moved on after a few years. In addition, I had to deal with a tenure case of a colleague who was both a minority and a woman. The case dragged on for years as it became more and more obvious that she had failed to live up to her initial promise. Even so, her case remained hard-contested. One of the most insistent voices in this drawn-out debate was a colleague who had once said in an all-male faculty meeting that we all really knew that women had no brains. On the other side was a colleague who came one day to my office to tell me: “I don’t think she deserves tenure. She is no good at all. But I will vote for her anyway. And if you should quote me on this, I will deny everything.” The final decision to recommend against her promotion to tenure left a bad after-taste.

One morning I walked into Moses Hall and saw a big poster announcing a new course dedicated to the philosophy of Ayn Rand. I had never heard of any such course and didn’t recognize the names of its two advertised instructors. It turned out that they were from the Ayn Rand Institute in New York; the course was supposed to consist of recorded lectures from the Institute, and course papers were to be sent to New York to be graded there. It was all very strange and completely in conflict with University regulations. On my enquiry, I discovered that the course had been sponsored by one of our colleagues. I called him in and told him that I could not approve it in its current form and that if he wanted to continue with it, he would have to take charge. His response was to write an open-letter accusing me of “German Panzer-mentality.” Fortunately, my other colleagues backed me up. But that was not the end of the story. After a few weeks into the semester, my colleague sent out another blast. I had completely failed in my job and should never have allowed him to take on this course. He had just discovered that the two Ayn Randians from New York were complete idiots. They had actually claimed that Mark Twain was the greatest American author. While he could agree on everything else with them, this was clearly over the top. I survived this one without sleepless nights.

Michel Foucault comes to town

My one achievement as chair was of a different kind. Leo Bersani, the chair of the French department called me one day to ask whether we were interested in co-sponsoring a half-semester visit from Michel Foucault. Foucault had been to Berkeley for individual lectures but was interested in establishing a regular relationship with us. I jumped at the possibility without even asking my colleagues and committed us to such an agreement. Fortunately, I didn’t hear any protests afterwards. Foucault was at that moment at the height of his fame and career and we were always keen to add to the department’s luster. The possibility that he would be coming once a year to teach a seminar was an exciting idea. Foucault’s sudden death the following year made this unfortunately a single occasion.

One of Foucault’s conditions had been that he would be teaching only a small, select group of students. We managed to keep it at that. But otherwise it was difficult to keep his crowds of admirers away. I asked him to give a colloquium talk to the philosophy graduate students and faculty. We kept the time and place secret but without success. When I took him into the lecture room, his face fell. The place was packed to the rafters.

We had also arranged or Foucault to give the Howison lecture that year – the philosophy department’s single public annual lecture. We were sure that it would attract a large audience. So we booked Zellerbach Hall, the campus theater with some 800 seats. An hour before the lecture, the place was crammed full and doors had to be locked. Still, there were masses of people outside. At short notice, we managed to establish an audio link to the Wheeler Hall lecture room which had an additional few hundred seats. Even so, not everybody got in. I knew already that Foucault had an ambivalent attitude to his own fame and was concerned about his possible rection. But he knew how to handle the event. Speaking with his usual charm, he  devoted his lecture to a painstaking examination of Stoic ethics, peppering it with plenty of Greek quotations. After the lecture, I overheard two students who had just come from the event. “What did you think of the lecture,” the first one asked. “Oh, I liked it alright,” was the reply. “Did you understand anything?” “No,” was the answer, “but I loved his voice.” Foucault’s French accent had carried the day.

Foucault spent much time in the main library. I would often seem him on the way there dressed nattily dressed in his tweed jacket, with brief case loaded with papers. For the semester he had rented an apartment in the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco from one of the French professors: a wonderfully Victorian area but the commute from there to the campus was terrible. I was still living in the city at the time and not too far from his place. So, I would occasionally offer him a ride back in my car. Stuck in the rush hour traffic on the Bay Bridge we talked about philosophy, America, and AIDS. I had discovered some affinities between him and Wittgenstein – for instance, in their rejection of the Cartesian conception of the self but more generally also in their freely experimental attitude to philosophy. Foucault said that he did now know much about Wittgenstein and so I tried to convince him that he should take a look. As Europeans we were agreed in our wary view of the US and our attraction to California. I warned him of the dangers of the new HIV virus which didn’t even have a name at the time. Foucault would hear nothing of it and insisted that it was all part of what he called “American anti-sexual hysteria.” It was the year before he died of the disease. He was just discovering the liberating world of San Francisco’s gay subculture. One Sunday afternoon I opened my front door and there was Foucault walking down my street dressed from head to toe in black leather. I invited him in and we talked for a while till he excused himself saying he was just on his way to the gay leather bars South of Market.

Foucault’s visit made a deep impact on the Berkeley faculty. My colleagues Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow from Anthropology talked extensively with him as they were preparing the first comprehensive book on his work in English. Professors from French, English literature, and History interacted with him. I was also becoming intrigued with his work. I had first come across it in a faculty reading group where we studied The Order of Things. Ian Hacking was one of its participants and so were my colleagues Dreyfus and Searle. Hacking made sense for us of the book by pointing out its parallels to Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. But the details of the book still remained impenetrable for many of us at the time. I certainly didn’t realize yet how much Foucault’s thinking would come to mean to me later on.

 

Berkeley Years

 

Berkeley days

 

Shades of blue

My first, overwhelming impression was that of the color Blue. I had just stepped off the plane that had brought me from London to San Francisco and everything I saw was bathed in an incredible, sharp, bright, magical blue. Outside the airport, gusts of wind carried a whiff of the ocean we had seen when our plane descended. The air felt prickly and cold, but the intense sun light made up for it. A typical Bay Area morning, I was to find out. The flight had been full of English holidaymakers decked out in Hawaiian shirts. They had obviously seen too many Hollywood movies, imagined themselves splashing in the ocean surf, and didn’t know the difference between Southern California and the North. When the captain announced that the temperature in San Francisco was a brisk 59 degrees, a shudder went down the spine of the plane. Tarski had prepared me, though, by saying that the weather in Berkeley was like an eternal spring; but he hadn’t forewarned me that it could also be like the first, coldest day in spring.

One of my new colleagues was waiting to take me back to Berkeley. I was to stay at the Durant Hotel till I could move into my new apartment. We crossed the Bay Bridge and drove up University Avenue. As I looked out of the car, my first sense of elation gave way to second thoughts. I saw giant billboards, shabby motels, dusty parking lots along an uninspiring street. My European sense of public order was being shattered. Where had I come to? After London, Berkeley looked unappealing.

But the hotel proved a comforting place. From my room on the seventh floor I could see the whole San Francisco Bay and beyond it a glimpse of the ocean. Soon, low clouds rolled in from the West, split open by shafts of golden light from the sinking sun. Perhaps I had come to the right place after all. But I had to admit to myself that it was different from what I knew. At the door to the old-fashioned dining room a sign read: “Gentlemen are expected to dress formally for dinner (jacket and tie).”  Even formality seemed to have a new meaning in California. I was soon to find out that everything else had, too.

The next morning, I went to visit my new department. I did not have far to go to find Moses Hall on the well-tended campus. Built in the early 20th century, the structure had the re-assuring look of a minor Oxford or Cambridge college. Ahead to one side stood a red-brick French mansion, the University’s oldest building. On the other, Berkeley’s landmark, a proud replica of a Venetian campanile. The mixing of styles, I soon came to appreciate, was part of California culture. Later on, my future (and past) colleague Richard Wollheim drew my attention to the ubiquitous restaurant sign announcing: “Breakfast served 24 hours a day.” This is the story of American cooking, he said. To an Englishman, used to teatime sharply between 3:30 and 5, such a confusion of categories would seem bewildering. It was certainly American and Californian but also curiously liberating.

The department of philosophy was ready to sign me up with a slew of forms. Academic bureaucracy had been minimal in England. At Balliol it had consisted of an old lady and a half-time help. In America it was in full bloom and growing more massive by the day. The land of the free, I learned, was also the land of endless forms and rules – all designed in the name of efficiency and fairness. Having checked in, I sought the way to my new office. The building was a warren of corridors and no one was there to ask. The staircase gave off that odor of quiet boredom that seems to haunt every philosophy department.  Someone had been cooking soup in the basement. I finally found my room looking out pleasantly over a wooded creek. Not bad, I thought. In London I had looked into the trees of Gordon Square; now I was right in the greenery.

On the Avenue

My next turn was, inevitably, a walk down Telegraph Avenue. I found the street alive with visitors from all over the world and, on this very first day, ran unexpectedly into one of my students from London. The Avenue had become famous as a hang-out for hippies, long haired in their tie-dyed shirts and flouncy, flowery dresses, luxuriating in the sweet smell of marijuana. Hare Krishna disciples were snaking through the crowd singing and dancing to their god. This was the epicenter of the world-wide counter-culture together with the Haight-Asbury across the Bay – the place where one experimented with exotic life-styles, exotic faiths, and equally exotic drugs.

I knew of Berkeley also as a place of political agitation and didn’t have far to go to find it. Almost every day demonstrations filled the plaza in front of Sproul Hall on the campus, often disrupted by the police wheeling their rubber truncheons. Clouds of tear gas would occasionally drift into class rooms. But at 5 pm the demonstrators would usually disperse. Everybody would rush home to see whether they were on the evening news. This was California, after all, where media mattered. The “community” was also being informed by a weekly rag called “The Berkeley Barb” whose headlines ran from “Kops Krack Kurfew Kids” to “Oodles of Love and Grass.” Inside, the paper advised on the safe use of illegal substances, reviewed classes in witchcraft, and provided telephone numbers of lawyers in case of arrest.

Campus life was like nothing I had known in Oxford or London. Herds of abandoned dogs chased each other across the campus and sometimes invaded lecture halls. Try to keep going in front of 100 students while a German shepherd is busy undoing your shoe laces. A “post-modern” philosopher came to speak on the difficulty of lecturing while eating an ice-cream cone – while eating said ice cream cone. Someone threatened to blow up Moses Hall and the building was flooded. One of my graduate students was shot to death while working in a second-hand bookstore. My colleague Paul Feyerabend promised every student an A in his class. 700 enrolled, including the entire Athletics team. It felt at times, as if I had landed in an alternative universe.

Drugs were difficult to escape. I was happy to experiment but remained cautious. My brain was, after all, my major asset and I did not intend to ruin it.  One day, Alison, who worked in our office at the time,  talked me into a drive to the sea at Point Reyes, some forty miles away, in order to spend an afternoon on mescaline. The beach was inviting at first but then the fog came in and the icy wind forced us to return to Berkeley. I had never before noticed the extraordinary beauty of changing traffic lights. Back home I lay exhausted on the floor listening to music. The ceiling in my modern apartment consisted of embossed plastic tiles which would sometimes start rotating to the sound of the music. When the movement finally stopped, I realized that the effect of the mescaline was wearing off. The next morning, I woke up and discovered to my surprise a smooth ceiling above me. No tiles, no embossed decorations, just smooth, white plaster.  I had learned a lesson about the distinction between appearance and reality. You may think that you know what is real and what is not, but the reality may turn out to be just another illusion.

One of our graduate students financed his studies by traveling to Asia to return with Buddhist statues stuffed with all kinds of forbidden marerials. At the time, we began our fall semesters by taking the graduate students to a three-day retreat at Asilomar, 100 miles down the coast. On the first visit, our in-house dealer plied everyone who wanted with LSD. At the end of a long afternoon on the beach, the scheduled evening discussion was disrupted by inexplicable gusts of laughter. My conservative colleagues found it bewildering. They had never imagined the free will problem to be so hilarious. The following year, our students decided they only wanted to smoke marijuana. The third year we were reduced to beer. And then no one wanted to go anymore.

Things began to simmer down. Berkeley became more normal. Meanwhile, it had begun to change me, though in ways I still find difficult to assess. I had arrived as a low-level assistant professor; but my Berkeley salary was three times what it had been in London. I felt suddenly rich, bought sunglasses and my first car, and became instantly a Californian. To be precise, I became a “Bay Arean.” What did I know of California and what did I care for the rest of the United States? The Berkeley Hills were behind us and behind them were the Sierras. Our view was to the Pacific Ocean. Far ahead were Japan and China. I was living on the edge of the Western world. That realization has, perhaps, changed me more than anything else.

I have lived in Berkeley now longer than in any other location. I have accommodated myself to the local culture. I have got used to dressing in jeans and t-shirts. I have become more relaxed in the ways I think and behave. I have become a vegetarian. I buy organic produce at our farmers’ market. Practice yoga. Go out hiking in the wilderness. I have become an environmentalist. I gave up on my earlier uninformed conservatism. My political views became radicalized. Also more American? Perhaps not. I still hold my German passport and still think of myself as a European. The longer I live in America, the more I have become aware of the subtle differences that separate me from those who were born and grew up here.

Normal philosophy

In those early days, it was difficult to keep one’s head above water in the daily turmoil of Berkeley. But Moses Hall was a refuge. Inside, philosophy was churning away along its slow, long-suffering tracks. There was plenty of talk about metaphysics and Stoic logic, about numbers and cylindrical algebras, about skepticism and what it is to see a tomato, about the variety of speech acts and the types of implicatures. Politics I heard of only in the quiet words of praise for Ronald Reagan when my senior colleagues spoke to each other. Even Feyerabend, who liked to see himself as a radical outsider and epistemological anarchist, was politically disengaged. I was no different from them in closing my ears to the sounds of the revolution outside.

Only occasionally would our students raise their voice to challenge the political relevance of what we were doing. Shortly before I arrived in Berkeley, the department had denied tenure to Richard Lichtman, a Marxist philosopher with a large student following. My colleagues argued that they could find someone more qualified, but, of course, made no effort to do so once Lichtman was gone. Most of my colleagues thought of philosophy as akin to science and as such entirely unpolitical. There was no place for Marx nor for the rest of 19th century philosophy with all its political entanglements. The history of philosophy ended with Kant and contemporary philosophy began with Frege and Russell. What had come in-between could be safely ignored.

I still do not think that everyone has to join in during moments of political agitation. There should be nooks and crannies where the usual affairs continue unhindered. A place for monks to copy manuscripts which no one else cares for. My colleagues were surely right in thinking that not every important philosophical problem is political in nature. But a colleague from the English department told me one day that our problem was not that we were detached from the events in the street. It was, rather, that the model of philosophy on which we were operating had run its course We were doing normal philosophy, a learned endeavor carried out, admittedly, by smart people – but to what end? I was shocked but had to admit that in other departments philosophical ideas were examined and philosophical texts were read that we were neglecting. An alternative kind of philosophical engagement was taking shape in these places. At some point, I joined colleagues from other departments who were gathering around  Leo Loewenthal, an exile from Frankfurt and a venerable representative of critical theory, in wide-reaching, exhilarating discussions.

The philosophy department at the time was full of logicians. They were all eager to teach our  standard in that area. One of them said to me that teaching the same logic class over and over again allowed him to do so without having to think about it. That was not what I wanted to do. I had taught logic continuously in London and was happy to leave that task behind. My enthusiasm for technical work in that field had definitely faded. I felt drawn to broader, more philosophical topics. Tarski, who had sponsored my move to Berkeley, was, no doubt, disappointed. But he still kept inviting me to his Polish Thanksgivings where his home-made vodka sometimes made us forget the turkey.

I had given up on work in technical logic but continued to occupy myself with the philosophical aspects of Frege’s work. His discovery of a new logic after two thousand years of Aristotelian syllogisms was a decisive break in the history of philosophy. But what had brought it about and what did it signify? I turned to the study of the history of logic, to the 19th century development of mathematics, to the Leibnizian and Kantian roots of Frege’s thinking. Years went by before I finished my book.  For a long time after that I came to be thought of as a Frege scholar and specialist. But that was, in reality, only one side of my philosophical interests.

I was becoming more deeply drawn into Wittgenstein’s work and concern with language in Wittgensteinian terms. More than anything else that would irritate my old teacher, Michael Dummett, who had once assured me that Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics was worthless. I also renewed my early acquaintance with Heidegger. I was little worried over the supposed incompatibility of analytic and continental philosophy. What kind of distinction was this anyway in which one term referred to a methodology and the other to geography? There was good and bad thinking to be found on both sides of that shaky divide, I thought, and the issues often overlapped. My colleague Barry Stroud encouraged my study of Wittgenstein, and my colleague Hubert Dreyfus that of Heidegger. I talked much with them, attended their seminars, and co-taught classes with them. I also rediscovered my interest in epistemology and the philosophy of science. Paul Feyerabend was both an inspiring and a disruptive presence in Berkeley. His concern with the actual history of science disabused me of the narrowly structuralist view of I had learned from Stegmüller in Munich and his rejection of the idea of a universal scientific method appealed to my Wittgensteinian instincts. But he could be harsh in his judgments, telling me at times that I and the rest of the Berkeley philosophers were like rodents gnawing away on moldering bones.

How we got to where we were

The Berkeley department had a curious history but which had been largely forgotten.  But I cam to realize eventually it was still at work in the routines that we were taking for granted.

The first professor had been George Holmes Howison who had come to Berkeley on the recommendation of William James. At the time the connection between Harvard and Berkeley was strong and the Berkeley faculty often referred to the place as “Harvard-by-the-sea.” Howison had made it a condition for accepting the job that the University would supply him with his own private lecture room, furnished according to his precise instructions. Astonishingly, the request was granted. The lecture room had a fire place and a raised stage with a chair and a writing desk. Late in the afternoon, with the students waiting, Howison, tall, bearded, and dressed in a long cloak, would sweep into the room carrying a lapdog. His first task was to answer his mail, while the students were watching. Finally, as darkness fell, he would rise, stir the flames in the fire place and begin to speak about there being no material world, only spirits, Leibnizian monads in space. His students – presumably offspring of California gold diggers – were duly impressed by this ennobling message. Howison became a sought-after public speaker. Even today, the department benefits from an endowment built on his lecture fees.

Not that everything went well for him. Every summer Howison would make a pilgrimage to Göttingen where the great Hermann Lotze had taught whom some considered the new Leibniz. But when the First World War broke out, everything German became taboo. German Americans anglicized their names. The German community in San Francisco renamed their meeting place California Hall. The English broke their Faber pencils and killed their dachshunds. American professors put their German philosophy books away and Howison died heart-broken in 1916.

After Howison, the department settled into humdrum solidity. I had to look for the names of those who came after him and still do not know what they stood for.  We imagine the history of philosophy to be a parade of great thinkers and memorable writings but the truth is that most of that history is forgotten. Only one of the second generation of Berkeley philosophers came to stick in my mind. A man by the name of Jacob Loewenberg– not because of his philosophical work, which I still do not know, but because of his remarkable life recorded in an autobiography he called Thrice-Born. His first birth, Loewenberg wrote, had been in Latvia, the second at Harvard, and the third when he came to Berkeley.  Loewenberg was born into a modest Jewish family in rural Latvia but managed to move on to study philosophy first in Berlin and then at Harvard. He arrived in Berkeley in 1915 as a disciple of Josiah Royce who had persuaded him to devote himself to the study of Hegel. In Berkeley, Howison took his young protégé aside and said: “They tell me that you have a deep interest in Hegel and Royce. You must not allow them too strong an influence. At another time I will show you the error of their ways.” The battle between Howison’s personal idealism and Harvard-style Hegelianism never happened because of Howison’s death the following year. So, Loewenberg stuck to Hegel for the rest of his life and retired from Berkeley fifty years later. What astonished me in the story is that my department has a history of idealist philosophizing of almost a century which had, however, entirely disappeared except for some unread volumes in the department’s library. At faculty meetings, my colleague Benson Mates would sometimes object to a job candidate by saying: “But we don’t even have anybody to teach Hegel.” His tone of voice always made clear that a Hegelian  was, in fact, someone he was least interested in.

Loewenberg had come to America with an idealized vision of its liberal and democratic credentials. Harvard had fully lived up to those expectations and so, it appears, had Berkeley. But his vision would eventually be shattered when the president of the University of California, Robert Gordon Sproul, in 1949 decided to root out “Communists” from the faculty. A loyalty oath required professors to declare that they had never been members of the Communist party or sympathetic to it. At first, there was loud resistance. But after some wrangling, most of the UC faculty decided to provide their signature. This was no big deal for the conservatives and the few genuine radicals considered the document, in any case, worthless. In the end only 16 well-meaning liberals refused to sign up. One of them was Loewenberg. The refuseniks were duly dismissed and Loewenberg spent some years in exile at various Eastern colleges teaching his usual course on Hegel. Eventually, the State Supreme Court re-instituted him and the other dismissed professors. Loewenberg retired, sobered but resigned to the realities of American life. His autobiography describes how he spent his last years sitting in the plaza in front of Dwinelle Hall, contentedly watching the students pass by and looking with sympathy at their new found political activism.

Loewenberg was at peace with himself also as far as the changing philosophical scene was concerned. “Nothing in his life impressed Berg so much as the mutability of philosophical trends and allegiances,” he wrote of himself in the third person. William James, Dewey, and Bergson had come and gone. Pragmatism had flourished and disappeared. The new realists and the critical realists had had their day. “And who could have predicted that logical positivists, so robust and so strident only yesterday, would find themselves so soon moribund?” Loewenberg‘s long experience allowed him to look with equanimity and tolerance at the current idols of the philosophical theater. He was sure that they too would pass.

When Hannah Arendt visited Berkeley in this period, she observed acidly that the philosophy department was “all philosophy of language, and second-rate at that.” Both Loewenberg’s and Arendt’s assessment of the state of philosophy in Berkeley were, in fact, not quite right. Logical positivism was by no means dead and the department was by no means entirely dedicated to the philosophy of language. In the post-Second World War period it had been dominated by Paul Marhenke who had breathed the positivist spirit. Marhenke was known to cite passages from classical philosophy in his classes, beating his forehead while groaning: “I don’t know why we even teach such nonsense.” In his logic class he used Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica as his textbook – surely an impossible undertaking – but with no interest in its philosophical underpinnings. His one purpose was to find shortcuts for proofs. Marhenke was long gone by the time I arrived but some of the positivist spirit sill lingered on.

Philosophers among themselves

But the department was definitely changing. It was not the residue of positivism that struck me, when I arrived, but the pervasive influence of Wittgenstein. Thomas Nagel, Thomas Kuhn, and Stanley Cavell had all begun their careers in Berkeley and had brought Wittgenstein with them from the east Coast. By the time I arrived, all three had moved back to the East, but the Wittgensteinian seeds they had sown had kept growing. Kuhn had gone to MIT after the Berkeley department had denied him tenure. My senior colleagues had judged his Structure of Scientific Revolutions to be insufficiently philosophical. The misjudgment was, perhaps, another sign of the lingering spirit of positivism with its characteristic blindness to the history of science. But Nagel, Kuhn, and Cavell had certainly left a Wittgensteinian aura behind. Those who arrived after them were all, in one way or other, indebted to Wittgenstein. That was evidently so, in different ways, of Tom Clarke, Paul Feyerabend, John Searle and Barry Stroud; but it was equally true of Hubert Dreyfus whose Heidegger sounded at times like Wittgenstein’s nephew.

Another sign of change was that the Americans were becoming a minority in the department. Up till then it had been sturdily American with Loewenberg the single exception.  The newcomers were Barry Stroud a Canadian, Paul Grice from England, and Frits Staal, the Indologist. from the Netherlands. Our specialists in Greek philosophy were both foreigners. Michael Frede a German and Gregory Vlastos a Greek. The same held for our two philosophers of science, Feyerabend was an Austrian and Michael Scriven an Australian. Searle was an American by birth but he had spent years at Oxford ad brought with him an international philosophical outlook. Somewhat later, two more Englishmen, Richard Wollheim and Bernard Williams arrived, not to forget Kwong-loi Shun, originally from Hong Kong, and Paolo Mancosu from Italy, who came both via graduate work at Stanford. Finally, there was myself from Germany, Oxford, and London.

That we came from so many different places contributed, probably, to the fact that we were not much of an intellectual community. Most of us went our own ways. In London I had been used to a different environment. We had met regularly to talk about our work and thus developed a sense of sympathy for what each of us was doing. In Berkeley, one saw many colleagues only at faculty meetings where we bickered over the usual administrative matters. Some of my colleagues traveled incessantly from one continent to the other. This was true not only in our department. Someone joked that the Berkeley faculty was like the US strategic bomber command. At every moment one third was airborne. I had got to know Feyerabend while I was still in London. In the first half of that year he taught at both Berkeley and Yale; in the second in London and Berlin. He was flying back and forth between all these places and it turned out that he was losing money on this deal. Later, in Berkeley, I sometimes thought that Howison had been right and that we were all like monads in space.

To make up for this, there was the seminar given by Paul Grice. I knew him from Oxford and had attended one of his classes which he often suspended when he was playing cricket. His Berkeley seminars had a character of their own. They drew scores of graduate students as well as colleagues from philosophy and other disciplines. Grice spoke in a free-wheeling manner on a wide range of topics. He was not much interested in what other people had written. His goal was to be entirely spontaneous in his thinking. Philosophy, he said, was “thinking on one’s feet” or, at other times, that it was a competitive game. Like cricket? I wondered occasionally. The result could be brilliant but on other days excruciatingly slow. One time, Grice set out to invent a new logic. Afterwards, Richard Grandy and I told him that this logic already existed and was known as combinatory logic and that his version had already been shown to be inconsistent. Grice responded that he would rather discover this for himself. That was heroic but not necessarily productive.

Grice had left Oxford because he felt he deserved the professorship that was given to his colleague Strawson. I don’t know how good the shift to Berkeley was for him philosophically. Grice was a remarkably intuitive thinker. His distinction between natural and non-natural meaning had been an eye-opener. And so was his recognition of the phenomenon he called implicature, the fact that we convey meanings with our utterances that are not literally contained in our words. Only someone English could have seen the importance of this phenomenon. Conversations in England were always laced with implicatures. In Berkeley, Grice began to think that he needed to systematize and formalize his insights. He saw himself in competition with our resident logicians. But doing this was not his personal strength. For this kind of work one needs to attend to the small technical details. Grice assumed that there were “little men,” as he put it laughingly, who could do that work for him.

Grice was a Falstaffian figure; a man with a belly, wild strands of white hair, irregular teeth and an endless appetite for the pleasures of life. What made his face unforgettable were his sharp blue eyes with their intensely intelligent look. He usually dressed in old pair of pants held up precariously with a tie and a blue sweater with holes at the elbows. One of our incoming graduate students had been fascinated by the street life of Berkeley and, in particular, by one street bum whose remarkable face had impressed him – only to discover, once he was enrolled in our program, that the bum in question was his new faculty advisor.

One attraction of Paul’s seminar was the social gathering that followed it. We would go out to eat and drink till late, talking philosophy till we were hoarse. Paul’s favorite spot was an Italian restaurant all the way out on Telegraph Avenue which was mostly deserted except for some sinister looking Italians in the back room. Paul was known there as “il professore” and they would give him second helpings on anything he would ask for, the minestrone, the pasta, the cheap red wine. Paul amused himself with the thought that the place was a local Mafia hangout.

Barry Stroud was one of the colleagues who would usually come along. His family was also of English extraction but he was a very different type of Englishman. Cool, reserved, and fastidious, his work in philosophy was always precise and controlled. Later in life he discovered Italy and spent his sabbaticals in Venice and Rome. The experience gave him a sheen he had previously lacked. Barry’s first book had been on Hume. I had been brought up on the German prejudice that one could safely ignore the English philosophical tradition – quite in contrast to contemporary English thought. It was through Barry’s book that I came to a different view. But I could never decide whether his later concern with Wittgenstein was colored by that bok on Hume, or whether the Hume book had already been written under the influence of Wittgenstein. Like both these philosophers, Stroud was a skeptic at heart but one who felt skeptical even about skepticism. My other friend, Dreyfus, had, of course, nothing to do with the circle around Grice. His thinking revolved entirely around Heidegger and he had no interest in the analytic tradition. I have never known another philosopher so dedicated to one single figure. He once said jokingly that he had never found a single philosophical statement in Heidegger to disagree with. He certainly judged all other philosophers in that light. His real ambition was to apply Heidegger’s philosophy to extra-philosophical problems, which he had done in a provocative book on the limits of computer technology. I liked Bert particularly for the way he taught. There was nothing authoritarian in his style. Instead, he asked his students to help him with some confusion he had got himself into. His courses drew hundreds of them  to the study of Heidegger. His graduate students became a generation of Heidegger scholars. Stroud’s classes were different and attracted a different type of student. They were probing,  meticulous, with intricate arguments on fundamental, though abstract philosophical questions often arising out of Wittgenstein’s writings.

When I arrived in Berkeley, John Searle’s Speech Acts was a philosophical bestseller. Searle was at the time at the height of his powers. In philosophical discussion he was impressively quick, imaginative, and to the point. He could instantly identify the weak spot in someone’s argument and attack it with well-aimed blows. His great contribution to philosophy was to have worked out J.L. Austin’s informal reflections on performative uses of language. Searle had been Austin’s student at Oxford. At some point, the Berkeley department had sought to hire Austin away from Oxford. But when Austin had died suddenly, the department hired Searle instead.  Searle took it into his head to teach me the local customs, He invited me to the winery in which had a stake to acquaint me with the secrets of California wines. He also thought that I needed to know about Baseball and American Football. How could I understand America otherwise? Indeed, how could I understand the examples he used to illustrate his theory? So we went to the games together. But I can’t say that I have kept it up. Was that why, eventually, we gave up on each other? He thought I was reading too many books. I thought that he was increasingly caught up in his own theories.

But where do I fit into this story?

The question kept nagging where I fitted in. Reading was one of my ways to avoid the issue. I had always enjoyed that activity and continued to do so. It was like an addiction. Not that I had a program of what to read. I worked myself forward from one text to another. Later on, I came across Foucault’s description of what he called the warm brotherhood of useless erudition of which he considered himself a member. I recognized myself in this and that was probably one of the reasons for my subsequent interest in Foucault’s work.

After a couple of years in Berkeley, I decided that I wanted to live once again in a real city and so moved to San Francisco.  Th city was still affordable at the time and not as yet crowded with high-rises and corporate headquarters. I found an apartment in the Duboce Triangle at the foot of the Buena Vista hill. The neighborhood had once been the center of Swedish life in the city. There were still a Swedish Seaman’s Mission, a Swedish delicatessen; and a Swedish real estate office. The house in which I lived belonged to people of Swedish extraction. Their grandfather had built many of the neighborhood houses with their elaborate woodwork facades. An Italian grocery store, an Armenian bakery, and a Greek cakeshop rounded things out.

I lived in San Francisco for ten years and enjoyed its amenities. It was a place where people of different origins and different ethnicities had found a way of living harmoniously together. Or so it appeared to me. I told my American students that they should try to live for some time in the city. Many of them were familiar only with the blandness of suburban life and needed to learn of riches of urban existence.

Eventually I left San Francisco and moved back to Berkeley because I was tired of the increasingly difficult journey to the campus. The Bay Bridge was becoming more crowded with cars and public transportation was not always convenient. In order to get to the BART underground train to Berkeley, I had to catch the local tram which was often so full in the morning that it would slide by without stopping. When it did stop, the driver often turned out to be one of my former undergraduate students who would welcome me loudly over the public address system: “Good morning, Professor Sluga.” Even today I often think of San Francisco as my home city.

Was it only the yearning for city life that had brought me there or had I been looking also for some daylight between me and my department? I was becoming increasingly politicized at the time and felt alienated from my department where politics was, at best, a marginal concern. That did not mean that I felt ready now to join the protesters in Sproul Plaza. My demons were different from theirs. I was, in fact, wary of the ongoing agitation. The chanting crowds reminded me of the German students would had helped to bring Hitler to power and of the Chinese students in the Cultural Revolution. I shied away from the irrational energy of such crowds. I was not attracted to messianic political speakers, to flags, uniforms, political conformity. I still feel uncomfortable in a large crowd. I don’t want to march for any cause. I dislike the uniformity of academic robes; I even resist the name tags one is given at conferences. I don’t like to sign public statements. I have never been a member of any party. I don’t like political labels.  I am most skeptical of politicizing philosophers.

What then did it mean that I myself was become more political? What kind of “anti-political” politics was I getting into? Was I an anarchist or libertarian? Those labels did also not fit me. I was sure that there had to be a political order. But I was at the same time suspicious of its realization. I had come of age after the Second World War and like other Germans of my generation I was scarred by the Nazi regime, the war, and the holocaust. I could not extirpate the images of human suffering and wholesale destruction from my brain.

I was certainly not politically detached. On the contrary: with the German history of the first half of the last century before me, I could think of nothing more important. The question was rather: if it’s so easy to go politically wrong, what other, better way is there?

This was the question I came to think about more and more, even as I was working on Frege, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. The matter came to a head for me when I learned that Frege had kept a political diary after the First World War in which he had expressed his admiration for Hitler and had reflected on how one could identify Jews more easily with the help of an appropriate label. I found it all nauseating. In his diary, Frege wrote that he had previously been a liberal. The war and its aftermath seem to have turned him around. I thought that it had, perhaps, been a good that he died in 1924. Otherwise, he would most likely have become an eager camp follower of the Führer in 1933. The discovery made me look anew at Frege’s surrounding. My attention was drawn to Bruno Bauch, one of Frege’s colleagues at the University of Jena, where Frege had spent his career. Bach was a Neo-Kantian philosopher, but also an organizer of rightwing intellectuals, a nationalist extremist and radical anti-Semite who had founded a philosophical society and a journal to promote those causes. Frege, it turned out, had been an early member of that society and had published his late work in its journal. A third figure at Jena was the philosopher Max Wundt, the son of the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, who was an idealist in the mold of Fichte and even more virulent in his nationalism and anti-Semitism than Bauch. So, I said to myself, you can be rational thinker and a great logician and still hold abominable political views. You can be dedicated to Kant’s philosophy with its ethical principles and still be a Nazi. You can be an idealist and still subscribe to the crude Darwinism of Nazi ideology.

I had known, of course, for along time of the controversies that have swirled around Heidegger’s political past. Some of his critics believed that every word he ever uttered was tainted by his Nazi engagement. At the other extreme were those who denied any connection between the philosophy and Heidegger’s politics. My colleague Dreyfus argued that he could always distinguish between Heidegger’s philosophical statements and the political ones and that he was not interested in Heidegger’s politics. But hadn’t Heidegger insisted that his Nazi engagement was rooted in his philosophy? Dreyfus’ response was straightforward. “That,” he said, “is a political statement and I am not interested in it.” This seemed too simple a solution but what then was the connection? Could it be found somewhere in the intricacies of his philosophy? In is existentialism? His critique of reason? His view of history? His notion of community? But since Frege, Bauch, and, Wundt – such different thinkers – had taken the same political route, one had, perhaps, to look more broadly at the philosophical profession to see whether there existed perhaps not common attitudes and beliefs that drew them all in the same direction. Further exploration of this question made me realize that there had been still other German philosophers with yet other different philosophical commitments who had equally joined the Nazi cause. Not all of them had, of course, been drawn into this quagmire. There had been those who had left Germany and Europe for racial or political reasons or both. Ernst Cassirer, Hannah Arendt, Rudolf Carnap, Horkheimer and Adorno come to mind. And a few had been able to stay in a state of inner emigration such as, in particular, Carl Jaspers. But the majority of German philosophers had fully conformed themselves to the Nazi regime. Was there perhaps a problem with the entire profession or, at least, a prevailing way of thinking about the relation of philosophy and politics? This, then, was my next philosophical project, my next book, to try to determine what had made it so easy for all of those philosophers, differently as they were, to accommodate themselves to that forsaken regime.

Taking turns

The department and, in fact, the entire University operated in a more democratic than I had been used to from England. There was no permanent head of the department who could make all the major decisions, but a rotating office with relatively few powers. The important decisions were made at faculty meetings where everybody had a vote. There were numerous committees and subcommittees, some permanent and some ad hoc which wrote and submitted reports. The chair was often merely a channel between the department and the higher levels of the administration – the one who had to pass on the good or bad news coming down from the top.

And the same pattern repeated itself in the Berkeley faculty a large. In theory, at least, the campus was a self-governing academic community with a Senate, an elected leadership, Senate committees and subcommittees, and, of course, Senate meetings and Senate reports. In reality, the bureaucratic machinery of the administration, set up by the “Board of Regents of the University of California,” had the final say since they held the purse strings. We were slowly turning into “employees” of a professionally run and bureaucratically organized corporation.

In the natural course of things, Paul Grice one day became chair of the department. It was felt that we needed with his international stature to represent us to the administration. Paul was not exactly born to that task. He was as careless with paper work as he was with his own appearance. When he finally retired, I helped to clear out his office. There were boxes of unopened letters from pleading deans and desperate publishers. Paul asked me to serve as vice-chair to take some of the burdens of his shoulders. We certainly made an odd pair. Neither of us were familiar with American bureaucracy, its demands, deadlines, and forms. Eventually our administrative assistant blew up and refused to have any more contact with Grice. I had to serve as conduit moving back and forth between their offices. I still had no tenure at the time and when I was finally promoted our Dean of Humanities, a distinguished classicist, said to me: “You know that tenure is there to protect you from your colleagues.” I took the message to heart. Not that I needed to be protected from Grice but I took the remark as an invitation that I should be going my own intellectual way.

One day when I complained to Feyerabend about my administrative work, he said to me: “You have done this all wrong. The first time they asked you, you should have proven complete incompetence and unreliability. They would never have asked you again. That’s what I did.” I could only respond jokingly that he, of course, was a Viennese who was understood to take life easy, but I was a German burdened with an unbearable sense of duty. Feyerabend: “Ach. ‘duty’ is a misprint for beauty.” In other words, I should be doing some beautiful rather than worry about duties.

My vice-chairing of the department did not really prepare me for the moment, a few years later when became department chair. I was certainly not willing to abandon my work in philosophy for this job and so was, probably, less effective in it than I should have been. One of my objectives was to push our offerings in ethics in a new direction by appointing a female candidate who worked on feminism and medical ethics. Some of my colleagues, unfortunately, never accepted her and she moved on after a few years. In addition, I had to deal with a tenure case of a colleague who was both a minority and a woman. The case dragged on for years as it became more and more obvious that she had failed to live up to her initial promise. Even so, her case remained hard-contested. One of the most insistent voices in this drawn-out debate was a colleague who had once said in an all-male faculty meeting that we all really knew that women had no brains. On the other side was a colleague who came one day to my office to tell me: “I don’t think she deserves tenure. She is no good at all. But I will vote for her anyway. And if you should quote me on this, I will deny everything.” The final decision to recommend against her promotion to tenure left a bad after-taste.

One morning I walked into Moses Hall and saw a big poster announcing a new course dedicated to the philosophy of Ayn Rand. I had never heard of any such course and didn’t recognize the names of its two advertised instructors. It turned out that they were from the Ayn Rand Institute in New York; the course was supposed to consist of recorded lectures from the Institute, and course papers were to be sent to New York to be graded there. It was all very strange and completely in conflict with University regulations. On my enquiry, I discovered that the course had been sponsored by one of our colleagues. I called him in and told him that I could not approve it in its current form and that if he wanted to continue with it, he would have to take charge. His response was to write an open-letter accusing me of “German Panzer-mentality.” Fortunately, my other colleagues backed me up. But that was not the end of the story. After a few weeks into the semester, my colleague sent out another blast. I had completely failed in my job and should never have allowed him to take on this course. He had just discovered that the two Ayn Randians from New York were complete idiots. They had actually claimed that Mark Twain was the greatest American author. While he could agree on everything else with them, this was clearly over the top. I survived this one without sleepless nights.

Michel Foucault comes to town

My one achievement as chair was of a different kind. Leo Bersani, the chair of the French department called me one day to ask whether we were interested in co-sponsoring a half-semester visit from Michel Foucault. Foucault had been to Berkeley for individual lectures but was interested in establishing a regular relationship with us. I jumped at the possibility without even asking my colleagues and committed us to such an agreement. Fortunately, I didn’t hear any protests afterwards. Foucault was at that moment at the height of his fame and career and we were always keen to add to the department’s luster. The possibility that he would be coming once a year to teach a seminar was an exciting idea. Foucault’s sudden death the following year made this unfortunately a single occasion.

One of Foucault’s conditions had been that he would be teaching only a small, select group of students. We managed to keep it at that. But otherwise it was difficult to keep his crowds of admirers away. I asked him to give a colloquium talk to the philosophy graduate students and faculty. We kept the time and place secret but without success. When I took him into the lecture room, his face fell. The place was packed to the rafters.

We had also arranged or Foucault to give the Howison lecture that year – the philosophy department’s single public annual lecture. We were sure that it would attract a large audience. So we booked Zellerbach Hall, the campus theater with some 800 seats. An hour before the lecture, the place was crammed full and doors had to be locked. Still, there were masses of people outside. At short notice, we managed to establish an audio link to the Wheeler Hall lecture room which had an additional few hundred seats. Even so, not everybody got in. I knew already that Foucault had an ambivalent attitude to his own fame and was concerned about his possible rection. But he knew how to handle the event. Speaking with his usual charm, he  devoted his lecture to a painstaking examination of Stoic ethics, peppering it with plenty of Greek quotations. After the lecture, I overheard two students who had just come from the event. “What did you think of the lecture,” the first one asked. “Oh, I liked it alright,” was the reply. “Did you understand anything?” “No,” was the answer, “but I loved his voice.” Foucault’s French accent had carried the day.

Foucault spent much time in the main library. I would often seem him on the way there dressed nattily dressed in his tweed jacket, with brief case loaded with papers. For the semester he had rented an apartment in the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco from one of the French professors: a wonderfully Victorian area but the commute from there to the campus was terrible. I was still living in the city at the time and not too far from his place. So, I would occasionally offer him a ride back in my car. Stuck in the rush hour traffic on the Bay Bridge we talked about philosophy, America, and AIDS. I had discovered some affinities between him and Wittgenstein – for instance, in their rejection of the Cartesian conception of the self but more generally also in their freely experimental attitude to philosophy. Foucault said that he did now know much about Wittgenstein and so I tried to convince him that he should take a look. As Europeans we were agreed in our wary view of the US and our attraction to California. I warned him of the dangers of the new HIV virus which didn’t even have a name at the time. Foucault would hear nothing of it and insisted that it was all part of what he called “American anti-sexual hysteria.” It was the year before he died of the disease. He was just discovering the liberating world of San Francisco’s gay subculture. One Sunday afternoon I opened my front door and there was Foucault walking down my street dressed from head to toe in black leather. I invited him in and we talked for a while till he excused himself saying he was just on his way to the gay leather bars South of Market.

Foucault’s visit made a deep impact on the Berkeley faculty. My colleagues Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow from Anthropology talked extensively with him as they were preparing the first comprehensive book on his work in English. Professors from French, English literature, and History interacted with him. I was also becoming intrigued with his work. I had first come across it in a faculty reading group where we studied The Order of Things. Ian Hacking was one of its participants and so were my colleagues Dreyfus and Searle. Hacking made sense for us of the book by pointing out its parallels to Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. But the details of the book still remained impenetrable for many of us at the time. I certainly didn’t realize yet how much Foucault’s thinking would come to mean to me later on.