A few Saturdays ago, my wife and I visited a local Muslim school that was hosting lunch as a way for neighbors to meet each other and to learn about Islam. The imam handled people’s questions with warmth, information, and humor. When asked whether Muslims felt that they had been mistreated in our area, he answered, “I wouldn’t say that we’ve been mistreated, but that we are misunderstood.” I thought that was a fine distinction, and one that the political mainstream seems increasingly incapable of making.

I want to write about this tendency on the part of the powerful to confuse umbrage with injustice, using two sources for my thinking: the anthropological philosophy of René Girard, and the worldview portrayed in the relatively recent movie God’s Not Dead. In short, what I want to discuss is what my friend James Stanescu has called “reverse scapegoating”: the claim made by those that scapegoat that they are the ones who have been scapegoated. It’s a rhetorically potent move, inasmuch as we have increasingly come to see victims as innocent, so if those who oppress the marginalized can make it appear as if they are victimized, then they retain the social authority to enforce the status quo. Crocodile tears: through feigning powerlessness, the powerful retain their entitlement to power.

I see this strategy at work in God’s Not Dead, which presents the situation of a straight white Protestant who can afford college as if he is one of the early martyrs being thrown to the lions in a Roman coliseum, just by virtue of taking an intro philosophy class. This is not played for laughs at all, but is portrayed as a young man’s courageous, lonely stand against the rising flood of a secular (read “atheist” (read “anticlerical”)) worldview that unfairly and aggressively suppresses the appreciation or even discussion of Christian views. This is a comparison made by a minor character warning the protagonist, Josh, upon seeing the cross he wears around his neck at an unnamed college in Louisiana—as though it would be a rarity in that setting for someone to dress that way. This is the first sign that the movie will trade in treating the norm as if it is the exception, and the exceptional as if it is normal.

For reasons that will become clear below, it matters that the college is unnamed but also in Louisiana. On the one hand, by being anonymous, the college is meant to stand in for any campus; we are to think that this is an artistic representation of academic persecution going on at college campuses everywhere, and by extension, a culture war between global forces of devout tradition and secular modernity. On the other hand, by being set in Louisiana, the movie hints at an equation of Christian faith with “the heartland” of the best country on earth, where plainspoken men and women possess a salt of the earth wisdom that ultimately triumphs over the shifty dissimulation of over-clever coastal elites.

In other words, over people like the villain, an atheist philosophy professor named Radisson. Radisson is persistently sarcastic, proudly struts his authority in the classroom, and joins his snobby atheist academic friends in berating the former student he’s dating for being a Christian and for serving a bad bottle of wine. He is an entitled jerk whose sole redeeming feature is that he only acts this way out of embittered childhood frustration with God’s failure to heal his terminally ill mother. He’s a commanding presence in this movie, thanks in large part to the acting skills of Kevin Sorbo, who imbues the role with as much subtle pathos as the ham-fisted script can allow. It’s Radisson who sets the plot in motion by demanding on the first day of class that students write “God is dead” on a sheet of paper, or else they will get a zero for a 30% portion of the class. Josh refuses to declare God dead and challenges Radisson to debate the subject—for fear that earning a maximum of a C in one class will “wreck his GPA” (these are the stakes taken to be equivalent to Roman persecution)—and aims to vindicate Christianity by “putting God on trial” in these classroom debates.

Radisson and Josh thereby form bowdlerized versions of Ivan and Alyosha in this C-grade version of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. These “arguments” consist largely in trading back and forth decontextualized quotations that name-drop competing authorities, until Josh emerges (by class vote) as the victor. Aside from a few scenes where he burns the midnight oil and gets in arguments with his vapid girlfriend (who dumps him for this grandstanding), Josh never goes through anguish; there’s never a scene where Josh seriously feels the weight of the possibility that there may be no God. It should be clear by this point that Josh is a cipher, a Mr. Everyman unburdened by existential crisis or any concern for people Jesus called “the least of these.” We never see or even hear about any family members Josh might have. Aside from the flakey girlfriend, he has no ties, no kith, no kin. Unlike Radisson, he has no surname. These relational and historical ties do not matter for the movie’s project, and indeed their absence allows Josh to take on the character of the universal subject—on the understanding, of course, that everybody is supposed to see themselves in a young, straight, white, middle class American man.

It’s here that we’re beginning to see what the movie is about, and why it matters that it’s set in Louisiana. The existential question of God’s nonexistence is not actually what the movie is about, nor is the movie interested in parsing the multifarious dimensions of what secularity, interfaith dialogue, rationality, or even Christianity can mean. Set aside the fact that every philosophy department teaches a course in the history of modern philosophy where practically every author, from Descartes to Kant, was a Christian (with the exception of Hume and, depending on who you ask, Spinoza). Set aside the fact that every atheist philosopher I’ve met is interested in teaching students how to think rather than what to think, and I’ve never heard even anecdotal evidence of professors insisting their students become atheists in order to pass a portion of the class, as the movie displays (and implies to be normalized). For all their errors those portrayals are actually a fig leaf for what the movie is really about, and only one discussion of the movie I’ve come across has seen it.

The movie is actually about validating the white establishment in America and coming to its defense. It is telling that one of the minor characters is a student from China—where there is actual persecution against Christians—yet he remains a minor character even after he converts. He is simply there to underscore our white protagonist’s bona fides, as are the two other people of color with names in the movie. One of them is a perpetually smiling reverend from an unnamed country in Africa, who embodies the stereotype of the “Magical Negro” to the hilt, visiting a white pastor whose surfer haircut and cool bracelets briefly disguise the fact that he is marginally less milquetoast than Josh. I will let you guess which of these two, the reverend or the pastor, the movie lavishes with more time, attention, and characterization. Like the student from China, the reverend is simply there to assure the white pastor that his comfortable life is just as godly. The third non-white character is a young student of unspecified Middle Eastern descent, whose brutish Muslim father forces her to wear a hijab, which she explains as “old-fashioned” and takes off at every available opportunity, such as when she cries to the baffled white pastor after he father disowns her for being secretly Christian. (In this tidy equivalence of a headscarf with Islam, one gets the sense that it’s been a while since the filmmakers attended a Greek Orthodox church.) Despite the fact that her father has beaten her and kicked her out of the home simply for being Christian—leaving aside how implausible that is—we never find out whether she cobbles together a new home life, or sticks by her faith despite this hardship. The real struggle, we are to believe, is Josh staring down the humiliation of a C in one class his first semester, a matter that he has decided to make public.

James described the movie to me as “a Tarantino revenge flick,” and I’m hard-pressed to disagree: every atheist in the movie either dies or gets a death sentence by the end. The movie is not really interested in exploring what it means to be a Christian—the faith is ahistorically portrayed as homogenous in the invisibly sectarian way that “nondenominational” (evangelical) Christianity tends to claim—because it defines itself negatively, over against an Enemy that does not really exist. In this movie’s universe, we can identify with Manichean ease who the believers are and who the infidels are. A blogger for “The New Left”[1] drives a car with a vegetarian bumper sticker, so we instantly know she is a liberal and therefore an atheist—and lo and behold, her first words are embittered invective against Willie Robertson, the celebrity from Duck Dynasty who attributes his worldly success to God’s favor. He wears an American flag as a bandana so we know he’s patriotic and therefore conservative and therefore devout—and lo and behold, he soon quotes Scripture about the need to acknowledge Jesus before men in order to be acknowledge oneself before God, which is “simple” without exegesis or existential grappling.[2]

The faith of each character is interchangeable with his; no Christians ever dispute over the meaning of any verse or what the right response to any situation is. For instance, there are no Catholics in this movie; they simply don’t exist in its universe. The protagonist invokes Georges Lemaître, who proposed the theory of the Big Bang, but refers to him as “a theist,” totally erasing over the fact that he was a Catholic priest. Even when citing a priest’s scientific discoveries as proof of God’s existence, the movie has to regard Catholics as not being real Christians, which should tell you something. This massification comes to a head in the movie’s denouement, which is Willie Robertson’s message at a packed Christian rock concert that if they love Jesus then they’ll show it by going into their cell phones and texting everyone in their contacts that “God’s not dead.” In case it wasn’t clear enough, the movie repeats this with a title card at the end, and indeed, the movie is more of a marketing campaign based on a meme than a film with an artistic vision that proceeds out of lived experience. If the movie ignores subtleties and finer points of theology and the messiness of concrete practice, if it steamrolls praxis under dogma, it is because its real goal is to mobilize, and so it is no accident that in the process it creates a mob.

The irony is that what motivates mob mentality—and gives urgency or even a semblance of rationality to its capacity to erupt into collective violence—is the latent fear that we are losing our individuality. It is here that Girard makes the first of many startling claims in his masterpiece, The Scapegoat: despite what we might think, it is not difference that the intolerant fear, but sameness. This is what Girard calls “the crisis of undifferentiation”; it is the anxiety that we are losing what makes us special. As an anthropologist, Girard notes that every culture takes itself to be sophisticated, to already respect all respectable differences, and to be fine with those who are different so long as they stay over there.

To illustrate this, take the current discourse of neo-Nazis and how they say they do not want genocide but simply an all-white “ethnostate.” First of all, note the fact that displacing all people of color would amount to genocide. What are neo-Nazis so afraid of that they would propose something so heinous? They fear that immigration means “we” are losing what’s special about America, and the fear there is that a person of color could be their neighbor, or marry their sibling, or teach their children. Their xenophobia is a fear that it may become hard to tell the difference between those who are “white” and those who aren’t. The fuzzy boundaries of who does and does not count as “white” deeply dismay and alarm them; I imagine they would dislike hearing that at one time the Irish were not counted as “white,” since the question of whether Jews are “white” brought them to schism.[4] Girard’s theory allows us to see the irrationality behind this and other modern forms of intolerance that take the form of the question, “Why can’t they be tolerant like us?”

Out of this anxiety to distinguish ourselves, Girard argues, we latch onto small and irrational differences as though they hold monumental significance: think about the animosity between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland, or between the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda. As an elaboration of Freud’s idea of “the narcissism of minor differences,” Girard tries to probe into why societies work so hard to contradistinguish themselves from people who are so similar to them, even to the point of arbitrarily selecting a victim and taking that victim’s oppression to be socially necessary. This is why we are so easily swept up into mob violence—because the continuation of society itself appears to be at stake, threatened by the scapegoat.

The signs that indicate a victim’s selection result not from the difference within the system but from the difference outside the system, the potential for the system to differ from its own difference, in other words not to be different at all, to cease to exist as a system. This is easily seen in the case of physical disabilities. The human body is a system of anatomic differences. If a disability, even as the result of an accident, is disturbing, it is because it gives the impression of a disturbing dynamism. It seems to threaten the very system. Efforts to limit it are unsuccessful; it disturbs the differences that surround it. These in turn become monstrous, rush together, are compressed and blended together to the point of destruction. Difference that exists outside the system is terrifying because it reveals the truth of the system, its relativity, its fragility, and its mortality.[5]

This is why scapegoating flares up in times of social crisis, when the traditional categories and distinctions start breaking down; society as we know it appears to be grinding to a halt. We start grasping at straws and pointing fingers, not so much because we lack the intellectual capacity to investigate into the actual cause of social ills, but because of an irrational and zealous conviction that somebody must pay. Again, it is not so much ideological superstition that motivates scapegoating, for that does not explain the bizarre and potent fervor that makes the superstition so attractive to begin with.

Instead, it is the crisis of undifferentiation, and this in turn rests on what Girard calls “mimetic desire.” Human beings have to be taught how to desire, Girard thinks, and we learn what we want and how to want by mimicking the desires of others. Think of how you can go all day without eating, perhaps without it even occurring to you that you are hungry, and the moment you see someone eating fried pickles you think, “Oh, that looks good.” It suddenly hits you that you are hungry, and have a specific hankering for something you normally wouldn’t choose. Our mimeticism naturally leads us to want fungible goods that cannot be shared, and thus we come into conflict. Or, even when from a rational perspective it is perfectly clear that we can share goods, each of us want to be the only person to have that. Think about how a child will steal another child’s toy even though he already has one identically like it.

My way of glossing the crisis of undifferentiation is to think of it in terms of a profoundly distressing question: who am I if I’m not the only person to want this? Rather than limit my desires or find some other way to feel special, it is easier to deflect my attention away from this crisis of identity, and to try eliminating the person who is an obstacle to my desire. This is why we so often get into heated arguments or come to blows with our best friends, our siblings, our fellows. This is why, at the climax of so many action movies, the villain says something along the lines of, “We’re not so different, you and I.”[6] That truth is too horrible to think about for too long; no wonder the hero has to kill the villain immediately afterwards. According to Girard, this is why so many myths tell tales of siblings (such as Cain and Abel)—or even more to his point, twins (such as Romulus and Remus)—murdering each other.

In point of fact, according to Girard, it is precisely this kind of groundless murder that all civilizations (not just Rome) are founded upon. Our institutions are waist-deep in blood we take to be necessary to have shed. There are bones in the foundations we have forgotten about. Mimeticism leads to a cycle of violence and retribution, but if there is a scapegoat, that temporarily relieves the pressure internal to mimeticism because we take the victim to be the cause of our conflict. For a time, order is restored and things actually do get better. But then mimetic desire triggers the crisis of undifferentiation again, thereby “necessitating” the selection of another victim. Over time, this pattern can become ritualized and taken as necessary for maintaining cosmic balance—and that is precisely what sacrifice is, according to Girard, and why every society has engaged in animal (or even human) sacrifice somewhere down the line in its history.

Witches in Salem, Jews in Nazi Germany, Japanese-Americans during WWII, communists during the Red Scare, immigrants from some (but not all) majority-Muslim countries—who the scapegoats are changes, but the social mechanism of scapegoating remains even in “advanced” societies. The story about what the scapegoat is guilty of is secondary, which is why the causal connection between the victim and the social crisis can be so tenuous or arbitrary. The zeal for sacrifice continues even today in the aforementioned conviction that somebody must pay, even when there is no real harm that has been done; mimeticism means we go out in search of insults we can interpret as injury, precisely to have somebody we can pin our frustrations upon.

I believe this is where we came in.

God’s Not Dead is seething with the fervor of mimetic violence. It’s not enough that atheists be proven wrong; they have to die for the narrative to achieve the closure it seeks. It’s as though atheism—which, in this evangelical milieu, is synonymous with intellectualism and progressivism—is a mortal sin, and the wages of sin is death. Christ’s sacrifice was somehow not sufficient for all humankind, and instead must keep on being repaid, on account of the anxiety instilled by the idea that America is losing what’s made it special, what’s made it supreme among all nations: a Christianity hazardously and appallingly equivalent to white supremacism, as James Cone has brilliantly pointed out. We should ask ourselves whether it’s accidental that Richard Spencer makes the same equation the movie makes, where in spite of saying that he does not believe in God, he identifies himself as “a cultural Christian.” Within this scapegoating perspective, people of color cannot count as real Christians, for “real Christians” and “the real America” are one and the same. What else can explain how a Christian could watch this movie and not be disgusted by its dehumanizing and violent attitude toward the heathens, other than that it is an exercise in self-validation in the face of an Enemy who poses no real threat? From a Girardian perspective, Americans thirst for rituals that reenact and lend justification to its murderous origins, and the popularity of God’s Not Dead speaks to this false need.

According to Girard, the logic of the persecution text becomes more complex over time, as the untenable and irrational nature of the scapegoat mechanism is slowly but surely becoming more apparent throughout history. Whereas before, people could be “naïve persecutors” who saw nothing wrong in lynching a scapegoat, now people have a greater awareness that victims of mob violence can be innocent. In order to persist, the scapegoat mechanism has to become more subtle to accommodate this dawning awareness. My hypothesis is that reverse scapegoating is a reactionary stance, taken up in response to the universal truth of universal inclusivity. It’s no accident that the Enemy of God’s Not Dead is a horde of progressives. The reverse scapegoating of recent decades of Pat Buchanan’s self-declared “culture wars” inform the political context of this movie: the real victims are conservatives, and the truly intolerant ones are liberals.

Girard’s account of the demonic sheds light on what makes reverse scapegoating possible. Following the classic Augustinian formulation of evil as the privation of the good all the way to its logical conclusion, Girard holds that Satan is not an entity that actually exists. Instead, “Satan” is name for the spirit of accusation that permeates the political establishment and underwrites its imperialist logic, which explains why Satan is described as “the prince of this world.” Since evil is parasitic upon the good, the scapegoating mentality cannot exist apart from those it possesses (indeed, Girard reads demonic possession this way), and it takes the form of divisiveness that inflames and rationalizes mimetic rivalry.[7] Because our political institutions have not yet internalized the spirit of universal inclusivity that Christ taught, the kingdom of God has yet to be realized, and is beset on all sides by the kingdoms of this world that it challenges. Because Christianity teaches that we are no longer to think of anyone as an Enemy of God, it takes away the self-imposed zeal for persecution that has defined all society hitherto, and thus poses a “threat” to those who crave a threat so that they can keep on craving, and not share space and resources (or think of everyone as their neighbor). Christianity’s internal logic is to be at “war” with the very idea that the nature of reality is war, and so it is not accidental but essential that Christianity is pacifist.[8] One shares this message not through the forceful indoctrination of the missionary (so hard to distinguish from the imperialist), beating the unwashed heathens over the head with a blunt dictum, but through the unforced force of living the Way (John 13:35).

The culture wars of Pat Buchanan and God’s Not Dead undermine this idea that we do not need an Enemy, for they would not know how to make America or Christianity great without some threat that is implicitly in the way of making both great again. It must demonize in order to conceive of itself as angelic; it must reverse scapegoat in order to buy its sense of grace on the cheap. (Indeed, at no point in the movie does any Christian offer any substantial help to anyone else; they all simply engage in virtue signaling.) A supremacist society cannot stand an affront to its supremacy, and it uses this as pretext to dominate new lands and markets. As Girard puts it, “To adore Satan is to aspire to world domination.”[9] This warmongering attitude is implicit in the normalized violence of the stance toward gun ownership taken by “real Americans,” represented again by Willie Robertson as he defends his hunting lifestyle in front of the shrewish leftie reporter.[10] This zeal for a culture war comes out most strikingly in a scene where Radisson briskly stalks up behind Josh in a hallway after class, slaps a hand on his shoulder, and whirls him around to practically hiss in his face, “In that classroom, there is a God, and I’m him! I’m also a jealous God, so do not try to humiliate me in front of my students!”

Only out of a demonizing spirit that needs an adversary would it strike anybody as plausible that an experienced and well-educated atheist would care enough about a freshman’s unoriginal objections that they would resort to violence and blackmail, at his workplace and in public view, just to silence them. While this scene is admittedly fictional, the movie’s final move is to provide a title card enumerating court cases of secular “condemnation” of Christians, to drive home the message that what you’ve seen might as well be real, that it dramatizes a real and ongoing persecution. Yet in almost every case listed, we find exaggeration or outright fabrication.

It is at that moment that the movie reveals its true message: to varying degrees of one-dimensionality, its characters are there simply to prop up the mechanism of reverse scapegoating. From a Girardian perspective, the movie engages in the very kind of demonic behavior it attributes to Radisson’s dimestore Miltonic rebellion. It is a movie possessed by the spirit of the Accuser. God’s Not Dead is of the devil.

[1] This movie passed up the opportunity to clarify whether minoritarian agitation and intersectional analyses reduplicate or overcome previous debates regarding the favorability of a united front or a popular front. I for one was really hoping to hear more about the shortcomings of class-only/class-first leftism.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVnVpIB5C48

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3X6LxYQP4Y

[4] https://newrepublic.com/article/140053/white-nationalists-came-washington

[5] René Girard, The Scapegoat, p. 21

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH0YPXb49q0

[7] Girard, The Scapegoat, p. 196

[8] Girard, The Scapegoat, pp. 189-190: “Jesus speaks as if the satanic principle had used up its force for order and as if all social order would henceforth succumb to its own disorder. …The reason lies in the fact that the violence of the cultural order is revealed in the Gospels…and the cultural order cannot survive such a revelation. Once the basic mechanism is revealed, the scapegoat mechanism, that expulsion of violence by violence, is rendered useless by the revelation. It is no longer of interest. The interest of the Gospels lies in the future offered mankind by this revelation, the end of Satan’s mechanism. The good news is that scapegoats can no longer save men, the persecutors’ accounts of their persecutions are no longer valid, and truth shines into dark places. God is not violent, the true God has nothing to do with violence, and he speaks to us not through distant intermediaries but directly. The Son he sends us is one with him. The Kingdom of God is at hand.”

[9] Ibid., p. 196

[10] With his prominent beard, his lifestyle in the wilderness, his homespun wisdom, as well as his giant face enjoining the faithful to mobilize the godly message at the rock concert, I am beginning to think Willie Robertson is this movie’s John the Baptist.

Categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: Augustine, bibliolatry, demonology, empire, evil, Girard, James Cone, mimetic desire, reverse scapegoating, scapegoating, war

A Desire Older than Desiderata

Joseph Trullinger

Posted on August 22, 2016

There is a tradition of common sense philosophy that rejects the possibility that reason is able to have or generate any interest by itself. Hume spoke for many when he said: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”[1] Like Hume, many people conceive of reason as separate from emotion, and needing the emotions in order to resolve upon a course of action, or even as playing no real part in how we decide. Think, for instance, of how readily the phrase “cold and calculating” is associated with “rational.” Think of how smoothly the Vulcans in Star Trek fit into our stereotype of the rational person: rational people are literally inhuman.

In this common sense view, reason is not meant to be free but to slave away for getting what we want as a kind of “living tool” (Aristotle’s definition of the slave). Reason then is an instrument for getting whatever it is we already happen to want, and it does so through problem-solving or troubleshooting whenever we encounter obstacles to our projects. For Max Horkheimer, it is no coincidence that instrumental reason has been put into the service of seeing people as tools, whether in the brutal form of totalitarian regimentation or the softer form of capitalist wage slavery.[2]

Today we will see how radically and vigorously Kant disagrees with this popular stereotype of instrumental reason and its Humean authorization, and we can do so by seeing why Kant thinks of reason itself as being desiderative without needing desiderata. It turns out that for Kant, reason itself is desire, but desire of a special kind that is anterior to any object we are externally determined to find appealing. Or, to use the Levinasian metaphor I used in the title of this post, practical reason (i.e., the will) is a kind of desire older than any desideratum. Much in the way that Plato says the Good surpasses being (and the lesser forms) in age and power, Kant says the desire for goodness is the source for desiderata of its own, what ought to be made real.[3]

Kant thinks that free will can determine itself independently of any object of desire, and resolve upon a course of action simply through a disinterested form or manner of desiring—that is, unconditionally good willing—and how this in turn means that the desire to be a good person is not something external to free will. It is pivotal for any deep understanding of Kantian morality to grasp that practical reason can set ends for itself without having to first acquire those ends from an external (pathological) source; although he alters the word order from time to time, Kant formulates this as “reason being of itself practical.” This is how I can make duty the determining basis of my will, without there having to be some end attached to the performance of that duty, some pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. This is how moral agency can be disinterested without being uninterested.

The key lies in Kant’s distinction between what he calls the lower power of desire and the higher power of desire. By higher desire Kant does not mean desires that yield more pleasure in a raw and strictly quantitative sense, which seems to be the operating stance of somebody like Bentham or the Cyrenaics, for whom all pleasures fall into the same scale. Nor does the higher power of desire signify the more refined stance of somebody like Mill—or as we’ll see in a second, Leibniz and Wolff—who demarcate qualitatively higher pleasures from lower ones, usually along the lines of the pleasures of the mind and those of the body. Contrary to all of these, by higher desire Kant means practical self-determination. The lower power of desire, on the other hand, is pathological inclination (whether mental, physical, or otherwise). Kant illustrates how intellectualism falls within the mercenary logic of the lower power of desire with some unusually evocative and concrete examples:

The same human being can return unread an instructive book that he cannot again obtain, in order not to miss a hunt; he can leave in the middle of a fine speech in order not to be late for a meal; he can leave an intellectual conversation, such as he otherwise values highly, in order to take his place at the gaming table; he can even repulse a poor man whom at other times it is a joy for him to benefit because he now has only enough money in his pocket to pay for his admission to the theater. If the determination of his will rests on the feeling of agreeableness or disagreeableness that he expects from some cause, it is all the same to him by what kind of representation he is affected. The only thing that concerns him, in order to decide upon a choice, is how intense, how long, and how easily acquired, and how often repeated this agreeableness is.[4]

The heteronomy definitive for the lower power of desire means that it is our usual standpoint, the standpoint where everything is for sale. This includes the intellectual pleasures of the Leibnizian ethics of perfection. One fascinating thing to note is that is that Kant includes “consciousness of our strength of soul in overcoming obstacles opposed to our plans” as one of the intellectual pleasures we can heteronomously desire through the lower power of desire.[5] This would be identical to his characterization of Stoic rigidity of will, and it has the subtle import that Kantian autonomy is not the hyper-individualism of mentally steeling yourself to always get your way, nor is it the pride of tenacity through adversity. Despite how easily his biography and his cantankerous tenor give that impression, self-denial is amoral for Kant, and sometimes we conflate this lower power of desire with morality itself.[6]

The salient difference is that with the lower power of desire we judge something to be good because we desire it, whereas with the higher power of desire we desire something because we judge it to be good.[7] As always, Kant cannot furnish any conclusive evidence that we ever actually succeed in desiring the good qua good, but if it is not conceivable that we could make this the determining basis of our will, autonomy would be impossible and therefore so would morality.[8] Freedom must be founded without ever being found. Indeed, strictly speaking, the hardness of abiding by the moral law cannot count as proof of free will (self-determination through practical reason), because nothing can, but also because as we saw earlier, being hard on oneself can be a sick pleasure (and thus spring out of the lower power of desire).

Kant calls this self-denial motivated by self-love moral enthusiasm, or as Pluhar’s translation more evocatively puts it, moral fanaticism.[9] Like the religious fanatic, the moral fanatic takes himself to be on a higher plane than the common run of humanity. The word for fanaticism (Schwärmerei) comes from the German “to swarm” (schwärmen), and like a swarm of bees or birds the fanatic is abuzz with fluttering feelings, roiling about and wreaking havoc. For Kant this ranting and raving is no innocent error, but the arrogance of thinking oneself equal to or above the moral law—that is, the Stoic boasting that virtue is easy and delightful—and this has to be struck down with the humbling comparison of one’s maxims to the moral law in all its austerity.[10]

The moral fanatic is incentivized to endure hardships for morality out of “ebullitions of feeling,”[11] but truly moral action can (and often does) lack this pathological sentimentality altogether. The thought of having done one’s duty often lacks warm fuzziness, and is instead cold comfort. I often think of this when friends mean to compliment me by remarking on what an honest person I am. I can’t help but think: isn’t that bare minimum?[12] So I don’t lie habitually. Whoop de doo.

Kant clarifies that the satisfaction (if we want to call it that) that comes from conscientious behavior is often unsatisfying, if not dissatisfying:

When an upright man is in the greatest distress, which he could have avoided if he could only have disregarded duty, is he not sustained by the consciousness that he has maintained humanity in its proper dignity in his own person and honored it, that he has no cause to shame himself in his own eyes and to dread the inward view of self-examination? This consolation is not happiness, not even the smallest part of it. For, no one would wish the occasion for it on himself, or perhaps even a life in such circumstances. But he lives and cannot bear to be unworthy of life in his own eyes. This inner tranquility is therefore merely negative with respect to everything that can make life pleasant; it is, namely, only warding off the danger of sinking in personal worth, after he has given up completely the worth of his condition. It is the effect of a respect for something in comparison and contrast with which life with all its agreeableness has no worth at all. He still lives only from duty, not because he has the least taste for living.[13]

The empirical blandness of dutifulness is instructive in multiple ways. For one thing, it underscores how mysterious self-determination is, how it surpasses the intelligibility that comes from there being conditions that trigger decisions. Kant’s distinction in the passage above between person and condition emphasizes that even when there is no material, social, or even emotional benefit to being a good person—no better state of things into which I enter—I can make my character matter to me more than any condition I could enjoy. Everything depends on seeing how making integrity matter to myself does not come automatically. I can and often do easily disavow self-respect as being unimportant to me. Despite conscience being an inalienable feature of all moral agents, people ignore their conscience all the time through various socially acceptable strategies, as Tolstoy argues in “Why Do People Stupefy Themselves?” [14]

Empirical self-tranquilization is not the same as the moral tranquility of true self-respect, which can only be had by behaving with integrity, that is, through the self-consistent free behavior codified in the moral law and intuitively knowable to us all through the simple question, “What if everybody did that?” (the categorical imperative). This means that there are no shortcuts to self-respect, no ways of gaming the system of moral agency to get tranquility through the lower power of desire, without honest and autonomous self-determination. To quote one of Kant’s favorite authors, “Long is the way/And hard that out of Hell leads up to light.”[15]

Moral fanaticism is an attempt to bypass the narrow path of duty, to get the end of self-respect before one’s conscience without the process of conscientiousness. It sees righteousness merely as a means to self-righteousness, and ironically thereby loses sight of genuine selfhood. The moral fanatic reifies himself through self-conceit: he thinks of character like an object he can get out of a certain way of behaving, and in so doing misconceives of personhood as a kind of condition. The moral fanatic engages in morality for the sense of superiority it gives him, but Kant stresses that a dutiful mindset often makes us feel quite the opposite of superior. The moral fanatic is looking at himself as if from the outside, as though the story of his moral striving is already finished and all he has to do is enjoy each installment of as it comes out. The act of comparing oneself to the moral law, by humbling us and striking down our self-conceit, unfreezes the moral fanatic’s flash-frozen self-conception.[16]

Personality is not a plaything, for it is not a thing at all; the non-objectifiability of the soul returns here as the idea of character as something to be perpetually enacted, not something premade and fated to unfold. It is unbedingt—unconditioned, unthinged, and uncertain. The higher power of desire—the capacity to desire to be a good person for its own sake, and not simply use one’s personhood merely as a means to bask in “ebullitions of feeling”—acts independently of any object or objectification, for it is self-subjection to the moral law and ipso facto self-subjectification.

Most people ignore how Kant says that duty’s source is personality—Persönlichkeit, personhood itself—and so the moral law is the idea in codified form of the completely good disposition or character, or the good will that Kant identifies at the beginning of the Groundwork as unconditionally valuable.[17] By thinking of a good will through the metaphor of law we attend to its lack of exemptions, the unconditional necessity of what must be and what we must be to enact it. This is the meontic dimension of the moral law: the ought transcends the is. The Good surpasses being in both age and power. This power is not power as we usually define it, in terms of violence or the power to determine others; it is the power of self-determination, the higher power of desire. It is practical reason’s capacity to rule itself (autonomy), to not have to look to any inclination to tell it what to decide.

Reason is not passion’s slave, as Hume would have it, for Kant holds that there is another way of desiring that is free and freeing. The more one sees that one is free in and through desiring in this way, the stronger one’s desire for integrity becomes. The desire older than desiderata is the desire to live for the calling of good character, the moral vocation whose infinity we are just beginning to appreciate.

[1] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Sec. III.iii

[2] Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

[3] Plato, Republic 509b. Eventually I would like develop this thought more, using some excellent connections observed by T.K. Seung. T.K. Seung, Kant’s Platonic Revolution in Moral and Political Philosophy. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1994. Pages 62-63: “The theoretical Ideas of perfection concern the existence of objects, such as the existence of the most perfect being, but the practical Ideas of perfection do not concern the existence of objects. …The pure concepts of the understanding are for describing what is; the Ideas of pure reason are for prescribing what ought to be. What ought to be can never be derived or deduced from what is; normative standards can never be set by positive facts. Kant takes this point as central in Plato’s theory of Forms as archetypes. He recognizes two conceptions of normative standard: normative positivism and normative transcendentalism. Normative positivism treats normative standards as social facts, such as positive law or conventional reality. On the other hand, normative transcendentalism claims that ultimate normative standards transcend all social facts. Kant looks upon Plato as the father of normative transcendentalism.” The aprioricity of the formal principle of morality (the moral law) is the anteriority of the Idea of the Good, whose demanding relevance is evergreen, its antiquity to all that exists lasting in the eternity to which all are called to be free together (see esp. Seung’s reading of Critique of Pure Reason A316/B373, Seung p. 63). The Good for Plato—the moral law (and its Lawgiver, God) for Kant—is treated as if it were Source from which all things proceed and the Destiny to which they return.

[4] Kant, 5:23, Critique of Practical Reason p. 157

[5] Kant, 5:24, Critique of Practical Reason p. 157

[6] A helpful corrective to this common misreading comes through the things Kant has to say about aesthetics and moral cultivation. See §53 of the Tugendlehre: “The rules for practicing virtue (exercitiorum virtutis) aim at a frame of mind that is both valiant and cheerful in fulfilling its duties (animus strenuous et hilaris). For, virtue not only has to muster all its forces to overcome the obstacles it must contend with; it also involves sacrificing many of the joys of life, the loss of which can sometimes make one’s mind gloomy and sullen. But what is not done with pleasure but merely as compulsory service has no inner worth for one who attends to his duty in this way and such service is not loved by him; instead, he shirks as much as possible occasions for practicing virtue.” Kant, 6:484, Metaphysics of Morals in Practical Philosophy, op. cit., p. 597

[7] For confirmation of this, see how Kant says that if we were to define morality through a material principle, then good would just mean good for getting something else (i.e., well-being, happiness). Kant, 5:62, Critique of Practical Reason p. 190.

[8] Kant, 5:24, Critique of Practical Reason p. 158: “The principle of one’s own happiness, however much understanding and reason may be used in it, still contains no determining ground for the will other than such as is suitable to the lower faculty of desire; and thus either there is no higher faculty of desire at all or else pure reason must be practical of itself and alone, that is, it must be able to determine the will by the mere form of a practical rule without presupposing any feeling and hence without any representation of the agreeable or disagreeable as the matter of the faculty of desire, which is always an empirical condition of principles.”

[9] Kant, 5:85-86, Critique of Practical Reason p. 209

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid., 5:85, Critique of Practical Reason pp. 208-209

[12] Immanuel Kant, 8:269-270, “On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy,” in Religion and Rational Theology, trans. and ed. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. 1996. Pages 35-36.

[13] Kant, 5:88, Critique of Practical Reason, pp. 210-211

[14] For this reason, Kant draws a distinction between conscience (Gewissen), and conscientiousness (Gewissenshaftigkeit) as the degree to which one has accustomed oneself or unaccustomed oneself to adhere to the deliverances of one’s conscience. See Kant, 6:400-401, Metaphysics of Morals pp. 529-530.

[15] John Milton, Paradise Lost II.432-433, ed. Gordon Teskey. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company. 2005. Page 38.

[16] See Kant 5:86, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 209. Whereas Arendt thinks of Platonic Ideas as statically frozen and in need of metaphysically deflationary thinking to restore dynamicity to our lives, Kant thinks the transcendental normativity of the Platonic Idea (of a free republic) thought through reason (Vernunft) is what “unfreezes” the solidified determinacy of quotidian understanding (Verstand). Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” in Responsibility and Judgment, p. 176.

[17] Ibid., 5:86-87, pp. 209-210.

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Tagged: Arendt, autonomy, desire, fanaticism, freedom, happiness, heteronomy, Hume, Kant, Leibniz, Levinas, ontology, Plato, selfhood

The Choice Between Choice and Condition: Four False Moral Systems

Joseph Trullinger

Posted on August 19, 2016

Why does Kant think that the principle that determines morality must be purely formal and have no content? In some sense it is just the logical extension of Crusius’ critique of Leibnizian and Wolffian pseudo-morality: if morality is defined through any object of the will, then our adherence to it would hinge upon self-interest in some way. Morality cannot be predetermined by any content, otherwise morality becomes unduly constricted and its bindingness contingent upon desire for that content (which we may or may not have). Readers will be familiar with this as Kant’s argument that only a hypothetical imperative can result from a non-formal (i.e., “material”) basis for morality. In plain English, the reason you do the right thing has to be first and foremost just because it is the right thing to do.

Here it helps to run through Kant’s taxonomy of all the different kinds of objects of the will that others have tried to make the basis of morality. There are four basic kinds of “practical material determining grounds [Bestimmungsgründe] in the principle of morality.”[1] Objective grounds for ethics try to anchor it in the nature of things through ratiocination, whereas subjective grounds entail empirical observation of how we act and feel. Since the subjective grounds have been more attractive to scholarly commentators, I’ll dwell longer on the objective grounds:

external subjective grounds: Here we look to education or government as the source of the principle of morality, where the rightness of moral acts is determined through the way that we are gently nurtured to behave (education) or more sternly induced to behave (government). Normativity and normality go hand in hand here. It is readily apparent, though, how problematic this is, and how easily it lapses into moral relativism across different social constructs. Even granting that nobody belongs to or moves between multiple and competing normative communities, there is the lurking danger of classism, particularly with regard to who has access to educational institutions. Above all, there is the danger of who watches the watchers—what makes the teachers and leaders of society moral experts, and how did they become so? These determining grounds are bound to be circular. From Kant’s rejection of this we can see the potential in his philosophy—only partially realized by Kant himself—for radical social critique.
internal subjective grounds: This category is comprised of two different kinds of feeling: physical feeling (which Kant associates with Epicurus) and moral feeling (Hutcheson). It is easy to see what Kant finds arbitrary and contingent about a moral system based on pleasure—it is his rejection of “Epicurean” morality—but it is harder to see why he rejects the “moral sense” school of British thinkers such as Hutcheson and Hume. This school holds that we know what is morally praiseworthy and blameworthy through spontaneous feelings of delight or disgust, and these stirrings are not tied up with self-advantage, but noble in origin and aim. Aside from the possibility that these feelings may be culturally dependent, the problem here is that many dastardly people feel no qualms about the moral havoc they wreak. Morality must then be defined by the feelings of people who behave morally, yet that begs the question. As Kant says, “…one must first value the importance of what we call duty, the authority of the moral law, and the immediate worth that compliance with it gives a person in his own eyes, in order to feel that satisfaction in consciousness of one’s conformity with it and bitter remorse if one can reproach oneself with having transgressed it.”[2] As much as Kant admires the moral sense school of thought (having maintained it in his youth), and as important as moral feeling is for the cultivation of virtue (as we will see in future posts), Kant thinks we lapse into circularity if it comprises the definition of virtue.
external objective grounds: This position is represented by “Crusius and other theological moralists.”[3] It is the idea that morality is determined by the God’s-eye view—literally. The objections to this view are quite familiar: how do we know what God’s will is? Do we know this through divine revelation? If so, how do we distinguish true prophets from false prophets, or truly sacred scriptures from false ones, without falling back on social bias? While Kant is not averse to theology—not at all, as we’ll see—he contends that deriving morality from theology is disastrous both for morality and for theology. In addition to the atrocities that are perpetrated in God’s name, even quiet and inoffensive believers distort their faith when they base their moral adherence on what they think (or have been told to think) of as God’s will because they are bound to view God in mercenary terms without an already clear moral system. In other words, if I try to throw out entirely my merely human standards and conceptions of right and wrong, and become entirely open to a theocentric morality, I am likely to be doing so out of a secret hope to get in good with the guy who holds the power of blessing and damnation over me. Noble-minded believers may say that they simply love God and want nothing from him, but then it must be asked why they love God—and if their reason is that God is supremely good, then it must be asked where they derive the ability to recognize God’s goodness as goodness. Kant’s critique can be extrapolated, mutatis mutandis, to moral theories based on religions that feature no ultimate deity. To a certain degree, in Buddhism (at least in its traditional forms) ethics is inextricable from a metaphysics and cosmology of mystical insights into the nature of ultimate reality (or lack thereof) that are inaccessible to the uninitiated (such as reincarnation, the wheel of samsara, the Buddha-nature, etc.). The main issue here is not the will of a personal God so much as it is grand metaphysical speculation about ultimate reality dictating how we ought to live, the idea that we can read ethics off of Nature itself at its highest level. To the extent that this strives to glean ethics from lower levels of reality, it shades into the final category, internal objective grounds.
internal objective grounds: This position makes the perfection of oneself the principle of morality, and Kant cites as its representative examples both Wolff and the Stoics. Of all the moral schools Kant critiques, this is the one most opaque to current-day readers, despite the widespread popularity of this Leibnizian way of thinking in the early to middle decades of 18^th century Germany; in fact, we know so little about it because Kant’s criticisms of its extravagant metaphysics were so devastating that it rapidly fell into lasting disfavor. Briefly put, “the concept of perfection in the practical sense is the fitness or adequacy of a thing for all sorts of ends.”[4] Wolff and his followers conceive of ethics as a matter of attaining greater completeness (today we might say “well-roundedness”) in both body and mind. Since this Leibnizian tradition conceives of sensual pleasures as the affective byproduct of bodily perfection—which is on the lower end of the scale of happiness, whose higher ends are intellectual contemplation—it follows that their ethics of perfection revolves around skill at attaining these heightened states of being.[5] Ethics then is a matter of reading the right books, seeing the right plays, doing the right exercises in the gym, and so on—whatever cultivates your mind and body toward refined happiness, or, to put it in the equally vacuous terms popular today, “personal growth.” It is the inoffensive ethics of bourgeois self-optimization, the Protestant work ethic. The problem here is that in lieu of a preexisting moral ideal that sets parameters upon it, the internal strength of mental acuity and attentiveness necessary for attaining these states—i.e., skill—is directed toward ends we just happen to have, and thus they are the ends that appear conducive to happiness. This is why Kant says that the ethics of perfection is a surreptitious eudaimonism or refined hedonism, because it is about the worldly wisdom or prudence necessary to put oneself into a higher, happier condition. Despite its attempts to rest on an intelligible principle, this ethical system has to fall back upon empirical principles to give it content; it parallels in practical terms the theoretical subreption (smuggling) of sensible content into Leibniz’s otherwise vacuous metaphysical ideas.[6]

Having exhausted all possible objects of the will that could serve as determining bases for making moral decisions, Kant concludes that there is no content or material that can serve as the basis for morality; instead, morality consists in a certain kind of form or manner of willing. It is not what these moral systems identify as duties that is the problem (though in some cases it could be), but why they take them to be duties; in each of these four cases, the mandatory nature of the duty hinges on desire for being in a better and happier state (whether overtly or covertly), and thus one is making the determining basis of one’s will a carrot or a stick of some sort.

This is heteronomy, wherein one puts one’s free will up for sale—deciding for whatever option fetches the highest price—instead of autonomy, wherein one upholds one’s dignity and respects one’s freedom as not being for sale.[7] For Leibniz all actions must be heteronomous simply because a decision can only be intelligible when we know the condition (price) it sold for. For Kant, on the other hand, autonomy is necessary for performance of the good to be truly disinterested—so autonomy is not self-aggrandizing insistence upon getting one’s way or getting what one wants, as in the careless caricature of Levinas and so many others.[8] It is quite the opposite of that, in fact. Liberty is not license. Kantian freedom is not getting whatever you want (heteronomy), but self-determination (autonomy).

It is customary to note Kant’s counterintuitive identification of bodily desires, emotional moods, and cultural metrics of success as being external to oneself (the “hetero” in heteronomy). I want to dwell on the comparatively neglected point that the ethics of perfection also falls under this heteronomy, because it is about amplifying one’s “intrinsic” (mental) and “extrinsic” (bodily) condition. Notice that for Kant, the cultivation of one’s intellectual prowess, and the attendant pleasures of doing so, are not automatically an exercise of autonomy. Kant certainly does think that, coming out of autonomous disposition, the subsequent perfection of one’s mind and body are duties. Paul Guyer puts it nicely:

…what Kant really rejects is not the abstract concept of perfection as the goal of morality, but the specific conception of perfection that his contemporaries like Wolff and Mendelssohn had ultimately derived from Aristotle. What Kant really does is to replace the perfection of our intrinsic and extrinsic condition as the ultimate goal of virtue with the perfection of the quality of our will itself—the good will.[9]

This echoes Kant’s famous opening declaration in his Groundwork that the only thing that can be thought of as unconditionally good is not virtue (strength for seeing ends through in challenging circumstances) but a good will (that wills good ends in the first place).[10] It is a certain kind of disposition of self-consistent freedom that Kant’s formalism is driving at by excising material determining bases of the will. It is by removing this that Kant carves out the idea that there is no end that could be so worthwhile that it would justify treating a person merely as a means to attaining that end. In other words, what matters above all for Kant are persons—choosers—and not the content of what they can choose.

This is not so universally conceded as it might seem at first blush. Playing off of my earlier proposal that we see bourgeois self-improvement as the modern version of the Leibnizian ethics of perfection—both are cherished by a well-educated elite that fancies itself cosmopolitan—we can see the derision such people pour on others who do not “make something of themselves,” who do not travel, go to college, eat organic, or have good table manners. They are in effect casting others as no longer deserving of moral consideration (respect) because they do not have the right “life-goals.” These failures have squandered their freedom on dead-end lives, and so they can be managed or shuffled out of sight without qualms; in the pseudo-universality of this false kingdom of ends, where no one is really an end in itself, there’s no need for them. There’s no need to postulate immortality for the wretched of the earth, for they will never make anything of themselves. Since eternity would only be squandered on them, we can console ourselves that we only need to put up with them for a finite timespan.

Contrary to the elitist ethics of perfection, Kant’s insistence upon universal moral principles is part and parcel of his insight that everyone matters, as Guyer explains:

The second version of the third formulation of the categorical imperative is the requirement “that all maxims from one’s own lawgiving harmonize with a possible realm of ends,” where such a “realm of ends” is understood as a “whole of all ends in systematic connection (a whole both of rational beings as ends in themselves and of the ends of his own that each may set himself)” (G, 4:436): this formulation applies the ideal of universal validity twice, first to the unconditional value of all rational beings and second to the derivative and therefore conditional value of the particular ends that such beings choose in the exercise of their free agency, that is, to the value that particular ends derive precisely from being determined by that in their agents which itself possesses unconditional value, their humanity or capacity for choice itself.[11]

Guyer’s analysis does a good job of bringing into sharp focus how the principle of morality is fundamentally based on one of two things: either on a kind of condition (an object of the will, and thus heteronomy), or on choice itself (free will’s independence from every object, and thus autonomy). It stands to reason that autonomy, the principle grounded within free choice itself, is the only way to have a moral system with room for anything of unconditional value, because it doesn’t rest on any condition through which it frames value. Because free will is unconditioned choice, it is the only way to guarantee that we properly acknowledge what is unconditionally valuable. It is through choosers mattering above all that the ends they choose can have their conditional importance properly recognized, so that we do not fall into the self-serving arbitrariness and elitism latent in the four material determining grounds of the will.

With this insight in hand—that choosers matter more than conditions, personhood more than thinghood[12]—we can then raise the question of what it’s like to acknowledge this priority. What is it like to motivated to be moral, if this motivation (as freely willed) cannot come from the outside, but one must instead make it the determining ground of one’s will? What does it mean to want to have a good will, or rather, to become a good will? What does it mean to want to not just be in a better condition, but to be a better person?

[1] Kant, 5:40, Critique of Practical Reason 172

[2] Kant, 5:38, Critique of Practical Reason 171

[3] Kant, 5:40, Critique of Practical Reason 172

[4] Kant, 5:41, Critique of Practical Reason 172-173

[5] Ibid., p. 173.

[6] For more on this, see Kant’s extensive discussion of Leibnizian subreption in the Amphiboly section of the First Critique: A268/B324—A280/B336, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. 371-377.

[7] Immanuel Kant 4:440; Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals 89. In Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. 1996. “Autonomy of the will is the property of the will by which it is a law to itself (independently of any property of the objects of volition).”

[8] Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy, Justice, and Love,” in Entre-Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press. 1998. Page 111: “A commanding B is a formula of B’s non-freedom; but if B is the human being and A is God, the subordination is not servitude; on the contrary, it is an appeal to the human being. We must not always formalize: Nietzsche thought that if God exists, the I is impossible. That can be very convincing. If A commands B, B is no longer autonomous, no longer has subjectivity; but when, in thinking, you do not remain on the level of form, when you think in terms of content, a situation called heteronomy has a completely different signification.” First of all, Nietzsche’s dichotomy between human and divine action smacks of a rather specific Lutheran theology that holds grace to be Irresistible or Bust. Second, I do not know why we are turning to Nietzsche as the authority best qualified to represent the range of legitimate theological options. Third, and most saliently, what does it mean for heteronomy to not be servitude if the other we submit to is God rather than a human being? Levinas can say this stuff, but he owes the Kantian a very long and thorough report in the morning about what the hell it really means. Why is it different in the case of God? Can we get an argument for this, apart from quoting Scripture? How does Levinas respond to Kant’s criticism of theological moralists? The best I can figure is that Levinas is taking Kierkegaard’s word for it that Kantian faith is a crypto-atheist reduction of God to morality—a rather odd canard for Levinas to keep parroting, given his own stance that ethical obligation to the Other is a doorway to meaningful religion—and is likewise proceeding from the parallel misunderstanding of autonomy as insistence of oneself at the expense of the Other. Just because autonomy has “auto” (self) as a prefix, this does not mean it deifies selfhood and demonizes alterity. Levinas is overfond of the Heideggerian practice of resting his argument on etymology.

[9] Paul Guyer, “Kantian Perfectionism,” in Perfecting Virtue: New Essays on Kantian Ethics and Virtue Ethics, ed. Lawrence Jost and Julian Wuerth. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. 2011. Page 205

[10] Kant, 4:393, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals in Practical Philosophy, p. 49

[11] Guyer 209

[12] Kant, 5:76-77, Critique of Practical Reason 202

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Tagged: autonomy, Crusius, dignity, freedom, happiness, heteronomy, immortality, Kant, Leibniz, Levinas, performance principle, Protestant work ethic, selfhood, the kingdom of ends

The Scandal of Freedom: The Independence of Free Will from Any Object

Joseph Trullinger

Posted on August 17, 2016

In the Kantian view, a free choice is by its very nature irreducible to conditioning factors. Since to explain is to spell out conditions for the conditioned[1], it is a category mistake to expect a causal explanation of why I chose what I chose, if this choice really stems from free will; a free act of the will is an uncaused cause, one that inserts something into the causal series of the world without being constrained to do so by a chain of events. However, we rightfully anticipate that for any event that happens in our experience there is a cause that precedes it in time. Kant reconciles the tension between the intelligibility of the natural world we experience and morality’s need for free will by arguing in his Third Antinomy that free will’s status as a noumenal and not phenomenal idea means that free will cannot be proven or disproven to exist. His account of this in the Third Antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason is famous, so I won’t reconstruct it here.

For my purposes, it suffices to point out that freedom is not the sort of the thing that could ever show up in the world of sense-experience. As Kant writes, “The concept of freedom is the stumbling block [der Stein des Anstoßes] for all empiricists, but also the key to the most sublime practical principles for critical moralists, who thereby see that they must necessarily proceed rationally.”[2] Freedom is a stumbling block, or in ancient Greek, skandalon—a scandal is what trips people up, something they can’t get past. The recurring torrent of breathless reports in popular outlets that science has proven we have no free will might be testimony to the inability of any inquirer to decisively show our decisions are unfree.

Free will sends empiricists into a tizzy not because it’s some indisputably evident phenomenon but because it isn’t, and the idea that something should alter the given world according to something which is no thing and which never shows up is anathema to the empiricist project (part and parcel of which is to not think of itself as having a project, that is to say, an agenda, but to regard itself as innocently “following the evidence”). When we inspect the range of the psychological motivations within ourselves, we are given again and again to drives to happiness in manners both subtle and great. It is fairly easy in this regard to conclude that what conduces to the greatest happiness for the greatest number constitutes the most ethical system, and all others are of no consequence. This is the conclusion not only of Mill but of many others long before him, including Hume and his philosophe friends such as Voltaire and Baron d’Holbach—all of whom found free will a useless metaphysical abstraction.[3]

When Kant advises we use pure reason to arrive at the principle of morality, he is trying to articulate a theory that will do justice to the unconditionality of human rights and individual freedom. Patrick Frierson nicely explains how attributing empirical conditions to the moral law etiolates its capacity to speak against given material conditions:

… most fundamentally, Kant’s concern with an empirical basis for morality is related to wonder. Whether one derives ethics from human nature or shows how what is ethical is ultimately what will make human beings happy or even ties ethics to divine rewards, in all of these cases, one tries to provide a reason for what is unconditionally good. And in the process, one makes morality more understandable and more appealing to the senses, but also less pure and ultimately less wonderful. Morality in all its purity is a source for wonder, and wonder at the moral law gives rise to a respect that is truly unconditional.[4]

Kant’s search for an a priori moral principle comes from a place of wonder at how it can be possible that we can ever act without our self-interest or even the subtle advantage of the “weak egoism” served in Leibniz’s style of altruism. Whereas for Leibniz the object of the will determines how the willing can be done, Kant’s search for a purely formal principle is an attempt to obviate this way that the content predetermines the worthiness of an action at the same time and for the same reason that it constricts the moral agent.

As we have seen in the previous post on Leibniz, a non-sensible or intellectual object does not save moral action from being surreptitiously egotistical, as Leibniz thought it would. Here it helps to go run through Kant’s criticism of this as a “material determining ground.” A “determining ground” (in German, Bestimmungsgrund, also translatable as “determining basis” or “reason for determining”) is a technical term Kant is drawing from his predecessor Christian August Crusius, who came up with it as a way to describe how I can make a choice between two options without the intellectual content of the options in my mind constraining me into making that choice. Leibniz says “choice follows the greatest inclination,”^{^[5]} and since we have the inclinations we have through the myriad and minute ways my individual essence (my quidditas) has been preestablished by divine providence to self-generate, this means that I choose what I choose not because of free will but as a result of what we might nowadays call “moral luck,” or in a more theologically inflected vocabulary, predestination. For a devout Pietist such as Crusius, the mockery that Leibnizian fatalism (especially in the Wolffian form popular in his day) makes of our ethical responsibility to become good people is unacceptable. Perhaps in the future I’ll explore Crusius’ theology, but for now I think a synopsis from Courtney Fugate will suffice:

In contrast with Leibniz, Crusius thinks freedom is most properly understood to be conscious self-determination, and an action of freedom is in fact one whereby we determine our actions, not through an eternal essence that we may never even become conscious of, but rather through the very ideas we are conscious of, and nothing besides. …To put the matter most briefly, Crusius’ main contribution to the discussion lies in his emphasis on the essential link he sees between absolutely spontaneous, but also conscious, self-determination and the very notion of a responsible agent that is also governed by a categorical law. He recognizes, in other words, that there can be no pure moral individualism, such as Leibniz offers, since without the idea of an absolutely self-determining or causally self-transparent subjectivity at its basis, the individual would not possess the essential freedom of subjectivity from all determinations of its individuality; yet this is precisely what is required for a genuine sense of responsibility and law.^{^[6]}

Crusius’ “determining ground of the will” is his way to do justice to two aspects of our ethical experience: 1) that we have to be choosing freely if we are to be in any way responsible for our own choices, and 2) that we have an idea of what we are doing when we choose without that idea itself doing the choosing for us. Leibniz is certainly right that we have to have some idea in our heads whenever we make a choice, but his intellectualism leads him to the hasty conclusion that it is clear attention to the idea of the option that is identical to my selection of it. Crusius instead affirms what Leibniz calls “indifference of equilibrium”; Crusius would say that the donkey in Buridan’s example can choose between identical piles of hay.

For Crusius, I am free to reject even the most thoroughly comprehended good option, otherwise responsibility for choosing such is just a will o’ the wisp, and my virtue or my vice are just byproducts of the ultra-subtle ways my psychology gets determined by my surrounding environment. There is no real me in that Leibnizian kind of choice; it is not I who choose but the butterfly flapping its wings in a distant galaxy that chooses for me—or really not even that, for nothing and no one truly acts without some antecedent cause predetermining it. Agency then is just transference of antecedent force through a ghostly shell of an agent, one after another in the phantasmagoria of pseudo-individuals, causal relations without genuinely existent relata.

Some see this as a good thing, as it takes away the vindictiveness of blaming people for their vice since no one is responsible—not even one.[7] (Anecdotally, I notice that deniers of free will are very comfortable with taking credit for their own virtue, usually by giving virtue a different and amoral name, even as they celebrate the disappearance of evil. Funny how that works.) Crusius and Kant are most decidedly moralizers, for better or for worse (whatever that would mean).

For that reason both stress the importance of holding fast to the idea of genuine self-determination, although Kant is a good deal less hard-nosed about it than Crusius is (which only makes sense given Kant’s overall epistemic humility and theoretical agnosticism about the soul and about free will). It has to be at least possible that our actions can be spontaneous in the good sense of being self-caused without also being spontaneous in the bad sense of being chaotic and blind. It is this possibility that the terminology of a determining basis of the will opens up for them.

Here we see that you make this or that the determining basis of your will, it does not simply happen to you. For Crusius, when presented with the choice between the sensually tempting and divine commands, we ought to make God’s commands the determining basis of our will, and not simply because the latter promises more happiness than the former, but because we see for ourselves its intrinsic rightness and voluntarily affirm that rightness. In this way, we replicate within ourselves and for ourselves God’s law as our own law; we have to legislate the divine law within ourselves for our obedience to count as genuine.

For Kant, we must make the moral law the determining basis of our will, and this means we must decide on the basis of disinterested rationality and not because of some happiness or improved state that the option promises. Kant repudiates with stentorian tenacity Leibniz’s claim that choice follows the greatest inclination; this not only makes possible Kant’s (in)famous distinction between duty and inclination, but gives substance to the very idea of duty itself. Morality cannot simply consist in the path of least metaphysical resistance, that is, predestination.

Yet how does one make one’s duty the determining ground of one’s will? Assuming that it exists, how can free will impact or alter the course of events in phenomena, such that a free decision (which, being noumenal, is made outside of space and time) shows up as a determinate and unbroken causal chain of neural network and environment? If it cannot be the idea of the good itself that makes us choose it, then how do we choose it? Kant’s account in the Third Antinomy demonstrates why our curiosity about this can never be rationally satisfied, which is fine so long as we have the free time to debate it, but there comes a time for action. The world and the desperate need of others call upon us to choose to make sacrifices that respect their dignity, and we already know how to make ourselves make these choices—we just don’t like making them—and so sometimes skepticism about our free will can function as a fig leaf for irresponsibility, and could be a sophisticated way of stalling.

Nonetheless, nobody can explain how we make duty the determining ground of our will—we just have the conviction that we can. It is this conviction (rather than comprehension) that reason demands us to reach: to behave as if one is free is a necessary component of treating people as if they are free, that is that they are to be respected as fellow choosers, as autonomous beings. This is the scandal of freedom that, if taken to its utmost conclusion in the idea of the kingdom of ends, condemns the disrespect and egoism of our social order as falsehood, the normal paling in comparison to the august resplendence of the normative.

While it seems a wispy thing for parlor room conversation in the jargon-laden pages of Kant’s books, the scandal of freedom implies to maintain moral idealism requires willingness to defy the pressing demands within our academies for certain answers and within our society for certain results, because none could ever be given in the first case and because the end never justifies the means in the second case. It is no sophomoric or thoughtless defiance Kant advocates, but a rational one, one whose rationality the Third Antinomy (and the critical project generally) demonstrates: “Thus I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith; and the dogmatism of metaphysics, i.e., the prejudice that without criticism reason can make progress in metaphysics, is the true source of all unbelief conflicting with morality, which unbelief is very dogmatic.”[8] While we keep wanting to objectify free will, to turn it into a kind of object determined by other objects, Kant’s moral project embarks from the possibility that free will is independent of any object, as is the formal principle through which freedom can be self-consistently exercised: autonomy.

[1] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. New York, NY: 1998. A303/B359—A305/B361, pp. 389-390.

[2] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. 1996. 5:7-8, page 143.

[3] It is significant in this regard that Kant’s mature critical philosophy is profoundly steeped in Rousseau’s critique of the Enlightenment narrative of progress, as well as its attendant anthropology and epistemology. For a vibrant account of Rousseau’s influence on Kant, see Richard Velkley’s Freedom and the End of Reason.

[4] Patrick Frierson, “Kant and the End of Wonder,” in Philosophy Begins in Wonder: An Introduction to Early Modern Philosophy, Theology, and Science, ed. Michael Funk Deckard and Péter Losonczi. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. 2010. Page 299

[5] Leibniz, letter to Coste, 19 December 1707, in Philosophical Essays, p. 194

[6] Courtney David Fugate, “Moral Individuality and Moral Subjectivity in Leibniz, Crusius, and Kant” in Cultivating Personhood: Kant and Asian Philosophy, ed. Stephen R. Palmquist. De Gruyter. 2010. Pp. 280-281

[7] Romans 3:10-12

[8] Kant, Bxxx, Critique of Pure Reason 117

Categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: Crusius, empiricism, freedom, Hume, Kant, Leibniz

Nothing Compares to You: Leibniz and Kant on Love

Joseph Trullinger

Posted on August 12, 2016

Jean-Luc Godard’s movie Contempt opens with an unforgettable scene: laying on the bed, a wife asks her husband if he likes her feet. He says yes. She then asks if he likes her ankles, her calves, and so on, and as she goes through the list of her body parts, he responds each time in the affirmative, finally ending with her face. By way of summation, she asks, “Then you love me totally?” He answers, “I love you totally…tenderly…tragically.” It’s a beautiful scene, artfully staged with gentleness and a sensitive musical score. It certainly captures a common way of conceiving of love, that to love a person is to love everything about a person. If you really love somebody, you think of them as the most beautiful person in the world.

But there is a tension simmering under the surface, one that—I would argue—underscores the falsehood of this approach. We are not meant to think the problem is that the husband might be lying about his fondness for her feet, her face, and so on (the wife is played by the conventionally attractive Brigitte Bardot). The problem is thinking that loving a person’s qualities amounts to loving that person, as though a person is the sum of their qualities. Some might argue that in loving everything about your partner’s body you succeed in affirming their quidditas, their singularity as that unique individual, but this is a fool’s errand, and not just because our body parts age and sooner or later fail to conform to narrow beauty standards.

If our uniqueness is constituted by a list of qualities, even if that inventory is made diachronic, then our being is fundamentally being viewed as replaceable. While it would only be a likelihood in the realms of science fiction, we could be replaced by someone else with identical qualities and our lover could just as well cherish our clone and dispense with us. In a less outlandish context, however, we encounter this eerie danger of being seen as replaceable all the time: in our sports, in our political economy, in our social lives, in our love lives, and in any number of phenomena. It is perhaps this insecurity that drives Bardot’s character to seek the reassurance of her husband that she is indeed lovable. It is perhaps also no wonder that their marriage is over before the film ends.

Sometimes I think the question “What do you love about me?” is one of those unanswerable but unavoidable questions Kant says human reason poses to itself in the first preface to his Critique of Pure Reason.[1] More precisely, I sometimes wonder whether this question is at bottom the question (or “paralogism”) of whether there is a soul, whether there is a self beyond a bundle of observable qualities.[2] Just as there is an epistemic (and perhaps even ethical) danger in attempting to prove the soul’s reality by reifying it—by treating it as though it is another sort object, just one that escapes materiality (and thus one’s character is a fait accompli)—there is a danger in reifying the beloved by treating them as a collectivity of lovables (what critical theory calls a “fetish”). Every now and again, in the fulgurating words of a Shakespeare or a Plato, words seem to have done justice to what the soul of love is, but they prove curiously insufficient for what one means to say but can never say. I wager that infatuation differs from love in being able to satisfactorily identify the lovability of the beloved.

At this point we might protest that there must be something about the beloved that I love, without being so crude as to think that we can enumerate every lovable aspect of the person I love. It could simply be that what I love about the beloved is so multiform as to escape enumeration or even conscious detection—it is instead a sophisticated and unique combination that makes for a je ne sais quoi. Leibniz’s theory of the tiny perceptions—infinitesimal sensations we have of everything in the universe, from our unique perspective, amounting to a confused experience whose elements we mostly cannot isolate—suggests that love could be the byproduct of innumerable small qualities of the beloved whose order of importance cannot be identified.[3] Only a superhuman mind could track down the imbrications of logical priority and anteriority that constitute the reasons why you love who you love; those reasons are there, you just don’t perceive (or more appropriately, apperceive) them. The ultimate intelligibility of love is thereby preserved while acknowledging its inscrutability to us. Your love might appear to be unconditional, but that’s only because there are so many conditions on it that you can’t keep track of them all, and so it appears that there are none because there are none in particular.

What do we love when we love disinterestedly? In his letter to Nicaise of August 1697, Leibniz defines love as the disposition of taking pleasure in the happiness of others. As Ursula Goldenbaum has noted, in this definition Leibniz aims to reconcile the Christian and Platonic morality of altruism with the Hobbesian insight that all our actions are self-interested.^{^[4]} Leibniz puts the crux of the issue thus:

For everything that produces pleasure immediately through itself is also desired for itself, as constituting (at least in part) the object of our aims and as something which enters into our own felicity and gives us satisfaction. This serves to reconcile two truths which appear incompatible; for we do everything for our own good, and it is impossible for us to have other feelings, although we may say we do.^{^[5]}

For Leibniz, it is impossible that I should be motivated to do anything that is not somehow to my advantage, yet this advantage must not be conflated with a crass attitude that helps others so as to get something else out of it, beyond their happiness. Gregory Brown argues that Leibniz’s “weak egoism” enables him to say that genuine and virtuous love is disinterested because it takes immediate pleasure in seeing the other pleased, whereas mercenary love treats the other’s pleasure as mediate, as a means to a further end such as monetary reward (which is what this opportunist takes immediate pleasure in).^{^[6]}

Thus if I buy you lunch because it makes me smile to see you smile, then my love for you is disinterested; but if I’m smiling because I know that you’re more likely to do me a favor in the near future once I’ve put you in a good mood, then my love is mercenary. The more materialistic my aims are, the more likely I am to envy your good fortune, because it is the nature of material goods that they are fungible; the pleasures of intellectual goods (knowledge, contemplation, etc.), however, are strengthened by being shared, and so disinterested love is best kindled by rational discussion and contemplation.[7]

Thus we see that for Leibniz, the object of the will we have in view—what we desire—is what determines the manner of willing, the kind of loving, that we can perform. What our desires alight upon is the function of how foolishly or wisely we go about looking for happiness, and that in turn depends upon how dimly or clearly we understand the nature of things. For Leibniz, reality is fundamentally mental, so it is the mind that not only discovers what is inexhaustibly pleasant, but also constitutes what is inexhaustible for pleasure: namely, the infinite richness of the divine Mind fashioning an intricately harmonious universe set up for our flourishing. Thus things are lovable to the extent that they offer an occasion for mental improvement.

For Leibniz this kind of “food for thought” is called perfection, which we should think of in its etymological sense as the per-fectus, what has been made all the way through, brought to completion. Perfection is the degree to which a thing fully is what its nature dictates it should be, so that it is without defects or aberrations, and from this we can easily draw the analogy that happiness is the perception of such completeness. For example, missing teeth or limbs would be imperfections, which we find less pleasing than the alternative. However, Leibniz is the first to acknowledge that the perfections of an object often transcend such blatant simplicity, for subtle diversity offers our minds more capacious reflection, and it is this activity of understanding harmony (rather than monotony) among diverse elements that is pleasant.^{^[8]} For instance, Leibniz notes our delight of syncopation in music, and we might add to the earlier example the beauty of people with a gap between their front teeth.

As one improves one’s taste with sensual delights, and even more so as one improves one’s mind through intellectual attractions, one develops a clearer sense of reality’s intelligible foundation in the ens realissimum: God as the supreme Mind who is the condition for the possibility of all finite things reflecting him in miniature, and this most harmonious of all possible universes gives us the greatest pleasure possible. As Leibniz writes toward the end of his life to Christian Wolff, “…pleasure is the sensation of perfection. Perfection is the harmony of things, or the state where everything is worthy of being observed, that is, the state of agreement or identity in variety; you can even say that it is the degree of contemplatibility.”[9]

The ideal Leibnizian lover is someone who has discovered that the greatest pleasures are the pleasures of the mind, and with that rational rubric finds intellectual potential in the beloved and develops it, thereby developing and expanding his own mind. Education therefore has a decidedly moral import for the Leibnizian: the more one learns the universe’s order the more one sees how it is set up to reward beneficence through rational self-interest. As the mind’s strength is constituted by its ability to properly differentiate the diverse elements making up a whole, the confusion wrought by the tiny perceptions will take on greater clarity and distinctness as the lover’s mind improves, meaning that the lover will become more and more capable of saying what it is they love about the other. The uniqueness of the other is ultimately sayable, even though it might take a finite mind infinite time to learn all the nooks and crannies of the beloved’s lovability. It is at least in theory possible to love someone “totally,” like Brigitte Bardot’s lover, but by loving their mental qualities one purportedly avoids shallowness and selfishness in that love.

For Kant, on the other hand, to think of uniqueness as indexed to qualities rots love at its root: the very activity of thinking there are conditions to one’s love, even ones subtle enough to escape apperception, changes the way one relates to one’s beloved, it puts one out of the attitude of respect and into the attitude of admiration. To pull a formulation from Alejandro Iñárritu’s recent movie Birdman, this is confusing love with admiration (the dangers of which the movie marvelously illustrates). To put this into Kantian terms, there is a profound difference between pathological love and practical love. Pathological love is a feeling that arises from the complex ways our body, our culture, our diet, and all other environmental factors interact to give us the inclination we call love; Kant calls it “pathological” because it refers to the pathe, the ways we are determined to feel. Practical love, on the other hand, is love you have to put into practice; practical love is taking care of someone even in the absence of feeling pathological love, out of a sense of responsibility for the other. Leibniz would explain the activity of practically loving others—indeed, all actions we undertake—as the result of what we think it will offer us in the end (pathological love).

Some people see Kant’s practical love as cold, but I don’t. I think the person who treats me well and does what is best for me—even when I don’t like it and am being especially ugly, which is probably connected to why they don’t like it—is the person who really loves me, as opposed to the mutual admiration society in Leibniz’s conception of love. Practical love is love that sticks around when the going gets tough and stays tough.[10] And much to the surprise of most readers of Kant, he makes the astute observation that taking care of a person even when you don’t feel like it (practical love, or beneficence) tends to produce a fondness for them over time (pathological love, or benevolence).[11] We owe others practical love even when they don’t reciprocate it, and even if we will never feel pathological love for them; this is the duty that is religiously comprehended as the commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself—“that law of all laws,” as Kant calls it.[12] Virtue sets the parameters for happiness, not the other way round.

Loving someone is not just different in degree but different in kind from liking them. It therefore follows that to truly love someone (that is, love in the very impractical “practical” sense) is to not base my treatment of them on the attitude that there are identifiable or even non-identifiable qualities of the other that please me. What Kant’s practical love captures is that love is an ongoing choice, that requires you to commit yourself—and like all commitment, it may mean making some sacrifices, and genuine sacrifice is mysterious. In Leibniz’s understanding of love as a kind of utility calculus, you don’t sacrifice anything for love so much as you exchange a comparatively small pleasure for a comparatively large pleasure. The rationality of this logic of exchange is readily apparent, because acting out of self-interest is readily intelligible, and Leibniz’s entire philosophical program is the affirmation of the fundamental intelligibility of everything, the universality of the principle of sufficient reason.

Because Leibniz holds that for absolutely everything that exists, there is some sufficient reason why it is this determinate way and not another, he also argues that it is impossible to make a choice without being guided by some conception (however wrong) of what makes one option more attractive than the other.

God or a perfectly wise person will always choose the best that they know of, and if one side were not better than the other, they would choose neither the one nor the other. The passions often take the place of reason in other intelligent substances, and we can always assert, with respect to the will in general, that choice follows the greatest inclination (by which I understand both passions and reasons, true or apparent).[13]

Through rational reflection we properly perceive our alternatives for what they truly are, and in this way our choice of them is what Leibniz calls “freedom of indifference” as opposed to “indifference of equilibrium.”[14] The famous example of indifference of equilibrium is to imagine a donkey placed between two equidistant piles of identically large and identically appealing hay; will the donkey be able to choose a pile of hay to eat from, or will it eventually starve to death because it cannot see any difference between the options? Indifference of equilibrium holds that the donkey can make a choice in this scenario, and Leibniz’s commitment to the principle of sufficient reason entails that he reject it. For Leibniz, the donkey could not make up its mind, if it is truly the case that the piles of hay are identical—but his companion principle of the identity of indiscernables means this is a phantom possibility. Because no two things can be entirely equally attractive, parity between options is impossible.

Thus for Leibniz, self-determination is therefore always a result of one’s perception of the determinate qualities within competing objects of the will. The process of choosing always involves—and is decided by—comparing one thing to another, one person to another, on the basis of their qualities. This job offers more money, that school has better libraries, this person has a better smile, that person has more eloquence. According to Leibniz, we cannot explain our interest in anything or anyone without this drive toward optimization.

Kant agrees on one point: we cannot explain a choice that is not determined through optimization, but that does not mean such a choice is impossible. From a Kantian perspective, when we love we are charged with a mystery. This is why though Kant in large part adopts the Leibnizian tradition’s definition of love as the adoption of another’s ends as one’s own—that is, loving someone entails taking an interest in the things that they want to achieve and that bring them happiness—Kant nonetheless thinks that unconditional respect for them as a priceless and separate person must be the foundation for all genuine (practical) love.

Dignity means that you have the right to be treated with respect—it would be hard to give Kantian arguments for tolerating abusive conditions—but at the same time love and respect for dignity call upon us to never make the condition of being wronged a pretext for doing wrong. Only by seeing the other as having inviolable and unconditionally important rights—that is, dignity—can we avoid the serpentine egoism of mutually beneficial categorization and comparison. The other’s lovability is not fully or even mostly intelligible to us, and thank heavens it is not, for were our love based on definite reasons we could replace them the moment someone else comes along offering amplified versions of those same reasons. Only then do we see them—and concomitantly, ourselves—as more than the sum of component traits and parts, only then do we see ourselves as whole and unfinished beings—i.e., as free beings. Love is a mystery because freedom is a mystery: How can moral agency be disinterested without being uninterested?

[1] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason Avii

[2] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A345/B403-A346/B404

[3] Leibniz, “Preface to the New Essays,” in Philosophical Essays, p. 296

[4] Ursula Goldenbaum, “All you need is love…Leibniz’s Vermittlung von Hobbes’ Naturrecht und christlicher Nächstenliebe als Grundlage seiner Definition der Gerechtigkeit,” in Neuzeitliches Denken: Festschrift für Hans Poser zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Günter Abel, Han-Jürgen and Christoph Hubig (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), 209-231.

[5] Leibniz: “On the Disinterested Love of God,” in Leibniz on God and Religion, trans. and ed. Lloyd Strickland (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). Strickland 159.

[6] Gregory Brown, “Disinterested Love: Understanding Leibniz’s Reconciliation of Self-and Other-Regarding Motives,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 19 (2), 2011: 265-303. 282-283.

[7] Here Leibniz is building upon an argument Spinoza makes at Ethics IVP35

[8] Donald Rutherford: Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.) Pp. 31-32.

[9] Leibniz, letter to Wolff 18 May 1715, in Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1989. Pp. 233-234.

[10] Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

[11] Kant, 6:402; Metaphysics of Morals in Practical Philosophy (Cambridge University Press), pp. 530-531

[12] Kant 5:83, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, op. cit., p. 207

[13] Leibniz, letter to Coste, 19 December 1707, in Philosophical Essays, p. 194

[14] Ibid.

Categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: beauty, dignity, freedom, happiness, Kant, Leibniz, love, selfhood

The False Equivalence of Virtue and Happiness

Joseph Trullinger

Posted on August 8, 2016

When my friend James Stanescu told me about Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” I began reading about the titular utopia of Omelas with excitement for its Marcusean vision. Omelas is a society that does not merely know no war, no poverty, no toil, and no pain, but also no boredom; it is a society of genuine and positive delight and constant play. The buildings are beautiful and exist in harmony with nature; people practice free love and heighten their experiences with a special drug called drooz that opens the doors of perception without making them addicts. Their lives are so tranquil that this drug does not function as escapist tranquilization:

What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world’s summer; this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life. I really don’t think many of them need to take drooz.

As Le Guin notes, we so cynically deride utopias as insipid because we think happiness is uninteresting and dumb—we say that suffering builds character as a cheap way of coming to terms with a world of unnecessary suffering. We are so inured to pain and evil that even the most imaginative among us struggle to conceive of a truly happy society, though Le Guin does an admirable job of trying. The story’s powerful description of beauty, peace, and love as what makes life interesting and an end in itself compelled me to smile. And then I read onward.

It turns out that what makes the joy of Omelas possible is the secret imprisonment and neglect of one child in squalor and solitary confinement, which all the Omelans are shown in their adolescence and eventually come to accept. It is never clearly stated why, but to release or care for the child would render Omelas impossible—and the child itself, permanently traumatized by neglect, would never be able to feel joy outside the prison anyway. No one would become happier by freeing the child. And yet:

At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Anyone familiar with Kant can readily see the affinity between this sobering story and his austere moral system. While teaching my students Kant this past spring, I asked them whether they would walk away from Omelas, and why. After some initial answers that the Omelans can’t really be happy—which misses the masterful way Le Guin has set up the provocation of her story—they came to the Kantian insight that the happiness of many or even all members of society cannot be predicated upon violating the dignity of even one person. As Kant writes in his Groundwork, “What has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; what on the other hand is raised above all price and therefore admits of no equivalent has a dignity.”[1] Beyond the usual observation that each person is of priceless value simply by virtue of being a person, that each person has infinite worth, we need to notice that Kant is saying that each person is irreplaceable, admitting of no equivalent or substitute.

So the immorality of mistreating the child is not merely that this child is cut off from any possibility of a happy future, although this is certainly wrong; it is that the child has been nothing but a means for society’s happiness, and it does not matter if this happiness is infinite either extensively (by being shared among all people) or intensively (by being of the highest caliber and quality). Even if the child itself were made happy by this mistreatment, it would in and of itself be wrong. Heeding the dignity of each free being as free—that is, the actions of care and respect that constitute virtue—is not only an infinitely worthy project, but the immeasurable measure by which the worth of any project is clarified, even so desirable a project as universal happiness.

Kant actually wants a world like Omelas, but on the sole condition that the child is included as a legitimate and self-determining member within its circle of play. Such a world is what he calls the highest derived good, or usually just the highest good. The highest good is maximal happiness in proportion to maximal virtue, and not vice-versa (a virtue made to fit the condition of universal happiness). As Le Guin’s story exemplifies, the highest good is not “happiness + virtue” but “virtue + happiness.” For Kant virtue and happiness are not identical but compatible, and it must be virtue that sets the parameters for that compatibility.

It comforts us to treat virtue and happiness as roughly interchangeable terms, both because it implies that the existing order of things is just (since only the bad are unhappy), and also because it implies that justice will exist by ordering our lives according to happiness (since only the good feel happy). If virtue and happiness are the same, then we never have to choose between the two.

Such is the appeal of the “Epicurean” way of thinking, as Kant has it. I say “Epicurean” because whether his picture accurately captures what the Epicureans thought is besides the point; for Kant it operates as a term for a kind of hedonism, which he does the service of seeing as refined and virtuous hedonism. In other words, the Epicurean thinks that by pursuing what makes us actually happy in the long term, we will be virtuous. The obverse of this equivocation of virtue and happiness is represented by the “Stoic,” who thinks that whoever attains the steely resolve needed for noble integrity will ipso facto be happy.[2] The self-awareness of his own moral fiber is what gives the Stoic happiness, such that the Stoic sage won’t succumb to any temptation, for he is happy even while being tortured. According to Susan Neiman, “In a word, both seek to deny that duty is hard.”[3]

The Omelans appear to Epicureans, for they want their virtue to be easy. Does that make the ones who walk away Stoics? Not so, according to Kant, because no person really can be the way the Stoics say. The Stoic view trades on a profound and morally hazardous misunderstanding of human nature. The Stoic sage is essentially a god, having superhuman impassability and detachment from the attraction of pleasure and pain, and therefore imperviousness to perversity. The Stoic sage is no longer a moral agent in any recognizable sense because they are beyond all temptation, and therefore deign to follow the moral law, as though duty is merely a kind of capricious pastime and not a necessary struggle, lagniappe and not la lucha continua.[4] Kant is frequently suspicious of such flattering self-assessment, which lacks the humility that comes with the genuine self-knowledge made possible by comparing oneself with the moral law’s sublimity and not merely our mores of lawless self-satisfaction. If the Epicurean thinks virtue is easy, the Stoic thinks virtue is hard for others but easy for himself. Yet as Le Guin’s story quite nicely illustrates, walking away from Omelas would be extraordinarily hard.

If that sounds wrong—after all, we all like to think we would be ones who would walk away from Omelas—then think about the extent to which our civilization is predicated on the exploitation of not just one individual like in Omelas, but billions. Think about how many of the goods of advanced industrial society are assembled in sweatshops, how much unnecessary animal suffering goes into putting steak on your plate, how much environmental degradation goes into keeping our cars on the road. You can become a vegetarian or make your own clothes or ride a bicycle—lifestyles easier to afford in plenteous cities with the right infrastructure—but that only scratches the surface of the vice upon which we predicate our way of life. As Adorno said, “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”[5]

But so too, anybody with even a little self-knowledge should recognize themselves in Augustine’s statement, “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.”[6] We stay in Omelas every day—and for what? For drooz, for peace, for great rapture and beauty? We stay for happiness that is nothing even close to the happiness of Omelas. Those who stay in Omelas also sell their souls, but they do not sell them on the cheap. With that in mind, we can appreciate how hard it would be to leave Omelas, how hard it is to make sacrifices for virtue.

This leads to the question of why anyone—which is not to say everyone—would forsake total happiness in order to do something virtuous. When I asked my students what they would get out of walking away from Omelas, they all said nothing. And where are the ones who walk away from Omelas walking away to? The story doesn’t say, and it says it can’t say: “The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all.” From a Kantian perspective, it is no place empirical, and therefore beyond concrete description: it is the kingdom of ends, the idea of an ideal world.

But Le Guin goes further: “It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.” Why should an idea of something that might not exist—specifically, an ideal—matter so much to us that we would ever risk anything (and sometimes everything) to instantiate it? The idea of the kingdom of ends compels us just by being the idea that it is, without having to already exist in fact, although the possibility is open that it does—what matters is that one can act as if it is real. It has an eminence that goes beyond evidence—that is, evidence in the sense of empirical facts, the kind necessary for knowledge but not necessary for responsible action. It is possible that the kingdom of ends does not exist, and that all one’s attempts to live up to the lofty standards of that kingdom’s moral law are actually futile, and virtue’s quixotic failure is the punch line to a cosmic joke that is the way of the world.

Perhaps because of his fussy and baroque authorial style, it is not adequately appreciated just how existential Kant is. Kant stares the possibility of an immutably amoral universe in the face, and makes a deliberate choice to say no to that possibility, not on the grounds of a logical refutation—because (unlike Leibniz) Kant thinks no proof of the world’s amenability to virtue can be given—but instead on the grounds that even just one person deserves ongoing benevolence and respect, and thus we must persevere in upholding the moral law to safeguard and respect the pricelessness of all persons.

What makes morality worth the adversity? Nothing tangible, nothing conditional. It is the conviction that any person, no matter who they are, or how inconvenient they are—or even how evil they are[7]—must have their freedom respected and fostered that drives the self-consistent moral agent onward through hardship. Yet the content of this idea, as infinite as it is, does not explain why its infinity should matter to us. Along with the Epicureans, it is easy to see why it matters to us if a difficult sacrifice promises us superior happiness later on down the road. And with the Stoics, we need only a little more imagination to understand why sacrifices are appealing when they allow you to rejoice in your strength of will, in your ability to make tough choices, self-affirmation through self-denial. Yet the ease through which we can understand these motivations comes at the cost of the possibility of genuine altruism.

For the Epicurean, sacrificing for others brings about a world where there this care is reciprocated. For the Stoic, sacrificing for others is a pretext for self-righteousness, a chance to bask in your own abstemious glory. If the Epicureans are right, self-interest would keep us from ever leaving Omelas. If the Stoics are right, even leaving Omelas would be self-interested. Yet the moral law has authority for us through neither—in fact through any—kind of self-interest. Through what, then? How is that moral agency can be disinterested without being uninterested?

[1] Immanuel Kant 4:434; Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals 84. In Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. 1996.

[2] Kant, 5:111; Critique of Practical Reason 229 in Practical Philosophy, op. cit.

[3] Susan Neiman, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant. New York: Oxford University Press. 1994. P. 172

[4] Kant, 5:126-127; Critique of Practical Reason 242

[5] Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia §18

[6] Augustine, Confessions VIII.vii

[7] It is important to remember that Kant distinguishes moral standing (the degree to which one is virtuous) from moral worth (the fact that one has dignity, inalienable rights).

Categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: dignity, happiness, Kant, the highest good, the kingdom of ends, utopia

Up the Endless Mountains of Desire: Perpetually Progressive Love

Joseph Trullinger

Posted on August 5, 2016

We can turn to Gregory of Nyssa’s “perpetual progress” (epektasis) for help in thinking about the perpetuity of pleasure, of desire escalating without exhaustion. As a part of his symbolic reading of Moses’ ascent up Mount Sinai in Exodus, Gregory puts forth the idea that with each new spiritual height the soul reaches in its yearning for God, the pleasure that vision affords amplifies the soul’s capacity to yearn more intensely and reach ever new heights:

If nothing comes from above to hinder its upward thrust (for the nature of the Good attracts to itself those who look to it), the soul rises ever higher and will always make its flight yet higher—by its desire of the heavenly things straining ahead for what is still to come, as the Apostle says.

Made to desire and not to abandon the transcendent height by the things already attained, it makes its way upward without ceasing, ever through its prior accomplishment renewing its intensity for the flight. Activity directed toward virtue causes its capacity to grow through exertion; this kind of activity alone does not slacken its intensity by the effort, but increases it.[1]

We should notice several features of perpetual progress. The first is that life with God (as the Good) is intrinsically desirable as the ultimate end in itself, and not merely for escaping hellfire (which Gregory, as an upholder of apokatastasis, rejects). The second is that this desire is transformative and escalating, such that the more we desire to see God the more we see to desire. The third, following logically from the first and second, is that this ascending desire is identical to being a better and better person, and thus one increasingly participates in the divine nature of the Good, becomes more like God. The fourth point is that God’s infinite and inexhaustible nature means that one is never done becoming more like God and closer to God, but always on the way to greater intimacy and virtue. One is already close to God, and at the same time not yet close enough to God. This leads to a fifth point, that one can and should begin this process of progress in this lifetime, and the afterlife will be a continuation of it, rather than a discontinuous break with the work of virtue in this life. A final point, explained well by a commentator named Jean Daniélou, is that the infinity of this ascent does not occur to the believer as a demoralizing or exhausting, but invigorating and peaceful:

Thus each stage is important: it is, as Gregory says, a “glory”; but the brilliance of each stage is always being obscured by the new “glory” that is constantly rising. So too the sun of the new creation, the New Testament, obscures the brightness of that first sun, the Old Law. And the laws of the soul’s growth are parallel with those of man’s collective history. And yet this is by no means to depreciate the value of each particular stage—all are good, all are stages of perfection. But the mistake would be to try to hold on to any one of them, to put a stop to the movement of the soul. For sin is ultimately the refusal to grow.[2]

Perpetual progress is a peaceful process, one marked by intensity without impatience and satisfaction without stagnation. Perpetual progress is not restless dissatisfaction with the present, but calm and peaceable joy amidst the immanent within its larger and mysterious context of the transcendent. It is not the insatiability of the bad infinity Hegel criticizes, because at no moment does the anticipation of greater future joy sour the great joy of the present; it is not the gigantism of Enframing that Heidegger criticizes, because the joy is not an object to be stowed away for our own manipulation and reproduction, but instead stems from and makes sense within a relatedness to another, an infinite Other; it is not the mummified stasis of “Platonism” in Nietzsche’s caricature, because it is perpetually active tranquility and not a permanently inactive tranquilization; it is not the restlessness of the performance principle Marcuse criticizes, because it is an activity that is not driven by anxiety about scarcity or salvation but by assurance about salvation as something to be savored through becoming more like the Good to oneself, to others, and to the infinite Other. Perpetual progress is unlike anything we are accustomed to contemplating in modern academic philosophy.

We can learn more about perpetual progress by reflecting on Gregory’s demarcation of it from the sort of desire it is unlike. Gregory thinks that trying to find satisfaction through bodily pleasure puts us in the situation of the Hebrew slaves trying to keep up with the pharaoh’s productivity quotas for brick-making:

It is clear to everyone that whatever belongs to material pleasure consists assuredly of earth or water, whether one is concerned with the pleasures of the stomach and the table or with the pleasures of wealth. The mixture of these elements becomes clay and is so called. Those who yearn after the pleasures of clay and keep on filling themselves with them never keep the space which receives them full; for although it is always being filled, it becomes empty again before the next pouring. In the same way the brick maker keeps on throwing yet more clay into the mould while it is constantly being emptied. I think that anyone can easily perceive the meaning of this figure by looking at the appetitive part of the soul.[3]

Using imagery much like Socrates’ description of the hedonist living like a stone-curlew[4], Gregory here thinks the soul’s appetite for bodily pleasure is intrinsically insatiable. Elsewhere, Gregory acknowledges that bodily pleasure can last for a while, but only at the expense of the desire that drove one to satisfy it: “A greedy appetite for food is terminated by satiety, and the pleasure of drinking ends when our thirst is quenched. And so it is with the other things…. But the possession of virtue, once it is solidly achieved, cannot be measured by time nor limited by satiety. Rather to those who are its disciples it always appears as something ever new and fresh.”[5] Here we might do well to wonder with Spinoza whether Gregory characterizes bodily pleasure this way because he has a limited understanding of what the body can do.[6] Saving this matter for a future discussion, we can nonetheless pull out of Gregory a threefold taxonomy of desires according to their temporality:

cyclical desire: desire that expends itself without escalating
insatiable desire: desire that escalates while exhausting
perpetual desire: desire that escalates without exhaustion

The first and second kinds of desire are both Sisyphean, because one either repeats the same activities over and over, or one never finds contentment in one’s restlessness, and in both cases all the future offers is more of the same. Perpetual progress is the third kind of desire, a desire whose futurity is one of qualitative progress (“something ever new and fresh”). In the course of rightly critiquing insatiable desire (time as a joylessly ascending line), Marcuse thinks his only alternative is cyclical desire (time as a circle of joy and suffering), which puts him at odds with his trust in Eros’ capacity for self-sublimation as perpetual desire (time as a joyfully ascending line).

Pace Marcuse, even if Gregory is wrong about the body’s incapacity for perpetual desire, Gregory has a strong case for thinking that God is the ultimate (if not only) object of perpetual desire, because “the Divine is by its very nature infinite, enclosed by no boundary.”[7] Indeed, God is encompassed by nothing because he is the All-Encompassing, including Nature within himself.[8] It is not that finite things are not beautiful, because they are—but as Marcuse himself draws from the scala amoris (“ladder of love”) in Plato’s Symposium to describe Eros self-sublimation, the polymorphous beauties of physical things point upward to higher and higher forms, suggesting an inexhaustible wellspring of Beauty.[9] Gregory identifies God as archetypal Beauty, through which we can adequately appreciate the ectypal beauty of finite things: “And the bold request which goes up the mountains of desire asks this: to enjoy the Beauty not in mirrors and reflections, but face to face.”[10]

We are never done ascending the mountains of desire, because Beauty never tires of offering ever new kinds of beauty for us to partake in. Our tête-à-tête with consummate Beauty will never finish being consummated: “Such an experience seems to me to belong to the soul which loves what is beautiful.”[11] Gregory’s word for loving here is eros. Here we come upon Gregory’s understanding of perpetual progress as a mystical marriage between Christ and his bride, not just the Church as a corporate body, but the individual soul as well. For Gregory, as for a great number of Christian mystics, the erotic is the best symbol we have for the love between God and the soul. “The bride then puts the veil from her eyes and with pure vision sees the ineffable beauty of her Spouse. And thus she is wounded by a spiritual and fiery dart of desire. For love [agape] that is strained to intensity is called desire [eros].”[12] The divine Lover makes possible an infinitely escalating arousal that is endlessly restorative and restive to his bride. Using the Song of Songs as his symbolic framework, Gregory implies the sacred marriage of God and soul is a kind of eternal foreplay:

… even though she has enjoyed her share of good things as far as was in her power, He nonetheless continues to draw her on to participate in transcendent Beauty as though she had never tasted of it. In this way her desire grows as she goes on to each new stage of development; and because of the transcendence of the graces which she finds ever beyond her, she always seems to be beginning anew.

For this reason the Word says once again to His awakened bride: Arise; and, when she has come, Come (Cant. 2.13). For he who is rising can always rise further; and for him who runs to the Lord the open field of the divine course is never exhausted. We must therefore constantly arouse ourselves and never stop drawing closer and closer in our course. For as often as He says Arise, and Come, He gives us the power to rise and make progress.[13]

The ecstasy of divine love the soul is called to experience and to reflect in benevolence to others will take on an evergreen and stable form in the life to come, and through hope for this perpetual progressive love the soul finds inspiration to be more living in the here and now. It is an eschatology of ecstasy, or if I can do that thing philosophers do and coin a new word, it is an eschatology of epecstasy—because in perpetual progress (epektasis) is not simply brought out of oneself in some static dislocation (ek-stasis), but one stretches (tasis) at (epi-) and beyond (ek-) to an ultimate and inexhaustible joy (ep-ek-tasis).[14] It is always arriving and arising simultaneously, in the paradoxical already and not yet of the messianic One who is always coming, who loves unconditionally and allows for a utopia of unconditional liveliness, the kingdom of heaven.

According to Gregory, whereas the person who desires only immanent things is like someone trying to climb uphill in sand—toiling constantly but ironically getting nowhere—the person who desires the transcendent is pulled onto solid ground thereby, paradoxically steadfast and striving: “It is like using the standing still as if it were a wing while the heart flies upward through its stability in the good.”[15] The restfulness Heschel finds within the Sabbath—so essential for remembering what holiness is amidst a lifestyle of toil and restlessness—exists here in perpetually progressive desire, allowing us to be at peace with the immanent and the transcendent alike in the time of the messiah that is already and not yet.

As Nietzsche rightly says, “… all joy wants eternity…wants deep, wants deep eternity.”[16] Altering Spinoza a little bit, we could respond that Nietzsche and his followers do not yet know what eternity can do. The issue is not “Dionysus against the Crucified,” as Nietzsche claimed[17], but the recognition within Gregory’s Neoplatonism that the Crucified is more Dionysian, more ecstatic, more epecstatic, than Nietzsche’s blinkered anti-Platonism can recognize.

A central element of Gregory’s theology is that there are is always more of God for us to discover, that God remains perpetually mysterious even in the midst of revealing himself; with every step the soul takes in perpetual progress, it is encouraged and strengthened all the more by the grace of this divine generosity, and thus perpetual progress is a kind of re-creation through which new qualities of the self, the world, and God emerge.[18] The heaven Gregory envisions is never boring, never harping, never just more of the same—it is qualitative progress. God’s hiddenness does not menace the present as godforsaken, but rather upholds and inspires the present as godbesotted, God-intoxicated.[19]

The transformative inspirations of eros, in its perpetual self-sublimation or flight upward after an ever-mysterious divinity, make of eternity a perpetual and liberated play, wherein one can keep on grasping time instead of being grasped by it. This peace that passes all understanding will not just simply show up one day like Godot, but can and has to be sought after here and now in the desire for infinite Beauty that includes and grounds the myriad finite beauties, through which we strive to create a community of love that refuses the Happy Consciousness not for desiring too much, but for not desiring enough. Faith in the divinity of romance—Romanticism—is not escapism, for it envisions within this world its unrealized potential for the new Jerusalem that includes all and works for it where one is:

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my Arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In Englands green & pleasant Land.[20]

Let us overcome the seductive false consciousness that equates the eternity of the messiah with dead time. Let us see that perpetual desire—the divinity of (and who is) infinite Love—is capacious enough to include everyone and everything. The spiritual is not threatened by the physical, it is simply not exhausted by the physical: “As Charles du Bos…has defined the spiritual, it is ‘the presence of more where there had been no awareness of less.’”[21] Let us not condemn any of the dohakei haketz who have no time for the spiritual. I believe that even when people find the language of faith too dead a language to hear it this way, ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. Ama, et fac quod vis.

This rhapsody of mine does not settle the issue of whether divine grace alone could make it possible for the soul to desire in the manner of perpetual desire. Nor do I take myself to have proven God’s existence, nor the truth of Christianity in this series of reflections. Instead, this has been an experiment to open up the range of what Christian eschatology—and the God at the head of it—can mean, to shed light on the radical change our restless and imperial way of being in the world would need to undergo, in order to have life and have it to the full. I do not consider myself to have finished unpacking the resounding truth of Marcuse’s statement that “Timelessness is the ideal of pleasure.”[22] I look forward to hearing your corrections in fiery friendship. Not binding myself to whatever mistakes I have made behind me, and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal of a Wisdom I can always come to love more.[23]

Part 1: Free Time for All Time

Part 2: The Afterlife as Escape and as Engagement

Part 3: A Road Leading Away from Rome: Agamben on Messianic Time

Part 4: Already and Not Yet: How to Do Time without Time Doing You

Part 5: B-Flat Eternity: The Restlessness of Modern Progress

Part 6: Up the Endless Mountains of Desire: Perpetually Progressive Love

[1] Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses §§225-226, p. 113

[2] Jean Daniélou, From Glory to Glory, p. 60

[3] Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses §§59-60, pp. 67-68ß

[4] Plato, Gorgias 494b

[5] Gregory of Nyssa, On the Beatitudes, sermon 4, PG 44.1244D-1245A. Quoted in From Glory to Glory, p. 70

[6] Spinoza, Ethics IIIP2S

[7] Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses §236, p. 115

[8] Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses §236, pp. 115-116

[9] Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 211. Notably, Marcuse leaves out the form of Beauty in his retelling of the ladder of love, perhaps to make it more conveniently fit his denial of Platonic metaphysics.

[10] Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses §232, pp. 114-115

[11] Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses §231, p. 114. The translator notes that Gregory uses the word eros here, which for him means “an intense form of agape”

[12] Gregory of Nyssa, sermon 13, 1045D-1048D, in From Glory to Glory, p. 272. It must be remembered that Gregory sees eros as a symbol. Gregory associated sexuality with irrational passion, and therefore as something ungodly; his praise of virginity as an approximation of the angelic superiority of being agender, alongside his stance that sexuality was not a part of human life in Paradise, reads the text of Genesis against itself. See Hans Boersma, Embodiment and Virtue in Gregory of Nyssa: An Anagogical Approach. Oxford University Press. 2013. Pp. 107-108 and p. 112. Nonetheless, we ought to note that the dichotomy between eros and agape that seems intuitive to us—and is repeated ad nauseam in sermons and lapidary asides in philosophy classes—is actually a false dichotomy from Luther, one that has become sedimented over time and fossilized in Anders Nygren’s popular account. See Daniélou p. 43. Given our earlier analysis of parallels between Marcuse and Christian eschatology, it is significant that Marcuse cites Nygren as proof that Christianity rejects eros in favor of agape (Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 126). Perhaps without this misinformation from Nygren, Marcuse might have seen these parallels.

[13] Gregory of Nyssa, From Glory to Glory, pp. 190-191.

[14] Daniélou, From Glory to Glory, p. 59.

[15] Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses §245, p. 118

[16] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann. 1977, pp. 339-340

[17] Nietzsche, Ecce Homo IV.9

[18] Daniélou, From Glory to Glory, p. 66: “Thus the notion of epectasis as a perpetual creation sets Gregory’s theology of man directly in the line of Biblical thought and the history of salvation. Indeed, it shows how the history of salvation is made up of a series of divine acts which are continually new achievements.”

[19] Building off of the myth of Poros and Penia in Plato’s Symposium, as well as Plato’s theory of divine madness, Plotinus talks about the difference between carefully composed reflection and carefree contemplative absorption in the One as the difference between sober nous and drunken nous. Gregory taps into this Neoplatonic imagery to describe the wild abandon of the soul’s union with God as a relationship of eros, symbolized in the Song of Songs. See Daniélou’s introduction, From Glory to Glory, p. 39.

[20] William Blake, preface to Milton, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman. New York: Anchor Books. 1988. Pp. 95-96.

[21] Daniélou, p. 63.

[22] Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 231

[23] Philippians 2:13-14

Categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: beauty, desire, eternity, fiery friendship, Gregory of Nyssa, Heschel, immanence, immortality, love, Marcuse, Nietzsche, perpetual progress, Plato, Romanticism, transcendence, utopia

B-Flat Eternity: The Restlessness of Modern Progress

Joseph Trullinger

Posted on August 4, 2016

This post will attempt to resolve a problem that arises for me when I think about Nietzsche’s statement that “joy desires eternity”: how can desire be eternal without being insatiable? In other words, are temporal limits necessary for avoiding a restless life in which one is never able to enjoy the current moment, being pulled out of it by a future that is always pulling away? I eschew the answers of Heidegger and Nietzsche for the reasons I articulated earlier, but I still need to articulate how joy can desire eternity with proper fidelity to both the already and not yet of eschatology.

In this project I find something promising in the mystical writings of Gregory of Nyssa, whose work I will take in an unorthodox direction by noting how it can be a resource for resolving the contradictions in Marcuse’s utopian eschatology. In Gregory’s account of how God increases the soul’s capacity to desire him with every moment of enjoyment of God, he offers an intriguing and overlooked way of understanding how desire can escalate without exhaustion—and it is this structure of perpetual progress that Marcuse needs to render his utopianism and his immortality consistent, such that Eros’ self-sublimation avoids being a hedonic treadmill of Sisyphean unhappiness.

An important disclaimer and clarification: when Marcuse uses the words Eros or erotic, and when I use them in the course of explaining Marcuse’s thinking, he and I don’t mean what most people mean by it. Most people take erotic to imply crass, disrespectful, objectifying lustful behavior that selfishly uses people to get a certain feeling out of them. Instead, Marcuse uses Eros and its cognates in a technical, neo-Freudian sense of “the pleasure principle,” which certainly includes sexuality but also includes all other sorts of pleasures such as singing, joking, eating, cooking, and any other number of activities that are joyful. In fact, one of Marcuse’s major criticisms of our society is that we restrict Eros to mean only sexuality (and only one part of our bodies), and this limits the range of what we are allowed to enjoy to narrow and preset parameters we receive from the society around us.[1] It follows that we have narrow imaginations about what constitutes pleasure and a happy life, and you can find evidence for this by watching commercials closely. Marcuse and I are also using the word Eros (and its cognates) in the Platonic sense of romantic love and passionate desire, where one seeks deep and personal connection with the beloved that respects them as the irreplaceable free being they are, not shallow and impersonal utilization of an object of desire that disrespects them as interchangeable with other objects of equally vacuous desire.

With this expansive conception of Eros in hand, Marcuse thinks Eros can generate its own principle of self-limitation and thereby sustain cultural order and create works of new mental or spiritual sensitivity (which Freud calls sublimation, because something basic is transforming into something more rarefied). According to Marcuse, Freud is right to think that we have to repress and delay the gratification of Eros to some extent in order to do basic things like hunt or sophisticated things like paint bowls of fruit, but Freud is wrong to think that the degree of our repression is directly proportional to the complexity and viability of our civilization, and furthermore wrong for thinking Eros needs a stern authority from the outside to force it to do the work necessary for civilized complexity. If automation technology could be used to make work less like toil and more like play, and if delaying full satisfaction of one’s drives can be a source for greater and more interesting pleasure later (as we see when we savor a meal instead of wolfing it down), then we can engage in the activities needed for social progress not out of anxiety about averting (usually artificial) catastrophe, but because the activity is pleasant in this higher, more fulfilling manner.[2] Marcuse writes:

The culture-building power of Eros is non-repressive sublimation: sexuality is neither deflected from nor blocked in its objective; rather, in attaining its objective, it transcends it to others, searching for fuller gratification. In the light of the idea of non-repressive sublimation, Freud’s definition of Eros as striving to “form living substance into ever greater unities, so that life may be prolonged and brought to higher development” takes on added significance. The biological drive becomes a cultural drive. The pleasure principle reveals its own dialectic. The erotic aim of sustaining the entire body as subject-object of pleasure calls for the continual refinement of the organism, the intensification of its receptivity, the growth of its sensuousness. The aim generates its own projects of realization: the abolition of toil, the amelioration of the environment, the conquest of disease and decay, the creation of luxury.[3]

It follows that the great degree of progress advanced industrial civilizations enjoy in the current age is technical progress without humanitarian progress; it is pivotal not to equate sophisticated technological mastery with advanced institutions that safeguard and promote the flourishing and peaceful coexistence of all individuals on fair and autonomous terms.[4] Nazi Germany is an intuitive example of how the one kind of progress can exist without the other. Marcuse also warns of “the idea of a totalitarian welfare state” wherein we might call people happy but “then it is the happiness of the administered.”[5] We are not freer simply because we have more disposable income and more elaborate markets to both meet and produce new consumer desires. This “quantitative concept of progress,” wherein we have more of the same, is technical progress; and while some degree of technical progress makes humanitarian progress possible, humanitarian progress will be a qualitatively improved kind of life.[6]

In the modern era, it is hard to imagine qualitative progress without distorting it into quantitative progress, since are in the grip of “the performance principle,” in which our highest value is productivity for productivity’s sake, way past the point of need. When we have free time we feel as though we should be making ourselves useful, and we in turn equate that with working hard, even when it is unnecessary for any rational biological or social or moral purpose.[7] No matter how much surplus our technological marvels allow us to have, we are afraid we don’t have enough; we tend to feel like imposters who don’t do enough, yet we tend to vehemently ostracize anybody who appears not to be busy. We are, in short, neurotic, because we have internalized an antiquated form of patriarchal domination that may have been necessary for prehistoric survival, but is completely unnecessary in an era when technology can make work more like play.[8] By overcoming the social structures that reproduce and ratify surplus-repression, we can overcome our unhealthy, compulsive restlessness:

Particularly characteristic of the modern view of progress is the evaluation of time. Time is understood as a straight line or endlessly rising curve, as a becoming that devalues all mere existence. The present is experienced with regard to a more or less uncertain future. The latter menaces the present from the beginning and is conceived and experienced with anxiety. The past remains behind as what can be neither mastered nor repeated, but in such a way that it continues to determine the present just because it is unmastered. In this linearly experience time, fulfilled time, the duration of gratification, the permanence of individual happiness, and time as peace can be represented only as superhuman or subhuman: as eternal bliss, which is possible and conceivable only after existence here on earth has ceased, or as the idea that the wish for the perpetuation of the happy moment is itself the inhuman or anti-human force that surrenders man to the devil.[9]

According to Caroline Edwards, Marcuse’s critical social thought contains covert traces of a tradition of Jewish messianism, and she sees in the ecological dimensions of Marcuse’s critique “the recalibration of transcendence by the ‘ecocritical turn,’ which in recent years has produced its own discourse of ecoeschatology, uncovering the ‘earthliness’ of immanent and historical hope within the Hebrew Scriptures.”[10] Edwards takes Marcuse to be engaged in an eschatology that is secular and therefore sees the time of the messiah as immanent in history and therefore is ecofriendly.[11] In my preceding posts I have problematized this easy and exclusive transitivity between secularity, divine immanence, and ecological care as potted history. I am all for “the greening of eschatology,”[12] as Edwards is; I simply think that the time of the messiah can have a transcendent dimension without excluding greenness (or what Hildegard of Bingen calls God’s viriditas).

Edwards does have a nice formulation that encapsulates how Marcuse is drawing from the Jewish messianism of the dohakei haketz, “those who hasten the end of time” through exemplary dedication to social justice[13]:

In the context of Jewish utopian messianism, then, the “Great Refusal” of Orpheus-as-liberator (EC 236) can thus be read as enacting a hastening of the end of time through the political tradition of messianic rupture; seizing the historical opportunity to resist capitalism’s reified “Happy Consciousness” and refusing an apathetic acceptance of death as ontological essence. For Marcuse, Orpheus instructs us to realize that death cannot be reduced to any pure negation of being since the end of time is signified by utopia, not death. Unlike Prometheus, who toils beneath the mighty albatross of progress, the legendary heroes Orpheus and Narcissus thus possess a vitally antagonistic relationship with the reality of the performance principle that militates against what Marcuse calls “the temporal dismemberment of pleasure” (EC 47). This mutilation of the time of pleasure must therefore be met with a commitment to the total negation of established society and subsequent instantiation of qualitative change.[14]

If the end of time is signified by utopia, not death, then the transcendence of the established order is not divorced from the prophetic and mythical imagination of a heaven, where the old order of suffering gives way to a new order of joy and justice, virtue and happiness, the highest good (summum bonum).

When Marcuse says that alongside a circular conception of time “all contentless transcendence would come to a close, and freedom would no longer be an eternally failing project,” he falls prey to the rationalization of suffering in Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, which Marcuse appears to take as the only meaningful way to talk about the “perpetuity of pleasure.”[15] However, Marcuse himself champions Eros’ capacity for self-sublimation and perpetually more intense and qualitatively improved forms. Here we notice a tension that recurs throughout Marcuse’s writings: on the one hand, Marcuse is militating for the historically unrecognized right to joyfully play and peacefully rest amidst a harmonious world here and now (let us call this a value-system of immanence)—and on the other hand, Marcuse’s utopianism calls for a better world that does not exist, contrary to entrenched repressive systems whose alternatives are unthinkable for most people (let us call this a value-system of transcendence).

This does not invalidate Marcuse’s project tout court, because he himself often notices the fertility of thinking about the tension between the way the world is and the way the world ought to be (e.g., his praise for dialectic as “the power of negative thinking,” or of “the aesthetic dimension” as “the Great Refusal,” etc.). However, Marcuse’s meager consideration of how Christian eschatology envisions the already and the not yet puts him at odds with himself in calling for immortality. He needs a new way of thinking about heaven, one that is not B-flat eternity where the future only promises more of the same (quantitative progress, not qualitative progress). I will outline this new way tomorrow, in my last post of this series.

Part 1: Free Time for All Time

Part 2: The Afterlife as Escape and as Engagement

Part 3: A Road Leading Away from Rome: Agamben on Messianic Time

Part 4: Already and Not Yet: How to Do Time without Time Doing You

Part 5: B-Flat Eternity: The Restlessness of Modern Progress

Part 6: Up the Endless Mountains of Desire: Perpetually Progressive Love

[1] For an observant illustration of how we tend to act out the stereotypes and scripts given to us by society, check out John Russon’s Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis, and the Elements of Everyday Life. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. 2003. Pp. 108-111.

[2] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 151-152

[3] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 211-212

[4] Herbert Marcuse, “Progress and Freud’s Theory of Instincts,” Five Lectures, pp. 28-29

[5] Ibid., p. 29

[6] Ibid., p. 28

[7] Ibid., p. 30

[8] Ibid., pp. 37-38

[9] Ibid., p. 32

[10] Caroline Edwards, “From Eros to Eschaton: Herbert Marcuse’s Liberation of Time,” Telos 165 (Winter 2013): 91-114. P. 97

[11] Ibid., p. 113

[12] Ibid., p. 110

[13] Ibid., p. 104.

[14] Ibid., p. 105

[15] Marcuse, “Progress and Freud’s Theory of Instincts,” pp. 40-41

Categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: eternity, immanence, Marcuse, performance principle, progress, Protestant work ethic, transcendence, utopia

Already and Not Yet: How to Do Time without Time Doing You

Joseph Trullinger

Posted on August 1, 2016

I was curious to know what my students at JCI thought of Agamben’s reading of the Second Coming, and if they saw any parallels to their own experience waiting for the day of their release from prison, which can be subject to sudden alterations or seem astronomically far away at times. To a man, they all said that to expect one’s life to instantly correct itself as if by magic once one is released is foolishness; they all stressed the importance of building a mentality of ethical responsibility as soon as possible, right now, even if one’s promised release date is far away or will in all likelihood not come before death. Many of them contrasted their scrupulosity in this regard to the zombie-like, repetitive, and short-sighted materialism of other prisoners who go through the motions, without a sense of purpose or vision.

I do not know if they are right about those other prisoners, but I am inclined to believe them, for in any case I think most of us are going through the motions in the manner they describe. I don’t think they were just humoring me when they said they liked Agamben. One prisoner once said to me, when I proposed teaching the class on time: “If there’s anybody who knows about time, it’s us.” They may not have precise vocabulary for it already, but there is a depth of insight when they speak about time that we should all listen to carefully.

Both in terms of vocabulary and insight, the sharp adage sometimes told in prison—“Do the time, don’t let the time do you”—harmonizes with Agamben on the futurity of the Second Coming: “In the one case, the time in which we believe we live separates us from what we are and transforms us into powerless spectators of our own lives. In the other case, however, the time of the messiah is the time that we ourselves are, the dynamic time where, for the first time, we grasp time, grasp the time that is ours, grasp that we are nothing but that time.”[1] Many of us are not grasping time but grasped by it in a ghostly dislocation from our own lives, going through the motions, doing as the Romans do while in Rome, only half-living in this static kind of dead time.

To grasp time and live dynamically in this Christian eschatology requires that one not put off taking care of those earthly things and persons, and at the same time, being committed to the possibility of taking care of them not just on a temporary basis but forever if need be, and thus the Christian resolutely takes up the ethical demand of now while also anticipating the ethical demand of eternity.[2] Here I want to repeat a formulation I used last time: what Christianity represents is not so much a transfer of hope from this world to another one so much as an expansion of the horizon of hope to include the physical world while also seeing its situation within an inexhaustible (that is, transcendent) context of an endlessly dynamic and all-encompassing Spirit.[3] The Christian sojourns by grasping the now within an expansive vision of the future as no reason for passivity in the present, but every reason for working towards the blossoming of the kingdom of God as soon as possible. (See, for example, how Jesus can be present among the faithful here and now, as in Matthew 18:20, and how love of God is impossible without love of neighbor in Matthew 25:34-40). As Agamben puts it:

Paroika and parousia, the sojourn of the foreigner and the presence of the messiah, have the same structure, expressed in Greek through the preposition para: a presence that distends time, an already that is also a not yet, a delay that does not put off until later but, instead, a disconnection within the present moment that allows us to grasp time.[4]

Agamben occasionally asserts that the time of the messiah cannot be a future time or involve the thought of a future life.[5] In so doing, Agamben emphasizes the already of eschatology and denies its obverse side of not yet—a denial that is understandable given the commonplace misunderstanding we saw in Nietzsche and Marcuse of Christianity as a layaway plan for future rewards. Yet I contend that this not yet has a progressive potential that has yet to be fully thought alongside its potency for the messiah’s presence in the now. For one thing, theologically speaking, Agamben does not square the identity of the messiah as the one who is always coming with this messiah’s promise of eternal life.

But on a philosophical note, Marcuse’s critique of the ideology of death should give Agamben pause, and make him wonder if he retains some crypto-Heideggerian worship of death. If Marcuse is right to hope for death’s defeat and to flourish in an order of eternal beauty and peace, then Agamben should not be so averse to Christians hoping for heaven, if this messianic hope really does contain the rich duality of already and not yet. Marcuse sees how Christian eschatology contains the not yet, but not how it contains the already; Agamben sees how Christian eschatology contains the already, but not how it contains the not yet. Their approaches are therefore complementary. Marcuse needs Agamben to correct his mistaken view of Christianity as politically complaisant, and Agamben needs Marcuse to sharpen his sense that history requires concrete transformation toward a lasting ideal future. Both need a more open stance on the positive possibilities of the idea of immortality—of the universally inclusive sort I’ve previously articulated in my post on the apokatastasis—as the confirmation of the urgency of now rather than its cancellation.

Thus, similar to Nietzsche’s way of grasping the finite through its eternal recurrence, I am proposing that a certain way of seeing immortality grasps the finite through its resurrection to eternal life through an infinite creation in which we are called to cooperate. But whereas Nietzsche accomplishes this by making time circular—with its attendant rationalization of suffering that Marcuse should find problematic—the Christian idea of heaven instead thinks of time as perpetual progress toward an inexhaustibly inviting God. But how can we reconcile the perpetual desire for greater intimacy with God with the legitimacy of fulfillment in the now? In my final posts in this series, I will unpack Gregory of Nyssa’s answer to this riddle in his doctrine of perpetual progress as an endless eros for God, and show its compatibility with Marcuse’s Eros as a principle of self-enhancing desire without restlessness.

Part 1: Free Time for All Time

Part 2: The Afterlife as Escape and as Engagement

Part 3: A Road Leading Away from Rome: Agamben on Messianic Time

Part 4: Already and Not Yet: How to Do Time without Time Doing You

Part 5: B-Flat Eternity: The Restlessness of Modern Progress

Part 6: Up the Endless Mountains of Desire: Perpetually Progressive Love

[1] Giorgio Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, trans. Leland de La Durantaye. London/New York/Calcutta: Seagull Books. 2012. P. 12

[2] Here I am modifying something I find inspiring in Levinas’ idea of diachrony, where the open-endedness of my relation with and never-ending responsibility for the Other opens up time, and by extension the meaningfulness of God transcending existence (as Plato says the Good is “beyond being” at Republic 509b): “The futuration of the future—not as ‘proof of God’s existence,’ but as ‘the fall of God into meaning.’ This is the singular intrigue of the duration of time, beyond its meaning as presence or its reducibility to presence, as in Saint Augustine himself—time as the to-God [à-Dieu] of theology!” Emmanuel Levinas, “Diachrony and Representation,” in Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press. 1998. P. 173

[3] Using the language of “penultimate things” to stand for earthly things and people, Agamben makes a nice point that confirms my proposal: “…Paul expresses the messianic relation between final and penultimate things with the verb katargein, which does not mean ‘destroy’ but, instead, ‘render inoperative.’ The ultimate reality deactivates, suspends and transforms, the penultimate ones—and yet, it is precisely, and above all, in these penultimate realities that an ultimate reality bears witness and is put to the test.”[3]

[4] Agamben, p. 26

[5] E.g., Agamben, pp. 12-13 and p. 26

Categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: Agamben, empire, immanence, JCI Scholars, transcendence

A Road Leading Away from Rome: Agamben on Messianic Time

Joseph Trullinger

Posted on July 31, 2016

For the last day of the philosophy of time class I taught for JCI Scholars this summer, I had us read The Church and the Kingdom, a “sermon” of sorts in which the philosopher Giorgio Agamben relays in accessible form the interpretation of messianic time he treats at greater length in The Time That Remains. I decided to close with this piece about how the early Christian church thought about the Second Coming (Parousia) in part because they have interesting perspectives on the material I like to think about, and because I thought it might speak to their own experience of awaiting release from prison.

The central problem of Agamben’s text is to retrieve the original meaning of “the time of the messiah,” wresting it free from the commonplace misunderstanding of it as a dramatic or cataclysmic future event set to happen any day now, until which we experience a life of injustice and suffering ticking along day after day with a vacuous and grinding banality. With a history of false prophets proclaiming that “the end is nigh” and providing embarrassingly precise timetables, the church has on the whole come to prefer discussing the eschaton in vague terms, just to be safe, as coming at some point. Yet even this vagueness still misunderstands the original eschatological message, according to Agamben: “The time of the messiah cannot designate a chronological period or duration but, instead, must represent nothing less than a qualitative change in how time is experienced. For this reason it is inconceivable to speak of a chronological delay in this context as though one were speaking of a train being delayed.”[1]

So what is the qualitative experience of the time of the messiah? “…Peter’s First Letter (1 Peter 1.17) defines the experience of time proper to the Church as ho chronos te paroikias, and which can be translated as ‘parochial time’ on the condition that we recall that parish originally meant ‘the sojourn of a foreigner.’”[2] To be a Christian in this pre-Constantine church meant to be without a fixed home, to sojourn, to be in the world but not of it. Here it is critical to bear in mind that “the world” in this context does not mean the physical world—nature or the cosmos as the local or complete totality of organic, bodily existence—but the empire, the imperial way of life spanning the whole world in the false peace of conquest and resource accumulation (Pax Romana).

For example, it says in 1 John 2:15-16: “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world.” Here we see the world means the common habit of jealously arrogating possessions and achievements unto oneself, a habit writ large and ratified in imperial conquest and colonialism. The world’s way of power is, as J. Richard Middleton puts it, power over instead of power with.[3] Reading it together with Luke 12:15, where Jesus says, “a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions,” we can see that sin is the futile attempt to own one’s way into fullness of life. As this pseudo-life—this death—of sinfulness has institutional sanction to the point that it comes to define sanctity itself, the Christian must redefine fullness of life in a way radically contrary to what the world calls wise and true (John 10:10).

Thus the Christian rejection of the world is not—or at least in its original and frequently marginalized practice, has not been—the ecological ingratitude or hatred of the body Nietzsche rightly repulsed, as ecotheology is keen to explain. Indeed, “the boasting of what [one] has and does” that defines the world is of a piece with social and environmental exploitation, and the bodily mortification of the ascetic can be just as much a stratagem for pride (1 Corinthians 13:1-3). As Agamben points out, the verb for “sojourning” is often contrasted with “katoikein, which designates how a citizen of a city, state, kingdom or empire dwells.”[4] Christian sojourn therefore has something of the ring that cosmopolitan originally had as the Cynics and Stoics used it: to be a citizen of the world (according to Diogenes) meant to not identify oneself with one polis, one place, but to be open to all, to be without or beyond borders. To sojourn is perhaps to be in flight from identifying with any one polis, but not necessarily in flight from politics, if by that we understand the extraordinary political activity of participating in communities that do not function the way empires do (Acts 4:32-34).[5]

Within this sojourning way of life—let us not forget that before the label “Christian” began as an insult in Antioch, they did not call it “Christianity” but simply “the way”—one does not simply devote one’s energies to Christ-like generosity and inclusivity with whatever time is leftover from one’s adherence to state-sanctioned customs and institutions. Instead of following Christ in one’s free time, following Christ is taken to free time itself, such that the communal sharing of resources for material security fits alongside the spiritual liberation of the majority of one’s time from anxiety and productivism (Luke 12:27-31), freeing time for life lived not as a means to some other end (which one has or does) but as an end in itself, as an end which can be endless: eternal life as the temporal dimension of fullness of life through participation in a divine way of life, a divinity who is the Way (John 14:6). The liberating time in which this divinity comes is not delayed, but already here for those who choose to let themselves be liberated by it:

…Paul reminds the Thessalonians, “About dates and times, my friends, we need not write to you, for you know perfectly well that the Day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night” (1 Thess 5.1-2). In this passage “comes [erchetai]” is in the present tense, just as in the Gospels the messiah is called ho erchomenos, “he who comes”—that is, he who never ceases to come.[6]

When we discussed this passage in class, one of my Muslim students shared a powerful insight I’d never heard before: for Jesus to come like a thief in the night does not merely imply that he comes suddenly or unexpectedly (as is in keeping with the vague forecasting that is typical in churches), but more precisely you do not see a thief in the night even while they’re in your house. Together with Agamben’s reading of the original Greek of the scripture, I take my student’s insight to mean that God is already here, unrecognized by most of us, not visible in any evidence we can handle in the light of day.

The students agreed that priests and religious leaders get the masses to procrastinate on overturning unjust social hierarchies by getting them to equate the Second Coming with a delayed future event, bringing up as their example Joel Osteen. They described the planes such hucksters have, the mansions, the swimming pools, the tax exemptions. Above all they described the egoism involved in allocating power through religion, and sharply demarcated it from the sincere spirituality many of them found in their own highly syncretistic and idiosyncratic paths. They saw this duality between power and spirituality playing out throughout many points of history and many faiths. For many of them, their spirituality has been honed by an acute sensitivity to the issue of waiting, and so their insights about eschatology are unusually perceptive in this regard, as I’ll explain at greater length tomorrow.

Part 1: Free Time for All Time

Part 2: The Afterlife as Escape and as Engagement

Part 3: A Road Leading Away from Rome: Agamben on Messianic Time

Part 4: Already and Not Yet: How to Do Time without Time Doing You

Part 5: B-Flat Eternity: The Restlessness of Modern Progress

Part 6: Up the Endless Mountains of Desire: Perpetually Progressive Love

[1] Giorgio Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, trans. Leland de La Durantaye. London/New York/Calcutta: Seagull Books. 2012. Pp. 4-5

[2] Agamben p. 2

[3] J. Richard Middleton. The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press. 2005. P. 297

[4] Agamben, p. 1

[5] A longer reflection would weigh whether Augustine’s City of God is entirely faithful to how the kingdom of God brooks no king but God.

[6] Agamben, p. 5

Categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: Agamben, empire, immanence, transcendence

experiments in ethicotheology

The Workshop of Hephaestus

White Fragility is Softminded and Hardhearted

Promise without Procrastination

The Theology of War: Bastille Day Reflections on Kant and Maldonado-Torres

Slavoj Žižek Analyzes the New Pepsi Commercial

Saying No but Meaning Yes: What I Learned from David Bowie’s Life

The Kingdom of Heaven Will Have No Enemy

Philonikers and Philosophers

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A Road Leading Away from Rome: Agamben on Messianic Time

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