history of philosophy – Philosophy Scare

38. Foucault’s Hidden Concern with Ousia

One of Foucault’s signal doctrines, flagged as such by Lynch (see #37), is that power is intrinsically unstable. It is the enactment of force, i.e. of that which puts a body into motion (Lynch p. 32), and force becomes actualized as power when it encounters obstacles (Lynch p. 49). Such actualization can be described as a set of clashes or events, and power is thus

The moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable.
Lynch p. 33

Beneath the institutions that constitute a society there thus roils an ever-changing ferment of power relations. But power can also be “institutionally crystallized” (Lynch pp. 31, 93) into a relatively stable site of hegemony or domination. So how does that happen? How do enduring structures arise from the multiple ferments of power relations?

Let us look at one Foucaldian example of such crystallization: the formation of a discipline. One condition for this, says Foucault, is “the constitution of a space, empty and closed, in the interior of which one is going to construct multiplicities” (Securié, Territoire, Population Paris 2004 18-19; my translation). Let us call that which encloses such a space a “wall.” Not all walls, in the case of a discipline, are physical. The psychological formulas which fix some people as “other” and thereby exclude them from a community are, on this reading, walls; but they are conceptual, not physical. So are the cultural differences which define some people as servants of others, even when they inhabit the same bounded space.

In addition to their exclusionary power, a wall ipso facto includes those to whom its structures will apply: to define some bodies as “other” is to define other bodies as “same.” Inclusion, like exclusion, has its evils: the Scots excluded from the Roman Empire by Hadrian’s Wall were freer than the people that wall included,who were subject to a multitude of disciplines exercised by the Roman army.

The construction of a specifically disciplinary wall, we may say, serves two functions with respect to what it includes:

It entraps the bodies to be disciplined. Without the impediment to motion presented by a wall, those bodies could simply move away from the discipline, either from a conscious desire to escape or from some other motive. Without the installation of permanent psychological or social formulae of exclusion, the same could happen.
Any social terrain, to be sure, is for Foucault traversed by a variety of force-relations (Lynch p. 33). In order for an enclosed space to serve as a terrain of domination, however, certain force-relations have to be privileged, so that they come to be exercised by a single, unified component of the whole—call it the “dominator.” Otherwise the force- relations within a given space would compete with each other, and domination would be impeached.

The crystallization of disciplinary power into an institution is thus the introduction of boundary and disposition, two of the three axes of ousiodic domination (# 8), into a field of human interaction. In disciplinary power, the dominator is a unified body of regulations and practices which governs the activities of people who are unable to traverse the wall.

Disciplinary power is not the only kind of power for Foucault, and the need for walls is present in other forms as well. In what Foucault calls “sovereign” power, for example, the dominator is usually a single person, and the wall-function is performed by the boundaries of the territory over which the sovereignty extends (STP 13-19, 94).

Biopower, or governmentality (Lynch pp. 123-126) is exercised, not over territory, but over a “population,” which is a multiplicity of individuals subject to a particular set of causal factors. These can be natural or artificial, and can range from climate and landscape to the layouts of population centers (STP 22-23). The territory on which a population lives is, then, looser and more porous than is the case with sovereign or disciplinary power. But it exists all the same, because the particular set of causal factors that defines a given population does not exist everywhere on earth: different populations are defined by the operation within them of a specific, indeed unique, set of causal factors. Governmental power is thus, like disciplinary and sovereign power, exercised over a limited spatial territory (or territories); and, like them, it crystallizes when a single unified agent—the government—assumes control over those multiple causal factors.

A final, attenuated form of territorial limit is found in pastoral power, which for Foucault is the ancestor of both disciplinary and governmental power. The shepherd’s flock, to be sure, does not occupy a fixed place—it is in movement (STP 146), and so the territory on which a flock finds itself at any given moment is a matter of indifference to the flock. But that does not mean that the flock itself has no boundaries at all. Keeping the flock together, i.e. policing its boundaries, is an important job which falls to a group of workers who are not mentioned by Foucault (or by the Christian texts he cites): sheepdogs. Any sheep who wanders off or falls behind is set upon by these tireless adjuncts, operating under the direction of the shepherd, and is nipped back to the rest of the herd.

In all four of these forms forms of Foucaldian power, then, we find boundaries of some sort, policed in different ways either by a single agent (a discipline or sovereign) or by a set of agents working in cooperation. This contrasts with Derrida, whose denial of boundary relegates his philosophy to textual matters (#36). Foucault, while he occasionally mentions boundaries, does not emphasize them. This prevents him, I suggest, from appreciating the value of his own thought as a series of contestations of social ousiai. Given the centrality of ousia to the history of Western philosophy, this means that Foucault also mistakes the relation of this thought to that history.

37. Foucault’s Post-Cold-War Paradigm

During the Cold War, which lasted for 40 years and has now been over for 30, Western political philosophy took a deeply abstract turn. Sartre attempted to ground radical freedom on the purely empty activity of “nihilation,” consciousness’ constant surpassing of its current situation. Habermas formulated his highly abstract “ideal speech situation.” In the US, Rawls articulated an “original position” defined by the ignorance of those in it of all the concrete facts of their lives.

This abstract turn, I suggest, was pushed by an aspiration to universalism, born of global struggle; it seemed urgent to find principles that everyone, East and West, should live by. But there was a still more urgent, and less philosophical, imperative: winning the Cold War. To that end, philosophers in the West, committed to and financed by their side of the global struggle, formulated a succession of “universal” truths that the Communist East could not accept. Thus, Stalinist societies could hardly accommodate the constant surpassing of present givens of Sartrean nihilation, or the unconstrained speech of Habermas’ ideal, or the centrality of rational choice presented in Rawls. Philosopically at least, they had to give in, refuted by philosophical argumentation. (In fact, of course, world events paid no attention to the philosophers. What refuted the East was not the West’s exemplification of universal truths, but its much higher standard of living and military prowess.)

“Cold War” philosophies, eager for universal validity yet rooted in partisan struggle, postulated a realm of thought unaffected by socio-political pressures—a realm styled a “space of reasons” or an “enclave of freedom.” Only in such an impartial arena could universal truth be won. But the philosophies that confronted each other in that arena all ran into the same problems.

First problem: the “space of reasons” doesn’t exist. We are not able to surpass all givens, or to occupy the Rawlsian original position for more than a few moments at a time. Habermas, perhaps anticipating this problem, insisted that ideal speech was, precisely, an “ideal;” it is not the space of reasons itself, but the idea of it, that grants us whatever objective knowledge and moral justification as we can obtain. But (as Kant would ask), what status can an admitted fiction have when it comes to determining moral behavior?

Second problem: committed to the fiction of an apolitical space of reasons, none of these approaches could reflect on its own origins in Cold War partisanship. The very existence of such origins, in fact, would make it path-dependent, and so call into question its claims to universality. That was why the “space of reasons” came to be postulated in the first place.

Third problem: universality must be purchased with abstraction, so these social philosophies had little to say about the concrete struggles of their time: matters of feminism, racial justice, the collapse of colonialism, and a long list of other struggles were met either with silence or with well-meaning common sense, for which we do not need philosophy. When the Cold War ended, and particular struggles like these replaced the one great global struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union as the driving forces of history, universality claims became nostalgic, and the space of reasons which was meant to vindicate them became vestigial.

Fourth and Final Problem: the universalism, for all its abstractness, was imperialistic. In the universalistic realm of the space of reasons, gender, color, and class were all bracketed out. The result was regression to traditional defaults: the inhabitants of the “space of reasons” turned out in fact to be, not universal humans (because universals can’t reason or, in fact, do anything), but white guys of a certain age.

The time was ripe for a thinker who denied the common root of these problems—the apolitical space or reasons—and moved philosophy into the center of the new struggles. That thinker was Michel Foucault, who can thus be called the most important political philosopher of the second half of the Twentieth Century.

The contretemps between Foucault and mainstream philosophy was not a debate, but a paradigm shift. As with paradigm-shifts in general, misunderstandings abounded. Adherents of the space of reasons often saw Foucault’s rejection of it as a rejection of knowledge and morality themselves. Foucault’s claim that power is present in all social relations was transmuted into the claim that all social relations can be reduced to power relations. He was then saddled with the view that that resistance to power is impossible, overlooking the fact that he accepts the classical definition of power—that it is the ability to overcome obstacles. Power for Foucault cannot exist without resistance.

The time was ripe for someone to cut through these misunderstandings and to show, in careful detail, why rejecting the space of reasons as Foucault did does not put an end to morality. This was Richard Lynch, on whose Foucault’s Critical Ethics much of the next section will be based.

For the moment, let us learn the lesson of these thinkers and admit that the quest for universality is one of humnaity’s less productive enterprises. What we really want from philosophy is guidance in our lives. For that we need philosophy to deal not in abstract truths, but in individual experiences. Philosophy should, therefore, be more an art than a science.

36. Texts, Gentlemen’s Agreements, and Jacques Derrida

Heidegger’s concern with scripts, with step-by-step sequences of actions (#35), is ongoing. Long after Being and Time, he is tracing developments, in poems and philosophical texts, that have no context larger than themselves—that, in his parlance in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” his most crucial essay, “set up a world” (eine Welt aufstellen). His tracings take them step by step, paying close attention to the order of the words. He thus treats each of these cultural phenomena as a script, and one which is completely independent of all other scripts. He calls these step-by-step treatments Holzwege, after the forest paths cut by loggers which lead from likely tree to likely tree and so nowhere in particular—certainly not to home. On a Holzweg there is no telos, and no unifying and ordering form.

Derrida’s writings, too, can be viewed as a set of Holzwege. Like Heidegger’s, they meditate philosophical and other texts, but now with the “aim” of thickening them up and rendering them more interesting because more undecidable. This is the antithesis to the usual scholarly practice of skimming a text for a take-away, for a thesis it proves or a lesson it teaches. The conceptual moves Derrida makes in the course of this are often arbitrary or even forced, which would be fatal if Derrida were trying to prove something about the texts he treats. His treatments, however, tend to end, not with a triumphant thesis, but on the brink of about three unasked questions—far from any kind of “home.”

So what good are they? Philosophy, in a market economy, has to produce results, truths and lessons which others can use. Does Derrida consider himself exempt from the laws of the market?

Of course not! One important achievement of his writings lies in the fact that usual scholarly practice with texts takes those texts to have ousiodic structure: the dominating form is the thesis or lesson, which organizes the whole. Every sentence, indeed every word, should contribute to its establishment; extraneous considerations should be excluded. Derrida’s many writings contest this whole approach, and thus amount to a vast number of assaults on various textual realizations of ousia (see my Philosophy and Freedom, Chapters One and Two).

Another takeaway, I think, is to be found, not within Derrida’s writings themselves, but in the contrasts between them and more traditional exegeses. What he shows, over and over, is that the reader’s journey from sign to meaning is often accomplished with the aid of what are nothing more than gentlemen’s agreements. It is these agreements that enable us to speed past the undecidable phrases, disjointed arguments, unintentional rhymes, and so on that any text contains. Often without our knowing it, our usual reading techniques fill in the gaps, amend the fallacies, eliminate the digressions, and so on until we get where we wanted to go—which is to see those texts as realizations of ousiodic structure.

Gentlemen’s agreements of this kind are not innocent, and the textual moments that incite them are not innocent set of authorial flaws. Derrida demonstrates this by focusing, again and again, on one script we recurrently use to understand things. I call it the “binary script:”

Isolate word-meaning w.
Correlate w to ～ w
Establish a preference-relation between w and ～w such that the former is preferred—or, as Derrida often puts it. “privileged.”

The third step can be achieved in many ways; just using a word can privilege it over its opposite. ～ w can also be excluded in other ways, or ordered into the disliked half of a binary; for example see any of Derrida’s texts, where he undoes the binary script over and over again. The point of these undoings is not to produce a better or fairer understanding of the original text, but to show that the binary script is indeed a script, something we bring to the texts but not written into their structure.

The binary structure, bi-partite with one side dominant, is also a partial realization of ousiodic structure, minus an explicit boundary; we may say that the dominant half, w, occupies the privileged traditional position of form, while ～ w is relegated to a status akin to that of ousiodic matter. The absence of boundary means, however, that the binary is totally open, nothing more than a link in a chain of signifiers—an openness that Derrida, early on, called “differance.”

This renders Derrida’s thought of only limited use when it comes to analyzing political or social case of oppression. When the oppressed being is a human, rather than a word or word-meaning, they can always run away—unless there is a wall to hold them in. Derrida’s undoings of the binary script thus contest ousiodic disposition and initiative (in traditional reading, the understanding of a text by its reader just as the writer intended), but not boundary, which is simply denied (“il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” a text has no outside).

Though the application of his (and Heidegger’s) insights beyond the uniquely unbounded way in which texts chain signifiers is problematic, Derrida shows us new and other possibilities of understanding philosophical texts, some of which are central to how we live. Thus, to read Derrida’s account of Geschlecht as telling us what sex “really” is would be sterile at best. To read his treatments of the gift as telling us what gifts “really” are is—poisonous (giftig). But to read them as forcing us beyond our ancient gentlemen’s agreements is liberating.

35. Heidegger’s Scripts Rescripted

Scripts, repeatable sequences of actions triggered by experienced events and aiming at a goal, were moved to the center of philosophy by Heidegger. But they long predate him, for they are basic to life itself. But where in fact do they come from? Where are they going?

There are different ways to take that question.

First, scripts are acquired by individuals, because they consist basically in bodily movements and bodies are individuated. How does an individual acquire a script? By learning (#34), but not only. Some are programmed into the human (or other animal) body: walking, eating, sex. Others are learned in early childhood (bathroom procedures, dressing). Others do not pre-exist their acquisition, but ae improvised from an encounter with something radically new (works of art). Some scripts come from other scripts, which they either modify (as driving cars modifies guiding carriages) or into which they are inserted as subscripts (as careful washing of hands was inserted into the “return home from the supermarket” script during the coronavirus pandemic).

The Kantian question of the criteria for forming a name, raised in post # 20, gains a bit more clarity from Heidegger’s notion of a script: a new word either plays its role in an old script (often, in this context, called a “language-game”), or modifies it, or designates a new script; the criteria for new words thus coincide, at least in part, with those for introducing new scripts.

What makes a new script, or word, a good one is in part how it relates to scripts already in existence. The relation may be additive, in that a new script enables socially coordinated action to achieve new goals, or more efficiently achieve old goals. A new script may also be revisionary, in that the new script makes changes in old scripts, often forcing them to cohere in a new and larger project. Hegel examines this sort of thing in his Philosophy of Right, which unites numerous social institutions and practices—scripts—into a new and a larger project of producing a sort of Kantian moral agents (see my Understanding Hegel’s Mature Critique of Kant).

This kind of unification of scripts can eventually result in the structure Aristotle sets out in Nicomachean Ethics I.1 (and which, as I mentioned in #34, was Teutonified in Heidegger’s account of the worldhood of the world in Being and Time): all human pursuits have a single goal. For Aristotle that goal was ἐυδαιμονία, reason functioning as the ousiodic form of an individual life (often mistranslated as “happiness”). For Heidegger (as a good Teuton) it is death.

But this raises another question: in what sense is death the “goal” of life? Who seeks it?

No one; death seeks us. As have argued elsewhere (Time and Philosophy, Chapter Seven), the fact that I am going to die shapes my life, for it means that I cannot do everything: I cannot live everywhere, marry everyone, pursue every possible career. I cannot acquire all possible scripts, and must therefore allocate my time and energy by selecting and organizing the scripts I do acquire. In doing so I act, like a Homeric hero (#32), at the behest of my mortality, which forces me to put my life into a definite shape.

Death thus dominates our lives in a way oddly similar to Aristotle’s concept of deliberation (προαίρεσις). In deliberation we reason back from our concept of ἐυδαιμονία toour present situation, and decide what we can do now to most advance our “happiness.” This process, which is the rule of reason in an individual life, selects and organizes, from all the alternatives available to the deliberator, the single best one. In that way the process of deliberation shapes the life of the person deliberating; and since it is a rational process (Aristotle calls it a syllogism), deliberation constitutes the rule of reason in a human life. Deliberating well is thus ἐυδαιμονία itself (hence the infelicity of “happiness” as a translation). It is the full realization (ἐνεργεῖα) of the human essence.

Death for Heidegger provokes similar selections and organization; it bounds and disposes thr components of my life and so of my self. But this ousiodic dominance is, here, without content: unlike Aristotelian ἐυδαιμονία,death does not provide a concrete goal to work towards but merely forces me to determine that some scripts will be included and others excluded from my life, without telling me which. It is indeed my τέλος, but it is an empty τέλος: since its nature is unknown, its commands are empty, and it rests with me to fill them in.

We can now see Heidegger’s major innovation on traditional accounts of ousia: ousiodic form, the telos of a life, is for him indeterminate, for no one knows what death is. As such, it has no characteristics of its own and is defined only by what it puts a stop to, i.e. a human life. It is an utter darkness at the end of the tunnel. Moreover, your death and my death, being both utterly featureless, are indistinguishable and so constitute a single large extinction—a single Nothing.

Yet this nothingness is active, in that it shapes the very lives it ends: “The Nothing,” Heidegger says, “nothings.” Given philosophy’s ancient commitment to ousia, it is not surprising that Heidegger’s pithiest formulation of his alternative to ousia—“the Nothing nothings—” should have drawn so much ridicule from philosophers, especially those in the English-speaking world. Their laughter showed us who they are.

Though ousiodic structure is endemic in the West, its three axes never been focused on, and the post-Aristotelian roles of ousia in structuring Western lives have never been seen clearly—which has only enhanced their dominance. In Being and Time, ousiodic structure finally receives a frontal philosophical assault; more will follow (see my Reshaping Reason, 2014).

34. Heidegger’s Scripts

Martin Heidegger was a Nazi. This can never be forgotten, any more than it can be forgotten that Jefferson owned and sired slaves, or that Nietzsche vilified women, or that Lindbergh was an anti-Semite. We need to redefine greatness: there is no such thing as a “great man” or “great woman,” only people—morally ambiguous beings who ocasionally do great things. The bad with the good, in philosophy as well as in philosophers: they were all mongers of ousia, but their mongering was often fascinating and now constitutes much of your intellectual spinal chord. The special problem with Heidegger is that his Nazism was, he claimed, a philosophical position—he himself joined his evil to his greatness. The joint is disturbing: what good is philosophy if it doesn’t teach you that Nazism is evil?

The connection is also suspect. Heidegger’s thought, which he himself clearly did not understand very well, is not unified enough for all aspects of it to be automatically classed as Nazi. Consider, in particular, Heidegger’s notion of the “totality-of-significance” (Bewandtnisganzheit), the context which enables the use of a tool. If the tool is a pen, its totality-of-signifieance includes physical things like paper and light source, social things like the technology of eventual publication or private delivery, cultural things such as the genre in which one writes, and personal things such as what one thinks one has to say. Totalities-of-significance concern practices of tool-using, and his emphasis on them joins Heidegger, not to Nazism, but to pragmatism.

It is testimony to the hold atemporality has on philosophical minds that so many readers of Heidegger think that a totality of significance must be all there at once, arrayed (if “non-thematically”) around the tool at the outset of its use. In fact, a moment’s reflection shows that even the most stable physical components of such a totality have to be encountered in a certain order. I need to secure paper and a light source before I pick up the pen, but I don’t yet have to know what I am going to say (and usually don’t, in any detail). Totalities of significance unfold step by step, which is why I call them “scripts.”

One important function of such scripts is to direct awareness: it is the script I am engaged in, and in executing which I have arrived as a certain point or “line,” that selects for me, from all the sensory messages that I am receiving at a given moment, the ones I attend to. This selection has the feel of something surging up before me, of its unwilled movement to the center of my awareness; and since it is governed by the script, it is a surging-up-as. The same thing (in physical terms) can surge up differently if I am engaged in a different script.

Scripts were for a while major concerns of artificial intelligence (see Shank and Abelson Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding, 1977). They dropped out of centrality because of the field’s obsession with getting computers to perform them. Heideggerean scripts are, more realistically, riddled with holes and ambiguities, which give them the flexibility to be performed on differing occasions. Computers, at least the ones available to Shank and Abelson, are not good with holes and ambiguities, and attempts to program even simple behaviors into computers recurrently collapsed under the weight of exceptions and spur-of-the-moment modifications. So much the worse for programing.

In human beings, the holes and ambiguities in scripts are mastered by their goal-directed character, and this helps explain why computers can’t run them. The person executing a script does so to achieve some goal, and any part of the script needs to be executed only well and completely enough to realize that goal. But deciding that requires a judgment-call which computers are, so far, unable to make. Their tendency is to execute each phase of a script perfectly, and this requires that it be written perfectly—something humans, so far, are unable to do. Hubert Dreyfus thus finds himself reversed[1]: in this case, getting computers to mimic human intelligence fails because of what humans, not computers, can’t do.

Because scripts guide behavior, philosophers have mostly ignored them; they have historically viewed the mind as a device for looking at things (“representational mind”), not acting. But pragmatism is not the only exception to this: Heidegger’s account of the worldhood of the world, which is built on the notion of scripts, is basically a Teutonification of Aristotle’s pragmatically-oriented Nicomachean Ethics I.1. And what are Kant’s categories but guides for encountering any object whatever?

Kant’s treatment reveals the limits of traditional philosophy, however, for he insisted that the validity of the categories’ operation extended to all experiences. This meant that the categories could not be acquired from experience, because then they would not apply to the experience of their acquisition. So they had to be a priori, independent of all experience, and that meant independent of the intuitive form of all experience, time—landing Kant back in traditional philosophy. Heidegger, by contrast, talks about relative a priori’s: contexts of significance acquired independently of my current experience, which they help to shape, but not of experience altogether: they are learned, i.e. come from previous experiences.

[1] Dreyfus What Computer Can’t Do, New York 1972

32. Homer, Nietzsche, and the Final Slamover

I called attention, in discussing Kant, to how tightly his solution to the problem of the causality or reason adhered to an Aristotelian model (# 24). Nietzsche, too, is more Aristotelian than he is often thought to be. I said (#8) that for Aristotle, form exercised a threefold domination over matter: it drew boundaries which separated one thing from others; disposed (ordered) whatever was within those boundaries; and took the initiative with regard to managing interactions with the outside world. Initiative and boundary are thus at odds for Aristotle, because once a boundary is in place, acting on the world outside transgresses it (see my Metaphysics and Oppression).

The heart of this problem is that boundary and disposition have priority over initiative: a thing without boundaries which separate it from other things does not exist at all, and a boundary within which no single component disposes the rest has—for the metaphysical tradition, anyway—no unity. Thus, for that tradition, something has to be fully existent, i.e. its form has to be in relatively full control of its matter, before it can cause changes in other things. Only an adult (male) can beget; only someone who has fully mastered a skill can teach it.

In Nietzsche’s inversion of metaphysics, initiative is basic: what is ontologically fundamental is not things but forces, which act on the world without themselves being rooted in a bounded subject or substratum. As Nietzsche puts it, “”there is no ‘being’ behind the deed, its effect and what becomes of it; ‘the doer’ is invented as an afterthought,—the doing is everything (Genealogy of Morality I.13). Nietzsche’s overall name for the totality of such forces is, famously, “will to power.”

When one force achieves dominance of another force (or forces), we get what I have called the “slamover.” This, I have suggested (#31), is Nietzsche’s appropriation of pre-Aristotelian (and indeed pre-Platonic) physics to furnish the stylistic form of his sentences and aphorisms. For much of their content, however, Nietzsche goes even farther back—to Homer. To understand Nietzsche even partially, then, we must understand a bit about the Homeric worldview.

There is such a thing, at least in the Iliad (for complexities in the Odyssey see its treatment in Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectics of Enlightenment). The social world of the Iliad is a simple place, centered on a series of hand-to-hand combats. In the Trojan War, groups of men never move together. Rather, each hero on the Plain of Troy selects an opponent from the other army and tries to kill him. If he fails, he dies. If he succeeds, he selects another opponent, ideally one slightly stronger then the first, and repeats his efforts. The whole Trojan War thus has the structure of a video game, in which each vanquished opponent only gives rise to a more formidable foe.

But this is no game. With one exception, every Achaean knows that if things go really well for him, he will eventually face Hector, the Trojan champion; and Hector will kill him. Every Trojan, without exception, knows that if things go really well for him, he will eventually have to face Achilles (if he returns to the battle); and Achilles will kill him. (Achilles himself, the exception, does not die in hand-to-hand combat, but from a poisoned arrow shot by Paris). Death, the ultimate slam-over, waits at the end of the hero’s path, and it is awful indeed: whether you have been good or bad, when you die you lose most of your life-force and spend eternity shrieking in Hades.

Most of the soldiers in this war do not want to play this game; they want to live and go home. Instead of fighting, they merely stand around and watch the heroes fight. Homer calls them ὄι κακοί, the ordinary ones; in classical Greek, as Nietzsche points out (Genealogy of Morals I.5) κακός will mean “bad.” But what about the heroes? What motivates them?

The utterly slim chance of salvaging something posthumous: the chance that your valor in battle will inspire a bard to sing about you, so that you gain ὃ κλἐος ἀθανατὀς, immortal fame. While you scream in Hades, your valor survives in the memories of your fellows.

The Greek hero, confronting his death with only his valor, quickness and strength, is a clear prototype of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. And Nietzsche describes the Achaean hero’s moment of glory, his ἀριστεῖα —the moment that shows him at his best, just after he has killed the last man he will kill, for—as he must suspect—his next opponent will kill him:

One experiences again and again one’s golden hour of victory—and then one stands forth as one was born, unbreakable, tensed, ready for new, even harder, remoter things…
Gen. Mor. I.12

After a victory, as one receives the plaudits of ὄι κακοί, our hero does not know if he is experiencing his ἀριστεῖα or not, for the future is radically uncertain, and the final slam-over awaits.

The Greek hero thus exhibits a metaphysical transgression. What makes his life worthwhile is not to be found in him, but in his effects on others—on those who will sing of him, and those who will hear the songs. The good life is not for Nietzsche a matter of the right organization of the soul, as both Plato and Aristotle thought, and certainly not one of following divine commandments, but of moving outward beyond one’s self to affect the world—one of the many meanings of Nietzsche’s famous concept of “self-overcoming.” Under the rubric of will to power, initiative, the last and most problematic of the tree axes of ousiodic domination, is posited as ontologically most basic.

31. Nietzsche and the Slamover

That time is a philosophical mystery has been obvious to philosophers since Heraclitus. That time is not merely one philosophical problem among others but a condition of philosophy itself, so that philosophy needs, in all its dimension, to respond to time was propounded by Hegel out of Hume’s success and Kant’s failure (# 24). It was so radical a thought that its presence in Hegel’s writings was, and still is, missed entirely.

How philosophy should respond to time is obviously a function of what we take time to be. For Kant, it was the ordering of incompatibles: if x has both property φ and ～φ, our minds assign φ and ～φ to different times, so that instead of a contradiction we have a process: φ_t implies ～φ_t±n.This follows from the nature of time itself: nothing comes-to-be from itself, because then it would not have come-to-be at all; it would have been there all along. Nor can it pass-away into itself, for then it would not pass away at all. So it must come-to-be from its opposite and pass-away into it, in the ancient sense in which the “opposite” of hot is not cold but not-hot. Kant’s account of time thus accommodates the ancient doctrine of antapodosis, that things come-to-be from their opposites (see Plato, Phaedo 70e-71e).

But this account of changes is incomplete, for it focuses only on the terminal points of the process:～φ from which it begins, and φ with which it ends (or vice-versa for passing-away). What about the process itself?

Nietzsche’s characteristic way of handling this begins by designating or evoking various intermediate stages of the process. Example: “the water is hot.” Since the hot water is in time, it must have come-to-be from something that is not hot water, either because it is not hot or because it is not even water. Let us take the previous case. English affords us several different ways of referring to water by its temperature, so we can say, first, that the water is cool; then that it is lukewarm; then that it is warm; then warmer; then really warm; and finally hot. We have now construed the coming-to-be of the hot water as a six-stage sequence ending in hot water. That final stage is different from the others in that it marks the end of our construal. The water may go on to boil, or it may cool down, but those possibilities do not interest us; for our purposes the process is over, and we now have, not a process of water getting progressively hotter but something quite different, namely a state of the water.

This, then, is a version of antapodosis, a general theory of coming-to-be formulated in Plato’s Phaedo. It is the last (indeed the only) theory of change advanced in the Phaedo before the Theory of Forms is introduced, so we can see how it would appeal to the materialist in Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s way of mimicking antapodosis is, often, to lead the reader in one direction, getting closer and closer to a final revelation—and then slamming-over, not to the revelation prepared for, but to something quite different: as if the sequence were cool—lukewarm—warm—warmer—really warm—ice. A quick and simple example is Nietzsche’s joke, “God’s only excuse is that He doesn’t exist.” The first part of the sentence prepares us, not merely for an assertion of God’s existence, but for an apologia for Him; the second part undoes the expectation. The two parts can only function together, but what is important is the slamover from seeming apologia for, to atheistic dismissal of, the Deity.

A deeper example, to be discussed shortly (#32), lies in the progression of the Homeric hero, who wins victory after victory—until he doesn’t, which means he is vanquished and dies in the ultimate slamover. Slamovers, then, are not merely philosophical tropes. They have general significance for knowledge and action:

As knowers, let us not be ungrateful towards such resolute reversals of familiar perspectives and valuations…to see differently, and to want to see differently to that degree, is no small discipline and preparation of the intellect for its future “objectivity—”the latter understood, not as contemplation [Anschauug] without interest but as having in our power our “pro’s” and “cons:” so as to be able to engage and disengage them so that we can use the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations for knowledge.
Genealogy of Morality III.12

One of the cardinal rules of reading Nietzsche is, then, to wait for the slamover. A case in point is his treatment of the Übermensch. We hear so much about the Übermensch’s superiority to others, his awareness of that superiority and his salutary contempt for inferior creatures, that we are unprepared for—and so set up for—the slamover when Nietzsche says that the Übermenschis is often kind to others—as humans are often kind to kittens. In particular, using other people to assert one’s own superiority is about as un-Nietzschean as anything can be—a fact which escaped Nietzsche-readers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who in 1924 failed to wait for the slamover and, entranced by the ruthlessness in early stages of Nietzsche’s portrayals of the Übermensch, killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago. They not only misunderstood Nietzsche but mutilated the rest of their lives: both of them went, fittingly, to the slammer.

30. Marx and the Market

Marx defined dialectics as thought which

includes, in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things…also the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because [such thought] regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and hence takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.
Marx, Capital, Morse & Aveling 1906: 26

This is a far more useful definition than the standard three-step straw man of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that Stalin used to “prove” that the society he controlled was the wave of the future, and that Western philosophers and economists still prefer to knock down when they think about dialectics at all.

It is true that even Marx’s good definition conveys a misunderstanding, for it allows him to try and use dialectics to make predictions. In Hegelian terms, dialectics is a way of organizing social memory, not a predictive device (# 26). What Marx is trying to do in predicting the death of capitalism is a form of future-oriented dialectics: Marx sums up the premises of a contemporary capitalist economy, negates just one of them—individual ownership of the means of production (i.e. factories) —and draws the conclusions. But in fact, as Hegel would point out, there are many such premises, and just which one (or ones) will get negated is not for philosophers to predict. Nor can they tell how the negation will proceed: Marx thought the negation of individual ownership of the means of production would transfer the ownership to the workers, via the revolution; in fact, it was transferred to the investor class, via the stock market.

As to markets in general, as far as I can tell, Marx has little to say. He thinks they are chaotic, but we all know that. His main complaint about free markets, I think, is that they don’t stay free. The moment one participant gains even a temporary advantage over another, they will seek to convert it into a permanent one, and from there into a monopoly. Sometimes they do this by direct action against the competition; sometimes they use the state as a weapon, calling in government regulators to act in their favor (see Thomas Philippon, The Great Reversal, Harvard 22019).

None of this is news to anyone (though Philippon’s revelations of the extent of it came as a surprise to me). What made Marx special is that he did not view market consolidation, the evolution of a market from freedom to monopoly, as a series of unfortunate accidents. It is what markets are: a free market is to a monopoly market as an acorn to an oak. This insight is part of his overall critique of political economy, the previous generation or two of economists (Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, etc.) who, in Marx’s view, tried to determine how the major components of the economy functioned without asking where they came from. Thus, they asked about how private property works, but not how there came to be such a thing as private property in the first place. They thereby eternalized it.

They, and their descendants. also failed to see needed distinctions. Private property for Marx originates in the appropriation of others’ labor. Nothing, then, could be further from Locke’s account of an individual enclosing and working on a given piece of land. Compared to Marx’s compelling and empirically-grounded account of the genesis of capitalism, Locke’s story seems like an idle thought-experiment; and yet things such as he presents have in fact happened, if only rarely. So there are two kinds of property: private property, which has immoral origins, and what we may call personal property, which does not.

Now suppose I go into a store and buy a toothbrush. I am buying something that was produced, let us say, by eight-year-olds working in a factory somewhere very far from the store I am shopping in. Their labor is being appropriated, but not by me; I have appropriated no one’s labor, and my toothbrush belongs to me as personal, not private, property. I benefit from the alienation of the childrens’ labor in that far-off factory, and this gives me certain moral obligations toward the people whose labor has benefitted my oral health, but it does not make me an exploiter or a capitalist; even in capitalist countries, socialists are allowed to buy toothbrushes.

The difference between private property and personal property lies in the path by which each come to be: they are path-dependent. Ignoring this led some defenders of capitalism to claim that Marx wanted to expropriate peoples’ toothbrushes, or clothes, or houses; but that is an idea he justly ridicules.

One thing that Locke and Marx have in common is the deployment of ousiodic structure in their accounts of private property. For Lock, one person enclosed a territory—gave it a boundary—and then, in laboring, ordered it so as to produce goods which he then controlled: ownership consisted in boundary, disposition, and initiative exercised by a unified agent over a limited space. For Marx the capitalist controls the boundary of his factory (or factories), determining who is allowed in (hiring) and who is expelled (firing). Within the enterprise, he sees that the individual jobs are done and allocates resources, ordering the whole, to that end; and he controls the output: boundary, disposition, and initiative are the three axes of private property.

The major difference is that for Locke, the ousiodic structure of individual ownership is a good thing; indeed, it provides the ontological framework for its justification. For Marx, such ousiodically-structured ownership is evil, and needs to be replaced by communal ownership—which I would argue, is not “ownership” at all. But that is a different story, a different path.

29. Marx and the Communists

Augustine, we saw, feared the “just now,” the modo (da me castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo, #16); Marx, as a “modern” philosopher, turns to it. The single property of the modo which provokes these opposite reactions is its position between the past and the future. For those who think the future will be like the past, the modo poses no special problem; but Augustine and Marx are too honest for such lazy platitudes. Augustine likes his playboy past, and fears a virtuous future; Marx deplores the past, which is nothing but a long history of class struggle, and sees the present moment, the modo, as the possibility of a different future.

At the moment in 1848 when Marx (along with Engels, to be sure) writes The Communist Manifesto, capitalism has cut through the kaleidoscopic disguises of feudal class oppression: instead of a motley of multiple authorities, religious and secular, and varying obligations to each, we now (modo) have just two groups in naked confrontation: factory workers and factory owners, proletarians and capitalists—or, in ancient words which still apply, matter and form.

Just those two, except for two groups of mind-workers. Non-owners who work with their minds—intellectuals—fall outside, yet victim to, the governing binary of owners and workers. Outside because they are neither proletarians (whose labor is primarily manual) nor owners; victims of it because they must align themselves with one of its two main groups. Either they become apologists for capitalism (in the tradition of the political economists of Marx’s day), or they set their allegiance to the workers and become—Communists.

So where does the Communist stand in Marx’s modo? At the center—for it is the Communist who will push the abject past into a better future. But a center is many things, and to get a grip on them we must turn to Hegel’s treatment of das Zentrum in his Logic. His dialectic is too complex to be followed out in detail here, but centers are basically classified by the kinds of agency they exhibit.

Any place where things come together can be called a “center;” on the simplest level, a center is merely a locus, such as a crossroads, and exercises no agency. Even this kind of passive center is fraught, however; for its lack of agency means an absence of exclusion, so one never knows what is going to show up. In certain versions of African-American lore, you may come across the devil himself at a crossroads.

But centers can also exercise various types of agency. The sun, through its gravitational pull, keeps the planets moving around it and serves as the center of the resulting celestial system, making it a “solar” system. Here the center exercises what we may call a “balancing” function among diverse forces (the various inertias of the planets), and so holds together that of which it is the center.

Finally, the center may also gain the power to exclude certain forces, rather than balancing all of them, as if the sun could somehow throw Neptune out of the solar system. At that point, it draws a boundary: its balancing of different forces becomes ousiodic disposition. The plenary center is an ousiodic form, which draws boundaries, controls whatever is within them, and manages interactions with the world outside.

Hegel presents these three kinds of centrality as stages of a dialectical process: to be a “center” is to be engaged in a development from mere locus to ousiodic form. A center which is going to maintain itself as a center must deal with forces converging on it which are too strong for it, and it must do this either by balancing such a force against the available countervailing forces, as the sun balances gravitational attraction against planetary inertia, or—when no countervailing force is present—by excluding a disruptive force altogether, as do ousiodic forms.

It is clear from the Manifesto that Marx took Communists to be central in the first, least active way. The Communist is the one who, not being a worker himself, is able to acquaint himself with the general characteristics of the class struggle at a particular moment in time (modo), which means knowing about the many isolated struggles that are going on just now in various factories across Europe and the world, informing each about the others. The Communist for Marx is thus a kind of teacher, like the Pullman porters who informed African-Americans in each town their train passed through about what was going on “down the line.” In this way they stitched together what eventually became one of the very few successful revolutions in human history.

Marx’s Communists inevitably had to do a certain amount of balancing, for an honest discussion of what was going on in some other town might well include the news, which in fact was a judgment, that that struggle was on the brink of success, while one’s local struggle was still unripe and should, instead of moving forward, hold off and support the others.

The balancing eventually required eliminating certain forces altogether, as unworthy of inclusion or as too dangerous for it. At first this exclusion was from the revolutionary center itself, as when the Communists excluded the social democrats (weak, unworthy) and, later, the Mensheviks (dangerous to the Revolution). Once the Bolsheviks were in control of the Russian state apparatus, exclusionary tendencies continued and were directed against the whole country: a national counter-system of prisons, gulags, and mental institutions became necessary conditions for the state, and—thus dependent on its internal enemies—it eventually, for many reasons, collapsed.

Marx, who was not good at predictions (he should have stayed with Hegel’s take on dialectics and restricted it to the past) failed to see that the Communists could not remain what he took them to be—teachers of the workers—and would have to assume, to great evil, a “leading role” in society. The Revolution could no more remain emancipatory than markets can stay free.

28. The Young Hegelians

It was only to be expected that the radicality of Hegel’s philosophy would be missed. Not missed entirely, for the Phenomenology’s central concern with temporality cannot be denied. But it was relegated to the first seven chapters of that work, with the final chapter viewed as climbing up and out of time itself, from history into traditional philosophy, with its claims to truth above time. I have argued elsewhere (Time and Philosophy pp. 39-42) that this is an utter misunderstanding of that chapter: when Hegel moves on to his System, he does not write a statement of anything permanent, let alone eternal, but constructs a wildly revisable fugue of definitions (see Understanding Hegel’s Mature Critique of Kant, Chapter One).

But this went unrecognized at the time, and Hegel was divided into a youthful, radical Hegel, who wrote the Phenomenology (except the embarrassing Chapter Eight), and a traditional late Hegel (that chapter and the later “systematic” writings). Each Hegel attracted its own group of Hegelians. The older of these took the late Hegel as their master and expounded his philosophy as a giant proof that everything that existed was somehow a part of God, which made them very conservative. The Young Hegelians took the Phenomenology as their incitement, and operated as if everything they could talk about had beginnings and endings in time. Since the Old Hegelians had made Hegel’s supposedly divine Absolute the lynchpin of their conservatism, the Young Hegelians waged their war against them as a critique of religion.

The Young Hegelians won that war, but lost it as well. They won it by becoming much more influential than their older counterparts. Many people know of Ludwig Feuerbach, the early Zionist Moses Hess, Karl Marx, and Max Stirner (the more brilliant avatar of Ayn Rand); who today but a specialist has heard of Leopold von Henning, Philip Marheineke or J. K. W. Vatke? But what they won philosophically, the Young Hegelians lost personally: their political and religious radicalism denied them university careers. Some of them lived off small inheritances (Hess, Stirner); others became journalists (Arnold Ruge, Marx) or were supported by wealthy friends (Marx again). Feuerbach apparently became a grifter, moving to a town, running up debts, and then moving again. It is one of the saddest stories in the history of philosophy. (For more on the Young Hegelians, see the “Introduction” to Lawrence S. Stepelevich (ed.), The Young Hegelians Cambridge, 1983).

Their sad fates turned out to constitute an early phase of an enduring problem: philosophy, it seems, fits ill within the modern university. For the university is an institution, and institutions need financial support. This can only come from the upper reaches of society, from political and economic leaders, and upper reaches are never happy with radical critique—or even with radical questioning; Socrates was hardly the last to find this out (even teachings of Aquinas, later a saint, were condemned by the Catholic church in 1277). We will hear more of this; for the moment, it meant the exclusion of the best and brightest of a generation from German universities altogether.

But universities still had philosophy departments—needed to have them, for excluding such an ancient and prestigious domain would impugn their very reason for being, which was the impartial search for truth. And those departments needed, as the 19^th Century wore on, to make hires. Whom did they hire? Those who were not the best and brightest: those who were not quite as sharp, those who were a little bit lazier, those who from an abundance of personal caution abjured the dangerous work of thinking for themselves. In short, German philosophy abandoned Hegel altogether, returned to a (bowdlerized) Kant,[1] and sank into an intellectual morass. Lewis White Beck describes it as follows:

….men entered and left the [Neo-Kantian] movement as if it were a church or political party; members of one school blocked the appointments and promotions of members of the others; eminent Kant scholars and philosophers who did not found their own schools or accommodate themselves to one of the established schools tended to be neglected as outsiders and contemned as amateurs.
White Beck, “Neo-Kantianism” in Edwards, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy V. 428.

This situation continued for almost the entire 19^th Century; it is no accident that Frege was in a mathematics department, or that Nietzsche was a classicist; neither could stand the theistic prattle of the philosophers. Not until the 1890’s did respectable philosophy re-emerge in German philosophy departments, and then it was in politically safe forms of Kantianism—the phenomenologists at Göttingen and later Freiburg, the Logical Positivists in Vienna and Berlin, and the neo-Kantians at Marburg—all avoiding the new, temporalized approach pioneered by Hegel, who, as today, was never read and little remembered.

[1] The bowdlerizing consisted mainly in systematic underplaying of the Third Critique, for which see ## 24 and25

26 What We Think About Hegel

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is, as far as I know, the first book in western philosophy to abjure appeals to the atemporality of anything—for Hegel’s immediate predecessor in this regard was Heracleitus, who didn’t write books; he didn’t even know what they are.

This is hardly the standard account of Hegel, which is still a quasi-theological one. Nor is it the usual revisionary one, which is quasi-Kantian. But it is the only view of Hegel I know of that actually makes his philosophy work, for the others require gigantic and indefensible presuppositions (e.g. “not only does God exist, but here is what He thinks;” or “these, not Kant’s, are the necessary categories of human thought”). And, as I have argued in two books, it has textual support: look Hegel’s his use of “truth,” in the Phenomenology, to designate the outcome of a certain sort of process rather than the traditional notion that truth consists in the “correspondence” of something verbal or mental (a sentence, belief, etc.) to some fact or state of affairs.

Hegel’s usage here reminds us that truth as correspondence is an atemporal notion. For the two poles of a correspondence-relation, a sentence or belief on one side and a fact or state of affairs on the other, must exist simultaneously for the relation between them to hold: if I say the cat is on the mat,” then the cat either is, or is not, on the mat when I say it. If I say “the cat was on the mat last Tuesday,” then I am inferring to something I cannot now experience; what exists right now is whatever evidence I have that the cat was on the mat last Tuesday. Is it that of which the sentence is true?

Saying that a sentence “corresponds” to the evidence for it would evacuate correspondence of all meaning, so philosophers invented something called “facts,” to which sentences (etc.) correspond but which are atemporal: it is a fact right now that the cat was on the mat last Tuesday. Such a fact can serve as the complement for true statements about the past and future. But why postulate wholly atemporal beings for this job, when you can follow Aristotle and say that our minds form images, φαντάσματα, of things, and locate some of those things in a similarly imagined past? “The cat was on the mat last Tuesday” is then true of my image of the cat on the mat, together with the temporal index “last Tuesday.” Philosophers don’t like mental images as a rule, and I sympathize—but how imaginary are facts? Have you ever seen one?

If I am right about Hegel, he thinks something like the Aristotelian account is the way our minds ordinarily work (he usually opts for Aristotle in such cases); but there is also the alternative of saying that “the cat is on the mat is true” has nothing to do with any state of affairs referred to, but simply conveys that a certain process has resulted in the localization of the cat on the mat. That is, roughly, what he does in the Phenomenology.

If to be true is to be the result of a certain kind of process, then everything true is path-dependent. What kind of path ends in truth? For the Phenomenology, it is one that resembles what is often called today the “hypothetico-deductive” model of scientific inquiry. It has four stages (forget the three-stage “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” stuff):

an hypothesis is formed (Hegel calls it a “certainty”);
it is tested against reality (“experience”);
it fails, i.e. encounters significant anomalies (“contradictions”)
the hypothesis is revised (“sublated”) to accommodate them.

The distinctive features of the Phenomenology, as opposed to scientific inquiry, are two: first, the hypothesis always fails and requires revision; and second, the testing carried out can be ethical in nature: an hypothesis promises the success of certain courses of action, and it is when these fail that the certainty needs revision. Since the revised hypothesis is the “truth” of the process, I will call the whole development a “truth-process

This characterization of the truth-process is formalistic, for in the Phenomenology it applies to a huge gamut of contents. The relation between the formalistic process and its content is therefore contingent; and, moreover, the relation between a particular case of the process and anything that ever actually happened is also contingent. History does not in fact exhibit truth-processes of this kind, except very rarely; the facts of history, Hegel tells us in the Preface to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, present us with a “slaughter bench,” a panoply of meaningless suffering. The question is not whether the available facts constitute a truth-process, but whether they can be reconstructed—or, better, reconstrued— or, better still, construed—as one.

Such construal requires, at minimum, omitting all kinds of random events and circumstances which, in reality, accompany the stages of the truth-process. These often include the intentions of the people engaged in a truth-process. Hegel justifies such omission of intentions as the “cunning of reason” (though it often amount to the “cunning of Hegel”). Though truth processes almost never actually happen, they are “rational” for Hegel when they are construable as testing just one part of a certainty at a time, via a series of minimal changes (“determinate negations”).

12. What’s With the Romans?

When we think of Roman philosophy today, what first comes to mind is a question: why on earth couldn’t they do it better? Why didn’t the energy and ingenuity which propelled the Romans to utter dominance in the known world move their philosophy beyond being a mere set of more-or-less elegant reworkings of Greek insights?

It’s not that they were just so busy conquering the world that they had no time or energy for philosophical investigations; they did enough to show that a philosophical impulse was there, as it is in almost all cultures. Something about Rome must have restrained that impulse, keeping it from developing into the creativity of its Greek counterpart. We can, perhaps, identify the restraints by considering a few rough contrasts between Greece and Rome.

The most glaringly obvious of these is that unlike Rome, Greece was politically disunited. During the classical period (510-323 BCE), it contained perhaps as many as 300-400 independent cities or poleis, each of them sovereign on its soil.

One result of this multiplicity of political jurisdictions was that if you ticked off the authorities in, say, Athens (as Socrates did) you could always move to, say, Megara (as he refused to do: # 7). This reminds us of something we should never forget: that philosophy, well-pursued, is a radical, and so dangerous, activity. As Tom Foster Digby put it in 1989:

Philosophical works achieve canonical status because they are recognized as exemplars of philosophy as a social practice. In the Western tradition, this practice is purely, directly, and intrinsically radical, for it involves uncovering, studying, and criticizing the root conceptions that inform all of the more narrowly focused intellectual pursuits, as well as social practices generally.[1]

Merely focusing on your basic concepts and beliefs, let alone criticizing them, brings the possibility that those basic concepts and beliefs, and the practices associated with them, might be found wanting. Even if you eventually uphold them all (as Descartes did), you have done something most people don’t like.

Unlike Socrates, a Roman social critic had no place to flee to, for Rome ruled almost the entire world: if you displeased its emperor, you had to flee to the world’s very edges before you were beyond his authority.

Such repression was not merely a matter of governmental muscle. Rome’s centralization of political authority brought a centralization of culture as well. If you wanted to be a famous playwright or sculptor, all roads led to Rome. When it came to philosophy, which by this time required a great deal of preliminary training, the roads led not only to Rome but to some of its larger mansions. Thus, Lucretius was a client of the prominent poet/politician Gaius Memmius; Cicero and Seneca were from families just below the highest, senatorial rank; and Marcus Aurelius actually was the emperor. Among Rome’s best-known philosophers, only poor, lame Epictetus was outside the circle of privilege—he was a slave. But his master, about whom we know nothing other than that he was wealthy enough to have at least one slave, allowed him to study philosophy.

Roman culture was not only unified, but deeply hierarchical. All of these men, except Marcus Aurelius, were dependent on those above them in the Roman hierarchy, whose higher levels they knew intimately. They all lived the same privileged Roman lifestyle (except Epictetus, who observed it at very close quarters). And that lifestyle was not only unified and hierarchical, but deeply grounded in Greek philosophy, which everyone cultured was expected to read in the original. So they all had approximately the same Roman life experience, and the same Greek conceptual tools to articulate it. Small wonder that their thought conformed to their Roman peers, and moved on tracks originally laid down in Greece.

Culture and government can, of course, diverge; not all Roman philosophers were subservient to imperial authority. Beginning with Nero and continuing under the Flavian Dynasty (69-96 CE), certain Stoics systematically irked the emperors. Indeed, Vespasian, first of the Flavians, was sufficiently irked to banish philosophers from Rome (on the usual charge of corrupting the youth), which pretty much makes my point about governmental centralization. But philosophical criticism of imperial Rome came from within its highest precincts: a number of the banished philosophers were senators.

Finally, Greek society also exemplified a special kind of diversity. Since the Greeks all spoke the same language, and were ethnically pretty homogenous, their diversity was primarily religious: Athena was worshiped at Athens, but other gods in other cities. These alliances could shift, so the Greeks had to compare their gods critically with those of other cities: what if Athena is the wrong goddess to be allied with? Maybe we should join up with Hera instead? Or Ares? Or Zeus?

People therefore had to justify and explain their choice of gods—which required justifying and explaining their basic values and aspirations to others who might not wholly share them. Plato takes this to a new level in the Euthyphro, when Socrates suggests that the holy must be pleasing to all the gods, not just to one or a few: to determine what was holy, you couldn’t just rely on the gods of your own polis, but had to figure out what was pleasing to all the gods of all the poleis. That would have been a philosophical task; Plato accomplished it, implicitly, in his general discussions of the nature of the forms and their common guidance to conduct.

Such issues did not arise in Rome, for its political unity also underwrote an official religion; the Roman gods were to be worshiped because they had overseen the rise of Rome to world domination. Since the gods had given Rome world domination, Romans had no temptation to worship anyone else. Subject peoples were allowed to keep their traditional gods if they wished; but if things got obstreperous their Roman overlords would perform an evocatio, which called forth a local god with promises of a larger temple or cult, endowed with Roman money. This invariably won that god to the Roman side.

Thus, we see two models of human living. One, the Greek model, is politically pluralistic and encourages forms of thought that will liberate individuals from local allegiances; the other is a monolithic system of power that binds each individual to a particular position within that particular system. So it is no surprise that Romans did not think for themselves as some Greeks had done, but conformed to the general and conceptually homogeneous view that surrounded them.

[1] Tom Foster Digby, “Philosophy as Radicalism” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 61.5 (June 1988) pp. 857-863, p. 857