Category: Meaning and Life and the Humanities

Cognitive Theories of Art

Nick Gaskill and I have been reading some classic works of aesthetic theory, including Nelson Goodman’s 1976 Languages of Art (Hackett Publishers) and Suzanne Langer’s 1942 Philosophy in a New Key (Harvard UP). Both Goodman and Langer are committed to a cognitive account of art. By cognition is meant our apprehension of the world. Art, for them, is a mode of apprehension. But, from there, it gets fuzzy, complicated, and increasingly implausible very quickly.

The stakes are clear—and I am 60% sympathetic with the cause that Langer and Goodman struggle to advance. Basically, we are on familiar turf: the defensive insistence on art’s value in a world that seems to find its claims on our attention negligible. Langer quite explicitly accepts the reigning logical positivist accounts of truth, knowledge, and propositional logic of her day. But then insists that there is another way of knowing that art embodies and that logical positivism misses. “Now, I do not believe that ‘there is a world which is not physical, or not in space-time,’ [quote from Bertrand Russell], but I do believe that in this physical, space-time world of our experience there are things which do not fit the grammatical scheme of expression. But they are not necessarily blind, inconceivable, mystical affairs; they are simply matters which require to be conceived through some symbolistic schema other that discursive language. And to demonstrate the possibility of such a non-discursive pattern one needs only to review the logical requirements for any symbolic structure whatever. Language is by no means our only articulate product” (88-89).

Langer is committed to 1) an assertion that we can “conceive” of matters relevant to (derived from) experience in non-discursive forms, and 2) that art deals in such non-discursive forms and 3) thus offers us a way to apprehend things that the discursive misses. Hence art is valuable because it is another way of knowing–and one that provides access to information we cannot gain in any other way. (Trouble is, as I am going to discuss, it is not clear that art, even by her account, is distinctive in that way.)

There are “different types of symbolic mediation” (97). She offers us two basic types: the discursive and the presentational. “In the non-discursive mode that speaks directly to sense . . . there is no intrinsic generality. It is first and foremost a direct presentation of an individual object. A picture has to be schematized if it is to be capable of various meanings. In itself it represents just one object—real or imaginary, but still a unique object. The definition of a triangle fits triangles in general, but a drawing always presents a triangle of some specific kind and size. We have to abstract from the conveyed meaning in order to conceive triangularity in general. Without the help of words this generalization, if possible at all, is certainly incommunicable” (96, Langer’s italics).

There is a puzzle here—and I can’t decide if it is a deep one or a trivial one. Presumably, we have direct sensual experience. So it seems that leaves us with two alternatives when it comes to Langer’s notion of presentational symbols (and of what art does). Either 1) art is just another instance of direct sensual perception (the artist just creates a new thing for her audience to perceive) or 2) the audience’s perceptual experience of the art object is a different kind of experience than ordinary perception. The answer to this puzzle must lie in the word “symbol.” Are everyday perceptions symbolic—or is it only the perceptions that art offers that are symbolic?

It is clear what is at stake for Langer in arguing for presentational symbolism: the widening of the scope of rationality and cognition beyond the strictures of logical positivism. “The recognition of presentational symbolism as a normal and prevalent vehicle of meaning widens our conception of rationality far beyond the traditional boundaries, yet never breaks faith with logic in the strictest sense. Wherever a symbol operates, there is a meaning; and conversely, different classes of experience—say, reason, intuition, appreciation—correspond to different types of symbolic mediation. No symbol is exempt from the office of logical formulation, of conceptualizing what it conveys; however simple its import, or however great, this import is a meaning, and therefore an element for understanding. Such reflection invites one to tackle anew, and with entirely different expectations, the whole problem of the limits of reason, the much-disputed life of feeling, and the great controversial topics of fact and truth, knowledge and wisdom, science and art. It brings within the compass of reason much that has been traditionally relegated to ‘emotion,’ or to that crepuscular depth of mind where ‘intuitions’ are supposed to be born, without any midwifery of symbols, without due process of thought, to fills the gaps in the edifice of discursive, or ‘rational,’ judgment” (97-98, Langer’s italics).

What a tangle! In the first passage I quoted, art offers us a “direct presentation” of something. Langer appears to desire an unmediated, immediate realm of apprehension that she calls “presentation”—and which is contrasted to the mediated and abstracted conceptualizations that discourse (with its inevitable reliance on generalizing terms) offers. But then presentations are also to be understood as “symbols,” which ties them as well to conceptualization (and to logic). With conceptualization comes “meaning” with its corollary “an element for understanding.” Presumably, understanding is tied to cognition. In the second passage quoted, the argument leads to “judgment” as the mental capacity exercised in the encounter with the presentational symbol.

The very next paragraph (I have not skipped anything here) gives us a better sense of what Langer thinks judgment is/does—and ties to judgment to knowledge.

“The symbolic materials given to our senses, the Gestalten or fundamental perceptual forms which invite us to construe the pandemonium of sheer impressions into a world of things and occasions, belong to the ‘presentational’ order. They furnish the elementary abstractions in terms of which ordinary sense-experience is understood. This kind of understanding is directly reflected in the pattern of physical reaction, impulse and instinct. May not the order of perceptual forms, then, be a possible principle for symbolization, and hence the conception, expression, and apprehension, of impulsive, instinctive, and sentient life? May not a non-discursive symbolism of light and color, or of tone, be formulative of that life? And is it not possible that the sort of ‘intuitive’ knowledge which Bergson extols above all rational knowledge because it is supposedly not mediated by any formulating (and hence deforming) symbol is itself perfectly rational, but not to be conceived through language—a product of the presentational symbolism which the mind reads in a flash, and preserves in a disposition or an attitude?” (98, Langer’s emphasis).

Judgment for Langer, apparently, is what makes sense of “the pandemonium of sheer impressions.” We need to do some basic abstracting, some sorting of our sense impressions into kinds or into analogies with other impressions, to attain any understanding. I think (relying on this and other passages in her book) that she, in Kantian fashion, builds this abstracting, this “formulization,” into the very act of perception. For example: “Our merest sense-experience is a process of formulation. . . . [T]he world of pure sensation is so complex, so fluid and full, that sheer sensitivity to stimuli would only encounter what William James has called . . . ‘a blooming, buzzing confusion.’ Out of this bedlam our sense-organs must select certain predominant forms, if they are to make report of things and not of mere dissolving sensa. . . . An object is not a datum, but a form constructed by the sensitive and intelligent organ, a form which is at once an experienced individual thing and a symbol for the concept of it, for this sort of thing”(89, Langer’s italics).

Thus, it is not clear that she actually allows for any distinction between “ordinary sense experience” and its symbolization (abstraction). The two occur simultaneously; the “fundamental perceptual forms” are always already there. Intuitive knowledge happens in a flash; there is no discernible gap between perception and the act of judgment that gives that perception “form.” And it symbolization has always already occurred, there is no “direct perception” of the unique object; that object has always been apprehended through the lens of an abstraction that sees it as one of a larger kind (the “sort of thing it is”).

Nick and I have also been reading Brian Massumi (and I will get to him in posts to come)—and he is committed to the quest for certain forms of immediacy. Certainly, much art since 1890 has tried to by-pass mediation in an effort for an innocent perception, a perception out from under received cultural forms and meanings and categories. Langer isn’t quite there; she builds mediation (symbolization) into presentation. She does so because she believes that “symbols” are “vehicles for the conceptions of objects” (60-61)—and an object that has not been conceptualized is, quite fully and literally, meaningless. You might say that we have “to know” what we are perceiving. Otherwise, we are lost in “the pandemonium of sheer impressions.,” William James’ bedlam. A symbol, after all, is not the thing itself. But perception of the thing itself without the “vehicle” of the symbol cannot register cognitively. Such pure perception would be the sheer nonsense that is the bugbear of logical positivism.

In trying, then, to rescue a non-discursive presentational mode from logical positivism’s narrow understanding of reason and knowledge, Langer goes too far. How so? Because if she builds symbolization into perception itself, then it is unclear what distinctive role is left for art. Even if we grant that art (at least the arts apart from literature) are non-discursive and thus an avenue for meanings and understandings not accessible in discursive, propositional modes, there seems to be nothing that distinguishes art from ordinary perception. What do we do differently in art from the spontaneous symbolization that accompanies apprehending things in the world?

[An aside: Langer uses the terms “meaning,” “understanding,” “judgment,” “reason,” and “knowledge” very loosely—as if they were synonyms. All of them, quite clearly, belong firmly in the realm of cognition on her view. But I still need to sort out for myself if I think that “to know the meaning of a sentence” is distinct—and how—from “knowing that my car is not running because it ran out of gas.” In other words, are “meanings” a distinct quality of things as contrasted to “causal explanations” or acquaintance (“I know him”). We can stand, it seems to me, in multiple different relations to things—relations that ordinary language characterizes as “knowledge” of those things—and “meaning” is only one of those multiple possible relations. Jumbling them all up under the general rubric of “knowledge” or “reason” is not helpful. From which it follows (as Langer presumably agrees) that there are also different modes of “cognition” (coming to “know” something)—and art might name one of those modes. That’s what a cognitive theory of art aims to establish.]

Langer digs the hole she is trying to escape even a bit deeper. Not only does she have to show that art’s presentational symbols do something that ordinary perception does not, but she also insists that we need to have a way to distinguish good art from bad art. (See 207-208.) Langer’s solution to this double problem is to extol “perfection of form” (208). Art is distinguished from ordinary perception by its abstraction away from the sensible (sensuous) particular things. “’Artistic meaning’ belongs to the sensuous construct as such” (208). That is, art is sensuous, but in a way that calls our attention to “the construct” not to the thing (or things) the art object offers to perception. “It exhibits pure form not as an embellishment, but as its very essence. . . . [T]he meaning of art belongs to the sensuous percept itself apart from what it ostensibly represents” (209).

If this is the case, then what is the cognitive content art is delivering? What does the apprehension of form enable us to know? What meanings does it convey—or allow us to grasp? Langer takes music as her primary art form because it is most fully distanced from representation, from “content.” Langer’s position is that music is “about” feelings, but it is not a representation of feelings. “If music has any significance, it is semantic, not symptomatic. Its ‘meaning’ is evidently not that of a stimulus to evoke emotions, nor that of a signal to announce them; if it has an emotional content, it ‘has’ it in the same sense that language ‘has’ its conceptual content—symbolically. It is not usually derived from affects nor intended for them; but we may say, with certain reservations, that it is about them. Music is not the cause or the cure of feelings, but their logical expression; though even in this capacity it has special ways of functioning that make it incommensurable with language” (218).

The basic idea is that music abstracts from particular emotions to reveal the fundamental form (particularly its rhythms, duration, unfolding, and entwined relations among various elements) of an emotion. Music has “genuine conceptual content” (219). “[M]usic is not self-expression, but formulation and representation of emotions, moods, mental tensions, and resolutions—a ‘logical picture’ of sentient, responsive life, a source of insight, not a plea for sympathy. Feelings revealed in music are essentially not ‘the passion, love or longing of such-and-such an individual,’ inviting us to put ourselves in that individual’s place, but are presented directly to our understanding, that we may grasp, realize, comprehend these feelings, without pretending to have them or imputing them to anyone else” (222). The cognitive pay-off is made clear here.

And Langer fully understands that it requires what she calls “psychical distance,” a term she borrows from Edward Bullough. Here is the traditional idea that knowledge requires “reflection,” and a distance between the knower and the thing known. Immersion is dangerous, messy, inchoate, and over involved. This commitment to distance (as Bourdieu outlines in Distinction) goes hand-in-hand with the elevation of form over content, and with the disparagement of popular art as offering cheap thrills in place of more subtle contemplative pleasures.

“[T]he hall-mark of every artistic ‘projection’ of experience . . . does not make the emotive contents typical, general, impersonal, or ‘static’; but it makes them conceivable, so that we can envisage and understand them without verbal helps, and without the scaffolding of an occasion wherein they figure (as all self-expression implies an occasion, a cause—true or imaginary—for the subject’s temporary feelings). A composer not only indicates, but articulates subtle complexes of feeling that language cannot even name, let alone set forth. He knows the forms of emotion and can handle them, ‘compose’ them” (222).

I am sympathetic to an “articulation” understanding of the arts—and that is why I am attracted to cognitive theories. We “know” something better after an artist articulates it for us. That “something” may be contents (feelings, beliefs, commitments, values, intuitions) that were fairly inchoate before our encounter with the clarifying work of art. And I am happy to say that articulation can come in non-discursive modes when the art is question is music or painting or other varieties that use non-linguistic media. I can even get on board with saying that such knowledge as the arts import has it uses. Perhaps it allows us to better grasp our own commitments; perhaps it lets us see meaningful connections or patterns that hadn’t previously occurred to us. In some cases it might even change our understanding of some thing (here we get to more rhetorical understandings of art, a topic I’d like to consider).

But where I get stuck is Langer’s elevation of form over content (notice how the word “form” gets snuck into the last sentence of the passage I just quoted). How is making certain emotional experiences “conceivable” a matter of form, not content? And why does it preclude my being marched through those emotions as part of the experience of the art work? I am inclined to a more Stanley Fish-type “surprised by sin” approach. The art work sees me submitting to an emotional process that it also provides me the resources to (eventually) reflect upon. It is this doubleness that distinguishes art works—and that doubleness has less to do with form than with the “fictional” nature of art. If there is a “psychical distance,” then that distance is provided by our knowing in some part of ourselves that this experience isn’t “real.” We have these emotions (you’ll laugh with him, cry with him), but they are “make believe.” And like the experiment in the lab, which is also “controlled” and distinct from actual life processes, the art work can tell us something about the “real world.” But I don’t see how that something it tells us is only and purely “formal.”

It all comes down to what is meant by form. I think form is simply the way various elements are arranged. A skillful artist will arrange her materials in a way that maximizes their impact. The recent movie version (2019) of Little Women offers an interesting example. From any straight-forward story-telling point of view (not to mention how the source novel tells its story), the film was overly complex. Its arrangement of its various incidents jumps around wildly in time and is potentially disorienting. Any viewer unfamiliar with story would be very confused. But that was Greta Gerwig’s (the writer and director) salvation. Her arrangement is parasitic on the assumption that the story was familiar to her audience. Thus she did not have to prioritize that audience’s ability to follow the plot line—and could achieve a variety of other effects through her formal tricks. But it seems crazy to me to then claim that those formal tricks are the sole focus of the true art appreciator, or the sole criterion for judging the film’s success or failure. The formal tricks were clearly adopted in service of various meanings, emotions, values that Gerwig wanted to convey. The content that she desired to deliver is what gives the formal tricks their point. Otherwise it is just an empty exercise in cleverness.

Now Langer clearly thinks that knowing “the forms of emotion” (222) has its benefits. But without a much more specific statement about what those forms are, I am at a loss. To say, for example, that the emotion of grief has its rhythms and its stages—and that music can gives us a feel for them—is not nothing. But such a statement (or such a presentation in a work of music) abstracted from the content of grief is close to senseless. Which, Bourdieu would say, is the point: to get as far away from the sense as possible into a world of pure intellect. That isn’t exactly where Langer heads. Instead, she wants to make sure the sensuous is “conceptualized.” Only then can it become something we can cognize, something that can be invested with meaning, and become an object of knowledge.

I’ll get to Goodman and Massumi is future posts.

Rachel Kushner

I have recently read Rachel Kushner’s novels, Telex from Cuba and The Flamethrowers. They are both compelling reads. Telex is more coherent, telling the story of Castro’s take-over of Cuba, mostly from the perspective of Americans living and working in Cuba at the time. The narrative evokes both the blindness of those Americans to what is happening—and the nostalgia for pre-Castor Cuba (and their lives there) that afflicts these Americans after they return to the States.

The Flamethrowers is a mess. The story wanders all over the place, with various characters and incidents offered up with no subsequent follow through. But is it always interesting. In its second half, it wanders into narrating radical (and violent) political action, specifically the Italian Red Brigade of the 1970s and their kidnappings and executions of business executives. The narrative voice during this section of the novel is curiously disengaged. It is not best described as a recording of the events that refuses to suggest any stance (moral or emotional) to them. Rather, there is a kind of unreality about the whole narration, as if (without ever explicitly stating this) the events are presented as an unbelievable fiction, as a visit to an alternative world neither the narrator nor her readers could actually credit. It’s like the play violence of a video game rather than violence that is actually experienced as a shock or a grim fact. There is something pro forma about these sections of the novel, as contrasted to the tale of the heroine’s experiences in the first half. Adding to this effect is the fact that the heroine walks away from the violence in Italy (in which she has become entangled) with little to no discernible effect on her life or attitudes. It’s as if it didn’t happen.

The violence in Telex is not sidestepped in the same way. Maybe it’s because we are dealing with a successful revolution—and with a civil war that saw wide-spread violence on both sides. In any case, Telex contends with the issue of the ways violence is utilized in political struggles—and with the divide between those willing (able?) to deploy violence in cold-hearted, “calculated” ways and those to whom violence is beyond the pale (for whatever emotional or moral reasons).

The following passage leads me to think about the connection between meaning and “the deliberate.” Obviously, we can do things that convey meanings we never intended to convey. But there are also cases where we very carefully set out to communicate something, to insure that what we do or say is fraught with meaning. Cases where we take special care to see that our meaning gets across. Kushner ties this heightened attention to meaning to certain acts of violence, ones that can be deemed “rhetorical,” through a speech given by the character La Maziere to a group of Castro’s guerillas after they have captured two of the counter-revolutionary forces.

“Executions, La Maziere continued, his voice rising to be sure everyone heard, was an act of intent, purpose, and exactitude. Assassination was a far lower act, an act of opportunity, or worse, ‘necessity’—a word he said as if it were a soiled, smelly rag he held between two fingers. Execution was a ritualized killing, he emphasized. It was never, ever, an act of necessity. It was always an act of choice, a calculated delivery of justice. And only by the elevated loft of choice, he explained, could the act of killing take on symbolic meaning. Killing, he said, had meaning, voluptuous and mystical meaning that should never be squandered. An execution was a rhetorical weapon, a statement that could not be disproved, just as a man could not be restored from death” (pg. 232 of Telex from Cuba).

Meaning is enhanced by ritual, by the elaborate staging/demonstration of deliberate choice, and by full publicity, full openness to view.

Arendt Contra “Life”

Hannah Arendt famously insisted that any politics that attended to the demands of “life” was doomed to descend into factional strife. How to understand her argument on these matters has troubled her readers ever since she first articulated this view in 1957’s The Human Condition and, more forcefully, in 1962’s On Revolution. It doesn’t help matters that the critique of a life-based politics in the former book is replaced (augmented) by a differently inflected argument in On Revolution: namely, that politics must avoid addressing “the social question.” Just how Arendt’s disdain for “the social” connects to her insistence that “life” should never be the principal motive for “action” is hard to parse.

Let me start with life. Arendt’s argument (derived from Aristotle in ways that resonate with Agamben’s adoption of the distinction between “bios”—bare life—and “zoe”—a cultivated life) is that life belongs to the realm of “necessity.” What is needed to sustain life (food, shelter, etc.) must be produced and consumed. The daily round of that production and consumption is inescapable—but the very opposite of freedom.

Politics exists in order to provide freedom, to provide a space for action that is not tied to necessity. As countless readers have pointed out, Aristotle’s polity relies on slaves to do the life-sustaining work tied to necessity—and Arendt seems nowhere more mandarin than in her contempt for that work. While it is going too far to say that she endorses slavery, there is more than a little of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic in Arendt. She seems at times to accept that the price of freedom, the price of escaping slavery, is an heroic, aristocratic disdain for life that allows the master to achieve his (it’s almost always a “he”) position of mastery in the life/death struggle that creates slavery in the Hegelian story. Those tied to “life” are slavish in disposition; they have bargained away their freedom because they have valued life too highly—have, in fact, taken life (not freedom or mastery) as the highest (perhaps even the sole) value. This contempt gets carried over into Arendt’s deeply negative views of “the masses.”

Arendt’s disdain for “life” has often been seen as a critique of bourgeois sensibility. The bourgeoisie is focused on “getting and spending” which it deems “private”—and is, consequently, uninterested in politics. That’s one way of interpreting Arendt’s lament that politics is in danger of disappearing altogether in the modern world. In a liberal society, all the focus is on “private” pursuits—the religion of personal salvation, economic pursuits, family and friends. It is reductive, but not altogether inaccurate, to link Arendt to figures like Tocqueville who lament the loss of an aristocratic focus on “honor” even as they both admit that aristocratic virtues are lost forever. If the triumph of “life” is to be overcome, it won’t be through a revival of either Aristotle’s or Machiavelli’s worlds.

Arendt’s prescription (especially in The Human Condition) appears to be the attempt to substitute amor mundi (a love of the world) for the love of life. My student Martin Caver wrote a superb dissertation on the concept of amor mundi in Arendt—and had to contend mightily with how slippery and vague that notion is in her work. Pushed into thinking about this all again by Matt Taylor’s essay—and by a subsequent email he wrote to me in response to my post on his essay—here is how I would pose the contrast world/life today.

The problem with “life” from Arendt’s point-of-view is that life is monolithic. Its demands appear to be everywhere the same: sustenance. To maintain a life is a repetitive grind that Arendt depicts as a relentless “process” that never allows for individuation. There are no distinctions within life. Every living thing is the same in terms of possessing what we can call “bare life.” Paradoxically, life renders everyone the same even as it also renders everyone selfish. Unlike politics, which for Arendt offers the possibility of individuation, selfishness just makes everyone alike. The bourgeois self is focused on “getting his”—which is why “life” is antithetical to amor mundi. We humans are in a sorry condition unless we can generate some care (think of Heidegger on Sorge at this point) for the world that we share. When everyone is pursuing only his own interest, the world falls apart. (Certainly sounds like a pretty good description/diagnosis of American society in 2020.)

What is this “world” that Arendt calls us to love? She insists that it is the fact of “plurality” (the fact that we are with others on this planet) and that it is what lies “between” the various actors who inhabit it. The modern retreat into the private is making the world recede. We no longer (at least as intensely) live and act together in a shared world, in a public space. That public space is the scene of politics for Arendt. And politics is where one distinguishes oneself (i.e. where one can achieve a distinctive identity). Politics is also where the world is produced through “acting in concert.” The notion here (although Arendt never articulates it in this way and is way too vague about the particulars of “acting in concert”) is that a public space is created and maintained by the interactions of people within that space—just as a language is created and maintained by people using it to communicate. The ongoing health and existence of the language is a beneficial, but not directly intended, by-product of its daily use by a community of speakers. Our common world is similarly produced.

Love of that world thus seems to mean two things: caring for its upkeep, it preservation, and a taste, even a love, for plurality. I must cherish the fact that it is “men,” not just me, who constitute this world. In Iris Murdoch’s formulation: “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”

To understand Arendt’s critique of “life” in these terms leads almost too smoothly into her work of Eichmann and, then, to The Life of the Mind. To be thoughtless (as Arendt accuses Eichmann of being) is precisely to be incapable of comprehending otherness, that fact that “something other than oneself is real.” Selfishness is thoughtless, a failure of imagination, a failure to grasp the fact of plurality in its full significance. Soul-blindness. And she reads Eichmann’s blindness in terms of his being entirely focused on climbing the ladder in the bureaucracy within which he works. That’s why his evil is “banal.” It’s the product of his daily round of making his way, not a product of any deeply-held convictions or ideology. He was, in her view, quite literally just doing his job with an eye toward promotion, without any conception of how his actions were effecting other people. (Whether this is a plausible reading of Eichmann is neither here nor there for the more general argument that the modern mind-set, along with the bureaucracies—among which we must count large corporations—in which so many moderns are embedded, generates soul-blindness, the thoughtless inability to see the consequences of one’s actions apart from how those actions contribute to one’s “getting ahead.”)

No wonder, then, that Arendt’s grasps onto the passage in the Critique of Judgment where Kant calls for “enlarged thinking”—and ties judgment to the capacity to see something from the other’s point of view. I must go “visiting,” Arendt says, in order to make a judgment. The person who is focused solely on gaining a “good life” for himself will never encounter “the world,” never grasp plurality.

The problem comes when the critique of “life” in The Human Condition is paired with a critique of “the social”—and that problem becomes a crisis when the full implications of banning the social from politics are articulated in On Revolution. Even Arendt’s most adept readers—Seyla Benhabib, Bonnie Honig, Hanna Pitkin—barely try to defend her position at this juncture. Bluntly put, Arendt says that the polity should never attempt to address or alleviate poverty or material inequities. The necessities of life—and how to secure them—should never be seen as a matter appropriate to politics. To make that mistake is simply to make politics itself impossible while leading to endless strife.

The puzzle has always been how a thinker of Arendt’s power could have been so blind, so stupid, so thoughtless (she is never so close to her caricature of Eichmann as at this point) on this score. How could she think 1) that banishing the endless strife over material resources to “the social” somehow solves the problem of that strife, and 2) that “politics” could somehow (by fiat?) be separated from allocation of resources (where those resources include power and status as well as material goods)? I can only suspect that she harbors the old aristocratic disdain of “trade” and imagines she can erect of field of contention where only distinction, honor, and virtuosity are at stake—and nothing so vulgar as monetary reward. Arendt’s ideal politics are, after all, agonistic. She is not against strife. But she wants a “pure” strife focused exclusively on excellence, unsullied by irrelevant considerations of money or status. She hates “society” because she deplores the standards by which it confers distinction. No surprise that her politics seem so aesthetic—and that she goes to Kant’s Critique of Judgment to discover his politics. What matters in the idealized aesthetic space is the quality of the performance—and nothing else.

So the question Arendt poses for us is: Is it harmful to have this ideal of a practice (or practices) that are divorced (by whatever means are effective) from questions of material necessity and reward? At a time when utilitarian considerations seem everywhere triumphant, the desire to carve out a protected space has a deep appeal. Reduction of everything to what avails life (Ruskin’s formula) very quickly becomes translated into what can produce an income. Various defenses of the university are predicated on fighting back against the utilitarian calculus.

But the danger of taking the anti-utilitarian line (the aestheticist position, if you will) is that it reinforces the bourgeois/classical liberal assertion that “the economic” is its own separate sphere—one that should be understood as “private.” Arendt may be a sharp critic of bourgeois selfishness and how that selfishness diminishes what a life can be even as its blithely denies the necessities of life to others, but she seems to be reinforcing the liberal idea of “private enterprise.”

It is not clear how (or where) economic activities exist at all in the “world” she wants us to love. And we have ample evidence by now that leaving economics to themselves is not a formula for keeping the economic in its place, in preventing its colonizing other spheres of human activity. Just the opposite. Laissez-faire is a sure-fire formula for insuring that the economic swallows up everything else. It accumulates power as relentlessly as it accumulates capital—and thus distorts every thing in the world.

In the realms of theory, then, Matt’s instinct that a monolithic, overarching concept like “life” would be better replaced by a pluralistic reckoning of the needs and desires of “living” seems promising. The thought is that “life” requires (in order for it to be defined) a contrast with “not life” (the world fills that role in Arendt)—and thus to a designation of the enemies of life (or, in Arendt’s mirror image, to a denigration of “life” in favor of another value, amor mundi). In either case, the logic leads to a desire to eliminate something because it threatens what is desired.

The alternative path of pluralism disarms such categorical condemnations. That path returns us to the “rough ground” (Wittgenstein) of tough judgments about what to do in particular cases where we have to attend to the particulars—and not think that generalized formulas are going to be of much (if any) use. There are always going to be multiple goods and moral intuitions in play, with painful trade-offs, and messy compromises. No overarching commitment or slogan—like “reverence for life”—is going to do the work. Similarly, we cannot successfully separate things into separate spheres—the aesthetic in that bin, the economic in another one, and politics in a third. It is just going to be messier than that even as we also struggle to prevent any one type of motive swamp the others. Pluralism is about (among other things) giving multiple motives some room to operate. Which is why I remain so attracted to some version of a universal basic income, some version of supplying the minimal resources required to “flourish” to all. Only when the material necessities can be taken for granted because secured (not disdained because they are bestial or vulgar) can other motives take wing.

One can also expect that others will disagree with, castigate her for, the course of action she does pursue, the positions for which she advocates. Plurality comes with a price—which is why it is hard to love. And why thinkers keep imagining formulas that will enable our escape from it.

Ontological Egalitarianism, Or, Can We Derive an Ethics from “Life”

My colleague and friend Matthew Taylor has a terrific essay in the current issue of PMLA (Vol. 135, No. 3: 474-491 [May 2020]). His topic is the “new materialism,” aka “the ontological turn,” although it also crops up under various other aliases.

Most simply put, the “new materialism” declares that all matter is animate; humans lived surrounded by other entities that should be recognized as having agency, as possessing “life.” Specifically, all things act to sustain themselves, perhaps even to better themselves (William James’ meliorism). One version is Latour’s “trajectories of subsistence” contrasted to a more static notion of “substance.” The idea is a) to reduce any qualitative distinction between humans and other entities; and b) to introduce a dynamic interactive web of relationships in which both humans and non-humans are entangled to replace the more traditional subject/object split where activity resides in the human subject who works upon passive material objects. In that traditional view, all the entities have their stable identities, their essences, their abiding substance.

Matt’s essay ties current thinking along these lines back to the “philosophies of life” current in the post-Darwinian intellectual world of (roughly) 1870 to 1920. I am more familiar with the characterization of Bergson, Nietzsche, James, Pater, and Whitehead as champions of “life.” Matt shows how “hylozoism” or “panpsychism” (basically, the assertion that all matter is “alive”) was the prevailing view of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century biology as well. From this point of view, Nietzsche does not look like an outlier, a lonely rebel (as he loved to portray himself), but very much in tune with the dominant intellectual orthodoxies of his time.

Current day versions of hylozoism often think there is an ethical pay-off. There are two ways to go in an ethical direction from the assertion that all matter is alive. First, you can preach a deontological respect for “life,” basically extending the Kantian “kingdom of ends” to include everything—thus erasing the privilege of “the human” to arrive at “posthumanism.” Second, you can use life (as Ruskin wants to do in “Unto the Last”) as your ethical standard. Whatever promotes life is good; whatever harms life is bad.

In both cases, it is easy to see that the ethicists among the new materialists are driven by a concern about climate change. The “respect” position addresses the massive extinctions of our era and bemoans an exclusionary focus on what is good for humans.

The “promotion of life” position is basically utilitarian. We judge actions in terms of whether they serve the interests of life—or not. Since climate change will be a disaster (is already a disaster) for many varieties of life (human and non-human), it is ethically wrong to perform actions that fail to work against that change.

Matt is having none of it. He does not think you can derive an ethics from an allegiance to life. I want to consider his reasons for this conclusion—some of which I agree with and others that I want to resist.

He presents four major arguments (as I understand the essay).

1. There is a central—and fatal—imprecision lurking in the term “life.” No one is ever able to nail down just what “life” means or entails. It is hard to deploy something so vague as a standard. I don’t quite know what to do with this argument, so will leave it be.

A different, but related, argument along these lines seems to me to have real bite. If you say mountains are alive as are protozoa as are human beings, you obviously need to have a very capacious (and perhaps vacuous) notion of life. However, at the same time, you can’t simply ignore the differences between mountains, protozoa, and humans. Inevitably (in other words), forms of life are going to be differentiated within the overarching category of life. And Matt argues that this differentiation will lead to a hierarchy; some things will be deemed “more alive” than others; there will be “degrees” of life.

This is the familiar post-structuralist insistence that wherever there is difference, there will be the privileging of one term over the others. Humans just aren’t equipped (mentally? in terms of the deep structures of thought?) to be egalitarians. I have always been suspicious of this transcendental move—transcendental because it posits a fundamental form that is endemic to all human mental processes. I always suspect “false necessity” at such junctures. Why can’t we equally value things that we recognize to be different? I don’t see any logical or ontological or psychological impediment to that possibility.

2. But Matt has a much better argument for the inevitability of hierarchy. Ethics, he says, requires judgments about better and worse. You don’t have an ethics is you have a pure egalitarianism. If you value life, then you must declare some actions harmful to life, even as you applaud others as life-sustaining or promoting. What is our stance going to be toward the mosquitos that carry malaria, the ticks that carry Lyme disease, and the virus that causes COVID-19, not to mention white supremacists? How are we going to avoid valuing some forms of life over others when some agents pose a threat to other agents? In other words, the new ontology repeats the classic liberal mistake of imagining a conflict-free world. But ethics is precisely about conflict—about choosing between competing visions of the good. The mosquito who infects me is pursuing life; from its point of view, its actions are not harmful.

This insistence that ethics must take sides, cannot be universally affirmative, is deeply troubling. For one thing, this insistence is at the root of many tragic and conservative worldviews. The tragic version is highlighted in Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. Freud expresses outrage in that text at the Christian injunction to love one’s enemies. Such an injunction takes away the very meaning of love, Freud says. As Yeats puts it, “hearts are to be earned, not had.” But Freud adds that our only bestowing our love in some cases goes hand-in-hand with our aggressive feelings (and actions) toward those we cannot (or will not) love. And numbered among those we cannot love is our own self. The superego’s aggression is directed at myself—as well as at my “enemies.”

Ethics—the self-righteous attempt to justify our aggressions—hoists us on own petard even as it stands as the crippling condition of an unending and inescapable tragedy: the tragedy of our uncontrolled and uncontrollable aggression.

Conservative thought holds onto the self-righteousness that the tragic vision (which deems all humans trapped in the same play) eschews. Conservatives hold onto a strong version of the righteous few and the reprobate many; they scorn the idea of “social justice” precisely because it would bestow benefits on the unworthy. Justice is about getting what you deserve—and thus the equal distribution of any good (whether it be health care, a decent education, or a basic income) is an outrage against morality.

The liberal/left tries to use the notion of “social justice” to place some things out of the conflict zone. The liberal must avoid the mistake of wishing away conflict, even as she tries to develop strategies for its mitigation. More on that later in this post. For now, Matt’s point against the new ontologists is well-taken. A univeralist ethos of respect for all forms of life sounds wonderful, but it is so general, so vague, that it can’t stand up for very long when actually encountering facts on the ground. “Life” pits some forms of life against others, so “life” itself can’t be the standard for adjudicating those conflicts.

3. This last point—that “life” can’t be the standard—leads Matt to adopt a strict fact/value dichotomy. You can’t read values out of “life” (or “nature”) is his fairly explicit position. “Justice” or “equality” or even “reverence for life” are human notions; there is no evidence at all (in Matt’s view) that the world or nature or some basic “life force” cares for any of those human values. Life carelessly and prodigally deals out death.

Life, we might say, is deaf and mute. It has nothing to say to us—and cannot hear anything we say to it. Humans, like the other life forms identified/celebrated by the new ontology, are the random, utterly contingent, result of long evolutionary processes that were not aiming to produce what ended up being produced. If ethical ideals are going to get any purchase in this evolutionary production, then it will because humans act to make their ethical values effective.

I want to be careful about adopting fact/value canyons. I am going to skip that can of worms here, only gesturing toward my intuition that the dichotomy functions differently in different contexts, and should be resisted in some of those contexts. But in this ontological context, I am inclined to accept a fairly drastic nature/human split. I am uncomfortable doing so, but don’t see a good alternative.

Two observations underline my willingness to accept that nature and life are amoral, while the human is the realm of value and moral judgments. The first is that we humans are not inclined to morally condemn hurricanes or animals for their destruction of life. We will bemoan the fact that the grizzly bear killed a person, but will not be morally indignant. In other words, we do not hold nature accountable for life-harming actions the way that we do human beings.

The second is the point made so forcefully in Plato’s Euthyphro—and in the scene in Genesis where Abraham bargains with Yahweh about saving Sodom from destruction if a certain number of just inhabitants can be identified there. In both cases, the point is that humans have self-generated standards that they wish/hope/try to get the non-human to adhere to. “Innocence” is a human concept—and the gods and nature are to be condemned when they inflict suffering on the innocent. The ethical standard is being imposed on the non-human—rather than the standard being derived from the non-human. Oedipus at Colonus thus becomes an attempt to save the gods from human condemnation.

The upshot would be a kind of humanism that is hard to evade as long as you want to maintain ethics. Nietzsche, of course, saw this clearly. To escape humanism, you had to go “beyond good and evil” and simply embrace the ruthless indifference of the non-human to human values and to life itself. Wanton destructive indifference, nature red in tooth and claw, is the fact of the matter—and you might as well join ‘em rather than trying to convert them over to (pathetically weak and sentimental) human values. (Of course, there is also plenty of cooperation among living creatures as well, a fact Nietzsche neglects. Sometimes, cooperation proves better than competition in advancing one’s life chances.)

4. Matt also argues that hylozoism almost always leads to a form of Platonism. He doesn’t put it that way. But I think it a fair account of the argument. Basically, the idea is that the general standard (or “form” if we use Platonic vocabulary) of “life” renders every actual instantiation of life an inadequate copy of that ideal. The logic here is endemic to versions of evolution that see each novelty an improvement on what went before. (For that reason, hylozoism in the 1870-1920 period was very, very often tied to eugenics, as Matt demonstrates.) Nietzsche’s “uber-mensch” displays this kind of thinking. The “true” or “ideal” embodiment of life is always out in front of us, which renders current forms unsatisfactory—perhaps even suitable for sacrifice in order to usher in the better future, just as Stalin and Mao murdered millions in the name of a world to come. (But, then again, Christianity committed similar murders long before the justification of a warped Darwinism.)

“Life” thus becomes the bringer of, the justification for, death—an argument found in Foucault and Agamben, but perhaps lurking as well in Arendt’s emphatic contempt for “life.” Certainly, Nietzsche (in another of his guises) points the way here. Platonism and Christianity preach a disregard for, a nihilistic rejection of, the here and now. With Christianity, we get the added hope that a non-human force will “redeem” the human—and the whole world. Against that nihilism, Nietzsche wants to find his way to “affirmation.” How can we affirm what is here before us, instead of whoring after strange gods and wish-fulfilling futures?

I am not convinced that an affirmation of “life” necessarily leads to a denigration of the life currently available. I don’t, in other words, buy the paradox that a stated commitment to life in fact generates a murderous aggression against actually existing life. I am, however, convinced by Matt’s other argument, i.e. that a bland egalitarianism cannot do the ethical work that needs doing.

So how would I propose going forward? At this point, I actually think pushing hard at the fact/value dichotomy might prove productive. We (everything that exists) are not going to be redeemed from the natural (and evolutionary) conditions that set the stage for singular life spans. But there is a social/cultural world that humans construct in their efforts to respond/adapt to that natural setting. That social world develops notions of what a “good” or “flourishing” life looks like (where the notion of flourishing in no way needs to be confined to only human life forms). Life (“bare life”) is a good, but a very minimal one if the means for “flourishing” are not available.

Egalitarianism is tied to ideals of “social justice” when we define what resources are required to afford the possibility of flourishing—and the political/ethical imperative is to work toward social arrangements where those resources are afforded to all.

This is a minimalist position. What goods are needed—clean water and air, enough food, a decent education, health care, security from violence, etc.—to have a life that escapes the sufferings that social arrangements can alleviate? What tribulations are remediable—not in terms of a redemption from the terms of existence, but in terms of having what is needed to cope with those terms? These are questions that can only be answered through political processes of deliberation and negotiation.

The liberal gambit is that providing those necessities to all would mitigate conflict. Yes, there is conflict now over doing such providing. But for many countries the idea of providing health care is no longer a live issue. Constitutionalism is a strategy for removing certain questions from the realm of conflict, of deciding them once and for all. Not a fool-proof strategy, but it works some time for certain issues. And some seemingly dead issues can rise again, zombie fashion.

But the liberal social democrat has this basic agenda: to increasingly make the provision of “basic goods” to all a matter of settled social practice. That is a way to serve “life” without promoting the death of those currently alive. But it is serving “life” in relation to human standards of what a “good” or “flourishing” life requires. So, in that sense, Matt is right to say you can’t derive those standards from life itself.

What about non-human forms of life? What about climate change? I do think that comes back to where I started. We can take the position that respect for all life forms is an ethical imperative—although that will run us into the kinds of problems Matt identifies (namely, that such universal respect is not possible where some life forms actively harm others). The utilitarian position seems more plausible. The new ontology can help cement the lesson that human flourishing is dependent in various ways on the larger ecological network of relations in which humans are embedded. Destroying the planet for short term gain is suicidal. Still, utilitarianism also has its limits. It is not utterly convincing to say humans could not flourish if the snow leopard went extinct. That’s why the deontological argument of respect gets trotted out so often.

Such puzzles remind us that ethical positions—despite the hopes of philosophers like Kant, Bentham, and Rawls—are never logically air-tight. Much more important, in my view, is ethical sensibility. What things outrage us? What things do we admire? Unless unnecessary deaths and lives lived in abject poverty strike us as unacceptable, as demeaning to our human capacities to make life well worth the living, we humans cannot expect either rational arguments nor non-human entities (like “life” or “god”) to generate the ethically affirmable life we claim to desire. Similarly, unless the extinction of the snow leopard strikes us emotionally as a diminishment of the world, we are unlikely to be argued into caring.