Category: the ordinary

Perfectionism and Liberalism

Adam Gopnik has become one of the most astute theorists/apologists for liberalism, even though his thoughts on that subject simply come as asides in the occasional pieces he writes for the New Yorker. In the July 30, 2018 edition, in a review of a book about the utopian fictions of the 1890 to 1910 period, he has this to say: “Liberalism is a perpetual program of reform, intended to alleviate the cruelty we see around us. The result will not be a utopia but merely another society, with its own unanticipated defects to correct, though with some of the worst injustices—tearing limbs from people or keeping them as perpetual chattel or depriving half the population of the right to speak to their own future—gone, we hope for good. That is as close as liberalism gets to utopia: a future society that is flawed, like our own, but less cruel as time goes on.”

The complaint of non-liberals is that liberals aim too low, that they timidly rule out as impossible things they should be fighting to accomplish. And surely there is much to be said for the view that liberals are particularly ineffective if they are not constantly pushed by a more radical “left.” On the other hand, liberal timidity, what Judith Shklar memorably called “the liberalism of fear,” is a commitment to minimizing concentrations of power and maximizing the distribution of power in order to prevent tyranny. Power deployed for economic gain or power deployed to bring about a utopian vision of solidarity/common effort are equally to be feared. Pluralism is the by-word, also known as liberal “permissiveness.” As much as possible, keep to an absolute minimum the power of any entity (be it state, business, church, or another person) to dictate to me the terms of my life.

Another common critique of liberalism comes from a different direction. The issue here is not that liberals don’t fight hard enough for the justice they claim to cherish, but that the individualism that liberal permissiveness establishes is unsatisfying. Left to their own devices, individuals will either (this is the elitist, right-wing critique of liberal individualism) choose “low,” materialist desires that are undignified and recognizably bestial or (the left-wing, “communitarian” critique) be left adrift, exiled from all the kinds of intersubjective associations/relationships that actually make life meaningful.

In short, a straight-forward “materialism,” which accepts that our primary motives are for bodily comforts and other basic pleasures—what I called “hedonism” a few posts back—is deemed insufficient for a “full” (now the term is Charles Taylor’s) human life. There must be more, Taylor keeps saying.

Here’s my dilemma—and kudos to Taylor for bringing it home so forcefully. A certain version of materialism, with its notion that personal interest in securing material goods plus the psychological satisfactions of familial love and social respect are primary and “enough”, reigns among the aggressive right-wing in the US today. The old line conservative, elitist critics of the Alan Bloom and Harold Bloom sort are just about total dinosaurs now. The current right wing scorns elites and their fancy views of human dignity and attachment to “higher” things. “Freedom” for Samuel Alioto is complete liberal permissiveness in economic matters, tied to a lingering moralistic attempt to suppress non-economically motivated “vices.”

So I certainly want to combat what Taylor insists is the “reductionism” of a materialist utilitarianism—the notion that all value resides in the extent to which something contributes to well-being, with “well-being” defined in very restrictive, mostly economic, terms. The humanities, as a whole, have understood this as the battleground: the effort to get the public and the body politic to accept (and act on that acceptance) the value of non-economically motivated or remunerated activities. (In a future post, I will return to this topic aand try to think through what the “more” is that a secularist humanities would offer.)

What path should one take in this effort to combat economistic utilitarianism? Taylor writes that “the question [that] arises here [is] what ontology can underpin our moral commitments” (607). Now, of course, Richard Rorty (of whom more in a moment) would argue that we needn’t have any ontology to underwrite our commitments, that the whole (traditional) philosophical game of thinking that “foundations” somehow explain and/or secure our commitments is a misunderstanding of how human psychology works. (Basically, Rorty is accepting William James’s insistence that we have our commitments first and then invent fancy justifications for them after the fact.) The critics reply (inevitably) that Rorty thus shows that he has an ontology—basically, the ontological description of “human nature” that is James’s psychology. If, like Rorty, you are committed to the liberal ideal (as expressed by Gopnik, who is consciously or not, channeling Rorty on this point) of reducing cruelty, then you are going to undertake that work in relation to how you understand human psychology. In Rorty’s case, that means working on “sensibility” and believing that affective tales of cruelty that will awaken our disgust at such behavior will be more effective than Kantian arguments about the way cruelty violates the categorical imperative.

The Humean (and Rorty, like Dewey, is a complete Humean when it comes to morality/ethics) gambit is that humans have everything they need in their normal, ordinary equipment to move toward less cruel societies. We don’t need “grace” or some other kind of leg up to be better than we have been in the past. Our politics, we might say in this Humean vein, consist of the rhetorical, legal, and extra-legal battles waged between those who would “liberate” the drives toward economic and other sorts of power and accumulation versus those who would engage the “sympathetic” emotions that highlight cooperation and affective ties to our fellow human beings. The Humean liberal, therefore, will endorse political arrangements that do not stifle ordinary human desires (for sex, companionship, fellowship, material comforts, recognition, the pleasures of work and play) while working against all accumulations of power that would allow someone to interfere in the pursuit of those ordinary desires.

What Taylor argues is that this liberal approach is not enough. And it is “not enough” in two quite different ways. First, it is not enough because it still leaves us with a deep deficit of “meaning.” It is a “shallow” conception of human life, one that does not answer to a felt—and everywhere demonstrated need—for a “fuller” sense of what life is for and about. Humans want their lives to connect up to something greater than just their own self-generated desires. (I have already, in a prior post, expressed my skepticism that this hankering for a “deeper meaning” is as widespread, even universal, as Taylor presumes. To put it bluntly, I believe many more people today–July 28, 2018–are suffering from physical hunger than from spiritual hunger.) People, in Taylor’s view, want to experience the connection of their desires to some “higher” or “larger” purpose in things. So the ontology in question is not just a description of “human Nature” but also of the non-human—and a description of how the human “connects” to that non-human. You can, of course, claim (like the existentialists) that there is no connection, that we are mistaken when we project one and would be better off getting rid of our longing for one, but that is still an ontological claim about the nature of the non-human and about its relation to the human. In that existential case, you are then going to locate “meaning” (a la Camus) in the heroic, if futile, human effort to create meaning within a meaningless universe.

Taylor’s second objection to Humean naturalism is more interesting to me because I find it much more troubling, much more difficult to think through given my own predilections. Put most bluntly, Taylor says (I paraphrase): “OK, your naturalistic account posits a basic ‘sympathy” for others within the human self. But, by the same token, your naturalistic account is going to have to acknowledge the aggressive and violent impulses within the self. Your liberal polity is going to have to have some strategy for handling or transforming or suppressing those violent tendencies. In short, there are desires embedded in selves that are not conducive to ‘less cruel’ futures, so what are you going to do about them?”

Taylor’s own position is clear. He doesn’t use the term “perfectionist” (that, instead, is a recurrent feature of Stanley Cavell’s objections to Deweyean pragmatism), but he is clearly (at least in my view) in perfectionist territory. Taylor is certainly insistent that what non-religious views (those that adhere to a strictly “immanent frame”—his term) miss is a drive toward “transformation” that is often motivated or underwritten by the desire to connect to some “transcendent.” Liberal “permissiveness” doesn’t recognize, or provide any space for, this urge to transformation—or for the fact that those who pursue this goal most fervently are often the humans we most admire. Self-overcoming, we might say, is view more favorably than simply “care of the self.” Taylor is very, very good on how the arguments about all this go—with the liberal proponents of care of the self seeing the self-overcomers as dangerous, with their heroic visions that tend toward utopian-seeking tyranny or a religious denigration of the ordinary, the here and now; and the proponents of transformative striving seeing the liberals as selfish, limited in vision, stuck in the most mundane and least noble/dignified of the possible human ways to live a life, to pursue and achieve meaning.

I am clearly of the non-heroic camp, but the challenge Taylor poses is most difficult to me when he says that even the liberal aims at a transformation of human nature, of built in human desires, insofar as the liberal seeks to minimize violence and even to banish it entirely. The conundrum: how do you either transform or (where necessary) suppress desire without being tyrannical? The easy way out is to say it is not tyrannical to suppress the rapist. But that just gets us into the business of what desires are so beyond the pale that their suppression is justified as contrasted to the desires we should let express themselves. The prevailing liberal answer to that problem remains Mill’s harm principle—which is, admittedly, imperfect but the best we’ve got on hand.

Meanwhile, it would seem that liberals would also be working on another front to transform those violent desires so that the need for suppression wouldn’t arise as often. Liberals, it would seem, can’t completely sidestep a “perfectionist” ethics, one that seeks to re-form some basic attributes of human nature–as it has so far manifested itself in history. To put it in the starkest terms: every human society and every moment in human history has manifested some version of war. Yet the liberal is committed to (in utopian fashion) the idea that war is not inevitable, that we can create a world in which wars would not occur. But the path to that war-free world must involve a “perfectionist” transformation of what humanity has shown itself to be up to our current point in time. The issue then becomes: “What is the perfectionist strategy to that end?” How does the Humean liberal propose to get from here (war) to there (perpetual peace)?

Taylor is not denying that the liberal has possible strategies. But he thinks those strategies are “excarnated”—divorced from the body and emotion, the opposite of “incarnated.” This is Taylor’s version of the familiar critique that liberalism is “bloodless,” that it disconnects the body from the mind in its celebration of the disengaged, objective spectator view of knowledge at the same time that it extracts individuals (in the name of autonomy) from their embedding in social practices and social communities. The ideal liberal self stands apart, capable of putting to the question everything, including the most basic constituents of his life (his own desires and his own relations to others.) This is Rorty’s liberal ironist, cultivating a certain distance from everything, even his own beliefs. The liberal, then, only has “reasons”—the consequentialist argument that life would be more pleasant, less “nasty, brutish, and short”—if we managed to stop war, stop being violent and cruel to one another. Or, if we go the Humean/Rorty route, the liberal can work to enhance the inbuilt “sympathy” that makes us find cruelty appalling—and mobilize that sentiment against the other sentiments that lead to finding violence thrilling, pleasurable, or ecstatic.

Taylor, instead, favors a non-liberal route that avoids “excarnation.” Instead, it recognizes that “in archaic, pre-Axial forms, ritual in war or sacrifice consecrates violence; it relates violence to the sacred, and gives a numinous depth to killing and the excitement and inebriation of killing; just as it does through the rituals mentioned above for sexual desire and union” (611-612). The Christian experience/virtue of agape, Taylor insists, is fully bodily and emotional—and affords a sense of connection to non-human, transcendent powers and purposes. And there can be a similar sense of connection in expressions/experiences of violence.

Of course, Taylor relies here on the “containment” that ritual performs. A safe space, we might say, is created for the expression of violence—a space that highlights the connection to the transcendent that violence can afford but which also keeps that violence from getting out of hand. (I continue to be very interested in all the ways violence is “contained.” Why don’t all wars become “total”? Why do states, in dealing with criminals, or other authority figures, like parents, stop short of total violence, of killing? Think of spanking; how it is ritualized, how it stops short of doing real physical harm—or how, in other instances, it pushes right through that boundary and does lead to real physical harm. What keeps the limits intact in one case and not in the other?)

But the ritual is not only “containment” for Taylor; it is also a path toward “transformation.” Think of how the ritual of marriage transforms the love relation between the two partners. Do we really want to argue that marriage is meaningless, that it does not change anything between the couple? The marriage ritual is not, as we all well know, magically efficacious—but that hardly seems to justify claiming it has no effect at all. What Taylor is pointing toward is some kind of similar ritual(s) to deal with aggressive desires (a complement to marriage’s relation to potentially anarchistic and violent sexual desires).

So what Taylor thinks we lose if we are a-religious secularists is this way (habit?) of thinking about the connection between desires found in selves and some kind of larger forces out there in the universe. And losing that sense of connection means losing any taste (or search) for rituals that take individual desire and place it in relation to those larger, non-human forces. As a result, we lose an effective strategy for the transformation of those desires into something more “perfect,” more in accord with our (utopian?) visions of what human life could be—where that utopian vision in Taylor’s case includes both a more meaningful life on the personal level (since connected to powers and purposes beyond the isolated self) and a more just, less cruel society because rituals contain the destructive potential of sex and violence.

Rorty’s alternative is instructive if we consider the modesty, the anti-utopianism, of liberalism. Rorty doesn’t rule out perfectionism (that would violate liberal permissiveness), but he relegates it to the “private” sphere. Self-overcoming is all well and good—from training for marathons to trying to overcome one’s tendencies to anger—but is a “project” undertaken by a self—not a path mandated by any other power. The “public” sphere is devoted (for Rorty) to overcoming cruelty and to something like a minimal social justice (making sure everyone has the means to sustain life). But any public mandate to “transformation” is opening the path to tyranny. What this Rorty formula leaves unanswered is whether the public (think of the French Revolutionaries and their festivals) should strive to create rituals for the expression/transformation of basic desires. These rituals need not be mandatory, but could still be useful in the effort to curb cruelty and heighten (emotional and moral) commitment to social justice. That is, even a minimalist public sphere (in terms of what it hopes to achieve and in terms of how much its leaves to the discretion of individuals when it comes to where they find meaning and how they spend their time) might still benefit from not being so minimalist in terms of the occasions for public gatherings and rituals that it provides.

Let me end here by saying that I am one of those anti-clerical, anti-religious people (so well described by Taylor) who worries that religion’s focus on the transcendent implies a neglect of, even a contempt for, the ordinary. I am always troubled by a search for salvation—whether that search take a religious or a Utopian form. I think we are better off if, as Gopnik puts it, we accept the imperfections of the human condition, and work on improving that condition, without thinking that some kind of “transformation” will change our lot very dramatically or, once and for all, insure that peace and justice will reign undisturbed from now on.

In my most extreme moments, I want to say not only can’t we be “saved” from the human condition as we now experience it, but that we don’t need to be “saved.” What we need is to take up the work at hand, work that is fairly obvious to anyone who looks around and sees the rising temperatures and the homeless people on our streets and the people going bankrupt trying to pay medical bills. There isn’t a “transformation” of a political or religious/ethical reality that is going to address such issues. It’s doing the gritty down-to-earth work of attending to those issues that will lead to some desirable changes, although not to the end of all our cares and worries. In short, I am secularist insofar as I don’t think help is coming from elsewhere. I have no faith that there are non-human powers to which we can connect—and that those powers will enable some kind of “transformation” that will solve our (humanly created) problems.

“Perfectionism” is a fully permissible add-on, but please do that on your own time (i.e. I accept the Rortyean notion that it is “private”), while the “public” of legal politics will demand that you act decently toward your fellows. Still—with all that—I acknowledge that Taylor poses a significant challenge when he says that even the liberal (whether a Humean or a Kantian liberal) will look to “transform” certain human desires in the name of a more just and less violent society.

Gandhi on Fear and Political Action

Here is yet another attempt to state succinctly one question I have been worrying on this blog for the last six or seven months: if you deny any legitimacy at all to currently constituted order (whether that order is political, economic, or social), what does that entail for the strategy and tactics to be adopted by your politics? If there is no justice to be found or means toward gaining democratic access within current political institutions (i.e. if our democracy is rotten to the core, completely unreachable by its citizens), then how to move forward? Not surprisingly, good answers to these questions are scarce. In the place of good answers, what I have encountered in my readings over the past year (Hardt/Negri, the material on contemporary social movements, Butler on assembly, Moten and now Livingston’s essay) either gesture toward some kind of “multitude” that gathers (but then does what?) or suggests a retreat into some kind of elsewhere, outside of the prevailing madness of the current political/economic reality.

One claim, found in almost all writing about non-violence as a political strategy (so it is present in Todd May and Gene Sharp), is found in Livingston as well: the jujitsu argument. Basically, the idea is that non-violence often works by making the adversaries’ power/strength into a weakness. As Livingston puts it, “the police and the state cannot threaten or coerce where there is no fear of death” (12). Bertrand Russell’s somewhat different version of this argument was to say that if the Belgians had simply laid down arms in 1914 when the Germans came marching in, there would have been much less bloodshed. Armies are not going to kill people who are not actively resisting/fighting against them. Set aside for the moment the fact that 20^th century tyrannies have been all too willing to kill non-resisting, passive people. More germane to my concerns here is that such non-resistance does nothing to undo, to effect a transformation, of the status quo. Just because power is nonplussed or embarrassed, that hardly means it is going to dissolve.

If non-violence effects a jujitsu reversal of the relations of force it can only do so because of the effect on witnesses—witnesses who have some kind of power within the polity. In Gandhi’s case, that appeal would have to be to British subjects. He would demonstrate to those people the moral outrages of empire—and thus make empire unsustainable. King’s work in the South followed a similar path. He was out to demonstrate to the polity the cruelties of Jim Crow. In other words, as I said in the last post, sacrifice is only politically efficacious if it is theater, if it is public. If the state (or other constituted authorities) can kill and keep the fact of its killing a secret, then non-violence has no other way of achieving that hoped-for jujitsu. In short, I don’t see how any non-violent strategy is not deeply and unavoidably dependent on moral appeal–and such appeals rely on the faith/hope that political actors can be swayed by moral considerations. Our current hopelessness resides, in large part, in loss of faith in the efficacy of a politics based on morality–where the key framework for moral positions circle around questions of justice.

But today I want to go down a different path, one that engages with the problematic of “life.” Basically, another track I have been trying to tread this past year concerns the suspicion of “life” as a goal/end, a suspicion found in the work of Foucault, Arendt, Agamben, Charles Taylor, and (now) in Gandhi as represented by Livingston. An attachment to “life” and a notion that the primary political goal is to ensure its “flourishing” is identified as an absolutely core feature of liberalism (Martha Nussbaum is one key figure here) and is seen, at best, as the legitimizing premise of a “bio-power” that augments the power of the state in the name of its ability (through public health measures, compulsory education, policing measures that promote “public safety,” food and drug administrations, welfare policies, and other interventions) to make its citizens lives better. In more extreme critiques, such as found in Taylor and Gandhi (it would seem, as I will show in what follows), those suspicious of setting up “life” as a goal argue that, perversely, the attachment to life serves to create political regimes that end up violently dealing in destruction and death. Such writers employ the rhetorical strategy that Albert O. Hirschman, in his wonderful book The Rhetoric of Reaction, called the most exhilarating piece of reactionary rhetoric, namely the argument that the efforts to cure a certain ill were actually the means toward perpetuating and even augmenting that ill. Hence, in Hirschman’s example, the Charles Murray argument that welfare payments actually make their recipients worse off than if you left them in utter poverty.

Gandhi (let’s leave Taylor aside for the moment; I will return to him in subsequent posts) was undoubtedly a reactionary, if we mean by that term someone who wishes to turn aside or even reverse what is deemed “modern.” Gandhi unabashedly denigrates and wishes to secede from “modern civilization.” In the Western context, as Corey Robin has shown, reactionary thought is almost always tied to a repudiation of the modern in its egalitarian clothes. Western reactionaries are defenders of privilege against what is seen as the leveling effects of modernity—both its political attachment to the equality of all citizens (reactionaries thus fight against the extension of political and social rights—such as the right to vote—against each attempt to extend those rights to new groups like non-whites and women) and modernity’s more radical (in all its leftist forms) attachment to social (status) and economic equality.

It is not clear to me where Gandhi stands on equality; I suspect that he believes the path to “self-rule” that is to be achieved by the practices of satyagraha (the quest for truth) are open to all. So he is not a western style reactionary, fighting against the vulgar masses’ accession to the privileges, status, rights, and prosperity of the chosen few.

But Gandhi is deploying the perversity thesis in his attempt to step outside of modern civilization. The linchpin of his argument (as Livingston portrays it) is an analysis of “fear.” “Modern civilization is intoxicated by its attachment to a materialist conception of the self as an organic body struggling to sustain its corporeal integrity in a hostile environment. The highest good of modern civilization . . . is to promote bodily happiness” (10). It is this attachment to bodily happiness that underwrites the modern subject’s willingness to grant the state such huge amounts of power—power ostensibly used to help secure that bodily happiness, i.e. “bio-power” (although, of course, Gandhi does not use that term). However, “the attachment to bodily happiness engendered by civilization produces illness, disappointment and, ultimately, fear. The modern self clings to bodily happiness out of a fear of harm and death; civilization unwittedly perpetuates this very fear in its attempt to redress it” (11).

We are slaves to our body—and to the fears generated by that body’s vulnerability to various harms, most drastically death. We are incapable of “self-rule,” of true freedom, in Gandhi’s view if we do not get over that fear. “Cultivating fearlessness in the face of death is not simply a preparation for political action; it is itself the practice of freedom itself” (13). Gandhi preaches the abandonment of “the cowardly attachment to mere life. ‘If we are unmanly today,’ Gandhi asserts in 1916, ‘we are so, not because we do not know how to strike, but because we fear to die’”(12). In advocating for this “courage,” this fearlessness, that is required for those aspiring to “self-rule,” Gandhi “fuses the renunciation of the sannyasi priest with the fearless activity of the warrior class (Kshatriya) as two sides of a singular search for truth” (16).

The priestly side is premised on a metaphysics of spirituality. Gandhi writes: “The body exists because of our ego. The utter extinction of the body is maksha [attainment of the truth; full self-realization]” (16). I don’t have anything to say about such a claim, except to say that if Gandhian politics is dependent on accepting that the body is illusion, that it does not truly exist—or that its existence can be nullified by some act of self-transcendence—then I can not participate in Gandhian politics nor do I want to. The pleasures of the body—food, sex, vigorous exercise—seem to me among the chief goods of human life—and I am looking for a politics that affirms and enables the ordinary rather than one which extols a repudiation of the ordinary in the name of some “higher” good. Furthermore, I think the historical record rather convincingly demonstrates that politics driven by “non-ordinary” pursuits have a considerable track record of proving tyrannous and death-dealing.

But I want to focus on the “warrior” side of the occasion at the moment. I think Gandhi’s understanding of the stakes—and even as the way the game plays out—are eerily and disturbingly reminiscent of Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic. Basically, it seems that the fundamental path to freedom for Gandhi is to overcome the fear of one’s death. Recall that in Hegel the one who lets the fear of death motivate him becomes the slave; the one who can put his life unreservedly on the line becomes the master. The Gandhian twist is to achieve that overcoming of fear by basically declaring that life—at least bodily life—has no value anyway. The master tries to gain control over me by playing on my fear of death. So the best response is to overcome that fear, to be fearless. And the benefit of—what I gain by—overcoming that fear is freedom. (A pretty empty freedom to my mind if it entails renouncing all bodily pleasures, but maybe freedom is worth that high price.)

My kids gave me a bumper sticker that read: “Oh well, I wasn’t using my civil liberties anyway.” Gandhi’s position strikes me in some ways as similar. The outrage of tyrants is that they make living my ordinary life impossible; they threaten that life everyday, and make it miserable in various ways when they don’t actually take it away. And the best response is to say, “well, life isn’t valuable to me anyway. Do your worst.” Hard for me to swallow.

What also troubles me is the very acceptance of the Hegelian scenario. It leads to two things: first, the notion that manhood—i.e. true courage, the status of warrior—rests on this confrontational encounter with the other. You can only have political freedom, full status, by facing down this other who aims to dominate you. Your options are very few: a) you have to dominate him instead, b) you can cowardly submit and hence become a slave, or c) (in Gandhi’s playing out of the game) you can achieve fearlessness by showing that you don’t care a fig for the life that your adversary aims to take from you. A zero-sum game if there ever was one—and one that fatalistically seems to accept that there is no other basis, no other way for organizing, fundamental human social relations. Our relations to others are antagonistic to the core; it’s a pretty fable to tell ourselves otherwise. No wonder there is then the spiritualist temptation to say there is another realm altogether, one where we can step out of this terrible scenario of endless antagonism. This world is inevitably so bad that we need to invent one elsewhere.

Hegel, of course, then is at pains to show that the master’s “victory” is hollow; the battle over, the master’s life becomes meaningless. The struggle is all for the warrior. Once it is over, his occupation is gone. Whereas the slave finds meaning in his occupation, in the very work that the master makes him do. Not surprisingly, I interpret that next step in Hegel’s text as a discovery of the resources resting in the ordinary. Apart from the heightened moment of confrontation, in the daily rounds of living a life, lie meanings and pleasures sufficient to day thereof.

I want to develop that notion of the ordinary—and of a politics that would nurture/attend to/be built on the cooperative relations that function within the ordinary in subsequent posts (while continuing to think about Taylor’s claim that such “bodily happiness”—to use Gandhi’s term—is “shallow.”)

But to finish up today’s post, I want to highlight something else: namely, the implied (or not so implied) contempt in using the term “coward” to refer to those who are attached to “bodily happiness.” It is no accident that Gandhi resorts to gendered terms (lack of “manliness”) when his thoughts turn to fear and fearlessness—and no accident that this proponent of non-violence talks of “warriors.” (Livingston tries to claim Gandhi upends traditional gendered associations, but I find his argument strained at that point.) Running throughout all the critiques of “life”—which entail, as I have been suggesting, the recognition that attachment to life is joined to an intense valuation of “the ordinary”—is an affinity to the long-standing disdain for the “bourgeois,” for the unheroic lives of the classes that have the nerve to push the aristocracy to the sidelines, and who devote such attention to “getting and spending.” (I think we get this contempt for the bad taste and vulgar pleasures and petty ambitions of the masses in spades in Arendt’s hatred of the social and her diatribes against a politics geared toward issues of sustaining life. Her politics is meant to be heroic through and through by showing its disregard of such material issues. “As for living, we have our servants to do that for us”—a favorite quote of Yeats’s, taken from a French symbolist writer.) The haughty aristocrat merges with the splendid warrior, the one who doesn’t count costs and give a fig for his life, willing to put it on the line at any moment since his honor, his sense of self-worth, and his dignity are all far more valuable than life. (Nietzsche also obviously partakes in this lingering aristocratic disdain for the bourgeois and his material concerns.)

Gandhi is hardly as outrageous as Arendt and Nietzsche in his contempt for the masses. I have already mentioned that he certainly seems to believe that the quest for truth is open to all. (Similarly, Arendt certainly believes that the realm of political action is open to all. She just laments that the moderns, because of misplaced desires and allegiances, seem to prefer social activities to political action. Nietzsche is another matter altogether; he does think most humans incapable of heroic action.) Nevertheless, Gandhi is accusing the mass of men of cowardice. He is saying that lots of people desire the wrong thing. They are living their lives in a fundamentally misguided way, one that also entails their unfreedom. The use of the term “mere life” (12) is a strong indicator here. Somehow, “life” itself is not a sufficient reason for living; there needs to be something more. It is that insistence, that hectoring admonishment, that I am suspicious of. I think the heroic life, with its attachment to the agonistic encounter we find in Hegel, much more trouble than it is worth.