A rather interesting paper by Richard Tuck at the OPT conference on Hobbes and Rousseau contained a longish quote from “De Cive”:http://www.constitution.org/th/decive10.htm (10.9) about the inconveniences of democracy. At the time it seemed to me to contain wise advice about the downsides of blogging, and on chasing it up, that view is reinforced:
bq. But perhaps for this very reason some will say, That a Popular State is much to be preferr’d before a Monarchicall; because that, where all men have a hand in publique businesses, there all have an opportunity to shew their wisedome, knowledge, and eloquence, in deliberating matters of the greatest difficulty and moment; which by reason of that desire of praise which is bred in humane nature, is to them who excell in such like faculties, and seeme to themselves to exceed others, the most delightfull of all things. But in a Monarchy, this same way to obtain praise, and honour, is shut up to the greatest part of Subjects; and what is a grievance, if this be none? Ile tell you: To see his opinion whom we scorne, preferr’d before ours; to have our wisedome undervalued before our own faces; by an uncertain tryall of a little vaine glory, to undergoe most certaine enmities (for this cannot be avoided, whether we have the better, or the worse); to hate, and to be hated, by reason of the disagreement of opinions; to lay open our secret Counsells, and advises to all, to no purpose, and without any benefit; to neglect the affaires of our own Family: These, I say, are grievances. But to be absent from a triall of wits, although those trialls are pleasant to the Eloquent, is not therefore a grievance to them, unlesse we will say, that it is a grievance to valiant men to be restrained from fighting, because they delight in it.
{ 19 comments }
Kieran Healy 01.09.05 at 7:41 pm
That’s a terrific quote.
Jason Kuznicki 01.09.05 at 9:27 pm
Short version: Dictatorships are better, because in a republic, people sometimes disagree with you, and disagreements are annoying.
Dan Kervick 01.10.05 at 6:06 am
Hobbes considers here only one the alleged benefits of “popular” government: there is pleasure to be had in the acclaim that attends prominence in public debate over public business, and in popular governments this pleasure is available to all who have the wit to make their voices heard and to impress the hearers, wheras monarchical government restricts that pleasure to a privileged few.
Hobbes thinks this benefit is overrated, apparently on the grounds that contentious debate can be a source of misery as well as pleasure, and an occasion to neglect other responsibilities.
But whatever merit there might be in Hobbes’s point, it makes for a a very limited argument against popular government. Hobbes doesn’t here consider the public utility that comes from broad and open debate, a utility that derives in part from bringing much more information into the debate, as the disputants are able to contribute the detailed, specialized knowledge that comes from intimate familiarity with their own occupations and sphere of social activity.
Nor does he consider the benefits to governmental stability and social cohesion that derive from enlisting all citizens into participation in the business of government, rather than dividing the people into a small governing class and a large governed class. People are more likely accept government decisions, and less likely to attempt to overthrow their government, when they feel that they are the government, or at least a functioning part of it.
rob 01.10.05 at 10:26 am
As well as what Dan said, there’s the small consideration that people have a right to have a say in their government. It is a very good quote though.
raj 01.10.05 at 12:43 pm
Somebody wasted money sending people to a conference on Hobbes and Rousseau? Who?
thisacademiclife.blogspot.com 01.10.05 at 2:32 pm
Don’t think Hobbes is really arguing against popular government here; he’s more trying to defeat an argument against monarchy. One has to keep in mind that Hobbes is a liberal, in the sense that the overall authority of the government derives from popular consent. The question of how the “mortall God” or Leviathan should be organized is a separate issue; a Hobbesian monarchy is still just as “popular” a government as a democracy would be, even if the mechanics of how consent is obtained and processed varies from system to system.
Personally I read the quotation as less relevant to a reflection on blogging, and more relevant to a reflection on the present (sorry) state of American politics. Does anyone think that the current public debate is much of anything but “an opportunity” for politicians “to shew their wisedome, knowledge, and eloquence, in deliberating matters of the greatest difficulty and moment”? Only a very utopian Habermasian could find much to love in the Crossfire mode of “public deliberation.” If no better solutions emerge from such exchanges — and I’d submit that none do emerge — we need to find a different basis for justifying democratic dialogue in the first place.
My point: neither “people have a right to have a say in their government” (Rob’s point above) nor the idea that dialogue enhances public utility will suffice to ground and justify the blogosphere — understanding the blogosphere as a component of civil society. Instead, why not take on Hobbes’ argument directly: it is “a grievance to valiant men to be restrained from fighting,” but not just because they like to fight. It is a grievance because not fighting, not competing, not struggling diminishes us as creative human persons. Maybe — as Nietzsche might put it — struggle and conflict are just irreducible parts of human social life, and efforts to eliminate them need to be resisted simply because of their hypocrisy in promising the “perpetual peace” of an absolute totalitarian nightmare in which all dissent is considered unreasonable and all dissenters need to be re-educated, “humanely.”
Of course, this doesn’t mean that we can’t collectively negotiate some rules for our struggles and conflicts. But we need to beware of taking those rules as something other than a contingent social arrangement subject to pragmatic evaluation. Blogs are probably better than dueling at ten paces with pistols, even if both remain ways to engage in combat.
rob 01.10.05 at 3:53 pm
From my limited reading of Hobbes, I’d say that characterising him as a liberal in the sense of consent to the state’s coercive authority is a bit odd. Sure, he argues in Leviathan that it would be rational to consent to the authority of the absolute state given the alternatives, but his characterisation of the alternatives is just bizarre. Maybe that’s not a point about consent, but it looks to me like artificially narrowing the set of options tends to invalidate consent. I’m thinking here of situations like the infamous ‘your money or your life’ demand of highwaymen of yore.
As well, I would have thought it was clear that I was supporting democratic forms of government rather than the anti-blogging claim. The blogosphere does tend to look rather a lot like Hobbes’s dismal picture of public debate at times, and as for what passes for public political debate (I suspect this isn’t so true of non-televised discussions amongst private individuals), God help us. That said, what Hobbes was offering us instead of this rancour and division was effectively the ‘perpetual peace’ of totalitarianism, especially if you take the strong epistemological reading of what the sovereign is supposed to do. Whether it follows that the ‘not fighting, not competing, not struggling, diminishes us’ thing has to be true is something else though, I think. Habermasian arguments about the moral obligations implicit in speech could be drawn on, just as could Millian arguments about the freedom to do and say as you please as long as it does not directly harm others. Neither of these obviously have that Nietzscheian component to them, and indeed, there seems to be in both a strong sense that Nietzscheian assertions of identity, necessarily involving denigration of or physical harm to others, are wrong.
There’s a sense in which the Nietzscheian answer caves in to Hobbes, because it admits that humanity cannot be trusted to behave morally (in the normal sense of the term) to one another, and merely disagrees about the consequences. The Millian or Habermasian answer takes on Hobbes at root, as it were, and denies that humans are, at root, greedy, capricious and violent.
thisacademiclife.blogspot.com 01.10.05 at 4:56 pm
Hobbes is a nominalist about everything but the existence of individuals. If he had some other linguistic tools at his disposal (which would be wildly anachronistic, of course, since those tools aren’t developed for centuries afterwards) he need not have called for a Leviathan — a big dictionary with a stick — to solve the problem of common meanings. But the fact that he did is still, IMHO, a point about the organization of government, not about its justification.
Hobbes’ monarchism doesn’t make him an absolutist in the sense that the government could do whatever it wanted to to anyone; there’s still the opt-out clause (if they come after you with guns you can resist; also, if you’re captured in battle you can switch allegiances because your previous sovereign can’t preserve your life), and the temporal authority of the government is still based on a social compact. Hence Hobbes is a liberal. He’s not a democrat, since he doesn’t think that the people ought to be consulted before decisions affecting their everyday interests are made. And his denigration of public debate shold, I think, be read in light of his argument in Leviathan that the people are each individually the authors of any of the acts of the sovereign, who is their representative; if that were the case, what would public debate add to the legitimacy of the government?
As for the Nietzschean argument, I think that its great advantage is that it doesn’t make any substantive claims about “human nature” (neither does Hobbes, actually; all of his comments about the state of nature are about the result of not having a sovereign, not some innate inner human proclivity towards evil. To say that humans are “at root” either good or evil would introduce a massive inconcistency into Hobbes’ nominalist stance about good and evil in the state of nature). Where Habermas and Mill — Mill less so than Habermas, I’d submit — are optimists about human nature, Nietzsche rests on the claim that there’s no such thing, and that what we think of as “human nature” is the result of a longish historical process of struggle.
I prefer to ground theories of social order on social arrangements and their consequences, rathern than on unverifiable metaphysical postulates about how human beings “really are.” Habermas strives mightily to get around this with discourse ethics, but at base he can’t shake that old Enlightenment “man is a rational animal” stance. That gives him a telos for the evaluation of actually existing social arrangements, but at what cost? Doesn’t any postulate of an essential human nature lead inexorably to the denial of difference and the massacre/elimination of the Other who doesn’t appear to be “human”?
rob 01.11.05 at 11:12 am
Hobbes’s opt-out clauses are still him presenting a grossly distorted set of options: either you cede all power to an absolute monarch, or you risk life being ‘nasty, brutish and short’. The fact that he thinks that you can justifiably revoke that power when it threatens your life, or when it fails to protect your life against another, similar power, does not mitigate that distortion. Thus I do not think Hobbes is a liberal.
I don’t think that I made any metaphysical claims about human nature, or that Mill or even Habermas (in the bits I’m familiar with: speech act theory seems to me a set of claims about speech, an undeniably empirical phenomenon) do. It looks to me like Nietzsche is guilty of either empirically false or empty metaphysical claims about human nature though: either the will to power is a urge to dominate and subjugate, in which case it just doesn’t seem to be true that all human behaviour is driven by it, or it is the tautology that human behaviour is willed by humans, which tells us nothing about anything. Hobbes may not make claims about human nature in a thick sense – as Marx does, say, in claiming that humans are productive animals – but the function of the state of nature in most premodern social thought seems to me to be anthropological, to aim to tell us how humans naturally are. That seems to be the aim of Rousseau’s prelapsarian view, for example, and there doesn’t seem to be any obvious difference with Hobbes, especially when one considers his hard-faced materialism about desires, the will and so on.
Generally, I’m rather unsympathetic to the postmodern view that ethical or ontological statements about humanity are some kind of restriction or unfreedom. I think that view has two failings: it’s ungrounded, because it denies the language games we are trapped in are a basis for thinking about humanity, and it can give us no ethical rules or guidelines, because these are inevitably are restriction on our freedom. But then all my philosophical training is in the analytical tradition, so I probably would say that.
thisacademiclife.blogspot.com 01.11.05 at 2:36 pm
But to say that we are trapped in particular language-games is not to make an ontological claim at all — it is to make a sociological claim about the present configuration of “common sense.” Nothing ontological there — just an affirmation of common practice. Going beyond the language-game, and claiming that this configuration we inhabit is somehow real or that it corresponds to some essential disposition of How Things Really Are strikes me as a problem.
Regarding Hobbes, I think we have to be careful to distinguish between liberalism, individualism, and democracy. I’d say that liberalism is the proposition that government derives from the consent of the governed; individualism is the proposition that social life is made up of constitutively autonomous units — the individuals — whose integrity has to be protected; and democracy is the notion that a process of public deliberation should inform collective decision-making. Hobbes’ work illustrates that one can be a liberal individualist but not a democrat. Indeed, as the original quotation indicates, if one is a liberal individualist than democracy is a means to an end, and public deliberation can be silenced or terminated to the extent that it doesn’t advance the cause of a liberal individualist social order: keeping individuals from killing one another and making sure that they have consented to the overall procedure of doing so.
So if we want to defend the process of public deliberation, we can’t simply rely on the notion that people have to consent to or even have input into governmental actions, as this opens the door to assertions of “extreme emergency” or “national security” or whatnot. Consent is already built in to the constitutional structure of a liberal individualist system; deliberation is just a nice plus. Then we have either the Habermasian or the Nietzschean way of defending public deliberation — deliberation as more-or-less rational process leading to overarching consensus, or deliberation as public clash and contestation. I prefer the latter because in my view it preserves agency and creativity better than the alternative.
Blogging won’t lead to Truth. And it won’t necessarily guarantee better public policy. But it can and does, I think, contribute to a diversity of discursive positions out of which people (re)produce themselves through contingent combinations of social resources.
[Also, not sure that it is accurate to read the will to power as emanating from individuals; the whole point of Genealogy of Morals is that “the individual” is a product of the will to power, not its source. Will to power is a way of reading history, I think, akin to a Weberian ideal-type; its point is to save the will by preserving creativity and contingency at the level of basic conceptualization. Contrast, say, finalist narratives like those in Marx and Hegel about how History comes to a (rational) conclusion, or the Enlightenment-scientific progress tale in which we come to know How Things Really Are and have no more need to explore or inquire or debate. Utopia or nightmare?]
thisacademiclife.blogspot.com 01.11.05 at 3:06 pm
But to say that we are trapped in particular language-games is not to make an ontological claim at all — it is to make a sociological claim about the present configuration of “common sense.” Nothing ontological there — just an affirmation of common practice. Going beyond the language-game, and claiming that this configuration we inhabit is somehow real or that it corresponds to some essential disposition of How Things Really Are strikes me as a problem.
Regarding Hobbes, I think we have to be careful to distinguish between liberalism, individualism, and democracy. I’d say that liberalism is the proposition that government derives from the consent of the governed; individualism is the proposition that social life is made up of constitutively autonomous units — the individuals — whose integrity has to be protected; and democracy is the notion that a process of public deliberation should inform collective decision-making. Hobbes’ work illustrates that one can be a liberal individualist but not a democrat. Indeed, as the original quotation indicates, if one is a liberal individualist than democracy is a means to an end, and public deliberation can be silenced or terminated to the extent that it doesn’t advance the cause of a liberal individualist social order: keeping individuals from killing one another and making sure that they have consented to the overall procedure of doing so.
So if we want to defend the process of public deliberation, we can’t simply rely on the notion that people have to consent to or even have input into governmental actions, as this opens the door to assertions of “extreme emergency” or “national security” or whatnot. Consent is already built in to the constitutional structure of a liberal individualist system; deliberation is just a nice plus. Then we have either the Habermasian or the Nietzschean way of defending public deliberation — deliberation as more-or-less rational process leading to overarching consensus, or deliberation as public clash and contestation. I prefer the latter because in my view it preserves agency and creativity better than the alternative.
Blogging won’t lead to Truth. And it won’t necessarily guarantee better public policy. But it can and does, I think, contribute to a diversity of discursive positions out of which people (re)produce themselves through contingent combinations of social resources.
[Also, not sure that it is accurate to read the will to power as emanating from individuals; the whole point of Genealogy of Morals is that “the individual” is a product of the will to power, not its source. Will to power is a way of reading history, I think, akin to a Weberian ideal-type; its point is to save the will by preserving creativity and contingency at the level of basic conceptualization. Contrast, say, finalist narratives like those in Marx and Hegel about how History comes to a (rational) conclusion, or the Enlightenment-scientific progress tale in which we come to know How Things Really Are and have no more need to explore or inquire or debate. Utopia or nightmare?]
thisacademiclife.blogspot.com 01.11.05 at 3:53 pm
Sorry about the double posting; there was a server error of some kind.
Tracy 01.11.05 at 5:46 pm
But to be absent from a triall of wits, although those trialls are pleasant to the Eloquent, is not therefore a grievance to them, unlesse we will say, that it is a grievance to valiant men to be restrained from fighting, because they delight in it.
It strikes me that valiant men (women/kids/small blue creatures from the planet zoid) may have a more serious greviance in being restrained from fighting, when they are restrained from fighting for the right. I am using a general sense of fighting here than the mere physical one, though I also think that it is right to defend yourself against a physical attack and someone deprived of such a right (e.g. the king is hitting them but they will be executed if they hit back, Othello is choking you, etc) suffers a serious greievance.
Ditto the greviance of not being able to have our say in public affairs is the serious greievance of not being able to fight for what we think is right. And if what we have to say is right, then it is not only our greievance but that of the general public, who is deprived of hearing the right answer.
Hobbes is making something very similar to a straw man argument here. He is setting up a minor greviance as the whole of the thing, and ignoring the much more serious costs of restricting who can have a say in the public debate.
rob 01.11.05 at 5:46 pm
The point of making the Wittgensteinian claim about language games is not sociological, either in the dismissive ‘common-sense’ sense or in the sense of being non-ontological. A language game is made of a set of rules, which do not have to be conscious, and which are open-ended. What the recognition that we are playing language games means for philosophy, as I understand it, is a revised version of verificationism: it rules out transcendental metaphysical claims, as they are either tautological or meaningless, because we can’t get outside the language game to see whether they are true. You seem to think I am guilty of making such statements, but I can’t see where.
Nietzsche’s claim about the will to power, on the other hand, certainly to me seems such a claim. It may well be the case that the ‘individual’ we currently know, as it were, is for Nietzsche a product of the will to power, but that story is grounded on human qua humans being driven by the will to power. The Nietzscheian valorisation of conflict looks suspiciously to me like the alleged Enlightenment quest to eliminate it as well, but I suppose that’s another debate (and all that stuff about the removal of contingency: the point about post-Wittgensteinian analytical philosophy is that language games are contingent, but that’s all that there is, and we just have to deal with that).
Hobbes again then. You say ‘liberalism is the proposition that government derives from the consent of the governed’. I don’t disagree with that. However, I think Hobbes’s version of consent is crap, and have given reasons why. You haven’t said anything about that. I see no reason to refuse to stop thinking of Hobbes as illiberal. This is not me saying you have to be a democrat to be a liberal – I’m a bit ambivalent about democracy as usually conceived, I think – simply, that if liberals think the coercive power of the state is justified by consent, Hobbes is not a liberal because he distorts the terms of the social contract so as to invalidate consent.
It’s true to say that we can either have the Nietzscheian or one of the conventional liberal methods, which doesn’t link it to democracy – Mill, Habermas, Rawls, even – of justifying freedom of speech. I prefer the conventional liberal methods, because I think Nietzsche is just wrong about a lot of stuff (although interesting). Someone needs to convince me that Nietzsche’s claim that conflict, in the sense of subjugation and dominance he means it, is endemic to human life is grounded on something other than a tautology or an obvious empirical falsehood. I’m not sure that Habermas is asking for a permanent consensus though: it looks to me like there is no obvious reason (other than the usual continental suspicion) to suspect that discourse ethics would one day end. The ‘national emergency’ argument against conventional liberal arguments looks a bit flawed to me: if consent is your foundational value, then if people consent – in and on appropriate terms – to restriction of their liberties, then they’ve consented, and the restriction is justified. Not that I was initially trying to defend blogging against Hobbes: I was trying to defend democracy, in the limited procedural sense, against him.
rob 01.11.05 at 5:47 pm
The point of making the Wittgensteinian claim about language games is not sociological, either in the dismissive ‘common-sense’ sense or in the sense of being non-ontological. A language game is made of a set of rules, which do not have to be conscious, and which are open-ended. What the recognition that we are playing language games means for philosophy, as I understand it, is a revised version of verificationism: it rules out transcendental metaphysical claims, as they are either tautological or meaningless, because we can’t get outside the language game to see whether they are true. You seem to think I am guilty of making such statements, but I can’t see where.
Nietzsche’s claim about the will to power, on the other hand, certainly to me seems such a claim. It may well be the case that the ‘individual’ we currently know, as it were, is for Nietzsche a product of the will to power, but that story is grounded on human qua humans being driven by the will to power. The Nietzscheian valorisation of conflict looks suspiciously to me like the alleged Enlightenment quest to eliminate it as well, but I suppose that’s another debate (and all that stuff about the removal of contingency: the point about post-Wittgensteinian analytical philosophy is that language games are contingent, but that’s all that there is, and we just have to deal with that).
Hobbes again then. You say ‘liberalism is the proposition that government derives from the consent of the governed’. I don’t disagree with that. However, I think Hobbes’s version of consent is crap, and have given reasons why. You haven’t said anything about that. I see no reason to refuse to stop thinking of Hobbes as illiberal. This is not me saying you have to be a democrat to be a liberal – I’m a bit ambivalent about democracy as usually conceived, I think – simply, that if liberals think the coercive power of the state is justified by consent, Hobbes is not a liberal because he distorts the terms of the social contract so as to invalidate consent.
It’s true to say that we can either have the Nietzscheian or one of the conventional liberal methods, which doesn’t link it to democracy – Mill, Habermas, Rawls, even – of justifying freedom of speech. I prefer the conventional liberal methods, because I think Nietzsche is just wrong about a lot of stuff (although interesting). Someone needs to convince me that Nietzsche’s claim that conflict, in the sense of subjugation and dominance he means it, is endemic to human life is grounded on something other than a tautology or an obvious empirical falsehood. I’m not sure that Habermas is asking for a permanent consensus though: it looks to me like there is no obvious reason (other than the usual continental suspicion) to suspect that discourse ethics would one day end. The ‘national emergency’ argument against conventional liberal arguments looks a bit flawed to me: if consent is your foundational value, then if people consent – in and on appropriate terms – to restriction of their liberties, then they’ve consented, and the restriction is justified. Not that I was initially trying to defend blogging against Hobbes: I was trying to defend democracy, in the limited procedural sense, against him.
rob 01.11.05 at 5:55 pm
Sorry about the repeat post: got an error message. Also, since when were liberals exclusively concerned with stopping people killing each other?
thisacademiclife.blogspot.com 01.12.05 at 10:42 pm
My sense of Wittgenstein is certainly that ontological and metaphysical claims cannot be prima facie true or false; they’re moves in particular language-games, no more and no less. But this doesn’t stop them from having empirical effects — it may be only a move in a language-game to make an ontological claim about essential human nature, but in practice such a claim works to end discussion by positing an essential foundation to which statements have to conform. One can have a language-game that denies its status as a language-game, and in my view such a language-game is nothing but an arbitrary attempt to limit creativity and contingency through the mystification of “limits.”
The Nietzschean story — will-to-power and all of its associated trappings — strikes me as a better story in a normative sense, in that it preserves agency better than the alternatives (including liberal individualist alternatives based on more or less rational consent). Language-games may be contingent things with which we have to deal, but no single language-game is so firmly established that we can’t formulate an alternative, possibly by looking for the holes and gaps in the existing langauge-games. In this sense, the analysis of language-games drives us in a sociological direction, because the dominance of a particular way of worlding (as it were) can’t be guaranteed by the essential character of the world, and hence must be in some sense endogenous to the social practices making up a given form of life. And if that’s the case, why not think about other games that might help to engender other forms of life?
Your arguments about Hobbes’ version of consent having problems all presume that the state of nature is not as nasty a place as Hobbes would have us believe. If one is a complete nominalist about good and evil, and if one is an individualist, then why wouldn’t the state of nature be a war of each against all? Under such circumstances, the Hobbesian choice (Leviathan or death) would make sense, and anything over and above preserving one’s life would be a nice but optional bonus. I fail to see why “your money or your life” isn’t a real choice; sometimes people are presented with such stark options, aren’t they? Maybe they shouldn’t be, but sometimes they are. And if we buy Hobbes’ account of the state of nature, people were presented with this and sometimes have to be reminded of what lurks outside of the sovereignty of the leviathan.
As far as I can tell there are only two ways out of this: either humans are essentially good, or at least essentially better than Hobbes thinks that they are (which is the Lockeian solution, and gives rise to the form of “liberalism” that we’re more comfortable with, I think); or social processes are not constrained by an inconvertable fact of individuality.
The former solution gives rise to the idea that consent has to be obtained for individual acts of the government, since people retain something of their intrinsic character when leaving the state of nature, and also since people can be trusted to arrive at reasonable conclusions when the deliberative process is correctly organized. [Insert here three centuries of technical discussions about the best way to organize such deliberation.]
The latter solution takes us in a different direction — towards an empirical specification of how particular configurations of rights and responsibilities are produced and sustained, including notions of individuality and freedom. I take your point that such a perspective deprives us of the ability to articulate clear moral guidelines for action, or to justify activities like blogging or deliberation in transcendental moral terms. The Nietzschean justification I prefer isn’t such a universal claim because it’s just an ethical position — and, to quote Wittgenstein, “ethics and asethetics are one.” So it’s ultimately an aesthetic preference.
I’m quite skeptical about the exercise of trying to essentially justify a form of government anyway. But I do think that it’s interesting to remember that it is possible to use “consent” to justify exceptionally anti-democratic arrangements. And we’d all survive if blogging (and other forms of public deliberation) vanished, wouldn’t we? The intellectual world might be less aesthetically pleasing, and that would IMHO diminish us as human beings — but not because of lost essential rights or anything like that.
rob 01.13.05 at 12:06 pm
You say “One can have a language-game that denies its status as a language-game”, but the point of the linguistic turn in analytical philosophy was not that this was wrong because it represeneted an “arbitrary attempt to limit creativity and contingency through the mystification of “limits””, but that as philosophers we should seek to expose the pretensions of such language games. It’s not ethical, but epistemological. If that’s the case, then claims about human nature – if they’re empirical in a broad sense – are perfectly legitimate: not only do they not violate the epistemological constraint, they don’t seem to violate the putative ethical constraint, since they could be falsified.
The fact that we might want to think about alternative language games we could be playing, to exploit the spaces and inconsistencies in existing language games to found new ones, doesn’t obviously make that task sociological. Exploiting the spaces and inconsistencies in a language game looks to me like a philosophical task, to do with meaning, coherence and the links between concepts within the language game. It also doesn’t obviously advantage Nietzsche, because all it seems to say is: ‘don’t make purely metaphysical statements; remember, all the tools at your disposal are the ones given to you by the language game’. That leaves the field pretty open, unless you’re Descartes or Kant.
The point about the ‘your money or your life’ is not that it isn’t a choice, but that it isn’t a choice which we would regard as legitimating outcomes. Being a nominalist about good and evil, I think, just means that you think that good and evil are convenient names people have found for things they do and don’t like. This doesn’t imply, of itself, that humans are capricious, greedy and violent. Hobbes needs another argument, an empirical one to my mind, drawing on what stateless societies are like, to show that the State of Nature is as bad as he claims.
I’m still not convinced that the conventional liberal needs claims about the essential nature of human beings. Locke probably does use them, but Rawls, even in ‘Theory’, could be read as claiming something about the proper relationship between citizen and state, rather than a thick claim about human nature. I’m also still not convinced that Nietzsche’s claims about human nature are not as thick as to qualify as statements of human essence, but it is a long time since I read any Nietzsche. As for the Wittgenstein quote, I suspect it is an open question whether he means that to denigrate ethics to matters of taste, or promote aesthetics to matters of reason and rule.
I suppose you could sum up our dispute by saying that I think that we can ground ethical statements, if not all of them at once, and you think we can’t, that ethics requires something less contingent than language games. I don’t think I’m going to convince you otherwise, but it’s been interesting.
thisacademiclife.blogspot.com 01.13.05 at 5:42 pm
I think that you sum up our differences nicely. I tend to read Wittgenstein as actually pointing towards a sociological and ethical take on things, since once we stop having coherence and stability guaranteed by a knowable external reality (I don’t think that Wittgenstein is a realist, or a dualist of any kind, so I’m not sure what “falsification” would mean in this context; falsification of a statement by comparing it with what, exactly?) we need to look to everyday practice and the habits of a form of life to account for social meanings. In that sense, pointing out the meaningless nature of metaphysical claims is both epistemological and ethical.
I agree with you that Rawls could be read as not using any thick assumptions about human nature, but then again, he could easily be read in the opposite way. Claims about proper relations between states and citizens always seem to me to have human nature assumptions lurking around someplace within them, living in the sub-basement and bunking next to assumptions about foundational knowledge claims. I suppose my position is that we shouldn’t bother trying to ground such things, but should be more pragmatic about them.
As for an empirical argument about stateless societies, there is a sense in which Hobbes is reproducing a peculiarly European view about primitive Others based on travel journals and the like. I agree with you that he’s wrong about that, but for different reasons: you think he mis-specified the character of life in such a condition, and I think he underplays the socially constructed and contingent nature of “the individual” in the first place. I am not convinced that arguing for a different state of nature is a viable strategy for justifying and defending democracy, and I’m not convinced that doing so can be done without violating the epistemological strictures about language-games.
In a way this keeps coming back to what we mean by “ground.” I read the insight about language-games as saying that the grounds that we have are just the grounds that we have, and not “grounds” in the transcendental sense at all. As such, I side with Rorty in maintaining that we need to look for alternate ways to justify modes of social practice, especially organized ones. The fact that “consent” doesn’t suffice to justify deliberation without a whole host of ancillary assumptions is, to my mind, just a useful illustration that can help to deflate the pretensions of liberal theory to have put this problem to rest once and for all.
Well-played — it’s been fun.
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