Group Reading of Martin Buber's I and Thou

This page is for anybody who is interested in reading and discussing I and Thou by Martin Buber.  Welcome!

First things first. Here's a link to the book.   https://ia800206.us.archive.org/16/items/IAndThou_572/BuberMartin-i-and-thou.pdf

I've written an intro to clarify--- as best I can-- some of Buber's obscure concepts and terms to make the book a bit more accessible. I've also included philosopher, Ran Lahev's very short video clip introducing the book and its meaning. But first, a few words on the the group reading.
 

I thought about how to coordinate this, and here's the tentative plan (if anybody has alternative suggestions I'm open to hearing them). The book is 120 pp. and divided into 3 sections.

I propose that we leave comments pertaining to passages from Section 1 (p. 3-34) for the first week (i.e. from today til Tuesday, 10/1/19. Hopefully these comments will get each of us to think of things from different angles, and enter into discussions about section 1. (Note: I'm not suggesting that you read only section 1. How much or little you read, and at what pace is entirely up to you. However, the writing is difficult, and I think it's best to break the discussions up just as Buber broke the book up into the 3 parts.)

If week one goes well and all or some of you want to continue, then we would leave comments pertaining to passages from section 2  (pp.37-72) for the second week (i.e. from Tuesday 10/1 to 10/8).

If all goes well again, we would do the same for the 3rd part of the book during week 3.  (Section 3: pp. 75-120)

After that comments would be open for discussing the book as a whole in any way you wish to do so.

In general, I don't like to structure things too much as far as discussions go.. So write about the sections and then the entire book in whatever way you see fit.  Comments might include, for example,  thoughts about quoted passages, questions about the meanings of certain words/terms and phrases, examples of how Buber's writing does or does not jibe with  your own life experience, thoughts on how it might apply to daily living in various settings (home, work, school, leisure activities, etc.) and just about anything else that the book brings to mind. If you have comments or questions about this post, that's fine. But remember, this post is only an attempt to help you understand Buber. It's not about what I think or believe.  It is my hope that your  comments and questions  will elicit replies/responses from other readers. Hopefully my own input by way of comments will have some value as well. 

I know that 3 weeks for a little book seems like a long time. But I think  it's just about right for a book that so many readers have called "cryptic" and "obscure." It is philosophy, but it is not written as discursive philosophy but in a style that one philosopher has called "descriptive evocation." Through poetic aphorisms, Buber tries to evoke experiences and insights that are almost ineffable. Nietzsche had a profound influence on him in that regard, but since Buber's work has a mystical dimension, it is often difficult to understand.  It has perplexed many readers to the point that Buber felt compelled to write a postscript in 1957, 35 years after its publication to help clarify some of the issues that had caused confusion. (The postscript is not in the free online version that I have provided a link to) In that postscript of 1957 he writes:

     "Again and again readers have turned to me to ask about the meaning of this and that. For a long  time I answered each individually, but I gradually realized that I was not able to do justice to the demand laid upon me...So I have had to set about giving a public answer, first of all to some essential questions which are bound together by their meaning." (Buber: p. 124)

Having read it, I'm not convinced the postscript clarifies the meaning of the text as much as Buber had hoped.  In the rest of this post, I'll do my best to shed some light on the unusual terms and concepts employed in the book. I'll also leave links to reliable secondary sources available for free online, such as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for Buber, which has a pretty clear summary of the book, as well as some of his other work and his biography. So with that, I'll jump right into the main theme/s and concepts you will come across in section one.

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Introduction to I and Thou (concepts, terms and themes)


Following many interpreters in philosophy,  I will use the word YOU in place of THOU, primarily because the latter is archaic and is not used in real encounters in our society. Because Thou is used in religious contexts ( e.g. religious services, readings of the Bible) it was used in the translation we're using. Later translations (e.g. that of Walter Kaufmann) have dropped it. What's important is to understand what Buber means by "You" or "Thou" which is very different from most traditional understandings of either word. For example, on page 9, Buber begins describing an "I-You" relation between a human being and a tree. Most of us don't routinely address trees with the pronoun, YOU, which means that this ordinary word YOU (Thou in the 1937 translation) is being used in a very unusual way.

Buber starts the book with a compact aphoristic passage that turns out to state some of the major premises of the book. The opening lines  must be at least somewhat  clear in order to understand what follows.  He writes:

     "To man [i.e. all people] the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold attitude. The attitude of man is twofold in accordance with the primary words he speaks. The primary words are not isolated words. The one primary word is the combination I-Thou. The other...is the combination I-It; wherein without a change in the primary word, one of the words, He and She can replace It. Hence the I of man is also twofold. For the I of the primary word I-Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I-It." (Buber: p. 3)

Also on the first page we find 2 very important statements:

>>"The primary word I-YOU can  only be spoken with the whole being." and


>> "The primary word I-IT can never be spoken with the whole being" (ibid)

I'll try to convey a sense of what he means when he speaks of "the whole being" by way of examples. But for now I just wanted to flag the term "Whole Being" or "Whole Person." These terms and the  ways of living and being that they stand for are central. Put in abstract, intellectual terms, we are made "whole" only in relationships with other people, nature or God. Hopefully that will become more clear below.

Another thing to notice is that when Buber uses the term "primary word" he isn't talking specifically about language in the usual sense of words and symbols. Rather, he means by primary, that which is most basic metaphysically. It's common to believe that the most basic reality in the human realm is individual consciousness, the self or the "I." But according to Buber, the "I" doesn't really exist without relationships.  While many philosophers and psychologists start out from the principle of the individual ego or self, Buber says you only become an individual through relationships with others.

"In the beginning is relation." (Buber: p. 18)


"There is no I TAKEN IN ITSELF [sic]..." (Buber: p. 4)
     


We can't take these statements at face value or we'd be lost in a forest of pronouns. Yet they are stated as axioms. That is, he does not present arguments to prove their truth, but simply states them as though they are obvious facts that must be presupposed to make sense of life.  So, how should we interpret these words, and what is their status? I interpret them statements of what Buber thinks are profound metaphysical truths. Metaphysical truths are those alleged truths that  claim to go beyond our personal perspectives and ordinary experiences (the way things appear to us)
in order to reveal the truth of the way things really are (which usually differs from ordinary or everyday understanding). Just as optical illusions can lead us to "see" things in a distorted way (e.g. 2 lines of equal length can appear to have very different lengths), ordinary understanding of the world and the place of human beings in it can be distorted by  concepts and  attitudes we adopt towards other beings (both humans and beings  in nature including animals, trees, etc. ).

For most of us, and for most modern philosophers, "I"  experience myself as the locus of consciousness. Experience is, we tend to feel, happening "in here/ in my head."  Each of us appears to be independent or separate from all others mentally and emotionally.  Each of us would probably consider it to be trivially true that we can describe our experience accurately by saying things like: I interact with others; I bond with them , I break relations off from them, I think about them, love, hate, like, dislike, or respond neutrally to them, I make plans with them, I work with or for some of them, and so on.

We say such things without any sense of mystery, feeling it to be obvious. After all, it was hundreds of years ago that the early modern philosopher, Renee Descartes provided a solid foundation for the existence of the independent subject or self.

 I think therefore I am/ Cogito ergo sum.

So this self-evident assertion of the individual as a thinking subject is the basis of most modern Western philosophy and predominates culture, as I stated above.  But despite our experience of ourselves as separate beings, Buber says this understanding is something like the philosophical equivalent of that optical illusion I mentioned. It appears to be true, but in Reality the individualistic outlook is not the most basic one, but a warped version of the metaphysical truth as he understands it. Buber holds that the most basic  reality is  the way we relate to others (be it You, He, She, or It). My sense of being a self only arises after I've been in relationships with others.  From a theoretical standpoint we can understand this outlook when we consider the fact that babies don't have language, concepts of "self" or "identities." Those things come with socialization.

Buber say that ultimately there are  two basic ways of relating, and each is governed by a basic underlying attitude toward that to which we are relating at any given time.



"To Man the world is twofold in accordance with his twofold attitude." (p.1)

This duality of human nature in terms of basic attitudes is broken down into the two most basic poles of experience.

A) The I-YOU mode of relating
and
B) The I-IT mode of relating. 


Because we are almost always living in the I-IT mode of relating, I will start there. When I relate to others (be it people or other beings in nature) I experience them in terms of an attitude that emphasizes "my" thoughts, impressions, feelings, desires, interests, curiosities, etc.( p. 4) where Buber writes:

" I perceive something. I am sensible of [i.e. I sense] something. I imagine something. I will something. I  feel something.  I think something....This and the like establish the realm of IT." (Buber: p. 4)

All of these examples have in common the fact that I am concerned with various objects of my selective attention.

The world  of  I-IT relations is divided into the thinking subject ("I') and all those "somethings" (thoughts, experiences, , memories, plans)  which become intentional objects of "my"  thoughts, desires, sensations plans and the like.  This is not to say the I-IT mode is "bad." It is actually necessary for everyday life, and within it there are various gradations of  relating some of which approximate the I-YOU more than others (Buber discussed this aspect of his thought in later works, see Sarah Scott link below). 

In the I-YOU mode of relating I experience others (in society, nature or the realm of spiritual , life) as undivided, whole beings that can't be dissected or  broken into parts without losing the connection with the fullness of the Other person.  Usually 'I' relate to others in terms of partial or selective aspects in which I am interested. When riding the bus I experience the person at the wheel only-- or at least mainly-- as a "bus driver" ( an occupational role) which is only one role s/he plays in life. I don't ENCOUNTER  THE OTHER AS A WHOLE BEING  but as an assemblage of parts to which I selectively attend, focusing on some particular aspect/s of the being    (such as personality, looks, intelligence, career, hobbies, fashion sense et. al) and ignoring others according to my partial interests and goals. The person who lectures in the classroom is the "teacher" to me. Only rarely do I meet that person and encounter them as a full human being with an irreducible uniqueness and wholeness. Much, perhaps most of life is lived in the context of selective attention governed by our conscious and unconscious desires, beliefs,  biases, memories and plans

Examples of I-It relations:

>>>I walk onto a bus and barely notice the bus driver. I notice her quickly and perhaps don't exchange any words. Nevertheless I rely on bus-drivers routinely to get around. Here the encounter between me and other is almost entirely absent. The other is experienced mainly as a means to an end; a tool to get a job done.  A thing to transport me from A to B. He or she is thus objectified.

>>> I notice an acquaintance from work on the same bus and strike up a conversation. We make "small talk" recognizing each other by means of talk about work, what other people we know are like, movies and TV shows we might like or dislike, sports events, music, etc. We might also try to get a bit friendlier by asking questions about the other (curiosity) or wondering what they might be thinking about us, or asking them if they care to go out to a movie sometime, etc.  All of this is totally normal, and we take all of this for granted. It's how we are even as we get to know people really well.

>>> I see a stray cat and feel a strong desire to get it to a shelter for strays or a vet. I care about the cat. The attitude is still dominated by the attitude of me being a separate being who might "do something about" a situation that disturbs me. It's a kind of emotionally laden trouble-shooting. It's a very good thing we can notice the misfortunes of others, reflect on it and be motivated to intervene, but it's still an experience not of the cat as a whole being, but as a "cat-in-trouble." We're still feeling separate from the being and slapping labels on it to figure out how to control the situation-- indeed for the better in this example. But the focus here is not ethics. It's basic attitude toward that to which I'm relating. And at the moment I'm only noticing things about the cat that require intervention.

The key insight is that all of these examples reveal a sort of practical attitude in which I'm not really with the other person or being as a "Whole Person" (Buber) but rather my way of relating is "partial." The root word of partial is part, and we break ourselves and others into parts all the time to communicate and function. In the first case it's most obvious. Here is a human being capable of being with others in a rich variety of ways. But for the moment I notice them (if at all) merely as a fraction of their wholeness. I abstract everything from the human being except for one little role called "bus driver." That's it.

In the the second example, it may seem that I am relating to the whole person, but as is normal most of the time, I'm categorizing them and myself thus breaking them down into parts. I take the attitude of co-worker, acquaintance and prospective friend. I try to figure out what to say next that might make the conversation go smoother. To do that, I categorize more (e.g. I think s/he's a movie buff, or so I heard, so I'll ask them if they'd like to hang out and see a movie some time. Maybe that'll break the ice." ) all of this has to do with what philosophers call instrumental reason. We see others as means to ends. This can be either morally good or bad, enriching or debasing, fun or tedious. The point isn't to judge but to see  beneath the illusion that we're usually encountering others as Whole Beings.  The cat, based on anything I wrote, is experienced as a perhaps lovely, but endangered animal that needs to be moved to another situation for help. This again is instrumental thinking. It's about means and ends. "How can I get this cat to a shelter for strays? Let's see, do I have enough for a cab? Let me dial 911." etc.  This is all great, but it's not a spiritual encounter with what Buber calls the Being of the other, that is I am not "fully present" with the cat, but experiencing him/her through a filter of selective attention governed by the attitude of means-to-ends thinking. We spend most of our lives -- even with lovers and spouses-- in such a mode of being, according to Buber.


Examples of I-YOU relations:

Now lets take very similar situations but emphasize what Buber sometimes has called a "gestalt-shift" during which my attitude changes from that of the I-IT mode to that of the I-YOU mode of being.  Maybe then the concept of "encountering the other as a whole being" will begin to make sense.

>>I notice the same friend I ran into on the bus; this time in the a park where we walk and talk together.  Though at first things are pretty much the same as last time (chatting and becoming friendly) something happens unexpectedly. Two dogs start barking at each other aggressively, and the owners are pulling them back to keep them from fighting. But suddenly, out of the blue, one of the dogs for no clear reason turns around noticing me and my friend. He lets out the weirdest sound, not a bark, but some kind of unique yelp that I've never hear but it sounds absurd and funny in the situation. The dog is also making the most uncanny face, an expression that immediately, along with the yelping sound, makes both me and the friend break out into hilarious laughter at the same time.We are laughing without any cares, without self-consciousness of any kind, we aren't judging or categorizing one another. I'm not wondering whether my friend likes dogs generally or not. I might ask that later on. For now we are, and I can't stress this word enough, together. The thing about togetherness is it can't be broken down into "parts."  Laughing-with-YOU  is a spontaneous, here-and-now unfolding which is unencumbered by plans, memories, wishes, regrets. The absurd  sometimes can jerk us out of auto-pilot and transport us into a mode where I am simply "receiving" a person and/or dog or both in a totally open way that has nothing to do with changing them or changing my self, or achieving any goals (means-ends instrumentality).  Hilarity of the absurd is one way of inadvertently undergoing a gestalt-shift from the usual mundane attitude of relating to an I-THOU. My friend and I experienced each other outside of any social roles, norms or judgments for a minute or so. Being transported outside of myself, or being literally "beside myself" as in stepping outside my usual identity or ego, is called ekstasis in Greek  , which is where we get the mystical-sounding word "Ecstasy." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecstasy_(philosophy)   An I-YOU experience has an ecstatic quality in the sense that while I'm right in the midst of others in this world (nothing other-worldly going on here)  yet I'm transported by way of a transient but vital connection with beings that I exist together with in a situation.

The laughter may have been side-splitting, but it subsides. Yet now my friend and I have (without planning or seeking anything) bonded in a truly authentic way. Nothing about either of our responses was a put-on. Nothing was done for the sake of "making the right impression." What happened unfolded with a Zen-like simplicity and ease. And when it was over we returned, perhaps, to our conversation, but we were not the same. We had looked into each other's eyes during the shared hilarity, seen each other's expressions and that of the dog, taking all of it in without thinking about any of it,  but just enjoying this being-together in the moment that was so absurd to  both of us. This I-THOU encounter, this irreducible togetherness can occur uninvitedly or during a dance, or while making love (though self-consciousness can hinder the openness in those circumstances) or just holding hands quietly on a bench with one's spouse of 40 years, feeling that bond and togetherness with nothing awkward in the silences. All these and others (Buber talks about a Tree on p. 9 ff) may not last, but they sustain us in an afterglow of truly feeling that life is not alone; that I am not cut off or apart; that the game is worth the candle because I can become fully present with other people and nature, and thus find a kind of wholeness that allows me to feel at one with others (which is togetherness). This isn't done in the "astral realm" or "heaven" or anything like that, rather the spiritual mystery that Buber calls God is found here and now in the middle of our everyday lives. In philosophical terms, God is immanent or present in all beings if we would open our eyes  and hearts.

Buber knows that atheists and agnostics read, and often got something out of the book. Because Buber has a pantheistic tendency, or at least a view that God is immanent in all personal,  social and natural beings*, it's possible to say without a belief in any particular theology, that there is a spiritual wholeness that can be felt at times. That the world seems more vivid at those times, as if it were aware along with us.

Anyway, this is an attempt using anecdotes, analogies, metaphors and examples to communicate the differences between I-IT living and I-THOU living; and to attempt a description of how we can and do transition from one to the other and back in ordinary situations. Most of all, this is not a mysticism of retreat from this world to another "higher" or "purer" one. Buber's mysticism can appeal to the nonreligious person  who can open up and simply appreciate being-with-others.**

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Notes:

*Buber describes his pantheism in the postscript of 1957,  which isn't contained in the free online pdf. He compares his views to Spinoza.  Spinoza said that we can find God in 2 different realms: that of "spiritual being" and "natural being." Buber emphasizes a third realm which he calls  *personal being.* It is there that we may find God or spiritual "presence"  not only through our I-YOU relations with   people, but in relation with God understood as, in his own words, "The Eternal You" ("The Eternal Thou" in our translation). Philosopher Sarah Scott claims that Buber stated that he found God, The Eternal You, in his wife. God is not "up there" or only approachable through esoteric yoga exercises and such. Those are fine too. But Buber wants to stress that we are already intimately involved with all kinds of beings that-- given a fundamental change of attitude-- might become for us The Eternal You. (Buber: p.135)


**Being-with-others is Heidegger's phrase, but it seems apt here, and I suspect he was influenced to some extent  by  Buber's I and Thou, as was his one-time student, Emmanuel Levinas).

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Here's an excellent  7 minute intro to I and Thou by philosopher, Ran Lahev.  If you find it helpful, there are 2 others by him that follow this one. If you go the Lahev's channel you can find them there.

Links and Online Resources:

>>This online encycolpedia of philosophy entry on Buber is quite informative and contains a summary of I and Thou.  
https://www.iep.utm.edu/buber/

>> Interesting article about  Philosopher and ethicist, Sarah Scott [who wrote the IEP article referenced above] playing Martin Buber at the Jewish Museum,  in a theatrical reading Buber's writings, as well as mock interviews and spontaneous conversations with audience members after the show. Interesting article about what must have been an interesting event:

https://stories.thejewishmuseum.org/why-do-we-hold-these-talks-if-we-dont-expect-that-in-some-way-they-will-change-us-wish-you-were-here-39a3158642ff
 

The Necessary Qualities of a Good Political Leader: Weber's Politics as a Vocation

In January of 1919, Max Weber gave a now-famous lecture on the nature of politics in the modern Western administrative state called Politics as a Vocation. It was particularly focused on the qualities that leaders (such as PMs or Presidents) must have if stable and reasonable conditions would prevail. When he wrote the lecture, Germany had lost WW1, and Weber had attended the Peace Conference in Versailles where a damning"guilt clause" with impossibly large fines was imposed on Germany. Like Keynes, Weber warned that it was an unwise and vindictive settlement that might cause a backlash. Meanwhile, within Germany, radical leftists, various reformers, liberals and conservatives were descending in a vortex of intellectual and physical violence against one another. In that climate, Max Weber-- then the most prominent public intellectual in Germany-- was much sought after in the role of an advisor during the chaos. What should we do? Which party should we support? Students, intellectuals,  journalists and politicians wanted to know.

At first Weber turned the invitation down. He believed strongly in the ideal of keeping one's personal views out of respectable Political Sociology, the field he did much to invent. But for whatever reason, he ultimately accepted the invitation by the liberal Student's Union that invited him to give the lecture. Weber warned that it would probably disappoint those who had come for practical advise regarding the "issues of the day." But though Weber did an end run around mere political advocacy of this or that party or ideology, he spoke to more enduring themes he clearly thought were the source of the political divisions and chaos in 1919 Germany (and elsewhere in that era). The lecture, and the essay it became, is broad ranging but famously centers on the question, "What makes a political leader a good political leader?" The main question is thus one of ethics and character vis a vis powerful political leaders in modern nation-states.

After a fairly in-depth summary of his pioneering work in comparative political and historical studies (some of which is discussed in a short supplementary video below), Weber focuses on modern administrative states of a kind we might loosely call 'democratic' or 'parliamentary' systems with  powerful leaders at the top (PM or President for example). Such states (like our own) are based on legal-bureaucratic authority  (the rule of law) which, however, can get stuck in a mechanical mode when changes are required to meet the problems that arise contingently (e.g. when challenges to the Law of the Land were made by civil rights activists in the 60s). At such times, and other critical ones, such as Germany's post WW1 crisis, Weber thinks we are likely to see the emergence of  charismatic leaders (e.g. Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler) who rise up from within the system yet initiate actions that challenge or deviate from some of the existing legal and bureaucratic procedures-- particularly during times of trouble. While Weber thinks strong charismatic leaders are necessary to counterbalance the largely mechanical behavior of career politicians in parties and organizations, he is aware that this can result in demagogues, would-be tyrants, and dictators if those with charismatic appeal turn out to be unable to live up to certain ethical criteria that should be carefully evaluated during the selection or election of political leaders.  How can we separate out merely charismatic leaders from good charismatic leaders?

He notes that politics in the West has increasingly become a profession but not necessarily a vocation. A vocation is a job, of course, but also retains the sense of "a calling." A good politician can only be such if s/he is not simply"living OFF their job but FOR it." to paraphrase Weber's distinction of "living FROM vs. living FOR politics." (Weber: p. 318) So, according to Weber,  politicians must be passionately committed to their ultimate convictions, and not just employees of the State. This "passion" must be in play for serious and plausible leaders in an age of relatively petty partisans and bureaucrats fighting each other for their own limited interests. There must be someone who feels called upon to mediate all of that; someone-- yes-- with vision but with a cool detachment enabling reasonable compromise as necessary. This balance of passionate commitment to an ultimate vision (i.e. Weber's "ethic of ultimate ends/convictions") and sense of responsibility for the grave impacts of all decisions for society and history ("ethic of responsibility") is ultimately something that involves a sober-headed ability to reason --i.e. to engage in mature rational assessment even of one's own strongest convictions,  desires and one's vision if necessary in order to stay in touch with the obligations of having the awesome powers conferred on leaders of nation-states (PM's, Presidents and the like).

What he's really worried about is the intoxicating effect of political power on anything less than a disciplined, judicious and appropriately detached individual. He's trying to describe what might be called political integrity, though he didn't put it in those exact words. The "2 fatal flaws" of political leadership, he says, are "a lack of objectivity" [rd. detached perspective, ability to rise above the passions of the moment] and  "vanity, the need to thrust oneself as far as possible into the foreground" [perfectly embodied in politicians like Trump and many demagogues]. Weber argues that it is the ethical makeup of a leader that is decisive over and above the exact ideology or party that happens to rule. He was lecturing as a venerated public intellectual to an audience that expected him to endorse the socialists or the conservatives or liberals, all of whom were fighting  each other for power (literally, assassinations--such as that of Rosa Luxenburg-- were occurring throughout Germany as he lectured). Instead of concentrating on party and ideology,  he said that the real need was for someone who can rise above the fray.  Someone who is spirited, yes, but can reign in the passions of the heart when necessary, and certainly restrain the lower instincts for petty gains and the lust for grandeur.This entails applying a cool, measured reasoning that never loses track of the fact that leaders of nation-states have the ability (for better and worse) to change the course of history. This awful responsibility must always be a decisive and humbling factor in keeping the leader well above rash and emotionalistic indulgences which we see in so many leaders-- especially demagogues.

So this is nothing less than an ethical evaluation on Weber's part, after years of study in comparative politics and history, of what the ideal traits, or character structure of a good political leader in the modern nation-state might look like. Though I hope this short summary of W's thought on political leadership is reasonably good,  I am posting an excerpt from the lecture/essay. The following is taken from what I believe to be one of the most important sections of Politics as a Vocation, and it is deservedly famous.

As we contemplate the question of just who should take the political position of perhaps the most powerful person on the planet, the president of the US, we could do worse than to consult Weber's answer to the question of just what kind of human being has what it takes to wield such power in a passionate yet responsible manner-- ever balancing core convictions and clear-headed responsibility to the citizens.

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Excerpt From Politics as a Vocation

by Max Weber

What kinds of inner joy does politics have to offer, and what kinds of personal qualifications does it presuppose in anyone turning to this career?

Well, first of all, it confers a feeling of power. The professional politician can have a sense of rising above everyday existence, even in what is formally a modest position, through knowing the he exercises influence on people, shares power over them, but above all from the knowledge that he holds in his hands some vital strand of historically important events [emph. added] But the question facing such a person is which qualities will enable him to do justice to this power...and thus to the responsibility it imposes on him. This takes us into the area of ethical questions, for to ask what kind of human being one must be in order to have the right to seize the spokes of the wheel of history, is to pose an ethical question.

One can say that three qualities are preeminently decisive for a politician: passion, a sense of responsibility, and judgment. Passion [is] the sense of concern for the thing itself  [i.e. the issue or matter at hand]  or the passionate commitment to a 'cause.'[This is not to be confused with]... what my late friend Georg Simmel called 'sterile excitement' [such as that we see]... amongst our own intellectuals at this carnival being graced with the proud name 'revolution; it is the 'romanticism of the intellectually interesting' directed into the void, and lacking all objective [sachlich] sense of responsibility. [This refers to the intellectual and quasi-military violence between socialists, liberals and conservatives fighting for control of the state in 1919 Germany. Many intellectuals, for example on the left, called themselves "revolutionaries" while Weber saw mainly a tragic loss of the ethic of responsibility for the fate of the country on all sides. He also mentions "many though by no means all Russian intellectuals" of the late 19th and early 20th century, and, of course, during the revolution and subsequent civil war that was raging in Russia as he lectured - ed.]. Simply to feel passion, however genuinely, is not sufficient to make a politician, unless in service to a 'cause,' responsibility  for that cause becomes the lode-star of all action. This requires (and this is the decisive psychological quality of a politician)  judgment, the ability to maintain one's composure and calm while being receptive to realities, in other words distance from people and things. A lack of distance [i.e. critical distance, capacity for cool, detached reasoning when everyone around you is inflamed or carried away by emotion- ed.] is one of the 'deadly sins' of the politician, and...will condemn our future intellectuals to political incompetence if they cultivate it. For the problem is precisely this, how are hot passion and cool judgment to be fused together in one soul? Politics is an activity conducted with the head, not with other body parts or the soul. Yet if politics is to be meaningful action rather than some frivolous intellectual game, dedication to it can only be sustained by passion.   Only if one accustoms oneself to distance...can one achieve that powerful control over the soul [i.e. self-restraint in the heat of the moment] which distinguishes the passionate politician from the mere 'sterile excitement' of the political amateur. The strength of a political personality means first and foremost the possession of these qualities

Every day and every hour, therefore the politician has to overcome a quite trivial, all-too-human enemy which threatens him from within: common vanity, the mortal enemy of all dedication to a cause and of all distance-- in this case, of distance to oneself

Vanity is a very widespread quality, and perhaps no one is completely free of it. In academic and scholarly circles it is a kind of occupational disease. In the case of the scholar, however, unattractive as this quality may be, it is relatively harmless in the sense that it does not, as a rule, interfere with the pursuit of knowledge. Things are quite different for the politician. The ambition for power  is an inevitable means with which he works. 'The instinct for power,' as it is commonly called, is thus indeed one of his normal qualities. The sin against the [metaphorically] holy spirit of his profession begins where this striving for power becomes detached from the task in hand and becomes a matter of purely personal self-intoxication instead of being placed entirely at the service of the 'cause.' For there are ultimately just 2 deadly sins in the area of politics: a lack of objectivity...and a lack of responsibility. Vanity, the need to thrust one's person as far as possible into the foreground, is what leads the politician most strongly into the temptation of committing one or other (or both) of these sins, particularly as the demagogue is forced to count on making an 'impact', and for this reason is always in danger both of becoming a play-actor and of taking the responsibility for his actions too lightly, and being concerned only with the 'impression' he is making... For although, or rather precisely because power is the inevitable means of all politics, and the ambition of power therefore one of its driving forces, there is no more pernicious distortion of political energy than when the parvenu boasts of his power and vainly mirrors himself in the feeling of power-- or indeed any and every worship of power for its own sake. The mere "power politician" , a type whom an energetically promoted cult is seeking to glorify here in Germany as elsewhere, may give the impression of strength, but in fact his actions merely lead into emptiness and absurdity. On this point the critics of 'power politics' are quite correct. The sudden inner collapse of typical representatives of this outlook has shown us just how much inner weakness and ineffectuality are concealed behind this grandiose but empty pose. It stems from a most wretched and superficial lack of concern for the meaning of human action, a blase attitude that knows nothing of the tragedy in which all action, but quite particularly political action is, in truth, enmeshed (Weber: 1994,  pp. 352-5)

Source:
Max Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs
Cambridge U. Press, New York; 1994, pp. 318-20 and 352-355

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The following 6 min. video focuses on Weber's conception of power (macht) and the manner in which it becomes legitimate authority (herrschaft). In the modern era the focus, thinks Weber, will be on the need to balance charismatic leaders with the impersonal rule of law or "legal-rational authority." This may help to situate the above passage from Weber. In the long lecture, Weber discussed many other things including types of power and authority. Since there isn't room for everything in the post, this video may be useful, particularly the closing comments on the "comeback" of Charismatic Leaders in times of crisis and social disunity in modern law based states. ( see 4:59 ff).

Possible Questions/Topics: 

-Does Weber's assessment of leadership in the modern state seem relevant to the current situation in the US (or for that matter the UK and other nation-states currently characterized by disunity bordering on crisis)? If so, discuss. If not, then why not?

-Sometimes pundits in the media talk about the "character" of political candidates and/or leaders. Weber's emphasis is largely on the moral character of the politician and the virtues which constitute it. How important to you are the characteristics he describes in candidates and/or leaders for whom you might (or did) vote?

-Weber (himself known as a liberal at the time of the lecture) chose not to "take sides" or support any of the parties that were engaged in sometimes-violent fighting. He refers to the struggle for power around him as a "carnival"(see above) and discusses the qualities of leadership he thinks none of those around him possess but need to understand. Was this a "cop-out" or do you think Weber goes beneath the self-proclaimed ideologies to address a deeper crisis of ethics? How important are ideology and party? How important are ethics?

(Note: These are merely a suggestions. Please write whatever seems important to you in relation to the post.)

Martha Nussbaum on the question, "What does it mean to be human today?" (With critical response)

Today's New York Times includes a mini-essay by philosopher and legal scholar, Martha Nussbaum. [Note: this post first appeared on 8/20/18 on a now-defunct Disqus channel] Ir is the latest in a series of philosophical responses to the question, "What does it mean to be human today?." https://www.nytimes.com/spo... Nussbaum is a prodigious philosopher whose writings since the early 80s have, by turns, focused on Classical Greek philosophy, Stoicism, Feminist Theory, Human Rights, Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, legal theory, quality of life in developing countries, "political emotions," and much more. I have great respect for Nussbaum, whose books and lectures are almost always interesting, and not infrequently quite original and insightful. I didn't have that response to her Times piece this morning, though. The topic she takes on and the issues she addresses in her essay are, however, important not only for philosophy but the future of humankind and the biosphere as a whole. What follows is Nussbaum's mini-essay followed by a very short response which I wrote for the NYT comments section earlier. Hopefully, the essay and response will generate a constructive discussion on the very timely issues involved.

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What Does It Mean to Be Human? Don’t Ask: (We don’t see the problem with our self-importance because our narcissism is so complete.)

by Martha Nussbaum 8/20/18
Source: NY Times

Over time, the idea of “being human” has surely meant — and will continue to mean — many things. There is and has never been just one answer. But surely one thing it ought to involve today is the ability to recognize that the question itself is a problem.

We humans are very self-focused. We tend to think that being human is somehow very special and important, so we ask about that, instead of asking what it means to be an elephant, or a pig, or a bird. This failure of curiosity is part of a large ethical problem.

The question, “What is it to be human?” is not just narcissistic, it involves a culpable obtuseness. It is rather like asking, “What is it to be white?” It connotes unearned privileges that have been used to dominate and exploit. But we usually don’t recognize this because our narcissism is so complete.

We share a planet with billions of other sentient beings, and they all have their own complex ways of being whatever they are. All of our fellow animal creatures, as Aristotle observed long ago, try to stay alive and reproduce more of their kind. All of them perceive. All of them desire. And most move from place to place to get what they want and need. Aristotle proposed that we should strive for a common explanation of how animals, including human animals, perceive, desire and move.

We know Aristotle as a philosopher, but he also was a great biologist who studied shellfish and other creatures large and small. He encouraged his students not to turn away from studying animals that don’t seem glamorous, since there is something wonderful in all of them, not least the sheer fact that they all strive for continued life.

This sense of wonder, which should lead us to a fuller ethical concern, is a deep part of our humanity. But wonder is on the wane, and we humans now so dominate the globe that we rarely feel as if we need to live with other animals on reciprocal terms.

Domesticated animals occupy a privileged sphere, but even they are often treated cruelly (think of puppy mills, or abandoned feral cats). The factory farming of pigs, chickens and other animals is a relatively new form of hideous brutality. As for the creatures in the “wild,” we can see that our human crimes are having a devastating effect on them: the damages that come from lab research using animals; the manifold harms endemic to the confinement of apes and elephants in zoos; the depletion of whale stocks by harpooning; the confinement of orcas and dolphins in marine theme parks; the poaching of elephants and rhinoceroses to benefit the international black market; the illicit trafficking of African elephants to American zoos; the devastation of habitat for many large mammals that is resulting from climate change. It is now estimated that human activity has contributed to the extinction of more than 80 mammalian species. https://vcresearch.berkeley...
New issues arise constantly. The world needs an ethical revolution, a consciousness-raising movement of truly international proportions. But this revolution is impeded by the navel-gazing that is typically involved in asking, “What is it to be human?”

Let’s rekindle and extend our sense of wonder by asking instead: “What is it to be a whale?” Then let’s go observe whales as best we can, and read the thrilling research of scientists such as Hal Whitehead http://whiteheadlab.weebly.... and Luke Rendell http://biology.st-andrews.a... Let’s ask about elephants (my own most beloved species), and if we can’t go on safaris, let’s watch films of elephants simply living their lives, exhibiting communal devotion, compassion, grief anda host of other complex attitudes that we humans tend to believe belong to us alone.

And let’s do much more philosophical and legal work on theoretical approaches to protecting other animals and developing more reciprocity with them. We have gathered so much scientific information about the complexities of animal lives. Now let’s put it to use philosophically. Will Kymlicka http://post.queensu.ca/~kym... and Sue Donaldson https://philpapers.org/s/Su... have already done wonderful work on reciprocity and community with domesticated animals, but there’s more to do.
In the world of philosophy-influenced policy, the most significant general approach to animal entitlements until now has been that of the British utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, https://plato.stanford.edu/... courageously and ably developed by the philosopher Peter Singer https://plato.stanford.edu/... . This approach continues to have great importance because it focuses on animals’ suffering. If we were to simply stop inflicting gratuitous pain on animals, that would be a huge step forward.

We now know that animals need many things that don’t always cause suffering when they are absent: the chance to associate with others of their kind in normal groupings; the chance to sing or trumpet in their characteristic ways; the chance to breed; the chance to move freely through unobstructed space; the chance to pursue curiosity and make new discoveries. So we also need, I believe, an approach that focuses on a plurality of distinct “capabilities,” or freedoms, that each species requires to live a flourishing life.

I’m now writing a book that will use my prior work on the “capabilities approach” https://plato.stanford.edu/... to develop a new ethical framework to guide law and policy in this area. But mine is just one approach, and it will and should be contested by others developing their own models. Lawyers working for the good of animals under both domestic and international laws need sound theoretical approaches, and philosophers should be assisting them in their work. And there is so much work to do.

So let’s put aside the narcissism involved in asking only about ourselves. Let’s strive for an era in which being human means being concerned with the other species that try to inhabit this world.

Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

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A Short Response:

There seems to be a false dichotomy at work here. Either we ask about our own species (narcissistic) or we cultivate a greater sense of wonder and ethical interest in the myriad of animals and life-forms all around us (expansive/mature). Yet we can concern ourselves with both, and indeed they are interrelated more than ever in the current age in which human beings exercise tremendous influence on the fate of the environment and all the animals that she mentions. What matters, I think, is how we inquire into these things. It can be done in a self-congratulatory or narcissistic way, as Nussbaum fears, but it needn't be so.

I don't see how we can explore other animals and nature in light of ethical responsibilities without first exploring 'the human condition' which is part of nature and the biosphere. To ask who and what we are and may become has been basic to philosophy from Plato, Aristotle,Augustine,Kant, to Nietzsche, Sartre,Simone de Beauvoir, et al. Not a bad pedigree! It's interesting to read Nussbaum lauding Aristotle for sidestepping the "narcissism" that theories of human nature and purpose imply on her view. As a sometimes-classicist, she must know Aristotle's ethics and politics attempt to describe, even define, human nature. For Aristotle, we're political animals (zoon politikon), our function (ergon) is rational activity, and our ultimate end (telos), is to actualize our potentials and achieve well-being (eudaimonia) that is conducive to a harmonious society/polis.

But such answers, as intellectually valuable as they are do not give guidance for "human beings today," which is the topic of the series of essays in the NYT . With all the powers we now have to destroy life on earth, we must ask "who" we are and what we want afresh.
-PD

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Questions:

-Is it possible to radically alter the way we perceive and treat other animals without, in so doing, asking questions about our place in nature, our needs, desires and ethical responsibilities?

-Must questions about human nature take the form of "navel gazing," "narcissistic" self-importance, as Nussbaum claims?

-The title of the essay includes the exhortation, "Don't Ask" in response to the question, "What does it mean to be human today?" (that's the NY Times' "big question for the series with the word "today" included). If we "don't ask" what it means to be human beings in the world today, how might we change "who" we are and what we do to be more compatible with the needs, or perhaps rights, of
other beings and the environment?

The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell: An Overview

                                                 

 The following is a tribute to Bertrand Russell as a philosopher (he was also an activist, essayist in matters of what he called "non-philosophical" ethics and politics, a writer of self-help books, and much more). The author, Andrew David Irvine, is very charitable to Russell, presenting what many see as an ever-changing set of philosophical positions and projects as a unified whole. In a certain sense there is thematic unity in Russell's overall body of work. As Irvine points out, Russell's animating question was always, "what can we know, and with what degree of certainty." But the doctrines he embraced in his long efforts to wrestle with those questions changed with some frequency, which led to criticisms of inconsistency. For my own part, I admire philosophers that can concede mistakes, change tack, and follow their best hunches and evidence in favor of the misguided need to appear "consistent" at all costs. Russell (with AN Whitehead) pioneered a great part of propositional and predicate logics which are at the root of most formal logics to this day. He developed analytic philosophy in its early phase, illustrating the power of conceptual analysis in such classic essays as "On Denoting." For one reason or another, there has not been a post in his honor here, so hopefully this excerpt from the TLS series, "Footnotes to Plato" will remedy that oversight. It is an abridged version of an article that can be read here: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/a...
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Russell’s [overall] philosophy was motivated by a single question. As he explains in My Philosophic Development (1959), “There is only one constant preoccupation. I have throughout been anxious to discover how much we can be said to know and with what degree of certainty or doubtfulness” Initially, Russell turned to logic and mathematics in the hope that they would help him discover a body of eternal, objective truths capable of being known with absolute certainty. When Ludwig Wittgenstein convinced him that logic was simply a mechanism for discovering new ways of saying the same thing using different words, he was intellectually devastated. Even so, this disappointment led eventually to a much more plausible account of human knowledge. At its core was what Russell called the liberal or scientific outlook, summarized in his essay of 1947, “Philosophy and Politics”:

The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment. This is the way in which opinions are held in science, as opposed to the way in which they are held in theology. The decisions of the Council of Nicaea are still authoritative, but in science fourth-century opinions no longer carry any weight. In the USSR the dicta of Marx on dialectical materialism are so unquestioned that they help to determine the views of geneticists on how to obtain the best breed of wheat, though elsewhere it is thought that experiment is the right way to study such problems. Science is empirical, tentative, and undogmatic; all immutable dogma is unscientific. The scientific outlook, accordingly, is the intellectual counterpart of what is, in the practical sphere, the outlook of Liberalism.

This view soon became a core feature of what is now known as analytic philosophy.
Before Russell, two views about the relationship between science and philosophy dominated. The first was that throughout history the terms “science” and “philosophy” had been used largely interchangeably.“Philosophia”, meaning love of wisdom, happened to be a Greek word.“Scientia”, meaning knowledge, happened to be a Latin word. Both referred, not to a single discipline among many, but to all organized knowledge. As Descartes wrote in 1644, “all Philosophy is like a tree, of which Metaphysics is the root, Physics the trunk, and all the other sciences are the branches that grow out of this trunk, which are reduced to three principal, namely, Medicine, Mechanics and Ethics”. It is in this sense that Isaac Newton titled his landmark work of 1657 not Mathematical Principles of Physics, but Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica)We still rely on this understanding of philosophy whenever we award those who have carried out advanced research, whether in the humanities,the social sciences or the bench sciences, a doctor of philosophy degree or PhD.

The second view is one that Russell himself initially accepted but laterabandoned. This is the view that while science and philosophy both help us understand the world, each has its own independent area of investigation. On this view, it is the scientist’s job to discover contingent, empirical truths about the natural world. Philosophy has a different job, namely the discovery of truths that are somehow universal or necessary, especially those relating to logic and to normative theories such as ethics. On this view, science uses observation to discover that copper conducts electricity, that wood does not, that the speed of sound is less than the speed of light and that species evolve through natural selection. In contrast, philosophy relies on reason rather than observation. It is through reason that we discover that nothing can be in two places at once, that modus ponens and modus tollens are just two of many universally valid forms of inference, that murder is always wrong. On this view, science and philosophy each contribute to our understanding of the world, but they do so by focusing on different branches of Descartes’s tree of knowledge.

Russell introduced a third view. On this view, it is not the job of philosophers and scientists to investigate different branches of knowledge. Instead, philosophy and science contribute different tools to the same job. While science does the heavy lifting of empirical observation, working to discover what the Australian philosopher David Armstrong calls the “geography and history of the universe”, taking geography in this sense to include all space and history to include all time, including the future, philosophy works at clarifying the concepts science uses to generate these observations. As Jerry Fodor summarizes, “Philosophy is what you do to a problem until it’s clear enough to solve it by doing science”

More precisely, on Russell’s view, philosophy’s task is to develop a logically perfect language, an ideal language through which rigorous, reliable scientific investigation becomes possible Observations alone, without the proper concepts to express them, inevitably lead to Alice in Wonderland types of confusion in which we are misled by the surface grammar of natural language:

I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone.“To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”

As trivial as these types of confusion might seem, Russell’s insight was that they underlie many of the most fundamental intellectual errors in human history.

Developing in-principle accounts of how to avoid such errors is not easy. Everyone knows that from “Men are mortal” and “Socrates is a man” we can infer that “Socrates is mortal”. We also know that from “Men are numerous” and “Socrates is a man” we cannot infer that “Socrates is numerous”, but without an explanation of why these two cases are different we are left wondering about the more general case, about whether from “Men are x” and “Socrates is a man” we can infer reliably that “Socrates is x” for other arbitrary instances of x. On Russell’s view, the analysis needed to resolve these kinds of puzzles does not focus primarily on the study of language, at least not initially. Hence, Russell’s spirited opposition to the mid-twentieth century turn towards ordinary language philosophy.
On Russell’s view,logical analysis is primarily a type of abstract investigation about the world. Only secondarily is it involved in developing a corresponding grammar and vocabulary. Without some principled account of why language and inference sometimes fail to mirror the underlying structure of the world, we inevitably have trouble placing even our most careful empirical observations into words. Without conceptual analysis, no scientific inference can be fully trusted. On this view, guidance comes, not from the surface features of natural language, but from the underlying structure of the world itself. As Einstein famously remarks, just as philosophy, when isolated from science, becomes intellectually empty, science without philosophy “is – insofar as it is thinkable at all – primitive and muddled”.

In a broad sense, this goal of having language mirror reality originates with Plato’s injunction to carve nature at its joints. In a more precise sense, it originates with Gottfried Leibniz, for it was Leibniz who first championed the use of a logically ideal language (or characteristica universalis), together with an effective calculus of deductive reasoning (or calculus ratiocinator). Only after developing these two tools are we able to reason about the world without fear of error. As Russell himself translate one of Leibniz’s most famous quotations in his book, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz,

We should be able to reason in metaphysics and morals in much the same way as in geometry and analysis . . . If controversies were to arise, there would be no more need of disputation between two philosophers than between two accountants. For it would suffice to take their pencils in their hands, to sit down to their slates, and to say to each other (with a friend as witness, if they liked): Let us calculate.

On this view there is no hard line separating the philosopher’s armchair from the scientist’s workbench. Conceptual analysis may not have about it the same air of empirical discovery as science, but it is just as central to the scientific enterprise as observation and experiment. Empirical observations reporting how the world in fact is may not immediately tell us how the world should be, but they too are essential for understanding even the most normative of projects. As Wittgenstein sums up Russell’s insight, “Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity”. Something similar might be said of science as well.

This view of philosophy did not come quickly or easily to Russell. The idea that philosophy’s purpose is to discover a body of eternal, transcendent truths was deeply embedded, not just in Russell’s early philosophy, but in the philosophical culture of his day. Gradually, though, Russell came to champion the idea that advances in knowledge begin as much with conceptual analysis as with observation. We start with beliefs that seem to be plausible but that we cannot express with any high degree of precision. We then go through a process that involves both observation and analysis. We search for more accurate language, we collect more data, we look for inconsistencies, we investigate more fully. This process, says Russell in My Philosophical Development, “is just like that of watching an object approaching through a thick fog: at first it is only a vague darkness, but as it approaches articulations appear and one discovers that it is a man or a woman, or a horse or a cow or what not”. The result requires the thoughtful integration of both empirical investigation and logical analysis. This view about the importance of analysis, concludes Russell, “is my strongest and most unshakable prejudice as regards the methods of philosophical investigation”.

As Russell sees it, this view of philosophy leads not just to a more accurate understanding of the world. It also leads to an increased appreciation of the importance of objective knowledge quite generally, a lesson that should not be lost on those of us living almost half a century after Russell’s death as we reflect on the social, political and educational issues of our day. As Russell puts it at the end of his History of Western Philosophy (1945),

In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few
unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of
basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and
as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for
human beings. To have insisted upon the introduction of this virtue into
philosophy, and to have invented a powerful method by which it can be
rendered fruitful, are the chief merits of the philosophical school of
which I am a member. The habit of careful veracity acquired in the
practice of this philosophical method can be extended to the whole
sphere of human activity, producing, wherever it exists, a lessening of
fanaticism with an increasing capacity of sympathy and mutual
understanding. In abandoning a part of its dogmatic pretensions,
philosophy does not cease to suggest and inspire a way of life.

Deepfakes Are Coming. What Happens When We Can No Longer Believe What We See?

The following is taken from a recent (6/10/19) NY Times' op-ed piece, Deepfakes Are Coming; We Can No Longer Believe What We See, by philosopher Regini Reni. Are the epistemological standards by which we separate fact from hearsay going to be inevitably lost when we can no longer rank visual information as the most reliable kind? Rini explores.

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On June 1, 2019, the Daily Beast published a story exposing the creator of a now infamous fake video that appeared to show House Speaker Nancy Pelosi drunkenly slurring her words. The video was created by taking a genuine clip, slowing it down, and then adjusting the pitch of her voice to disguise the manipulation. Judging by social media comments, many people initially fell for the fake, believing that Ms. Pelosi really was drunk while speaking to the media. (If that seems an absurd thing to believe, remember Pizzagate; people are happy to believe absurd things about politicians they don’t like.)

The video was made by a private citizen named Shawn Brooks, who seems to have been a freelance political operative producing a wealth of pro-Trump web content. (Mr. Brooks denies creating the video, though according to the Daily Beast, Facebook confirmed he was the first to upload it.) Some commenters quickly suggested that the Daily Beast was wrong to expose Mr. Brooks. After all, they argued, he’s only one person, not a Russian secret agent or a powerful public relations firm; and it feels like “punching down” for a major news organization to turn the spotlight on one rogue amateur. Seth Mandel, an editor at the Washington Examiner, asked, “Isn’t this like the third Daily Beast doxxing for the hell of it?” It’s a legitimate worry, but it misses an important point. There is good reason for journalists t expose the creators of fake web content, and it’s not just the glee of watching provocateurs squirm. We live in a time when knowing the origin of an internet video is just as important as knowing what it shows.

Digital technology is making it much easier to fabricate convincing fakes. The video that Mr. Brooks created is pretty simple; you could probably do it yourself after watching a few YouTube clips about video editing. But more complicated fabrications, sometimes called “deepfakes,” use algorithmic techniques to depict people doing things they’ve never done — not just slowing them down or changing the pitch of their voice, but making them appear to say things that they’ve never said at all. A recent research article suggested a technique to generate full-body animations, which could effectively make digital action figures of any famous person.

So far, this technology doesn’t seem to have been used in American politics, though it may have played some role in a political crisis in Gabon earlier this year. But it’s clear that current arguments about fake news are only a taste of what will happen when sounds and images, not just words, are open to manipulation by anyone with a decent computer.

Combine this point with an insight from epistemology — the branch of philosophy dealing with knowledge — and you’ll see why the Daily Beast was right to expose the creator of the fake video of Ms. Pelosi. Contemporary philosophers rank different types of evidence according to their reliability: How much confidence, they ask, can we reasonably have in a belief when it is supported by such-and-such information?

We ordinarily tend to think that perception — the evidence of your eyes and ears — provides pretty strong justification. If you see something with your own eyes, you should probably believe it. By comparison, the claims that other people make — which philosophers call “testimony” —provide some justification, but usually not quite as much as perception.Sometimes, of course, your senses can deceive you, but that’s less likely than other people deceiving you.

Until recently, video evidence functioned more or less like perception. Most of the time, you could trust that a camera captured roughly what you would have seen with your own eyes. So if you trust your own perception, you have nearly as much reason to trust the video. We all know that Hollywood studios, with enormous amounts of time and money, can use CGI to depict almost anything, but what are the odds that at random internet video came from Hollywood?

Now, with the emergence of deepfake technology, the ability to produce convincing fake video will be almost as widespread as the ability to lie. And once that happens, we ought to think of images as more like testimony than perception. In other words, you should only trust a recording if you would trust the word of the person producing it.Which means that it does matter where the fake Nancy Pelosi video, and others like it, come from. This time we knew the video was fake because we had access to the original. But with future deepfakes, there won’t be any original to compare them to. To know whether a disputed video is real, we’ll need to know who made it. It’s good for journalists to start getting in the habit of tracking down creators of mysterious web content. And it’s good for the rest of us to start expecting as much from the media. When deepfakes fully arrive, we’ll be glad we’ve prepared. For now, even if it’s not ideal to have amateur political operatives exposed to the ire of the internet, it’s better than carrying on as if we can still trust our lying videos.

Below is a 10 minute documentary on the problem of deepfakes (courtesy of WSJ)

Comments/Thoughts:

In the tech sector, there have been attempts to combat the problem of Deep Fakes. For example, the photo and video verification company, True Pic, has designed technology which "fingerprints" videos and photographs right at the moment they come off the image sensor. These fingerprints can be used later to establish the authenticity of the image. There is an interesting article in Fast Co.

“If I was a campaign manager for the next election, I would be videotaping every single one of my candidate’s speeches and putting them on Truepic,” says Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College who has helped detect manipulation in preexisting images for organizations including DARPA and The New York Times. He now serves as a Truepic adviser. “That way, when the question of authenticity comes up, if somebody manipulates a video, [the user] has a provable original, and there’s no debate about what happened.” https://www.fastcompany.com...

Further, Truepic is partnering with Qualcomm which manufactures a large portion of the smartphone processors in use today. The plan is to insure that the Truepic tech is built into the smartphones so that it isn't even necessary to download a photo/video authenticating app.

But tech solutions only get us so far here. Just as surely as partial antidotes hit the market, so will more advanced versions of deep fake tech. More to the point in terms of the points made by Reni in her article, no technology insures that it will be used. To combat the current problem, we would need to be, as Reni states, "at the point where a camera that does *not* use the tech is suspicious by default." We are far from being at that point. Why?

Our epistemological norms have served us relatively well for many centuries. Eyewitness accounts are now intuitively accorded much greater credibility than testimony or other sensory data such as audition without vision (e.g. claims that you recognized a voice without accompanying visuals). This hierarchy of reliable evidence informs everything from our methods of education, criminal procedure, news and journalism, right down to plain old small talk and gossip. In order to practice vigilance in the era of Deep Fakes, we would have to learn how to habitually put such implicit schemes aside and start with the premise that all perceptual evidence is deeply problematic in principle. Such a change in cognitive and perceptual MO, if it were to come about, takes a lot longer than the period of time in which more and more refined Deep Fake programs are developed and disseminated widely and cheaply.

Wittgenstein: On Certainty

(Note: This was written as the third and final  in a series of three posts devoted to his late work, particularly Philosophical Investigations. The previous two posts are below in archives, though this can be read independently of them as well.)


After Philosophical Investigations was published posthumously in 1953, one last book, entitled On Certainty appeared. The book takes the form of a response, or series of responses to the common sense realist GE Moore. But the main line of Wittgenstein's response to Moore gives great insight into the later W's overall appraisal of philosophy and its quest for foundational knowledge.

The problem that faced GE Moore in the early 20th century was that of Idealists who said that there is no way to know that we are not actually immaterial beings in the mind of God, or something of that kind, despite all the appearances to the contrary. Thus we could not really know that our bodies exist; they could be mere images we see when God causes us to see them (or in this era a scenario like that in the Matrix might enable the same type of skepticism such that you think you are moving or eating, but you are really in a box with your brain connected to an elaborate virtual reality program). GE Moore thought that it was sheer nonsense to doubt such "self-evident knowledge" as being in possession of your own body. In sometimes-heated debates with skeptics and idealists Moore would raise his hand up, then raise his voice and exclaim "I KNOW that this is my hand." He was trying to say that knowledge of the real world does not really lead to an infinite regress (e.g. "How do you KNOW that is your hand, Prof. Moore?") but rather reaches a stopping point or foundation which is common-sense self-evident knowledge. "I know I am typing now" would be another such statement.
Why are these sorts of statements self-evidently the case? Because we cannot function in the everyday world if we seriously and sincerely start to doubt these basic articles of common sense facts, according to Moore. Only philosophers interested in abstract speculation sincerely argue about these things with counter-examples. In everyday life it would never come up. These common sense foundations are, said Moore, indubitable.

Moore's realism came to be seen as, and indeed called "Naive Realism." But Wittgenstein brought Moore's defense of realism back in a very interesting way. He said, in On Certainty, that Moore was correct to say that there was no reason to doubt that "This is my hand" while holding it up. Why? Because there is no language game in which such a doubt ever arises accept philosophy. This only shows how peculiar and detached from reality philosophy actually is, says W. So he agrees that it is "nonsense" to doubt whether or not the hand you are waving is really "your hand." But crucially it is also nonsense to say "I know this is my hand" while holding it up. Why? Because knowledge claims make no sense unless they can be doubted. If you cannot doubt something then the question of knowledge doesn't arise. The point of knowledge is to remove doubt. This was implicit in the PI when discussing sensations and pain. If I cannot doubt that I am in pain, then it makes no sense to say "I know I'm in pain." (Unless someone like a doctor doubts me, but that is not the same as me doubting my own sensations). What, would saying "I KNOW THAT I am in pain" add to the sentence, "I am in pain?" To understand this rhetorical question is to understand why W thinks philosophy creates psuedo-problems rather than clarifying things.

Wittgenstein holds that a person who doesn't believe they are in pain when they are feeling pain; or doesn't believe they have a hand when they are using one; or doesn't believe it is raining while they are walking through the rain with an umbrella; such people do not need training in the intricacies of epistemology, but rather something more like "a slap in the face, or a conversion experience." His image of a situation in which someone acts like the skeptic or idealist in these situations is one where the listener grabs the doubter and shakes him while saying something like,"For God's sake, come to your senses! Snap out of it. You're acting crazy." The only exceptions would involve idle speculation among philosophers or creative imaginings for the production of fantasy novels or movies. In everyday life, it doesn't come up. His view is that epistemology and doubt go together. The quest for certainty tends to generate doubts that otherwise do not arise. In ordinary circumstances we settle for what W calls riverbeds which are not beliefs or doubts, but the solid ground of pragmatic givens in everyday experience. I am here and you are there, and there's no problem, no intellectual issue at all. This is a lot like American Pragmatism but without any desire to convert it into a "theory" of experience. The experience is just fine as it is and requires no no theory, thinks W.  Any theory devised to reassure me that "my arm is 'really' my arm," or "I am in pain at T" or "It is raining" is absurdly superfluous, for W. There is no need to gild the lily of non-problematic experience with theories designed to "prove" that there are no problems. Anyone who is caught up in trying to prove that they are feeling pain while they are feeling it, for example, needs psychological help and not philosophy. They need the "Philosophical Therapy" of the Philosophical Investigations which, as covered in previous posts, is designed to convince the suffering philosopher that philosophy itself is a kind of illness from which s/he can only be cured by ceasing to engage in the activity. Perhaps, W saw himself as something like a "a philosopher in recovery!" And here we come to the end of the line of W's later work.
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Relevant Readings:

-On Certainty: Ludwig Wittgenstein, trans. Dennis Paul & G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford Basil Blackwell, 1969

- Letures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief: Ludwig Wittgensetein, ed. Cyril Barrett, Univ. of Cal. Press

-An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Religion: Brian R. Clack, Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1999
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Below is a humorous snippet from Derek Jarman's film, Wittgenstein, which deals with just the issues of this post. He has both Russell and Keynes as part of his audience, and storms out of the room in a state of vexation. (He did do this during his lectures at times).

Following the original OP from 2016 (reposted above) was  a dialogue between  a reader/commenter  (who now shows up only as "Guest" in the Disqus comments) and myself. I think it's worth including here, as the content and meaning of W's On Certainty, was made more elaborate. Also, the possible relation of W's post-1929 thought to the earlier thought of American Pragmatists like Peirce was discussed.


Guest:

Maybe I missed it, but it seems we're leaving out sort of the most crucial part of Wittgenstein's view here. For Wittgenstein, radical doubt/skepticism is structurally incoherent. When we claim we know or doubt some proposition, we are submitting that proposition to an evaluation: we are testing it to see if it can hold up to the evidence. But in order to test or evaluate a proposition, we need to do so in terms of things which are taken for granted: if I'm testing whether there is an elephant on my couch by looking around my living room, I am taking it for granted, for instance, that my eyes are working properly. Without taking this for granted, testing "there is an elephant on my couch" by looking at my couch would not work. In order to evaluate some proposition, we must take other propositions for granted: else we don't have any standard or criteria to compare them to. Something must hold firm. And the things we take for granted, like that our eyes work properly under normal circumstances, that we have hands, that our body has never left the Earth, and so on, forms our epistemic bedrock- the background framework of beliefs and assumptions against which we test epistemic claims.
On the other hand, the whole point of radical, universal doubt is that nothing is taken for granted. Universal doubt removes the very thing it requires to function, if Witt's epistemological picture here is correct: with no epistemic bedrock, we have no criteria or standard for comparison, and no basis for accepting or doubting anything. So universal doubt is incoherent and ultimately self-defeating, for Witt. And Moore is mistaken in saying that he knows he has two hands, for the same reason that the skeptic is mistaken in doubting he has hands- that we have hands is part of the background framework we use to evaluate knowledge and doubt claims, it cannot coherently be itself subjected to that framework. We don't know that we have hands- we take it for granted that we do, and such foundational assumptions provide the necessary starting point for epistemic evaluation, such as knowledge and doubt.

PD:

I don't think the points you raise were missed, at least I hope not as I did my best to summarize them (and other points) in a short and accessible way. Anyway, your reading sounds right to me. The "background framework" of assumptions against which we check knowledge claims whenever we do is a good description of the "riverbeds", "banks", "scaffolds" etc., which metaphors W uses for these presuppositions you are discussing. Importantly, they are internal to, and embedded in cultures (forms of life and associated language games). He uses metaphors like "beds and banks" to avoid any misinterpretation of him setting up yet another theory of knowledge, as I point out in the post. I thought the ideas you are mentioning were conveyed in passages like this one above:

" In ordinary circumstances we settle for what W calls "riverbeds"
which are not beliefs or doubts, but the solid ground of pragmatic
givens in everyday experience. I am here and you are there, and there's
no problem, no intellectual issue at all. This is a lot like American
Pragmatism but without any desire to convert it into a "theory" of
experience. The experience is fine as it is and needs no "theory." Any
theory devised to reassure me that "my arm is 'really' my arm," or "I am
in pain at T" or "It is raining" is absurdly superfluous, for W. There
is no need to gild the lily of non-problematic experience with theories
designed to "prove" that there are no problems."

Statements like "The Earth was here before I was" and "I know I have a hand before me" may be bedrock, but I 'm not sure I interpret them as *epistemic* bedrock, if by that there is any implication of foundationalism. I think he sidesteps (like Pragmatists) epistemology and ontology, predicating knowledge on shared norms within cultural-linguistic communities. I think you may have the same idea in mind, but only because you used the phrase *epistemic bedrock* I wanted check whether or not we can agree that if this is epistemology then it is social epistemology at bottom.

The question of how satisfactory such an account (and, of course, there's much more to On Certainty than either of us can encapsulate here) may or may not be is one that divides interpreters into myriad camps. There are a lot of different answers out there. But as far as the overview skipping your point, I don't think that happened. If it did, I'll edit in some stronger statement of the notion of presuppositions that allow language games to "go on."

Guest:

I don't say "epistemic" here because Witt was a foundationalist, but because the issue he's concerned with is justification (including of epistemic attitudes like knowing, doubting, believing, etc.) and the problem of regress. On the other hand, Witt's solution does share one striking feature with foundationalism: like foundationalists, Witt holds that the regress of justification eventually terminates- when we reach those framework assumptions which we do not, and even cannot, subject to evaluation, the chain of justification ends. But unlike in foundationalism, these terminal judgments are not intrinsically justified (due to self-evidence or immediate presence to our awareness or what have you)- being part of the background framework required for justification in general, they are themselves outside the scope of justification, and in this sense are non-epistemic. In any case I don't see anything wrong with construing this as "social" epistemology, given Witt's somewhat novel (at the time at least) emphasis on the communal nature of language and even judgment.

And though your quoted passage is perfectly consistent with what I've said, I'm still not sure that someone who wasn't already familiar with Witt's view on the matter would come away understanding why there are "no intellectual issues" with these framework judgments (i.e. because of their role in the structure of judgment and evaluation). But either way I don't think you need to edit your OP at this point: I imagine that if the point wasn't clear enough to begin with, it should be fairly clear with these additional comments.

PD:

Thanks. It's hard for me to take on the perspective of an outsider, maybe I'll add a sentence or two, though I think that after 15 days, and with comments like these, your probably right that it's unnecessary.

Also, I pretty much figured you meant what you just explained when using the term "epistemic."
I'm not sure how new the communal conception of knowledge was to be honest. As I wrote in the OP, I think he ends up in a very similar position as some of the American Pragmatists like Dewey and GH Mead, though they weren't against systems and theories, nor did they think philosophy was always misleading; rather they looked at the history of phil piecemeal.

Guest:

Sure, and I only say that Witt's emphasis on the social nature of knowledge/judgment was "somewhat novel", i.e. in the sense that it was waaaaaay outside the norm (which was to consider individual knowers in isolation from their environment, including/especially their social environment), and particularly so for the hardcore logical/analytic tradition Witt found himself in at Cambridge... not because Witt was the first to consider it. Maybe "unusual" would've been a better word for it.

PD:

Absolutely. I didn't mean to nitpick. I'm interested in the history of ideas, and it turns out that W's friend Frank Ramsey--before he died-- discussed pragmatism with Wittgenstein. Ramsey was doing work on Peirce and was familiar with Dewey et al. What is interesting about all this is that you're right in suggesting that Wittgenstein was out of step with the analytic world. He was seen by some of his peers as having gone astray. Russell was particularly scornful saying that W's later work was "invented to save W the trouble of thinking" or words very close to those.
Russell had heard some of these ideas before though. His debates with John Dewey were sustained and the divisions sharp ( in terms of theories; they met and actually became friends who disagreed about philosophical matters). Point is, there's been all this talk since Rorty about "neo-pragmatism" and I think in many ways Wittgenstein was already there in the mid- late 30s when he arrived at most of what ended up in PI. Interestingly it spawned a minor, if forgotten, revival of pragmatism at the time, and a very similar field in linguistics with Paul Grice and "Pragmatics." This leitmotif of finding meanings in the various uses of words in social contexts is definitely part of Mead and Dewey, who had also railed against the picture theory approach, the residual effects of Platonism (essential definitions etc.) and Cartesian dualism etc. I'd say there's a good bit of "family resemblance." But maybe I'm biased as I did a lot of work on the pragmatists in the past.
Of course none of this means that either pragmatists or Witt are right about many of the things argued. And indeed, as you point out on another thread, there are many interpretations of W (and for that matter Dewey). Still, the general contours are strikingly similar imo.
Though I do not like this author's interpretations of Peirce, James or Dewey, philosopher, Cheryl Misak wrote on the historical connections between the pragmatists and Ramsey---> Wittgenstein. She may overstate the case, but examines letters and dusty manuscripts from Peirce, James, Dewey, Moore, Ramsey, Wittgenstein and others. Anyway, it's an interesting historical connection.https://global.oup.com/academic/pro...

PD: (Following up on last comment about Witt. and Pragmatism)

The following passage is from W's notebooks of 1930 which Misak published for the first time in its entirety, and is one of several intriguing documents re: the prag-Witt connection. It is Wittgenstein MS 107 fr. 1930 (2 days after Ramsey's death) and contains an explicit reference to "meaning as use" as an idea coming from pragmatism. 1930 was the year of Wittgenstein's so-called "U-turn", and these are among the notes that represent a decisive change of direction which culminates in PI and On Certainty.

-From Cambridge Pragmatism pp 239-40. Wittgenstein: MS 107-

"Sentences--what we ordinarily call sentences in everyday use-- seem to me to work differently from what in logic is meant by propositions, if there are such things at all. And this is due to their hypothetical character. Events do not seem to verify or falsify them in the sense I had originally intended--rather there is still, as it were, a door left open. Verification and its opposite are not the last word.

Is it possible that everything I believe to know for sure--such as that I had parents, I have brothers and sisters, that I am in England--that all of this should prove to be false? That is, could I ever acknowledge any evidence as sufficient to show this? And then could there be even more reliable evidence to show that the first kind of evidence was deceptive?

When I say, "There is a chair over there," this sentence refers to a series of expectations. I believe I could go over there, perceive the chair and sit on it, I believe it is made of wood, and I expect it to have a certain hardness, inflammability etc. If some of those expectations are disappointed, I will see it as proof for retaining that there was no chair there. [This sounds almost like a quick summary of the main arg. in Peirce's How To Make Our Ideas Clear.]

Here one sees how one may arrive at the pragmatist conception of true and false: a sentence is true as long as it proves to be useful. Every sentence we utter in everyday life appears to have the character of a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a logical structure. That is, a symbol for which certain rules of representation hold. The point of talking of sense-data and immediate experience is that we are looking for a non-hypothetical representation.

But now it seems the *representation* [sic] loses all its value if the hypothetical element is dropped, because then the proposition does not point to the future any more, but it is, as it were, self-satisfied, and hence without any value. Experience says something like, "It is nice elsewhere too, and this is where I am anyway." And it is through the telescope of expectation that we look into the future.
It makes no sense to speak of sentences if they have no instrumental value. The sense of a sentence is its purpose.

When I tell someone, "There is a chair over there," I want to produce in him certain expectations and ways of acting. It is terribly hard here not to get lost in questions that do not concern
logic. Or, rather, it is terribly hard to find one's way out of this tangle of questions, in order to contemplate it whole, from the outside." -Ludwig Wittgenstein (Fr. 1930 Notebooks of Wittgenstein as reprinted in Cheryl Misak's book, Cambridge Pragmatism: pp. 229-30)

That's MS 107 from start to finish. I find all of this--though academic-- just fascinating. The official story is that Pragmatism died with Dewey himself, if not sooner (around 1950). "Sloppy" and "crude" Pragmatism was replaced by the icy logic and rigor of Analytic Philosophy. But PI was published in 1953, and focused anglo/analytic philosophy on decidedly social and pragmatic ideas and themes, leading to a cross-disciplinary set of movements emphasizing everyday or "ordinary" language, speech act theory, linguistic analysis of "pragmatics" or language *use*, and Wittgenstein-inspired social science, driven largely by his student, Peter Winch, among others. This is all years before Rorty's Consequences of Pragmatism which brought the pragmatists back into dialogue with Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Quine, Goodman, et al. But had the divide ever been as sharp as many mainstream analytic philosophers had imagined? I wonder.

Any thoughts?

Guest:

Yeah that is really interesting- obviously one can find areas of overlap and agreement between pragmatism and the PI, but not quite like this: parts of this passage sound, as you note, as if it could have been written by Peirce himself! And for my part, I tend to think that these historical narratives we get about AP [i.e. Analytic Philosophy- ed.] killing off pragmatism, or the continental/analytic split, tend to be overly simplified and often just misleading- useful if you're trying to give a "history of philosophy in 60 seconds or less", but not that useful otherwise. There was alot more common ground than is often supposed; one can even find hints of pragmatism in the positivists, and in some ways LP represents analytic philosophy taken to its logical extreme. I suspect if you looked at everyone's manuscripts, you'd find alot more of this behind-the-scenes dialogue going on, like what we see here with Wittgenstein.

And I guess its sort of fitting that Witt could be viewed as a kind of bridge between pragmatism and AP/OLP,  [OLP = Ordinary Language Philosophy - ed.]the same way he is sometimes viewed as a bridge between AP and continental philosophy- I remember Walter Kaufmann wrote about GE Moore and Soren Kierkegaard each being "half a Socrates", and Witt being the closest we get since Socrates to fusing these two disparate tendencies or philosophical spirits. The fact that this buys into/depends on the simplistic picture of the AP/continental split is sort of beside the point: Wittgenstein displayed qualities, and was concerned with topics, that were all over the philosophical map, and so is natural to view as a bridge between philosophers who were a little more domain-specific. And I suppose it shouldn't be overly surprising, when we consider how much of an odd duck Witt was to begin with: a Vienesse occupying a chair at Cambridge, writing in German about characteristically British philosophical concerns!