“Suicide is morally acceptable if the prolongation of one’s life would destroy one’s human dignity."
If we wish to understand and evaluate such an argument at a deep level, we might consider taking these steps:
1. Clarify crucial concepts or jargon that are pivotal to the argument.
In this case, an example would be “human dignity.” We should ask: what does it mean, where is it found, of what does it consist, how might one lose it, what does life look like if one loses it, etc.? Might there be disagreements about the definitions and uses of such a term? We must not take for granted that all people agree on a single definition for dignity.
2. Evaluate various claims made within the argument.
Is it true, for example, that suicide is consistent with human dignity? Can one actually lose her dignity, or is it something inalienable? If one can lose her dignity, is such a loss truly worse than choosing an early death? Under which specific circumstance can we call suicide “morally acceptable?”
3. Uncover the basic moral assumptions that operate in the background of the moral argument; they are unstated, but taken for granted.
If we argue, in this case, that suicide is right if it prevents certain bad consequences, we automatically assume that if an action leads to bad consequences it is wrong, and if it prevents them it is right. We also assume, but do not explicitly state, that we believe it is appropriate to morally evaluate the nature and timing of a person’s death. Is this a fair assumption, or are a person’s individual decisions regarding her own death so personal that they are outside the realm of ethics?
4. Map the internal structure of the larger moral theory which generates and supports the argument.
For example, it might appear at first blush that the argument regarding suicide is part of a larger moral theory which makes claims about the deontic status of certain actions, meaning their rightness or wrongness. It is right, the argument says, to take one’s life, under certain circumstances. This means our moral argument is part of a larger theory of right conduct: a system that tells us which actions are right or wrong.
However if we dig even deeper, we see that there is an even more basic moral theory operating beneath the surface, a foundational theory which supports and shapes the theory of right conduct. That deeper theory might go something like this: “happiness is the only intrinsically good thing in the world.” This is what is known as a theory of value: it tells us which things (or states of mind) are good or bad. This particular theory of value tells us that everything in the world, including one’s very life, is only good to the extent that it generates happiness, for oneself and for others. Upon that foundation, we construct a theory of right conduct: it is morally right, perhaps even our duty, to maximize that which is intrinsically good: happiness. Thus, it is morally acceptable to commit suicide, if by so doing we can create more happiness (for ourselves and our loved ones) than we could by clinging to life a bit longer.
A terminally ill person — who cannot rise from a bed, who is constantly in pain, who is completely dependent on others to help her perform even the most basic and personal human functions, who knows that each expensive day she spends in the hospital drags her family deeper into debt and closer to financial ruin, who has lost entirely her sense of human dignity (without which she feels utterly worthless and despondent) — might draw the conclusion that an early death will spare her family and herself much pain, and that this death, chosen intentionally by her, will restore to her some of the dignity she has lost, which will bring her much joy in her final hours, much more joy than she would feel if she allowed her life to continue. In this particular situation, she reasons, suicide is the only act that could maximize happiness for everyone involved. If this is true, suicide is not just morally acceptable, but also her duty. We see here a theory of value informing and shaping the deontic analysis of actions (theory of right conduct). Through this understanding of the structure of these underlying theories, we gain a clearer picture of a broader worldview at work, a worldview which likely shapes many of this person’s moral arguments.
Now, isn’t this more fun than simply arguing back and forth about morality?
Notes
Mark Timmons, Moral Theory: An Introduction (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002). ↩︎
Utilitarianism starts with a basic premise: every person on earth desires happiness.1 Since happiness/pleasure/well-being (I will use these all interchangeably) are universally desired for their own sakes (not desired as means to some other end, but desired for themselves), they must be intrinsically good, i.e. good for their own sakes, as opposed to instrumentally good.2 If we wish to live an ethical life then, we must aim our actions toward achieving that which is intrinsically good: happiness. This does not mean happiness for ourselves only, but also (more importantly) happiness for others. In fact, it is our moral duty to maximize well-being to the greatest extent possible. If we boil utilitarianism down to its simplest message, it might read: do as much good in the world as is humanly possible.3
Utilitarianism requires us all to look outward, and judge our actions based on how they impact the community of persons affected by our decisions. But often there is a conflict between what the individual desires and what would most benefit the community. In this case utilitarianism issues a direct challenge to the individual: if you desire an end that does not maximize general happiness, you are required to abandon your desire. This turns out to be a very strict standard indeed, one that may require us to make tremendous personal sacrifices for the good of others.
If utilitarianism is supposed to be our guide for living ethical lives, we must recognize right off the bat that most of the decisions we make throughout the day do not maximize general happiness. After all, by taking the time to write this essay, I am choosing not to use that time to serve food to the homeless. Does that mean it is unethical to write this essay, because by doing so I fail to maximize utility? Must I strive to meet the utilitarian standard in all my daily actions? This forceful version of utilitarianism seems to demand that we all become saints, constantly subverting our own desires for the benefit of others. If so, then is utilitarianism even feasible as an ethical theory? If the moral requirement is so strict that normal people are incapable of meeting the challenge, is the theory practical at all?
We all have busy lives full of persons and obligations which require our full attention. Our children, our parents, our spouses, our bosses, and our friends all (rightfully) make demands on our time, leaving us very little bandwidth with which to decipher what “the general happiness” means, let alone time and energy to maximize it. For many parents with young children and full-time jobs, it can feel impossible to do anything for the community while trying to juggle such a home life. Faced with such a complex and intractable dilemma, many people ignore completely the needs of the community, and focus instead on the daily demands of life.
We could attempt to justify such a lifestyle choice (from a utilitarian standpoint) by defining a busy parent’s ‘moral community’ in a narrow way: it includes only her family and friends and colleagues; everyone outside that circle is excluded from the community and therefore excluded from the utilitarian calculus. Does a person with such a narrow moral community live an ethical life? Is it ok to define one’s community so that it only includes those persons one is actually capable of serving while still living a “normal” life? Or must a person restructure her entire life in order to expand that moral community, i.e. tailor her whole existence around service to the wider world, even at the expense of her own family’s happiness?
Really I’m asking: whose happiness should we care most about? Jeremy Bentham answers: “the greatest happiness of all those whose interest is in question [is] the right and proper, and only right and proper and universally desirable, end of human action.”4 This is famously known as the Greatest Happiness Principle. J.S. Mill, a few years after Bentham, demands (in a statement which contradicts many other statements in Utilitarianism) that our moral standard be “not the agent’s own greatest happiness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogether.”5 Seems clear enough. But for the mother of young children, who has professional, familial, and domestic obligations coming out of her ears, this standard can easily comes off as impractical, useless, even meaningless.
Imagine there are three concentric circles:
The smallest circle contains only your family and closest loved one. The next circle contains all your friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and neighbors, your community, your network. The final circle includes larger populations of strangers, such as your city or perhaps even your whole country. Which of these circles are we to focus on, if we wish to live according to the utilitarian standard? If we dedicate our energies toward creating happiness for one of the circles, we use up time and energy that cannot be spent spreading happiness to the other circles, so a choice must be made. But which is the most ethical option?
If I dedicate myself fully to building the best possible life for my children, wife, and parents (my smallest circle), I will certainly do a lot of good; but such a choice requires that I neglect, to a large extent, the wider world. An afternoon spent playing with my children is an afternoon not spent working at the local food bank; a weekend trip to Arizona with my father requires money that can not be donated to a more worthy cause. Do I truly meet the utilitarian standard if I pour most of my love, care, energy, wealth, and spare time into my family, but largely ignore the happiness of the wider world? Though the happiness within my home will be maximized, and my children more likely to grow up well-adjusted and emotionally stable (compared to children who are neglected), my dedication to the ‘greatest happiness principle’ is questionable at best.
If instead I dedicate my life to spreading well-being to the largest possible number of persons (the outer circles), I might accomplish truly great things!… but at a cost. Those who make such a choice – tireless activists for the poor, traveling community organizers, dedicated and focused union leaders, political dissidents – often make huge sacrifices in the personal sphere in order to fulfill the utilitarian ethic, an ethic which they believe requires them to serve the wider world. Yes my children will be sad if I don’t return at night to tuck them in because I’m working late at the homeless shelter, but so many others will benefit from my actions. If I’m away repeatedly, over the course of many years, my children may develop neuroses and abandonment issues and anger, may grow to hate me, may even have tragic lives. But over those years I could improve the lives of thousands of people. Is this the ethically correct sacrifice: spread joy to the greatest number, at the expense of a few (who happen to be my children)?
Mahatma Gandhi faced this very question, and he chose to serve the widest circle. He was a famously neglectful father, but a saint to a nation.6 Gandhi’s work for the poor, disenfranchised, impoverished, victimized, and low-caste was the ultimate display of utilitarian action.7 He dedicated his entire life to helping the less fortunate; this included extensive travel, the founding of communes, organization of large-scale protests, hunger strikes, the construction of a political party, travel to foreign nations to negotiate with world leaders, and many other activities which demanded his full concentration and energies. In the end his sacrifices and selfless actions improved the lives of millions of people around the world,8 and his legacy continues to inspire people today. However his children felt acutely the sadness and anger that come from having an absent father. His oldest son Harilal, whose relationship with Gandhi was always strained, never forgave his father for the ill-treatment, and later became an alcoholic. It seems there is no way to dedicate our full selves to the service of our closest loved ones AND to the wider world; there will always be a sacrifice one way or the other, and so we must choose.
On the surface the ‘greatest happiness principle’ appears to teach us that the price of a few very sad and neglected children is a reasonable price to pay, if their sadness purchases happiness for thousands of others. But this feels intuitively wrong. How can I be expected to ignore the unfathomably deep love bond I share with my two children? To put it more generally, how can I be expected to care more for strangers than I do for my loved ones? The utilitarian principle seems to insist that if my mission in life is to maximize happiness, it would be absurdly unethical to give special weight to the happiness of two children over the happiness of the larger population. Mill is very clear that one must be “as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator” when it comes to moral questions.9 A truly disinterested spectator would never choose the well-being of her own child over the well-being of many children. But I am tempted to reply (from the gut) that if it is unethical to dedicate my time and service almost exclusively to my children at the expense of thousands of others, then I am content to live an unethical life. Is this my own selfishness at work? Is it nothing more than a self-serving desire to relish the innate, mammalian love bond I feel for my offspring? No there is more to it than that. I genuinely struggle to see the merit in a moral system that tells me it is unethical to love my children (I say love because real love requires time and dedication). I’m ready to state boldly (and obviously) that of course it is ethical to love our children! So how do we reconcile this with the greatest happiness principle?
To begin to answer this question, let’s hit this from another angle: if we universalized the duty to serve the widest circle at the expense of the inner circle, would that actually create a happier world? Imagine if humanity widely practiced such a morality. Many millions of children would wind up neglected and traumatized by parents who felt obligated to serve the world instead of care for their children. Whole generations of young people would carry around the anger, bitterness, resentment, and sense of abandonment that ill-treated children often carry. If this tipped the scales away from general happiness and toward general sadness, if this ended up creating a worse world, we will have failed in our utilitarian mission, even if we intended our actions to create a happier world (this assumes we judge the merit of actions based on actual results as opposed to intended results, which is a debatable question in utilitarian ethics). It seems good for the species if we instead give extra weight to the happiness of our children, and bad for the species to create a generation of persons who have never been taught how to love or how to build lasting relationships. A world of neglected children is a sadder and angrier world. So how can this possibly be the utilitarian standard, if the enactment of such a principle would bring more pain than happiness?
Clearly the greatest happiness principle must mean something besides “always serve the greatest number“. Either that, or the principle itself is false according to its own utilitarian standard, since its enactment would make the world worse-off. It is deliciously ironic that the Greatest Happiness Principle would, if enacted, fail to maximize happiness. It also goes without saying that such a principle would also be completely impractical in the real world, since most parents feel morally and evolutionarily driven to help their offspring flourish. A utilitarian could make a compelling argument that we more fully satisfy the utilitarian standard (we create a happier world) by spending lots of time serving the smallest of circles: our tiny, helpless babies. As Utilitarianism.com says: “As there are obviously good utilitarian reasons to want the next generation of people to grow up to be emotionally healthy and capable agents, there are thus good utilitarian reasons to endorse the social norms of parental care that help to promote this goal.”10
That all being said, there must be some part of the utilitarian standard which does indeed require us to serve people outside our inner circle. We showed above that if we universalized the duty to serve exclusively the outer circle, it would, in the end, likely fail the utilitarian standard, since it would create a worse-off world. Well the same is true if we universalize the duty to serve exclusively our inner circle. Such a principle would require us to maximize happiness for our loved ones and acquaintances, while allowing (or encouraging) us to feel complete indifference or even hatred for strangers, foreigners, the poor, and members of political parties which oppose our own. If we have no moral obligations whatsoever to persons outside our narrow inner circle of acquaintances, we adopt for ourselves an isolationist moral philosophy: my duty of care extends to my own property line, and no further. This state of affairs, which weakens community bonds and encourages a myopic and lonely outlook toward the wider world, sounds tragically like the actual world in which we live.
Clearly utilitarianism, if it is to be useful in this big, scary world, requires a bit of nuance in its application. Mill strives to make utilitarianism a workable and useful theory for every day morality, so he sometimes downplays our individual commitment to the greater good, and tells us we are free to follow our hearts most of the time. This allows us a lot of leeway, but reduces the utilitarian standard to something vague and amorphous, an ethical principle that refuses to state clearly what it requires of us. Are we allowed to substitute the greatest happiness principle for the “create whatever local happiness you feel like creating” principle?
The reality is that real humans do love their children and wish to serve the wider world. Perhaps the answer then is simple: try for a balance. We should give as much love as possible to our inner circles, and occasionally (if we can spare the time) do some work for the outer circle. This seems like a practical solution, but as a moral theory it is weak tea: you’ve got a bunch of love to give, so spread it around in whatever direction feels right. There is some power in the aphorism, “as long as you are loving somebody, you are doing the right thing,” but is this really what utilitarianism is supposed to boil down to?
This idea that at times it is morally right to serve our families, while at other times it is morally right to serve the community, delivers us to the conclusion that utilitarianism cannot be the sole guiding moral law in our lives. Since we are expected to know when it is appropriate to switch between one or the other circle, there must be a principle that we can follow to guide us to the ethically correct decision, a principle which will tell us when to serve our families and when to serve others. Importantly, this principle cannot be utilitarianism itself, because serving any of the circles seems to meet the utilitarian standard in one way or another. A pluralism of ethical theories will be needed to navigate this unending dilemma.
So it seems utilitarianism (at least as Mill and Bentham understood it) cannot properly serve as an end-all, be-all moral system; more lenses are needed if we wish to fully see and appreciate all the complexities of real life. In the meantime, I will love my children, work hard at my job, show love to my wife, and generally work to maximize happiness within my smallest circle of loved ones. Perhaps I sacrifice the Greatest Happiness Principle in order to adopt for my family an “Ethic of Care,” and maybe this is right, even if it means failing to maximize the happiness of the community (failing even to come close to that goal). The necessity, the urgency, the implacability of the love I feel for my children is something utilitarianism simply can’t resolve, unless it abandons (or severely limits) the Greatest Happiness Principle. If it refuses to abandon the principle, it is revealed to be fraudulent as an ethical theory. If it does abandon the principle, what is left of the moral theory besides: “do as much good as you feel like?”
Whenever I quote from Mill’s Utilitarianism (1863), I will cite the chapter/paragraph in the following format: Mill, Utilitarianism, II/2: “The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, much more requires to be said; in particular, what things it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this is left an open question. But these supplementary explanations do not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded- namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.” ↩︎
In Mill, Utilitarianism, IV/8, the intrinsic goodness of happiness is a key feature of Mill’s famous ‘proof’ that utilitarianism is right: “…there is in reality nothing desired except happiness. Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means to some end beyond itself, and ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it has become so. Those who desire virtue for its own sake, desire it either because the consciousness of it is a pleasure, or because the consciousness of being without it is a pain, or for both reasons united; as in truth the pleasure and pain seldom exist separately, but almost always together, the same person feeling pleasure in the degree of virtue attained, and pain in not having attained more. If one of these gave him no pleasure, and the other no pain, he would not love or desire virtue, or would desire it only for the other benefits which it might produce to himself or to persons whom he cared for. We have now, then, an answer to the question, of what sort of proof the principle of utility is susceptible. If the opinion which I have now stated is psychologically true- if human nature is so constituted as to desire nothing which is not either a part of happiness or a means of happiness, we can have no other proof, and we require no other, that these are the only things desirable. If so, happiness is the sole end of human action, and the promotion of it the test by which to judge of all human conduct; from whence it necessarily follows that it must be the criterion of morality, since a part is included in the whole.” ↩︎
Russ Shafer-Landau, The Fundamentals of Ethics, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 120. ↩︎
Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Hafner Press, [1789] 1948), 1. ↩︎
See Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi Before India (New York: Vintage Books, 2013) for a heart-breaking look at Gandhi the absentee (yet often still over-bearing) father. ↩︎
Gandhi was actually quite critical of utilitarianism the political philosophy. He saw the ‘greatest happiness principle’ as justification for majority rule and the exploitation of minorities (happiness and economic prosperity are generated for the majority, at the cost of poverty, disenfranchisement, and unceasing labor for the minority). Instead of the greatest happiness of the great number, Gandhi preferred the greatest happiness of all, a concept which he called Sarvodaya, a Sanskrit term meaning “Advancement of All”. Despite this critique of political utilitarianism, Gandhi’s personal actions typified the utilitarian ethic, which requires immense personal sacrifice as a means to generate as much happiness for others as possible. For an example of Gandhi’s critique of utilitarianism, see his article in Indian Opinion dated May 16, 1908, which appears in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Publications Division Government of India, 1999), Vol. 8, 316-319. ↩︎
This is a debatable point. However the debatability of this point might not have bothered Gandhi. The philosophical text which most excited Gandhi was Bhagavad Gita which instructs us to focus more on intentions than outcomes. Like utilitarians, we should aim to do as much good as possible in the world, but we should not allow ourselves to become emotionally invested in outcomes outside our control. God may not allow our plans to come to fruition, and we may even be forced to endure tragedy and heart-break and loss; but we must continue to strive for a better world no matter how many times we fail. This is the key to living an ethical life and flourishing personally. This message was very important to Gandhi, who encountered many failures and set-backs and unintended consequences during his long career. For example, despite Gandhi’s best intentions, his actions as an anti-colonial activist were an indirect cause of the horrible sectarian violence that erupted after the partitioning of India in 1947. So though Gandhi made tremendous sacrifices to improve the lives of his people, the actual short-term outcome for much of the Indian people was a mixed bag. There is a lesson here for utilitarians: though a person may sacrifice much in order to maximize happiness for the many, there is no guarantee that she will be successful at maximizing happiness. If we judge a person’s actions solely according to the actual outcomes they produce, we are forced to condemn a person who sacrifices everything in order to spread happiness to the masses but ultimately fails to increase the general happiness. This would mean that Gandhi was not acting ethically any time that his actions inadvertently led to more pain than happiness (any time he failed to maximize utility). But this feels intuitively incorrect, given the sacrifices Gandhi made in the service of so many persons, and given the limited knowledge all humans have about how our decisions will affect the future. TheGita teaches that if you have an honest intention to do good in the world, you work selflessly toward your goal, and you fail, you are still living ethically. Later utilitarian thinkers have distinguished between the actual utility of a certain action (the actual outcome), versus the expected utility of that action (the outcome we expect), which allows utilitarianism to shrug off some of its consequentialist tendencies: if we judge actions based on their expected utility rather than actual utility, we really shift from focusing on outcomes and instead focus on intentions. This brand of utilitarianism teaches: “as long as we truly intend our actions to maximize the happiness of others, our actions are ethical even if we ultimately fail in our goal”. Gandhi would not have called this concept ‘utilitarianism’, but would have instead called it the message of TheGita. Regardless of what he called it, this ethic formed the foundation of Gandhi’s philosophy of action. See: Uma Majmudar’s “Mahatma Gandhi and the Bhagavad Gita” on The American Vendantist website, published Dec. 6, 2014. If you want to explore the philosophy of TheGita further, read this essay. ↩︎
J.S. Mill teaches us that all humans desire happiness. It is therefore right and good that a person should maximize her own happiness, develop a full life rich with various pleasures and containing only minimal pains, invest in herself, experiment with life, flourish. Mill encourages us to pursue these goals through all the stages of our lives. At the same time, he suggests that we are also morally obligated to maximize happiness not just for ourselves but for others too. One’s personal happiness matters little when placed up against the general happiness of a community. So a person can only live ethically by maximizing that which is most good for humans: happiness. Taking this moral duty seriously means dedicating as much time as possible toward the promotion of otherpersons‘ happiness. But what if one’s personal road to happiness does not run parallel to a life spent serving others? In other words, when self-interest and the duty to be selfless conflict, which should win out? This may in fact be the most fundamental question in utilitarian ethics, but sadly Mill is very unclear on this issue.
When I think of “utilitarian ethics,” I imagine a system whose main focus is selfless, individual action which seeks to benefit others in some way. Such an ethical system should require certain kinds of selfless actions, provide a philosophical foundation to justify these actions, define their scope, and perhaps even incentivize persons to act.
By selfless, individual actions, I mean actions which:
A) individuals perform (as opposed to governments),
B) are carried out for the good of others (as opposed to for the good of the individual performing the action), and
C) may require varying degrees of personal sacrifice.
I call this an outward-facing, personal ethics. It strongly encourages, perhaps requires, that the agent promote the happiness of others. This is opposed to an inward-facing, hedonistic utilitarianism which encourages the agent to seek out and maximize her own happiness. Mill has much to say about the latter ethics and less (but not nothing) to say about the former. Does he take outward-facing, personal ethics seriously? If not, can we really call his ethics “ethics” at all?
Mill, who generally takes great pains to be clearly understood, muddles up this whole question to a surprising degree. No doubt, the question of where our duties to ourselves cease and where the duties to others begin is a sticky one. It’s a swamp, a quagmire, a tangled mess. It has flummoxed many a philosopher, and Mill is no exception. Whenever he ventures into the swamp, he immediately realizes the danger and backs right back out again as fast as he can. Before he does, he says just enough to leave the reader puzzled.
Chapter II of Utilitarianism is a fine example of this muddle. It contains some forceful and, at time, grandiose language about the importance of an outward-facing ethics. Self sacrifice for the good of others is “the highest virtue which can be found in man”.1 Actions are right in relation to how much happiness they produce2 (a clear injunction to maximize communal happiness). His emphasis on the importance of human dignity3 and his definition of a happy life4 are of course applicable to the individual focusing on her own happiness, but they could also be ethical calls to arms, demanding that we fight for the restoration of dignity to those who have lost it (through poverty, poor health, or unhappy circumstance), and to lessen the pains felt by those less fortunate than ourselves. He decrees: “I must again repeat, what the assailants of utilitarianism seldom have the justice to acknowledge, that the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent’s own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator.”5
Yet in the same chapter, Mill takes pains to water down this outward-facing, ethical duty. It is, after all, unreasonable to require the average person to put her own happiness on hold, to require that she set as her life-long goal the enhancement of communal happiness. “The great majority of good actions are intended not for the benefit of the world, but for that of individuals, of which the good of the world is made up; and the thoughts of the most virtuous man need not on these occasions travel beyond the particular persons concerned, except so far as is necessary to assure himself that in benefiting them he is not violating the rights, that is, the legitimate and authorised expectations, of any one else.”6 So we need not, it seems, concern ourselves with the happiness of individuals outside our tiny circle of self and loved ones. So long as we don’t violate the rights of others, we meet our moral obligation to them. Shortly after the “benevolent spectator” line, he demonstrates his skill at back-pedaling: “It is the business of ethics to tell us what are our duties, or by what test we may know them; but no system of ethics requires that the sole motive of all we do shall be a feeling of duty; on the contrary, ninety-nine hundredths of all our actions are done from other motives, and rightly so done, if the rule of duty does not condemn them.”7 So though he issues the moral injunction that we must be impartial when deciding whose happiness to promote (which could mean it is indeterminate as to whose happiness we must promote, or could imply that the combined happiness of many persons should always outweigh one’s personal happiness), he lets us off the hook immediately after by telling us that 99% of our actions are exempt from the injunction because these actions not part of the moral sphere. What seemed a few minutes ago to be a dynamic and insistent moral creed has now been diluted. The reader is left to question: what exactly is my moral duty? Is there a principle which tells me when it is appropriate to focus on myself and when I am obligated to do the opposite? Where does the moral sphere begin and end? Whose duty am I obligated to promote? Do I meet the utilitarian standard if I live a full and bountiful life that does not include selfless action toward the wider community, or is such a life actually unethical?
An orthodox utilitarian might argue that since it is ethical to maximize that which is most good, and we can only fully maximize happiness if we help as many individuals as possible achieve it, we are ethically bound to adopt an outward-facing, personal utilitarianism, to maximize the greatest happiness for the greatest number. As for our own personal happiness: if we include in our utilitarian calculus the needs of others, our own happiness shrinks down in importance. It is no more than a single datum in the desirability equation, while the happiness of others weighs heavily on the scale. Such an ethic would require us to make daily sacrifices (both short-term and long-term) for the benefit of others. But Mill, who does not wish to upend our personal lives by injecting an unrealistic utilitarian standard into our every waking action, exempts from the utilitarian equation 99% of human action, leaving us free to structure our lives as we wish. As Mill put it, “there is a standard of altruism to which all should be required to come up, and a degree beyond it which is not obligatory, but meritorious.”8 So long as we don’t harm others through our daily actions, it seems we need call forth the standard of (outward-facing) utilitarianism only when we are faced with purely “moral” questions, which is not often.
In this way Mill’s utilitarianism provides us with guidance when we are faced with obvious moral dilemmas (should I cheat on an exam, should I refrain from telling a friend about harmful gossip, should I commit suicide, etc.). His utilitarianism instructs us, in these situations, to ask which option produces the greater net utility for all parties involved, and to pursue that option. In this narrow context, his system offers the individual a practical, outward-facing, moral philosophy. But what about questions about the broader structuring of a moral life: which career should I choose, how should I dedicate my time and resources, how generous should I be, etc.? In the non-stop chaos of daily life, it becomes easy to believe that these are not moral questions at all, but practical or economic questions (“I will choose the career which pays the most; I will dedicate my time to work, family, and hobbies; I will be as generous as possible within the confines of my own self-interest”). If utilitarianism does in fact require us to promote the happiness of others, these questions take on a deep moral significance. After all, every day I spend working on a job which pays me well but does not contribute to the general happiness is a day I cannot spend working toward a nobler goal; every minute I dedicate to water color painting is a minute not spent volunteering at a food bank; every dime I save for myself is a dime I cannot give to a hungry person. Mill does not necessarily want us to see these as moral questions at all; such questions are outside Mill’s sphere of morality altogether. But couldn’t we just as easily argue that an outward-facing utilitarian ethics will require an entire lifetime of selfless action, and that this ethics should rule over the 99% of actions Mill wishes to exempt from the moral sphere?
This indeterminacy as to where my obligation to serve myself ceases and my duty to serve others begins is one of the chief weaknesses in Mill’s ethical philosophy. We can easily find, in Mill, utilitarian justifications for pursuing our own gratification and the happiness of the broader community, without a penetrating analysis of how we should behave when these two goals conflict. Some critics of this utilitarian vagueness have suggested that we could simply justify any action with the claim that it promotes someone’s, anyone’s happiness in some way. D.G. Brown refers to this problem as the “deeper source of indeterminacy in what the Principle of Utility is.”9
Mill makes it clear that it is not only NOT wrong to pursue individual happiness, it is how we should live our lives. Our own happiness will naturally outweigh the happiness of the community 99% of the time, and Mill does not endeavor to develop a moral system which would require us to fight against this innate quality. So perhaps Mill isn’t much of a moralist, but more of a self-help author. He helps us refine our actions so that they aim toward, rather than against, our own happiness. This places his utilitarianism in the realm of personal development more than ethics. Mill wants us to believe that the principle of utility will not only guide us toward our own flourishing lives, but will also somehow motivate us to live virtuously. But for many persons, these are two completely separate (if not contradictory) goals. Since, for the individual, the utilitarian pursuit of happiness is really a theory of individual interest, it cannot act as the referee between our duty to serve others and our naked self-interest. For every statement Mill makes which demands that we focus on the general happiness of the community, he offers a contradictory statement which soothingly urges us not to worry about such lofty ideals, but to focus instead on building happy lives within our own household. Our duty to serve others (which in my opinion is one of the most crucial pieces of a utilitarian ethic) remains wishy-washy and ill-defined. Under Mill’s system, a person could dedicate her entire life to self-gratification, and at the end could claim, so long as she didn’t violate the rights of others, that she met the utilitarian standard. For me, this renders the system practically useless as an ethical system (though it may be worthwhile as a self-help doctrine). So while Mill’s principle of utility does offer us a guide for building a flourishing personal life, for seeking self-actualization, and for achieving a sense of peace and fulfillment after a life well-lived, I struggle to call any of this “ethics”.
Maybe I’m being a bit too harsh on Mill. I understand that he doesn’t advocate selfish behavior. It’s more that his system is incoherent. This incoherence leaves the individual free to do whatever feels right, and that’s why I don’t love calling this “ethics”. Maybe instead I should say it’s a very weak, watered-down ethics, one that permits a wide range of selfish behavior across an entire lifetime. It’s a system that sanctions the general ethics of the average American: focus strongly on family, but don’t feel obligated to develop a duty of care toward the community, unless doing so brings you pleasure. That ethical standard may be easy to meet, but it’s wreaking havoc on our planet, and (dare I say) might actually be unethical.
I want more from utilitarian ethics. I want a standard that is difficult to reach. I know the drawback: fewer people will reach it. But if ethics were as easy as “do whatever good you feel like doing in whatever direction feels right”, then it wouldn’t really be a field of study, it wouldn’t be something philosophers puzzle over. The art of loving oneself, loving one’s family and spouse, and cultivating hobbies is all important and worthwhile, don’t get me wrong. I just want more from an ethical system.
Whenever I quote from Mill’s Utilitarianism (1863), I will cite the chapter/paragraph in the following format: Mill, Utilitarianism, II/19. ↩︎
Mill, Utilitarianism, II/2: “The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.” ↩︎
Mill, Utilitarianism, II/6: “Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs. They would not resign what they possess more than he for the most complete satisfaction of all the desires which they have in common with him. If they ever fancy they would, it is only in cases of unhappiness so extreme, that to escape from it they would exchange their lot for almost any other, however undesirable in their own eyes. A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence. We may give what explanation we please of this unwillingness; we may attribute it to pride, a name which is given indiscriminately to some of the most and to some of the least estimable feelings of which mankind are capable: we may refer it to the love of liberty and personal independence, an appeal to which was with the Stoics one of the most effective means for the inculcation of it; to the love of power, or to the love of excitement, both of which do really enter into and contribute to it: but its most appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or other, and in some, though by no means in exact, proportion to their higher faculties, and which is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom it is strong, that nothing which conflicts with it could be, otherwise than momentarily, an object of desire to them.” ↩︎
Mill, Utilitarianism, II/14: “An existence made up of few and transitory pains, many and various pleasures, with a decided predominance of the active over the passive, and having as the foundation of the whole, not to expect more from life than it is capable of bestowing.” ↩︎
Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865), Part II: “It is not good that persons should be bound, by other people’s opinion, to do everything that they would deserve praise for doing. There is a standard of altruism to which all should be required to come up, and a degree beyond it which is not obligatory, but meritorious. It is incumbent on every one to restrain the pursuit of his personal objects within the limits consistent with the essential interests of others. What those limits are, it is the province of ethical science to determine; and to keep all individuals and aggregations of individuals within them, is the proper office of punishment and of moral blame. If in addition to fulfilling this obligation, persons make the good of others a direct object of disinterested exertions, postponing or sacrificing to it even innocent personal indulgences, they deserve gratitude and honour, and are fit objects of moral praise. So long as they are in no way compelled to this conduct by any external pressure, there cannot be too much of it; but a necessary condition is its spontaneity; since the notion of a happiness for all, procured by the self-sacrifice of each, if the abnegation is really felt to be a sacrifice, is a contradiction. Such spontaneity by no means excludes sympathetic encouragement; but the encouragement should take the form of making self-devotion pleasant, not that of making everything else painful. The object should be to stimulate services to humanity by their natural rewards; not to render the pursuit of our own good in any other manner impossible, by visiting it with the reproaches of other and of our own conscience. The proper office of those sanctions is to enforce upon every one, the conduct necessary to give all other persons their fair chance: conduct which chiefly consists in not doing them harm, and not impeding them in anything which without harming others does good to themselves.” In this light, our chief moral duty is simply not to do harm to others. ↩︎
D.G. Brown, “What is Mill’s Principle of Utility,” in Mill’s Utilitarianism: Critical Essays, ed. David Lyons (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1997), 19-21. ↩︎
This is an easy to understand and down-to-earth introduction to the major ethical theories in western philosophy. The author does not use a professorial tone, but a conversational one, which is fitting of the subject matter. So much of ethics only make sense through discussion of concrete examples and counter-examples, and so it is helpful that the author talks things out in a more casual way, offering up understandable real-world examples along the way.
One distinct feature of this textbook is the author’s affinity for logic: he lays out tons of ethical arguments in the form of syllogisms (premise-conclusion form), and then critiques each argument to test its validity. It’s an interesting way to view ethical arguments, which in the real world are infrequently tested for logical validity. His objections to the various arguments and his defenses of them are often creative and thought-provoking. Sometimes the logical format works well with moral premises, but other times it feels oddly out of place, too strict a system for something as loosely-goosey, as slippery as human morality.
Sometimes the author, in a quest to poke holes in certain ethical theories that he seems not to agree with (such as ethical skepticism), resorts to straw-man arguments, intentionally using flawed premises (or premises that, while being easy to disprove, do not capture the full spirit of the philosophical argument at-hand) when stating the arguments he wishes to dismantle. He doesn’t do this too often, but it does stand out when he does. However, the author doesn’t talk down to the reader in any fashion. The reader is invited (required) to think critically about each of the moral arguments presented, and the author makes it clear that much more philosophical work needs to be done in all of the most controversial areas of ethics. Nowhere in the book does the author claim that there is an easy answer to difficult ethical questions or an open-and-shut case when it comes to challenging moral theories. This book is an excellent starting-off place for those who wish to do that philosophical work themselves, for those who want to walk the long and many-forked road of ethical contemplation.
Overall, the author is an even-handed referee, sorting strong arguments from flawed ones. Though I detect, despite his even-handed approach, that he embraces the theory that there are in fact objective moral truths. He spends the last couple chapters picking apart arguments that express skepticism of our ability to possess objective moral truth, and his efforts to damage skepticism are convincing though not unassailable. I walk away with a deeper uncertainty that moral truth is possible than I had before I read this. It seems that every moral rule (do not kill, do not torture, do not lie) comes with exceptions (it might be ok to kill if someone is threatening to harm your family, it might be ok to torture a terrorist if by doing so we can learn the whereabouts of a bomb that is about to detonate in a major urban area, it might be ok to lie to a Nazi officer who is seeking a family of Jewish refugees that are hiding in your basement). If there are no categorical reasons to follow any particular moral law, there may not in fact be objective moral truths. Perhaps every moral truth is subjective, based on the context of the situation, malleable. Or perhaps moral “laws” are actually just expressions of our emotions rather than objective laws (when we say “it is wrong to torture,” we actually mean “torture makes me mad, grrrrr!”). Or perhaps objective moral truth does exist, but it’s far more complicated than we realize.
This doesn’t mean there is no such thing as moral behavior in the real world (most of the time I decline to torture people), but only that perhaps morality itself is more of a human construct than many moralists would like to admit. As the author acknowledges repeatedly, there is much more work to be done on this question.
Various works by Plato: Charmides, Euthyphro, Laches, Lysis, Menexenus, and Ion.
I read these all one after the other, so my head is all full of Socrates’ ancient voice. All of these dialogues show Socrates deep in conversation, challenging his friends and acquaintances in his usual insistent style. Though I too seek wisdom at the feet of the great teacher, I continue to walk away feeling uneasy whenever I drink deeply from the Socratic well.
Whenever Socrates offers up conflicting meanings of particular concepts: Charmides (temperance), Euthyphro (piety), Laches (courage), and Lysis (friendship), it seems that his main goal is to demonstrate that nobody really knows anything, or even worse, to demonstrate that those who believe they have gained knowledge are mistaken. But often all this amounts to is word-play rather than timeless wisdom. Sometimes Socrates seems to want to thoroughly confuse the conversation to such a degree that nobody is sure what is true any longer. His tactic reveals more confusion than it does truth, which may actually be Socrates’ aim.
I’ve written before about Socrates’ habit of using word-play to prove that the so-called experts are actually phonies, and that the average life of the average person is nowhere near as important or authentic or deep as the life of the philosopher. Though the quest for truth was clearly Socrates’ calling, it’s easy to see how his behavior might have annoyed his fellow citizens. He constantly questioned everyone he came into contact with. His questions often led the conversations down zany or even nonsensical paths, where words stop making sense and truth is flipped on its head. Once the victim is thoroughly confused and turned around by Socrates’ inquisition, Socrates can easily accomplish his over-arching goal: proving that people don’t know as much as they suppose.
(This is not to say that Socrates only critiques the ideas of others, and never proposes positive philosophies of his own. He certainly offers up a unique philosophy in the later dialogue Republic, and even in Euthyphro his question about pious acts – whether God loves pious acts because they are inherently right, or whether pious acts are right only because God loves them – has been a relevant question in the field of ethics for over two thousand years.)
It also doesn’t help that many of the characters in these so-called dialogues seem absolutely trusting and worshipful of everything Socrates says. So the format of the dialogue is subverted; Socrates’ logic, no matter how tortured, is rarely challenged in any substantial way. The characters that are supposed to critique, question, and counter-balance Socrates’ philosophy fail in these crucial tasks, and instead show themselves to be either pompous, one-dimensional buffoons (Euthyphro) or yes-men (Socrates’ companions in Lysis). This is fairly harmless in the low-stakes discussion about the nature of friendship, but takes a more troubling form when Socrates lectures on his political philosophy in Republic.
Menexenus has a unique format compared to the others: it’s a satire of political funeral speeches, such as the one delivered (just a generation before Socrates) by Pericles during the Peloponnesian War. Though it seems like Socrates wishes to ironically parody the Athenian tradition of giving funeral speeches (Menexenus mainly features Socrates giving a mock funeral oration), Socrates’ speech really doesn’t sound much different than a real funeral speech. In fact, Plato clearly had a knack for speech writing.
Ion is not so much a dialogue but a lecture that attempts to prove that poetry is delivered to man directly from the gods. It is pious Socrates, Socrates the teacher. His opponent Ion, the renowned performer of the poetry of Homer, has the air of a villain. He is vain and over-confident of his abilities (much like Euthyphro), the perfect target for our hero. So Socrates employs his usual tactic of trying to prove that his opponent knows nothing of that which he considers himself an expert. Ion is shown to be a phony: Socrates uses wordplay to prove that actors and performers do not actually possess an art, knowledge, or even a real skill. And though Socrates’ logic is (as usual) a bit wacky, Ion offers no competing ideas. Thus the format of the dialogue suggests this is an open and shut case by the end; Ion is rightly humiliated, and Socrates once again proves that only he understands real truth. The frustrating part for the reader is that Socrates’ argument leads to a bogus conclusion, and nobody is there to challenge it. Actors and performers do indeed practice an art form and possess a skill set. Socrates doesn’t believe this to be true because he’s got a chip in his shoulder about non-philosophers: anything of value besides Socrates’ own profession (philosopher) holds no value to Socrates, and so he relentlessly attacks any who have not chosen that path. No wonder he was widely detested.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat by Karl Kautsky
It was fascinating to read this critique of Lenin right after reading some of Lenin’s writings from the same exact time frame.
Kautsky buys into the Leninist idea that socialist transformation is inevitable. But unlike Lenin he emphasizes (in a somewhat convoluted fashion) that socialism cannot exist without democracy. Lenin was eager to abandon democracy the very moment his party seized power, and this is really the basis of Kautsky’s scathing critique of Lenin’s tactics.
In his own way, Kautsky supports bourgeoisie democracy because it lays the groundwork for (what he perceives to be) the inevitable proletarian revolution, and allows the workers to voice their grievances and form workers parties (capitalism generally comes with liberty and freedom of speech). He believes that if capitalism continues to grow, the disenfranchised proletariat must grow with it, and so capitalism will inevitably create communism, as Marx argued. The working poor will grossly outnumber the wealthy, and so they will eventually vote their way into power. Kautsky assumes that the workers in a democracy, once given the power, will unanimously demand socialism. And so he’s not so different from Lenin, in that he believes that class interest motivates all decisions (also known as vulgar materialism). Like Lenin he has an idealistic image of a united working class all sharing the same demands and motivations, without disagreements or deviations within the ranks. This is not how real politics works, which makes the idealism of Kautsky and Lenin appear particularly quaint (and in Lenin’s case, dangerously naive). Though Lenin and Kautsky subscribe to the same brand of idealism, they disagree on the timeframe: Kautsky prefers the slow and even development of socialism over time; Lenin demands a violent and immediate revolution (any who refuse to come along with his plan must be purged).
So Kautsky and Lenin both share the same end goal, only that Lenin was too hasty to get there. What is really at the heart of this disagreement over the timeframe of the revolution is a more critical disagreement about democracy. Democracy is a crucial feature in Kautsky’s imagined revolution, and in his imagined communist society that follows that revolution. To take it even further, Kautsky believes that socialism cannot exist without democracy. Without democracy the whole plan will decay into dictatorship. In this regard he was proven right by Lenin. The Bolsheviks’ first move was the dismantling of democracy, including democracy among the workers (many of whom dissented or belonged to different parties from the Bolsheviks). By the time the Bolshevik transition to power was complete, real socialism (read: equality between all classes) was dead in Russia: Lenin’s party (read: the new ruling class) controlled all facets of government, culture, and society, while the teeming masses were disenfranchised to such an extent that they were completely unable to openly voice grievances. The Bolsheviks’ so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” was just a dictatorship, not socialism.
So Kautsky is right in the sense that socialism without democracy decays rapidly into dictatorship or single party rule. However Katusky isn’t particularly clear about how democracy will inevitably lead to socialism. While Lenin squashed democracy in order to preserve his party’s power, Kautsky sees democracy as the pathway to real socialism. But this will only happen if the vast majority demand socialism, and agree on what “socialism” should mean. Lenin rightly understood that this isn’t really feasible. The democratic electorate simply cannot come together on such a large and ambiguous goal, if all citizens are allowed to vote and speak freely. And so Lenin and his small cohort of true believers staged a sudden coup rather than allowing the masses to vote him into power (which he knew they would never do), and then once in charge he destroyed all vestiges of democracy in his rise to absolute power. Was this a cynical attempt to hold onto power, or did he truly believe that by eliminating democracy he would one day create real socialism? Answer: who cares. His method led to totalitarianism, so it was wrong (call me a consequentialist if you like). It was the wrong method both for creating socialism and for governing in general.
Lenin understood, unlike Kautsky, that democracy is more likely to kill socialism than birth it, because factions within workers parties and disagreements between large swaths of the population create deadlock and stalemate and thin margins for change. Generally the most revolutionary outcomes a democracy can hope for are the sort of liberal, incremental, compromise-focused changes that we typically see in parliamentary governments. Kautsky ignores the reality of pluralism, to the detriment of his political philosophy. People hold different opinions and see the world through unique lenses, and this is true even within workers parties and unions. This is a natural facet of humanity, and cannot be ignored. It is a fantasy to imagine that something as intricate as a socialist economy could ever be democratically planned and administered, or that the entire population could even be made to agree that socialism is the correct path, or even be made to agree on one single definition of socialism. Democracy is far too messy and inefficient and factional for that. There will always be disagreements and innovations and challenges to the status quo, and economic factors alone will never be the sole drivers of human behavior. This is why democracy does work well with capitalism, which is also sloppy and unplanned and competitive. Pluralism is one of the driving forces of capitalism, which (like the gene pool) is strengthened by diversity. Lenin understood all of this well, and so (as a hater of diversity) sought to prevent any who opposed him from exercising any democratic power whatsoever. Lenin couldn’t allow factions or even small disagreements to flourish within the party, so he dictated to the party members (and therefore to the people of Russia) exactly what they needed to believe. The result certainly was not capitalism, but it also certainly was not socialism.
So allowing real democracy is unlikely to lead to socialism, but snuffing out democracy only leads to dictatorship and totalitarianism. Socialism fails when it’s undemocratic, and it fails when it’s democratic. I fear that the message here is that socialism is impossible.
Main Currents of Marxism, Volume 2: The Golden Age by Leszek Kołakowski
This book is a masterpiece of philosophical summary and deep-diving analysis. Kolakowski has an uncanny ability to break down and explain even the most complex philosophical arguments in a clear and concise manner. At times he plays the part of omniscient referee, diligently sorting the good ideas from the flawed ones. But never does he simply tell us that a writer’s theory is wrong; instead he identifies the holes in it and pries them open, exposes them to the light, lets the reader decide what to think.
In this book his main target is Leninism, a philosophical tradition absolutely bursting with contradiction and double-talk. Kolakowski’s even-handed tone and mind-bogglingly high level of erudition suggest that he did not intend to write a polemic against Leninism. But in the end Kolakowski’s even-handed philosophical critique of Leninism amounts to a withering indictment of Lenin’s method, his philosophical rigor, his honesty, and his contradictory actions once in power. Lenin is revealed to be a boor, a liar, a tyrant, a power-hungry despot. Kolakowski does not draw these conclusions explicitly, but instead allows the reader to do so. Perhaps Kolakowski is a masterful propagandist who possesses the ability to incept these opinions into the reader’s brain, but I don’t really believe that. Instead he just exposes various thinkers’ theories to the light, that’s all. This doesn’t mean Kolakowski is a constant critic; his analysis is so much more subtle and productive than that. If a theory has enough qualities to withstand the author’s scrutiny, it comes out stronger for it in the end. Kolakowski analyzes many Marxist ideas and traditions throughout his magnum opus, and a good portion of them – those based on sound reasoning, honest argumentation, and deep philosophical reflection – show their quality under Kolakowski’s scrutiny. It just turns out that when we shine this same light on Lenin’s theories, they wither, crack, and fall apart. They are revealed to be hollow and decrepit. (Oh dang I’m being too polemical again).
Kolakowski sees Lenin’s dismantling of Soviet democracy as the original sin of Bolshevism. Lenin’s critique of bourgeois democracy hinged on the notion that modern democracy is a sham: the propertied classes (who overwhelmingly benefit from capitalism and bourgeois law) trick the exploited masses into believing they are sovereign in order to pacify them and prevent revolution, though in reality the workers are largely disenfranchised. In other words, the masses are led by our culture, media, and propaganda (all of which is shaped by the ruling class) to believe in freedom, democracy, individualism, and the sanctity of private property, but all of that is a veil over their eyes that prevents them from noticing that they are slaves. This sentiment, borrowed wholesale from Marx, is compelling in itself. Here’s the sad irony: once in power Lenin banned all democratic expression (including dissent from the proletarians he claimed to speak for), imprisoned his political adversaries, and disallowed any political party but his own. A man who rose to power by arguing that only communism could bring authentic democracy to the masses turned out to be a despot who was so desperate to hold on to power that he fully and permanently disenfranchised the masses. To make it worse, while doing so he claimed that the new Soviet system was a more authentic form of democracy than a parliamentary system could ever be. Kolakowski punishes Lenin for this betrayal of his own principles, simply by laying out the actual actions Lenin took once in power. Turns out that listing Lenin’s achievements is enough to reveal his naked opportunism and staggering hypocrisy.
Kolakowski’s main argument, if one must be identified, is that Bolshevism did not deteriorate into totalitarianism because of Stalin (as is often argued, especially by Lenin sympathizers), but instead because totalitarianism was baked into Lenin’s philosophy from the start, despite all the noises he made about wanting to create a better democracy. Before he was even in power, Lenin fantasized about liquidating all his political opponents, using violent coercion to keep all dissenters in line, and dictating to the masses what was and was not in their best interest. He desired to create a new permanent elite (the communist party officials), but dressed it up as if he was actually abolishing all elites forever, as if his new elite would better represent the masses than could parliamentary democracy. Lenin described in detail his dream of conducting mass confiscations of all private land and surplus (see Lenin’s State and Revolution), and imagined that the bulk of the people would not only celebrate these actions but assist in the mass thievery. In reality, Lenin’s first economic policy of requisitioning “surplus” grain from peasants (or what the requisitioners considered to be surplus) led to widespread mistrust of Lenin’s new state, as well as bribery and coercion. The people did not want to give up their product to the state, and the officials in charge of snatching the goods were highly susceptible to bribes. Their only carrot for making the people obey was threat of force, and use of Lenin’s massive police state infrastructure. Meanwhile all political activity that did not “further the socialist revolution” was anathematized.
This was not Stalinism, but Lenin’s original ideas and policies, the tactics that he used when he (Lenin) was in charge. Modern lovers of Lenin argue that he truly fought for the good of the people, and that after his death it was Stalin who corrupted his ideas and policies, warping them into a totalitarian, violently repressive, hyper-bureaucratic police state. But Lenin was the true founder of Soviet totalitarianism. Kolakowski lays this bare without becoming overly angry in the process (something I would struggle with). In the end, his critique of Lenin is devastating, yet really he lets most of Lenin’s ill-conceived ideas and shameful policies speak for themselves.
What is to be Done? and State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin
Having read a few of Lenin’s writings now, I can say with confidence that I don’t enjoy his written work. He is absolutely humorless in his tone, harsh and reproachful toward anyone who even very subtly disagrees with him, and uncompromising in his particular vision of how a revolutionary party must behave and the goals they must fight for. He believes he is the lone defender of the Truth; anyone who has even the slightest variance of opinion is a liar, fraud, chauvinist, opportunist, or traitor. There is no room for compromise, no point in discussing alternative views, no patience for philosophical objections to his worldview, no time to hear warnings of the dangers that lurk in his political program. In other words, he is insufferable.
He points his intense beam of hatred not just toward the obvious targets (capitalists, politicians, the czar), but also toward his fellow socialists who object to his heavy-handed and dictatorial approach to party management, and even toward workers who don’t conform to his narrow outlook. Reading Lenin, one gets the impression that he would gladly banish from the party (or perhaps from life itself) all those who don’t agree with him on every single point, including proletarians who refuse to convert (though he claims to fight for and speak for the working class). Pluralism is his enemy, which of course makes him the enemy of humanity as it really is: contradictory, sloppy, confused, slow to act, apathetic, open to various arguments from different parties, agnostic. Lenin is a utopian: he believes that one man is capable of unlocking the one single universal Truth that renders all other opinions invalid for all time, and wishes all humans to either conform to his plan or vanish. Only those who show dogmatic adherence to Lenin’s program get to be included in the citizenry, in his revolution, in his definition of “the people.” I have little patience for this kind of approach to politics. Even if he claims to fight for the lowest classes, he is actually an enemy of mankind. Real humans, with all their flaws, can never thrive under a system that requires a hive-mind mentality, requires us to shun anyone and everyone who disagrees with the Founder. Despite Lenin’s best intentions, the party and governmental machinery he hopes to construct will only become the perfect vehicle for totalitarian dictatorship. Lenin himself may not have intended that, but he was so vain and so convinced of the perfection of his own ideas, that he was deaf to this criticism.
For these reasons, I find myself feeling absolutely repulsed and disgusted whenever I read his writing. I want to dismantle his philosophy, shine a harsh light on all its flaws, flay it in the public square and leave it bleeding on the pavement. Why do I care? Because there are those today who still believe Lenin’s philosophy holds the key to solving the major problems of our time: wealth inequality, climate change, etc. Though I still believe that Marxism has much to teach us about our world, and perhaps (when combined with liberal democracy) can even provide us with a workable approach toward addressing problems like climate change, I firmly believe Leninism is a dead end.
Of course, Lenin would say that my opinion here is driven entirely by my class status (I suppose he’d say I’m petty bourgeoisie). But that cop-out argument is the exact reason I detest his arguments: he can’t stomach philosophical critique of his outlook, so he side-steps it by automatically invalidating all criticism by claiming it is driven by class interest. When someone raises a valid question, he slaps him down and calls him an opportunist, as if all objectors are agents for the ruling class. Personally, I fear totalitarianism and understand the value of civil rights, which is why I raised objections to Plato’s Republic. Were those objections class-driven, or perhaps driven by a genuine distaste for dictatorship?
Lenin’s early writings are dictatorial in their approach to party politics, demanding either obedience or expulsion from the party. The society he later founded exhibited these same features on a much grander scale: demanding society-wide obedience to the party, or banishment/death. The inevitable slide into totalitarianism is all right there in his writings, nakedly apparent to anyone who stops to think about what he is actually saying. Lenin claims to speak for the worker, but he only speaks for himself and his cohort of zealots (and opportunists who will ride his coattails to power). That all being said, I think it is imperative we study his work, lest we forget how easily dictatorial thinking can slip into ideology that claims to be selfless, that pretends to serve the long-suffering masses, that promises to build a better world. Just another utopian with a thinly-concealed thirst for power, a desire to be God and remake the world according to his whim. I’ll have more to say about this guy later.
The Iliad by Homer
After reading a bunch of Plato, I felt like it was finally time to tackle this classic of the ancient world. Afterall Homer’s work plays an out-sized role in Plato’s Republic; it is the main target of Socrates’ program of censorship. I can understand why: Socrates wishes for the warriors in his polis to be fearless in the face of death, absolutely selfless in their submission to the will of the state, and incapable of pity or mercy or really any unmanly emotion. Therefore literature in the polis must not portray either soldiers, kings, or gods showing any of those negative (banned) attributes. But in the Iliad, a poem that was legendary even by Plato’s time (Socrates state in Republic that Homer was the poet who educated Greece), soldiers openly discuss their fears about death, the king’s authority is challenged by his subordinates, the childish gods bicker with each other and act in a petty and insolent fashion, and Achilles (the deadliest soldier in the army) whines and weeps and complains constantly about his sorry lot in life. He even sits out of the battle like a coward, all because he is so angry at the king for confiscating his favorite slave woman. While these situations push the drama forward and make the story so much more interesting, Plato can’t allow any of this in his polis. They insinuate that the heroes, the kings we are supposed to obey, and the god we are supposed to worship are all just a bunch of whiny, fearful, petty, contradictory jerks. In other words, they act like real people, and Plato can’t allow that because he is attempting to build something that resembles the Ideal. He can’t have his humans acting like humans! So Homer’s gotta go.
As for my thoughts on the Iliad: I’m glad I read it. The language is beautifully crafted and bursting with delicious similes. Many of these similes reference wild animals, nature, and farm life. These provide a closer look into what actual Greek life was like during Homer’s time (approx. 400 years before Plato). Here are a couple examples:
Like flies swarming around shepherds’ pens in spring, when pails fill up with milk, so the Achaeans, a huge long-haired host, marched out onto that plain against the Trojans, eager to destroy them. Just as goatherds sort out with ease the wandering beasts, all mixed up in the pasture, so through all the army, the leaders organized the troops for battle
He was like a lion slightly hurt by a shepherd guarding his sheep flock out in the wilds, when it jumps the wall into the pen. But he’s not killed it. The wound rouses the beast’s strength. The shepherd can’t keep the charging lion from his sheep, who, left unguarded, panic. Huddled in a mass, they crowd in on one another. So the lion, in his hot rage, leaps over the wide sheep-fold wall. That’s how strong Diomedes went to fight the Trojans in his angry fury.
Aren’t those fun! Honestly though, the plot of this poem is a bit thin. Reading about how the battle went back and forth and back and forth, over and over, and this guy slayed that guy and on and on, it started to feel like I was reading a written account of an Ancient Greek football game, every play written out in epic poem style. In other words it got a bit dull (try describing a football game, play by play, and see if you can keep it interesting). The poem is also surprisingly violent, full of graphic descriptions of slaughter and atrocities. The main characters are all mass murderers, many of them openly reveling in the bloodbath. They have absolutely no problem with slavery, pillage, desecration of their enemies’ corpses, and wholesale butchery. As a fan of history, I appreciate how this draws the reader back to a bygone era, revealing the warped psychology of the Ancient Greek warrior-nobility.
But in the end, I much preferred the Histories of Herodotus to the Iliad. Both are beautifully written, but Herodotus delivers so much more plot and insight into the cultures of the world, so much more varied and deep perspective on he goings-on of man. Homer’s work only gives us a single perspective: those of the warrior-nobility. Homer is blind to the plight of slaves and common soldiers, completely uninterested in the perspective of those who might view the rape and pillage of a city as gross injustices. He’s a man of his time. Herodotus offers up something that feels, at least to me, more timeless.
The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato by Karl Popper
I’m not sure if I was just naturally disinclined to disagree with Plato’s political philosophy, or whether instead Karl Popper incepted the dislike of Plato into my brain. I feel like I probably would have disagreed with Plato no matter what (Plato is a totalitarian idealist after all), but Karl Popper gave me all the tools to turn my vague discomfort into sharpened arguments. I’m sure that a fan of Plato would tell me that it’s an awful blunder to read Popper’s scorching critique of Plato side by side with Republic. Shouldn’t I let Republic stand on its own merit without allowing a critic to tear it apart before I’ve even had a chance to enjoy it? Look, I want to give Plato a chance and all, but I’m so very glad I read Popper’s work, so glad. I am fully under his sway, I’m captivated. I lapped up his critiques like a hungry puppy! Frankly he nails it. He pinpoints exactly what is wrong with idealistic totalitarian thinking. I am so excited to read part two, where he tackles Marxism. I imagine he has much to say about philosophy’s other most famous idealist (yes I know Marx was a materialist, but I also believe he was deeply idealistic in his prophesies about the future, his opinions on human nature, and his belief that class is the ultimate defining feature on one’s life). Popper is a philosopher of science, which means he cares very deeply about scientific method, and about only using the word ‘science’ to describe actual science (not pseudo-science). For example, after reading Popper one realizes how laughable is the notion that a revolution – where so many factors all change at once – can ever be ‘scientific.’ Yet in Marxism there is a belief that if we apply the scientific tools of Marxism, we can not only orchestrate a socialist revolution, but then scientifically engineer a society that can maintain communism and radical democracy. Popper might not flatly argue that the goal itself is impossible, but only that it is absurd to imagine that any part of that chaotic process would be handled ‘scientifically.’ Popper also rejects the notion that history has patterns that, once understood, allow us to predict future historical patterns. Therefore Plato’s theory of history (that history started with the ideal Forms and degenerated over time, but if we make certain changes to society we can return to the ideal that was lost) is hogwash, as is Marx’s prophesy that eliminating capitalism will usher in an era of communism. Anyhoo, I loved this book. I haven’t read an author I agree with more than Popper in a while; I can feel his influence shaping my long-term thinking about philosophy, science, and politics.
Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics by Joli Jensen
This book is a treasure trove! Though I am not a true academic, I not-so-secretly wish I was one, and this book spoke directly to me. Here are some of the nuggets of wisdom I picked up:
Write for 15 minutes per day no matter what. If all you feel is frustration and lack of creativity, write about that. The act of writing will expunge those negative feelings and bring you closer to resolving them.
Close the door to distractions. You have to be willing to shut the rest of the world out for a brief time every day so that you can give your writing the full focus it deserves.
Aim for craftsmanship, not performance for others. You do not need to impress anyone, and your work need not be a timeless masterpiece. Think like a carpenter learning to construct a great rocking chair. It may take many iterations, and each time he learns from his mistakes and makes subtle (or drastic) adjustments to his design, process, and execution. The goal is not to create the world’s greatest rocking chair, a chair that belongs in a museum or on an alter. The goal is to improve steadily, to work on your chops, to gain experience. With this attitude always at front of mind, the pressure of performance dissipates and writing becomes fun and relaxing, a release valve for built-up tension and intellectual backlog, an activity we look forward to.
Save productive minutes for this work, don’t wait til you’re depleted. If you are most productive in the morning, spend 15 minutes writing during that time. You can spare 15 minutes. Don’t wait until midnight, when your brain is shutting down. Write when you are fresh and most productive.
In The Apology, Socrates comes off as a nearly mythical figure. He is the heroic truth-seeker who dedicates his life to exposing ignorance, corruption, and self-righteous hypocrisy; the prophet chosen by a god to enlighten and provoke the people of his city; the philosopher who asks hard questions and refuses to accept easy answers; the martyr who is willing to die for the cause. This is an inspirational story, but it misses something about Socrates’ approach to philosophy that helps to explain one of his main limitations: his personal commitment to unmask and embarrass anyone who claimed to possess wisdom. This practice, which he repeated often throughout his long career, was not only detrimental to his standing in the city, but also largely unproductive as a philosophic endeavor because it failed to bring Socrates much closer to discovering the wisdom he claimed to seek. It also helps explain why the people of Athens grew so exasperated with him.
In his own retelling, he set out at a young age on a lifelong quest to seek out any man who “was thought to be wise by many other people, and especially by himself,” so that Socrates might publicly interrogate him, and in so doing prove to the man and the surrounding crowd that the man “thought himself wise without being so”1. In order to demonstrate to the crowd that the man was less wise than he believed, Socrates would often sow confusion in the conversation, purposelessly attempting to confound the person he was questioning.2 Though Socrates did often achieve his goal of demonstrating that the man was more ignorant than he let on, the unfortunate side effect was that Socrates (to his “dismay and alarm”) made enemies everywhere he went. His uncouth behavior earned him “much hostility of a very vexing and trying sort.”
So the cost was high in this quest for philosophic truth. The problem was that though he claimed to seek truth itself, in practice his agenda was to humiliate “those who think themselves wise but are not.” His goal was not to answer hard questions, but simply to prove that anyone who claimed to know an answer was a fool.3 This reveals a certain arrogance about Socrates: as he fought tirelessly to prove that politicians, lawyers, poets, and even common laborers were, in a certain sense, frauds because they failed to acknowledge their ignorance on certain philosophical matters, Socrates meanwhile strengthened his own deeply-held belief that only he possessed true moral courage: the courage to admit that he knew nothing. In this way he could think very highly of himself and his powers as a philosopher without ever having to take up the much more challenging task of seeking actual answers to the tough questions. Afterall, if one asserts forcefully that he knows nothing (as Socrates did), it gets one off the hook from having to provide answers; instead one can spend all his time trying to prove that everyone else also knows nothing. In a sense it’s as if he set out to prove that true knowledge is impossible, that the best a human can hope for is an honest confession of his own ignorance, and that any who believes he or she has cultivated something of value deserves public scorn.
This is a low standard when it comes to philosophic knowledge, and as a civic philosophy it certainly does not make for a thriving city. A city depends on large groups of citizens cultivating and putting to good use diverse sets of skills and know-how; the city values those skills and considers them worthwhile and necessary. But Socrates believed such knowledge was a mirage, such success was hollow; the only life worth living was a life spent engaged in philosophical inquiry. He openly looked down on the beliefs, priorities, moral courage, and accomplishments of his peers, even going to far as to suggest that their unique successes were not even “real.” For example, when speaking about a champion at the Olympics, he asserted that “that victor brings you only the appearance of success, whereas I bring you the reality.” It is simply untrue that one who has trained his whole life and reached the pinnacle of his profession does not represent “real” success. There are many kinds of success, and one is not objectively more real than another – a philosopher should acknowledge that.
How is it helpful, or wise, to denigrate all professions except one’s own, to declare that everyone who has honed a craft or gained hard-earned knowledge has wasted his time and effort, that his success is all an illusion, that the only way to demonstrate “real” success is to live life exactly as Socrates lived it? Socrates failed to understand the inherent value of pluralism when it came to skills, knowledge, and perspectives, allowing himself to develop a myopic opinion of what “real” success looks like. The various and interweaving skills of the population are what made Athens what it was. No doubt most members of the jury had spent their own lives cultivating their own diverse sets of skills, skills that those jury members likely valued quite highly. In this light, Socrates’ courageous truth-telling probably came off as pretty insulting to the average Athenian who worked hard and cared about his career, family, and hobbies. (Likewise Plato failed to appreciate the importance of pluralism in his political philosophy, but that’s a topic for another essay).
We need to be able to live in the world. The world is not all just a mirage that can be destroyed simply by declaring that nothing is real; nor is it truthful to blithely declare that philosophic knowledge is the only knowledge that truly matters. If one wishes to be a philosopher, he or she should seek answers rather than merely critique anyone who values something in life besides philosophy. It is no surprise – due to his belief that his own esoteric quest was the only way of life that could possess any objective value – that Socrates neglected his own family and their needs. As he put it, “That I am, in fact, just the sort of of gift that God would send to our city, you may recognize from this: it would not seem to be in human nature for me to have neglected all my own affairs, and put up with the neglect of my family for all these years, but constantly minded your interests, by visiting each of you in private like a father or an older brother, urging you to be concerned about goodness.” It is likely that he considered the role of father far less important (less worthy, less “real”) than the role of god-appointed unmasker of ignorance; indeed he was actually trying to teach others how to be “concerned about goodness” by neglecting his own family. For Socrates it was both worthwhile and good to be a wandering philosopher, just as it would have been less good to be a committed father and husband. This is a statement not about objective value, but about what Socrates the man valued.
A true philosopher must be able to comprehend that many other things besides philosophy objectively matter just as much as philosophy, including a lawyer’s knowledge of the law, a poet’s skill with language, a mother’s ability to calm her child, and (a skill Socrates would probably mock, but one he seemed not to possess) the social skills necessary to live in a city without constantly making enemies. Socrates certainly possessed philosophic wisdom, but lacked a certain social wisdom. Is one objectively more important (more “good”) than the other, if we have to live in the world? Can one search for truth without constantly embarrassing one’s peers in the process? Can a philosopher work to uncover deeper truths while accepting that other humans value other endeavors just as highly as the philosopher values his own quest, and that those other endeavors might actually be just as “good” as his own? Or must the philosopher become so bogged down by his own self-importance that he makes it his mission to make enemies out of the whole world? If one truly seeks wisdom, valuing pluralism and diversity of opinion in this complex world is a great place to start.
Notes
I use the translation of Plato’s Apology by David Gallop, appearing in John Perry, Michael Bratman, and John Martin Fischer, eds., Introduction to Philosophy : Classical and Contemporary Readings, Seventh Edition, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). All quotations above are from Apology.
Socrates himself never wrote down his own ideas nor kept records of his conversations. Therefore our only real record of the Socrates’ achievements are the dialogues of Plato, wherein the character “Socrates” often attempts to prove that a so-called wise person is actually quite ignorant. In dialogues such as Charmenides, Laches, and Euthyphro (just to name a few), the conversation ends in confusion, the only conclusion reached that nobody seems to know anything. These early dialogues might be a more accurate representation of the Socrates’ actual conversational method, since they were written when Plato was younger and still under the sway of his teacher. But ultimately we don’t really know how much of the character “Socrates” is a realistic portrayal of the actual man, and how much is Plato’s creative imagination.
This is certainly not true of every Socratic dialogue. In Republic and Phaedo, Socrates offers extended positive arguments about the formation of an ideal society, the nature of reality, the afterlife, etc. It is possible though that by the time Plato was writing these dialogues, he was no longer interested in portraying Socrates as he truly was, but instead began using “Socrates” as a mouthpiece for Plato’s own theories. If we take Apology to be a fairly accurate picture of how the real Socrates described his mission in life, then I think it’s fair to say that one of his main goals was to prove that anyone who claimed to know an answer was a fool.
In Book I of TheRepublic, Plato establishes a habit of isolating people, virtues, activities, and things into very narrow categories. For example if a leader takes good care of his people, he falls into the narrow category of “ruler.” But if he uses his power for personal gain, he is not (in that moment) a “ruler”; instead he falls into the category of “money-maker” or “criminal.” Following this logic, a true ruler, therefore, can never abuse his office for personal advantage, because the moment he does he ceases to be a ruler; a ruler, by definition, can never act unjustly. The very definition of ruler, in Plato’s eyes, is bound up with the act of providing care and comfort to the population, so any rulers who stray from that path are not rulers at all. Likewise a doctor ceases to be a doctor the moment he makes an error, or even the moment he contemplates how much to charge for his services (in that moment he is a money-maker).
The categories represent perfect ideals, so any deviation from the ideal behavior associated with that category immediately shifts the thing described into a different category. The main character of Republic, Socrates, asks his companions whom they would rather hire to construct their homes, a just home-builder or a skilled home-builder, and of course they select skilled. The category of “just man” needs to be in a separate category from “home-builder.” In a way, this is the first introduction (within The Republic) of Plato’s famous Theory of Forms, which plays a crucial role later in the dialogue. Basically there are a series of perfect ideals (called the Forms) that include justice, love, goodness, but also home-building, doctoring, and kingship. These ideals give meaning to the words we use to describe these things in the real world, even if in the real world the things described rarely if ever live up to the ideal. Our eternal soul remembers the Forms from a previous life, which is how we understand perfect concepts like justice; we understand justice even though we live in a world where one might never glance real justice even once in a lifetime. If it wasn’t for the existence of the Forms (and the soul’s memory of the Forms), we wouldn’t even know what justice means.
The problem is that the Forms aren’t real! If I state that a home-builder suddenly transforms into a money-changer the moment he accepts payment, I’m not stating some crucial fact about the real world; I’m actually just practicing word play. Humans invented the concepts of “home-builder” and “justice.” There is no eternal, divine, or perfect category called “home-building,” just as there is no eternal Form of perfect justice. These are both constructs. When we distill these definitions down into their purest forms, we manipulate avatars that stand for concepts we invented. We can change the definitions of words however we see fit! For example, one man might say the ideal king is a ruler who always puts the good of the collective ahead of the good of individuals, while another might believe a king is a man who wields absolute power and tolerates no challenge to his authority, while a third could state that a king is only a king if he successfully builds a massive web of patronage, or some other meaning. Picking just one “perfect” definition of king doesn’t tell us anything useful about real kings in the real world. So how can we base our real understandings of kings on a made-up fantasy version of so-called “ideal” kings? Think of the various ways that could warp human behavior, if the expectation is that all of mankind must conform to a particular man’s version of a make-believe ideal.
It becomes clear right away the danger inherent in constructing a political philosophy built on the premise that our institutions must, if we wish to have a just society, force human action to mirror the made-up Forms as closely as possible. Plato’s ideal society, which he meticulously constructs in Republic, is based on the notion that a truly just society is one where the rulers do everything in their power to attain the ideal, regardless of what the citizenry might desire. The ideal kings will rule as all-powerful philosophers from on high, the ideal soldiers will sacrifice everything for the Fatherland, the ideal workers will toil their lives away in silent acquiescence. Every man, regardless of his class, minds its own business, and focuses solely on his own work, the work that was assigned to him by fate. In a way such a society might be similar to a military theocracy: start with a warped construct that does not resemble the real world (in Plato’s case, the Forms; in Christianity’s case, an omnipotent and perfectly good diety), then construct an entire system of laws that enforces the orthodoxy of the ruling elite. How quickly an ideal society transforms into a dystopia.
Plato would even arm his kings with near totalitarian power in an effort to enforce the ideal upon the masses. This is by design: they will wield their power wisely because they are true “rulers” (ideal rulers who only make decisions that benefit the state). The rulers must not only live according to the Forms, but also strive to understand the Forms. Thus Plato decrees that it will be just and good for his philosopher kings to possess absolute power over culture, procreation, government, and society, because only the kings, as philosophers, understand what is truly good for the state. Likewise the soldiers who protect the city will live the ideal lives of perfect soldiers, and will be better for it. As children the only stories they will be allowed to hear are those which teach bravery at all costs and absolute obedience to the city, the gods, and one’s elders. Any story that portrays death as scary or tragic must be eliminated, so that soldiers will be fearless in combat and ambivalent about death. These soldiers will also be told the lie that they were literally born from the soil of their country, so that they will love their country the way sons love their fathers. Through such programs of indoctrination will the members of the soldiering class attain the ideal Form of “soldier.” As for the workers, they will attain their ideal categories as well. A builder must build and focus on nothing else. He will not even deviate from his career in order to be a father to his children; all children will be communally raised. Nor will the builder stray from his ideal path in order to act as a devoted husband; all wives will be held in common, so personal relationships need not get in the way of developing one’s singular talent. Thus will members of the lowest class achieve the ideal Form of “worker.” And just to make sure the workers don’t revolt, they will be taught from birth that they have “bronze souls” while the rulers have golden ones. So it seems the pathway to the Forms is paved with lies.
Here’s the situation: Plato uses concepts that do not really exist in the real world (such as perfect justice and perfect kingship) and makes them the bases upon which we are supposed to construct our systems of ethics and justice, our institutions, and our understanding of the real world. But at best the Forms are a fun-house mirror version of reality: the images are distorted and wrong, unnatural and grotesque. Real humans are multi-faceted. Human individuals tend to have multiple talents and (sometimes conflicting) ambitions. Humans want to be heard, to innovate, to challenge authority, to improve systems; Plato will have none of that. I wonder: how can Plato look at the multi-talented individuals surrounding him and preach that the ideal man is a creature who rigidly performs one single task throughout his entire life? How can Plato, who had the courage to question and challenge the political system of his own city of Athens (because he thought it was an unjust system), argue that the ideal citizen must remains unquestioningly obedient to his betters, content in his ignorance, proud of his powerlessness? How can Plato look at the beautiful diversity of the real world he lived in and argue that the government should use force, censorship, and deception to enforce closed-mindedness and rigid conformity?
Plato starts with his personal version of “ideal,” and forces the world to conform to it. He calls the ensuing dystopia an ideal polis. Along the way he argues that the definition of justice is when a man minds his own business, focuses on whatever Form corresponds to his life (whether its ruling, or soldiering, or ship-building, or doctoring, or laboring in the mines), and does not deviate from that path. So in the end, a just man (for Plato) means a man who adheres to Plato’s Forms. It goes without saying that if a person considers deceit, disenfranchisement of workers, censorship, and forced indoctrination to be unjust, Plato’s vision of a just world comes off as pretty unjust. One could even argue that the only way one could call it “just” with a straight face is to change the definition of justice to mean the dedication of one’s life to the unwavering pursuit of said Forms. In other words, only by practicing wordplay, by manipulating the definition of words, can we believe that such a society would be good for us. This isn’t so different from any religious fanatic whose definition of justice entails worshipping the deity of his choice; put that fanatic into a position of power, and he will soon call the censorship of art, the suppression of competing worldviews, the execution of political opponents, the indoctrination of the young, and the impoverishment of his people “just,” so long as the citizens worship the deity. Plato practices wordplay when he invents his categories, then he practices more wordplay to convince us these categories are just.
In the real world everything is a blend. Home-builders are just or unjust, and their skill level is not mutually exclusive or dependent on that first variable. Doctors do make errors in the real world, and they do not immediately cease to be doctors in that moment, unless one wishes to create a make-believe ideal for doctoring that no doctor on earth could ever even resemble. Rulers do use their power for personal gain, and they are still rulers when they do so because in the real world rulers do these things. To say that a thief cannot meet the definition of “ruler” is to manipulate the definition of a word, not to comment on how the real world operates. More importantly, when Plato constructs his perfect state, he believes his rulers will come so close to the ideal that he is willing to sacrifice art, poetry, freedom, democracy, individualism, and much more to attain that ideal. But this “ideal” ruler cannot co-exist with human nature, it can never be realized unless humans stop being human and start being divine. Rulers will steal and hoard power and manipulate their office for personal gain because that is something human rulers do. So why on earth would we sacrifice all of those precious things in life in order to attain the unattainable? This is the danger of creating a political program based on Forms: one who believes in such a program might be willing to sacrifice everything that makes life worth living, if it will help the society reach the ideal. Later utopian thinks like Lenin will go on to make the same mistaken argument: it is wise and just to sacrifice everything, including large swaths of the population if need be, in order to realize the ideal society where we can finally all live in peace and brotherhood.
Let’s not build political philosophy from figments of imagination, and certainly don’t be too eager to sacrifice all that is beautiful and free in order to live up to a fairy tale ideal. Instead allow the real world to shape the political program, and remember to cherish the qualities that make life worth living: art, love, freedom, questioning, innovation, diversity, upward mobility. If these factors don’t play a role in the “ideal” society, misery will ensue.
At the opening of the short dialogue Crito, Socrates is found sleeping peacefully in his jail cell as his execution day draws near. When his friend Crito arrives (after bribing the guard), Socrates greets him joyfully, and Crito is surprised by Socrates’ serenity in the face of death. Crito then passionately attempts to convince Socrates to escape with him. Crito makes it clear that with his wealth and influence he can easily sneak Socrates out of prison and whisk him away to a foreign land where he can live out his days in safety, far from the Athenian authorities who wish to see him dead. It will be no trouble at all to escape, if Socrates will only allow his friends to save his life.
Crito offers a variety of arguments for why Socrates should flee, chief among them that Socrates has been unjustly convicted by the state and wronged by his countrymen, so therefore he has no obligation to submit meekly (perhaps even shamefully) to their judgement. The honorable action would be to disregard Athenian law and escape while he still can. He could then continue his teaching as a fugitive and exile. One additional perk to this plan would be that by staying alive he would allow his friends and students to have more time with their beloved Socrates, whom they honor above all others.
Despite his friend’s urging, Socrates remains unconvinced. He proceeds (in his typical fashion) to thoroughly dismantle Crito’s arguments, and instead posits that the truly moral act is to stay in prison and face his impending death. Along the way, Socrates makes an argument that has sparked 2,500 years of further debate among political philosophers: it is a moral and just act to obey the laws of one’s country at all cost, even if those laws appear unjust; to disobey an unjust law is in itself an immoral, shameful, and unjust act.
Socrates argues the following: If one is born in a country and chooses to live there rather than flee to a foreign country, he is bound by a sacred vow (or at least, an implied contract) to obey the laws of that country. This is like an early and extreme version of the social contract: if one chooses to live in a country and reap the benefits of citizenship, one thereby agrees to obey all laws, decrees, verdicts, and orders issued by the government of that country, regardless of whether they are just or moral. If one does not consider the laws of his country to be just, he should renounce his citizenship and move elsewhere. Since Socrates had lived his whole life in Athens, married his wife and raised his children in Athens, fought in the Athenian military, and never once thought of renouncing his citizenship all those years, he must not turn his back on his country the moment a judgement doesn’t go his way. After everything the city had done for him all these years, it would be dishonorable to disobey and abandon her in the end, simply to save his own life.
At the same time Socrates argues that one’s country is like one’s father. He raises the child up and nurtures him, directs the child’s education (both moral and scientific), and gives the child a share of his own hard-earned wealth; the child in return must obey and honor his father, thereby acknowledging the debt he owes to the man who raised him. So it is with one’s country, which nourishes and educates its citizens, and therefore deserves the same honor one bestows upon his father.
My first thought upon reading Socrates’ argument that any citizen who chooses to live in a country enters into an agreement with that country to obey all laws whether they are just or not was that this line of reasoning would render all forms of civil disobedience immoral. If a citizen (or second class citizen) falls prey to a discriminatory or persecutorial law (for example a Jim Crow or Apartheid law), Socrates might argue that this citizen is morally bound by justice to obey the discriminatory law, simply because that citizen failed to flee to a new country when he had the chance.
In a world where some citizens are treated differently than others (due to poverty, ethnicity, social status, employment status, etc.), and various groups of citizens fall victim to discriminatory laws, it seems absurd to argue that those most harmed by such laws are morally required to obey them, and that by choosing to live in a country one forfeits his right to publicly object to or protest whatever injustices might be baked into that system. Would it have been a moral act for an African American citizen living in the southern United States in the 1950s to silently accept the gross injustices of Jim Crow, and immoral for him to disobey a racist law? One could argue the opposite: it is shameful to acquiesce to unjust treatment, and honorable (moral) to protest such a system, even if (especially if) that system was legally created by the duly elected parliamentary body (the body that also, of course, makes the rules on who gets to vote on the members of that body).
Socrates was unjustly convicted, but his conviction was done in a lawful fashion. Thus Socrates believes he must obey the sentence and give up his life. But what if an entire legal system or economic system are inherently unjust or imperfect, as all such systems are to various degrees? How could obeyance of such an imperfect system be a perfectly moral act, so moral in fact that the morality defies all context: no matter how unjust the law may be, it is always moral and required that citizens obey it? It seems to me that it can never be a 100% moral act to obey any human institution, since every human institution will be flawed or corrupted in some way and to some degree. There is always nuance, always context. Perhaps it is moral to obey a law that orders one not to kill his child, but it is immoral to stand silently by while an innocent man is sentenced to death because of his ideas, as Socrates was.
Perhaps by protesting such a verdict Socrates could have introduced the idea to the public that one should not be sentenced to death for his ideas, that there should be protections for free speech that even the government (even the democracy) cannot override. And perhaps by spreading this idea, Socrates could have persuaded enough of the populace to actually initiate some reforms. Though this is far-fetched, it proves a point: in this example Socrates would have made his legal system moremoral by disobeying the law. This shows that there are examples where it is more moral to break a law than follow it. After all, if by protesting or disobeying an unjust system we make it more just, how could that protest be an unjust act? In this light, civil disobedience can be a moral act, since it can help a country shed some of its more egregiously unjust laws. (Then again, perhaps by martyring himself Socrates accomplished the same goal: to spread awareness of just how grossly unjust and absurd it is to execute a man for his ideas).
Oftentimes (even in democracies) minorities are left with few options when the laws are stacked against them. When the duly elected legislature fails to dismantle these laws, perhaps because of economic/racist/sexist/religious/political motives, it is up to the citizenry to take action. But if a majority of the citizenry supports discriminatory laws, the minority may find themselves in an impossible situation. When all the mechanisms of power are locked away and all the “legitimate” avenues of change are blocked by an elite (or by a majority) determined to keep certain groups out of the halls of power, citizens who are oppressed by the laws have little recourse other than to protest, to disobey, to interfere. Rob them of this tactic (by branding their protest as inherently immoral or even illegal), and they are left only with silent acquiescence. They are to become slaves.
One might argue that if a law is truly unjust it should be left to the democracy to legally overturn it (and therefore we do not need civil disobedience at all), but this leaves minorities at the mercy of the majority. If a black citizen in Mississippi has been “lawfully” convicted by a racist jury and condemned to die by a racist judge (following to the letter the laws written by racist legislators, who were voted into office by racist voters), it is not shameful or unjust for that man to flee in the dead of night (if he is able to do so) and evade his executioners (as Socrates might have done). One only has one life to live. By living in a given country, one does not automatically agree to silently forfeit that life in the event some powerful, entrenched elites wish to see him dead.
It is of course difficult to objectively state which laws are just and which are unjust. A gun lover who believes it is unjust for the state to tell him he can’t bring a rifle to a preschool might believe it is a moral act to protest that law by bringing a rifle into a preschool. Without a clear conception of “justice” we easily sink into relativism: anyone who disagrees with a law can label it unjust and disobey it, and by doing so he is acting justly (from his point of view). I am not trying to argue that an individual has the moral right to disobey any law he wishes, nor that any law a person disagrees with must be an unjust law. Clearly we need a clearer picture of the difference between a truly unjust law and a regular law that certain citizens disagree about.
I’ll have to save the laborious process of defining justice for another day. For now I’ll just say this much: breaking a law is not an inherently unjust act. Laws are human institutions, not some higher, heavenly ideal before which we all must bow. If a law is wrong it must be fixed; if the democracy refuses to do so, then the democracy absorbs the immorality that was formerly localized in that unjust law. In this situation, the oppressed citizen might be acting morally by working (in a legal or extra-legal fashion) to purge the injustice from the system.
The context is key: what is the law, who is affected by it, why was it created, who benefits from it, and who is harmed? We mustn’t ignore those questions when assessing the morality of a political action, as Socrates does. Also: do those affected by unjust laws have any legal remedy, or are all legal and “legitimate” mechanisms closed to them, leaving protest or civil disobedience (or even violence) as the only options? If so, then we should hesitate before calling their attempts to overthrow systemic injustice “immoral.” The real key here is that context matters; questions of immorality are never black and white.
I believe that those who are abused by the state (as Socrates was) have no moral obligation to silently obey their abuser, just as an abused child has no moral obligation to obey an abusive father (to use Socrates’ own metaphor). The state, like a parent, needs to earn our loyalty by acting justly towards us. If a father acts justly some of the time, a child acts morally by obeying in those moments; when a father acts unjustly (for example, by beating his child), the child is not immoral to disapprove of or disobey or flee from his father. The shock of this protest against injustice may even prove to be a learning opportunity for the father (or the state, in the event of a protest against an unjust law). It is difficult for me to see how the very act of protesting injustice could, in all contexts, be unjust.
Socrates makes a further argument: a man who disobeys one of his country’s laws seeks to destroy his country. In other words, any single act of disobedience against the state is the same as declaring war against that country’s entire legal system. Socrates conflates the protest against one single unjust law with the complete destruction of the city, as if recognizing the injustice of one law automatically makes one a traitor to his country; so if Socrates were illegally to flee from his unjust execution, this action would actually be an attempt to destroy Athens itself, just as a child who disobeys his father one time must be trying to kill his father. And since it is usually wrong to seek the destruction of one’s own country (or the death of one’s father), we must therefore offer up our complete submission in all matters to both city and father. Even if one’s father is insane, we must submit; even if a country’s laws are insane, we must submit.1 We must be slaves to both, because to ever disobey either would be the same as treason and murder.
This is a common conflation in Plato’s work: we are forced to consider the city as a whole, rather than thinking clearly about its component parts (which are single laws or individuals). In Republic Plato tells us we are supposed to aim for the happiness of the city at the expense of the individual. Individuals are asked to sacrifice their freedom, political power, and social mobility all for the sake of making “the city” happy, whatever that means. The component part is asked to sacrifice all for the good of the abstract whole; the component part (in this case, a human individual) does not matter at all, only the city matters. In Crito we are asked to accept the entire law code our city puts forth, or else accept the premise that we hate the city and wish to see it destroyed. Again we must ignore the component parts (the individual unjust laws) and focus all of our love and devotion on the abstract whole (the city). An attack on one part is the same, in Plato’s eyes, as an attack on the whole. This is faulty reasoning that demands we only take notice of abstracts, and completely ignore the concrete component parts that actually affect our real lives as humans. We know from experience that this way of thinking is dangerous: a country’s legal code can be full of both just and unjust laws, but if we label as treason any attempt to improve those unjust laws, we will fail ever to innovate, to improve, to grow. The injustice within the system will breed and grow, safe and sheltered from all harm by an ideology that makes citizens too fearful ever to question the morality of any single law, since those citizens will be labeled as traitors and city destroyers. Socrates seems to believe that instead of protesting unjust laws, the best remedy for an oppressed person is simply to renounce one’s citizenship completely and seek citizenship elsewhere. Afterall, as Socrates argues, if one stays in the country with unjust laws, he tacitly agrees that all the laws in that country must be just. It’s all or nothing for him.
Side note: Can I just mention also that it is pretty cavalier for Socrates to state that if one wishes not to follow the laws of his country, that he should simply pack up and leave it. He makes it sound so obvious that one who disagrees with his country’s laws can easily uproot himself, abandon his family, friends, and career, and set off for a new land in search of laws that are more just (and that the persecuted citizen must flee before he has been officially convicted of a crime; once convicted he is bound to stay put and face his sentence bravely). In reality not everyone has the option to flee if one’s country has unjust laws. David Hume once wrote: “Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artizan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires? We may as well assert, that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her.”2 Socrates seems to forget, or not notice, that most people who are oppressed by the state don’t have wealthy friends like Crito who can simply whisk them away to safety, and that choosing to become an emigrant is an uncertain, heart-breaking, and dangerous adventure that most people choose only out of sheer desperation. Emigration is not the handy solution that Socrates makes it out to be. By ignoring this reality, he finds it easy to condemn anyone who refuses to either leave their homeland prior to a conviction or to obey unjust laws.
Then again maybe I have this whole thing wrong. Maybe Socrates isn’t making a grand statement that following the law is always a just act if one loves his country. Perhaps instead he is only making a personal statement: for him personally, it would be unjust to break the law because of his own unique feelings about his country and his own unique situation. Perhaps for Gandhi civil disobedience was a just act because of his own unique situation. In other words, maybe Socrates isn’t making a blanket statement, but instead arguing that justice is in the eye of the beholder. Therefore it isn’t universally unjust and immoral to flee from prison; it is only unjust for Socrates to do so because of his own beliefs and intuitions. According to this view, we each choose our own version of justice and live our lives accordingly; we will all be judged according to our own internal metrics of justice.
I don’t really think he’s arguing that way in Crito. His language in the dialogue suggests he has a more universal view of law and morality (disobeying the laws of one’s country is always immoral), not that he’s just sharing his own personal take on his own unique situation. In fact the “eye of the beholder” argument is an argument for relativism, which flies right in the face of Plato’s theory of forms (expressed in other dialogues such as Republic and Phaedo). This theory states that there are certain ideal and perfect phenomena (such as Justice) which are more real than our own reality, and pre-date our reality. These ideals provide the meaning behind the words we use, even if we often use the words incorrectly (for example by labeling an unjust act as just). They also demonstrate just how hollow and paltry man’s real-world understanding of justice truly is, and how often we fall short of the ideal. In fact, humans never experience ideal Justice in the real world; the only reason we have any understanding of this concept whatsoever is because of a deep-seated memory of the ideal from a past life, when the world was younger and humans were closer to the gods (this is part of Plato’s proof that the soul is eternal, in Phaedo). It is the philosopher’s job to contemplate the true meaning of Justice and teach others to seek objective and universal truth as well. Philosophers must avoid getting wrapped up in day to day situations and particulars (the way most people do as they go through their daily routines and the challenges of life), and instead keep their eyes aimed up toward the heavens, always seeking universal understandings and higher truths. Since Socrates seems to think of himself as just this kind of philosopher, it seems out of character for him to apply the word “justice” to the narrow context of his own execution, while leaving room for others to follow a different standard and remain just in his eyes. No, when Socrates uses the word “just” he is making a universal claim (he’s no relativist). Therefore disobeying the laws of one’s country is flat-out wrong; civil disobedience is immoral.
Yet I still hesitate to believe that Socrates really thought this way about the law. In another dialogue, The Apology, Socrates argues that divine authority (and Socrates’ own quest for truth) supersede the laws and decrees of Athens. The authorities wish him to stop being a philosopher, but he refuses. That version of Socrates makes it clear that even if the government legally enacted a law banning him from philosophizing, he would be compelled by a higher power (perhaps his sense of justice?) to disobey that law. His purpose on this earth is to help men discover truth, to question, to teach; through these actions he lives a moral and just life. So in this case he is willing to ignore the man-made authority of the city in favor of his own sense of what is right and moral: he will never cease to question authority, search for truth, and practice philosophy, no matter what the laws of Athens may require. It seems then that Socrates does not consider civil disobedience to be an inherently immoral act, since he would in fact be willing to disobey a law if, by so doing, he was honoring his commitment to moral behavior.
So does he contradict himself between these two dialogues? Maybe so. But I think we should let him off the hook. After all, how consistent and calm would I be if I was put on trial for my life, found guilty, and sentenced to death, all because of my personal beliefs and ideas. I find it difficult to judge a man for his beliefs on justice when he has been unjustly condemned and faces his own immanent death. But due to this contradiction, maybe we shouldn’t try to pull some timeless truth about morality and law from Socrates’ words; perhaps it’s pointless to take ideas that are over two thousand years old and attempt to make them seem relevant and true today. Perhaps instead the point of reading Plato is just to allow our thoughts to be provoked. If it gets us all thinking and questioning, that’s worthwhile!
Notes
This paragraph was inspired by Leo Strauss’s essay, “Plato’s Apology of Socrates and Crito,” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 61-62.
David Hume, “Of the Original Contract,” in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1777), paragraph 24, accessed online at https://davidhume.org/texts/empl2/oc.
The great philosopher Socrates, on trial for his life, faces the jury and prepares to defend himself. An array of trumped-up charges have been leveled against him, namely impiety, corrupting the youth, and turning “the weaker argument into the stronger.” The entire affair is a thinly-veiled attempt to silence a steadfast and incorruptible voice that has been speaking truth to power for decades. The accusers are powerful and well-connected Athenians who eagerly hope he will be exiled (or, fingers-crossed, put to death). The nature of the charges are irrelevant; the point is to destroy Socrates by whichever means are available. A trial seems a most expedient tactic.
It’s no big surprise that Socrates is on the receiving end of this indictment: he has spent his whole career making enemies of powerful citizens with his incessant habit of publicly cross-examining anyone who considers himself to be wise or moral. Socrates openly acknowledges as much: “The effect of this questioning, fellow Athenians, was to earn me much hostility of a very vexing and trying sort, which has given rise to numerous slanders.”1 The more citizens he interrogated – whether they be politicians, priests, lawyers, poets, or craftsmen – the more he discovered ignorance masquerading as wisdom, and also (to his “dismay and alarm”) the more enemies he made. Now during the great political upheavals taking place in the aftermath of Athens’ devastating and humiliating defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, the enemies of Socrates see a golden opportunity to finally take their revenge on the annoying old trouble maker, by painting him not just as a public nuisance but as a scapegoat for all of Athens’ woes.
Socrates’ main defense against the accusation of impiety is that the gods themselves commanded him to do as he had always done: to perform philosophy, cross-examine any who claimed to be wise, and point out flawed logic wherever he encountered it. Socrates explains: “Why then, you may ask, do some people enjoy spending so much time in my company?… My listeners enjoy the examination of those who think themselves wise but are not, since the process is not unamusing. But for me, I must tell you, it is a mission which I have been bidden to undertake by the god, through oracles and dreams, and through every means whereby a divine injunction to perform any task has ever been laid upon a human being.” This was a divine command, so therefore Socrates must continue these activities at all cost, even if in the process he makes enemies out of the most powerful and influential Athenians – even if in the end it costs him his very life.
By following this command, Socrates is in fact demonstrating every day his devotion to the gods, proving his piety through the very actions for which he has been condemned: practicing philosophy, teaching, and questioning the powerful. Socrates makes it clear that he will continue to follow this command even unto death, that the gods must be obeyed. When he ponders aloud what his reaction would be if the jury decided to free him on the condition that he give up philosophy forever, he declares, “I have the greatest fondness and affection for you, fellow Athenians, but I will obey my god rather than you; and so long as I draw breath and am able, I shall never give up practicing philosophy… and you may let me go or not, as you please, because there is no chance of my acting otherwise, even if I have to die many times over.” Socrates is willing to sacrifice his very life in order to pursue what he perceives to be a religious agenda, an order from heaven to practice philosophy. Following this logic, he should not only be set free but honored, because clearly he is one of Athens’ most pious men.
Of course this defense doesn’t work against the jury, who ultimately condemn him to die by poisoning. When his sentence is proclaimed, Socrates makes it abundantly clear that he has no regrets, that he is not scared, and that he will never stop. After all, why should a death sentence scare an old man, when death is already close at hand? And why should the condemnation by a group of small-minded individuals bother a man who perpetually seeks truth and wisdom at the behest of the gods themselves? The unending search for truth and the endeavor to truly understand our world (and make others understand too) are divine imperatives, and Socrates will be blessed for having dedicated his life to these efforts. In the end, philosophy is not just a noble profession, but a mission worth dying for, and one that is sanctioned and encouraged by the gods.
And thus in this light, the book reads like prophesy. The gods order Socrates never to stop questioning the powerful, never to stop teaching, even if the authorities put him to death. This execution (which Socrates could have easily avoided by simply agreeing to stop being a gadfly, or by accepting exile) stunned and mortified his disciples, especially his brilliant student Plato. Plato was so affected by the death of Socrates, that he wrote a series of dialogues wherein Socrates takes the starring role, representing the ultimate seeker of truth and wisdom, the figure who exists to unmask the liars and those who fool themselves, the teacher who shows us a whole new way of understanding reality: through the lens of the Socratic method. Plato’s vision of the legendary Socrates (which is the Socrates we encounter in this very book) went on to inspire and guide philosophers across the globe for the next 2,500 years, making Socrates one of the most influential men who has ever lived. In this way the prophesy of the gods was fulfilled, since only through his unjust execution could Socrates ultimately spread his crucial message to such a wide audience that transcends time itself.
Would we even know the name of Socrates, if he had agreed to stop teaching to spare his own life? Would Plato have turned him into a symbol of truth and justice if he hadn’t followed the gods’ orders? Would the message that philosophy and the search for truth are worth dying for have taken root among the countless thinkers who have dedicated their lives to that endeavor, if Socrates had chosen not to martyr himself for the cause? The gods seemed to know from the start that the only way to teach mankind that we must never abandon the search for truth was to ask a man to lay his own life on the line for that very purpose. Only through that example could the lesson be brought home, and a whole world of philosophers be inspired enough to dedicate their lives to that same effort. That’s the prophesy that Socrates, who seems to me to be more pious than any of his accusers, fulfilled.
Notes
I use the translation of Apology by David Gallop, appearing in John Perry, Michael Bratman, and John Martin Fischer, eds., Introduction to Philosophy : Classical and Contemporary Readings, Seventh Edition, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Why? Well that’s a good question. Let me come back to that.
My ultimate goal is this: I want to do something about climate change. How can becoming an expert on Marxism help fight the climate battle? I’m not exactly sure, but that’s what I hope to find out.
First let me talk for a moment about climate change. It isn’t like the other political issues of our time. Sure when most media figures talk about gun control, abortion, voting rights, minimum wage laws, free trade, etc., they act as if the world itself hangs in the balance. But climate change stands above all those other issues. It is a real-life bona fide existential threat to humankind. When I picture in my mind the tribulation my children and grandchildren will face because of climate change, and the ambivalent responses our so-called leaders tend to offer toward addressing the crisis, I’m left feeling empty inside. The sense of frustration, impotence, and hopelessness are intense, I can hardly bear to engage with the issue whatsoever. Climate change is the reason I gave up watching cable news a few years ago; I simply can’t stomach to watch politicians and media outlets obsess about small-ball issues while ignoring or down-playing the actual looming threat that is staring us directly in our faces.
There are many reasons why politicians and corporate media outlets choose to ignore or downplay climate change, or pretend it isn’t caused by human activity, or cast doubts upon climate science itself as a field of study, but I will not go into that here. The point is that I want to do something about climate change. I want to contribute any way I can.
But how?
It just isn’t possible for me to change jobs and start working at a climate-focused non-profit, at least not right now. We have two young children who need our love, time, attention – and our financial stability. Our son Charlie has leukemia, so we need a good healthcare plan and a steady enough income to pay hospital bills. The point is that I can’t simply leave my job and go work for some organization that studies carbon capture technology. I have people who depend on me, so my life must maintain a certain level of stability for their sake. I won’t be switching careers just yet.
I’m also not a scientist. I do not have the necessary knowledge or credentials to work as a climate researcher. I would love to help advance the crucial research efforts that are taking place on the frontier of climate science, but that kind of research is not my strong suit. So I won’t be joining the army of citizen scientists who are seeking some kind of scientific solution to this problem.
And If I am being completely honest, I’m probably also not cut out to play an active role in a climate-focused political party either. Maybe it’s because I just don’t do particularly well with committee politics. Put me in a situation where I’m a member of a committee and we need to discuss and decide on an important issue, and I completely lose my mojo. Maybe I’m a bit too outspoken and tactless when debates gets started, which is not a helpful trait if one is trying to build up a fledgling political party (or trying to talk politics with friends). Or it could be that I have problems with authority; this has been suggested at various times in my life. So I’m not sure entering into party politics is the right path for me. I would still like to join a climate-focused party, but I’d prefer a behind-the-scenes role.
So what the heck can I do to help? How can a guy with no science background or political acumen, possessing very little free time or spending money, contribute to the most critical scientific and political problem facing mankind? I had to turn this problem over in my mind for a long while. What I came up with is this: I can write.
Maybe by writing I can be of some use. But what will I write about? Well I’m not sure about that yet either. I’ve never been especially serious about writing, though I’ve always known I have a certain knack for it. Thus far I’ve mostly only written about music composition. But I feel an intense urge to write something, anything, that might help with this cause. The motivation is there, so maybe that’s how I can play my small part, how I can help move the ball down the field.
Ultimately what I want to write about is not science but philosophy, political philosophy to be exact. Political philosophers study how people solve big problems, and sometimes they develop potential (or even groundbreaking) solutions to those problems. Climate change is the biggest problem we (our species) may ever face, so studying how our species can best respond to the crisis seems a fitting use of my time. Perhaps through philosophy I can help develop some workable solutions, collaborate with others on larger projects, find a suitable role for myself in a climate-focused party, and make some kind of impact. It’s a long shot I know, but it’s better than where I’ve been up to now: frustrated to such an extent at my inability to help in any way, that extreme apathy is my only weapon against despair.
I’ve chosen Marxism as my starting point. Marxism is a philosophical tradition that focuses on critiquing systems that are unjust, exploitative, and oppressive. It rips the mask off and reveals all the layers of rot lying beneath the surface, all the contradictions and lies. It also proposes (sometimes revolutionary) solutions to these problems; it is not a tradition that supports empty theorizing, but instead it seeks to pair theory with actual practice. In other words, Marxism takes a stab at understanding and solving big problems. So I will start there, and see what it has to offer. I’m not sure whether the solutions Marxism proposes will be worth a damn in the climate fight, but as I said it’s a starting place.
I am no expert in Marxism, so I will have to start from scratch. This is going to mean an intense course of study, and hopefully a lot of writing as I process these new ideas (new to me anyways). I genuinely wish to discover what concepts/philosophies/worldviews/lenses exist in the Marxist tradition, and whether any of them can actually be put to good use solving the climate crisis in the real world. And while there is a relatively new thread of Marxist thought that specifically examines the intersection of Marxism and environmentalism (see as an example: Organic Marxism – An Alternative to Capitalism and Ecological Catastrophe by Philip Clayton and Justin Heinzekehr), I will not start my course of study with environmental Marxism. I will start instead with Karl Marx’s own writings, and from there I will branch out into the writings of his predecessors and peers, and then onto the many diverse writers who took Marx’s worldview and extended it in so many directions. Along the way I will also read critiques of Marx and Marxism, as well as writers from other philosophical traditions who shared their views on Marxism, and whatever other angles I haven’t thought of yet. I’m looking to dive deep into this tradition, and see if I come out a changed man on the other side.
I am not starting this endeavor as a Marxist. Though my political leanings have always been on the left, I do not at this time call myself a Marxist, nor do I exactly understand what that even means. Can one be a Marxist if he simply concurs with Marx’s critique of capitalism? Or does one also have to believe in Marx’s vision of a future communist utopia to call oneself Marxist? For that matter, what did Marx really say about the future? Did he really advocate for a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” or was that just something Lenin added in? Did Marx actually believe that we could usher in communism via a worldwide revolution, or was that more of a metaphor for long-term change? How much of Marxism is just pure critique of the status quo, and how much consists of potential solutions to our problems? I want to know what this tradition has to offer a sick, sad world on the brink of ecological collapse. If there is anything useful in there, I want to learn it.
I also plan to separate out the parts of the tradition that are beyond saving: hopelessly outdated analyses, advocacy of programs for which the destructive or dangerous results far out-weigh potential benefits, one-sided or fallacious or propagandistic philosophical reasoning, and critique of a long-past world whose relevance to our own has faded beyond usefulness. One could say I am hunting for a “workable” Marxism, a “realistic” Marxism, one with real applicability in the modern world, shed of its darker or utopian elements. I seek in Marxism a tool that can be harnessed to bring beneficial change. I’m not sure at this time how much of this mission is possible. Critics tell me that it isn’t at all possible. It seems that most conservative (and many liberal) pundits want me to believe that 1) Marxism is evil and dangerous, 2) it will necessarily lead to the destruction of freedom, democracy, our children, religion, America, everything we hold dear, etc., and 3) it is also hopelessly irrelevant, a product of the 19th century that belongs in the dustbin of history. But listening to those guys – those corporate pundits whose large paychecks depend on their ability to endlessly and relentlessly flog Marxism – I get the impression they are really saying “whatever you do, don’t look over there! Don’t question capitalism. The status quo is perfect. Don’t look behind the curtain!” Well I intend to take a peek.
I recognize that Marxism has a checkered past. This philosophical/economic system has been blamed for many epic historical catastrophes, including genocides and totalitarianisms. I intend to discover exactly how the writings of Karl Marx are linked across the generations to Stalinism. I am going to learn in what ways those views were distorted or adapted by myriad thinkers and politicians and polemicists along the way. I want to examine the good and the bad of this tradition, with the intention of cutting out the bad parts and salvaging only what is useful. Are there parts of the Marxist philosophical framework that differ wildly from the dystopian Stalinist nightmare many Americans picture when they think about Marxism, or is totalitarianism the inevitable result of Marxism? Can we have Marxism without secret police, without gulags, without severe limitations on personal freedoms? For that matter, can we have Marxism without revolution, without violence? Based on what I’ve read so far, Marxist scholars have many disagreements on these questions.
Though many Americans likely picture Stalin as the timeless symbol of Marxism, in reality Stalinism is but one thin branch of the enormous Marxist tree. At this early stage in my studies I can already conclude that there is no longer just “one Marxism,” but many. During the past 150 years, a wide range of Marxist scholars and authors have weighed in on this tradition, each adding his or her own unique spin, each adapting or modernizing the tradition to meet the realities of the author’s time, each taking it in a new and exciting direction. In fact Marxism has become like a huge cave with countless labyrinthine tunnels; I plan to explore these tunnels and see where they lead (or where they dead-end). Of course not only Marxists have weighed in on Marxism; moral philosophers, feminists, economists, political scientists, and legal scholars have all explored how Marxism can weave and intertwine with these various disciplines. On top of that, a handful of countries have attempted to implement Marxist programs, and each time the result has been that Marxism combines with the culture of that country and comes away changed (and also Marxism changes the culture of the country as well). To make the tradition even more complex, modern Marxist organizations and parties are each contributing their own novel ingredients to the stew.
Despite all this vibrancy and diversity of thought, Marxism has been declared a dead tradition countless times (especially after the fall of the Soviet Union). Yet the tradition continues to attract talented writers and intellectuals to this day. I suspect there is something of monumental value here, and I intend to seek it out – and to disregard all that is toxic. So I’m aiming for that workable form of Marxism. And if that turns out not to exist (or if it only exists in such a corrupted form that it decays quickly or does more harm than good), then at least I’ll know that. But I’m hoping it exists! Above all, I hope that the collected wisdom of the Marxist tradition can actually help us fix our big problems.
This is only my first step toward becoming a political philosopher; Marxism is just my starting place. I’m uncertain where this study will lead me, but I intend to go as deep into it as I can. I intend to take it seriously. And of course I will always keep in mind my over-arching long-term goal: to work on climate change. But I still need to start somewhere. This starting point will allow me to work on my research/writing chops, build up a kind of foundational knowledge that will make it easier to jump into other areas of study later, and perhaps even uncover unforeseen truths that will help me build a philosophical system of my very own someday.
This graphic lays out the steps of my very rough “how I will help fight climate change” plan:
Obviously there are a lot of gaps in there. I’ll work on filling those in as I go. You may also notice that “enroll in a university” is not currently listed on there. Let me just say that I would love to pursue a higher degree in political philosophy. If I get the opportunity to do so, I will jump at it. However at this moment in my life that just isn’t feasible. I have neither the time nor the money to become an academic – though becoming an academic is my secret dream. Maybe when my kids are older I will make the jump, a step which is probably crucial if I actually wish to accomplish my goals. Not only would I learn so much from having peers and teachers (rather than studying alone), but the academic life would also give me the opportunity to build networks of friends and colleagues, professors and mentors, publishers and journals contributors. If I ever wish to see my work published outside of this website, those connections will be critical. Not to mention that the academic life gives one the opportunity to shine, if one sees fit to take up the challenge. There are endless research opportunities, access to the best libraries in the world, and colleagues with whom to collaborate on writing projects and new ideas; in other words universities offer a support network for those who wish to take their studies seriously, and a platform for those who want to break new ground. I believe I could rise to that occasion if given the opportunity, but that is for another day.
You may also wish to know why I don’t simply skip all the rigamarole and get straight to helping. Why not simply start writing about climate change right now, instead of going through all those extra steps? Why wait!
My answer is: I don’t want to just write about climate change. I don’t want to be a pundit, simply commenting on the here and now (as if I could even do that properly without research). I want to develop solutions! But I don’t feel ready to do that yet; I don’t feel like I know enough. I don’t know what’s possible or what’s been tried. I don’t have foundational knowledge on my topic – not the science of climate change, nor the political philosophies that might address it. If I hastily crank out a bunch of essays right now without doing any research, they will be full of factual or logical errors. They would certainly demonstrate my ignorance and lack of erudition on my topic, but probably would not accomplish much more than that. No, I need to do some studying first. I need to learn how to think and write and argue like a philosopher.
So onto Marx then!
Selected Writings by Marx and Engels
“On the Jewish Question” by Karl Marx
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 by Karl Marx
The German Ideology by Karl Max and Friedrich Engels
Capital (3 vols.) by Karl Marx
Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx
Critique of the Gotha Program by Karl Marx
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels
Anti-Dühring by Friedrich Engels
Revolution and Counter Revolution by Friedrich Engels
Some areas I plan to explore:
Marx’s general contributions to philosophical/political thought
Marxism and Rights/Liberty
Marxism and Materialism
Marxism and Humanism
Marxism’s views on parliamentarism (using the state apparatus to create change)
Marxism’s different views on revolution
Marxism and Moral Philosophy
Marxism and Religion
Marxism and Political Violence
Marxism vs. Anarchism
Marxism and Science (Marxism is sometimes called a science)
Marxism and Grand Prophesies about the Future
Marxism and Human Nature
Marxism and Democracy
Marxism and the Dialectic
Criticism of Marxism
Distortions of Marx’s Ideas (i.e. how the ideas changed over time)
Marxism and its application in various countries
Marxism today (current Marxist movements/groups/parties and the arguments/tactics they employ)
Marxism and Environmentalism
I’m not particularly interested in writing an exhaustive study of how Karl Marx discussed certain themes or issues. I’m not after finding the ultimate orthodox Marxism. Instead I want to study the tradition, which outlived Marx and changed in countless ways as later scholars and thinkers expanded the tradition. The tradition lives on to this day, and changes every time a new writer picks it up. This allows the tradition to change with the times, and adapt to humankind’s changing needs. It’s a living tradition.
Here are some of the different thinkers and schools of thought I plan to study:
Classical Marxists: Marx, Engels, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxembourg
Social democrats and reformists: Bebel, Liebknecht, Eduard Bernstein, Lasalle
Leninists and Trotskyists: Lenin, Trotsky (perhaps also Alex Callinicos, Perry Anderson, Hal Draper – not sure if these guys would actually call themselves Leninists).
Western Marxists: Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Korsch, Ernst Bloch. Sometimes included: Bertolt Brecht, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Alfred Sohn-Rethel
Frankfurt School: Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas, Adorno, Leo Lowenthal, Walter Benjamin, Alfred Schmidt
French Hegelians: Henri Lefebvre, Lucien Goldmann
Existentialist Marxists: Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir
Anti humanist, anti-Hegelian Marxists: Althusser, Galvano Della Volpe
Autonomist Marxists: Tony Negri, Harry Cleaver, Michael Hardt, John Holloway
Analytical Marxists (anti-dialectic): GA Cohen, Jon Elster, Adam Przeworski, John Roemer, Robert Brenner
English Marxists: Maurice Dobb, Christopher Caudwell, Maurice Cornforth, Raymond Williams
Neo-Marxists (Post-Marxists): Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis
Marxist historians: Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm
Marxist writers working today: Philip Clayton, Justin Heinzekehr, Zizek, and many many more.
Critics of Marx: Leszek Kolakowski, Thomas Sowell, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, and many many more.
This endeavor may not actually lead anywhere useful, but it feels good to try something. It feels right to learn and better myself and expand my mind, even if climate change still kills us all in the end. But who knows, maybe I’ll learn something that makes a difference to someone somewhere. All I can do is try.
How can I live my best life? What are some strategies that will help me reach for fulfillment in life? Here are some of the lessons I picked up from reading one of the world’s oldest self help books: The Bhagavad Gita.
Strive to do your best in all things you attempt, but do not attach yourself emotionally to the consequences of the actions you take. In other words, you can control an arrow only up to the point you release it from the bow. From there, it is beyond your control what happens to it. So put all your focus into aiming true. Release that arrow as perfectly as you can, but once it’s been released do not be attached to what happens next, because it is out of your hands. Feel free to observe how it lands and adjust your next shot accordingly, but do not become emotionally invested in the results. You goal is to improve, and therefore you must practice and hone your craft. But see if you can do this without letting your ego get involved in the process. As you prepare to release that next arrow, remember that your self-worth does not hang in the balance.
This is useful in so many ways. In the business world, you should try your best to be a productive part of your team or organization. However once you’ve finished that business presentation and sent it out, you no longer have control over what happens to it. It may be judged harshly, it may be ignored, or perhaps unforeseen forces outside of your control will cause your presentation to fail. These things can and do happen; when they do happen, gather whatever data helps you grow from the experience, and move forward. Likewise, in a family you should be a generous and caring participant in your loved ones’ lives: do your very best to guide them and love them, and teach them important life lessons, and give gifts, and give them your time, and make as many things special for them as you can. But once you’ve done all that you can’t control how they will respond, or the people they will ultimately become. Do not invest yourself emotionally in the result, but do your best and focus on continuing to improve your own performance.
This may seem like an impossible or even a distasteful goal (“Why on earth would I want to become emotionally detached from the outcomes of my parenting?!?”). Remember: this sort of “detachment” does NOT mean withdrawing from the world, nor does it mean acting in a callous, distant, aggressive, loveless, or harsh manner, or refusing to care about the consequences of your actions. Be active, be a participant, show love, give gifts, build something, engage! Just don’t let your pride (or even worse your sense of self worth) hinge on the results, on the consequences, because the consequences are beyond your control! Be your best self and you WILL make a better world, but understand that there are so many things you simply cannot control. If you try your very best, and learn from your mistakes, and make active improvements in yourself and how you treat others, you’ve done all you can do. You must then be at peace with whatever outcomes may come (while still learning from them, so that you can continue to grow and improve).
While it is wise to be at peace with outcomes, this does not mean that one should live a “passive” life, where we simply let the waves of life crash over us while we feel neither joy nor sadness, while we sit motionless and inactive, detaching ourselves from all warmth and love and connection, seeking some inner knowledge while the world passes us by. In fact, a good life is a life of action! There are countless paths that lead to enlightenment and fulfillment, but most require some form of action. One can seek deep knowledge in her field or expertise in her craft, or focus on taking selfless action for the benefit of others to build a better and more peaceful world (Gandhi followed this path, among others), or one can dive into meditation and self reflection, or build a life that is centered on love and family and empathy. A person can venture down all of these paths at once if she likes, but note that all of these paths require action! Don’t hide in a cave like a hermit, and don’t renounce all earthly joys like an ascetic, and don’t shut out the world or detach from loving other human beings. Go be active in the world and do good work, love people, build connections, get out there and do something. The message here is this: yes live a life of action, while also working to become emotionally detached from outcomes beyond your control. Another way to say it is this: everything in your life should be active, except your ego.
This is easy to talk about but very difficult to put into practice every day. Even as I write this, I picture in the back of my head a day far in the future, when my (adult) sons discover that their father created music and wrote articles about interesting ideas, and how proud they will be, how they will think I was so cool, how they will then be inspired to expand their own minds, etc. etc.! You see? It is my pride and desire and need for affirmation that drives this fantasy, and it’s a clear example of my emotional investment in other people’s future opinions of my life’s work, an example of my ego at work, an example of how much I really do invest my self worth in the outcomes that I cannot control.
Instead, I should write this just because I feel compelled to write it, because it brings me joy, because writing this is me playing my part in the greater whole of humanity; I should not write it just to get future praise and admiration from my sons. Even as I write about detachment from these sorts of desires, I am so very very attached.
This is really about suspending one’s ego, and resisting the urge to expect a quid pro quo in all things. I should not parent well BECAUSE I expect future praise from my children. I should not strive to be a good teacher BECAUSE I hope students will tell everyone what a great teacher I am. I should not write beautiful music BECAUSE I need everyone to know what a gifted musician I am. I should do these things well because it is right to do them to the best of my ability. That is how I play my part, how I contribute to the great human story. I parent, I teach, I write music, and I strive to do those things well, because that is what brings me joy. But once I complete a task, I must detach myself from the consequences. As long as I am doing everything to the best of my ability, and learning from my mistakes, then I have played my part well.
This is also about not caring what people think of you. As long as you are doing your best in everything you attempt, and living virtuously by trying to do good (because emotionally detaching oneself from consequences is not a free pass to be a jerk to everyone), then you can ignore other peoples’ opinions about you. Again, I don’t teach well because I need the other teachers to think I’m great. If I teach well, a likely byproduct will be that other teachers respect me, but that is not guaranteed, and also that is not the purpose of teaching. If I indeed teach well, then I really don’t need to care what the other teachers think, because I genuinely give it my all and do my best to bring quality to my classroom. Beyond that, I actually have no control. All I can do is my best. I need to be at peace with whatever comes after that.
Of course if another teacher or a student offers me constructive criticism, I should not ignore it (“Sorry I don’t listen to feedback because I am so detached from the outcomes of my actions”). Quite the opposite: I should listen and use it as a growth opportunity, a way to improve. But I should not let my self worth crumble because somebody saw things in a different way than I did, or because I made an error and didn’t realize it until a peer pointed it out. Take the feedback and grow, but don’t obsess over the mistake itself (which is in the past); instead focus on doing better next time, and remove the ego or the stung pride from the equation. Nobody lives a mistake-free life, and nobody can ever please everyone all of the time.
Even more importantly: if life ever throws you a real curve ball, and places you in a lose-lose situation, a situation completely out of your control, a situation that tests you and puts you under pressure, these same lessons apply triple fold. Pull back your arrow, aim it as best you can, and fire. Then, pull another. In other words, do your best. And once you’ve done your best, don’t rake yourself over the coals because your best didn’t match up to some unreachable standard. Sometimes you might get battered by the waves, and face challenges far beyond your control. Sometimes no matter which path you choose you will wind up paying a high cost.
A typical example: an elderly parent suffers a debilitating long-term illness that requires many hours of your care and attention every day for many months, but at the same time your new position at work requires extra time for meetings, managing teams, due diligence on new topics, and long-term planning. Meanwhile you have two young children who need your love and attention, and a house that is in need of some repairs. If you sacrifice time with your parent in favor of work, you neglect someone who needs you, someone who is suffering a profound personal crisis, someone who cared for you when you were so small and weak, who loves you dearly, who wants nothing more than to spend as many precious few moments with you as possible. But if you neglect work, you will lose your chance to build your team, squander the opportunity to build on what you’ve already worked so hard to achieve, maybe even lose your position. Not to mention that this schedule leaves no time whatsoever for self care. In these moments it’s so crucial to be kind to yourself: emotionally detach from outcomes beyond your control and just do your best. When life gets real there are so very few things that you actually can control. Focus on doing whatever you must do to survive, to get by. Keep paddling, keep shoveling, keep trying. As long as you do as much good as possible with the limited resources you have at your disposal, you are free to accept the outcomes without self-judgement, even if they are not optimal.
This focus on intentions rather than consequences aligns well with philosopher Immanuel Kant's deontological approach to ethics, which emphasizes the importance of acting ethically and following the rules of morality at all costs, consequences be damned. In other words, pay no heed to outcomes, and instead be sure to obey your moral compass (or your moral duties) regardless of the context of the situation. Personally I find Kant's expression of this ethical principle too forceful and one-sided, since it seems to completely discount the idea that ethical action can ever properly be defined by the consequences of one's actions. Consequences do matter in the real world; in fact they matter very much, and they must be taken into account when determining which course of action is most ethical (or which ethical duty we must follow).
TheGita's expression of this principle is more subtle than Kant's, perhaps because its focus is less on finding the optimal moral behavior, and more on achieving fulfillment in life. In essence, one should strive to become emotionally detached from consequences not because this is the key to the most moral possible behavior, but because this behavior will allow a person to live a happier and less-burdened life. Simultaneously, the person should also try to do as much good as possible. Perhaps then the person could combine the message of TheGita with that of Kant. Or maybe she prefers to combine TheGita with a moral system that aims to maximize a particular outcome, such as happiness (this is called utilitarianism). Either way might work just fine for her purposes: live a happy life and do good. If it is possible to follow a strong moral code, while disallowing one's sense of self-worth to hinge on the uncontrollable outcomes of one's actions, we may just hit on the ultimate combination of fulfillment and moral action. See Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals for Kant's take.
Another facet of The Gita‘s message about personal fulfillment is the argument that freedom comes from discipline. By discipline I do not mean disciplining others, but instead “self discipline”. For example, if you want to become so talented at playing a musical instrument that you can improvise with complete freedom, perform music that leaves listeners breathless and fills their hearts with emotion, experience a sense of total control over your craft, and create timeless art with your own hands, the only way to achieve this is through years of disciplined practice. Without self discipline, one will not sit still long enough to learn anything, and will not practice when practicing becomes hard. Whether learning a craft, parenting, reflecting on one’s own actions, building a professional skill set, or building a love-based relationship with someone, discipline leads to focus and improvement and growth and a better life.
We are sometimes taught (especially in the USA) that freedom is the opposite of discipline. If only we had no rules to follow, then we would be truly free! One can easily imagine a Libertarian fantasy where we all enjoy perfect freedom, total liberty to live exactly how we please, and everyone lives a fulfilled life. This premise that real freedom comes from a lack of discipline is most likely wrong (dare I say utopian) when applied to society as a whole (after all, wouldn’t the local warlord with the most guns and money simply take advantage of this lack of structure and seize power?), but it is especially wrong when applied to self-discipline. Without some kind of self-discipline in place, freedom can never be achieved. One could even go so far as to claim that a total lack of discipline leads to slavery, because a person with no hard-won skills or knowledge will be at the utter mercy of those with skills and know-how.
It is worth noting that this particular take ignores the materialist notion that what truly makes people into slaves or pawns or oppressed peons is not lack of inner discipline, but instead the material forces one faces from birth (i.e. one's class). Those in poverty do not have the time or resources or capital to focus on self-cultivation and skill-building, while those in higher classes do, and that is what determines whether someone will end up a leader/owner/master or a peon/proletarian/slave. It has almost nothing to do with one's own work ethic, since hard work and self-discipline will only get you so far when one starts out in poverty (i.e. if work ethic mattered more than one's original class position, there would be a lot more millionaire fruit pickers out there). See Marx's and Engels' The German Ideology for a classic exposition of this materialist position. I find this position highly convincing, and therefore I need to make clear that this Gita message about the power of self-discipline should be applied solely to personal growth, and not warped into an argument that claims those who are in poverty are there because they lack self-discipline. This is a conservative distortion of The Gita's message that destroys its meaning, and turns it into a tool to distract us from the problems caused by capitalism. This warped message blames the poor for their poverty, rather than addressing the systemic causes of poverty. The Gita's message is certainly not "the poor are only poor because of their own choices".
Ok back to self-discipline. Lets picture a classroom metaphor. If a teacher is a disciplinarian, the students may crave the freedom of having no rules. But abolishing all rules and discipline creates not freedom but chaos. Imagine a classroom that lacks all discipline. Some students ransack the classroom, others casually chat, others attempt to teach themselves something, and others simply leave. The majority of the students will not learn anything nor gain any wisdom from the experience. It seems that when everyone just does whatever he or she wishes to do, the classroom stops being a classroom and becomes something else (a hang-out spot, perhaps). In the end all the students will just wander away from the school, leaving only an empty building. The school is thereby rendered useless. It has failed to fulfill its purpose, and the students who expected to gain knowledge there only wasted their time. Chaos, not freedom, was created in that place.
Imagine that your mind itself is the school. Do you want this kind of chaos (this kind of “freedom”) in your mind? Is this the proper way to cultivate skills and learn long-term lessons? In this metaphor you are the teacher and also the student. You must possess the discipline to teach yourself, to practice, to stay focused, to learn lessons, to grow. When one does not possess the control to do these things, no skills are gained, and our base desires rule us while we live in ignorance. When one exerts discipline over oneself, specifically when aimed toward perfecting a skill or craft, and when we combine it with a certain detachment from the consequences of the good work we do, the results are a kind of freedom that can only come with mastery, can only come with detachment from the opinions of others. It is the freedom to create, to innovate, to improvise, to push boundaries, to rise to ever higher levels. Picture a performer who appears to play piano effortlessly, but that “lack of effort” is actually the result of years of diligent practice, and a mind that is willing to work hard.
Also picture the struggling student who keeps at it, despite the obstacles in her path. Sometimes a voice in her head tells her that she will never achieve her goals, that she will never be good enough. She must let that voice off at the nearest dock, and sail away down the river. She is already good enough today, as she was yesterday and will be tomorrow. Whether she does achieve her goal, or whether she changes it completely, she is good enough. We are free to climb as high as we wish, but there’s no requirement we climb to the top. Whether we wish to doggedly pursue a long-held goal, or set new goals and disregard old ones, the world is our oyster. So do not judge or berate yourself, nor let the imaginary viewpoints of others scare you from pursing happiness. Let your ego off at the next dock, and sail away. Then go work hard at something, anything, and joy will come.
It is so easy in our modern world to let the chaos take over, to jump from one task to another, to let ourselves be constantly distracted by texts, emails, videos, Tiktok, and so much else. To cultivate a skill, you must possess the discipline to shut those distractions out, and set your mind on a single track for a nice stretch of time, to sink slowly into practice, and explore/probe/investigate one single topic, even as the whole wide world tries endlessly to crash down the doors of your concentration and destroy your focus. You are the gatekeeper to your own mind, you are the teacher of your mind’s classroom, you are the master of your own focus.
All things of quality require time and discipline and hard work. This is true of art, it’s true for those who seek knowledge, it’s true of fidelity and maintaining open communication in a marriage, it’s true of cultivating a skill or talent, it’s true of building strong friendships, it’s true of raising children, and it’s true in business.
Ideally, I strive to make my life and my art and my relationships the best that they can be, and all of this takes much practice. Of course simple repetition is not “practice”. To practice, one must reflect on one’s actions and adapt one’s technique over time in order to overcome barriers and gain new skills, and stick to the cause of self-improvement even when it becomes challenging to forge ahead. One must be present and engaged, not zoned out (the difference between practicing piano versus simply noodling, or the difference between being truly present with one’s children versus staring at the iphone while the children play at one’s feet). Being present takes focus and energy; life moves quickly and it’s easy to just coast or tune-out or “get through it” without reflection, especially when one has children and work and so many other things to juggle. So many times my wife Erica and I have commented how we feel sometimes like we have become parenting robots, delivering love and care to the children but completely hollow inside. This is not healthy or ideal. Striving to be the best I can possibly be (as a parent, etc.) is a daily challenge, and I easily get burned out.
Therefore, don’t overdo it with self-discipline. A lack of discipline may create less freedom, but that does not mean too much discipline creates maximum freedom. Go easy on yourself when you’re feeling burned out. A burned out parent should go (if she can) away from the children and grab some time for him/herself. Even a few hours can make a big difference. This is also true of practicing piano or any other skill. Take breaks, but stay conscious of the goal and always return to it when you are ready. Remember: rest is just as important as discipline, and in fact it may require some discipline to make yourself rest. The body and mind must recharge if you plan to stay healthy in this challenging and difficult world. Therefore making time for rest is in itself a form of personal growth.
So stay disciplined and focus on personal growth, and strive to do your best in all things, and to do good. But do not concern yourself with what happens once you complete a task and send it out into the world. Don’t let your pride hinge on the praise/condemnation you receive from your loved ones and contacts. When life becomes difficult and times get tough, just do your very best; that’s all anyone could ever ask of you. Aim your arrow as well as you can and let it fly, then focus on the next arrow, content that each time you fired you aimed it as well as you could. And if you do watch the arrows fall, it is only to gather data so you can make your next shot even better.
