Book Review

Selected Works 

by Cicero

     In ancient Rome, Somnus (otherwise known as Hypnos in Greece) was a personification of sleep. He lived in a cave that contained the river Lethe(forgetfulness). Somnus is only tangentially connected to Cicero via and time and place but he is being mentioned here because he visited me several times while I was reading Cicero’s Selected Works. Without diminishing its historical importance, I will say that this book was a crashing bore that persistently made me drowsy and Somnus successfully lured me into his cave several times throughout the course of this short 200 page essay collection.

Cicero was a Roman statesman, neither patrician nor plebeian and also an outsider because of his obsessive-compulsive insistence on moral purity and honesty at any cost. He came from the Stoic school of philosophers. It could be tempting to say that Cicero’s political life was more exciting than his ideas, he had five men executed in the Catilinian Conspiracy to prevent the senate from being overthrown and he supported the assassination of Julius Caeser, but he is most famous for his oratorical skills and writings in Latin concerning the ethical branch of philosophy.

Since Cicero’s forte was public speaking, this collection opens with a transcribed speech in which he denounces Verres, the corrupt governor of Sicily. He denounces Verres for nepotism, bribery, and debauchery while declaring the superiority of running government as a system of laws as opposed to the tyranny of men. As far as speeches go, this is a good one with precise phrasing, effective punctuation, rhythmic cadences, a mixture of abstract and concrete ideas , and a sufficient buildup of thematic tensions to keep the audience engaged. Compare this to the transcribed speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. or Barack Obama and you can see how a good speech works just as well in writing as it does in speaking. Hearing it spoken in the echoing chamber of the Roman senate must have been impressive. But a clear picture of Cicero, with his Apollonian self-righteousness, begins to emerge early on. While I am inclined to agree with Cicero that honesty in government is necessary, if I wanted to have a good time, I would rather seek out the company of Verres.

The essay “The Second Phillippic Against Antony” is another work of character assassination that targets another individual. Again, despite the moral indignation, Cicero makes Antony look like an interesting character in contrast to Ciecro’s high ground which certainly is higher but certainly not exciting. Antony, after all, was the guy who got to fuck Cleopatra. In these polemics, Cicero presents us with such a stark contrast of the rigid orderliness of Apollonian ethics and the disorienting, life affirming celebrations of Dionysus, the polar tensions that have defined the human experience up until the present day.

The second section of Selected Works is a collection of excerpts from letters Cicero wrote to his friends and colleagues, many of which were penned during his time of exile from Rome. He comments on politics and some battles. There isn’t anything of interest here unless you are deeply immersed in the study of Roman history. These read like footnotes and supplements to a more significant work on the history of the empire and as a casual reader, I didn’t get much out of them.

Moving on, there is a dull essay called “on Duties” pertaining to ethics and honesty, mostly in regards to commerce and the marketplace. No doubt, this Stoic philosopher probably had his own personal grievance in this matter since when he returned from exile, he found that his property had been confiscated and sold without his permission, although I am not sure if that happened before or after this essay was written. I actually don’t care enough to bother checking the dates. Cicero uses the criteria of moral righteousness and advantage to evaluate the ethics of non-disclosure in financial transactions. (Yes, I know you are yawning already) Morality means adhering to what is natural and since lying is unnatural it is immoral. Therefore, using deception to gain an advantage in a sale is unnatural and fundamentally against morality. Even though, as an honest type of a person, I am inclined to agree with this concept, it still seems like a flawed argument and a reductio ad absurdum as well. Cicero spends very little time examining nuance in his argument nor does he address the ambiguous concepts of “natural” or “advantageous” in sufficient detail.

The equation of nature with morality is a problematic construct since morality is inherently subjective and humanistically determined, hence not natural. Deceptiveness is also not unnatural since an insect may have evolved to look like a plant in order to camouflage itself from predators. This would be entirely natural and since being deceptive in this way would further ensure the survival of that individual insect and benefit its species if it successfully reproduces then this deception is not immoral from a human standpoint either. So Cicero’s argument collapses almost immediately and without much effort from the reader. Forging German passports and visas to help Jewish people escape concentration camps would just as well be a form of deception that is morally justifiable. I could imagine Richard Dawkins beating the crap out of Cicero but to be fair I do see the rudiments of game theory in this essay since Cicero argues that more people in society benefit when business is conducted honestly and with minimal conflict than otherwise. Cicero just doesn’t take his argument far enough. His concepts of “moral”, “honest”, “deception”, and “advantage” are not sufficiently defined here, unfortunately, to make the argument work.

The final essay, “On Old Age” addresses the topic you would expect it to. The Stoic Cicero comes out in favor of the elderly, essentially arguing that old age is superior to youth. Since physical strength declines as we age, we get more time to spend enhancing the life of the mind. As a philosopher and ethicist, Cicero is far more concerned with philosophical and educational matters than he is with strength which is good for little more than menial labor and warfare. In his view, the thinkers get to rule society while everybody else gets stuck doing their shitwork. These ideas are neither surprising nor lofty but they are refreshing in today’s world where being young and stupid is valued over being old and wise. It is even worse now with the younger generations that rail against racism, sexism, and homophobia while expressing a vile and nasty hatred towards anybody over the age of forty. Ageism is just as much a form of discrimination as those other ills and expressing ageist ideas can very well be considered hate speech in some circumstances. But in the internet matrix world, young people know everything and old people know nothing so that is just how it is nowadays, be it sensible or not.

Overall, Cicero comes off to me as a morally upright prig, the kind of po-faced killjoy who screams at people for farting in his presence. If there is one thing that John Milton proves it is that we need villains in order to make life interesting. It was the upright and uptight American Puritans who banned Christmas celebrations and alcohol during Prohibition. It is the Islamic Wahhabis and Salafis that try to purify the world by draining all the joy and color out of everything. It is the homicidal monk in Umberto Eco’s The Name Of the Rose who kills someone for laughing, claiming that laughter is immoral because Jesus never laughed. Bone-dry morality is just as boring as a pile of cardboard. Even conman Christian preachers have figured out that nothing puts a congregation to sleep faster than a sermon on righteousness. That’s why the grifter evangelicals have injected so much showmanship into their prosperity gospel with razzle-dazzle stories about going to war against Satan. Why do you think that Qanon inspires fanaticism when Methodism and Lutheranism don’t? While most intelligent people who aren’t sociopaths would be inclined to agree with what Cicero had to say about ethics, that doesn’t mean his beliefs were exciting to read. The people he attacks are far more exciting. He certainly was an important historical figure and I have no interest or intention of taking that away from him, but these Selected Works are little more than a cure for insomnia to me.

Cicero. Selected Works, translated by Michael Grant. Penguin Books, New York: 1971, 

 

Book Review

The Concept of Dread

by Soren Kierkegaard

     This has to be one of the worst books every written. Soren Kierkegaard apparently wrote The Concept of Dread in his younger years as a writer. Reading this short and indigestible tract is equivalent to breaking off the ends of asparagus stalks, not the tips which you can gently cook and easily eat in a wide variety of ways, but the bottom parts that are hard as wood, fibrous, and nearly impossible to chew. Lacking in any clear purpose, direction, or relevance, this is one work of literature that can be spat out into the garbage so you can move on to something more nurturing and digestible.

It is not easy to tell why Kierkegaard wrote this. He never explicitly states his reasoning behind the matter. He apparently wanted to write something about psychology, or at least he keeps mentioning psychology and saying that it has severe limitations, something he claims to demonstrate. But the definition or purpose of psychology is never examined. He says its is inferior to religious dogma but he doesn’t get around to saying why dogma is more useful. In fact philosophy, in the truest sense of the word, is meant to do away with dogma, a system of beliefs that does not require proof or systematic thinking. After reading The Concept of Dread, you can possibly deduce that Kierkegaard preferred dogma to evidence based reasoning because he had no talent for logic or methodical thought. He never argues a point. What he says is true because he says it is true and you are stupid if you don’t agree with him. End of argument.

You could invoke Wittgenstein’s claim that philosophy is meant to be descriptive of reality rather than argumentative, an assertion that has merit when used in its proper context. But if that is what Kierkegaard was up to here, he fails miserably to convince through description. The descriptiveness starts with Adam, alone in the Garden of Eden. Kierkeagaard objects to the story of Adam and Eve being interpreted as an allegory or a myth; we have to take it as historical fact. Why? We can’t know because he never gives a reason for this. But let’s be nice readers and take him at his word for the sake of following his discussion. Adam, the first man, was paradoxically outside the human race while being the human race at the same time. Why is this important? Who knows? Did Adam have language? He didn’t need it because he had no one to speak to until Eve came along. Only God spoke to them but God is omnipotent so would he even need to use language to communicate with them? Couldn’t he just implant information in their heads without the medium of speech? Kierkegaard raises this question but never attempts to answer it. And that pesky serpent didn’t actually speak because snakes, by nature, don’t talk.

So when Adam is confronted with the possibility of committing Original Sin he hesitates because he feels...GASP!...a moment of dread. Yes those butterflies in his stomach were a paralyzing anxiety that made him see a future full of infinite possibilities that could result from his desire, decision, and consequent action. But Adam has faith and takes a leap, crossing over the abyss of anxiety and commits Original Sin. And we, the descendants of this mythological first man, have been doing the same thing ever since. This is a profound insight by Lierkegaard’s standards. But this is the same dread felt by every teenage boy the first time he tries to kiss a girl. It is the dread you feel before going to a job interview. It is the dread you feel the first time you score a bag of weed or use a fake ID to buy beer at a convenience story. No doubt, it is the dread that Evel Knievel felt every time he revved up his motorcycle engine before jumping his bike over a line of parked cars. Yes, people get nervous before they do something risky. It is a mundane insight by most people’s standards. 150 years after Kierkegaard wrote The Concept of Dread we have self-help books with titles like Feel the Fear and Do It Anyways. Thanks Soren, you really did the world a favor by writing this book. It’s not easy to comprehend what the field of psychology was like in the mid-19th century but certainly they were farther along than this. He doesn’t advance his thought much beyond this simple assertion and his claim that psychology is inferior to dogma is undercut by the obvious fact that he didn’t seem to know much about psychology to begin with.

How does he claim to know what Adam was feeling at that time? Did he travel back in time and ask Adam about the matter? He couldn’t have been relying on someone else’s testimony because no one was there but Eve and the snake. By Kierkegaard’s admission, the snake couldn’t speak and it hasn’t been established that Adam could either. Is any of this important anyways? Nope. Kierkegaard doesn’t grasp the idea that philosophizing and quibbling are two different things.

There is also a wonderful mess of insights we get from the rest of the book too. Original Sin entered the world through Adam but it is possible that Original Sin was first a part of God; after all, if it entered the world, it must have entered from someplace, it had to exist first in order to enter. Every human is a sinner but each one has to start the chain of sin themselves; humans are born as an eternal chain of recurrence and sin starts anew with each one. “Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy”, says Edward Norton’s nameless charcter in Fight Club. Great idea, Kierk, old buddy...where did you get it from? Socrates, right?

We also get a long digression into the description of time and eternity, though it’s not explained what purpose this serves in developing the thesis, though it’s not quite clear what the thesis is. Time is the measurement of eternity’s flow through the present into the past. A moment is a segment of eternity but it is a segment that lasts forever. Eternity only extends into the future because once the present becomes the past it no loner exists. But doesn’t that mean that eternity has a boundary and a limit, making it, therefore by definition, not eternal? “Shut your mouth”, shouts Kierkegaard from his grave, “logic is nonsense when being confronted by the truths of belief and dogma.”

Towards the end he claims that people who have faith are able to overcome dread but people who oppose faith because they fear it become locked up inside themselves because without faith, they are unable to make the leap of faith that overcomes dread. What logic! Did Kierkegaard personally know of anyone who fit this description? How can he claim this to be a universal truth when he spent so little of his life around the other human beings that he despised so much? The guy didn’t have many friends and apparently he didn’t want any either. He probably never even traveled outside of Denmark. These concepts of faith, dread, and fear of faith are vaguely expressed and some concrete examples of what they mean would have gone a long way in clarifying matters and proving they have any validity. Kierkegaard lacked an epsitemology and his wrtigins suffer terribly because of that omission. Of course, he believed faith mattered more than facts so why bother with proof?

Don’t forget that spirit is what binds the soul to the body and Hegelian philosophy, science, paganism, and anything that isn’t Christian is twaddle, an oddly annoying word that gets used often whenever Kierkegaard makes an ad hominem attack on anyone he disagrees with. To be fair, this overuse of “twaddle” is probably the fault of the translator. But even so, at an intellectual level intellectual level it’s like calling someone a poopy-face or saying, “Yo mama’s so hairy you got rug burn when you was born.”

The book actually gets easier to follow towards the end. The theme of “dread” that is supposed to be the thread tying the whole book together but it is not strong enough to do this. The comprehensible parts of the book are random and don’t complement one another. The Concept of Dread is formless, sloppy, lacking in structure, without clear purpose, and never presents any ideas that are relevant to anything in the real world. If you are not a Christian, then it is based entirely on a false premise. You may want to be a good sport, keep an open mind, and try to see this from the point of view of someone you disagree with but that does not add up to much when the author does such a poor job of stating what his purpose even is. Even if you are a Christian there is a definite possibility that you won’t understand or accept what Kierkegaard is yammering on about because he does such an insufficient job of writing clear and meaningful ideas.

Some people say reading Kierkegaard will help you understand the Nazi Martin Heidegger but if you can understand Heidegger at all, reading Kierkegaard doesn’t offer much assistance. Heidegger, the fascist sympathizer who studied under the Jewish Husserl and had and had an affair with the Jewish Hannah Arendt, was possibly nothing more than a master of obfuscation anyways. Bertrand Russel accused him of using complex language to hide the fact that he had nothing to say (I only partially agree with this) and even the Nazis snubbed him, calling his philosophy gibberish, when he petitioned them to be the prime philosopher of National Socialism while applying for the position of rector of an elite Nazi university. (If you are a Kierkegaard defender, don’t whine at me about this digression since Kierkegaard also goes on long, irrelevant sidetracks in several of his books.) Reading Kierkegaard in light of Heidegger is like reading one of those footnotes that doesn’t do anything to enhance the main text.

Over the last 30 years, I have read a lot of philosophy. I have read other books by Kierkegaard too. Abstract thinking is not foreign to me. Other reviewers say they like this book but can’t explain it. Some reviers explain it but their explanations make no more sense than the original text does. I’m calling bullshit on The Concept of Dread. It reads like something Kierkegaard wrote in haste without putting much thought into what he wanted to say. He probably never bothered to proofread it, revise it, or edit it. If he were alive today, he might even be surprised it is still in print. Skip over this pile of detritus and go straight for Fear and Trembling. I don’t agree with that book but at least it is comprehensible and can be understood, analyzed, and debated in a meaningful way.

Kierkegaard, Soren. The Concept of Dread. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey: 1973. 

 

Book Review

Fear and Trembling/The Sickness Unto Death

by Soren Kierkegaard

     In the Old Testament, God commands Abraham to kill Isaac, his only son. Abraham takes the boy to Mount Moriah, builds a stone altar, and prepares to commit the act of human sacrifice. When the knife if unsheathed, God commands Abraham to stop and kill a sheep in his place. In this way, Abraham’s faith in God was being put to the test. His faith was absolute and his immediate reward for his obedience was that he got to keep his son Isaac. What their relationship was like after this troubling incident, the Holy Bible does not say. But Soren Kierkegaard, in his philosophical treatise Fear and Trembling, uses this story as a means to explain how and individual human relates to God and that theme is carried over into another treatise, The Sickness Unto Death.

     The first thing to take into account when reading Fear and Trembling is that it is a method of analysis and that method utilizes a hierarchy of values. Kierkegaard values the individual over the collective society, he values the inner life of the mind over the social life of the masses, he values passion over rationality, and he values religion over secularism. Rooted in this hierarchy is the method of dialectics, a means of analysis that utilizes two opposing points of view to explain each other; these dialectics would later become known as “structuralism” in postmodern philosophy. It is important to remember that these dialectical pairings are vertical and hierarchical values, entailing the concepts of “superiority” and “inferiority”. Therefore, when Kierkegaard says that the so-called “pagan” philosophers of ancient Greece had some good ideas, this entails the concept that Christian ideas are, by definition, superior. (He fails to realize that the New Testament’s mythology and theology are largely a reinterpretation of the life of Socrates, as so many other Christians have. Christ was not original in any way whatsoever.)

     The next important step in understanding the dialectics of Fear and Trembling is mastering the definitions that Kierkegaard provides. He defines his terminologies technically so it helps to follow his explanations and disregard the common definitions of the words he uses. For example, his explanation of “aesthetics” has nothing to do with art or beauty but rather involves the surface appearances of social behavior; his aesthetics means hiding or obscuring truth for the sake of social harmony. This contrasts dialectically with “ethics” which has less to do with morality and has everything to do with revealing truth rather than hiding it. Kierkegaard’s ethics are inherently about honesty. Therefore, a married couple might act according to aesthetics by pretending to be happy in public but they behave ethically when they tell the public that they fight all the time at home and privately hate each other.

     Now remember that Kierkegaard contrasts society with the individual. The next step in this dialectic is to contrast the “tragic hero” with the “knight of faith”. Both are individuals who have come to an awakening. The tragic hero transgresses some societal rule of the aesthetic and this act of transgression exposes the inherent, sometimes hidden, values of society and thereby reinforces them. The tragic hero breaks a law but their lawbreaking benefits society in the end. At one stage, Abraham is a tragic hero because he broke the law by trying to murder his son; this benefited the Hebrews because it proved that God would reward those who acted with absolute obedience to his commandments. Thus the concept of “paradox” is introduced into the philosophy.

     But Kierkegaard does not have a high regard for the tragic hero because such a person remains an inclusive part of society. Rather he holds the knight of faith in higher esteem. The knight of faith is a paradox because he is both a member of society and an individual who transcends society is his own isolation. His individuality comes from his turning inwards, away from society and into the interior of his mind and spirit. This is where the knight of faith as an absolute being confronts the absolute being of God. The knight of faith puts his faith in God, promising to carry out his commands without question and, most importantly, without regard to what society thinks of him. This faith is absolute and it is absurd, as the author would say. But in this case “absurd” does not mean nonsensical; it means “impossible for humans to comprehend”. Abraham can not comprehend why God wants him to kill Isaac but he obeys the commandment anyways.

     Kierkegaard is calling for the true knight of faith to abandon the world and all its people and, as an individual, concentrate single-mindedly on God alone. He hated society and he especially hated organized religion. He saw the masses of humanity as lacking in passion and self-awareness. They just blindly shuffle through life like a bunch of farm animals. In this, his philosophy runs parallel to that of Nietzsche who addressed the same problem but arrived at atheism as a solution. The two existentialists digress in their approach to the world as well; Nietzsche believes in celebrating life even though the world is a rotten place and Kierkegaard believes in retreating into his own solemn and serious inner sanctum where the pettiness of other people could not intrude on his misery. He believes in a type of ascetic autism, an individual hermetically sealed in their own private world with little or no contact with the outside. Kierkegaard’s mysticism might have been a bitter reaction to his own social awkwardness, his own social ineptness, and his own sexual inhibitions (he was too much of a coward to marry the woman he loved). In his version of Plato’s Allegory Of the Cave, the knight of faith leaves the cave, sees the truth, then decides to never return to tell the others about what he found. He just keeps walking into the light until he dies. Interestingly, in his explication of the knight of faith, the man isolated from society and in the presence of God, there is little discussion about God himself; the description is almost entirely about the isolated and individuated man. There is no theology in this discourse. This is how Kierkegaard came to be labeled as the father of existentialism.

     This analysis of Abraham is a bit dated now. Imagine if a man in your neighborhood tried to stab his son then changed his mind and hacked the family dog to death instead. The the police came and he told them the voice of God told him to do that. He would not be hailed as a hero; he would be diagnosed as a psychotic and thrown in the psychiatric hospital. In the time the Old Testament was written, there was no knowledge of psychiatry, forensics, or neurophysiology. The unexplainable was explained with the best tools they had at the time: supernaturalism and religion. Events like this were given symbolic meaning and absurdities were coopted to teach moral lessons. Kierkegaard may have literally believed in the truth of Abraham’s story but it does appear that he is using it as a vehicle for his own preoccupations, primarily the supremacy of the individual and the inferiority of the common people.

     Kierkegaard, at a distance, advocates for a radical form of selfishness, one that is justified by spirituality and mysticism. His dialectic, if taken to far, could result in an indifference to atrocities like war, mass murder, or genocide. It is highly doubtful Kierkegaard himself would defend such things but his knight of faith, when asked about those horrors, might be inclined to say, “I’m too busy talking to God to worry about what happens to all those people that I despise.” His form of individual religion could result in a systematic ignorance of the world, a turning away from life, ultimately a dangerous form of nihilism and a negation of humanity. The knight of faith is concerned with neither aesthetics nor ethics; he is only concerned with himself.

     In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard analyzes the individual even further. Again, a hierarchy comes into play. At the bottom there is an ordinary person, living in the world and lacking in self-consciousness. This accounts for the vast majority of people. They work, they eat, they sleep, they reproduce and they never think about themselves or their place in society. They go about their business, essentially being nothing more than cogs in the machinery of society. They are mostly happy but simple and their lack of self-awareness prevents them being conscious of “despair”. A small number of people think about their lives and become aware of this despair. They become aware of it but they do not pursue it. They may read some books, do some serious thinking, and become upstanding members of a church community but go no further towards becoming a knight of faith. These two categories of people are not worthy of being in the presence of God because they have made no effort to achieve that honor. That reward is reserved for the strong, the courageous, those who strive and make the most effort. God is only revealed in a type of mystical meritocracy. In our times, Kierkegaard would look at churches as being equivalent to fast food restaurants, serving a cheap and simplified version of McReligion the way those restaurants serve bland hamburgers with no nutritional value, at low prices to people who have no concept of quality. Like his contemporary, the anarchist and atheist Mikhail Bakunin, who Kierkegaard corresponded with, he saw the church as being a method of political control, using religion as a tool to keep the masses subservient.

     The real pursuer of truth is aware of their own “despair”. Again, Kierkegaard defines this term technically, making it mean the divisions of the individual self. The true self exists in absolute purity but living in the world divides the self against the self. It becomes divided between its public functions and persona, its private self, and its internal self. When an individual turns inwards toward God, they become aware of this despair and the more they become aware of it, the closer they get to purity, the absolute self in the presence of the absolute God. Thus, despair is actually beneficial because it motivates the individual to pursue a cure for despair, the cure being absolute faith, achievable only at the time of death. The most important form of despair is sin, which is defined as rebellion or disobedience to the commands of God.

     This is all great for religious people but is there anything in this for those of us who are non-believers? Looking at Kierkegaard in the context of intellectual history, it becomes obvious that he latched on to ideas that were taken up later by other. The idea of differing layers of consciousness is significant, even if rudimentary. His explanation of the self divided against the self was later taken up in the phenomenologies of Heidegger, Husserl, and Sartre and probably inspired the concept of the decentered individual that became so prominent in modernism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and existentialism. His observation that the masses of people are like a herd of cattle had some grim outcomes in the politics and economics of the 20^th century. That latter assertion of his is one thing that is still relevant now. Kierkegaard influenced a lot of thinkers he probably would not have liked. His philosophy may seem irrelevant today but these ideas were seeds that germinated into greater ideas in later times.

     Soren Kierkegaard was probably not a pleasant man to be around and neither Fear and Trembling nor The Sickness Unto Death have many ideas that are directly applicable to today’s world. In actuality, if God does not exist then these books are rendered even more useless and Kierkegaard’s philosophy is entirely lacking in an epistemology to support it. Taken on their own, these books do not mean much. But taken out of themselves and looked at in a broader context, they add some key pieces to the ever expanding puzzle of philosophy. The picture this puzzle creates can be comprehended without all its pieces but for the sake of completion, it is nice to have as many of the pieces as you can get.

Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling/The Sickness Unto Death. Doubleday Anchor Books, Garden City, New York: 1954.

 

Book Review

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

     Do you think capitalism sucks? Try schizophrenia instead! That is sort of, but not exactly, what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari recommend in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. They lay out a dense but somewhat comprehensible description of human beings and their relationship to the capitalist system. They also explain how Freud’s system of psychoanalysis acts as a method of repression that makes capitalism function more effectively.

     Deleuze and Guattari begin by describing the human as an individual. The human mind, particularly the unconscious, is made up of desiring-machines which work together to create flows. The concepts of “desiring-machines” and “flows” are both loosely defined and can be applied in a multitude of contexts thereby resisting the tyranny of the sign/signifier as the deconstructionists would say. The flows they write about are roughly equivalent to Freud’s concept of “libido” or psychic energy that circulates through the mind. The concept of “desire” is also central to their thesis. Traditionally, most philosophers, economists, and psychologists have written about desire as being a lack. A poor person desires money because they lack it or a hungry person desires food because they don’t have any but Deleuze and Guattari turn the concept on its head and analyze “desire” as being a creative force. The desiring-machines create energy that combines with energies created by other desiring machines which strive to reach full realization of their potential for completion. Desiring-machines can also be parts of the body; therefore, eyes, hands, mouths, anuses, and anything else can be a desiring-machine or a partial, detachable machine; for example, a breast-machine seeks to connect with a baby’s mouth machine so that both can fulfill their purposes to completion by creating flow, in this case, milk for nourishment for the baby. Like other psychologists, Deleuze and Guattari have a strange preoccupation with things like anuses, penises, and breasts; sometimes you have to wonder why psychoanalysis never offers any theories on knees, ankles, ribs, elbows or eyebrows.

     Desiring-machines create flow that extends beyond the individual into the socius, the societal body in its entirety. Social-machines are individual humans that invest desire in the social praxis. As this desire flows through the socius it gets encoded as things like money, labor, property, or information. Outside the limits of the socius is the body without organs, a wilderness or deterritorialization without form or organization of any kind. The body without organs is the unknown and that is where Deleuze and Guattari want us to go when we become schizophrenized.

     In a capitalist society, psychoanalysis has crystallized the ego in the form of Oedipus. The figure from the Greek tragedy who tore out his own eyes becomes a censor and a castrator for the desiring-machines. The ego-Oedipus blocks the flows they produce and turns them into an unconscious theater where the desiring-machines no longer produce desire but instead express themselves through symbols. This Oedipus-ego is kept under control by the authoritarian father-figure, a representative of the psychotherapist who prevents desire from flowing into the empty space represented by the mother. This Oedipus-complex, according to the authors, is implanted in the psyche by the psychotherapist himself. Since this Oedipus is under strain from blocking the flows and desires created by the desiring-machines, it is under constant risk of neurosis, a state where Oedipus is weak and gets submerged in the psychic content while barely blocking it from circulation. Failure to do so leads to psychosis.

     Oedipus is like an iron-door, one that is under the control of the father. It is a barrier and an internal instrument of repression. This functions in capitalism because that politcal-economic system also has mechanisms of internal repression and control in the form of non-productive social-machines like the police and bureaucracies that function by limiting the flow of things like labor and money, otherwise defined as chains of desire produced by social-machines, encoded and overcoded by capitalism. These flows of encoded desire are controlled by the axiomaticization of the ruling classes.

     Capitalism is like schizophrenia because it strives for fulfillment by breaking through onto the body without organs. It is there where the surplus value of the encoded chains of desire get decoded and deterritorialized as pure capital. The system of capitalism differs from schizophrenia because the schizophrenic seeks to go further over the body without organs, permanently plunging into deterritorialization so that others can follow but capitalism actually reterritorializes its capital by extending its limits and reterritorializing its decoded flows. Capitalism reterritorializes its flows by investing them in things like new technologies or private property, or it can recode capital to create more capital through credit and interest. Capitalism also recodes desire by expanding its internal limitations so that the working classes can never get rich or stop working for long periods of time. They become permanantly contained despite the constant expansion of their territorial limits. Factories are prisons and reterritorializing capital expands the prisons into larger and more complex prisons so that the ruling classes can keep circulating encoded and overcoded desires to continuously overcome the boundaries of the socius and generate more wealth for themselves.

     For Deleuze and Guattari, there are two ways out of this dilemma. One is to navigate around Oedipus into a paranoiac molar gregarious-aggregate, a group of social machines that believe themselves to be superior to the rest of the socius. Being molar demands that its social-machines be uniform, conformist, and easy to control. This paranoiac gregarious-aggregate is their definition of fascism but other groups that demand this type of corporatist community can be molar as well. On the same axiom of resistance is the schizophrenic individual, a person whose desiring-machines flow freely without any interference as they break out of the socius into the body without organs. These individuals resist capitalism because their thinking and language are derailed, freed from the logic of repressive categories, and permanently deterritorialized, unable to be recaptured by the socius to have their desires recoded. Thus, the authors advocate a type of psychotherapy called schizoanalysis. They do not literally want to make people schizophrenic but they think an individual can liberate themselves by taking on aspects of the decoded flows that characterize people suffering from that clinical disorder. They wish to dissolve the tyranny that Oedipus has over the desiring-machines of the unconscious so that people can free themselves from the prisons and injustices of capitalism, making it possible to achieve a fuller, richer life.

     So that sums up some of the main ideas in Anti-Oedipus. Where does that leave the reader? Probably confused. There are plenty of descriptions to support these ideas but it isn’t really necessary to understand all the minute details to understand the book. At first you might be impressed by the complexity of the authors’ work. It is an intricate and complete system nd you might even feel self-congratulatory for having understood a lot of it. But with a little distance, something seems to be wrong. While their argument can be understood with a good deal of effort, it appears to be disconnected from reality. There is no doubt that there are flows through the socius and capitalism does appear to succeed at expanding both internal and external limits. But are there really desiring-machines in the unconscious? By what mechanism does capitalism encode, overcode, decode, and recode deterritorialized surplus value? Who is responsible for doing this? Is it happening by instinct? Are the captains of industry conspiring with psychotherapists to operate this machinery? That would take us into the domain of conspiracy theories, wouldn’t it? How can we be sure any of this is real? There is certainly no empirical way to justify this work of philosophy. It is like a city made of vapor that blows away in the wind when you finish the book.

     If we can choose between capitalism and schizophrenia, is schizophrenia really the better choice? The use of schizoanalysis to guide the patient to the body without organs certainly has its risks and could leave the individual being unable to survive. At best, they would probably be a lone eccentric or possibly even one of those homeless people yelling at ghosts on the street corner. Would this kind of deterritorialization really be a legitimate foundation for a society? One might venture to speculate that capitalism is at least stable and relatively safe despite all its horrible shortcomings. Deleuze and Guattari appear to be advocating a naive form of libertarian individualism that could ultimately lead to nothing more than the social and mental isolation of the individual. There are not many radical anarchists out there who could even entertain the idea of living naked in the woods while scavenging for bugs and wild mushrooms to eat for the sake of spiting capitalists. Deleuze and Guattari simply do not make a strong case for the idea that schizophrenia is a desirable alternative to capitalism. They actually do not even make a strong case that capitalism is inherently undesirable either. They describe capitalism in their own unique way but never say much about why it is wrong.

     On top of all that, this book is written using the language of psychoanalysis and the Oedipal complex is the cornerstone of the authors’ thesis. But psychoanalysis is now considered a pseudo-science. Freud has been disproven over and over again. No one believes in Oedipus anymore. Schizoanalysis never made any headway in the psychiatric community either. It could be safe to say that the only people who even know what it is are those who have read this book. And that also revolves around the idea that they were able to comprehend it in the first place.

     Gilles Deleuze once said that works of philosophy are more like works of art than arguments. They should be appreciated for their systematic structure and descriptive language. Taken at that level, Anti-Oedipus is an impressive work. But then you have to wonder why they chose to write it in the first place. Critiquing capitalism and advocating for a new form of psychoanalysis that would radically change the political system doesn’t mean much as a work of art for art’s sake. This is a work that demands its readers put its ideas into action. In the end, it is too dated and disconnected from the real world to be of real value. Even so, Anti-Oedipus is still a real accomplishment because of its intellectual rigor and the way ot forces the reader to keep thinking while goes along.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Penguin Books, New York: 1972. 

 

Book Review

Book Review

Society Of the Spectacle

by Guy Debord

     Guy Debord was a founding member and the prime theoretician of the Situationist International, an art school that developed out of the later stages of the Surrealist movement. They were reacting against commodity fetishism, as it was defined by the Surrealists, the idea that consumer goods hold a magic power over their owners. Eventually the artistic side of the group fell away and the remainder of the SI turned to urban guerilla politics. They played a key role in the events of May 1968 in France. Debord’s Society Of the Spectacle outlines his concept of what commodity fetishism does to the masses and how it alienates them from themselves.

     This short treatise utilizes ideas from Hegel and Marx. From Hegel’s phenomenology we get a description of a “geist”, which could be defined as a type of motivational spirit that defines a particular society and era. Debord here is defining this geist as the Spectacle, the post-World War II capitalist boom in which a deluge of luxury consumer items were made available to the masses. Along with this surge of material goods came advertising, a solidification of the hierarchical nature of society, and the resulting psychological anomie. This is where Marx comes in.

     Marx, in his day, introduced the concept of “worker alienation”, the syndrome where a factory laborer feels no personal connection to the machinery they operate. They spend the majority of their time pulling levers and turning gears on machines they don’t understand to make products they will never afford to buy in order to make money for the bourgeoisie that they will never personally know. The end result is the disappearance of meaning in life. Debord extends and shifts this idea to mid/late capitalist society where the consumer finds identity in what they own. While the existentialists said “you are what you do”, the Situationists said “you are what you own”. If people’s identity is defined by what they buy, then they invest most of their mental energy into the purchase of consumer goods, most of which have no functional or inherent value, and become alienated from themselves. Lacking reflective self-consciousness, anomie and depression become more intense as they get blindly led like rats through the capitalist maze with no exit, being lured along by advertisers in pursuit of fulfilling an elusive desire that they can not even control or comprehend.

     Guy Debord was a radical leftist but he had no sympathy for communism despite his use of Marx in his critique of society. A whole section of this book is about the miseries of the Soviet Union, a corporatist political construct in which state ideology is the spectacle, or geist, to which people collectively adhere. Communism has no room for individual expression because individuality leads to disruptions in the direct line of communication from the dictators of the ruling class to the submissive block of factory and farm workers whose sole purpose is to follow orders, maintaining the functionality of the state machinery. Debord thus concludes that, while both communism and capitalism are inherently miserable and oppressive systems, capitalism is better because it leaves open more possibility for subversion. An individual can buy a printing press or a movie camera and make consumer goods, like newspapers and films, that can be weaponized to destroy the domination of the spectacle, freeing the masses from the illusion.

     These are some of the most interesting ideas in the book. Other topics briefly covered are the spectacle’s evolution throughout history, its relation with time and space, and the need for the proletariat to awaken to their role as subjective actors in the historical process. That last point could use further development and criticism. Debord falls into the same trap that makes so many leftists ineffectual: leftists are good at diagnosing and articulating society’s problems but they fall short when it comes to providing plausible solutions. Society Of the Spectacle is no exception in this regard.

     Guy Debord’s short tract lays out a vision of the spectacle as a motivating but damaging illusion that drains modern society of its passions, vivacity, and meaning. As a philosophical work, it does not argue or assert its argument. Debord instead describes it as he sees it and lets the reader decide on its accuracy and merit. The critique is rudimentary but would later get elaborated on by Jean Baudrillard. If you think Situationism is outdated or inaccurate, try applying the idea of commodity fetishism to the current obsession with smartphones and tablets. The younger generation lives their social lives by creating internet personas on social media platforms; they manufacture their own image and identity and invest so much energy into doing so that the end result is epidemic proportions of depression, loneliness, suicide, mental illness, and social dislocation. Agoraphobia has become normalized. Recent studies have shown that IQ levels have been dropping since the internet became the central focus of our culture. Debord’s thesis may have been rudimentary in its time but it also was prescient, seminal, and prophetic. 

Debord, Guy. Society Of the Spectacle. Black & Red, Detroit: 1983.

 

Book Review

Book Review

The Rebel by Albert Camus

     Your impressions of Albert Camus’ The Rebel will mostly depend on how familiar you are with his subject matter. Camus draws heavily on fiction, philosophy, art, and European history since the Enlightenment. The more you know about these, the easier this book will be. It simply is not a book for young and inexperienced readers. Having said that, with a considerable amount of mental discipline and a long attention span, it is something that can be read by novices even if only to grasp the main ideas.

     The Rebel was written to be a philosophical companion piece for his novel The Plague. Metaphysical rebellion is the theme. In this philosophical work, Camus moves on from the story of Sisyphus to those of Prometheus and Milton’s Lucifer. He defines metaphysical rebellion as a rejection of the conditions of existence. The rebel is one who simultaneously says “no” and “yes”; they say no to their position of servitude and the suffering of all but also say yes to the prospect of justice and freedom. The rebel is someone whose long term goal is self-actualization, totality, completion, and unity with everything. This latter point is not clear or easy to grasp at first but after he explains the philosophy of Hegel, it makes a lot more sense.

     The concept of nihilism is central to this book. Camus goes on to parse and explain its different forms, illustrating its different facets with examples from literature, philosophy, and art. He exemplifies the concept of absolute nihilism with the writings of the Marquis de Sade; this negation of values is purely destructive. It does not create anything from the ruins it leaves behind. Ultimately it leads to contradictions, self-negation, and an inevitable self-destruction. The other side of this is Friedrich Nietzsche who used nihilism as a tool to renounce all of existence. While Nietzsche sought to dismantle all values, his ultimate purpose was to to rebuild a new and higher form of existence. His nihilism was a step along a path to greater ways of living in the future. Finally, the Surrealist art movement is used to show how nihilism and creativity can be combined through art to make something useful and fulfilling out of rebellion. All of these analyses are excellent and Camus had a deep understanding of those intellectual trends which he communicates effectively to those who have already been initiated into those methods of thought. The sequence of introducing those concepts is significant too because it determines the later course of this book.

     The theoretical part of The Rebel continues on with an exceptionally good explication of G.W.F. Hegel’s phenomenology. An individual human is validated through recognition by other people. Through self-assertion, an individual achieves self validation by making themselves known, meaning that the more recognizable they are, the more validated they are to themselves. Hegel’s major dilemma is that societies are made up of masters and slaves, the dominators and the the dominated, the managers and the workers, the owners and the owned. A rebel seeks validation by breaking free from their servant status and establishing themselves as a master. This is a movement in the direction of totality and one that seeks increasing validation through increasing domination over others. Taken too far, this leads to tyranny and cruelty, sometimes even destruction and in the worst cases, the totality of destruction can result in self-destruction along with the destruction of everything surrounding the rebel. Camus’ description of Hegel is crystal clear and relatively easy to follow; for this reason, The Rebel is worth reading for the passages on Hegel alone, especially if you have read Hegel and got thoroughly confused by his opaque writing style. That seems to be the case for most people who try to read him.

     Hegel’s theory of history was one of dialectics. Political conflicts will continue through a process of evolution, progress, and refinement until the need for conflict no longer arises. Then humanity will unite with God, material and its essence will be one, phenomena and noumena will be perfectly united, and history will end. This idea directly influenced the writings of Karl Marx and led to the establishment of the communist state in Russia with the Hegelian goal of ending history in mind.

     While a direct line can be drawn from Hegel to Marx, Adolf Hitler claimed to be a philosophical heir to Nietzsche. Camus, an avid Nietzsche scholar himself, demonstrates how the Nazis deliberately misread and misused the theory of the ubermensch while ignoring more beneficial human concerns in those writings. Camus also succeeds in showing how it would be more accurate to draw an ancestral line from the absolute nihilism of the Marquis de Sade to National Socialism which resulted in the suicidal spasm of an entire nation. Hitler’s plan was for never-ending warfare and his inability to articulate a vision of post-war society led to Nazi defeat and the collapse of the German nation.

     Camus’ historical analysis of communism in the Soviet Union takes up most of The Rebel. Camus, in how own way, was reacting against the widespread support for communism and even Stalinism among French intellectuals during the 1950s. His depiction of the Soviet revolutionary government is one of injustice, sterility, and stagnation. Where the Soviets were undoubtedly superior in terms of rationality, they were severely lacking in terms of creativity. This is where Camus brings in the need for art to stabilize society because without art, rebels and revolutionaries will not know when to stop in their quest for totality and absolute freedom. Maybe he is right since communist doctrine ended up having more in common with religion than it did with the sciences it claimed as kin. Without the outsider’s perspective of the artists, there was no way for the Soviets to question their practices or see themselves from alternate points of view.

     Camus’ concept of the rebel as artist is probably the most controversial part of this book. He introduces the concept but never fully examines its implications. He does not address the efficacy of the solution he proposes for the conflicts he introduces. It sounds good in theory but now in the 21^st century it is obvious that world leaders have no interest in using art for self-reflection so it may not be so sound in practice. Maybe Camus felt like he was cheating his readers for not proposing a solution to his dilemma but, a lot like the concept of God, it seems like a simple solution tacked on at the end of an inquiry to answer an unanswerable problem. Or maybe it is an invitation for future intellectuals to examine the concept on their own.

     Overall, The Rebel might be a challenging read but Albert Camus provides a strong defense of his thesis. His concept of rebellion and revolution can be transported from mid-century Europe to probably any other place or time. Not only is it useful for explaining intellectual and political movements but it can also be used as a tool to explain things like counter-cultural movements, social justice activism, and religious institutions like sects and mind-control cults. It can even be applied to mundane affairs like the social dynamics of business, be they small mom-and-pop operations or massive corporations, as well as educational institutions, sports teams, online discussion groups, and mass media outlets. It could be said that the first effective step in rebellion is accurately understanding the mechanisms of power so Camus can certainly be an aid in that endeavor.

Camus, Albert. The Rebel. Vintage Books, New York: 1956.

Postmodernism Isn’t A Scourge on Civil Society—It’s Just a Pointless Indulgence

Postmodernism has taken some heat in recent years. Anyone with the capacity to say I don’t know who has taken a close look at it since it first emerged from mid-twentieth century France has considered it, at best, very silly, and some of them have bothered to say as much publicly.

Read the full article on Areo here

Book Review

Book Review

What Is Property?

by Pierre_Joseph Proudhon

     “Property is theft” is one of those literary sentences that gets stuck in your head as if someone permanently burned it into your gray matter with a branding iron. What Is Property? is Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s attempt at explaining what it means. Understanding his argument is certainly an intellectual challenge.

     First Proudhon explains how he defines “property”. This is not as easy as it may seem since he does not follow the common understanding of “property” in terms of possession and ownership of something, most often an object, money, real estate, or intellectual property. On one hand, he defines it as synonymous with a concept like “attribute” or “characteristic”. The properties of the human body include a head, a torso, limbs, organs and everything else an average human being is composed of. He extends this definition to include objects that a human owns, possesses, or uses. Humans are users of tools so ownership of tools is perfectly alright in Proudhon’s mind. These two kinds of property are acceptable to him. The property he objects to is a landlord’s or businessman’s appropriation of goods produced by laborers in exchange for money. The semantic root of “property” and “appropriation” are philologically linked so that “appropriate” would mean “to take property away from someone”. This type of business transaction is what Proudhon rants against when he says “property is theft”.

     The reasoning behind this notion can be tricky and confusing. This is probably because Proudhon had not followed his own chain of logic to its end. It goes something like this: one laborer extracts raw materials from the Earth, another laborer forges them into tools, and those tools get used to do farm work. Each laborer along the chain adds something of value to the crops that are the final product. If we were to calculate a value for each step in the process based on time and effort spent in work we could conclude that each vegetable or piece of fruit is worth x amount of money when the proprietor comes to collect his goods. He buys the food in bulk which means that he pays less per item than the sum of the cost of labor put into its production. Since “labor” is a property of a laborer, each laborer in the chain of production owns a portion of all the crops that are later sold. So when a tenant farmer receives payment for his produce, the property of each laborer is being appropriated by the proprietor against their will. Therefore, property is theft and the proprietor is a criminal. After following Proudhon’s reasoning, it makes sense. Well at least it does for about twenty or thirty seconds. The if you start to think about it in detail, the whole theory falls apart. This is as close as he comes to constructing a logically coherent argument.

     The following section is an explication of the concept “property is impossible”. Proudhon sets the bar higher here and some of his arguments in this part are smart, a little more clear and a littlre more clever. One of his strongest points is that a piece of farmland exists in time and space. The farm itself may be sentient but the land it is on exists eternally. Furthermore, space and time are physical dimensions, kind of like vessels that are filled with things like farms, farmers, and crops. The landlord holds a lease giving the time of purchase and the boundaries of the land tract he owns but the lease does not state that he owns the time and space in which the land tract exists. That is because it is impossible for any human to own the abstract dimensions of time and space just as it is impossible for a finite being to own something that exists infinitely like a section of Earth. Therefore, property is impossible. It is like saying a wagon is made out of wood and the wood is made out of molecules which are made out of atoms that are made out of subatomic particles. No one can actually own subatomic particles so that means the wagon can not be owned. Now try stealing a car and using that argument as a defense in court; you would probably not be found innocent but you might end up getting locked in a hospital for the criminally insane rather than the federal penitentiary. It is an interesting concept but too far from the real world to be of much value. It might make an interesting topic of discussion in a law class though.

     The third and final section is a rant. Proudhon derails his narrative fequently, starting with an etymological examination of the word “theft” which shifts into a summary of Hegel, followed by some religious sermonizing, a declaration of anarchism as the only logical form of governing, and it all ends with a rather bizarre and hysterical statement that the idea of property being theft will wipe out the older ways of life and usher in a new utopian paradise of freedom, justice, and equality for all. Despite Proudhon’s inability to stay on topic, this section contains some of the clearest and most well written thoughts in the book.

     What Is Property? is a strange book. Even the most fanatical anarchists would concede that the logic has a few shortcomings. One obvious flaw is that the statements “property is theft” and “property s impossible” are mutually exclusive concepts; you obviously can not steal something that doesn’t exist. At best Proudhon will be remembered as a minor footnote in history which is certainly more than I can say for myself or most of you who are reading this, by the way. Despite his rudimentary thinking, Proudhon was one of the first theorists of anarchism and his ideas had a strong influence on Karl Marx who lifted the ideas of collective ownership and the elimination of the bourgeoisie class directly from his thinking. Marx and Proudhon were actually friends until the two had a falling out and died as enemies.

     Even if Proudhon’s thinking is confused and underdeveloped, knowing something about his life puts it into a clearer perspective. Proudhon grew up in a family of tenant farmers. He saw first hand how the people he knew struggled with the hardest physical labor and lived in extreme poverty while the landlord paid them pennies so he could sell their crops and make a fortune doing little more than signing receipts and lending money at interest. Proudhon was good at reading, got accepted at a college and saw the French Revolution come and go, leaving the poor farmers poor and the aristocrats rich. He saw that the replacement with monarchy by parliament left the general populace just as oppressed as ever. He desperately wanted to transform society so the farm laborers would have their fair share in life. What Is Property? Can be seen as an attack on the economic and political injustice of the world. Despite its naivite and limited scope, it is a sincere fight in favor of the common people who deserve more than what they get. Proudhon had no chance of winning this battle but he was determined to keep up the attack until the end. There is something admirable and noble about his attitude.

     So is property theft? Proudhon does not make a convincing case but in failing to prove his point he raises a lot of questions about society and morality that are legitimate and worth contemplating. The statement “Property is theft” is like William S. Burroughs claim that “language is a virus”. It is one sentence that has become detached from its original context to fly freely through the ethers of abstract thought to this day, a power-chord riffing through the symphonies of intellectual debate. It is a mind-blowing thought that survives long past any other ideas put forth by Proudhon.

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. What Is Property? Cambridge University Press, New York: 1992. 

On Noam Chomsky’s Theory of Human Nature

Noam Chomsky is perhaps the most famous (or infamous) academic who is also a prominent public intellectual. Chomsky is known first and foremost for his decades of activism on the political left: opposing American imperialism, advocating for egalitarian and democratic social policies and engaging in feuds with prominent right-wing intellectuals. Now in his 90s, Chomsky continues to pursue a dizzyingly busy schedule focusing on political activism, including an interview with yours truly, which will be livestreamed on 16 April. Love him or hate him, Chomsky’s energy is impressive.

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Book Review

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World

by David Deutsch

     Theoretical physicist David Deutsch presents us with an onslaught of ideas. The Beginning of Infinity is an attempt at combining various branches of science with the branch of philosophical epistemology. While a wide range of explication and analysis is contained here, the quality of his ideas shifts from good to bad and back again.

     The core idea of this book is that humans are a unique species of beings on our planet and what makes us unique is our ability to generate knowledge; what makes this knowledge so significant is that we create explanations and because of this ability, problem solving has become the skill that ensures our chances of survival as well as the capacity to make infinite progress in our ability to understand. Every advance in knowledge is a beginning of infinity, an entryway into a string of continuously improving explanations of what reality is. This process starts with statements of conjecture that get analyzed and modified; every problem that gets solved leads to a giant leap in knowledge but also opens us up to new problems as well, in an infinite series of solutions and dilemmas that can never be complete. Europe’s Age of Enlightenment saw the beginning of an explosion of science and rationality that is still in the process of unfolding now.

     The importance of forming explanations is at the core of this core idea. Explanations can be good or bad and scientific knowledge advances when bad explanations are replaces by good explanations. Examples of bad explanations are mystical or religious forms of causality, vague or inaccurate observations, and the conflation of ideas that have no bearing or relation on one another such as the position of stars and the occurrence of terrestrial events promoted by astrologers. Even more important is that the details of bad explanations can be altered without having to make any alterations in the claims they support. Good explanations, on the other hand, can not be varied without significantly changing their claim. The thesis and sub-thesis of this book are provocative and worthy of consideration.

     In the process of analyzing and testing conjectures, humans are prone to making errors and inaccurate judgments. Deutsch does an adequate job of identifying and defining these impediments to accurate knowledge. Some of them, like anthrocentrism and relativism seem right on the mark while others like inductivism and empiricism appear to be somewhat problematical. Empiricism, or the idea that we derive knowledge from our senses, can not be so easily written off. Deutsch explains that our senses deceive us; we can not see that the Earth is round from our vantage point and we can not feel it rotating. Instead, he claims we learn this information indirectly through the use of scientific instruments like telescopes, satellites, computers, and Foucault’s pendulum. It can be accepted that some forms of data are experienced indirectly but this does not disprove empiricism because we depend on our senses to observe and analyze the information gathered by theses instruments; without the sense of sight, any images captured in a telescope would be useless. Telescopes and satellites extend, amplify, and enhance our senses and without empiricism they would be impossible to construct or use. Empiricism is the reason that blind people do not become surgeons. Just because the empiricist philosopher David Hume made some inaccurate statements in his writings does not mean that all of empiricism has to be abandoned. We do not obtain scientific knowledge through inspiration, telepathy, divine revelation, or mystical communion. The information has to be communicated to us somehow and that process takes place because of empirical experience even if that merely means using our sight to read a graph or using our hearing to listen to another scientist explaining mathematics. Deutsch scores some big victories from the start of his book but also makes some horribly problematic claims as well.

     The book proceeds into the use of these ideas as tools to explain various branches of science like cosmology, space exploration, and evolution. These chapters are interesting, clearly written, and accessible to the lay-person, though a non-scientist may have some trouble judging the soundness of Deutsch’s arguments if they do not have enough background knowledge. One chapter explains the mathematics of infinity in challenging but comprehensible terms that can be grasped by people who are not mathematically inclined. The most imaginative chapter involves Socrates engaging in a dialogue with Hermes during a dream. They discuss the need for epistemology and the conflict between static and dynamic societies, a key concept that permeates the rest of the book. Static societies believe themselves to be perfect, are resistant to change or creativity, and depend on authoritarian rule. A dynamic society strives eternally for an open-ended perfection and so engages in a never ending quest to improve on what is already known. By strictly contrasting the two, Deutsch relies on a false dilemma fallacy and an oversimplification that could easily have been avoided if he had followed his own advice and generated a good explanation for his claim. Besides, it seems most societies combine both stasis and dynamism and even thrive because of the tension between the two. Societies need to have some degree of stasis to remain stable but they also need to be dynamic enough to adapt to inevitable change. Leaning too far in one direction or the other can cause a society to collapse.

     This is where The Beginning of Infinity completely falls apart. Deutsch leaves science behind and launches into a chapter about the fallibilty of representative democracy in America. A reader may get a couple pages into this chapter and wonder why it was even included in the book. It appears that Deutsch is trying to demonstrate that Western nations are more progressive because they embrace the idea of improvement and auto-correction. It seems that he is also trying to show that his concept of good explanation and infinite progress have reach outside of science and into other areas of human endeavor. These messages get buried in a dull and muddled mess about the shortcomings of coalition governments and why a representative democracy is mathematically impossible but still superior to other forms of government.

     Another confusing chapter is one where Deutsch attempts to demonstrate the existence of objective beauty. Genetically speaking, flowers and bees evolved simultaneously so that their symbiotic relationship would ensure the survival of both species. This is quite interesting but he tries to make a logistical leap and explain that flowers look beautiful because human genes adapted to find them attractive in a similar way. But he does not give a complete answer as to how humans benefited from this adaptation. He also does not take into account that there are vast numbers of people who are indifferent to whether flowers are actually beautiful or not. Some people even hate them. But this leads into a discussion on how humans evolved to find objective beauty in music and art, specifically the orchestral works of Mozart. He points out that musical expression reached a peak in Mozart’s day because he lived in a dynamic society that valued change and innovation and a static society could never have produced such a genius. This is probably true but his concept of objective perfection in aesthetics is entirely Eurocentric which qualifies it as a subject form of beauty rather than an objective one. Besides, in the entire world’s population, the people who actively listen to and enjoy Mozart are a minority. Professional wrestling is more popular internationally than classical music. Even worse, the example of Mozart contradicts his claim that in dynamic societies the process of analysis, modification, and correction lead us along an eternal path of getting closer to truth; it can only be stated as an opinion that classical music has developed into forms that are more complex, superior, and perfect than Mozart. Deutsch never even takes into account that Mozart’s The Magic Flute has never been considered to be much of anything but junk by most his listeners which might make the case that Mozart was the peak of aesthetic realization a little weaker.

     If aesthetics have evolved, classical music may or may not have gotten better but what about other forms of art and entertainment that came post-Mozart? We not only have John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix but there is are also aesthetic forms like the bad taste films of John Waters, death metal, industrial music and power electronics, niche and fetish categories of pornography, the Cinema of Transgression, the art of Hermann Nitzsch, the Viennese Actionists, and Paul McCarthy, all of which embrace an aesthetic of ugliness, offensiveness, or disturbing content. Adherents to these forms of aesthetics might willingly admit that Mozart is artistically superior but they probably would not spend much time listening to his music either. So how do these art forms fit in with the optimistic view of human progress held by David Deutsch? Maybe the concepts of progress and evolution need to be separated? In any case, his examples of flowers and Mozart do not sufficiently make the case that objective beauty exists.

     By far, the worst chapter in the book is the one describing the multiverse theory of quantum mechanics. He starts off with some stuff about transporter technology in the Star Trek tv series, veers off into some other stuff about writing a science fiction novel about a man and woman who fall in love on a spaceship, then mashes all this up with explanations of parallel universes and alternate threads of history. It is a confusing, disjointed mess. Ironically, the most poorly written chapter is also about Deutsch’s pet theory and area of expertise, one he admittedly says is not popular with other theoretical physicists. He says his theory of the multiverse is the most correct and condemns its critics for using instrumentalism and bad explanations to disprove it; other than that he never gives any details as to why they are wrong. He just states that hey are and moves on. He is capable of describing these things too; if you look him up on Youtube you will find his videos where he clearly explains these concepts. Even worse, this chapter seems entirely arbitrary; it does not fit snugly in with the main thesis of the book and does nothing to enhance the other concepts he presents either.

The Beginning of Infinity picks up again with a good section on the evolution and replication of genes and memes that is rooted in the work of Richard Dawkins. Deutsch ruins himself, though, as he takes up the idea of static and dynamic societies again. He makes the claim that Native American societies were static and post-Enlightenment white people were dynamic then dives headfirst into Social Darwinist territory by claiming that Native Americans failed because they never taught themselves how to domesticate animals. So their cultural evolution “failed” because they did not arrive at the same endpoint as Europeans? For the most part, the indigenous people of the Americas were not only surviving but thriving on their own terms until the Europeans showed up with their guns and their syphilis and tried to ethnically cleanse them. If left alone, they could very well have developed some form of science or industry, possibly even something entirely different that Europeans could never have conceived of. We will never know because the invaders decimated them.

     Deutsch attributes this “failure” to the inability of Native American people to use their imaginations. So the people who crossed the Baring Strait from Russia and migrated throughout the entire continents of North and South America as well as the Caribbean Islands were incapable of imagination? How does that lack of imagination account for the pictographic writing system of the Mayans or the empire built by the Aztecs? How about the Aztec pyramids? How did people with no imagination develop a rich tapestry of mythology, folklore, and shamanic practices? What about the Navajo language that is considered to be one of the most semantically and syntactically complex languages in the world? These are products of people who had no imagination?

     Archaeology does not support the idea that Native Americans were static and incapable of innovation either. Some societies evolved from using bone tools to carving stone into tools and sometimes combining them with sharp minerals like obsidian. Southwestern pueblo architecture and pottery production showed clear signs of cultural evolution. Some tribes evolved from being bands of hunter-gatherer nomads into sedentary or semi-sedentary agricultural societies. Complex tribal federations created by the Cherokees and Iroquois show an ability to innovate politically as well.

Deutsch claims they were incapable of innovation because they never tried to domesticate the woolly mammoths or mastodons that existed in North America when they arrived and instead killed them off by over-hunting. But think for a minute. If you were a nomad in a band of fifty people or so and you encountered a woolly mammoth, wouldn’t it make sense to kill it? If your immediate need is food it would supply your band with enough to last a while and also provide skins for clothes and bones for tools and weapons. It seems like trying to catch a woolly mammoth, tame it, learn how to ride it and use it for work would not only be precarious and dangerous but also a tremendous waste of time and effort. A giant hairy elephant would not present itself as something easy to control and losing a person or two in the attempt could be devastating to a small society where all members would contribute to the band’s chances of survival. We also do not know what they thought. Maybe they imagined taming the animals but failed in their attempts to do so.

     Deutsch goes on to say that static societies are more like animals than dynamic societies. It gets worse when he says this is not a racist theory because static societies are not genetically inferior humans; they are psychologically inferior instead. As if that is not racist; transferring a racist concept from one domain to another does not make the concept not racist. He continues on with the idea that Western societies are psychologically superior because of their achievements in science and we can almost hear alt.right douschebags like Gavin McInnes and Steve Bannon cheering in the background. Deutsch’s entire explanation of Native Americans as a static society is based on cherry picking and hasty conclusions. He does not appear to know much about the history of indigenous people but that is probably because he spent his life in the laboratory and very little time learning about human societies or even being a social part of the modern world. Besides, Western ingenuity also gave the world garbage like the music of Kid Rock, the Jerry Springer tv show, cell phone addicts, Hitler, marmite, McDonald’s, telemarketing, and football hooligans. And isn't Eurocentric thinking only one step away from antrocentric thinking anyhow? But like he says, every problem that gets solved creates new problems. So on to infinity.

David Deutsch has some great ideas but unfortunately, the bad chapters in The Beginning of Infinity have a tendency to overshadow the better parts. He does a good job of writing and analyzing when he sticks to the hard sciences but when he goes outside his areas of expertise the results are disastrous. And for someone who promotes the idea of progress resulting from good explanations, he does provide an awful lot of bad explanations along the way. But according to him, all claims are fallible so he should be willing to own up to his own shortcomings in thinking. But maybe that is the point. This is a book of conjectures and by analyzing, modifying, and correcting their fallibilities we are making progress towards higher levels of truth. Maybe David Deutsch does not want to tell us what to think but would rather have us make an attempt at finding a beginning of infinity for ourselves. For that reason this book has some value despite all its flaws.

Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World. Penguin Books, New York: 2011.