tag:theconversation.com,2011:/africa/topics/philosophers-49026/articlesPhilosophers – The Conversation2023-04-25T12:28:22Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2026962023-04-25T12:28:22Z2023-04-25T12:28:22ZWhat Socrates’ ‘know nothing’ wisdom can teach a polarized America<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521089/original/file-20230414-24-tyvncl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=34%2C9%2C2082%2C1400&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The most important part of knowledge, in Socrates' view? Knowing how much you don't know.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/socrates-statue-royalty-free-image/521822255?phrase=socrates&adppopup=true">Yoeml/iStock via Getty Images Plus</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A common complaint in America today is that politics and even society as a whole <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/american-system-broken/616991/">are broken</a>. Critics point out endless lists of what should be fixed: the complexity of <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/column-need-rewrite-tax-code-scratch">the tax code</a>, or <a href="https://www.uschamber.com/immigration/calling-on-congress-fix-americas-broken-immigration-system">immigration reform</a>, or the inefficiency of government.</p>
<p>But each dilemma usually comes down to polarized deadlock between two competing visions and everyone’s conviction that theirs is the right one. Perhaps this white-knuckled insistence on being right is the root cause of the societal fissure – why everything seems so irreparably wrong.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/rs/faculty/jt27">religion</a> and <a href="https://www.uml.edu/fahss/philosophy/faculty/kaag-john.aspx">philosophy</a> scholars, we would argue that our apparent national impasse points to a lack of “epistemic humility,” or intellectual humility – that is, an inability to acknowledge, empathize with and ultimately compromise with opinions and perspectives different from one’s own. In other words, Americans have stopped listening.</p>
<p>So why is intellectual humility in such scarce supply? Of course, the quickest answer might be the right one: that humility runs against most people’s <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-be-wrong/id1603230204">fear of being mistaken</a>, and the zero-sum view that being right means someone else has to be totally wrong. </p>
<p>But we think that the problem is more complex and perhaps more interesting. We believe <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wisdom/">epistemic humility</a> presents something of a twofold danger that makes being humble frightening – and has, ever since Socrates first put it at the heart of Western philosophy.</p>
<h2>Knowing you don’t know</h2>
<p>If your best friend told you that you were the wisest of all human beings, perhaps you would be inclined to smile in agreement and take the dear friend for a beer. But when the ancient Athenian Socrates was delivered this news, he responded with sincere and utter disbelief – even though his friend had confirmed it with the <a href="https://historycooperative.org/the-oracle-of-delphi/">Delphic oracle</a>, the fortune-telling authority of the ancient world. </p>
<p>This nascent humility – “No, get out of here, I’m definitely not the wisest” – helped spark what became arguably <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/">the greatest philosophical life of all time</a>. Despite relative old age, Socrates immediately embarked on a journey to find someone wiser than himself and spent many days seeking out the sages of the ancient world, a quest Plato recounts in his “<a href="https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-source/plato-the-apology-of-socrates-sb/">Apology of Socrates</a>.”</p>
<p>The problem? He discovered that the sages thought they knew more than they actually did. Eventually, Socrates concluded that he himself was, in fact, the wisest of all men, because at least he “knew that he didn’t know.”</p>
<p>This is not to say that Socrates knew nothing: He demonstrates time and again that he knows a lot and routinely demonstrated good judgment. Rather, he acknowledged there were definite limitations to the knowledge he could claim. </p>
<p>This is the birth of “epistemic humility” in Western philosophy: the acknowledgment that one’s blind spots and shortcomings are an invitation for ongoing intellectual investigation and growth.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521090/original/file-20230414-16-lfypqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A coffee mug, pencils, pen and cookies next to a note reading 'The only thing I know is that I know nothing – Socrates.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521090/original/file-20230414-16-lfypqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521090/original/file-20230414-16-lfypqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521090/original/file-20230414-16-lfypqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521090/original/file-20230414-16-lfypqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521090/original/file-20230414-16-lfypqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521090/original/file-20230414-16-lfypqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521090/original/file-20230414-16-lfypqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Reminder to self: Keep it humble.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/the-only-thing-i-know-is-that-i-know-nothing-quote-royalty-free-image/1289867552?phrase=socrates&adppopup=true">tumsasedgars/iStock via Getty Images Plus</a></span>
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<h2>Provoking the powerful</h2>
<p>But this mindset can feel dangerous to other people – especially if they feel absolutely certain in their convictions.</p>
<p>In ancient Athens, as much as in the U.S. today, being perceived as right translated into money and power. The city-state’s culture was dominated by the Sophists, who taught rhetoric to nobles and politicians, and the Poets, ancient playwrights. Greek theater and epic poetry <a href="https://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/civil/greece/gr1180e.html">were closely related to religion</a>, and their creators were treated as <a href="https://www.vast-project.eu/theatre/">mouthpieces for aesthetic and moral</a> truth.</p>
<p>What’s more, theater and poetry were also major moneymakers, which motivated artists to adopt a mentality of “fail fast, fail better,” with an eye to eventually proving correct and getting paid.</p>
<p>By critically interrogating the idols and polarized views of his culture, Socrates threatened the power holders of his city. A constantly questioning figure is a direct threat to individuals who spend their lives defending unquestioned belief – whether it’s belief in themselves, their superiors or their gods.</p>
<p>Take Euthyphro, for example, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1642/1642-h/1642-h.htm">one of Socrates’ principal interlocutors</a>. Euthyphro is so sure that he knows the difference between right and wrong that he is bringing his own father to trial. Socrates quickly disabuses him of his certainty, famously debating him about the true meaning of piety.</p>
<p>Or take Meletus, the man who eventually <a href="http://www.historyshistories.com/the-trial-of-socrates.html">brought Socrates to trial</a> on accusations of corrupting youth. In Plato’s account of the trial, it takes Socrates no time to show this “good patriot,” as Meletus calls himself, that he does not understand what patriotism truly means. Without any pretensions to knowing the absolute truth, Socrates is able to shed light on the underlying assumptions around him.</p>
<p>It’s frustrating to read <a href="https://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/plato/index.htm">the Platonic dialogues</a>, the works of philosophy that recount Socrates’ life and teaching, in part because Socrates rarely claims the final word on any subject. In short, he gives more questions than answers. But what remains constant is his openness to uncertainty that keeps his inquiry on the move, pushing his inquiries further and deeper.</p>
<h2>Paying the price</h2>
<p>The second danger of epistemic humility is now probably in view. It’s the danger that Socrates faced when he was brought to trial for corrupting Athens’ youth – the danger to the humble skeptics themselves.</p>
<p>He is brought up on <a href="http://www.historyshistories.com/the-trial-of-socrates.html">two very serious charges</a>. The first was an accusation that he taught students to make the weaker argument appear to be the stronger – which is actually what the Sophists did, not Socrates. The second was that he had invented new gods – again, he didn’t do that; poets and playwrights did.</p>
<p>What was he really guilty of? Perhaps only this: Socrates criticized the arrogant self-assertion of his culture’s influencers, and they brought him to trial, which concluded in his death sentence. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521091/original/file-20230414-24-tna6by.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Vibrant red and purple flowers behind a statue of a slumped-over man." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521091/original/file-20230414-24-tna6by.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/521091/original/file-20230414-24-tna6by.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521091/original/file-20230414-24-tna6by.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521091/original/file-20230414-24-tna6by.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521091/original/file-20230414-24-tna6by.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521091/original/file-20230414-24-tna6by.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/521091/original/file-20230414-24-tna6by.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">He asked the big questions, and he paid a price.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/sokrates-statue-in-the-parco-civico-of-lugano-royalty-free-image/519981918?phrase=socrates%20dying&adppopup=true">Roland Gerth/The Image Bank via Getty Images</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>Socrates taught that <a href="https://philosophynow.org/issues/53/Socratic_Humility">being humble about one’s own views</a> was a necessary step in searching for truth – perhaps the most essential one. That was and perhaps still is a revolutionary view, because it forces us to challenge preconceived ideas about what we believe, what we worship and where we tap meaning. He placed himself in the middle of Athenians’ sharply polarized debates about what truth and goodness were, and he was the one who got hit.</p>
<p>“Humility like darkness,” wrote American philosopher Henry David Thoreau, “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Walden/49qWhJ0gjZQC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Humility+like+darkness+Thoreau&pg=PA346&printsec=frontcover">reveals the heavenly lights</a>.” Put another way, humility about the verity, accuracy and wisdom of one’s ideas can reveal the fact that others have understandable reasons for thinking as they do — as long as you try to see the world as they are seeing it. In contrast, arrogance tends to extinguish the “heavenly light” about what we still don’t fully understand. </p>
<p>Being humble about one’s position in the world is not an invitation for a post-truth, anything-goes opinion free-for-all. Truth – the idea of truth – matters. And we can pursue it together, if we are always open to being wrong.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202696/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>This article was produced with support from UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center and the John Templeton Foundation as part of the GGSC's initiative on Expanding Awareness of the Science of Intellectual Humility.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>J. W. Traphagan and John J. Kaag do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointments.</span></em></p>Athens was deeply polarized over big-picture questions, and Socrates was never hesitant to question both sides’ assumptions – or his own.J. W. Traphagan, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, The University of Texas at AustinJohn J. Kaag, Professor of Philosophy, UMass LowellLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1972032023-01-10T17:15:46Z2023-01-10T17:15:46ZRichard Price: how one of the 18th century’s most influential thinkers was forgotten<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/503384/original/file-20230106-23-db9yxn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C2%2C1914%2C1069&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Richard Price reading a letter dated 1784 from his friend, Benjamin Franklin.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Benjamin West, National Library of Wales & Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>According to the eulogies and <a href="https://archive.org/details/sim_gentlemans-magazine_1791-04_61_4/page/388/mode/2up?q=price">obituaries</a> written at the time of his death in 1791, <a href="https://richardpricesociety.org.uk/">Richard Price’s</a> name would be remembered alongside figures such as Benjamin Franklin, John Locke, George Washington and Thomas Paine. </p>
<p>Three hundred years on from his birth in the village of Llangeinor, near Bridgend in south Wales, why has he therefore been lost from our popular memory? </p>
<p>After all, here was a polymath whose lasting contributions ranged across a number of disciplines, including moral philosophy, <a href="https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2013.00638.x">mathematics</a> and theology. Moreover, Price’s contribution as a public intellectual made a huge impact, not least in international politics. </p>
<p>A useful starting point are the parallels with his friend <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2015/oct/05/original-suffragette-mary-wollstonecraft?CMP=share_btn_link">Mary Wollstonecraft</a>. She was a philosopher, a women’s rights advocate and the mother of <a href="https://www.bl.uk/people/mary-shelley">Mary Shelley</a>. </p>
<p>Wollstonecraft was both inspired by Price and indebted to him. Indeed, her most influential texts are directly linked to Price and the pamphlet war known as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_Controversy">Revolution controversy</a>. </p>
<p>In these texts, influential thinkers discussed the political issues arising from the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/French-Revolution">French Revolution</a>. It has subsequently been recognised as a <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/26213839">formative debate in terms of modern political ideas. </a></p>
<p>It was Price who sparked the controversy with a sermon in 1789 entitled <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/A_Discourse_on_the_Love_of_Our_Country/92QNAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover">A Discourse on the Love of Our Country</a>, in which he supported the opening events of the revolution in France. </p>
<p>He declared it to be a continuation of the spreading of enlightened values and ideas introduced by the <a href="https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/parliamentaryauthority/revolution/">Glorious Revolution of 1688</a> in England. </p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Richard Price’s sermon to the Revolution Society in 1789.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This provoked a response from the philosopher and Anglo-Irish Whig MP <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edmund-Burke-British-philosopher-and-statesman">Edmund Burke</a>, with his famous text, <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/reflections-on-the-revolution-in-france-by-edmund-burke">Reflections on the Revolution in France</a>. </p>
<p>This is regarded as a formative text of modern conservative thought. It defended the importance of the traditional institutions of state and society while warning of the excesses of revolution. </p>
<p>In response, Wollstonecraft published <a href="https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/wollstonecraft-a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-men">A Vindication of the Rights of Men</a> in 1790. It was both a critique of Burke and a defence of Price, who died a year later. </p>
<p>Then in 1792, she wrote her profoundly influential <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/mary-wollstonecraft-a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman">A Vindication of the Rights of Woman</a>, explicitly extending dissenting ideals to women, with a searing social critique. </p>
<p>Both Price and Wollstonecraft would subsequently be written out of history. </p>
<p>Price’s biographer, <a href="https://www.uwp.co.uk/author/Paul-Frame-663/">Paul Frame</a>, suggests this can be partly accounted for by events in France and the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Reign-of-Terror">violent turn to terror during the French Revolution</a>. </p>
<p>As a result, <a href="https://www.uwp.co.uk/book/libertys-apostle-richard-price-his-life-and-times/">Frame suggests</a> Burke was “the man who had accurately predicted the direction of the Revolution”. This “undermined the more optimistic faith in rationalism and natural rights” of Price and others. </p>
<p>They both also suffered in terms of their personal reputation. Price became a caricature of the picture painted by Burke, captured in the cartoons of the day. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Satirical cartoon of Richard Price at his writing desk overlooked by a large nose and eyes surrounded by haze representing Edmund Burke, carrying a crown, a cross and a copy of his pamphlet." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/503100/original/file-20230104-70338-pvtb8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/503100/original/file-20230104-70338-pvtb8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503100/original/file-20230104-70338-pvtb8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503100/original/file-20230104-70338-pvtb8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503100/original/file-20230104-70338-pvtb8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503100/original/file-20230104-70338-pvtb8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503100/original/file-20230104-70338-pvtb8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A caricature of Richard Price with a vision of Edmund Burke looking over his shoulder, by James Gillray.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Library of Congress</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Wollstonecraft was posthumously <a href="https://lithub.com/how-a-husbands-loving-biography-ruined-his-wifes-reputation/">undone by the candid biography of her widower</a>, its contents deployed maliciously by those who sought to undermine her. Thankfully, <a href="https://theconversation.com/mary-wollstonecraft-statue-a-provocative-tribute-for-a-radical-woman-149888">her works and good name were recovered by the feminist movement</a>. </p>
<p>As Frame suggests however, there were deeper, structural factors at play. </p>
<p>Price was the embodiment of a reformism the British establishment had a material interest in thwarting. He represented a dissenting community whose <a href="https://welshchapels.wales/nonconformity/">nonconformist Christian denominations</a> were in opposition to the established church and discriminated against. </p>
<p>Price spoke out against the crown, slavery and chauvinistic nationalism. He advocated equality, democratic principles and civic nationalism. </p>
<p>The hostility towards the progressive forces he embodied was symbolised by the <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100452318;jsessionid=7677A3EB1D19321A218678801F2EDCD1">Seditious Meetings Act</a> introduced in 1795 to stifle the reform movement. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="An illustration from 1790 showing three men speaking from a church pulpit to a group of others reading and tearing up documents." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/503390/original/file-20230106-6729-mq16ci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/503390/original/file-20230106-6729-mq16ci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=841&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503390/original/file-20230106-6729-mq16ci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=841&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503390/original/file-20230106-6729-mq16ci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=841&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503390/original/file-20230106-6729-mq16ci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503390/original/file-20230106-6729-mq16ci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503390/original/file-20230106-6729-mq16ci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Richard Price, Joseph Priestley and Theophilus Lindsay in a 1790 engraving satirising the campaign to have the Test Act repealed.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">James Sayers</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There would have been very real consequences had it been Price and his ilk – and not Burke – who were lionised as the spirit of Britain (a state less than a century old at the time). Arguably, we still live with the ramifications today. </p>
<p>Price’s politics eventually had their day as the social tumult of the 19th century meant the tide of reform could not be stemmed. </p>
<p>Burke’s conservatism, however, conceivably still symbolises where the balance of power sits in terms of the UK’s political culture. The Tory party is often <a href="https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA271975015&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=15555623&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7E26847d25">still regarded as the natural party of power</a>, and deference towards the ruling classes remains. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A memorial stone dedicated to Richard Price in Newington Green Unitarian Church" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/503386/original/file-20230106-24-s9fgwp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/503386/original/file-20230106-24-s9fgwp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503386/original/file-20230106-24-s9fgwp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503386/original/file-20230106-24-s9fgwp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503386/original/file-20230106-24-s9fgwp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503386/original/file-20230106-24-s9fgwp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503386/original/file-20230106-24-s9fgwp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Memorial to Richard Price in Newington Green Unitarian Church in North London.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jonathan Cardy</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Given the collective amnesia towards him within Britain, it is perhaps apt that celebrations of Price’s life and works should begin this month with a talk at <a href="https://www.amphilsoc.org/events/electrifying-thinkers">the American Philosophical Association</a> in Philadelphia. </p>
<p>There will, however, be <a href="https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100089200358334">a programme of events at home</a> to reflect on his contribution and contemporary relevance. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1599865290761785344"}"></div></p>
<p>This will include a birthday celebration in Llangeinor, an academic conference, and <a href="https://contemporancient.org/">a play</a>. </p>
<p>If he has not been celebrated by a British culture, for which he had such high hopes, then it is high time it happened in Wales, at the very least.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/197203/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Huw L Williams works for Cardiff University who are a lead partner in the 'Price 300' project celebrating Richard Price's tercentenary in 2023. His work as a philosopher is part-funded by the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol, a government-funded body responsible for promoting academic activity and teaching through the medium of Welsh. He is the President of the Adran Athroniaeth Cymdeithas Cynfyfyrwyr Prifysgol Cymru that promotes philosophy through the medium of Welsh and Welsh-language philosophy.</span></em></p>He was an important philosopher, mathematician and social reformer of his time. But Richard Price was subsequently written out of history.Huw L Williams, Reader in Political Philosophy, Cardiff UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1960662022-12-07T15:14:01Z2022-12-07T15:14:01ZHegel is considered the hardest philosopher, but his views aren’t actually that outlandish<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499231/original/file-20221206-23-87jmu1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=35%2C6%2C965%2C502&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A lithograph depicting Hegel with his students.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Friedrich_Hegel_mit_Studenten_Lithographie_F_Kugler.jpg"> Franz Kugler</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>There has been much excitement at <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/29/manuscript-treasure-trove-may-offer-fresh-understanding-of-hegel">the discovery</a> of a treasure trove of notes from the lectures of the great German idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel.</p>
<p>The several thousand pages date from Hegel’s <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=GHWJQhWRNy0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Hegel:+A+Biography+by+Terry+Pinkard&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwir6pK329r7AhXgQkEAHd2hDvUQ6AF6BAgCEAI">time at the University of Heidelberg</a> (1816-18), when he returned to academic life after a nine-year absence. </p>
<p>He had previously worked as a newspaper editor and then a headmaster and philosophy teacher – inflicting his distinctive philosophical ideas on doubtless bemused pupils. Now finally, he could get back to lecturing and developing his philosophical system.</p>
<p>While the discovery is certainly exciting for nerds like me who work on Hegel, it is perhaps surprising that this find has received such attention more generally, especially outside Germany. After all, <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwid_Yyx6uT7AhXFoFwKHR23AFEQFnoECA0QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheconversation.com%2Flearning-from-bertrand-russell-in-todays-tumultuous-world-95405&usg=AOvVaw2QJv6C_aYZtjmhBXdTEm83">Bertrand Russell</a> was probably right to <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/HISTORY_OF_WESTERN_PHILOSOPHY/z2YAzwEACAAJ?hl=en">dub Hegel</a> “the hardest to understand of the great philosophers” – so why the interest?</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/sex-lies-and-hegel-did-the-intimate-lives-of-philosophers-shape-their-ideas-176570">Sex, lies and Hegel: did the intimate lives of philosophers shape their ideas?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<p>Maybe it lies in the hope that the new discoveries will at last bring clarity to Hegel’s difficult ideas and enable his significance to be properly understood. </p>
<p>If so, before rejoicing we should ask: why does Hegel have this tricky reputation? And is it reasonable to expect that this new set of lecture notes will finally shed light on what can seem so obscure about his thinking?</p>
<h2>Will this new discovery make Hegel any easier?</h2>
<p>There are perhaps grounds for optimism. While Hegel <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hegel/GHWJQhWRNy0C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=pinkard+hegel&printsec=frontcover">had a reputation</a> as a poor lecturer, mumbling along in his difficult <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swabian_German">Swabian</a> accent, we nonetheless know from <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/On_Art_Religion_and_the_History_of_Philo/ldLBRsCHgmUC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=hegel+lectures+philosophy+of+history&printsec=frontcover">transcripts from his students</a> that he was often easier to understand in his lectures than in his own texts.</p>
<p>Also, these newly discovered lectures come from an interesting period in Hegel’s development. He was writing the first edition of his <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Georg_Wilhelm_Friedrich_Hegel_Encycloped/qsLrAQAACAAJ?hl=en">Encyclopaedia</a> of the <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hegel_s_Philosophy_of_Nature/pQnOQlowPKMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=hegel+encylopedia+philosophical+sciences&printsec=frontcover">Philosophical</a> <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hegel_Philosophy_of_Mind/o94SDAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=hegel+encyclopedia+philosophical+sciences+mind&printsec=frontcover">Sciences</a>, in which he starts to publish his philosophical system. It is always illuminating to see a philosopher at work as they are bringing their ideas together.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, we shouldn’t get carried away. It is important to remember why understanding Hegel has always been so challenging.</p>
<h2>What makes Hegel so difficult?</h2>
<p>Hegel initially seems difficult due to his style and because he was writing for an audience of fellow idealists. If these were the only things that made him hard to understand, that might give us hope that this new material (which was instead aimed at students in the lecture hall) will prove illuminating. But the difficulty in understanding Hegel <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/">goes much deeper</a> than this.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499235/original/file-20221206-11-uyjrna.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Close up portrait of Hegel's face shows a strong nose, blue eyes, ageing skin and a cravat paired with a brown fur jacket." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499235/original/file-20221206-11-uyjrna.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499235/original/file-20221206-11-uyjrna.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=781&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499235/original/file-20221206-11-uyjrna.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=781&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499235/original/file-20221206-11-uyjrna.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=781&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499235/original/file-20221206-11-uyjrna.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499235/original/file-20221206-11-uyjrna.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499235/original/file-20221206-11-uyjrna.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A portrait of Hegel from 1831.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Georg_Wilhelm_Friedrich_Hegel#/media/File:1831_Schlesinger_Philosoph_Georg_Friedrich_Wilhelm_Hegel_anagoria.JPG">The Picture Art Collection</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For a start, his philosophical approach is fundamentally <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwi_096B6-T7AhWLX8AKHRv9B38QFnoECAoQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fconversational-leadership.net%2Flanguage-of-conversation%2F&usg=AOvVaw3BlfJZYqeNG_4JP5lrlT5g">dialectical</a>, which means he is trying to hold together ideas which we more naturally think of as in contradiction with one another. For example, he will argue that an individual can only be free if they are part of a community, even if this means limiting their desires.</p>
<p>The result is that for Hegel, many presumed stark oppositions must be overcome in order to make proper sense of ourselves and the world, including between mind and body, emotion and reason, intellect and will, the divine and the human. </p>
<p>He accepts that this is hard for us to grasp, as it often seems more intelligible to keep these oppositions in play. But for Hegel, we must see that moving beyond them is not contradictory at all, but is actually required for a coherent understanding of reality.</p>
<p>It’s unsurprising, then, that his views are also hard to pin down. He can seem at once both too liberal and too conservative. Too <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjor-DA6-T7AhXITcAKHWaqBlMQFnoECAgQAw&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheconversation.com%2Fthe-psychology-of-believing-in-free-will-97193&usg=AOvVaw3JWLsGhigcHRXJxtR6lRAx">deterministic</a> and too libertarian. Too religious and too secular.</p>
<h2>Further complications</h2>
<p>Hegel doesn’t just want to tell us how he sees things – he wants to take us through a process in which we come to see things this way for ourselves.</p>
<p>He does this for two main reasons. First, because otherwise we will not grasp what is at stake and so will slip back into easier but more one-sided thinking. </p>
<p>Second, he wants to avoid the kind of dogmatism that insists on the correctness of his view without showing you in your own terms what is wrong with yours. This is why, rather than signpost his discussions in the usual way, offering helpful comments that make his thinking easier to understand, Hegel prefers to step back and let the argument play out for the reader.</p>
<h2>Hegel’s final irony</h2>
<p>The final irony here is that Hegel’s views are actually much less bizarre and outlandish than many other philosophers with less challenging reputations, such as <a href="https://theconversation.com/is-god-good-in-the-shadow-of-mass-disaster-great-minds-have-argued-the-toss-137078">Leibniz</a> with his monads, <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjj7pyJ7OT7AhWlmFwKHc7IBE4QFnoECA0QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheconversation.com%2Fexplainer-the-ideas-of-kant-121881&usg=AOvVaw1kyHwiKyqQcdzgbDvJCTgy">Kant with his noumenal realm</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/solve-suffering-by-blowing-up-the-universe-the-dubious-philosophy-of-human-extinction-149331">Schopenhauer</a> with his metaphysics of the will.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499240/original/file-20221206-3888-vqxqzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black bust of Hegel's head sits atop a grey concrete column emblazoned with the word 'Hegel'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499240/original/file-20221206-3888-vqxqzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499240/original/file-20221206-3888-vqxqzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499240/original/file-20221206-3888-vqxqzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499240/original/file-20221206-3888-vqxqzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499240/original/file-20221206-3888-vqxqzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499240/original/file-20221206-3888-vqxqzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499240/original/file-20221206-3888-vqxqzf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An 1872 bust of Hegel by Gustav Blöser in Berlin.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hegel_B_Mitte.jpg">Miriam Guterland</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For Hegel, there is a natural world which is rationally ordered. This means it can be made comprehensible through various processes of inquiry. We are contained within it as free beings who can mutually recognise one another as free. </p>
<p>When rightly organised, he believes our communities will enable each of us to realise our natures as free beings. And the truth of all this is grasped in diverging but complementary ways by art, religion and philosophy.</p>
<p>But put simply like this, of course, one loses how deeply Hegel has to argue for his philosophical position, to guard against the more one-sided thinking that challenges it. As we have seen, it is this that makes his work so demanding.</p>
<p>While they are doubtless fascinating, I therefore doubt that these newly discovered lecture notes will render Hegel’s ideas easier to understand than any of the other texts in which he has articulated them. After all, Hegel’s distinctively challenging thought is hard to understand not despite what he is trying to do and say, but because of it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/196066/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Stern does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>With the discovery of several thousand new pages of Hegel’s lecture notes, fans are hoping his famously tricky philosophy may become easier to understand – this expert isn’t so sure.Robert Stern, Professor of Philosophy, University of SheffieldLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1697142021-10-20T12:43:30Z2021-10-20T12:43:30ZHow ideas from ancient Greek philosophy may have driven civilization toward climate change<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/426757/original/file-20211015-15-aau255.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=12%2C12%2C8614%2C5729&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Firefighters and residents battle a blaze in hot, dry conditions in Athens, Greece, in August 2021.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/EuropeandAfricaPicturesoftheWeekPhotoGallery/96d8941b2a7c4091ab1e0fcb4346aa7e/photo">AP Photo/Petros Karadjias</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Wildfires driven by increasing winds and unprecedented heat <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/07/apocalyptic-scenes-hit-greece-as-athens-besieged-by-fire">surrounded Athens, Greece</a>, this past summer, blanketing its ancient marble monuments and olive groves with ash and acrid smoke. These are the same places <a href="https://europeupclose.com/article/walking-in-the-footsteps-of-the-philosophers-in-athens/">where philosophers gathered</a> almost 2,500 years ago to debate questions about the nature of matter and morality.</p>
<p>The ideas formulated then echo through Western civilization – for better or for worse. At its best, classical Greek philosophy imagined humans as <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Greek-Philosophers-from-Thales-to-Aristotle/Guthrie/p/book/9780415522281">capable of great honor and achievement</a>, guided by reasoned discussion. At their worst, some of their ideas have licensed an exploitative, expansionist way of life that has helped fuel global warming and pushed civilization toward the brink of self-destruction. </p>
<p>The centuries since classical Greek philosophers took stock of the world constitute an experiment on a global scale, <a href="https://www.routledge.com/blog/article/freya-mathews-on-the-ecological-self">testing which philosophies</a> invite planetary thriving and which invite ruin.</p>
<p>Aspects of the worldview formulated by classical Greek philosophers – coupled, compounded and refined by others over centuries – helped set the stage for the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/">climate changes</a> that now fuel <a href="https://theconversation.com/extreme-heat-waves-in-a-warming-world-dont-just-break-records-they-shatter-them-164919">destructive fires and extreme weather around the world</a>.</p>
<h2>The Atomists’ perilous path</h2>
<p>The early Greek philosophers were primarily interested in two kinds of questions. The first kind was metaphysical: What is the world? The second kind was ethical: What is a good person? The two sorts of questions were intertwined, as the physical description of the world shaped humanity’s place in it.</p>
<p>So where did the early Greeks take a perilous path? A group of philosophers now known as <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/atomism-ancient/">The Atomists</a> – among them, Leucippus and Democritus – argued that matter is composed of atoms that, for them, are tiny solid particles that vary only by their shape, size and speed. A fire atom, for example, was sharp, small and fast; whereas an olive oil atom was round, large and slow. The tiny particles are independent of one another, interacting only when they collide.</p>
<p>If the world is only matter, it has no purpose or intentionality, no divine design or intervention, no spirit or sanctity. It’s just stuff moving around or not, crashing or not. The particles operate according to mechanistic laws, as expressed by the principles of geometry. Consequently, the world has no emergent qualities – soul, mind, consciousness – that cannot be expressed in numbers.</p>
<p>In that view, the world is profane, a word that comes from “profanum,” meaning “outside the temple.” There is nothing special about it, nothing inspiring respect or veneration.</p>
<h2>An open door to exploitation and waste</h2>
<p>Before the Atomists, early Greeks generally <a href="https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-us/books/john-baird-callicott/greek-natural-philosophy/9781516528561">did not draw a sharp distinction</a> between the material and the spiritual worlds. In their view, everything – river, mountain, child, tree – is enlivened by a life force. </p>
<p>But the mechanistic, reductionist, matter-in-motion worldview stripped the spirit from the natural world. In doing so, <a href="https://www.routledge.com/blog/article/freya-mathews-on-the-ecological-self">it also stripped the world’s inherent value</a>. The world became unremarkable, reducible, explainable, ownable, for sale. And so, the mechanistic worldview opened the door to exploitation, waste and abuse.</p>
<p>Over time, this worldview became deeply embedded in Western thought. And so human enterprise, following this view, <a href="https://www.routledge.com/blog/article/freya-mathews-on-the-ecological-self">could damage and destroy</a> the matter of the world and offend no god, value or sacred place.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/426755/original/file-20211015-15-nwxg6c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A thick, intact rainforest stands on one side with the clear line where it was cut away, leaving an open field." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/426755/original/file-20211015-15-nwxg6c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/426755/original/file-20211015-15-nwxg6c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426755/original/file-20211015-15-nwxg6c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426755/original/file-20211015-15-nwxg6c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426755/original/file-20211015-15-nwxg6c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426755/original/file-20211015-15-nwxg6c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426755/original/file-20211015-15-nwxg6c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Soy farmers and cattle ranchers have cleared millions of acres of the Amazon rainforest, a region important for global biodiversity and regulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/soy-plantation-in-amazon-rainforest-near-santarem-news-photo/462376826">Ricardo Beliel/Brazil Photos/LightRocket via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Of course, the Greek philosophers did not anticipate or intend this result. But over time, their ideas both <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Feminism-and-the-Mastery-of-Nature/Plumwood/p/book/9780415068109">fostered and sanctioned</a> the ever-increasing human ability to exploit the planet, a process that began in the Renaissance and developed throughout the Industrial Revolution.</p>
<p>Civilizations’ social license to create an existential environmental disaster coincided with their power to do exactly that. At the same time, the power of their ideas – and the way in which those ideas served the interests of the powerful – demeaned, disempowered and in many cases destroyed Indigenous and other competing worldviews. In <a href="http://www.nativepartnership.org/site/PageServer?pagename=airc_hist_boardingschools">American Indian residential schools</a>, for example, the federal government, often with the assistance of religious institutions, forced Native children to give up their cultural and religious traditions. </p>
<h2>A call for a new worldview</h2>
<p>With a new worldview, or one inspired by ancient Indigenous cultures, we believe it may be possible for Western civilization to free itself from the old materialism and restore life, spirit, purpose, value – and thus, some measure of protection – to the substance of the planet. Consider alternative answers to the two great questions:</p>
<p>Reconsider: What is the world?</p>
<p>Today, in a great convergence, ecological science, evolutionary theory, quantum theory, Indigenous wisdom and the religions of the world are all telling us that the story told by the mechanistic worldview is too small. On this expanded view, there is complexity in the cosmos, in rivers, plants, animals that can’t be explained by matter in motion.</p>
<p>The converging worldviews emphasize that new properties and entities evolve or emerge from the interdependencies and interactions of natural systems, not from their matter alone. Orchids or consciousness or beauty, for example, aren’t snapped together from particles of matter like Legos. Rather, they <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/vibrant-matter">emerge over long expanses of time</a> from the evolving organization of particular systems. <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300209433/journey-universe">As systems become more complex</a> and interactive, they organize themselves into new patterns, new life forms, new realities.</p>
<p>[<em>Over 115,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=100Ksignup">Sign up today</a>.]</p>
<p>And what of the second ancient question: What is a good person?</p>
<p>Ethics begins by recognizing that entities of this Earth are both material and animate. In this re-imagined worldview, humans are members of the community of beings. We share the urgency of life, shaped by our cultural, ecological and physical relationships. We will share a common fate.</p>
<p>There is no hierarchy of value in such a world; the value assigned to human beings is generously distributed throughout the world. If all beings are worthy, then all count in the calculation of what is morally permissible – and what is not.</p>
<h2>Stopping the fires of planetary ruin</h2>
<p>As strong winds drove wildfires through Greek forests this past summer, authorities organized boats for evacuations, and fire crews used helicopters, bombers and hoses to slow the fires’ advance. Firefighters from other countries urged the Greek crews to <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-58172031">set backfires</a>, pouring flames from torches in advance of the line of the firestorm; the strategy was to burn the ground clear of the heavy buildup of fuel, and so slow the advance of the fire. </p>
<p>As global catastrophe unfolds, it is unlikely that there will be boats for a planetary evacuation to a safe place. But we can adopt the strategy of the backfire to slow the conflagration. We can burn away the old mechanistic ways of thinking that are fueling the fires of planetary ruin and create space for a world where people live in respectful relation among other beings.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/169714/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Athens fires were a dangerous reflection of Atomist philosophies that see the world as exploitable, for sale and open to waste and abuse.Michael Paul Nelson, Professor of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, Oregon State UniversityKathleen Dean Moore, Distinguished Professor Emerita, Oregon State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1636182021-07-21T12:11:43Z2021-07-21T12:11:43ZWhy a 19th-century Russian anarchist is relevant to the mask and vaccine debate<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411967/original/file-20210719-21-ckdu1u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C0%2C696%2C511&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Beards? Yes. Masks? Perhaps not.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B8%D1%85%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%BB_%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87_%D0%91%D0%B0%D0%BA%D1%83%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BD#/media/File:Basel_1869.png">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Americans who refused to don masks or get vaccinated during the pandemic don’t have an easy task constructing a valid philosophical defense of their behavior. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108755993">go-to philosophical</a> <a href="https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1257/john-locke">authorities typically cited</a> to defend individual liberty in the U.S. – John Locke and John Stuart Mill – do not provide compelling reasons for ignoring public health messages.</p>
<p>Locke’s <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-political/">doctrine of natural law</a> states that people are <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-political/">endowed with natural rights</a> to “life, liberty, and estate,” premised on duties to God of self-preservation, and any behavior that risks survival constitutes a <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-moral/">violation of that natural law</a>. As such, there is no justification to refuse a safe and effective vaccine during a deadly pandemic.</p>
<p>Similarly, Mill’s “<a href="https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-the-harm-principle/">harm principle</a>” – which broadly states that people are allowed to do whatever they want provided they do not directly harm others – doesn’t help those opposed to vaccines and masks. Their actions might <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/10/biden-covid-vaccine-anti-vaxxers-us.html">prolong the pandemic</a>, allowing the virus an opportunity to mutate and <a href="https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/two-thirds-epidemiologists-warn-mutations-could-render-current-covid-vaccines">potentially render vaccines ineffective</a> – behavior that puts everyone at risk.</p>
<p>There is, however, another ethical framework that people refusing to be vaccinated or wear masks might turn to, although it comes from an unlikely source: the 19th-century Russian anarcho-communist <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/bio/">Mikhail Bakunin</a>.</p>
<p>Perhaps most famous for his <a href="https://doi.org/10.3917/amx.041.0112">lengthy and bitter tiff with German philosopher Karl Marx</a>, Bakunin’s philosophy of anarcho-communism consisted of the abolition of government, private property and indeed all means of coercion. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Portrait of Mikhail Bakunin" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/412002/original/file-20210719-19-u2lfpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/412002/original/file-20210719-19-u2lfpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=760&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412002/original/file-20210719-19-u2lfpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=760&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412002/original/file-20210719-19-u2lfpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=760&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412002/original/file-20210719-19-u2lfpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412002/original/file-20210719-19-u2lfpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412002/original/file-20210719-19-u2lfpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/portrait-of-mikhail-alexandrovich-bakunin-ca-1860-private-news-photo/600027341?adppopup=true">Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>As a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=i2z87R8AAAAJ&hl=en">professor of political theory</a>, I believe Bakunin has been overlooked in the current debate about masks and vaccines. Some of his views are consistent with at least the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/07/19/892855760/bioethicist-on-libertarian-views-toward-face-mask-laws">libertarian-based criticisms</a> of mask and vaccine requirements. Indeed, despite meaningful differences, many libertarians in the U.S. share with Bakunin the belief that <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism/">freedom is the most important value</a> and governments are by nature coercive. They may distrust Bakunin’s insistence on linking freedom and rationality and certainly would reject his embrace of communism, but libertarians would likely nevertheless admire his skepticism of authority.</p>
<h2>Science as a threat to freedom</h2>
<p>Bakunin might not be an obvious source of support for many in the anti-mask and anti-vaccine camp. His classic 1871 text, “<a href="http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bakunin/godandstate/godandstate_ch1.html#pref">God and State</a>,” begins in a manner sure to offend certain elements of the religious right, who make up a sizable number of <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/03/23/10-facts-about-americans-and-coronavirus-vaccines/ft_21-03-18_vaccinefacts/">those refusing to follow public health advise on vaccines</a>.</p>
<p>Bakunin attacks Christianity as <a href="http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bakunin/godandstate/godandstate_ch1.html">the enemy of rationality and freedom</a>. If humans wish to be free, he argues, they should learn the physical laws of the universe and social laws of society to inform their decision-making. If guided by genuine knowledge, Bakunin says, people can make smart decisions and become rational agents in charge of making choices for themselves.</p>
<p>But science, too, can be a <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1873/statism-anarchy.htm">great threat to freedom</a>, Bakunin suggests – and it is here that many of those opposed to mask and vaccine mandates may warm to his argument.</p>
<p>Beyond the fact that there are limits to scientific knowledge, Bakunin believed that there is always the possibility that <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1873/statism-anarchy.htm#s1">scientists themselves will be invested with coercive authority</a>.</p>
<p>If rationality and knowledge are requisite for freedom, Bakunin argued, then those with knowledge are in a position to force people to do, or not do, certain things.</p>
<p>As such, Bakunin worried that scientists, emboldened by their importance in society, will “<a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/godstate/ch02.htm">arrogantly claim the right to govern life</a>.” </p>
<p>“We must respect the scientists for their merits and achievements, but in order to prevent them from corrupting their own high moral and intellectual standards, they should be granted no special privileges and no rights other than those possessed by everyone – for example, the liberty to express their convictions, thought and knowledge. Neither they nor any other special group should be given power over others. He who is given power will inevitably become an oppressor and exploiter of society,” <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1873/statism-anarchy.htm#s1">he wrote</a> in 1873.</p>
<h2>Skeptical consumers of knowledge</h2>
<p>Bakunin’s solution to the risk of coercion by scientists was to lessen their authority without diminishing the value of scientific knowledge. To do so, he makes each individual responsible for learning and acting on whatever knowledge they have. The idea is for people to consult scientists for knowledge with the understanding that no one scientist has all the answers and that the accumulated knowledge of all scientists likewise is limited and cannot give perfect answers.</p>
<p>To apply Bakunin’s theory of freedom to pandemic America, no one should be required to get a vaccine. Rather, the population should be encouraged to investigate the efficacy and safety of the vaccines.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Anti-vaccine rally protester holds a sign saying 'Stop Forced Vaccine' above an American flag." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/412183/original/file-20210720-23-1ivoh5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/412183/original/file-20210720-23-1ivoh5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412183/original/file-20210720-23-1ivoh5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412183/original/file-20210720-23-1ivoh5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412183/original/file-20210720-23-1ivoh5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412183/original/file-20210720-23-1ivoh5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412183/original/file-20210720-23-1ivoh5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Protesters cast vaccines as an attack on their freedom.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/anti-vaccine-rally-protesters-hold-signs-outside-of-houston-news-photo/1233673090?adppopup=true">Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images)</a></span>
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<p>For its part, the scientific community needs to vigilantly scrutinize itself and present knowledge in an honest fashion, eagerly volunteering to the public what it knows and does not know.</p>
<p>Bakunin would be highly critical of both naïve optimists and doom-and-gloom pessimists in the scientific community. People need the unvarnished truth presented in simple and clear terms. If the answer is “we scientists don’t know,” then so be it.</p>
<h2>Ask questions … but be reasonable</h2>
<p>Bakunin’s theory of freedom asks much of the population. It requires individuals to know something of the nature of scientific knowledge, ask sensible questions and then make a rational analysis of the available evidence. It requires scientists to check their egos and desire for quick celebrity and soberly present their knowledge in accessible and honest terms.</p>
<p>And granted, Bakunin did not account for <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/19/facebook-twitter-covid-misinformation-conundrum/">disinformation campaigns</a> of the sort found on the internet that undermine access to reliable scientific data. He did, however, have faith in people to sort through information and make rational decisions. This ability, according to Bakunin, is a precondition for freedom.</p>
<p>Vaccine skeptics, thus, might find comfort in Bakunin. If they ask good questions and do not find satisfactory answers, then his philosophy suggests they should absolutely refuse a vaccine. The same goes for masking: If the scientific community cannot effectively communicate why masks are still needed, then people should not be expected to wear them, Bakunin might argue.</p>
<p>At the same time, those opposing masks and vaccines need to sincerely follow the science and allow themselves to be convinced by data, Bakunin’s philosophy suggests. Refusing to wear a mask based on an uneducated hunch or because of a belief that the “government wants to control me” constitutes folly, not freedom. In short, anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, to claim their freedom, need to be reasonable.</p>
<p>[<em>Get our best science, health and technology stories.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/science-editors-picks-71/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=science-best">Sign up for The Conversation’s science newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/163618/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Locke McLendon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>John Locke and John Stuart Mill don’t provide much in the way of justification for ignoring public health advice in a pandemic. Mikhail Bakunin, however…Michael Locke McLendon, Professor of Political Science, California State University, Los AngelesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1641912021-07-09T11:53:19Z2021-07-09T11:53:19ZFive lessons on bringing truth back to politics from Britain’s first female philosophy professor<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/410573/original/file-20210709-25-1ao83va.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C7%2C1251%2C716&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Susan Stebbing's 1939 work is just as relevant today as it was then.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://london.ac.uk/susan-stebbing">National Portrait Gallery, London via Creative Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It is often said that we live in a “post-truth” era. It is unclear at times what role, if any, truth plays in politics. During the pandemic, world leaders <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/20/national-academy-sciences-donald-trump-coronavirus-response">dismissed the advice of experts</a> and acted against <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01589-0/fulltext?utm_campaign=lancetcovid21&utm_content=172221470&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&hss_channel=tw-27013292">empirical data</a>.</p>
<p>Democracies have felt precarious – in the US, during the Trump presidency, and in countries like Brazil, Hungary and Poland currently. Integral to such corrosion of democracy (as George Orwell made clear in his novel 1984) is the distortion of truth and facts in favour of a particular agenda.</p>
<p>In times of crisis, it can be helpful to look backwards at how our forebears have coped with similar situations in history.</p>
<p>Now, I suggest we look to an under-appreciated philosopher writing just before the outbreak of the second world war, as fascism and communism threatened the stability of European democracy.</p>
<p>Susan Stebbing was the first woman in the UK to be appointed to a full professorship in philosophy (at Bedford College in 1933). She came through the ranks of academic philosophy alongside some of Britain’s best-known philosophers, including Bertrand Russell. </p>
<p>Like most women in philosophy’s history, Stebbing has been overlooked in favour of her male counterparts. She is not a household name, even though she published prolifically and served as president of the UK’s two largest philosophical societies, as well as Humanists UK. Only recently has her work gained its deserved attention among philosophers.</p>
<p>Stebbing’s 1939 book Thinking to Some Purpose taught a general audience to use the tools of philosophical logic to engage in healthy public discourse. She calls for people to “think clearly,” unclouded by “unconscious bias and unrecognised ignorance”.</p>
<p>Stebbing’s lessons on thinking clearly and taking politispeak with a grain of salt can help us navigate our fraught political climate today. Here are just a few.</p>
<h2>Question your most cherished beliefs</h2>
<p>Stebbing claims that all of us have long-held beliefs we are not willing to doubt. She explains that in such cases we confuse the “passionateness” of our feelings for a “guarantee of truth”. </p>
<p>Stebbing argues it is important to question all our beliefs, especially in politics. Once we’ve identified our most cherished beliefs, we might ask ourselves: could I reasonably accept that now? If the answer is no, they ought to be weeded out.</p>
<h2>Avoid the fallacy of ‘special pleading’</h2>
<p>Stebbing thinks people are generally pretty poor at putting themselves in one another’s shoes. We make claims about how others should behave, without considering whether we would do the same in a given situation. </p>
<p>She writes: “A safeguard against this mistake is to change <em>you</em> into <em>I</em>.” For instance, before condemning one state for selling arms to another, I ought to consider whether my own state does the same – and whether I am happy with it. Only then can I be sure I am not acting hypocritically. </p>
<h2>Be wary of emotive language</h2>
<p>Stebbing distinguishes between two types of language: “scientific” and “emotive”. Scientific language is used to make objective claims. Emotive language is intended to evoke strong feelings. Often, in politics (and journalism), emotive language is disguised as scientific language –- giving words “a significance in addition to their objective meaning”. Think of the way <a href="https://theconversation.com/culture-wars-uncovered-most-of-uk-public-dont-know-if-woke-is-a-compliment-or-an-insult-161529">“woke” is used</a> by right-wing commentators. It isn’t so much describing someone, as getting you to feel a certain way about them.</p>
<p>Paying attention to whether politicians are trying to appeal to our emotions can help us tell a convincing argument from a cheap, emotional dog whistle. We can then decide whether to allow ourselves to be persuaded by our feelings or to turn to more objective forms of evidence. </p>
<h2>Look out for empty slogans</h2>
<p>Stebbing emphasises that politicians make good use of slogans: short statements that stick in the minds of voters. Slogans are not inherently harmful, she thinks – they are often rooted in truth and can reveal meaningful assertions. However, some slogans seem meaningful but wilt under scrutiny. If a slogan is empty, it has no role to play in rational argument and should be discarded.</p>
<p>Consider, for example, Theresa May’s claim that <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36782922">“Brexit Means Brexit”</a>. While this initially sounded like a firm commitment to follow through with the referendum result, over time it became clear that no one really knew what “Brexit” was going to mean at all.</p>
<h2>Think freely</h2>
<p>Stebbing is part of a long line of philosophers, dating back to the 18th-century Enlightenment, known as “free-thinkers”. Free-thinkers believe that we should only form judgments based on our own independent reason, as opposed to church teachings, newspaper propaganda or party politics. </p>
<p>If your judgment tells you that something doesn’t sound right, pursue that thought. We all have an innate “capacity to follow an argument” that we should put to good use. Rather than voting the way we have always voted or taking the advice of others, we should weigh up the available evidence and form our own conclusions. </p>
<p>Stebbing’s work is finally attracting the attention of other philosophers, but it was never her intention to be read only by her peers. She wanted to bring philosophy out of the ivory towers of Cambridge and Oxford and into the hands of ordinary people. She thought politicians underestimated the public’s ability to follow an argument, and that instead of trying to provide proof of their policies, rely on making themselves appear likeable and painting their opponents as frauds. </p>
<p>Stebbing thought there was something we can do about this state of affairs – we can bring truth back into politics by learning to think clearly and holding politicians to greater scrutiny. Indeed, many of our current leaders would do well to study her lessons.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/164191/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter West does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In our “post-truth” political era, there is a lot we can learn from an under-appreciated philosopher who focused on “thinking clearly.”Peter West, Teaching Fellow in Early Modern Philosophy, Durham UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1447542020-08-21T09:13:28Z2020-08-21T09:13:28ZLeprosy of the soul? A brief history of boredom<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353872/original/file-20200820-14-cjob8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C2480%2C1643&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'God, I'm just so bored.'</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">JeniFoto via Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>We all respond to boredom in different ways. Some may find a new hobby or interest, others may instead rip open a bag of crisps and binge watch a new Netflix show. Boredom may seem to you an everyday – perhaps even trivial – experience. Surprisingly, however, boredom has undergone quite a metamorphosis over the past couple of centuries. </p>
<p>Well before the word “boredom” cropped up in the English language, one of the earliest mentions of boredom is in a Latin <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/23064068?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">poem by Lucretius</a> (99–55BC), who writes of the boring life of a rich Roman who flees to his country house … only to be find himself equally bored there.</p>
<p>The first recorded mention of the word “boredom” in the English language seems to be in the British newspaper <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-50769-5_1">The Albion in 1829</a>, in the (frankly impenetrable) sentence: “Neither will I follow another precedental mode of boredom, and indulge in a laudatory apostrophe to the destinies which presided over my fashioning.” </p>
<p>But the term was popularised by Charles Dickens, who famously used the term in Bleak House (1853) where the aristocrat Lady Dedlock says she has been “bored to death” by, variously, the trying weather, unremarkable musical and theatrical entertainment, and familiar scenery.</p>
<p>In fact, boredom became a popular <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Boredom-Literary-History-State-Mind/dp/0226768546">theme in English Victorian writing</a>, especially in describing the life of the upper class, whose boredom may reflect a privileged social standing. Dickens’ character James Harthouse (Hard Times, 1854), for example, seems to cherish perpetual boredom as indicative of his high breeding, declaring nothing but boredom during his life as military dragoon and on his many travels.</p>
<h2>The existentialists’ boredom</h2>
<p>In the second part of the 19th century and during the early 20th century, boredom gained notoriety <a href="https://iep.utm.edu/boredom/">among existentialist writers</a>. Their view of boredom was often less than flattering, and one that confronted all of humanity, not just the upper class with its presumably empty existence. </p>
<p>The early existentialist Danish philosopher <a href="https://www.sorenkierkegaard.nl/">Søren Kierkegaard</a>, for example, wrote: “The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.” This was, according to him, only the beginning of the trouble with boredom. It would eventually lead Adam and Eve to commit their original sin. </p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, Kierkegaard declared boredom to be the root of all evil. Several other existentialists shared this unfavourable view. Jean-Paul <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1191/1478088706qrp066oa">Sartre called boredom</a> a “leprosy of the soul”, and <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/HOLNHA">Friedrich Nietzsche</a>, agreeing with Kierkegaard, remarked that: “The boredom of God on the seventh day of creation would be a subject for a great poet.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Jean Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir surrounded by people in front of a plane." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353861/original/file-20200820-16-1t6k9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/353861/original/file-20200820-16-1t6k9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353861/original/file-20200820-16-1t6k9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353861/original/file-20200820-16-1t6k9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353861/original/file-20200820-16-1t6k9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353861/original/file-20200820-16-1t6k9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/353861/original/file-20200820-16-1t6k9fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir: often bored, but never boring.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Photo Collection of Israel</span></span>
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<p>Arthur Schopenhauer took the cake when it came to being gloomy about boredom. According to him, the human capacity for boredom was nothing less than direct evidence for life’s ultimate lack of meaning. In his fittingly titled essay, Studies on Pessimism, <a href="https://books.google.ie/books?id=5eWCI1UjvikC&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">he wrote</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy, and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A world of boredom, the existentialists seemed to warn, is a world without purpose.</p>
<h2>The science of boredom</h2>
<p>The 20th century witnessed the emergence of psychology as a scientific discipline. While our understanding of many emotions slowly increased, boredom was surprisingly left alone. What little psychological work on boredom existed was rather speculative, and more often than not excluded empirical data. </p>
<p>These accounts hardly painted a more positive picture of boredom than the existentialists. As recently as 1972, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm blatantly <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1972/02/27/archives/fromms-theory-of-aggression-the-young-have-rejected-the-consuming.html">denounced boredom</a> as “perhaps the most important source of aggression and destructiveness today”.</p>
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<p>During the past few decades, however, the image of boredom has changed once more, and with it has come an appreciation of the hitherto discredited emotion. Development of better measurement tools allowed psychologists to examine boredom with greater accuracy, and experimental methods allowed researchers to induce boredom and examine its actual, rather than presumed, behavioural consequences. </p>
<p>This work reveals that boredom can indeed be problematic, as the existentialists assured us. Those who bore easily are more likely to be <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S019188691930217X">depressed and anxious</a>, have a tendency to <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886919301412">be aggressive</a>, and <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-26395-9_2">perceive life as less meaningfull</a>. </p>
<p>Yet, psychology uncovered also a much brighter side of boredom. Researchers found that boredom encourages a <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2012-30613-001.html">search for meaning in life</a>, propels <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-26395-9_3">exploration</a>, and inspires <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-12206-001">novelty seeking</a>. It shows that boredom is not only a common but also a functional emotion that makes people reconsider what they are currently doing in favour of more rewarding alternatives, for example increasing <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10400419.2014.901073">creativity</a> and <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15298868.2016.1218925">prosocial tendencies</a>. </p>
<p>In doing so, it seems that boredom helps to regulate our behaviour and prevents us from getting stuck in unrewarding situations for too long. Rather than merely a malady among the upper classes or an existential peril, boredom seems, instead, to be an important part of the psychological arsenal available to people in the pursuit a fulfilling life.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/144754/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Wijnand Van Tilburg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Over two centuries. the notion of boredom has shifted from an upper-class malady, through existential peril, to a functional emotion.Wijnand Van Tilburg, Lecturer, Department of Psychology, University of EssexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1392412020-05-28T12:13:18Z2020-05-28T12:13:18ZEveryday ethics: Should I allow my kids to visit Mom despite her high risk status?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/338031/original/file-20200527-20223-15olnd1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5391%2C3597&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Visiting parents during the pandemic poses new risks.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Virus-Outbreak-Contact-Tracing/f48f48d1dbab498cb3b87561300c747d/6/0">AP Photo/Rick Bowmer</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327254/original/file-20200410-174608-3elamt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327254/original/file-20200410-174608-3elamt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=250&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327254/original/file-20200410-174608-3elamt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=250&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327254/original/file-20200410-174608-3elamt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=250&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327254/original/file-20200410-174608-3elamt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=314&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327254/original/file-20200410-174608-3elamt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=314&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327254/original/file-20200410-174608-3elamt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=314&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>A lot of people are facing ethical decisions about their daily life as a result of the coronavirus. Ethicist <a href="http://www.leemcintyrebooks.com/">Lee McIntyre</a> has stepped in to help provide advice over the moral dilemmas we face. If you have a question you’d like a philosopher to answer, send it to us at <a href="mailto:us-ethicalquestions@theconversation.com">us-ethicalquestions@theconversation.com</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p>I read your last article advising against <a href="https://theconversation.com/everyday-ethics-should-i-visit-my-mother-138779">visiting a mother against her wishes</a> and it left me wondering, what if Mom wants to be visited? My wife is very high-risk – she suffers from COPD, has congestive heart failure and is on oxygen 24/7. But she has told our children to visit because she would rather die than not be able to see them. Even social distancing has broken down, and our son was horrified when his mom wanted a hug. He is afraid of giving her COVID-19, as she would likely not survive another hospitalization on a ventilator (she’s had two over the past two years). Should she be forcing herself on her children? - Alan Bolick </p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>I am so sorry to hear about your wife’s ill health and agree that it would be best for her not to be exposed to any risk of contracting COVID-19. But it sounds like she’s got other priorities. Literally, she is willing to risk her life in order to see her children. So should they respect her choice and simply bow to her autonomy? </p>
<p>The tricky thing here is that it’s not just your wife’s autonomy that is at stake. It’s clear that your children are terrified of giving their mom COVID-19. If your son is “horrified” at the prospect of a hug, the guilt he might feel upon giving your wife a life-threatening illness could be devastating. </p>
<p>Put aside for a moment the idea that your wife could expose her children to coronavirus – that’s unlikely and not really what this is about. But she is exposing them to the possibility of a lifetime of remorse if they happen to be the one who gives her the illness that kills her. Is she okay with that? </p>
<p>Respect for individual autonomy is a foundational idea in ethics. Even John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant – two philosophers who stood on either side of the debate over whether morality should be judged by measuring consequences – agreed on the importance of <a href="https://www.iep.utm.edu/aut-norm/">autonomy as a core component</a> of human well-being. Even if your wife feels it is “worth it” for her to take a risk, your children clearly don’t feel the same way. As such, she may not be respecting their autonomy while thinking of her own. </p>
<p>One solution might be for your kids to go on <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/06/coronavirus-how-to-self-quarantine/">complete quarantine</a> for a set period of time – the <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/if-you-are-sick/quarantine-isolation.html">Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends 14 days</a> from the last potential of exposure – with absolutely no contact with any other human being, and then spend as much time with your wife as circumstances allow. This would severely reduce the risk of infection, <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/01/824903684/the-science-behind-a-14-day-quarantine-after-possible-covid-19-exposure">according to public health experts</a>, and would apparently mean more to your wife than life itself. Knowing this, might your kids be willing to make this sacrifice? </p>
<p>Knowing how much it would mean to their mom, maybe so.</p>
<p>[<em>You need to understand the coronavirus pandemic, and we can help.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=upper-coronavirus-help">Read The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/139241/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lee McIntyre does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A mother with underlying conditions wants to hug her children even if means risking her own life with COVID-19. Should they abide by her wishes or keep their distance?Lee McIntyre, Research Fellow, Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1381612020-05-18T17:32:35Z2020-05-18T17:32:35ZAfter the crisis: how to avoid (some of) our misleading beliefs<p>Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his colleague and friend Amos Tversky formalised the concept of “cognitive bias” in 1972, and considerable research since then has shown that our brain finds it remarkably difficult to make rational decisions. Cognitive biases refer to deviations from a rational treatment of information. They can have dramatically negative consequences in the business, military, political and medical sphere. </p>
<p>A blatant illustration of how dangerous cognitive biases can be is confirmation bias – the tendency we all have to disproportionately seek information that confirms our existing beliefs. This bias actively contributed to the Iranian decision to shoot down flight PS752 on January 8, 2020, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/ukraine-iran-crash-panic-bad-training-may-led-missile-attack-2020-1">killing the 176 passengers on board</a>. The media called it “human error” at the time. Confirmation bias was also deemed <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/how-confirmation-bias-can-lead-to-war/260347/">partly responsible for United States’ decision to invade Iraq in 2003</a>.</p>
<p>With the coronavirus crisis, this bias has hit us with all its might. Whether we consider the delays in deciding to close countries’ borders, the tardy decision to start (or restart) mass-producing masks and ventilators, the discovery that Covid-19 was in Italy weeks after it had already begun to kill Italians, just as the decision each of us makes to go outside because “we need to”, and the remarkably solid belief in some parts of the world that things are “not as bad as they seem”. The consequences are the devastating (underestimated) death figures that every country affected continuously chimes out.</p>
<h2>How to mitigate confirmation bias</h2>
<p>If most of the manifestations of this bias are hard to take control of, this article proposes to focus on two types of decisions that each of us can actively work on to mitigate confirmation bias. The first type of decision is that of leaving your home. Let’s start with a simple, even though unrealistic, observation: if we could freeze everyone in the world for 15 days with at least 2 meters between each person, the virus would be eradicated. We live a prophecy that French philosopher, scientist and theologian Blaise Pascal shared with us more than 300 years ago: <a href="https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-07-19/new-study-found-people-are-terrible-sitting-alone-their-thoughts-how-about-you">“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”</a>. </p>
<p>Of course, we cannot freeze in place for 15 days – there are a number of outings we must do, whether to get food, or help vulnerable others through the confinement. But are these the only reasons we go out? Can’t you further reduce the number of times you go out shopping? Must you go out for exercise? Could you work out at home instead? If you have people confined with you, ask them how necessary your going out truly is, in the light of disconfirming arguments. Every time we choose to go out, it feels as an insignificant, microdecision, but we know the significant impact that it can have down the transmission chain. This, we all understand rationally, enough media rehashed it since lockdown started. #StayHome, #IoRestoaCasa, #JeRestealaMaison. To what extent do you rationally apply this to yourself?</p>
<p>A second type of decision that we need to urgently tackle is what we will actually implement the “day after”. Here, it is noteworthy that a “return to normal” fantasy is fast spreading. Companies project <a href="https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/mccormick-projects-a-return-to-normal-in-2021-2020-02-04">“a return to normal in 2021”</a>. “Our annual meeting gathering thousands of attendees will take place right after things get back to normal”, an event organiser tells me, inviting me to join him there… </p>
<p>But what does going back to normal even mean, when it will be a possibly unprecedented <a href="https://time.com/5827348/great-depression-coronavirus-after/">worldwide recession</a>, directly causing millions to experience financial and material difficulties? Should we even wish for things to go back to normal? Plenty of data show that going back to “normal” would be one of the worst possible crisis exits that we could envision. The old “normal” was famously problematic for too many reasons: </p>
<ul>
<li><p>10% of the world’s population lived on less than $1.90 a day. This translates in <a href="http://www.nccp.org/topics/childpoverty.html">21% of US children living below the federal poverty threshold</a>; in the UK, it is almost a third, while it hovers around 20% in France. These figures will likely markedly rise as a result of the coronavirus crisis. </p></li>
<li><p>33% of the worldwide agricultural production destined to human consumption was wasted, while <a href="https://www.minnpost.com/foreign-concept/2015/06/795-million-people-don-t-have-enough-eat-why-s-actually-good-news/">1 in every 9 people</a> was not eating as much as they needed. </p></li>
<li><p>Between <a href="https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2017/607350/IPOL_STU(2017)607350_EN.pdf">15 and 125 million Europeans suffered from energy precarity</a>, not only due to high energy prices, but also to vast energy inefficiency, with computers’ use deemed “useful” representing only 60% of the time that they are powered on. </p></li>
<li><p>Air traffic was claimed to double between 2019 and 2037, when, in 2018, it already represented 5% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. In spite of these sparkling clear data and the numerous calls for rationing flights, in the old “normal”, every one of us could go all over the globe <em>ad libitum</em>.</p></li>
</ul>
<h2>Creating sustainable value</h2>
<p>In 1962, the American philosopher John L. Austin warned us that we “do things with words.” How about we forbid ourselves to talk about going back to normal, to rethink instead our economy, in order to create sustainable value for most of us? Time is running out, the virus will disappear and the old “normal” will quickly spread back into our days, with its hectic pace and its disastrous consequences.</p>
<p>Lockdown time has a unique quality to it, which already fascinated French historian Fernand Braudel, who wrote from memory his masterpiece <em>The Mediterranean</em> while in a German prison, between 1940 and 1945. He used a telegraphic style to write to a friend : “Believe that without captivity, would never have obtained this lucidity. […] captivity […] allows long meditation of a topic.” Since March, half of humanity lives in a glass case. The Earth is closed. Maybe so we can truly hop off and better catch our breath for what’s to come?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/138161/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anne-Laure Sellier has received funding from the HEC Foundation for her research. She is a lecturer-researcher at HEC Paris.</span></em></p>Involving family and friends in decisions or rethinking the meaning of “getting back to normal” helps protect against cognitive bias and its harmful consequences.Anne-Laure Sellier, Professeur Associé en marketing et membre du groupe de recherche CNRS-GREGHEC, HEC Paris Business SchoolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1382322020-05-14T12:05:40Z2020-05-14T12:05:40ZEveryday ethics: Stripping puts me in close contact with others – should I go back to work?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334449/original/file-20200512-82353-4uxgm7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C2986%2C2110&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Tipping from a social distance at The Lucky Devil strip club in Portland, Oregon.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/dancer-harlow-uses-a-pair-of-tongs-to-grab-a-tip-during-the-news-photo/1222418089?adppopup=true"> Steve Dykes/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327254/original/file-20200410-174608-3elamt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327254/original/file-20200410-174608-3elamt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=250&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327254/original/file-20200410-174608-3elamt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=250&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327254/original/file-20200410-174608-3elamt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=250&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327254/original/file-20200410-174608-3elamt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=314&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327254/original/file-20200410-174608-3elamt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=314&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327254/original/file-20200410-174608-3elamt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=314&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>A lot of people are facing ethical decisions about their daily life as a result of the coronavirus. Ethicist <a href="http://www.leemcintyrebooks.com/">Lee McIntyre</a> has stepped in to help provide advice over the moral dilemmas we face. If you have a question you’d like a philosopher to answer, send it to us at <a href="mailto:us-ethicalquestions@theconversation.com">us-ethicalquestions@theconversation.com</a></em></p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>I’m a stripper and struggling to decide whether or not I should go back to work as normal once the lockdowns are lifted. I live with my boyfriend and his two kids. My job is very high contact with no social distancing at all. I don’t know if it’s irresponsible for me to work in this fashion due to the pandemic, as I might be putting other people – and myself – at risk. But I don’t have any other form of income that can sustain me at this level at the moment, especially since I am also in school. – Michelle O.</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>I commend you for looking out for the health and safety of all concerned. Even if they aren’t able to do so, your patrons should thank you for thinking of them too.</p>
<p>As the COVID-19 crisis continues, work is changing in many industries. Millions of people have <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/09/jobs-report-demographics/">lost their jobs</a>, while others who were once required to show up in person – including high-tech workers and those in customer service call centers – have discovered it’s possible to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/12/twitter-coronavirus-covid19-work-from-home">work from home and still get paid</a>. </p>
<p>Instead of routine examinations, many doctors are now <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-future-telemedicine/">seeing patients through telemedicine</a>. Might something similar be a possibility for you? Your line of work seems no different than any other in the possibility for innovation in the face of lockdowns or social distancing. </p>
<p>Instead of going back to stripping in person, perhaps you could make an <a href="https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/cam-girl-who-earns-150000-13285408">equivalent amount of money</a> as a “cam girl” online? You’d be in control of both your level of interaction and clientele and even your schedule. Some of your previous patrons might welcome the opportunity to see you again.</p>
<p>Alternatively, depending on where you live, you might search out clubs whose owners have retooled their business plan in response to the novel coronavirus, to allow for no contact or drive-thru service, such as the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-dancers/food-2-go-go-oregon-strip-club-brings-burlesque-to-coronavirus-carry-out-idUSKCN22A1EF">Lucky Devil Lounge in Portland</a>, Oregon.</p>
<p>As you recognize, financial considerations can make it a lot harder to do the “responsible” thing, even when we know what that is. But that has always been so. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that virtuous behavior arose not from any moral calculus or weight of consideration, but from the <a href="https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/virtue-ethics">discovery of one’s true nature</a>. Virtuous behavior is what virtuous people do. Instead of trying to make the right decision, the greater challenge for you might be to accept the kind of person that you already are: thoughtful and concerned. </p>
<p>The facts would seem to suggest that it’s not safe for you to go back to stripping right now. But whether you do that or not, one hopes that, as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/751815-a-good-will-is-good-not-because-of-what-it">put it</a>, your character might “like a jewel, still shine by its own light as something which has full value in itself,” whether anyone else can see it or not. </p>
<p>[<em>Get facts about coronavirus and the latest research.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=upper-coronavirus-facts">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.</a>]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/138232/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lee McIntyre does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Strippers, by the nature of their jobs, need to get close to others. Is there a way to do this safely during the coronavirus crisis?Lee McIntyre, Research Fellow, Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1383502020-05-12T14:38:44Z2020-05-12T14:38:44ZLord of the Flies real-life story shows how humans are hard-wired to help each other – philosopher<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334098/original/file-20200511-49589-1djcaq0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C953%2C717&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A still from the 1963 film of William Golding's Lord of the Flies.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">British Lion Film Corporation</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Fiction is a powerful force in shaping social understanding and, in the 20th century, a number of novels shaped philosophical discourse and influenced the way people think about the world. One of the most important was William Golding’s <a href="https://www.william-golding.co.uk/books/lord-of-the-flies">Lord of the Flies (1954)</a>, in which a group of young schoolboys marooned on a desert island turn savagely on each other. </p>
<p>It is a novel that makes us despair for the human condition. But a new book by Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/12/humankind-a-hopeful-history-by-rutger-bregman-review">Humankind</a>, argues that humans are fundamentally good – or at least not fundamentally evil – and refuses to accept the conclusions that many before him have drawn from Golding’s book. </p>
<p>The subtitle of Bregman’s book summarises his thesis in three words: A Hopeful History. In this book he challenges the dystopian scenario in Golding’s novel with a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months">little-known real-life example</a> of six boys in 1966 stranded in a deserted Island south of Tonga in the Pacific Coast for more than a year. </p>
<p>Their experience was nothing like that of Lord of the Flies: they survived because they lived in harmony, cooperating with one another, helping each other. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1259766119826632704"}"></div></p>
<p>This story is an invigorating endorsement of everything that is good and noble about human nature. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-myth-of-the-noble-savage-55316">myth of the “noble savage”</a> comes to mind, symbolising the innate goodness of humankind before being exposed to the corrupting influences of civilisation. </p>
<h2>Nasty, brutish and short</h2>
<p>As a philosopher, this story leaves me cold. In terms of theorising human nature we have to take what we read in a novel such as Lord of the Flies with a pinch of salt. Similarly, we cannot and should not draw any conclusions about human nature from one case study – fascinating as it undoubtedly is. </p>
<p>Also, the philosophical underpinnings of Bregman’s analysis are slightly suspect. What puts me on the defensive is the fact that, not for the first time, Thomas Hobbes is portrayed by Bregman as the bogeyman of political philosophy. Bregman appears to reject the well-known Hobbesian view of the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3038543">state of nature</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334326/original/file-20200512-175229-md1y2d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334326/original/file-20200512-175229-md1y2d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334326/original/file-20200512-175229-md1y2d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334326/original/file-20200512-175229-md1y2d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334326/original/file-20200512-175229-md1y2d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334326/original/file-20200512-175229-md1y2d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334326/original/file-20200512-175229-md1y2d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334326/original/file-20200512-175229-md1y2d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Not as bad as we seem.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This essentially says that, without a society to restrain our most basic instincts and left to our own devices, people will turn on each other. Society, theorised Hobbes, would thus collapse into an abysmal anarchy – a “war of all against all”, where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.</p>
<p>The only way out of the state of nature is via a social contract and the formation of an <a href="https://www.ttu.ee/public/m/mart-murdvee/EconPsy/6/Hobbes_Thomas_1660_The_Leviathan.pdf">all-powerful Leviathan</a>, Hobbes wrote. This has led some in modern times to accuse the philosopher of <a href="https://thelibertarianideal.com/2015/06/02/the-totalitarian-doctrine-of-hobbes/">justifying authoritarian dictatorship</a>. But that is misleading: the modern Leviathan is nothing more than the legitimate authority of a modern state.</p>
<p>That the absence of authority leads to anarchy certainly seems to be Golding’s message in Lord of the Flies – away from the strict regime of school society, the young castaways turn to killing. And so the real-life case of the six boys from Tonga is Bregman’s way of telling us that Hobbes was wrong. But I think his reading of Hobbes is erroneous. Hobbes never said that human nature is evil, instead he believed that we are blessed with “prudence” – which he defined as foresight, grounded on experience: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Prudence is but experience, which equal time equally bestows on all men, in all things they equally apply themselves unto. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yes, we are also naturally motivated by self-interest, as Bregman points out – but for Hobbes in the state of nature, self-interest is morally neutral. To act on our self-interest is not morally “bad”, because ethical judgements do not apply to the state of nature. And, crucially, good things can come out of our self-interest.</p>
<h2>Cooperative self-interest</h2>
<p>A more accurate reading of Hobbes is the following: our main and greatest motivation is to avoid death – and we appeal to our self-interest to stay alive. Hobbes also tells us that the best way to stay alive, and what is ultimately in our self-interest, is via social cooperation. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334082/original/file-20200511-49569-1g6swu7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334082/original/file-20200511-49569-1g6swu7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334082/original/file-20200511-49569-1g6swu7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=732&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334082/original/file-20200511-49569-1g6swu7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=732&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334082/original/file-20200511-49569-1g6swu7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=732&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334082/original/file-20200511-49569-1g6swu7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334082/original/file-20200511-49569-1g6swu7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/334082/original/file-20200511-49569-1g6swu7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The much-maligned Thomas Hobbes.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Michael Wright (1617-1694)/National Portrait Gallery</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hobbes is perhaps the greatest thinker of mutually beneficial social cooperation, because he doesn’t make cooperation about altruism but about self-interest. Social cooperation is the essence of the social contract, and the role of the modern state is to facilitate social cooperation. Reading about the six boys reinforced my view that Hobbes was right. Thanks to prudence they soon realised that the best way for them to survive was by working together, cooperating, helping each other out. They survived for a year, which is a miracle, but would their harmony have lasted if they had not been rescued? </p>
<p>We don’t know. What we do know is that on the island there was an abundance of food and fresh water. But what if the environment was different? In other contexts of greater scarcity, people have been known to turn to cannibalism. In a famous legal case from 1884, a four-man crew sailing from England to Australia were <a href="http://www.e-lawresources.co.uk/cases/R-v-Dudley-and-Stephens.php">shipwrecked with almost no food</a>. When the 17-year-old cabin boy became ill, two of the men decided to kill and eat him. After being rescued, the two men were convicted of murder and sentenced to death – which was later commuted to six months’ imprisonment.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-it-feels-like-we-are-sliding-into-a-period-of-unrest-but-political-philosophy-offers-hope-137006">Coronavirus: it feels like we are sliding into a period of unrest, but political philosophy offers hope</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>We can only speculate what the six boys on the island in the Pacific Ocean would have done if they had run out of food – but whatever it is, I would certainly not draw any conclusions from it in terms of the essence of human nature.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/138350/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Vittorio Bufacchi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Thomas Hobbes wrote that humans are motivated by self-interest. Often that means working together for the benefit of all.Vittorio Bufacchi, Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, University College CorkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1312662020-02-27T15:52:05Z2020-02-27T15:52:05ZWhy philosophy is an ideal travel companion for adventurous minds<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317617/original/file-20200227-24701-11g0l3d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=18%2C0%2C2466%2C1646&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AVA Bitter via Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 2019, there were <a href="https://www.e-unwto.org/doi/pdf/10.18111/9789284421152">1.4 billion international tourist arrivals</a> globally – and, given that the planet only holds <a href="https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/">7.7 billion humans</a>, this figure alone suggests that a lot of us are travelling. The World Tourism Organization <a href="https://www.e-unwto.org/doi/pdf/10.18111/9789284421152">reports</a> two major motivations for this – “travel to change”: the quest for local experiences, authenticity, transformation and “travel to show”: the desire for Instagramable moments and destinations.</p>
<p>I think both trends are fuelled by curiosity about the unknown, the unfamiliar. Humans have always looked for new experiences, ways to live, things to show to others. Travel magazines are strewn with articles about visiting “<a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel/2020/01/why-travel-2020-experience-overlooked-destinations-want-your-attention">overlooked</a>” and “<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/19095928-3eaa-11ea-b84f-a62c46f39bc2">unknown</a>” places – and this curiosity has a long history. </p>
<p>Throughout his <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14363">Antarctic explorations</a>, Apsley Cherry-Garrard yearns for “unknown” places. Mary Kingsley describes the “sheer good pleasure” of canoeing down an “unknown” <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5891">West African</a> river by moonlight, and delights in places “not down” on maps. A character in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness describes how “inviting” the “blank spaces on the earth” seem and tells us about his hankering for “the biggest, the most blank”.</p>
<p>Philosophy can also be about exploring the unknown. In one of his <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=SM2AzN_ZlmIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=berkeley+dialogues&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi_lfXolJznAhXqVBUIHePyBcEQ6AEIPjAC#v=onepage&q&f=false">groundbreaking books</a> on idealism, 18th-century Irish philosopher George Berkeley likened his investigations to a “long Voyage”, involving difficult travel across “wild Mazes of Philosophy”. Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume offers similar reflections halfway through his most radical sceptical work <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-L4IAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=hume+treatise+of+human+nature&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi9p-bWlJznAhWRYsAKHeFOCmoQ6AEIMTAB#v=onepage&q&f=false">A Treatise of Human Nature</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317305/original/file-20200226-24651-g6x3v5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317305/original/file-20200226-24651-g6x3v5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317305/original/file-20200226-24651-g6x3v5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317305/original/file-20200226-24651-g6x3v5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317305/original/file-20200226-24651-g6x3v5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317305/original/file-20200226-24651-g6x3v5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317305/original/file-20200226-24651-g6x3v5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Travels on a ‘boundless ocean’: Scottish philosopher David Hume.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">PrakichTreetasayuth via Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He imagines himself as a sailor who has struck shallow water, narrowly escaping shipwreck. Safety tempts him to remain perched on the rocks, rather than venturing out onto “that boundless ocean, which runs out into immensity”. Yet Hume decides he will put out to sea again, in the same “leaky weather-beaten vessel”.</p>
<h2>Wild mazes of thought</h2>
<p>The “philosophy of travel” isn’t a thing. It isn’t the subject of lecture courses, or conferences – there are no lists of great philosophical travellers. But, as I argue in my new book <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/019883540X?pf_rd_p=f20e70b1-67f9-48d1-8c78-ba616030b420&pf_rd_r=TDTYNR8TNG2J459STQ13">The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad</a>, travel and philosophy have enjoyed a quiet love affair for centuries.</p>
<p>Travellers and philosophers can both aim at pushing the limits of their knowledge – at seeing how the world is. Adventurous travellers covet new places – even Earth’s unexplored oceans and planets around distant stars. Radical philosophers crafts new questions and shake old assumptions. What is time? Or matter? Or goodness?</p>
<p>You might think wishing for the unknown is the only thing philosophy and travel have in common. Travel involves trains, passports, luggage. Philosophy involves books, ethics, bearded Greeks. But despite their differences, travel and philosophy are tangled together. Travel has affected philosophy, and philosophy has affected travel.</p>
<p>Travel can help philosophers develop new questions. For example, 17th-century European travellers began bringing home, en masse, reports of foreign customs and beliefs. John Locke, the “father of liberalism” – and a voracious reader of travel books – discussed practices that Europeans found shocking. His <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pDNIAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=locke+essay+concerning+human+understanding&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiRgc7ClZznAhXSgVwKHas_DmsQ6AEIMTAB#v=onepage&q=locke%20essay%20concerning%20human%20understanding&f=false">Essay Concerning Human Understanding</a> describes cannibalism among peoples in Georgia, the Caribbean and Peru; the immodest sex lives of Turkish saints; and atheism running rampant throughout China and Thailand. </p>
<p>Some of these reports were erroneous: reports of cannibalism <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Everyone_Eats.html?id=3xWt_kWk6L8C">were exaggerated</a>, while – even then – China and Thailand had long religious traditions. But it was becoming clear that people across the planet disagree about ethics and religion. Locke used these disagreements to raise a philosophical question. Are there any innate ideas that all humans are born knowing? (For Locke, the answer was “no”.)</p>
<h2>New questions</h2>
<p>Travel is still prompting new questions today. What are the ethics of doom tourism, to places affected by climate change? Can we imagine what other, non-human minds are like? How might space travel affect us?</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317307/original/file-20200226-24668-12z7jg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317307/original/file-20200226-24668-12z7jg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=364&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317307/original/file-20200226-24668-12z7jg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=364&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317307/original/file-20200226-24668-12z7jg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=364&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317307/original/file-20200226-24668-12z7jg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317307/original/file-20200226-24668-12z7jg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317307/original/file-20200226-24668-12z7jg2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mary Kingsley: English explorer who helped map West Africa and discovered new fish species.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">rook76 via Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Just as travel has moved philosophy forward, philosophy has sometimes pushed travel practices in new directions. Every so often, a new philosophical idea impels travel to particular places, or in particular ways. For example, American literary scholar Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Aw8j8JZhxpYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Marjorie+Hope+Nicolson%E2%80%99s+book+Mountain+Gloom,+Mountain+Glory&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjXx9_NlZznAhXhUBUIHe_RDUgQ6AEIKzAA#v=onepage&q&f=false">Mountain Gloom, Mountain Glory</a> argues that, from the late 17th century, a new theory of space incited tourists to visit mountains. On this “<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-space-the-300-year-old-philosophical-battle-that-is-still-raging-today-85628">Absolute</a>” theory, space is God’s immensity or infinite presence.</p>
<p>Nicolson argues this led to people perceiving big, infinite landscapes such as mountains as divine. “Great cathedrals of the earth” – as the Victorian thinker John Ruskin wrote of the Alps – “altars of snow”. Once mountains had become cathedrals, everybody wanted to visit them.</p>
<p>Similarly, the philosophy of wilderness set out in American philosopher Henry Thoreau’s <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=B_pKAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Henry+Thoreau+Walden&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjF4O7xlZznAhXJUBUIHSgxDRgQ6wEILDAA#v=onepage&q&f=false">Walden</a> started a craze for solitary wilderness travel – and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/what-it-means-that-urban-hipsters-like-staring-at-pictures-of-cabins/254495/">cabin porn</a>.</p>
<p>What counts as unknown depends on your starting point. For British sailor James Cook, Alaska and Australia were “new” lands – but their indigenous inhabitants knew them well. Roman Syria would have been unfamiliar to Chinese explorer Gan Ying, but not to the Syrians. Sometimes journeys explore places unknown to all human beings: the depths of <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/son-doong-cave-vietnam-expedition/index.html">Son Doong caves</a>, the under-snow <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/feb/24/antarctica-mountains">mountains of Antarctica</a>, the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jan/05/space-race-moon-mars-asteroids-commercial-launches">Moon and Mars</a>.</p>
<p>Philosophers can also venture into areas of thought that are new to them but familiar to others. I would have this experience if I began researching medieval German philosophy, or contemporary Chinese philosophy. And philosophers can attempt to strike out into wholly new areas of thought. I think this is when philosophy and travel are at their most fascinating: when they look to the borders of what humans do not know.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/131266/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Emily Thomas receives funding from the AHRC.</span></em></p>Travel and philosophy have enjoyed a quiet love affair for centuries.Emily Thomas, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Durham UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1017192018-09-17T10:51:36Z2018-09-17T10:51:36ZCatastrophe overload? Read philosophers and poetry instead of headlines<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/236504/original/file-20180915-177968-h8p4ke.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Read poetry.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Priscilla Du Preez/Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>For almost two years now, Americans have been confronted daily by ominous tidings. We are living through stressful times. Reading the news feels awful; ignoring it doesn’t feel right either.</p>
<p>Psychologist Terri Apter <a href="https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/grenfell-tower-terri-apter/">recently wrote about</a> the “phenomenon in human behavior sometimes described as ‘the hive switch,’ where "catastrophic events eliminate selfishness, conflict and competitiveness, rendering humans as co-operative as ultra-social bees.”</p>
<p>But if hurricanes, earthquakes or volcanoes trigger the hive switch, does this principle hold for man-made catastrophes? </p>
<p>What about the immigration policy that has been separating children from their parents? School shootings, suicides, ecological disaster? </p>
<p>What about the flood of frightening and infuriating news that splashes against us daily?</p>
<p>In response to all this, people are hardly swarming into a cooperative hive. On the contrary, our human qualities of imagination, alertness and compassion seem to be turning against us. To imagine the suffering of our fellow beings and the future of our beleaguered planet provokes rage, dread and an overwhelming sense of helplessness.</p>
<p>What, if anything, can we do?</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235693/original/file-20180910-123122-lt9c5s.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235693/original/file-20180910-123122-lt9c5s.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235693/original/file-20180910-123122-lt9c5s.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235693/original/file-20180910-123122-lt9c5s.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235693/original/file-20180910-123122-lt9c5s.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235693/original/file-20180910-123122-lt9c5s.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235693/original/file-20180910-123122-lt9c5s.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Seneca has answers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27620840">Jean-Pol GRANDMONT</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Listen to Seneca and Epictetus</h2>
<p>Rage and dread can morph into political activism, but it’s hard not to feel that any change is too little and too late. </p>
<p>The children who have been separated from their parents, for example, even if they’re all reunited, which doesn’t seem likely, will bear the psychic scars for the rest of their lives, as physician Danielle Ofri has <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/as-a-doctor-i-see-child-separation-as-a-medical-emergency.html">pointed out eloquently in Slate</a>. </p>
<p>How should people react to <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-is-suicide-on-the-rise-in-the-us-but-falling-in-most-of-europe-98366">rising suicide rates</a>? Perhaps, judging from much recent coverage, the most we can hope to do is muster enough insight and hindsight to try to prevent the next one. </p>
<p>Yet this spring’s exhaustive coverage of a <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/health/ct-celebrity-suicides-midlife-20180611-story.html">pair of celebrity suicides</a> – Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade – sent me back to the <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stoicism">Stoic philosophers</a>, thinkers who flourished, particularly in Rome, in the first and second centuries. Uninterested in abstruse speculations, these philosophers stressed ethics and virtue; they were concerned with how to live and how to die. Stoic psychology offered and still offers help working with the mind to calm our anxieties and help us to fulfill our function as human beings.</p>
<p>Both Bourdain and Spade, creative and successful personalities, icons of glamour and achievement – particularly Bourdain, whose restless and courageous explorations of various corners of the world inspired countless viewers and readers – turned out to have been vulnerable people. </p>
<p>William B. Irvine, whose 2009 <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/A_Guide_to_the_Good_Life.html?id=yQ59JV_9AfIC">“A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy</a>” I’ve been rereading, usefully distills from his four favorite Stoic writers, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lucius-Annaeus-Seneca-Roman-philosopher-and-statesman">Seneca</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Epictetus-Greek-philosopher">Epictetus</a>, <a href="https://www.iep.utm.edu/musonius/">Musonius Rufus</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marcus-Aurelius-Roman-emperor">Marcus Aurelius</a>, two salient Stoic techniques for combating dark thoughts. I’ll continue this teaching tradition by distilling Irvine.</p>
<p>The advice of writers like Seneca and Epictetus feels remarkably germane. The kinds of misery that are often mentioned in connection with suicidal impulses, such as fear and anxiety, are perennial components of the human condition. When we speak of a suicidal person wrestling with demons <a href="http://www.historydisclosure.com/word-demon-come/">– a word as old as Homer –</a> that’s what we’re talking about. </p>
<p>The Stoics teach that you can try to counter your demons – not with talk therapy, let alone pharmaceuticals, but by working with your mind. </p>
<h2>Be ready</h2>
<p>The first technique is negative visualization: Imagine the worst so as to be prepared for it. </p>
<p>Most likely the worst will never happen. The bad things that can and probably will happen are likely to be milder than the worst thing you can think of. You can feel both relieved that the worst hasn’t happened and also somewhat mentally bolstered against the worst possibility. </p>
<p>“He robs present ills of their power,” <a href="https://www.loebclassics.com/view/seneca_younger-de_consolatione_ad_marciam/1932/pb_LCL254.29.xml">wrote Seneca</a>, “who has perceived their coming beforehand.” </p>
<p>Elsewhere, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=e6pvK6SQuvgC&pg=PA40&lpg=PA40&dq=%22Trees+that+have+grown+in+a+sunny+vale+are+fragile.+It+is+therefore+to+the+advantage+of+good+men,+and+it+enables+them+to+live+without+fear,+to+be+on+terms+of+intimacy+with+danger+and+to+bear+with+serenity+a+fortune+that+is+ill+only+to+him+who+bears+it+ill.%22&source=bl&ots=_6S887Wovx&sig=cGayQvgwpH59WZqc2EWQCUrX9tU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjrnafWg7HdAhWqmuAKHZKBDYAQ6AEwAHoECAAQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22Trees%20that%20have%20grown%20in%20a%20sunny%20vale%20are%20fragile.%20It%20is%20therefore%20to%20the%20advantage%20of%20good%20men%2C%20and%20it%20enables%20them%20to%20live%20without%20fear%2C%20to%20be%20on%20terms%20of%20intimacy%20with%20danger%20and%20to%20bear%20with%20serenity%20a%20fortune%20that%20is%20ill%20only%20to%20him%20who%20bears%20it%20ill.%22&f=false">Seneca writes</a>, “Trees that have grown in a sunny vale are fragile. It is therefore to the advantage of good men, and it enables them to live without fear, to be on terms of intimacy with danger and to bear with serenity a fortune that is ill only to him who bears it ill.”</p>
<p>Much the same point is made by Edgar, disguised as Mad Tom, when he observes in “King Lear” that <a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/gopher/text/earlymodern/shakespeare/tragedy/KingLear/KingLear_ACT_IV_SCENE_I">“the worst is not/So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’”</a> The very fact of being able to comment on how bad things are – and such bemoaning is now a daily ritual for many of us – means that we have survived.</p>
<h2>Divide and conquer – or not</h2>
<p>The second Stoic self-help technique is what Irvine calls <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-guide-to-the-good-life-9780195374612?cc=us&lang=en&">the dichotomy of control</a>: Divide situations into those you have some control over and those you have no control over. </p>
<p>Epictetus <a href="https://donaldrobertson.name/2012/12/06/the-stoic-teachings-of-zeus/">observes that</a> “Of the things that exist, Zeus has put some in our control and some not in our control. Therefore…we must concern ourselves absolutely with the things that are under our control and entrust the things not in our control to the universe.”</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235695/original/file-20180910-123131-1lfn2mg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235695/original/file-20180910-123131-1lfn2mg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1061&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235695/original/file-20180910-123131-1lfn2mg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1061&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235695/original/file-20180910-123131-1lfn2mg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1061&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235695/original/file-20180910-123131-1lfn2mg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1333&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235695/original/file-20180910-123131-1lfn2mg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1333&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235695/original/file-20180910-123131-1lfn2mg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1333&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Epictetus has some answers, too.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The John Adams Library at the Boston Public Library</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Irvine <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-guide-to-the-good-life-9780195374612?cc=us&lang=en&">adds a third category</a>, thereby transforming the dichotomy into what he calls a trichotomy: things we have no control over, things we have complete control over and things we have some degree of control over. </p>
<p>We can’t control whether the sun rises tomorrow. </p>
<p>We can control whether we have a third bowl of ice cream, what sweater we choose to wear or whether to press SEND. </p>
<p>And, as for suicides, school shootings, agonized children torn from their parents? We can do something. We can vote, run for office, organize, contribute money or goods. In these ventures we can cooperate with our neighbors and colleagues, acting as hive-like as possible without being paralyzed by anguish.</p>
<h2>Play baseball, go to the park</h2>
<p>Those fortunate enough to experience private joy still sense the shadow of public dread. Yet joy is still joy; life still needs to be lived. </p>
<p>If we’re baseball players, we can play baseball. If we’re grandparents, we can take our grandchildren to the park. We can read – not only the news, but fiction and history that takes us out of our moment. And we can read poetry, which has the power of distilling our times, of making our moral dilemmas, if not precisely soluble, beautifully clear. </p>
<p>If we’re poets, we can write poetry – not a community venture, ordinarily, but what these days is ordinary? Public anguish makes its way into private lives, and some of the best new poetry braids public and private together. I myself both read and write poetry – both activities over which I have a good deal of control. And the poetry I’ve been reading is riveting.</p>
<p>An eloquent recent poem that encompasses the ethical dissonance between home and homelessness, safety and danger, is <a href="http://www.literarymatters.org/1-1-empathy/">A.E. Stallings’s “Empathy</a>.”</p>
<p>Interestingly, the Stoic notion of negative visualization animates the poem’s argument: how good that I and my family are snug in our beds at home and not tossing on a raft in the dark. It could be so much worse:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My love, I’m grateful tonight</p>
<p>Our listing bed isn’t a raft</p>
<p>Precariously adrift</p>
<p>As we dodge the coast-guard light…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And in its final stanza the poem unflinchingly rejects the easy notion of empathy as smug and superficial and hypocritical: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Empathy isn’t generous,</p>
<p>It’s selfish. It’s not being nice</p>
<p>To say I would pay any price</p>
<p>Not to be those who’d die to be us.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Rejecting what poet <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=_FsgAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA280&lpg=PA280&dq=%E2%80%9CPray+God+us+keep+from+single+vision+and+Newton%27s+sleep.%E2%80%9D+William+Blake&source=bl&ots=BQkaabc_fM&sig=MpVdropf-b63oi3rxllZXQJYa_k&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjw7972jbHdAhXLmuAKHXpKB_EQ6AEwAHoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9CPray%20God%20us%20keep%20from%20single%20vision%20and%20Newton's%20sleep.%E2%80%9D%20William%20Blake&f=false">William Blake called “single vision</a>,” Stallings courageously sees, and seems miraculously to write from, both sides. </p>
<p>She also manages to live on both sides. For the past year and a half, she has been doing extraordinary work with <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/144785/crossing-borders">refugee women and children in Athens</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/236042/original/file-20180912-133892-12ugjrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/236042/original/file-20180912-133892-12ugjrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236042/original/file-20180912-133892-12ugjrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236042/original/file-20180912-133892-12ugjrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236042/original/file-20180912-133892-12ugjrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236042/original/file-20180912-133892-12ugjrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/236042/original/file-20180912-133892-12ugjrv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Poet A.E. Stallings doing hand-rhymes and songs with refugee children in Athens.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Rebecca J. Sweetman</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The dark undercurrents roiling in our time can also be felt in <a href="https://newversenews.blogspot.com/2018/06/not-my-son.html">Anna Evans’s “Not My Son,”</a> a villanelle whose rhymes of “border,” “order,” “disorder,” “ignored her,” “implored, her” and “toward her” clang with ominous music.</p>
<p>Poems like “Empathy” and “Not My Son” aren’t comfortable to read, nor were they, presumably, very comfortable to write. But they represent a measure of what some of us who happen to be poets can do; and I’d rather take in the frightening news as these poets thoughtfully and eloquently present it than gobble down headlines raw. </p>
<p>My next collection will be called “Love and Dread.” The Stoics knew that dread is always part of the picture.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/101719/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rachel Hadas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>From human suffering to political chicanery to environmental degradation, the tide of bad news, blared in headlines every day, seems overwhelming. One poet and classics scholar asks: What can be done?Rachel Hadas, Professor of English, Rutgers University - NewarkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/954482018-04-30T04:53:56Z2018-04-30T04:53:56ZJohn Stuart Mill’s marginalia tells us much about the great thinker’s mind<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216622/original/file-20180427-175077-su6fv9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">John Stuart Mill</span> </figcaption></figure><p>In <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3044429.pdf">The Man of the Year Million</a>, originally printed in the Pall Mall Gazette on November 6 1893, then-journalist H. G. Wells imagines the descendants of humanity as “enormous brains” with bodies “shrivelled to nothing, a dangling, degraded pendant to their minds”. Wells’ facetious vision of an explicitly cerebral future may be scientifically suspect, but it is accurate with respect to the reputation of pre-eminent 19th-century logician, liberal, and cultural and social critic John Stuart Mill.</p>
<p>Remembered principally by philosophers for his <a href="https://archive.org/details/anexaminationsi06millgoog">System of Logic and Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy</a>, by political scientists for his <a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/Mill/mlP.html">Principles of Political Economy</a> and <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5669/5669-h/5669-h.htm">Considerations on Representative Government</a>, and by literary scholars for his <a href="https://www.utilitarianism.com/millauto/">Autobiography</a> and for <a href="https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/one.html">On Liberty</a>, Mill’s carefully cultivated image of himself as a mind – exhaustively educated, disinterestedly logical, and meticulously organised – persists nearly 150 years after his death.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215885/original/file-20180423-75100-1psw6sm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215885/original/file-20180423-75100-1psw6sm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=674&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215885/original/file-20180423-75100-1psw6sm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=674&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215885/original/file-20180423-75100-1psw6sm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=674&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215885/original/file-20180423-75100-1psw6sm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=847&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215885/original/file-20180423-75100-1psw6sm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=847&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215885/original/file-20180423-75100-1psw6sm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=847&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Spines of books in JS Mill’s personal library, all transcribed in Mill Marginalia Online.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Somerville College Oxford</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And yet, Mill’s humanity ought to count for more than a degraded pendant to his place in intellectual history. An anxiously precocious child, he grew into a complicated, endearing – and sometimes amusing – adult. These less well-remembered features of his prodigious intelligence have recently begun to reemerge from the title pages, endpapers, flyleaves and textual margins of his personal library.</p>
<p>Donated to <a href="https://www.some.ox.ac.uk/">Oxford University’s Somerville College</a> in 1905, Mill’s book collection from his house in Blackheath has history – including Mill’s personal history – literally inscribed on thousands of its pages. Like many serious readers, Mill read with pen or pencil in hand, marking passages he found interesting, protesting against premises and conclusions he judged facile, and sometimes summarising his own thoughts in annotations on unprinted pages.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215886/original/file-20180423-75093-p99ht1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215886/original/file-20180423-75093-p99ht1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215886/original/file-20180423-75093-p99ht1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=187&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215886/original/file-20180423-75093-p99ht1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=187&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215886/original/file-20180423-75093-p99ht1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=187&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215886/original/file-20180423-75093-p99ht1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=236&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215886/original/file-20180423-75093-p99ht1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=236&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215886/original/file-20180423-75093-p99ht1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=236&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Somerville College Oxford.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mill Marginalia Online home page.</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Collectively known as marginalia, these unfiltered records of Mill’s original reactions to his books are the subject of an international collaboration between Somerville College and the University of Alabama. The digital component of this effort, <a href="http://millmarginalia.org/">Mill Marginalia Online</a>, aspires to digitise all handwritten marginalia in Mill’s library and, in doing so, to reconstruct the sometimes messy process of reading, the initial gut-level reactions, of one of the leading minds of Victorian England.</p>
<h2>Great thinkers</h2>
<p>“This is all my eye” – Mill’s expression of scepticism never made it into his overwhelmingly <a href="http://thegreatthinkers.org/tocqueville/commentary/js-mill-m-de-tocqueville-on-democracy-in-america/">positive review</a> of Alexis de Tocqueville’s <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/816/816-h/816-h.htm">Democracy in America, Part II</a>. It is, nevertheless, clearly legible on page 170 of volume three as Mill’s first reaction to the French thinker’s somewhat imprecise distinction between what he called democratic and aristocratic centuries.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215887/original/file-20180423-75110-14v1bfw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215887/original/file-20180423-75110-14v1bfw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215887/original/file-20180423-75110-14v1bfw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215887/original/file-20180423-75110-14v1bfw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215887/original/file-20180423-75110-14v1bfw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215887/original/file-20180423-75110-14v1bfw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215887/original/file-20180423-75110-14v1bfw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215887/original/file-20180423-75110-14v1bfw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la Democratie en Amerique, vol. 3, p. 170, inner margin, Mill’s personal copy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Somerville College Oxford</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Mill had, in 1835, introduced England to the first two volumes of Tocqueville’s chef-d’oeuvre, and the men traded friendly and intellectually engaged letters on the subject of democracy over the next five years, as the Frenchman prepared the latter half of his treatise. In recognition of their growing mutual regard, Tocqueville even sent Mill an inscribed copy – it was on the basis of this French edition that Mill penned his second, 1840 review.</p>
<p>And it is in the margins of these same two volumes that Mill recorded comments that might well have tested their friendship. Thus, in response to the aristocratic Frenchman’s thesis, on page 323 of volume three, concerning what we might today call “vocational determinism”, in this case the degrading effects of a life spent “making heads for pins,” Mill wrote “all this mu[st] be taken wi[th] great reserve[ation]. It is not tr[ue] as here state[d]” (I have filled in any missing letters).</p>
<p>What was true, Mill thought, was Tocqueville’s observation, on page 128 of volume four, that Americans were thin-skinned and quick to take offence in response to criticism. Originally marked with a marginal double score (two vertical lines made in the outer margin of p. 128), this passage received fuller attention in Mill’s annotation on the volume’s back flyleaf:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This feeling has nothing to do with democracy – Wait, until the Americans by their great deeds, in arms, arts, science and literature, have taken a place among the great nations of the earth, and they will no longer be quarrelsome, and doubtful of their position – They will then be as proud haughty and self satisfied as the English – But not before – …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s hard to tell whether Tocqueville’s “insatiably vain” Americans or Mill’s “haughty and self-satisfied” British middle classes come off worse in this annotation. Either way, such caustic humour may surprise those accustomed to the measured reasonableness of Mill’s mature publications.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215888/original/file-20180423-119528-12xdcb8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215888/original/file-20180423-119528-12xdcb8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215888/original/file-20180423-119528-12xdcb8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215888/original/file-20180423-119528-12xdcb8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215888/original/file-20180423-119528-12xdcb8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215888/original/file-20180423-119528-12xdcb8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215888/original/file-20180423-119528-12xdcb8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215888/original/file-20180423-119528-12xdcb8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la Democratie en Amerique, vol. 4, back flyleaf, JSM’s personal copy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Somerville College Oxford</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>With roughly 10,000 examples of marginalia spread across well over 100 titles, Mill Marginalia Online offers numerous, previously unknown points of entry into Mill’s refreshingly versatile and perennial active mind. In addition to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, significant works by <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/bacon_francis.shtml">Francis Bacon</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Carlyle">Thomas Carlyle</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Auguste-Comte">Auguste Comte</a>, <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/ralph-waldo-emerson">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Maine">Henry Maine</a>, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/percy-bysshe-shelley">Percy Bysshe Shelley</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/August-Wilhelm-von-Schlegel">August Schlegel</a> and many others bear revealing marks and annotations in Mill’s distinctive hand.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215895/original/file-20180423-133865-1014l3z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215895/original/file-20180423-133865-1014l3z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215895/original/file-20180423-133865-1014l3z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215895/original/file-20180423-133865-1014l3z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215895/original/file-20180423-133865-1014l3z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215895/original/file-20180423-133865-1014l3z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215895/original/file-20180423-133865-1014l3z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215895/original/file-20180423-133865-1014l3z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Arnoldus Vinnius’s Institutionum Imperialium, pp. 674-75, interleaved material, Mill’s personal copy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Somerville College Oxford</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Mental acrobatics</h2>
<p>Also hinted at in the Mill collection are aspects of his personality and personal life that may never be fully known. For instance, tucked between pages 674 and 675 of <a href="http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=3225997&partId=1&people=17918&peoA=17918-2-70&sortBy=producerSort&page=1">Arnoldus Vinnius</a>’s Institutionum Imperialium – a weighty and much-reprinted history of Justinian law – are two paper dolls, with a third waiting between pages 866 and 867.</p>
<p>Two of these bodies in motion have obviously been commercially produced and then either punched or cut from the pages on which they were printed. The bottom of the two acrobats is even more evidently homemade, although no less painstakingly shaped and coloured. I would guess that their presence in the Vinnius has less to do with the book’s subject matter than with its size and the solidity of its binding – it was an excellent choice for keeping one’s dolls flat and safe.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215897/original/file-20180423-133881-1vkbgcw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215897/original/file-20180423-133881-1vkbgcw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215897/original/file-20180423-133881-1vkbgcw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215897/original/file-20180423-133881-1vkbgcw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215897/original/file-20180423-133881-1vkbgcw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1315&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215897/original/file-20180423-133881-1vkbgcw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1315&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215897/original/file-20180423-133881-1vkbgcw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1315&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Arnoldus Vinnius’s Institutionum Imperialium, pp. 866-67, interleaved material, Mill’s personal copy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Somerville College Oxford</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But the question is, whose dolls were they? Printed in 1665, the book is old enough to have been in the Mill family library when the young John Stuart was tutoring his sisters. Left in the library at Blackheath after his death, it might also have served as a toy depository for Harriet Taylor Mill’s daughter Helen (Mill’s stepdaughter) about whose childhood relationship with Mill we know very little. And need these three objects have had only one owner, or could they have been passed down and around, as playthings sometimes are?</p>
<p>The questions posed by these inclusions assume greater intellectual, as opposed to biographical significance, when we examine the handmade figure more closely. Inverted both back to front and top to bottom, we can see that this doll was crafted from a manuscript – one that bears Mill’s handwriting. The partial word written across the torso could be “government” and that underneath it may be “leaves”. It’s too little for an identification, but more than enough to wonder whether this manuscript was volunteered for doll duty or had been fortuitously scavenged.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215898/original/file-20180423-133872-lq5ayd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215898/original/file-20180423-133872-lq5ayd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215898/original/file-20180423-133872-lq5ayd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215898/original/file-20180423-133872-lq5ayd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215898/original/file-20180423-133872-lq5ayd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215898/original/file-20180423-133872-lq5ayd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215898/original/file-20180423-133872-lq5ayd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215898/original/file-20180423-133872-lq5ayd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Close-up on Arnoldus Vinnius’s Institutionum Imperialium, pp. 674-75, inverted interleaved material, JSM’s personal copy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Somerville College Oxford</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Future conclusions</h2>
<p>What is certain is that these dolls – and every other example of human/book interaction in the roughly 1,700-item personal library of Mill’s – will be catalogued, digitised and rendered fully searchable within Mill Marginalia Online. All of us who work on the project are acutely aware that we cannot know what the research questions of the future might be. </p>
<p>So, rather than limiting our data by type or frequency or what we – today – perceive as its significance, we are striving to record everything that we find, to remove ourselves as much as possible from the results – and to welcome the future by refusing to foreclose upon it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95448/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Albert Pionke does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The great thinker left thousands of comments in the margins of his personal library. Now these are being digitised and catalogued.Albert Pionke, Professor of English Literature, University of AlabamaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/907132018-01-30T15:10:14Z2018-01-30T15:10:14ZAchille Mbembe on how to restore the humanity stolen by racism<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203978/original/file-20180130-107694-1wr3y5q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>African philosopher, <a href="https://wiser.wits.ac.za/users/achille-mbembe">Achille Mbembe</a>, has gained an enviable reputation as a scholar that challenges the tenets of modernity. Some aspects of modernity Mbembe is known to challenge are characterised by the move towards more capitalistic economies, an increase in social stratifications and the universalisation of Western European thought. From <a href="http://www.africanbookscollective.com/books/on-private-indirect-government">“On Private Indirect Government”</a> (2000) to his recent book, <a href="http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/critique-of-black-reason/">“Critique of Black Reason”</a> (2017), his interest has always been on how the world can account for the construction and consequences of race and racism. </p>
<p>In “Critique of Black Reason” Mbembe challenges us to rethink the present with the view of charting a future that, according to Mbembe, will differ from the past and the present.</p>
<p>A key interest of the book is on how race and racism have played a role in how the modern world is organised. However much the world might have benefited from modernity, what is unavoidable is the integral role of race and racism in the construction of modernity. This is why for Mbembe it is of utmost importance that we examine this aspect of modernity as it continues to exclude subjects and create new and old victims that are “the wretched of the earth”. </p>
<p>He writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>race, operating over the past centuries as a fundamental category that is at once material and phantasmic, has been at the root of catastrophe, the cause of extraordinary psychic destruction and of innumerable crimes and massacres.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For Mbembe, the construction of race emanates from the symbolic. It accounts for the ways in which subjects live and where they live. It explains the kinds of debates that prohibit – or allow them – to lead meaningful lives.</p>
<h2>Age of Reason</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203766/original/file-20180129-100923-ni4qyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203766/original/file-20180129-100923-ni4qyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203766/original/file-20180129-100923-ni4qyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203766/original/file-20180129-100923-ni4qyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203766/original/file-20180129-100923-ni4qyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203766/original/file-20180129-100923-ni4qyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203766/original/file-20180129-100923-ni4qyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cover of ‘Critique of Black Reason’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wits University Press</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The book focuses more on how discourses of race and other differences emerged in the eighteenth century during what is popularly known as the <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/enlightenment">Age of Reason</a> or the Enlightenment. </p>
<p>This was a period in which science, philosophy and other disciplines, and social debates, constructed differences between people.This was driven by two factors: material interests and an unwillingness to live with the unfamiliar. Mbembe’s book takes to task this idea of Enlightenment to show how it is responsible for the construction of race and racism:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Black Man is the one (or the thing) that one sees when one sees nothing, when one understands nothing, and above all, when one wishes to understand nothing. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This, for Mbembe, is not coincidental. This is because,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the term ‘Black’ was the product of a social and technological machine tightly linked to the emergence and globalisation of capitalism. It was invented to signify exclusion, brutalisation, and degradation, to point to a limit constantly conjured and abhorred. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Capitalism, from this perspective, is only possible because it’s exclusionary. For much of our contemporary history, this has been through the discourse of race.</p>
<h2>History of Africa</h2>
<p>Africa is the continent where most “black” people live. Mbembe’s book therefore looks into the history of Africa and how it has been used, and abused, as the antithesis of Western modernity. Since the West depends on the “rest” in order to construct itself, it is not surprising, Mbembe writes, that,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>when Africa comes up, correspondence between words, images, and the thing itself matters very little. It is not necessary for the name to correspond to the thing, or for the thing to respond to its name.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is because,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>when one says the word ‘Africa’ one generally abdicates all responsibility.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And it is in this abdication of responsibility that Mbembe argues for a different way of being in the world, and of living with others that are different from oneself. </p>
<p>While, then, the word Africa might speak to a historical and present suffering, there is also something in the word, Mbembe writes, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>that judges the world and calls for reparation, restitution, and justice. Its spectral presence in the world can be understood only as part of a critique of race.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mbembe argues that while race and racism still play an important role in the present, it is also clear that there is a “Becoming Black of the world” that has to do with the numerous forms of exclusion and violence that haunt the contemporary.</p>
<p>For instance, Mbembe writes, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If yesterday’s drama of the subject was exploitation by capital, the tragedy of the multitude today is that they are unable to be exploited at all. They are abandoned subjects relegated to the role of a ‘superfluous humanity.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>To be hopeful</h2>
<p>How, then, does one continue to live, and to be hopeful, when it seems as though the history of the world is a history of depredation and cruelty? To answer this question, Mbembe turns to philosopher <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-fanon-continues-to-resonate-more-than-half-a-century-after-algerias-independence-43508">Frantz Fanon</a> (as he does in much of the book) and writes that one of the important lessons that he taught us is,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the idea that in every human subject there is something indomitable and fundamentally intangible that no domination - no matter what form it takes - can eliminate, contain, or suppress, at least not completely.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is here that the possibility of a different future is possible.</p>
<p>This is because for Mbembe,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>until we have eliminated racism from our current lives and imagination, we will have to continue to struggle for the creation of a world beyond - race. But to achieve it, to sit down at a table to which everyone has been invited, we must undertake an exacting political and ethical critique of racism and of the ideologies of difference…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And that is precisely what this book does.</p>
<p>In bringing together thinkers us such as Fanon, <a href="http://science.jrank.org/pages/7919/Negritude.html">Aime Cesaire</a>, <a href="http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/the-philosophy-of-friedrich-nietzsche-explained-with-8-bit-video-games.html">Friedrich Nietzsche</a>, <a href="http://marcusgarvey.com/?p=225">Marcus Garvey</a>, <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/page/biography">Nelson Mandela</a>, <a href="https://scholar.google.co.za/scholar?q=Michel+Foucault+philosophy&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjmsfS49vzYAhXKAsAKHUSPAwoQgQMIJDAA">Michel Foucault</a> and many others, “Critique of Black Reason” is an impressive book. It offers readers insight into how the construction of race and racism underpins our understanding of modernity and therefore of the world we inhabit. </p>
<p>More than this though, it challenges readers to undo forms of exclusionary thinking that still haunt the ways we live. It is only in doing this, according to Mbembe, that we can,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>restore the humanity stolen from those who have historically been subjected to processes of abstraction and objectification. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>“Critique of Black Reason” is an illuminating and brilliant addition to Mbembe’s corpus. It is the kind of book, I suspect, that will become compulsory reading for undergraduate and graduate classes worldwide.</p>
<p><em>“Critique of Black Reason” is published by Wits University Press</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90713/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Manosa Nthunya does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>“Critique of Black Reason” offers readers insight into how the construction of race and racism underpins our understanding of modernity.Manosa Nthunya, PhD Candidate, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/862882018-01-29T11:28:15Z2018-01-29T11:28:15ZHow should we decide what to do?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203552/original/file-20180126-100908-oli6m8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">How many times do we wonder, 'what's the right thing to do'?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AHelping_the_homeless.jpg">Ed Yourdon from New York City, USA (Helping the homeless Uploaded by Gary Dee, via Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Most of us are faced with ethical decisions on a regular basis. Some are relatively minor – perhaps your cousin makes a new recipe and it really doesn’t taste good, and you have to decide whether to tell the truth or a little white lie so as not to hurt her feelings. </p>
<p>Others are weightier – should you blow the whistle when you discover that your co-worker is behaving in ways that could jeopardize everyone at your workplace? Should you forego a relaxing vacation and instead donate the money to a worthy cause? </p>
<p>For thousands of years, philosophers have debated how to answer ethical questions, large and small. There are a few approaches that have withstood the test of time. </p>
<h2>Doing the most good</h2>
<p>One approach, which we often use in our day-to-day lives even if we aren’t aware that it is a type of ethical deliberation, is to figure out what the consequences of our actions might be and then determine if one course of action or another will lead to better outcomes. In the policy context, this is often referred to as a <a href="https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Ftd7AgMtIGcC&oi=fnd&pg=PA179&dq=moral+cost+benefit+analysis&ots=w4quICsxdO&sig=1PRVTUzSmn9DtZECklqedr5Qifk#v=onepage&q=moral%20cost%20benefit%20analysis&f=false">cost-benefit</a> analysis. </p>
<p>“Consequentialism,” an ethical system, suggests that the right thing to do is the action that will bring about the best consequences for all those affected by the action. “Best consequences” are usually thought of as those that bring about the <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/">most happiness</a> over suffering. </p>
<p><a href="https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Ftd7AgMtIGcC&oi=fnd&pg=PA179&dq=moral+cost+benefit+analysis&ots=w4quICsxdO&sig=1PRVTUzSmn9DtZECklqedr5Qifk#v=onepage&q=moral%20cost%20benefit%20analysis&f=false">Utilitarianism</a> is the primary version of this ethical system. Its most noted living defender, philosopher <a href="http://www.petersinger.info/">Peter Singer</a>, has made compelling arguments about how we should decide what to do. He argues that when we can do something to <a href="https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/resources/peter-singers-girl-in-the-pond">promote the well-being of others</a>, whether they are near or far, human or nonhuman, at relatively little cost to ourselves, that is what we should do. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203472/original/file-20180125-100915-v3c25f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203472/original/file-20180125-100915-v3c25f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203472/original/file-20180125-100915-v3c25f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203472/original/file-20180125-100915-v3c25f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203472/original/file-20180125-100915-v3c25f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203472/original/file-20180125-100915-v3c25f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203472/original/file-20180125-100915-v3c25f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Should an individual forego a vacation to help fight global poverty?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/fmsc/14098532037/in/photolist-ntQEoz-adBUmm-nU6nNC-byRMeq-saG7GS-cGutkY-bzB5bp-7FbmsU-of2eK2-ow58Pe-of2ibf-MapB9i-ow8UBh-nvNmP-oYGaFd-nTC1uu-rRAVVZ-nSR9GX-7DgrJB-dNxmKq-97cWE-6QhcP2-d4LsQ-JBSYuy-U9C1NH-pQboEj-2kQTf1-cRQ8WE-aHVb9T-5HRRDN-5HRNmW-qD9wxR-9qptrF-orKtTd-dNxnoY-bnKaMk-9ySro8-8DBEhm-DqKK7-NAGXk-amXYF4-jjDszm-4EpDnX-vkzs6-7orLfT-7cUQZM-2a1CKW-p3N37j-dmTVaD-hweB8h">Feed My Starving Children (FMSC)</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For example, across the globe <a href="https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-global-poverty">children are suffering and dying</a> from easily preventable diseases. Their lives could be saved if those of us in wealthier countries gave just a little bit of our wealth to organizations fighting global poverty. </p>
<p>Perhaps people could go on less expensive vacations or bring lunch from home rather than eating out and then donate the money saved to help those in need. The suffering that could be prevented would greatly outweigh the slight loss of happiness that such luxuries provide. </p>
<h2>Following the rules</h2>
<p>But why stop at giving up a fancy vacation? Why not forego all travel for pleasure? Surely that could do much more good. In fact, why not forego having children or donate one of our <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/books/review/strangers-drowning-by-larissa-macfarquhar.html">kidneys to someone in need</a>? </p>
<p>When I raise these possibilities with my students, they often complain that this is going too far. So I push the examples to an extreme to try to get clearer about what is wrong: </p>
<p>Imagine a person in a hospital recovering from knee surgery whose organs happen to match three people who just were rushed into the emergency room after a car accident. The three people need a heart, a lung and a liver. </p>
<p>Imagine further that the person recovering hears the family members of those in the accident crying, and the person asks the doctor to take his heart, lung and liver to save the three people. A doctor wouldn’t do that – it is unethical to kill one person to save three people. But why? It would bring greater happiness.</p>
<p>Doctors take a Hippocratic oath to do no harm, so that is one reason why they wouldn’t do this even if asked. The Hippocratic oath can be seen as part of another system of ethics, one that locates the ethical thing to do in doing one’s duty or acting according to good principles. The Hippocratic oath is one such principle. </p>
<p>Doctors follow this rule, not for the sake of following a rule, but because this rule, like the <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/goldrule/">Golden Rule</a>. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” protects and promotes important values. Values we might promote include respecting people for themselves, not their body parts, and treating others and their projects as worthy.</p>
<h2>Empathetic care</h2>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203471/original/file-20180125-100915-1hhn2qx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203471/original/file-20180125-100915-1hhn2qx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203471/original/file-20180125-100915-1hhn2qx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203471/original/file-20180125-100915-1hhn2qx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203471/original/file-20180125-100915-1hhn2qx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1009&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203471/original/file-20180125-100915-1hhn2qx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1009&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203471/original/file-20180125-100915-1hhn2qx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1009&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Aristotle.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AAristotle_Altemps_Inv8575.jpg">After Lysippos via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There is another ethical approach, one that I have been <a href="https://lanternbooks.presswarehouse.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=438993">developing</a>, that comes out of a tradition in ethics that doesn’t focus only on outcomes or on duties, but rather on being a good person and promoting <a href="http://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/The-Ethics-of-Care-Personal-Political-and-Global-by-Virginia-Held.pdf">caring</a> relationships. </p>
<p>Many philosophers, going back to Aristotle, have argued that <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=YqzABgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Routledge+companion+to+virtue+ethics&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwixp5zUlPPXAhVic98KHdDHCrEQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=Routledge%20companion%20to%20virtue%20ethics&f=false">virtue</a> can be our guide. When figuring out what to do, we might want to ask how our actions reflect back on ourselves and the relationships we value. </p>
<p>There are many different ideas about exactly what counts as virtuous. But it’s hard to deny that being a compassionate, respectful, empathetic person, who takes responsibility for her relationships and works to make them better, would count. Honing these skills and acting on them can be a guiding ethos for our choices, actions, and making our way in the world. </p>
<p>If we strive to be better people in caring relationships, doing the right thing, even when difficult, can have unexpected rewards.</p>
<p><em>Editor’s note: This piece is the start of our series on ethical questions arising from everyday life. We would welcome your suggestions. Please email us at <a href="mailto:ethical.questions@theconversation.com">ethical.questions@theconversation.com</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/86288/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lori Gruen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A scholar suggests a few approaches that have withstood the test of time.Lori Gruen, William Griffin Professor of Philosophy, Wesleyan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/755932017-10-09T23:42:06Z2017-10-09T23:42:06ZHow the stoicism of Roman philosophers can help us deal with depression<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189210/original/file-20171006-25772-1uz37na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The statue of Marcus Aurelius Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffd/79900576/in/photolist-84vE9-aaMVPn-nZCjjs-8m2kK8-nfBNed-GmWNKE-paZLDc-4TavMg-bW6buV-j1xiuN-6G6oyC-8c9fkp-Jmxar2-nvFF2f-eSWTiv-e8GDgQ-8TJQ3V-25WrfM-7sk448-4pez75-dqc9pW-fPG6s-fczxWL-fesjaW-eaN9th-a6W9yL-njyzY8-qcykA9-8cagXp-GmWPFC-7hwScp-3bg9x4-j1wB3f-8gqzfE-8LV5UU-7hAPas-sGqpU-68pRMc-5nquBt-dV9uiv-9RoMR6-dwmSex-ohwuYo-j1wrHn-9TW7Jz-j1z4uS-2JQuy-j1ynbA-aAyL1b-JieG9">Jeff</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Depression is on the rise. A study conducted by the World Health Organization found <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/mar/31/depression-is-leading-cause-of-disability-worldwide-says-who-study">an increase of 20 percent</a> in depression cases within just a decade.</p>
<p>I work on a university campus. One might expect such a place to feel vibrant and energetic, but lately there seems to be more fatigue and malaise. Even for me, on some days it can feel hard to face the world. </p>
<p>As a scholar of ancient philosophy and a practicing <a href="http://modernstoicism.com/">stoic</a>, I have found great solace in the works of Roman stoic philosophers such as <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/marcus/">Marcus Aurelius</a>, emperor of Rome, and <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/epictetu/">Epictetus</a>, teacher of Stoic philosophy and a former slave. </p>
<p>What tools do these ancient thinkers offer to deal with depression? </p>
<p>Of course, I must add here that clinical depression, which is a serious health issue and should be treated by a professional, is a different matter than the sort of ordinary depression and fatigue that most of us might feel from time to time.</p>
<h2>What is stoicism?</h2>
<p>Stoicism is based on the idea that the goal of life is to live in agreement with nature. Nature itself is defined as whole of the cosmos, including our fellow human beings. </p>
<p>Epictetus, whose school of Stoicism flourished in the second century A.D., <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html">tells us</a> how to pursue this idea. He says, “some things are under our control and some things aren’t under our control.” And, if something is not under our control, it is not worth expending energy on.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189212/original/file-20171006-25752-1cchn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/189212/original/file-20171006-25752-1cchn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189212/original/file-20171006-25752-1cchn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189212/original/file-20171006-25752-1cchn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189212/original/file-20171006-25752-1cchn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189212/original/file-20171006-25752-1cchn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/189212/original/file-20171006-25752-1cchn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/scrc/26407841620/in/photolist-5wFPY-5Sq6EH-5RMg8F-7sk448-5qhUpF-dPti48-VyRttQ-XZJCTe-Gez6h9">W&M Libraries</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nonetheless, there were days, even for these thinkers, when they found it hard to carry on with their duties. Marcus Aurelius, who, as emperor of the Roman Empire from A.D. 161-180, was the most powerful man in the world, makes clear in one of the passages of his “Meditations,” that he is struggling to get out of bed. So, he <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.5.five.html">tells himself</a>, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I am rising to do the work of a human being. Why, then, am I so irritable if I am going out to do what I was born to do and what I was brought into this world for? Or was I created for this, to lie in bed and warm myself under the bedclothes?” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>He also acknowledges how this exhortation may or may not be effective some days. So, even if he drags himself into the world, Marcus highlights <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.2.two.html">what he may face</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Say to yourself at the start of the day, I shall meet with meddling, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and unsociable people.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>While this observation may seem not very helpful, insofar as it focuses the attention on all these negative possibilities and hardships, there is a very important stoic point here. One could ask, why would reminding oneself of hardships be beneficial?</p>
<h2>Meeting the world on stoic terms</h2>
<p>Stoic philosopher Epictetus provides an answer – it can help us anticipate possibilities and prepare us for what may come. He <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html">says</a> in the “Enchiridion”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“When you are about to undertake some action, remind yourself what sort of action it is. If you are going out for a bath, put before your mind what happens at baths – there are people who splash, people who jostle, people who are insulting, people who steal. And you will undertake the action more securely if from the start you say of it, ‘I want to take a bath and to keep my choices in accord with nature’; and likewise for each action.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Epictetus’ example of the Roman bath could be adapted to a contemporary context by considering the sort of things that might happen at work, while commuting, or at home. </p>
<p>Epictetus is telling us to be prepared to face situations with a realistic attitude toward what things are really like. </p>
<p>Marcus Aurelius provides <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.2.two.html">more specific guidelines</a> on how to respond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I, then, can neither be harmed by these people, nor become angry with one who is akin to me, nor can I hate him, for we have come into being to work together, like feet, hands, eyelids, or the two rows of teeth in our upper and lower jaws. To work against one another is therefore contrary to nature; and to be angry with another person and turn away from him is surely to work against him.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In all this, what these philosophers are reminding us is that to live in accord with nature is to recognize that even the most difficult of those we might run into in the course of a day could be someone like us – someone perhaps struggling with their own malaise or malady. </p>
<p>Upon recognizing this, it is easier to be forgiving of those we disagree with. But more than that, perhaps, it makes it easier to be more forgiving of ourselves. It helps us recognize an important piece of suffering and of being human. </p>
<h2>Suffering and its solution</h2>
<p>This idea is echoed when <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html">Epictetus explains</a> the source of human suffering:</p>
<p>“What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about the things.” </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
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<span class="caption">Epictetus.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Epictetus.jpg#file">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>Being upset about something is not a function of the thing that seems upsetting; rather, it is the judgment about that thing that causes the distress. </p>
<p>Judgments, not external things or events, are the source of human suffering.</p>
<p>The remedy to all this, according to Epictetus, is really just a shift in attitude toward the things that happen. When we can face the day, with full acknowledgment of what that day might entail, and recognize that still we must go on, we can move forward. </p>
<p>That may mean letting go of the conception of how things ought to be, and accept them for what they are, even the most frustrating and depressing. </p>
<p>Then, “the work of a human being” might not seem so daunting.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/75593/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert S. Colter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A philosopher explains how to learn from the stoicism of Roman philosophers to cope with present-day troubles.Robert S. Colter, Associate Lecturer, Philosophy, University of WyomingLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.