How the Schocken Books collections changed Arendt scholarship

TLDR; Hannah Arendt never wrote a "moral philosophy." It is not hidden away in the archives or any of the recent collections of her work, nor in her unpublished lectures, letters, or journals. She was a political theorist who thought that moral philosophy requires a set of social relations that are inaccessible in the modern world. Yet as she has become more popular and is taught more and more often by moral philosophers, she is developing an unearned reputation as a moralist that perverts both what we should mean by moral philosophy and what she hoped to show us about the world we now inhabit.

Starting in the mid-nineties and then accelerating in mid-2000s, the publishing house Schocken Books has been publishing impressive thematic collections of mostly unpublished or inaccessible papers by Hannah Arendt. Edited by Jerome Kohn, the collections take up themes like Arendt’s approach to her Jewish identity, or the themes of understanding, politics, or judgment. The first “Essays in Understanding” collection was originally published in 1994, but seemed not to find an audience, and so was not completed: after the successful publication of a new version of Origins of Totalitarianism in 2004, the series was rekindled in 2005 by the publication of The Promise of Politics. Promise was a hit, as were the followups, and a new volume of essays on understanding is due at the beginning of next year.

This has been a great service to Arendt scholars, but it has also had a peculiar impact on the uptake of Arendt in the contemporary era. As I will argue here, these four volumes have completely transformed the disciplinary identification of her work and, perhaps, undermined her own account of how she ought to be read and understood.

Some background: I wrote my dissertation on Arendt. Though I attended Bard College where Hannah Arendt is buried, I first encountered her work in graduate school under the tutelage of Holloway Sparks, a political theorist, when I took a seminar on her work. We read Arendt–as I think was then the fashion–in chronological order, after a brief introduction by way of this interview (transcribed in the Penguin Portable Arendt as this was pre-Youtube):

At the very beginning of the interview, Arendt claims that, “I neither feel like a philosopher nor do I believe I’ve been accepted by the circle of philosophers as you so kindly suppose.”

The interviewer, Günter Gaus, protests: “I consider you to be a philosopher.”

Arendt responds: “I can’t help that, but in my opinion, I am not a philosopher. I’ve said good-bye to philosophy once and for all.”

Later, she explains: “I want to look at politics with an eye unclouded by philosophy.”

That was enough to situate Arendt as, in some sense, anti-philosophical, and to highlight the important distinction that motivated much of her work: an antagonism between politics and philosophy. Philosophers, Arendt argued, were too obsessed with objectivity in their assessment of nature and metaphysics to be able to take up the situated thinking of a political theory. Where political theory essays to understand what has happened, which is just what we expect from philosophy of science or metaphysics, when it tries to be political, philosophy retreats to a kind of impotent moralizing. Contrast Marx and Rawls and you’ll see the difference immediately.

It was, at the time, also quite au courant to cite Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography of Arendt on the question of Arendt as an ethical thinker:

The myriad currents of political opinion represented by Arendt’s critics flowed over or around the larger issues Arendt had raised–and not answers. These issues loomed larger in American political life as the war in Vietnam escalated. Rosalie Colie, Arendt’s Wesleyan friend, ended a letter about the war with a plea: “Please write your morals. We need it, I do anyway.” For a “morals” there was–and still is–a great need, but Eichmann in Jerusalem would not satisfy it.

Thus, Young-Bruehl too assumed that Arendt had left philosophy and its effort to separate normative issues from political ones behind.

Now, of course, we have since that time received the Schocken Books collections with great pleasure. Much there is collected around themes, and perhaps because of this great interest in Arendt’s morals the papers I hear most often cited are the papers on personal and collective responsibility. In other words, the desire for Arendt’s “morals” is so great, produced so much secondary scholarship and archival research, that Jerome Kohn decided to publish the primary source material that might best represent this theme.

The impact of this decision has been, I think, far ranging. I wrote my dissertation just as these collections were being published, so I feel that my own experience of Arendt bridges the pre- and post-Schocken worlds. An ethical reading of Arendt that at the time felt fresh and only available to those who had spent time in the archives at the Library of Congress has begun to feel fairly well accepted. Yet I sometimes wonder whether we have lost the political theoretical version of Arendt in the shuffle.

Consider five ways to read Arendt for the first time: (1) the exhaustive chronological reading of a graduate seminar, (2) in order of impact and importance, (3) a thematic tour through works relevant to your interests, (4) an exhaustive reading focusing on lines of argument and thematic connections, and (5) brief dips into relevant essays, ignoring the larger project.

While I still think (1) is the proper way for upper-level students to imbibe Arendt’s oeuvre, I can acknowledge that completeness is not always a friendly initial goal. Most of my colleagues and readers are pursuing some version of (3) or (5), although a few may get seduced by the exhaustive thematic approach. When my friends James Stanescu and Joseph Trullinger asked me to rank Arendt’s works by importance, I discovered that as much as I hate to admit that some of her books and essays are more important than others, I do have strong feelings about how they ought to be read if (2) is at stake. The ideal read order by impact and quality would be:

  1. The Human Condition
  2. Between Past and Future
  3. On Revolution
  4. Origins of Totalitarianism
  5. Eichmann in Jerusalem
  6. Life of the Mind
  7. Love and Saint Augustine
  8. Crises of the Republic
  9. Men in Dark Times

This is in many ways a conventional order: though many students will start with Eichmann, I believe one can’t appreciate it as an Arendtian text without having a grounding in her other work, both on politics in general and on totalitarianism in specific. I also happen to think that two works which are not as often read today deserve to be more carefully studied: her work On Revolution comparing the French revolution to the American one, and her collection of linked essays, Between Past and Future, which is both deeply philosophical and shows–as she protested in the interview–how political theory is truly a different method than political philosophy.

The publication of the four Schocken volumes (with a fifth coming in January) have radically changed this ordering, however. First, it made available her unpublished piece, “Introduction into Politics” which she intended as a followup to Between Past and Future. (Recall my lengthy treatment of one of its themes here.) Second, it made easily available a triptych of pieces: “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” and “Thinking and Moral Considerations” which together are often read as supplying the necessary “morals” from Arendt.

Let me say a few things about this triptych: written as lectures and addresses, they are clear and easy to read and teach. They also address some of the questions that most bedeviled critics of her account of Jewish leaders’ collaboration with Nazi authorities, and her strange half-indictment of Adolf Eichmann less for what he did out of hate than for what he did out of stupidity. These essays are certainly in conversation with the startling results coming out of social psychology (Asch, Milgram, Zimbardo) regarding the terrible things people will do out of compliant respect for authority or subsumption into a role or job. How can seemingly ordinary men and women–who love their families, attend church regularly, and might never scruple to steal or cheat–engage in horribly violent acts?

Yet is this, this moral psychology, really all we want from moral philosophy? In some sense, the horrors of the Shoah are plain to all who care to look, and “speechless horror” is a perfectly adequate response. After that, Arendt’s moral philosophy constantly returns to a conception of self-consistency, regular reflection, and seems to conclude that most evil-doing is a kind of superficial self-deception. The totality of her moral philosophy might be boiled down to: a) “No one has the right to obey,” and b) “Morality is being able to live with yourself and what you’ve done.”

Arendt says as much in “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” which largely summarizes the argument of Between Past and Future and is primarily about confronting the collapse of morality into manners, the loss of abstract principles or autonomy in the pursuit of social conformity, and the ease with which mores and customs can be turned towards wickedness.

As such, I’ve begun to worry that these new collections may cause us to ignore Arendt’s political theory. It’s as if a new edition of Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer became all the rage and we began to ignore the Critiques. Reading Arendt through the lens of her disgust with moral philosophy–which, like religion and theology was utterly unable to prevent or even explain the Nazis–means that we ignore what, to my mind, she was able to help us see about the world. It also means that we too readily accept that moral philosophy can never be anything other than a kind of degraded political theory. I think there are many more interesting lines of inquiry to be had from moral philosophers than how to avoid committing genocide!

But I won’t defend moral philosophy from Arendt here. Too many of her critics read her looking for flaws or weaknesses to attack. Instead, here’s an act of appreciative theory:

Joshua Miller’s Top Ten Things that Arendt Got Right About Political Theory

  1. Race-thinking precedes racism. Arendt’s analysis of the rise of totalitarianism is a mammoth book, but the basic argument is simple: you can’t hate Jews for their race until you think of the fundamental flaw with Judaism in racial terms. Thus, race-thinking comes before racism.  Before race-thinking, Europeans hated Jews for completely different reasons: religion! You don’t exterminate other religions, you convert them. But once you have race-thinking, you can create justifications not just for anti-Semitism but for colonialism, imperialism, and chattel slavery of Africans.
  2. The Holocaust happened because Europeans started treating each other the way they treated indigenous peoples in the rest of the world. Europeans learned to think racially in the colonization of Africa, and the European model for dealing with resistance involved murderous concentration camps. Thus, when race-thinking eventually returned as a form of governance in the European continent, so too did the concentration camps.
  3. Totalitarianism is largely caused by the growth of a class of “superfluous” people who no longer have a role in their economy. In an industrializing society, much traditional work can now be done with fewer workers. One possible solution to this oversupply of workers is to put some of that surplus labor force to work monitoring, policing, and murdering the rest.
  4. Ideologues ignore counter-evidence. A very good way to understand ideology is as a logical system for avoiding falsification. There are alternatives theories of ideology that aren’t immune to counter-evidence but instead merely exert constant pressure: for instance, there’s a difference between what Fox News does and what Vox does, and Arendt’s account is more useful for criticizing Fox’s constant spinning than Vox’s technocratic neoliberalism. But Arendt supplied us a useful account of ideology that is closest to our standard use and our current need.
  5. The language of human rights is noble and aspirationally powerful. However, statelessness renders most rights claims worthless in practical terms and in most judicial institutions. Someone who must depend on her rights as a “man” or a human is usually worse off in legal terms than an ordinary criminal.
  6. You don’t discover yourself through introspection. You discover yourself through action. The main set of claims she made in The Human Condition about the role of public and political life strikes me as pretty important, especially insofar as it denigrates economic and racial identity politics. Think of the cocktail party version of this: on meeting a new person, some people will ask, “Where do you work?” in order to get to know them, identifying them through their profession, their economic role. Others will ask: “What are you into?” as if to say that our recreation and consumption is what defines us. But for Arendt, the appropriate question is: “What have you done? What do you stand for?”
  7. If you take that seriously, “identity” politics is frustratingly restrictive. A person is not defined merely by the class or race they come from: they are defined by the principles upon which they act. While it is often necessary to step into the political sphere as a representative of Jews or women–and Arendt acknowledged that this becomes unavoidable when one is attacked as a woman or a Jew–the best kind of politics allows us to enter the political sphere as ourselves, not knowing what we will discover about those selves until we have acted. So the need for identity politics is an indication of larger injustices: we respond as members of our groups when systematic and institutional forces oppress us as members of these groups.
  8. Revolutions that aim for political goals are more likely to succeed than revolutions that aim for economic goals. Misery is infinite and thus insatiable; political equality is comparatively easy to achieve. Thus it’s important to connect economic complaints to a deprivation of political equality: the important problem with white supremacy, for instance, is not that whites “have” more than Blacks, but that we count for more, that it is uncontroversial that “White Lives Matter.” (Though an important indication of that “counting for more” is that white people have more than Blacks because we continually plunder Black people and are able to get away with it systematically.)
  9. Philosophy as a discipline is fundamentally at odds with politics. This is a problem for political philosophy, and it helps to explain why so much of political philosophy is hostile to politics and tries to subsume the agonistic nitty-gritty of the public sphere under rules of coherence and expert knowledge. This is because thinking as an activity is a withdrawal from active life, and especially politics: the fundamental conflict between the eternal and the ephemeral is not one that can be usefully bridged, and most often those encounters are pernicious for both thinkers and doers.
  10. Work and labor are different. Some activities are repetitive and exhausting, and only biological necessity forces us to continue them. Some activities make the world and our lives within it meaningful and fruitful. Many people have economic roles that mix the two activities, but still and all they are distinct. What’s more, there’s not shame in wishing and working for a world without labor, perhaps a world of automation. But a world without work would be fundamentally meaningless.
  11. Evil is not complicated, so don’t overthink it.

One last thing: the Schocken collections are admirable and beautiful texts, but Jerome Kohn sometimes turns to salesmanship in his introductions. Perhaps one reason they play such an outsized role in recent readings of Arendt is that he argues in the introduction (and many readers seem to accept) that “her unwritten volume on Judging… may have crossed some of the t’s and dotted some of the i’s of ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy.'” In short, Kohn bills these lectures as filling in the unwritten volume. (While he disavows this interpretation in the next line, he also writes assertively if schematically about what Judging must be given these essays.)

Lectures given in 1965 and 1966–which only set up questions and ostentatiously end in uncertainty rather than answer them!–are supposed prefigural accounts of Arendt’s thoughts a decade later. It’s really a shame: a Heideggerian anxiety over mortality and the unfinished projects it portends that is deeply un-Arendtian. As with Beiner’s transcription and interpolation of the Kant lectures and indeed as with my own dissertation on her work, we are so focused on what we lost with her death that we ignore what she gave us.

Hannah Arendt on Academic Freedom

We often say that colleges and universities deserve some sort of freedom from political interference. But for Arendt, freedom just is politics. The idea of freedom from politics is largely oxymoronic for her, and involves fundamental misunderstandings of the component terms “freedom” and “politics.” But of course, we seem to know what we mean when we use “freedom from politics” so these misunderstandings are obviously institutionalized in ways that are at odds with Arendt, such that it takes some excavation to determine how this divergence is possible, and whether we can adjudicate the disagreement:

“As long as one understands politics to be solely concerned with what is absolutely necessary for men to live in a community so that they then can be granted, either as individuals or social groups, a freedom that lies beyond both politics and life’s necessities, we are indeed justified in measuring the degree of freedom within any political body by the religious and academic freedom that it tolerates, which is to say, by the size of the nonpolitical space of freedom that it contains and maintains.” Hannah Arendt, Introduction into Politics.” The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), pg. 136.

The disdain with which Arendt articulates the justifications for religious and academic freedom in this passage is remarkable.  What seems obvious to us seems equally absurd to Arendt, such that she has to spell out our mistake: “as long as one understands politics to be solely concerned with what is absolutely necessary for men to live in a community….”

(She might as well write, “if you insist on starting from absurd premises, then yes, it’s true, absurd conclusions will follow….”)

She is not just exasperated that we are so devoted to universities and churches that we’ve set them outside of and above politics, but seems to believe that when we see the assumptions required we will reject them. (Loyal readers will recall this post on Christianity and the flight from politics.) For Arendt, politics is not merely about providing the bare necessities of communal life: if anything, communal life serves to provide the conditions of possibility for politics. But our communities are decidedly non-Arendtian: why should we accept that reversal?

Here, a brief Arendtian recap may be in order: she argues that the Platonic (née Parmenidean) ideal of freedom from politics is predicated on the belief that speech carried out before the many becomes corrupted or deceptive, while speech among the few can achieve truths “higher” than political freedom. We now regularly encounter these “higher” or “realer” truths: science, religion, justice, beauty, family, wealth, health, culture, morality, and happiness are all often celebrated as the true purpose of politics, those ends that politics must achieve but for which politics should be forsaken. So obviously Arendt is on to something in her diagnosis. But it’s thus striking that Arendt is nearly alone among political theorists and philosophers in claiming that the true purpose of politics is politics–the coordination of collective action–itself!

For this she is often accused of romanticizing the Greek polis. She goes so far as to say that many people and places have taken the “higher” purposes of politics so seriously that they’ve lost track of politics in the first place:

“Politics as such has existed so rarely and in so few places that, historically speaking, only a few great epochs have known it and turned it into a reality.” (Arendt, Promise of Politics, 119)

But I don’t think this is properly-speaking a romantic view of the Greeks, since the Greeks are to blame for losing track of the meaning and significance of politics (for themselves and for Europe too) when they built the Academy:

“In order for their institution to succeed, the few had to demand that their activity, their speech with one another, be relieved of the activities of the polis in the same way the citizens of Athens were relieved of all the activities that dealt with earning their daily bread.” (Arendt, Promise, 131)

Arendt has often received criticism for her view that politics is only possible for those who are free from necessity because others (slaves, peasants, capitalist workers) labor. She always acknowledge the horror of this dependency and exploitation, but it’s hard to ignore how elitist she sounds in those moments. Here she accuses those seeking academic and religious freedom of a similar kind of elitism: to turn politics into a means-to-an-end of something that cannot equal it.1

Universities are not, then, havens from politics, but in their purest forms they become hierarchical substitutes for politics. This helps to explain the kinds of inconsequential wrangling that often trouble departmental life: having determined that only academic merit can satisfy our fundamental political needs, we then get lost in minutiae in a fight for recognition.

And then there is the not-so-pure form: acknowledging that the university is partially shielded from politics, we retreat to it with a fantasy that Arendt diagnosed as an Archimedean (“Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the earth”) whereby we desire to engage in politics without being engaged by it, to act on the world without being acted upon. The university becomes a place to engage in politics, to affect policy and act as a political agent, but one that is sheltered from the consequences of ordinary political spaces. It becomes a microphone or a platform with which to shout one’s projects without having to listen.

It’s this conception of academic freedom that both inspires and worries me. It inspires me because I’d like to think we can find some shelter from the political currents of the day to think through the problems that confront us and investigate matters that require it, and that when that thinking and investigation is done our fellow citizens should listen to what we’ve figured out. It also inspires me because the company of disagreeing friends is one of the major sources of joy in my professional life. (Recall: 1, 2, 3)

But it worries me, too, because governments fund these havens, and they are growing increasingly disenchanted with our work. And it’s only natural that when political actors recognize a source of influence in their communities–an unmoved mover that is both powerful and claiming shelter from power–they will move to capture the “commanding heights” of that influential position. An Iowa state legislator even proposed partisan balancing tests for new faculty. (And the backlash surrounding his Sizzler certification is ample evidence of the exclusivity and signaling role of college education.)

Now, a standard reply is that the university has earned its role as a place outside of normal politics by welcoming a diversity of viewpoints. We inoculate ourselves from the claims of partisanship by encouraging educated disagreement, and take a voluntary vow of nonpartisanship in exchange for that freedom. But this is no longer sustainable. It’s both at odds with the evidence of partisan affiliations, and at odds with the consensus-building towards expertise we expect from the sciences.

We really don’t and shouldn’t welcome a diversity of viewpoints on race and IQ, for instance, which is both reasonable (internal to the disciplines involved) given the methodological shenanigans required to justify white superiority stories, and reasonable (writ large) given the fact that pseudoscientific racism actively hurts our students and our society.

I am tempted to end on the idea that academic freedom debates are a part of local, nested norms of safety and collegiality and freedom-from-interference, such that there is no generic answer about academic freedom, but rather a set of internal institutional norms that get articulated and adjudicated in practice. But sometimes in all that sophisticated distinction-making and precise line-drawing, I think we miss the fact that universities are parts of society as a whole, inhabited by faculty and staff with multiple conflicting allegiances and communities of interest. We don’t need principles of academic freedom because we are discovering the eternal and unchanging truths of these systems, but rather we need these principles as simple coordination mechanisms. Sometimes we need to be able to say: “This is not what we do, this is not who we are.”

1. It’s worth noting here that most legal defenses of academic freedom either make a professor’s rights subordinate to the public welfare via the claim that unimpaired investigations into the natural sciences produce public goods (i.e. Sweezy v. New Hampshire) or treat academic freedom as a tacit custom that governs university contracts with faculty. (i.e. Greene v. Howard University)

Touchstone Terms: Arendt’s Metaphysical Deflation

This post is a part of a series on some ideas that I find particularly useful or interesting. It also extends the post from last week of metaphysical deflation in Nietzsche. Here, I begin an account of Arendt’s metaphysical deflation, and its intimate connection to a kind of skepticism about personal identity.

Though Hannah Arendt began her intellectual career as an existential phenomenologist, she declined to elaborate her own theory of perception. Implicitly, she takes our encounter with the world to begin with the world, and not a particular object in that world. As she writes in her first attempt to describe the vita contemplativa: “[Facts] must first be picked out of a chaos of sheer happenings (and the principles of choice are surely not factual data) and then be fitted into a story that can be told only in a certain perspective, which has nothing to do with the original occurrence.” (Arendt 1968, 238) The disorder of phenomena must be ordered even before we can encounter them, and Arendt was content to begin where she found herself, in an ordered world where experience was already endowed with sense.

Withdrawal from the Sensible

For Arendt, the phenomenological basis of thinking lies in the withdrawal from experience into what she calls “invisibility.” The world gives us phenomena, both visual and otherwise; it presses us with its sensational gifts until this generosity threatens to overwhelm us. In its withdrawal, thinking encounters invisible aspects of its now-absent experiences.

When we think, Arendt suggested, we focus on re-imagined appearances preserved by our memory. These ‘invisibles’ strike the thinker as further appearances, beyond or on the far side of appearance. Reflection on this process reveals a double movement: from sensation to image, and from image to thought. “[T]he thought-object is different from the image, as the image is different from the visible sense-object whose mere representation it is.” (Arendt 1978, I, 77) Arendt borrows her account of this process from Augustine: first, “sense-perception” gives way before an “image that re-presents it.” (Arendt 1978, I, 77) Memory holds this image in abeyance until thought calls upon it to provide this image, and here “the mere image of what was once real” is separated from “the deliberately remembered object.” In this bifurcated form, memories come to us either as abstractions and impressions of the experience, or as stored presentations of a past moment.

Arendt here splits sensory data from the imago, and asserts that we develop concepts or ideas of the appearance from the imago. She gives a similar account in her reading of Kant’s “Schematism,” where she argues that intuitions and concepts are naturally combined in any particular encounter with an object through the faculty of imagination. The schema “table” is available to anyone who has encountered at least one table, and can even be relayed verbally or abstractly, through description or a quick sketch. (Arendt 1992, 82-3)

The thinker encounters past appearances anew, re-presented through memory, altered, manipulated, combined, and dismantled until they offer insights that the thinker calls by many names: category, cause, or concept. Some of these names actually obscure the phenomena they describe. The thinker may develop the distinction between appearances and invisibles into metaphysical systems. She may encounter her own activity and posit a subject or a soul. Many of these efforts to cement the movement of thought into certainty are more or less obviously flawed. “[O]ur tradition of philosophy has transformed the base from which something rises into the cause that produces it and has then assigned to this producing agent a higher rank of reality than is given to what merely meets the eye.” (Arendt 1978, I, 25) According to Arendt, the long history of ontological mistakes is itself reducible to this confusion of cause and ground, and the normative dimension that it takes on.

The ‘Two-World’ Theory and the ‘Two-in-One’

Arendt refuses to grant professional philosophers a privileged capacity or relationship to thought, and she stakes few claims about the relative superiority of various metaphysical schemes. The frequent exception to this rule is her rejection of idealism: she constantly points out the errors of speculation that posit the invisibles as a ‘truer’ world than the appearances, since these tempt the thinker to attempt to dwell in the withdrawn world of invisibles. She calls this the ‘two-world theory,’ in which the thinker privileges the world of his withdrawal over the appearances from which they are derived. In those cases, Arendt applauds the derisive laughter that brings the philosopher back to the present and obvious, confronting him with the appearances he has ignored. Yet she emphasizes that the potential errors available to metaphysical thinking are not an indictment of the project of thinking altogether.

The speculative play of these invisibles is entertaining, even engrossing. It leads its practioners astray as often as it corrects them. Arendt’s account of the role of thought in avoiding evil focuses on two lines from the Platonic dialogues, developing a version of thinking as ‘account-giving’ or a narrative self, through reference to Socrates’ self-relational ethics. She claims these are the only non-aporetic assertions in the Platonic version of Socrates: that “it is better to suffer an injury than to inflict one,” and that “it would be better for me that my lyre or a chorus I directed should be out of tune and loud with discord, and that multitudes of men should disagree with me, than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict me.” (Arendt 1978, I, 181) The Gorgias’s account of wrongdoing, Arendt argues, depends not upon a given self-identity established through logical assumption, but rather on the reflective work of producing this self-identity.

Thinking brings the many propositions about intentions, desires, beliefs, and experiences that must share the intimate space of the psyche into harmony. This is why Arendt emphasizes the Socratic parenthetical, “…I, being one, should….” The force of this imperative to maintain consistency and avoid wrongdoing lies in the success of the work of unification of the self; so long as the self does not, or cannot, achieve unity, the force of the imperative is lacking. Thus, she cites the Hippias Major, where Socrates ends with a playful account of his jealousy of Hippias, who is not discomfited by self-contradiction, while Socrates must return home to cohabitate with “a very obnoxious fellow who always cross-examines him,” that is, himself. (Arendt 1978, I, 188)

Hippias does not feel the sting of the imperative to avoid wrongdoing. His ‘blissful ignorance’ secures him against the self-injury that contradiction entails. Hippias contains many men, just as Walt Whitman wrote: “Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Hippias is not one, cannot be one, but is many: the man who claims that beauty is a woman or that it is gold, a man who maintains that it is a thing or object and then also that it is a life lived so as to bury one’s parents and be buried in turn, and yet another man who is unconcerned with the contradiction because opinions are just bits of speeches to be collected and wielded as needed.

Of course, Hippias is not Adolf Eichmann. But like Eichmann, there is a lingering threat that he will act without knowing, behaving in such a way as to take a bold stand unconsciously, ungrounded in conviction or courage. Because he simply cannot become one with himself, the plurality within him threatens to engage the plurality without in a manner that destroys the common world.

Like Eichmann, Hippias fails to supply a consistent account of himself to himself. Unlike Eichmann, however, Hippias’s self-contradiction will not result in genocide. Thoughtlessness becomes evil only in those circumstances when the deed and the account of the deed we give ourselves diverge. In that divergence, we approve an act that we would never forgive. In those situations, we say we ‘ought to have known better.’ Yet Arendt argues that the Socratic conflation of knowledge and virtue is flawed, because action does not always depend on forethought, and the quest for certainty actually threatens to overwhelm the capacity to act with an impossible demand: to know the results.

The Unfinishable Work of Self-Unification

Thought is a process of self-reflection aimed at bringing oneself into agreement with oneself. Thus the ‘I’ who thinks in the Cartesian formulation is not a metaphysical given, but a product, a work of fabrication. (Arendt 1978, I, 187-9) For Arendt, internal consistency is an achievement garnered through the work of thinking, not an assumption to be granted. Once achieved, even the metaphor of unity or consistency will have to be jettisoned.

How do we make ourselves whole? How do we weld our psyche into a persona? How do we channel the diverse currents and movements of mind into a single intention or position upon which we can act? For Arendt, this is the wrong question: though thoughtlessness threatens evil, thoughtfulness does not promise goodness. (Arendt 1978, I, 191) In fact, thoughtful action appears to be a contradiction in terms for Arendt, as does thoughtful politics: the capacity for action is the will, and the same impulse that wrongly seeks certainty of results will also fail when it seeks to contain the human capacity for novelty within the bounds of some internal narrative or personal ethic.

Arendt writes of thought that, “the guiding experience in these matters is, of course, friendship and not selfhood; I first talk with others before I talk with myself.” (Arendt 1978, I, 189) My relations with others give me a model for my self-relation, and the two continue to inform each other so long as I am afforded both interlocutors and opportunities for solitude. Thinking, then, is not an encounter between desires and intentions, but rather between perceptions, concepts, and most of all, propositions. It takes on the tone and rhythm of my conversations with others, and finds there the language to explain my experience.

Arendt modeled this self-reflection on an ideal of self-friendship in the midst of a divided, democratic polity. Aristotle argues, that we do not govern our desires and intentions, but master them. If he is right, then the moment we attempt to apply these same techniques publicly, the republic becomes a tyranny. One cannot dwell in self-dissensus: we must struggle to achieve consensus between these intentions. As such, it seems that a citizen-thinker must enslave herself in order to act as an equal with others. How else can we acquire the agreement of rage and lust with the conclusions of reason or duty? Arendt draws on Aristotle, then, when she rejects the image of a body-politic, to be ruled by the soul as the city is ruled, where diverse interests and intentions struggle for recognition just as vigorously as they do in the world we share with other citizens.

There cannot be a polity-within, because the psyche is too intimate for politics. Thinking cannot be reduced to an act of the will, whereby we force ourselves to believe something, overcoming the resistance of counter-arguments through the threat of intellectual violence. It remains a question whether thinking enforces some kind of logical syntax, or is enforced by it, just as it remains a question how friends can remain friends in the face of disagreement.


Arendt, Hannah. “Truth and Politics.” In Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin Books, 1968.
———. The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1978.

Nietzsche and the Parable of the Talents

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. (Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth And Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense.)

I think most philosophers will be familiar with this famous essay by Nietzsche deflating our conception of truth into a kind stripped metaphor. This idea that words are like coins who have gotten so old and rubbed clean that they count only as weights of metal and not as coins captures the ways in which the etymologies of words can surprise and delight us, and give us an understanding of our history–and ultimately of human meanings–that we have not previously explored.

Yet it has always seemed to me that there was a direct reference hidden in these lines–almost certainly a well-known one that Nietzsche the philologist would have been expecting us to catch. The coins that become mere metal complete a transformation that began in the Gospel of Matthew, in the “parable of the talents.” The word “talent” in modern English means a natural skill or aptitude. It’s a term for innate competence or mastery. Yet for the Greeks it was a unit of measure, and for the Romans it was a unit specifically used for the measure of currency. How did this odd “worn out metaphor” come about?

In the parable, Jesus depicts a master leaving on a long trip: he leaves different sums of money to three different servants. When he returns, those with the most money had invested it. The servant with the least money had merely preserved the original loan. So the richer servants hand over increased wealth, while the poorest merely returns the principle. The master punishes the servant for not investing as the richer servants had done.

It gets worse:

But his master answered him, ‘You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

On their own, these lines from Matthew seem to be advocating for a kind of “success theology,” by which God demands that we grow rich or suffer punishment. If nothing else, it supports usury and interest-bearing loans, which the Church forbade.

But this passage is followed by a list of commandments that seem utterly at odds with the claim that “Them that’s got shall have/Them that’s not shall lose/So the Bible says/And it still is news” as Ella Fitzgerald sang. Thus the passage–or perhaps the compositor–already begins the transition in the meaning of the word (we see the same in Luke, but the term there is “mina,” which didn’t receive the same development.) How do we save the passage from the explicit reading?

As early as Augustine, the passage has been interpreted as an allegory: since the direct meaning is offensive and at odds with what follows, the implicit meaning must be otherwise. Augustine saw it as a passage on salvation, and not wasting the opportunity it supplies. Later commentators analogized the talents to God-given abilities, and later still we find ordinary language mentions of “talents” without the connection to the Biblical text, including the success theology idea.

But back to Nietzsche: it seems to me obvious that Nietzsche is referencing this particular history in his account of the coins returned to metal once again. How odd that we would embed meanings in innocent words, and have later generations read them back out again? We’re doing that all the time, at many different levels, mobilizing that army of metaphors in a way that takes crystallized human relations as if they were merely for expressing banal observations about the color of snow.

I call it “deflationist.” Nietzsche makes an effort to reduce Christian allegories to their constituent parts, to take all meanings and make them mere patterns of behavior, all while spinning out more allegories, parables, and poetic embellishments. In particular, explorations of metaphysics become etymological explorations into the play of metaphors. In a future post, I hope to detail the ways in which Hannah Arendt picks up this metaphysical deflation in her own work, and try to specify what it means for her conception of truth.

Imperialism as a Response to Surpluses and Superfluousness

“Older than the superfluous wealth was another by-product of capitalist production: the human debris of every crisis, following invariably upon each period of industrial growth, eliminated permanently from producing society. Men who had become permanently idle were as superfluous to the community as the owners of superfluous wealth. That they were an actual menace to society had been recognized throughout the nineteenth century and their export to populate the dominions of Canada and Australia as well as the United States. The new fact in the imperialist era is that these two superfluous forces, superfluous capital and superfluous working power, joined hands and left the country together. The concept of expansion, the export of government power and annexation of every territory in which nationals had invested either their wealth or their work, seemed the only alternative to increasing losses in wealth and population. Imperialism and its idea of unlimited expansion seemed to offer a permanent remedy for a permanent evil.” (Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, pg. 150)

Hannah Arendt’s work on totalitarianism is famous for drawing explicit comparisons between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR. It is much celebrated (though infrequently read) because it achieved an important ideological task: previously it was tempting to treat the mass casualties on the Eastern Front as evidence that the Soviet Union had nothing in common with the Nazis they died to defeat. But if these were simply the two faces of totalitarianism, then we were obligated to oppose them both.

Yet Arendt was not a devoted anti-Communist: her actual goal was to offer a historical explanation for how the Jews came to be murdered by their neighbors. Thus she offers an explanation for the growth of the biological–rather than religious–sort of anti-Semitism that caused Jews to be seen as a race to be purged rather than a culture to be converted. To make this history work, she suggests that only an account of imperialistic racism can explain the development of ethnic concentration camps by which the tools for mass murder were developed.

Arendt rejects two possible explanations for anti-Semitism that still circulate today, that the Jews were merely randomly selected, and that the enmity against the Jews was somehow inevitable. First she rejects the “scapegoat” explanation by which the Jews were supposedly a convenient, innocent group upon which to a hang a community’s aggressions. As she puts it, “An ideology which has to persuade and mobilize people cannot choose its victim arbitrarily… the chief political and historical fact [is] that the [the forgery, “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”] is being believed.” (Origins, 7) Something, she argues, has to explain why it was not the “Protocols of the Elders of Romani” that motivated Nazi ideology, given that Rom and homosexuals were also murdered in large numbers. Anti- Semitism, though, was the motivating ideology that made the other murders conceivable: the gas chambers for Jews could be used to murder the disabled, but they were first built for the Jews.

Arendt goes on to argue that the idea of eternal enmity is also mistaken, because it misunderstood the role that Jewish assimilation into bourgeois culture had played in stocking the fires of a hatred that was no longer about the divide within Judeo-Christianity: “The Jews mistook modern anti-Christian anti-Semitism for the old religious Jew-hatred….” (Origins, 7) While religious Jew-hatred served a unifying function within Jewish communities, modern anti-Semitism nearly destroyed them, by replaced religious fervor (which could be nullified by conversion) with racial animosity (from which no assimilated parvenu could be safe.)

One of the main components of her story is the idea of a privileged group becoming superfluous: the Jews had had a role in Europe as usurers. When Protestantism and the industrial revolution forced Europeans to recognize that banking could be compatible with Christianity, it began to seem that Jews were irrelevant. Thus the network of trade, diplomacy, and credit that a few Jews helped to facilitate began to seem replaceable, and them men and women who had created and profited from it thus became dispensable, along with the mass of much poorer Jews who had no role at all but survived on the forbearance of sovereigns alone, who were themselves increasingly checked by democratic institutions and beholden to public opinion.

I call this an entitlement crisis, following Habermas’s usage in Legitimation Crisis. Habermas’s theory of the entitlement system, and the crisis that it can generate, depends on the idea that one of the primary functions that institutions in society must satisfy is justifying inequalities in the distribution of merit and material goods. An entitlement crisis is one in which the benefits and privileges of some class no longer seem deserved: when one has power without purpose or wealth without a visible role in production. Marx’s theory of exploitation invoked one entitlement crisis: the capitalist earns advantages at the expense of others, and these advantages are undeserved.

Habermas Political System

In modern society we don’t usually experience the capitalist in this way; we mythologize Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as somehow deserving their wealth, and worry that perhaps bankers and stock brokers do not. The Jews, however, had taken on a role in European society that made them seem as if they had privileges granted by the state that they didn’t deserve, while divorcing themselves (for good reason tied to the enmity of non-Jews) from the other classes that were not governing.

Meanwhile, the industrial revolution produced surplus capital in need of investment, and Europe also had many more superfluous men, who were put out of work and off their lands by the industrial revolution and had to make their way in a culture that no longer needed them. Capitalists thus became imperialists looking to use the state–and those surplus men–to open up foreign markets to their goods.

Only conquest could render foreign markets open to both their goods and their innovations without surrendering the future profits from both. Thus in a long discussion of Cecil Rhodes, Arendt argues that “expansion for expansion sake” is not actually a political ideal but a product of “business speculation.” It is the logic of the market–of ever-more-productive industry and ever-more-efficient transactions–taken as “the permanent and supreme aim of politics.” (Origins, 125) Yet there is an inevitable mismatch between the potentially limitless expansion of economics and the very limitations of legitimate consent required for the function of a nation-state. The project of unlimited growth is doomed to fail, and to create demands for isonomy wherever it touches.  (Origins, 126-8)

Imperialism, you see, is an allocation problem: how to re-allocate the benefits of increased productivity without losing the ownership stake that the capitalists had developed in those surpluses they call profits. Perhaps this allocation failure ought to create class conflict, but instead it created an alliance between surplus men and surplus money, an alliance between the mob and capital. And the mob was “a mass of people… free of all principles and so large numerically that they… could only be used only by imperialist politicians and inspired only by racist doctrines.” (Origins, 156-7) On Arendt’s account, the mob becomes a serious force in domestic politics when it begins to form movements to demand more imperialism, more conquest, and pride of place for the domestic mob against the colonies.

The mob’s first political movements are not leftist populism, but an effort to “imperialize the whole nation… for the looting of foreign territories and the permanent degradation of alien peoples.” (Origins, 155) As if recognizing that whole groups of surplus people will eventually be exterminated, the mob clamors for others to be disposed of first. That these techniques–the concentration camp, the racist registrations, the differential legal status–eventually make their way back to Europe to contribute to the mass extermination of the Jews was already prefigured in their imperial origins.

If Arendt is right, the bourgeoisie are to blame for totalitarianism, even when it ultimately turns on them. The mob only existed because the bourgeoisie refused to countenance the obvious solution: domestic redistribution of the increased productivity of the industrial revolution. This is one of the main motivators of my scholarship, though it’s usually quite far in the background: to develop an account of entitlements and merit that can sustain domestic equality and eliminate the threat of superfluousness in the face of our burgeoning wealth. Thus I worry about the way that the current political economy fails to find roles for people unless they are disciplined enough to attend college. And I worry more about the unspoken belief I see among my peers that the uneducated and unemployed are somehow to blame for their own useless existence, for not having made anything of themselves but a racist, and thus worthy of dismissal.

As I’ll argue in a future post, this is the flipside of the abusive policing and mass incarceration of African-Americans. The mob would not be a mob if it was not organized around racial and racist ideologies. As Arendt explains, the degradation of ethnic others is implicit in the mob’s origins, and–arguably–is the only purpose to which it can be put. It’s a provocative assertion, and hopefully historically bounded, but if Arendt is right then populism is always nationalist, and nationalism is always imperialist.

Yours, Mine, and Ours: Confessing a Philosophical Theft

In a post today, my longtime friend Leigh Johnson charges me with erasing her contribution and appropriating her idea of “friendly fire” in my response to Noma Arplay and Joseph Trullinger. In this post, I want to acknowledge my error and say a few things about the difference between our two conceptions of “friendly fire.”

To be clear: the phrase is hers, and I credit her for it. But I failed to link to her blog in my post: I linked to my old post, which itself links to her post. Most readers will not follow those links, and so most readers would not see the larger context. In cases like those, it’s important to link explicitly (like this and this) if only to produce trackbacks. Johnson is actually a champion at this particular practice (as you can see in the post in question but really all the time), and I needed to emulate her.

Additionally, I’ve appropriated the term for a different idea, and erased her usage in the process. The ideal that I articulated under that name is distinct from Johnson’s. In brief, I believe she has a basically “Aristotelian” conception and I have an “Arendtian” one. So I was using “friendly fire” to name a concept that I believe is Hannah Arendt’s by way of Lessing. That’s important to me, because I articulated that ideal in my dissertation long before I had a disagreement with Johnson about moral realism. I stole material in my dissertation to write that post and I want to be clear which parts are Johnson’s and which parts mine.

Here is what I take to be Johnson’s idea of “friendly fire:”

On the contrary, almost all of the fights that I have with my “true” friends work to reinforce the idea that they are exactly the kinds of people I think they are: people who are committed to their ideas, convicted by their values, fearlessly engaged in the world and with the people that constitute our shared lives. It is because of that character that I find we are able, as Aristotle says, to “live together.”

For Johnson, “friendly fire” is when disagreements happen between people of conviction, commitment, and engagement. Since (on Aristotle’s terms) perfect friendships should not be dissolved by disagreement, but (also on Aristotle’s terms) perfect friendship should involve shared judgments of pleasure and pain, Johnson argues that among her “true” friends, arguing with conviction is not a sign of a lack of shared judgments, taking pleasure and pain in different things. Rather, having and valuing commitments is what gives all such friends pleasure (and lacking them gives pain.)Among her perfect friends, disagreement is evidence that we are like-minded by virtue of having convictions worth disagreeing over.

I say that this is all “on Aristotle’s terms” but Johnson’s reading of those passages against each other goes beyond the text and deserves to be called “Johnsonian.” What she ultimately shares with true friends is commitment-as-such rather than specific commitments: this makes volleys of friendly fire the source of friendship rather than an impediment to it. (And I’ll note that she’s displaying that sort of friendship here, for which I am grateful.)

The conception of “friendly fire” I used back in 2009 was always intended to be a distinct one from Johnson’s, while intending to preserve credit for the phrase Johnson used and to be inspired by her Aristotle-inflected account. It is derived from a reading of the truth/fact distinction described by Arendt, both in the way it plays out in her Lessing prize address, and in the way she develops it in her essays on truth and lying in politics. It played a crucial role in the first chapter of my dissertation, which was finished years before my exchange with Johnson. In the subsequent years, I’ve used that phrase “friendly fire” and the ideal it describes on many occasions, always linking back to the 2009 post. So in that sense, Johnson’s distinct conception of the term really has been elided: I stole it to refer to something about Arendt for which I didn’t have a good name.

I’ve also conflated this conception of disagreeable friendship with Maurice Blanchot’s Infinite Conversationeven though Blanchot’s actual conception of the phrase “infinite conversation” is radically different than Arendt’s, than Lessing’s, and than Johnson’s. It’s really just the title phrase “infinite conversation” I like: the idea of taking a position just for the sake of disagreement among friends who savor argument; to Johnson’s “principled” and “engaged” disagreement, I contrasted Arendt’s pluralism: disagreement for its own sake, to extend the conversation.

Johnson charges me with erasing her contribution: I didn’t link to her at all, throughout the most recent post. I mentioned her name at the start, but by the end she had dropped out. Now, Johnson calls this erasure, and I think she’s right. I erased her name, and added a different one, and I erased her concept, and added a different one. I kept the term as my own, and I really have spent the last seven years thinking in terms of “friendly fire” quite often without also thinking of my friend Leigh Johnson. So Johnson is right here:

I suppose someone might argue (maybe even Miller himself) that the insertion of “Arendtian” distinguishes what he calls “my ideal” and my (Johnson’s) idea of “friendly fire.” No reader could make that argument, though, because the actual content of my idea of “friendly fire” was erased from the get-go.

I agree: I actually did erase the content of her idea. I did it from the “get-go” in my most recent post. And that will tend to lead to confusion about what belongs to whom, and since the term is hers I really should get my own or use one of Arendt’s. Johnson has always had a gift for pithiness, and I appropriated it. Mea culpa: it is my fault, and I apologize.

So that is the “yours” and the “mine.” Let me say a bit about the “ours.” Leigh Johnson has been my fiery friend for more than twelve years; we’ve basically always found each other disagreeable in the friendliest ways. So the content of my conception of “friendly fire” was always about our friendship–especially our frequent disagreements on the blogs–no matter which philosophers were referenced. For her role in helping me develop my thoughts on Arendt in practice, I owed her much more than she received in the last post.

And it gets worse: I must confess to a further crime. Good citation practices should really have required me to refer to Johnson’s essay (with Ed Kazarian) on tone policing. For a lot of us in this little group of fiery-friendly professional philosophers, that post was a major influence on how we’ve thought and talked about tone and tenor in philosophy for the last couple of years. Now, the position I take at the end of my last piece, spelling out desiderata for a (third? fourth?) conception of friendship, is a bit more conciliatory and so is not really fully compatible with Johnson’s and Kazarian’s critique of civility and collegiality. I do try to spell out a disposition for all practitioners that is not combative. But it’s important to cite and work through relevant prior work on a topic: it’s a good scholarly practice, and this is ultimately a scholarly blog.

I’ve also now learned that the conception of “taking pleasure in being proven wrong” may be itself owed to another friend. Kate Norlock’s published article on the ideal of receptivity captures much of what excited me in Sam’s comment. An excerpt should tempt you to read the rest:

Generally, philosophers provide arenas for argumentation to advance understanding or ascertain the truth; if one is engaged in a community whose members hold that truth is best tested by some rigorous argumentation designed to experiment with whether a counterargument succeeds or fails, then adversariality of a sort is a receptive practice.

This means that how or whether one goes about the adversarial project depends upon which philosophical community provides the opportunities for argumentation. One with the explicit goal of ascertaining through analytical methods whether an argument is nearer or further from the truth will require a different sort of rigorous inspection from an organization dedicated to investigating the historical accuracy of a translation, or a workshop exploring the interconnections between new scholars’ related research for an anthology. I frequent feminist conferences in communities that have quite publicly committed to a reduction of adversariality and offered alternative models of engagement. There, what receptivity demands of me is different. This picture of the philosophical aims of communities is complicated when one enters general gatherings populated by people with different commitments, some of whom value adversarial methods highly and some of whom deplore the same methods. Although one’s task in such plural communities is more difficult, it is not a reason to discount receptivity. Sometimes the golden mean is hard to hit. We should still try.

That’s good, right? Norlock has really worked out–using Nel Nodding’s conception of care–an account of receptivity that Sam’s comment and perhaps also the fiery friendship that Joseph Trullinger is developing.

One last thing: Johnson charges me with a kind of unintentional misogyny. This is a difficult charge to evaluate internally, and is best judged by others, especially Johnson. I think everything she says on this point is true in general, but I am tempted to argue that substituting one woman’s ideas (Arendt’s) for another’s (Johnson’s) in response to a third female scholar (Arpaly) and using others (Kristie Dotson and Maria Lugones) to make the point doesn’t feel quite like a good exemplar of the true, pervasive, and general problem Johnson points out.

Yet at the same time, there is ample evidence that women must be much more qualified than men to receive the same esteem and citation, so that substituting more famous woman for a less famous one will tend to contribute to that trend. So there, too, more care was and is warranted, and I owed it to my friend–more than I owed it to the subject of my dissertation–to make sure she got credit

Friendly Fire and Fiery Friendship: Noma Arpaly, Joseph Trullinger, and the Tenor of Philosophy Conversation

I often refer back to this post about a disagreement with Leigh Johnson over the role of critical engagement in philosophy. Using Gotthold Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and Hannah Arendt’s account of it in her Lessing Prize address, I described what I took to be the pleasure of disagreement in our profession:

Even when we retreat to our armchairs for solitary thought, we are not alone: we are drawn to each other because we share a commitment to these inquiries no matter where they may lead, and because we need the support of a community of fellow inquirers. The corollary is that, among philosophers, it is considered honorable to take on the position of devil’s advocate in order to introduce needed pluralism and distinction into a discussion. Among us, holding unfashionable views is needed and strangely satisfying. When we find ourselves at odds, when we begin to take what Dr. J calls ‘friendly fire,’ it is a reason to rejoice: our friends have arrived!

Johnson’s phrase has stuck with me over the years. I’ve often used it when welcoming correction, or when explaining why my own critical engagement with a friend is meant to be a sign of respect.

Is Polite Philosophical Discussion Possible?

I was reminded again of that exchange by Noma Arpaly’s excellent discussion of politeness (and rudeness) in philosophical debate. As Arpaly tells it, philosophers tend to violate two interrelated conversational norms, without distinguishing them: we are frequently rude, and we frequently engage in disagreement and correction. Among civilians, there is a strong non-correction norm that tends to go along with other norms like not hypothetically threatening or actually sneering at our colleagues.

Yet Arpaly wants to endorse violations of the non-correction norm, while preserving other norms of civil behavior. She creates an analogy to soldiers: the military requires soldiers to violate a widely held norm of pacifism–not-killing. But they must discipline soldiers not to thereby justify other norm violations–killing civilians and committing war crimes.

Having lost, of necessity, the inhibition against killing people, some soldiers find themselves shedding other moral inhibitions—and committing war crimes.

Having lost, of necessity, the inhibition against correcting people, some philosophers find themselves shedding other social inhibitions—and being terribly, terribly rude.

That’s just the nature of inhibition loss.

It’s a real problem. Arpaly counsels us to make the relevant distinctions and discipline ourselves all the harder on civility given that we’re already engaged in an unavoidable violation of the norm of non-correction. This seems exactly right.

Pleasure in Being Proved Wrong

On the Daily Nous thread on Arpaly’s piece, “Sam” writes:

Excellent post. I think there’s another, corresponding virtue worth cultivating here which could (cumbersomely) be called: “Pleasure in Being Proved Wrong,” the disposition to feel exhilaration when corrected by a polite (even if “frightening”) objector. The reason we should try to feel pleasure in being (politely and civilly) corrected, rather than embarrassment or humiliation, is simply that, as the author points out, this kind of correction improves our positions in ways that are nearly impossible to achieve by other means. In a sense then, objectors (provided they are not hostile or rude) are really just assisting the presenter towards a goal they both share (doing good philosophy). Of course, it’s essential that the objectors appreciate this shared goal as well, and present their objections accordingly. If all parties view successful objections as pleasurable, mutually beneficial exchanges rather than humiliating losses or merciless victories, there will be fewer frightened presenters and fewer rude objectors.

What I liked about Sam’s comment was that it seemed to endorse and extend the Arpaly analysis by saying, “Here is a way that we can endorse a norm of correction without endorsing rudeness.” That this is actually my view (I like to be corrected so I can be correct) made me doubly happy to see it percolate up in a comment from another person.

This is not to put the victims of philosophers’ rudeness on the hook for responding gladly to their behavior. The “glad to be (shown) wrong” norm applies equally to objectors and presenters; more to the point, it applies even more to rude objectors than to anyone else, who must prove they really do mean to correct and not just to humble the presenter. Arpaly endorses violations of the norm of non-correction: she is no pacifist, as she says.

But describing an attack (of the “What if I slap you?” variety) is rude in part because it puts vulnerable others in an uncertain position: they’re required to pretend that disembodied philosophers never would do what they say. But this goes well beyond violating basic civility: discomfiting one’s interlocutor does nothing productive at the level of correction and even interferes with shared inquiry. It’s not that we must sometimes violate basic civility in order to violate the norm of non-correction: it fails on both counts.

Many philosophical practices must be rethought in this light: interruption, for instance, is pretty obviously a violation on her view and on the “glad to be wrong” view. You don’t interrupt someone if you’re engaged in mutual beneficial exchange, because that assumes that you already know the outcome of that exchange. Nor do you ask questions that are really just coded assertions of error: you actually engage with the interlocutor about whether there are corrections to the (shared) position within the evolving inquiry.

We must, we must be friends!

For Arendt, the philosopher needs disagreeable friends in order not to be lost to the crowd’s violent enforcement of the non-correction norm. Philosophers need to disagree with each other so that we are not isolated by our disagreement. Thus, the norms of disagreement arise from the intrinsic good of intellectual friendships. As Arendt put it:

“[Lessing] was glad that… [truth] if it ever existed, had been lost; he was glad for the sake of the infinite number of opinions that arise when men discuss the affairs of the world.”

We wrestle with hard questions–take detours into difficulty–because it is our excuse to spend time together. For Arendt, the philosophical project may have some or another goal–to think what we are doing, for instance, or prevent nuclear war–but its true function is to give we disagreeable ones an excuse to reach out to friends like ourselves (alike in the virtues of agreeable disagreement.) It’s thus primarily a practice of friendship in homonoia, like-mindededness. This is what makes “friendly fire” palatable: that we have deeper bonds that salve the blows when we do not pull our punches.

My friend and former colleague Joseph Trullinger comments further:

Arpaly undermines the point with the war analogy, because it doesn’t go deep enough into the psychology informing the mood of the rude dude. Really, I think Arpaly is proposing something more like a “gentlemanly” duel in contrast to “unsportsmanlike” war, when it’s the martial virtues themselves that are the problem here. I think patriarchy instills in us (where by “us” I mean especially men, such as myself) this idea that the defense of one’s honor legitimates the use of aggression, but it is really putting lipstick on a pig. The fighting done to regain or steal away social standing is like sweeping leaves on a windy day, and it may in the first place be wrong to do. Philosophy has for too long patterned itself after polemos, war, and been polemics; I think there’s a reason Nietzsche’s depiction of the philosopher as warrior of ideas appealed to me more when I was a reedy hormonal teenager, as these sorts of self-descriptions appeal to men undergoing a crisis of masculinity. The issue is not that we have been “too soft” with ourselves and need someone from the outside to be “hard” on us. The issue is that we worship hardness itself at the expense of what we tell ourselves we’re defending with it. Here I draw a lot of insight from Simone Weil’s essay, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.” (h/t Joan Braune). Yeah, Achilles looks cool, and he takes offense over something trivial, but don’t get carried away with that pretext for allowing or gloating over more violence. Briseis is not the issue here, dude. Nor is it actually Achilles’ honor, or Agamemnon’s honor. It’s the idea that life is all about enforcing one’s life in the push and pull of force and counterforce. The intellectual “battlefield” is not the Iliad, nor should it be. Instead, we should foster the hospitality we see so many good examples of in the Odyssey.

TL;DR: less andreia, more xenia

Trullinger goes on to recommend that we replace my ideal of Arendtian “friendly fire” with a related one: “fiery friendship.”

It seems like an important point: too often in praise for “agonism” we tend to treat the conflicts as if they are self-justifying. We somehow need the agon to achieve the intrinsic goods of flourishing; we wrestle to develop strength and skill, which is the real function. We argue not because we are engaged in a collective project but because honing the arguments themselves is supposedly tied to the good life.

Trullinger reminds me that the “Pleasure in Being Proved Wrong” attitude requires more than just contention for the fun of it. Correction requires correctness; we cannot bracket truth for the sake of the infinite conversation and hope that that conversation will have the same character. Indeed, bracketing a shared commitment to truth-seeking leads to just the kinds of hurtful “games” that Arpaly rightly refuses to play.

Fiery Friendship and Philosophical Hospitality

In the backdrop here is the status of women in the profession. Arpaly suggests that the rudeness may be particularly off-putting to vulnerable participants, and that a move civil tenor will make the profession more welcoming. At least some of the masculinist norms of epistemic arrogance (interruption and “Well actually” and so on) have non-pathological roles to play in parts of our social lives. The really unprofessional thing is when we treat conference presenters the same way we treat our buddies or teammates.

Women, Arpaly suggests, are just as “glad to be wrong” as men. They too can violate the norm of non-correction in service of a shared inquiry. But the profession still doesn’t welcome them, and it demonstrates this inhospitable demeanor by treating philosophy as a game whose rules are constantly changed, or perhaps like hazing: where jocular rudeness and dishing out and receiving contempt are a part of how the game is played. This has the effect of protecting the space as a region of rough play–and certainly many women and other diverse practitioners can survive in such spaces, and many men cannot–but what would it mean to make it welcoming and inclusive?

Trullinger’s view seems to be that we ought to endorse the spirit of “glad to be wrong” by being particularly welcoming to those who are unlike us: those who are most likely to find the space of rough play unwelcoming, with whom we lack homonoia. True strangers are those who can offer us grounds for disagreement much stranger than mere contradiction.

I sometimes joke that we only ever hear calls for ideological diversity in political matters, and never Thomistic approaches to quantum mechanics or a nurse’s eye-view on bioethics. But Trullinger means what he says: he actually does want to see an expansive ideological diversity in non-political matters, to study Mexica metaphysics, queer philosophy of time, Byzantine logic, and Confucian epistemology.

Some desiderata: fiery friendship should allow joyful disagreement and also charitable agreement; it should offer opportunities for world-traveling and loving perception. It should be an avid fan of the unfamiliar. It should be glad to be proven wrong and it should be receptive–not just to correction but–to a complete redirection of our projects. It should welcome the vulnerable and make them strong. It shouldn’t punch down, or slap down, or suggest hypothetical down-slapping. It might even entertain actual pacifism, which need not be weak.

Human Rights as Democratic Conversation Starters

Omri Boehm has written a troubling op-ed in the Stone summarizing the failure of human rights discourses to actuate political institutions, entitled “Can Refugees Have Human Rights?” Boehm worries the answer is “No.” Citing the most famous lines from Hannah Arendt’s discussion of refugees ( “If we should start telling the truth that we are nothing but Jews, it would mean that we expose ourselves to the fate of human beings who … are nothing but human beings.”) Boehm diagnoses a failure of modernity to find a metaphysical grounding for human rights, and suggests that this metaphysical failure is the blame for the institutional failure to protect refugees:

The truth is that we have never managed to vouch for human rights in sensible modern terms. One common strategy has been to appeal to nature rather than to God — on this view, human beings have inalienable natural rights — but in order to accept this alternative one must ascribe to nature qualities that science tells us it doesn’t have. […]

Modern political thinkers can meaningfully speak of the state as an instrument for defending the interests of its citizens. When they speak of the state as defending justice, or universal human rights, they are missing the necessary concepts.

This is a common refrain, and indeed it seems to have motivated more than its fair share of philosophical articles and monographs arguing for a return to metaphysical foundations long since rejected. But as I read Boehm, he does not mean to call for such a return. Rather, the failure of political theory in this regard has led to the failure of rhetoric and action. Indeed Boehm seems to regret that these categories can find no purchase among human beings who understand themselves to be the result of evolution, that there is no political theology worthy of the grand gestures of institutional inclusion declared as universal human rights. Call this tragic naturalism: after millennia of supernatural universalism, we can no longer delude ourselves. But we’ll probably always pine for the good old days.

Responding to Boehm, Eric Schliesser argues that the human rights tradition has offered itself as an alternative to democratic politics, calling human rights “political conversation stoppers.” He goes on to explain:

“Once they are invoked matters of principle are settled, and put aside, and all that remains is the technocratic discussion of solving the means by which to implement them. That is, while we often claim that rights generate duties, politically they are designed to generate obedience.”

On Schliessers’ view, human rights (unlike ordinary political rights) are meant to be uncontestable barriers to further inquiry; we must not quibble about slavery or bodily inviolability, but instead get busy abolishing slavery and securing bodily inviolability. Whereas ordinary political rights are constantly the subject of contestation and no entitlement is absolute.

This seems wrong to me. On my view, human rights aren’t political conversation stoppers, they’re a prerequisite for certain kinds of political conversations at all. Indeed, human rights are so foundational to certain kinds of political conversations that many people lay claim to them even where they don’t exist so as to begin or continue a difficult political conversation.

Let’s return to Arendt for a moment: in her analysis of the origins of totalitarianism, she spots a fervor for nation-states the was supported in part by the conviction that “people
 without
 their
 own
 national
 government
 were
 deprived
 of
 human
 rights.” If the only would-be “human” rights that exist are actually national rights, justiciable in one or another courtroom, then every human being needs a nation-state to protect her. “Human” rights sound nice, but they’re not the sorts of things that a lawyer can win a case on, and when you’re fighting the political head-winds of populist anti-migrant rhetoric, you need the courts.

So human rights are metaphysically ungrounded and politically ineffective. Too often we’re only able to give them salience retrospectively, in the context of historical genocide. Worst of all, just where you need them most, like when you belong to a group that has lost its political power–and must seek recognition for your vulnerability and powerlessness–you will find that no one is listening.

Now, it’s not at all clear why philosophers bemoan the metaphysics in situations like this. No one believes that the lack of a metaphysical ground is causing the political inefficacy of human rights. In the hypothetical world where a God exists to supply normative justification for a divine moral law that demands refugees be fed, sheltered, and protected, we would still have a Syrian refugee crisis. We would still have collective action problems, and states trying to avoid their fair share of supporting their burden of stateless persons, and budget limitations, and the fundamental fact that we only half-heartedly want to do the thing God demands. “Make me a humanitarian, Lord, but not yet! (And not before you make my economic competitors humanitarians, too.)” And we would still have difficulty determining which rights God intended to write into the structure of reality and who was charged to protect them.

Meanwhile, tragic naturalism may have some glimmers of hope. For one thing, it draws our attention to the ways in which many rights-claims start off ungrounded and develop institutional and political efficacy over time and through effort. The rights-claims in the Declaration of Independence are rhetorically grounded by God’s creation, certainly, but they were just as obviously not rights that any group of Christians has been able to find the normative purchase on previously.

It has become common, then, to point out that most rights-claims are self-founding. It’s the rights-claim that grounds the right. Of course, this suggests that human rights-claims are not actually universal  or human rights but instead political rights-claims that seek to sidestep the claimant’s lack of the appropriate codified legal status. But it’s not clear why we’d reach for politics (and its “rights of citizens”) in those instances, since most who require the protection of a scheme of universal human rights are equally well barred from political participation.

Ayten Gündoğdu gives an excellent account of this in her recent book Rightlessness in an Age of Rights. Human rights have always had an aspirational quality, as we have seen among the Sans Papier movement in France where those designated economic migrants (and thus ineligible for refugee-status) continue to demand documentation and regularization. The movement has all the signs of a successful set of ungrounded rights: it is a political movement whose very existence assumes the capacity to engage in politics is not simply a matter for citizens.  It is an illegitimate demand that seeks to legitimate itself and the demanders. In this sense, human rights-claimants are always engaged in a kind of political foundation, creating the institutional basis for their own eventual juridical protection.

Of course, such efforts at political foundation often fail. This isn’t a triumphalist account of human rights, as if the problem was resolved in 1948 and need not be revisited. We shouldn’t ignore that the refugee who points to her own vulnerability to justify her rights-claims (while failing somehow to qualify as an asylum-seeker) currently lacks institutional grounding, and that the migrancy crisis will only grow: 232 million people belonged to that category in 2013, and an estimated 9 million Syrians have fled their home since the beginning of the crisis.

When stateless migrants interrupt previous metaphysical and institutional conceptions of human rights by making unrecognized human rights-claims, this interruption does not stop a democratic conversation but start one. If what we want out of human rights is a way to bend democratic polities to some “higher law,” we’ll be disappointed. There never was a real conflict between democracy and human rights, and this goes back to the reason naturalism seems tragic: we’re disillusioned because the story was better than reality could ever be. But there’s no tragedy if we treat human rights as an opportunity to exchange reasons (including ungrounded reasons!) with our fellow-citizens (documented and undocumented) and engage in powerful acts of institutional co-creation with our vulnerable neighbors.

When not to Forgive: Lessons from the Donatists

As I have repeatedly argued, we ought to reject the obligation to forgive (or compromise) because it undermines the exercise of judgment. If we have neither a categorical nor a conditional duty, then deciding when to forgive–and when not to forgive–is neither a subject to a precise calculation nor a random act of willing. Yet here we find little guidance in political theory: we do not know what we should do or how we will know when to forgive. I don’t think it can be a simple matter of determining when the benefits of forgiveness or compromise outweigh the costs.

So I propose a perhaps-unexpected and undoubtedly too-long example of when not to forgive: the Donatist controversy within the North African Catholic Church. The Donatist controversy exemplifies the tension between situated values and global consensus-seeking in the resistance of local North African congregations to the newfound solidarity between Roman imperial domination and theological authority.  This tension continues to plague political philosophers under many different guises: federalism and subsidiarity, globalization and nationalism, imperialism and home-rule.

Throughout the fourth century, North Africa was the center of intense theological debates about the scope and doctrines of Christianity. These arguments were not simply abstract: partisans for both sides clashed violently. One particular group that gained particular notoriety was a movement that called itself the Agonistici, “warriors for God.” They are depicted by non-Catholic historians as a part of a larger egalitarian social movement bent on harassing landlords who oppressed North African peasants and engaging in redistributive banditry. However, they were dubbed “Circumcellionsby the Catholic Church “because they roved about among the peasants, living on those they sought to indoctrinate.” (Chapman 1911, “Agonistici”) After they were suppressed, the group was accused of terrorism against property-owners and nobility in the region, and of initiating violence designed to lead to martyrdom. The Catholic Encyclopedia offers one famous account of their behavior:

A number of these fanatics, fattened like pheasants, met a young man and offered him a drawn sword to smite them with, threatening to murder him if he refused. He pretended to fear that when he had killed a few, the rest might change their minds and avenge the deaths of their fellows; and he insisted that they must all be bound. They agreed to this; when they were defenseless, the young man gave each of them a beating and went his way. (Chapman 1911, “Donatism”)

As depicted by the Catholics, the Agonistici were an early variety of suicide attackers, seeking martyrdom by provoking others or simply by throwing themselves into the sea. Yet many Protestant Christians have attempted to salvage the image of the Circumcellions as a social justice movement opposed to imperial economic domination and control of matters of conscience.[i] Because few records survive other than the arguments of the partisans (which carry what appears to be propagandistic rhetoric) there is little evidence or contemporary source material upon which to base our estimation of the movement.

We do know that the Agnostici were members of what has come to be called the Donatist sect, which originated from a schismatic response to religious persecution under the Romans. At the start of the fourth century, Christians throughout the Roman Empire were persecuted under edicts demanding that their churches be destroyed, their sacred texts burnt, and their clergy forced to renounce the faith or face death. Though this persecution lasted only two years, from 303 to 305 CE, it left Christians in North African congregations in disarray, as some who had given their scriptures to the Roman officials to be burnt were declared surrenderers, literally traitors,traditor’ from the Latin transditio, “to give over.” Those who refused to give up their copies of the sacred scriptures risked martyrdom, and many were executed while others were imprisoned, tortured, or lived as fugitives. When the surrenderers returned to their churches after the persecutions ceased, those who refused to recant expressed their disappointment in their fellows’ betrayal by excommunicating them:

“Even to alter a single letter of the Scriptures was a crime, but contemptuously to destroy the whole at the command of pagan magistrates was to merit eternal punishment in Hell.” (Frend 2000, 10)

As Roman rule shifted from persecution to patronage for Church officials under Constantine, the incentives for challenging the legitimacy of a potential nominee’s credentials grew.

However, this issue came to a head eight years later when Pope Miltiades declared that Donatus of Cassae Nigrae was guilty of schism for rebaptizing lapsed clergy.[ii] The theological dispute has been framed since then in terms of the distinction of office and officer: the Catholics held that even a corrupt or sinful officer can perform the duties of his office legitimately if the formal conditions of ordination are met, while Donatus seemed to believe that a clergyman’s baptism could only be authoritative if it was performed by an officer whose own “credentials” were in order, which was not the case for clergy baptized by the excommunicated traitors. Put another way, the Donatists agreed that a schism had occurred, but believed it existed between those whose loyalty to the Roman Empire trumped their participation in the Christian communion. They refused to forgive their fellows for this choice and this doctrinal division became the basis for a generalized opposition to Roman authority projected across the Mediterranean through military, economic, and theological domination.

North African Christians of the time faced a series of interrelated conflicts between the congregations at Numidia and Carthage, among secular authorities loyal to Rome and those who sought political and economic independence, and among the traditores and fanatical rigorists who had opted for martyrdom but survived the persecutions. Rigorism and fanaticism were especially popular among the poor, for whom the promise of a blessed afterlife was undoubtedly tempting in the face of imperial economic domination. Sound familiar?

Provincial rivalry between city and country, anti-imperial fervor, and class-based religious zealotry combined to create a schism in which the clergy of Carthage unfairly elected a Primate of Africa without the participation of the Numidian clergy or the support of the Carthaginian people. Enraged by what they perceived as a power grab, the Numidians went to Carthage and challenged the election with the support of the Carthaginian poor. The Carthaginian choice, Caecilian, had been consecrated by three bishops, and one of these bishops, Felix of Apthungi, was accused of surrendering, of betraying the faith, and though he was declared innocent in 315, the damage was done.

Since the Primate controlled the Church’s wealth in North Africa, there were obvious political and economic motivations for this theological challenge. The Donatists maintained that lapses like surrendering the scriptures required penance and forgiveness before a traditor could rejoin the Church: “unfruitful branches are to be cut off and cast aside… unless they are reconciled through penance with wailing acknowledgment [of their fault.]” (Frend 2000, 20) This is the charitable version of the doctrine, since the more radical members of the sect suggested that penance would be achieved when they were able to “break Caecillian’s head.” (Frend 2000, 19)  They further held that it was the martyrs who must absolve and readmit the traitor, that forgiveness was theirs to give, not the sinner’s to earn. Thus, by consecrating Caecilian without first having been absolved, he accepted communion with someone who did not deserve it. Though he may not have known Felix of Apthungi’s failings at the time of the consecration, the Donatists held that on learning of them he ought to have denounced Felix and moved to seek a valid sacrament of consecration with the approval of the Numidian bishops.

Though this argument was self-serving, it was also consistent with African practice, which preferred rebaptism as a symbolic and actual penance, and emphasized a rigorous definition of the community of believers that shunned sinners and lapses. Though they were at odds with the Pope in Rome, the rigorist followers of Donatus, who refused to be in communion with anyone who did not denounce the traitors, quickly grew to be a majority. When Augustine of Hippo became the Roman Church’s public face in opposition to this doctrine a century later, his success in the ecclesiastical court was not matched in public opinion. Donatism remained the preferred blend of Christianity in North Africa until the eighth century, when Donatist Christianity largely gave way to Islam.

The theological issues at the heart of the Donatist controversy are the Christian sacraments of baptism and communion, but there is a dispute about forgiveness and community underlying these doctrinal matters, with implications for judgment. The budding imperial hopes of Roman Catholicism under Constantine claimed the power to unite all human beings under a single ecclesiastical authority, where agreement on the divinity of Christ could ground a transnational political authority. Ultimately, even these basic agreements were insufficient for suppressing intercommunity rivalry or the daily indignities of class and their attendant resentments, which arose in complex procedural and doctrinal differentiation which became the basis for principled disagreements and righteous violence.

However, it is here that the Donatist controversy becomes more than a historical example. Augustine’s North African theological opponents also rejected his defense of the public and political implications of Christian charity. Their skandalon was symbolic: the original traditors were only guilty of ‘rendering unto Cesear what is God’s.’ They felt no obligation to forgive those who betrayed them, even though the original treason was a century old, but their refusal to forgive became the basis for a community organized primarily in resistance to imperial and economic domination. They became fixated on their grievances, adopting what has become known as a chosen trauma: “a large group’s unconsciously defining its identity by the transgenerational transmission of injured selves infused with the memory of the ancestor’s trauma.” (Volkan 1998, 48) In most chosen traumas, forgetting the grievance or forgoing identification with it would be sufficient to dissolve the bonds of the community. Certainly the Church fathers of Carthage cannot have forgotten that the Roman Empire had destroyed the city during the Punic Wars, but it was religious persecution that the North African congregations chose to protest.

In his 417 CE letter to Boniface on the controversy, Augustine reminds his readers why schism is sin: “An enemy of unity cannot share in God-given charity.” (Augustine 2001, 203) To have worked through the phenomenology of desire that leads to caritas is to have accepted that all humans share both an essence as sinners who must turn towards God and an origin as God’s creatures who inhabit a world that they have not created but that they must make habitable through love. Though that essence apparently points us away from each other and into isolation, it is coterminous with our shared origin, which points us towards each other and the world we must create and maintain in order to love each other. To refuse communion with another would-be-Christian is thus to refuse to share the world with him or her, to refuse the shared origin and thus–on Augustine’s view–to demonstrate that one has misunderstood the results of the phenomenology of desire. The evidence for caritas is to be found in our every gluttonous thought and urge for those willing to follow them to their conclusion, and only willful blindness could allow the Donatists to accept so much of Christian doctrine while refusing to see the principle of charity upon which it is based.

What responses did the Donatists offer to this logic? The arguments to which we observe Augustine respond are twofold: first, that a sinner must be forgiven and rebaptised before re-entering communion with his fellows Christians, and second, that the occupants of an office can tar that office if they are not exemplary officeholders. This second argument has come to be known more broadly because it encapsulates a legal principle: that the acts of an office are not tainted by the acts of the officeholder, because, in the Church at least, the office gains its authority from God and all human officeholders are likely sinners. The same thing goes for authority granted by a political constitution but granted to fallible and corrupt men. As Maureen Tilley explains, “The Donatists saw the Church not so much as a hypostatized institution, as Augustine did, but as the people who professed Christianity.” (Tilley 1991, 14)

Yet the Donatists had a third argument which the Catholics, including Augustine, refused to address head-on: that “the right to use the appellation ‘Catholic’ was a central issue of the Conference.” (Tilley 1991, 12) They could agree that schism is a sin while preserving their position if only they could show that it was the Roman Church which was in schism with North Africa, and not vice versa. By associating themselves with the same empire that had previously oppressed them, the Catholics had ceded their claim to be the universal representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ. Until they were forgiven by the Donatists, they could not claim to be representatives of the true Church.

The Donatists couched their concerns in terms of the specific doctrines of baptism and personhood upon which the conference at Carthage dwelled, but only because they and the Catholics both came to the conference as litigants, not interlocutors. Or, as Tilley describes the rhetorical contestation, they both sought to depict themselves as the defendant: “For these people being the true Church meant being the persecuted church. Therefore it would be unthinkable for them to make the first accusation.” (Tilley 1991, 12) The antagonistic framework of the conference forced that schism deeper.

As the debate evolved, Augustine would repeatedly assert that this question could be ignored in favor of the distinction between office and office-holder or in the distinction between confession and baptism. But in making this argument, he was effectively arguing that the Church was a political institution, with authority over both the souls and the lives of its congregants. In contrast, the Donatists argued that the Church is constituted by its members and has no independent life, and vice versa: that believers could not sustain their faith in isolation for their communion. As a result, the personal holiness of an individual is not purely the product of his or her own will, but rather dependent on his origins and the company he keeps. Throughout the dispute, the Donatists attempted to identify the lineage of each of their interlocutors, including Augustine, and show that they had been baptized or ordained by traditors.

Though Augustine treats their arguments as legalistic hairsplitting, and responds in kind by seeking contradictions and resisting charitable interpretation, the Donatists did have a point beyond their idiosyncratic concerns around rebaptism and the equation of office and office holder.

“In a legal context the examination of the persona would judge the fitness of the person to execute a contract or to appear in court in whatever capacity. In a religious sense, person indicated the moral character of an individual. Petilian exposed the double nature of the concept and its implications in an unequivocal manner. Bishops might gather to discuss a theological issue, but Christians, he said, do not go to civil court with one another. He demanded a resolution of the problem. The very option of resorting to civil law, especially on a religious matter, by any so-called Christian participant appeared in Petilian’s eyes as an abdication of the claim to be a Christian.” (Tilley 1991, 17)

By the Donatist way of reckoning, merely by seeking to enforce the authority of Rome, the Catholics were already sacrificing their authority as Catholics, i.e. as representatives of the true and universal Church. But Augustine’s response grants this, and this is why the dispute is not treated as a lawsuit but as a conference between fellow Bishops: rather than addressing the particularities of a criminal accusation, the interlocutors were to devote themselves to matters of doctrine and theology. Yet this was hardly a victory for the Donatists, because much of their claim to being the true Church depended on the particular acts of religious oppression that they had yet to forgive, by which they laid claim to the notion that that the Roman Church could not really be in communion with them as equal discussants regarding matters of faith until they were forgiven by those they had been trespassed against.

The Donatists preferred to have the abstract debate about the nature of the Church and the sacraments within the context of historical acts. In forcing them to choose between specific acts and ecclesiological principles, Augustine put his rhetorical and legal skills to the task of misunderstanding the Donatists’ concerns. Thus the Donatists complaints are treated as irrational, self-contradictory, or unintelligible, rather than as candidates for belief and affirmation. For Augustine, this uncharitable reading was in the name of the larger charity of unity. But in taking up that cause in the name of the Roman Catholic Church, he was never able to fully consider the question of which Church was “true,” of which Church had split from the other.

Augustine’s response seeks to enforce the duty to forgive. But he acted to advance the purposes of a political institution, not an onto-theo-logical affect of caritas. In this, he was helping to develop a model for the Church that could be both grounded in charity and granted a monopoly on legitimate violence, “because it was right that people should be forced to come to the banquet of everlasting security once the church was strong and sturdy in members….”(Augustine 2001, 158) Augustine’s failure is, at root, the failure to mobilize the ‘incongruities’ between human beings conceived simultanouesly as isolated mortals worldlessly focused on Being and neighborly creatures dwelling in a world they must make habitable.

The Donatists judged that reunion with the Catholics would entail a new domination by the crumbling Roman Empire. They refused to forgive, refused to share authority and a political world with Roman agents who claimed to want only peace but had historically engaged in political domination in the region. The question that Augustine’s letters present is this: could they forgo ‘sharing authority’ while preserving the charitable affect of dwelling in a shared world? Generally speaking charity does not demand agreement or the fusion of horizons, certainly not in the face of an unforgiveable scandal.

Hannah Arendt argues that judgment requires some withdrawal from perspective, some artificial suppression of pluralism through the embrace and enforcement of a “common sense” or homonoia. I believe the best explanation for this is that judging as withdrawal from personal perspective is predicated on loving the world, whose perspective we take when we abandon our own. In dialogue, we fashion a shared world with those who share our tradition, and we begin the process that will eventually be narrated as a shared history. Instead of a “view from nowhere” deliberative judging is the adoption of the plurality’s viewpoint, but that plurality is necessarily exclusive. The account of judging that would have emerged from an extension of Arendt’s reading of Augustine on the ‘love of the world,’ would be one which preserved this tension between homonoia and the enlarged mentality. Maximal tolerance still entails the intolerance of intolerance, and even Rawlsian pluralism excludes the irrational. Moreover, tolerance itself is not enough: the condition of world-sharing demands that we act and judge together. The love of the world becomes a love of the tradition, of the history that brings us to this moment and that authorizes us to work together. A shared history like that between Carthage and Rome could not be mediated by agents of Rome unless that agent was willing to charitably embrace the perspective that demanded division.

When, then, ought we to forgo forgiveness? Here’s one possibility: when forgiveness comes at the expense of homonoia, of the like-mindedness required for deliberative judgment. This is exactly the situation which confronted the Donatists. They did not oppose authority as such or unity as such: they merely hoped to control conditions under which authority or unity could be granted. They argued, and fought, to preserve a distinct and isonomic political community, in which matters of theology could be resolved by like-minded community members. They did not reject caritas by seeking to preserve their theological and political segregation, but they did seek to preserve theological pluralism even at the expense of a greater sensus communis between Carthage and Rome.

[i] See, for instance, (Gaddis 2005), (Tilley 1996), and (Von Heyking 2001).

[ii]My account here largely depends on that supplied by W. H. C. Frend in (Frend 2000) He relies on Opatus of Milevis’ De Schismate for the dating of the Pope’s verdict against Donatus.

Chapman, John. In The Catholic Encyclopaedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911.

Gaddis, M. There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire: Univ of California Pr, 2005.

Frend, W. H. C. The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman Africa. New York: Clarendon Press, 2000.

Tilley, M. A. “Dilatory Donatists or Procrastinating Catholics: The Trial at the Conference of Carthage.” Church History (1991): 7-19.
———. Donatist Martyr Stories: The Church in Conflict in Roman North Africa: Liverpool Univ Pr, 1996.

Von Heyking, J. Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World: Univ of Missouri Pr, 2001.

Margalit and Derrida on Forgiveness and the Skandalon

Avishai Margalit offers an interesting justification for the duty to forgive. The obligation to forgive the other’s crimes for one’s own sake “stems from not wanting to live with feelings of resentment and the desire for revenge.” (Margalit 2002, 207) Where Immanuel Kant holds that we owe it to ourselves as rational beings to be free from the pathological heteronomy of malice, Margalit associates this obligation to forgive with the obligation to preserve one’s own health: to fail to forgive is to imbibe “poisonous attitudes and states of mind.” (Margalit 2002, 207) In either case, the obligation to forgive is a special case of self-preservation and self-care.

Part of his reasoning is that Margalit wants to preserve the role of regret and to distinguish forgiveness from forgetting. His principle concern is memory and the obligation to remember past transgressions, so Margalit argues that we need to find a way to deal with past transgressions in a way that does not completely blot out their memory. As a religious practice, forgiveness models the divine absolution between the Creator and his creation and so requires two actors: the penitent, who remorsefully reports her crimes to the priest or to his Creator who already knows them, and the confessor, who judges her contrition and offers penance and the absolution of her sins. It is the transgressor’s act of remorse that ‘covers up’ her crimes. In undoing his past acts, the remorseful transgressor not only makes himself worthy of forgiveness, but creates a positive obligation in his victim. Quoting Maimonides, Margalit chides us that “it is forbidden to be obdurate and not allow oneself to be appeased.” (Margalit 2002, 194) But in converting the religious vocabulary of divine prohibition into a humanist dialect of ordinary duties and rights, he preserves the claim that forgiveness is a duty rather than supererogatory.

Focusing on the root ‘give,’ Margalit articulates the problem of an obligatory gift, but, pointing to the work of early anthropologists, concludes that some gifts are “intended to form or strengthen social ties between the original giver and the one who returns the gift.” (Margalit 2002, 195) On this reading, the original giver is the transgressor, who offers his remorse.

“I am claiming that the obligation to forgive, to the extent that such an obligation exists, is like the obligation not to reject a gift—an obligation not to reject the expression of remorse and the plea for forgiveness.”(Margalit 2002, 196)

To refuse to forgive is to refuse a gift, not an exorbitant gift, but an ordinary one, as when gifts are exchanged in what eventually appears as an economic transaction similar to any other commercial deal. The victim is obligated to respond in kind by granting forgiveness, in the name of “social ties.” Compare this to Hannah Arendt’s judgment of Eichmann: that no one, not even she, could be asked to “share the world” with him. For Margalit, the forgiver must exclude the forgiven act from all future judgments of her transgressor. The transgressor’s remorse covers over the past, but it still falls to the forgiver to resist peaking underneath the cover of forgiveness.

The metaphor of the palimpsest helps to illustrate this task: though the transgression is indelible and ineradicable, the forgiver nonetheless scratches it out. Forgiveness leaves an overwritten mark that can be deciphered, especially in light of further transgressions.

What does it mean to claim that such a pure gift is possible? To give remorse in expectation of forgiveness is like giving a gift in expectation of the return of a gift of equal or greater value. It is the economy of the gift, the obligatory mutuality of this “mutual release,” that troubles Arendt when she encounters it in Auden’s letter. My suspicion is that it cannot be obligated in the way that Margalit suggests: if forgiveness is to retain its capacity to begin anew, it cannot be subjected to this sort of calculation.

Margalit’s account mirrors that of another recent theorist of forgiveness, Jacques Derrida, who pushes this tension into a now-famous paradox to the debates on deliberation based on a similar paradox in the gift. (Bernstein 2006, Derrida, et al. 2001) Derrida juxtaposes obligatory forgiveness with what he calls impossible forgiveness. On the one hand, there are acts of forgiveness required by the regular and ordinary relations of friends or fellow citizens. We ask and expect forgiveness for lateness or when we brush past someone in a crowded space. To refuse to forgive in those situations appears as a provocation or an attack. When strangers deny each other this petty reconciliation, they are declaring hostility. When friends refuse to make allowance for each others’ foibles, they effectively dissolve the friendship. Insofar as we wish to avoid hostilities or preserve the friendship, we are obliged to trade remorse for this ordinary and expected gift of forgiveness. As such, ordinary reconciliation is hardly real forgiveness, just as an exchange of equally valuable goods isn’t really giving.

On the other hand, there is forgiveness that Derrida labels “impossible.” This is the skandalon, the unforgiveable act over which our efforts to forgive not only stumble but are absolutely incapable of making headway. Systematic injustices, massacres, torture, and acts of genocide all present themselves to us as candidates for forgiveness, but Derrida argues that these acts are not really within our jurisdiction to forgive.  Either because we cannot represent the dead victims or because the act itself is too unimaginably atrocious that it resists our efforts even to understand or the criminal’s efforts to encompass in meaningful remorse, forgiveness in these situations is impossible.

For Derrida, this is an aporia: forgiveness is impossible, because it is only really required when we face an unforgiveable transgression. Yet those unforgiveable transgressions are the only times when forgiveness is necessary. Anything less than the unforgiveable need not be forgiven, since such negligible acts can be simply reconciled, overlooked, or embraced as peccadilloes if friendship is to be possible at all. Since I must forgive minor transgressions, the only tests of forgiveness are precisely those acts that are beyond my capacity to forgive. Is it obligatory? Is it possible? We cannot know this a priori: we must wait and see.

As I see it, the limit of forgiveness is not within our voluntary power, an act of will, but rather in developing the capacity to imagine the act that we are trying to forgive. Thus the skandalon of forgiveness is an imaginative challenge, we stumble over it when acts are unimaginable, and we overleap it when our imagination succeeds. We make these imagined acts meaningful for others through poiesis: we create a world of meaning in which they are imaginable by marking exemplars, noting commonalities, and creating spaces of remembrance. The product of our work thus makes these meaningless deaths and thought-defying atrocities meaningful and thinkable. If you think about it from the perspective of un-consolable resentment, this is a crime akin to justification or exoneration.

This fundamentally creative act is ultimately what made Arendt’s work on Eichmann so troubling: not that she herself made him appealing or granted him mercy, but that by imagining the kind of character that could have helped commit genocide, it made that genocide forgiveable as it ought never to be. Whether Arendt forgave Eichmann or condemned him to die is then irrelevant: insofar as she created the conditions for forgiveness, she deserves repudiation and hatred. She used her imagination to make the impossible-to-forgive possible.