Category Archives: Philosophy

the ham actor and the psychopath: Adorno on Trump and Musk

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It is not my style to apply psychoanalytic categories to political phenomena. I generally want to take explicit political claims at face value, whether I find them appealing or awful. I see this as a way of treating other people as fellow citizens. Besides, I have little background in psychoanalysis and sometimes doubt whether it can make falsifiable claims about politics.

However, if you want a critical Freudian interpretation of people like Trump and Musk (or Putin, or Modi) and their supporters, I can recommend a classic text: Theodor Adorno’s “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda” (1951).

Adorno claims that many people in capitalist societies have “a strongly developed rational, self-preserving ego agency.” I think this means that people have been taught to form personal desires and to strive to get what they want. But they also experience “the continuous failure to satisfy their own ego demands.” In short, they are not as successful as they expect to be. “This conflict results in strong narcissistic impulses which can be absorbed and satisfied only through idealization as the partial transfer of the narcissistic libido to the object” (p. 126).

This object is a leader. “Only the psychological image of the leader is apt to reanimate the idea of the all-powerful and threatening primal father. This is the ultimate root of the otherwise enigmatic personalization of fascist propaganda, its incessant plugging of names and supposedly great men, instead of discussing objective causes” (124).

Three features enable a leader to draw support:

First, the leader presents himself as similar to his followers. “While appearing as a superman, the leader must at the same time work the miracle of appearing as an average person” (127). He even demonstrates “startling symptoms of inferiority,” such as a “resemblance to ham actors and asocial psychopaths.” (I thought about Trump and Musk, respectively, when I read that sentence.)

Adorno explains why people tolerate–or even prefer–their leader to have such flaws: it makes it easier to identify with him. “He resembles them psychologically, and is distinguished from them by a capacity to express without inhibitions what is latent in them, rather than by any intrinsic superiority” (132). “The leader image gratifies the follower’s twofold wish to submit to authority and to be the authority himself.” In short, the leader aims to be a “great little man” (127).

Second, people gain pleasure from loving a leader who demonstrates little or no love. “One of the most conspicuous features of the agitators’ speeches, namely the absence of a positive program and of anything they might ‘give,’ as well as the paradoxical prevalence of threat and denial, is thus being accounted for: the leader can be loved only if he himself does not love.” This combination is compelling because the followers identify with the leader and thereby feel liberated from having to give or care.

Or perhaps the leader vaguely expresses love for his followers (without being accountable to them), while denouncing more general love. Adorno quotes Freud’s “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1922): “Even today, the members of a group stand in need of the illusion that they are equally and justly loved by their leader; but the leader himself need love no one else, he may be of a masterly nature, absolutely narcissistic, but self-confident and independent” (127)

Third, the leader enables the followers to identify with each other by expressing hatred for weak outsiders. The followers do not deeply believe the premises of the hatred but gain pleasure from participating together in ritualistic expressions of it. “Just as little as people believe in the depth of their hearts that the Jews are the devil, do they completely believe in the leader. They do not really identify themselves with him but act this identification, perform their own enthusiasm, and thus participate in their leader’s performance” (136-7).

There is more to Adorno’s account. For example, the mass’s desire is libidinal and erotic, but this truth must be concealed because it would be embarrassing. “It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends” (123).

Also, the decline of serious religious belief helps fascist leaders, because actual religions teach demanding ideas, including self-sacrificial love. But once religion becomes an identity label, religious ideas no longer stand in the way of politics.

the division between the believers and nonbelievers has been maintained and reified. However, it has become a structure in itself, independent of any ideational content, and is even more stubbornly defended since it lost its inner conviction. At the same time, the mitigating impact of the religious doctrine of love vanished. This is the essence of the “sheep and goat” device employed by all fascist demagogues. Since they do not recognize any spiritual criterion in regard to who is chosen and who is rejected, they substitute a pseudo-natural criterion such as the race, which seems to be inescapable and can therefore be applied even more mercilessly than was the concept of heresy during the Middle Ages (129).

Finally, Adorno denies that fascism has caused these outcomes or that a fascist leader is ultimately responsible for them. “Fascism as such is not a psychological issue” (135). Rather, for Adorno, a fascist demagogue is a tool by which capitalist interests control the masses.

(I am not committed to either the Freudianism or the Marxism of Adorno’s account, but it rings lots of bells today.)

Source: Theodor Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’”[1951] in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (New York, 1982). See also: the troubling implications of factor analysis for democracy (with notes on Adorno); philosophy of boredom; what if the people don’t want to rule?;

how markets “think” about politics

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As I write, US stocks are plunging. I have no idea what will be happening by the time you read this post. However, stepping back from the moment, what does it mean that Wall Street indexes rose after Trump won the 2024 election but fell last week? Or that Ukrainian government bond prices rose from October 2024 until last week and then fell rapidly?

One view is that markets have wisdom–or at least predictive value–because they aggregate information from many people. Investors think critically and rigorously because their money is on the line. The recent trends make sense on their face and confirm that markets are rational.

A different view is that capitalism involves a class struggle, and capital markets rise when the upper classes expect their interests to prevail. This model has no trouble explaining why business leaders, including registered Democrats, would tell Steven Rattner that they like Trump. They were not predicting prosperity for all but expecting to profit for themselves.

I would endorse a third model. Friedrich Hayek had a genuine insight: individuals have limited cognitive capacity and diverse motives. Therefore, individuals cannot reliably assess whole societies, let alone predict the future of anything large-scale. However, says Hayek, within our own domains of experience and expertise, we can reasonably predict specific prices. After a tough spring, farmers will expect the price of wheat to rise.

Prices allow us to plan efficiently. Many people do not seek to maximize wealth but to accomplish something else, such as holding onto a valued job or retiring soon. Nevertheless, the result of all their private planning is a market that is–in certain respects–efficient.

However, markets also create opportunities to profit by correctly predicting the large-scale situation. In turn, such predictions require assessing the present. For example, to guess how the US economy will fare over the next four years, it’s necessary to evaluate Donald Trump as a leader. One can buy bonds and other securities partly on the basis of such predictions. In this way, an accurate evaluation of Trump could pay off financially.

But Hayek’s defense of markets would not encourage us to trust the aggregate results of such thinking. Just because many people trade securities, it does not follow that their overall understanding of the present or their predictions for the society as a whole are reliable.

On the contrary, each participant in a market who tries to predict how a whole economy or country will perform is subject to the same cognitive limitations that–according to Hayek–beset us as voters and policymakers.

Markets do respond intelligibly to news. Wall Street indices fall every time Trump announces tariffs and rise whenever he seems to back off. But these changes are not predictive. In fact, we can easily predict market shifts as soon as we know what Trump says. The market adds little new information.

It’s true that putting money on the line gives an individual a motivation to think rigorously and critically. But motivations do not solve cognitive limitations. The businessmen who confided in Rattner said that they didn’t like “woke stuff” under Biden. Such feelings should not directly influence their market behavior under Trump. Nevertheless, their hostility to “woke stuff” could affect their stock trades by influencing their moods or by leading them to consume news and information that is tilted in favor of Trump. As cognitively limited creatures, we must rely on limited sources and a priori models–also known as ideologies.

In recent months, CEOs reported rising confidence in the economy, while consumers’ confidence slipped. A closer look at consumer confidence reveals that it fell by 28 points among Democrats but rose by 32.8 points among Republicans between January and February. So we can compare three changing predictions: those of corporate bosses, Democrats as consumers, and Republicans as consumers. Why do the Democrats diverge from the CEOs and the average Republicans?

  • The CEOs tend to have different values from the Democratic consumers. If everyone agreed that Trump’s tax policies will boost corporate profits but hurt the environment, CEOs would be more positive than representative Democrats.
  • The CEOs have different information from Democratic consumers. They are awash in data about their own balance sheets, plus business-oriented news. Democratic consumers are seeing negative assessments of Trump.
  • The CEO’s and the Democrats probably hold different mental models of such fundamental issues as the role of government and businesses in our society. Everyone holds such models, without which we cannot absorb new information.
  • Partisan identity is working as a powerful heuristic. Americans are using the party of the incumbent president to predict the economy. This may be unwise, but human beings must use heuristics, and a party label does convey relevant information if you combine it with a model of the society.
  • Some people act performatively. I would probably answer almost any survey question about Trump in a way that made him look bad, even if I didn’t completely believe the literal truth of my response. Some may even buy financial instruments to make a point–witness the popularity of Trump’s cryptocurrency.
  • Finally, the information that people absorb may reflect political agendas. Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos, and other media barons want to affect public opinion, although their impact is uneven because news consumers are sorted ideologically.

This is not a simple model, but it does have a simple core. It is methodologically individualist, presuming that the decision-makers are human beings rather than classes or other abstractions. Regardless of their interests and social positions, these individuals are cognitively constrained and not primarily concerned with assessing the whole society. When they do make general assessments and predictions, these decisions reflect their mental models (which, in turn, often reflect their social positions), limited information, and concrete issues that are salient for them at the time. As a result, markets respond intelligibly to widely reported breaking news but have little predictive value.

See also: The truth in Hayek; making our models explicit; social education as learning to improve models; how intuitions relate to reasons: a social approach; etc.

the future, in utilitarianism and pragmatism

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In 1993, Cornel West wrote that “the future has ethical significance” for pragmatists. “In fact, the key to pragmatism, the distinctive feature that sets it apart from other philosophical traditions—and maybe its unique American character—is its emphasis on the ethical significance of the future” (West 1993, 111). He quotes John Dewey and Josiah Royce to that effect.

At first glance, this claim seems mistaken. What about utilitarianism, which teaches that an act, policy, rule, or institution is good to the extent that it improves happiness in the future?

For philosophers, utilitarianism is a type of consequentialism. In general, consequentialism focuses on the future by assuming that our responsibility is to make things better in the long run. Utilitarianism is the version that equates “better” with greater net happiness. Therefore, isn’t utilitarianism as much concerned with the “ethical significance of the future” as pragmatism is? And isn’t pragmatism a form of consequentialism?

I agree with West that pragmatism has a distinctive focus on the future. Utilitarians believe that we know today the criterion for evaluating future states. We already know what happiness is, and we will find out later whether our current actions promote future happiness. Our concern with the future requires predicting the effects of the present on outcomes that we value today.

In contrast, pragmatists presume that values will change as a result of continuous learning. We cannot know today the criteria by which the outcomes of our present acts will later be judged.

Dewey writes that the “present meaning of action” is the “only good which can fully engage thought.” He is against measuring this present meaning in terms of “a remote good” or “future good,” whether that “be defined as pleasure, or perfection, or salvation, or attainment of virtuous character.” This sounds like a focus on the present to the exclusion of the future. But Dewey adds:


‘Present’ activity is not a sharp narrow knife-blade in time. The present is complex, containing within itself a multitude of habits and impulses. It is enduring, a course of action, a process including memory, observation and foresight, a pressure forward, a glance backward and a look outward. It is of moral moment because it marks a transition in the direction of breadth and clarity of action or in that of triviality and confusion. Progress is present reconstruction adding fullness and distinctness of meaning, and retrogression is a present slipping away of significance, determinations, grasp. Those who hold that progress can be perceived and measured only by reference to a remote goal, first confuse meaning with space, and then treat spatial position as absolute, as limiting movement instead of being bounded in and by movement. There are plenty of negative elements, due to conflict, entanglement and obscurity, in most of the situations of life, and we do not require a revelation of some supreme perfection to inform us whether or no we are making headway in present rectification. We move on from the worse and into, not just towards, the better, which is authenticated not by comparison with the foreign but in what is indigenous. Unless progress is a present reconstructing, it is nothing; if it cannot be told by qualities belonging to the movement of transition it can never be judged (Dewey 1922, 281-2)

This is rich but abstract. For me, at least, Ruth Ann Putnam helps make Dewey’s view more concrete. She defines “inquiry” as a process that begins when we perceive a problem—something that requires action. “Values typically enter into the beginning of an inquiry on an equal footing with facts,” and they emerge on an equal footing as well, but potentially changed by being explored and compared by groups of people. She writes: “the facts are value-laden, and the values are fact-laden” (Putnam 1998, 7).

See also: explaining Dewey’s pragmatism; Dewey and the current toward democracy; a John Dewey primer. Sources: Cornel West, “Pragmatism and the Sense of the Tragic,” in Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (1993): 96-106; John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (Henry Holt, 1922); Ruth Ann Putnam, “Perceiving Facts and Values,” Philosophy 73, no. 283 (January 1988): 5–19

nostalgia in the face of political crisis

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Amid the barrage of bad news about US politics, I frequently find myself nostalgic.

Sometimes, it’s for the recent past–for last summer, when we were on a family vacation and Kamala Harris seemed to be surging; or the eve of last fall’s election, when I spoke dispassionately about polarization at American and Colgate universities; or even last month, when we thought that Trump might prove more feckless than reckless.

Other times, my nostalgia reaches further back, to the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, when this white, male, college-educated, fairly moderate American felt that the republic was secure and the public’s values were evolving for the better with each new generation. That underlying optimism was one reason I spent most of the next 20 years focused on promoting youth civic engagement.

If I wish to return to when I felt better about politics, that means that I want to go back to being naive; and we shouldn’t want that for ourselves. Nor is nostalgia reliable. In the past, not everything was dappled sunlight on a late-afternoon lawn–certainly not for people less fortunate than me.

Near the beginning of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera’s narrator says that everything is bathed in nostalgia in the face of dissolution, even the guillotine. He’s discussing Nietzsche’s trope of the Eternal Return. If we believed that the French Revolutionary Terror would recur cyclically, we would fear it. Because we know that it has passed, we bathe it in nostalgia. Our deepest fear is the passage of time, because events do not recur endlessly for us. They move permanently into the past as our time runs out.

Nostalgia can be a way of grasping at the self, trying to trap that ghost in a display case. As such, it is better avoided, regardless of its cause. As for political nostalgia, it is a common ground of reactionary politics.

A related word is “envy.” In his Theses on the Philosophy of History (#2), Walter Benjamin notes that we never envy the future. He says that happiness that makes us envious is connected to our past. We seek redemption by wishing to recover (sometimes from other people) what we already experienced. A worthy redemption, however, requires a change for the better. Political progress brings a better future into the present and thereby imparts a new meaning to what happened in the past. “For every second of time [is] the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.”

This is a pretentious and roundabout way of saying that what matters is not what used to be but what we do now to improve the world that we are in.

See also: phenomenology of nostalgia; nostalgia for now; Martin Luther King’s philosophy of time

20th-century political philosophy syllabus

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I will be teaching 20th-century political philosophy as a new course this spring. One could choose many different readings for such a course. My list reflects my own interests, to some extent, plus some advocacy by the prospective students. Just as an example, Tufts’ political theory students tend to study Nietzsche intensively, so I have omitted Nietzsche from the “background” part of this syllabus.

Jan. 16: Introduction to the course (we’ll look together at “W.H. Auden’s September 1, 1939”)

Part I: Background

(A review of five major schools of thought that were already well developed before 1914 and that most subsequent authors knew and addressed.)

Jan. 21: Liberalism

  • John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), chapters 1 and 2

Jan. 23: Liberalism

  • Mill (1859), chapters 3-5

Jan. 28: Marxism

Jan. 30: Psychoanalysis

  • A dream from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). [It is the dream about Count Thun, discussed by Carl Schorske, and I provide a version with my own explanatory notes.]
  • Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930), chapters 3, 7 and 8. (The rest is recommended but not required.)

Feb. 4: Modernity

  • Max Weber, Economy and Society. Ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittic. New York: Bedminster Press, 1922/1968, excerpts from around pp. 223 and pp. 956ff.
  • Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism, trans. by Talcott Parsons (1930), pp. 13-38, 102-125
  • [Not required, but an interesting take: Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity (2001)]

Feb 6: Faith and/or nation

PART II: Responses

Feb. 11: Friedrich Hayek 

  • The Constitution of Liberty, chapter 1, pp. 11-21, chapter  4, pp. 54-71and postscript, “Why I am not a conservative”
  • Chapter 2, Creative Powers of a Free Civilization, 18 pages
  • “Errors of Constructivism,” from The Market and Other Orders, 19 pages 
  • “Engineers and Planners,” from Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason, 13 pages

Feb. 13: Isaiah Berlin

  • “Two Concepts of Liberty”

Feb. 18: Marxism after Marx

Feb. 25: Fascism

  • Benito Mussolini (1883-1945): The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)
  • Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, pp. 19-22, 25-52, 53-58, 78-79

Feb. 27: Pragmatism I: John Dewey

March. 4:  Pragmatism II: other authors

  • Sidney Hook, “The Democratic Way of Life” 
  • Cornel West, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (1994), Chapter 7: Pragmatism and the Sense of the Tragic

March 6: W.E.B. DuBois

  • Black Reconstruction in America (1935), pp. 55-83, 182-202, 210-219, 711-731

March 11: The Frankfurt School

March 25: Hannah Arendt

  • Excerpts from On Revolution  (1963)

March 27: Hannah Arendt

  • The Human Condition, chapters II and V

March April 1: Simone de Beauvoir

  • The Second Sex, trans. by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier (1949/2011), pp. 23-39, 83-5, 330-360, 848-863

April 3: Frantz Fanon

  • The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Richard Philcox (1961/2004), the preface by J.-P. Sartre and Parts I-IV and the Conclusion.

April 8: Michel Foucault

  • Excerpts from History of Sexuality and/or Discipline and Punish [To be selected]

April 10: late Foucault

  • “What Our Present Is” (1981), from The Politics of Truth 
  • “What Is Critique?” in James Schmidt, From What Is Enlightenment?
  • Course Descriptions from the Collège de France 
  • “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom”
  • “Technologies of the Self (pp. 145-169) in The Essential Foucault
  • “The Subject and Power” (pp. 126-144 in The Essential Foucault
  • “Truth and Power” (1976) in The Essential Foucault   pp. 300-18

April 15: Jürgen Habermas

  • “The Public Sphere” 
  • “Legitimation Crisis”

April 17:  Habermas

  • Between Facts and Norms, pp. 17-23  and 38-41 and pp. 359-379 

April 22: Left open to pursue gaps we have identified (or else texts from the Habermas-Foucault debate]

April 24: Concluding discussion

Cuttings: Ninety-Nine Essays About Happiness

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Cuttings is a book in progress that consists of 99 essays about the inner life: about suffering, happiness, compassion, and related themes. I first posted each of the essays on this blog, which is 22 years old today and has accumulated more than 2,400 posts. I’ve selected the contents of Cuttings carefully from this archive, revised most of the essays substantially, and arranged them so that there is a small and meaningful step between each one. In the last three years, I have written some new posts to fill gaps that I perceive in the overall structure. I believe that the architecture is now pretty solid.

Michel de Montaigne is the hero; I seek to emulate his skeptical, curious, humane mind. Like Montaigne, I talk about books, but my library is different from his. Cuttings includes short essays about Montaigne himself, early Buddhist texts, Greek philosophers, Keats and Blake, Hopkins and Stevens, phenomenologists from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty, Arendt and Benjamin, and Hilary Mantel and Ann Carson, among others.

I am releasing the third edition today–a substantial revision from last year, but not yet the final one. You can find the book here as a Google doc. I have also posted it as an .epub file, which will open directly in many e-readers. Alternatively, you could download the .epub to a computer or phone and then use this Amazon page to send it with one click to your own Kindle.

As always, comments are welcome and really the best reward for me.

happiness, for skeptics

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Perhaps human beings are designed for a purpose or end, the pursuit of which brings us happiness. Aristotle is a major proponent of this view (“teleology”), and his theory has influenced each of the Abrahamic faiths.

But what if one is skeptical that we have any end, or that pursuing any “telos” promises a good life for us?

One school was already skeptical more than two thousand years ago. The First Noble Truth of Buddhism (the ubiquity of suffering) is incompatible with teleology, and the Buddhist doctrine of Dependent Origination says that things arise just because previous things happened–not for any end.

The Third Noble Truth implies that we can escape permanently and completely from pointless suffering by understanding and transcending our will, thus entering the state variously understood under the word “Nirvana.”

What if one is skeptical of Nirvana as well as teleology? What if one doubts either an end or an exit? Is there anything to gain from the Aristotelian-Abrahamic tradition or from Buddhism?

I think there is much to be learned. I would offer these six points.

1) It is not peace but the turn toward peace that yields our happiness

In “The Poems of our Climate,” Wallace Stevens imagines a pure image that could come from East Asian or European modernist art: “Clear water in a brilliant bowl / Pink and white carnations.” He posits that this image could represent “complete simplicity / Stripped … of all one’s torments.” For a suggestive illustration, consider a “Blue Vase” by Paul Cézanne from 1890 (above), to which I will return later.

Such an image, Stevens says, cannot represent peace or happiness for creatures such as us. It cannot satisfy anyone who has a “never-resting mind.” Since “the imperfect is so hot in us,” our “delight” lies not in pure and permanent simplicity but in those moments of relief that art or nature can offer. In other words, we can never be the brilliant bowl and cut flowers, but we can relish objects that are purer than ourselves.

I paid homage to Stevens’ poem with one of my own that relates my relief at hearing a Bach oboe concerto in my earphones during a flight on a hectic day. “That turn, / For us—with our minds so noisy— / Our delight lies only there.”

This principle has a limitation. Like Stevens’ poetry, it is all about the individual who experiences things. What about all the other sentient creatures who also suffer? We should care about each as much as we care about ourselves. “Without exception, no sufferings belong to anyone. They must be warded off simply because they are suffering” (Šantideva, 8.102-3).

2. Compassion combats suffering

It’s a very small step from understanding the truth of other creatures’ suffering to feeling compassion for those who suffer. The disposition of compassion is grounded in a clear view of reality. That is one argument in its favor.

Another argument is that compassion is what people (and some animals) need from us. Sometimes, they need us to fix their problems, and compassion may necessitate action. But we cannot make others happy or liberate them from suffering, and therefore action rarely suffices. Nor do creatures need pity or that mirroring of emotions that I would call “sympathy.” If you are sad, you don’t want me to be sad sympathetically. You want me to will your relief.

After the Buddha has defeated an elitist student, Ambattha, in a debate, Ambattha’s teacher calls this student a “fool” and says, “Please forgive him.” The Buddha replies, “May the student be happy”: sukhi hotu, a Pali phrase that now serves as a greeting. We want people to extend this wish to us–and to mean it (Long Discourses, Sujato trans. DN3).

A third argument is that compassion can fill one’s mind, replacing the kind of self-oriented will that is (per the Second Noble Truth) the source of suffering. In my skeptical view, compassion can only ever take up some space, leaving room for willfulness and pain to persist, but it is worth expanding.

Universal, undifferentiated compassion is a virtue–perhaps most appropriately a monastic one, because a monk renounces individual attachments. For those of us who deeply prize specific relationships, compassion is not the sole positive emotion that should fill our thoughts. There is also love, which borders compassion but differs by being focused and by needing to be reciprocated.

3. Each mind is a ripple in the river of history

Looking at pink and white carnations, or hearing one’s own breath, or observing someone in pain, we naturally presume that the self is directly experiencing the object. Not so. Our minds are deeply structured by language, judgments, memories, and other cultural inheritances that arose before us and will continue after.

For instance, we enjoy flowers because our predecessors have named, raised, bred, sold, collected, drawn and painted, and praised these particular plants.

At the time of each day that we call sunset, the big ball of rock on which we live is turning so that we can no longer see a huge and remote ball of fire. Yet we experience the sun as moving across our sky toward its “setting,” and we think about closure, sleep, or even death and rebirth. We must think about these things (at least occasionally) at twilight because they are inherent in our languages and stories. Science describes the solar system, but not our experience of it, which has a human past.

It follows that we are never alone. Others speak through us. The stream of thoughts that constitutes a self began before and continues after a person.

There is no reason to presume that the whole stream flows toward happiness or justice. But we do know that the species can accomplish more than any person could in the space of one life. To me, this realization makes some sense of the doctrine that achieving enlightenment requires many lives. And it makes me less attached to my own life and less interested in being original, authentic, or influential. The 13-century Zen teacher Dogen writes:

It is an unshakable teaching in the Buddha’s discourse that death does not turn into birth. … Although there is birth and death in each moment of this life of birth and death, the body after the final body is never known. Even though you do not know it, if you arouse the aspiration for enlightenment, you will move forward on the way of enlightenment. The moment is already here (pp. 116-117).

4. We can do things that have outcomes for their own sake

This is an Aristotelian argument that I owe to Kieran Setiya (2017):

Many of our actions have concrete and immediate goals. We work to make money; we wash the dishes so that they are clean. When we behave this way, it is difficult to escape from suffering because the mind is set on the future, and there is always more to do.

We also do some things for their own sake, like listening to music or watching carnations or paintings of them. But we cannot depend on intrinsically valuable activities to obtain happiness. They are rare for most of us, and if they come to occupy all our time, how can we be compassionate? Only the idle rich can spend their whole lives on intrinsically enjoyable experiences.

The solution is to perform tasks that have objectives as if they were ends in themselves. I can grade papers not to complete the task but to be an educator. This is not always easy, and such an attitude would be harder if I cleaned toilets or processed chickens instead of teaching college students. But it is something to strive for in our own lives and to make more attainable for others.

5. Reality rewards a close and open-minded inquiry

We evolved to have brains that can do many things, but we do not know what we cannot fathom, just as my dog has no idea that he is unaware of politics, cosmology, or Shakespeare. In an entirely abstract way, we know that our reality of suffering, delight, and finitude is not the only reality.

Specifically, we evolved with brains that are not very well designed for understanding consciousness itself. Our minds prove evasive to our minds. Neverthless, highly disciplined and strenuous efforts to describe consciousness yield glimmers that expand our consciousness and bring–if we use them right–some happiness.

Merleau-Ponty begins his essay “Cézanne’s Doubt” this way:

He needed one hundred working sessions for a still life, one hundred and fifty sittings for a portrait. What we call his work was, for him, only an essay, an approach to painting. In September, I906, at the age of 67–one month before his death–he wrote: ‘I was in such a state of mental agitation, in such great confusion that for a time I feared my weak reason would not survive. . . . Now it seems I am better and that I see more clearly the direction my studies are taking. Will I ever arrive at the goal, so intensely sought and so long pursued? I am still learning from nature, and it seems to me I am making slow progress.’

What was Cézanne working so hard to accomplish? According to Merleau-Ponty, he strove to present the experience of nature without the tools that people had created for that task, such as “outline, composition, and distribution of light” and linear perspective. “He was pursuing reality without giving up the sensuous surface, with no other guide than the immediate impression of nature.” For him, “reality” meant neither the object in itself nor the subjective appearance of it, but the way they unite in our experience.

The “Blue Vase” shown above is harmonious and calm, yet close inspection reveals choices that a classically trained painter would avoid. For instance, the base of the vase is perpendicular to the plane of the painting, whereas the table on which it stands tilts down. And the color of the flowers seem to have influenced the shadows, making them bluish.

Similarly, in Stevens’ poem, the color of the bowl infuses the space around it: “The light / In the room more like a snowy air, /
Reflecting snow.”

Such choices are more obvious in an 1880 painting that Cézanne left unfinished (right). Here the vase clearly stands separate from the table, with entirely different vanishing points.

Our experience does not encompass the whole world at once, lining everything up together. We focus on objects that have names and significance for us, then move to other ones. The color of one object depends on its relationship to others. We do not perceive a world made of borders filled with color, but something much more complex and dynamic.

Although the following paragraph from Merleau-Ponty’s essay is not about any particular painting, it could describe Cézanne’s 1880 vase:

Similarly, it is Cézanne’s genius that when the over-all composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging order, of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes. In the same way, the contour of an object conceived as a line encircling the object belongs not to the visible world but to geometry. …. To trace just a single outline sacrifices depth-that is, the dimension in which the thing is presented not as spread out before us but as an inexhaustible reality ful of reserves. That is why Cézanne follows the swelling of the object in modulated colors and indicates several outlines in blue. [Compare the outlines of the flowers above.]

We can attend closely to positive experiences, such as the sight of flowers. We can try to analyze suffering, although that requires impressive equanimity. I am especially interested in the close investigation of states that I find mildly problematic, such as my own regretful and appreciative awareness that a current pleasure is transient. This is roughly the same as mono no aware in Japanese aesthetics, or, as I have named it, “nostalgia for now.” It affords insight into time, just as the phenomenology of other states reveals other truths. And one can focus on other people’s experience or on relational states, including love.

Cézanne’s explorations brought him no happiness, Merleau-Ponty describes the artist’s “fits of temper and depression.” In short, Cézanne was obsessed. Wallace Stevens also devoted his career to a constant exploration of consciousness, and he seems to have been far from happy.

These people failed to balance their expeditions into their own consciousness with concern for other people. Merleau-Ponty says of Cézanne, “His extremely close attention to nature and to color, the inhuman character of his paintings (he said that a face should be painted as an object), his devotion to the visible world: all of these would then only represent a flight from the human world, the alienation of his humanity.” Stevens has a similar tendency and writes, “It is the human that is the alien.” Wisdom requires a combination of intense inner inquiry with care for others.

Exploring consciousness can enhance compassion rather than distract from it, since we can learn to feel the depths of others’ experience. Glimpsing hidden worlds can shake our attachment to our everyday circumstances. And the curiosity that motivates our expeditions into the inner life can supplant anxiety and discontent. But it is more likely that we will obtain happiness by looking at a painting by Cézanne or by reading a poem by Stevens than by trying to be either person. They are not models but they left us gifts, as have many others.

6. We must embody truths, not merely acknowledge them

Important thinkers have provided arguments and reasons for each of the preceding five principles. Although these conclusions cannot be proven from axioms, they can be defended.

However, assenting to a principle of this type or acknowledging the arguments in its favor accomplishes little. One must consistently feel the truth of the idea. That requires practice, ritual, meditation, and other cultivated habits.

To return again to Cézanne’s flowers: it will do no good to glance at them or to read a learned article that explains them. One must take the time to see the object itself, must “come back / To what had been so long composed” in order to realize that “the imperfect is our paradise.”

Sources: Shantideva, The Bodhiicaryacatara, trans. by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton (Oxford University Press, 1995); Kazuaki Tanahashi and Peter Levitt, The Essential Dogen: Writings of the Great Zen Master (Shambala); The Long Discourses translated by Bhikkhu Sujato on Suttacentral (2018); Kieran Setiya Midlife (Princeton, 2017); and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1946), in Sense and Non-sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Northwestern University Press 1964). The paintings are Le Vase bleu (1889-90) in the Musée d’Orsay and Flowers in a Blue Vase (1880) in the Orangerie. I quote the Stevens Poems “The Poems of Our Climate” from Parts of A World and “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit” from Transport to Summer.

See also: many previous posts, which I have collected and organized as Cuttings: A Book About Happiness.

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explaining a past election versus deciding what to do next

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The Internet is saturated with explanations of the 2024 election. Some of these “quick takes” are dispassionate, while others take the form: If only Harris had done what I know is right, she would have won.

The challenge is epistemic: it’s virtually impossible to explain a single past event that involves many decision-makers (in this case, about 150 million of them).

Explaining the decisions of a few powerful people is hard enough, but at least then we can use evidence about their individual values, goals, and personalities. For instance, we can investigate why Napoleon ordered the main assault at the Battle of Borodino in 1812. However, says Tolstoy,

It was not Napoleon who directed the course of the battle, for none of his orders were executed and during the battle he did not know what was going on before him. So the way in which these people killed one another was not decided by Napoleon’s will but occurred independently of him, in accord with the will of hundreds of thousands of people who took part in the common action. It only seemed to Napoleon that it all took place by his will (War and Peace, 10:28)

It’s easier to explain the pattern displayed in a large set of cases (inductive reasoning). John Burn-Murdoch observes that every incumbent government in the world that has faced an election in 2024 has suffered major setbacks. John Sides argues that inflation lowered Biden’s approval rating, and the incumbent’s approval predicts reelection.

But these generalizations cannot explain the single event of the 2024 US presidential election. Generalizations inevitably involve variance, and 2024 is obviously anomalous. Should we even categorize Harris as the incumbent, when she was a vice president stepping in for a president and running against the previous president?

We can also look at patterns within the population to try to explain why individuals voted. For instance, Michael Tesler assembles evidence that few American women vote from gender solidarity and race consistently trumps gender as an explanation of voting.

This is a valid approach that will yield more precise insights once we have voter files and better survey analysis for 2024. But this method also has limitations for the purpose of explanation. As the (true) cliché reminds us, correlation is not causation. Besides, individuals vary in ways that are not captured in generic surveys. And we must distinguish carefully between two tasks: explaining why large numbers of people voted for each candidate, versus explaining the marginal change since 2020. Big blocs of the electorate vote predictably, yet much of the conversation is about changes at the margin. Our whole discussion would be different if Harris had won by 4 points instead of losing by less than one point, but either way, most people would have voted the same.

To emphasize the last point: I strongly suspect that a male Democrat would have fared no better than Kamala Harris, or even possibly worse. One of many pieces of supportive evidence is the fact that people whose survey answers indicated sexism already tended strongly to oppose Joe Biden in 2020 (Spencer 2021). I doubt that sexism explains the marginal change between 2020 and 2024, yet that hardly makes sexism irrelevant, since it helps to explain the 2020 baseline. Whether you feel that sexism is at stake may reasonably reflect your own depth of concern about misogyny in our society; this is not simply a statistical question. Put another way, whether you explain the result in terms of sexism depends on whether you are trying to a) combat misogyny or b) win an election. The explanation is relative to its purpose.

We might conclude that it is fruitless to make a model to explain any particular case. But that is exactly what we must do before we act. Even if there is no way to know now what would have happened had Harris acted differently, Harris and her team had to do something. In September, they needed a prospective model of the single case that confronted them: the election.

In 1903, Charles Sanders Peirce coined the term “abduction” (or “abductive judgment”) for the logic that explains a single case. Abduction is a pragmatic necessity because we always act in specific circumstances. In my view, valid abduction never depends on a single claim. There is no way to test whether one premise caused a given outcome in a given case. Rather, a good abduction consists of many linked components: a whole model. And it is appropriate for the model to contain facts, values, and strategies.

Thus, if you were Kamala Harris in September, you needed a coherent account of the current US electorate (facts), what you sought to achieve as a president (values), and how various messages and methods would affect the outcome (strategy). You had to guard against biases (believing facts because they confirmed your values), but you were entitled to bring your self into the analysis. For one thing, this was a model for how you should act, so it had to motivate you and your team and sound authentic coming from you.

We cannot tell which parts of Harris’ implicit model were right or wrong–and it remains possible that her model was as good as it could have been. But what we need now is a model to guide our own next steps.

Since I am not running for president, my model should not be designed for that purpose–although I might start armchair strategizing in 2026 or so. For now, I need a model that guides my actions as a concerned citizen during the Trump Administration. To a limited extent, my model might be guided by my retrospective assessment of the 2024 presidential campaign–but not by much. The main question, as always, is what should we do?

Sources: Spencer, Bettina. “Impact of racism and sexism in the 2008–2020 US presidential elections.” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 21.1 (2021): 175-188; Peirce, C.S. 1903. Lectures on Pragmatism, Lecture 1: Pragmatism: The Normative Sciences. See also: using a model to explain a single case; overestimating the impact of leaders; What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life

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generosity as a virtue

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Summary: I will argue here that generosity is a virtue when it is involves respectful care for an individual. Therefore, paradigm cases of generosity involve acts of personal attention and two-way communication, such as carefully selecting an appropriate gift or making a kind remark. To assess a transfer of money, it is better to ask whether it manifests justice, not generosity. Aristotle launched this whole discussion by drawing a useful distinction between generosity and justice. However, because his ideas of justice were constrained, and because he analyzed generosity strictly in terms of money, he left the impression that generosity was not a very appealing virtue. We can do better by focusing on acts conducted in the context of mutually respectful relationships.

To begin: virtues are traits or dispositions that we should want to cultivate in ourselves and in others to improve these individuals’ characters, to raise the odds that they will benefit their communities, or both.

Generosity is found on famous lists of virtues, such as Aristotle’s twelve (or so) and the Buddha’s six paramitas. However, generosity receives much less attention than most other virtues in contemporary English-language philosophy. Miller (2018) finds only three “mainstream philosophy” articles about generosity prior to his own. Ward (2011) finds little discussion of generosity in scholarship on Aristotle, notwithstanding that a whole section of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is focused on it.

I would propose this explanation. Aristotle continues to provide the most influential framework for theories of virtues in the academic world, partly because he is often insightful, and also because he shaped ethics in the three Abrahamic religions. However, his account of generosity (eleutheriotes–more literally translated as “liberality”) makes it a problematic trait. And that is why the virtue does not receive much attention in Anglophone and European academic philosophy.

Aristotle introduces his discussion of generosity with an explicit mention of money:

Let us speak then of freeness-in-giving [eleutheristes, generally translated as generosity or liberality]. It seems to be a mean in respect to needs/goods/property [chremata], for a man is not praised as generous in war, nor in matters that involve temperance, nor in court decisions, but in the giving or taking of goods, and especially in giving them–“goods” meaning all those things whose worth is measured with coins (NE 1119b–my translations).

For Aristotle, generosity does not mean transferring money to people who have a right to it, because that is the separate virtue of justice. Rather, generosity means donating material things voluntarily because one is not overly enamored of them, and doing so in an excellent way.

Things that are done in virtue are noble and are done for their nobility. The generous man therefore will certainly give for the nobility of it. And he will do it rightly, for he will give to the right people, in the right amount, at the right time, and whatever else counts as right giving; and he will give with pleasure or at least painlessly, for whatever is done virtuously is pleasant and painless, or at least not distressing (NE 1120a).

The appropriate recipient is not one who deserves the money (again, that would be an act of justice), but rather someone whom a person of generous spirit would desire to help. I imagine a land-owner being generous to his tenant or to a retainer of long standing.

Aristotle acknowledges that a person with less money can be as generous as a rich man, since the appropriate measure is the proportion of one’s wealth that one donates. Nevertheless, his paradigm of a generous person is a man of inherited wealth who is liberated enough from the base appeal of material things that he voluntarily gives some money away in a gentlemanly fashion (NE 1120b).

I will not claim that the ideal of generosity in the Buddhist canon is the same as in Aristotle, but the early Buddhist texts also appreciate people who give things away because they are free from a desire for goods:

Furthermore, a noble disciple recollects their own generosity: “I’m so fortunate, so very fortunate! Among people full of the stain of stinginess I live at home rid of stinginess, freely generous, open-handed, loving to let go, committed to charity, loving to give and to share.” Then a noble disciple recollects their own generosity, their mind is not full of greed, hate, and delusion. This is called a noble disciple who lives in balance among people who are unbalanced, and lives untroubled among people who are troubled. They’ve entered the stream of the teaching and develop the recollection of generosity (Numbered Discourses 6.10.1, translated by Bhikkhu Sujato).

One difference is that Aristotle mainly thinks about generosity to people who are poor against their will, whereas the paradigm of generosity in early Buddhism is a wealthy layperson’s donation to monks, who have voluntarily renounced worldly goods. In fact, I am not sure that monks can be generous in the Pali Canon, because their role is to receive alms. Another difference—typical when comparing Aristotle to classical Buddhism–is that the Buddhist path leads toward complete liberation, whereas Aristotle expects us to navigate happiness and suffering until death.

In any case, for Aristotle, generosity is relational (one person is generous to another), and it usually accompanies an unequal relationship. As Ward writes, it “abstracts” from justice. When we are being generous, in Aristotle’s sense, we do not have justice on our minds, although we might also act justly.

If one accepts inequality and suffering as natural, then justice is simply a matter of paying one’s debts, honoring contracts, and otherwise following the current rules; and generosity easily accompanies justice. A true aristocrat exhibits justice by paying his bills and taxes. He may also make generous gifts, although never giving so much as to threaten his social standing. (Aristotle defines prodigality as giving so much as to ruin one’s own resources: NE 1119b–1120a.)

However, if we decide that the current distribution of rights and goods is unjust and should be changed, then we will not be impressed by a person who is generous yet not just. More than that, we may feel that justice is the only standard, and generosity is virtuous just to the degree that it approximates justice. Then a gentleman’s holiday gifts are virtuous insofar as they diminish an unjustifiable disparity between the lord and his tenants. The effect is probably quite small. It would be better if the gentleman were prodigal or if his lands were reallocated. Meanwhile, if he takes satisfaction in his own gift-making–as evidence that he is free from base material desires–then he looks worse, not better. If he makes gifts, he should demonstrate respect for the recipients by making the payments seem obligatory and insufficient.

By alluding to land reform, I am suggesting that a social system should be egalitarian, and some powerful force, such as a modern government, should make it so. This is not necessarily correct. Adam Smith makes a different argument for generosity. In his view, a market economy is best for everyone because it continuously increases prosperity. But rich people should be generous, not only for the sake of those with less but also because a reasonable person will not be overly attached to his own wealth and will know when he has more than enough.

When “a man of fortune spends his revenue chiefly in hospitality” (benefitting friends), he demonstrates a “liberal or generous spirit” and also puts his wealth into circulation, thus contributing to the “increase of the public capital.” On the other hand, by hoarding his money for himself, a person would manifest “a base and selfish disposition” (Wealth of Nations, ii:3). It is less clear whether Smith recommends generosity toward poor people who are not one’s friends (discussed in Birch 1998). But in general, virtues are good for the individual and contribute to a civil society. Generosity is just one example; “humanity, kindness, compassion, mutual friendship and esteem” are others (Theory of Moral Sentiments, IV).

Whether you endorse or reject Smith’s view of markets, at least his theory of generosity is connected to his theory of social justice. Ward argues that Aristotle also considers generosity in the context of his view of a good community. She discusses the sections in the Politics where Aristotle says that the best regime empowers the middle classes. They are neither arrogant, like the rich, nor craven, like the poor (Pol. 1295b5).

A democracy dominated by the middle classes enables deliberation among peers. Equal citizens can look one another in the eye, say what they think, and cast equal votes to set policy. To the extent that Aristotle appreciates this kind of political system, then his discussions of generosity (giving moderate amounts of money to individuals) and munificence (giving lots of money to the city) begin to seem ironic. These are virtues of oligarchy, and Aristotle prefers democracy (albeit with qualifications).

I appreciate Ward’s argument, but I suspect that for Aristotle, equal standing or eisonomia can only work for an elite (even if it extends to the middling sort), and they should be generous to those who are naturally inferior. Members of the Assembly should treat the large majority of humans who are non-citizens generously, while treating one another with equal respect. However, once we embrace universal human rights, then everyone should be a citizen–somewhere–and the Aristotelian versions of generosity and munificence begin to look problematic.

As long as we are thinking primarily about the transfer of money or goods that money can buy, then I think that justice is the relevant virtue, and generosity is a poor substitute. This point does not depend on a radically egalitarian theory of social justice, because a libertarian should also put justice first and generosity well behind.

However, we naturally use the word “generous” for things other than money. For instance, “generous reading” is a common phrase for interpretive methods that seek to reconstruct persuasive positions from texts. Ann Ward reads Aristotle generously by combining his discussion of generosity in the Nicomachean Ethics with his analysis of democracy in the Politics.

Likewise, we can make “generous remarks” at a colleague’s retirement party, and our words will offer real insights about the colleague’s contributions. We can also give things or people our “generous attention.”

Our partner the Vuslat Foundation defines generous listening as “active, empathetic engagement with another person’s thoughts and feelings. At its core, generous listening is about creating a space for authentic dialogue.”

Think of a colleague who skillfully chooses holiday gifts, wrapping them nicely, and adding thoughtful notes. The objects may have limited monetary value yet reflect generous attitudes toward their recipients because they match each person’s desires and needs. Finding the gifts required time, and during that time, the donor focused on the recipient. We would not object if the skillful donor takes pleasure and pride, just as we generally appreciate cases when people derive happiness from their own virtue.

Whereas money is fungible, the generosity in these examples is specific to the individuals involved. Aristotle (like the Buddhist sutra I quoted earlier) is most interested in generosity as a display of freedom on the part of the giver, but in the cases I am sketching, the donors focus on the recipients. And these forms of generosity are relatively independent of the social system. I presume that generous speeches at retirement parties are appreciated alike in state socialism, corporate capitalism, and the nonprofit sector.

We might, then, agree with Smith in the Theory of Moral Sentiments that generosity is one of the virtues that “appear in every respect agreeable to us.” Generosity is agreeable regardless of the social or economic system, and apart from justice. But it is a virtue that requires benevolent respect for the recipient, listening and speaking as well as giving. Contrary to Aristotle, it is least relevant to monetary transfers and does not reflect a gentlemanly insouciance about private wealth. Rather, it is best manifested in reciprocal relationships, when the parties devote time and attention to one another.

Sources: Christian B. Miller, “Generosity,: in Michel Croce and Maria Silvia Vaccarezza, eds., Connecting Virtues: Advances in Ethics, Epistemology, and Political Philosophy (Wiley, 2018): 23-50; Ann Ward, “Generosity and inequality in Aristotle’s ethics.” Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought 28.2 (2011): 267-278; Thomas D. Birch, “An analysis of Adam Smith’s theory of charity and the problems of the poor.” Eastern Economic Journal 24.1 (1998): 25-41.my translations of Aristotle use the text from Project Perseus.

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how thinking about causality affects the inner life

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For many centuries, hugely influential thinkers in each of the Abrahamic faiths combined their foundational belief in an omnipotent deity with Aristotle’s framework of four kinds of causes. Many believers found solace when they discerned a divine role in the four causes.

Aristotle’s framework ran afoul of the Scientific Revolution. Today, there are still ways to be an Abrahamic believer who accepts science, and classical Indian thought offers some alternatives. Nevertheless the reduction of causes from Aristotle’s four to the two of modern science poses a spiritual and ethical challenge.

(This point is widely understood–and by no means my original contribution–but I thought the following summary might be useful for some readers.)

To illustrate Aristotle’s four causes, consider my hands, which are currently typing this blog post. Why are they doing that?

  • Efficient cause: Electric signals are passing along nerves and triggering muscles to contract or relax. In turn, prior electrical and mechanical events caused those signals to flow–and so on, back through time.
  • Material cause: My hand is made of muscles, nerves, skin, bones, and other materials, which, when so configured and stimulated, move. A statue’s hand that was made of marble would not move.
  • Formal cause: A hand is defined as “the terminal part of the vertebrate forelimb when modified (as in humans) as a grasping organ” (Webster’s dictionary). I do things like grasp, point, and touch with my hand because it is a hand. Some hands do not do these things–for instance, because of disabilities–but those are exceptions (caused by efficient causes) that interfere with the definitive form of a hand.
  • Final cause: I am typing in order to communicate certain points about Aristotle. I behave in this way because I see myself as a scholar and teacher whose words might educate others. In turn, educated people may live better. Therefore, I move my fingers for the end (telos, in Greek) of a good life.

Aristotle acknowledges that some events occur only because of efficient and material causes; these accidents lack ends. However, the four causes apply widely. For example, not only my hand but also the keyboard that I am using could be analyzed in terms of all four causes.

The Abrahamic thinkers who read Aristotle related the Creator to all the causes, but especially to the final cause (see Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, 2:1 or Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, Q44). In a well-ordered, divinely created universe, everything important ultimately happens for a purpose that is good. Dante concludes his Divine Comedy by invoking the final cause of everything, “the love that moves the sun and other stars.”

These Jewish and Christian thinkers follow the Muslim philosopher Avicenna, who even considers cases–like scratching one’s beard–that seem to have only efficient causes and not to happen for any end. “Against this objection, Avicenna maintains that apparently trivial human actions are motivated by unconscious desire for pleasure, the good of the animal soul” (Richardson 2020), which, in turn, is due to the creator.

However, writing in the early 1600s, Francis Bacon criticizes this whole tradition. He assigns efficient and material causes to physics, and formal and final causes to metaphysics. He gestures at the value of metaphysics for religion and ethics, but he doubts that knowledge can advance in those domains. His mission is to improve our understanding and control of the natural world. And for that purpose, he recommends that we keep formal and final causes out of our analysis and practice only what he calls “physics.”

It is rightly laid down that true knowledge is that which is deduced from causes. The division of four causes also is not amiss: matter, form, the efficient, and end or final cause. Of these, however, the latter is so far from being beneficial, that it even corrupts the sciences, except in the intercourse of man with man (Bacon, Novum Organum. P. F. Collier, 1620, II;2).

In this passage and others related to it, Bacon proved prescient. Although plenty of scientists after Bacon have believed in final causes, including divine ends, they only investigate efficient and material causes. Perhaps love moves all the stars, but in Newtonian physics, we strive to explain physical motion in terms of prior events and materials. This is a methodological commitment that yields what Bacon foresaw, the advancement of science.

The last redoubt of final causes was the biological world. My hand moves because of electrical signals, but it seemed that an object as complicated as a hand must have come into existence to serve an end. As Kant writes, “it is quite certain that in terms of purely mechanical principles of nature we cannot even adequately become familiar with, much less explain, organized beings and how they are internally possible.” Kant says that no Isaac Newton could ever arise who would be able to explain “how even a mere blade of grass is produced” using only “natural laws unordered by intention” (Critique of Judgment 74, Pluhar trans.). But then along came just such a Newton in the form of Charles Darwin, who showed that efficient and material explanations suffice in biology, too. A combination of random mutation plus natural selection ultimately yields objects like blades of grass and human hands.

A world without final causes–without ends–seems cold and pointless if one begins where Avicenna, Maimonides, and Aquinas did. One option is to follow Bacon (and Kant) by separating physics from metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics and assigning the final causes to the latter subjects. Indeed, we see this distinction in the modern university, where the STEM departments deal with efficient causes, and final causes are discussed in some of the humanities. Plenty of scientists continue to use final-cause explanations when they think about religion, ethics, or beauty–they just don’t do that as part of their jobs.

However, Bacon’s warning still resonates. He suspects that progress is only possible when we analyze efficient and material causes. We may already know the final causes relevant to human life, but we cannot learn more about them. This is fine if everyone is convinced about the purpose of life. However, if we find ourselves disagreeing about ethics, religion, and aesthetics, then an inability to make progress becomes an inability to know what is right, and the result can be deep skepticism.

Michael Rosen (2022) reads both Rousseau and Kant as “moral unanimists”–philosophers who believe that everyone already knows the right answer about moral issues. But today hardly anyone is a “moral unanimist,” because we are more aware of diversity. Nietzsche describes the outcome (here, in a discussion of history that has become a science):

Its noblest claim nowadays is that it is a mirror, it rejects all teleology, it does not want to ‘prove’ anything any more; it scorns playing the judge, and shows good taste there, – it affirms as little as it denies, it asserts and ‘describes’ . . . All this is ascetic to a high degree; but to an even higher degree it is nihilistic, make no mistake about it! You see a sad, hard but determined gaze, – an eye peers out, like a lone explorer at the North Pole (perhaps so as not to peer in? or peer back? . . .). Here there is snow, here life is silenced; the last crows heard here are called ‘what for?’, ‘in vain’, ‘nada’ (Genealogy of Morals, Kaufman trans. 2:26)

Earlier in the same book, Nietzsche recounts how, as a young man, he was shaped by Schopenhauer’s argument that life has no purpose or design. But Nietzsche says he detected a harmful psychological consequence:

Precisely here I saw the great danger to mankind, its most sublime temptation and seduction – temptation to what? to nothingness? – precisely here I saw the beginning of the end, standstill, mankind looking back wearily, turning its will against life, and the onset of the final sickness becoming gently, sadly manifest: I understood the morality of compassion [Mitleid], casting around ever wider to catch even philosophers and make them ill, as the most uncanny symptom of our European culture which has itself become uncanny, as its detour to a new Buddhism? to a new Euro-Buddhism? to – nihilism? (Genealogy of Morals, Preface:6)

After mentioning Buddhism, Nietzsche critically explores the recent popularity of the great Buddhist virtue–compassion–in Europe.

Indeed, one of the oldest and most widely shared philosophical premises in Buddhism is “dependent origination,” which is the idea that everything happens because of efficient causes alone and not for teleological reasons. (I think that formal causes persist in Theravada texts but are rejected in Mahayana.)

Dependent origination is taken as good news. By realizing that everything we believe and wish for is the automatic result of previous accidental events, we free ourselves from these mental states. And by believing the same about everyone else’s beliefs and desires, we gain unlimited compassion for those creatures. Calm benevolence fills the mind and excludes the desires that brought suffering while we still believed in their intrinsic value. A very ancient verse which goes by the short title ye dharma hetu says (roughly): “Of all the things that have causes, the enlightened one has shown what causes them, and thereby the great renouncer has shown how they cease.”

I mention this argument not necessarily to endorse it. Much classical Buddhist thought presumes that a total release from the world of causation is possible, whether instantly or over aeons. If one doubts that possibility, as I do, then the news that there are no final causes is no longer consoling.

Secondary sources: Richardson, Kara, “Causation in Arabic and Islamic Thought”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.); Michael Rosen, The Shadow of God: Kant, Hegel, and the Passage from Heaven to History, Harvard University Press, 2022. See also how we use Kant today; does skepticism promote a tranquil mind?; does doubting the existence of the self tame the will?; spirituality and science; and the progress of science.

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